Case Study: Five Key Lessons I’ve Learnt From Running A Successful Ecommerce Business Alongside A Full-Time Job

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I’m sure a lot of you understand how hard it can be to start a new business while trying to juggle full-time work. You might be working a full-time job or perhaps you’re studying full-time or maybe you’re doing a mixture of both.

My business venture revolved around the old Nintendo DS. I used to purchase second hand games in the US and then I would resell them in Australia. I built up a lot of connections with suppliers and stores in the USA for second hand Nintendo DS games.

So, what I would do is I’d buy a game, for say $25 and import it into Australia and sell it for 50$/60$. This could be classified as an advanced form of international arbitrage and it worked fantastically. I made a lot of money and I naively announced to my friends and family that this was it, I was never going to get a job.

That was of course until Nintendo announced that they were no longer going to make Nintendo DS anymore and they were instead going to now make the Nintendo 3DS. To someone who doesn’t know much about gaming, these probably sound like the same thing, but trust me when I say that they are.

Nintendo 3DS killed my business because in the past, with a Nintendo DS you could import again from the United States, but you could still play them on systems that you purchased in Australia.

For the next version though, the 3DS Nintendo made it so that if you purchased games in the United States and then you tried to use them on devices bought in Australia, it wouldn’t work – you had to purchase local games. Otherwise, they would not play. So basically I could no longer import super cheap games and resell them at home. This is called region locking and it killed my business.

So guess what I had to do. I had only worked part time before I started my first successful business, as I was only 18 years old and didn’t have to worry about paying the bills. By the time my business failed, I was no longer 18, I had adult bills to pay, so I had to go out there and find work.

When I did this, I swore to myself that it was just going to be temporary. It was just a bump in the road. I was going to rebuild my business on the side and I’ll be back up and running in a few months.

Funny enough, when I got a dose of reality, I discovered what it’s like working a real full-time job. I found out that it wasn’t going to be as easy as I thought. By the time I woke up in the morning, made my commute to work each day, got through all of the work that I had to do, then finally made the commute back home, all that I wanted to do in the evenings was nothing. I just wanted to watch YouTube, but I can tell you what I didn’t want to do. I didn’t want to work on my store. I was too tired and so for months I languished and I did nothing, but I had already had a taste of success and I knew that honestly, I wanted to get rich and unless you were born into wealth the only true real way to get rich is to build a business.

Jobs have income caps. You only have a finite amount of time to exchange for money every day. But with the business you can hire other people and use their time to make you money. And so unlike jobs, businesses don’t have income caps. If I wanted to get rich then I had no choice. So I sucked it up and I found the will power to build up my business again on the side and spoiler alert – the story does have a happy ending – I ended up pivoting into a related niche.

I actually ended up going into a different business model, closely related to my previous retail arbitrage model. Through that I learned to work with wholesalers, manufacturers and dropshippers. In a way, my first business collapsing was actually a blessing in disguise and fftentimes these things in life are, but it certainly did not feel that way at the time and rebuilding my store was challenging.

So if you are working full-time or you’re studying full time or you’re doing a mixture of both, this article will be helpful for you. In this article I reflect back on what techniques I used to stay motivated and to also think about the mistakes that I made and where I’ve seen other people making the same types of mistakes.

1. Avoid the shiny object syndrome

I think all of us have suffered from the shiny object syndrome at least once in our lives. I’ve got a great idea for a business: I’m going to start a dropshipping Store. It’s going to be amazing. Oh, what’s this, affiliate marketing? Cool. I’m going to start an affiliate marketing website.

Right. Now I know that I have fallen for shiny object syndrome in the past. But in general I have a natural resistance to it. I’m really good at staying motivated on one thing and I think that that helped me a lot. Unfortunately. I am highly unusual. Most people are very susceptible to shiny object syndrome. And I genuinely think that this might be one of the most common reasons that people fail as starting a new business and to figure out why you just need to look at the maths.

You have 24 hours a day and you need eight hours for sleep. And you need eight hours for work and you have one hour and they’re for commuting and preparing for work. That leaves you with just seven hours a day. With those seven hours, you need to cook, clean and manage your life. You need to juggle friends, family and have down time so that you don’t go insane. For most people, realistically, they might have one or two hours a day on weekdays to be able to dedicate towards their business. So that means that collectively they’ve got five to ten hours every week. Of course, weekends are a prime time to work. So maybe you were very disciplined and you work 8 hours on both of those days. That means that you are working 16 hours on the weekends and total that means you might have 20 to 26 hours on average each week to work on your new side hustle, soon-to-be main hustle.

Now consider this, here at SaleSource, people often ask us the question: If I’m looking to start a new dropshipping store, how many hours should I dedicate towards it, each week? My answer to that is at least 15 to 20 hours and once your store starts making sales, you need to be prepared to set aside at least one hour every day to manage your orders. And that is really low compared to most businesses.

