Welcome back to another episode of the Resellers Mindset Podcast.
My name is Mike, also known as the used book guy on YouTube,
along with my friend and fellow full-time reseller, Johnny B.
We help people start and grow their reselling businesses
from the ground up.
We also have a weekly Zoom call and private Discord
for all YouTube members.
Head on over to youtube.com backslash used book guy
to join the channel and gain access
to the full-length podcast, Zoom call, and private Discord today.
Let's get into this week's episode.
What is up, everybody?
Welcome to another episode of Resellers Mindset Podcast,
Mike alongside Johnny.
And we figured you guys are tired of just hearing both of us.
So we have a special guest on here, the number one
used CD seller in Australia, Tom.
Welcome to the podcast.
How's it going down there on the other side of the world?
Good, good.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah, it's good.
We're busy.
It's unusually cold for summer here at the minute.
And yeah, that's the story.
I'm curious.
I mean, you've risen from you weren't even on eBay
to being number one.
The insight of you starting reselling,
and what does reselling look like in Australia?
Because over here, it's almost a secondary thought people have.
Like if I tell a family or friend member, like, hey,
I resell, it's almost like, eh, so you almost
get a condescending, snark look.
I'm curious if it's different down there.
And just give me a little bit of insight
of how you got into reselling.
Yeah, no, look, it's the same here for us,
especially if you say to people that you still
predominantly use music CDs full time.
They just look at you and they're confused.
But the way I got into it was when I was 15 in 1998,
I went to a music shop in Sydney, which is a couple hours
from where I live.
Bought some stock really cheap, took it back to my hometown,
and then sold it on consignment through a music store there.
Made a tidy profit, realized there
was a bit of a future in this.
And that was how I got started.
And then it snowballed from that.
Fast forward 25 years, and I've got two full time staff,
one pine time staff, about 11 warehouses,
130,000 active listings on eBay, and more death
bowl than you can poke a stick at.
So it's turned into a quite large scale operation.
That is insane.
So you started with music and stayed with music the whole time.
You never got distracted and decided, hey,
I want to try clothing or shoes or electronics.
You just said, I'm the music guy beginning to end.
Actually, it's funny.
What we started with, what I started with,
was some graffiti magazines.
And the main interest there was I
was a collector of these magazines,
and I wanted to buy more, but they were quite expensive.
And being 15, I didn't have much money.
So I used to buy in bulk, kept a few myself,
and then on sell the rest.
And so originally, we were known as an art supply store.
And we sold all sorts of art supply stuff.
And then we changed and tried a bunch of different things.
One of the main reasons we got into CDs
was because we were selling boxes of paint.
And the same amount of space a box of, say, 12 cans of paint
would take up would equal about 80 CDs.
And for each CD, the same amount of profit margin
we're getting off each CD, we were getting off
the 12 cans of paint.
So we got into CDs pretty early on mainly
because of storage issues.
From a logistics point of view, they're good to store.
You can store a lot of them in a very small space.
And they're fairly lightweight and easy to deal with.
So we got into CDs, vinyl records, DVDs.
The main emphasis, and if I could only
pick one thing to deal in, it would just be CDs.
But in buying CDs, we also would get offered
a truckload of books.
So we'd take the truckload of books,
mainly to have a good relationship with our suppliers
so we could open the door to more future wholesale CD lots.
And then we ran into this problem with, well,
what do we do with all these books?
So at the time, I knew a book reseller, Mel, back
from Burnout.
And I said to her, look, we've got a truckload of books.
Are you interested in buying them?
She came out and saw them and then
started referring to me as her book guy.
Never actually bought any books from me.
And then in the end, we're like, well, what are we going to do?
We're going to have to start selling books.
So we started selling books.
She's the number three used book seller in the country,
and we're number four.
And she's also my girlfriend now.
So it's interesting the way it's all snowballed.
But we'll buy and sell anything.
Our main emphasis is on media, CDs, DVDs, books, records,
that sort of thing.
But at the same time, if I get offered
a truckload of ambulance stretchers or pallet racking
or forklifts, if there's money to be made,
we'll most certainly buy and sell and deal in them.
So we're good.
That's a true reseller right there.
Tractor trailer full of stretchers.
He's like, if the price is right, back at it.
I mean, you said you have 11 warehouses,
so the space is no big deal.
You just take it over there and drop it off.
Go ahead, Johnny, take it away.
So how long since you started at 15
did you hire your first staff member?
Like how soon did you start that whole employee to warehouse
or were you working out of your home
for like the first year or two?
Yeah, so I was working out of my parents' place
for a fair while.
And I started living with my parents for a fair while
because I had a lot of space there and it was free.
And I liked my mom's cooking.
And I moved out and I moved about an hour away.
And then I was still operating out of my house.
And then I would have been, I'd say probably about,
that's a really good question, probably about 33.
So I would have been into it for about 18 years
before I got my first staff member.
And what I originally did was I had
say stay at home moms or stay at home grandmas.
And what I'd do is I'd take stock to them
and they'd take the photos.
So they then supply me the photos and I'd upload them.
So I started off by doing that.
Then I started off, I went one step further
and gave them access to the eBay account
and got them to upload the photos.
And I went one step further than that,
got them to actually do the listings.
And then what I was doing was I was paying them per month
and what I was doing was I was paying them per listing.
So all they were doing is putting them up
as quickly as they could.
The quality control was terrible, endless mistakes.
And it was just, it was, the whole thing was horrible.
And then what I did was I went through probably
about five people like that,
that were good for a little while
and then they just got lazy and were no good.
When I got my first full-time employee
and she was fantastic.
And she was with me for about three years.
And during that time, her son came to work for me
and he's now my right-hand man.
And he's been so valuable to the organization.
I sent him on a all expenses trip to Japan recently
to get trained up in another area of the business.
But thinking back, I mean, the ratio of getting good stuff
to bad stuff would be 20 to one.
We would have gone through 20 bad stuff
to find one good one.
Just, and it was a case of work ethic and being trustworthy
and just being competent and smart at the job.
You've got to be able to think for yourself.
It's not just data entry, this job.
No, absolutely.
I mean, I went through, I think I was fortunate
to only go through six people
before I found my one decent employee
and only employee at this present time.
So 11 warehouses, is the thought process,
11 is gonna be it or we wait, we fill,
how do you do the fill up before you decide
to build another warehouse?
Or do you try to sell off to keep the amount of warehouses
you have the same or is it always expand and grow,
expand and grow?
Well, it's always expanded, bro.
So what we've got is we're at this one complex
and we are the biggest tenant.
There's probably about 30 different people
that rent space at this complex.
And we rent at least a quarter of it.
