Work At Home Success Story: Suzie Cyrenne, Homeoanimal.com

This week’s Work-At-Home Success story comes from Suzie Cyrenne of Homeoanimal.com.

Suzie is truly the heart and soul of our company. Her personality embodies everything we strive for at HomeoAnimal. From the moment you meet her, you’ll realize that she is kind, caring, warm and genuine. She loves animals as much as she loves people – and that’s saying a lot! Suzie’s first project with HomeoAnimal was her own idea and creation: A guide to help anyone navigate through the animal adoption process. Homeoanimal now sells their remedies in over 50 countries.

Suzie is truly the heart and soul of our company. Her personality embodies everything we strive for at HomeoAnimal. From the moment you meet her, you’ll realize that she is kind, caring, warm and genuine. She loves animals as much as she loves people – and that’s saying a lot! Suzie’s first project with HomeoAnimal was her own idea and creation: A guide to help anyone navigate through the animal adoption process. Homeoanimal now sells their remedies in over 50 countries.

1) How did you get started working from home?

I have worked in the dental field for years. Although this field was a passion for me during my studies, I found that once my studies had finished, in the work place, reality was very different from my expectations.

I got married in 2011 and since my husband had a lot of e-commerce experience, the desire to build my own online store and work from home became so strong that I decided to take the leap.

2) How did you choose the work-at-home career you do?

With my husband’s e-commerce experience, I found the idea of having my own online store very appealing. We wanted to build a business that would allow us to work anywhere in the world, and the business model we chose allows us to do just that.

Also, my mother-in-law is a homeopath, acupuncturist and reflexologist, who started an online store for homeopathic remedies for animals, to french speaking clients only, several years ago. Her store was working very well and clients were very satisfied with the products. I then decided to open my store offering those homeopathc remedies for animals to English speaking clients.

3) How did you get started (basic initial steps)?

I started by finding the platform I wanted for my online store. We had initially chosen Woocommerce. We then worked on the webdesign, integrating the remedies and opened in June of 2014.

And so, for 3 months, despite the hundreds of dollars spent in Adwords, NO SALES.

We then decided to ‘remake’ the store, find a new design, product pictures and even re-writing all the descriptions, to finally re-open our English version in September of 2014.

4) How did you get your first client or customer or job?

Since I had already had a previous online store that did not succeed before Homeoanimal, getting no sales during the first 3 months, I was afraid another failure was unfolding. But, I decided to pull up my sleeves, re-work the site and re-open everything.

Actually, with the 2nd version we made of our online store, we had our first sale that same day 🙂 We placed our remedies on a Pinterest board and the rest of the work was done at that moment.We were so thrilled!! At last we were seeing our project was going to succeed.

To help us in the process, we hired ‘users’ to test our website (VERY useful and practical) with usertesting.com. People who then visited our website helped us optimize it in order to make our first sale.

5) How do you market your business?

Our company values are HEALTH, CARE , INTEGRITY and QUALITY.

Obviously, HEALTH is our primary and most important value since we sell homeopathic remedies for animals.

We chose the term CARE, not only because each pet parent takes good care of their pets with our remedies, but also because we ensure each person that contacts us feels special. This way, by word of mouth a large part of our publicity is done for us.

INTEGRITY is also very important because it pushes us to make sure we follow through on every promise we make.

We sell exclusively online and for our marketing, we use a lot of adwords and Facebook publicity. We will be trying 2 other promising sectors in the near future. We will be able to talk about their success in another interview 😉

QUALITY: Our remedies are PREMIUM GRADE. What is a premium grade remedy? If your head hurts, or your cough won’t go away and you go to the pharmacy to buy a product of modern medicine, you have 2 choices: The remedy on the shelves that is fine, but never as good as what the pharmacist has behind the counter.

