I recently read this article on Photo Booth Magazine about a husband and wife couple, Brandon and Katrina about starting up their business The Photo Booth Supply Company. In November, I actually have a few moments to sit down and talk and get to know them! The article struck me in many ways how they grew to expand their business and how we manufacture spend.
Here’s an excerpt:
I realized quickly that this industry was incredibly difficult to scale and sustain. How would we be able to book ourselves for more than 30-40 events a year? It would be physically impossible unless we duplicated ourselves. The job was also physically draining. I had friends in their late 30’s and early 40’s shooting who could barely make it through the day. The job was also very seasonal, as there would always be a huge gap in the winter time of no one getting married. This left us with months that went by without getting any paychecks, making it harder for us to plan financially for the future.
How many times have you thought about scalability? Or the fact that you can only manufactured spend when there is active participation like going into the stores and buying whatever prepaid or gift card you need.
All of the struggles that they encountered is very much like what we do. They had seventeen(!) revisions before they were able to lock down how to make a production run of their photo booths. I can confidently say that we faced the same thing starting off on finding what works and what doesn’t work. Learning some thing new can be struggling at times, but highly rewarding at the end. How exciting is it when you are able find a gift card deal to resell? It’s very exciting! And it never gets old. I kept trying one location for Reloadits. They kept telling me no for the longest time and and only recently I have been successful, but Evolve just closed their doors. That was disappointing.
I was ready to close the door on all my cards for the gasoline quarter, but then I found a new place that codes as gas and there is a profitable churn. I will now go nuts and buy up the $9000 limit that I have for the gas category.
Minimum Wage
Did you also notice?
With that in mind, we tried hiring a photographer, but after doing all the math, we were barely making minimum wage after all the hours of training.
I can remember starting off manufactured spending and learning the process barely making minimum wage. This is where I am with reselling, as my friend says when we look at a venture, “are we better off flipping burgers?” If we are, then we will look into it a little further, if it’s not, then we’ll forget the idea.
When the next thing dies, it’s not an if, you need to plan in advance so you’re not caught flat footed so you won’t struggle again. Sure, it stinks the birds died, but I am not upset one bit. In fact, I am quite the opposite from it. I survived for a long time without any of the birds. It was only recently that I started to use them because of all the driving that I incorporated it into my travel plans. Adverse action like this also quickens the pace for me to accelerate the plans to resell more. I always say if you’re not learning something new or evolving, then you’ll fall behind and become one of the angry people, don’t be like that.
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