I'm not just the President of the Hairclub for Men, but I'm also a client.
In research done by Forbes in 2024, 82% of small businesses fail, citing cash flow as a reason. There's nothing BUT advice that tells new businesses to have multiple months and even years of cash on hand to help you through those rough early times. And yet, many still go ahead anyways. Not going to lie, we don't have a Scrooge McDuck vault of cash on standby.
Like many, we were excited about our vision and got that strong internal "nudge" to go ahead with what we had. A business plan was very important but a well managed budget to get the essentials was also key.Sidequest Loot is - BAR NONE - our own best client that uses our abilities to our best advantage to save money and get the best Loot. In today's blog post, we highlight some of the items and sources that helped us to do more with less money spent!
The ability to find savings has always been a tool in my chest. I love a bargain, I love sales prices and I absolutely refuse to pay full price for anything. Sometimes this means taking some calculated risks on packaging condition, walking into a store where I've never been or judging an item based on a few pictures. This skill was honed when I worked as a manager at a restaurant and one of the explicit terms of my employment contract was to "watch every penny and spend the company money as if it were your own". Did they ever get themselves a frugal miser!
We have written before and given up some of our sources for the items that we list for sale from Sidequest Loot. Aside from the "Loot" there are many other considerations that are part of the cost of business. To keep our prices at our aggressive target (part of our appeal) we needed to make sure that we found every opportunity to save on anything and everything that our type of business would need:
- packaging and shipping supplies
- office supplies
- shipping costs
- our online store, including the website and marketing - pretty effin' critical
Packaging and shipping supplies
We're not going to tell you to re-use boxes and the packaging from all of the stuff you receive. We hope that you're doing that already. Send you to the Dollar Store? You have already been and found the limits of their selection. Besides, you have already noticed that nothing is a dollar anymore and the size of the items that you receive are getting smaller. Here are a couple examples of how we find our own Loot:
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| 500 Sheets of Environmentally Friendly Paper Fill: Canadian Tire Clearance Area ($13 vs $50 Retail) Hint: There's still one more at Canadian Tire on King George Rd in Brantford |
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White Heavy Duty Craft Shipping Roll (4' x 200') Paper: Online Auction ($9 vs $50 at the time of auction)  Bags come in handy for additional sorting and organization of your goods - we found some with better prices, size options and package size at a local liquidation outlet. For us, these ranged from $0.99 for the 50-pack that's a perfect card size to $1.69 for the 15-pack of freezer bags. We lucked out recently and also got a 100-pack of clear shirt bags that are absolutely perfect for protecting larger hard-cover books. Office supplies Some things you shouldn't skimp on - pens, highlighters, sharpies - these are items that we use pretty much daily and throwing out 9 new pens to find one that works is wasteful but 100% frustrating. But a walk through the office supplies section of a Returns Liquidator (also Brantford) found us these for a TOTAL of $20 (after their sticker price was marked down another 40%) - at least $50 off retail if you've had to buy these name brands at Staples:     Specialized print stock like this helps to put off those specialized orders from Vistaprint (we have an account and ALWAYS use their coupon codes) while still allowing for us to have some of the nicer things. Avery-brand stock also works well because we can use it with our own printer (bought on sale, of course) using the templates on the Avery site where we just type in the model number of the stock to bring up what we need. Thrift stores are a great source for similar items - we happened to find our mailing label stock at one local store for $1.99 for this sealed package, a savings of about $17.00...  Shipping Costs |
- Free delivery in Brantford with a $25 spend: This is local for us and we can be more efficient with time and fuel by combining deliveries with our regular business around town.
- Canada Post - Let's start by hoping that these fine folk stop getting jerked around and a good deal gets done for them. Love them as a convenient option to send things on the fly with multiple locations just about everywhere. We signed up for a business account which doesn't much business structure - if you're an independent seller, sign up! It gives us a small discount on Parcel Shipping and supplies for when we're in a pinch. We can fit a stop at one of their locations with our local deliveries, above.
- Courier Depot Services - Companies like ChitChats & Stallion Express effectively cut out approximately half of the expenses of shipping by having the sender take care of part of the trip. You bring your package to their location and they take it the rest of the way. For us, using ChitChats with a Burlington location and Stallion Express at their Kitchener location lets us incorporate these courier options in our business that frequents these different areas. Efficiency!
- Courier Broker Services - We use Flagship for our other needs. They provide quotes online with all of the available options for you, which default to listing by cost. They then assign the job to the selected delivery service who will pick up from your door!
Our Website and Online Platforms
Setting up a website is expensive, time-consuming and often both. I am computer-savvy and have dabbled with coding but building a site from scratch was elusive to my skillset and budget. I am fortunate to have others who can help me with elements of what is required (graphics, animation, proofreading) - it helps to be able to ask for help when you are helpless.
I opted to try GoDaddy to secure the domain, the website and online store. The price climbs in a hurry but two words: COUPON CODES. This cut the cost of our site in half and we found similar savings for our toll-free number and accounting software. One Google prompt ("GoDaddy Coupon Code") took roughly 30 seconds of our time to find the right result. When GoDaddy prompted us for an add-on later, we did the same thing again.
We are in the process of integrating Facebook Marketplace (business) that is COMPLETELY different than personal but it is free (so far) with no commission charged on our listings. We have had a Facebook Business page since the beginning of August and haven't paid for any boosts yet. We have managed to increase our followers more than we expected by being friendly, trading Follows-for-Follows, Liking/Sharing/Following the content of others and a whole lot of good old-fashioned networking. Keeping our Followers/Following ratio at 1:1 seems to be paying some healthy dividends. If you have 400 Followers but are only Following four yourself, you are fighting by yourself and have an uphill battle. It's called Social Media for a reason.
Ebay has Store options but if we restrain ourselves to only listing 250 items, there are no additional charges except for a commission on every item we have sold. Before we pay twenty bucks a month (plus those nasty commissions) for the most basic store, we can try Ebay for free and see what works best for us.
The other platforms are coming with time and we will custom the items that fit best for each platform. Some are free, some charge monthly subscriptions, some only allow individuals to list, some charge for every item that is listed - sometimes commission on top of this, sometimes not.
Some items we might list solo on platforms just for the advertising!
Hopefully, there were some savings tips here that were helpful and informative for you. We like to share our Sidequest experiences and hope to find some new collaborators in the process.
Happy Thanksgiving and Keep Lootin'!
James
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