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, special guest today down sitting underneath us tech and sports.
He's back for the second time, almost a year to the day.
So now that we have him back again, we haven't watched the previous one we did.
He kind of did a little bit of his background, his backstory.
So today we figure we're going to jump into some more kind of right to it, right
to the point topics when it comes to reselling and kind of how things have
changed over the past year, because for all of us sitting here, all three of us,
our businesses have changed greatly, but in ways they kind of have stayed the same.
So tech, thanks for hanging out with us.
Uh, and I guess you can give a little bit of a spiel for those that don't know
who you are and then we'll kind of take it away.
Um, so first and foremost, thank you, Johnny B.
Thank you, Mr.
Use book guy for having me on.
Um, always a pleasure talking to you guys.
Um, you're right.
It's about one year to the day.
I think it's one year, one week.
And like you guys said, first repeat guests.
So I got the championship belt for that one.
I'll take that.
Um, but yeah, so, um, I sold on eBay for, uh, over 15 years.
I built up the number one pre-owned men's clothing business.
We did a couple of million dollars per year.
Um, I always had a mission to have the best eBay store when the listing
quality report came out on April 15th, 2021, it showed that I was number one
in every single pre-owned men's clothing category.
And if you're like me immediately fall out of love.
Once, once I'm the best immediately fall out of love.
I got to find the best thing to do.
Um, once I have conquered, I'm done.
I got to find the next thing to do.
So, you know, in, in the, the years after that, you know, I let my warehouse
time out and the lease expire.
And, you know, when, when I met my wife about 15 years ago as well, she kind
of came into the picture when I started eBay, you know, we were working hard,
both working very hard and we came up with this plan to kind of get after it
as much as we humanly can until my son graduates high school.
Make some smart investments and hopefully we have enough money where we don't
have to grind this out for so long.
Um, and you know, all of those pieces kind of fell into place, you know,
ended up, you know, having the best store, making some smart investments,
not on the come up anymore.
We are much more fortunate these days.
And, you know, we had a plan in place to hopefully put ourselves into the
position to take a 50 year vacation, which is wake up and do whatever you
want to do, however you want to do it.
Um, and doing stuff like this, talking to you guys on a nice fine Sunday morning.
This is what I want to do today.
So this is what I'm doing.
And after this, I'll go find something else that I want to do today.
And, you know, that's just all thanks to the power of, you know, flipping stuff,
all thanks to the power of reselling, all thanks to the power of eBay.
And that's why I still like, like making videos, like helping people, like
answering every single question that comes through on Instagram, because
like I am someone who I don't want to owe anybody anything.
So like if Johnny does me a favor, I'm going to do Johnny a double favor.
Like Johnny's never going to have a one-up on me.
I don't want anything, but like, I am so indebted to flipping and eBay and
reselling that, you know, I just want to give back as much as possible and try
to help as many people as possible.
Like I said, whether it's on Instagram, whether I see people in real life.
If I can just help someone somehow with some little piece of information or a
big piece of information, whatever it takes, um, that's what I enjoy to do.
That's what I love to do.
That's what I enjoy to do.
That's what I like to do because there was a lot of times when I was trying
to figure stuff out in 2008, when I started, you know, we were in two world,
we were in two wars.
We were with Iraq.
We were in Afghanistan.
The housing crisis was happening.
We were going through a recession and you know, a lot of times I needed help with eBay.
I didn't, for a long time, I didn't know eBay had sales comps.
So like, I don't know how the word I was pricing my items for a long time.
I was writing every single address on the envelope and bringing us to the post-off
because I didn't know you could print labels on eBay.
So like, I never had anybody to, to ask a question to about eBay, whether
a simple question, hard question.
The YouTube community wasn't built out the way that it is now.
There, there wasn't an abundance of answers on the internet about reselling
the way that it is now.
So, you know, if I could just give back, help people hang out, have fun, perform
my duties, then you'll never hear me being unhappy ever again.
I think that's going to take me into the first topic I want to address is you
talked about the recession in 2008.
A lot of resellers today, or say over the past, this whole year, 2024, they seem to
be feeling it a little bit harder than, I don't know, years previous.
But for those that don't know, Tech has a Patreon group and we've basically had
every one of his coaches on, and we're probably missing a few, but we've had
every one of his coaches on the podcast and they all are getting like super great
results, doesn't matter the platform or the category.
So it kind of like, I don't know if it makes me jaded because when I see people
saying that the reselling business is on the downswing, my business has grown this
year and I see other people on other platforms or the categories that are also
getting results.
So it seems like the, the, the wave is, well, it's not what it used to be, but
here I am talking to people every month on a different platform and a different
category and myself getting results.
Like what do you attest that to the kind of mindset behind reselling over the
past year and what is your thought process behind, has it just been a rougher
year for reselling and maybe what does the outlook look like in your eyes?
I mean, so like gone are the days where you could just throw up items with the
expectation that they're just going to sell or sell themselves.
Those days are gone.
Like if you're not doing it in the proper way, if you're not continuously
gaining an education, continuously understanding the customer, continuously
understanding the platform and all of the changes that they're doing, you will
get left behind.
And I think that, you know, for, for me, I started in a recession.
I've gone through the recession, quote unquote recession, cause they haven't,
you know, come out and said necessarily that it is a hundred percent a recession.
However, it did or does hit the definition of it.
You know, there, there has been a downturn compared to when the stimulus was
received, money was raining from the sky.
The entire world was closed.
People were stuck inside and they were shopping like back then you could list
anything, however you want.
And it's going to go not only sell, but it will sell for a humongous premium.
And I think that, you know, a lot of people did fall into this, you know, when
everything shut down and, you know, people were working from home and, you
know, the entire world changed, you know, they discovered the world of online
selling and, and these last, you know, three or four years, especially when
you started doing this, and that is your kind of first impression, and that is
your expectation that I could just throw up anything that I want.
It's going to sell for a huge premium.
It's going to sell quickly.
There's stimulus money raining from the sky and sales are at an all time
high, like all time highs eventually have to come down.
Like you can't just have a trajectory of all time highs forever.
And the sales coming down is what we're seeing because like, let's not beat
around the bush, like there is more money available.
There's more money circulating today than any point in history in time.
So like the money is out there, but the money is not getting spent with, with
us or our listings for a particular reason.
The money is out there.
Now, is it spread out a little bit more?
Does eBay have a little bit more competition?
There's Amazon, there's Poshmark, there's Macari.
Yes, but like the money is out there.
And if you look at the trend, the trends of like pre-owned clothing, for example,
like pre-owned clothing, for example, this year is like $45 billion in
the secondhand market.
It's expected to go up to $450 billion in the next 10 years.
There is not a reseller alive or resellers alive for the next 10 years.
There is not a reseller alive that can maintain that trajectory.
Like billions of dollars is such a huge amount of money, let alone half a
trillion dollars is expected to come into the secondhand market.
So like the money is there, but this is the problem.
And you can go right onto eBay and you can go right onto Terapeak or as have
they branded it now, product research, and you can search any brand you want to
search and they have two nifty arrows on both sides of the graph.
You can go to the seasonality and the price you can go over and they have a
couple and then the third or fourth graph will tell you the distribution
of sales per sellers.
So if you have a hundred sales, an example, a hundred percent of the
sellers will get a hundred sales.
This is basic math, but they're not evenly distributed.
The 100 sales are going to the overwhelming majority of 25% of sellers.
25% of sellers are getting 75% of the sales in a lot of these brands that
we're selling where 75% of the rest of the sellers have to fight over the
remaining 25% of sales and that's not evenly distributed either.
So you have your 25% that's getting the lion's share of the sales.
That next 10% is getting a lion's share of the remaining 25% and so on and so
so forth as you end up trickling down and going down.
So like the good sellers, as you've mentioned are getting better, are
making more money.
Like there's we were just coming off of the month of November.
I can't tell you how many people posted in the group.
October was my best month.
October historically was one of my slowest months, but here in the group,
we have best months, best months, best months.
Um, and, and, and there's a bunch of different reasons for that.
So like, if you're just starting, if you're in grow mode, you know, but,
but even people that are year over year have blown out last October's because
you know, it reselling and eBay is a contact sport.
If you just want to list an item and forget it, those days are gone.
You used to be able to do that maybe in like 2015, you could list it, forget it.
Someone's going to come and get it.
Used to be able to do that, you know, during the COVID era, you could list it,
forget it, somebody's going to buy it.
But the most amount of hate and vitriol that I ever got on a podcast was in
2021, when I said everything is going to rise.
The thrift store price is going to rise.
Gas is going to rise.
Your insurance is going to rise.
Labor is going to rise.
Your warehouse is going to rise.
eBay fees are going to rise.
All of these things are going to rise and it will act as death of a thousand cuts.
And it will, it will trickle down and decrease what our margin is because all
of these expenses are going to rise.
