So, just as I write about how I have trouble dis-engaging on vacations, in some ways vacations give me a creative, energy boost used for growth.
So, what I’m been mulling over last while is the path to scale up this ‘puppy’ to $125 in 3 years. The beauty is, that I can see a picture in my mind of how this would work. I know that having a clear ‘vision’ of how things are – is a pre-requisite for me to making it happen in reality and that in the past whenever I could ‘see’ what the future looks I could always make it happen.
So, here is what I see in the near future:
1. Ecommerce Department – 6 to 10 people: most people are ‘skinners’, 2 are designers – their job is to create site skins, turn those skins into sites. This team also handles all the technical stuff, payment gateways, checkout systems – basically all the pluming of the sites.
2. Merchandising Department – 5-10 people – these people are focused on finding products, sourcing, QA, deals. Out of this, 1 is legal (for contracts), 3 are db entry and product management, the rest are ‘vendor’ interface. Photography would sit here.
3. Marketing – 6-8 people – these people will take on the new sites and setup ppc, seo and then have a P/L responsibility for the sites. These are high level marketing people, that can take my SOP’s, my sales strategies, apply them and improve them.
I can see these teams sitting in each area – each with a score board showing their goals and how far they are along.
We have a weekly meetings to see how things are moving – big scoreboard is keeping track of progress. Sharepoint is keeping our KPI’s and each day I can see how much we have progressed.
Each time a site is launched, we have a celebration party. Each time a site hits $100K in sales (total) – the teams get a bonus.
The shipping, customer care and fulfillment scale also, but those juts get build up on existing infrastructure, so nothing new here – just pure scaling.
Give what I ‘see’ – I would love to have this come to life middle of next year – so that would mean onboard between 16 to 25 new people (fulfillment, CC excluded). Could it be done – yes. My growth limit I had before put on the table was 50% resource growth – ie. no more than 15 new peeps for this year. But, I feel like time is off the essence – the depressed US economy is now my friend – and it will not always be depressed.
I see a HUGE opportunity to be able to get ready to really hit it in 2 or 3 years, when things pick up. Meanwhile, things are so stacked in my favor – labor in CN is now available, its more affordable that it was before, suppliers are hurting and therefore more friendly to creative deals. All I can say – bless the recession – what an incredible opportunity it has created for RedStores