And literally it started off as sort of a four car garage
and then it went to a essentially a 20 car garage
and then it just snowballed from there.
But every single bit of space we've got
is absolutely chock-a-block full at the minute.
And it's just, we're just absolutely inundated with stock.
And the problem is we get,
we bought a whole bunch of brand new sealed DVDs
from the supplier.
It was equivalent to five 18 wheeler truckloads.
And the problem with it is a lot of it was good
and a lot of it was sellable.
But when you've got 300 copies of the same title,
it's gonna take a long time to sell them,
especially with the way the DVD market's gone.
So we've got a lot of stock that is listed,
but we've got 30 copies of it in a pick box.
And then we've got a pallet of it
somewhere else in another warehouse.
On top of that, we've got a bunch of death pile stuff
that we haven't even looked at.
We've got boxes from four years ago
we haven't even opened yet.
And it's just a case of,
sometimes you'll spend five minutes
on each individual item.
And you need that time to go through
and check everything and do it correctly.
And it's just a slow process.
But what we do now is any new stock we have that comes in,
we deal with that first,
and then we try and tackle as much of the death pile
as we can, but it's certainly a process.
I already know the answer to this,
but I'm gonna ask it anyway,
because we have a fairly large Amazon audience.
Can you tell us how Amazon works in Australia?
And if it's a big thing over there, is it in the US?
I think you guys are really lucky in the US
because you've got multiple different ways
of selling items.
In Australia, the monopoly is with eBay.
There are some secondhand items on Amazon here.
I haven't really looked into it.
And I don't know too many people that are successful
with selling secondhand items on Amazon in Australia.
I know the new market on there is pretty competitive.
And I know to the point where people are,
there's one eBay store I know
that's got about 8,000 listings on eBay.
And literally all they've done is they've gone to Amazon
and they've taken all the information,
the photos and the description,
and they've put it on eBay at I think 25 or 30% higher price
and they just drop shipping straight from Amazon.
So the prices on Amazon are competitive for the new stuff.
The second hand, I've heard stories
where people have got 30,000 items listed
and they sell maybe one a day.
So it's not, I don't think it's,
it's certainly not where it should be.
No, not at all.
Not with the name brand Amazon.
I'm curious, 130,000-ish listings on eBay.
You said, you like quality listings.
Are you using like a listing software
or are you just knocking these out?
You're taking your own photos, everything like that.
Because I can't even begin to imagine that many listings
if you're taking photos yourself.
Yeah, you have employees, but that's still a lot.
I'm curious, like the process of getting to that point
with listings and what your listings look like,
maybe compared to other people that just,
maybe use a listing software and a stock photo,
or do you use stock photos?
What we originally did was we wanted to set ourselves
out from the crowd and we didn't want to use stock photos.
So what we did was for every item that came in,
we'd individually take photos of it.
So for a CD, it'd be the front cover,
the label side of the disc, and then the back cover,
and then get it listed up for sale.
Our item descriptions are basically non-existent.
It's just a copied and pasted,
essentially terms and conditions.
This is what we'll do, this is what we won't do.
So the actual descriptions don't really come into it.
Our selling point really is the photos.
Our photos generally are pretty good.
We might have 30 different listings for the same release,
but you might have a different sticker,
the condition might be slightly different,
and we've got an individual listing for it.
If we condensed all our listings,
I think we'd have a lot less.
And we are condensing a little bit
on the proviso, everything matches 100%,
and you end up with a listing where secondhand item,
but it's almost like a replenishable item,
because you've got sort of stock photo,
it's an actual photo, but each item is secondhand,
but it's got to match that photo perfectly,
it's got to match that condition perfectly.
And then we'll have listings where we've got one in stock
and we've sold 20 copies of it.
We like the idea of going to that model,
and it's sort of the same as a lot of the bigger players
that they've sold 300, they've got one in stock,
but they've got a stock image,
they've only got the one photo you can't really see
or get a good feeling for what's going on.
Obviously we differentiate between the slightest difference.
So with a CD, you might have a British version of a CD
that might be worth $20,
then you might have the Australian version,
which is exactly the same,
the only difference is it was made in Australia
and it says it was made in Australia,
and there might be a $500 price difference.
So obviously we want to differentiate between those two.
With our listings, I mean, I think our oldest listings
are probably seven and eight years old,
and that stuff that as we've evolved
and we've had different staff list them
and different price points and different
and different price points and different quality metrics,
I think our listing and our price points
and everything is getting a lot better.
And if we went back and looked at a lot of these old listings,
a lot of them just need to be deleted.
And that's something we're working on.
The goal for this year is to get our listings up to 250,000
to fill a lot of our,
essentially our boxes we pick from on shelving,
like designated shelves,
we've already got set up.
So we want to fill that up
and get rid of as much death pile as possible.
Then we want to go back and pick our first box of CDs,
our first box of books, our first box of DVDs,
and go back through them and go, right, well,
do we need to just change the title?
Do we need to lower the price?
Do we need just to liquidate this all together?
What do we need to do with these listings?
Because our sell through rate is terrible.
It's less than 3%.
And we'd love to have a much better sell through rate,
but it's one of these things where with books, for example,
we had no expertise about books,
had no idea what we were doing,
didn't know what would sell, didn't know what wouldn't sell.
So instead of sort of looking at the market
and researching it,
we just started listing everything we had.
I think it's a hard way to learn what'll sell and what won't,
but at the same time, it gives you a good in-depth picture
as to what's worth listing and what's not worth listing.
So yeah, so we've got a fair bit of work to do,
go back and essentially do a stock take
and work out what's what with all these old listings.
I'm curious here,
because I know a lot of people that kind of have jumped
into CDs and DVDs, we get to a point
where we buy a resurfacer to clean up scratch disc.
Now I can't even get in a fathom if I had to clean
as many discs that you probably have to deal with.
Is this something where you have a resurfacer?
Do you resurface disc or do you just eye test it,
maybe test it into some kind of software and throw it out?
Like what's your process for scratched CDs and DVDs?
I'm personally really passionate about taking items
that otherwise might get discarded, might go to landfill
and getting them to a point where someone
will be happy to own it and they want to own it.
And then our job is to get that item to that person.
So fairly early on in the piece,
I went in and I bought resurfacing machines.
And I started with the JFJ, the American JFJ machine.
And that was fairly messy and time consuming
and somewhat expensive to use.
And then what I did was I looked around
and I hunted about for a long time and read reviews
and looked at different machines.
And we ended up going with the Elm Eco Pro 2 machine.
And so what we did then was,
well, what we do is we look for holes in our business
and we try and plug those.
So an example is, okay, we know there's demand
for a certain CD, we seek to get that and to unsell it.