There's more resellers bringing down the price of the item, classic supply and
demand.
So our price has come down on, on, on our offer.
Our expenses have gone up trying to get our offer up.
And the only way to, to absorb this is to get better and do more.
And people don't want to hear you have to get better.
People don't want to hear you have to do more.
But if you made a hundred thousand dollars in sales in 2021, a hundred thousand
dollars in sales in 2022, 120, 23, and you're going to do 120, 24, get that person
on the podcast who says, I'm making more money today.
And my business has remained exactly the same.
It's impossible.
Everything has risen since then.
So if we don't rise to the occasion and we get better and we do more net net, our
sales are going to be down.
And I think, you know, there's a few reasons for this reason.
Number one, we love to source.
We don't love to list.
So we need to take an account and we need to audit where is the money.
And I ask myself that every single day, where is the money?
Wherever the money is, that's where I need to go.
So where is the money?
Resellers money is in one of three places sitting behind them, unlisted.
That's where your money is.
So you have a thousand items back there and you spend $7 each and your bank
account is empty.
You have $7,000 sitting behind you and you could call it a money pile.
You can call it whatever cute name you want.
That's a debt pile.
Like your money is back there sitting and it's gotten you a debt.
You have $7,000 behind you.
You have no money in your bank account.
That's reason number one.
That's where primary, a lot of people who fail, that's where their money is.
The second place where people's money is, is listed onto eBay.
They've done a fantastic job.
They've sourced items.
They've photographed them.
They've got them listed.
They're up for sale on eBay.
And if you have a thousand items on eBay and you spent $7 each, you have $7,000
sitting on eBay that is unrealized.
You don't get any credit just for listing the items.
So we need to make an assessment.
Did I spend all of this time listing items that people don't want?
And if you've listed items that people don't want, those items are never going
to sell.
It doesn't matter if you mark them down to one penny.
If no one on the face of the earth wants them, it doesn't matter.
So if you've done everything that you're supposed to do and everything is listed,
you have items that people don't want today.
So it's either they don't want them in general because they're not good items,
or the sell through is so long that no one wants them today.
And your cashflow has been depleted.
Your business has no liquidity.
Therefore you can't go out and buy new items to replace those items that are
selling instead of having your money in your bank account, which all of us at
the end of the day, our money needs to be in the bank account.
And I was talking to someone the other day who is hugely successful now.
They do maybe four or 500,000.
And they said their biggest realization that when they joined the group is that
when they first started eBay, they were doing eBay to like collect shirts and
put them online.
Somehow, some way a switch got hit that they were supposed to do eBay to make
money.
And I think a lot of people, they don't hit that switch and go, wait,
I'm supposed to be doing this to make money.
Like if you want to do this for a hobby and like collect t-shirts, that's fine.
But like the fundamental thing of why we list on eBay is to make money.
So I think the whole COVID era, it was a great time to resell.
Will that era ever come back?
I'm not sure.
But the people that are busting out are the people that were listing items and
they were magically selling just due to the amount of customers that were on the
market.
Way more customers outpacing the supply.
So the prices were up.
Way more money that was easily disposable.
So the prices was up.
And or they were selling so good back then.
And you see people who will report, I'm selling 30,000.
The next month, they're selling 25.
Next month, 20.
Next month, 15, 10, 8.
I'm out of business.
These people probably over leveraged.
And they probably built out infrastructure that they couldn't financially maintain.
And now they're out of business.
So I'll never forget the day.
I was hanging out with my son.
We were driving around and he was talking about everyone getting a stimulus.
And back then, I don't know, maybe he was 16 or so.
And he's like, everyone's going to have a lot of money.
And I said, no, no, no, no, no.
Sony is going to have a lot of money.
Nintendo is going to have a lot of money.
Apple is going to have a lot of money.
These people that are getting these $1,200 stimulus, that money is good as gone.
So like all of the stimulus that came to us, ask yourself how much of that money we still have.
And the money's gone somewhere.
So like everyone got the money.
But the people who have the money today are the people who had the money before
the shutdown and the people who have the money now.
And there was a saying that I heard a long time ago when I was really in my grind stage.
I used to listen to a lot of inspirational stuff to get me through 120 listings at
two o'clock in the morning knowing I had to wake up at four.
And a guy on a video somewhere said, if you took all the money in the world and you evenly
distributed it to everybody, the money would soon find its way back into the same hands.
So if you took every single dollar and you gave it to every single person,
the people who know how to make money and know how to get money, that money's going to come
right back.
So I think that a lot of people fell into this.
A lot of people tried to turn a hobby into a business without the business acumen.
And that's really what you see today because the prices have gone up.
The quality of merchandise is not the same.
So if you're still selling items in 2022 and it's 2024, don't worry.
This kind of leads me into my subject I want to talk about a little bit.
Outside of business, they say the first 10 million is the hardest to get.
I've noticed because I'm in various groups, people that are in the six figures,
getting the seven figures seems to be the hardest hurdle to overcome.
Why do you think it's so difficult to go up from 100 to 7 million dollars essentially?
Why does it seem to take people longer to get there?
Outside the numerical, 10 times the number, sure.
You have to change the kind of person that you are.
So it takes years to get to that point for most people, unless you hit a crypto bazanga,
that's different.
But it takes years.
It takes years to build up that amount of cash reserves because the money comes in
and the money goes out.
The money comes in and the money goes out.
And the money comes in and the money comes out.
And I look at it and I've always visualized it.
Like you standing on the beach, the waves come in forever.
The waves are the customers and they crash on the beach and they come up
and a little bit of that water touches your feet.
And then the water goes back out.
That's your money going back out.
But the water that touches your feet, if you look down,
you still have a couple of water drops on your feet.
That's the money that you were able to keep.
That's your profit.
That's you.
The money that goes back out, that's our money going back out to the streets,
going back out to work.
And then those waves come back in.
That's how I've always visualized it, where the money is always coming in.
The money always goes back out.
But we have to keep a little bit of this to make sure that we can pay our bills
and that our personal interests and our finances grow
while we always put our money to work.
So it takes a long time.
You have to change your mindset.
You have to learn discipline.
If you can't be trusted, and we all know these people,
every single person knows someone where you can't trust them with 10 bucks.
You can't trust them with $100.
And if you can't trust someone with $10 or $100,
how can you trust them with $100,000?
So you have to be immensely disciplined to have a target,
to develop a road plan and a plan to get yourself to the $100,000 threshold.
Or your first goal, my first goal was to get myself to $1,000 in savings.
Okay, I did this.
Now I have to do 10 times this to get to the next level
and get myself $10,000 savings.
And there were many times where I was making great money
and I got right down to zero.
That was almost a monthly experience for me.
I was making great money, selling a couple thousand dollars worth of stuff,
making a couple thousand, bills come, things come, bang.
I'm right back down to zero.
I got to get back into hustle mode.
And I got to make this happen all over again,
because in 30 days, the same exact thing is going to happen.
And I got to have these funds available.
So my first goal was to get you a thousand bucks savings.
With that thousand, I try to get to 10,000.
With the 10,000, I try to get to 100,000.
And the way that I did it was the same exact way that I made the first dollar,
is the same exact way that I got to a thousand.
The way that I got to a thousand is the same exact way that I got to 10,000.
The way I got to 10,000 was the same exact way that I got to 100.
And that's the same way that I got to a million.
I didn't wake up every single day with a new bright idea.
I woke up every single day and get exactly what worked the previous day.
So I have 15 years experience of doing the same damn thing over and over and over again.
So people see me, I can go to any flea market in the United States of America,
I don't care where it is, and I can go there and dominate.
Because I have 15 years compounding building of the same experience.
But I wake up tomorrow and say, you know what, I'm going to try to sell cutlery.
And then I go to a flea market, I'm going to find no items.
This is my first day selling cutlery.
So how many people find something that works, wake up tomorrow,
and choose to do something totally different?
Those reasonings are beyond me.
I don't understand that.
If you find something that works, wake up tomorrow and do it again.
Wake up tomorrow, do it again and do more of it.
So when I made my first dollar, I had to do a hundred times more to make my first hundred dollars.
I had to do a thousand times more to make my first thousand.
I had to do 10,000 times more to make my first 10,000.
But it was never find something that works, wake up tomorrow, try something totally different.
We need one idea.
We don't need 20 ideas.
There's a million ways to do it.
We only have to choose one.
Choose one, figure out how to do it.
Because this is the problem.
Everything works.
You just have to figure out how to make it work.
Like you could run a business that sells tiddly wings for a penny each,
and you could build that business.
That business can work.
Everything works.
We just have to figure out how to make it work.
And the way that I've made it work is spend five bucks, sell something for $25,
pocket a $20 profit, rough numbers.
That's what I have found that works.
Because $20 profit items, I have gained the education.
I have put enough boots on the ground to hit enough thrift stores, hit enough flea markets,
make enough relationships where these items are available in abundance.
