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, Resellers Mindset Podcast, Mike next to Johnny.
Today's topic is one that's kind of been near and dear to me lately as
resellers, we all expect to make money at the end of the day, not sales profit,
money you actually take home, can buy yourself a cheeseburger with put into
your 401k or, you know, pay off some debt, whatever works for you.
So we're going to talk about how you can make a thousand dollars in
the next 30 days reselling.
Johnny's got a lot to say on this.
So he's just going to take us away here in the beginning and we'll just
see where this goes.
I'm actually going to tell you how to make more than a thousand dollars a day.
And it's a very, very simple thing.
One box a day, one eBay listing a day for 30 days in a row every day.
Now you can cram multiple days into one day.
If you're have a full-time job or a part-time job is for instance, so you
could do all your sourcing one day.
Knock it out in eight hours.
Do all your packing one day there.
You're working two days a week.
Or you could just do one box a day, one eBay listing a day.
It ain't going to kill you.
Now you're going to have to do some sourcing to get the material in
order to do this, of course.
So there's, there's going to be work involved.
I'm afraid to say actual work.
So what should you do first?
Well, you should probably find out where you need to go to get the stuff.
You have so many options that we've gone over in a plethora in previous
podcast, we'll just go over the top of the list, there are stores,
bookstores, flea markets, garage sales, pawn shops, library sales.
So those are probably, that should be good enough to get you what you need
for this little 30 day project of a box a day and one eBay listing a day.
So once you get all the material, you're going to have to process the material.
Flip through the book at least once, make sure there's not graffitied
all in there by previous owners.
And you probably want to set your book sizes or DVD or CD sizes or vinyl,
whatever you're into and organize them a little bit.
So they'll go in your packing supplies.
So if you don't have packing supplies, you're going to have to get some.
If you have no money to get some, well, you could try your grocery store,
your Sam's club, see if you can get some free boxes to just start out.
Now, if you got a few dollars, the Lowe's and Home Depot or U-Haul boxes,
good enough.
You can order some on Amazon.
Even you probably don't want to go over 40, 50 pounds per box.
So doing the math at home, 30 times 40 pounds, big numbers, math.
Yay.
And then you're going to have to have some mailing labels.
You can use your standard printer, of course, if you don't have a printer.
Well, you can go down to good old local library.
They all got computers and printers these days.
May have to pay a few cents for their single sheet of paper.
But you can do it. You're going to need some skew labels as well.
And then you're going to need time for all of this.
Time being the biggest factor, especially if you have a full time or part time job.
So you got to do some pre-planning, figure out where you can squeeze in the minutes
that add up into hours that will make you fulfilled in this grand scheme of one
box a day and one eBay listing a day, because not everything you're going to pick up
is going to be Amazonable.
So then it becomes eBay-able.
You may have to put a bunch of crap together to make one listing.
That's OK. You can do it.
I believe in you. I think you can do it.
I think John is a little crazy with his one box a day because I find it hard to even
pump one box a day on a weekly basis.
But I will let you slide with one box a week that will still get you over the
thousand dollar mark on Amazon.
So and that's really not that bad.
I think one thing I want to harp on is.
How much stuff do we have sitting around that we're going to be able to do?
We have sitting around that we don't use just in our house.
I mean, come on, think about just some of the random stuff that we have that we could,
you know, old phones, you upgrade your phone, you still be surprised at what you can
get for some of these older phones, especially like a flip phone.
Me and Deborah talking about flip phones the other day.
But those things go for crazy money and they sell all the time because they don't
exist no more. Everybody probably has like a kitchen drawer full of old electronics
that you can easily sell old iPads, tablets, laptops.
And when I when I used to be broke and kind of talking about being a broke
reseller here, or if I'm already talking about somebody that's resounding,
they're not making money.
You should be wanting to sell things and get money, because isn't that the point
of reselling is to make money is not just to say you're a reseller at the end of the day.
So sell the stuff around your house.
You don't use no more.
You know, a lot of people play video games nowadays, games you don't play no more.
There are so many different things.
Kitchen appliances you don't use no more that you can make money off of that
you have sitting there. It's ready for free.
And hey, you can get a lot of stuff for free.
Download the freebies app, freebie alert app, put in whatever you want, put in free.
Anytime somebody lists anything free on the Internet, it's going to pop up to you,
set to your location.
