This week's newsletter is very concise and very easy to digest. Sometimes it doesn’t need to be war and peace to get the point home. Here is something very simple a close friend and uber-successful mentor introduced me to, which he calls time-to-money. At the time, I was scrambling around trying to build a business in about 26 countries at once if you include Europe. The problem was that we were always running out of stock in each one, due to cashflow, for several reasons; -We were paying suppliers upfront -We had long lead times -We were giving customers credit terms -We had a wild variance in all the above It sounds simple now, but on my pal's advice I was able to turn the whole thing on its head by asking these questions; -Can we get better supplier terms? -Where is the shortest distance from supplier to distribution that has untapped sales volume for us? -Who are we selling to that we give the least credit to, but could sell more to AND are least costly to fulfil? Holy cow, that changed my life forever! We revamped the lot based on these questions, and in relatively no time at all, we ended up; -Paying our supplier 10% upfront instead of 70%, the balance at sight of documents, releasing 60% cash back into play. -Shipping 80% of our volume from Indonesia to California, cutting down the transit time by half overall. -Selling 70% of our stuff via drop ship retailers and dropping 120 day retail accounts. The result? Our cash flow cycle went from an average of 180 days to 70 days...seriously! What do you think we did with this dramatic increase in cash on hand?
Bought more inventory and finally started to find the ceilings and potential in the SKUs we'd been running out of, and reach that elusive 'velocity' that's talked about in eCommerce in hushed tones!
Ask yourself those 3 simple questions and I guarantee you’ll see the whole thing differently. Sometimes the most transformational messages don’t have to be complex to be transformational.
It changed everything for me, and I hope it resonates with you too.
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