Narrator: (00:01)
Welcome to the process to e-com profit podcast, where we know top line sales, just isn’t enough to have the business of your dreams. Learn to run a profitable business online that doesn’t run you
Cindy: (00:17)
Well, welcome to today’s podcast. We’re super excited to have a guest with us today. Beth FBO is joining us from busy baby. Beth was born and raised in Alberta Le. she left Minnesota for 10 years after high school to serve in the United States army four years of college and corporate and corporate work. She finally settled down with, a family life at the age of 40. she was a daughter of an entrepreneur, and she always knew she wanted to have her own business, but never knew what that would be and never took the time to take that leap. But shortly after having her first child in returning to work, she had a pro she saw an opportunity to solve a problem, and she had an idea and a close friend helped her bring, the prototype product for a baby, busy baby to life. So busy baby has become bigger and, is now a, has surpassed 5 million in revenue. Congratulations, that’s super exciting. And she’s still working, out of her garage in Minnesota and we can see her fulfillment center behind her and Beth welcome. We’re super excited to have you as a guest here on our, our podcast.
Beth: (01:27)
Well, thanks, Cindy. I’m happy to be here and, and thankful to all the help I’ve gotten from you over the last year as well. to get to that 5 million.
Cindy: (01:35)
Well, I, I, we are super excited to work with you, Beth and I, I was telling, Jessica, your bookkeeper that we were gonna be talking today and she says, oh, I would just like to have a hundred more clients just like her . So, you got a fan on our team?
Beth: (01:49)
Yeah, that’s nice.
Cindy: (01:52)
Well, well, we have a little bit of a hint in your introduction of why you started busy, baby. well, what was the problem you were trying to solve?
Beth: (02:00)
It really was, right when I went back to work from maternity leave, a couple of my stay-at-home mom, friends took me out to lunch and they brought their one year old babies and the whole lunch was spent with these two cute little girls reaching for everything, dropping and throwing everything. One of the moms was a germophobe, so she was wiping everything down. We really just couldn’t have a full conversation. So, I mean, right there at lunch, I grabbed my phone, and I went on Amazon looking for something that I could buy. So, when my son was big enough to join us at the restaurant, he wouldn’t be that distraction, and nothing really existed at the time. That would both be a clean place for his food and keep the toys within reach and off the floor. And so, the next day on my commute, I had an idea, and I went home, and I cut and glued some things together, made some prototypes. And now here we are with the first ever place mat that stops babies from dropping and throwing their toys.
Cindy: (02:48)
I, I think this is gonna be an evolutionary step in man cotton, because I think that has happened for quite a long time. And, and to solve that problem is, is really gonna change the course of humankind. I’m pretty sure best
Beth: (03:01)
Beth: (03:02)
I think
Beth: (03:02)
Might be a little bit of an exaggeration, but I appreciate it. I think it is, I’ve had a lot of people comment on my ads and stuff of like, where was this? 40 years ago? And my kids were little, or a number of people said, oh, somebody made my idea real. I think a lot of people got the idea. A lot of people see the need. It’s just, I was the one that was stubborn enough to actually take it to market.
Cindy: (03:23)
Well, maybe, maybe not stubborn, but, visionary yes, sure. Visionary. Yes. Yes.
Robyn: (03:30)
What would, what do you think was like the most surprising roadblock? You know, I think a lot of people are like, I’m going to create this product and they, they anticipate some roadblocks, but what was the thing that kind of, that, that, that stopped you or got in the way that you were kind of like, oh, I didn’t see that one coming.
Beth: (03:48)
you know, there’s a, a lot of unknowns, it’s all unknowns. And I, but I did see that coming and that’s the hardest part is always knowing that I don’t know. I don’t know what I don’t know, but I know there’s so much, I don’t know what I had, I think anticipated was that my product was gonna go viral right away. I thought this is a no brainer. Everybody calls it genius. As soon as I get a few videos out there, every mom on the planet’s gonna share them and everybody’s gonna know about it. And it turns out marketing is by far the hardest part, getting people to know the product exists. I mean, I was on shark tank. I was on nationals’ television and still, most people have no idea what busy baby is never heard of a busy baby bat. so that’s definitely the hardest, biggest roadblock still to this day is marketing.