I mean, when I first started reselling, me and Deb used to drive around the rich
neighborhoods on trash night to sell stuff on eBay.
And this is the truth. It'd be like 10 o'clock at night, pitch black.
Right. So I'm trying to get, you know, shut up, even though it's a nice neighborhood.
And I don't want to feel weird like I'm they don't want to catch a gold plated
bullet. I mean, I don't want to.
I don't know. But we should drive around the nice neighborhoods and you better
believe I was filling up my old school Chevy Lumina with anything that seemed
like it was worth it. And you can make money doing that.
And it's cost you nothing. It cost you a tank of gas, which will run you
four bucks on the super high end.
I think there's so much opportunity to make money in reselling when I hear
people aren't making money.
I don't know if it aggravates me or just makes me feel sad inside because you can
sell anything, right?
You might not make a million dollars off everything, but if you wanted to list
all your T-shirts for, you know, five dollars free shipping or six dollars
free shipping to make two bucks, you probably could sell the majority of the
probably could sell everything in your house if the price was right.
No, absolutely. I mean, you could even open up your own dollar store with your
own possessions, essentially, and clear some money.
Another note on that freebie alert, that's great.
You could check Marketplace and or Craigslist and type in the word free to
see what appears.
Now, keep in mind in these ads, when they say free, sometimes it's not
essentially free.
They'll have it clarified in their ad.
They're really charging money even though they put in their title free to
get suckers like us to click on it.
So just do just do your research on it.
You don't want to show up and they want to charge you a dollar per thing.
And the first one's free, right?
They try to trick you a little bit there, but it's not everybody.
Most people's above board on these places, but sometimes you'll catch those
kind of things.
Yeah.
So if we're doing Mike's model, you make more money if you do my model.
But anyway, if we're doing Mike's model, you work less if you do my model.
You do work a whole lot less.
Will you make more money?
I don't know.
Maybe, maybe.
I don't think so.
No, I don't think so either.
So you're doing one box a day and you're doing one eBay listing a week
in addition or no eBay listings?
No, you should be doing eBay listing.
I think one eBay listing a day is feasible because you could just draft
seven out easily in like 30 minutes, one day of the week.
So one box a week and one eBay listing a day.
Well, 30 listings total, however you want to splice that up.
And four boxes.
Four boxes.
So four and 30 here.
So we're talking probably in the neighborhood, 200 items or less is what
we're going for.
We'll call it 250.
So 250 items.
Some are eBayable.
Most are going to be going to Amazon, right?
So again, you got to figure out where you're going.
You got to have a budget in mind unless you're doing the freebie and alert thing.
Then you're going to need to plan out a route because there's only so many hours.
You may get five, 10 here, two here, zero here because, oh, it's water damage.
Got to leave it behind.
This is why it was free.
So again, time management is going to be a key factor here.
And we had a conversation on this on the Sunday call last week.
Schedule, especially for you people.
Let's say you're a nurse.
You're on call and you're used to working 60, 70 hours a week.
So your minutes are critical.
You're going to have to do a lot of pre-planning and a lot of scheduling.
Maybe you go on your lunch break, eat on the drive there.
You're driving with one hand, eating another, doing a big gulp kind of thing.
I don't know.
However you want to play it.
It's doable.
I don't care what kind of schedule you have.
If you're a college kid with all the time in the world or the nursing mom,
all of this is doable in one month's time span with 250 items.
You can do it.
No matter how tight your schedule is.
I got a hot take to make a thousand dollars a month on Amazon.
How many hours a month do you think I would need, Johnny,
to make a thousand dollars a month on Amazon?
Five hours a week, 20 hours a month.
No, you're way high.
I thought it was a thousand dollars a month.
I thought it was.
It's half that, probably.
Probably less.
It's probably three, four hours.
This is everything.
Pack and box, drop them off.
Everything.
Everything about it.
You get one box of CDs, 100-ish CDs at average $10 profit right there.
Boom, you're done.
I'm factoring in the guy that has to drive around with Freebie Alerts app.
I'm not factoring in.
You go into a thrift store or a library and buy some.
No, I'm just telling you the bare minimum, I think I could get it done.
You, yourself?
Yeah, absolutely.
Two hours, three hours a month.
I think it's going to take you, I think you're going to be under five.
I don't think you're going to be three.
Okay, all right.
I'll take five.
I'll give you five hours.
Five hours, okay.
I'm fine with a $200 per hour going rate.
I think we can call it up.
