736: Replaced His Salary in 5 Months and Set Up a $700k Exit

25:53So from here, it's now like, okay, let's get my Shopify store up and running. Let's get a demo store that I can start calling suppliers. Let's start getting some suppliers on board, uploading their products. Because now I would say it's like a, it's not a race, but it's a momentum game towards being able to take your first sale. Because that's when things really start to change and you start to get that like addiction that's going to drive you on to the big numbers. Yeah. It starts to feel real. Yeah. You could always talk yourself out of a niche or an idea and the grass is always going to be greener.

26:23What if there's this other thing that I hadn't thought of? But if you found something that kind of checks the boxes for you, I liked your line, the best thing you do is go all in. So this is something that comes up on all the dropshipping episodes is why I need suppliers to have a working website and I need almost a working website to have suppliers. You kind of mentioned, I need to set up this Shopify demo store to make it look like I already am in business, but I'm not quite yet. And it's kind of this chicken or the egg dance here? How did you address that? It's the worst part of the entire business.

26:54It's almost frustrating because being out the other side, it becomes so easy to get suppliers when you've got skin in the game and you're just desperate for a few to give you a chance because how do you get skin in the game without the few giving you a yes? So the best advice I can give to anyone here is just volume and numbers. Like you need to get to a stage where you can get enough suppliers to take a sale, to get live, to get skin in the game. And let's say that's five, right? There is no magic number, but five is probably enough to give yourselves a reasonable chance of going live with some ads and making some sales and getting moving.

27:34Now, what happens often is people kind of choose 10 gold suppliers and they're like, they're the ones I really want. And they then maybe only land one of them and they get disheartened. Whereas like, If you've done your niche research right, and let's continue on with the example of like my original site, I can go and contact 20 different brands that manufacture grills and outdoor kitchens. I can contact 20 different brands that manufacture gazebos, 20 different brands that do furniture, 20 different brands that do fire pits. And so I'm starting to build a list of suppliers that I can contact that even if I have a 10 % hit rate, I'm going to have five to 10 suppliers on my site that I can upload their products and get moving.

28:16And that is probably the biggest hurdle you've got to get over. So casting the net wide and becoming a little bit immune to the fear of, let's face it, doing something that isn't very pleasant, which is essentially calling someone out of the blue and trying to convince them to give you a chance. But there will be, if you cast the net wide enough, enough suppliers that either decide to give you a chance or to be completely honest, just have a fairly low bar offer onboarding retailers. Like some suppliers just take the example of like, look, it doesn't cost us anything to onboard you. If you make some sales, great.

28:46If you don't, nothing lost. And you're going to land some of those and then others you're convinced, but it's a numbers game. Well, there's a couple things here. The first is probably somewhat important is instead of going for a site called Veranda's direct to you or being more specific, you kind of went a little bit broader and say, yeah, we'll sell you the outdoor kitchen. We'll sell you the fire pit. We'll sell you all this stuff. My kind of gut would be like, no, I'll be the go-to guy for the pergolas. And I don't want to mess with anything else. It's like, ah, if you go a little bit broader, all of a sudden you open yourself up to being able to have more potential supplier relationships and kind of build maybe more of a brand.

29:24I don't know. That was an interesting one. But what was the outreach like? So you've identified this niche, you've identified the suppliers within that niche, and now is it picking up the phone trying to find somebody in business development like who do you look for and what do you say and you're absolutely right by the way of serving a person rather than a product is exactly the right way rather than saying i've got a store that's going to sell verandas or pergolas i've got a store that's going to serve someone who wants to make an incredible entertaining space in their backyard the second one is 100 the best way to go about it so that's the first thing and that did help me my experience was very much i had to call a lot i got a lot of no's, but I got enough yeses.

30:05I think I got four to launch my site. And that was probably off the back of calling 50. Now, when I called then, I was very much like classic cold call style, like, hi, I'm Jaden. I'm from this store and probably speaking like quite quickly and quite nervous and very timid. And they're just thinking, oh, geez, cold call. Like, how do I get this guy off the phone? I got stopped by a load of gatekeepers. Those who didn't, like, just send an email that I'm never going to reply to. Like, how do we just get this guy out the way? And, and, you know, some of them gave me the time of day and some of them, I was persistent enough and I called back enough times.

