The Swank Store’s Aaron Kay believes that business may be filled with uncertainties, but it’s never personal. There’s no stigma attached to failure – just learning and the more you learn the quicker you’ll understand. This entrepreneur is all about being driven and focused on making his grand plan unfold.
What follows is the full interview on how Co-founder and Creative Director of The Swank Store overcame his initial challenges.
What was the first challenge that you had to overcome when you started? Was it giving up your day job? Was it the money?
As media and marketing people, we knew how to attract large audience and build demand for our product, but the operational side was lacking
From our standpoint as a digital business, we knew that we could acquire an audience and to be able to make a positive return on our business so cash flow wasn’t our initial problem.
Our initial problem was essentially running a business – how do we get the product to our customers in a timely fashion? How do we make our customers happy? How do we make those customers return and make them our advocates?
We learned very very quickly that all we needed to do was listen to our customers and make them happy and then we’d be okay
Where do you think self-doubt comes from? Do you have self-doubt? Why do you think that is?
There’s no need to fear anything. It’s more about educating yourself and making calculated decisions that are in the interest of your business, not personal gain. The more you learn the quicker you start understanding how you can better your business
I would always recommend reading as much as possible, joining forums, engaging with your customers and retooling as much as possible. Conferences, educational seminars, anything like that, that’s attributed to your business is always going to help you out, and that can then alleviate your fear because you’re tooled up, you’re skilled up and you understand what’s going on.
How do you push through the negativity to keep hustling?
Within 3 months of our business, we were getting so many orders that we were just overstretched but we didn’t want to let any of our customers down
We realised we needed a bit of a break. We were overworked. We took a step back, shut up shop for a few days. We just met up to talk about what we could do to put new systems in place to make things more efficient
That has now led us to where we are today because those same systems are running through a year and a half later and it’s made our life so much more easier.
To see the rest of Aaron’ story, head to Shippit.com/Hustle.
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