I want to get into eBay a little bit here because I just feel like eBay,
we feel like we just drag ourselves into this.
We drag ourselves along for the ride with eBay.
It's been talked about so much about not having a death pile.
What percentage of eBay sellers today do you think have a death pile?
I'm not talking about a QPile, things that you, you know, you're listing 10 a day.
So you got your next stack of 50 ready to go.
Yeah.
I'm not talking about that.
I'm talking about stuff that you bought maybe a month, two months ago.
That's just sitting there.
What percentage of eBay sellers do you think have a death pile?
96%.
Shoot, damn, dude.
All the eBay sellers are going to come for you.
I was going to say like 50 to 60 maybe.
No, I've been around a minute even in hardcore groups.
It's like that.
We all buy.
Even I have a death pile in another warehouse.
It does not come in this warehouse where there's a queue.
It's just piles of stuff.
When I get to it, I get to it because deals come around.
Good deals come around once in a while.
Regular deals come around every day.
Do I do the everyday deals anymore?
Not so much, but I still got books walking my door because I have a brick and mortar now.
A lot of that.
Well, I try to make a lot of that stuff go to Amazon.
The rest just goes right in the storefront.
And a small percentage goes to eBay these days for myself.
Now, if somebody ever dropped off or that great deal came along, I have a place to put it.
And that is, quote unquote, a death pile of mine.
But that'll probably be all cleared out this year.
Now, I don't do frequent buying like I used to because I don't need to these days.
But when I run out, I will have to buy again.
And I probably won't have a death pile for very long.
It'll come from death pile to queue pile, essentially.
I'll argue against you that it's not a death pile.
You just have to have so much inventory to feed your business.
Yes.
That it's almost just like an extended queue.
Right. Like there's a plan to get to that in the next month, the next two months, the next three months.
So like I see what you're saying is it's a death pile.
But the volume you do, it's really not a death pile.
And I think about think about people that go to a thrift store.
Right. You sell everything, anything you can make a buck on eBay.
You spend your ten dollars today for that item.
And then you go home and you don't list it and it sits there for God knows how long.
Not only are you losing on the profit you're going to make from that sale,
but you already got your money invested into it.
Like that's literally lost money sitting there.
Like it's not just it's free and it's sitting there, even if it's free and it's sitting there, it shouldn't be sitting there because there's money to be made off it.
But you have that's literally a pile of your money is sitting there.
You're staring at every day.
Right. And it's it's actually costing you money if you think about it,
because that downtown place I paid rent on it, I pay rent on the facility I'm in here.
So when stuff ain't for sale, well, you're not making any money on it just sitting there.
I just crunched some numbers.
We're doing about just on Amazon, averaging out two hundred and forty items a day that we're sending out.
So the two fifty you guys can do in a month that I can do in a day.
Now, keep in mind, I do have one employee is doable.
We're also doing we're doing.
Twelve eBay listings a day, we're launching six drafting six every day of eBay we do.
We generate a day off when we need to concentrate more on Amazon to do these bulk buys or I have to go in town for out of town for a bigger buyer networking opportunity.
So that's how we're doing our time management.
We're doing two days of eBay every day.
To allocate our time like he talked about the draft bank earlier.
I think that is very critical and crucial to people with little to no time as well as people who want time off like like Mike.
He wants to work as little as possible.
So he would probably do a draft bank, bring it out in one day so he didn't have to do it all throughout the month.
He'll do his 30 listings in one day, probably maybe two days.
Do you think you think the argument I know the answer you're going to give me because you literally have worked 16 hour days for weeks months straight.
You think the argument that people don't have the time is just BS.
Yeah, I do. I honestly do.
I agree. I agree and I barely work dude because think about it.
There's something you're wasting time on every single day, right? I enjoy watching Unsolved Mysteries.
Well, if I forget Robert Stack for the hour of the two hours I watch every night, I got an hour free that I can work on a business.
Well, you have kids. Well, the kids are not up 24 hours a day.
If you really want to make the extra money, possibly get out of the situation you're in financially or see results and some kind of side hustle you have going.
You're going to find the time that I found the time when I was working at CVS over 50 hours a week to grow my eBay business to quit CVS.
So the idea that we don't have time. Everybody has circumstances, right?
Johnny has things going on in his life. I have things going on.
People have kids. People have illnesses. They care for others.
The list is endless, but there's still ways you can fit time into your day that you don't think that you actually have.