With the cleaning machines,
because the machines are expensive
and the supplies are expensive,
what we did was we went 10 steps further
and we became a Elm distributor in Australia.
And that's why me and my girlfriend
and my right-hand man went over to Japan.
So we're able to get the machines cheaper.
We're able to get the supplies cheaper.
Because we've got our finger on the pulse
and we use the machines daily,
we're a good agent to sell these machines to other people.
And the interesting thing is,
we're able to see who our competition is.
We're able to see what sort of volume
our competitors are doing.
But at the same time,
we're able to give them our knowledge
with using the machines and pass that on.
So it's quite beneficial to us to be in this position
where we are a distributor,
we're able to get the best wholesale prices,
we're able to have a really good,
strong relationship with Elm in Japan.
And it's been quite beneficial.
We've only brought in a small amount of supplies
and spare parts of machines so far,
but we've negotiated to get 150 of the Eco Pro 2 machines.
And I think in America last year,
they only sold 130 or 170 of those machines
brand new in America.
So it's not a huge market for them,
but the people that know and the people that need them,
it's what they're after.
But I think if you're selling CDs, DVDs,
any kind of disc media games as well,
I think you have to have these machines.
Otherwise, fingerprints are time consuming to get off,
light scratches can be removed,
disc can be brought up like brand new,
even deep scratches on some stuff,
the disc can be brought back to life.
And I think it's really beneficial to have those machines,
even if you don't go with an Elm machine,
if you go with one of the competitors.
But I think it's just up to the individual
to have a look around and see what's available.
But at the minute we've got three Eco Pro 2s,
we've got one Eco Master.
So the Eco Master, you light up with 50 discs at a time,
and that does different levels of sanding,
and that really takes really deep scratches out.
Whereas Eco Pro 2 machines,
they just work on heat friction
and basically just buffs out light scratches.
But we wanna expand the amount of machines
we've got for ourselves,
because what we do is one day handling.
And so if we've got 50 discs we need to clean,
they've got deep scratches, that could take seven hours.
So we need to get our orders packed
and out the door as quickly as possible.
So that's why you need multiple machines, I feel anyway.
That's, I was not expecting that answer at all.
That's like next level business thinking here,
becoming a wholesaler for them.
I mean, go ahead, Johnny, take it away.
So do you do front-low cleaning
or do you clean as they sell?
Or both?
We do a little bit of both, it depends what it is.
So what we started doing is,
the business model we want to go to is this.
We cast a really wide net, we buy as much as possible.
We then go and cherry pick what we want.
We might take top 10%.
And then what we wanna do is we wanna wholesale the rest.
As long as it's the decent titles in decent condition,
we don't wanna alienate anyone.
So we wanna put those in bulk lots and sell them out.
So then what we're doing is we're selling planes,
highly collectible, expensive items individually.
Then we're selling lots.
So it might be where you've got a music series
where they've done volume one to volume 20.
We might lot that together and sell volume one to 20.
And we wanna sell that again and again and again.
And then what we wanna do is sell replenishables.
So as far as the cleaning machines and the supplies go.
And it's a three-pronged effect.
So the same amount of work for us goes into selling one CD
for a 50 cent profit margin or a $50 profit margin.
We've paid our dues.
We've dealt with enough of the cheap,
cheaper, lower profit margin stuff.
We know there are people crying after that stuff.
So we might as well wholesale that to them
and also sell them a cleaning machine and the supplies
and be essentially a one-stop shop for our competitors.
At the same time, we're pulling out exactly what we want
in the genres we know about,
in the collections and sets we want.
And just to me, it just makes more sense to go that route.
I don't think there's much of a future
in really low profit margins on huge volume,
unless you've got a huge amount of staff,
a huge amount of space, a whole bunch of systems
and setups like these guys in America
that use these Nito sort machines,
where they're able to process 3000 books an hour.
We're not set up like that.
We're still doing a lot of stuff manually at this point.
So yeah.
So let's talk about shipping.
How long does it, on a typical day, does it take you?
There's four plus you makes five, right?
No, there's four in total.
There's four in total.
Now is everybody all hands on deck during shipping
or is it like one guy's job to do that
for the majority of their shift?
No, so it's all hands on deck.
And what we wanna do,
many hands make light work.
And what it is is if we can get the pick in the pack done
as quickly and efficiently as possible
and get that stuff to the post office,
at that point, a whole bunch of stress is gone
and we can concentrate on what we need to concentrate on.
So what we do is we've got one person that goes
and picks all the DVDs from the DVD room.
And that's the same person that lists the majority of them.
So they know the DVDs quite well.
So that speeds up and makes that process easier.
So he starts at seven o'clock in the morning.
The next loss, the two next guys start at 7.30
in the morning and generally one of them will pick CDs
and the other one will start printing out labels.
The process we use to print labels,
it takes about 10 minutes a day to muck around
with the software we use to print the labels.
So he does that whilst one guy's picking CDs.
I generally genuinely,
I also help picking CDs.
And then what I do is I jump on the machines
and while the CDs are still getting picked by two people
and the DVDs are still getting picked.
The reason for that is, you know,
it takes a bit of time to run the disk through the machines
and you've got to look at each one, double check everything
and make sure everything's good to go.
You've got to pick which method it's getting posted.
So you've got me on the machines and designating
how things are gonna get dispatched.
Then we've got one person packing,
then we've got one person entering tracking numbers
and ticking things off.
And generally we have another person
that's still picking a few orders.
So we pick in three lots.
We've got the DVDs get started on first,
the CDs normally two people do.
And then we normally have probably 20% of our orders of books
and we have one person that goes and picks all the books
in the book room.
So how long does this whole process take on a daily basis?
So on a Monday morning,
normally we'll have about 250, 300 orders going out.
We're normally done in about four or five hours.
That's not bad at all.
Yeah.
Yeah, so look, it is fairly quick,
but I know guys that they clean as they list everything.
So we want to get to that point,
but we wanna take to another step.
What we wanna do is check everything meticulously,
clean it, have it 100% ready to go
and then run it through a sealing machine and reseal it.
And what we wanna do is we wanna sell it as secondhand,
but sealed.
So we're not selling it as brand new.
It is a secondhand order.
The reason we wanna seal it is so we know 100%
it's been checked.
We don't have to open up and double check it.
Because that's time consuming.
And it helps protect it, keeps dust off it
and all that sort of thing.
So we wanna get to that point
where we know what we're dealing with so well.
We know 100% this will sell at this price point.
So we can be confident we can run it through the machine,
which is expensive and then seal it
and then put it in a box.
Because when you pick and pack a brand new sealed item
or a secondhand sealed item,
it's so much quicker and easier.