I can process them.
I can list them correctly.
I can separate myself from every single person on eBay with the proper keywords,
proper title structure, most enticing offer, the best return policy, an accurate description,
good photos, good dispatch time.
I can separate myself from everybody else on eBay.
So there's a lot of times where people say, oh, that item never sells for me.
That item sells fantastic for me because I have figured out how to sell it.
I have figured out whatever the customer is looking for.
I've unlocked that.
So the beginning of your business is very hard.
The middle of your business is very hard.
The end of your business is very hard.
But once you get more money, like they say, like the first million is the hardest million,
it's absolutely correct.
Because then you can get to the point, you can transform your business.
And this is what I have done.
And I'm still learning this.
I'm still a student every single day.
You can get to the point where you can allow your money to work for you,
not so much you working for the money.
So as I've grown, as I've matured, and I've been selling on eBay and running business
since I was 25 years old, I'm 40 now.
For 99% of my life, it was me waking up every single day, getting after the money,
me breaking my back, me 100 miles an hour, 20 hours a day.
That was me for 99% of my life, my working experience.
I'm just now starting in the last couple of years to figure out how to get the money
to work for me.
And my first exposure or taste of this was buying a piece of real estate.
So I bought the piece of real estate.
It still requires work.
It is management.
Like I'm not there today.
I'm not there right now.
And the rent will be due for today's portion, which is going to be due at the end of the year.
But also it is an asset.
So that asset has risen in value without me having really to do anything.
It's just kind of risen.
So that overall has increased the net worth, increased, you know, potentially I can go sell it.
And then I get more money back way more than I put into like that kind of helped me.
I started using, you know, CDs in the bank and like, I'm not an expert on this, but like
I started using some CDs a couple of years ago, maybe you get 5%, whatever.
You don't have to work for that money.
You're putting your money to work.
I started really building out my businesses and trusting people that are really, really
trustworthy, really have their head on straight and utilizing them to help me build a business
where I don't have to be there every single day.
And speaking of COVID, that helped me a lot.
When COVID happened and the entire world stopped and we were supposed to be home for two weeks
to flatten the curve, it ended up being six months in Florida.
I used to go with the tree crew every single day.
And I used to make sure every T was crossed and I was dotted and I used to come home and
I used to do eBay.
When COVID happened and we had to stay home for two weeks, if you remember, people were
dropping in the streets.
They were spraying like fumigation in the streets.
Like no one knew what was going on.
Those are the videos that we saw.
So we were forced to split the crews and one crew would go out and then one crew would
go out the next day.
One crew would go out, one crew would go out the next day.
So like I was on the B crew, the A crew would go out and guess what?
Everything still got done.
No customers complained.
Like customers were happy.
They were still upselling jobs and I didn't have to be there.
So that taught me like I have good people in place and I don't have to be there.
So put very good people into place, pay them very well, take care of them very well.
And again, that's my money going to work.
So even today, I've always said, you know, for a very long time in the group and even
going back to the first podcast I ever done in 2017, I always say like eBay is not going
to be forever.
eBay for me is a stepping stone to multiply the money to make sure that I can make enough
money, put it into enough investments where those investments pay for everything that
I need and those investments give me enough money where I can reinvest it back into more
investments and kind of create in my head what I see as like an infinite money loop.
So I make an investment, helps me pay the bills.
I don't have to actively go out and work for the money.
The investment helps with that.
You make enough investments and all of your bills start getting paid by the investments.
You make enough investments.
Now you have extra money coming out from those investments, which you can reinvest into more
investments to make more money.
That drives me every single day and that's what I've been doing for a very long time.
And I always said, as eBay scales down and I've talked about every single milestone,
every single step of the way, I told people on May 1st of this year, this is what's going
to happen.
On January 1st of this year, this is what's going to happen.
On September 15th, this is what's going to happen.
So like I had the scale down many years ago, but I always told everyone I'm always going
to be involved in clothing in some sort of capacity because the clothing is the best
way to multiply the money that I've been able to identify.
For you guys, it's books.
That's fine.
You can put 10 cents into a book.
You can get eight bucks out.
You could do that an unlimited amount of times.
Like there, if Warren Buffett knew what we were doing, he would pull all of his money
out of Berthes-Sire Hathaway and he would put it into eBay items.
He would get a 500% return in 90 days.
Like if he knew what we were doing, he would be doing this.
So like I'm always going to be involved in clothing to some capacity.
So for my eBay career at the biggest peak of the eBay career, I had 50,000 items on eBay.
I sold between 250 and 300 items a day.
I had the best listing, best products, best selection.
I never one day sold a thousand items.
I never sold 1200.
I never sold 500.
Never.
I always sold between 250 and 300 for whatever reason available.
So made fantastic money, was doing great.
But now I sell 4,000 pieces of clothing per day.
Do I make $20 profit or $15 profit each?
No, I might make $2 each.
If I'm selling 4,000 pieces net net, I'm making more money, putting out my money, buying 4,000,
throwing it into a palette and then selling it to somebody else so they can go and make
the lion's share of the money.
So I'm letting my money work by continuously buying these clothing.
And I could be in New York City.
I could be in Los Angeles.
Los Angeles, I could be in Kalamazoo.
eBay is not going to tell me I had a late shipment.
eBay is not going to tell me I need to list every single day.
So if the guy's car breaks down, we ship out pallets tomorrow.
It's okay.
So I had to understand, realize and identify these ways that I can let my money work for
me.
And that's the part that comes after you make a couple dollars, it's much easier to
make more money.
So like with the clothing thing, I can make $4,000 or $8,000.
I never in my wildest imagination knew that I would be able to make $4,000, $8,000 in
a single day.
Never.
I look at some of my old tax returns.
I used to make like $8,000 in a year.
But that's because I didn't have the skills that I have now.
I didn't have the experience that I have now.
I didn't have everything that I had to painstakingly learn every single day of my life
over the last 15 years.
So people ask like, how long is it going to take for me to achieve this?
And the answer is however long it's going to take.
Like this stuff does take time.
It's not get rich quick.
It is a marathon.
It's not a sprint.
But as you do build up more capital, you can start allowing your money to work for you.
And every single person that sells online, to some extent, you are letting your money
work for you.
But you're still actively working for a lot of that because we have to do photo ship,
you know, customer service, everything that that source, everything that is all
encompassing of reselling.
But hopefully, we can take this money that we are making from reselling up and above
whatever our bills or requirements are.
And we can find another vehicle, a different vehicle where we don't have to work so damn
hard because I have worked very hard.
And I'm very fortunate.
And if you gave me a contract today and say, dude, do everything I've had to do for almost
the last 20 years and you'll be in the position that you are, I'll sign that contract every
single day of the week because I have no education.
I didn't go to college.
I had a son at 18 years old.
And to be in the position where I am today, it's only due to the power of reselling,
multiplying the money, being smart with the investing and getting after that every single
day.
So I know these are like long winded questions, but I'm very passionate about this stuff.
Now we've free the thorough honestly.
So the person who's I'm not talking about just anybody, but a person who's been at the
game while they're in the six figure club and they decide to push all their chips in
to try to speed it up.
What do you find happens to those people?
The majority of the time, do they fall on their place or they bet on themselves and
go big?
I think like the speeding up part, I think is dangerous for reselling.
I think that because there's so much processing involved and then the processing costs time.
And if you want to buy your time back and get an employee, now you're overhead Costco
up so much.
So I think that like there has to be a healthy, steady growth.
And I've talked to thousands of resellers.
I've never talked to a single reseller that has scaled the profitability.
And with the margins that reselling affords us, I don't think there's any reason to scale
to profitability.
We should be able to be profitable from day one and maintain that profitability through
our entire reselling eBay, Amazon career.
We're getting 500% returns.
If that's not good enough for you, then maybe sell drugs.
I don't know.
But this is the closest to selling drugs as you can get without going to jail.
It gets the same principles.
You buy a bunch of stuff and you break it down and sell it individually one by one.
And our street corner is eBay or Amazon.
It's the same principles.
You just don't go to jail for it.
So the speed to do it, if you don't have a couple of years to get yourself into a
different position in your life, I don't know what to tell you.
If you don't have 10 years to lock yourself away and imagine if someone did every single thing
the exact same way for 10 years and compounded and built that in the reselling space,
they'd have more money than they know what to do with.
And that's 10 years.
And you talk to people and they say 10 years.
10 years is not a long time, man.
My son is 21 years old.
In a blink of an eye, that dude was at my knee.
It happened so fast.
Like 10 years is not a long time.
Do it for two years and report back and do it for five years and report back.
It's not a long time.
Forever is a long time.
10 years is not.
I think what you're hitting on here is there are sacrifices that have to be made if you
want to turn this business into a business.
And when you said a lot of people started in the COVID era and those are some of the
people that are kind of getting phased out.
I just think back, you're 2 a.m. listing stuff.
