Is My Business ACTUALLY Successful? My One Year Reflection Running an E-Commerce Store
Hey guys, it's Joi here, and I'm so excited for today's video because we're celebrating one year of my small business Joiful Bee. If you're new here, Joiful Bee is my haircare accessories and tools business, and I started it in February of 2020. So it's one year, and today we're doing a huge business reflection. I'm going to be talking about the wins, the losses, the lessons I learned, and what I'm going to take into 2021 to continue to run my business. I hope this video is helpful for any of you guys who do have a small business, have a side hustle, or are thinking about starting one. If you do have a small business, leave a comment down below, letting me know what you do and your side hustle. I'd love to check out some of your businesses and things that you guys are working on. Let me know down below, and let's get started with this reflection.
First, I'm going to get into the backstory of my business. Joiful Bee was started after I made many haircare videos on YouTube. After reviewing numerous natural hair products and tools, I wanted to make a product line for the natural hair community. I took all of our natural hair struggles in mind to make products that were solutions to those. My signature product throughout 2020 was the Wash Day Kit, which is a bundle of all of the Joiful Bee haircare tools.
Just for context, I started the business with my own money. I get a lot of questions asking if I got a grant or did I get funding. I started the business with my own money from my first business, which is Joi Wade Media. That's the business you guys interact with here on YouTube and carries my social media influencer brand, brand deals, ad revenue, etc. And I used money that I saved up in that business to start Joiful Bee. If you want to know the ins and outs of how I launched Joiful Bee, you should watch the video I have that goes in-depth in the strategies and the marketing aspects.
Now that you have a little more context let's get into my wins and my losses of 2020. Let's do the fun part: the wins. The biggest win for 2020 was that the business crossed six figures. That is a really big deal to me because, in one year, I was able to turn negative money into six figures plus. I think it is amazing for our first year in business, but that is not business profit. Launching a business comes with many expenses and, in Joiful Bee's case, costs six figures. What I learned is that running a product-based business is super expensive. I'm more hopeful for Joiful Bee's profit this year because we've adjusted our business strategy. Now that we have tested the waters and are aware of what products people are interested in, we can be a financial success.
Next are the milestones along the way that kept me motivated and excited about my business. I finally received trademarks for Joiful Bee, the company name, and the Wash Day Kit, our signature product. This means no one in the haircare space can use Joiful Bee on their products and tools, and also, no one in the haircare space can use Wash Day Kit to name their products or tools. I'm super excited about the trademarks because they will help me build brand equity and protect my business as we continue to grow.
Another win is just the feedback and the engagement from our customers. I love reading all the reviews on our website. We have over 160 reviews on our website of people raving about the Wash Day Kit. I love seeing all of the unboxings and tutorials that our customers post on Instagram. I think it's super amazing that we have such big engagement from our customers. We don't ask them to post these things, but they're so excited and engaged with the story of Joiful Bee that they post independently. We also have a playlist of reviews of people who just made reviews and unboxings here on YouTube. So I'm so grateful for that.
The next win in Joiful Bee was being able to hire my mom and get my digital assistant work. I've been able to engage my family members when it comes to packing and shipping the products. And my digital content assistant works on a lot of social media for Joiful Bee now and many different things for my other business Joi Wade media, which I talked about before. I love that I've been able to hire people and collaborate with others.
Now that we talked about a couple of wins in the business let's talk about some of the losses. And they weren't losses, they're just learning experiences that will help me with 2021. So the first quote-unquote loss was not having enough inventory for the year. I did a couple of launches, and they all sold out immediately. So, for a holiday launch, I just got so much inventory so that we wouldn't sell out. If you're new to the business, you might think that selling out is a good thing, but it's not. When you don't have inventory, you're losing money because those are sales that you could have had. I was going months without inventory in 2020. I only had inventory for about five or six months out of the year, so I didn't have a full year of making sales. Since it was my first year in business, I got smaller quantities to test the market. And now, in 2021, I'm making sure I have inventory for the entire year because now I know that the market is interested in what I'm doing.
Another loss is not correctly strategizing for Q4 (the holiday season). I used a lot of digital advertising means to support the sales of Joiful Bee, and I didn't prepare for the increase in advertising costs. My advertising costs 5x as much on some days. So, I couldn't run as much advertising as I usually would, and therefore not selling as many units as I wanted to. So now I know in 2021, I'll correctly strategize for Q4 and try to get as many sales before the prices go up.
Let's talk about the lessons that I learned. I realized that you could achieve your goals when you put your mind to something, but it's important to strategize. I'm super happy that I started Joiful Bee strategically. I started with a lot of market research before I launched anything. If you're interested in learning more about how you can see if your business idea is a good idea before you even sell anything, go to my video on how I started, launched, and marketed my business.
And the next lesson I learned is to make sure that you're not just posting to post but posting to promote and that you're constantly getting in front of your audience. So I'll continue to post and talk about Joiful Bee. Some of you have been subscribed to my channel for a while, but you might not have any idea that I started Joiful Bee even though I posted tons of videos about it and talk about it on social all the time.
Next up are my 2021 goals for my business. One is communicating with my manufacturers effectively to make sure I have inventory for the whole year. Scaling and predicting the inventory will ensure that there aren't long periods where I'm sold out. My second goal for 2021 is to work with the mastermind group of business owners. In the mastermind, we learn about Facebook and Instagram advertising and other forms of marketing. We're all working together to scale our businesses, and we meet weekly. So that's another aspect that's going to help drive my business and keep me educated in all the different sectors. It will also improve my craft so that I'm never complacent. I'm leaning on mentors that I paid at the beginning of the year. They weren't cheap, but are were worth the return on investment. I am so making sure that you continue to allocate business budget for gills and things like that.
And lastly, I want to continue working with others. I'm so excited to be working with my digital content assistant, and her name is Aralyn. She's killing it right now. So she's going to be doing a lot more with the Joiful Bee brand this year, and I'm continuing to work with family members to help scale up the business.
So that's everything I wanted to talk about. Let me know if you've liked this video, just recapping my whole first year in business. Let me know if you have any questions or video requests. Because I'm back filming and I'm getting my life together. Because I do work full time, have a business, and do all of this digital content stuff, I'm doing different things to make sure you guys still get the content you love on this channel. Now that I have a second business, I'm trying to post things that I'm interested in and not getting caught up in, like, all the algorithm stuff. I'm just going to post what I like to post y'all. And if you're down for that, then subscribe, like, comment, engage, and we're going to be good. So thank you so much for watching, and I'll talk to you guys next time.
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Office Supplies Favorites!
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