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 use 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 back to another episode.
Resellers Mindset Podcast, Mike alongside Johnny.
As always, we have a pretty fun topic to cover today.
And since we've been reselling for years and years, we've basically been reselling
since we were toddlers, babies.
We've come across people that surefire ways you can fail at reselling.
So we're going to talk about some of those traps today and have like, how do we
navigate them when we hit that point?
And what are some things that are like, you're guaranteed to fail reselling.
I'm going to throw the first one out there and it might seem stupid, but I know a
lot of people have this.
It's not listing the stuff you buy, right?
Me and Johnny can go to their stores.
We can buy tractor trailers full of books, CDs, DVDs.
But if they never leave the tractor trailer when they get back and they sit out
in the back, you know, shed barn yard, whatever you have going on, you never
make any money and that's it.
You're done.
And I mean, as simple as it sounds, a lot of people get stuck with death piles.
And I'll be the first to admit when I used to do eBay and I was an everything
seller, Johnny, my death pile was a mess.
Deb hated me because it was literally a pile.
It wasn't, there was no queue system.
There's no like nice stacks on the table.
It's like, throw it to the corner.
It hits both walls, lands in the corner.
And that is the death pile.
So it is kind of like a fitting term for a death pile, but what's your take, you
know, cause you took eBay a lot more seriously than me when it comes to like
death piles versus queues, right?
Cause people will be like, well, that's my queue pile.
Is there like a formula for like your queue pile?
Like what, at what point does your queue pile turn into a death pile?
Is it like your draft bank times 10 or like, is there some kind
of secret formula out there?
I mean, I think there is, and it has to do with the pre-processing of sorting,
sorting your goods, your death pile, more or less to go into the queue.
If you just grab a handful of the death pile and try to list that you're
in for a world of pain.
If we just talk about books, I mean, I'll extrapolate CDs and DVDs too, but books,
if I, if I grab a pile and then I sort that pile, either by publisher or by
author or by genre, and then go do, and then put them in like piles, the makes
my photography a lot easier, makes the listing a lot, makes every, makes the day
a lot easier, but it's that upfront work.
Now the more granular I do it, the easier my listing day.
So if I can get the holy trinity of publisher, author and genre, should
have an easy day of listings.
Now extrapolating that to DVDs, grabbing a pile of DVDs, I'm probably
going to be in for a slower day.
Then, okay, I grab a pile of DVDs, action, drama, comedy, or hey,
here's an act, here's the action, Schwarzenegger, Van Damme pile.
And then they're all from, I don't know, Fox, all action, Fox,
Schwarzenegger, Van Damme movies.
CDs, same deal.
Grab a pile.
Oh, here's jazz, here's opera, here's heavy metal, and then the subsequent
bands they go in and then the subsequent, what are they called?
Record labels, record companies that they go in.
You do that for a lot better day, but this applies to everything.
And back to being an everything seller.
I mean, I was a little bit more organized than you.
I had storage lockers that were nicely organized by here's the glassware,
here's, I don't know, sewing patterns, here's books because books
were in everything as well.
Here's clothes, here's shoes.
So I had them separated, but I had multiple storage units because I would
go to these estate sales and I'd be like, I'll take it all.
Just flat out, I'll take it all.
Don't do this.
I learned a lot and I learned a lot what I never want to do again.
Do you think like, I mean, I know my answer to this too much inventory too
early in your reselling journey is a surefire way to sink.
Oh, I thought it was hot shit and I could do that.
I thought I was the shit man.
I'll do this.
Yeah, no problem.
It's never again.
I think starting out, it appeals.
A lot of inventory appeals a lot more when you first start out because
you're like, whoa, I'm going to be a billionaire, right?
It's like, look at all this stuff, right?
Like you said, you're like, you walking around and you got that
swagger in your step and everything.
And it's like, and then it hits you in the face.
And I, I, I was the same way, right?
I'm like, Ooh, if I can get, you know, a gaylord of books or DVDs or CDs.
And now nowadays I'm like, I don't want no parts of that.
You kind of develop into understanding the time and processes it takes to
be efficient at that scale.
And I think starting out, a lot of people are so attracted to kind
of like what you did, right?
You walk in, you say, give me everything you got, I'll give you pennies on the
dollar, and then all of a sudden you got everything and you don't know
where you're going from there.
