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Member Workshop: Fundamentals of Financial & Business Management - Oct 5th
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Last Post Oct 5, 2005 11:14 AM by: deirdre@ebay.com
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deirdre@ebay.com
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Member Workshop: Fundamentals of Financial & Business Management - Oct 5th

Sep 29, 2005 2:23 PM
Topic: Member Workshop: Fundamentals of Financial & Business Management for Your Business

Host: Greg Harrison, Founder and CTO of Mpire
Date: Wednesday 10/05
Time: 10:00 - 11:00 PDT
Location: Workshop Board

Description: In this workshop, Greg Harrison, Founder and CTO of Mpire, will discuss the fundamentals of financial and business management for your eBay business. You’ll learn how to determine profit & loss for your business, inventory tracking, how to effectively use a chart of accounts & cash register to track your business expenses, setting a commission plan structure & tracking for consignors, and how Mpire can easily help.

Hope you can join us!!!!

Deirdre
eBay Community Development
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deirdre@ebay.com
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Member Workshop: Fundamentals of Financial & Business Management - Oct 5th

Oct 5, 2005 9:58 AM
Welcome and thanks for joining us today!

We love workshops to be interactive, so please feel free to ask your questions that directly relate to this topic.


Cheers,

Deirdre
eBay Community Development
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mpire_greg
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Member Workshop: Fundamentals of Financial & Business Management - Oct 5th

Oct 5, 2005 9:58 AM
Greetings!

This is Gregory Harrison and I am the CTO for Mpire Corporation (and an eBay Nut!). We are a Certified Solution Provider that specializes in providing a true business management application for eBay Sellers.

I’m excited to be here today to discuss a personal passion of mine: Evaluating key business metrics to make smart decisions to grow your business!

Today I will be talking about tracking your “online” eBay data and “offline” expense and income data to measure your results and help you with making decisions on how to grow your business. This means basing your decisions related to inventory sourcing, pricing, shipping, etc. on hard facts rather than “guesstimates”. There are many elements that ultimately define the health and well-being of your business, something that we at Mpire have taken great care to provide for you automatically. This workshop will also cover consignment tracking and the importance of tracking your direct inventory sales separately from your Consignment sales.



Greg
Mpire Corporation
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mpire_greg
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Member Workshop: Fundamentals of Financial & Business Management - Oct 5th

Oct 5, 2005 9:59 AM
The Four P’s – the universal business mantra
Products, Profits, People and Promotion


You should always be asking yourself the following kinds of questions:

  • Products: Am I selling the right products for the market I am targeting? (This question could be an entire workshop, but considers availability of inventory, cost, market demand, seasonal trending, and competitive landscape as a start).

  • Profits: What is making me the highest per-item margin and am I considering all aspects of my income and expenses?

  • People: Who are my buyers? Do I have repeat buyers? Who are my top 20 buyers and what are they buying and what percentage of my gross sales do they represent?

  • Promotion: What am I doing to (a) retain my top buyers and (b) what am I doing to find new buyers? Have these efforts paid off?


What do these have to do with this workshop? They all form the foundation of any business operation - grow your perspective to go beyond gross sales or feedback score and consider those P's!


Greg
Mpire Corporation
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mpire_greg
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Member Workshop: Fundamentals of Financial & Business Management - Oct 5th

Oct 5, 2005 10:05 AM
Running your business like a business!
One thing that I feel very passionate about is treating your eBay business like any other business. Whether you are clearing $500 per month in gross sales or $5 Million, tracking your costs and constantly assessing your goals and performance are critical to ANY business. Meticulously tracking all financial elements of your sales is as critical as finding the right inventory to sell! You also need to make sure that you consider ALL income and expense elements to truly measure your profitability. The major emphasis on this workshop is to reinforce the need to track your financials as a basis for guiding your future business plans.


Greg
Mpire Corporation
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isoldit.mi019
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Member Workshop: Fundamentals of Financial & Business Management - Oct 5th

Oct 5, 2005 10:08 AM
What do you recommend as best way to track expenses and to develop a profit-loss statement each month?
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marylouharrisdesigns
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Member Workshop: Fundamentals of Financial & Business Management - Oct 5th

Oct 5, 2005 10:10 AM
I am only three months into my business and I want to get started tracking. What are the most important things to track? I can get lost in details, so what are the general things to track?
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bollieolson
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Member Workshop: Fundamentals of Financial & Business Management - Oct 5th

Oct 5, 2005 10:13 AM
what is the quickest and easiet way to track everything?
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marylouharrisdesigns
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Member Workshop: Fundamentals of Financial & Business Management - Oct 5th

Oct 5, 2005 10:13 AM
This is new to me. I see only two posts and I'm not sure if this is a happen'n thing. Greg, are you there?
I am about to hire a new bookkeeper. What things should I ask her to support me in tracking.
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chapleau-hill-1
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Member Workshop: Fundamentals of Financial & Business Management - Oct 5th

Oct 5, 2005 10:14 AM
What's the best solution for tracking inventory vs. sales?
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mpire_greg
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Member Workshop: Fundamentals of Financial & Business Management - Oct 5th

Oct 5, 2005 10:14 AM
isoldit.mi019, thanks for your post.
If you are looking for automation, then there are limited resources available to gather all of the requisite information. However, the most important recommendation is to actually implement a practice of capturing all aspects of your expenses. Even a spreadsheet program is better than nothing at all. If you are manually tracking expenses, then just be diligent about capturing all of those monthly statements.

We capture all available financial elements from eBay and Mpire, so of course you are going to get a friendly referral to our application. Part of the reason why we built Mpire was because there was no real solution out there to help you do this.

Greg
Mpire Corporation
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mpire_greg
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Member Workshop: Fundamentals of Financial & Business Management - Oct 5th

Oct 5, 2005 10:16 AM
How do you measure success?
Some comments stand out after interviewing many eBayers: “I am pretty sure I am doing well, I am selling a lot of Inventory” and “I could not tell you what my highest margin product is right now”. Are gross merchandise sales the most reliable indicator of the success/failure of your business? No, you could find out that everything you are still making less profit than your goal (or even worse…). Some key questions you need to ask LONG before you consider scaling your business and sales volume: What items are producing the best/worst margins? What should I buy more of and what should I discontinue? Am I making or losing money on shipping? And more... The point here is that one of the LAST measurements of your success is volume. First make sure you have a sound, profitable model, THEN scale it!


Greg
Mpire Corporation
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mpire_greg
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Member Workshop: Fundamentals of Financial & Business Management - Oct 5th

Oct 5, 2005 10:16 AM
MaryLouHarrisDesigns, The key things that I think are important to track are the Cost of your product, the various Fees (Listing, Final Value, Paypal, Shipping costs) and finally the Time spent. And a key point is to never forget any "offline" expenses or office expenses.

Greg
Mpire Corporation
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marylouharrisdesigns
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Member Workshop: Fundamentals of Financial & Business Management - Oct 5th

Oct 5, 2005 10:16 AM
I am on the verge of making the change to mpire--of giving up my "just learned" eBay listing tools. I live in Seattle and have been to the mpire offices. What are the tracking tools in mpire that can help me?

This may be an odd question but...Is there any way to track gas mileage?
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mpire_greg
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Member Workshop: Fundamentals of Financial & Business Management - Oct 5th

Oct 5, 2005 10:19 AM
bollieolson,

Regrettably, there are not many applications for online marketplace sellers to automatically capture this information for you. If you are not planing on investing some $$$ in an application to do so, I would recommend getting those spreadsheets out and making a list NOW of all of the things you can think of that represent income and expense and start capturing it!

Greg
Mpire Corporation
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