Blue pill or red pill?
December 2017…
My dropshipping store had just done $732,000 in sales.
Seven-hundred-thousand dollars!
Ho-ly-shit batman!
On the outside, I was ecstatic. I’d made this ‘dropshipping’ thing work. I was working full-time on my store.
Living the dream, bro!
In the dropshipping world, this was the top of the mountain–what I and the others in the dropshipping course strived to reach.
But my bank account told a different story…
We were living in my parents’ bungalow. Sounds nice but it’s really a sectioned-off part of a shed that had been converted into a studio room.
My wife had trusted me to bootstrap this business I started by selling our family home and moving to Thailand with Issy our daughter who was 3 at the time.
My plan was to leave my job, sell the family home and live in Thailand cheaply, which gave me the runway to get the business up to a point where we could come back to Australia and buy a house again.
But plans rarely go 100% to plan. Funny how that works.
Thailand, although cheap, wasn’t nice to live in full-time with a 3-year-old.
Especially with me working 10+ hours a day on the business.
So we came back after three months with no home, and barely enough money to live off.
There was such a disconnect between what I’d ‘achieved’ in the dropshipping world and my reality.
I’d climbed the mountain everyone talks about.
But it wasn’t a mountain.
It was a ceiling.
That was the real problem.
It wasn’t traffic.
It wasn’t work ethic.
It wasn’t SEO.
It was the margin ceiling of the model.
You can do $700k… $1m… even more…
And still be stuck.
Looking back, the beauty of this situation was that I had to make this work. I had no other choice. My back was against the wall.
Once I realised that the next step for me was to build my own product brand, it opened up a whole new world. I got excited again.
So I fumbled my way through and eventually figured out how to build my own brand, which gave better margins and solved the problem of a low-profit dropshipping business.
Long story short, our brands are now responsible for ~60% of all sales, and we’re in a position to never have to worry about money or a roof over our heads again.
Don’t get me wrong, dropshipping is incredible for starting. But terrible for staying
Because at some point, you realise you don’t own the things that matter.
You don’t control:
- The product
- The supply
- The pricing power
- The margin
You’re playing someone else’s game.
And here’s the dangerous part:
How do you know what’s next if you don’t know where the roadblock really is?
In the dropship world, it’s another ad tactic, or more backlinks for SEO or even a ‘faster’ theme.
But these aren’t the root cause of the issue. They just take you further down an empty rabbit hole.
The real shift happens when you ‘see’ the constraint.
Once you have the clarity to identify the specific roadblock based on data, not hype.
One of the best tools we have is something called the Daily Clarity Dashboard. It shows us what the roadblock is in our business every day. For that day, that month and that year.
This is the tool that allows you to ‘see’.
You feel like Neo in the Matrix, seeing the code.
(fun fact, the Matrix code is just Japanese sushi recipes)
This is the first thing our students in Escape Velocity implement on day 1, and hand on heart, everyone has the same ‘seeing the Matrix’ reaction once they plug in their numbers.
I can’t give you our full DCD — that’s something we build properly inside Escape Velocity.
But I built a stripped-down version called The (Mini) Daily Clarity Dashboard™ so you can start seeing what we see.
*In my best Morpheus voice*
Here’s your choice…
Do you want the blue pill: revenue screenshots?
or
The red pill: knowing exactly what’s actually holding you back?
-Matthew
PS. If you chose the red pill (I knew you would)… Did the numbers confirm your suspicion… or change it?