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Jas0n United States. Aug 28 2011 12:24. Posts 1866

I know it's been a while since I've written anything about the start-up of the business I run with edzwoo. To be honest I just didn't really know what to write about. From where I left off last time, a lot has happened but most of it is administrative stuff that probably wouldn't interest you guys very much. So instead I figured I'd talk about the house I just moved into along with what's happened over the last couple of weeks. If you read edzwoo's blog post you'll know a bit of what's going on.

I moved into a house with edzwoo, acckerman and a friend from high school at the beginning of August. It's a four bedroom, 2.5 bath, 2600 square foot house. edzwoo and I rented out the house for the sole purpose of running our eBay business. We figured we would use the entire first floor as storage and hoped that it would be enough space to last us for the year. We were wrong. This is our house two weeks after we moved in.

We purchased somewhere between 10,000lb - 15,000lb of inventory since we moved in and we're bringing in around 2,000lb - 4,000lb worth of inventory each week. We're at the point where we actually have to start storing things in our backyard. It's pretty likely that we'll need a warehouse soon. The only reason we decided to rent out a house instead of a warehouse in the first place is because edzwoo and I are pretty lazy and wouldn't want to drive to a warehouse every morning. We also don't plan on staying in Illinois permanently. If things go as planned, by next August we will be somewhere close by San Fransisco because that's where a lot of the major shipping ports are located. We would be able to directly import products from manufacturers in China and Pakistan instead of having to go through wholesalers in California. Pretty much all legit wholesalers are located in California because of the port locations and the cost of freight transport from California to Illinois accounts for 20% of our total inventory cost. Because of this, it didn't make much sense to us to invest in a warehouse, set up industrial sized shelves, purchase pallet jacks, etc if we're just going to move after a year.

We also recently transferred our proprietorship to a S-Corp which greatly limits our liability if we are ever involved in a lawsuit. Also, edzwoo and I each received 500 shares of stocks which I think is pretty awesome. You gotta feel pretty legit when you can say that you own your own company and it issues stocks, even if the stocks are not public. So the whole process of forming an S-Corp costs less than $300 if you fill out the application yourself. Our lawyer recommended that we just file the documents through his firm so he can take care of all the paperwork and handle the incorporation process. He estimated the bill to be around $1000 which didn't seem bad but he ended up charging us $2500. We got value-towned pretty hard there. Our accountant is also charging us $950 to go through our transactions for the last six months and integrating all of that into Quickbooks.

Well, that's about it. Holidays are coming up which means we're going to get a ridiculous amount of sales. From mid October to mid December last year we had so many sales to process it nearly killed us. I stayed up for three days working on eBay stuff and studying for finals. Hopefully we will be better prepared this year.

0 votes

whamm! Albania. Aug 28 2011 12:57. Posts 11625

wow nice to know ebay is workign out for your business. here in my country people hardly visit or purchase stuff from ebay because there are tons of scammers in manila and filipinos trust craigslist type internet sites more

Bigbobm United States. Aug 28 2011 16:19. Posts 5511

sick to hear things are working out. grats with what youve done so far and gl with the busy season coming up

Its time to stop thinking like a bitch and think smart like a poker player - ket

Exhilarate United States. Aug 28 2011 17:25. Posts 5453

nice. are you guys going to hire assistants or anything?

PuertoRican United States. Aug 28 2011 18:53. Posts 13141

Sounds kewl.

Write an update blog post after the holidays are over to keep us updated.

Rekrul is a newb

Highcard Canada. Aug 28 2011 19:59. Posts 5428

5 stars, good read man. It's nice the details you add to the posts and not just frivolous things, stuff like west coast shipping, cutting 20% costs from transpo, stuff is interesting.

I have learned from poker that being at the table is not a grind, the grind is living and poker is how I pass the time

Ket

United Kingdom. Aug 29 2011 04:20. Posts 8665

Very nice, please keep us informed, I'd love to follow updates on how this venture is going. Gonna go look at edzwoo's blog soon when I get time. I'm always interested to hear what poker players transition onto after they're done with the full time grind life (or the DOA decides they're done unless they wanna uproot, either way), especially the ones who are trying to keep the self-employed status doing something other than playing. Best of luck!