This Business Model Will Make You £1M (Zero Employees) Episode 162

 👉 Ready to start your own online store? Start here → https://dropshipunlocked.com/start?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=ep162-this-business-model-will-make-you-1m-zero-employees

🗣 In this episode, Lewis Smith and James Eardley reveal the exact business model that’s helping everyday people scale to £1M+ in revenue — without hiring a single employee.

They break down how high-ticket e-commerce creates leverage, how to find products that consistently generate £1,000+ profit weeks, and why traditional side hustles and social media “grind” models can’t compete with this approach.

🎥 Prefer to watch instead? Watch on YouTube → https://youtu.be/w2pnYGAYhLI

🧭 Topics Discussed
★ The £1M Business Model — Why high-ticket e-commerce remains the most scalable, low-overhead business in 2025.
★ Leverage from Day One — How to build systems, SOPs, and automation so your store runs without you.
★ No Employees, No Problem — The smart way to use virtual assistants and AI to scale while keeping lean.
★ The Power of Domestic Suppliers — How UK-based supply partners give you next-day delivery, better margins, and less risk.
★ The Fastest Route to £1M — The three principles Lewis used to go from £0 to seven figures: high-ticket products, local suppliers, and data-driven decisions.
★ The CEO Mindset Shift — Why thinking like a founder (not a freelancer) is the key to seven-figure growth.

🛠 Links & Resources Mentioned
Lewis’s Book → https://dropshipunlocked.com/book
Shopify £1-for-3-months Offer → https://dropshipunlocked.com/shopify
Free Trial of a Professional Phone Line → https://dropshipunlocked.com/circle

💡 Key Takeaways
★ Think Big, Start Lean — You don’t need employees to scale; you need leverage through systems, VAs, and automation.
★ High Ticket Wins — Fewer orders, higher margins, and faster path to profit — that’s how the £1M stores are built.
★ Low Risk, High Control — Selling from UK suppliers to UK customers creates fast delivery, happy customers, and a business that compounds in value.
★ Build a Brand, Not a Store — The real money is made by building equity in a branded, sellable asset — not just generating short-term cash.
★ Momentum Over Perfection — The biggest wins come from taking action now, not waiting for the “perfect” time.

📲 Follow Us
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X / 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

