I’m continuing this week with more of my interview with Delia Ursulescu because it is just so chock-a-bloc full of actionable steps you could take to immediately improve your business and your profits if you sell anything online.
Here’s the step-by-step breakdown of how she and her partner leveraged a $200 business expense into $280K
My first job online was on Upwork. It was called Odesk before that… That’s right… Yeah, I got my first research position or research job on Odesk: a consulting firm in DC hired me to do some research for them. So I knew about Odesk.
I figured oh let me go to Odesk and post a job for a sourcing agent in China because I heard about it somewhere… I don’t know where, and I found a few people who do that type of job. They contact companies.
So I said, “Hey, I’ll pay you a hundred dollars if you get me samples from three suppliers that sell this type of product. This is what I need.”
So I paid somewhere between seventy five dollars and a hundred dollars per product to get three samples and the price the quotes from suppliers. So the agent did most of the work.
That’s where I started to enjoy the business because communicating with suppliers in China was a pain. Sometimes the English wasn’t good and we couldn’t understand each other, so this way I had all the communication was passed through the agent who had better English.
So the agent would talk to the supplier and then send us the questions. And we went back and forth after that.
When we started to make more money we hired companies… sourcing companies in China who charge usually more, but they handle everything: the sourcing, the quality control, making sure the products get to the port.
Then they get shipped, or if they get shipped by air, they handle all that process. So it costs, I think, somewhere around a thousand dollars for a company to do that.
And we didn’t go with like the best company, but the company we chose ended up being quite good.
So those are three ways if someone doesn’t have money. Well, you have to do it on Alibaba. It’s time consuming. It’s not hard. It’s just time consuming.
If you have a hundred two hundred dollars extra to pay a sourcing agent to be the middle person… And if you have a thousand two thousand dollars. then pay a company and they do an even better job and they negotiate even more for you, so that makes it a lot easier.
MM: Right. I don’t have to go to China. I don’t have to handle the whole process. Have you ever been to China?
This is not the time to fly anyway, but yes, we do have to go to China, either myself or my business partner in the near future because it changes things. We usually get better terms better prices.
I’ll be back with more of Delia’s Amazon strategy on the blog, and you can see the full interview at https://www.strategicempire.com/movie/amazon-queen-got-her-start-full-version/