No, it was a headache.
And I mean, though I was organizing and I was doing it the best I could as an
everything seller, my profit per hour, all that pre-processing, because even
then I was doing pre-processing.
It was just too much.
I mean, what I was doing, I would really need a team to do, not as a solo guy
to do it effectively and profitably, but me doing it solo, but I was probably.
I don't know.
I was making like a Starbucks employee was kind of wage, which is okay.
But it's not great.
And I think the more narrowed down on what you can do, you can just be a
media guy or you could just be a books guy instead of, I don't know, an antique
mall person or an auction house.
They get everything right.
And yeah, they can make money with it.
And some of them can make a lot of money.
And the people that I do see make a lot of money doing those kinds of things.
Again, they have a team of people to do that processing.
Because when we see all this pile of stuff, all we see is dollar signs, right?
Just money, money.
Yeah, there's money in it.
But when you divide that money up by X amount of hours, there's very little money
per hour that you're going to get back as far as your rate of return on time spent.
Overhead cost, man.
I think I'm going to kind of bake overhead costs into exaggerated purchases
when you first start reselling, because it's kind of like a
first start reselling because it's kind of, I'm going to include it into it.
Right.
How many people, I guess I'm going to come for the newer resellers here.
Maybe the last three years of reselling.
Uh, how many people now before they even start reselling Johnny, they need the
rollo, they need the diamond, they need, uh, the, the fanciest, you know,
uh, light box to take photos.
They need everything that's top of the line.
Listen, when I was reselling, when I started, I had one of those crappy HP
printers, I got for like 20 bucks from Walmart.
Um, I was literally taping the labels on.
I wasn't using the sticky back shipping labels, things like that.
Um, and that just kind of, that's not even the overhead of like a storage
unit or the cost of running your business, the electricity used, maybe you have
internet, maybe you have a, uh, you know, a shed you ran or a store like yourself.
Why did, what is the big deal with like, I need the fanciest, coolest stuff.
And they haven't even sold a single item yet.
That irritates me to the end.
I have an answer for this and I don't want you to take this personally, Mike,
but before you join a group to ask questions, cause let's just say you're
watching a ton of YouTube videos.
Cause that's usually how people start out on each one of those videos.
Everybody has a referral links to all these things you must buy.
And you must have them all apparently, because here's the list of things you
need to be a reseller.
And again, don't take this personally, Mike, cause I know you have one too, but
they don't know, they don't need to get that stuff right away.
And they certainly don't need to buy it all right away.
They think they do.
Everybody thinks they do.
Cause they don't know any better.
Cause either they don't ask the person doing the videos.
Hey, do I need this stuff?
All this stuff right now?
They don't ask that question.
They just buy it.
Cause Hey, here's the links to the, here's the list.
The list is on every video.
I need to have everything on this list.
Cause it's a list.
That's you're so right.
I'm guilty as charged.
You lock me up.
Don't take offense.
You got to make your money too.
Boo boo.
Lock me up.
Throw away the key.
Um, I do think it is crazy though, that the times we live in, that people are
willing to spend so much money before any type of proof of concept of how things
work and that's just the bells and whistles.
I mean, even nowadays, like whenever Deb shopping for like new.
Dimeo labels for us, like she's looking for the cheapest deal ever since.
Every single time, right?
I'm just not clicking on a link and buying stuff.
And I think people that stuff adds up, man.
Like you were talking about, you bought like 40,000 labels.
Yeah.
This Amazon labels the other day.
It's like at, as you grow, these expenses grow with you.
And if you don't keep track of them, you're not making no money and people
don't take this into consider.
Listen, everybody out there.
I made a hundred bucks today.
Are they factoring in all the supplies or I made a thousand bucks this month.
Are you really factoring in your supplies, your utilities, your
rent, things like that?
Like they're not doing that.
And just not understanding your overhead costs.
And listen, I say it again, the storage unit life, the shed life,
it ain't nothing to be out here.
You know, Oh, look, I got a storage unit.
Like, and I am, I'm not gonna lie when I got one, I needed one.
I should have got one, you know, probably a year before I did.
But like, yeah, I was like, Oh cool.
I got a storage unit.
I finally made it.
And now I'm like, you don't want to be the storage unit guy.
You know, you know what it's like?
