eCommerce Scale Collective with Jodie Minto

Today I'm chatting with Naomi Swalwell from House of Lacuna about her journey of starting and scaling an ethical and sustainable fashion label.

We chat about:

- How to find manufacturers

- Manufacturing and collection/product advice

- What the biggest driver of traffic and sales is for House of Lacuna

- What it's like to work with me!

Tune in to hear the full episode.

Are you ready to learn how to really scale your sales with Facebook ads for your eCommerce store?  Put your name on the waitlist for eComm Ads Academy.  The next round starts just after Easter. 

Show links:

House Of Lacuna - www.houseoflacuna.com

Sourci - https://sourci.com.au/

Jodie Minto - www.jodieminto.com

eComm Ads Academy

 In today's episode, I share with you the top 12 (14 actually!) learnings, reflections or plain right dumb things I did and would do very differently in my next eCommerce venture. Because there are a lot of them.

I’ve broken down my reflections and things I’d do differently into four categories - Products, People, Marketing and Money and I’m going to share them with you now in case they help you in your current eCommerce journey no matter where you might be in it.

Tune in and hear what they are.

Full the full episode page, click here.

Hello friend,

It has been some time.

A lot has been going on in my world, as I’m sure it has yours, which has kept me away from the microphone and keyboard and having lots of day naps. 

In this episode, I’m sharing an exciting update with you.  I sold my eCommerce business!

And then I fell into a complete, exhausted heap.

Today I talk about both of these things, the good and the bad, with a little oversharing too (sorry in advance). 

But this is life as a business owner and I’m not one to sugarcoat things.

So let’s go and get stuck into it.  Listen to the whole conversation below, or if you don’t care about the burnout stuff, read the overview below covering tips and things to consider when you plan to sell your business. 

Selling a business is equal parts scary and exciting, and in this episode, I share with you my experience and tips that might help you when the time’s right to sell your business.

And if you are feeling tired and stressed, perhaps there are a few helpful lessons in today’s episode too. 

See you next week!

Jodie

xo

Links:

Link to this podcast episode: https://jodieminto.com/26-selling-my-7-figure-ecommerce-business-burnout/

Flippa - https://flippa.com/

Website Closers - https://www.websiteclosers.com/

Iland co. - https://www.ilandco.com/

Kate Toon - https://www.katetoon.com/

A Podcast episode on Burnout - The Lise & Sarah Show with Chelsea Thomas from I HEART Bargains

My beautiful Kinesiologist - https://www.thebloomcollective.live/ 

Find out more about working with me here 👇🏻:

https://jodieminto.com/digital-marketing-courses

https://courses.jodieminto.com/eComm-Ads-Academy

Let’s be friends: https://www.instagram.com/iamjodieminto/

Today I'm talking about the pros and cons of offering refunds in your eCommerce Business. Tune in and hear the top 3 pros versus cons.

If you would like more help with launching and scaling your online store, be sure to sign up for my waitlist for my coaching program, Online Store Success.  It opens for enrolment again in Feb 2023. 

Q4 advertising on Facebook in Instagram is never a good time. We wake up one morning and the 'Black Friday' madness has begun and all of our best-performing ads just up and die... But not all is lost. Tune in to hear what IS working and what other marketing tactics you can try when the ad auction becomes impossible.

Honestly, this is nuts but here we are! iland co. is back online trading - have a listen to this week's podcast to hear why and the new structure of the business.

Curious to see my online eCommerce store? Have a look here: www.ilandco.com

Interested in working with me to help you grow and scale your business? Take a look at my coaching programs here: www.jodieminto.com

Is your business for a reason, a season but perhaps not a lifetime?

In this week’s episode, I want to tell you a story. It’s a true story, with all the highs and lows you’d expect.. And better still, it’s my story. And it includes some amazing lessons, some hard truths and yes, a lot of vulnerability

Over the last few months, I’ve been making some HUGE business decisions behind the scenes. Life-changing decisions. But before I tell you about them I want to take you back in time.

It was 2014 and I was ready to start my own fashion business.

Like many of you, I wanted to escape my corporate job and create a career on my own terms.

I wanted freedom and flexibility over my time.

I wanted the mythical ‘laptop lifestyle’ (yes I’m doing air fingers) 

Over the last 8 years, the business has gone from humble market stall beginnings to a million-dollar-a-year fully-fledged eCommerce business with a fancy office, a team of staff I love and loyal customers over the world. 

 I’ve won a host of business awards, featured in many newspapers, radio segments, magazines and more and done 5-figure sales days, sold out of collections in minutes.

We launched into the US, have a heap of wholesale customers and a stand-alone B2B website and even did our first wholesale trade show in Melbourne this year.

I was kicking all of the business goals. 

But personally all that came at a cost.

And I want to be really honest about that, even though it’s a little painful for me.

It started on a family holiday when yet again I found that I was working like a mad woman, glued to my laptop rather than enjoying family time.

This wasn’t what a laptop lifestyle was supposed to look like.

I had become a slave to my business in the pursuit of scaling and growing to the ‘next level’...

The truth was.

In truth, I was utterly miserable because of it.  

I was back working full-time in an office environment, which was one of my main reasons for starting the business in the first place - to not have to do that!  But now with the added responsibility of paying ALL the bills, managing staff for which I was not equipped to do or really even wanted to do, including paying consultants to teach me about building a strong culture and working on my leadership skills which are not where I ever envisioned myself. 

My skills and interests are in big-picture thinking and ideas, digital marketing and analytics,-not in HR conducting annual performance reviews or building office cultures, not designing fashion pieces and managing production, not in recommending style tips to customers or dealing with yet another lost or delayed customer order threatening to take us to a current affair if we didn’t deliver their kimono IMMEDIATELY…

With each new level of business, instead of questioning “is this what I actually want?”,  I rolled with it hoping that by building a bigger business focused on growth, I’d be able to hire more people to help, expand our product range even more and perhaps sell the business later down the track for a big fat healthy cheque.  

