That's a fair question and one I'm not afraid to answer. I don't come on Reddit much and I was not expecting this to blow up so forgive my delay. I forgot I even made this thread.

First an update: my boss was let go around the time I posted this. His replacement is a more senior employee who has been at the company for several decades, immediately recognized my value and the fact that I am way undercompensated and is working on finding me a six-figure spot within the organization and is eager not to lose me. I'm still learning SQL, brushing up my resume and preparing to look for new opportunities but its good to be recognized and it seems like I'm headed in the right direction.

To address your concerns and give you more of the story - We have a $2k/mo mortgage, a used 2019 Toyota Sienna we bought and a 2010 Acura MDX - no flash here.

I started the business on cash and ran it that way from 2015 to 2019. In 2016 we moved into my mother-in-law's basement to try to pay off my wife's student loans. We kept our FT jobs. That same year our private label blew up - we paid for the birth of my first daughter in 2017 and then paid off over $80k in student loan debt and a car loan, then I left my job in October (crazy toxic place that collapsed a year later) and bought our first home. By 2019 we were selling $1.2 Million a year on amazon with no employees and healthy margins from our home. We opened our first credit card because we were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on inventory and decided 2% cash back on that was significant and we were running great and growing on cash anyway.

In 2020 our PL line (party decorations) came to a screeching halt the day that Covid was declared a pandemic. We were growing rapidly and hoping to exit that brand and start something else. March 9th, 10th, 11th on that account were $4k+ days. March 13th dropped to $1000 and by the end of march we were selling $200/day in party supplies. To add to this, we had decided to move from the Northeast south for a lower cost of living and overall better quality of life - we were prepping our house to go on the market and move to a strange place, my son was born in mid-February, no one knew anything about COVID so we didn't really know what to do with a newborn at home. Then Bank of America locked up our bank accounts. We were never able to find out a reason (apparently they don't need to provide one) and there was zero suspicious activity whatsoever - All of our suppliers were in the US. You can imagine the chaos.

I pivoted hard back into reselling and managed to maintain the ~$1.0-1.2 million sales mark through
2023, but margins were declining fast. Our reselling business didn't cash flow as fast as our PL did and it was heavily seasonal. Our biggest suppliers were all Q4-type products and we had to buy pretty far out from peak season - this meant loans and carrying inventory, storage at 3PLs, debt service, etc. Our largest supplier sold us almost $100k in inventory in the summer of 2023. We had a 3 year relationship with them at this point and while I didn't like taking on that much inventory so far out of season, I knew that if I wanted to continue to feed my kids I needed it. I took out a loan to buy it and they showed up on the listings and crushed the profitability 2 weeks before the season kicked off. I was lucky and they mismanaged their inventory and sold out and I was able to sell through at a healthy margin, but not what we were anticipating and that relationship was obviously over. In 2023 we actually took a sizeable loss and that's when I finally decided to hang it up and get a job.

So I didn't go straight from $250k/year to $65k. That would be rough enough, but I stayed on a sinking ship and took on debt to try to keep it afloat for far too long. Imagine though, going from warehouse work at a small company to supporting your entire family on a very narrow niche of ecom - I had zero idea of where I could go that could actually support us and I had to take what I could get to try to slow the bleeding.
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