You can get the pick and pack done a lot quicker
because you don't have to double check everything.
You don't have to change a case.
You don't have to double check artwork.
You don't have to come across,
oh, this booklet is actually stuck together.
We need to find a replacement.
Or we got to communicate with the buyer to say,
this is damaged.
What do you wanna do?
Do you wanna refund?
Do you want something else?
What do you wanna do?
So, yeah.
So I got a fun question.
You may or may not know the answer to this multipartner.
The answer to this multipart question.
Do you know what your most expensive CD, book and DVD were
and what the amounts were?
The most expensive CD we ever sold was
it was around the $1,400 mark.
And when that sold in the 90 days on the side,
there were two other copies of that that sold.
And I went for about $1,500 and $1,600
for that individual CD.
Now it almost brought tears to my eyes
because the other day I saw someone that sold
not only that CD, but a whole bunch of other CDs
by the same person from the same era for about $350.
That would be a dream score.
The current market on that particular CD has dropped a bit.
The cheapest I've seen it individually sell for
is about $500.
It does fluctuate a little bit.
And that was Richard Clapton's, Prussian Blue.
And that's an Aussie rock singer from the 70s.
So that's certainly a good one.
Apart from that, there was a CD single we had once,
which was from a, it was from a Seag of Mega World in Sydney.
So it's sort of like a smaller version of, I suppose,
Disneyland or something like that, like a theme park.
And it was a single.
And it was only four or five tracks
and we couldn't find it anywhere.
So I said to my staff member, I said,
look, put it up for $500.
We don't know what it's worth.
I think that ended up selling for about $400.
And I think since then we've sold about five copies.
And each time we've sold,
the price has gone up a little bit.
And it's just highly collectible because it ticks boxes.
It's rare and it's Seager.
And it's just, it's something that was sought after
by collectors.
As far as DVDs go,
there's a few that come to mind.
Recently box sets that were for sale for about $500
in retail shops here in Australia three years ago.
We sold a couple of those for about 1,100.
There's been a couple of sets, full sets of DVDs
we've sold for 2,500.
There's certain types of shows we're looking for.
And that's more so TV series
and sort of older Australian classic TV series
that we're looking for.
Sometimes it'll be an oddball thing
like some weird horror movie from America
or something like that, that commands,
all right, this is going for $300,
but you don't come across those every day.
What we are finding is there's a lot of TV series
like an example is there's a show called Grand Designs,
which is about architecture.
And individually, some of those sell for a decent price,
but a lot of them are selling for sort of 10 and $20.
But if you put them in a set,
you can suddenly sell it for $280.
Just because there's a few hard to find ones
in amongst there.
So what we're doing is we're jumping on eBay
and looking around and actually buying quite a few
of these individually in sets,
getting them back, doing quality control on them,
putting them into a set,
making sure everything's 100%
and then selling it at a premium price.
And I think there's actually a bit of a future
with DVDs in particular in doing that.
Instead of trying to sell them individually
is locking them together in a logical set.
As far as the most expensive book,
we had, there's some military books we had,
Jane, they're called Jane's, Jane's Books.
And they're big, thick, heavy,
almost like a military catalog
of all the military toys you can get.
And a whole bunch of those,
we just automatically listed about a thousand dollars each.
And we were getting offers for $300 each for a few of them.
And we sold three in one go to one guy,
I think in Canada or in the States for about a thousand bucks.
So they've been good.
But I mean, the most expensive books I've heard of selling,
before we were selling books,
my dad had a neighbor across the road from his house
and the husband had died.
And the wife was left with all these books
that she didn't know what to do with.
And he was some sort of professor at a university
and they were pretty specialized books.
So anyway, he had a garage full of these books
because he likes books and didn't want to throw them out.
He asked me if I wanted them and I said no.
And I taught him how to sell them on eBay
and he sold three of them for $500 each.
And he also had, that was after he had a university
come look at the collection, take a whole bunch of them.
So I hate to think what sort of value was there.
But I'm glad I was able to teach my father
how to use eBay and sell books
for more than I can sell books for.
Never happened, that event never happened.
There you go.
I'm curious.
But I remember when I got into books,
my father actually said to me,
don't get into books, there's no money.
And we turned around and said,
at one point I was sending him screenshots
every time we sold a book over $100.
We're into this for $4, we just sold for 100.
It sold within a week.
There's no money in books.
And he certainly had to eat his words.
But just look, it's pretty assuring
there are a lot of people out there
that are still after books.
And they're prepared to pay the money for those good books.
And it's fantastic.
The only other expensive thing I could think of was,
I had one record we sold for $1,100.
And that was a David Bowie record.
Was that before or after he died?
That would have been,
that is a good question.
I don't remember, I don't know.
I remember it was a Hunky Dory album.
And it was a special one for some reason.
Yeah, I remember that went for 1,100,
which was pretty good for us at the time.
All right, I got a few rapid fire, silly questions here.
First off, Grand Designs is a good show.
I watch this from time to time.
People make these super efficient, crazy houses
that they put a lot of money into.
So yeah, it's a good show, definitely worth watching.
Is Taylor Swift a big thing down there?
Yeah.
Okay, so Taylor Swift sells anywhere in the world.
That's good to know pretty much.
We got the US, Australia crossed off the list.
So when it comes to music,
is there a media mail equivalent?
In the US, we kind of get a cheaper shipping rate
for media mail, which is education, materials, CDs, DVDs.
Is there something down in Australia
that it's cheaper than your normal postal rate?
Not really.
So the way our postage works,
realistically, it's just based on weight.
And so for us to send a CD that's under 125 grams,
pretty much anywhere in the country,
it costs us about $2.40, super, super cheap.
When you think about how vast the country is,
how spread out it is,
where it takes four days to drive
from one side of the country to the other,
it's a cheap ride.
That's untracked.
If you want to send a track,
the price jumps up to about $5.
If you want to send it in a sort of thicker padded mailer,
it costs, it sort of starts about $8 or $9
and goes up from there.
But our postage here realistically is fairly cheap
within Australia.
Now, I guess this is a good question.
Do you know how much of your business
is made up of international orders?
Because for ours, it's very small in comparison,
but yours might be much larger.
Before COVID, it was 23%.
It was much larger, okay.
Yeah, so right now, I think it's,
it's slowed down a little bit,
mainly because we put our prices up,
because when COVID came about,
all of a sudden we had all these crazy emergency surcharges
and all sorts of things and all sorts of problems.
And we charge a blanket amount.
We'll charge $33, that's our starting price
for anything anywhere in the world.
And sometimes it might only cost $8 to send it,
sometimes it might cost $40 to send it.
But we like to keep it simple.
