Most people in the ecommerce space have never operated a physical business. I have. And I can honestly say that buying and running a grocery store changed the way I think about online business more than any course, mentor, or mastermind ever did.
Before I bought the grocery store I had already built and sold a clothing brand online. I understood ecommerce. I knew how to source products, run ads, fulfill orders, and manage customers. I thought I had a solid grasp on what it meant to run a business. Then I stepped into a brick and mortar operation and realized very quickly that there was an entire layer of business I had never been exposed to.
The first thing that hit me was how unforgiving the margins were. In ecommerce you can price a product with enough cushion to absorb mistakes. You can run a promotion that cuts into your margin for a week and make it back the following month. In a grocery store that kind of thinking will put you out of business. The margins are razor thin, and every single purchasing decision matters in a way that I had never experienced before. I started paying attention to cost structure at a level of detail that I had frankly been lazy about when I was only running online brands. That discipline followed me back into ecommerce and completely changed the way I price products, negotiate with suppliers, and think about profitability on a per unit basis.
The second thing that changed was my understanding of cash flow. When you run an online business, money comes in digitally and expenses go out digitally and if you are not careful it can all start to feel abstract. You see numbers on a screen and as long as the balance is positive you assume things are fine. In a grocery store cash flow is visceral. You are paying suppliers on tight terms. You have payroll going out every two weeks regardless of whether the week was slow. You have rent and utilities and insurance and maintenance costs that do not care how your sales are trending. I learned very quickly that revenue means nothing if the timing of your cash inflows does not line up with the timing of your obligations. That lesson alone was worth the entire experience, because when I brought that understanding back to my online businesses I started managing money in a way that was far more disciplined and far less reactive.
Inventory management was another area where the grocery store rewired my thinking. In ecommerce, if a product sits in a warehouse for an extra month it is not ideal but it is not a crisis. In a grocery store your inventory has an expiration date. Literally. If you overbuy you eat the loss. If you underbuy you lose the sale and frustrate the customer. I had to learn how to forecast demand with a level of precision that I had never needed in the online space, and I had to build systems around purchasing and restocking that left very little room for error. When I went back to building online brands after selling the grocery store, I carried that same discipline with me. I stopped over ordering inventory based on optimism and started ordering based on data, sell through rates, and realistic demand projections.
Managing a team in person was probably the single biggest adjustment. When you run an online business your team is usually remote. Communication happens through messages and calls and if someone is underperforming the impact is often delayed or easy to miss. In a grocery store you are standing next to your employees every day. You see who shows up on time and who does not. You see who takes initiative and who waits to be told what to do. You feel the energy of the team in a way that is impossible to replicate through a screen. I had to learn how to hire, train, manage, and sometimes let go of people in a face to face environment, and that experience made me a significantly better leader when I returned to managing teams remotely. I became more direct in my communication, more intentional about setting expectations, and much faster at identifying when someone was not the right fit.
Customer experience in a grocery store is also a completely different animal. Online, if a customer has a bad experience they leave a review and move on. In a physical store they are standing in front of you. Their frustration is immediate and personal and there is no buffer between their disappointment and your response. I learned how to handle complaints in real time, how to de-escalate situations on the spot, and how to create an environment where people actually wanted to come back. That skill translated directly into how I approach customer experience in my online brands. I started treating every support interaction with the same urgency and personal attention that I would give someone standing across the counter from me, and the impact on retention and repeat purchases was immediate.
One of the less obvious lessons from the grocery store was about systems. When you are running a physical operation with perishable inventory, a team of employees, and hundreds of customers walking through the door every day, you cannot afford to wing it. Everything needs a system. Ordering needs a system. Stocking needs a system. Opening and closing the store needs a system. Cash handling needs a system. I became obsessive about building processes that could run without me standing over them, and that obsession carried over into every online business I built afterward. The brands I run today are more systemized, more documented, and more operationally sound than anything I built before the grocery store, and I attribute that directly to the experience of running a business where chaos was not an option.
The grocery store also taught me something about ego that I was not expecting. When you are in the ecommerce world it is easy to feel like you have things figured out. You are building brands, running ads, making sales, and it all feels very modern and sophisticated. Then you find yourself stocking shelves at six in the morning and mopping floors at ten at night and you realize very quickly that business is business regardless of how glamorous it looks from the outside. That humility grounded me in a way that has made me a better entrepreneur across the board. I stopped romanticizing certain types of businesses and started respecting the fundamentals that make any business work, which are margins, cash flow, systems, people, and the willingness to do whatever the operation requires on any given day.
I eventually sold the grocery store and moved on to my next ventures. But the lessons I took from that experience are baked into everything I do now. The way I manage money in my online brands, the way I build teams, the way I think about inventory and customer experience and operational efficiency, all of it traces back to the time I spent running a physical store with real stakes and very little room for error.
If you are building an online business and you have never operated anything in the physical world, I am not saying you need to go buy a grocery store. But I am saying that the fundamentals of business do not change based on whether your storefront is on a street corner or on Shopify. The grocery store taught me that, and it is a lesson I carry into every brand I build and every student I work with inside Brand Starter Academy.