Studies show that 44% of Australians bought a lottery ticket/scratchie in 2018. It’s no secret that everybody dreams to one day quit their job and live the life they want.
One of the biggest goals I want to achieve in life is financial freedom, and the purpose of my blog is to explore and try alternatives which may lead to the fulfilment of this goal.
However, with a dream like this, it can’t just be left to luck. It requires a change in mindset, a new way of looking at the world, a shift in perspective!
This is why I really like Tim Ferris’ book the Four Hour Work Week. Tim challenges all of our conventional ideas and ways of doing things, the way society has indoctrinated us to think, and shows us the world through the lens of an entrepreneur.
Upon my first time reading this book in 2019, all of the ideas felt quite foreign and distant from reach – for instance, starting a business. And so I dismissed plenty of the ideas in this book. However, since diving into e-commerce and building my first online business, many of the principles in this book has become strikingly more relevant to me.
I won’t go over the whole book now in this blog post, only some of the few key ideas which are mostly relevant to me at this time.
Virtual Assistants
One of the biggest things which has come most relevant to me right now is the use of Virtual Assistants. In the book, Tim heavily encourages testing out VA’s, even if it’s for trivial things. The main concept behind this is that, for e.g., if your time is worth say $25/hr, and a VA can be hired for $5/hr and they can perform the same task, then you may as well outsource and focus your time on more high-value activities.
The way in which this has become first become relevant to me is through e-commerce. When building up my first store there were some tasks which I had to outsource, such as outsourcing my ad creation. And while this wasn’t that cheap ($65/ one ad), this was one of the first times I got to delegate a job to a VA, which I guess is a milestone!
Also, since dropshipping is a business and to increase profits/sales you would need to scale your business, this would mean that there are a lot of things piled up on your plate. The way people scale their business, whether that be in e-commerce or real life businesses, is that their easy administrative tasks are outsourced while the business owner focuses on more of the high value activities. So when I look into the future of creating a passive source of income to hopefully be my muse out of the ‘rat race’, I know dealing with VA’s is actually something I would need to do if I want to be successful.
An unconventional (?) way of using VAs
II’ve also been quite interested as to how Amazon FBA works. Amazon FBA and dropshipping are quite different in many different ways, however they also do share some mutual similarities in some aspects also which is why many successful e-commerce people on Youtube have dabbled in both. I do believe one of their keys to success is that they just have a broad knowledge of how everything is, and I think gaining an understanding of this different e-commerce model will similarly benefit me and improve my e-commerce lens!
Here’s one of my favourite quotes from the last airbender 😀
Anyway, when browsing around I found this interesting video:
The reason this video was really interesting was because the way in which this person approached the E-commerce game was something which I did not perceive as possible. So basically, she hired a VA to basically BUILD her Amazon FBA business for her.
So at $5US/hr, she’s able to hire someone to work FULL time on the side to build up a business for her! This is the perspective and the lens which Tim Ferris tries to groom his readers into achieving – the lens of an entrepreneur.
In the end, she was relatively successful in generating profit with this online business while accounting for the cost of the VA.
This made me think about the whole possibility of VA’s and what is possible with an open mind.
My turn to hire a VA!
With this new perspective, I went out venturing into the world ready to try some new stuff! Haha.
So I hopped onto Fiverr and tried to see if there was someone that could do some product research for my shopify dropshipping store. What came to my surprise that there were HEAPS of other services for offer! Such as:
· Getting your website build
· Having your store managed
· Having someone run the ads for your store
So basically everything you need is to do is available for outsourcing!
Now, I’m not being optimistic here and saying that you can be successful by just stitching up the work from all these different modules together then calling it a day and hoping for profit. What this really affirmed to me was the power of being an entrepreneur, the power of having the eyes to see what others don’t, as Robert Kiyosaki says in his book:
Keep using your brain, and soon your mind will show you ways of making money far beyond what I could ever pay you. You will see things that other people never see. Most people never get to see these opportunities because they’re looking for money and security, and that’s all they get. The moment you see one opportunity, you’ll see them for the rest of your life
The real entrepreneurs are the ones who hold the vision. They hire people who are smarter than them, and work collectively towards that vision.
