The 1 Hour a Day Ecommerce Plan (£59k/month) Episode 159

👉 Ready to start your own online store? Start here:
 https://dropshipunlocked.com/start?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=ep159-one-hour-ecommerce-plan

🗣 In this episode, Lewis Smith and James Eardley reveal how busy parents and full-time professionals are building profitable e-commerce businesses by working just one hour per day.

They unpack the exact structure, product strategy, and systems behind the Home-Turf Advantage™ model — explaining how it’s possible to build stores generating over £59,000 per month without sacrificing your job, family time, or freedom.

👉 Prefer to watch this on YouTube? Check it out here ➡️ https://youtu.be/rXrrh0sQuBM

Topics Discussed:
★ How It’s Possible: Why the 1-hour-a-day model works — and the common mistakes that make most people think it can’t.
★ High-Ticket Leverage: How selling £2,000+ products lets you do what 50 small orders never could.
★ Domestic Suppliers: The power of using UK suppliers for fast delivery, fewer customer issues, and higher trust.
★ Automation & VAs: How to systemise and delegate daily tasks so your business runs without you.
★ Busy Parent & Career Professional Proof: Real examples of members building six-figure stores around work, kids, and travel.
★ Needle-Moving Activities: What to actually focus on in your hour — supplier outreach, ads, and tracking metrics.
★ Freedom Through Systems: Why the goal isn’t “quit your job overnight” — it’s to build a lean, leveraged asset that compounds over time.

Links and Resources Mentioned:
Pick up a copy of Lewis’ book: https://dropshipunlocked.com/book
Get Shopify for £1 a month for 3 months: https://dropshipunlocked.com/shopify
Get a free trial with a professional phone line: https://dropshipunlocked.com/circle

Key Takeaways:
★ 1 Hour Is Enough — If You’re Focused: Success doesn’t come from time spent, but from working the right model with the right structure.
★ Leverage High-Ticket Sales: One £2,000 sale equals what 50 low-ticket orders can’t.
★ Local Suppliers = Less Stress: Working with UK-based suppliers means faster delivery and fewer headaches.
★ Automation Is Freedom: Build systems and hire a VA so your store runs while you live your life.
★ Consistency Beats Hustle: You don’t need 10 hours a day — just one hour of focused progress, every day.

FOLLOW:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dropshipunlocked/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/DropshipUnlockd
LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/company/dropship-unlocked
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/dropshipunlockedlewissmith
Website: https://www.dropshipunlocked.com/

Thank you for listening to the Dropship Unlocked Podcast!
 Don’t forget to subscribe and leave a review on your favourite podcast platform.

★★★ Dropship Unlocked – Lewis Smith ★★★

🌏 Want to create location, time, and financial freedom?
 Watch Our Free Training ➽  

