How I Built My $1M+/Year Coaching Business And Now Work 2 Hours/Week
Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?
I’m Lewis Smith and for the past 5 years, I’ve run multiple dropshipping stores that have generated over £4.68M in revenue in that time.
After seeing success with those stores and the unique model of dropshipping that I use, I launched Dropship Unlocked, which is now the best-reviewed e-commerce education company in the UK. We have over 800 members in the program and our coaching business generates revenue of up to £225k/mo.
What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?
My journey started with dissatisfaction with my corporate 9-5 pursuit because I felt that I was destined for more. I had an entrepreneurial spirit but had no idea how to start a business when I had less than £10,000 in savings.
Then I read a book called The 4-Hour Work Week and discovered the dropshipping model. It seemed perfect for the life I wanted to live as well as the constraints I faced. The model promised low start-up costs, a low barrier to entry, and I could run the business from anywhere in the world from my laptop.
But my first foray into dropshipping was a complete flop…
The most popular model of dropshipping involved shipping low-priced trending products from China. But I soon discovered a huge problem with this model. Within a few weeks of launching, my customer support inbox was bombarded with complaints from people asking where their product was. The 30+ day delivery time from China was causing big issues.
Plus, by selling cheap products, I discovered that the volume of sales I’d need to make to hit my income goals wasn’t conducive to the life of freedom I wanted to lead. Every product was a potential problem I needed to resolve.
So after some research, I discovered two changes I could make that would keep the best parts of dropshipping while changing the parts that were causing me issues. Firstly, shipping from UK suppliers offering next-day delivery, and secondly, selling high-ticket products that required me to make fewer sales to hit my income goals.
Take us through the process of building the first version of your product.
I didn’t get very far with the first version of my store before I stumbled on the real issue with dropshipping in the UK. One of the reasons selling products from China was so popular was that the suppliers were accessible.
You could find products on Alibaba and order them online. But finding UK suppliers and convincing them to work with you? Not so easy.
So using the niche I’d chosen, I rang supplier after supplier and kept getting rejected. At first, being new to the business, I couldn’t figure out why. But that’s when I realized that “dropshipping” had created a bad name for itself.
It wasn’t that signing domestic suppliers was difficult. It was that I approached them in completely the wrong way. To them, I looked like an online chancer without a real business who might disappear into the night after a few weeks.
So I changed my approach, making sure that my store was live, and I stopped mentioning the word dropshipping. Sometimes I even went to meet the suppliers directly to buy them a coffee and discuss a partnership.
Systematize as much of the business as possible so that everything is repeatable and can be executed as efficiently as possible.
Describe the process of launching the business.
When you launch a dropshipping store, there’s no fanfare, no red carpet, and no countdown to ‘live’. Sadly. In reality, it’s more of a soft launch because your customers won’t know you exist until they find your store online.
And this was the second problem I faced. How do I drive traffic to my store? At this point, I built my store using Shopify and had products ready to sell. But without a reliable traffic source, we weren’t going anywhere.
Most people using the China dropshipping model relied on disruptive marketing via Facebook ads. And they worked because the products were mass-marketed and trending. For the high-priced, niche products that I wanted to sell, Facebook wasn’t the best platform.
So I sent traffic to my store using Google search campaigns. This allowed me to target people who were specifically looking for the items I was selling, so I knew their buying intent was high.
I launched the store and after a few days of tweaking and optimizing, sales started to come in. Back then, you used to get a “cha-ching” sound from Shopify when you made a sale. There’s nothing like sitting at lunch with friends and your phone is blowing up with sales notifications. From that moment, I was hooked.
Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?
My customer acquisition strategy focuses purely on search intent marketing. I serve a series of ads to people who have different stages of awareness and tailor my spending depending on how likely someone is to buy.
For example, if I were to sell BBQs, I would spend less money on people who are simply searching for “BBQ” on Google because I know they’re still in the research phase. But I may serve them with some value to help their research process and build some reciprocity with my business for when they’re ready to buy.