Robyn: (04:33)
I think field of dreams was like the worst movie ever for people who are entrepreneurial, cuz we’re like, if they, we build it and then we build it and we’re like,
Beth: (04:42)
Where,
Robyn: (04:42)
But I’m in the middle of the cornfield. Why isn’t anybody coming out here? You know? And you know, like I’ll, you know, I’ll talk to, you know, product owners and like, but I have a great product. And I was like, but it, that, that’s not the thing, you know, it’s it, that’s one piece of the, of the puzzle, you know? Yeah.
Beth: (04:58)
It’s so much more than that.
Cindy: (05:00)
And well, and it, it’s no surprise that a lot of the people that we work with, that’s been their focus from the time they start their business is trying to figure out how to sell. And one of the things that Robin and I share in, in the interest of creating this podcast is we, we see people that have gotten that figured out that they’re at least far enough down the road that they’ve started to run into some other challenges and like how to run this business now that we have got some sales coming through the door mm-hmm. And so that’s one of the focuses that we have for the podcast is just helping people understand that there’s, there’s some skills to creating a business too. I was curious, you mentioned shark tank. what was it like for you to prepare for the show? What all did you have to do to get ready?
Beth: (05:45)
You know, what I personally did was watch every single episode of shark tank that ever existed, which was exhausting. There’s over 200. but I wanted to just be sure I was gonna be able to respond to every question, know how the different sharks would react to different answers. I needed to have my books in order, and I needed to know my numbers, which was my, probably my biggest weak point, because I just knew how to get sales out there. I was going to expos. I was getting in front of people. I was demonstrating how awesome the product is and getting people to buy it. And then I was keeping a spreadsheet and just like recording every transaction. And pretty soon the transactions got to be more and more and more, and I just didn’t have control of my books. And so that’s when I engaged with books, keep, and got my books in order so that I could have a good idea of what my numbers are to present when I was on shark tank. So that was probably my biggest part of preparation was getting my books in order
Cindy: (06:41)
Getting your numbers. Yeah. Cause they, they wanna dive in and, and, and know that, you know, not just, yeah,
Beth: (06:47)
Know that and I’m glad I did, you know, they were really impressed. I mean, Mr. Wonderful said I was the real deal. And I was like, yeah, like I don’t think I would’ve been able to answer every single question they gave me had I not done that work ahead of time.
Cindy: (07:00)
Awesome. That’s great.
Robyn: (07:01)
I feel like you can take that to your grave, like Mr. Wonderful. You know, like, you know, like, like no matter what happens, you’re like, look, I was nobody yelled at the TV when I was on shark tank. yeah,
Beth: (07:11)
Yeah. I, my, and it’s gonna say Mr. Wonderful said I’m a rockstar
Robyn: (07:16)
Cindy: (07:18)
well you didn’t take the offer. mm-hmm but, and, and I know you’re self-funded and that is a huge accomplishment and, so kudos for you to be, you know, building this huge business with, with, with being smart about how you’re growing and cause that’s, so it’s so easy sometimes just to, to take, take money or to look for loans so that you can scale, but you don’t have the things in place to, to really grow and scale profitably money sometimes makes bigger problems than it solves. And so, I think it’s just a, a real point to be proud of that you’ve been able to scale and be self-funded, but I’m curious on the TV appear appearance. How did that change your growth trajectory? I mean, did it, did you see a big spike in orders? Did it make a big difference?
Beth: (08:06)
Oh yeah. Oh yeah. well first to touch on the self-funded I did get loans and I did borrow money from family, and I did sell cars and stuff. I didn’t take any investors. I actually did almost have, give up half my company to some investors and, and I ended up not going through with that deal. Thank God. but I, so yeah, the self-funded, I, I do have quite a bit of, of loan. but there’s lots of organizations, especially here in Southern Minnesota that give you no interest, payment, free loans for, you know, 12 months to help you get started. And that’s what I did awesome with shark tank. we sold about six weeks’ worth of product in three days when that show aired, it was incredible. And then for the next probably week or two, we saw an elevated level and then it came back down to a new normal, which was just slightly higher than the old normal. So, it was really now looking back almost a year ago. It’s a, it was a great marketing event.
