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 next to Johnny.
Believe this is the first time Johnny recently relocated.
So this is the first time you ever see a different background.
If you're watching over on the YouTube, if you're listening on podcast platforms,
we appreciate you just as much and you don't need to see his background.
It's nothing fancy. All right.
It's basically the same thing, just cutting page change,
dragging drop a few Photoshop, see Mockerboards.
I mean that printer was over there.
Instead of pegboard,
the great reseller resignation is going to be 2024, right?
More resellers than ever have quit, but steering clear from the doom and gloom
and you're all going to fail topic.
We're going to kind of structure this in a way where reasons why you shouldn't
quit reselling because everybody can tell you that it sucks and this platform
sucks and that platform sucks and it's hard to find beacons of hope, right?
Like you throw out the bat signal and there's no Batman in your city.
You're kind of as so well, but for us,
we have made leaps and bounds and strides within our businesses this year.
So if everybody's leaving the party,
why are me and Johnny still waiting in line to kind of get into the next
level of the club here?
And I think it's important to see that there still is opportunity and ways
you can make money. And yes, we sell on Amazon, but I,
I'm a true believer that if you have good business sense,
good business practices, it translates no matter what platform you sell on.
If you're doing things the right way, right? So yeah,
I don't have an active eBay store, but I can tell you right now what works on
eBay and what doesn't work because I see it, right?
I'm around people in that situation.
And I do think the bigger fallout is happening over on platforms like
eBay and some of the smaller reselling platforms.
So the first thing I want to hit on before I throw it over to Johnny is
going back in and getting rid of dead inventory and pricing your inventory
that's been sitting for X amount of time, lowering the prices, running sales,
just, just selling stuff, I guess, right? That's the biggest thing. I mean,
I want to do a whole 10 hour podcast episode on,
you don't get paid until the item sells as resellers,
we don't get paid until it sells and we actually lose money by it,
not selling because we paid money. And if you got it for free,
you pay time to go get that stuff.
So that's the biggest one I want to start on is you actually have to sell your
stuff. So do whatever it takes to sell it.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we,
odds are if you're in the book game, even if you're in the disc media game,
space is an issue for you. So for those who've been at it a minute,
you're probably renting a space, whether it's a storage unit,
a warehouse, or you had a shed build out back to make sure you had a
shed build out back to turn into your office, right?
Even if you're, you still using your garage or your room,
those precious, precious square footage that you have,
they have to turn constantly so you can put newer items in to make even more
money. If they just sit there, you make more money, you put in the time,
you've bought in the stuff you may have bought in bookcases or built your own
or something. You,
you're in the negative for a little while and you're getting a few dollars in,
but you want a lot of dollars to come in and it's all about turnover rate.
Is there an argument to be had? This is a $3,000 book and it will sell in
five years. Sure.
As long as you do a bajillion of them and you can speed up the five year to
collect those thousand dollar purchases of time. Great.
So you're reliant. If you don't do that, you're reliant on your lower end items,
bread and butter is the phrase tends to go.
I'm going to get back to that phrase in a minute because that annoys me.
Okay. Wait, I got a question for you. The $3,000 book.
It'll sell for the full $3,000 in two years,
but you can sell it at the one year mark for a thousand dollars,
or you could sell it at the six month mark for $500.
And you paid, we'll say you paid $10 for this book. All right. Sure.
Where are you at? Where are you selling?
I'm just selling at the first day I'm offered the company.
I had a point in case I had a $3,500 book listed guy sent me an offer for
1700. Yes, sir. Took my money and left.
I mean, he sent me an offer for pretty much half of what I was asking for.
But you know what I paid for the stupid thing? 20 cents, 20 cents for $1,700.
So why 3500? Yeah, I was.
What's the mindset behind the person that's going to hang on for the two years to sell it at three grand?
Is it just the mindset that they're never going to find another item to resell at that amount?
Who refuses to take that offer? That mindset is they know what it's worth.
So they're waiting for the right buyer, the right time.
And I'm not saying that right by right time is wrong, but the right buyer with money in hand is who I want.
Who wants to give me the money right now today? I don't want to wait.
I'm not after the dollars for tomorrow. I'm after the dollars for today.
I think Mr. Tech did an episode and he didn't go into the third one, which is what we're talking about here.
But basically, it's high turnover rate business or low margin, high volume.
There is luxury in store, but they still have turnover because they're willing to take offers below what it's worth.
Then there's a person who just waits and waits and waits and waits. That is the slowest model.
It takes, I'm going to say, half a decade to get going, honestly.
I mean, you'll make some sales, but to really start making any kind of decent money, you're looking at about a half decade.
