How to be successful with a dropshipping store immediately…
To be successful need money or many different skills. Usually we have one or two skills but you can’t be good at everything. That’s when you need external people. What if we could start a store and join our skills to make it a success?
Allow me to explain the idea to you. It’s actually pretty simple…
The idea
Start a dropshipping shop together with a group of professionals in different and complementing competence areas as equal shareholders. Sourcing local products enabling small and medium manufacturers and businesses to florish rather then competing with Ali sellers in a high volume and low margin market.
Short term objective will be to start one shop in an expanding market, preferably high ticket sales in order to finance growth. Medium and long term objective is to open multiple dropshipping shops to serve different markets.
But hey, what if there an opportunity to start several shops in several regions with an appropriate team? Let’s keep it all open.
If you are looking for a 9 to 5 job or being any kind of employee, you can stop reading. This is not for you!
Also if you are a newby in dropshipping and you think this might be interesting, it’s not for you! Unless of course you do have specific skills that we can or should use.
We are creating a team of talented people, specialized in different areas and being a complement and a value to the company.
If you see this as an adventure, if you are ready to invest time and if you are convinced we can make it worthwhile then let’s read on.
It can literally be anything. As a web designer/developer I don’t really mind what we are selling in the shop, for a social media specialist I can imagine you have certain preferences or maybe already a large group of followers in a specific market. I would say high ticket or high volume sales but not trying to compete with many china product sellers. At the same time, if you can convince the group of a different approach, you’re more than welcome. As long as it is a group decision it’s fine.
We all have our own set of talents. You maybe an insta-famous seller, a product trend spotter or maybe you know everything about numbers and legal stuff.
At the same time many of us are struggling with other talents we don’t have but which we would need to start a successful business. Hiring all these different talents is not an option for most of us.
What if we can join our talents in one company, share the same objectives, without hierarchy but with a democratic decision structure, being equal shareholder and thus sharing the same goals, work to together in a motivated team to make it successful?
By joining forces we are able to start a full-blown company with no hiring, no office renting and no upfront investments.
What we do need is an investment of your time.
As in every medium or big company there are a number of roles to be fulfilled. Without giving any authority to it I have grouped the different roles in business units. The list below is a draft version of what it could actually be:
- Product Management
- Sourcing
- SEO
- Copywriting
- Social media & Sales
- Community building
- Blogging
- Vlogging
- Ads
- Finance
- Accounting
- Legal
- Taxes
- IT & Operations
- Shop design & development
- Maintenance
Flat structure
Each business unit is responsible for running their projects and proposing new projects. Periodically the delegates of each business unit will discuss and decide on new projects proposed by the different business units. A delegate is not a manager (in fact no one is) but can be anyone from the business unit who wants to present the project, e.g. the owner of the project.
Interested?
There is still a lot of work to be done and as will be a joined project it should be defined jointly.
- Social contract; how do we work together and what do/can we expect from the other partners? What is accepted behaviour and what is not? By defining a social contract we can create a set of rules we all agree upon and we al will respect.
- Defining the roles and responsibilities; this goes from defining the business unit structure, which roles are needed (now, mid-term, long-term) to what are their respective activities and responsibilities
- Shared responsibilities; The starting point is that we are all professionals and responsible for our own piece pf work. If, for any reason, one of the partners is not performing there should be a mechanism in place to be able to address these issues and if needed to take decisions
- Define the legal structure(s); how to be organized in one company, having limited responsibilities, avoid paying excesive social charges and taxes etc…
- What if… not what we start with but what if one of the partners decides to leave, how do we manage that
- And probably much more to be defined/done… but let’s do that together…