30:39They're like, oh geez, okay, fine. Come on then. And that, and that did the job. But now the way I do it is I call up the company. I always phone because I find it much, much easier to, the hit rate is much higher that way, even though it's uncomfortable. And the first thing I do is I ask them, can I speak to someone who deals with commercial sales? like essentially deals with partners who place bulk orders or commercial orders, right? Because straight away, that gets me in the door. I've not said anything untrue, right? That is the fundamental business model. Over the next year, I plan to place 5, 10, 15, 20, 50 orders with them, right?

31:13So I am a partner who places bulk commercial orders or places multiple commercial orders. But in their mind, that's just gone from a conversation where I'm there to cold call them and pitch them, where they're trying to get me off the phone to potentially something that hits their KPIs, right? Whether this is the company owner of a small brand or the trade sales manager or business development, whoever it is, like all of those people will have some sort of target or vested interest in making business-to-business sales. So like straight away that gets me in the door. Yeah, it's almost a mindset shift from asking them for a favor.

31:44Oh, please, I need a supplier so I can launch my site. It was like, look, I'm trying to help you make more sales, right? We all win here. Exactly, exactly. And so that gets me to speak to the right person. And then the next thing I'll do is just genuinely be really inquisitive about one of their products. I'll do a quick bit of research. I'll find one of their products. And I might say, I was really, really interested to chat to you about one of the gazebos you've got there. I see that you guys have got this new electric design. That's pretty cool. And it's got the LEDs built in and like it's remote controlled.

32:11That's awesome. And I might ask a couple of questions about how that works. And, you know, that makes sense, right? Because I'm a potential buyer of these products. And so now we've got a conversation going. We build a bit of rapport. And then I might say, well, the reason I ask is because we're a retailer of these products. We retail high-end pergola products for people who are kind of building these outdoor living spaces. And if I've already got one, I might say we're actually working with brand B and their product is quite similar to this one. So we're anticipating we might get some questions from customers of how this one compares with that one.

32:41So I thought I better just call and make sure I've done my research and completely understand how those two compare. also if we were able to to offer your product as well that would be great because then you know when customers come in for brand a we can also talk to them about your brand and you know might open you up to some some additional eyeballs some incremental customers that sort of thing we're trying to create you know a space where our customers who are coming in to buy these things have got as much choice as possible okay and nine times out of ten they say yeah thanks but no thanks So what do you think tips the scales in your favor to get a guess?

33:14I think persistence is one. The number of times you call, there is definitely some hazing. Ultimately, if you make it to the point where you make a first sale, it's not particularly hard, but it does require dedication that, let's face it, just most people don't have. So there's definitely a lot of these people have been burned by the first 10 people they spoke to. They signed up and they never even got their site live or never even made a sale, right? So there's definitely some hazing. And if you call enough times and stay persistent enough, they'll be like, okay, that's kind of all I was looking for.

33:46I'll give you a go because you clearly seem to be sticking at this. Yeah. So we're kind of avoiding the D word. We don't want to say drop shipping. We say, I'm a retailer of these products and would love to have you on board for our launch. Yeah. And also silly things. But if they say, do you hold stock? Yeah. Which is a common one because naturally they want to know, can I sell you 30 units today? And you can say things like, look, we don't hold stock out of the gates because ultimately you've got 30 different SKUs. If we take one of each, there might be three that sell brilliantly, but then we've ended up tying up our capital.

34:21So we actually focus more of our investment on paid advertising, on essentially things that bring the customers in to make more sales for you. down the road, if we have a few SKUs that are selling really well, sure, we'd be open to taking some stock. But we'd start by essentially doing direct-to-customer delivery just so that we can get some data and work out what sells. And that handles that objection quite well. You can also say, look, we're happy to organize the logistics. We can send a courier to come and pick it up from your warehouse and deliver it to the customer. That's the easiest thing in the world to organize, right?