It's like, and everybody's seen these action movies where they talk about
Vietnam war, man, I was in the shit.
You don't know this.
It's a lifestyle thing and it's like, cool.
It's trendy, but they went through a lot of hell and turmoil to be
able to make that statement.
Do you necessarily need to go through all that hell and turmoil to be cool?
And what's with being cool anyway?
I care about money.
Money's cool to me.
Being, being, being cool and having no money that that's no, I'm sorry.
That's that is literally what the trade-off is.
It's like, I don't know, keeping up with the Joneses, right?
Like you have to do everything everybody else does.
Or if you, if you stray from the path a little bit, it's like, well, no, like,
you know, I'm an automatic loser because I don't have the $75 ring scanner that
Mike has, I always tell everybody, you can get a cheap ring scanner for like
five bucks when you first start reselling.
See if this is something you want to do.
Spend five bucks on eBay, get a little cheap one used.
Boom.
You're good to go.
You don't need to be doing this crazy, these crazy investments, like
sure right from the beginning.
I have a friend and she actually listens to this and she'll know who she is
because she knows I'm about to make this story.
She lives in a nameless state and I won't name her name, but she knows who she is.
So the names have been obstructed to some law and order spiel there.
But anyway, where she goes, there's a lot of people that resell full time,
but they live out of their cars.
Yeah.
It's a lifestyle and they're making it a lifestyle and they think
they're living a good life.
But in my opinion, they're living out of their cars.
That is not, I think you're cool amongst your peers that are also doing that,
but you got to realize you're at the end of the day, you're living out of your car.
Yeah. But I mean, the trade-off is listen, I'm defending this person,
whoever they are, because me and Deb always talked about when we get older,
we're going to buy Winnebago and travel the countryside.
Right?
So the trade-off is if I told you today, Johnny, that you could, I mean, this is
per this is the perfect example.
I'm glad you brought this up.
What is the overhead cost for somebody who's traveling out of their car
versus somebody who's got three storage units?
Maybe they rent a place that overhead cost is so low, but you know,
I get what you're saying here because you're trading off, you're sacrificing
a lot to live out the car and make money that you have to be tactical in that
approach, right?
If I told myself I'm going to go live, live out of one of those Sprinter vans,
right?
Like, I mean, these cars are souped up pretty nice.
I've seen the YouTube videos.
That's an excellent counterpoint you're making.
You can save a lot of money, dude.
Like if I said, you could go on the road for the next two, three years,
you're going to travel the country.
You're going to make crap ton of money.
You could probably argue that you could put away, you know, a hundred,
a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in your pocket because your only expense
is literally maybe your gym membership.
So you can shower and your gas and your vehicle maintenance versus, you know,
having a mortgage or renting a place.
I think with those people, that has to be the approach.
I don't think it's like, oh, you can just fiddle faddle around.
Like I'm just doing this for fun.
I think you got to have like an end game of if I'm going to do that, if you're
going to send me out today, Johnny, on my way, I got my little my stick and my bag
on the end of my stick.
Like I'm going to say, OK, I'm going to do this for two years, but this is going
to get me to a point where I can retire or I can have a boatload of money where I
can go buy a house in cash and then I'll have no expenses overhead and I kind of
can coast out the rest of my life.
I think that is approach you have to have because you can ease and then all of a
sudden you wind up on the road for 50 years, right?
And you've got nothing to show for it.
Like that's what you don't want to be.
Now, I don't know if he listens to this, but the best success story I've ever
heard of somebody doing this, honestly, is Avery, Roamer the Roamer.
He did that when he started.
He was the road warrior driving from town to town, gutted his car so he could
sleep in it and he would just pack a box, buy stuff, pack his box and send it out
that day, maybe occasionally do an Airbnb if he bought too much kind of deal and
just send, send, send.
And then he's transitioned beyond that.
He does software, he does courses now, runs a very successful whatever his split
half the restricted inventory.com thing.
So he's got a lot of good things going for him, but his initial start was getting
that capital to be able to do all these software development and businessy things.
I think he did it very smart way.
I don't think he planned to make that transition because he was like, what,
18, 19 at the time, all that.
But he had no expenses essentially other than gas and cost of goods.
And he just traveled the country doing that.
I think if you have, if you have the luxury of doing that, that's a great way to do it.
And you can extrapolate to people who don't want the road warrior life.
