As we were driving back from our little pre-December annual retreat, I thought it might be fun to do a daily countdown blog talking about what we're doing this holiday season. I already keep a journal so I can look back over the patterns of our business (i.e. "was I really this freaked out about stock last year? oh... yep. I totally was."), but I thought it might be interesting to share a little window into our busiest season.
November has already been really great in terms of retail sales, but we took a huge hit by not having ThinkGeek's massive wholesale order (they did place an order, but it's shipping in January), so we're struggling to keep our revenue on par with last year.
People have asked what "good" is. We're still a tiny business, so even our best months are under $10k in sales (but fingers crossed that we are going to beat that this month!). Once you take out expenses, we have about $5 profit... but we've been working on that, and the fact that we've broken even in our first three years is pretty rad.
So, for this countdown, I figured I'd summarize my focuses for the day (since everything is chaos coming at me for 14 hours, I like to think in terms of focuses instead of individual tasks) and maybe reflect on how things are going. Sound good?
Dec 1
Write blog entry
Customer Service
Respond to aging customer service emails
Set up Zendesk account and direct all support emails there
Get Hali (virtual assistant) set up with a Zendesk account
Write some frequently asked question templates and go over customer service expectations
Retail Orders
Russ filled most of orders from last 24 hours
I'll put out packages for mail lady
Wholesale Orders
Respond to wholesale inquiry
If I have time, package wholesale orders for Whole Foods
Amazon Inventory
Wrap 100 bars of Unicorn Poop and 50 bars of Hair of the Dog
Ship to Amazon
In-house Inventory
Wrap Hair of the Dog soaps that are cured
Check in and wrap Stick-ups
Verify stock of shaving soaps as totally sold out :(
Write newsletter to go out Thursday
Dinner with Jean from Bubble Farm Soap Company in Alameda
As you can see, it's kind of a busy day. And it's almost 11:15, so I gotta get to the next thing!
Until tomorrow,
Danielle
