Jan review -

Wins:
#1) Highest revenue & most profitable month across whole company (beating December)
#2) Managed to get the revenue on our main store trending upwards again after more turbulent times last year.

Ls:
#1) A lot of shit broke as we doubled our revenue: Customer service quality went down as agents struggled with influx of tickets, we were well behind a lot of our KPIs (first response time, time to first response, time to close)

#2) Trustpilot went below 3.5 for main store which sucks (as a result of CX/inventory issues), FB feedback score went below 4 (lowest it has been in 10 months).

We learnt a lot at this scale and it's clear we have heaps of work to do in all areas of the business.

Things I'm working on for next month & beyond:
1) Financial Discipline - we had a great month & the temptation is to overspend. Trying to maintain financial discipline with the business because: general market sentiment is pretty poor right now & FB is very volatile.

2) Mental Discipline - temptation is to take the foot off the gas, but really the journey is just beginning and the vision is so much larger. Keeping a lot of money in the business and not much in my personal accounts to keep me hungry.

3) Improving our business model. I still see our business model as a Facebook arbitrage - the majority of profit is still on first purchase, each of our stores started as a "one product store" and is very product focused. We're online only. On one ad platform

3 cont.) There's no real community or shared values tying customers together, and the LTV is quite low.

We're working on ideas now that are ideally: consumable product & high LTV, can be online, retail & AMZ, made locally & taps into a group with shared values

4) Working on the exit value of each store - We're going through an exit process now, and it's becoming clear that we could have done a whole lot more to increase the market value of our main store.

4 cont.) Anyone in our position I would implore you to speak to a trusted broker now, because there is A LOT of things that can add (or reduce) the value of your business when it's time to sell, and they take time to put in place.

5) Better predicting issues - a lot of problems we faced in Jan could easily be avoided with better planning, so we're putting steps in place to future plan issues and solve them before they happen.