I own a reselling business and have owned it in one form or another since 1999.
Since about 2015, I grew the business to six employees, a big warehouse and tens of thousands of customers. We were top of the game for awhile, I was even on TV!
Due to the rising costs of everything, as well as attempts to grow that didn’t work out, and added competition, I have accumulated debt for the first time in many years, over $40k. Last year my husband bailed me out of another $40k.
I am just barely making my bills of $10,700 per month. I have let go of all but two employees. I have cancelled all services I can live without and I have begun liquidating and running sales. Since we have over 30,000 items, it’s a big job! It will take a very long time to get rid of this stuff.
Every extra dime goes to paying debt, but despite working my butt off, there doesn’t seem to be any extra. I haven’t paid myself for years. Luckily, I have some financial security in the form of savings, but I feel terrible for having to use it. But what is savings for if not to use?
I’m a 43 year old woman, and am burnt out beyond belief. I think it’s time to finally throw in the towel. I need a fresh start and need to move on from this personal hellscape of stressful responsibility.
I have poured so much into this that I feel very sad, like I lost a child. I also feel like all the people who told me my dream was stupid were right. Maybe I should have listened? In the end, I won’t walk away with anything except experience.
For those of you who closed down your businesses, did you go work for someone else or start another business? I have to find a new path and persevere. It’s going to be excruciating, but I have to do it. Numbers don’t lie.
Any other advice is welcome!
UPDATE:
Just wanted to update this. I’m very touched and encouraged by all the responses here. They have been helpful during a very difficult time. I wanted to make a list as to what I believe happened that contributed to the fall of my business.
Since about 2015, I grew the business to six employees, a big warehouse and tens of thousands of customers. We were top of the game for awhile, I was even on TV!
Due to the rising costs of everything, as well as attempts to grow that didn’t work out, and added competition, I have accumulated debt for the first time in many years, over $40k. Last year my husband bailed me out of another $40k.
I am just barely making my bills of $10,700 per month. I have let go of all but two employees. I have cancelled all services I can live without and I have begun liquidating and running sales. Since we have over 30,000 items, it’s a big job! It will take a very long time to get rid of this stuff.
Every extra dime goes to paying debt, but despite working my butt off, there doesn’t seem to be any extra. I haven’t paid myself for years. Luckily, I have some financial security in the form of savings, but I feel terrible for having to use it. But what is savings for if not to use?
I’m a 43 year old woman, and am burnt out beyond belief. I think it’s time to finally throw in the towel. I need a fresh start and need to move on from this personal hellscape of stressful responsibility.
I have poured so much into this that I feel very sad, like I lost a child. I also feel like all the people who told me my dream was stupid were right. Maybe I should have listened? In the end, I won’t walk away with anything except experience.
For those of you who closed down your businesses, did you go work for someone else or start another business? I have to find a new path and persevere. It’s going to be excruciating, but I have to do it. Numbers don’t lie.
Any other advice is welcome!
UPDATE:
Just wanted to update this. I’m very touched and encouraged by all the responses here. They have been helpful during a very difficult time. I wanted to make a list as to what I believe happened that contributed to the fall of my business.
- GROWTH - I started doing things differently in 2015 and experienced major growth. Doubling my income year over year until I hit about $13,000 p/m in gross revenue with only about $3-4k in costs. I stagnated there for years. I knew I had to take it to $20,000 p/m to get that coveted $100k per year I wanted for myself, plus a healthy growth fund. I tried a lot of things, including opening new stores and channels. I hired to increase efficiency. I increased production and got better shelving and warehouse processes. I tried advertising and selling differing products. Ultimately, no matter what I did, I was always stuck at this point between $8k (half the time) and $16k (a few months out of the year). The high months would bail out the low months.
- OVER HIRING: I hired a lot of bad workers cause I couldn’t afford to pay for descent people. That wasted a lot of money. I was also bad at managing them (I don’t have to be managed so I assumed others don’t either). All attempts to manage them using systems like Jolt failed and just roped me into expensive contracts. I had to do double and triple the work to clean up their messes. In the end it was always cheaper and faster to do things myself, which was burning me out.
- INCREASED COMPETITION: More people started reselling, causing the markets to flood with similar items. A lot of people copied my tactics and offered them at lower prices. I had a big problem with people ripping off my entire store and even stealing the photos from my listings. I dropped prices, raised prices, added bundles tried a lot of things to stay on top. It’s been a constant battle.
- INCREASED COST FOR PRODUCTS: Due to inflation and education, more people know the value of their items and one has to pay a lot more to acquire in demand items.
- INCREASED RENT: My state was hit very hard during the pandemic in the real estate sector. A lot of people moving from California has doubled home values. Commercial rent is insanely expensive. I tried to rent storage units for a few years but they ended up being comparable to warehouses because I needed several of them. Also, it was hard for the employees and myself to work in the heat and biting cold. I don’t have a big enough home to hold the products and the business activity would hurt my marriage.
- INCREASED COSTS: Everything from boxes to postage to bubble wrap costs more now. I have tried to get free shipping supplies, ship using ground, etc, but these costs keep going up. Buyers are balking at the added shipping costs. Attempts to sell with free shipping gave mixed results. Shipping is my major cost.
- DENIAL: I was in a state of denial for years, always thinking things would get better because I was constantly trying to make them so. But revenue stayed the same while costs steadily compounded. Every new idea I had gave me a ray of hope that was quickly replaced by another ray of hope. All these “attempts” cost money. It took me getting into debt TWICE to finally go “Oh crap! This hasn’t worked for a while now!”
- COMPARISON: People my age are making $100-$200k per year working less hours than I do and with benefits. I didn’t realize that until more people started opening up about their salaries. This was pretty depressing for me. Combine this with my husband getting laid off years ago and not working, I realized I am not living the life I want anymore. While we have passive income through investments, it’s not enough to cover our conservative lifestyle.
- PLATFORM ALGORITHMS: Selling platforms suppress you in search and keep you at a certain level of income unless you run ads. This is why you have to keep selling on different platforms to stay afloat, as ads don’t work for one-off items. Each platform required additional resources (time, money) to maintain. Because there is only so much resource, divestment in one platform and investment in the other, caused things to remain the same.
- TOO MUCH INVENTORY: We buy large collections and consignments, and although our markdown schedule is good, we can only process x amount per day (usually 100-200 items) so there was always a big backlog to go through. We basically hit the ceiling to what we could process and adding people did not increase the ceiling. For every excellent worker I found, two couldn’t manage the workload and I kept them paid way too long figuring out if they could step up. This left us with just a few processing hours per day between the three of us, and we couldn’t keep up with it on top of the other duties like shipping and customer service.
- BURNOUT - When you try and try and try only to have nothing work and things get worse, you can burn out. I think I was depressed for two years straight, just kicking a brick wall, trying everything I could think of. Eventually I stopped hoping, wanting and trying. For a few months I just worked the bare minimum and came home and stared at my phone for hours. I’ve lost my sparkle. I used to be full of life and energy and now I just sleep a lot. It’s affecting my family and marriage.