Cindy: (09:01)
Mm-hmm mm-hmm . And, and were you prepared? Did, did they help, you know, how, how much inventory to have on hand? No,
Beth: (09:10)
No, they don’t tell you anything. And you guys, I cried so hard when I got the notification that I was going to air because they tell you the entire time, just because you go there and you film does not guarantee you’re going to be on the air. Any decisions you make with your inventory or with your business is on you. Shark tank has no liability for anything you decide to do. They are, there’s no guarantee you’re gonna be on the air. For me, it takes, you know, 75 days to get product. They only give you; you know, a week or two weeks’ notice of whether or not you’re gonna air. So, I made, took a big risk and ordered a lot of inventory, like half a million dollars’ worth of inventory, in hopes that I would air, fortunately for me, my product is just silicone it’s, it doesn’t expire. Doesn’t need any particular kind of storage, special storage. So, it can just be, you know, in my shed in Minnesota, in the winter. but if I didn’t have product to sell, when it aired, then I would lose out on that marketing opportunity if I had too much and I didn’t air it’ll all sell eventually. So that was kind of my thinking with that
Cindy: (10:14)
Calculated risk.
Beth: (10:14)
But no, they don’t help you at all. They, when I said no to the deal, thank you for your time. And I turned and walked away. I did not hear from a single person until February 10th, I believe is when I got the email saying prepare to air on March 5th. Wow. That was it. And nothing else even says that nothing else.
Robyn: (10:34)
I think that can be kind of like the life of an entrepreneur too. You’re like, if I just had this big, like you have this thing, this is the solution of my problems, and you get to the solution. You’re like, well, now I have a new problem. Yep. You know, like, you know, now I have all this marketing now I’ve got a, and you know, I’ve seen, companies they’ve go on track tank and they, you know, especially if they had something that was expiring, they couldn’t go all in because they didn’t know when it was gonna air. you know, so it, you can, you can do all of that work to prepare and be, and pitch and not get the lift. and that lift doesn’t last forever. I think sometimes people think, well, you’ve been on shark tank now you, you know, you’re living in Bora, Bora, you know, playing in the sand all day. And that’s, it’s just one piece of the journey, right?
Beth: (11:17)
It’s a very small piece of the journey. I thought it was going to be that way too. I thought, oh yes, we’re gonna be on the air. It’s gonna be a breeze from here. No, it was, it was a, a fun thing that happened. but now it’s back to hard work. And now, like you said, it’s just new problems. Now we’re trying to figure out how do we go international? Don’t know how to do that. But that’s what we’re figuring out this year, you know, just new problems, bigger problems.
Robyn: (11:39)
And with all of that rapid, oh, go ahead.
Cindy: (11:42)
15 minutes of fame. It’s a real thing. Yeah.
Robyn: (11:45)
It
Beth: (11:45)
Was real. Yeah. Call it two weeks of fame and it’s done
Robyn: (11:49)
Well and you’ve grown pretty quickly. And you know, so with growing that quickly, like if, if you could go back and tell yourself or tell somebody else, who’s like, you know, like I’m, my goal is to just get to 5 million as fast as possible. Like, what are some of the challenges that you experienced and kind of, how did you deal with them?
Beth: (12:09)
I think if I could tell anybody anything, it would be to hire the experts earlier than you think you should. And I’m actually still battling this right now. I feel like it’s still just my brother and I running this company. And then we’ve got Kim who helps us with fulfillment. It’s just the three of us. So, we should be hiring help. You know, we contract out a lot of our work, but we, we need to hire help. And I feel like that entrepreneur, like I can still do this stuff by myself. I should still be bootstrapping this by myself. I shouldn’t be spending more money paying somebody else, but I learned, you know, like my first big jump from 2019 to 2020, I went from a hundred thousand in sales to a million in sales. And it was because I hired a professional Facebook, Instagram marketing person who knew what they were doing, knew how to set up ads and target them properly. And I saw 800% growth. I wish I had done that sooner. I wish I had hired a book company, keeping company. I wish I had done that sooner. and now I think when I do eventually hire some, you know, marketing people, some, some people to help around internally, I’m gonna wish I had done that sooner as well.