It's a very long, long, long game.
However, this model, I do think if done properly, you're waiting to do that long con game.
You would make the most money at the end of the day, but you're not making hardly any money for that first five years, in my opinion.
Barely. You're not even touching the man hours you put in, honestly.
You're maybe paying yourself $2.50 an hour for the work you're putting into that.
I think as resellers, you need to focus on sell through.
I've thought about this long and hard, and I used to kind of swing the other way.
ROI meant something to me.
We still have that, though. That's the crazy part.
We still have a crazy ROI, even on a high turnover rate.
Even on a low margin game, you're paying $0.05 to do $5.
But if you do that one million times in a year, my God, that's a lot of money back to you and a huge rate of return.
But we get greedy. We want 1,000, 3,500,000% rate of return.
It's crazy to me.
It's tough because people see their item and they see that the phone has sold for $100.
So this is going to be $100. I know what I got. Price is firm. I know what I got.
We cannot live in this realm as resellers. And cash flow is why these people go belly up.
But I do want to defend because I've seen this a lot is the COVID error.
Like resellers are the ones that are getting washed away.
And I think it's you see more people quit than are successful in any business.
Right. And you always hear the failures are always louder than the success stories.
And I do think a lot of people that started in the COVID error kind of built their business
in a correct way are seeing huge results and better results now.
And the people that kind of could just wing it back then go by the wayside.
But I don't think it's too late for the person that's struggling today and reselling
to turn their business around. You just got to take a look in the mirror.
What do you have listed? Okay.
I'm going to clear one thing up too.
Just taking money for the sake of your time is not always the answer.
We're not spending hours listing items where we're going to make $2.
And they're not going to sell within 10 seconds of them being listed.
And even 10 seconds, why are we wasting time with a $2 item if we're taking photos, doing all this?
That's the big difference between the eBay realm and the Amazon realm is
I can list a box of CDs here, 174 CDs in the box I did yesterday within 30 minutes, 45 minutes.
So sure, some of that sells five hour profit stuff, but a lot of it's higher than that.
But there's no work after that.
In any other business model, you cannot be that person because you got to take the photos.
You got to do the correct listing. And I think that's why the eBay sellers struggle the most
is because there's a lot of work you have to do.
And if you're chasing a low dollar garbage that is not selling instantly,
which is 99% of the stuff because of its low dollar,
it's probably something that's not moving quick.
I don't know, man. It's tough for me. I do think there is a path,
but it's a hard look in the mirror.
And we've all kind of been there at different times in our business where you're like,
what am I doing? Why am I not making as much money as I should? I'm out here hustling.
And then you say, okay, well, let me take a step back. Let me look at it.
One thing I've done, we talked about it before the call.
I went in and spent two hours manually repricing my items.
I had my best day of the month. That day I went in and manually repriced thousands of items
that were sitting there for more than six months because that money is money sitting there.
Not only is it not making me money, I'm paying storage fees, whatever my buy cost was,
and it was over a thousand units that I manually repriced, take an average of a dollar buy cost,
it's a thousand dollars plus storage fees, yada, yada, yada. I literally have $1,200 just tied up
there. So even if I can get back my buy cost, that's a thousand dollars that I'm going to be
able to spend in a much smarter way. Today, someone gave me a thousand dollars.
And for me, I'm playing longer sell through cycle. For me, it's liquidating or returning
or lowering my bottom, as I mentioned. I'm going pretty low and I've almost sold a thousand units
for the month so far. But I'm not making a whole lot of money. I'm saving a whole lot of money
because of those storage bills, because I sent in a huge amount this year, huge. And it's just a
matter of, I want to keep as many of my dollars and avoid a bigger, bigger occurring bill that I have.
So now's the time of the year where I'm lowering it because we have faster sell through, because
everybody's stuck at home these last three-ish months we have left in the year here. And again,
it's about, it's a sell through. Got to sell it through. You have to.
What's up, Amazon sellers? We wanted to take a second to talk about GoToLister, the software
me and Johnny both use to list and manage our inventory and grow our businesses. With the
fastest listing speeds out there and built-in profit analytics, it's a no-brainer. Easily and
quickly have items available for sale using 2D barcodes and get more for your items with its
built-in smart pricing. Make sure to check out the 30-day free trial at gotolister.com backslash
Mike or using the link in the description below. You have the fees, you have a storage issue if
you're doing the eBay, the merchant side, you have cashflow. I mean, for those of you doing it full
time, you're probably trying to buy stuff constantly. That's another thing. If you're continuing to buy
with a slower output, I hope you have a grand master plan to speed up that output because
you're going to screw yourself royally. Oh yeah. And you're going to be called Sally afterwards.
