Although I am very grateful for the experience of starting and growing Sportscloseouts.com, I am super excited to be moving on to other things.
Deena and I have sold the business and are now fully focused on helping other people reach their goals and dreams. We have been blessed abundantly and look forward to helping other people fire their boss and stop being an employee.
A job is the worst way to make a living, in my opinion.
:o)
The 2007 Webby awards are over and it was a really good time. Meg was super cool, the Youtube guys, Steve Chen and Chad Hurley are incredibly nice guys. I was shocked at how normal they were and how genuinely down to earth and nice they are. Kudo's to you guys for selling out for a billion.65 and still being super great. Meg's son Griff, has been brought up very well, he is very cool and was a pleasure to get to know.
Cathy Black, the President of Hearst media, is an amazing person. I thoroughly enjoyed sitting next to her and was very grateful to hear many words of wisdom and get to hear her story. She reminded me of my Wife, Deena Morton, in that she had a "Fire in her belly" for success, Just like Deena.
I am going to put more up about this event but am too tired to at the moment. I have some killer video of the Webby's that I will be throwing up on youtube.com very soon.
Liz Kaplow and her staff from Kaplow Communication, were awesome. They made us feel comfortable going down the red carpet and not feel like the newbish amateurs that we are.
Here is a link to the CNN news story. Deena and I are on the part where it shows ebay's acceptance speech.
Lanny
Forgot, will be on KFNN Radio in Phoenix 7 am Monday to talk about the experience.
I am sitting in the bar of the Soho Grand, anticipating the webby's (Internet version of the Oscars). I am a bit nervous as I have never been on a red carpet before. I have a feeling Deena and I will be walking down and people will say, "Who the hell is that" and "I wish those 2 would get out of the way so we can see someone important" or "Who let the ebay dorks onto the red carpet?"
Either way, we are excited and nervous to be here. I really hope I get a chance to meet Steve Chen and Chad Hurley and I am definitely looking forward to hanging out with Meg Whitman, CEO of ebay. Deena and I bought her a little gift, I am hoping we don't see it for sale on ebay next week but you never know.
Here is a link to an article in the Arizona Republic. I like the publicity, I am not gonna lie, I am a ham, but it is irritating when Deena is excluded from the story. She did more to create and make this business happen than I did. I just think of the ideas, she is the executor, or executioner. lol
http://www.azcentral.com/business/articles/0604biz-ebayseller0604-ON.html
Here is a link to Youtube, I am uploading video of our experience: (please note: my first attempt at video editing)
http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=arizonaswede
Will post more very soon.
Lanny
I have started running free mastermind groups and I am very excited at the results that people are getting. I was trained by bob Proctor to do it and the process is very powerful.
Deena and I have done well and I am shifting into a mode that I really want to help others realize their potential and start a business if they desire to.
If anyone is interested in Joining one of my free groups, send me an e-mail or you can go to Freemastermind.com to purchase the book Think and Grow Rich, mastermind edition and its accompanying workbook that we have created. The mastermind group is a 10 week study of the book Think and Grow Rich by Napolean Hill.
Thanks
Lanny
I started a new site to help people for mastermind groups. It is a work in progress but I am excited about the project. It is http://www.freemastermind.com
Deena and I are back in Entrepreneur magazine in the May issue. I haven't seen it yet but Deena got a call from a friend that is a subscriber. I went to Borders and it wasn't there.
I am working on some really cool new projects that I think will really help people who want to start their own business. There is a lot of bogus stuff out there and I hope to deliver something that really helps people.
Check out the May issue of Entrepreneur and let me know what you think.
Lanny
Wow. The FBR open, formerly the phoenix open was a blast. I had the opportunity to be a Federal Express honorary observer. On Sunday, the final round, Deena and I were able to walk inside the ropes with David Toms, Robert Garrigus and Heath Slocumb.
I was totally impressed how these guys were just like normal guys with no attitude or cockiness that I would expect from an athlete making a lot of cash. When the round started, David Toms approached us and said "Hi, I understand you are coming around with us today, I am Dave, great to meet you" in a tone that was very warm. friendly and genuine. Heath and Robert were just as cool.
Heath Slocumb had a hole in one on the 4th hole, which was totally bad ass. I have never seen a hole in 1 in person before, it was really cool.
Robert Garrigus was having a great round of golf until he hit water on 15. As he was walking down the fairway, I overheard him saying to his caddy, "they are going to be laughing at that shot in the broadcast booth."
The one thing I learned about high level PGA golf while walking with this group that was contending for the open championship was that the PGA tour is a putting contest. Any one of these 3 golfers could have won the tournement if they were making the putts. It really seems to come down to putting and staying out of major trouble.
Thanks Fedex for a great round of golf, it was a once in a lifetime experience.
This is the time of year where our company reflects on what we did well for the previous year and what didn't do so well.
If I look at a glance at what we did well, the list would include: More streamlined order pick-pack and ship, better boxes to minimize Dim Weight penalties, diversification of sales into more channels, better products at the right time of the year (I wasn't loaded up on water sports this year with snow falling all over) and I feel really good that we paid off our $500,000 line of credit. The line of credit was expensive money and although it created short term bliss, it would have been fatal long term to stay reliant on it. PR was very good this year (Fox News story here, USA today article and Entreprenuer Article) all helped generate web traffic.
Things that I sucked at: Consistancy, It was a struggle to stay consistant this year. (as it is every year for me). Still make too many bad buys of product. We lost our ass on way too many deals. Leading people (I think I was about a 4-5 out of ten).
I would welcome anyone that reads this to use the Comment link below this post with your accomplishments and screw ups for 2006. We can learn from each other and it is always nice to learn from other peoples mistakes.
Have a merry Christmas and a happy New Year!
Lanny
I am going to grade the various channels for holiday sales.
eBay: Grade B
eBay sales were very strong this year on the buy it now format. Auctions still aren't working like they used to. In previous years, 99 cent no reserve listings on eBay were profitable. They just don't work like they used to because the number of new buyers coming into the marketplace has fallen way behind the number of new sellers. Everybody thinks they can make a million dollars on ebay, it is a lot harder to do that now.
Ebay express is a joke. I didn't get any sales from it.
Overstock.com Grade A-
Overstock.com had some issues this holiday season with the vcommerce system. Tracking wasn't uploading without serious delays and it was definately a pain in the butt. That being said, the only reason they get a minus sign is because of system issues. Sales Rocked. Overstock represented 22% of our holiday sales. That is up from about 2% last year. It kicked butt. I can't wait for next year with these guys. If I was a stock analyst, I would give these guy a buy rating.
What more can I say, better conversion rates, FREE MERCHANT PROCESSING, it was the beginning of the google era for our company. I am really excted about what they are doing and I am amazed at how many paid through google checkout. The customer experience with checkout was really good too. The $10 off $30 purchase promotion was a hit and was very compelling for click throughs on e-mail campaigns.
No activity here, nothing to mention other that no sales.
Amazon still has a crappy interface for our software to plug into. If they had a good API it would make life a lot better. Amazon represented 1/7 of 1 percent of our holiday sales, mainly because of the difficulty of our software to push product into their platform.
Overall, it was a fantastic December, I wish I could get 1 more week like last week for cash flow, it would be nice.