Robyn: (13:17)
Well, it’s hard cuz you’ve got, you’re being pulled in a lot of different directions and you could do it all, but there’s just an opportunity cost there that if you do, if you do everything in this area, that means that the, the next order of the mats doesn’t come in on time or you don’t get the best negotiated prices. And I think it can be really easy to try to save money. And you know, I even find this in my agents. I’m like, well, I want, I want control. And I wanna know that it’s done the way I want it done. But if you, if you aren’t willing to, you know, start to trust your team and to build out that team. Yeah. Then it, it, and then also there’s a single point of failure, especially with, you know, you know, somebody gets sick or, you know, you know, all three of us are mothers. You know, one of our children gets sick, then it, it puts the business in a more precarious place, you know?
Beth: (14:04)
Yeah. And I think in the early stages, you know, up until maybe where I’m at now, it’s okay. That I’m kind of good at a lot of things. Cause I was able to mostly get us this growth, but now we’re at a point where if we wanna keep growing, we need to have somebody who’s really good at each thing to be doing those things. And not me being kind of good at
Robyn: (14:23)
All of them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Cindy: (14:26)
What, what was your background, Beth in your corporate, in your corporate job, do you think you can do a lot of things. So, did, did corporate job help you be that person?
Beth: (14:35)
You know, I think honestly the time in the military was really what helped. one thing about military veterans that I wish everybody knew is we are really good at learning because almost every single person that goes into the military has no clue how to do the job that they do in the military. You go in and you train, and you learn how to do that job, which is in a skill in itself, you become good at learning how to do things. You don’t know how to do. and you learn how to accomplish things when things don’t go as planned. So, in the military, you know, like we train, we train, we train, then we get deployed. Now I’m on deployment, I’m in the desert. And what I trained for doesn’t work out how we thought it was going to work out well now I’m there.
Beth: (15:17)
I can’t like, I gotta figure out some way to make it work. So, you just do there’s no. Oh, well shoot. That didn’t work. You just have you forced to find a way to make it work, which I think translates into being an entrepreneur. There’s no roadblock that I can’t figure out a way around cuz that’s the mentality I have from the military is you don’t just say, oh shoot, you find a way around that wall. my corporate job after the military, was just really being a keyboard warrior and managing a relationship between corporate is very, very boring, but paid the bills but it, it did help with managing relationships with, with people, which is very important. right now managing all the relationships with the people we work with in our, our company.
Cindy: (16:01)
Well, and, and boring sometimes allows that entrepreneurial part of your brain to be a little more creative too. So, a boring, always a bad thing.
Beth: (16:09)
No, and it actually worked out well for me because I just left that job this past summer. So, the first three years of busy baby, I was still working full time. Wow. With my corporate job and doing busy baby on the side and in the gaps and,
Cindy: (16:22)
And having two little children in the process
Beth: (16:24)
And Hannah having two little children.
Cindy: (16:27)
Yeah. Wow.
Beth: (16:28)
I know I’m gonna look back at this someday and be like, how the heck did you do that? Like
Cindy: (16:33)
Yeah. Well, one of the things that, Robin and I are huge fans of profit first and, but we’re also fan of, of, one of Mike’s other books called clockwork, which is all about making sure you have the time in your business to work on the strategic design piece of it. And not just so many people that I work with, when they, they start working with us, they’re just burn out and they’re like, why did I even, why did I even do this? And you know, it’s, it’s just a lot. So, so it’s, it’s a big it being, being able to make sure that there’s time in your, in your day to actually, to work on the business is hugely important.
