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 into another episode of Resellers Mindset Podcast.
Mike alongside Johnny.
I just point both ways now if you're watching over on YouTube,
because I always, my stuff's mirrored.
I don't know which way I'm pointing.
Johnny doesn't know the topic today, right?
Keeping him in the loop.
He's been bugging all morning since 5 a.m.
Hey, what's the topic?
What's the topic?
Johnny, the topic is one that is like near and dear to my heart.
And I think we have to have a real discussion about it.
And it comes to why do resellers make reselling a thousand times harder
than it needs to be, right?
So I'm going to throw a crazy example out there first.
The big one I get is, well, my customers love how I pack my items and they come
back and they buy more from me.
And I'm here to tell you, listen, repeat customers on eBay.
You might get them once in a blue moon, right?
You might catch the same person walking down the street.
On Amazon, they ain't, I mean, nobody's coming back to shop your store specifically.
And I think what happens here is, and I wanted to relate it to like a huge
company like Amazon or Target or Walmart.
When you buy something online, how they send you their, how do you get
your stuff from Amazon, right?
Usually in a poly bag, not even a padded poly bag, just in one of those
super cheap, thin poly bags.
Why are we, I don't understand.
Why do we have to have a perfect size box for every single item I'm ever going to sell?
Why do I need, you know, the used book I've branded tissue paper, branded tape.
We go so far above and beyond chocolate candies.
I mean, people were yelling at me, dude.
I put a video out talking about that.
I was like, we talked about it in the podcast and it was a short and somebody's
like, I put candies in all my packages and the people love it.
I'm like, I think it's such a disconnect that we have this strange, like, Oh, I
want to be the best, I don't know company ever.
And you think by your, your packing materials and how you handle things.
And that's just one of the things I'm going to go off the rails on today here.
Right.
Because there's so much more when it comes to like, I got to make sure
things are in the perfect description.
And I seen something in our discord earlier today, somebody counts how
many pages are highlighted in the whole book.
It puts that in their listing, dude.
No, no.
Really?
This is going on out there.
And you, if you think otherwise, I think the problem is, I think the problem is
when you're small time, when you're small time sales and a lot of free time, you
get into this trap of every little thing has to be perfect down to the very last.
I got to dot every I and cross every T and I'm here to tell you, even if you
stay small time, it's a waste of time to crap.
Some of these resellers do a lot of these resellers do.
We got to move on because you're never even going to be able to get to the point
of scaling if you're going to look at every little thing, Oh, well, how many
pages are dog-eared in the book?
Like I don't mess around with none of this stuff.
And I don't even at first I was like, yeah, I'm lazy.
It's like kind of like cutting corners.
It is, that is not the case at all.
It's called being efficient.
If it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter.
So there are several things to unpack here and I will ignore the person
who mentioned counting highlighted pages.
Yeah, that's, that's really funny to me.
Anyway, I'm sorry that you're in our discord server and I'm laughing at you
right now, but I hope you learn from it.
No more.
They pulled it from Facebook.
So it wasn't somebody.
Okay.
Actually a part of our server.
Okay.
Free pass to discord community.
Good.
So we're really essentially talking about here, customer service, what's required.
What's necessary and what is a waste of your time.
So to me, what's required is laws in the book that they're notated in the
description that you mail the package on time and it gets to the customer in
an undamaged fashion, the best it can.
Now here, here's where we're going to segue to what Mike was talking about.
If you're putting glitter and candy and anything beyond a thank you note in
there, it may be some do not bend stickers.
Cause I use these two just to help it get there and arrive undamaged.
I have no way of proving those stickers actually mean a thing or not.
I may be wasting some money on that and time.
However, I do believe in streamlining your packaging to make it go out as
efficiently as possible when you're packing, if you're doing like 10 orders
or 20 or 50 orders, having uniform packaging, I believe is essential as
far as a system in place to get it out.
Now, whether you need to Christmas wrap and put a bow on there and maybe a
gigantic, you're the best customer ever sticker right on the front of the
Christmas wrap box, I believe that is unnecessary.
Will it make the customer feel extra special?
Yes, no doubt about it, but will they return to your store and make another
purchase because of the Christmas wrapping and bow that you put on there?
I believe no, but I will admit it looks nice and the customer will appreciate it.
But will they spend more money with you?
No.
Who cares?
Who cares if the customer is like, Oh my God, I got a, I got a little gummy fish
in my package.
