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 today's episode is going to be a fun,
but I think intuitive one, what if.
So I'm gonna throw crazy scenarios out there
and I'm sure Johnny's gonna do the same with his little,
if you're watching over on the YouTube,
he's got his little, you know,
hooray horn shooting off little confetti.
What if, so being on a platform like YouTube,
you always get a lot of people like, well, what if?
Analysis by paralysis.
I think this kind of falls into the same category.
So I'm gonna throw one at Johnny first
and he can throw one at me
and we kind of can just go back and forth.
What if you get banned on Amazon today?
You can't give like 30 minute answers here.
We wanna get through a lot of these today.
I'd probably roll into Amazon, or I'm sorry,
I'd roll into Walmart and ramp up eBay
in the interim of me getting all that figured out.
Good idea, all right, you're up, hit me with one.
What if the prices at your mom and pops got raised?
Would you still source from them
or pay up essentially or go elsewhere?
And let's say selling prices remain the same.
I think the big thing with that is
it's fine to walk into a thrift store
and pay face value if it's reasonable,
but there is a lot to be said if prices go up, right?
Go all of a sudden, they wanna start charging $5 a book.
For some reason, books are like the hottest thing out there.
I think that's when you have to have the conversation of,
hey, forget putting books out.
I'll just take them all off your hand.
You don't have to pay somebody to put the books out.
I'll buy them all behind the scenes for a discounted price.
I think that would be the path you would have.
And I mean, that's really not even like, it's a what if,
but like it happens every day, right?
I mean, my Goodwills-
And so you'd go bulk essentially
to lower your price back down, okay.
You would have to.
I mean, there's no other way around it.
I mean, it's just be one of those things.
And it's happening right now.
Anybody that's listening to this,
if I ask you what your Goodwill prices were a year ago
compared to today, it's always gonna be going up.
And no matter what category you're selling,
it's not just the media, it's the shirts.
I mean, the clothing prices at these thrift stores
are nuts, dude.
Like me and Deb used to go in,
the shirts would be like three bucks.
It doesn't matter what shirt it is.
Now they're all individually priced.
They're all at least $6.
I'm talking nasty, plain,
like beat up, stained up white t-shirts.
So if you get to a point where your retail cost is too high
when you're going in and you're buying thrifted items,
that's when you have to start thinking about,
okay, what does a bulk operation look like for me?
And how can I find bulk sources to fuel my inventory?
What if somebody started reselling today?
So do you think there's any money?
What if I started reselling today in the year 2024?
Do you think I can make money?
Yes, I would advise you to go high ASP
if you're just starting.
So you can have capital to have flexibility to maybe,
you can still maintain what you're doing,
but if you wanted to switch business model down the road,
that's probably the best way to do it initially,
off the gate, go high ASP model,
get decent chunk of change,
and then decide if you wanna stay that model,
just scale it up.
Or if you wanna transition to a different model,
it has a higher gateway to entry
for capital intensive reasons.
I mean, you just covered everything on that.
I do think, I agree with that.
I think there's still a lot of opportunity
and reselling does lots of things
that haven't been done yet.
There's lots of processes
that haven't really been ironed out yet.
And I mean, it's just part of the game.
There's always money to be, no matter what you do, right?
We can pick anything in the world.
And I think this kind of translates
like just across the board in your life.
If all of a sudden I couldn't sell what I sold,
like I'm confident I could go open up XYZ,
I could, a food truck, a brick and mortar thrift store,
any type of business.
I think once you have the business sense,
you understand how it works.
You understand the P&L and working at CBS all those years,
like you get a P&L every single month
and you can see every single expense,
a three page report of exactly
what that location is making, every expense.
So I think it translates over to everything in your life,
not just reselling and 2024 is no better year
than this year to get started in reselling.
All right, your turn.
What if you got an employee,
what task would you give that employee to do
off of your plate?
Man, this is a tough one because the fun part,
the fun part, I really don't consider it fun, like sourcing.
I know a lot of people, like I enjoy scanning stuff
and finding stuff, but when I go into a thrift store,
it's not like, woo, look at all this shiny stuff.
I'm to the media, I'm out of the store.
I don't even, I don't walk anything else anymore.
I gotta go to the bathroom, I go to the bathroom,
then I'm out of there, right?
I'm not even walking down the aisles.
There's something big that's kind of standing out
in front of me, I'll take a second look at it
if it looks like something I'm familiar with,
but I would probably say sourcing.
I know listing is the answer for a lot of people,
but I think with Amazon compared to eBay,
I think that initial list price is so important
that I wouldn't feel comfortable,
even though the software does kind of,
you can have it go a certain price or go off the buy box.
I don't think that's good enough anymore.
So I would probably outsource my sourcing
and I would do all the listing.
