Back in late 2019 I was feeling a bit restless. Things had been going well at my job, I had purchased a house, and I generally felt that I was ready to take a leap and see if I could make something happen with a business idea I had been pondering for a while. Surely 2020 was poised to be a great year and nothing catastrophic could come through and upend my well-laid plan, right?
The Plan
As you might guess from the content of this site I am, and have been for some time, an avid golfer. What might not be so readily apparent is that I also have a strong desire to make the world more sustainable, eco-friendly, and less wasteful. This was sometimes hard to reconcile on a golf course where I would see trees cut down to expand fairways, massive amounts of fertilizer and pesticides sprayed, and constant use of smoke-belching machinery to keep greens perfectly manicured and club patrons zipping around the course. What better place to start a business then but the intersection of two of my passions? Environmentally friendly products were becoming increasingly mainstream at the time, and golfers are already used to paying high prices for products, surely they could (and happily would) absorb another few dollars to make sure their purchases were some combination of carbon neutral, recycled, and sustainable.
With these thoughts in my head I quickly created an LLC, purchased a website, and started product shopping for the future of golf equipment and apparel: Carbon Golf LLC.
The Reality
I don’t believe that my expectations when starting this first business were exceptionally lofty. In fact, I still have the handwritten list of goals I hoped to achieve in my first year in business and, even with the benefit of hindsight, it looks downright reasonable.
• Source 20 unique items to sell on the site
• Make a sale to someone that is not family or friend
• Reach $500 in total sales
Small as those goals might appear, the disappointing truth is I failed to achieve even a single one. Sourcing products, ironically, was the hardest part of getting my business off the ground; the irony comes from the fact that my day job is literally a sourcing professional. Turns out that the difference between sourcing for an established company with preferred suppliers, an established history, and large purchasing power is a totally different ball game than finding a supplier willing to provide white label products in 25-unit increments – who knew! While I was extremely comfortable with the numbers side of business and had great plans for tracking inventory, understanding what sort of margins I needed on products, and budgeting for advertising, those skills proved to be a far cry from the skills I really needed to get this business off the ground. To be fair, “skills” might not properly encapsulate what I was missing: that could likely be summed up as dedication.
The world of white label sourcing is full of minimum order quantities, batch label creations, and slotting fees to maintain a place in the warehouse. Frequently my entire order quantity would be the “sample” quantity for a manufacturer; after they had shipped me enough product to last me a year they would reach out asking me when I needed the “full” quantity which I would, as politely as possible, decline. Fees came from seemingly every direction and just compounded on top of each other. Want to test a new product? There’s a design fee. Need that new product shipped to you? There’s a small order fee. Happy with the quality and actually ready to sell something? Looks like you need to collect payment through PayPal and, you guessed it, there’s a fee for that. Very quickly my assumption that I could buy a product for $15, add $3 worth of cost to it in the form of carbon credits, and mark it up for a reasonable-but-not exorbitant profit had evaporated. Instead I was realizing that even pricing my products 30% or more above competitors would barely leave me breaking even unless I started to move some far more significant volume. It would take far more dedication (read: investment) than I had originally anticipated to really get a business like this off the ground.
Even still I had some hope that I could make this work. Maybe the universe would help me out a little bit, I’d get a small stroke of luck, and – no, nope. That didn’t happen.
The Pandemic
While it would be nice to blame the pandemic for the lack of success and eventual closure of my company, the reality is it only exacerbated the flaws that already existed. My train had been built, the tracks had been laid, and they were taking me precisely nowhere: COVID simply shoveled more coal into the steam engine.
My already-grim business plans faced challenges that had been turned up to 11. Minimum order quantities, once in the several hundred dollar range, were increased to $10,000 or more as businesses frantically reprioritized to maximize throughput with a limited workforce. My limited sources of white label products shrunk even further, either going out of business or dropping customers with less established purchasing histories. My dedication to this idea was being tested to greater limits with every passing day. For several months the only reason Carbon Golf continued to exist as a website was a combination of having pre-paid for web hosting for the remainder of the year and the small tinge of pride preventing me from admitting to all friends, family, and coworkers who had supported me that it had been a failure.
The Failure
But failure it was.
The Silver Lining
Stay tuned for the next section of my small business journey!