It is the biggest weight and this, and on the topic of conditioning, you, you
cannot condition every single book differently.
One condition note that blankets everything.
If you look at my Amazon condition note, it says, but I'm not going to
show you everything.
Look at my Amazon condition note says as shelf where may or may not contain
highlighting, even if the book doesn't have highlighting, you can have it in
one single condition.
No, these people are nuts, man.
It's like, why, why does every little thing have to be perfect?
They ain't coming back.
I'm here to tell you, you might get lucky if you have a super large store, which
you're never going to get to.
If you run a, run a reselling business this way.
Sure.
You'll get repeat customers.
You sell specific niche.
So yeah, you'll get repeat customers, but even Johnny ain't putting candy in
this stuff.
I mean, we have to, I think it's just like, it stops you from growing as a
reseller when you worry about all of this little nonsense that piles up.
And it just, there's no, there's no value back.
And I think to myself, people get pissed off because I ship every book I sell in
a box, I'm not shipping none of myself in a box, unless it's like a hundred plus
dollar book and I got specific size boxes that I have that I rarely use.
Everything else goes in a bubble mailer.
How many, how many negative feedback are on my eBay and Amazon account?
Zero.
It means nothing.
Nobody can prove to me otherwise because I do the bare minimum.
I do the bare minimum when it comes to conditioning, when it comes to packing.
Why am I going to waste my time and energy on something that has no return value?
All it is, is taking more of my time.
Think about putting a book or anything in a poly bag or a bubble mailer versus a box.
Sure.
Well, Oh Mike, you're not sending out that much.
Well, you know what time adds up over time.
And that's, that's the reality of reselling.
And we have all this time.
A lot of us, we just burn time.
And that's kind of why I wanted to get into some of this stuff is if we're
going to resell full-time or even part-time, you have to be efficient as
possible to make it work and to scale your business.
And I, it's funny because I said it in another one video recording, tech was
doing one of his live streams and I asked him, I said, yo, what classifies
you as a full-time reseller, the time you spend or the money you make.
And without hesitation, he said, it's the money you make.
Who cares about how much time you spend.
Yeah.
I mean, and right there.
So when I tell, when I tell everybody, Hey, I'm in my Amazon business 20 hours a
week, but I make more than a full-time income.
If I was working at CVS, it's like.
Johnny, do I gotta go burn these other 20 hours?
No, I don't.
I can find ways to be more efficient.
And the only way you ever get it to a 20 hour Amazon a week business, you
can't be conditioned in every book.
I can't be going to the corner store and buying penny candy to put in every single
book, you can't play this game, the thank you cards.
Sure.
There's some value to this and feedback, but I mean, at the end of the day,
feedback doesn't pay your bills.
I can have 10 million eBay feedback.
If I, you know, put free gifts in every bag or whatever you do to get feedback.
Who cares about the feedback?
I don't even care about feedback.
Yeah.
I mean, I think on eBay, at least getting your feedback to a thousand is
somewhat important because customers do look at the customer or the seller's
feedback and if it's a low number, they're kind of like sketchy about it.
So there is some validity there.
I would say anything above a thousand is.
Whatever you did to get to a thousand, yay.
After that, you shouldn't waste your time with those extras.
Um, now as far as conditioning notes, my notes are boiler plated.
Now, if there's an additional thing that's not in those boilerplate, I will add it in
like it's an X library.
Okay.
I'll include the X library, but even that's a boilerplate line in itself or
cover creasing.
I don't, I used to be, I used to over condition my books, cover creasing in
the upper left-hand corner, about three inches from the left.
That's no, that's a waste of time.
Stop doing that.
Just say cover creasing.
And if you want to front or back cover, but even then I think that's unnecessary.
You just put cover creasing our dog earring.
You don't need to say dog earring pages 58, 75 and one Oh eight.
No, just say dog earring and you're covered.
Um, the simpler, the better.
Now, as far as about boxes and poly bags players choice there, I got really cheap
boxes that were cheaper than poly bags and it's a box, but we only really use
those for like our multi-quantity orders.
Everything else I use in a state flat.
Um, and then if it basically order of operation, it goes into stay flat, can't
go in a stay flat.
It goes into poly can't go into poly goes in a box, can't go in the box.
It goes in the fit.
Everything.
Poly bag.
It's gigantic.
Yeah.
I got some of those too.
They're like, it's like a blanket of poly bag.
