Recently my brother and I have started a business. We’re calling it B3 Commerce - Bodacious Barry Brothers Commerce. We are determined to find out if a profitable business can be built solely around suppliers who dropship products directly to customers. This model greatly reduces risk by allowing the retailer - B3 Commerce - to not hold inventory and only pay suppliers for product when the customer orders a product from our website. By being an online retailer with out a brick-and-mortar facility coupled with dropshiping as a distribution channel we can virtually eliminate risk and focus entirely on marketing the products and branding the website. It almost seems too good to be true. On top of the low risk model there is the ability to automate every operation in the buying decision process. For example, a customer finds the site through a search engine such as google. Search Engine Optimization can allow customers to more easily find our site. The customer then finds a product and places an order. This is where the elegance of this model comes in - in terms of automation. We and the supplier then gets an email notification of the order. The supplier dropships the product with our label on it to the said customer, notifying the customer and us of a successfully shipped product. The customer’s credit card information is given to us at the time of the order. We then charge the credit card and have up to 30 days to pay the supplier - this agreement is known as a net 30 terms agreement.
The beauty of this model is the work-to-profit ratio. As you can see very little is needed in terms of customer support, shipping, and supplier relations. Every major process is covered and automated. It seems too good to be true. We plan to find out if it really is. The model is realistic and plausible and it’s done on hundreds of sites on any given day. So what is the catch?
I’m finding more and more that what I learned in school has been sorely disconnected with the skills needed to be PERSONALLY effective and productive. In school one is given a syllabus and told to go to class and when the tests are. To be successful one simply has to play by the rules and more or less just be physically present. In other words, there was a structured way to play that game with a wrong and right answer that would signal pass or fail. In this venture of building a business, there are blurred lines that require a type of mental finesse and creativity that wasn’t required in school. These lines aren’t in most jobs where presence is demanded over productivity - jobs intended for the successful students. I’v been a student for 3/4th of my life. I have been successfully indoctrinated into this blind pursuit of the next passing answer. I am now in a new arena of education. An arena that seems to require a whole new part of the brain to operate in than what I’v been used to. Mostly, it comes down to the ability to productively manage the self. There is no authority figure to please or for that matter to let me know I’m not a pleasing student. The passing of this test seems to rest solely on the number of sales our business makes. There is no formula to fill in. No process that has been tested repeatedly. No science.
I have found something out about myself. I have a need to SEEM productive rather than actually BE productive. I genuinely believe something has gone wrong in me through upbringing, through the education system, through some need to be accepted by a vague authority figure. what ever has gone wrong has made me feel more fulfilled when I am present than when I get the job done. This leaves me in a strange position. The model I have chosen to pursue - dropshipping - has required a unique stretching of my comfort zone. In stead of the typical model of right an wrong I am given a number of answers that are all correct. A strange thing happens to someone who is given freedom to be creative when all they have ever been given is an order to regurgitate information. They freeze. It takes time to wake the creative sides of a brain that have been dormant for so long. But that is exactly what has to happen. Creativity and the ability to persist with ones direction are the criteria of success in the new approach to life. A new level of personal management has to be practiced in this persistence. With no authority figure to please and no syllabus to follow there are any number of paths that may be correct and any number of ways to fail. But one sure way to fail is to remain frozen. To not allow the creative elements that were trained out of us to wake.
Oscar Wilde said, “work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do.” In the end, we hope to find something better to do. Something that allows us to make an income without the need to be hyperactive but not productive. Without having to be present just for the sake of being there. We want something more from this life. We know it’s out there and we see it in the business we are pursuing and in the waking up of our creative potential. There are no wrong answers here only a lack of decisiveness.
