For most people the difference between a professional ebay business and a hobby ebay business is when the business can replace their wage allowing them to leave their jobs and go full time.
This is where many ebay sellers have problems transitioning from hobby to professional.
To go professional the business must continually grow. Although this sounds obvious, many ebay sellers get stuck in the trap of only working in their business and stop working on growing their businesses.
A successful growing ebay business needs employees or someone else to do the daily listing, packing and customer service tasks.
How many small ebay sellers actually make enough to earn the same amount they would make if they “sold” themselves to an employer?
Expanding an ebay business is not about you working harder or longer hours. As a business owner our job is to be doing only the $100 per hour work and the $1,000 per hour work only so we can grow our business.
The $100 per hour work is what we do to “build” our business and the $1,000 per hour work are those brilliant ideas which come to us when we are not working at all!
We could be playing golf, gardening, at the beach, flying a remote control plane, in the shower, or we could even just wake up at 3am in the morning with that brilliant idea which will generate more profits.
This is why hobbies and holidays are absolutely critical for success.
These days it is easy to outsource overseas staff from $1 per hour up so we have to be careful to not get bogged down with the $1, $5, $15 per hour work that we all get sucked into doing. Instead we need to outsource this work, so we can be doing the $100 per hour work to grow our businesses.
Most business owners spend all their time working :”in” their business and do not spend enough time working on “growing” their businesses. Remember the old saying.. “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result!”
Even if you hire someone at $15 per hour and they list 4-5 items that will bring in $25 each you are much better off than if you did it all yourself. You now have an hour to manage that person plus be strategic in your thinking and directed in your efforts.
For us, my time is best spent analysing data and letting the product sourcing, listing, packing and customer service be the responsibility of the employees.
It is very important to always build ebay businesses with an exit strategy so they can be sold. By doing this you automatically build the businesses so they do not require the owner to run it. Otherwise, the business is worth much less to sell.
By doing this, you subconsciously create a business which runs by itself so you can do other things with your time.
To your success
Neil Waterhouse
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Thank you for the reminder how absolutely important it is for us to work ON our businesses. It is amazing how we can go from knowing that to slowly starting to do a small thing here and a distracting thing there and not realize that our entire day is taken up by things that don’t do anything to actually GROW our business.
Another wonderful reminder!!
Thanks for the great content! Do you have any recommendations for places to find quality, trustworthy overseas staff?
Thanks Neil; this is a timely and pertinent reminder as it’s far too easy to just go from one job into another by doing everything oneself. I notice in this article you’ve used $15 per hour as the going rate for hiring an employee to list 4 to 5 items; would you mind sharing some tips on the process you go through to find, interview, hire, train and (retain) motivate staff at these rates?
Thanks again for sharing your knowledge so freely and generously.
Sincerely
Neil
Thanks again for the important teaching that is so easy to forget. It is such an important part of building your business.
You’re welcome Adam. Glad to help.
Hi, just wondered if you had a favourite outsourcing option . I have used Fiverr.