Must basically hire a scouter,
would be kind of the route I would go and they could,
it wouldn't be in my town because I would still source.
I would just have them maybe in Pittsburgh or Philly
and I would go pick up once every two or three weeks
the stuff they source.
But I mean, employees, how you,
if you hire an employee,
your business better level up immediately
because it's a huge expense, right?
I mean, you know how it is and it can be a huge headache.
You know, you've been down that road too.
Like you've been down.
I just did my 1099s for all the people I fired last year.
I know how much it cost me.
Yeah, and if you're hiring people, life happens.
Thankfully you're somebody that's reasonable,
but it still sucks if you hire somebody
and they can't work for a month or two months.
So a hiring employee can be a great,
you know, basically attribute to your business,
but there's a lot more that comes with it.
So I would just have them source.
I would still list everything
and I would still source myself,
but I know a lot of people don't want to give up sourcing.
And Amazon you can because you're just scanning.
On eBay it's a little bit different, right?
Then you got to have the knowledge
if you're going to be sourcing for eBay in a category,
you got to know the brand,
you got to know, you know, the antique stuff to look for.
There's so much more knowledge that goes into it.
It'd be hard I would think for somebody to hire a sourcer
or eBay unless they were already like specialized, right?
If I was selling vintage tees,
maybe this person is into fashion
and I'm paying them to do this on the side
is like a little side hustle.
But then again, the thing with that is that they know like,
hey, this is a $500 vintage t-shirt.
Why am I buying this for Johnny
when I could just sell this myself?
So there's always the fear.
That's what I hear from people that have people
that sourced for them.
They always are worried that they're going to take
the knowledge that they got trained on
or already knew and just take a walk.
Do that.
Yeah.
I think it's, I don't think it's,
I mean, most people don't want that, right?
Most people that work, I mean, if I worked for you, dude,
I will want probably no parts of selling media.
I'd be like, this dude's a mad man.
He's here seven days a week, you know, sunrise, sunset.
All right, it's like, I would be like,
no, no, keep your business.
I'll just do what you want me to do, right?
It's a...
Yeah, I just had to change my alarm to get up earlier
and stay later because of this being a critical month
because of the fees happening next month,
just to get some extra man hours in.
I got a pretty crazy one here.
What if you never started reselling?
I would still have my marketing firm
and be a partner in my book publishing company.
Do you, I mean, I know for a fact,
I would not be better off in any way, shape or form.
I, you know, my health would be a lot worse.
My mental health would be a lot worse.
Oh yeah.
My personal life would be a lot worse.
But I do think it is important to kind of talk about it
because a lot of people, when they get into reselling,
maybe the first video they see is like how reselling's
like a scam and people are scalping.
So it is important to be like,
well, what if we didn't start reselling?
Yeah, I mean, if you look back at the earlier videos,
I'm a lot heavier guy and a lot more cave beard going on.
I'm, because it didn't matter what my personal appearance
and I didn't have time to really think
about my health too much.
I still, I'm still a heavy guy.
Don't get me wrong, but I'm a lot lighter than I was.
I probably lost, I don't know, 60, 70 pounds
since I started reselling.
I'm not saying reselling is your diet program,
but you just, in my case, I was just a lot more active
in a little less time at the keyboard, honestly.
I mean, I'm still at the keyboard,
but there's a lot more moving around these days for me
versus what I was doing.
And that's just, just doing that, I lost a ton of weight.
It circles back to, I always tell everybody,
if you're gonna try something
and it's something you wanna try, right?
If there's something I wanna try,
maybe I wanna learn how to juggle.
Maybe I wanna try to get in the circus
or something like that.
You have to commit to yourself
and not really care about what others think or say.
I think you have to give everything a fair shot
that you wanna do in life.
So if I told Johnny, hey, I wanna, you know,
I'm brand new, I just get on social media.
Johnny's a long friend of mine.
And I'm like, yo, Johnny, I'm gonna join the circus.
I never juggled before,
but I'm gonna start learning today.
I think you have to bank more on your own word
than the words you see around you,
because listen, there's a lot of negativity out there,
especially in the reselling world.
We talk about it all the time.
So you have to be like, hey, okay, I see that, you know,
maybe my family or friends will think, you know,
I'm some kind of lesser being
because I'm in the thrift stores.
And all of a sudden, if you're in the thrift stores
flipping stuff, then you're robbing the poor
and people look at you a different way.
So what if you never started reselling?
That might be the case for, you know, tens of thousands,
hundreds of thousands, millions of people,
because the first thing they seen online was,
oh, if you're a reseller, you're stealing from the poor,
which is completely false.
There's no way she performed true.
Okay, what if you never started a YouTube channel?
Oh, man.
The honest answer I would give myself
is I probably would have made 5X the money reselling
that I have up to this point.
