Scaling Up Your Business Overview

This is the last module, and it addresses a different problem from the ones before it. Everything up to here has been about finding profitable stock. This module is about what happens when finding stock stops being the constraint and your own available hours become one instead.

The problem this module solves

Every method in this course costs time in proportion to the results it produces. Twice the sourcing means twice the hours scanning, buying, prepping, labelling and shipping. Nothing you have learned so far breaks that link.

At some point that becomes the limit. Not money, not knowledge, and not a shortage of products worth buying. Simply that one person can only work so many hours, and a growing amount of that work is repetitive.

Scaling means separating the results from your hours. There are two ways, and this module covers both:

• Give the work to people. Outsourcing and hiring.
• Give the work to a service. Prep centres, which take the physical handling out of the business entirely.

What is in this module

1. What to Outsource. A method for working out which of your tasks should go first, rather than guessing.
2. How To Hire. Where to find assistants, and how to select one so you do not spend three months finding out they are unsuitable.
3. Prep Centres. What they do, what they cost, and the questions to ask before committing.

The condition attached to all of it

One point runs through the whole module and is worth stating at the start: do every task yourself before handing it to anybody.

This is not a matter of principle. It is that you cannot direct work you have never done. You will not be able to write instructions, judge whether the output is any good, or recognise when somebody is doing it badly. An assistant sourcing products against criteria you have never applied yourself will buy things you would not have bought, and you will not know why until the stock arrives.

So this module comes last for the same reason wholesale came after arbitrage. Learn it, then delegate it.

A note on getting here

The lesson opens by observing that most people who start this course do not reach this module. Some watch the first module, some watch a few, and stop.

That is worth knowing for a practical reason rather than a motivational one: the work in this course is ordinary and repetitive, and the people it works for are the ones who keep doing it. There is nothing in the later modules that is harder than the earlier ones. There is just more of the same.