Dear Prospective Buyer’s for Jesus Life:

In the interest of being transparent with information to help efficiently work through the process of helping potential buyers for Jesus Life explore this opportunity, we have created a Q&A using some questions a few interested parties have emailed us.

SUMMARY:

• Great opportunity to build a marketplace ministry; one that makes a respectable profit, while promoting "Living a Jesus Life," and that helps Christian organizations, such as churches, ministries and Christian schools raise funding through a "consignment" program.
• Over $8,500 wholesale cost of inventory will transfer with sale; at retail this inventory should generate $25K+/- income.  
• Very strong domain name that is Trademarked will convey to new owner(s)
• Website professionally developed on the DNN platform that is versatile, intuitive and extremely powerful
• E-commerce engine (aspdotnetstorefront) is considered to be the most dynamic solution on the market; its scalable, very easy to use, and has built-in "affiliate" technology.
• Business opportunity will prosper under leadership with the time and resources to market / sell at targeted Christian events; this will build brand awareness, which will lead to expanded online sales and create new distribution opportunities.

Why are you selling the company? Answer: Candidly, we started the business and for the first six months everything was moving forward nicely; we had very positive sales early on at a few church events and Christian festivals. We (my wife and me) were doing this part-time with a vision to grow the company and evolve Jesus Life into full-time work. Unfortunately, with the economy, since last June, I am working 60+ hours a week, and my wife homeschools our children, and we’re in the process of moving; consequently, we have NOT been able to focus on building Jesus Life to its potential. I’ve really struggled with the notion of selling the company, but after prayer and thinking it over for the past several months, I / we feel that if we aren’t in the position to work on building Jesus Life, then we should let someone else who has the time, focus and resources do it. Ultimately it’s not about us; it’s for the glory of God.

What month did JesusLife get started in 2009? Answer: If memory serves me, the official launch of JesusLife.com was mid-January of 2009.

You show a gross income of $43,583. What was the cash flow? Answer: We finished the year at breakeven; however, in the launch year we weren’t forecasting to positive cash flow. Inventory, website development work, merchandising racks, banners, and medical expenses for my family that I run through the business accounted for $14,000 in expenses last year. With the exception of replenishing some inventory and maybe medical expenses for the new owner, those expenses won’t apply to the business again, which would imply a healthier cash flow situation outlook ahead.

Is there a P & L statement available? Answer: Yes. That can be shared at the appropriate time.

What percentage of your business is online? Christian events? Churches?
Answer: Roughly speaking, 70% Events, 10% Online, 20% Churches. In the interest of being transparent, we’ve learned JesusLife’s online sales are a function of developing brand awareness through grassroots marketing, e.g. events, home parties, churches, etc.. Using the Life is Good brand as an example (popular apparel company), their online sales struggled for several years; It wasn’t until they had established their brand positioning through event sales / marketing that they saw consumers purchasing directly from their website. On a positive note, we’ve seen sales at events like Acquire the Fire run over $5,000, and a church we approached sold several thousand dollars in just a few months using very simple merchandising efforts. When the JesusLife product is displayed at an event or church lobby, people are drawn to the message, design and quality of our shirts. It’s very affirming to hear people’s remarks about JesusLife. They purchase the shirts and are proud of promoting living a Jesus Life-live it- wear it- share it!

Is your online business 100% organic or do you do PPC? Answer: Per the remarks above under #4, our business has been mostly through churches and events.

Has the website been professionally optimized? Answer: The website was professionally developed by Arrow Designs (http://www.ArrowDesigns.com). The owner of the company, Ryan Morgan, is a strong fellow Christian who specializes in DNN (DotNetNuke: http://www.dotnetnuke.com) website developments. DNN is one of the most popular development platforms. It is popular because it is versatile, intuitive and scalable to manage growth. More importantly, the e-commerce engine was developed using ASPDotNetStorefront. Here’s a link to some customer sites using this e-commerce engine: http://www.aspdotnetstorefront.com/t-portfolio.aspx . This solution is considered to be the most robust e-commerce engine for the DNN platform. The licensing cost approximately $3,500, and the licensing rights will transfer to the new owners. The rational for investing in such a powerful e-commerce engine was for its powerful built-in features, and incredible “Affiliate” partner technology. The affiliate technology is the same tool Amazon.com and several other large retailers use to build sales through online referrals that tracks and compensates people who promote their sites, e.g. you sign up and refer someone to JesusLife.com, and if they purchase, you get compensated. Here’s a link that explains our Affiliate program: http://www.jesuslife.com/Fundraisers/AffiliateProgram/tabid/89/Default.aspx It’s worth noting here that with a few minor changes, the Affiliate program could be switched to effectively manage an Independent Contractor sales network, e.g. Pamper Chief, Southern Living, Premier Jewelry, etc.. We get requests for people wanting to represent Jesus Life, so we think this could be a new distribution opportunity with great potential.

What is the highest page rank for JesusLife? Answer: searching Jesus Life clothing, Jesus Life apparel, Jesus Life shirts, our website ranks #1 on google.com. In reviewing our web-stat logs, most people arrive at our website searching “Jesus Life clothing.” I will add here that we paid $2,800 for the JesusLife.com domain name. We considered the investment worthwhile because, a.) consumer recall on JesusLife.com is high, so we knew consumer’s could easily find us on the web after encountering us at an event or something like that, b.) having a domain name that is the brand name is a huge plus for brand building.