Transcript

0:00

So if you've got a good job and maybe you've got children, your time is going to be limited. Right. So can you really build a successful e commerce business in just one hour a day? Well, the truth is, if you've only. Got an hour a day to build your store, then you really need to. Focus on and that's when you then realize that you don't need 10 hours a day to hit your goals with. But only if you sell that type of product, otherwise the business will take over your life. I built a 5.7 million pound E commerce business and we show people how to do it in just one hour per day, as long as they welcome to the Dropship Unlocked podcast. I'm Lewis Smith, the founder of Dropship Unlocked and with me is our client success coach, James Eardley. Now, when we're not recording podcast episodes or running our own e commerce business businesses, you'll find us helping aspiring entrepreneurs launch their own high ticket dropshipping stores. So if you're ready to build your own six or even seven figure online business, then head over to dropshipunlocked.com forward/start. Now sit back, relax and let's unlock your potential with the Dropship Unlocked podcast. If you are a busy parent, perhaps maybe a full time professional. And if you've ever thought, I'd love to build my own business, but I just don't have the time, well, this episode might just change your mind because today we're going to show you how our members are building high ticket e commerce stores by working just an hour a day and why that's still enough to build a store generating £59,000amonth and beyond. So Louis, you've done exactly that. So let's walk people through how this actually works then. So the obvious question that we need to answer straight away is, is how is it even possible to run a store in just one hour a day? Yeah, I do understand why that might sound unrealistic at first, but it does become doable and we'll explain in today's episode how you can do that when you're building it the right way. From the beginning, from the outset, it's very much predicated on building it with the right foundations in place to ensure that later on it doesn't zap up all of your time. So if you break it down and there's a few different things. So firstly, high ticket products is going to be key. So by high ticket we mean higher value, more profitable items, which means that you need fewer orders to make your Target income. And that means that there's less admin needed, there's less customer support needed, there's less time input from you or your virtual assistant needed. Because One sale for £2,000 can do what you know, 50 cheaper widget items that you may have sold on a different type of store probably still wouldn't even make in profit. So would you rather have 50 orders with 50 customers asking you for updates and shipping tracking codes and you know, all of the rest of it, the hassle and the stress that comes with that, or just have one order for £2,000? Then the other part that really makes this work is using domestic suppliers. And when I say domestic, I mean in relation to where the customers that you're serving live. So for example, if we're targeting the UK market, if we're in the UK and we want to run a business in the uk, there's plenty of customers here in the UK to target. If you can work with suppliers who have the products already in the uk, that means you can offer fast, often next day delivery to your customers. But it also means that there's no customs duty and border control stuff that needs to, you need to worry about with the items. There's no like support tickets that are coming in saying, where's my item? It's been six weeks and it's stuck on some ship coming from China. Your store just runs much, much smoother from day one. You can have suppliers that are local to where your customers are because then they can get the items to them the very next day. Eventually, once this business is up and running, it might not be one hour a day from the very beginning. And it might, if you can only put in an hour a day, then it might take you a little bit longer to get there. But we can put in place simple automations, maybe bring in a part time virtual assistant to answer the phones for your business and help fulfill orders once your systems are there and in place. I mean you're not needed for most of the day to day stuff. So really that hour of time input that you put in might be just paying the occasional supplier or you know, paying your team if you have a virtual assistant or checking on your ads or signing a new supplier. Like that's really your time input is on growing the business at that point. Exactly. It's all about leverage. And this business model has leverage built in as long as you choose to do it the right way up front with high ticket products, UK suppliers and then putting in automations so it runs without you and that's the key really because we speaking from experience, we've tried the different type of E commerce. Initially I tried to sell very low ticket cheap items from China and dropship them on my Shopify store to customers in the uk. And the things that took up the time was handling unhappy customers. It was handling multiple orders because you needed to generate multiple orders when there were very low ticket sales for every individual order. And working out the logistics with an overseas supplier, also very time consuming. So we've wiped those out by using that model. And so that means now members inside the dropship are not masterclass as I am as well, are able to do things like the school run and they talk about it in the community, how they're doing the school run, they're coming back to do an hour of work in between dropping the kids off and picking them up later in the day or they're able to do it alongside their their work breaks or after they they do their 9 to 5 job. For me at the moment I can travel as well and not be constantly looking at my phone and answering customer live chats and emails because it's a system that we build from the start. It's a machine