And that's crazy to say for somebody in my shoes,
but I do believe it's a trade off of, you know, the money,
you don't make lots of money on YouTube.
The trade off is, can I help somebody else
get out of the same situation that I was in?
It's the only reason I do it is just try to help
other people make more money, especially, you know,
I started this before the whole world went crazy.
So back then, things were a little bit different.
I was just like, hey, you know,
put an extra 500 bucks in your pocket.
Then it turns into, well, you can live off this money
if you're smart about it.
So for me, the money trade off is just being able,
I guess, to help other people and kind of provide
some kind of value to change in somebody's lives,
you know, as dramatic as that sounds.
I mean, if you give anybody an extra 1000 bucks a month,
which is easily obtainable with Amazon,
you can change lives.
I mean, an extra, I remember being so broke.
If I got an extra 20 bucks a month, dude,
I was out there, you know, dancing my ass off.
And I know it sounds kind of cheesy, but you just do it.
I only do it to help people.
And if I didn't, I mean, I think that goes for any YouTuber
because it takes time away from your business.
There's nobody that does YouTube that puts in no time, right?
It's a huge time sink across the board for any reseller,
any content creator, I'll tell you,
takes a lot of time and I even have an editor.
So even that, like I try to make it as easy as I can,
but it still takes time.
We got the Discord, we got the group and things like that.
So it's just to help people,
but I would definitely have more revenue from my business,
a lot more revenue from my business,
because I don't have the distractions.
I can just go do my thing, stay in my own little lane.
But then again, you wouldn't learn as much.
And you know, the ideas we've kind of bounced off each other
over the years kind of have leveled up our businesses.
So I guess it works both ways at the end of the day.
Yeah, and plus your money down the road comes,
I mean, you're gonna get opportunities
from all the network you've done.
I mean, I've gotten some opportunities
just by attending this podcast, amazingly enough.
And for those of you who offered me 60,000 books,
thank you, but no thank you, those that have approached me.
I think you're gonna, it's the payoff later.
I mean, that's what we're all working for,
is the payoff later.
And your investment right now is in YouTube.
And plus, like you said,
you just generally like helping people.
And for those that don't know,
for about 10 minutes before we start this podcast,
I slam Mike with questions,
and he answers every single one of them very politely.
I mean, sometimes impolitely,
but it's amusing nonetheless.
I got, I'm gonna mark this off,
is this is gonna be the best what if of this episode.
What if Johnny B had a newborn son
that showed up at his front door today?
Can I sell it?
And you can't sell the baby, dude.
You gotta raise that baby.
Gotta raise that baby, okay.
So yeah, my quest for Johnny B 2.0
would start then and there from crying.
I'll teach him to cry efficiently.
I refine that process.
No, I mean, I thought about it.
Like I do want kids some point down the line.
I would have to schedule my time
that I allocate to child raising,
I guess is the best words to put on there,
or family time.
But we'll just call it child raising
because that is important.
That's a fundamental shift.
I mean, it can be,
there are people who hire, what do they call it?
Au pairs or whatever to raise the kid or nannies.
But no, I would want to be involved
in some level raising said child.
And it would be,
some parts of the business would have to shift
and I would have to get even more focused
on every minute of my day, honestly,
to account for my business goals
and then my family goals, honestly.
And that is a very good question
because there are a ton of resellers
that have children and or families
and they still continue to resell even on a full-time level.
And the people that do that, I very much applaud
because I know some high level sellers,
they got like kids and kids with learning disabilities
and run a family on top of that
and run a six, seven figure business on top of that.
Kudos to you, sirs and mams out there that do that.
I can't complain about anything
because you're 100% correct.
Everybody out there for some reason,
I don't know what it is, it's like, well, this happened.
Well, life happens.
A perfect example this past week,
well, I have my library dud sitting at the storage unit.
They've been sitting there for four weeks.
So Wednesday was the day, Johnny.
I'm going out there.
I'm getting rid of these duds, dude.
Whatever happens, these duds are going away.
So I load up the car, fully.
There's passenger seat, center console's got boxes.
You can't fit anything else in the Lamborghini.
And Deb texts me right after I got the car full,
hey, our cat Diana, she's in and out of the litter box.
She's having problems going to the bathroom.
Well, with cats, this can be a serious thing.
So it immediately went from, okay,
I was just going to have my day.
I was going to go get rid of my books,
go to the thrift stores to, okay,
now I have a car full of books.
We need to get the cat to the bed as soon as possible.
So these types of things happen,
but I think the huge benefit to being your own business owner
is you can create your own schedule.
And me and Deb even talked about this.
If I was still at CVS, I'm not getting out of CVS, dude.
I'm the only one there.
They're not going to let me close the store.
I'm going to the store for my cat.
They could care less about that.
So things happen, life happens,
and people have this stuff every day.
There's ongoing care, childcare, family care,
loved one care.