And if people ask for a discount,
or if they wanna combine,
yes, certainly we'll muck around,
change things and lower the cost for them.
Sometimes we'll raise the cost,
depending on where it's going, what's happening.
But international from Australia
generally is quite expensive.
America's cheap for us to send from Australia to America,
that's cheap, and Canada.
Send to places like New Zealand
and some Asian countries, very cheap.
Then we get into say Europe, very expensive.
So for us to send a CD, just a normal CD to say Germany,
$23 just to post it there.
So we'll charge the 33 for that.
You take eBay fees out of that $33 taxes,
packing, handling, all that sort of stuff, all the costs.
You're not really making a profit off the postage.
Essentially it's just paying for itself.
So do you have any, or go ahead, Mike.
I'm curious here with the international shipping
and everything, you say you kind of bake,
it's kind of an average game for you.
Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.
Do you have certain shipping supplies?
Okay, for me, I swear by these little nine by six
padded mailers, and people yell at me all the time,
oh, don't put a disc in a padded mailer
because it might crack or whatever, but I still do it.
Do you have like a go-to, like, okay,
if somebody orders one CD,
it goes in this specific packing every single time.
Yeah, yeah, we sure do.
We've only got minimal packing supplies.
And what we do is we custom a lot of things.
But generally if it's one CD,
what we'll do is we'll put in a small padded mailer,
we'll fold it over, and then we'll put that
in another padded mailer.
So it's got that double protection.
And look, to be honest,
unless a lot of people are really kind of not telling us
when cases arrive cracked,
keeping in mind dual cases on CD is quite fragile,
it's pretty successful.
We got that idea from Music Magpie.
That's how we, when we bought a few items from them,
that's how they were sending them to us.
And it works for us.
But what we do is we've got,
the reason I've got one person that's packing items is
a lot of our items just go straight into a padded mailer
and it's quick and easy.
When it comes to an international order,
if it's something that's fragile or more expensive,
he's custom making boxes, he's cutting bits of cardboard,
he's wrapping stuff up with bubble wrap,
and certainly making it so it'll arrive hopefully in one piece.
You know, it doesn't always go to plan,
but you know, we've got pretty good success rates
and our feedback, comments, feedback,
comments a lot about how well items were packed.
I think we just bought a new machine yesterday that
essentially you put cardboard through
and it sort of cuts it up.
It sort of half shreds it into this honeycomb,
stretchy honeycomb sort of padding.
And the reason we got one of those was,
we've got a problem with,
we've got a lot of leftover cardboard.
We don't know what to do with it.
We don't want to throw it in the bin.
We do want to reuse it somehow.
But also we spent a lot of money on bubble wrap,
foam wrapping, packing peanuts,
and we want to reduce those overheads.
So we're reducing overheads,
getting rid of some of our waste
and recycling all at the same time.
And I think that's really beneficial.
But I think it certainly pays to
have a good packing station set up
with all your supplies ready to go within arm's reach.
So it doesn't matter what you have to pack,
everything's there at your fingertips.
And one of the good things about the way we pick orders,
when we print out a packing, a picking list,
it's books first and any really large, weird items,
whether it's a gun holster or a DVD set,
they all come from one room.
So they get packed first.
Then we've got CDs, then we've got DVDs.
So the way we pack all that first stuff generally
is the same, all the books,
same sort of packing materials, all the CDs,
again, same sort of packing process and materials.
And then again, with the same with the DVDs.
So we're able to batch process it.
So we're not jumping from one process
to another and back and forth.
And just by doing that,
you actually save a lot of time and energy.
So I'm gonna ask a question to the 3% of our audience
that it applies to you.
For those that wanting to pursue the warehouse life,
multiple employee life,
what are some lessons if they're still solo
and they're about to make that jump?
Do they go with the employee first?
They go with the warehouse,
huge sum of stock coming in.
What would be your advice on the direction they'd have
and any other tips and tricks you can involve
making the transition into large reseller?
I'd stop and I'll think about it long and hard first.
And I think,
you need to plan ahead
and you need to look at what can go wrong
and what the possibilities are,
both positive and negative.
And I think you need to,
one of the best things I ever did was
I actually drew blueprints
of how I want my warehouse laid out.
And that helped a lot
because I think one of the things you need to do
is you need to maximize your space you're in.
And I think you need to start off small
and then you need to start off small.
You need to start off small and then gradually expand.
And I think that's the best way of doing it.
I don't think you want to buy off
more than you can chew to start with.
And I think it seems like, okay, well,
if you get employees and you get a warehouse space
and everything's hunky-dory,
but then you don't have a good supply of new stock coming in,
that's a big problem.
The biggest problem we face now is getting good stock in.
So we built a website based on buying stock from people,
same as Declutter in America or Music Magpie in the UK.
The biggest problem I see is getting good stock.
We can always get bad stock,
but getting good stock that is sought after,
that's in good condition that people want
that we can buy at a low price and sell at a high price,
that's hard.
I think you need to think about all this sort of stuff.
And then, there's a whole bunch of things that came up.
Having employees is almost a full-time job in itself
because you've got to manage them.
They get sick, you've got to make sure they're comfortable,
they're happy at work.
You've got to look after their needs.
You've got to worry about that.
And you've got to worry about the business
and you've got to worry about your own needs.
But I think if you can start off small and build it up,
I think that's the best way.
So a lot of people say they started off
with getting employees to help pack orders
because they couldn't keep up with that.
In my case, it was, I got someone to help with photos
because I was sick of doing photos and we needed a lot of them.
And what I like to do is I like to train my guys up
so they've got a good overall understanding of the business
and they're able to jump in and do multiple things
in different areas.
And so if I'm not here, they can look after it.
But at the same time, if it's a job I can do
and I can show them how to do it and they can do it
and I don't need to do it,
there's other stuff in the business, smarter stuff,
where I need my experience, my insights, my expertise.
I need to focus on that.
So I'm not saying go after the fun stuff.
I'm saying go after the stuff
that you can't get your staff to replicate.
So I make pricing decisions.
I make strategic decisions.
And I think that's what you've got to sit back
and look at and go, okay,
I want a warehouse because I don't want to have
all this stock at my house anymore
because I feel like I never escape work.
Now I've got a light switch in my brain there.
When I'm at work, I'm at work.
When I'm at home, I'm at home.
Keeping in mind, I go home to sleep and shower
and do washing and then I'm back at work and that's it.
I essentially don't have a life.
I'm just work focused because I'm trying to build an empire.
And I think you've got to look at your motivation,
what you're trying to achieve, what you want.
And when you can answer those questions, your why,
I think that's when you can go, right, do I need staff?
Do I need a warehouse?
What's the justification for that?
Budget it and do a business plan.