Sorry, people call it Sally in the world, but that's your name. Yeah, you're right. Because I
talk about this all the time with people that start Amazon and I want to give them a realistic
expectation that we're looking at a six month burn here for you to actually start bringing in
some extra money here in addition to your buy costs. So I can't have you go spend your $500
you have for this business within the week. I need you to burn this money in a way where you're
growing, think outside the box. There's a million different ways you can get quality inventory for
cheap, but we can only rely on the thrift stores. And yeah, man, you're right. Because the money,
unless you got a money tree, if you're spending more than you're selling, sooner or later,
the balance at zero. Yeah. I mean, if you're taking out debt and you're doing the friends
and family kind of personal loan, or if even you're doing the PayPal or the eBay loan, or I hope to
God, you're not doing the Amazon loans because they're pretty terrible these days. If you're
injecting cashflow and you're trying to force it to be cashflow positive, you're doing it wrong.
It needs to be cashflow positive from the get go. But oh, there's this huge buy. It'll transform
my business. Maybe, but odds are you're not experienced enough to even make that kind of
call yet, honestly. And if you've already done it, you've probably realized you're digging yourself
out of a hole because the catch up time from when you think you're going to forecast to get out of
the debt incurred to now I'm starting to get positive dollars to the man hours you put in
between these two segments. How much dollars are you really making? It's shrunk because you took
out a loan or you've had cash injected somehow, some way. I think if I had to give advice to
the person that's struggling right now with Amazon or is thinking about quitting Amazon,
my best piece of advice is go in, fire, sell your items. You can see how much the fees are for each
item super easily now. Get your buy costs back out because items that have been sitting there,
you should be a smarter reseller now than you were then. And make the change of focusing on
higher sell through items. Johnny, I've been saying this in YouTube videos for four or five
years since I started. Just because I'm willing to send in a DVD or CD that sells once every six
months, I literally tell people, do not be Mike. When I put out my information with my trigger sets,
I don't put out my personal one because it doesn't work for everybody. I'm in a place where
I'm getting it for next to nothing. I understand the data better than probably 95% of the people
that sell media on Amazon. And I am cashflow positive. I can afford to take the risk.
Most of you can't, especially if you're trying to grow how much money you got. You cannot wait
six months and hope that item sells. You cannot do that in any way. Honestly, you could argue that.
I shouldn't. I'm going to ask you a serious question. We're going to flashback. You or Mike,
when you had debt, because you've talked about debt public before, what do you play the longer
dollar game or the may or may not sell item? Would you be sending those in if you were still in debt?
No, because even back then when I had my eBay store, like, sure, there was a few things that
I had that sat around for a while, but I was only buying quality brands and quality electronics that
I knew would sell because that $10 I had to spend at the thrift store was literally dinner for me
and Deb for two nights. But that's mindset, dude. That's a completely different mindset.
And it's hard to just assume- But flash forwarding now being debt free,
you can afford to take on those not really chance here, just may sit for a longer kind of items.
That's the fundamental difference. And I think people think they can do it from, well, I'm not
going to say a disadvantage, but a circumstance situation where you can't afford to do that.
Your business literally cannot afford to do that. You need to make money today to get yourself out
of financial crumbling ruin, essentially. You're trying to build it. You're digging your way out
as fast as you can. And again, the key word there is fast. You've got to do this as fast as possible.
So you need things that will sell within three months if you're really in debt or six months,
if you only got some light baggage there or you just lost your job, you need money today.
You don't need money tomorrow. You need money right now.
I got a good saying in the group that I should almost get t-shirts made, right? We don't talk
books. We talk business. There's never been a signal like, sure, I'm the used book guy.
Johnny's the book shepherd. Who cares? I could care less about the books.
I got a table full of CDs over there now.
I think media is one of, especially books, dude. You book lovers out there that want to have
businesses around books, most of the time it's not going to work out because you're too attached to
the items you are selling and you cannot be in this business. You've got to sell items to make
money. I don't know. There's no other way to put it. So what can you do as an eBay seller?
When I sold on eBay, every item I listed, Johnny, I would see that they're sold comps. I don't care
what, honestly, I don't care what it's sold for. I just wanted to see how many sold comps were there
versus listed comps. This is 100% how I did eBay. Mobile phone, how many solds, how many listed,
and then, okay, I see. All right. It meets the sell through rate that I'm looking for.
And then when I listed every item I ever listed on eBay, when I listed it, I made sure I was the
lowest price. Yeah. I mean, if you're at or below market, you're going to sell fashion.
