What I Learned From Running an E Commerce & Delivery Company

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[choopa]

You look heaps healthier my man. Cheers for the great content ✌🏽. Hope your health issues are all good now

[themendez]

Thanks for making all these videos. They are motivating and pushing me to entrepreneurship. Good luck with your business! Very insightful videos!

[goldstar]

Great content .Did you operate the delivery business with an app ? I would like to discuss your opinions on creating a delivery app

[jackmiddleton]

I see it as a success. You can roll what you have learned into the next thing. Partners, employees, and investors are always a funny thing. The more someone is willing to invest in you the less money they tend to have, and the more someone is willing to work for you the less experience they tend to have. That is why my present philosophy as a seeker of employment is to be an entrepreneur and my philosophy as a seeker of employees is to teach. On a separate note, Elon Musk has said that if you have a new product it needs to be an order of magnitude better than what people are currently using or nobody will use it because it takes too much effort and risk.

[alexanderbanman]

Great video, thanks for sharing your experience.

[jonpayne]

Firstly, thanks so much for your transparency here. It takes a ton of courage not only to start a business but also to share both the good and the bad publicly. Kudos!

I'll now ask a question and offer a critique but please take it only as a positive comment that I hope is helpful, from a fellow small business owner who only wants to help. But sometimes helping means pointing out the problems.

Now my question... can you explain the order economics here? You mentioned that you would make a profit of roughly $6 or $7 on each order, and that sometimes the cost of acquisition made that a wash but when you figure in reorders then it makes sense. I get that. But how do you cover the delivery cost for the 2-hour delivery? Were you charging a substantial fee for that? I tried to find that but if you mentioned it I must have missed it.

If you were doing free delivery within 2 hours then its just not a viable business model. While you may be willing to work for free, eventually if its going to grow then you'd have to hire someone and pay them a market wage. Best-case could they do 3 or 4 deliveries per hour? If you are paying $15 per hour then you are looking at $4-5 per delivery so there is no room for any profit on the $6-7 profit per order. Well technically $2 but then the $15/hr wouldn't work b/c they need to pay for gas, plus they won't always be making deliveries.

The only ways this could scale would be 1) to grow it HUGE by taking on huge investment and crowdsource delivery like DoorDash or Instacart, 2) to increase you minimum order like at least 5x so you are making $25+ per order, or 3) to charge a significant delivery fee to cover costs of delivery, but based on what I understand about your average order that would mean charging something like $15 delivery on a $12 order and thus might have really killed the conversion rate and order volume. I think basically you were working for free here - not accounting for your time as a delivery person (which eventually would have to be hired out to someone else) and the other costs like fuel, vehicle wear and tear, etc. The business can't be viable long-term if it relies on you to volunteer to do the delivery.

Rather than a partner, I think you needed to hire a delivery person. That would have taken that work away from you to give you time to focus on growing the business, and also would have forced you to confront the actual cost of 2-hour delivery and find a way to build that into the financial model. And then at least you would know if this worked or didn't.

Let's say you run the numbers and realize you need to charge $15 for 2-hour delivery, or you can make it free but the order needs to be $40 minimum in order to cover that cost... whatever the math works out to be. You then charge that. It either works - people pay it and keep ordering, or it doesn't - they stop ordering. Either way its a good resolution. If they pay it, you now have a business model that is working, profitable, and can be scaled and grown. And you aren't chained to your car making deliveries. If it doesn't work, you know the business didn't work and can have peace with that and were able to probably test through this more quickly since you were able to focus on this rather than making the actual deliveries.

Again, what you have done here is amazing and I give you tons of credit! I'm a fellow entrepreneur and am only offering this b/c I've basically made essentially the same mistake myself several times over! I'm offering this comment in hopes it will help aid reflection not only for you but also anyone else who reads it in the future. The business has to work and be able to scale with actual employees getting paid a market rate to do the work. If it can't, its not so much a business as it is a full-time (or much more) job you have created for yourself. And that is fine and many people do that and nothing wrong with it - but its not something that can be scaled or invested in by partners and is only viable as long as you are willing to essentially work as a delivery person, which is not what most entrepreneurs are looking to do.

[duvan]

Hey, I am so impressed by you. I started a landscaping business at 18 and that was fun, I’m a 1/3 owner of an IT company, now I do business consulting and working on other things. I think I may have some ideas that may help revive this service, I’m not sure if you tried them. If you did you can use it as you wish or maybe entertain doing something together. As an entrepreneur, is great to help others and see them succeed if I can. None the less, very impressive!

[vvolfflovv]

my biggest challenges have been doubt and sticking to my comfort zone and my biggest regrets are not embracing rejection and mistakes. That said, I'm still happy and am working hard but have much higher ambitions for the future and its time to put the gears in motion for that to happen.

[nicolegarcia]

Everytime i click the joisk link, the domain is unknown...what happened??? Did it not work out?...

[iloveramennoodle]

Hey Jack all the channels or companies offering free webinars to learn the "secrets" to making money. How do those benefit the creator? Like monetarily or is it just getting attention to them?

[shuvanuganguli]

hey great content, one thing i wanna say is what happened to the tshirt printing and sorts, you could have made a tshirt brand

[SunRabbit]

The most valuable piece of advice I would give regarding business is that you NEVER, EVER take on a partner. I've been self-employed for most of my life and that one thing was the biggest mistake I ever made, and unfortunately that happened 3x where everytime I'd rationalise it away thinking "this time it's different." Employees, sure! Contractors, sure! Like a lawyer, or an accountant. But never anyone who has any say in how YOU run YOUR business or (more importantly) who has access to the company accounts.

In Europe there's a new thing called an SE. It's basically a single-proprietorship corporation or more specifically, it CAN LEGALLY BE a single-owner corporation if desired with no advisory board or any of that useless shit. Initial capital requirements are reasonable. I agree with your other video on debt, and yes, debt is great. Although I did study accounting for 2 years, I've always used an external accountant to take advantage of all the tax loopholes, etc.

Right now I'm in 2 (actually 3) different vehicles. Commercial real estate. Good stuff. I'm hoping to get into SOLAR specifically because that's the last thing on anyone's mind because most EU governments are now "off" that in terms of subsidies.

I actually have business ideas like you wouldn't believe but the problem is that my properties are generating very little actual income despite having increased in value tremendously. My banks have renegotiated my loan agreements where I was able to get a reduction of about 25% on my monthly payments but to move forward I need ANOTHER loan which nobody's willing to give me. A year ago I did the (mis) calculations and figured I need to either SELL one of the buildings or BUY another one. I didn't do anything and now I know I just have to wait patiently. Keep saving up money so I can get another loan. The irony of it all.

[alexanderbanman]

Why do you keep saying partner? What's the reason for wanting someone in that capacity instead of hiring someone on as an employee?

I could have easily seen hiring someone to deliver packages at $20 an hour... was this cost-prohibitive considering your margins?

Not saying you're wrong, just curious why them being partners was important.

[glorias.]

Can you please review the Robinhood app?

[OO-voxb]

2 hour delivery is just not very smart

[Demomaker]

Cool, I got another shoutout xD (btw, it's Demo Maker, not Demon Maker, but I don't really care)