that generates income rather than a job that you're giving yourself. And I'm currently out here in Cape Town in South Africa for anyone who's looking at the YouTube video version can see the background. And that's only possible because I can travel and go to different time zones without worrying about handling the day to day operations of the business. So that's great. Once we're up and running and that's how we build something, that means it's not time intensive up and running. But what about those people that are getting just wanting to get started and perhaps they've got a busy 9 to 5 job, what would you say or what would you suggest should be the way that they approach their day if they've got lots of other commitments to actually get this business off the ground with just one hour a day. Yeah, it's a great question and it's exactly what we guide people through inside Dropship Unlocked. So if you are in the position where you only have one hour per day to put into this, then you can focus on things that really move the needle. Like for example, support supplier outreach. That's something that you as the business owner are best positioned to do. Speaking to suppliers, signing them up, getting them on your site and then you have their products to sell forevermore. Or it might be launching your ads if you have that One hour a day. And you think, if I can get a new ad campaign live, that ad campaign can then generate you sales 24 hours a day on autopilot. Once you've put in the time initially to set it up, it might be reviewing your numbers and you know, diving into profitability, checking which suppliers are getting you a higher return on ad spend and where you should allocate more of your advertising spend to get more profit. You know, those are the things I would focus on with an hour a day. Not tweaking your logo or the color scheme on your website or things like that. That can be done by someone who does that for a living and you can just pay them, you know, for their time to do that. We even offer that as a service inside the masterclass where we'll just build the store and do all of those fiddly bits for you. Because you as the business owner really need to focus on the stuff that's going to take your business from you know, 1 to 10, not the like 0 to 1 kind of fiddly bits up and running. Getting color schemes and things set up like that's all very doable by many, many people. You as the business owner have clear needle moving activities that you can work on. Another thing might be putting things like checklists and sops in place for your team and even following those. I mean, we give people step by step playbooks inside the masterclass so there's very little wasted time figuring out what's next at any stage because we've helped people go from I have no idea what E commerce even is and I work an unrelated job to I'm running a full time business and I'm out of it. I don't even put my time really into it. Right. There are various stages along that journey where we can expect the plateaus and know the questions that members are probably going to have next because we've seen it happen so many times. So we can now just give you the templates as to what to do at each of those stages. And if you do find yourself filling up that one hour a day that you have to dedicate to the business yourself with just menial, small, busy work, get really good at delegating. As soon as the store is profitable and it's self sustaining, we help members put in place systems, vas things like that, to take over the repetitive tasks so that they can really extract their own time input from the business. So it's. It runs independently of them. Exactly. Suddenly when you've got a business, you have to put on the business owner hat, which thinks very differently to an employee mindset because a lot of employees it's easy to fall into the habit of turning up knowing that you'll get paid a certain amount for the hours that you put in regardless of how efficient you are with certain, with certain hours in the day. Whereas when you're a business owner, your time is suddenly incredibly valuable, incredibly closely tied how you spend that time to the results that you get back. And so we need to start thinking about how can I get the most out of the time that I can put into a business. And so I followed the dropship a lot masterclass. So going back into my story a few years ago when I started my E commerce business, I didn't want to spend time thinking about what I had to do because that's time consuming in itself. I wanted to have the steps in front of me. So it's just a case of showing up and doing the next action on the list. So that starts out with putting foundations in place like a company and a bank account. Then it's signing, then it's choosing your niche, then it's building the store, signing the suppliers and running ads. And when you know the system, you can just quickly get to work. Do one thing an hour a day and quickly your momentum will build if you're doing little and often every single day. And we've actually broken down the the path and the easiest way to start high ticket dropshipping and that is episode 135 which I'd recommend checking out if you want a more detailed explanation of all the steps involved. But yeah, the key for me when I was doing it alongside my 9 to 5 job was that I could just be very effective in an hour before work or an hour after work, whichever made sense on that day for me to get my laptop open and get straight to it and just work on one thing that was building a long term asset for myself. So let's talk about results now. That's the process because people will see £59,000amonth in the title which we've done on purpose to create some intrigue. And they'll assume that that kind of business is probably going to require full time hours. So perhaps you could share some examples of how that part time effort initially can still lead to serious income. Yeah, and just to clarify that 59,000 pound per month figure. So that's a kind of approximate average of