The 10M Project: Are we crazy?

The Goal: Take an ecommerce store from startup to 10 Million in annual sales in three years.

Time Remaining: 24 Months

Current Annual Sales: $540,000

• One Year Into Our Journey -

My business partner (Anna) and I started the 10M Project because we wanted to see what we could accomplish if we applied everything we’d learned from working with our marketing clients over the past years to a business of our own. We’ve always worked with Ecommerce stores and that has become a specialty of ours. Also, because of the depth of experience we’ve had working with ecommerce business owners, we felt that this would be an area where we’d have the best chance of success.

Then there’s the dog factor. Anna is just crazy about dogs. She’s got two of her own and in her “spare time” is like a semi-pro dog trainer (she’ll never admit to that but trust me she’s amazing with dogs).

The kernel for the idea for the 10M Project site started with Anna about seven years ago. She had the idea that she wanted to do an online store for dog products. Anna put the basic concept together way back then but the business got shelved as “more important” priorities came down the pike.

About two years ago Anna and I were talking about what kind of business we wanted to pursue (in addition to the marketing consulting business) and would we in fact do an Ecommerce business. We started talking about her original idea to do a dog product store and the more I thought about it the better it sounded. After some additional market research on my part (I’m supposed to be the marketing genius) it looked really good so we decided to give it a go. When I drew our long-term business plan, what came out of it was “10 Million in three years.” We both looked at that figure and said “wow that’s a big number – could we really do that?” The plan seemed to make sense (as naïve as it was at the time) and hence the 10M Project was born. Little did we know what we were in for…

Our brand new baby — our dog products store (TheUncommonDog.com) — had its grand opening in early October of 2009 and since then it’s been quite a ride. Over the past year we’ve enjoyed a nice amount of success and also have had our fare share of hard knocks and seemingly insurmountable challenges. But, overall we’re loving the ride and our passion is as strong as ever to see our project all the way through to 10M and beyond.

We’ve got two years and another $9.5 Mill to go.

Join us for the ride. It’s going to be a good one!