A little catch-up for previous months before I talk about where I plan to go for August and beyond.
May - The beginning
- Sold enough cards to purchase modern cards and build that inventory a little - found a shipping hurdle for writing addresses
- purchased essentials to the business: stamps, cheap envelopes, top loaders, penny sleeves.
June - Building
- Sales boom - scaled up stamp purchases
- Purchased essential business operating items - printer, label maker, team bags, address stamp - solved the shipping hurdle
- Improved my spreadsheet for readability and accuracy - found an inventory hurdle for tracking
- Made my first secondhand purchases outside of family! - found another inventory hurdle for sorting
- Purchased sealed products for ripping and finding modern inventory - found financial hurdle in using too much liquid cash on acquisition
- Searched for better deals on shipping materials and storage - found hurdle in fundamental lack of business structure professionalism, looked into applying for business license
July - Scaling
- Introduced to inventory tracking software via Youtube videos - solved inventory tracking and sorting hurdle
- Settled on business decision to make better financial choices in inventory sourcing - solved financial hurdle for inventory acquisition
- Purchased Ashland Gaming domain via Shopify - Settled on direction of business and potential for customer traffic
- Purchased business cards for local/in-person advertisement
- Purchased storage dividers for new chaos sorting system - found liquidity hurdle in cash flow from June overspending
- Applied for business license and trade name for privacy, professionalism, and tax separation
August - Refining
- Website design and direction
- Inventory sorting and finish posting all current stock - found inventory posting hurdle in speed of inventory posts
- consider upcoming holidays and areas for growth in product diversity - many areas seem to rely on cash flow, so I'll be working on saving money more this month than previous months
- ?????
- Profit
Moving forward, I plan to finish making the website look cleaner, and filled-in. I also plan to finish posting up all of the stock I've acquired over the last couple of months. That's my biggest bottleneck. I'm still nowhere near being able to do this full time and since I don't have a card scanner, I don't have the efficiency of posting more than 300 cards to my inventory a day. Some days, I'm unable to post any, and others only 100 or so. I still have roughly 8k more cards to post, so it's one chunk-at-a-time kind of deal.
And that's the current state of Ashland! Thank you for being here!
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