Or, How I Made Almost No Money for a Year
When you’re a one-man operation it’s important to be at least halfway good at everything. From making coffee to producing the things you sell. When it comes to making coffee I’m unrivaled and I’m pretty darn good at building costume weapons. What I’m not so hot with is Excel.
Early Days
When I started this business I spent a couple of weeks designing an algorithm in Excel. It would let me quickly and easily calculate prices based on materials and a little profit. In the beginning this was fine, the prices it was turning out seemed fair. Then there was an incident with a courier company that sparked a change in how I ran things. First of all, I found a new courier, sourced some new, tougher shipping boxes. Finally, I made the decision to switch from using floormats to using foam designed expressly for the purpose.
I went back to my algorithm and plugged in the new numbers and that was that. At least, until I noticed that Etsy seemed to be taking more of my profit on each sale. I was barely breaking even! So I took another look at my spreadsheet. Sure enough, while I was tinkering, I had broken the part that was responsible for adding the margin. So if you’ve placed an order in the last year you’ve got yourself a very good deal!
The Solution
In the last couple of days I’ve redesigned the algorithm to account for the fact that this is my job. As much as I love doing this, my primary aim is to make money. This means that my prices have gone up. While it looks like a huge jump there is a good reason for this. All items now include delivery. And delivery isn’t cheap these days.
I’ll have to see how things pan out. I’m still not going to be making fat stacks, but for now even a small profit is a massive improvement.