I was working a full-time job and I had to drag my wife out on my days off.
And thank God she stuck around for it because two days off a week, one day off a week,
I'm dragging you to a stinky thrift store.
I think it is accustomed people to not really have to sacrifice as much or feel like they
have to sacrifice to get the results because of the YouTube, the social media, the way
it's spun up.
The way it's being resold is you can just go to a thrift store and make a bunch of money.
And reality is, I try to tell people this, you're talking years.
I can't get people to sign up for six months of just sticking with something to get results.
So the idea you're talking five, 10 years, it's just too big for people to handle.
And I shoot straight now with people and they're like, hey, I work full-time.
I want to quit my job to grow this business.
I said, well, there's going to be sacrifices you're going to have to make along the way.
And it's going to be a lot of your time.
And if you have a significant other or kids, you're going to have to figure it out because
it's hard to fit everything in to make it work.
I agree with that 100%.
And those posts that you're referring to, we went through a couple of those on the morning
call a couple of weeks ago because people were curious, how did you make all of this work?
So I got posts all the way back from 2019.
And a lot of those posts, I was finishing my listings at 2 AM and saying, hey, I got to wake
up at 4 AM.
And every single one of those posts, I said, I'm tired.
I was tired.
It was hard.
It was not easy.
But it was the best way that I could find to make the kind of money that I was making.
At those times, finishing at 2, waking up at 4, I was making more money than a doctor.
And a doctor has to go through all of that school and be responsible for somebody's life.
And they have to carry that on top of them, on top of everything that they have to do.
Like doctors ain't getting out of the office at 5.
Like sometimes they got to stay till 5 30.
Sometimes they got to come in when they don't want to come in.
Like if you want like extraordinary results, there's going to be a large portion of sacrifice.
If you want the most basic results, then there's going to be the most basic amount of sacrifice.
And I think eBay is one of the things that the amount of energy and effort and time that you
put into it is going to be a direct correlation of what you get out of it.
And I always say eBay, but like eBay is like a synonym for reselling.
It doesn't matter what platform you're on.
Reselling the amount of time, effort, and energy that you put into it on the front side
is a direct correlation of what you get out.
So if you see the people that are doing the bare minimum, bare minimum listing, inconsistent,
bare minimum product research, throwing up junk, bare minimum everything, those people are going
to get the bare minimum results.
If you see the people that are actually putting in extraordinary effort, extraordinary energy,
doing great research, consistent every single day, these are the people that are doing fantastic.
But like you can't, like we said in the beginning, you can't run a reselling business
like we were in 2020.
Brands in 2020 are not good in 2024.
If you're still buying those at the same clip for the same price and listing them in the same
percentage, those brands have fallen off.
We have to constantly call the bottom 10 or 15%, 20% of our brands and replace them with
the new kid on the block.
Like there's new kids, there's new brands right now that are very popular that are at
the thrift store starting to get into the thrift store, flea markets, garage sales,
where the old ones have fallen out of favor, falling out of style.
We have to constantly call this.
And one of the ways that we can do this is I've always done an aged inventory markdown
strategy.
So for me, as the item gets older, the percent goes up and the offer becomes more enticing.
So if I price to that $50, you mark it down, maybe it gets all the way down to the point
where it's $25 and that's enticing enough for someone to purchase the item.
Once upon a time they used to sell for 50, now they're selling for 25.
Did it fall out of favor?
Is there more on the market and the demand has remained the same?
So the supply has outweighed the demand.
So the price is coming down.
Various reasons why items can come down.
But when items get to my most aggressive markdown, I take an inventory or an audit of them.
Am I seeing patterns?
Are certain brands that used to sell out before they were getting marked down this much now
all in the most aggressive markdown?
Are certain sizes, do I have to stop picking up men's extra small?
Because even if it's a fantastic brand, it's in my most aggressive markdown.
We have to audit our inventory.
Are items that used to sell fantastic, no longer selling fantastic?
If the answer is yes, we need to come and we need to do our research and we need to
identify new items.
On one of the calls, I said, you know what, I'm going to identify a bunch of new brands
today.
In 45 minutes, I identified 18 brands that will get you $20 to $50 plus profit, 90 day
sell through just in the golf polo category.
18 brands.
But all of this auditing, all of this running markdown sales and promotions, all of this
doing homework and education, all of that comes after we're done with what we already
have to do.
And that's the extra, that's the sacrifice.
Did I want to clock out after my listings were done and go do something else?
Absolutely.
But that's doing a disservice to my business because my business isn't getting better.
The education taking an hour and doing mind numbing, scrolling, it sucks.
But that's what you have to do to get those new kids on the block that are actually coming
in and people are finding and having success.
We have the zip code call.
So to do the zip code call, to study the sold, study the comps, learn your customer, do audits
of your inventory, run your numbers, make sure everything is all situated.
All of that is extra because people want to source, photo, list, ship, and then they're
done for the day.
But what about all this other stuff that we have to do?
That's extra.
And if you do this other stuff in place of source, ship, photo, and list, then you don't
get your listings up.
So then we hear the people that go, oh, well, there's so much to do.
I can't be consistent.
This is the sacrifice portion of it.
We have to do the things that we got to do.
And this is the crazy part about having freedom.
And a lot of people join reselling to have freedom.
You have to do certain things.
There's a requirement and a commitment to do certain things every single day to have
freedom.
It's like a conundrum.
Like in order for me to have the freedom that I want as a reseller, I have to be consistent
every single day as a reseller.
It's crazy.
There is no ultimate freedom where you don't have to do anything and have no obligation.
But in order to have the freedom that reselling allows, we have to actually do certain things
every single day.
There's no getting away from that.
And those things that we have to do on top of the things that we have to do, that's where
the sacrifice comes from.
Because a lot of the studying, a lot of the running the numbers, a lot of the figuring
out promotions, a lot of figuring out markdown sales, a lot of all this figuring out stuff,
that's after and in addition when our work is already done.
We can't just play, oh, I'm going to do research today in this whole week and not get any listings
up.
That doesn't work either.
So like the sacrifice comes with all this additional stuff that we must do in addition
to the things that we have to do.
I think you hit it on the head here.
I do truly believe that the blueprint is out there for every single person to be successful
reselling, no matter what the platform is.
But it's those people that are actually going to put in the work and make the sacrifices
are the ones that are actually going to see the results.
And what happens here, some people might sacrifice for a month, maybe two months.
And like you said, with the money management side of it, if I'm up at 2 a.m., there's only
so many days, months I'm going to be up at 2 a.m.
And my bank account is still $0 before I give it up.
And I think that's where people fall into the trap is, well, I feel like I'm sacrificing,
but the bank account ain't going up.
Well, then there's something else you have to address in your business.
And you said it earlier, it's hard to take criticism.
Right.
Like if I bring you over into my house and say, here, break down my business, what do
I have to change?
What kind of looks out of whack to you?
And as a store manager at CBS, like people could not take criticism, but I'll be the
first one to take it.
Right.
Like hit me with what I'm doing wrong or maybe something I can do better.
And that's the that's like the whole benefit of like listening to your podcast.
Having Johnny sit next to me every single week is because there's always ways we can
improve.
There's different people doing different things.
And most people just feel like, well, this is how I do it.
And this is this is the right way.
And I'm just here to tell people, like, just open up your ear for five or 10 minutes and
have somebody else give you a little bit of perspective and just take it into consideration
a little bit.
But yeah, the sacrifice when your bank account ain't going up, there's something else going
on.
It's not your sacrifice.
You're doing it, but there's something else wrong with the business.
There's a couple things.
So people first and foremost are intimidated and afraid of the numbers and we have to get
over that.
Numbers are the numbers.
They're not going to lie.
They're not going to do anything.
They're not going to hurt you.
Numbers are the numbers.
They are black and white.
They don't lie.
There's no escaping them.
So people are afraid and intimidated by those.
People love to talk about numbers when the numbers are going up.
People run away and choose to ignore the numbers when the numbers are going down.
So for me, I do every single month on the 10th, I reconcile my net worth.
So everything that I have under management, every single chainsaw mower that I have for
the businesses, my eBay inventory, my liquid cash in the bank account, I do this every
single month on the 10th.
And I do this because on the first, you got a bunch of money coming in and out.
So on the 10th, most things are settled.
I do this every single month on the 10th.
And I do it because the numbers don't lie.
And if we don't pay attention to the numbers, we don't pay attention to the money.
It starts to slip and it starts to disappear.
I'll tell you this.
When real estate is booming, I can't wait to the 10th because I know my money's way up.
When real estate is kind of stagnant or it starts going down a little bit, I start,
but I still do it because the numbers don't lie.
So like when things are going good, people love paying attention to the numbers and looking
at them, but when they're not going so good, we need to figure out why.
And I think resellers, we don't ask ourselves why enough.
Like why does eBay want us to do this?
Why when I list this in a certain way, it works?