There's so many different things.
So it is important to kind of, like what you're doing,
you're kind of building a business
so you can step back from it.
You don't have to be there every single day.
You have an employee that's step one.
Maybe this employee, she turns in to be
your general manager,
GM of your little book warehouse there.
So Johnny B doesn't have to be there every single day.
He knows he has somebody.
That's the benefit of the employee route
is you create a structure underneath you
so that if something happens, what happens?
You know, what if I get sick
and I can't do nothing for a month?
Then all of a sudden you're not,
you don't have money coming in.
And if you don't have savings, I mean,
you're all of a sudden you're in a really bad situation.
That's why I always try to tell people,
get smart about your money.
So yeah, that's a good answer.
And you are right.
More people have ongoing family relational,
you know, obligations than don't in reselling.
I think we all can agree to that.
There, yeah, I mean, I've noticed it
because I'm in multiple groups.
A lot of them are parts of a family,
either husband and wife, or husband, wife and children,
or children only.
I guess I'm the odd bookseller out.
I don't have any of that.
I mean, I got folks or whatever
and a couple of brothers and sisters,
my family obligations are very minimal.
So I'm gonna throw it back at you.
What if you had no Deb?
We talked about this before this call.
What if I didn't have Deb?
I mean, that's, for those who don't know me
and Deb have been together,
man, how many years since 2010, we're in 2024.
And funny story, we first started dating on July 4th.
I got enough alcohol in my system to finally ask her out.
So that's the background story of that.
I was probably fried somewhere down in Philly.
Well, it was at her dad's house.
We're playing washers, you know,
like you throw washers in a little square box thing.
And I probably, I don't know how many beers I had that day,
but I asked her out.
So she's kind of been like a pivotal person along the way.
So if she didn't exist, I mean.
I don't even, I don't, I seriously, I do not,
I can't even think of a situation.
Like I couldn't even tell you that I'd still be reselling.
I couldn't even tell you that I would be moved out of Philly,
which to some might not seem like a big deal.
But I mean, where I grew up was terrible.
I mean, it's one of the worst neighborhoods out there.
I grew up in Kensington, it's a neighborhood in Philly.
And you go on YouTube, you'll see just how bad it is.
I couldn't even tell you, like I couldn't even guarantee.
Still be at CBS if there were no dub?
I don't, probably not, because if I don't leave the city,
I don't make it back to CBS.
I don't know, man.
My whole life would be different and not in a good way.
It would be, I mean, I probably,
I definitely won't be as motivated.
That's a guarantee with any aspects of life.
Because when you have somebody else,
you're more motivated, right?
You're like, hey, you know, like, all right,
what's going on?
I got somebody, I don't provide for Deb.
She has her own business.
So it's not like she needs me.
And I think that's kind of pivotal too,
like when it comes to relationships is,
you shouldn't feel like you're required
to depend on somebody else.
Codependency, it never works out, dude.
And her having her own brand,
if she gets tired of me one day, she can up and leave
and she'll be perfectly fine out on her own, right?
And I think that's like a quintessential part
of being like a happy couple when it comes to that.
But man, I probably know Deb.
Did she make you sign a prenup?
No.
I would probably be down in Philly still,
probably living with one of my friends,
just not really, just existing, just being a lazy.
Going through the motions of life.
Going through the motions, probably working part-time
to have a little bit of money to buy myself beer
and pizzas every single day.
That's honestly like, it'd be bad, dude.
It'd be bad.
It would be bad.
It would just be, it would be completely, I mean,
I'd be a mess straight up.
And that's, I'm not just saying that
because we've been together so long.
I mean, think about it, like if you have a friend
that you've been around for so long or like,
you know, somebody you see and talk to every single day,
if you don't have that, it's so tough to kind of
try to find that again and just think about life,
you know, not having it.
I mean, that's really rough.
So yeah, that's a good one.
Like, what if you don't have your, you know,
and people, this happens all the time.
Yet again, you know, tragedies happen.
If you don't have your best friend, your business partner,
your significant other, it's tough.
And unfortunately, this kind of stuff happens.
You just have to figure out a way to continue forward.
But she came so long ago that this would not exist.
I'll tell you that much.
This would not exist in any way, shape or form, you know.
It'd be crazy to kind of, what if like the,
you know how like the Marvel universe
has like different like timelines, right?
So that's kind of like what this kind of-
Timeline where Dev is not part of the equation.
Apparently Mike said the pie to dumpster
is trying to find your money.
I'm probably living up at K&A
and it's like an intersection,
Kensington and Allegheny up in Kensington.
And I'm probably just shooting up all types of crap
I shouldn't be putting in my body.
Yeah, that'd probably be me just because
you don't get out the city, you don't get out the area,
you don't change your mindset,
then you're kind of stuck, you know, where you are.
