Adventures in Entrepreneurship with Jeremy Hanks

Plan Your Work and Work Your Plan!

There’s a myth out there about how easy it is to make money on the Internet. It goes something like this: The Internet has made it easy for anyone to make a fortune, or at least an extra thousand dollars every month or so. All you have to do is start selling stuff on eBay and you’ll be rolling in dough.

As savvy entrepreneurs know, making money on the Internet—or anywhere else for that matter—is not easy. If it were, everyone would be doing it and no one would be making money by professing to hold the sacred key to yet one more vault of entrepreneurial knowledge. The truth is, the only surefire way to make money on eBay or anywhere else is to plan your work and work your plan. Other people might call it ‘working hard’ or ‘working smart’ but no matter how you cut it, you have to be smart enough to know that without a plan—without a roadmap—and without hard work and dedication, you will fail.

While technological advances and the Internet have put business ownership within the reach of more people now than at any point in our nation’s history, more people it seems are failing as business owners. What the guy who lives in Missouri and sells movies on eBay may not understand is that relatively speaking, he has to work just as hard if not harder than the guy down the street who owns the local video store. For starters, if he’s selling on eBay, there’s a community of buyers who are more than willing to share their experiences (with the seller) with other eBay buyers. Imagine walking into your local video store and being able to ask all of the store’s current and previous customers to rate the store’s performance on price, customer service and value, right in front of the store’s owner and right in front of every other potential customer. On eBay and other Internet sites, that’s exactly what happens, and if you take your job lightly—and it is a job by the way—your customers are going to shout it from your rooftop, and before too long you won’t have anyone buying your DVDs.

Don’t be too fooled by the promise of eBay. Sure, a lot of people are making a couple extra grand every month or so on the site (and a select few are making a lot more than that), but it’s not because they’re not working for it. For every eBay success story, I’d bet you dollars to donuts that there are at least 1,000 or more absolute failures. I believe that the people who are making a killing on eBay—and even those who are pulling down a few extra grand every month or so—are the same people who would have been successful back in the 1950s selling Tupperware, or who would have persevered and made something great happen during California Gold Rush of the 1840s. Why? Because they had a plan and they worked hard to achieve their goals.

Unfortunately, a lot of people get sucked into pipedreams (and I’m not talking about the type where they promise you you’ll make millions by selling candles or handmade baskets through direct sales parties). The biggest pipedream of all is that if you post it on eBay or display it in the front window of your store, that someone will buy it. Nothing could be further from the truth. In the broadest sense, the typical eBay seller’s expectations are wildly exaggerated, while at the same time, their understanding of what it takes to be successful—in terms of man hours—is nowhere near where it should be.

Sure, the Internet as a platform has made it a lot easier to start a business. When compared to opening a bricks & mortar operation, the start-up costs are negligible… you don’t have to sign a multi-year lease, there are no ‘tenant finishes’ to borrow money to pay for, and now-a-days with drop shipping becoming more and more popular, you can even get by without carrying any inventory. But all of that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll succeed in an online marketplace.

First of all, far too many eBay sellers—and other business owners as well—attempt to compete on price and price alone; and as any adjunct B-School professor will tell you, competing on price gets you nowhere in the long run, especially when there are Wal-Marts or dollar stores on just about every other street corner. Sure, if you’re an attorney and you can offer your customers solid legal advice at a lower price-point than your competition, you just might scrape by. However, trying to match the lowest-priced lawyer in town is nasty business. Unless you can match her dollar for dollar on human resources and overhead, you’d better offer something she can’t, like superior service, better turnaround time, or savvier advice, all priced appropriately, of course.

With so many people chasing their dreams now a days on the eBays of the world, I strongly recommend that you take the time now—if you haven’t done so already—to plan your work and work your plan. Even if you create just a one to two page business plan that identifies the basics—like target market, points of differentiation, product mix, and basic financial expectations for the next six months—you’d be further along than 95 percent of online retailers. Follow your plan according to your vision and adjust when and where necessary, and work hard or smart or however you want to call it, and you’ll be in the top one percent of eBay/online retailers before you know it.

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