Our remedies can be compared to the higher quality found behind the counter at the pharmacy. We can often find homeopathic remedies on store shelves in pellet form. This is fine, yet once it is absorbed and a portion of the homeopathic solution that has been ‘sprayed’ on the pellet is digested, the remedy is absorbed slower than the original liquid solution we offer to our clients. Also, as in modern medicine, it is not all homeopathic remedies that can be sold to the public.

Because we have a certified and experienced homeopath and that we deal with the best laboratories, we can offer homeopathic remedies that are not available on store shelves. This is also one of the reasons we only sell online and not in stores.

We can offer better quality and better help to animals around the world.

6) What does your usual day look like?

Personally, I am not a morning person, but still I make sure to start my work day by 8 am to answer customer questions or get ahead in administrative duties. Since I work in conjunction with Suzanne, who is in charge of customer service, I can make sure each client has been well answered, because our clients LOVE Suzanne.

This way I have the possibility to better work on every little aspect that will give a better experience to the client, that it be shipping, creating new remedies or the marketing aspect which I do with my husband Matt.

It also happens VERY often that I work in the evening, not because I have to but because I’m truly passionate about my work. For a few weeks now I have had the privilege of working with Carolyn Rodz, an exceptional woman who has accomplished so many great things, and the work we are doing together literally keeps me up at night. I’m so excited to continue my work the next day.

I also try to buy out my time by bringing documents with me when I leave the office, I mean I still have to go grocery shopping!! We waste so much time waiting here and there which can be frustrating, so I focus my thoughts on my work and get much more done this way 🙂

7) What do you know now that you wish you knew when you started?

As I’ve mentioned before in the questionnaire, we had created a previous online store before Homeoanimal that did not work out. This experience taught me a lot! But here is a more precise list of things I wish I knew before:

1) I would very much have liked to have a better knowledge of what it takes to start an online company, especially the importance of knowing the market and what makes us different from others.

2) My knowledge never being enough, I would have liked to find out about thrive15.com way before. This website is SO important for me because I learn the entrepreneurial aspect much better. People who have succeeded and explain different aspects of a company. For example, a few weeks ago, I followed a training given by the leaders of Disney!!

3) Working with my strengths and letting others work with their own strengths. Let’s say at the beginning I wanted to do everything myself: Marketing, web design, managing the server hosting our website… But now, I try and find the strengths of each person I wish to work with, or of each company I look into. This way I can delegate tasks according to their specific talents. Trying to do everything alone doesn’t work. Trust me!

Suzanne is one of the best customer service agents I have come across. Clients often write us to thank us for her excellent work, which is one of the reasons she has joined our customer service team. Matt, my husband, is passionate about marketing at every level, he is therefore in charge of marketing as well as web design.

Most importantly: Our Homeopath! Denyse is THE best person to create the different remedies. Her experience in homeopathy as well as her long years of acupuncture and chinese medicine training, combined with her expertise in reflexology make her THE best person for the job. For this reason we count Ambassadors, Doctors, Veterinarians and even Olympic athletes amongst our clients who which to treat their pets naturally and effectively.

4) Shopify: Yes, I would have liked to know about Shopify before now. Why? On WooCommerce, despite several nice possibilities, we had a lot of maintenance to do, as well as hosting problems which slowed us down a lot. Time spent fixing problems stopped us from moving forward with Homeoanimal. Since our move to Shopify, not only do we now have peace of mind, but our website is also more user friendly.

8) What advice would you give someone who wants to work from home?

People who say: “How can I work from home? I will never be disciplined enough to make it work!”

My answer to them is: “I don’t work, I have fun!” And in my case, I can never have enough fun!

So my advice would be that each person choose a field they are passionate about, also making sure they can build their company to have the lifestyle they want. It is very possible to have an online store with a full inventory to manage and therefore must always stay close to home. However, we wanted the liberty of working from anywhere in the world, and we built our business to allow us to do just that. This aspect is even more motivating for us because we not only build a company or a job, but we successfully build the life we want in the future. THAT’S motivating!