So if it, like, if it can't fit in our standard box, it goes in the, will
fit in this bag, guaranteed.
It's a trash bag, poly bag.
Even you have to fold it and tape it to form it around the book.
Anyway, uh, streamlining your packages is important.
I'm indifferent about the poly and box thing.
It does not matter.
I buy what's cheap and not going to break on the way there.
I don't care if it's a poly bag or a box or, uh, I don't know, stay flat.
It doesn't matter.
Um, now another thing I think people do on the customer service end.
I've debated about this on every one of my orders.
I send them the tracking number of the item.
I don't know if I need to do that because eBay does this automatically,
but I send them a personal message.
Here's what you ordered.
Here's your tracking number, but I also throw in my coupon in those
messages in case they missed the four other messages explaining my coupon.
So it's really an endorsement to buy more.
Yeah, I think, I think you get ahead of yourself with this discussion.
I think you were thinking in the terms of somebody that has, you know,
10,000 plus eBay listings, right?
The problem is the majority of the people we talk about are in this cusp of.
Part-time that want to be full-time or part-time that spend full-time
hours and make part-time money.
I think that's where I mean, and honestly, a lot of resellers fall into that majority.
There's nothing wrong with being in that majority at all.
I just want you, Hey, if you're part-time, you shouldn't be working more than me.
Like, let's be real.
You should not be working more than me.
There ain't no chance you should be spending all this time.
And, you know, Johnny was kind of harping on the eBay sellers.
I'm going to take a huge dig at you Amazon sellers because you all pissed me off.
Why are we polybagging items that don't need to be polybagged?
Right.
I understand like the first time you do something and like, Oh, I don't
want the CD case to get cracked or I don't want just send it in the box.
I'll send a box of 177 CDs last week.
They're jam packed into the Lowe's box.
There's no poly.
There's no stuffing.
There's no nothing.
The whole box, Johnny, there's not even room for anything else to fit in there.
Do you sticker the cases so they can't pop open?
I did that many, many moons ago.
And after one week, I said, Johnny, how the hell am I ever going to get anything sent in?
I mean, maybe if I got 10 a week, all right, then sure.
It makes sense.
But most people out there, they want to be as efficient as possible.
I ditched that just as fast as I started it.
It is not feasible.
What happens if the case flies open?
Well, you know, listen, what happens if the UPS truck carrying your stuff gets
smoked by a tractor trailer on the way to the warehouse?
I mean, it's like this what if game of things that never happen.
We're worried about stuff that's never going to happen.
Like, well, what if I just imagine the UPS driver sees a sign that says bump ahead,
puts on the nitro and just guns it and everything pops up in the back and falls
down, crash, bang, boom.
Love it.
It's crazy to me that we, we do these things for what?
Right.
If Amazon doesn't ask for you to poly pack it, don't poly bag it.
Well, it's a new CD.
It's a new DVD.
I mean, it's going to be okay.
It's just a CD.
It's just a DVD.
Like I sold two, two 75 plus dollar DVD sets this past two weeks on eBay.
And I thought to myself, I put them in one of those little bubble mallards, Johnny.
I thought to myself, how many resellers right now?
If I just made a video just saying, Hey, look, I'm sending this $80 DVD set
in this tiny, thin bubble mailer.
Like, Oh my God, dude, what are you crazy?
I hope you got signature confirmation.
That's another thing.
Oh my God.
If it's over, if it's over 20 bucks, you better get signature confirmation
because everybody's going to scam you.
Johnny.
I don't even do that on like a hundred dollar plus books, nor do I
buy the fancy insurance.
I, I just let it rip and roll, man.
Rip and roll.
We need shirts that say that because we get carried away.
Why are we worried about signature confirmation?
You know what happens with signature confirmation, Johnny, you send out your
a hundred dollar, your $200 item.
The person works.
They try to get a signature.
It doesn't happen.
They try one more time.
Doesn't happen.
It gets returned to you.
Now you got to resell it, relist it.
Yeah, pretty much.
Or they're annoyed that they have to go to the post office to sign it because
the time the UPS, USPS driver gets there, they're never there because they got a day job.
And now they have to spend time out of their day job on their lunch break to go to the
post office to sign a damn thing.
They paid $20 for F that.
Oh man, we're, we're going off the rails today, but I think it is important because
in order to scale, you need to spend more time.