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Transcript

0:00

Everything has changed. There's one business model that consistently leads to a thousand plus profit weeks, but. Only if you using that business model is what then allows me to generate consistent money online. And that's why everything has changed. So we have to adapt. Don't get caught up thinking that you need to grind your way through social media posts every day to make money online. The truth is. 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 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 dropship unlocked.com forward/start. Now sit back, relax and let's unlock your potential with the Dropship Unlocked podcast. Today we're going to be answering a fundamental question. What is the best online business to start today? Not a side hustle, not some crypto speculation. We're talking about a real business that can scale. And to be clear, we are talking not just about theory, actually about what works in practise. This is the exact model that Lewis and I have used to build our stores to seven figure revenues. So let's break down what actually works right now. Louis, where should someone start if they want to launch a business today and actually make money? Yeah, so I think of things in that there's, there's three key principles that I would want to look at for choosing the right online business to run as of today. And the first would be high value product. So high ticket products they call them. So if you can sell products that are say £500 to £2,000, you could be making hundreds and hundreds of pounds in profit per sale. You know, if you're selling a 2,000 pound item at 30% profit margin, that's 600 pounds in profit on every single transaction. So then that means a lot fewer sales are needed to make the same overall revenue. So it keeps things simple. So that would be the first thing, like what are you selling? Is it high value enough to make the margins make sense? The second part I'd look at would be building something that allows leverage back to you. You don't just want to build a business necessarily or I wouldn't. That creates more busyness and more admin and hustle required for me the more clients that I sign or the more customers that I get. So if I can have Virtual assistants who are using standard operating procedures. So just sets of instructions that I provide and document and leveraging AI and just things like automation so that it can really scale up from the start without needing me at every single junction in the business. That's really important to me in terms of building a lifestyle business from it that I can enjoy as well. And then I think if it, if you're set on building an E commerce business because I think those first two high value something you can fully outsource. E commerce is like the logical route to go down. If you can sell with domestic suppliers, so suppliers in the country that your customers are in, then it means you don't have to rely on websites like AliExpress to find your items, but you can offer fast, often next day delivery from your suppliers. You can then build a real brand with good reputation, good reviews and like a credible business. And it removes that kind of taboo and stigma that dropshipping often gets. It certainly does. Yeah. There's a bit of a taboo around the word dropshipping and some people think that that is a business model of the past. But if you want tonnes of proof to know that it works today, then obviously we've got our communities with dropship unlocked and we're getting post in there every day about how people are selling high ticket products on a daily basis to customers in the same country as them and that way they can generate consistent profit through their business and they've been able to sometimes replace their jobs and you know, even supplement their income that they're getting already because they're able to implement these simple ideas. And I know when I first decided I wanted to make money online, I felt really trapped in my 9 to 5 job that I was in. And although I was making some money from that 9 to 5 job, I didn't feel fulfilled and I didn't feel like I was getting to where I wanted to get to in life. So I put my mind to making money online and I made all the mistakes first. And when you say those three principles that you talk about there, Lewis, I did the complete opposite. First of all, I thought I needed to sell cheap products, but it soon turned out that the numbers just weren't on my side. If I was trying to only make 20, 30 pound profit per order, so I had to go high ticket. Also I was trying to sell products from overseas, like with AliExpress, like you say, and trying to sell products from China into the UK market. And I had to deal with funny imports, fees and, and communication with suppliers in broken English. It was a. It was a nightmare, to be honest. So we made it. You made it so much more simple. When I joined the Dropship or Not masterclass to understand how to make money online by selling high ticket products from UK suppliers to UK customers. Really simple when you think about it. And so we've now laid that all out inside other podcast episodes. So if you are interested in the specific details of how you do that, then that is in episode 135, which is the easiest way to start dropshipping. We've explained the blueprint in that video, but for now, Lewis, let's talk about why this model makes so much sense. And importantly, if someone wanted to start now, they'd want to know what actions can they take in order to get the most out of this and get to seven figure revenue as quickly as possible. So what would you say those execution levers would be for somebody to pull straight away? Yeah, if I had to start again from today, there's a few things I would focus on to really make sure that I was using my time as effectively as possible. So first thing is I would be laser focused on finding a niche that had buying intent behind it. What I mean by that is finding a group of products to sell that there are people already out there on the Internet searching to buy. It's much, much easier to just find a queue of people who are looking for a product and just kind of position yourself in front of that queue than it is to go out there and try and drum up interest in a product and convince people to buy. It's much more expensive and time consuming. To do it that way as well. So just find an in demand market and then just go to it. There's plenty of them. The other thing I would do, as I talked about before, is I would outreach, like speak to UK suppliers directly, go to them and say, can we sell your products? You know, obviously we've got like scripts on how we'd approach them, how we position ourselves as a, a viable business partner for people inside our, our programme when approaching suppliers. But we would build Trust with say 4 to 10 suppliers, get approved by them, begin uploading their best selling products and then running ads to them, you know, and starting to see those sales come in and then using the profit from those sales to fund other activities in the business, hiring a virtual assistant, you know, increasing the conversion rate on our website, things like that. But it's like you almost have to tune out all the noise, all the distractions and just have a direct route to what is going to make this business viable and profitable as quickly as possible. And so one of the best ways of doing that, if you think about, you know, if you're listening