So, all right, that was a good one, man.
I don't even know if I can top that.
You're just dropping all the bombs on me.
What if you could only spend 10 hours a week
on your business?
Man, that's a good, yeah.
What'd I do?
So I got 10 hours.
So I would, my business model would totally shift.
There's no way to do bulk with just 10 hours.
I would probably go pure antiquarian
and I'd probably be dealing with a lot
of those rare antiquity bookshops
and dealing with those guys.
That is a very expensive game to play.
And it would probably take me a lot longer to bankroll that.
I couldn't have, I don't think I could,
well, maybe I could have.
I may or may not need more capital to start that journey
doing it that way, but I would have known to do that then.
But let's just say I did know that.
Yeah, I probably have to have significant cash,
upfront cash to even get in that game
because that's kind of like, well,
it's not retail arbitrage, you're still buying books,
but you're gonna pay a much higher rate for those books
to try to squeeze out some higher end margin down the road
or maybe they mispriced something.
You're looking for their mistakes, essentially,
at a high level, as well as more premium collections
that I could source online
from people who don't know what they're doing at,
like auction houses and stuff.
They don't know what they have.
They should have taken it to the rare bookstore, honestly.
And that's if I did books.
There would probably be easier games to play
in the non-book market.
Yeah, dude, you gotta run away from books, 10 hours.
I'm gonna change my answer.
I wouldn't do books for just 10 hours.
I'd probably get in the electronics game, honestly.
Yeah, you would have something that's high.
I would go super high end.
I would just go maybe even watches or something
where you spend 200, sell it for three,
you make your 75 bucks,
you just kind of continue on the road
because it would even be hard
to have a successful eBay store
when you only got 10 hours a week.
There's the question,
would I be doing eBay for 10 hours a week?
I don't know.
It'd be tough.
It'd be tough for 10 hours a week
because that's like, that's not even part-time.
That's half a, that's a quarter timer.
Here's what that is.
Yeah.
Oh man, that's a good question.
I don't know if I even answered it right, but there you go.
I would do something luxury.
Books, electronics or gold bars or gold, currency.
There you go.
Yeah, currency, 100%.
What if,
what if you worked on your business like I do,
put in the hours I do?
Man, first thing that comes to my mind
is I'm gonna be doing a lot of driving.
The big difference between me and Johnny
is having thrift store routes, it's a lot of driving.
A lot of my routes, basically all of my routes
are at least a one hour drive to get out
to the furthest store, at least one hour.
That's if traffic's perfect, everything's perfect.
So if I had to dump the extra, I mean,
if we're being straight up, you're probably working
extra 30 to 40 hours in me in the business currently.
I mean, I would make a whole lot more money,
but I probably would be a whole lot more miserable.
And that's just, yeah, I don't mind driving, right?
I usually have podcasts on, I'm listening to something
while I'm driving, but you would make a whole lot
more money, right, because we already have the tools
for success, but I would just have to drive further
distances because all of the thrift stores
in an hour and a half of me are already mapped out.
So I'd be looking at going two hours out.
Your bubble would expand essentially, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, then I'm out and I'm in New York,
I'm down south, I'm like, once I start crossing state lines,
it's like, this is nuts, right?
I just drove an hour and a half to get to somewhere
in Maryland, yeah.
Cross the Canadian border to source books.
Yeah, it would be a blessing and a curse, I think.
And I think at that point, I would be in your boat
where I would definitely hire somebody,
even though I don't have the bulk you do.
I do think once you start maxing out your time,
that's when you need to look at an employee.
How can you get your time back to focus on the higher task?
So for me, I would make a lot more money,
but I'll tell you right now, I'd be driving two hours
one way and the days would be, I'm up at six,
I'm out the door at seven, and I'm not home
till probably nine or 10 at night.
And that's just the reality of a thrift store model.
The only way you make money is going to more stores
and you can't keep going to the same store.
I can't keep going to my Goodwill five minutes down the road.
They're not putting out, they're putting out
maybe 10 new books a day, that is not sustainable.
I hate to break it to these people
that have five thrift stores.
You can't build a business off this.
Sure, you might walk in, you might get lucky
every once in a while, but there's no consistency
to that model.
So for me, it would be a lot more driving,
a lot more work, a lot more gas money,
a lot more car upkeep, a lot more podcasts,
and a lot more misery in my life.
That's just the reality of it when it comes
to thrift store models.
You gotta be willing, I mean, you see all the time,
people drive, they get hotels, and you know,
some people enjoy traveling.
People love traveling.
I'll say this hotel, it's a business right off there.
I got nothing against these people.
You enjoy doing that, go for it.
For me, I like going out, getting home,
at least being able to sit down and eat dinner with Deb,
maybe watch a show at night.
Like my personal life has more value to me
than I guess I would say my business life.
