Founder of todotaladros.com at IE Business School

Entrepreneur session 6:

Alberto Torron

It is often argued that the life of an entrepreneur is a lonely life where you have to absolutely scarify everything and everyone and only have one thing in you mind, which is your venture! 

Is it really necessary to give up everything when deciding to becoming an entrepreneur? 

According to Alberto Torron the co-founder of todotaladros.com it is not necessary to even giving up your day job!

Alberto, is still working in a demanding job with great responsibilities at the same time of managing todotaladros among a few other ventures. How does he do it? By managing a small but stable growth. 

One of the reasons for their success has been the unique customer experience that they are able to provide. An interesting thing that he mentioned was that, if a customer has any concerns, he will be contacted by the owner of the 'store' personally to rectify the issue on spot. 

This is obviously not a service that is commonly provided within the e-commerce environment and indeed not one that can be sustained if the business was to have a rapid growth.

todotaladros.com is a online ecommerce where you can purchase tools such as Drills. Starting with 5-6 Drills and selling from home, they now have over £150k worth of inventory. 

Despite being a 'part time entrepreneur', Alberto has illustrated that it pays to be one. Without disclosing any confidential information, their revenue proves that a part time venture can still make more than a full time job. 

It also shows that there is absolutely no perfect profile for an entrepreneur and that everyone and with any life preference can turn an idea into profit. 

A great fact that he share with us was the importance of the ROI when investing in SEM.  

He mentioned that it takes 300 visits to the site to make one conversion, which in this particular case is to purchase a product that costs an average of 200 Euros. So as he nicely put it "unless you want to work for google, then it makes no sense to buy AdWords costing 2euros and hope to make a profit just because of an increased traffic. 

So...the advice is to calculate your ROI in all aspects of your business...even when it comes to marketing!

A final comment... I wonder how long Alberto is able to sustain his current lifestyle of being in a full time job and running a venture that is growing. My assumptions is that he would have to choose... It would be interesting to see what he would choose... 

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