Is your website user friendly from a management standpoint? Answer: Indeed, you don’t have to be a web developer to manage the site. The administrative part of the website is very, very intuitive. It offers a built-in document editor, similar to Microsoft Word, and adding new images / photo’s is as simple as browsing to the file on your computer and selecting it to upload. Depending on the individual, my guess is the administrative part of the website could be mastered in 1-2 days. I certainly would make myself available to train the new buyer on these tasks.

How much room is required for your onsite inventory? Answer: for cost reasons and convenience, we’ve stored the inventory on racks in a spare room at home. My wife fills the orders in the afternoons from home.

What is the time commitment per week to simply maintain? Answer: the site requires zero time commitment to sustain it as is. Adding a new item takes less than 5 minutes—very simple to do.

Can you provide an overview of the type of inventory on hand? Answer: Yes, to highlight we presently have on hand $8,400 of salable inventory. The asking price includes this inventory. At the present retail pricing, this inventory would generate over $26,000 in gross sales. At the appropriate time, I can make a detailed inventory report available to a prospective buyer.

What type of customer base do you have? Answer: our demographics are roughly 80% female / 20% male. Yes, women do shop more than men. Does it include opt in email addresses? Answer: all online sales are stored and unless the customer opts-out when checking out, their email address is accessible through the administrative section on the website for follow up marketing.

Where is the site hosted, and what is the monthly cost?   Answer: We use PowerDNN to host. They specialize in DNN sites. Annually we pay around $500.

About how many emails do you receive per week that need to be responded to? Answer: Candidly we’ve not marketed the business or attended any events since last June, so our sales and email volume is minimal.

Do you have a list of monthly Christian events, or a resource guide to locate them? Answer: I found lots of events searching online and asking around. Within a week, we had event organizers calling us trying to get JesusLife to attend their events. Locally we found many youth and women’s conferences. The larger events, like Acquire The Fire and Atlanta Fest were the bigger events for us, and they generated around $5K gross sales; however, the local events were profitable to do too. They normally didn’t cost anything to attend (we’d give a donation back to the event organizer) and we sold a lot of inventory. Especially at women’s conference gatherings.

How costly is it to attend the events (i.e. average entrance fee, do you pay the promoters a percentage of your sales, etc.)?  Do you bring stock to these events, or do you take orders and then ship the items out when you return home? Or maybe both? Answer: As noted above, most of the local events didn’t cost anything. We found ministries and churches were very supportive of our products. The larger Christian festivals cost more to attend. I’d estimate a booth at those events run $800+/-, and some do ask for a percentage of the sales. We elected to be a title sponsor at Atlanta Fest and 2 Acquire The Fire events. They sponsorship end tripled our cost, but at the time we thought the investment was worth the extra expense. Having that experience behind us, I’d say the sponsorship didn’t justify the added expense. If we were to ever do similar events in the future, I’d just pay the booth fee and sell JesusLife products. As for how we sold at the events, yes, we'd bring the inventory with us to sell at each event. We learned after a few events to bring a scaled down selection from what we sell online.

Can you make any design changes to the site yourself, or does this require the designer to do this for you at an extra cost? Answer: The DNN platform makes it easy to add anything you want to the site in seconds, e.g. new images, flash, text, questioners, polling, blogs, etc.. A novice can make a very robust site using DNN. This is one of the reasons we went with this platform.

Is the site set up to automatically keep track of inventory (i.e. the part that shows whether stock is available in the various sizes), or is this something that you must update manually (as items sell out) through the site's admin?   Answer: Good question. I suspect you have experience with having to manually update inventory on a website. If that is correct, you’ll truly appreciate the fact the ASPDOTNETSTOREFORNT e-commerce solution we use tracks inventory automatically. It will also track product cost, sale price and profit, which makes it simple to track sales for reporting and taxes. This feature also saves time and headackes by avoiding selling items that are out of stock. The site clearly displays the available sizes on the each product page, so for example if a customer wants a medium in a particular design / shirt, it indicates whether that sizes is available on the site by displaying a “Yes” or “No.” When a size is out of inventory, the item will not allow the customer to purchase that size. When products that are out of stock get resupplied, it is easy to go into the system and update the inventory by size.

Could you give me a ballpark estimate of the cost of the blank shirts plus the screen printing?   What type of minimum order requirements are there for new designs?  Have you ever used a dtg (direct to garment) printing company or only screen printers? Answer: After networking and attending the Magic Apparel conference, we’ve got our shirts down to about $5+/- cost. This is for a very good quality blank too. No cheap Glidan 6000 series, but really good combed cotton 3/1 or 4/1 tees. As for DTG, we visited the idea several times. If I had the machine, I could find plenty of uses for it; however, we just couldn’t justify making that large of an investment at this stage. Certainly if you had a DTG machine or could pick a good used one up at a reasonable price, it would make the production end of the business very efficient and simplified.

I have been working with a couple of small business finance companies, but was wondering if you could give me an idea of what type of owner financing you might be offering?  Answer: Subject to the buyers credit and commitment level, we’d consider financing $10K-$12K of the $21,990 asking price. As mentioned before, the wholesale value of the inventory that is included is worth over $8,500—at retail it will generate $25K+/-. Also, the e-commerce license and domain name alone are worth about $5K. 
 
Do I need a graphic design background to create new shirts? Answer: No. Most of the designs have been created by a freelance designer I found online. He charges a very modest fee ($100+/-) and is willing to rework a design until I am satisfied with it. Before finding this designer, I’ve had excellent success using online graphic designer sites, such as www.designoutpost.com and www.99designs.com . These sites make it real easy to post a design project, and then freelance graphic artist compete for the reward by submitting designs for you to critique and select a winner. On average we get over 40 designs to chose from.