So that's why I try to run a super lean reselling business
so I can have time to go for a walk
or me and Deb wanna go here, or she wants to go to Target,
or whatever happens, we can just kind of roll with it,
and my business still makes enough money to be sufficient.
So yeah, that was a good one.
I got a better one for you.
Oh, okay.
What if you had to spend all the money you made
every single week, like you would have to operate
at zero dollars, zero cents?
So I have cash flow, but it's constantly going out, okay.
Yeah.
I mean, that would just be more ordering.
And by ordering, there would be only, like you,
there would be only so much I could source locally.
So I'd have to spend the money online.
So it'd be a lot more online shopping,
and I'd probably be hitting all the auctions online.
I'm not even talking, I am talking eBay,
but there's much more than just eBay, at least in books,
that you can attend and take part in online.
And then a lot of my time would have to shift
toward tracking down those orders.
Did they ship it?
Did it arrive?
Was it in the same condition stated?
How many returns am I going to have?
It would be a lot more, it's not customer service.
Yeah, it is customer service, just the reverse,
because I'm the customer at that point.
Well, I'm not handling customer service,
but I'm still having to do customer service.
Part of my business would change.
That's probably where a bulk of that time
to spend that money would be allocated,
purchasing and following up on set purchases.
Yeah, that's crazy to think about.
If you had to spend the money you make every single day,
even not on a weekly basis, what if it was every day?
You make 200 bucks today in profit,
you have to spend that 200 bucks today where it disappears.
You would go nuts, dude.
You'd be on eBay at 11.59 trying to buy whatever you can
so you get back down to your zero balance.
It's just cost and grow mode, and that's a great model.
But just like anything else,
it becomes tiring over time, the same thing,
day in, day out.
But the job's the job is what it comes down to.
So if that's your business and you love doing that,
more power to you.
And the question then becomes,
yeah, because with that would come more processing
and a lot more manpower need put in that.
So you're looking at a bigger staff to process
everything coming in, that's just another expenditure,
but you're making more money so it balances out.
All right, you're up.
What if you had a truck to do your business with?
I mean, I don't know.
Listen, I'm not big on the truck life.
I think there is some validity to maybe you can fit more
in a truck than me, but I can fit-
Let's make it fancy.
Let me revise that.
A truck with a trailer attached to it.
Or like a truck with a lift gate or something like that.
Yeah, something like that, that kind of truck.
I mean, I definitely would be open to
possibly sourcing bigger deals at great prices
because the more you buy, the cheaper you get it, right?
I have people around me that sell stuff
via the Gaylord and things like that.
I'd definitely be more open to it because yeah,
loading everything up into the 2008 Nissan Ultimate,
it's not a fun time.
And then unloading it and then reloading it
to get rid of all the junk.
So it kind of does constrain what you do.
And I often think about this,
what if I had like 10 libraries that are like,
yo, take our stuff.
That's not feasible for me, dude.
I would have to be unfortunate.
My whole life would just be that.
And I don't think there is a value to it,
but I don't think there is enough value to make it worth.
I think the relationships you have,
you have to be getting something back from it.
And sure, donations are great,
but the work that goes into taking these donations takes time.
If I had a truck, yeah, it'd be a lot easier, right?
I just get a little pallet jack,
you can wheel it right up to the lift gate, boom,
done, easy peasy.
I would need a bigger space.
I'd probably have to rent another storage unit,
but you definitely get stuff for way cheaper.
The more you can take, the better price you can get.
That's why I wanna hear people talk about,
well, I'm paying $800 for a pallet.
I'm like, you're nuts.
If I spent $800 on thrift storage,
just cherry picking inventory,
I'm probably gonna make 10 grand in profit.
So why are we spending so much
if we're ordering so much inventory?
It should work the opposite way.
The more you buy, I don't care how they spend it.
Oh, not picked over, fresh donations.
None of that stuff matters.
If you're buying in quantity,
you should be paying next to nothing per piece per pound.
So yeah, a truck would kinda,
truck would solidify me as being a bulk seller.
Maybe that's why I'll never get a truck
because I don't wanna be a bulk seller.
Once you get a truck, you gotta go bulk.
Yeah, it's like, oh, you got a truck?
It's like these dudes, they drive around and they have trucks.
I'm like, what do you do for a living?
You're like a construction worker or something?
They're like, no, I work from home.
I'm like, why you got an $80,000 pickup truck for?
You ever even put anything in the back?
Okay, I put my groceries back there.
If I have a truck, then I gotta go bulk all the way,
especially if it's a box truck with a lift gate.
I mean, you could just people have businesses
just around that, you know?
Maybe I just rent out my box truck with a lift gate
for people that need to move or buy furniture.
Or like a lot of our local furniture shops,
they usually hire somebody that has one of those
for delivery.
