Busy, Busy, Busy

Things have been crazy busy lately so I’ve been spending more time working on my business than updating on the blog.  I’m going to knock out updates for both January and February and cut out some of the extra details.

January & February – $41,310 in Sales

As I detailed in my last blog post, I’ve stumbled on a new product that is selling like crazy.  I had my best single day with almost $3,500 in sales in just one day.  This was insane and I actually made a profit of about $1.5k that day, more than I make in a week at my day job.  Here’s what my sales looked like for the first 2 months of the year.

The blue line is from this year and the red line is the same timeframe from a year ago.  Sales are going pretty good so far and my new products are getting traction.

My first year selling on Amazon I did $59k in sales.  In 2016 I did $170k, and this year I’m on track for $350k-$400k.  It’s pretty crazy how quickly you can grow an FBA business with consistent effort.

The Debt

One issue with selling physical products is the huge amount of money you need for inventory.  Right now I’ve got a $20k loan from Amazon and another $10k on credit cards that I will have to carry and pay interest on for about 2 months.  All of this debt is just to fund inventory purchases.  The worst part is I’m paying tens of thousands of dollars to buy inventory and it isn’t even available to sell on Amazon for almost 2 months since it takes so long to produce it and ship it to the United States.  I’ve resisted the urge to raise funding since I’d like to own 100% of my business and being comfortable with taking on a little risk in the form of personally guaranteed debt has allowed me to grow as much as I want to right now.  Also if I did raise money it would probably have to be from family and if something went wrong and I lost their money I would feel horrible.

Upcoming Plans

I’ve got several new products on the way and I’ve got no plans to slow down.  I’m hoping to pay off the $30k in debt over the next 2 months then maybe, finally, pulling out some profits from the business.

My long term plan is to sell the business on Empire Flippers for a 25x multiple.  Once my new products get launched I should be doing about $50k in sales and making $20k per month in profit which means I’d be selling everything off for $500k.  Not too bad for a business that didn’t exist just a few years ago.

Questions?  Comments?  Want help starting your own Amazon FBA business?  Shoot me a message down below.