With best offer. So not only was I was the lowest buy it now price, I had best offer on,
and any offer that came through, you better believe I took it.
Absolutely. Now me, I mean, I priced my items high because I know the offers that come in are
going to be lower than that, but these are already low value items to begin with. Like most of them
are sub $20 in value, but I make them close to $20 or above $20 in value because I know how the
eBay game works. But if I wanted money, if I just wanted to dollar, dollar, dollar, dollar,
I would have a 60,000 item plus store if I wanted to play that game. And that's how you would play
that game is you're the lowest guy. You're well below market or right at market. And you take any
offer comes in because you don't care what the item is. It's about how fast can I turn it over?
Dollar, dollar, dollar can stack up or quarter, quarter, quarter. I mean, it's a harder game to
play the quarter game, but the disc only guys, they can do that. I mean, they're hustling as
fast as they can. It's how fast can I get the items up? Because that increases my sell through
rate versus listing quality item, which is just going to sell naturally in a saturated market.
Honestly, I think it's a balancing act because I don't want to sit here and tell people that
trading your time for money is terrible, but I do think you have to have a threshold when it comes
to, okay, I'm low on cash. I'm willing to trade my time for money, but I don't think you can
chase that garbage, that one, $2 garbage. I don't think that model exists in 90. Sure. The person
you're talking about, the mega sellers that have refined process that have been doing this for
years, you get to pass, but the 99% of us that are not that you cannot trade your time for the dollar,
$2 items. And you just got to get rid of this stuff. And if I had to do that later,
you could change your business model later. I think that is a later play if you choose to go
down that road, but earlier on or middle of the road where I'm able to pay my bills, but I'm not
really able to save money or store money away because I'm just chasing the eBay or Amazon
check to check kind of deal. You're not really making any, you're just maintaining. And in order
to get out of the maintain, you got to shift your model a little bit better to maybe faster sell
through rate and the items that do sell, you're making more than a dollar. I agree with Mike here.
You need to be making five, 10, 20, as many dollars as the item can really sell for.
Probably 10 plus is what you really need to be angling for. Anything higher than that's great.
Please do that. If you have access to nothing but $20 profit back to you in the bank kind of items,
list them all. They're not going to be no later. That's kind of what he's saying. They're not going
to be no later unless you focus on what you got going on now. Unless you're 20 years old and it
takes you 20 years to figure out this information. You're basically starting your reselling business
at 40 years of age. Come on now. We just think outside the box as resellers, right? Like
maybe we should have titled this podcast, the outside the box ways to, I don't know,
get some cash and not quit reselling because the lowest hanging fruit has always been the thrift
stores. And I'm here to tell you, me and Johnny, it's not a huge reliability anymore in this
business. It's tough, but there are so many different ways. This stuff is everywhere.
And I hate to say this, depending on what category you're selling, different platforms do better.
You either got to get with it or you got to get out. It's the same argument we make about
anything. If you don't like the way the platform you sell on operates, then go do another platform.
Right. You have to be involved in the ongoings of what your platform wants, what they expect. Is
this platform best for the type of items you sell? If not, what other platforms best go there? You
got to make changes. And I think what happens, a lot of people that quit, they just, I don't know,
they see like, all right, the Titanic hit the iceberg, Johnny. And I'm just going to stay in
my cab until this thing sinks. They want to will their business model into profitability,
like with willpower, not with math, not with testing, not with analysis, not with networking
and talking with others that may have done what you're trying to do right now. They're trying to
wish upon a star. Hey, Disney, if you're listening, we'll take sponsorship.
I think you're right. I think you're right. It's tough. And criticism as somebody,
you know, store manager criticism, you got district managers every single week in the store telling
you that you suck, your store sucks. When you know it doesn't. I think you have to take criticism
and self criticism. And as resellers, there's usually not nobody else, right? Like not everybody
has a Deb sitting behind you that's like, Hey, why would you ever do that? Like, don't even do
that. Like she saved my ass, Lenny at times. Like I owe her royalties for life for the amount of
stupid decisions I would have made, but not everybody has that. So you have to kind of be
around a group or another person that's in the business. So you can, I don't know, get a second
opinion. And if you're not getting the results, it's a okay to be like, Hey, here's where I want
to be. Here's what I got going on. What do you think are some steps I can take to get there?
And it all usually starts with getting better products at lower prices, listing more items,
being more efficient in processes and everything's fixed. Yeah. And usually the other thing,
we all, all of us, every single one, 100% rate, all like buy. That's our favorite part.
We want to do it again and again and again. We want to go out and buy, but you know what?