Yeah, on the call last week, the person I was most impressed with was Tatiana was her name?
Yeah, yeah, the teacher.
The teacher. Yeah. She does teaching full time.
She has a family and she does bulk, but she does bulk on her time and her time is precious.
She doesn't buy more than her capacity of her garage, but she fills that up when she can and then she processes every spare minute she can get.
Meanwhile, doing a full time job. Meanwhile, running a family.
I know. And that is impressive. She's doing it all.
And she's working very hard at it. I was very impressed with her.
She's making it work and doing a bulk model. Bulk is a lot of hours.
Dude, she started out and she was just hitting thrift stores and she quickly realized like, hey, you know, like you're saying she has all these time commitments that it's not feasible for me to be driving.
And going to all these thrift stores like I can't block out, you know, a full day to go thrifting or half a full day to go thrifting.
So she said, well, I'm going to try, you know, getting getting some bulk inventory because when it's sitting behind you, you can stop and go work on something else or something else needs your attention.
You're doing a lesson plan for teaching. You can stop. So she completely pivoted.
And now she's crushing it. It's crazy to me that once you're self aware of what's going to work for you and you just commit to it, sky's the limit.
The only one thing that I think she's doing incorrectly and she's doing 95% of it right. She's allocated zero minutes to herself because I asked her that she says I don't have minutes for myself.
I'm doing all these other things like you need to reexamine your schedule.
I mean, if it's even a 30 minute walk once a week, you need to find that 30 minutes for yourself because I'll be honest with you.
I do that kind of grind too. And every now and then I do need a break. I mean, Mike busted my balls and saying he gave me a day off. I didn't realize this. Thanks Mike. It was actually appreciate it.
I was busy that day. Very busy.
It gets to you doing the 15, 16 hours a day. You need a break every now and then just to reflect. Give yourself. Am I doing everything right? I mean, we think about these things all through the day.
But really having the time to really focus on it, not just an afterthought of am I doing it right? Okay, I think I am. Let's continue to go.
And or am I happy? We don't ask ourselves this question enough, I think, as a society or humanity as a whole. We can play a whole lot how we're miserable or not. If you take a minute, am I really happy? Am I really satisfied? Do I love what I'm doing?
Whether that's business outside of business, personal, family, whatever, entertainment, hobbies, etc.
I think that's very critical to readjust yourself so you can perform better in business, honestly, even if it's just taking a minute out of yourself that has nothing to do for business.
It helps with your business as a whole, believe it or not, because we're humans. We're not machines, unfortunately. We can call people machines sometimes and they are and they're workhorses, etc. But even they need a few minutes for themselves sometimes.
I think there's another side of this we have to look at is that people that aren't making $1,000 or $1,000 for the sake of this podcast, but they are actively working in their business every single day.
How long do you have to bang your head against a wall for you to realize what you're currently doing ain't it? This ain't it, right? Think about somebody that's listing one item every single day on eBay, Johnny, and they're making $100 a month and they just continue to do it.
You have to see what's going on. Is it the stuff you're listing? Is it how you're listing? And the argument that you can't find desirable items. I think that's another thing along with the death pile. It's been completely blown up thousands of times by successful resellers on social media and YouTube.
There is profitable items everywhere you go. You just have to know what to look for. And that excuse is gone along with the death pile excuse. And if you're the person that is, you feel like you're working real hard and you're not getting no money.
It's not the platform. It's the crap you're selling or the processes you're doing to try to sell it.
Absolutely. I mean, we mentioned his name a lot. We're going to mention it again because he's main. Well, he's usually right. Mr. Tech and Sports says, okay, if you can't get $30 items and you're trying to get 14.
Okay, fine. Get 28 $14 items. Can you do that? You'll have to grind a little more, but doesn't make it feasible to obtain the same thing.
It it there's always a way. It just may be a little harder for you because everybody has different benefits where they are, or they have different cons going for them.
Let's say you have one arm, for instance, that's by all considered a negative. Should they be unable to do the same job you do? No, they just may have to work at it a little harder, but they can do the same damn thing.
And this goes with reselling. If you can't find the items, well, maybe you need to double the work to achieve the same dollar objective. You're trying to get that $100. So if 38 cut it. Well, maybe you do 60.
Or you go up and you drive farther out to get the higher quality items to come back. If you're stuck in your 30 minute radius, maybe go out of 30 minutes additional 30 minutes for an hour radius.