my stores long term monthly revenue. If you were to average everything out, obviously things fluctuate over Time, but that was built working around one or two hours a day if that down the line. And so I guess there's a few things that really make that possible if we break it down. So the first is that one order can be 1500 pounds all the way up to 5000 pounds or more for a single order. So I mean as, as I said, you don't need hundreds of orders to hit a really strong revenue. You know, if you're selling 5,000 pound products to hit a 50k month, you need on average 10 orders a month. Right. So that's less than one order every three days. So that, that's a definite shortcut to hitting those higher revenue and higher profit numbers is just sell more expensive items. And if you are under the illusion that, or the myth that customers don't buy Items that are 1500 pounds, 2000 pounds, 5000 pounds plus online, then I think that is a limiting belief that will serve you very well to break as soon as you possibly can because that may be the thing that's holding you back. Just because you might not be going out buying 5,000 pound items online, that does not mean that your target customers are not doing that. So try and not fall into that trap of thinking like that. Surely no one spends that kind of money online. The other thing is that we're building these long term supplier relationships. So once you've built trust with UK brands, UK suppliers, remember they have the stock in the uk, they can fulfill orders for you really easily. Your store can just start to work like clockwork because it's, they're used to working with retailers like us. We are their route to market and that's how they make their money. They. And so if you can then put your systems and your virtual assistant eventually in place to fulfill the orders, the whole thing kind of operates without you having to even get involved. So it's about a smart use of your time. It's about really thinking I have the limited time to put in, what can I do that no one else in the team really is able to do and I can't delegate if you can focus on leverage. So things like ads for example, you set them up once and then they work forever like they continue working for you to get gathering sales or automations. You know, a customer opts into your email newsletter and you set that up once. And now thousands and thousands of future customers that opt in or users that opt in will continue to get your marketing emails that generate you sales 24 hours a day. And then for the stuff that you can't yet. Automate delegation is really going to be your friend in terms of not having you do everything yourself. So if you can get it to that stage, it's absolutely possible and very achievable to hit, you know, revenue of 59,000amonth or a lot more. And we see members going way beyond that. In fact, we had an order the other day from one of our members that was nearly that for a single order, didn't we? That's right, yeah. Verna shared in the community. She made a sale of 49,000 pounds and she joined us this year and only started running a month, I think running ads a couple of months ago. And yeah, 49k in a single order. Think about how many of those you'd need to live around the world or achieve whatever goal that you have. Also axe on the same day, shared in the community, in the masterclass, that he made a sale for £22,000 and he has a very involved, very busy professional work life alongside this business that he's building. So it just goes to show, you don't need to put in hours a day, you don't have to rip up everything and quit your job and 8 to 10 hours a day into this business to get to these significant income, which I think is great news. If you're a busy parent or a professional working in a busy career, you can build this absolutely alongside and build something very sustainable for the long term. So I think the most important thing is you start with a plan, you put in place what's worked for other people. You don't try and reinvent the wheel. You stick to those principles of UK or domestic suppliers. Wherever you're selling high ticket products and thinking about how you can delegate and automate. As soon as you've done something once, think about how can I get that outsource and off my plate so the business runs without my direct involvement and suddenly you're building an asset that doesn't require your time to generate you a consistent income. And that's the goal for, for myself when I first joined and it's the goal for so many people that join the Dropship Unlock Masterclass. So, Louis, any. Any final thoughts for those busy professionals or parents that are listening right now and they're on the fence about starting mainly because they've got that, that worry about if they've got enough time? Yeah, I think if you are waiting for the perfect time, where you suddenly have loads of time, it's very unlikely to come. Specifically, it's very unlikely to come at the right time, you know, you might find later on that you get made redundant or there's some kind of like severance pay. But do you really want to be building something at that point where, like, the real stress is on you to kind of make it work and you know, this is your only option? I think it's, it' very, very wise, if you can, to build something alongside, supplement your income at first and then eventually use that to replace your income. So if you can find one hour a day either before your shift, after your shift, you know, whenever, even if it's just batching some of that time at the weekends, and you have a willingness to create the kind of freedom that a business like this provides for you and your family and the experiences that you can share together and you want to follow a proven plan to do that, then you can build something that changes everything about your situation. Don't be tricked by the limitations that society or the media or whatever imposes on you that this isn't possible, because it absolutely is. We've seen it time and time again and we've both