to me and saying, okay, I get what you mean by standing in front of a queue of people rather than trying to drum up interest, but how do you do that on the Internet? Like where, where's the queue of people? Well, if you search for a product on Google, you'll most likely see a list of product photo ads at the top of the Google search results. Now those are called Google shopping ads. And so that's where I'd start. I just say, what if I can run my product as ads at the top of those search results? People are going to, you know, click them when they're looking to buy them. So I'm not going on social media trying to create interest, trying to find these audiences and then convince them that not only do they need the product, but now they need to buy it from me instead. I just go to where they're already thinking of buying and then I become one of several retailers who are selling those products. I won't get all of the sales. That's okay. If I pick a product market that's big enough and there are plenty of them in the uk, I'd argue thousands of them. You can just run pretty lean ads operation. I'm not talking about spending thousands on ads and just target those ready to buy customers and just soak up those sales from the top of the Google search results. So you're kind of a middle person, but you're building a real brand, you're building a retail brand that becomes a saleable asset. The difference is you don't have to buy any of the stock, you never have to part with any huge capital for any like warehouses or anything. It's very much an Internet run business that you can do from a laptop. So I think those are the things that I would do initially to get this up and running as quickly as possible. Yeah, nicely broken down there. It's very simple and it's good to have that abundance mindset that you talk about. They're not getting greedy, thinking you need the entire market to buy from you. You just need to get the people who are ready to buy within that market to get onto your website. So what you said there, it answers those fundamental questions that people will have when they think I want to make money online. We're answering the question of what do I sell, how do I sell those products and how do I get People to buy, so what to sell? You answer because you showed me how to, to find a niche that's validated, products that are in demand and will sell on our websites. You then worked out how we will sell those products by showing us how to find the suppliers that sell those products to UK customers so we can start to advertise them and get access to their products. And then you answered that third question which is okay, but how do I get people to buy the products that I can now sell online? And that was through the ads that we run. So you run ads at the top of the Google search results to get people onto your website and purchase when they see the product that they're already looking for. So super simple. But it answers those fundamental questions which are actually really hard to answer. When you first decide to start selling online, it seems really overwhelming to think yes, I want to make money, but what on earth do I sell? Especially if you don't think you've got any kind of hidden talent in any certain area. But that can be applied across all backgrounds and across any skill set that you might have already. So you don't need to have experience making any money online in order to find out the questions to those difficult find out the answers to those difficult questions. So yeah, I love that Lewis. It really what enticed me into the business model because of the simplicity of getting started with it. And that's why some of our members do £1,000 sales, £3,000 sales within the first week or two of running ads because they knew how to answer those difficult questions. So yes, that's great Louis for getting to the first few sales and we understand now how to build that business. But what about people that are like wanting to hit that million pound mark and they want to get to seven figure business and they don't want to play small, they really want to get to 5k, 10k, even 50k months and beyond. What would be the key to building that kind of online asset? Well yeah, I think a 50k month, 100k month, 500k month, they all start simple. They all start with the first sale, don't they? So it's about kind of building your store up I think with the right foundations from the beginning and thinking beyond just a store. You know when people say oh you run a shopify store, Well I, I see as more than a store, you're building a salable scalable asset. You're building something that one day you could exit, you could sell that business even though it's a digital Asset, it's just as valuable, if not more valuable than selling like a bricks and mortar physical asset. You know, it's, it's just less, I guess sometimes it's, it feels less tangible because there's nothing you physically touch because it's literally an online business, but it's a money making system and machine that you've built. So it's very valuable. And if you can turn your store rather than just saying, oh, I run a Shopify store into a brand, you know, so companies as big as, like Gymshark, I don't know if they still are, but like, I believe they were built on, on Shopify, certainly at one point during their journey, possibly even still today. Do you think that, you know, if you were to go to Gymshark and say, like, are you running a Shopify store? You know, they would resonate with that? It's not as a brand that happens to be built on the Shopify platform. And I think it's that kind of progression beyond, like, oh, I'm not just trying my luck here at Shopify because I saw an ad about how you can make money with Shopify. No, we use Shopify as a tool in the business, but we're building brands, we're building something of value to the market. So that means having like a professional custom domain, a custom email address, a UK phone number for your customers that's not like a mobile number, but like an actual, you know, landline number that comes through voiceover IP and then goes to your customer support agent wherever they are in the world for you and it becomes your business. So it's not the kind of business that, you know, you walk into the office of every day, but it's the kind of business where you can sit in Cape Town and open up your laptop and there it is, it's just there, your team are all there with you on Slack, you know, working with you from wherever they are in the world as well. So I think the important thing to remember with this is when you're building this business, try and view it as if you're doing the hundred thousand pound months right from the beginning and just ask yourself the question. I'm not saying you have to go and hire loads of team members, but just think, how would you know when I get a sale from a supplier, how would this operate if we were getting 10, 15, 20 sales per day? So that when I fulfil this one order per day, it can work and start putting in place those systems to begin with? Because that way you then don't become the bottleneck in kind of restricting its growth later on because you can bring in outsourced customer support, you can automate the fulfilment of orders so it doesn't take your time. You can use things like AI to handle your live chat, even the actual voice on the phone as well. So it allows you to really step back from the business and focus on working on the business. And how can you optimise and double triple the