That doesn't work. Double it two hour radius. You will find it. That still doesn't work. Well, there's this lovely thing, ladies and gentlemen, we call the internet. Yeah, you're gonna have to pay up, but you're gonna get the kind of items you want. That's how this works. There's always, always a way.
It's funny because you hear with eBay, you need knowledge, right? I mean, sure, you can scan barcodes on your phone, right? But like, you have to understand the stuff you're selling and what's valuable. Every I mean, you hear it, I hear it in almost every thrift store I'm in people scanning stuff with the eBay app.
And I think to myself, how long are we saying in one thrift store scan and every single thing and why don't we have the knowledge before we get to the thrift store to be like, okay, I know this is a Stanley tumbler.
And this is a $40 bill, I don't have to sit here and type it in or Google lens every single item on the shelf. I think a lot of it is just ignorance to the category you sell in and not having the knowledge base. So when you get out there, everything is worth you don't know how much anything is worth in a thrift store.
Like if you had on the, the, you know, the Apple vision pro everything out right like it would all be question marks if you don't have that on because you have no idea what the value of anything is and if you're going to look at reality them up in a thrift store, you ain't ever going to get nowhere you sure you might find some gems but think about how long it's going to take you to get through it.
No, absolutely. I mean even that thing, if it's a one of a kind, it's not going to know what to do with it's never been on the internet. There's nothing, and it'll just come up a question mark or block it out entirely because I don't know what to do with it.
So even technology can fail on some things.
Do I think technology is great in southern certain areas to speed up your workflow. Absolutely. We all use software over an Amazon land. I mean in an effective itself Amazon eBay platforms are soft software to sell our goods faster.
We're not just stuck in carriage and carton horse times these days and have to journey on down the local farmers market fair to sell our wares anymore we sell on a global market we sell it to the entire world as our audience.
And you know what there's a lot of people who underpriced there's things that you can take advantage of even on the online market not just thrift stores, not just pawn shops not just library sales there's the whole world's available at a keyboard these days.
Now, I think time management is probably the biggest thing that's going to help you out even on the initial challenge here getting your $1,000.
And I think that is so crucial, especially in my business and Tatiana's business a bulk our minutes are precious so we have to analyze.
And we're gonna pull a line from Mr. Jack here your profit per hour is what I'm doing, making me money on an hourly basis. Yes, no, no, is going to lead me to making more money over the next hour.
I don't have anything to do sweeping the floor task or move this box out of my way task, because it in itself doesn't make me any money, but it'll speed me up over the next hour to make even more money versus walking around the stupid box.
So, what do you think about people who just get up every day, and don't have a schedule and just kind of try to do reselling.
I used to be me, you can make it, it's just chaos.
Yeah, I mean, you want to have zero mental calories left every single day.
Have no kind of schedule. If you want to see results that are, have no schedule.
It's like, it is night and day and I understand the argument like, oh, things happen throughout the day. Oh, I'm not saying you got to block out every 30 minutes every hour, have an initial overview of your day.
Right. You can always adjust the benefit of being self employed. I get my wisdom teeth yanked out, I can take off, however many days I damn wanna right, you're not obligated to do these things.
So, being self employed, it's a lot of self motivation and having a plan is going to motivate you more to do it because if you don't wake up knowing that today's the day you're going to go source then you're probably not going to do it you might but it won't you won't get out early you won't go to where you really want to go.
So yeah, I mean there's, you got to have some kind of plan, especially if you're working full time and this is part time I think it's even more crucial to have a plan but like we said right.
If you're gonna have so many moving pieces, well then you figure out a business model that you can fit into your moving piece in business there's nothing wrong with that you just have to accept the fact that hey, I got a lot of things going on right now so I got to change my business model
for X amount of time, and it works as proof that it works.
Right. I think another key point to achieving this goal. Um, the tools that you're given and we're talking the Amazon site here the tools that you're given. You need to spend the time to set them up correctly I'm talking about your repricer.
And not only that when you initially price the item you got to understand the columns on your scouting software what they all mean so you know how to price the item. You can't just flatline hundred dollar bill hundred dollar bill hundred dollar bill 10 items I'm done right.
No, that's not how that works. Oh, I didn't see this over here this is really a $5 item. Maybe I won't send this in, because if you just send things in willy nilly you're in fact going to lose money because there's fees on all these items on even on the point of boxing
them in we're getting fees now on a per item that we put in there.
