I have a question for you:
What is the difference between a good small business and a great one?
And when I say, “great one,” I mean a business that customers love, that the owners love, that employees love, and that grows and makes tons of money.
Is it a popular product that sells? Well, that’s nice, but that’s not what makes a business great. Is it an owner that “gets it”? Again, close, but no cigar. Is it a good location, smart advertising, low overhead?
No, no, and no.
Having spent more than 20 years as a best-selling business author and the small business columnist for USA TODAY, and being an entrepreneur myself, the thing I have learned is that the best businesses have great teams.
Creating a great team allows the owners / entrepreneurs to concentrate on those things that they do best, thereby allowing the teammates to do what they do best. It’s a classic win-win.
Let me give you an example:
UPS just launched a new service called eFulfillment. If you engage in ecommerce, this is the type of product, and the sort of teammate, that can take your business from good to great. It certainly did for Tim Gibb and his business Tidal New York.
In fact, it tripled their online business.
Tim and his brother own a business that manufactures and sells unique flip-flops. The online business was so successful from the get-go that it created a problem – he and his team were spending so much time fulfilling and shipping orders that it was taking time, effort, energy, money, and resources away the rest of the business.
The solution? UPS eFulfillment.
Says, Tim:
“I just can’t speak highly enough of UPS as a partner and eFulfillment as a solution. The tracking, the ease with which we were able to roll out products, the integration with Shopify, were all great.
In addition, the technical support team is outstanding. For us, having as a partner one of the biggest companies in the world, one that actually cares about small businesses, made all the difference.”
So just what is eFulfillment, you may be asking? It is a one-stop-shop that allows you to manage your stores on 21 different marketplaces (including Amazon, Etsy, and eBay) from one central online dashboard.
It is a technology platform and a fulfillment service and a shipping solution all rolled into one.
And that, says Tim Gibb, makes all the difference. “The ability to focus on growth instead of managing our infrastructure allowed us to pursue business that we wouldn’t otherwise have had the bandwidth to go after.”
Signing up is easy. Simply enroll using a quick onboarding process and list your products. UPS will handle all of the backend – storing the merchandise, packaging products once a sale is made, and then shipping from warehouses strategically located in Kentucky and California (and, if your inventory is stored in other locations, such as an existing warehouse, it can be added to the platform too.)
Do you see how this can revolutionize your business?
By centralizing the sales of all of your online marketplaces into one dashboard, by having a world-class partner like UPS handle your fulfillment and shipping, and by bringing on a partner that allows you to concentrate on selling and not shipping, you are creating the sort of team that can, well, take your business from being merely a good one to a truly great one.
