How I Got Location & Time Freedom From My eCommerce Business

Today, I'm going to show you how I built an e-commerce business I can run from anywhere. Currently, I'm based in Cape Town, South Africa. I'll be here for a couple months. I've been traveling full-time for the past 2 years while the business has been running alongside me. Screenshot from our inventory software, $4.2 million in revenue since 2022. Photo of some actual inventory, so it's not just numbers on a screen. And this is my team based in the Philippines that helps me got get to this point in the business, which we're going to cover shortly.

I'm going to go through the journey that I've taken to get here as well as the tactical of how I've been able to achieve this. So, first we'll go back to how it started. In 2017, I started flipping sneakers and building up an inventory pile. This is definitely a lot smaller than it has grown to, but this is one of the early early days photos. I would get a customer order, package each one individually, bring it to the UPS store.

And so, that meant that I was very location dependent and time dependent. Also, I would even go as far as to go to New York City to pick up a single pair of shoes. Now, I wanted to achieve these location and time freedom. And so, I had to make some changes in the business in order to get there. As I actually grew the business model and advanced it. Now, the first step there was hiring staff for packing.

I had an office and they would do the individual packing to the customers, picking the items, putting them in the box. And I found out very quickly that the warehousing business is another business in itself. And it meant that I kind of had location freedom, but if someone called out or if there was issues in the like I would still have to be there for it. So I couldn't entirely be I couldn't be on the other side of the world.

And I definitely did not have time freedom. Every hour of my day like an hour I would put in is still an hour I would get out of the business. Then I switched to Amazon FBA, which meant I was able to ship these big old boxes to Amazon warehouses where the Amazon warehouse employees would fulfill them directly to the customer. And so it kind of got the time freedom. I was not having to be, you know, we didn't have to ship out individual orders.

It was more bulk based, but still the same thing with location freedom. I had to process the inventory and so I still had the warehouse. Then my achievement of location freedom was contracting a 3PL, a third party logistics in the Amazon space. This is known as a prep center. And so they would receive the inventory. They would label the inventory and they would ship it to Amazon warehouse. They were located in Oregon when I was in Colorado.

And so I didn't have to be in Oregon. I've only been to Oregon once, never to the warehouse. So I achieved the location freedom I was looking for, but the day-to-day operations of the business were still reliant on me. And so that's when I built a remote team. I have a I had a team that still do based in the Philippines that I was able to delegate all of the day-to-day operations to and it allowed me to travel the world.

I achieved the location freedom. I could be anywhere and the business still runs and I had time freedom. I could not be working and the business was still running forward and my hours became multiplied. Now my life looks something like this. Not as I mean these are like the the glamour shots. a lot of my days spent working at the desk still, but it allowed me to do these kind of things that I didn't have back in the early days.

Now, the tactical loop that I followed was I'm a very like data process driven person. And so, every step of the business was something I could turn into a process. I did I did it o over and over. And so I would turn that I would take like the all the tasks that I did in the business, take the lowest value one, turn it into a process, turn it into a training, a document, teach that process to someone that I hired, and then repeat, go up the next level, the next level, the next level.

And over the years, it has allowed me to accomplish this. The specifics in there are hiring from currency arbitrage countries. You can definitely hire these roles in the US, pay US salaries, but I discovered the great benefit of hiring from countries where the US dollar goes very far like Philippines. And that's where I built my team. I was devoted to training, making that a a continual process, not just like a here's here's the the SOP, go run with it. and became my my full-time job became empowered leadership doing what it took to get these these team members to to want to succeed and to it be in their best interest to succeed as well not just like hiring it and exiting the business from the day-to-day.

So now my time is spent I probably spend 4 hours a week not like Tim Ferrris but that's just what it has come out to four hours a week on the business. And so my highest leverage activities are these first is daily Slack check-in as part of that empowered leadership. I want to make sure my team knows I'm there. I'm not just absent from the business. We do weekly one-on-one meetings where I check in with them, see their progress, see what they're up to.

Weekly KPI data. So metrics are very important. key performance indicators. And so they will post those weekly, track them daily, post them weekly. Every month we do a KPI report meeting where they tell me our progress year-over-year, month over month, we see which way we're trending, what areas need improvement. A monthly recap meeting where it's less data focused, more like setting goals, seeing how we did the past month, what went well, what didn't go well, what we can improve on.

And then the last thing that is not really leadership focused but that I've still retained in the business is inventory reconciliation. Because in a business so reliant on inventory and spend, I want to make sure I'm still keeping a pulse on the finances of it. So I did not do this whole journey to not work in the business. I did it so that my time became worth more and so that every hour I put in was was multiplied.

It wasn't like one to one. I've actually gotten to the point where the e-commerce business is no longer my main focus and my team knows that. I spend all my time on the recruitment business, which we help other business owners do this and have helped plenty of business owners do the same thing of achieving the location and time freedom they want by hiring from other countries like the Philippines. Hope this has been helpful.

I'll see you tomorrow.