You can transition your eBay money to other things, just as Mr. Avery did, or Roamer,
as people call them.
I think, I think that is the best example of what we're talking about is him, his,
his origin story.
If you go back to his earlier videos and see what he's doing, if you're listening to
this and yeah, that's my jam.
I got no responsibilities.
Hey, I'm 20 years old.
Go for it, man.
And go for it.
People love traveling.
I'm not a, I'm not huge on traveling.
I'm honestly kind of like a home body.
Like I like being at home every single night.
So like traveling for me isn't like something that appeals to me.
Even, even if Johnny's like, Hey, I'm going to fly you down here.
I'm going to put you up in a five star hotel and be like, nah, Johnny, I'm good.
Like, we'll meet up on different terms.
Right.
Why don't you come to me?
I'll be like, Johnny, I'll pay for you to come to me.
That's kind of the person I am, but I do think I wouldn't do that today, but in my twenties,
I probably jump on that bag, bandwagon.
It is crazy to think like that would be such a huge opportunity for free.
I mean, I think it goes both ways.
I think people middle-aged like that.
I don't think it appeals as much to the middle age as it does to people that are young or
people that are coming up on retirement.
I think those that's kind of like the sweet spot for those travelers.
Cheryl, she has her little camperage or she has plans to do the whole camping reselling
lifestyle while running her tax business.
She's another good example to your point of the older audience doing that on the retiree
side.
But yeah, I think you're right.
Us guys in the middle over like, we want our, we want our little bit of comforts, right?
Our routine, we don't like anything dinking with it.
We don't want to travel the world yet, right?
We're trying to get there.
I think it transitions.
I feel Aladdin and Jasmine carpet ride.
I could show you the world.
It transitions into not spending your time properly is another way you were going to
lose at reselling very, very, very fast.
Your time has to be, I'm not going to say, like Johnny's a, he's crazy with time.
This dude's got like his whole life is scheduled out in front of him here.
Every hour, every day he gets a little notification of what he's got to do.
But I do think a lot of people, they just half ass things, man.
And they don't care if they don't value their own time.
And it drives me crazy because I think to myself, time is like, it's the most important
thing we have.
Right.
And even us being thirties, I still think time, like I don't want to just be in my reselling
business all day, every day.
I enjoy, you know, being having these calls, hop it on the zoom calls with everybody, spending
time, you know, comment on YouTube, doing YouTube, but I don't want to be the 60, 80
hour a week reseller.
And I think it's almost as if people think a certain way when I tell them, Hey, I got
my business down to like 20 to 25 hours every single week.
And I think it's kind of like, people think that themselves, well, you're not even full
time, dude.
You're a loser because I'm doing it 60 hours a week.
And my argument always is, well, how much money are you making in comparison to maybe
you want to break down, you know, like what's your hourly rate?
But I do think just the overall talk of how much time you spend in the business, it's
like, it's almost like a badge of honor, right?
Like it's a, it's another badge on your belt.
It's like, well, I work on my business 60 hours a week.
You're a loser if you don't know exactly right.
And same with like your listing goal or how many boxes you're sending out.
I do think both those things translate into money.
Sure.
Another, another key point on our main topic here.
I see people, they have a laundry list of things they want to do and they never finish
anything.
And then they always try to play this perpetual catch up and that bites them.
So here's some advice.
Yeah.
Everybody has a laundry list of things to do.
Sure.
But make a priority order for the day and whatever you don't finish rolls over to the
next day until everything's done.
Now there'll be some mandatory need to get it done every day, especially for your eBay
people.
You need to get your quota up for the day.
Or if you're Amazon seller, your box out for the week or boxes out for the week.
Sure.
But barring that everything else is manageable and let it roll over.
Cause if you try to play catch up, you're going to always be perpetually behind.
It just stacks and you'll never get ahead.
So if you don't finish something and especially things that throw you off, like the electricity
going out or let's just say inventory labs being down for a day or more that happened
this week.
It's okay.
Let it be okay.
If it's annoying and it's frustrating to you, especially people like me who I need to get
this done, but I can't get this done.
It's out of my control.
I can't stand it.
I don't like it.
I'm not a fan of it.
But I need to let it go and move on with my next day.
Do I need to pay like catch up with the amount of boxes I couldn't send out that day?
No, no, I do not.