If you're going to spend more time, it has to be doing things that make the business
money, uh, you know, thank you cards.
Sure.
They're nice.
Are they going to make you money?
Maybe once out of every million, you miles ago, buy a lottery ticket.
Uh, conditioning your stuff.
I mean, you got photos, it's all on eBay, Amazon, nobody reads anybody.
Listen to this.
If you purchase something on Amazon, you've never, never looked, you don't even know
how to find the condition notes.
I mean, me and Johnny talked about it all the time.
You don't even need condition notes for Amazon.
Maybe you're perfectly fine.
I have them, but where are they on the listing?
You don't even need them.
So we justify these things that are waste of times in our business because you think
it's maybe it's like a better look for you.
When it's not, it's just, it is what it is.
Nobody cares about it.
And then it's unfortunate because a lot of people, you know, they do noise packaging
and it's over the top and it just, it's too much.
And my wife, she sells on Etsy and that platform's like the, the king and queen of
over packaging, right?
Like everybody's got to have the fanciest packing.
It's tied up with like thread from, you know, medieval times that some king used.
And it's, it's crazy, man.
And I want everybody to be successful reselling, but I don't want it to consume your soul
because once it starts consuming your soul, any fun, no more, you're not going to enjoy
it.
And you're just going to want to give it up on it.
I think here's a proper analogy.
Stop, stop treating your e-commerce store like a five star resort and start treating
it like a motel.
You just need a place to sleep, they just need a place to order their goods.
We aren't deal, well, most of us are not dealing in 300, $500,000 books, DVDs or CDs or other
forms of media as the entirety of our business.
Do we have a few of these sprinkled in our business as a whole?
Absolutely, we do.
But if we treat the $20 items like we're treating the thousand dollar items, you're never going
to get any work done.
Now, Mr. Jack Weaver, who's been on this podcast before, is a big proponent of profit per hour,
is what you're doing providing you profit in an hour format.
Not with what we're addressing today, it certainly is not.
In fact, you're spending money to do those extra dude ads.
You are losing money per hour instead of making money per hour.
The time you spend doing these little extras, you could pack another box for Amazon.
You could do some more listings or take some more photos for your listings tomorrow to
save yourself some time to go out and source more.
Do you know what?
Bring back more items to sell.
So evaluating your time.
Now, are there some things that don't produce a penny but are necessary?
Like if you got a pile of stuff on the floor that you're having to walk around every time
to get to what the stuff is to make you money, well, you know what?
Maybe you should spend a few minutes cleaning that pile up.
So you're more efficient to getting your actual work done.
There is such a thing as resetting your workflow to zero and making it fresh.
Or you know what?
I'll just throw it in the storage unit and get to it tomorrow.
Well, maybe you should get to it now if you got a few extra hours.
I know, I don't know, Murder She Wrote's on at home at five and you want to get to that.
But you know what?
Everything's recorded these days.
Murder She Wrote can wait.
The murder's still going to be there for you.
Hey, if you want to watch Unsolved Mysteries at night with me, then we ain't got time.
Sorry, I'm not inviting anybody over that's putting candies in their packages or putting
$5, $10 books in boxes.
It just doesn't make sense.
We didn't even talk about the added expense that comes with a lot of this stuff and the
workflow.
Cost money.
Even thank you notes cost money.
Even if you order them or you print it for your printer like I do, the paper's not free.
The ink you got to refill.
I ain't faking it.
The paper's not free, the ink you got to refill ain't free.
The time's free, dude.
That's what all resellers think.
Time is free.
Time is not free at all.
Time is free.
It's free even though it took me 20 hours to cut out all my thank you notes.
But it's free.
I didn't do nothing.
Yeah, you did.
You just spent 20 hours of your life.
And I think it is important.
You kind of hit it on the head is your workflow.
What does that look like?
Because it's a waste of time.
A lot of things we do within the workflow.
How many times we make it a big point.
We only want to pick up a book one time and make a decision right then and there.
Why are we keeping things in piles around the house, around the garage to come back
to it later?
Why are we doing these?
Why are we going sourcing when we have a whole table full of books right there we can take
care of?
But these, that's not the fun part of the business, I guess.
I guess that's my big struggle.
Amazon is so hobby seller friendly that even if you try to take it seriously, you may never
get out of the hobby mentality of it actually being a business.
Right.
I mean, I still estimate inefficiencies with my Amazon business.
Right now we scan a book.
