Will staying in a small county and working on Amazon alone lead to a slow death? At the age of 32, should I leave my wife and children and go to Qingdao or Yiwu to develop on my own?

A small county town in Shandong, 18th tier, with 7 years of experience in operation. 32 years old this year, with two boys.

I started selling on Amazon in 2017 and started working on my own in 2021. I have always been in the boutique mode, and the four accounts on the US and European sites are all registered in the name of myself or my relatives.

Currently, we have rented a small office in the county town, and together with my three operators, we are responsible for product development and selection, shipping operations, after-sales management, tax refund declaration, etc.

In the first year of 2021, we made RMB 6.8 million, with a profit margin of 18% (including tax refund)
In 2022, the company made RMB 14 million, with a profit margin of 14% (including tax refund)
In 2023, the company made RMB 18 million, with a profit margin of 11% (including tax refund)
The plan for 2024 is very good, sales should be able to double, and it would be good if the profit margin can maintain 6. The above are all net profits.

The current situation is that the staff in the county is unstable. The operations are done by recruiting mothers with language skills and then training them myself. Maybe mothers have a lot of things to do, so the staffing issue has bothered me every year since I started working on my own.

The market is not good this year, and the staff is unstable, some are about to have children, and some are on sick leave. I can't say anything about these situations. I am easy-going and will not treat employees harshly, so all the work falls on me.

But maybe it's because I'm getting older now, and there are a lot of things going on at home, so I want to take this opportunity to seek some changes. I have a few ideas to ask you.
 

1. Should I leave my wife and children behind and go to Qingdao or Yiwu with my account to develop? If I go, I might have to spend half a year renting an office and hiring people. My wife is also very conflicted.
   

2. Is it a slow death if I continue to stay in the local area and do this? Because I have planned a lot of high-priced products in 2024, the factory is very supportive and has given me payment terms ranging from 4 months to half a year.
   

3. Should we directly find a medium-sized or large cross-border enterprise and integrate it? How to integrate is a problem. It should be a win-win situation, but I really don’t want to waste energy and time on people. We don’t have one locally, and the nearest ones are in Jinan or Qingdao.
   

4. Is there any other way out? Cooperation is also a direction, but I have done it with partners before, and my partners don’t understand this. To be honest, partnership hurts. I am a pure operations person. Management is not my strong point. I like to study products and data.
   

5. I sold it, but before it became successful, to be honest, it was not worth much and I felt unwilling to do so.
    
   

I majored in accounting. I started my business in 2021 with a loan of 600,000 yuan from my family. I don't have many products, just a dozen parent products, across the US and European sites. I am really grateful for the support of my suppliers in the past two years. The cash flow is still healthy at present, because this year I made two seasonal products that accounted for 900,000 yuan of inventory. It is really difficult to produce seasonal products this year.

My categories are pets and gardens. There are many platforms that I have opened, including Amazon, Walmart (I don’t have the energy to do it after opening it), Shopify (I don’t have the energy to do it after opening it), Temu (I don’t have the energy to do it after opening it), Xiyin (I don’t have the energy to do it after opening it)

Finally, I would like to thank everyone for their advice. Those who are older than me in the industry may have also gone through this stage, and those who are younger than me may encounter the same situation in the future.