I just, it's a new day.
So I'm going to do my quota for that day.
I'm not going to do yesterday's quota and today's quota and work myself to 2 a.m.
Cause that's going to throw off the next day.
Cause I'm going to be tired and I'm going to drag.
It's diminishing returns when you try to do that.
Yeah, and it also kind of entails us like the people that try to do five different business
models, dude.
I'm not talking about, listen, I believe there is, I mean, I see it right.
People that have success selling everything, but they know they accept the fact they're
an everything seller.
I'm talking about the people here that are like, okay, I sell shoes, right?
So I enjoy selling shoes, but I think there is this opportunity.
If I decided I'm going to start selling one shoe instead of two shoes.
So I'm just going to sell one shoe of the pair.
And then they also have this crazy idea of, well, yeah, I sell shoes.
I think I'm going to start, I think I'm going to sell some laces now.
I'm just going to sell the laces of shoes, right?
And then all of a sudden your time goes from here selling pairs of shoes.
Normally now you think, oh, I got this cool idea.
I'm going to sell the laces.
I'm going to sell one left shoe only.
Like then all of a sudden you're gone because your focus is in a million different places
and you can't give a hundred percent to multiple things.
You're right.
There's only so much mental real estate you can assign yourself.
Like even I'm guilty of this.
Like I spent a lot of time last year figuring out how to play the eBay game better.
And you know what?
It was, I learned some stuff.
But the time I put in, I don't think was worth the time I was putting in versus just doing
what I always did.
And then I ran a lot of experiments.
Again, I don't think you shouldn't run experiments from time to time, but the amount of experiments
I did last year to try to figure out I'm missing something.
I know I'm missing something.
If I figure this out, it's going to be a huge win in success, marginal success at best for
all those experimentations I did.
But again, I'm not saying don't experiment and don't be innovative.
I'm not saying that, but allocate a small amount of time versus a large amount of time
to things like that.
I think the difference is between you and the average person is that your experiments,
okay, I'm giving it a month.
I'm going to do it.
I'm going to go back, see if it works.
I think the problem is people, they don't commit to the experiment.
They say, I'm going to fiddle faddle.
I'm going to list laces once whenever I feel like doing it.
Right.
I'm going to list laces so whenever I feel like doing it and it's just a, it's in perpetual.
It's never taken back off the table, but you really never put it on the table to begin
with because you didn't give it an actual chance.
I always tell everybody, you got to give it a shot.
You got to give it a long duration.
And some of my experiments I thought were a little too short.
Again, I usually give it about 30 days.
If I see some marginal success, I'll let it run a little longer.
But you only have X amount of time in your lifetime.
How much are you going to devote to finding some piece of information out?
The time argument just turns into burnout and burnout means you quit reselling.
That's basically when I say, you don't leverage your time or use your time.
You just get burned out and then you're like, well, to heck with this.
I'm not doing it.
And then it all kind of boils back down to the money you're making.
If I'm going to sit here and tell any reseller, hey, you're going to make a hundred dollars
an hour.
Here's exactly what you need to do every hour to make a hundred dollars an hour.
And there was a list that says, okay, you're going to do these five steps.
And every hour, a hundred dollar bill prints out from your computer.
Everybody would do it.
But that's not the case at reselling.
You have to do your, you have to find your own way, build your own processes and see
what works.
And you know, most resellers make over $50 an hour.
I think that's kind of like a safe point that a lot of people fall into is, hey, I want
to make at least $50 an hour, which is well above, you know, if we decided to go out and
get a job or, you know, if I was a store manager at CVS, you know, there's a, there's a lot
of potential to make a lot of money doing this, but you have to be focused and time
and burnout is one of those things.
And like you were so knee deep in eBay last year.
Like, I mean, you're working 14 hour days.
I can't even begin to fathom sitting down for 14 hours a day and working in a eBay business.
And like, that might be lazy, short sighted of me, but there's no way I would last more
than like a week.
So like, what was your mentality day in day out?
Because I know you weren't taking days off.
I know you were sick and you were still working.
So like, what did you tell yourself?
Were you just like looking at the end game?
Like, Hey, I'm going to be making $20,000 a month at the end of this.
So this is what, this is what I got to do to get there.
Like, what was your motivation to everyday get up and go sit and for 14 hours and deal
with eBay?