That's just how it is. So you want to put profitable items, above and beyond all the fees that you're going to pay. You also have to factor in. Well, is it going to sell in a timeframe where it is positive can I send this $8 item in, and but it's only going
to sell once a year. Answers probably know you're not going to clear enough money, unless it's a super light item, then it's a maybe, but you got to know that you can't send in that same $8 item on a five pound book, it's not going to work.
I got something that might be eye opening every single item I've ever listed on eBay.
I've listed at the current lowest price so when I listed that item.
I was the lowest price on eBay, regardless of what the item was my whole eBay career. I never played this game of well Johnny I'll let Johnny sell his first and I'll be next in line and I know price doesn't mean everything on eBay, but you fools out
here that are trying to play the game of getting an extra 35102030 dollars. It ain't going to work. I'm here to tell you this price is what people care about and this was even before we were so broke as a country.
We're broker than we've ever been as a country. Why do I shop on eBay when I go look for my jerky my jerky guy right like it's because he's got the best price. It's much cheaper than anywhere else I can get it.
People care about the price. They don't care about your photos. They don't care about this if they see to to, and how do you think the huge sellers get away with selling media on eBay with a stock photo.
There's no actual photo of the book you have no idea what conditions going to be it's literally the brand new photo, and they will outsell every single person that decides to take a photo of the actual item.
If their price is that much cheaper price is what matters. You can't, you can't chase this high dollar. I'm going to get more for mine because x y and z well, most likely, probably not going to so I think that that way of reselling.
Good luck, Chuck. I don't want to hear about things not selling for me, I'm taking a quick money, turning my money into more quick money and that's how I kind of got to the point where I'm at.
Now the only, the only thing I'll make a slight adjustment on what you just said, if you put the additional time and effort in your listing the additional photos.
You can have better item specifics, a banger description and correct condition notes, you can charge slightly up. However, Mike is perfectly correct.
He's going to sell his item at the lowest price faster than I will and I will get the most money. So again this comes down to managing your time and cash flow how quickly do you need to turn over your inventory.
Knowing this, you got to know what you're doing. Yeah, dude, but people aren't like you make it sound so easy right like if we look at your, your eBay business where you're selling sci fi trade paperbacks.
Yeah, when the average reseller thinks, oh more items specifics or a better description right like this is them just putting in the description instead of the item is in good condition, putting, oh, this item is in the good condition, it's from a smoke free
smoke free pet free home like there's really no substance that adds to the overall value of the product right you're putting in like the artist of the cover art, right the author, they may be a little synopsis of the book you're scraping from the internet like that
is not what's happening out there. If you tell somebody hey do a little bit better of an eBay listing I guarantee it's going to be pet free smoke free home in the description.
That's it. That's fair enough. I mean, when I look down in the description sometimes it's just condition that's just like what you're saying is not even the title of the book, like what book did I click on again let me scroll all the way back up to find out.
No, but put your damn title in the description at least in addition to condition nodes that's you'll go night and you'll you'll at least be beating half the listings on eBay by just doing that one change.
Also, I mean I price up I wait a minute for my books but my business model set up to do that I met a warehouse I have a huge storage facility for my eBay listings.
But, and I also list a lot while I used to list a lot more not so much these days my eBay store still gigantic to some people that are like, oh my god thousands of listings I mean yeah.
Yeah, sure. But I put in a lot of hours to do that that's the thing. That's the other reason it's blowing your mind when you hear those numbers, because you haven't factored in the amount of hours is to equal that if you put the same amount of hours into your own business,
you would not be impressed. You'd be like oh yeah this is this is what work gets you. Yeah, that's true.
Yeah, it kind of almost becomes a job in the sense of it like the time you're putting in, but the problem is a lot of people turn into a job and they're not getting paid more than if they just went down the street and worked at McDonald's right and there's something to be
said to make less and be your own boss but sheesh, there's a lot of better things you can do than reselling to make a decent amount of money, if it's not working for you I mean there's so much opportunity out there.
I mean, the hard one a little bit, because I know we're going to get. I can't find the profitable stuff in my area the desirable items, and Johnny already kind of cover that today.
Look outside your thrift store. How does everything in the thrift store get to the thrift store.