34:53But it kind of makes you feel like, okay, taking more of the onus off them. Yeah. Do you ever get the question of, well, what kind of sales volume do you expect? Yeah, sometimes. And I would actually ironically say like going low is a good thing here. You know, maybe saying like, look, to begin with, we were just looking to maybe sell one or two units a month. Like we'd be really pleased with that, but we're really confident the longer we work together, the better we get to know your product line, et cetera, that we can increase those volumes. But I think almost if you try and go too lofty there, even if you might achieve it, but I think they start to think, oh, how realistic is this person?

35:26Whereas I think, You know, most businesses that you work with would be happy if you sold an extra few units a month. They'd be delighted if you sold 10 units a month. So, you know, starting there and saying, look, a couple of months to begin with, and then maybe in six months if we can get it up to double figures, that'd be awesome. They're going to be like, yeah, that sounds realistic. And we'd like that too. Okay. And so they say, okay, we're on board. Let's try this out. Because again, you know, what do they have to lose, really? They're giving you access to a product catalog and maybe some images that you plug into your Shopify store, right?

35:56It's no skin off their back. And then now you have, you got four or five companies to say yes, and you've got your store built out and you can say, okay, now if I build it, nobody's coming. I still got to drive some traffic and maybe starting with paid ads in this case. Is this the longer tail organic style, you know, this brand versus, I guess even that would be more bottom of the funnel. But what kind of ad strategy or marketing strategy comes in out of the gate to try and validate to these new suppliers? Like, hey, we're legit. We're going to drive sales. and to prove to yourself like, oh, this is real.

36:28This is going to work. Jaden's response, plus how most new sellers waste a ton of money on ads, his transition to quit his job, and what drove him to put the business up for sale. Coming up right after this. Running a business is hard. If it were easy, everybody would be doing it, right? You've got a to-do list a mile long, and you've got a dozen different hats to wear. So here's a resource to help lighten your load. I'm excited to partner with Gusto for this episode because they've been one of the most recommended services by Side Hustle Show guests. Gusto is the easy, affordable online payroll, HR, and benefits tool for modern small businesses.

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37:36That's three months of free payroll at gusto.com slash side hustle. One more time, that's gusto, G-U-S-T-O dot com slash side hustle. So last month, it was time to replace the air filter in the car, which is about the level of vehicle maintenance I'm qualified to do. So I Google up the part number, I find this random store that is selling it, and then to my absolute delight, I see that they're running on Shopify. How could I tell? That little purple ShopPay button at checkout. It meant not having to create yet another new account. It meant not having to find my wallet. I am paid and checked out in just a couple clicks.

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38:43Sign up for your$1 per month trial today at shopify.com slash side hustle. That's shopify.com slash side hustle. One more time, it's shopify.com slash side hustle. Paid ads is definitely the lifeblood of this business model for the first, probably at least three to six months. There are some lower competition terms you can start to rank for organically, but realistically, when it comes to traffic that converts, it kind of hinges on those paid ads early on. And it's going to be important for you, like you say, to get that proof of concept, the initial profit, and then also for your suppliers. The big thing here is making sure that you are funneling as much of your ad spend behind high propensity to convert keywords as possible.

39:26Google sets you up a little bit to fail here. And also a lot of people kind of, I guess, maybe don't completely understand kind of buying intent and how a keyword translate to buying intent. Because if we use my store as an example, I might look in an average ads account for that and see a huge amount of clicks and traffic for terms like pergola, gazebo, veranda, you know, wood gazebo, etc. Which to someone who's just started a business looks like good traffic. Well, that's what I sell. And that's, you know, terms related to it. Or it might be, you know, informational terms. Which one should I buy?

40:00How can I install it? You know, can I put it on grass or my patio or whatever, right? and the problem with those is that in this space the cost per click so what you pay for that click on that keyword and essentially the conversion rate like the relationship is not linear and therefore you might be paying one dollar a click for a thousand clicks on gazebo and it might take you that to get a conversion because a real top of funnel term like gazebo it probably is you'll be lucky to be honest if that converts at 0.1 percent and so if that's one dollar a click i've just had to spend a thousand dollars to get a conversion off that whereas i might have a longer tail higher intent keyword like oak gazebo 10 foot by 16 foot now you can see the difference there there's a customer who's browsing who knows roughly what they might be interested in versus a customer who knows exactly the product type they want now the cost per click over here might be three dollars but it might convert one percent because it represents a customer who really knows what they want as a really clear idea.