It's hard for me to answer that because it took a lot out of me.
I think the main motivational drive is I have to do this.
I have a purpose to fulfill what I said I was going to do.
My own personal goals and everything else doesn't matter.
I got to, I got to do what I said I was going to do.
No excuses.
And that's a line from tech.
No excuses, right?
But I took that really to heart and I just did it every day.
It sucked.
There were days I did not want to do what I was doing.
It was, it was very rough.
I probably aged about 10 years last year.
It was exhausting, tiring.
But I learned so much.
I got better for it.
I became a little more jaded, certainly.
But it showed me if I push myself to the limit, what is possible or what is impossible is
what a lot of that was a lot of the takeaway.
And it really instilled into me, yes, I can have goals, but being able to shift or objectives
rather not goals.
If I see something not working, I need to open my eyes to what I know is working for
others and the more simpler the thing is, usually the more profitable it is was my big
takeaway from last year.
Like I knew there's money in Amazon.
I avoided Amazon all last year because I just wanted to spend a whole year focusing on eBay
and I shut that down probably into September to go back into Amazon.
I didn't give it the full year.
I gave eBay as much as I could put in and it wasn't good enough for me.
The results I was wanting to get out of it.
And that's not to say what I was doing was 100% right, but I was trying everything under
the sun.
I was trying more listings.
I was trying higher end listing.
I was playing around with promoted.
I was playing around with newsletters, all the tools available to me.
And at the end of the day, I determined that the book market, just the book market was
a very slow turnaround time.
Didn't matter how much I was slinging up despite that sale that just happened.
It's only going to output me X and running the numbers on what X would be, what my store
size would need to be.
I would need something to equivalent of about 70,000 active listings to get where I wanted
to be.
So I knew what I could do even if I was to scale a staff, but let's just say I maintain.
It would take me roughly about seven and a half years and I was like, that is a lot of
time.
Can I do what I'm doing now for another seven and a half years?
I can inclusion.
I don't want to do that.
So I moseyed myself back into Amazon and I think I've been better for it.
That's not to say I don't do eBay.
I do, but I put a lot less time into it than I did.
Now that doesn't mean I can't pivot back in when I want to and I have plans to revamp
up my eBay store more so on the cross-listing route, but it's not that I was stubborn.
It was just, I needed to trust and verify for myself what the reality of this really
was and only by doing what I did last year, putting myself fully into it, like, okay,
this is what it is and there's nothing I can do to change it.
I tried to change it, I tried to force it, but it is what it is.
I'm still a major, you're sitting here today, all those hours you're putting in because
you were going seven days a week, right?
You weren't no days off.
No days off.
That's just insane to me and it kind of gets you back to what motivates you and what kind
of gets you to where you want to be and when you start out reselling, I think an overlooked
thing here and I used to say you could start the whole, oh, sell stuff around your house
first thing, but I do think cashflow is a huge problem when you start out reselling
because you don't pay attention to sell through because you really don't know what you're
doing and even, I even argue this, people that have been around forever, their cashflow
sucks because they want to try to get every single penny out of every single item and
I'm here to tell you regardless of what category you sell in, unless you're selling super high
end, desirable Rolex watches, highly collectible items, you need to take the lower amount of
money and sell through your items quicker.
I'm here to tell you this because I get this all the time.
For those that sell on Amazon, you can build like a trigger set, software that tells you
whether or not you should buy something.
So I have it set up to if something sells once every six months, that's going to pop
green and say, you should buy this item.
So I get this all the time.
Well, I come across a lot of this, you know, one, it sells once every six months items
and I tell everybody it is there for you to take a look at what's in front of you.
You cannot buy all items that only sell once every six months.
You will be bankrupt within the month.
It's just not feasible.
It's in there for you to take a second look at something, see if it makes sense, because
there's different factors that go into this.
But cash flow, people love spending money at thrift stores on stuff, but they don't
love it coming back in because that takes the work.
And cash flow will sink you, especially in media.
I mean, we're talking thousands and thousands, tens of thousands of items you're buying
every single year, even at an average buy cost of a dollar.
That's $10,000 if you buy and send in 10,000 items.
$10,000 coming out of your pocket.
What are you doing to get that to come back in?
And a lot of people spend more money.
You can only find stuff at thrift stores, Johnny.
You can't source from anywhere else.