Somebody physically has to take it from their house to the thrift store. So, there's a gap in between here, you save somebody the drive to the thrift store, you get it for way cheaper. It's way better quality, and it's not picked over because if you think
thrift stores. If you still live in this room where you think thrift stores aren't looking items up you're absolutely out of your mind.
You can cut out that middleman altogether you save money, and you get to you get the good stuff but what do I know I just resell on Amazon.
You know it's funny on, I think the last two eBay calls we did.
Maybe the last three. There was always a person in there when they were asking or we got on the topic of sourcing.
It's gonna blow your mind. Have you tried going to a book store. No.
Where do I get inventory from I'm looking for books, we tried a bookstore.
Doesn't, because everything is plastered the internet's not that it's very global the go to a thrift store they go to the Goodwill bins that go to the Salvation Army.
And I'm like at booksellers, even, even the ones on YouTube.
They don't really cover bookstores. I'm not saying the prices are great at bookstores, but I guarantee you they have all the inventory, all the inventory is there because it's all books right because it is indeed a bookstore.
Like, it's the easiest, like, but it's almost the dead end of the line of the life of an item right so it's like, it's the easiest because hey there's one right there out the window but it's like, how many people have seen or touched that item before it's got there
and then after the thrift store it's literally the don't like that's like, you're at the very end of the process the life of that product you're trying to find.
Right. Somebody's probably found that long before it's even made it close to go into the thrift store. Right. People have a state sales before they donate everything are you going to the estate sale.
There's so many easier ways to kind of source the better items we have people to just rely solely on the state sales, and they'll do well over you know 50k a year on Amazon and they go just two, two days a week on the state sales it's crazy to me that we think
thrift stores are our only option, when in reality it's the worst option.
I'm going to give you two ones here that I'm people really talk about too much.
What do they call those little local neighborhood libraries.
Oh yeah, the little free libraries, the little free libraries now.
It's frowned upon if you just take everything. It's less frowned upon if you exchange items for the items you're taking. Do that latter one, don't rob the community, re donate to the community and then take the good stuff.
And then another one, not people think about it if you go to.
I mean like what do you what are you wanting to read well we love Noah Robertson john Grisham. He's our jam and let's throw in some Louis Lamour while we're at it, I got lots of that I'll give you all of it. It's great and then I'll take what you don't want.
And now I have fresh inventory some of it may be junk so it may be great. And there's other senior related things and I'll let you noodle on that, where you can do the same thing from.
There's all these ways you just gotta think about it. Think about it. Think about it. Both things you just said, if you go to little libraries, you got business cards you should have business cards.
You put a little business card and you know a lot of the books in there, you go to the senior home, put your little business card in there all of a sudden word of mouth spreads.
You know the pot the home said you know you buy books, boom, boom you're in like it's people that are getting books from little free library. Read books, you know what that means they probably have bookcases full of books at home, I mean it's a little card
and you know one of those books. It's so foolproof sometimes and we just kind of we just over complicated. I firmly believe, whether you're part time or full time whether you're working five hours a month like me, or you're working you know 40 hours a week, you should easily
be making $1,000 in profit every single month.
Another one.
You'll have to do a little bit of research in, but if you pay close attention to your everyday places you go. A lot of them have what we older generations like to call a bulletin board. And on this bulletin board, you can place your card and or a flyer.
And you'd be surprised what kind of calls you get you gotta be a little careful to get some crazy sometimes. But you can have a Google number doesn't have to go to your main phone. But in my area, my small town, that's still a lot of the way people network or
bulletin boards we've got one of the grocery store, we got one of the mechanic and we got one of the Chamber of Commerce works.
I want to move away from the idea of media, I want to let's let's look at this from like an aspect of we sell used clothing. Right.
Do you, I think it would work just as good because there's so much clothes everywhere like if you did the same exact thing. Maybe you went to like some smaller boutiques or places that you know turnover clothes, often thrift stores that you know turnover
clothes, often. I think there's still I think there's relationships, regardless of the category that can level up your business because people like well books are different well I don't think it's different than if you're the shoe guy.