Beth: (17:14)
Yeah. I think, for me, it’s having the routines in my day. The time blocking of this is when I’m doing these things and this work things and these, when I’m doing these family things. And another thing that I think has helped me and my brother now, my brother joined me last year is every six weeks. We schedule a retreat where we go away from the office, and we spend four to six hours with the exact same agenda. we start celebrating, what did we achieve in the last six weeks? And then we say, okay, well what did we learn from in the last six weeks? And then we visit revisit our goals, our strategic plan, our marketing, and doing that exact same process every six weeks really helps us stay kind of focused on that strategic plan and adjust as necessary.
Cindy: (17:59)
That’s awesome. And keeps you two connected towards the same vision that that’s awesome.
Beth: (18:03)
Yes. And, and keeps us from being, you know, I think by the end of last year, at the end of Q4, we were both a little burnt out. and I planned a special retreat where I took all of my notes from the previous seven retreats, and I took all those celebrations and combined them. So, we had a year’s where the celebrations and I, we, we did it in this conference room that had a, a whole wall was just made of whiteboard material. And so, I mapped out all of our celebrations from the year and to look back on, you know, you get stuck in this day-to-day grind of like trying to get through the next thing you’re doing. You kind of forget, like when he joined me in January and didn’t have a clue what he was doing, I had the busy baby Matt and one new product in development. And since he’s joined, we have six products everything’s been put into retail packaging. It’s become a beautiful brand. You know, we’ve achieved all these things that when you put it all on a board at the end of the year, we went from that kind of state of mind of, oh my God, this year, this fourth quarter, whew, to like, holy crap, look at what we did. And it like lifts you up. And I feel like it, it put us into this year with a, a really good positive mindset.
Robyn: (19:10)
Well, I think it’s really important that you do that. Like I, you know, if you don’t celebrate those small wins, I think that, as an overachiever, it it’s really easy to be like, oh, well I see those three failures and forget the 400 wins that you’ve got mm-hmm but then it’s also, I see, I’ve like, I’ve talked to you, as I says, one time I was talking with somebody that was doing really well. And she’s like, well, I guess now I’ve gotta do this next thing. And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, why do you have to? She’s like, well, that’s the next thing to do. That’s what everybody does. I was like, that doesn’t mean you have to do it, you know? And there can be a lot of growth for growth sakes. You know, I saw this person do that. So now I’ve gotta do that. Even when it doesn’t fit, you know, what they really need for their life or for their business, you know? Yeah.
Beth: (19:53)
One thing I think we learned too is you just said something that kind of made me think we learned that some of our wins became losses and some of our losses turned into wins. So, we had celebrated in one period that we hired this company for, to manage our Amazon account. We’re so excited. They’re gonna blow it outta the water. So be great. And then in the next sprint, we had to fire that company or two sprints down the road because they were doing a horrible job and, you know, just driving down our sales. But then we had, you know, one kind of like lesson learned of shoot. We ordered too much of those of one color. We are way overstocked, which that turned into a celebration because we found a way to pivot that into a sale that actually brought in more revenue. so it’s kind of fun to see how that wins can sometimes turn to losses, but losses can also sometimes turn into wins. So, any downturn is not necessarily the worst thing in the world because it could learn lean towards the next big win.
Robyn: (20:51)
I think it’s, you know, it’s being that solution oriented, always looking for how, you know, just kind of, like you said, with the military, like you can’t go to your commander and be like, well, I don’t know, it didn’t work, you know, but you like, that wouldn’t go well. you know, but also, you know, you, you have to keep, you have to go with like, this is how I, I’m gonna be focused on how to solve the problem and not focus on oh, well, if it just hadn’t been for Susie ordering too many things, you know, cuz it’s easy to get stuck on that. And then for miss the potential opportunities that come from that, you know.
Cindy: (21:21)
Yeah. Well, and there’s the seeing the opportunity that there’s also then institutionalizing that learning. What did, what did you see? and how did it work and how can you learn from that to do it again, to take that win and replicate it. And I mean, yeah, it was not necessarily a good thing that you had extra product, but you learned something by being able to offer that sell. So, is there a chance to replicate that in a deliberate way? Not just by falling into it?