We're touching books more than once now.
Scanning a book, we're putting it on that back bookcase for those watching the YouTube
video to then go over to the listing station at a later point and to do that part.
What I really should be doing that I haven't figured out how to do is we scan a book and
we list it right away if it's profitable.
I'm not set up to do that.
That's a goal of mine to get to because now we're having to rescan books when we're listing
because they may sit on the shelf for a couple of days and in those couple of days things
may happen.
I'm not as efficient as I could be in my Amazon business.
I have dreams of being more efficient, but Mike's exactly right.
How many times are you rescanning books or DVDs or CDs or whatever you're scanning to
go into Amazon?
The workflow has to be scan, list, send.
Scan, list, send at the end of the day because that's how you save the most amount of time.
I mean, with eBay it's the same way, Trey.
You go out, I source a shopping bag of 20 items.
It doesn't just go to the side and then I go out the next day and then I just wind up
with a whole pile full of shopping bags full of stuff to list.
I think people... Is it because the tasks we're talking about a lot of the times are
not enjoyable tasks and people rather do more fun things like source and be in Facebook
groups and discords and watch YouTube videos about reselling instead of actually... For
me I think it's a huge problem.
I consume more content than I probably should.
Now I've gotten to a point now where a lot of it is podcast format where when I'm driving
to thrift stores I can listen, but I think a lot of resellers, it's almost like a cool
kids club now to be a reseller YouTuber or be involved in all of these different communities
when if you took a tiny bit of that time you spent there and put it into your reselling
business you can still be in these communities.
We're full-time sellers.
We can be as active as we want, but get yourself to a point where, okay, I got money coming
in.
Sure, I'm going to share my experiences of what's going on in my business, how I got
here.
A lot of us never... The plane never leaves a runway, dude.
We can't... It just doesn't happen for a lot of resellers.
Yeah, I'm actually calculated a couple of weeks ago how many calls I actively attend
and I try to work during the calls, at least the ones I'm not... Like this one, I try
not to do work in this call, but a lot of the calls where I'm not a host, but just a
participant, an active one, I try to do work while I'm doing calls because there's a lot
of time in that.
Now, if you're sitting there just watching a YouTube video and not working and just laser
focused on the video, I mean, that's time lost as well.
In my opinion, everybody learns differently, sure.
You can have that stuff in the background, which you need to be doing work, especially
if you're... Like on our Sunday call.
I work during the Sunday call.
You guys have seen me work during the Sunday call.
I look over to the monitor, not a whole lot of you guys are working.
Now, Mike gets a pass because he's the host, right?
He's not a participant.
He is the host.
He has to run the call, but the rest of us need to be working during that call.
You need to be scanning books.
You need to be checking your repricer.
You need to be... I don't know, maybe even be doing your bookkeeping.
Bookkeeping is important.
Yeah, I got to keep... I actually got a whole bunch of receipts in my email I got to keep
up with.
It is true, right?
It's... I don't know.
We spin our wheels so much with reselling.
I guess it frustrates me that there is not more people crushing it.
I guess that's where my whole frustration comes from this.
I think of all the little things along the way where we all can just waste a whole bunch
of time.
If nobody ever tells you, if you never hear this conversation of stop doing things so
extra, then you just keep doing it because you think it's the norm, right?
You think Johnny puts candies in his packages and Mike puts candies in his packages.
We condition every single book down to how many pages are highlighted.
This does not exist and it cannot exist at scale.
Look at huge sellers on eBay and Amazon.
Polybag out the door.
Sure.
Oh, you might get... Somebody might say something bad about your packaging.
Oh my God.
I'm going to ship this book in a polybag.
Who cares?
I mean, we're talking... There's always going to be picky people that you're never going
to please.
I think everybody's so scared of getting that one feedback that's like, oh my God, did you
see what they said about me?
I'm going to call this person up and I'm going to message them on eBay and Amazon.
You can't satisfy everybody in life.
I'm here to tell you that.
It's never going to happen.
All right.
As long as you aren't cutting corners and doing your job, negative feedback does fall
off.
Now, the rules have gotten a little bit more stringent on what feedback means and it does
impact your account, but if you're doing your job and you can relate to eBay that you in
fact did your job when a customer says you didn't, more than likely you're going to get
whatever that negative is removed.
Even if you don't, it'll fall off after a period of time.