So you go buy something, you can't take it home.
Oh yeah, I got a guy that'll deliver it for you
for X amount of dollars.
That would be a fun business model.
A truck business fleet of trucks for resellers to rent out.
Yeah.
I mean, there's U-Haul.
I mean, it kind of already exists, sure.
But like a service that does the pickup
in addition to that.
Yeah, there's definitely money to be made in that
and you can undercut a lot of people.
All right, so let's do a few rapid fire ones here
to kind of wrap this up.
What if you didn't have a beard?
I would look like a sheriff.
Oh, look at those cheeks.
Just want attention.
Stay away, stay away.
All right, go, hit me with one.
What if somebody wrote you a blank check to retire today?
What would that figure look like?
A realistic one, not just a billion dollars.
Man.
So what's the retirement dollar amount?
I can never work again.
Never work, you're done.
No more work.
What's the number?
Where I'm at, it probably, it's not a lot.
I mean, people probably, there's no way,
but I don't have any debt.
My cost of living is, am I going off
like my current situation too, right?
Yeah, cats and all, Deb too.
Probably to be safe, I'd probably say two million.
Two million, okay.
And that's not a lot of money to retire.
People might think-
That's a very frugal lifestyle.
I mean, you may live somewhere cheaper.
Yeah, I live in the middle of nowhere.
Central Pennsylvania, I can buy a decent house
for probably 150K, boom.
All right, property taxes are minimum
because I live in the mountains somewhere,
maybe like 500 bucks a year.
And then you just invest everything.
You just live off your 10% return every single year,
which will easily be 100K.
I mean, that's more money, you know,
and you ain't doing nothing.
So, I mean, I could easily, listen,
I live a frugal lifestyle.
I don't need all the bells and whistles.
And just being broke kind of got me to this point.
So yeah, three million, probably two million.
I probably get away with 1.5, honestly.
I don't need that much.
I mean, I really don't,
but you gotta get yourself into that situation
and get yourself, and it's different for everybody, right?
If I go decide to live in Austin, Texas,
I'm gonna be paying 500K for a condo
versus 150K for a house with 10 acres
in the middle of nowhere in Pennsylvania.
I mean, that's kind of a good one.
What if you had to leave Texas?
Where are you going?
Somewhere with mountains, probably Colorado.
I'm a big fan of mountains.
You're going from like hot to cold.
You gonna survive up there?
Well, you do have that beard.
Yeah, I've lived in North Dakota,
North Carolina before, and Columbus, Ohio.
I've lived in cold places, Mike.
So you've been moving all over the place.
I have, I've lived a very interesting life.
No, I love the mountains.
I love mountain towns, actually.
They're a lot different than country town folk.
Still town folk, right?
But it's just a different atmosphere.
I like seasons.
I like seeing all four seasons.
Texas, you get too windy and sometimes cold and then hot.
What if you had to live overseas?
Where would you live?
That's tough.
I took, in high school,
I took four years of Mandarin Chinese.
I do know a little bit, right?
Really?
Deb's probably scoffing back there
because she always asks me stuff.
I'm not like fluent, but I know like the numbers
and like basic convers,
really basic conversational things,
but I don't think I would go there.
I probably like, I don't know, man.
I go somewhere where there's,
there's none of this crazy nonsense that goes on.
I don't know, dude.
I would have to do research.
I can't give a direct answer today.
What about a region?
Are we going Europe, Asia, Africa?
I'm not going Europe.
I'm not going South America.
Pacific Islands?
I'm not staying in North America.
So yeah, that kind of, kind of narrows it down.
I, so I'm looking at Africa, Antarctica,
Australia, or Asia.
Okay, okay.
I don't know, somewhere in there,
somewhere in there.
What if you had no power for a week?
Like no electricity?
Yeah, give me a quick answer.
You got no electricity for a week.
I guess somewhere with electricity.
There ain't nowhere, dude.
There's an EMP went off.
There's no, like, well, what if an EMP hits?
Yeah, what if there's, you ain't got no power for a week.
I would sort books,
to her when the power comes back on.
Dude, listen, there's an EMP.
He don't know what's going on out there.
He can't turn on the TV to find out what's going on.
He's still, he's just still going to be working away.
Little does he know there's a nuke
about to drop in the middle of Texas.
He's just like, I'm sorting my books.
No, I would sort them because even if I have to get a,
a cart and horse to sell my books,
I will still continue to live.
Hey, you're, you want to learn how to make potatoes, right?
I got this potato farming book for you.
I'll just trade you 10 cans of soup for it.
So even in the apocalypse, my book industry goes on.
Yeah, I sent in a book this past week.
It's the second time I sourced it.
Raising goats for meat.
I mean, I seen it, I said no way.
Or how to make your own mason jars
with sand and the sunlight.
