Winging it

I’ll level with you, I’m winging this post. In fact, it is fair to say that all of us at The Money Mountain have been winging it for a few weeks now and it has finally caught up with us.

Chris is under the pump at work, Ben has been travelling for the last 11 days and hasn’t had a day off in 18 days now, and Dave, well for all we know he may be helping the Libyan’s to develop a nuclear weapon (a reference for the children of the 80’s there).

Achy balls

We had hoped to relaunch our purchased business on 1st November 2019. Sadly we’ve missed that deadline for several reasons. Without giving too much away, listing things for sale on Shopify is a massive ball-ache. That’s the first reason. Secondly, creating content for a website is a massive ball-ache. Thirdly, setting up a business bank account with Santander is a massive ball-ache. Fourthly, fitting all this around working for the man is a massive ball-ache.

If we look at each of these in turn:

Listing on Shopify

I guess it depends on what you are selling, but if you need multiple pictures, to assign colours to them, to assign a code to them for customs, create your own SKU, add tags, SEO optimisation, pricing all of the above and it will take you several hours just to get your products uploaded.

Creating content for a website

So, we’ve listed the products. You think that’s the end of it? Oh no, no, no, no. Then you need a shipping policy, terms and conditions, an About Us section, FAQ’s…it never ends. As well as that, Google rewards original content on your site, which is great…until you forget that your phone camera and that setting which softens the background and sharpens the foreground might be good for your glass of wine with a turquoise sea in the background on holiday for your 73 Instagram followers, but it will look terrible when trying to sell a product.

Setting up a business bank account

Last time we spoke, we were full of praise for Santander and were no fans of HSBC, but a week is a long time in banking. Santander very much subscribed to the old adage of, it it seems to good to be true, it probably is.

We thought we’d cracked it, but no. Our inside man at Santander dropped a bollock and subsequently Chris and Ben were listed as Silent Partners of the business with no right to transact on the account at all. Bad news when Dave is off with the Libyan’s. What does this mean? Chris and Ben had to sign forms, send off ID and have our names removed from the company bank account. Now we have to fill in more forms, send TWO forms of ID and rely on Dave’s good will to have us added back to the bank account, only this time with the right to transact. Everyone anticipates more ball-ache here. Banks are mostly awful to deal with.

Still having to work for a living

What with Chris’ job being a touch unpredictable in terms of workload, Ben being in the midst of travel season (it seems the entire world holds their conferences between September and November) and Dave designing Flux Capacitors, there has been precious little time to get everything together for the launch. We got close. We got so close. We had our Facebook posts ready to go on a schedule, we had it all planned out: stock was prepared, drop shipping arrangements were made for where we didn’t have stock…and then we had to pull the plug. We expect to have news soon on the launch, but for now, we remain as we were.

Incredibly, however…

Amid all this chaos, a terrible looking website with precious little functional content, let alone something to give any customer any confidence they would get what they ordered…WE GOT AN ORDER!

We sold our first item! We had to arrange this as a drop shipment, but we’re off and running. After all the deductions etc, we’ve made US$7 profit. At the time of writing, that amounts to £1.80each. Not forgetting the tax man’s share, we’ve made around about a quid each.

It is a shiny pound I shall frame.

Wednesday’s child

I appreciate this is a post full of self pity. Any entrepreneurs reading this will no doubt be laughing their heads off at our pathetic little problems and giving us the rods from behind their tablet screens; and rightly so. We’re merely playing here. We have precious little riding on this venture. If it goes wrong, we’ve lost about £100 each, a fraction of what we’ve made from Matched Betting. A pain, but no biggie.

We will persevere and hopefully report some better news in a few weeks time.