Beth: (21:48)
No. And that’s a really great point, Cindy, because prior to that sale, so it was the black mats. We had way too many, we thought black was gonna be a super popular color. Nobody ordered it. And so, prior to that, every sale we ever did was some sort of sitewide sale. It was either a site wide, 20% off or sitewide bundle and save. But for this instance, we just took the black mats and cut ’em in half 50% off black mats. We still made a small profit, but we got rid of some of our excess inventory, and it turned out because people were getting such a deal on the black mats, they were buying additional accessories, driving up the average order value. So, like, whoa, we could actually just keep doing this. So, every month we’re just gonna take one product or one color instead of marking down everything on the whole website, we’ll just mark down a few things and then see that we don’t act, we actually get more, more sales even though parts. So, it just, it opened up a new way of, of kind of marketing and, and creating, you know, marketing sales. Cool.
Robyn: (22:47)
We were just talking to another client about something similar, cuz you know, we were talking about like, we can’t just get focused, you know, like on the overall Roaz of like sometimes you have to look at the big picture and say, you know, they had a consumable product and you know, you could say you have a consumable product that you think people will reorder. You feel confident of that. It’s okay for those like new to, to brand buyers for that RO a little bit low, cause you’re gonna get a better return over the long run or, you know, you’re gonna be able to increase average order value that can have a bigger impact on profitability and customer adoption. and then that can kind of feed into itself as more people see your product out in the marketplace. Mm-hmm
Beth: (23:26)
Robyn: (23:27)
Yeah. But what would you say your super seller of power is if you know that that is most important to your success?
Beth: (23:34)
I think it’s the relatability. and somebody else was just kind of poaching me another business friend of mine, of P people. Like I think that it’s a mom invented product and that I have kids and that I invented this, and we sell this and we market this, you know, as a mom invented thing to just help make life for new moms, a little easier. And one thing I’ve been really bad at is putting myself out there on social media and stuff like that. And what, you know, my, my other friend in the business is learning is that people actually really care about your story, and they care about, they want to know the behind the scenes. They want to see, you know, your real life and your real struggles and, and you know, more about the company than just like what the product is. So, I think I need to build on that whole, like people do like the mom invented and the brother sister own company. We need to take that super seller strength and make it bigger this year.
Cindy: (24:27)
I think that’s been a thing for a while, but I think right now with the, the COVID issues that we’ve felt disconnected from family a little bit, we have been physically disconnected. I think there’s just really a, a, a need to feel connected, in a, in a way that that hasn’t existed for, for a long, long time. So, yeah, I think, you know, everybody can, everybody can relate to family and the importance of family, I think. So that sounds like good advice. You’re getting. okay. I think we’ll wrap it up. I, I’m curious to know Beth, what are you looking forward to? We’re kicking off, we’re already halfway through, January of 20, 20, 22. What are you looking forward to this year?
Beth: (25:12)
I’m looking forward to this feeling in my gut to go away that I had last year at this time of, I don’t know what I’m doing. I need to find, you know, I had explosive growth last year. I can’t not keep growing. and that feeling goes the way throughout the years, you keep doing the next best thing and taking the next right step and finding the next right person to help you. And I know this year that this, this feeling like we’re trying to get into more retail stores, we’re trying to get into international markets, and these are all things I don’t know anything about. and it’s a very uneasy feeling, knowing that there’s so much to learn and so much look out for. And hopefully I do the safety testing, right, for all these other countries and find the right safety markings to put on my packaging. I don’t know how this all works. and so it’s a really kinda icky feeling. So, I’m really looking forward to the fact that I know as I go through and keep taking the next right steps, that feeling is going to change, and we will see success.
Cindy: (26:06)
That’s really interesting because you know, a lot of people think of, new year’s resolutions and starting over and, and it kind of energizes them, but you’re the first person I’ve talked to. You said it’s kind a feeling
Beth: (26:19)
I feel right now, I’m looking forward to this going away.