41:00And so now you can kind of see how the relationship, I have to spend$300 over here to get a conversion, whereas a thousand over here. And the problem is there's a lot more of this style of generic traffic. And so if you aren't deliberately funneling as much of your spend behind those high intent keywords and as many of them as possible, you're essentially going to be burning a lot of ad budget on a lot of generic traffic. And a lot of people say, I've got a conversion problem because people aren't converting my conversion rate's really low. It's actually a traffic intent problem. Right. Somebody just looking for a gazebo, they're not ready to buy yet.

41:31They're just in research mode. The leakage from there as well, the leakage out your funnel, that person may well buy, but they might still be 15 touch points away from buying. And so for a new business that doesn't have much in the way of retargeting or they're not really adding people to their email list, they're not doing any of that sort of nurture stuff that gets people down the funnel, the amount of leakage you're paying for the clicks and then they're all leaking out the funnel and so you're kind of you're kind of there thinking geez i'm paying all this ad spend and it's not turning into conversions and it's because you don't really have the mechanisms to deal with generic traffic and you're not getting enough high intent bottom of the funnel traffic that's ready to buy to kind of get that conversion rate and therefore that return on ad spend that you need okay so starting out we're focusing on those high intent buyer keywords they're looking for specific dimensions, specific material types, maybe even specific brand names, if the brands are going to let you bid on their branded terms.

42:27And do you have a first sale moment or, you know, maybe even the first month where it's like, okay, people are buying, like somebody bought a thing, this actually works. Yeah. So my first sale happened about a week and a half in customer called me on the phone. They wanted to buy like a big barbecue outdoor kitchen thing. It was about £2 ,000. It's like genuine high ticket sale. And yeah, that was cool. But to be perfectly honest, I'd put so much pressure on myself that it felt more like relief than joy. So I would actually say, I think it was month five. That was the first time that the profit the business generated got to that nut of 7K.

43:07And that is actually in my mind, that was a much bigger moment. And maybe that was because that you know one sale for me it whilst it proved the concept it didn't feel like it changed anything if anything i was like oh my gosh now i have to replicate this 5 10 15 30 times but it was that that first time that i'd done and i could see the progression towards that happening and i could see that the curve was continuing upwards i was like okay i've just got to replicate this or keep the growth going at this sort of rate and like this could be a reality i'd get out my job here yeah was it fairly common for customers to want to talk to somebody on the phone for these products that are two, three,$4 ,000?

43:42Yeah, it's a customer service business model. Like anyone who tells you that high ticket dropshipping is a sit behind computer, like four hour work week style gig is in my opinion, selling you a bit of a dream. Like it doesn't have to be you forever and it doesn't have to be at the time. Like I had a job that meant I couldn't answer the phone when I was at work, right? So I had to use my lunch break, use evenings etc to call customers back and i had to have like good voicemails and i had to make sure that when i finished work i called every customer that called you i might have it's early days so i don't have that many but i might have three customers that called me i call them back and i yeah try and do the best job from there and sure i miss some sales early but now for example i don't answer the phone at all i have a team that do that but you kind of have to earn your stripes there and that's one of the balancing acts that you have to to juggle before you kind of go from side hustle to full-time.

44:35That makes sense and I appreciate you saying that. Look, this is a customer service business. Anybody can go through the legwork of the research and the supplier outreach and build a website, but what separates you from everybody else who's working with the same suppliers is that willingness to pick up the phone, have the conversations to really make it a branded customer experience and a positive customer experience to make that sale. Yeah, and to be honest, you need the information as well. Even if someone came to me tomorrow and said, I'm going to start this business, but I've actually already set aside the money to hire someone right away to the customer service, I'd say, it's a risk.

45:15I think you should do it yourself, at least for a little while. Even if you want to say, as soon as I'm profitable, as soon as I make my first, whatever, 1 ,000, 2 ,000, the first 2 ,000, I'm going to hire someone, even if that's part-time, fine, but at least answer the calls to begin with, because you need to understand what excites these customers what objections they have what concerns what problems what information do you need to put on the product page what do you need to put on the product page to make that product sell better what content you need to create and write for these people what retargeting ads can you create to try and get people over the line like all these things do come from knowing your customer better and the level you'll do them at will be that much higher so i think it's also an essential part of kind of applying your trade with one of these businesses yeah you get that firsthand experience of, well, what is this customer really looking for?