If you're the t shirt guy, I think there's relationships to be made, and there's so much inventory out there you have no idea, like, estate sales like you could just go before the estate sale and and buy the vintage clothes at a more premium price then they plan on
selling it for that you know we talked about a few episodes ago I watched this show where the girl would you keep an eye on the obituaries and then go to the house and knock on the door and ask if she could literally shop the clothes of the person that passed away and she said
I'm going to put these clothes into somebody else's wardrobe that's going to appreciate it, wear it again. There's so many ways and we just said, I got a couple for you right here if I lived in the north, here's what I would do, I would set myself up a nonprofit, full
website that says we sell a small portion of the stuff for our business, and every year I'd run a coat drive. And I'm going to take some of those coats to resell the rest are going to do the nonprofit thing. And now, let's reverse it let's say I'm
well I'm in Texas right, same thing Western wear drive right, bring all your cowboy hats clothes your Pearl snap button ups whatever. I would sell a small portion of them. The rest would do whatever the charity does with them given to people in need etc etc.
That's a way to do it.
Here. Well fine I'm just going to give away all the fun things today. If you go up to your local food pantry. People donate more than just food to these people. I've gotten books from food pantries. I've seen clothes at food pantries.
I've seen electronics at food pantries.
People donate because to these places they don't know what to do with it, or they don't have a good will in their area. So if you think outside the box for just, again, take a minute. Where do people give stuff.
Answer those questions come up with 10 places.
And maybe two of them are outside the box. And those two are probably going to feed you for a good minute. Yeah, it only takes a few of these relationships, especially if you're a solo entrepreneur reseller only takes a few of these larger relationships
and you're going to be swimming in so much profitable inventory that the goodwill is going to be an afterthought you're barely step foot in one of these places ever again because, hey, now you got it coming from before it even gets to the goodwill.
It's better stuff. It's an endless supply out there no matter what category selling.
Now this is the fun one I've heard a few people mentioned it now I'm not going to say the categories because that's their information. This is a non recorded call but they'll go to the convention, or a place that hosts a thing about a thing and they'll buy a booth for the weekend.
They're not selling anything. They put up a sign saying we're buying dude yeah we're buying we're not selling we're buying. You just sit there because all the people, all the vendors and stuff.
What they don't sell.
They don't want to take it back with them, so they're going to come over to your table at the end of this thing, or they're going to have people that come in for the convention or whatever thing event being run.
They may want to have some stuff to sell.
I'm open for business. It's a business. It's a reimagined lemonade Stan. Yeah, right. That's all it is you literally mean you could probably do this out front of where we live go to a book fair and do the same thing have a blank table.
A stack of money. Yeah, sign that says buying books, you could do it right from your garage or right out front of your house have a yard sale.
Sell some of your stuff and then hey, you also put the thing I'll buy I'm buying books I'm buying, I'm buying shirts I'm buying sneakers whatever, and people come to you you ain't even got to leave it that sounds nice Johnny maybe I'll do that, and I'll put
just sit out your apartment right there. You should record this might you should do it. It would be great film avoid little little table, little little sun hat your little sun hat thing maybe a little umbrella.
Buy buying all media books CDs and DVDs. I'll set up a little bell down there and I'll have a bucket going out the third floor window and they fill up the bucket and I pull it up.
And I just send it to lower with money. Yeah, yeah, that's it. That I mean, that kind of is like, that's almost that's that's a hack everybody has because everybody's living somewhere so just be like hey, promote it for a month put it on Facebook and all your
local yard sell things hey this day it's funny because I think it was last year I was driving to thrift stores. And there was a local jewelry shop Johnny that was doing a jewelry buying day.
Dude, the line was like half a mile long and the jewelry shop was like maybe 50 by 50 feet like it was that same right there. Dude, you can't lose it comes to you you don't gotta go look for the same thing my brick and mortar people.
I swear, more books get donated than leave. I don't know if I'm winning this battle, but I like the books come in. Yeah, it's that. I mean that's, I'd be curious, you got me, you got me curious if you just set up a little table promoted it for like two or three
weeks that hey on this weekend. I'm going to be buying books CDs DVDs bring a buy get a cash offer today like herb side pickup books for money CDs money DVDs for money cash money all day let's do it.
Yeah, vintage t shirts for money like oh my god you, you would probably you probably would run out of cash, honestly, especially if you're in somewhere that is kind of populated because people need cash, take advantage of cash is king that is still true today even though
like people need the 20 bucks people need the 30 40 $50. Yeah, man, I think we're gonna call it there. We appreciate y'all listening or watching over into YouTube and we'll talk to you in next week's episode.
Thanks for listening to another episode of the resellers mindset podcast. Today's full episode and all previous episodes are available to all YouTube members, along with the weekly zoom call and private discord, head on over to youtube.com backslash to use book guy and consider
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