Now no one likes doing business plans.
It's super unsexy, but it gives you a good understanding
of your financial position, where you're at,
where you want to go, you can plan it out.
The more meticulous you are with your planning,
the better off you are.
I mean, I know guys that jump in head first,
grab a warehouse, grab staff, hope for the best,
throw a bit of money at it.
And then they wonder why it's turned to crap
after 12 months.
Their staff steal from them, their vehicles break down,
the warehouse leaks, whatever it might be.
So I think you've got to think about all that.
I think you've got to think long and hard.
But before I got my first warehouse,
I certainly, I couldn't fit anything else at my house.
The whole thing was chock-a-block.
And it was bringing me down because you walk out
of your bedroom and you've got stock everywhere.
And it's just a horrible, horrible position to be in.
So I think if you want to escape that,
even starting off small and getting a small storage unit
is beneficial and then increasing it from there.
I got a few controversial, but hot topics for eBay sellers
that I see as a YouTuber out there all the time.
And it's always something going on with eBay.
First thing, is promoted listings necessary in Australia?
And do you do it?
I know this is like some people that I don't promote.
They're basically stealing my money.
Well, these are things we have to ask,
especially somebody like you where we can't find you
on the internet, you hide away.
So this is kind of your chance to voice your opinion
on the hot topics of eBay.
So the first one is promoted listings.
Is it required?
Do you do it?
Yeah.
So I resisted it for a very long time
and our visibility went down by 80%.
So what I think happened was they just kept turning
down our visibility and forced us to promote.
Bit of a conspiracy theory, but I don't really trust eBay.
And I think it's a smart business move
for them to do things like that.
I think that's what happened.
So as soon as we started promoting,
all of a sudden our visibility is back
and we started getting sales again.
So I think we got forced into it.
Currently we do promote, we promote all over the place,
essentially our selling fees average out at,
I think it's 20%, but I think it's goes as high as 23, 25%.
And what I sort of allow for is about,
our eBay selling fees are gonna be about 25%.
So it's hit us really hard, but without doing that,
we wouldn't have sales to sustain us.
So I think it's a necessary evil.
Yeah, I know a few people that don't do it
and that refuse to do it and they still get sales.
Great, that's great for them,
but they've only got a few hundred listings.
They don't have as many as we do.
We sell it quite a high price
and we're in a saturated market.
So I think it's a necessary evil definitely.
So the next one I have for you is,
I always hear a lot that eBay is like the website
doesn't work correctly or people feel like
they're not getting the sales
they should be getting on eBay.
I'm curious, do you throw like huge hissy fits basically
if eBay is not working one way or another?
Or is this something when you get to a certain level
in the business that it doesn't even,
you're not really worried about,
are you checking is eBay down.net
to see if eBay is actually working?
Do you even care about any of that stuff?
Are you just business as usual, day in, day out,
you don't care what's going on on the platform?
I've certainly got a love-hate relationship with eBay.
I do love it, but I also hate it with a passion.
I really, really do.
And the reason is I don't see them as being a innovate.
It's not a company that innovates anymore.
They replicate and they copy.
So an example is Amazon came into Australia,
eBay felt threatened by that.
So they started to compete with Amazon.
There is no competing with Amazon.
They're a logistics company.
The difference is if you want the weird, obscure,
hard to find, legitimately rare item,
eBay is the place to go.
If you want the brand new mass-produced Chinese junk,
Amazon is perfect for that.
Why eBay felt the need to compete with Amazon,
I don't know.
They should have stuck with what they were good at
and stopped with the,
they introduced a lot of Chinese sellers
on eBay in Australia.
And the problem that was people thought they were buying
from within Australia.
So they'd assumed that they'd get it within three days.
Little did they know it was getting dropped ship
from China and took three weeks to arrive.
So it's a bad customer experience and it put people off.
And that was detrimental to eBay in Australia.
We know there's a bunch of glitches on eBay.
We know there's an old clunky system.
We keep an eye on,
we know when there's a problem on eBay
because our sales drop a lot.
We know, okay, obviously,
Boxing Day, Christmas Day, Christmas Eve,
they're gonna be lower sales dates.
But apart from, you know, days like that,
if you, you know,
all your sales days are quite average
and then all of a sudden you get a huge drop.
You know, it's not a conspiracy theory to think
that there's something might be going on
with visibility or with a website or with a server
or whatever it may be.
So we're aware of that.
I don't really look into it too much
because it takes up time and takes up energy.
We just know sometimes it's gonna be really good
and just hum along.
And other times something's gonna happen
and things are gonna drop off.
However, it's in eBay's best interest
to keep the sales down.
So we're aware of that.
However, it's in eBay's best interest
to keep everything humming along nicely
and get those sales rolling through for us.
So we're confident that if something does go wrong,
they will fix it pretty quickly.
And the good thing about eBay
is it's such a ginormous organization.
You've got all these different arms,
this company all over the world
and they're all operating essentially 24 seven.
And so it might be midnight here and there's a glitch,
but you know, okay, the IT team that's in Israel
are probably working on it right now.
So they're pretty quick at rectifying those sort of issues.
We used to have issues with if someone opened up a case
like an item not received case
or item not as described case,
all of a sudden their sales would drop off for four days.
And that was not a coincidence.
They don't seem to do that anymore.
We offer 60 day returns.
We've got five open returns at the minute.
It's very easy for a seller to open a return.
It's harder for them to close it.
A lot of the time they don't know how
and that's eBay's fault.
They make it very easy for someone to open a case,
but hard to close.
And these are cases where someone wants to return it,
but then they never return it.
And the case just stays there open for a month.
There's not much you can do about it.
So that doesn't hurt our sales as much as what it used to.
So I think they've made some changes there.
But to be perfectly frank,
I look at holes in the market
and I try and find a solution and I work towards it.
And at the minute we've built two websites
and we're looking at building a competitor to eBay
at some point for the Australian market
and different to eBay with interesting used items,
hard to find, sort of like what eBay was 15 years ago.
But that's, you're talking about a million dollar project,
huge amounts of staff, huge project
that won't kick off for a while.
But the point is I look at eBay
and I see a lot of problems with it
and problems that a lot of problems
would be simple to overcome.
So I certainly, like I said,
I've got a lot of hate relationship with them,
but I think it could be improved.
And I think the problem is they're popping too much
and not being innovating enough.
So from when you started to where you are now,
do you think, two part question,
how many hours did you put in back then
versus how many you put in now?
And do you think you will need more or less hours
as time goes on?
When I first started,
I remember spending about three hours a day
hand addressing each package.
And so obviously as we've improved what we've done,
we've got software that helps us with certain things.
You know, label printers that speed up a lot of the processes.
