Last year was a learning experience in joining the business market. I chose to take on a second job to help boost the income for my family. In doing so I learned a plethora of things about business and how to spend more money than I needed. One major area I neglected was the cost of packaging supplies. I had decided to sell all my products based on cost of the product, shipping costs and labor and I neglected to add in the cost of the packaging supplies that it took to ship them out.
So knowing all aspects of a business is key to being able to learn and grow in the business world. This means learning different areas that even I didn’t enjoy and or want to learn. Running a business as a soul proprietor meant that I was in this case all alone. I didn’t higher any other employee, thus I was forced to take on all of the tasks myself. This means I took on the task of procuring my products and also selling them as well. The sales cycle was much more complicated then I ever would have imagined. I understand now why many companies create sales divisions to funnel customers and clients into the proper place. I did not understand the man power and time it would take to go through the sales process and also confused sales and marketing.
Marketing is the process of getting clients to find and want to purchase from my company. What I did not know was there was an entire sales process after and moving clients from marketing to sales was a task that took me a long time to understand and be successful at. There was also a much added cost in the process of purchasing the software to make the transition of marketing to sales. I had to learn different software and implement it successfully and in all honesty I probably lost 50 percent of my actual sales to failed software implementation.
The biggest cost was failing to see the need for extra time in actually putting the products together to ship. I should have simply hired a hourly worker a few days a week to put things together and get everything ready. Instead I took all my time to package them myself and it took away from me doing marketing and sales. It was a tricky time and in the many lessons were learned.