If you're really paranoid about the couple of things that got left there that you couldn't
get removed, just up your game a little bit on whatever that metric you got ding in.
Item not as described.
Okay.
I boilerplate in my condition notes, but maybe not good enough.
How can I up my game there and redo the work you did on that and continue that same process
on the new things you got going to your store?
That should resolve your problem.
You just take that same methodology to whatever else it is.
Item, I don't know, inventory not in stock.
Maybe you take a minute to do an audit of your inventory to make sure you actually have
everything in stock.
The proof to me is being more efficient is doing less time performing the same task.
Nobody ever comes along and is like, Hey, I'm going to spend 10 minutes listing a single
item because it's better.
It's never that case.
It's always okay.
How can I do the 10 minute quality listing in 30 seconds?
That's the way to do it.
eBay, Amazon, it doesn't matter.
Like you can get quality listings done in well under a minute, but we can't do that
because every item is unique, Johnny.
And I want this item to really go to somebody that's really going to appreciate it.
And they need to know every single, the whole history of this item, where it came from.
Oh my God.
It's crazy to me.
And I think it's going to take me into the next one here.
And I know a lot of people do this.
I know you're all burning time and thrift stores.
I know for a fact, you go into a thrift store, you might never sold a board game in your
life, but you seen, you know, some big time YouTuber, Mel, we just had her on the podcast.
You see Mel all of a sudden she found a $200 board game to sell, right?
You don't sell board games.
Maybe you're a clothen seller, right?
You go in and go to your clothing racks, go into clothing racks, peek over like, I don't
got board games over there.
I need to go look now, right?
All of a sudden we're off the wagon real quick.
And I know there's, you can have successes and everything seller.
I think everything sellers on eBay, you know, they're, they're unicorns.
You're selling anything and everything.
You got to have a crazy knowledge base.
But for those of us that choose to niche down, you have to do that while you're in the thrift
store.
I'm here to tell you that you can't be, I don't even, I don't even look in the glass
cases no more.
If it's there when I'm in line checking out, I'll be like, okay, let's see what kind of
overpriced garbage they have.
But I'm in and out of these stores, Johnny, I'm turning and burning as fast as I can to
get to as many sources as I can to get as much profitable inventory.
And I think to myself, if I even walk down an aisle in a Goodwill, every single time
I'm in a Goodwill, I should run a test.
How many Goodwills I'm in?
How much time am I losing over the year of sourcing because I'm going down an aisle and
that's, I'm not even talking about stopping and looking.
If I stop and look at 10 things, just 10 random things down a different aisle, all of a sudden,
you're losing hours, days of your sourcing over the year.
Yeah.
And back when I was having to proactively go out and get inventory, I had come to terms,
I'm spending way too much time in these stores.
It is easier and fundamentally cheaper for me just to be the buy it all guy.
That's what I turned into.
Now I don't need to source as much because I figured out how to do that and scale that
up where I just make a phone call these days.
Hey, I need some inventory.
Okay, Johnny, we got you.
When can you be here?
I'll be there in an hour.
That kind of stuff.
Because me bringing it back here and processing it here where I'm set up to process is way
more efficient.
Now, do I get a lot of junk because of that?
Absolutely.
And for you cherry picker guys, I understand why that's not the lifestyle for you.
You're not set up to process bulk.
No shame in that.
But if you're cherry picking, you got to figure out a way to do it more time effectively.
Even if you buy it all and donate the rest and do it that way, sure.
You used to process in front of your apartments, didn't you?
When you had bulk buys outside?
Right now on the sidewalk, dude, I would literally have 50 different stacks of books.
People would think I was crazy.
People walk by, I'd be like, yo, you want a book?
I've had people take books right from the sidewalk.
I don't care.
It's been no use to me.
I used to bring in my yellow cart dolly thing with some empty tubs on it.
That was how I would cherry pick.
And what goes in the tub?
And I'd stack them.
And I roll those things four high to the checkout line.
And the lady's just like, we're going to make some money off this guy.
I'm like, yes, you are.
And instead of me having to have multiple baskets or me have piles of books in the floor
that I have to hand carry, I had to figure out how to make my sourcing as efficient as
possible and accounting for any worst case scenario.
Like, oh my God, look at this collection of books.
Well, hold on.
I need to run home to get my totes and stuff.
Well, I always had totes in the back of my truck.
I always had my dolly ready to go.
You have to figure out again, comes back to the fundamental.