Well, guess who has the most highest prices when it comes to sourcing?
The thrift stores.
So we don't care about spending $7.
Oh, I can buy this shirt for $7 and I'm going to make, I'm going to 100% ROI.
I'm going to sell it and I'm going to make an extra seven on top of that.
That's not the reality of it.
And I think a lot of people get caught up with that, especially when it comes to like
best offers on eBay.
Like, okay, I bought the shirt for seven bucks.
I'm going to sell it for 20.
You listed at 20.
Someone sends you an offer for 15.
You take the offer.
All of a sudden that initial mindset you had, you're going to make the $7.
It really isn't $7.
Cashflow is the most important thing in reselling.
If you don't got it, you're not going to exist.
You might, you might like hover around for like three months, maybe a season, but you're
going to get to that point where you ain't got no money coming in.
Right.
And I think about us being full time, we got to cover the bills, right?
It covers the rent, covers every, every expense we have in life.
It's the reselling profits that we have to spend.
So not only do we need cashflow to buy more inventory, we need cashflow to survive.
Right.
My cats, I got to feed my cats and they don't eat the cheap stuff.
They eat like $3 canned cat food.
So like I'm out there thinking to myself, I'm like, okay, I got a hundred books I'm
sending in today.
My average profit on these books is 10 bucks.
Okay.
That's a thousand bucks in my pocket.
Like I think in the terms of numbers, like how much money am I going to get back out
of these items?
And people don't care about cashflow, dude.
They're just like, I'll go buy whatever I want at whatever price.
And I just have this crazy number.
I think I'm going to get for it.
Right.
I mean, there's three ways to make money in this business.
And I'm going to reference Mr. Tech.
He put out a public video.
It's available to the public.
You should all go watch that.
Public video.
Yeah.
It's tech with a marker board.
That's all it is.
It's a great video.
But you can sell a bajillion $5 items and make money.
You could sell a small amount of items that cost a lot to make a lot of money.
Then the third one, which is the hardest and which is what I was trying to do.
And I kind of smiled when I saw that video.
Hey, that's what I was trying to do.
And it's the hardest one to do is you're going to list items, but you're going to wait a
really long time for them to sell.
They're all going to sell at some point, but the desirability and turnover for those items
is really slow.
And they're weird.
It's kind of like the ASP model just with a slower sell through rate.
It's more so in the collectible market.
This is what I was trying to do.
And it does work, but I decided the amount of work and time investment, I wasn't cut
out for it.
I thought I was when I started.
I'm like, this is going to be fun.
I'm going to make so much money.
And I was, and I made okay money.
Don't get me wrong.
But it is hard and it's a grind and you got to wait and it's frustrating and waiting.
I'm not a patient.
Well, I'll take that back.
I am a patient individual to a point.
And I decided after doing it for a couple of years that my patients had run out and
I was seeing it work very slowly, very, very slowly.
And I've tried again, just not trying to make it this episode all about me, but I tried
to make it work.
I really did.
It speeded up any way I could and just didn't work at the end of the day.
Well, word is just, I didn't want to wait the time that it was going to take for it
to fully work.
I think I hit it on the head.
It's a balancing act of figuring out where your cashflow is going to come from.
Because I was talking about every once in a while, I'll buy an item that sells once
every six months.
This is not a huge part of my business, but there are opportunities in the market.
Like, hey, did you look something up on eBay?
Maybe it's a $50 vintage shirt.
You see there's one listed and maybe five or like one listed, one sold over the past
90 days.
So like, yeah, the sell throughs like, oh yeah, one's listed, one sold 100% sell through,
but that's one over the past 90 days.
And I think I'll be willing to bet, dude, this is a hot take.
I don't even care.
I know a lot of people listening are a little bit more experienced in reselling, but I think
a lot of new people, they don't even look at the sold comps, dude.
It's almost as if when you go to like a garage sale or a flea market and they're like, well,
this is going for $500 on eBay.
I think a lot of new sellers are the same way.
They scan something and they just see the listed on eBay and they're like, oh yeah,
money, money, money, money.
And then you go to sold and there's like, there's 500 listed and there's one sold and
it's sold for like $3.
Right.
So here's an example.
Let's say this book in my hand for those just listening and not watching the YouTube video,
I'm sorry, we're going to get a little less out of what I'm about to say.
