Are you in manhattan or LA., or Lawrence Kansas? It’s impossible to answer that without knowing more details, look at what similar jobs pay in your area. Our warehouse manager started at 45K with 5% increase yoy based on performance reviews. I know guys running warehouses in LA making $150K a year,albeit much larger operations.
$19.99 plus $5 shipping, in general having a min purchase for free shipping has worked best in most situations that I’ve experienced with.
First 4/5 years of growing my business it was mostly 3 day weekends, and one 2 week vacation to visit my in-laws on the other side of the country. Now that we have grown and I have a good management team in place I work only 2-3 days a week, take a month off completely during the winter and we go somewhere sunny, last year we went to Costa Rica, took the kids out of school, was a great experience. The business doesn’t really grow during this time but that’s okay, we have matured enough that 10-15% growth a year is our target. Business is in manufacturing outdoor furniture type products.
Tomorrow morning put up a wanted ad on your favorite job site, you have more than enough cash flow to pay someone else to do 99.9% of the work. I did that but to a lessor extent 3.5 years ago, it’s been awesome. Picking someone competent enough is your biggest hurdle, but if you incentivize enough and take your time looking you’ll be golden. There’s no reason with that cash flow why you should be stressed like that. My 3 kids are in that same age group and I wake up early and work out at the gym then make them breakfast and my wife and I drop them off then we go get coffee together or take our dog for a long walk before I settle in to work the part of the job I love, but I’ll be honest I will take a month off not doing much of anything other than reviewing financial statements lol. The biggest reason why many businesses fail to grow is the owner is afraid to let go, sure they are going to fuck up something, that’s what your liability insurance is for. Live your life, don’t let your business dictate it.
Yeah I hear you there, one of my last year in the trades I was making around $60hr, worked a lot of overtime and at the end of the year on the W2 it looked impressive but I was downright exhausted physically and mentally and knew I just couldn’t do this another 20+ years.
Moving into something else was scary but I also knew that if I kept at it I would find something that worked. I don’t like to share that exact product or our brand because frankly it wouldn’t be that hard to replicate, now we have a good moat with the product variety and “expertise” I’ll just say it has something that is welded together and powder coated. The first few years was out of my garage and just myself, my first hire was actually my UPS guy who was always curious what I was doing and saw that I was growing, I first had him help out on his free days and a year later he came on full time and we moved into our first industrial space.
I paid him before I paid myself, and yes I was working my regular job at the same time. We sell a lot of B2B -business to business and had a customer reach out from my Craigslist ad, he bought one and then after seeing the quality asked if we could make a hundred or so in different sizes and colors. We did and we’re off to the races, I discovered how to sell on Amazon in 2013 and that’s been our biggest marketplace next to Home Depot and our general b2b sales.
I did try many things, mostly focusing on products as I liked the idea of selling stuff and not relying on my physical input to make money. I flipped items on eBay and even did wholesale for awhile but I quickly realized the real winners were the brand owners so I decided I needed to make my own brand of something. We now have 5 successful brands, with our lowest sales one just pulling in $300K a year, has high margins though of 40% and we literally don’t touch it, we contract out in Taiwan, it gets shipped directly to Amazon 3 times a year.
I’ve also failed at several lol, I tried some kids toy stuff only to get letters by patent owners, also had some electronics that worked well for awhile but found they were a fire hazard and so I just divested myself from them. I was chasing the next big thing instead of focusing on what I already have.
Not anything against the op, but I keep seeing these posts in all these groups from coders and sass /app wannabes. Not counting the daily dms asking the same questions. I love helping people out but please just search these groups for the same questions, you’ll find a million ideas.
I think I started seriously thinking about it after I was in my twenties, found my career path although lucrative (commercial electrician) not what I really envisioned after losing my parents in their early 50s, why work 30+ years hoping for retirement and possibly dying early. Around your age I put a 5 year plan in place to have my own business, I really hated working for others lol.
There was a few things I wanted,
I considered for a long time just starting my own service company, but after talking to a few owners even seasoned 10+ years most executives still worked 50-60+ hours. I found working service jobs for manufactures I saw more of what I wanted and more steady consistent work, it took me 10 years from then to find a niche.
I recommend to just writing down your wants, needs and just explore businesses in everything. See if you find anything interesting, several podcasts on buying a business, this is great to listen to, they talk about the good and bad of different industries. You can also buy instead of building but requires some capital.
Just don’t rush into anything
RVs, and storage for them, huge increase since covid. We bought a 4.5 acre property zoned for outdoor storage and are in the process of building out the property with a mix of covered and non covered parking. $3.5m investment that will net $40-50K a month once filled.
My neighbors use one of those services, they have 3 dogs and the couple works from home and has two teenage kids, makes no sense
I would have just befriended Bezos and become an early investor, then invest into bitcoin at inception and help the world convert to bitcoin and get off the inferior fiat currencies.
I take a trip every 6-8 weeks, sometimes it’s just one or two nights away, during the dark winter months I go somewhere warm for up to 3 weeks, completely disconnect for the first part, and I mean from everything, I read books and only use the phone if necessity arises. Exercising, like swimming helps me a lot too.
Might be worth just throwing $100 into a bunch of alt crypto coins and hodl, throw them in a cold wallet and just wait. I would also say targeting toys in the 7-14 age range, those are the part of things people collect when they are older, need to keep them in mint condition unopened as the packaging gives it the most value. Otherwise real estate