But I already wasn’t enjoying the business in its current form and hiring more people and creating more designs were the things I hated the most…. Growth meant more and more of this! It meant more work, more hours in the office and more moving away from my initial WHY I started the business in the first place.

And so on that holiday back in April this year, I seed was planted in my mind that I couldn’t shake… ‘is this what I truly want?’  And for the next 6 months, I came up with a thousand different ways that I could try and fundamentally change my business... But none of them had any hope… because a creative business (or any business for that matter) needs a passionate leader at its helm.  And I’d completely lost my passion to the point of being resentful of the position I found myself in. I felt trapped, unable to escape from this business I so desperately wanted, but was so far away from my original ‘WHY’ of starting in the first place.

One morning I woke up and said out loud “I don’t want to sell clothes anymore”.

 And from then I knew I was done.  

It was time for me to exit this business I’d created for myself.  I then spent the next 3 months having difficult conversations with staff, suppliers, and customers about what was coming.   I stopped ordering more products, I started discounting everything via a clearance sale,  so that we had a good runway of not owing refunds after we closed. 

I continued trading until my very last employee found another job, and then simply turned off the website.

This is one of the hardest decisions I’ve had to make and it’s been filled with ALL of the emotions. This feeling of dis-alignment has been lingering for almost a year now and it got to a point of not being able to ignore it any longer.

I’m in the process of listing the business for sale, but despite my broker's distress that I’m no longer trading and every day that goes by is possibly less money we will get for the business, I just don’t care.  Because when I made the decision to close, I knew that possibly meant I would never sell the business.  But I’m exhausted and have always had a steadfast, unwavering faith that everything will be ok in the end. And it will.   

I have made peace with that, like relationships, businesses too can be for a reason or a season and not always forever. 

 My business has been for a season of my life and career, and that’s ok..  One in which I’ve learnt an entirely new skill set launched another business and moved to a different business model.

I’m sharing this because I want to give other business owners that are at the cusp of expansion (or burnout), to always remain focused on the ‘why’ you started your business. Is it for a laptop lifestyle where you can work from anywhere? 

 Because if so, moving into a commercial office or warehouse with staff won’t serve that goal.  Even if you have people running the business for you, there needs to be someone ‘running the people and that is a full-time job in itself.

I hope this heartfelt episode has been helpful to you and will help you re-align with your overarching goals for starting your business. 

Perhaps you need to stop and course correct too and see if there's a better way that will serve you more or perhaps it’s time to wrap up a business that no longer serves you.

Some businesses are created for a reason.

Some last just a season.

And honestly very few last a lifetime.

But deciding when to step off the merry ground is a hard thing. And I hope this episode has helped.

Until next week, 

Jodie

xo

Welcome to the online store success podcast with me Jodie Minto. If you have or are planning on launching your very own online store, you are in the right place, my friend. I'm your host Jodie Minto and an award-winning eCommerce mentor online fashion business owner and speaker based on the central coast of New South Wales. I started my own online fashion store from scratch as a side hustle when I was working full-time in the corporate world, juggling young children and living in the Middle East. Today. That side hustle is a seven-figure-a-year online fashion brand with stockists and customers all over the world. Join me each week for Real Talk lessons and strategies that I used. In order to build up Island code to the million-dollar-a-year business, it is today. The lessons and strategies I share with you each week we'll help you build and scale your very own successful eCommerce fashion business too. Because I know how my life has changed for the better after launching my own business. And I want the same for you.

Welcome to today's episode of online store success where I'm sharing with you an influencer horror story. 

I have many of these horror stories, but today I'm going to talk to you about one particular one, which I hope sharing with you will help you avoid the nightmare situation that I found myself in with this one. 

I've worked with tonnes of influences over the past seven years or so, both in Australia and international influences, and boy do I have some horror stories. Yes, we've had some great success too. But it is one of those marketing strategies or campaigns that people often don't always have a great experience with. So I'm going to share one of my horror stories with you today.

Now I can't name names because I don't want to get sued. However, I will certainly share with you the story and also my lessons from that story. And hopefully, it's something that you can take away. And remember and know to try not to get stuck in a nightmare situation like this. 

Listen to the full episode for all the gory details. 

 And here is the link to the influencer platform I mentioned: https://www.tribegroup.co/

This week on the Podcast I'm chatting about why often posting on social media feels like a bit, fat, waste of time and what you could do to amplify your efforts instead.

If I had a dollar for every post I've seen from well-meaning business owners asking 'when's the best time to post on Instagram', I'd be currently sipping expensive champagne on a yacht somewhere fancy.....

You see trying to 'trick' the algorithm isn't the best strategy. In fact it's not a strategy at all (sorry). There are no 'hacks'. Instead, we need to understand that social media platforms are very much a 'pay-to-play' space for businesses now, with organic reach dropping year on year.

If you feel like you've been wrestling with the algorithm long enough, have a listen to today's podcast episode.

  You can listen to the full episode here. 

And if you would like MY eyes inside your Facebook ad account to help you accelerate your sales coming into the holiday season, take a look at my newest coaching program, eComm Ads Academy, which is currently open for application (there are only 6 spots remaining as I write this, so get in quick!).

 See you next week!

Jodie

xo

PS. Here's the link again to eComm Ads Academy - you don't want to miss this special foundation round offer.

This week, I'm chatting about my eComm Ads Academy course!

I chat about FB ads management and whether it may be the right time for you to tap into the power of paid social media ads!

Tune in!