46:02What are their holdups? I think that does make sense. It's hard to outsource from the very first moment unless you have somebody on your team or somebody you know who just lives and breathes outdoor patio furniture. They know how to speak this customer's language already and then maybe they could kind of dictate that strategy going forward. But isn't it such an empowering moment when this is the dream, you know, to have the side hustle, I mean, still part-time working lunch breaks, working evenings to have it replace your salary in just five months. I think that's a really incredible milestone and probably worth noting there.

46:32So what happens next? Do you like very next month, you give your notice at work? Like what happens after that? No, I was scared. So I quit in month nine and the business had 70 ,000 pounds. So that's probably about 90 ,000 US dollars. Literally sat in the bank account before I was comfortable going full time. Because for me at the time, that was basically I had a year's income. and I knew that if I went for it right at the beginning, I would just worry the whole time. Like, was I going to be back in that job in three months? Was it going to dip down and, you know, dip below the salary and panic?

47:05And I also think financially stressed business owners typically aren't the best business owners because you focus on the wrong things. I wanted to keep building so it was sustainable. So yeah, so I went an extra. Luckily, the trend kept going up and I started earning profit months that were far above what I needed for my salary. It was pretty much coming up for a year just after nine months where we had about a year's worth of income in the business and it's cashflow positive, right? Because we don't buy inventory. If we're doing it right, our ads costs are covered kind of by the sales we make in months.

47:38So I don't really need to reinvest that profit. So it could sit there as a nice little sort of buffer and nest egg for me to feel confident to go full time. If you're doing it right, what's the target profitability on on your ad spend because it's a cool model where you look i don't have to buy the product until i sell it but my main cost is driving that customer or cost of acquisition you need big row as is to be profitable in high ticket drop shipping margins vary but i would say your average trade margin so essentially the discount your supplier gives you will normally be in the region of 20 to 40 percent let's say 30 and your net profitability will normally be in the region of 15 % if you're doing things well.

48:18And that will typically scale up and down. So essentially, let's say we sell a product for$3 ,000, we might buy it for, let's say$2 ,000, we might need to spend$200 shipping it. So we've got$800 worth of customer acquisition cost, you know, and in there needs to be our customer acquisition cost and also whatever it costs in terms of our time or our team's time, etc. to make that sale, which, you know, obviously you're happy to kind of, you know, sweat that work a little bit in the outset. But that is why getting that cost of acquisition, you know, you kind of want your cost of acquisition to be$300, maybe on a $3 ,000 purchase.

48:55So, you know, we're talking 8, 10, 15x ROASs, which, you know, it's tough in low ticket markets, but very achievable in high ticket if you have your account set up in the right way. And the nice thing about high ticket is, again, the relationship between CPC and cost of product is not linear. Like if I go and look at a mushroom tea, for example, there might be$30 a bag. The CPCs for all of the keywords there will still be one, two, three,$3 for a CPC, of cost per click, right? And I might also be paying$3 per click for a$3 ,000 per gola. So luckily, the greater gross profit in pound or dollar value gives me more customer acquisition cost.

49:39Got it. Got it. That's helpful to know. So yeah, where the dollars or where the pounds get kind of sliced up on a transaction of that size. We've got the acquisition cost, we've got shipping cost. Is that so you advertise free shipping for the customer? I would just follow whatever's done in your niche. So it's important to have a competitive offer. There will be places where like it's the done thing to charge for shipping and there will be niches where the done thing is free shipping and you've just got to work out where your margin sits, basically net of these things. And to be perfectly honest, it's relatively immaterial because often suppliers who charge you for shipping will give you a slightly better trade margin.

50:15And so the net impact is often very similar because ultimately these suppliers need to make it work for their retail partners because they rely on them as a route to market. And so I find most of these niches we go into are pretty well established. They've been there for a while. So they've kind of found an equilibrium with their retailer program. So you don't need to worry about margins as much as you think you might going in, I would say. The real key is managing your costs and your ad spend because that's the variable bit and the bit you can control. Right, and so ROAS was the acronym, Return on Ad Spend.

