Starting Dropshipping Business while being an Analyst in IB
I am currently an investment banking analyst at a small IB where the workload is slightly lower (on average 60-65 hours a week) and have had some time to work on creating a side dropshipping business with two others in the retail space.
The business will hopefully provide very small side-income and will definitely require minimal oversight, especially given there will be three of us running it.
I am planning on forming a company and launching the business soon, but I wanted to know if my compliance department would approve this outside business activity?
Or do they commonly reject requests for people to create side-businesses given that it will take away time from the current day job?
Thanks!
I would guess the ROI is probably not there and it (drop shopping) is never as easy as it’s made out to be.
probably better to spend your time increasing your future incremental income (e.g. being good at your actual job, prepping for PE) rather than a side hustle
Thanks for the response. Totally makes sense - agree that this is a tough space to be in.
I am just trying to get a bit more experience with dropshipping / starting a company and learning about Direct-to-Consumer ecommerce platforms.
Its definitely something that has interested me for awhile and I figured that a good way to learn about it would be to start a company in the space.
Do you have any idea if compliance would be alright with doing something like this?
Absolute garbage advice lmao. Good stuff trying to get another stream of income so you don’t have to slave away in banking forever.
Not really garbage advice bro anyone employed at an investment bank has the intelligence, connections, and resources to spend their (very) limited free time in more productive ways than fucking drop shipping
Agree with you. Fuck this slave mentality. Work as hard as you want in the cube you’ll only be another middle class family trying to make it by. Know your worth. I have no advice on the dropshipping or any of that but best of luck and I hope you succeed. We need more of this attitude of pushing boundaries in here. Otherwise we’ll continue to have depressed analyst post #20 here every week. Let’s do it.
“Dropshipping” and other e-commerce businesses like “SEO” and that shit is for unemployable people that want to try to be an entrepreneur while sitting on their computer in their basement at home. Not scalable, not very profitable, highly saturated. You have a golden ticket with IB so go all in on that and you will make so much more than some dropshipping bro-company. And compliance typically doesn’t like to see analysts do shit like this to answer your question…
Got it understood - just trying to experiment with generating different streams of income beyond my traditional day job. Trying a bunch of things and trying to see what is successful!
Don’t listen to those guys. You can make serious $$$ drop shipping.
Don't think compliance will have an issue. Make sure you emphasize that it is 1. a low-maintenance business to begin with, AND has 3 principals so you will be helping out on weekends and 2. is completely unrelated to your current work (i.e. if you work in a C&R group, they might not go for this). Taking time away from the day job isn't as important to compliance, that's more up to your department if your performance drops. They are more focused on covering their ass for FINRA
That said I will third that dropshipping isn't a good business, so make sure you really do your diligence here. If you want it to be a learning experience that's fine, just don't dump too much personal money into it, or go into the business with your two best friends.
Thank you!!!
Even cooler, use your IB skillset to buy an e-commerce store on microacquire or shopify marketplace and lever it up if you can. Could be fun
Interesting idea - do have any thoughts on what to look for when evaluating potential businesses to acquire on one of these platforms / if it’s worth it to do vs. starting your own shopify store?
I actually tried doing this and that's the issue. It's not that hard to start a dropshipping platform; most of what you would pay for in an acquisition is brand assets like email list, instagram accounts etc. I'm in college so the opportunity cost of my time is pretty low so I decided to just build myself. My budget was like $5-10k tho, if you went higher (maybe with leverage if you can get it) you could buy a solid brand rather than just some random site.
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