Royal Key Supply

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Royal Key Supply

5 Remote Hires and Counting: How Remote CoWorker Helped Royal Key Supply Build an E-Commerce Business

Average number of weeks to hire

Number of dedicated remote employees

$100k+

Savings compared to traditional hiring

"They become like regular employees. They are people who are excited to be part of your team and who actually help you go to the next level."

Billie Jo Stoddard

Owner, Royal Key Supply

The year was 2020, and Billie Jo Stoddard found herself at a crossroads.

Billie Jo spent 25 years running an automotive repossession business, operating in a stressful, high-liability industry. She also owned a mobile key locksmithing company called KeyMotive, which she’d started in 2018.

The COVID lockdowns made business operations difficult, and she was struggling to find staff she could count on.

She was thinking about retirement.

“I think everyone started reevaluating during COVID,” Billie Jo told us. “At the time I was just very frustrated and wanting a different life.”

She decided to make a change.

“I looked at our businesses, and I realized that mobile locksmithing was the more profitable business,” she said. “So I sold the repo company, and I sold several commercial properties, which we had a lot of.”

She was considering selling the mobile locksmithing business as well.

But when she looked through the vans the company owned, she realized she had a problem.

Each van had $50,000 worth of blank keys, far more inventory than the business had been using on a regular basis.

“We were only using about $6,000 in keys each month,” she said. “I had to ask myself, ‘What am I going to do with all of these keys? I’ll never be able to sell this business with this dead stock of keys.’”

At that moment, a new business idea was born.

Building a Remote-First E-Commerce Company

Billie Jo called her youngest daughter and asked if she would help her build an e-commerce store to offload all the unused keys.

That business soon became Royal Key Supply.

The mother and daughter pair planned to offload the unused inventory, then Billie Jo would retire.

But as they began selling their unused inventory, they realized they had an advantage.

Creating a Customer Base

Modern keys are complex, expensive items, and there is money to be made doing so.

“In the U.S., the majority of key sales are from repossessors,” Billie Jo said. “Last year there were over 1.7 million repossessions in the U.S.”

For years, most aftermarket keys have been cut by third-party locksmiths or auction houses.

But Billie Jo and her daughter are changing that.

“We’re now training repo companies how to cut and program their own keys so they can make money on them,” Billie Jo said. “In the past, they’ve just outsourced that profit to third-party locksmiths.”

Adding keys to a repo business can dramatically increase profitability, which is why Billie Jo and her daughter have found such a strong market.

“I can’t tell you how many people have told us that they’ve taken our training, learned how to cut keys, and they say it just changed their whole lives,” Billie Jo said.

Once a repo business adds mobile locksmithing to its skill set, it needs a source to acquire blank keys.

That’s where Royal Key Supply found its niche.

Building a Remote-First Company

When Billie Jo and her daughter launched Royal Key Supply, they decided that they would run much of the business using remote employees.

“I decided we were only going to require people to be in-person if they really needed to be here for their job,” Billie Jo said.

That decision provided flexibility, and it allowed Billie Jo to experiment with staffing models other than local, in-person employees, the model she had used with her previous businesses.

The Problem: Finding the Right Hiring Partner

From the start, Billie Jo began looking at options to hire internationally.

She explored the idea of hiring international workers directly, but quickly realized that becoming an employer in a foreign country was a tremendous amount of work.

She was also hesitant about working with an outsourcing agency, which she had experimented with during her time running a repo company.

“The company I worked with didn’t give me a great experience,” Billie Jo said. “They had a model where they assigned tasks to a pool of workers. You don’t get a dedicated person you can work with and grow with over time.”

That’s when she found Remote CoWorker.

The Experiment: Hiring the First Remote CoWorker VA

Billie Jo found Remote CoWorker through a Google search, then reached out for more information.

She connected with Hazel from the Remote CoWorker team, who helped define the requirements for the type of VA Billie Jo wanted as a first hire.

Within days, Hazel sent five resumes for Billie Jo to review.

Billie Jo selected two of the candidates, then interviewed them on a Zoom call alongside Hazel.

The following Monday, Royal Key Supply had its first VA.

“We were thinking small in the beginning,” Billie Jo said. “We were only looking at monotonous, busywork data entry type of tasks. But that was small-minded. We had no idea how much Remote CoWorker could do for us.”

Scaling Up: From One Remote CoWorker to Five

As Royal Key Supply grew, so did its need for remote employees.

Every time the company needed a new resource, Billie Jo reached out to Hazel to see if Remote CoWorker could help.

“We needed someone who knew the world of e-commerce,” Billie Jo said. “It’s this whole world of click conversions and SEO. I have a general knowledge, but a lot of it I’m still learning.”

Billie Jo didn’t know if Remote CoWorker could provide a skilled e-commerce manager, but she asked Hazel anyway.

“We thought of it like a shot in the dark,” she said. “We just emailed Hazel and asked ‘Hey, are you able to find someone who’s a marketing Google Ads expert? Or someone who can help with our SEO?’”

Hazel came through, finding Billie Jo an online e-commerce expert who now manages Royal Key Supply’s online presence.

Over two years, Hazel helped fill a variety of roles for Royal Key Supply.

The company now has a total of five virtual employees who now help with the website, marketing, social media, data entry, and data management.

“I’ve been very happy with our remote coworkers,” Billie Jo said. “We had one who managed all our Black Friday and Cyber Monday promotions. Another runs our numbers to make sure everything works, and then another is responsible for managing our QuickBooks.”

Billie Jo’s advice for other companies considering Remote CoWorker

At the end of our conversation with Billie Jo, we asked her what advice she would give to other business owners considering an outsourced employee.

Here’s what she told us:

1. They can do a lot more than you expect

When Billie Jo first began working with Remote CoWorker, she assumed she would only be outsourcing lower-level administrative tasks.

Today, she knows Remote CoWorker can help her find highly-skilled professionals in a variety of fields.

“They become like regular employees,” Billie Jo said. “They are people who are excited to be part of your team and who actually help you go to the next level.”

2. If you’re an entrepreneur, you don’t have to do everything yourself

Like many entrepreneurs, Billie Jo has a tendency to assume the burden of every operational area of the business. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

“I think every entrepreneur is guilty of trying to do it all sometimes,” Billie Jo said. “But there are only so many hours in a day,”

3. Outsourcing is a skill

Finally, Billie Jo shared that she now views outsourcing itself as a skill, one she will take with her no matter what she decides to do in the future.

“I think if I had it to do all over again, I would have used what I know now about hiring remote employees to help me run the repo business,” she said.

“That business was extraordinarily labor intensive. Having remote help would have been a game changer.”

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