50:48If I spend$100 to make an$800 net profit customer, that was an 8X ROAS. So it's something to think about as you're scaling this thing. So as time goes on, we're adding more suppliers. we're working on building out kind of the organic content pages if you know if we can acquire a customer for free through google that sure is better than spending a hundred dollars through through the ad campaign we're setting up retargeting campaigns is this on meta or is this still on google i like to do to do both with retargeting i find that meta doesn't work particularly well for acquisition marketing for high ticket because you know you're kind of in meta we're scroll stopping we don't have a search term to give us an idea of their intent whereas Whereas in Google, we have a search term which gives us a proxy for intent so we can be really targeted.

51:32But in terms of when the customer's already been to my site and I want to, you know, without sounding creepy, follow them around the Internet and kind of help them to convert, help them to come back. Then I kind of want omnipresence. So like for some niches, Pinterest remarketing is great as well. If you're in like quite a visual niche, like you're selling fireplaces, often people will be on Pinterest looking at media wall designs and you might want to show your retargeting ad there and that sort of thing. So it's a little bit niche dependent, but for customer acquisition, Google Ads is kind of king and SEO is king.

52:02But then when it comes to remarketing, multi-channel can become quite effective. Yeah, just kind of a gentle reminder. Hey, we noticed you didn't check out quite yet. You know, something else, maybe a content piece to help get you over the edge and kind of be top of mind. Because like for a$4 ,000 purchase, it's going to take multiple touch points. It's going to probably get taking that customer or getting that customer on the phone too. So things are going well. It is scaling, it's growing, you've quit your job, you're full-time selling patio furniture and pergolas and fireplaces. And then you say, what if I don't have to run this thing anymore?

52:35Like where, where is the day-to-day going in the operations and kind of this transition to setting it up for a sale? Okay. So unfortunately I would love to say that I, I sold because I was just like riding the wave and I saw the big payout and I was like, yeah, nice, let's cash in. But actually, my first business transpired to me being very bad at outsourcing and delegating. So I grew this business fast, I got out of work, and that was great. And then I got my wife out of work, and that was awesome. And then I essentially just kept focusing on growing the business and doubling down on all the things I'd done that got us there and completely neglected the operational side of the business.

53:14And frankly, me kind of doing my best effort operationally as a one-man band was fine when we were doing 50k a month but when we were doing 150 200k months and you know over 100 purchases and big complex items like this crack started to show and I was trying to do the sales the after customer service everything all together and so I just basically kept pouring fuel on the fire you know money solves all issues kind of thing let's grow it as big as possible and kind of neglecting that side until I completely burnt out And yeah, it's funny looking back, but me and my wife got married. We had a massage at like a nice fancy spa afterwards, 90 minutes.

53:53And like that 90 minutes in silence, alone with my thoughts at that time, two years roughly into the business was like torture because I was so, so stressed and burnt out. And I came out of it and I was like, I need to sell. I need, I've learned loads. I've developed loads. And also, you know, financially I've benefited loads. I know this is because I always had an eye on the exit. So I was always kind of working out based on where we were, how much it was worth. I kind of know it's worth high six figures. I want to take the exit. Did you go through a broker? How did you do it? Yeah, we went through a broker, US broker, really, really good.

54:29And yeah, found like a small private fund, essentially. They buy e-commerce businesses and kind of group them together. They have like one customer service team, one ads team, etc. We were their fifth acquisition, I think, good to work with. And I had to stay on for three months, which is longer than usual. But because I'd kind of made such an operational mess of this, like a lot of it was in my head. So I had to stay on for a bit longer. But that was good because I got to see how they took my business and its strengths and then distilled that out to a team. And that was big for my development for future businesses of how like I can do this bit where I grow it.

55:02But then I also need to do the team bit and the processes and everything like that to make sure they can support it. Yeah, it's tough as a solo founder because you're like, well, every person that I hire, that I bring on, it takes more time. It eats into my margins that are always feel a little bit thinner than you'd like. And it can be tough. But this is an interesting way to almost get paid to get kind of an entrepreneurial education for the next project for the next phase. So congrats on that exit. I think that's really cool to even though you kind of are self described as being the bottleneck in this business's operations, it still is an asset that has huge value, like you said, high six-figure value to the next acquirer who can keep it running.

