20 Big Lessons??

Hey there,

Hope you’re week is off to an awesome start. I’m writing this week’s edition as a guilty break to get away from building a very stressful PowerPoint presentation and reviewing endless financial documents. We’re building a 2023 recap and 2024 roadmap for our financial partners and it’s been really helpful for some self-reflection.

We had one goal for CROSSNET in 2023. It was to stay alive and get profitable at all costs. I’m happy as hell to say we accomplished that, but that doesn’t mean we’re out of the water yet. As a seasonal business, the bills add up in the offseason and it’s incredibly challenging to ever get ahead. It feels like these days the best days are where I make it to 7PM without a vendor looking for payment, somebody yelling at me, or looking for me to fill out another excel sheet.

I started writing this newsletter in 2022 to be helpful. That’s all I ever wanted. To give 1-2 hours of my time a week to all the hungry and at times desperate entrepreneurs who want 5 minutes of my time or to pick my brain. These articles have been shared thousands of times and the lessons I’ve shared back in 2022 and 2023 are still probably relevant to myself and many of you.

So with that, I’m opening the book. Although I won’t be sharing my 2023 financials with you readers (unless you want to buy CROSSNET, if so let me know), I will be sharing some of my favorite lessons and mistakes that I hope to not make this year or any other year.

1) If you wouldn't spend it from your personal bank account, don't spend it from the companies

2) Every hire does not need to be a full time?

3) You don’t need to hire just because it feels like thats the next logical move

4) There is a real thing of outsourcing yourself too far out of the business. If you do, make sure you are not outsourcing yourself away from the financials of the business.

5) Prepare for a rainy day atleast 90 days before the rain comes

6) It’s better to be sold out of than sitting on months of inventory

7) Understand your storage costs at your 3PL, manufacturer, and Amazon

8) Do you really know how much it costs to get an order out the door to a customer?

9) Your sub 20M in revenue ecommerce business doesn’t need a full time CFO

10) Doing things that don’t scale is nice occasionally. If you are going to repeat this it needs to become a budget habit.

11) Stop overspending on branded search terms. If somebody is searching for CROSSNET they are going to find it.

12) Don’t put too much trust into people that don’t deserve your trust

13) Focus on 1-3 big objectives instead of 250 small tasks

14) It’s okay to not double revenue year over year

15) Remember why you built your company in the first place

16) You’re never too big to network. The homies I met along the way have helped so much. That’s why I launched The Founders Club.

17) You’re overpaying for software. I know you are

18) Stop paying for nonstop new content. Repurpose the stuff you already paid for.

19) If something doesn’t make sense. Question it. You deserve to know everything about your business.

20) You’re overpaying for business insurance. Big time.

The Quickest Way to Save Money

Speaking of insurance. It has to be the most unsexy thing to talk about and such a lack of knowledge around it. Lets face it, you probably have no idea what type of insurance you actually need for your ecommerce business. Are you overpaying? Underpaying? There’s really no market place and for all you know you could be getting robbed.

That’s how I’ve always felt atleast. There’s no e-commerce insurance school for these type of things. I’m a product and a sales guy. I don’t know what a good deal is and for the longest time I accepted paying $20-30,000 a year for insurance that I didn’t even need. Could have invested this in an employee, ad spend, or hell paying myself for once!

That’s why I’m so happy I found Assureful, this week’s sponsor for CROSSED Commerce. They are built exclusively for Amazon / Ecommerce sellers to solve the problems we all are facing. How so?

The way insurance is currently bought is you estimate your revenue and pay an annual price based on your forecast. We came short this year by $1M on our forecast, so for the entire year we overpaid $7000 for no reason.

Assureful syncs directly with Amazon & Shopify and you pay premiums based on actual sales. They underwrite and cover 95% of products sold on Amazon and over 30,000 different product categories.

Take a second. Pull up your insurance plan. Assureful may be able to save you 30-40% annually. It’s not too late to switch.

Get a quote here or send me an email for a direct intro.

That’s it for this week! I hope a few of these stood out for you. I’ve found that the best way to deal with feedback is to face it head on. Be honest with yourself, your faults, and your mistakes. Make sure you’re constantly improving or not making the same mistake again.

Want to chat about something specific or have me cover something next week send me a response back or DM me on Instagram - @chrismeade

Have a great week,

Chris