A couple who started their business with just £10 after being inspired by The Apprentice have detailed their route to success.
Kevin Blackburn and Kylie Thomas, both aged 33 and from Scunthorpe, decided to start a “family challenge” where they tasked each other with spending £10 and making the most profit.
It was inspired by seeing candidates on The Apprentice having to buy and sell as part of weekly challenges.
The couple, who’ve been together since they were 17, began selling on eBay but soon found having to queue up at the Post Office every day wasn’t an efficient way to work.
It was this problem that sparked the idea for their business Systemise Fulfilment in 2015.
Systemise Fulfilment is a warehouse and shipping operations business that handles Amazon FBA and eCommerce businesses orders.
Within one year, Kevin and Kylie made £130,000 in sales and decided to quit their jobs to manage the business full-time.
Kevin said: “We made a family challenge to spend £10 and turn it into profit.
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“We headed to our local charity shop and bought around eight second-hand porcelain birds for 75p each and sold them on eBay for £8 to 12 each.
“This quickly turned our initial £10 investment into £60 to £70.
“It was like a lightbulb moment going off for us when we realised - if we could source hundreds or thousands of these birds, we could make a huge profit.”
The savvy entrepreneurs also began purchasing popular Monsters Inc teddy bears from Tesco for £12.50 each and re-selling them online for £28.
In their second month of buying and selling, they made £15,000 and by Christmas that year had made £130,000.
Explaining how they achieved continued success, Kevin added: “We used insights from Amazon to analyse the volume of specific products being sold, their sales rank and other information available for each product listing.
“This allowed us to make strategic decisions based on information already out in the public domain.”
To date, the company has shipped over two million units for partners and customers all over the world, expanding its operations in the UK, Europe, and the USA.
The business also has 21 members of staff in total.
Kevin also started a YouTube channel in 2016, documenting their business success story and how they’ve got to where they are now, which now has over 9,000 subscribers.
“The ultimate key to our success though has been our belief in what we’re trying to achieve,“ said Kevin.
“We’re doing this for our family, we wanted a better life, a better work-life balance than we had in our previous careers.
“We wanted to be at home more with our young children, not working overtime and weekends and this really has changed ours and our families lives for the better - that goes way beyond just financial benefits.”