55:44For sure. Are you actively building new sites? I know you've got the 1 % e-com club. What's the portfolio look like today? Yeah. So right now I've got two high-ticket dropshipping sites. One that has been going about 18 months. It's on track to do sort of like mid seven figures, which is awesome. And then one that's only six months old. So we're in like the early stages. It's really fun. And yes, I've got those two. And then I'm also kind of like a fractional CMO for a third one. So that's a nice portfolio for me. I've got like all ones at different stages, different revenue. And then I've also got the 1 % Ecom Club, which is a school community where essentially we have about 150 high ticket e-commerce business owners from people who haven't even chosen a niche yet to people who are doing seven figures.

56:28And essentially we have like a support community in there. We have all the strategies I've talked about and more. we have the kind of ins and outs of these are the tools these are the ai processes these are how to think about it how to set it up all that sort of thing and i really like that balance because i really enjoy working with those people and i also have an immense amount of gratitude for what this business model has done for me and you know i see someone i'm only four years back from this point where i started right so i still remember how much i wanted out of that nine to five i still remember how much i wanted to build one of these things so seeing other people do that in the the community is awesome for me.

57:03We have a mission to try and create 30 new seven-figure businesses from zero having picked a niche to seven figures in the next two years. That's what the community is for there. But then I also like that I'm still actively in the game. So I kind of get to teach all my strategies over here and see them implemented, but then also implement me in my own businesses and feedback what's working. And it feels like a nice sort of 360. Yeah. If you're looking at a million dollars in gross revenue, you're at those 15 % margins. That's$150 ,000 business, probably enough to get you outside of your job and off to the races.

57:36Plus it's an asset that could be worth several hundred thousand dollars to the next buyer. So that's interesting to hear, like, okay, I'm going to take a load off my shoulders. I'm going to get out of this one, but then I'm going to dive back in, baby. I'm going to do it better this time. And I'm still in the game and taking what I learned from the first one to build out these other sides, I can build them better, faster, more operationally efficient and help others do the same thing because there's almost unlimited niches here, which is super exciting. Absolutely. Well, you can check Jaden out at 1 % Ecom Club.

58:07Join the school community over there to take a deeper dive into this really unique, life-changing business model. I think that's the power of the side hustle to say, like, I was willing to work for it. And you kind of bore the brunt of it on your shoulders. it sounded like he would talk about these moments of sprint and rest where it's like you can't sprint forever, but you also can't rest forever. You can't do nothing and expect something to change. So it's like, I was willing to do the sprint part and to have set yourself up with the kind of nest egg that you did at a young age. Really, really cool.

58:39So again, 1 % Ecom Club. Jaden, I appreciate all of that. I appreciate you saying, look, this is a customer service business. If you are out there for passive income, this might not be it, but it could still work for you. And I really like the call to serve a person instead of a product. Yes, we're starting with product research and, you know, what are the different things that somebody might want to buy, but taking it one level higher and thinking about, well, who is that buyer persona? And in Jaden's case, it's just like a person trying to set up this epic backyard experience for their whole family and kind of putting yourself in that mindset of what are they really buying at the end of the day?

59:15And what are the other products I can sell? I think that's really interesting versus, you know, I'm going to be, you know, niched down and I'm only going to do pergolas or whatever the product is. So I think that's really interesting. We've got a handful of other e-commerce related episodes in the archives. I'll link those up for you in the show notes, including some other dropshipping examples. So be sure to check out the show notes for that. Big thanks to Jaden for sharing his insight. Thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone. SideHustleNation.com slash deals is where to go to find all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place.

59:49Thank you for supporting the advertisers that support the show. That is it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you're finding value in the show, the greatest compliment is to share with a friend. So fire off that text message. Somebody in your life I know needs to hear this and could benefit from it. So I appreciate you spreading the word. Until next time, let's go out there and make something happen. And I'll catch you in the next edition of the Side Hustle Show. Hustle on.