If you’re stuck in a rut working your day job, or you’re looking to start a side gig to make a little extra money each month, it may be worth looking into starting your own business.
Besides a variety of tax write-offs for small business owners, starting your own business can be a way to increase your income and do some more personally fulfilling work. One simple industry to get into is the vitamins and supplements market. This market is booming and is showing no signs of slowing down; it’s projected to be worth almost $200 billion dollars in the next six years.
If you want to work for yourself and make a decent profit, here’s what you need to know about starting an at-home business selling supplements and vitamins.
Find your focus
When starting your own business, it’s crucial that you pick a focus. While starting an online vitamins/supplements store is a niche within the broader market of health and wellness products, it’s best to make sure that you can diversify yourself from the competition.
Focusing on supplements for building muscle or women’s vitamins (as examples) can be a simple way to specify your business a bit more and help attract a more specific audience. This will help when it comes to marketing, as online social media channels and Google AdWords all allow you to target specific demographics and interests.
Distribution tactics
Once you’ve determined what area of the supplements industry you want to serve, you’ll need to find a distributor to fulfill your orders. There are plenty of dietary supplement manufacturers who can provide you with a wide range of vitamins and supplements, so it’s good to know what to look for when choosing a distributor.
In an ideal world, you’ll find a business that can handle multiple aspects of the supply chain, such as manufacturing, design, and fulfillment. Having one business handle each of those aspects will enable you to move much more agilely as a business owner.
For example, if you need an order drop shipped overnight due to the success of your latest ad campaign, it can be helpful if you don’t have to field requests from multiple companies. This way, you spend less time worrying and more time delivering great service.
Tracking your business
After you’ve set up your online storefront, you’ll need to be able to track your sales and inventory. It’ll also help you learn about the value of your business. Or, you can also go now and contact business mergers and acquisitions advisories to learn important insights about your business.
This is particularly important as you begin to scale your business up; you don’t want to be running out to the palette of supplements in your garage every time a large order comes in. While you could use a spreadsheet to track this information, using asset management software is a far more powerful solution to consider.
Using cloud-based asset tracking software allows you to access your sales and inventory from a host of devices, and also lets you attach photos, images, and even voice memos to specific customers, products, and orders. An asset tracking solution is also far more flexible than typical spreadsheets, offering you the ability to sort and search in a variety of ways while keeping important data linked.
As you can see, starting an at-home business requires a lot of legwork at the onset. That being said, if you put in the right amount of effort at the beginning and think strategically about how to position yourself in the market, you can begin to start turning a profit. Customers are excited about becoming fitter and healthier, and by selling vitamins and supplements, you can play a meaningful role in their lives.