Dude, I was reading this book before I sent it in.
And the knowledge they have in these books
when it comes to some of this, like these farming techniques,
it's crazy, man.
It's, it's absolutely crazy.
All right, your last one.
Okay, my last one here.
I got, I got to be very particular on this.
I got one for both of us.
What if you worked in corporate?
Funny thing is, I always thought
I was going to be a corporate worker.
I thought I'd be the guy with the briefcase and the suit.
Yeah.
Look how I turned out.
I wear a Michael Myers hoodie
and I record a podcast every single week
with your crazy Texas ass.
So yeah, I don't know, man.
Life will be different.
It is funny, too.
I mean, I'm not a big fan of the show.
I'm not a big fan of the show.
I find the way this is changing
is gonna make things more interesting and先y different.
It is funny, too.
When I was in eighth grade,
they had us write a letter to our future selves
and the teacher actually held on to these letters
for 15 years and then mailed them to us.
Really, I mean.
He just did an annual thing, the last,
yeah, okay, okay.
But Seth's still pretty cool.
Yeah.
What did you just say?
Oh my.
I don't know if I wanted to close it here on the podcast.
I'll spill the beans, right?
So I said I was gonna be married and have,
I think at least two kids right now.
Okay.
I was gonna be a professional football player as well.
Oh, NFL, all right.
In eighth grade, yes.
This was what was going on in my mind.
So those were the big things I took away from that letter.
Yeah, I was gonna be a professional football player
and I was gonna have two kids right now.
And I mean, look at me, what a failure.
Yeah.
What a failure I've turned into.
I sell stinky media for a living.
I got cats instead of kids.
At least I have dev, right?
What seller is the NFL?
I mean, you're similar.
At least I have dev.
I guess that's the one thing that sticks with me.
And listen, the cats are a lot easier than the kids
and I got no problem with that.
So yeah, that was a good one.
So I guess I'm gonna wrap it up here.
My Jerry Springer final thought is.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, you had a question for both of us.
What's that like? I did.
What if for some reason we had a disability
that couldn't like that affected our business, right?
So I think about this.
I talk about this guy all the time.
A one foot flipper.
He has a YouTube channel and he sells on eBay
and the dude crushes it.
And I think to myself, like,
we take these things for granted, right?
So like, what if I was in a situation where, you know,
maybe wheelchair bound or maybe, you know,
I have to use a walker to get around.
Like that literally changes my whole business instantly.
But I do think, right, the proof's already out there
that you can be successful.
You would just have to, you know,
make the necessary changes.
And it kind of boils down to like the overall,
like my final thought was gonna be like,
there's a million what ifs, right?
You can't always worry about the what if,
because if you do, then you never get anywhere, right?
What if a comet comes and hits the earth, right?
What if Amazon goes away?
What if eBay goes away?
What if fees go up?
There's so many of these things out there.
You just have to focus on what is
and, you know, be prepared for a situation
that might happen, right?
You know, maybe, you know,
Johnny's long lost newborn son shows up at his doorstep
after this podcast today, right?
And you know, it's kind of crazy.
And to hold around in college is what I'm hearing.
It's crazy to think about all the what ifs
that are out there.
And a lot of people get caught up
and they only think of like the worst case scenario, right?
It's like, it's never like,
what if you're gifted a warehouse with a box truck?
Or like, what if you're gifted things
that can 10X your business overnight?
That's never the case.
It's always like worst case what ifs, right?
Like, or things, or like huge hurdles.
What if this happens?
And it's always like, it's usually never a positive thing.
It's always like, well, what if this breaks?
Or what if that goes wrong?
Or what if that, what if that?
So give me your final thoughts on what ifs
and you know, just your overall opinion
on getting caught up with all the what if nonsense.
You gotta stay focused.
You can worry, you can play that game,
but it's a rabbit hole of not focusing.
However, I think it's healthy to do it every once in a while.
Like, what if I did this to my business?
How does that change it?
So my final thought that I'll leave to everyone
is in the form of a question.
What if you doubled your business
as far as the amount of money you made?
What does that look like?
What do you need to do to accomplish
doubling your income this year?
What if you did?
You make double the money,
but it's gonna be a lot of work.
So you better be ready to take everything
that comes with it.
So we're gonna wrap it up here.
We appreciate you all listening.
What if everybody that watched this video liked it,
subscribed to the channel, gave it a five-star review?
We would be the number one podcast in the world, Johnny.
And then we would have to have security guards with us
when we went out grocery shopping, paparazzi everywhere.
I don't know what's the life we really want.
But-
We're not gonna be satisfied
so we're number one in Japan.
We do appreciate everybody listening and liking
and leaving us five-star reviews on the podcast platform.
So we will talk to everybody in next week's episode.
Thanks for listening to another episode
of the Resellers Mindset Podcast.
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