The last few months I’ve been head down getting the new (to us) business up and running.
Quick recap…
I bought a brand! The brand has been around for 30 years, but only online for about five of those. I acquired a 90% stake in an asset purchase and it is the first platform company for me and my new business partner (Dr. Travis Zigler).
I’ll be sending insider updates like this one from time to time so you can follow along as we turn it around and GROW.
We needed cash!
When we took over the brand the core products were out of stock (a big reason for selling it by the way). The lead times to replenish those were 8 weeks for one, and 12 weeks for the other. They each went over their marks by about 3 weeks 😅.
Without inventory to sell we couldn’t generate cash. But we still had to cover carrying costs of about $2,500 per month. So those last few weeks were pretty tight trying to squeeze every penny out to cover our next note payment.
Then Travis had an idea…
Let’s do a pre-sale! Production is wrapping up and we’re just waiting on third party testing to complete, so we should have it in hand in just a couple of weeks. Let’s pre-sell it to generate some cash!
So we did.
Over the last 10 days we pre-sold about $4,500 of our supplement. That was enough to cover the note payment for July, some recurring expenses, and make the final payment on the inventory (yes, the same inventory we pre-sold).
As we speak it’s on a truck heading to our warehouse in Wisconsin. 🎉
This is such a great example of the importance of an email list!
If we were an Amazon only brand or totally neglected our customer list then we’d be in a pinch right now.
I won’t say it was a fun experience that I’d like to repeat, but hey, what an adventure! And that’s one of the things that keeps life (and business) interesting.
Next our attention is turning to our upcoming launch on Amazon (more on that later)…