Cindy: (26:23)
Well, I hope you get there by March, so you don’t have it for very long
Beth: (26:28)
No, I think it’s like, I forget what the actual quote is, but if it doesn’t feel, if it doesn’t feel hard, then you’re not gonna get the growth or, you know, something like that. If, if it doesn’t if it’s not hard, it’s, it’s not, you’re not gonna grow. Yeah.
Cindy: (26:43)
Yeah. I forget the quote too, but definitely had the feeling, so know what you’re talking about.
Beth: (26:49)
Robyn: (26:51)
One of my favorite quotes is from Walt Disney and, it’s kind of fun to do the impossible and you know, like, I, I see people like you doing it all the time, you know, people would say, you know, it’s not, oh, I can’t start a business cause I’m, I’m a mom or I’m, I can’t start a business because I’ve never been in manufacturing mm-hmm and you know, it, you are really a great example of J is completely possible to do the impossible. As long as you take it one bite at a time,
Beth: (27:17)
One bite at a time and find a tribe. There are so many resources available to help you learn how to do it. there’s all kinds of startup ecosystems all across the country of, you know, co-working spaces and, and economic development centers and all the cities that are there just truly to help you learn how to do it and help you take the next step. So, I think finding those resources is key and any, like, I seriously had no idea how to do a single thing that I’m doing now when I started this. So, it’s possible for sure.
Cindy: (27:50)
I
Robyn: (27:50)
Forget.
Cindy: (27:51)
You’re awesome. Hold outta the water in 2022.
Beth: (27:53)
I hope so.
Robyn: (27:55)
I’m excited to see what’s coming up ahead for, for your company and we wanna thank you so much. If people wanna get ahold of you is the best way for them to go to your website at busy babies.
Beth: (28:06)
Yep. Busy baby.com. Yep. Busy baby.com or busy baby matt.com. We bought both domains. So, you can usually just Google busy baby and find us one way or another.
Robyn: (28:16)
Well, thank you so much for coming on. now we’re gonna go to our five-minute fix and we hope that you have a wonderful week.
Beth: (28:23)
Thanks. Thank you, ladies.
Cindy: (28:24)
Thank you, Beth. Hi, this is Cindy Thomason with your five-minute fix. One of the things that you can do just is really super easy is to set up a bank account for inventory. One of the challenges that, many of my clients have faced is that they have all of their, all of their expenses going through one bucket. And it’s really hard to understand how cash flows for monthly expenses and how that’s different from inventory that comes through on a real sporadic basis. So simply by setting up a separate, bank account to handle your inventory, you can start to see a, a more consistent cash flow for your operating expenses in your primary bank account. And then you can start to see how you’re building up a balance in your inventory bank account and know that that money is gonna be there when you have to buy your next round of inventory.
Cindy: (29:20)
So the first thing you do is you set up a bank account, a checking account with your bank, and then every time you get an Amazon settlement, you’re gonna look at your cost of goods for that particular settlement, and just simply move the money out, for that amount over from your, you know, wherever the deposit comes into your bank account, move it out over to that inventory bank account. And you’ll start to see that balance grow. Now, just be a little careful and watch your traditional bank account because those inventory dollars are usually just sitting there and, or they’re sitting there, and you find another use for ’em. And then when it comes time to buy the inventory, you’ve got a problem, but you’ve had probably a little more cash flow in your, in your operating expense account. So, you’re gonna have to watch that and, and be mindful of what’s going on there. You may have to do a little balance tweaking. You may not be able to do this a hundred percent, but if you’ll start diverting some of your money over to an inventory checking account and ultimately get to the point where you’re preparing to make that next inventory buy with those dollars. so that you’re fully funded. That will save you from having to go to other accounts, to, to borrow money for inventory. Whenever those big, purchases have come along.
Narrator: (30:38)
Thank you for listening to the process to e-com profits podcast. Make sure you subscribe to get updates for new episodes, leave a review. And one lucky winner each month will win a one-hour call with your choice of our hosts. A value of over $300. Keep listening to hear the winner announce on the first show of the month. You can contact our hosts by using the contact us form at process to e-com profits.com. You can also find the contact information of our hosts and show guests in the show notes for each episode.