I've talked to several people recently to have more to list than they can list. And why are they
continuing to buy? Because they, it's the fear of missing out on the deal of a lifetime. It's the
fear of, if I don't buy, I don't feel like I'm working, but you know what? You've already
bought more than you can list. Get your butt in the chair and you're either listed on eBay or
you're boxing for Amazon or both. Honestly, it's probably both because you're trying to get as
much money as you can. Because if you just keep buying and your business model is kind of broken
and you're not fine tuning the process by either doing boxes or listing over and over and over
again on eBay, you don't have that, aha, I'm stupid for doing this moment. And trust me,
I've had plenty of those. This is, I'm dumb. I should not be doing this. I need to change
something up. And if you're just buying all the time, you never have, give yourself those moments
because you're trying to feed a machine that it's bouncing all over the place. It's falling off the
wheels. The conveyor ain't going so fast. You're doing it wrong. I've seen something recently,
you know, like people used to be like ashamed if they had death piles, right?
It's turned the corner. It's no longer shameful to have death piles, Johnny. I've seen multiple
posts. It's not, because everybody has one. Yeah. It's like glorified now. Like look at all this
stuff I got, right? Like why aren't we just listening to you? I can't get behind it. I really
can't get behind it. Why are we not just listening and selling it? Cool. You got 10 storage units,
full of stuff you bought. You're still buying. You think it's cool that you have all this back stock,
but you, that's literally costing you money sitting there. So why not? Are we just sitting down
listing it all and getting the money? And then you don't have to worry about a storage unit.
You don't got to worry about your house looking like an episode of Hoarders and you get paid.
What a miracle. Crazy concept. So for those listening at home or on the radio or however
you're listening to us or watching us- On the radio, not yet, dude. We're not that famous.
I'm sure we're, it's some channel in Cuba we're on. They just linked it in somehow.
Look around. What, why, look at that pile you got over there. Just list one and then list another
and then list another or box one, box, an item box, another item, another item, another item,
another item. I mean, you can, on the software, assuming you're using software, you can continue
to load that box. And once it's all full, mail it maybe. Yeah. Let's do that. Dude. I talk about it
all the time. That stupid pair of dance goes, it was the last I know my eBay store when I was an
everything seller on eBay. They sat in that tub for months and months. And now when I see a pair
of dance goes in the thrift store, I'm like, no, get away, get away. The devil, the devil's work.
Why aren't we just going back, revisiting these items we have listed, getting our, we pay five
bucks. Let's price it. So we get our five hours back out of it because you today going to spend
that five hours smarter than you six months ago or however long it was. We have to continually
reprice with Amazon. We have software, but even that misses things on eBay. I'm straight up.
Tell you, Johnny, I never went back and did manually like repricing of like seeing what the
new comps are for everything. So I'm 100%. Like if I was the eBay seller that I could be the kind
of people I'm talking about where I don't go back and revisit prices and lower prices. But I think
my saving grace was when I initially priced it, I was the lowest and I had best offer on. So like a
lot of that stuff sold that probably otherwise wouldn't, but you got to be involved with
everything besides sourcing. You said it earlier. Everybody loves sourcing. It's the funnest part
of the day. That's part of the game. Not for me. When I get, when I look at my money coming into
the bank account, that's fun for me. Right? Like source, insure you see cool items. And most people
like it the other way around. They like to see money leading the bank account. They're oblivious
to this fact. How much money can I spend? I made $200 on eBay. Let's me go spend that right now.
Or I got a thousand dollars on Amazon. Let me just spend it as fast as I can. No, stop, take a
minute. What do you need? If you don't need it, don't buy it. If these are wants, stop. They need
to be needs. If you need a printer, go get a printer, go do that. But you don't need more
inventory more than likely. If you need inventory, then you need inventory. Then it's time to buy the
inventory. Not until you need it. Don't buy it until you need it. Maybe you can sink on this ship
with me, but I will say the statement first and then you can say whether you agree or not. It is
a controversial statement and I really don't care because I do believe it's true. People who cannot
operate their personal finances, 100% of the time can't operate their business side of finances.
And that's a huge problem out there because if we can't control how we spend personally,
you're definitely not going to be able to control how you spend it within the business.
No, absolutely. Outside of reselling in business, they say the first one to 10 million is hard to do.
In reselling, we're going to drop a zero. The first 100,000 to 1 million is hard to do.
That's hard for resellers to do. But the ones that figure it out, they're A-OK. They're probably the
most calmest people, politest people you'll ever meet in your life. They're out there. There are a
lot of these groups, including this one here, Resellers Mindset or the Usebook Guide, depending
how you want to phrase it. You're all over the place today. You got a new studio. You're talking
of a resellers mindset group. I guess it's close enough, but I do think you're right now. I have
an example because you... I got a good example of this. So I'm at the Goodwill just the other day.
