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Mom-and-Pops, All Grown Up
Bill and Susan Gearing run her online SusieCraft fabric business from their Columbia Home. As sales have grown, so has the operation's complexity.
(Photos By Linda Davidson -- The Washington Post)
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Customers sent e-mails at a rate of about a thousand a week, prompting Canty to hire two full-time employees for that job. She also realized she could no longer handle shipping on her own. "Within six months, we had UPS come to the house," she said. "The post office people kind of miss me."
It also meant Canty and her husband had to make investments; they moved their operation into a leased warehouse and hired a nanny to care for their child. Frischling said he had to "let go" and not micromanage employees. Originally, he'd hoped to design their software systems in house, but last month he hired a vendor to help manage inventory, auctions, label printing and shipping data.
"That alone probably saved us the work of one and a half people," he said.
Dyscern, which gets most of the merchandise it refurbishes from big-box retailers, sells 60 percent of it on eBay and 5 percent on Amazon. It also sells wholesale to smaller eBay dealers and is experimenting with auctions on Overstock.com.
But Dyscern's heady growth did not come easily, especially during the holidays, which generate as much as 60 percent of annual business for many small retailers, including Internet ventures.
Last holiday season, Canty hired people on the fly to keep pace with the crush of orders for iPods and other gadgets. But without adequate training, her green staff members didn't move product efficiently, leaving her feeling like Santa short several dozen elves.
"It was a beginner's mistake," Canty recalled. "This year, we're moving as much product as we should have last year, with half the staff."
The amount of work it takes to build a flexible structure to manage the business is a never-ending challenge, Canty said. "You can be more consumed by this" than by any day job, she said.