So we're able to do a lot more with a lot less time
and a lot less effort with having better equipment
and better systems in place.
And I think that will continue.
I think I'll have to do a similar amount of hours,
but it will become a lot easier to do a lot more
because we'll have better systems, more staff,
et cetera, et cetera.
When I first started, I mean, I've been doing full-time hours
on eBay for more than 10 years,
but at the same time, I had a full-time job
up until about three years ago.
So I was working 12 hour shifts, an hour drive there,
an hour drive back, so 14 hours gone.
And I was coming back to a warehouse,
picking and packing orders by myself for three hours,
going home, getting five hours sleep,
and then doing it all over again.
And it was not sustainable.
And it probably cost me years of my life.
In the last three years, I've increased my hours
in the business, but I've also,
I'm trying to work smarter, not harder.
So at one point I was consistently doing
a hundred hours a week in work.
And I'll probably still do similar to that,
but what I do is I'll break it up a little bit
so I'll go and do a sourcing trip,
but I'll also combine it with a road trip,
and make a mini holiday out of it.
So I get to have a bit of fun
and do something I enjoy doing,
at the same time I'm doing a bit of work.
And I mean, look, that's what I enjoy doing.
So to me, that's where you're doing something you enjoy,
therefore it's not really work.
But obviously, being in the office, doing tax
or dealing with negative feedback or whatever it may be,
the boring stuff, the stuff you don't enjoy doing,
that's what I consider work.
So in my mind, my work-life balance, it's not perfect,
but I feel like it's okay because I'm doing stuff
I enjoy doing, and I wouldn't be doing it
unless I was passionate about it,
unless I enjoyed doing it.
But going forward, I certainly, there's other stuff
I wanna do in my life than just selling stuff
online, I wanna build, essentially I wanna build an empire,
give a whole bunch of people good jobs
and give people an outlet for getting rid of stuff
they don't want, and also a place where they can go
to buy items they're looking for
and give them good quality items at a fair price.
You are a man of the people.
So, yeah, this is, this just wants to help everybody.
So you kind of think about it,
you kind of talk about it a little bit here,
before I, sorry to interrupt you there, Johnny,
but you're kind of at this point where you're saying,
you don't wanna resell on eBay the rest of your life.
Do you have an exit plan and what's your thoughts?
Because personally myself, I say it all the time,
I can't lift heavy boxes of books when I'm 70 years old,
and I'll get all the comments saying I'm 70 years old
and I'm lifting heavy boxes of books,
but I feel like this is, if I put in the work now,
I might be able to get out of the grind and hustle sooner,
so like, what is your future plan?
Do you have like a, I'm sure you definitely do
because your business thinking is just next level
just from listening to you here.
So do you have like an exit plan when it comes to
where you're at today and how long, how far out,
and what do you think about resellers having a exit plan
to get out of reselling in the form of it being a business?
Because we enjoy hunting, right?
Hunting's fun, going thrifting's fun.
We're always gonna stop in a thrift store
probably the rest of our lives as resellers,
but as a business, what's your take on an exit plan
for yourself and reselling and in general?
I struggled with it a lot because the way I started out
through a long time, it was a hobby business for me,
and I did it because I was trying to build up
my own collection, and it's just sort of evolved
as I've evolved.
At this point, it's a pretty risky move
because pretty much all our eggs are in the one basket
with eBay.
There are a couple of backup plans if all of a sudden
we got kicked off eBay, what we could do
and how we could do it.
As far as an overall exit strategy, not exactly,
I'm looking at more of an expansion strategy
as opposed to an exit strategy,
and I'm constantly working on that.
So it's things like holes in the market
and filling those holes.
So right now, I'm yet to see anyone that has got a business
that is solely designed to support resellers.
So for someone in my position, I need stock, I need CDs,
I need replacement cases for CDs,
I need bubble mailers for CDs,
I need cleaning machines and supplies for CDs.
If there was a one-stop shop for me to go to,
and buy all that stuff, and I could just have
a weekly subscription with once a week,
a pallet of stock arrives to me,
oh, that solves some problems.
That makes it a lot quicker and a lot easier for me.
That's one thing I'm interested in doing
is building a one-stop shop for resellers.
So it's a lot easier said than done
because I'm a CD seller, DVD book, record seller,
you know, that's fine, you can buy that stuff wholesale
and we could sell that wholesale.
But what about all these other resellers
that sell different niches, you know,
how can you help them out?
So I'm looking at, all right, can we have a business where
we sell single-hand CDs, we sell the cleaning machines,
we sell all these other supplies direct to other resellers,
and they can deal with that lower profit margin stuff
and the more volume market.
So for a long time, we weren't selling anything
that was untracked.
So straight away our postage costs were double.
So we only wanted to sell stuff
that was a lot more expensive.
But at the same time, there was a whole bunch of meat
left on the bone for all this lower end stuff
that there was a profit margin in,
but it needed to be sent untracked.
So we looked at supplying that stuff to essentially
competitors that were happy to send all the stuff
untracked, and that worked quite well for a while.
The people, everyone seems to want to buy the item
for a dollar and then sell it for 30.
And in media, that's not realistic.
You know, yeah, you can do it, but you can't do it,
you know, a thousand times a day.
So I think instead of an exit strategy for us,
I think it's more of an expansion strategy
and diversification.
And I think what we want is we're building
a strong foundation, and then we're going to be able
to build a strong foundation,
and then we're building on top of that.
And essentially in my mind, I've got a pyramid built.
And at this point, we're on layer one.
And where I want to go to the pinnacle is a lifetime's work.
And how I want to get there, you know,
it's just a grind and it's a hard slog,
and it's going to take a fair bit of time,
money and effort, but it's something we're working towards.
And it sort of comes down to, okay, well, we sell on eBay,
we're buying stock, we'll build a website
designed to buy stock off people.
You go on there on your smartphone, on an app,
or a barcode scanner, desktop computer, scan a barcode,
we give you a valuation, you put it in a box,
we pay for the postage, you send it to us,
we check it for quality, then list it for sale.
So that solves the problem.
And then as I said, with the CD, DVD, cleaning machines,
that's a whole separate business.
It's all wrapped into one,
but that is a different type of business,
but it supports the main aim.
So I think it's not an exit strategy,
it's an expansion strategy.
I've got a few rapid fire questions here,
if Johnny has any before we wrap up here.
First thing I have is if media went away,
do you have like another category
you would choose to sell, right?
For me, it could probably be toys.
I always say like, toys would be fun.
Like toys are a fun thing to list and sell.
If I go and sell media, then I probably do that.
What would be your next thing to jump into
if everything media went away from your life
and you had to choose something else?
