Sorry for the long delay between postings. We took a few days off over Easter weekend to visit family in Cincinnati. Since then, we’ve been getting the business ramped back up to full speed.

This is a good lesson for those of you thinking about becoming self employed. Taking a break is a good thing. Sure, you get no vacation time, no sick time. If you take a few days off work, the income for those days is likely gone (or less than it normally would be). You may miss out on some sales or some opportunities. That’s okay. There will be more. This was the first time we’ve taken anything resembling a vacation for about three years (minus one wedding). We waited too long and it was high time for a break.

One of the reasons I originally started a home based business was flexibility. I had returned to school, suddenly had a family to worry about and needed a lot of flexibility in my schedule to balance everything. Working at home created a ton of room in my schedule on a day-to-day basis. That flexibility broke down though when we started talking about taking several days off. I felt chained to my house or desk a lot of the time. Sure I could take a few hours off whenever to go to the littletheorist’s activities or run into Kansas City for something. The thought of going days without making sales, contacting my customers, or buying new inventory almost paralyzed me though. It’s like the entire house of cards could collapse if I didn’t have my eye on it all the time. This was not a healthy way to do business, and I knew it. It wasn’t even true. The business was fine and healthy and growing at a nice clip. My own insecurities and fears were just popping up.

The ladytheorist has really been working on me to relax and take time off every week. For a long time, I worked 7 days a week, usually 10 or more hours a day. I had to when I was in school. But, things are a little more relaxed now. First, I started taking Sunday’s off. The business kept growing, perhaps even more than before. Now, we only work a half-day on Saturday. Our customer base didn’t revolt because I wasn’t answering their emails at 4:30 on a lovely Saturday afternoon. We’ve got our weekday hours balanced out so the evenings are free for the family (though I’m still prone to do some work after the girls have gone to bed). Forcing myself to take time off also forced me to streamline the time I spent working, so I was more productive.

I still check my email more than I probably should, even when I’m not supposed to be working, but the reply sometimes waits until the next morning. So, do yourself a favor and plan some time off into your schedule. Even if it seems like that time doesn’t exist, you’ll find out that taking a break makes you and your business healthier in the end.

Tip of the Day

When I launched this blog, part of my plan was to offer tips and stories about what I’ve learned running a small online business and hopefully help others do the same. But, since I started at the same time eBay announced all of this year’s big changes, I ended up writing predominantly about that for awhile. I’m finally getting around to writing up some guides and anecdotes about running a small business.

So, here’s a trick I learned from a clerk at my local post office to get maximum protection for your items at the least cost. It ‘s particularly effective for international shipments going via Priority Mail.

International shipping is expensive. Through the post office, you basically have three options. First Class International is cheap, but slow and provides no tracking. Express International is expensive, but relatively fast and provides full tracking. Unfortunately, most customers won’t want to pay for Express. Priority International is still expensive, but delivers packages in a reasonable time and provides some tracking (not to all destinations). We prefer Priority International for most of our overseas shipments.

Many of the items we sell are fragile or sensitive enough that they need to be shipped in a box, not an envelope. To ship any box to, say, the United Kingdom via Priority Mail International, it’s a minimum charge of $19 if you print postage online ($20 at the post office). The postage for a Priority Mail International flat-rate envelope is $10.45 if you print online ($11 at the post office). So, it’s a savings of $8-$9 per shipment to use the envelope, but you don’t have the protection of a box.

Flat-rate envelope from the post office.

The post office gives boxes to customers for free (you can order them from their website). The smallest box offered by the post office (0-1096S) fits inside their flat-rate envelope. The box measures slightly smaller than 9″x6″x2″. So, any item that will fit inside that box, can then be inserted into the flat-rate envelope. You get the protection of a box and the cost of an envelope. Because many of the items we ship overseas are rather small, this trick works for 90 percent of our orders. It allowed us to maintain our packing standards while lowering the cost of shipping to our customers by $8 (making us more attractive than many of our competitors). For eBay sellers, since buyers can now rate you on how much you charge for shipping, this is a great way to lower your shipping cost without costing your business any money.

Keep in mind that for overseas shipments, the flat-rate envelope has a weight limit of four pounds and a value limit of $400.

It will work for domestic shipping also, but the savings won’t be as large. The flat-rate envelope costs the same as a one pound package ($4.60) to ship. So it only works if you have an item smaller than 9x6x2 that weighs more than one pound that needs to go Priority Mail. That’s not nearly as common for us, but it does happen.

This works great for small electronics, toys, collectibles, some media, jewelry, watches, computer parts and probably a ton of stuff I’m not thinking of off the top of my head.