This month I will remember as the month I decided to turn what has essentially been a part time hobby into a fledgling business.

Of course, this required a colossal shift in mind set on my part. Previously my record keeping had been atrocious, all my purchasing numbers were in my head (approximate figures anyway, I have an extremely good memory for this) and I had kept no receipts for anything I had brought nor for costs incurred with shipping items. I didn’t even have any previous records of sales kept on a spreadsheet. There just simply hadn’t been a need up until that point.

My item storage location (also known as my study) had no inventory management system in place other than a basic concept of: Books go on the book shelf, clothes can go over there, and I will put these collectables in this box. I guess you could say items were loosely sorted either by type or into groups. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this approach and I never had an issue finding anything once it had sold.

However, I realised that to scale my income (and by extension required inventory) I needed some actual investment in both physical infrastructure (such as shelves and tubs) and a better organisational system. Bubble sort was not going to cut it over a long timeline.

Anyway, to the numbers for the month:

I got busy this month adding an extra 154 items to my store (excluding the 36 sold), this equates to an average of 6.13 items listed per day which really is achievable. I will note here that I did spend an entire day just solely listing and smashed out 30+.

Sales tripled which is great though I spent all of the profits on inventory (and then some). At an early stage of business growth, I see this as necessary to build inventory to a critical mass. That and I was finding heaps of cool items so had trouble reigning in spending! Some of these items were truly high dollar value as well so the eventual payoff will be very nice. Example $35 item resold for $500? Hasn’t happened yet but I’m confident it will with the item I found, I did manage $25 into $200 on a jacket though. That’s an extreme example (the $500 item) but those are the types of items I have been trying harder to find with returns into the hundreds.