This Goodwill sucks usually, but it's on my route that day. I'm like, yeah, I got to hit this Goodwill.
I don't want to go in here. It's like when your mom or dad's dragging you by the arm to go in,
I'm just like, I got to go in. I'm like, I guess I'll bring a bag because Goodwill's too cheap to
give you bags anymore. All right. I get in there, Johnny, and there's a bunch of old school rap CDs.
So like, oh man. OK. So I'm scanning. I'm in no rush, dude. I'm just chilling. These CDs probably
been sitting there for weeks, months. I'm on the third shelf. Some other bozo comes in. He just
starts grabbing all the old school rap CDs and throw them in his cart to go look them up. So I
don't know, dude. I felt bad and maybe I shouldn't have felt bad, but he's selling on eBay. So all
the stuff he's putting back out of his cart, I'm scanning and it's all profitable on Amazon.
So you got to get with the platform that's best for the products you're selling.
Right. Like, absolutely. Dev sells handmade cat and dog toys. Like that's impossible,
almost impossible. Sure, you can list it on other platforms, but we all know Etsy
and her own website is the best approach with this. You got to be strategic and people that
act like that are fools. So like, I don't know, man. Give me some examples of somebody that's like,
or give me ways somebody that's thinking about quitting within the next month that like,
if I had to send you in like Gordon Ramsay on like Kitchen Nightmares where he's got to fix the
business in like a week, right? Like, what are you going to go in, look at first, have them do
differently? Possibly. I'm going to have them, if they're an eBay seller, I'm going to have them
pull up the eBay store and we're going to sort high to low and everything. I'm going to ask the
person, how much dollars per item do you want to make? And they're going to give me some number
and I'll say, great, we're going to double that and we're going to cut out everything that's below
that number right now from our eBay store. We're literally going to put it in a pile and you got
two choices. You can Facebook market this place for a dollar or you can Facebook market this place
for free. The remaining items that we got at your storefront and whatever's left, these are the kind
of items we're going to sell going forward, this dollar amount metric. And then I'm going to look
around at their processes. I'm going to ask them, okay, walk me through your processes. And if I see
hot garbage, well, guess what? We're going to redesign some processes and then I'm going to
take a look at their schedule. Like, what is your schedule? Because I'm going to guarantee you it's
not consistent. And then we're going to look and the last thing, and there's some little things
in between, but the very last thing we look at is where are you going to source? Where are you going
to buy from? And we're going to look around and we're going to look, compare dollar amounts to
the items, rape, a pull from these items. And we're going to shorten that list. And then we're going
to expand upon that list to new and exciting adventures. I like that idea because I love
Gordon Ramsey and I think that shows good. I don't know. I'm just into like businesses,
kind of like pivoting and making changes. I think it is important that when you sit down and you do
look at your business before you decide to quit in a week and to listen to this podcast, think
yourself what you're passionate about, right? Let's start from a clean slate. I want you to
have the mindset of you basically start in a brand new business because old habits have to die. You
cannot continue to drag these same things into this new business, this new category, or even the same
category, a new business, right? Even if you got, can you change the name of your eBay story after
you have it? You can, it made it a lot harder these days, but you definitely still can, yes.
So there we go, right? If I'm the person that's going to quit within the month or I'm thinking
about quitting, I'm a whole new reseller. I'm starting back from zero. I'm changing my eBay
store name. I'm getting rid of everything. I'll run the sale for the month, right? I'll get myself a
leeway, right? I want to get as much money. Sure, have a fire sale. Yes, fire sale. So then I'm going
to start my new eBay business. It's the same thing. You're just changing the name, but you're a new
person. You're going to study people that have seen success. What are they doing? We're going to
start thinking we're not going to the same sources because clearly those sources aren't working for
us. They're not giving us the quality of items we need to get. Or they are, you're just taking a
whole lot of junk with it. Leave the junk there. Let it stay. That's true. Set hard guidelines
within your business. We have them in Amazon in the software. If it scans red, then we know we're
not buying it most of the time, right? You got to be the same way in the eBay land. And it's just a
little bit more time consuming. But I do think you got to just boom, brand new. We're a whole new
person. Here's the thing. Why people don't do that. They put in a lot of time and they want to get
paid back for their time, but they're not going to do it doing it the same way or being unwilling
to change. You're not. You got to either pull the plug or cut some cords here and there to have a
more refined system. You got to refine, refine it, refine it, and refine it until there's nothing
left to refine. And then if you're still not making it, well, you probably should switch
categories at that point, honestly. Yeah. And you have to-
Or platforms.