Why when other people do this, this is working.
Like a lot of people are running promotion sales and they don't know why.
Like why are you running a promotion sale at that percentage?
Why?
Well, I don't know.
It's because someone else told me or someone else is finding success with that.
Well, do you have the same offer, the same business philosophy, the same storage capability,
the same everything as this other person that has this same percentage?
Or are you trying to run a business out of a studio apartment in New York City?
Like that person is going to have different needs on the back end than you who might live
in Wisconsin and has a $20,000 building or 20,000 square foot building in the back.
Like your needs are going to be different.
So all of these things, like you can't copy, you can take the foundations and the framework
that we all talk about all the time, but after that you have to figure out why and what works
for the business.
So when we talk about staying up till 2 a.m., staying up till 11, staying up to 10,
then we get into the conversation of, oh, but I joined reselling to have work-life balance.
That's correct.
But work-life balance, the first thing in it is work.
And then after that, you could find the life and you can find the balance.
But a lot of people who scream work-life balance are people that have a three-hour eBay day,
but take 16 hours to get it done.
How is that work-life balance?
If you have a three-hour eBay day, it should be done in three hours.
But if you have a three-hour eBay day and it takes you 16 hours to do it,
you don't have work-life balance.
So there are people that are putting in extra effort taking the initiative to do more.
And sometimes the days do run late.
That's how it goes.
That's a business owner.
And if you don't want to do that, go right back to CVS like me and you used to do.
Clock out when your shift is done and tell them to pound sand till I come back.
Not my problem.
Go get a nine to five.
Go get a two to 10, because that's what I had.
I had a two to 10.
I went in that Tuesday till 10, got off of work at 10.
And that sucks because you wake up tomorrow morning,
there's not enough time in a day to do anything.
I'm devoting my entire day to go work at CVS.
So there ain't nothing you could do between nine and two.
Your day is done.
So go out and go get a job.
If you don't want the extra responsibilities of dedicating your time to your business
and getting better, because there is a humongous difference
between signing the front of a check and signing the back of a check.
If you sign the back of a check, someone else has taken on every single burden of responsibility.
They have made the money and they are paying you.
If you are signing the front of a check, you are a business owner
and it's up to you to make sacrifice.
And if you want to get to the point where you're having an employee,
where you're having a warehouse, where you're signing your name on the dotted line,
you have brought yourself voluntarily an immense amount of responsibility.
No one is obligated to do anything that we're doing.
However, we all have voluntarily signed up to resell and sell on eBay.
We have voluntarily decided to do that.
With that voluntary decision, all of these things that we're talking about do come into play.
There is no two ways about it.
If you want work-life balance, you have to get your work done in the allotted time
and then go do something else.
If you want to be a business owner, you have to handle the responsibility,
the obligation and the duty, and you have to wake up every single day,
put your feet on the ground, and you and only you are responsible
for getting the money, making your profit.
No one is coming to save you.
No one is a manager and you're going to work at their direction.
You have to be a self-starter.
You have to be a problem solver, and you have to constantly ask yourself, why?
Why am I doing these things?
Challenge the things inside of your business.
Challenge yourself.
A lot of us, we have limited beliefs.
We are capable of anything that we put our time to, put our education to,
put our skills, put our experience to.
We can accomplish great things.
But being a business owner is a much heavier burden and responsibility
than just clocking a paycheck.
And a lot of that burden and responsibility comes with doing these extra things,
making their sacrifices, and putting in this additional time,
which a lot of people don't want to do.
So what I've noticed is a lot of the more successful people
have made their work life very simple.
Everything is generally the same.
Their systems are refined to a point.
But what I find more on the 6K figures, they try to reinvent the wheel so often
versus going simple over and over and over and over again.
And there are some people who do something very complicated
and are very successful with that overcomplication.
But by and large, the more the seven-figure, eight-figure people,
they just, it's just very, very simple and plain.
Why do you think we get in our own way with overcomplication?
Or we're trying to make better than sliced bread, essentially.
Why do we do this?
I think a lot of people, they think, they associate
difficulty and more complication with, I guess, less likelihood
to fail.
So for me, I grew a multimillion-dollar eBay business,
the number one in the entire world in my category.
By far, nobody was even close.
And it was built on plastic tubing, cardboard, and pieces of wood
that I drilled together.
Like, that's what I built it on.
It was nothing fancy.
There was no robots or anything like that.
It was low cost, no cost.
Really breaking it down, bare bones down to zero.
And the way that I think reselling should be scaled, and it worked
for my business, is to make sure that you can get yourself to a
point where you can make a carbon copy of whatever you're doing,
and then that doubles the business.
So for me, I had my photo set up.
I was able to do 120.
So why don't I get an employee and then have them have the same
exact setup, and then they can do 120.
So now I've gotten an employee.
I've assumed that burden and responsibility, but I've doubled
the output of the business.
And their station, believe it or not, was an exact copy of my station.
It was a carbon copy.
Same computer, same camera, same clicker, same carpet, same lights,
same everything.
It was an actual rubber stamp side by side.
Once that worked, then I got another one side by side by side.
Once that worked, side by side by side by side.
And it was like an assembly line all the way through.
So I could have built this out 40 different times all in the right
direction of the exact same thing just built out four different times.
And I could have built this out 40 different times if I had warehouse
space that would allow it.
That way, that method was going to work forever.
Could I have made it more complicated and added a whole bunch of other
stuff?
Maybe I could have, but the way that I listed my very last piece of
clothing on eBay was the same exact way that I listed my first piece
of clothing on eBay.
I just did more of it, refined it a little bit more, made a couple
improvements, gained some experience to the reps, the repetitions that I
was putting in, and gradually got faster.
So when I had the goal of doing 250 a day, I had three people taking
photos, three people doing listings.
So the same three people.
I didn't have six.
They were taking photos and they were doing listings.
So they would all get to the amount of listings that we needed.
We needed 360 a day because I needed to do seven days worth of work in
five days because people work five days, not seven.
Only business owners work seven.
So they would go home Saturday and Sunday.
So they needed to get to 360 a day in order for me to have 257 days a
week.
When we first started doing that, they would be able to get all the
photos done, but not all the listings done.
I would have to spend a couple hours drafting the rest of the listings.
A couple of weeks go by, they're able to get all the photos done and all
the listings done.
I didn't change anything.
A couple of more weeks, a couple of more months go by, they're able to
get all the photos done, all the listings done and get a head start
for the next day.
I didn't have to do anything.
Eventually they got so good at getting, you know, 360 items done every
single day that we became 11 days ahead.
That's how fast they were doing it.
I didn't change anything.
They just got faster by them having the muscle memory, figuring out little
things that worked individually for them to speed up their process, getting
better at the listing process, you know, listing basically with their eyes
closed and by them just repeating the process, they got better.
So when you have a business, the first hire that a business makes is going
to be a generalist.
It's going to be someone that does the exact same thing as you.
You want to double the output of the business and a lot of resellers, they
hire for the reason of, I don't like to do this, so I'm going to hire this
out.
And when we hire for, I don't like to do this, so I'm going to hire it out,
your output never increases.
So if I don't like to take photos and I don't like to list, I love to source
and do everything else.
I'm going to hire a photo and a lister to do the same 20 that I used to do.
Technically speaking, you have voluntarily taking a pay cut because
you are paying somebody to do the same 20 that you used to do without them.
So if you're going to hire somebody, your output needs to go to 40 in order
to afford and offset the new financial burden that you have instituted into
your business.
And whenever you hear me talk about the business, the business is sitting
right here next to me.
They are a silent participant in this podcast.
I am not speaking on behalf of my business.
My business is over here.
It has its own EIN.
The United States of America looks at it as its own person.
This is not me.
I have to, my duty is to make the correct decisions for my business in the
best interest of my business.
And if I'm going to hire someone for my business, it's going to be in the
best interest of the business.
And when you hire people in the best interest of the business, you also have
to fire people in the best interest of your business.
And that's a part that comes with it as well.
So if we are going to hire someone, our first hire is usually a generalist,
someone that does everything that we do, mirrors what we do.
If we ship, they help ship.
If we pack, they help pack.
If we photograph, they help photograph.
That's what I want.
A lot of people, their first hire in reselling is a specialist.
A specialist is someone who is going to take away from the business without
increasing the bottom line.
So a specialist would be in the conventional world, a HR person.
HR is not driving revenue and putting product out the door.
A specialist would be someone that specializes maybe in law.
Maybe you have to hire a lawyer.
The lawyer is not driving revenue and bringing money to the bottom line.
That person is costing you money.
So the first hire most businesses should make is a generalist, someone that
does the exact same thing as you and can double the output.
Once you've hired enough generalists and your output has grown by so much,
and now you start having people problems, which means you have so many people and
everything is moving smoothly, that's when you hire a specialist.
That's when you hire a manager.
That's when you hire someone for HR.