So you should watch the video.
There you go.
Subscribe while you're at it.
So this book right here, let's say it sells $5 in 30 days.
Great.
I could have a lot of these and make $5 off of all of them in 30 days.
This book right here sells for $60, not $5, but it sells in 90 days, exactly like you're
talking about.
Hey.
So this is having a lot of, I'm going to get a lot less of these than the first one I showed
you, right?
At $5 guaranteed to sell within 30 days.
Then this book right here sells once every two years, but it's worth $200.
This is what I was trying to do, folks, is get a lot of these and list a lot of these,
but the turnaround time for these bigger ticket items that have a slow, slow, slow sell through
rate, it works, but it's slow.
You got to know that going into doing that.
You're going to make a lot of money once your store size is gigantic, because once you have
X amount of two years sell through rate items, a gigantic bandwidth store, hey, hey, there
you go.
That's what I'm talking about right there.
But that journey, I tried it, not for me.
You have to basically wait two years to see any kind of real results, right?
So we're looking at two years sell through.
You're basically anything, it all boils down to a balancing act.
Like you said, tech says it all the time, all the models work.
Who do you want to be?
Exactly.
Pick a lane and run with it.
Like if you want, there's perfectly fine.
You want to make a dollar per item?
That's yeah, get a million of them.
Get a million of them.
There's no problem with that.
Just understand that every item takes effort to list, to source, right?
So you have to value your time at the end of the day, sell through and ASP and cash
flow in a reselling business.
I mean, that's basically, it's almost the only thing that matters is cash, right?
Because if we're talking about why you're going to fail at reselling, it's because you
ain't making no money at the end of the day, right?
Nobody does this.
It's like a charity.
No, no one does.
And I think what, going back to the main point here of why people fail, I think they could
focus on where they could be and not where they are.
It's that journey in that middle.
Kind of like when you walk into a graveyard, you see a dash between someone's, when they're
born and when they're dead.
It's that dash.
That's what's going to make or break you in reselling is that journey.
When people try it and decide it's not for them, that's okay.
You can get into this.
You can also get out of it.
You don't have to overcommit or you don't have to overcommit to staying in your lane.
Let's say you're a clothing seller, but you just can't do clothes.
It's okay to shift out of it.
If Mike came to me, you know what?
You know what?
I'm done with media.
I'm going to go sell toys.
I'd be like, great.
Take what you've learned out of selling media, apply it to your toys and figure out what's
specific to toys and add that to what you already know.
Good for you, Mike.
I'm glad you're a toy seller.
You never know, dude.
I get it all the time.
When are you going to stop selling media?
I was like, nah, I got this figured out.
I think there is a lot to be said.
You're motivating factors, right?
For me, it's money.
Everybody knows I'm not a huge reader.
I don't even have a bookcase full of books.
I have a little stack back there, maybe 10 books that I have that are my personal collection.
For me, the money and the processes I've developed is what motivates me.
For you, it might be different, right?
I always tell everybody, do something you're passionate about.
If you like music, sell CDs.
If you're into fashion, sell clothing.
You're into your sneaker heads, sell sneaks.
You like vintage.
Do something that you're passionate about.
It's going to make reselling so much easier.
I'm just like Mr. Krabs, dude.
I'm so passionate about a dollar bill that honestly, I probably could have started with
anything and stuck with it if I seen money in it, right?
There's nothing better than buying stuff for under a dollar and selling it for a hundred
bucks.
That's where my passion comes from.
Yeah, you're going to transfer the things you've learned over time.
I think we're going to wrap it up here.
We appreciate everybody listening, liking the videos, leaving us five star reviews on
the podcast, wherever you're at in the universe.
This was a good chat.
I think Johnny's been through it all.
He gave you a little bit of his backstory last year on eBay.
You have to make changes if things don't work as a new reseller.
Cash flow is the only thing that matters.
Johnny, I'm going to let you have the Jerry Springer final thought of this episode.
Sure.
Go with what you know and don't be afraid if it's not working to stop whatever's not
working and start anew.
Wishing for the best and hoping your failure will succeed is foolhardy.
Don't be afraid to let it fail and move forward.
That's what I got.
Plain and simple.
We appreciate you listening.
We'll talk to you next week's episode.
Thanks for listening to another episode of the Resellers Mindset Podcast.
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