okay. Eso My name is Daniel Timms. Lee. I'm an entrepreneur. I started an online business. Um, I started selling online in 1991. I started my own website back in 2002. Eso a number of years ago. I started out selling on eBay a variety of things, um, and then branch into my own website that specialized in club and going out clothes. Yeah, I'm a graduate of Florida A and M University, but I actually went to school for psychology and criminal justice. Eso a bit of a departure? Um, let's see what incidents Experiences shaped my career. Oh, really? I just got very lucky in the timing of when I started online business. Um, because I started at a time, um, where people were sort of learning about the Internet, how it worked. There was a lot of information gap, so I was able to take advantage of a bit. Ah, lot of social media was in a very nascent stage when my space got big around 5 4006. Um, and I also was in the age group to where I could recognize that I was in my twenties. Um but they kind of blew up in people. Didn't see what a great advertising opportunity Iwas. I was actually one of their first big advertisers. Um, and they used to do those huge, huge, literally huge take up your whole page AG, which now they don't do because really that form. But it was great for me, and they gave me these incredibly cheap rates because people didn't take it seriously. Eso that drove a ton of traffic and I was able to hop on Facebook girl and so on. So I would say those were kind of big things. That sort of shaped my career, I guess.

Okay, so I ran great glam from I think I started selling under the name Great Glam in 2000 and one through 2000 and 17. I was the owner, founder in CEO. Basically, my responsibility was everything. Um, you know, initially, in a startup, everyone does everything. Um, as time went on, it was more overseeing over other people that I can brought on. But ultimately, the book kind of always stopped with me. Eso responsibility and decisions. Yeah, everything. Everything. Um I was able to move other decisions to more and more people as I grew staff, but I still needed to have oversight and everything. Weekly work hours all the time. Went awake all hours in a week. Like awake. I didn't have a work schedule. Um, the great thing about an online businesses, you're always open. The bad thing about an online businesses, you're always open. Eso it really doesn't matter what time it is. If the website goes down, um, you need to deal with it. If there's a major problem, you need to deal with it. Um and then at one point for about three or four years, I also had several physical stores, which, ironically, stores are busiest at the times when online sales are slowest. So the stores would be busy on the weekends, when online sales will be slower and vice versa. So, yeah, you work all the time, which is fine in your twenties. I recommend that. Actually, I enjoyed it. You like doing? Um, I do. I do recommend it when you're in your twenties. I mean, one of the other alternatives. I mean, my other friends were out going out doing stuff. I was enjoying building a business, so it was positive I wouldn't recommend it as a lifestyle forever. But for your twenties, Why not? You have the energy and the stamina, sowork travel. Okay, so my business was based in clothing. Eso I did travel a lot. Eventually. I had buyers. Um, but I still oversaw that a lot, so I traveled a lot for buying trips. Um, but I liked it, Um, and working from home, I actually was able to work from about four or five years, and I pretty much mostly worked from home. And I did have people in the office managing the actual physical getting shipments out. In all of that, I would be in the office a bit, but, I mean, the and I actually prefer to work from home just because I'm going to keep weird hours anyway, um, so I did. Ah. Lot primarily work from home, and I think I think what addresses them.

um, I think big challenge, Um, was definitely finding the right people for the right rules. Um, and a lot of ways, I was definitely learning on the job. Um, and so were the people I was working with and everybody I was bringing on. So definitely human resource management and making sure you have people, um, who not just understand the job and have the same level of commitment to the company, is you. When you're the owner of the company, you definitely have a different attitude towards things than others. And the best people I worked with were always the ones who had a sense of ownership themselves about the company and took pride in how the company did eso. I would say that was a great approach was really to look for. People would think of it as theirs, too. Uh, much other challenges. Budgeting management was a hard challenge, especially in an inventory heavy business. I maintained an inventory. Oh, gosh. At one point, we had over 2500 different clothing styles on the website. Um, so we literally had I don't even know how many pieces. Over 200,000 pieces of clothing at any given time, if not more. I mean, that's a guess. It was a lot and millions of dollars of inventory. Even given time, which ties up a lot of money and ties, a block of resource is, but at the same time you need to have all that in place. You have to have closed.learn better. Um, yeah. So just managing, um, expenses and overhead, especially in an inventory heavy business. I guess I would encourage anyone who's engaging in an inventory heavy business to think very carefully about that, especially in the business when you're selling clothing off course. The problem with inventory is you can have lots of inventory, but styles change, and that's not always predictable. So that was a constant and ongoing challenge. Um um, other challenge. Um, gosh, and I'm trying to think of examples that are things that they can utilize. Yeah, personnel inventory, financial management, both personal in your business, I think really, really important. Thing is, it's important to be cautious of your own individual expenses because you can become a liability to your own business. If you are have such an expensive lifestyle that you have to keep pulling money out of your business to support it. Um, that can definitely be problematic. So I would say, maintain a lean lifestyle. Andi, keep your salary as low as possible for as long as you can. Um, guess those air probably. My three best examples is that I think are probably actionable. Um, I don't know if you want me to talk about, my business is closed. Um, and I guess this is probably actionable thing That definitely happened with me the last couple of years of the business. The industry has changed a lot. Sales slowed down. I had an expensive lifestyle into fuel emery purchases. I borrowed a lot, um, and put a lot of debt on the business, which was very manageable initially. Um, but it became more more difficult because sales continue to slow than I borrowed more than sales. So more and I borrowed more. Um, and actually, at the time I closed my business, we were still running pretty profitably on the business was still bringing in a very, very low seven figure amount. But unfortunately, the debt load was really what took it down. And I didn't really take on down until the last couple of years in my business. So I guess I would definitely more in the students Avoid taking on that if you can at all avoid it. Because, honestly, we'd still be open. It was still profitable.