A manager isn't pushing the blue button on a reselling business.
A manager is an outsourcing for a reselling business.
Very few businesses get to this point, but you understand the point that I'm
trying to make.
When we hire a specialist, the output doesn't go up.
We're just subcontracting out a portion of what we don't want to do.
Every single time that I've made a hire, it's been a rubber stamp, double the
output.
Eventually, you build a business that hires only specialists.
The hugest companies, they don't have generalists.
They have everyone that is a specialist.
They have a PR person.
They have someone that only cleans, someone that only does it.
They're filled with only specialists.
But for us, our hires need to be generalists.
They need to be side by side with us.
And every single time that we make a hire, the output needs to go up
proportionally.
So for us, when we were listing 360 a day, that was 120 every single person.
If I had a $20 profit, that's $2,400 a day in profit for every single person
that I hired.
And I was paying $20 an hour, so I was paying 160.
So it was costing me $160 to put up $2,400 in profit every single day.
A million dollars in profit every single day for $160 was my cost.
Now, if I hired someone for $160 and said, I'm not going to list anymore.
You're just going to do my same 120.
The business would have still sold the same amount, but I would be out $40,000
as a voluntary pay cut because now I'm paying this person to do a portion or
a piece of what I used to do.
So even though I was hiring people, I was still doing the work right along with
them because as you hire people, the revenue generation, the profit should
also increase proportionally to the people that you are bringing around.
And that's why for me, when I reached 100,000 or when I did my first hire,
that's why my business exploded.
So in 2019, I did $1.2 million, almost $1.3, and I did that by myself, no
employees.
When COVID hit, I started really paying attention more to eBay because
everything was shut down.
I was forced to do so.
That was the only thing that I could do.
And from 2020 to 2022, I built the company from $1 million to $5 million in
sales.
That's because I was adding people.
I was adding processes.
I was adding more revenue generating arms of the business.
I also opened up a brick and mortar store.
I started doing a little bit on whatnot.
I started dabbling into the wholesale, where now it's only wholesale and the
business has just increased from there.
So I think that's where a lot of people get stuck is that they start hiring
people and maybe they hire too many specialists right at that point to do
portions of the business that they don't want to do.
And when you do that, you take a voluntary pay cut rather than hiring
someone who's going to work alongside you, be the same generalist.
Almost have their own eBay business inside of your eBay business.
And then they could just list their items, sell their items, and you just
keep doing that same way, same thing.
I've got a fun hypothetical for you because I've had a discussion with
people that lived in high expense states like California and New York.
So if you were to live in one of these particular states, would your volume
or the type of items you were to do in these states, would they have to
increase to basically make, like I live in Texas, make the equivalent, I
would probably have to work maybe half as less, I think, than if I were to
live in California or New York, honestly.
So I've had the pleasure of going to both recently.
I was in California for about three weeks, New York City for a month.
I actually hit a thrift route in New York City, downtown Manhattan, on foot
it was a five and a half mile thrift route.
I could have did it in a car, but I did it on foot.
I went to about five or six stores.
My average cost of goods was $11.28 in New York City.
And Johnny B, he did the reaction I was looking for.
But my average sale price was $53.
There you go.
So it works.
It still works.
And may they have maybe challenges with storage?
Perhaps.
I talked to a lady, her storage was in Staten Island.
So maybe she's got to jump on the Staten Island ferry and go over there and
ship and pack.
So there are going to be challenges for every single situation and scenario.
But when I went to New York City, I'll tell you this.
Down here in Florida, we have a pretty high cost of living as well.
The thrift store prices were the same.
There was one store up there that was about 10 or 20% higher than the others,
but we have stores down here that are 10 or 20% higher than the others too.
The thrift store prices were the same.
The flea market prices were the same.
But in New York City, they don't have any junk.
The stuff that they have over there is fantastic stuff.
Where for me, I have to sift through a lot of junk to find winners.
They have really good stuff up there.
So maybe your infrastructure cost is going to be a little bit higher.
Maybe the rent for your apartment is going to be higher.
Maybe.
But you can spend $10, $20 per item in New York City.
And you can get $100 profit items.
And I did that two weekends in a row at the flea market.
I did that at the thrift store.
I identified a vendor at the flea market who ended up having other stuff
where I went to their house.
I didn't know who they were.
I didn't have a car.
I got into an Uber, went to some city in New Jersey that was an hour away in an Uber,
and I bought $50,000 worth of stuff for retail price.
I bought it for $5,000.
And it ended up being a company that has 100% sell-through.
It's in the Lululemon category.
It has 100% sell-through.
But I found out, due to I started talking to people at the flea market,
I found out that this company had a storage unit where they used to store some of their items,
and they lost the storage unit.
So they had a whole bunch of stuff still brand new at Tags where someone won the storage unit on an auction,
and now this stuff was out at the flea market.
So the thrift store, the street vendors, I got a $500 jacket off a street vendor for 20 bucks.
I got a $300 jacket off a street vendor for 30 bucks.
There's money everywhere.
So while they do have some increased costs and overhead,
you can't just walk down the street in most cities,
and there's racks of clothing sitting there and pull out a $500 jacket for 20 bucks.
That pays your storage for the whole month, 20 bucks.
Or have access to a tremendous flea market right across the river,
or network with these people.
There's stuff everywhere.
When I went to California, I pulled $100,000 of stuff in California,
dead stock from the back of some old building that had rats, roaches, water, and mildew.
The stuff is out there.
We just have to put ourselves in the position to go get it.
And as I go, and this is the thing, too,
you find all this stuff in the big city,
and they go, oh, well, you can only find all that stuff because it's in the big city.
Go to somewhere that's a small town.
I've gone to places where the town is 3,500 people.
I found plenty of stuff.
The place that I go to, all of the flea markets on my videos,
and I do this by my own initiative,
I go far away from my house because I don't want to go to my flea market where I'm El Presidente.
I've gone there for almost 20 years.
Everyone knows me. Everyone holds stuff.
I don't want to go to my flea market. It's like shooting fish in a barrel.
I wake up, I go four hours away where nobody knows me
to a flea market that has more strawberries in their city than people,
and I still find a tremendous amount of items.
And when I go to the big city, people say, well, try to do it in a small town.
When I do it in a small town, people say, well, there's no competition.
That's why you can do it in a small town.
So, like, you can't win.
So if you do it in a big city where all the competition is, you can't win.
You don't get credit for that.
You do it in a small town where there's no competition, but you still find items.
You don't get credit for that either.
So, like, at the end of the day, the stuff is out there.
The stuff is everywhere.
I have found it in towns with 3,500 people.
I have found it in towns with 13 million people.
And if you know what to do, you put boots on the ground, you get out there at the right time,
you ask the right questions, you don't beat people up, and you are a professional,
it's amazing what type of items you start to find.
See, it's funny you say this because in my book, there's about 25% of them are all in California.
And there's stuff they're pulling out just amazes me on the frequency they're able to pull this out from.
But it correlates to what on my sales, like where I'm sending my stuff,
because I track location where they're going.
A lot of them are going to California.
A lot of them are going to New York.
A lot of them are going to the high cost of living states that I mentioned.
So it's no wonder they're pulling it out more frequently because we're all selling it back to these high cost of living states.
And at the end of the day, we can move.
Like we could just move.
And like every single person that lives in a small podunk town is no more than a half day drive from a mega metropolitan area where they can go find stuff.
Like the way that the United States of America is built out, even if you live in the plains, you can go to Kansas City.
You could go to Omaha.
Like there's still places out there, even if you live in the middle of nowhere that are a half day away, six hours away.
Go drive six hours, source all day, get a hotel, drive six hours back.
You'll pay for your entire trip.
There's no doubt.
What do you feel about the natural progression of getting better sources?
Because I look back when I started, it was always like the goodwill, the Salvation Army.
And now I preach to everybody in my group, like let's rely on thrift stores last.
Right. Because now in our business, at least a lot of thrift stores scan the items and they keep the good stuff for themselves.
So I'm a huge proponent of all right, where can we get our stuff that isn't the thrift store?
Maybe go up a little bit and get better quality stuff.
And believe it or not, usually when you go up the river here a little bit, it's cheaper.
So not only do you get better quality, it's actually cheaper.
Do you think that kind of plays into the whole people aren't getting results or they're not what they used to be?
Because everybody just relies on that thrift store to have everything they need.
And in reality, it's changed so much over the past six months versus you were talking four years here.
So, so my disregard where the best items are, don't worry about that.
Only go to the closest thrift store to your house and only go there once a week.
I'm done, dude. I'm bankrupt. This is over.
Wouldn't that be utterly ridiculous to recommend?
But that's what people are doing.
Disregard where the best items are, only go to the three closest thrift stores to your house and get whatever they present you and then come back home.
That's what people are doing.
And if we sat here on this podcast and said, this is the official recommendation, disregard where the best items are,
only go to the closest bins to your house three times a week and the closest three thrift stores three times a week.
