This month's Spotlight is with the founder of a small UK online shop who spent her first eighteen months packing every single order at her kitchen table, most evenings, after a full day job.
On the point it became unsustainable
"There was a night I was packing orders at midnight with the day job starting at eight the next morning, and I remember thinking: this only works if I never get ill, never get tired, and never want an evening off. That's not a business. That's just a very committed hobby with invoices."
On why she kept going that way for so long
"Honestly? Because it felt cheaper to just do it myself, and because I was proud I could. There's a real pull towards proving you can handle everything on your own, especially in the early days. Looking back, that pride cost me a lot of evenings I'll never get back, for the sake of saving what turned out to be a fairly small amount of money."
On the first thing she changed
"I didn't hire anyone at first — I couldn't afford to. I used a fulfilment service for the busiest product line only, kept packing the smaller stuff myself, and that alone gave me back most of my evenings. It felt like a small thing. It changed everything."
"I actually put off looking into fulfilment services for months because I'd assumed they'd be too expensive for a business my size. When I finally got a quote, it was nowhere near as bad as I'd built it up to be in my head. I wasted a lot of tired evenings assuming something without ever actually checking the real number."
"I'd spent a year thinking the answer was 'work harder' when the actual answer was 'stop doing the one task that was eating all my time, even though it wasn't the most important one.'"
On what happened once she had her evenings back
"It sounds small, but I started actually thinking about the business again instead of just running to keep up with it. I noticed things I'd been too tired to notice before — a supplier I was overpaying, a product line that was barely breaking even. Getting my evenings back didn't just give me rest, it gave me back the ability to actually think clearly about the business."
On what she'd say to someone at the kitchen-table stage now
"Work out which task is actually eating your time versus which task is actually growing the business — they're very rarely the same task. For me it was packing boxes. For someone else it'll be something completely different. Find yours before you burn out looking for it the hard way."
"And actually get a proper quote before you assume something's unaffordable. I cost myself months of exhaustion by guessing at a number instead of just asking."
Video interviews with more Business Stuff community members are coming soon — if you'd like to be considered, the Facebook group is the best place to put yourself forward.
