I Built My eCommerce Business To Run Without Me

My e-commerce business does a million dollars a year in revenue and I spend five hours a week on it, but that hasn't always been the case. Just a few years ago, I was working 60hour weeks to run the same business. Today, I'm going to show you the team and systems I built to make my time worth more. My goal is to show you exactly what I did so you can apply the lessons to whatever business you're in.

To understand how I got here though, you have to see where I was. In 2020, I was running the ecom business full-time. A usual day would start with the most important task, finding inventory to buy. That is the core of the business. But finding the inventory is only half of it. There is a ton of work I needed to do on the back end. So, in the afternoon, I would shift to the admin side, updating my Google Sheets, talking with the warehouse, setting our prices, that kind of stuff.

And that routine worked pretty well to get me to the 500K revenue mark, but I couldn't figure out how to get past that. Now, around that time, Alex Forzi started popping up in my feed. I remember I kept seeing his videos and I was like, who is this other jacked business fella? His content made me realize I had so much further to go. It's also where I first really understood the topic of leverage.

I realized I couldn't get past where I was by working more hours. I needed to find more time somehow and local salaries were out of my budget. That's when a mentor introduced me to hiring international talent. So, in 2021, I went to online jobs ph and made my first post for a data entry virtual assistant. Within a couple days, I had hundreds of applicants, but had no idea how to filter through them.

So, I read a couple resumes, got overwhelmed, and just started scheduling interviews randomly. I remember one in particular, I asked like three questions about her strengths and her weaknesses, and then said, "Okay, I've heard enough." She literally said, "Are you sure that's all you wanted to ask?" I said, "Yep." And I hired her. A week in, she started missing work because of headaches, so I had to let her go. And that was my fault.

I didn't vet properly. So, I went back to the drawing board and started building out how to find what I was looking for. Shortly after, I found someone great who's been with me for three years through ups and downs. But, if I'm being honest, there was a lot of luck involved in that one. And that luck is exactly why I knew I needed a good process cuz I could not rely on that.

Now, knowing I needed a good process and actually building one were two entirely different things. I went through about 10 hires improving on my process to build my core team and then I screwed up. I overdelegated. I lost the pulse on the business and I just assumed things were getting taken care of when they weren't. So, there were two things I did to fix that. One, I changed who was on the team and two, I tracked better data.

Today, the business runs with just two people who've been with me for years. They handle all of the day-to-day. I spend five hours a week max on it. The time I do spend is on looking at the highle data and seeing what needs our attention. I'm asking the team questions like why is this happening? What do we need to focus on this week? Did we improve this number from last month? We check in with Slack messages.

We meet for weekly one ons. And we send a weekly KPI report. Once a month, we sit down to look closer at the KPIs, review our goals, and set new ones. I know my team is doing a good job if the numbers go up. That's it. Every year, our margins improve as our knowledge compounds and as each person gets really good at their one thing. Now, after delegating most of the business, I reached a turning point.

I could have doubled down on buying more inventory, but I knew it's not what I wanted to do long term. Instead, I realized, "Oh, wait. I'm really good at this hiring thing." And I saw other business owners weren't so good at it. So, I started helping them build their teams. Now, we've successfully made over 60 placements for our clients. And I wouldn't have been able to do this if I was still working all day on the e-commerce side.

But more than that, I wouldn't have known how to do it if I didn't have the experience of hiring, firing, training, and leading my own team. So, the ROI of delegating for me wasn't I work less and vacation more. Instead, I freed up my time to pursue opportunity. And that's where I see the value of building a team to buy back your time so you can focus on the highest leverage work only you can do.

So, here's what I took away from all this. First, having a good vetting process will make you more money. Second, always stay on the pulse. The data tells me how I'm doing. And third, I have limited time. Building a team allows me to do more with the hours in my day. If you want help building a team like this, we've done it over 60 times for businesses just like yours. And our offer is pretty good.

You only pay if you hire. Click the first link in the description. Or if you're feeling brave and you want to try this yourself, watch my video here on how we launched the full hiring campaign.