And thank you, Mr. Jack Weaver, for pointing this out to everybody.
Your profitability per hour.
Someone I don't know their name.
I forget their name on YouTube.
They said profit per hour.
Doesn't matter.
They're full of shit.
I'm dead serious.
Is it problem per hour?
I think I did one of those community posts where I said, like, you should reach sellers,
know how much they're making per hour.
And just like, you just completely went off the rails.
I think it's I think with the thrift stores.
Sure.
I think it's cool.
If I see a video, you know, somebody found like this super cool item.
Like, yeah, you know, cool for you.
Right.
You know, I watch plenty of everything sellers and I think it's cool when they find some
of the stuff.
But for my business and to support my family and to have my reselling business, I can't
be that person.
I'm here to tell you, none of you can afford to be that person.
If you're going to be the everything seller, you still can't be in one thrift store for
10 hours.
You can't look at I would I should I can't because I refuse to do this.
But maybe we should pay somebody, Johnny, to go to a thrift store, reasonably size one
and look at every single item, touch every single item in the thrift store, every single
item you have to touch.
I don't even care if you just go around like and just poke every single item.
Like it would take a couple of days at least if it's a decent size one, not a small like
corner shop kind of deal.
But I mean, just the clothes alone, how many even the even the guys that are good at that
doing the they're doing that.
Yeah.
But they're going to get to books or you pull it out.
You got to scan it.
You got to open it to see if it has nice.
I'm going to say they're going to have to open it to see if it has an ISP.
And we'll we'll give them a pass on the cover scanning.
Sure.
Board games, dude.
You got to make sure the pieces have all the pieces, man.
Electronics.
Well, let me walk over to the wall and plug it in.
You have an outlet on the wall.
I hope you do.
Plug it in.
Ain't telling you nothing, right?
You go get one of those VCR as you plug it in.
It might power up, but that don't mean nothing.
I mean, it's going to play anything.
I mean, it's going to eject anything like and then what?
You got to go see if they got a VHS.
You got to go get VHS.
Or the couch.
Let's flip over the cushions or the cigarette stains burned in there.
Oh, look at that.
Yeah.
Oh, God.
There's a dead raccoon in here.
Yeah.
It's it's so important as a reseller to be efficient with your time and cutting out some
of this nonsense.
It'll change your life.
I'm here to tell you this.
You don't need to be working 40 plus hours a week to make a full time income reselling.
That is I think I think that's like almost a misconception that you got to work 40 plus
hours as a reseller to make a full time income.
Sure.
If you need to make 300 K a year, then yeah, your ass is going to be working those hours.
But you need to do 100 K.
I firmly believe that you could easily do 100 K a year.
Well under 40 hours a week.
Gross.
Yes.
Yeah.
OK.
So you probably could even you probably could even get close to net if you really lost in
your ass.
So I don't think you could get exactly 100 K, but you'd be close.
Yeah.
You probably you probably fall a little short.
But then you'll be a little bit closer to 40 hours, probably like 32 35 somewhere in
there.
So you're basically 40 hours at that point anyway.
But yeah, man, it's it's it's near and dear to my heart that people waste a lot of time
in reselling because time's the most precious thing we have, man.
And resellers, they don't value it, man.
I said it earlier, like, oh, yeah, well, I can print out my thank you cards for free
and I can make them for free.
And it takes five hours, six hours.
And in the mindset that we have, time is free when it's the most expensive thing that we
have.
But it's so crazy to me that we just if there's no like immediate cost to something like a
monetary cost to something, then it's free.
And that's not the case.
Like free book pickups.
I don't do them because they ain't free.
You know why they ain't free?
Because your ass got to go in the basement.
You got to carry up all the books, got to take the books to where you're going to take
them.
You got to sort the books, scan the books, get rid of the books.
Yeah, I didn't spend a dollar.
But I mean, I don't want no 10 hours of that life.
No way.
And even then, there's a monetary expense beyond time.
I mean, unless you're walking or cycling over there, you spend a little bit of gas money
to get there.
So maybe maybe we're talking a fraction of pennies per item, but still fractions of pennies
add up.
Yeah, it all boils down to time and valuing your time as a reseller.
That's the biggest takeaway I want everybody to have is I know it's kind of cheesy to like
sit down and be like, well, how long does it take me to do a box?
Okay, there's 100 items in that box.
So it takes me 45 seconds.
It takes me two minutes.
It takes me four minutes per item.