We do a lot of media because it's easy to store
and it's a similar process with posting and taking photos
because the items are flat.
I don't know, I mean, look, at the end of the day,
it's the same process.
It doesn't matter if you're selling a tractor or a guitar,
you've got to clean it up, you've got to make it look good,
you've got to do your research,
you've got to take your photos,
you've got to check the market.
It's the same process.
Doesn't matter what the item is.
So we're versatile, we can do that
and jump into anything else at any point.
But to specialize in something else,
I really don't know.
I don't like dealing with clothing,
but that's a huge market.
Don't do it, Tom, don't do it.
So what is your biggest mistake that you learned the most from?
Look, I'm a trial and error guy.
I constantly make mistakes.
I don't know, there's been quite a few.
There was one scenario where we got in trouble
for selling some stuff we shouldn't have been selling
through the business.
I think in business, what you need
is you need a good accountant and a good lawyer.
And you need these guys ready to go for good advice.
So if you're not too sure about the legalities or something,
or you're not too sure about the legalities,
you need to be able to do that.
So if you're not too sure about the legalities or something,
or you're not too sure about, say, the tax implications,
you've got people you can go to straight away
and just ask them the question.
They're already familiar with you,
they're already familiar with your business,
and you can just tap into that resource and ask them.
Yeah, I don't know, there's a lot of mistakes.
Yeah, it's pinpoint one, I don't know where to start.
I think it's...
I mean, I know you're doing the same thing with your clients
all the time, but I always learn from them.
Oh, look, yeah, of course.
And if you don't, you're crazy.
But I think it's one of these businesses
where you've got to learn to cover yourself.
And the way I look at it is my job
is to keep my guys employed,
and their job is to look after my best interests.
So it's little things like, okay,
if we know this particular item is on the Vero list
and we can't sell it, don't list it for sale.
But I think it's just the whole thing,
selling on eBay, eBay is not good at educating people
about how to use the platform, how to do certain things.
They're terrible at that.
And I think you've got to learn by trial and error,
and you learn by, you learn the hard way,
or we learn the hard way anyway.
How many listings per day?
Yesterday, we did 500.
Now it's interesting because our aim is about 1,000 a day.
And if we were ready to go with everything,
that'd be fine.
So yesterday, we had three full-time people,
one part-time person working on that.
We were able to get that many done
because we knew straight off the bat,
a whole bunch of stock, what it was gonna be priced at.
So that really sped the process up.
But we're big on batch processing,
and what I've got the guys working on today
is doing quality control on a whole bunch of stuff.
So checking the CD doesn't have any cracks,
isn't too badly scratched, matches the artwork,
the artwork's all complete, the booklets aren't water damaged.
So it's 100% ready to go.
I then come in, price stuff,
and if I can leave them with 1,000 priced items,
between the three of them,
they should be able to get those up and dealt with.
Our goal this year is to get up to 250,000 listings,
and that's pretty achievable.
Yeah.
Do you use a draft bank or do you live dangerously
and just let them rip when you get them up?
No, no draft make.
I've got a bunch of stuff in draft make,
and that's just by accident.
We wanna get those listings up as quick as possible.
And our motto is, I mean, our motto has changed,
but it used to be,
listed and forget it, you can't do that anymore.
You gotta have your finger on the pulse,
you gotta update things, you gotta look at price points,
and you gotta keep an eye on it.
But what we do now is,
you can't sell anything that's not listed for sale.
So even if we've got a bad listing out with a bad title,
as long as we've got a title, photos, and a price,
at least we've got a chance of selling it.
But what we're doing at the minute is,
our listings go up with no frills,
so it's got a placeholder photo,
which is just our business logo.
And then basically the stock goes to our photographer,
and he takes those photos and uploads them.
And basically we know,
if our photographer is not busy taking photos,
we know we're not doing our job.
So it's just a continual process of feeding the beast.
But at the moment, we've got so much death pile,
we're just trying to list essentially everything.
Any new stock we've got coming in,
we have gotten better and better and better
knowing what sells and what doesn't,
what's worth what.
So the new stuff coming in, we prioritise,
because generally it's best,
and it helps kick the store into gear.
And then to clear out a lot of the older stock,
we do a lot of things like buy 10, get 10 free,
buy four, get two free,
10% off here, 15% off there.
All these things are coming in,
we're getting 10% off there.
All these sort of incentives for customers to buy more.
And so they're looking at our new stuff,
but at the same time, they're finding a few of our old items.
And we still sell, not on a daily basis,
but on a weekly basis,
we'd still sell listings to the seven years old.
And maybe as a funny game, you'll get someone will die,
or someone will go on tour, a band will break up,
or someone will release a book,
something might happen,
but it's only sales pick up.
It's like we haven't sold a Kate Bush CD for six months,
and then Stranger Things came out
with Kate Bush's running up the hill song
that was 37 years old,
and went back to number one in the charts
because of Stranger Things.
And this whole new generation discovered Kate Bush,
and all of a sudden,
every single Kate Bush CD we had sold.
And you don't know things like that are gonna happen.
You know, obviously Goldie Hawn is getting on,
at some point, she will die.
Is it worthwhile to stop piling Goldie Hawn DVDs?
Probably not, but when that fateful day does happen,
we will sell a lot of her stuff.
So it's interesting.
It's still, there's still an element of listed and forget it,
because you don't know what's gonna sell and when and why.
All right, well, I think we're gonna wrap it up here.
Tom, we appreciate you hanging out with us.
I do have one final fun question here.
As somebody that sells CD,
we have to know who is your favorite artist, band, singer,
whatever you have.
You have to listen to music
if that's all you're around all day.
So we gotta know, like, what's your go-to CD,
or, you know, music you listen to?
Remember, Jared listens to this.
Uh-oh.
It's quite funny the way it works for me.
It's got two mindsets.
To me, a good CD is a CD that sells.
All right, so I may like it or not like it,
but in my mind, it's good if it sells.
If it doesn't sell, it's no good.
The sort of music I'm interested in,
diverse range, classical to, you know,
gangster rap and everything in between.
But I do like a lot of the old hip hop stuff.
And I was a nightclub bouncer for many years.
I used to have really good taste in music,
and then I worked at all these different sort of venues,
and my taste in music just went all over the place.
So I like a lot of cheesy top 40 and weird techno music
and gangster rap and all sorts of stuff, you know,
all over the place.
But I do like to listen to a lot of music, definitely.
Well, all right, Tom,
we appreciate you hanging out with us today.
We look forward, maybe we'll talk to you again,
probably in a year, see where you're at.
And yeah, thanks for spending your evening with us
and sharing all the insights in your business.
Thank you very much.
Thanks for having me.
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