Buy shipping supplies in bulk: a great way to save time and money is to buy your shipping supplies in bulk, every single month. Instead of buying those expensive shipping supplies at the post office, buy them in bulk from shipping supplies wholesalers.
You can find these wholesalers if you go to www.yellowpages.com and search for "shipping supplies". You can also check out www.uline.com or search "shipping supplies" on eBay.
You might think that you will simply be able to go and find boxes in the back of stores and parking lots. Yes you can probably find some boxes that way, but that is an extremely time and energy consuming way of doing it, it is the exact opposite of efficiency. Trust me, I’ve tried it myself! The biggest reason you should buy your shipping supplies is to save time and effort.
If you are selling products that come already packed (electronics come in strong boxes and are protected by Styrofoam) all you will need to by from shipping suppliers is wrapping paper. This can save you a lot of money because wrapping paper is a lot cheaper than boxes.
Electronics are fragile, so they usually come with "bullet proof" packaging straight from the factory. There is no need to place something that is already well packed in to a box in another box, all you need to do is wrap it in paper, write the address and send it on its way. In some cases you may be able to just slap on a shipping label and avoid the wrapping part altogether.
Ship 3 times a week: don't ship every day. You need to go to the post office every 3 days...Monday, Wednesday and Friday. This is what smart sellers do. That is why when you buy from some eBay sellers, you are informed that your item will be shipped in 1-2 days.
How will this save time? Because you will be making less trips to the post office. Instead of going every day you will be going every second day. How long does it take you to go to the post office and back? Well if it takes 1 hour there and back you will be eliminating two hours of work per week.
Two hours may not seem like much, but keep in mind that this is just one small way you can save time, there are many ways to save time in this book. And if you use all of the time saving methods provided in this book, little by little the time you save will ad up and the amount of time you spend working each day will get smaller and smaller.
Get a scale and print postage: If your business is shipping enough items to justify it, then this is definitely the way to go. You can eliminate having to go to the post office altogether! You can simply weigh your items, print out postage from your online account, and the post office will pick up your packages from you.
For more information, go to www.usps.com USPS and eBay now even have a label printing program that can be used for free! http://pages.ebay.com/usps/shippingitems/labels.html An alternative to USPS is to use UPS or FedEx. You can set up an account with them and they will pick up your packages daily or upon your agreed schedule.
Hiring help: if you are planning to make a lot of money and sell a lot of products, you may not be able to handle the work load by yourself. And even if you are able to work 8 or 10 hours a day, why not hire someone so you only have to work 2 hours a day and enjoy the money you are making?
And why not, why not hire some help? If you are making a lot of money, why not hire someone for a fraction of what you are making so you can take 80% of the workload off of your shoulders and enjoy your life, not to mention the money you're making.
Think of all the stuff you don't like about your business. If you hire an employee, you can make them do all that stuff while you supervise them and do the things you like doing. Hiring an employee is like getting a partner, except you don't have to split the money in half.
Some PowerSellers have a whole team of employees working for them, and I don't mean 5 or 6 people either. I mean they have 10 or 20 employees that handle everything from answering phone calls to keeping track of finances. Isn't that crazy? I guess, but what's even crazier is how much these sellers are making a month...these sellers are multimillionaires!
Hiring someone is not only a way to expand your business and handle more work load, it's also a way to make money with little effort. Imagine being able to make thousands of dollars a month without doing any work. Well if you hire enough people to completely run your business you can have that kind of freedom.
Wouldn't it be amazing to take a long vacation and come back to a business that is running a smoothly as ever and working hard to make you money? Well if you hire enough people and develop an easy business system for your employees to follow, you can definitely take those vacations.
Look at any successful business. Look at any McDonalds, gas station etc. Can you find the owner of these businesses in the back, working hard? Usually not, it's the manager's job to do all that. The owner pops buy once in a while to check how things are going and motivate the employees, but that's about it.
Sure there are thousands of small owner-operated businesses, but guess what? These owners are wasting their life! What good is it to have your own business if you are going to work 12 hours a day until you die of exhaustion? Why not just get a regular job, it would be a lot less work.
These business owners are usually the ones that only work IN their business and stop growing their business to soon. Remember what we talked about; part of working ON your business and growing it is making your business self sufficient.
To me it makes a lot of sense to pay $10,000 a month in return for $25,000 a month, don't you agree with me? And that is exactly what you would be doing if you decide to hire 4 fulltime employees to completely run your business for you.
If you hire 4 fulltime employees, pay them a salary of $2,500 per month you will be spending $10,000 a month on a passive income of $15,000 ($25,000 minus $10,000) and the freedom to do what you like, when you like and where you like.
Passive income is income you don't work for, all you have to do is set it up. Stocks earn you passive income, real-estate will earn you passive income if you rent it out, and a business can earn you passive income if you have a team of employees running it without your assistance.
However, in order to be able to simply hire a couple of employees and ride away into the sunset, you need to make it easy for those employees to do their jobs. Otherwise they will be calling you about problems every five minutes while you are trying to relax on the beach.
That is another reason why you must work ON your business before you work IN it. You need to work on your business, make it efficient and profitable, and most of all easy to work IN for your employees. How do you do that?
Well, first of all your business needs to be efficient before you hire the employees. You will also need to develop rules and guidelines for the employees to follow. You will need to give them a way of doing things and you will need to make it easy for them to understand what it is that they need to do.
If your business is so complicated that only you can run it, it's too early to hire anyone. Unless you want to hire some sort of highly skilled specialist (those cost a lot). You need to make your business simple and efficient, you need to make it so a 16 year old can run it (like McDonalds) just as well as you can. You need to make your business "user friendly" or rather "worker friendly". To do that your business needs to be organized and predictable.
If your business is efficient, organized, predictable and is simple to explain. You will have no trouble training your employees. If your business is chaotic, inefficient and hard to explain...no one but you will be able to run it.
So instead of hiring specialists that will be able to whip your business into shape and run your business for you, work on making your business "user friendly", that way you won't have to check up on how business is going every 5 minutes while you are on the beach trying to relax.
And if someone decides to quit, you won't need to look for the "right person" for the job, because anyone will do. Instead of hiring specialists, work on making your business "special". Hiring help is something you will definitely need to look into, because having an employee working for you will not only free up some time.
But it can also make it easier for you to expand your business and even give you the freedom to do what ever you like, when ever you like and where ever you like. While your employees are busy running your business and making you a ton of money.
Note: if you want to learn more about making your business easy to run for your employees and business in general, read "the E myth" by Michael E Gerber. There are many books out there that teach you haw to work ON your business, "the E myth" is the one that started it all.
Oh, I should have mentioned this in the first part of this section, but make sure you talk to your tax advisor and/or attorney before hiring anyone. You may wish to use contractors for awhile rather than employees, might need to set up a corporation or LLC, etc. But don’t worry about that stuff! When you’re ready to start hiring help just go talk to an attorney or tax advisor. They’ll be more than happy to help you do it the right way.