Find what they have there, bring it home and build your business on it.
By disregarding where the best stuff is, do that.
People would hear that and think that's utterly ridiculous and they don't understand that that's what they're doing.
They're disregarding where the best items are and only going to the most convenient place.
So I have a Goodwill, maybe six baseball throws from my house on a roll.
You let the ball roll. I could pick it up and throw it six times. I'll hit the Goodwill.
That Goodwill sucks.
It would be amazing if I can go to this Goodwill and I can get all of my sourcing done for the week.
However, that store sucks.
So at the peak of my thrifting route, I had to go to 55 stores.
Do you think all 55 of them were right outside of my neighborhood, six baseball throws away?
No, I'm driving hours and working my way back in one direction, driving hours, working my way back in another direction.
I'm waking up at four o'clock in the morning, going to the flea market three times a week.
Saturday and Sunday, I'm going to two different flea markets.
And in a lot of my videos, I'm going to multiple flea markets.
You have to put yourself in the best position to find the best items that you possibly can.
Not go to the most convenient place.
The most convenient place to me is this Goodwill. This Goodwill sucks.
So this is the difference between Goodwills, flea markets, garage sales, all of that.
The thrift stores will have a steady supply of the bread and butter items.
On a percent basis, you are more likely to run into a hundred dollar profit at a garage sale or flea market versus the thrift store.
On a percent basis, you are more likely to run into a Grand Sam item at the flea market or garage sale versus the thrift store.
On a humongously disproportionate percentage, you are more likely to run into a business changing, life changing deal at a flea market, garage sale versus the thrift store.
I have got so many hundred dollar home runs at the flea markets at garage sale.
I've got so many 20 pieces that I'm going to make a thousand dollars on at the flea market at the garage sale.
I have got so many business changing, life changing deals at the flea market at the garage sale.
I've never walked into a thrift store and have found a deal where I'm going to make $10,000.
Have found a deal where I'm going to make $50,000, $20,000. I've never found that at the thrift store.
However, the thrift store is all reliable, constant supply, constant flow of these bread and butter items.
And the bread and butter items are the items that meet the metrics.
If your metric is as an example, and it could be anything, you can have a $10 profit in a six month sell through.
If every single item that you pick up meets that metric, great. You can have a $20 profit and a 90 day sell through. Great.
You can have a hundred dollar profit with a one day sell through.
So long as every single item that you pick up meets, and this is the important part, meets the metric.
When we talk about meeting the metric, what does that mean?
That means those are the worst items that we pick up and accept into our business.
Every single item above a $20 profit is a better item.
Every single item above a 90 day sell through with a $20 profit is a better item.
So that metric of $20 profit and 90 day sell through, we're not tied and bound to that.
That's just the worst item that we're going to accept into our business.
And every single item is going to meet or exceed and be on top of that.
So in reality, if your metric is $20 in a 90 day sell through, your average profit is going to be above $20 profit per item.
Because the worst item that you accept into your cart is $20.
And all of our business decisions as resellers start and end when we accept that item and we put it in our cart.
Because when we accept bad items and put them into our cart, every single business decision after that is how can we fix that problem that we just committed?
If you don't commit the problem, you can focus your attention and time on actually building your business and having those be your decisions.
But if you accept garbage items into your cart, every single decision after that is trying to fix that problem that you just committed.
So, we're stores, they're great, they're fabulous.
But if you really want to make gains, if you really want to put yourself into a position where you are finding really fantastic items, they're not in the thrift store.
The thrift store is reliable, you can find $50 items, you can find $100 items every now and then you get lucky and find a $200 profit item. Great.
But the thrift stores are getting smarter. They're calling the inventory, they're putting it online.
And even if they're not profitable online, which we had this discussion this week in the group, even if Goodwill is not profitable,
which they are, even if they're not profitable, putting items on online and it's a waste of time and they're better served selling it in the Goodwill stores, that part doesn't matter.
They can be not profitable doing that. The problem is $100,000 a month we're taking out of that store that used to go into our pockets and is now going into a different endeavor for them, which may be profitable or not profitable.
That part doesn't matter. Those items have been eliminated from the store and given to someone else, whether it's an Amazon account. You know how many Goodwills have Amazon accounts?
You know how many Goodwills have eBay accounts? Some of the biggest accounts on eBay are Goodwills.
These items used to be in the store so we have to get better than them. We have to show up more often, we have to put in more reps, touch more clothing, gain more exposure and experience, and we have to outsmart them in their own game.
Goodwill is outsmarting a lot of people and that's why a lot of people are failing as well, in addition to everything that we've talked about.
We have to constantly put ourselves in the position where the best items are, not put ourselves in the most convenient position.
I have a Goodwill Binz that's literally within walking distance of me and I'll never go in there. They have nothing for me. People are like, man, if I had a Goodwill Binz, I'd be rich.
Maybe I should rent this place out and put in the listing. Great for a reseller because the Binz is within walking distance.
Excellent location. Give me 20 bucks and I'll tell you where it is.
I got two things for you. Based off everything you just said. Bread and butter, I think people get confused with junk a lot of the time because bread and butter to me, I see as like a Stephen King book versus James Patterson, which is an abundance.
Both are everywhere, but one I should pick up and one I should leave it where it lies.
And I'm wondering your thoughts on if most people still do not know what a bread and butter item is kind of deal.
Like both we're going to sell. It's just one's going to sell for 10 times the money.
Yeah, so I think that we should identify the metrics. The metrics are our desired profit in how long we want the item to sit and sell for. So how long do we want our money out before we realize the profit and those items that are kind of in that zone or in that area that that meet the metric, meet the sell through metric, the profit metric, and we kind of run across a lot like those are the bread and butter items, everything that is outside of that.
So if you want to make a $20 profit, the $50 profit items like those are the outliers. We don't always run across $50 profit items. But like the thing about outliers is outliers don't scale the bread and the bread and butter, the desired metric, those items that we constantly run into and constantly, you know, kind of keep the gas in the engine or like those old steam locomotives where you constantly got to fire and coal to keep them going.
So that's the bread and butter, the foundation of our business in respects to our product offering. Anything like in that next kind of echelon of items, those are going to be those outliers, those more profitable items, those home run items, those Grand Slam items.
So both of them, we need both of them. And we also need deals and I was talking about this the other day. We need like deals, we need to come across those items where we can make 500 bucks when we buy 10 of them, where we can make 1000 bucks when we buy 20 of them.
And like when you go to the flea market, we need to find the people that have the items on a reoccurring basis. Like we need to walk across that vendor who's got $500 worth of stuff and he's selling it for 50 bucks.
Like we need those deals too. And like if we can get the bread and butter, we can get our outliers and we can run across those deals, then you become unstoppable.
I agree. And my next one here, I said this on a podcast not too long ago and they probably hate me for saying this. Hi, Hunley and Sam.
I said most people probably should stop doing lots or bundles or assembly of these items to try to make a dollar off this massive quantity you acquired somehow some way.
And I see this in the book world so so much, probably in the media world in general. I have all this extra stuff, it can't stand on its own. So let me try to put it together with some similar type things, throw it up to make it a passable as if it were one item metric item.
That's an absorbed amount of time to do in scale and I just, I'd rather just list a single item that can stand on its own. What are your thoughts on doing lots versus not doing lots?
When is the appropriate time to do lots? So for me personally I've never done lots and I don't know how well they work in the clothing, you know, sphere but because like if I list five Tommy Bahamas shirts, without a doubt you're going to get the message of going,
oh I only want the green one, can you separate? So I've never done that before and then, and I think that selling lots on eBay is challenging because eBay is set up usually just for one item so I think it's a little bit challenging, but it just comes down to just the opportunity cost.
Like you said, the time it takes to set up a lot, like, dude it could take you 30 minutes to photograph a lot of items. Are you better off taking 30 minutes to photograph this lot that's going to sell for X, or are you better off just doing what you're supposed to do for 30 minutes
that's going to sell for X? So if you spend 30 minutes to do this, sells for 50 bucks, could you list enough items in the next half hour that can get you 100 bucks or can get you $51 or 200, whatever it may be, and odds are is, if you just spend your time doing what you're supposed to be doing, you're going to outperform whatever lot is.
Otherwise, why are every single YouTube channel or every single reseller on the face of the earth, why is every single listing not lots? Like if lots are the way to go, like why isn't that like the official recommendation?
Just have a giant floor space of just piles of what you're going to be listing.
Yeah.
It doesn't work.
I want to get into the idea of eBay, you have your days, you mark things down in days. I think the big thing I realize is, you might have a desirable item, but the price is out of line. And when I used to do eBay half-assed, I'll be the first to admit, I never went back a single time and like check to see if the markets changed or maybe you or Johnny came on the listing with a quantity of 50 and undercut me.