Ss you can see, most people barely have enough time to focus on just one new business or one new store. Let alone two, three, four or five of them. Focus on just one end do it well.

2. Wake up early and invest in you and not your boss

A lot of the people reading this article might be night owls and you will do your best work at night. And if this is you, you’re actually really lucky, because it’s going to be easier for you to start a business on the side. This is due to the fact that you are your best, most creative, most sharp at night. And where are you at night? At home, working for yourself and not at your job. This means that you can show up as your best self for you and your business – not for your boss.

But most people are not night owls. I know that I’m not. I work best in the morning and when I was working, I had an epiphany. I thought: I wake up in the morning, I get ready and I go to work to do my job when I’m at my best, when I’m fresh and rested. And so I did a really great job for my boss and I expended all of the mental energy on my job. By the time I got home, I was always tired: Not just physically, but mentally as well. Not only do I find it hard to stay motivated and to not just watch Netflix, but I also don’t do a very good job because I’m not working at my full capacity.

Why do I keep giving my boss my best self? Screw that, I want to give me my best stuff. I want to be the sharpest, the most creative when I am working for me. What that meant for me was that I had to go to bed two hours earlier each evening so that I could dedicate those two extra hours in the morning for something that truly matters. To this day I live by that rule. I avoid organizing meetings or answering emails in the morning and instead I choose to set that time aside to work on projects that require my best, most creative self.

3. Stay healthy, don’t get sick.

What I just said was a little bit deceptive. I did eventually start going to bed earlier so that I could wake up earlier, but I didn’t start out by doing that. I just chose to wake up earlier and go to bed at the same time as before. Genius idea, if I sleep 6 hours rather than sleep 8 hours, then that’s two extra hours I can dedicate to work.

What an utterly stupid idea. Can you see what this article really is about? It’s about the struggle that you have when you’re working full-time, because your most limited resource, your time is going towards your job. When you’re working full-time or you’re studying full time, you need to be really careful to maximize your free time, so that you can spend it on your new business. The sacrifice will pay off down the road. Once you have enough money, you can quit your job. Then you will gain a lot of extra time, especially once you have enough money coming into the business that you can hire people to do tasks for you. In the meantime, though, you need to be careful with your time and you can’t afford to get sick.

So, my genius idea to sleep less. I weakened my immune system and I suddenly started to get lots of colds. Yes, I gained two hours of work, but I paid a hefty price. I lost many days to being sick. It was a short-term gain in productivity for a long-term negative consequence and my productivity. The people that manage the asleep and health are the tortoise and those that don’t are the hare. And guess which of these won the race? Business isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon.

4. Sell something that you are passionate about.

When I look back at how I rebuilt my store, it was a lot easier to say motivated, because the fact that I was selling something that I was passionate about. I’m not a video game fanatic anymore. Although I still do love watching Zelda 64 games on Twitch, but back then I was super passionate about them. And this was good for two reasons.

The first reason being is that as a consumer myself, I had inside knowledge, which made doing market research a whole lot easier, and because I understood what the market wanted, that freed up my time, as I wasn’t spending as much time doing things like product research. I could instead use that to do things like learn about how to work with dropshippers and manufacturers.

When you’re first starting your new business, there are so many new skills that you need to learn. So why not make it as easy for yourself as possible by picking something to sell that you already know about. That applies whether you’re getting into e-commerce, like I did or whether you’re starting a service-based business. Try and see if you can sell something that you’re passionate about and know about.

The second reason, of course is that it’s a lot more fun to build a business around something that you like and if you find it fun, then you’re less likely to procrastinate.

5. Budget your time like you budget money.

Let me ask you a question. How would you create a weekly budget for your money?

1. You write down all of your weekly income

2. You write down all of your weekly expenses

3. You minus your expenses from your weekly expenses. Sometimes you budget and you’ll see that your finances are super healthy. You’ve got lots of money left over and that is awesome. But sometimes it’s the opposite, you find that you don’t have any money left over. In fact even worse. Your expenses are even higher than your income, which means that you are now in debt? So what do you do?

You have to find ways to cut down on your spending. The same goes for our time – keep track of where you’re spending it. You might find that you’re wasting way too much time on YouTube, that you should instead be spending on your new venture. It’s a great idea to get an app for your phone, like SmarterTime. With this app you can keep track of how you actually spend your time throughout the day.

Final Words

Here is the truth. Probably the biggest difference between those with a rich mindset and those with a poor mindset is how they approach their time. People with the poor mindset will exchange the time for money any day. Rich people, on the other hand, understand that time is the scarce resource. In fact money is something that you can get more of because you can build a successful store, you can build a successful business and then you could hire people to run that for you. And with that passive income you can then go out there and use the time that you gained back to build another successful store and so on and so on.