You can't do the same things and expect different results. It just doesn't, nothing works like that
in life. You got to make a change. And if you're thinking about going like, oh, I'm just going to,
the big thing right now, I didn't even want to get into this topic on this call, but I'm going to,
is we waste time just getting dollar, $2 items, right? So the big push is like, hey, go,
you know, whatnot, like the new hot thing. And people do it properly and people get results.
But for the average person that can't properly run an eBay store, you ain't going to be able
to properly run a whatnot stream. I'm here to tell you that's the hard facts. And it's the same way
if me, the Amazon guy wanted to go start an eBay book business, I can't just switch and just think,
oh, everything's going to translate over, right? Is there times to make the switch,
but just run into the next shiny object being the same crappy business person that you are, you're
going to be right back where you started from. You're just going to wake up one day and you're
back on the Titanic again and the icebergs right there and there's nothing you can do.
Now, abstract a little bit. Americans were very passionate about the underdog story.
If you grind it out, you put in a lot of hours, you will be triumphant. Okay. Slapping the
Hollywood out of you right now. That's not true. If you go over to professional boxing,
for ease of Rocky analogy, they have proper techniques and they don't really start off
knowing them. They go to professional to learn from them. And then after a while that they do
pretty well, but a lot of them fail too. Even people trying to go that route, there's a lot of
failure. You have to be a consistent, be have good technique and by technique, just refining your
process, making it smarter. How can I shave 10 seconds off a listing? How can I shave 10 minutes
off a box that I'm packing for Amazon? And the stuff that I'm sending in is a good quality stuff.
If it's a pile of garbage, probably a bad idea. Even on a send everything model, that's a hard
game to play. I mean, I'm currently playing it, but I'm telling you, I'm going to be making some
changes up here because of the data I've seen over the course of the year. Still waiting the
last two months to mine out whatever I can. And then I'm going to just make some quick changes.
Anyway, back to you guys. Constantly change, constantly look at the numbers, knowing the
numbers, that's a huge part of the game. You really got to know if you're not a math person,
you're not a math person. Okay. Two columns, how much am I spending? How much am I making?
They make book books with a little red line in between it. If you got just white paper or
printer paper, draw a line down the middle. And you can see, is column A bigger than column B?
And we're going to call column B what's going in our bank. It's either yes, no. And then you
can look at the other column, where am I spending my dollars? Should I be spending my dollars in
these locations? I think another thing- It don't get no simpler than that.
People fall into is the idea of relying on these home run items, especially us that hit
thrift stores, right? Like I'm here to tell you the home run model, it's glorious for YouTube
views, but that's about it. You're not walking in, I'm not walking in stores finding, you know,
black law dictionaries in every single store. I mean, I found one and I've been in thousands
and thousands of thrift stores, right? Like these growls and this idea that every time you go in a
store- It's gambling.
It literally is. Like it's gambling. The majority of the time you got your chips on one number,
the roulette wheel spins any hit in your number. And if you think that that's going to be a reliable
business model to walk in and find that the big brands that are worth the big money every single
time, you're not going to make it, dude. And that's unfortunate, but it's the bread and butter,
fast moving, great priced items. Even if you're under market, you're still making money on what
you paid and it actually sells. So you're actually making money versus the person who's trying to
get this exuberant amount and it never sells. Okay. I'm going to give a good example because
I did mention bread and butter earlier on. I want to come back to it. That is the most abused term
I hear out in probably YouTube land and Instagram and where social media, we'll just call it social
media, the bread and butter items, right? Okay. We're going to use Nora Roberts here. Yeah. She
sells every single day on whatever platform you put her on, but she ain't worth jack. Okay. I'm
just going to make a whole bunch of her, put them in lots. And then she's worth some money
where you could have just, I don't know, listed a Stephen King or a Clyde Barker in Ricebook,
who will sell for that same amount of dollars in less time than you spent making that stupid
John Grisham, Nora Roberts, Patterson garbage. It should be flushed down the damn toilet.
Dude, you're offending book collectors all around the world.
Yeah, I am with a smile. I know, dude. It's tough. It's tough because we've been doing this for so
long and we've kind of experienced different things and all we kind of can do is convey the
experiences we had, right? We talk about all the time. There's people out there that can crush it
with lots, but their whole business is lots. That's the big difference. They know what to
get for, what to look for, the process of listening, packing them. They got the space for it,
got the storage for it. They got all the processes for it. That ain't us. No, we're leaving it every
single time. I can walk in and I can see a full box. Nora Roberts, Tom Clancy for free. It's
even, it's already in the perfect size box, Johnny. Perfect size box. You're packed, ready to go for it.