Then you can start figuring out the inefficiencies of your business.
And as you scale, or even if you don't plan on scaling, you can spend a lot less time.
All of a sudden, you're not reselling, you're not living in Johnny's warehouse 120 hours
a week.
Life is good.
I enjoy my life again, right?
All of a sudden, you know, hey, I want to watch Killer Clowns.
You know, I got time in my day to watch Killer Clowns.
I don't have to worry about, you know, dealing with all this reselling crap around the clock.
And it's overwhelming.
Like I said, there's tons of groups out there, great groups.
There's also the other side of the spectrum.
Spend your time, whether you're in a group, whether you're on your own, whether you're
watching content, listening to content, make sure there's value to what you're getting,
right?
Podcasts, throw it on while you're driving.
Sure, you can't watch the videos.
Unfortunately, you know, I'll be the first one to tell you.
It's harder for me to sit down and watch like a YouTube video, right?
Like a video, Johnny out in the thrift store.
Those videos are a little bit harder for me to kind of get, I don't know, like, but not
as attractive to me, but I can throw on tech, daily refinement podcast, and I can just listen
to that stuff while I'm driving.
You get value out of it.
And I don't have to be, you know, there's still something going on for the business
while that's going on versus like you said, YouTube video.
It's got to be right here on my screen, Johnny, I got to be looking at it because they're
going to be showing up with the God and you want to see what's at the bins and what's
in the bin.
So I can be like, hey, you missed this shirt in that bin at five minutes and 27 seconds.
Like, I don't know, man, time is the biggest challenge for me with this call.
And I don't like spending a lot of time in reselling.
So like, I guess I would say, is it lame duck of me, Johnny, that I don't want to spend
40 hours a week reselling?
No, because you have two businesses going.
One's your YouTube business, which you pump in time, which does require a little bit of
research development, which is, well, watching other people's content.
So no, I don't think it's lame duck of you.
And then your other part of your business is the content you're producing, which is
the reselling side of it.
So you actually have to be a reseller to produce the content for your YouTube thing.
So no, you're not a lame duck person at all.
You just have a lot going on.
Yeah, I think I guess that's the thing that saves my ass is that I have the results, right?
So like, even if it's just 40 or just 20 hours, I can be like, hey, well, here's my results.
What are your results?
Right.
So I'm like, hey, buddy, you know, like, what's your per hour?
Like, you know, and we kind of mean you kind of reference this, like, you know, you have
you have an employee, I'm just by myself.
So like, you should always be crushing me like the bug I am when it comes to sales and
everything.
And that's just how it should be.
So like, get in the mindset of, hey, Mike, you're doing this 20 hours, what are you making?
Don't plenty of videos showing exactly what I make throughout time frame.
So like, you know exactly what I can make doing this 20 hours a week.
You should be like, okay, 20 hours a week.
All right.
Well, if I'm doing 30 hours a week, then I should be, you know, one and a half X of what
that person's doing.
And everything's different, right?
Stores different world location is a huge factor in reselling.
We've talked about this, but value your time.
We're going to wrap it up here.
Johnny, any final thoughts when it comes to the things we waste our time on as resellers
and how we can be more efficient?
Do what's necessary and required of you, both by the platform and your own personal integrity.
Now you don't spill into the going above and beyond that doesn't yield any profitable results.
Yes, go above and beyond when it yields profitable results.
Money in the bank.
Now if you spend a little money to produce a little money out of that, so be it.
But I don't think your glitter and chocolates is that, my friends.
So now that we got to the bottom of candies to end this call, we're going to have Johnny
put candies in every single one of his packages for the next three months.
We'll do a podcast in three months and we'll see how much more money he's made because
of all the little gummy fish.
Do you have like a favorite candy you would put in packages?
Nerds nerds dude, see that could be messy, man.
That's almost like glitter, right?
Like what happens if the nerd box breaks open in transit?
Oh, it melts because it's hot.
Yeah, dude.
I'm thinking like Swedish fish, maybe like the bigger little sour patch guys, you know,
like the ones that used to cost like 10 cents a piece.
No, it's one of those Trumbull loans.
It's bigger than the actual items and I have to restructure my whole packaging to fit these
gigantic candy bars in there.
You could just get big, bigger than like the triangle packages.
They come in and you can put your stuff in there and just ship it in there.
There you go.
All right, we're out of here.
We appreciate everybody 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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