But if they were to search for a “Weber Genesis II E-410 GBS Black Gas BBQ” I know that they are far enough down their research rabbit hole and know exactly what they’re looking for. So within a budget that makes sense for my business to acquire a customer, I’ll spend more money to attract these people to my store.
For retaining customers, I like to keep things simple. One of my values is to run sustainable, low-maintenance businesses. The e-commerce stores generate good money to maintain my income, and these days, I like them to be fairly hands-off. So I focus on automated methods to attract repeat buyers. To do this, I create email flows that are evergreen and automated and allocate some budget to retargeting previous customers via Facebook.
How are you doing today and what does the future look like?
Today my e-commerce stores generate around £1M/year in revenue. This is as close to passive as it can get, as it now takes me just 2 hours per week to run them.
Everything in my e-commerce business has SOPs (standard operating procedures) and I have a team of great VAs in the Philippines who take care of everything in my business, from customer service to day-to-day management of suppliers.
I like to still keep some connection to the stores though, as it helps me pass on the experience to the members of my mentorship program, Dropship Unlocked.
And that’s where I now focus most of my time. I’ve built a team of 8 at Dropship Unlocked, as well as an assortment of other freelancers who work for us on an ad-hoc basis. Dropship Unlocked is where I get most of my fulfillment so I prefer to spend my time here. There’s nothing quite like helping other people to achieve the same level of freedom that I have.
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
The biggest lesson I’ve learned on my journey is to ask yourself what type of life you want to live and base all of your business decisions around that. For me, it was that I wanted freedom. At first to travel with my wife. And now that we have young children, it’s to spend time with them as they grow. Once you're clear on that, all decisions you make become a lot easier.
Sometimes it will mean forgoing profit, but for me, it’s a trade-off I’m happy to make. Because what good is extra profit if all you do is work, and you can’t enjoy your financial and time freedom with your family?
Three key things help me build thriving businesses whilst maintaining that work/life balance. The first is to build a team of high-quality people who are bought into the mission and culture of the businesses. Then I place trust in them as experts in their role to make decisions and solve problems.
Secondly, I like to systematize as much of the business as possible so that everything is repeatable and can be executed as efficiently as possible.
And lastly, I prefer to create evergreen assets where possible. Yes, sometimes that means forgoing a bit of urgency and recency which means you might lose a few sales. But it helps me create lifestyle businesses that don’t burn me out.
What platform/tools do you use for your business?
For my e-commerce stores, we use a pretty standard tech stack. Shopify is the gold standard for hosting a store and has made things much more accessible for anyone to launch an e-commerce business.
We use ClickCease to help prevent click fraud and we also recommend ClearSale to reduce the chance of any fraudulent orders.
Klaviyo is also an incredible email marketing tool for e-commerce brands and helps me to create the evergreen and automated flows that I’ve outlined previously.
And none of my success in creating a lifestyle business would be possible without hiring great people. For my e-commerce stores, Online Jobs.ph has been a great source of fantastic remote workers in the Philippines.
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?
The book that started everything for me was The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss. It was transformative. Not only because it was where I first learned of the dropshipping business model but also because it opened my eyes to the possibilities of running a business that gives you a good work/life balance.
The second most impactful book I’ve read is The 12-Week Year by Brian P. Moran and Michael Lennington. Since implementing the concept of working in 12-week sprints, I’ve been able to get an enormous boost in productivity.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?
My advice is to aspiring entrepreneurs in particular because in my coaching business, Dropship Unlocked, I speak to this group of people every day. So I see their desire, but I also see the things that hold them back.
But let me tell you, there is NEVER a perfect time to start a business. Either the news is reporting an imminent recession, or something is going on in your personal life. If you wait for a moment when life presents a clear path for you to start a business, you’ll be waiting forever.
You need to embrace the challenges preventing you from starting a business and work your way through them. It’s a good litmus test for whether you’re cut out to be a business owner.
And if you’re not cut out to be a business owner, that’s okay! But the sooner you decide whether it’s the life you don’t want to live, the better. Because you can instead focus on being happy with the life you do have instead.
Where can we go to learn more?
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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