done it. So it's not about trying to get there as quickly as possible and cram it all in and become a millionaire by next week. It's about going consistently, chipping away, using a proven model and doing it step by step. So if you'd like our help getting started and to do that, head over to dropship unlocked.com forward/start. Are you enjoying the podcast? We'd love to hear from you. Leave a comment or a review and we might feature it in an upcoming episode. And for detailed show notes and resources, visit dropshipunlocked.com podcast. If you found value in any episode of this podcast, please could you take just 10 seconds to leave us a quick five five star review on your favorite podcast app? It helps us more than you can imagine. And who knows, you might just hear your comments read out on the show. Thanks for being a part of our community. Your support helps us keep delivering new episodes to you every week. Now it's that part of the episode where we're going to answer a question that we've received from one of you, one of our lovely listeners. And remember, if you have any questions that come up while you've been listening or watching today's episode, simply comment beneath the YouTube video version of this episode. And it won't just be answered in the comments, it may also be featured in an upcoming episode. So we're going to feature swap Neil's question now so she's asked this underneath a recent YouTube video. So they've asked it would be helpful to see the contents of the email that you send to your suppliers to get them signed. Hopefully it's covered in the masterclass. Yep, great question, swapnil. And yes, it is absolutely all covered inside the masterclass. So we provide full access to all of the email and phone scripts that we use to sign high quality UK suppliers. So both the initial outreach that we would do to them, but also then the follow ups, what to say, what not to say. And this by the way, is from hundreds and hundreds of attempted, you know, trial and error conversations where we've said something that we've realized has scared a supplier away from working with us, or we've said something that has really made them lean in and say, yeah, I want to work with you. And we've kind of honed that in so you can get it right the first time. And if you just think about what one supplier that you get over the line could be worth to your business and the profit that could come from that relationship in the long run, like that one tiny thing alone pays for the investment for the masterclass many times over, if you think about it like that. To give you kind of a summary of the type of email that we're sending to suppliers, it's, it's about presenting yourself as a professional UK retailer. So it's kind of explaining that you're launching a specialist UK brand in their market, in their niche and that you're looking to drive consistent sales to their branded products with advertising and marketing. Again, music to a supplier's ears because they're thinking, oh, someone else is going to run ads to my product and market my products, that's amazing. You can also explain to them that you pay upfront so you don't need any credit terms. And that's really helpful to suppliers because they're removes any risk of them, you know, loaning you the money or providing credit terms. And then for example, the risk that you disappear and don't pay them back is now removed because you're paying for everything upfront. And you explain that you can handle customer service and that their job really is just to fulfill the orders. Again, these things are all really music to the suppliers ears because that's what they want to hear. And I guess crucially, we recommend that members adapt these scripts to match their own voice and their own way of speaking and their own brand tone as well. Because if you try and read something that is just scripted and you read it verbatim exactly as written, it probably won't work. It will come across as wooden and it won't feel authentic. So the framework that we give you, we know it works, but you've gotta sound natural and make it sound like it's coming from you. So absolutely personalizing it and adapting it to fit your voice and your brand tone exactly. And it's a great question, perfectly timed with this episode as well, because talk about high leverage activities, reaching out to sign new suppliers, talking about those things that Lewis mentioned then in the email is going to get you really high quality suppliers and then that leads to consistent sales over the long term. So yeah, great question. Now time to highlight a recent review that we've had for the podcast as well. So a big thank you to Mark Smith who left a lovely YouTube comment that we wanted to feature. So Mark Smith said, awesome content. Thank you so much for your review Mark. Really appreciate it as always. Before we wrap up today, I'd like to ask a quick favor of you listening to this or watching this today. If you're watching us on YouTube, if you enjoyed today's episode and you got any value from it, would you take a moment to leave us a quick 5 star review? Your feedback really helps us reach more listeners and keep improving our content. Plus we'll try and read your review out on our next episode. Thank you for joining us on this episode of the Dropship Unlocked podcast. We hope you are leaving with new insights and inspiration from to fuel your. Entrepreneurial journey to kickstart your e commerce business. Head over to dropshipunlocked.com start. It's the perfect place to start and get access to resources that will help you build your business from the ground up. And don't forget to hit that subscribe button for more episodes packed with strategies, tips and success stories. Plus, if you enjoyed this episode today, a five star review will would mean the world to us and you might even get a shout out on the next episode. Thank you for choosing to spend your time with us today. We can't wait to bring you more insights on the next episode of the Dropship Unlocked podcast.