Foundr - 😢 How? How did I lose $1.3M? 

Dear ,

I lost $1.3 million and it was the biggest mistake I’ve made in business so far.

I wanted to share this during our Biggest Ever Sale for Start & Scale, to show you both my wins and my losses. 

Because it’s easier for me to say that just one new business idea took me from having $24 in the bank, to making $600k per month within just 6 months…

…than to tell you that I lost more than 7-figures with one simple mistake!

And while it’s a bit embarrassing to dive into all the details, I’m sharing it with you to inspire you to have the confidence you need to get started in spite of all the challenges you face.

So for my first business, Skinny Me Tea, we had been manufacturing our tea in Australia and we wanted to test outsourcing to a manufacturer in China.

We found one on Alibaba. 

They had some, you know, pretty good reviews and was like a gold rating or platinum or whatever. 

And we tested a few initial runs with him and they were great.

Like the tea was of awesome quality.

We even sent it back to Australia to double-check the quality.

Got it tested in Australian labs as well.

Everything came back perfectly.

We're like, great, okay, let's press go because operations on the product side aren't always my favorite.

I was like, how good would it be if we stopped running out of tea and in and out of stock all the time and just ordered like a year's worth of tea all at once and we can just have it there.

You know, like, we're growing at this rate. So based on my current growth projections, I think we need to order this much tea.

So we placed an order with the manufacturer for 1.3 million US dollars worth of tea.

Everything had been great to that point. We had a really good personal professional relationship with the manufacturer. We'd done our samples, we'd tested smaller batches of the tea customers had, it was great.

It was such a big order, the manufacturer has been producing the other orders in his factory, which was great, but when he got this deal, he was like, yeah, yeah, sure we can do it. 

In China, they always say they can do it. 

Yeah. 

They're like, we can do that. 

We can do that.

So we placed the order and waited.

And waited...

Then finally, the shipment arrived in Australia.

When we opened the shipment, it was a total nightmare!

The stuff inside was like compost and mold.

Like a bacterial mess of metal bolts and it stunk like rubbish. 

Like I wouldn't even let my team touch it without putting gloves on.

It was shocking to say the least.

We didn't know what to do.

So that was our monumental screw up when it came to manufacturing.

$1.3 million down the drain.

We were so lucky that we had cash in the bank.

I paid that order out of cash, not a debt. 

If we had a $1.3 million debt that we had to keep repaying and keep repaying and keep repaying, it probably would've killed us. 

I am sure that we would've gone under if that was the case, but luckily I always say that your profit margin is your mistakes margin when you're first starting out.

So lucky we had a pretty high mistake-margin 'cause that was a huge one.

What happened in our case was that the manufacturer basically subcontracted that out to another factory who then subcontracted it out again.

It had been subcontracted like eight times.

By the time it got to the last factory, even they couldn't do it. 

There just was not that much raw material going around. $1.3 million worth of tea was like over a ton of tea or something.

So they patched up the shortfall with crates and crates and crates of rotten "something" and it contaminated everything.

We never really calculated and worked out the full kind of loss...

The bad thing was then we were three months behind in production...

We had to go straight back to basically creating a production line ourselves and having a team mixing and packing all of the orders by hand again.

That was a very hard lesson.

I’m telling this not to scare you but to…

#1: To show you the exact mistakes I made.

#2: To help you avoid these mistakes and save your money.

I truly believe that my program Start & Scale can not only shortcut your journey but also save your hard-earned cash.

That’s why I’m excited for this sale.

Foundr has decided to give you their full 9+ hour Ecommerce Masters program (normally $2,997)…FOR FREE and give you 85% OFF the entire Start & Scale course!

Check out the Biggest Sale for Start & Scale here >>

Gretta van Riel

P.S. We just had a person share their success story today, Aug 29th, 2024, in our 20,000+ strong private Start & Scale community.

If you're looking to do the same yourself in the near future, get Start & Scale for 85% less AND the entire Ecommerce Masters course at no extra cost. 

And I'll see you on the inside!