The most important challenge you have to face when your e-commerce starts to grow

About two years ago I was close to burnout from wanting to take on so many projects at the same time. I wanted to be my own investor, reinvesting all that income into products to sell later on Amazon. Before I got completely burned out, I was able to stop and change my strategy. We started asking for bank financing. Things have been going well, but now we have to take the next step.

The snowball of growth that crushes you
Growth is a positive thing. Don’t get me wrong. It’s what we look for when we want to create a business. But not everything that glitters is gold. You have to be prepared to face uncomfortable situations. The more you grow, the more money you will have to advance in purchases to the manufacturer. What happens can be surprising if you don’t have previous experience with this type of business. Your company is making high profits, but your bank account doesn’t necessarily reflect this at all times. Your incoming cash flows arrive later than your outgoing cash flows. In other words, you are short of cash. You have been creating a snowball that is causing liquidity problems due to the growth you are experiencing.

Financing, collaboration and investment as a solution
There are several solutions to the issue and we are doing almost all of them. I have already mentioned bank financing. It is a cycle that begins and then has to be renewed every year from then on. Now we have finally been able to send all our numbers (which have been very good by the way) and we have to wait for the response from the banks. In a matter of two weeks we will surely know more.

Then we also have a collaboration model with manufacturers. It is something that has emerged from negotiations last year and that we are now going to establish as a business model under a new non-agency brand. I have already talked about it and I will surely do so more later.

Turning a task into a routine
When we have that situation, I ask myself what we are doing wrong. We have made a decision to do something but then we don’t do it. There are communication channels beyond just with me. Sometimes the team makes decisions without taking me into account. They do it because they don’t consider it important. What does it take to make a task like, for example, recurrent purchases of a product into a routine? And I’m not talking about carrying out a routine for two weeks, but rather doing it all year round without exception. I don’t yet have the answer, other than being very annoying, giving slaps and insisting. I will learn to do it better.