It's already packed. I ain't taking it. I know what I'm good at. I know I can focus on higher
dollar per hour things. And I'll straight up tell you, when you ain't got the cashflow, you got to
trade time. You got to chase the free stuff, the low dollar stuff, but you got to be calculated
with it. It's got to be items that actually sell. If you're chasing low dollars, it's got to turn
and burn. So your $1 keeps multiplying fast. It can't be $1 every month. It's got to be $1
every day, every two days. Absolutely. I mean, and it's hard early on to know what to avoid,
because you're learning. I get it. You picked up the Nora Roberts box. It said free. It looked
like a good score. Even if I make a dollar off that, I'm in the positive, right? Because it was
free. Wrong. The time eaten away by you messing around with that stuff is not free. It costs you
time that you could be making more money into your business. Now, if you don't know, fine.
You got to take some hits. You got to learn. But don't do it again. Why are you punishing yourself?
Even if you sold it in eight months, or you sold it and you got your $2 out of it, don't repeat
the same mistakes. Learn from them. Learn what to avoid. Learn what to leave behind. Learn what to
make another reseller's problem that's not you. And also, say the other thing. Don't inherit other
people's problems. If another reseller is offering you a deal, it's normally too good to be true.
It is. It is. Because they know things that you haven't learned yet.
I'm going to wrap it up here. Final thoughts on this one for me and for Johnny, because I know
this is what he has in his mind as well. Because we just think of like we're basically two peas in a
pod. He used to be the eBay guy. Now he's the Amazon guy like me. And that's a-okay. I don't
think any less of him. Now he works a lot less. I actually think more of him because he's getting
more for his time. He's getting more bang for his buck. I think if you're on the fence about
quitting reselling, or you're the person that's around all the negativity and reselling, you got
to make a change. You got to have a clean slate. You got to get away from all the negativity,
whether that's groups, whether that's influencers, whether that's whatever it is you're watching
every day that's saying eBay sucks, Amazon sucks. You have to get as far away of that as you
possibly can. There are plenty of people out there that are readily available to have you in a group,
to tell you that there's light at the end of the tunnel, that post positive results,
that post that platforms actually make you money, don't care about the little things,
can help you grow yourself as well as your business because they go hand in hand.
Right? Like you're always learning. You're always growing business-wise, personal-wise.
And I do believe as much as you see it out there that people are quitting this, people are quitting
that. My mind hasn't changed from episodes ago when I said now is the best time than ever to
start a reselling business because if you do it the right way and you build it the right way,
you're going to crush it and knock it out of the park because at the end of the day,
there's a lot more people that have passed this business than they're actually going to understand
the business, understand what it takes to be successful and actually grow a good reselling
business. So if you're that person and you know deep down like, Hey, I'm hustling, but I'm not
getting results. It's there for you. You just got to make a few changes. Don't feel like this is the
end of the line by no means necessary. It's probably one or two things you got to change out,
change out your sources, what you're listening. But I mean, it's all there for the take. I'm
gonna let you throw the last one out there because even though that was a mouthful,
I'm sure you got something else to add on. No, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna steal one bit of that
here. If you do not know the right way and the wrong way, and you think you're spinning your wheels,
you probably are spinning your wheels. There's plenty of people, there are groups, there are
comments on the YouTube channels that you can make too. You could DM on Instagram or do a public one,
whatever. You'd be surprised the amount of information people are willing to tell you
if you simply ask, or that person needs more information. If you just say, I'm making no money,
that doesn't mean no good. Be specific with why you're making no money. Outline it, talk to people,
network, get involved, be proactive in the things you are unsure on. Because the, the stupidest
question is the one not asked, I'm afraid. If you're not asking it, and if you're not asking
yourself more importantly, and you're struggling, maybe it's time to, well, pull out notepad. I don't
care if it's physical or on your computer, pull out a notepad and start to figure it out. And then
if you're stuck somewhere on why you're still not successful, ask, please ask. There, Mike's here,
you got tech, you got a bajillion other groups, you've got Instagrams, YouTube, Twitter, I guess
some people still use that. Whatever, I don't care what it is. Ask. You, you give me $2.99 a month,
shameless plugs, six months of your time, and you take selling media seriously, you come hang out in
the discord, you come get on the weekly calls, ask questions, I guarantee you'll see results.
I mean, you might not be a million dollar seller, but I guarantee you will actually be making money.
And I stand behind that. I do believe you could start selling media on Amazon today and be making
decent money within six months if you treat it like a real business. So that's going to do it for
this week's episode. We'll talk to you all next week. 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
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