The essential oil extractor market is wide open for everyone, but only a few will survive, for a litany of reasons. Some despite the best intentions and efforts, as well as moral charter and some by business suicide.
For those of ya'll hankering to join in, I offer the following observations.
80% of all new businesses fail in the first two years.
There is more than one way to approach the market window for essential oil extractors, and the fish trap exists only because of the fish.
The choice of business style is a fish trap and usually clearly reveals the assumptions followed, as well as the nature of the fish sought.
If your fish is all the low hanging fruit, with no intent of harvesting repeat business, your tactics need not nurture your customer relationship. Grab the money and run!
If on the other hand, it is your intent to nurture an image as a backbone in the industry, that people think of first, your fish trap is designed to not start off with pissed off customers, and to not casually either ignore them, or tell them to take a hike for being unreasonable.
Using the principle of OPM. If you collect a lot of Other Peoples Money up front, you can place a larger import order, and make more money faster.
The down side is that nothing coming by boat from China will go smoothly or as planned, so there will be inevitable delays.
Having someone available to contact that list of customers and hold their hand while they tell you how disappointed and inconvenienced they are repeatedly, to make sure you understand, therefore becomes a cost of business when conducting affairs in that manner.
Such hand holding is damage control, not to be endearing to customers, but not close to the turn off that, "WTF just happened to my money and the person that charmed me out of it?", draws from the customers deepest primal emotions.
A fish trap designed to denigrate and devalue the competition, rather than promote why your product has more utility at the margin, suggests that your product and service has no attributes to sell that are better than the competition, so it is necessary to downgrade the competitions image to improve the odds.
One thing that I've clearly learned in 70 plus years, is that actions are what is real and words are manipulated by most of us cunning linguist.
If you want to know a persons underlying beliefs and assumptions, just watch and see what fish traps they design, and their actions over time.
Wishing everyone jumping in the best of luck, but add the caveat to not forget the people part of conducting such a business and plan for it in your business plan.
If you don't possess such charm and patience yourself, hire someone that does
Also that most businesses fail due to underfunding, so don't base your business plan on sitting on other peoples money, because there will be less and less of it available as word gets out.
You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to Gray Wolf again.
Everything you said is spot on! I appreciate all of your work and knowledge. You're a real class act.