business rather than like how many customer sales calls can I take today and how many sales can I close? You know, that's important at the beginning and I think everyone should go through that part. But it's, it's having one eye on being the, the founder, the CEO of the business who can eventually put in place systems so it doesn't take up all of your time and become another job for you. I think keeping a close eye on dashboards and tracking your key performance indicators as well, making sure, you know, like how much revenue's coming in, how much ad spend is going out and then using that data at the beginning to keep an eye on what's our return on that ad spend, what's our average order value, how do we increase that, what's our lifetime value, are customers coming back and purchasing other items? And so you can really start to kind of play those numbers and eventually it does, it becomes a game of numbers. And you know, it's, it's just like any business, once you get those numbers working, you can start to scale things. Up profitably and that's when things get really exciting because you're just focusing on the high level actions that you can take as a business owner to really tweak and improve and optimise in ways that get you to those 50, 100k months and beyond. And always exciting to see when people post about that in the community because like for example, Adam, who's Now doing consistent 100k months, he talks about on the interview we've done with him on the podcast, how he had to switch his mindset into being a business owner rather than being an employee. And, and when he did that and started to see all of his actions as having long term benefits, it then changed him into a different gear to get to that, that next level. It's exciting to see the people that the, that these people become, you know, myself included when you start to think like a business owner and have big goals that you pursue. And yes, travelling the world is amazing. And I'm in Cape Town now, managed to get Table Mountain behind me in the background of this episode. But it's more about the person that you become when you build a business and go after your goals. You know you can feel proud of yourself when you really go for it and you stop being held back by doubt and fear and worry about not things not working. When you push past that, which I think we all feel, you then get the benefits of being proud of who you've become. When you've really gone for it, when you've thinking about starting something and you actually go for it, that's that's the biggest difference. So for those people that are on the edge, Lewis, they're thinking about getting started and they really want to go into a business model that's going to get them to those high numbers quickly. What would you say for those people who ask, is now the right time to start? Will it ever be the right time to start? I mean, if you're wondering whether now happens to be the perfect right time to start, I've I'll probably think of it like this. This year won't reward those people who just wait and see whether it was the right time. It will reward those people who today take an action and do something about it. Even if it's imperfect action, it's better to be in momentum than just be stuck in the headlights. So if you are ready to launch your own high ticket store and join a community of real entrepreneurs running these types of online businesses every day, head over to dropship unlocked.com start and we'll guide you through the first steps to get started. 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 star review on your favourite 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 let's answer a question that we've had in from a listener. So if you have any questions that have been coming up while you've been listening or watching today's episode, then all you need to do is comment beneath the YouTube video version of the episode. And not only will it be answered in the comments, we may also feature it in an upcoming episode. So that is what Oliver has done. Great question. I'm going to put it to you now, Louis. So Oliver's asked. I'm in the final stages of the niche selection to find out which products to sell, specifically looking at the manufacturer search volume results. So I know the more searches per month the better. But does anyone have a rough figure of what is a good baseline value? Yeah, great question, Oliver. Really, really thinking along the right lines here. And great to see that you're in the final stages of niche selection as well. That's definitely a big milestone that you'll be able to check off soon. So as a general rule of thumb, we would recommend looking for at least 10,000 monthly unique searches across the main keyword related to your niche. So think of kind of the top level keyword that someone might search in your niche. Are there more than 10,000 searches for that kind of commercial keyword search? Now, that level of search volume in the market on Google or the other search networks usually indicates that there's a strong demand in that market. Enough for you to go in and be one of the retailers in that market. Remember I said you don't need 100% of it, you just need to be able to take you your slice of the pie, especially if that is a growing market as well, because you can benefit from that growth as well. Remember though, it's not just about raw numbers. The other criteria when it comes to niche selection must also align. And then once you've got those, we can proceed with that niche knowing that it's data backed to succeed. It's not just a hunch, it's not just guesswork, but it is based on the niche validation criteria that we go through. So just make sure the searches are from people who are ready to buy and not just people who are browsing or researching. Make sure it's quite a commercial search term. And if there's commercial intent behind it, then I'd say that 10,000 mark is the threshold that I would look to tick off for that one of the several criteria. Awesome. Yeah, great question, Oliver. I can tell you well on your way to finding a niche group of products that are validated already. So when you start selling them, you can be confident that they'll start selling from the from the very start. And by having at least 10,000 monthly searches, that means there's massive amount of demand that you can tap into, as Lewis said. Okay, thank you, Oliver, for your question. We're also going to highlight a review that we've had for the podcast as well, because if you've been enjoying what you've been watching or listening to today, we'd love to shout you out. So a big thank you to Kat for leaving this nice Apple Podcast review. She said, I can't stress enough how helpful these podcast episodes have been in helping me to get started with my e commerce business. Thanks guys. Keep up the great work. Amazing. Thank you so much for your review. Kat really means a lot and we really appreciate you leaving this lovely review on Apple Podcast. Now, if you found value in today's discussion, we'd really appreciate it if you could leave us. A review only takes you a few seconds, but it means the world to us and it just helps us keep this podcast going. We're always looking to hear your thoughts and like we did for Kat, we might try and feature your review in 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 to fuel your entrepreneurial journey. To catch 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 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.