And is that like a big reason why people don't get their money because I'm a firm believer now that I'm in the same mindset you have is, I'm not getting paid to the item sells, right? So if maybe when I listed it, it was a potential $20 bill, but if I lower today and take my $3 that I can actually get if I drop it down, I'm going to take that $3.
You think a lot of resellers just don't go back and revisit the items they listed and that's where all their money's tied up and that's why they wind up going away.
So no one wants the item is reason number one, people like to list a lot of stuff that they think are cool, but it's not good.
Someone likes the item, but it's only one person on the face of the earth and it takes them a long time to find your item that sell through that that's where number two is number three is like you're saying, maybe you see a comp.
That was an astronomical outlier and you go Oh, this is market price that happened one time, maybe you see a couple that that that was maybe an outlier you price it at that.
Maybe the market has decreased. Maybe there's an error in the listing maybe there's a typo in the title maybe you put short instead of shirt that happens a lot.
Maybe you have, you know, some sort of discrepancy between title photo and item specifics maybe the title says extra large, the photograph says large the item specific says large that causes customer confusion so that's going to happen.
Maybe some items just fall through the cracks, and that's what happens sometimes too like so for me when I sold clothing. I used to concentrate on maybe 30 to 50 brands so I would get the same type of items all the time.
And some items, exactly the same would sell all the time, but there would always be one that kind of like fell through the crack and worked its way down and no one ever got it that's just how things go sometimes maybe it has a flaw, maybe something so there's some kind
of discrepancy on the listing for whatever reason doesn't result in a sale. So you can you can go back, audit the listing and ask yourself figure out why is this item not selling.
Let's, you know, revisit the price okay the price is good. Let's revisit our title are we do we have like a generic title, where we are saturating our own opportunity of selling the item, because we're using the keywords that every single person on the face
of the earth already knows like casual or long sleeve like no one is searching for that like no one types in, you know, I collect dollar bills casual shirt they don't type that in.
And if you had the pertinent keyword, and you may be included my name into that shirt that you're wearing, someone will actually find it and it's going to come up.
So like, we have to ask ourselves, are the keywords pertinent to the item, are we, are we creating separations from the competition of everyone else that lists on eBay and if everyone else that lists on eBay is very generic, you know very intermediate
level of knowledge and you have a better level of knowledge and you can identify a keyword like for a hiking item maybe ripstop, because for a hiker maybe ripstop is important.
But if you don't have ripstop and they search for, you know, Patagonia ripstop pants. 99% of people have been eliminated from the game, they're done.
So if you people know the keyword, they have ripstop now you have a 33% chance of getting sold. First a point 0000 33% chance of getting sold. So having that identifiable marker that that that pertinent keyword that your customer is actually going to search,
that will help you to so rework the price, identify and assess the market, put in keywords that actually move the needle not junk keywords, make sure all of your item specifics match the photo photo matches the title, and if everything is good and it still doesn't
sell, we have to ask ourselves does anybody want this we asked to ask ourselves, does anybody want this in the amount of time that I'm comfortable presenting this item for sale.
And then the item gets marked down and we make it more enticing because every single item on the face of the earth has a one day sell through at a certain price.
Can you afford to sell your item for the one day sell through magical pricing the answer is usually no, we usually need to make a profit, but like the closer we can get to that 100% one day sell through and still afford us the margin that we're looking for
that's the spot that our price that our items should be priced because for me, I don't care what the market says I disregard the market. If Johnny B want to sell his items for $20 and I want to sell mine for 18.
Good luck Johnny B he's out of business Johnny B's business is not my concern. The eBay business the eBay market is not my concern my market is my market I have bills to pay.
If you're coming up to me and going yo looks like you had a tough time on eBay this month you need a little bit of help on the bills, it ain't happening. So your market is your market bless your heart on your market, but if I can get this item $2 cheaper,
and I can make the same margin as Johnny B but I can be $2 cheaper and Johnny B can't be $2 cheaper, because he paid too much or his overhead infrastructure is too high.
Good luck to Johnny B that's not my problem my problem is a selling problem. Every single reseller has a selling problem. We all have selling problem, we have selling problems because we all need to sell more items.
So forget what the market is, I need to make this amount of profit in this amount of time. Good luck to everybody else and every single time someone else makes a sale. I take it personal.
I shouldn't get sales, I should get all the sales. So I want to operate and conduct my business in this manner, and I don't care about Johnny B's business I don't care about your business.
I care about my business, putting food on my plate, building my business and that is the United States of America in a nutshell we are a capitalist society. They don't care about your business.
They care about making money. And until we understand this. Nothing else matters.
I'm so glad you said this because we had somebody on the media call, I won't disclose her name so I won't embarrass her. But she was mentioning how she couldn't compete with high end media sellers like secondhand sale, big time media player.
Do you think they care? No, they don't. They don't care.
And I made a sale, and I pulled it up and I showed her, see second sales price at $8, me over here, $30, still sold mine because look at my listing compared to theirs.
Technically they should have way faster sell their over mine but again quality listing and doing the rules of eBay, the algorithm, knowing how to do it properly.
And I also told her to stop doing lots. That's why we also we also don't know how many they've sold at $8 for you to sell yours. Right, they're going to sell 10,000 more items than me on any given Sunday, because they're that gigantic so they don't care if they're selling this for $8 or 80 cents probably because they can just put more up continuously.
I mean, you just summed everything up I think we're going to wrap it up here. What you just said is like that, that three minute. You got to get your money, like who cares what else is going on like that is that is I try to tell people there's so much like you have to get paid to be in business
right and like, I'll take. I got 4500 items at Amazon, if somebody came to me today and said, Mike, I'll give you, you'll make $3 on every single item. Sure I got some items in there that are 2030 4050 profit, I'm taking that money today because technically we should be a better business owner,
and we can find better items better brands, and we can just rinse and repeat this right, but if you don't have the mentality of it's all out there for the taking you just got to be willing to do it, then you're always stuck in well I can't I can't make the bills my items don't sell and I'm just glad you, you dove in the YouTube
the way you did because it's always there for people to just be like, well, there's no difference between tech and somebody else who shows up at that flame market besides him just going in having a conversation and knowing what to look for anybody can do what you do like
and I, that's how you come off and that's how you are right you, you're not like well I'm special you're like, no, you can do this, anybody can do this.
And I show people exactly where I go exactly what time I show up exactly who I buy from everything, and there's nothing fancy I record the videos on a cracked phone.
I record my podcast on a laptop with no special camera on headphones from a galaxy s 10 these headphones are probably 10 years old in an empty room.
All of this on purpose. All of this is to show that you don't need anything special to get started you just need to get started. Could I have a nice fancy background like like our good friend down here with the library behind us I sure could but for me.
I have nothing.
I have nothing. I have no special talents no special advantages the only advantage is that I put myself in the best opportunity to find the best items, that's it, and it's best items, best price, not best price, best items.
I want to pay fair price for a fair item. I don't want to get everything for a penny and find the best items that I can for one penny that's a different model.
So, we don't need anything we just got to wake up every single day. Take action, don't listen to this as if it was the TV. There's much better stuff out there on TV go watch, maybe LeBron tonight or go watch desperate housewives watch whatever you want
they're more entertaining than this. Listen to this and take action. If you're going to listen to this and take no action, then you've done yourself and your business a disservice.
Yeah, and just necessarily just because somebody's on a different platform or has a different business model, like, I'll probably never sell on eBay again but like I take things away from what you say in the podcast don't don't let that limiting belief that just because
somebody's on a different platform has a different business model that you can't still learn from them I mean, we talked about it earlier, all the coaches from your, your, you know, patreon group we've had on completely different business models and every single conversation
there's something I can take away and I'll never sell on Poshmark I'll never, you know, do do the categories they do I'll never sell a car part I can't even fix a car to, you know, I could barely pump gas in the thing but you take things away from business model so we
appreciate you. And next year will be round three. Well, you know, and that'll be exciting so yeah man. Why was links down below most of you know where he's at but I'll tag them down below and thanks for hanging out with us tech as always.
Thank you both of you guys for having me on again I always enjoy talking to you guys and usually I like my podcast like everyone else does all the talking so it's, it's interesting sometimes to have the tables turn and have questions posed towards you so I do
appreciate all of you guys always and you summed it up pretty good like when I listened to Johnny be on the media call like I can learn stuff even though I don't sell media I don't sell on Amazon listen to Jared with the car parts I don't sell car parts but it's just, it's
interesting to listen to I like to be absorbed into the entire just reselling atmosphere and I think just like surrounding yourself with people that are, you know, doing things, being productive being actionable people that are better than you.
And I think you know you can only go up and only you know, excel, what you are already trying to do so you know it doesn't take any special talent or skill to do this but you just have to do it and do the same thing on a daily basis it's mundane it's boring at times
but you know we could all be out there digging ditches as well so we gotta put everything into perspective. We appreciate you will talk to everybody 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
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