Welcome back to another episode of the Resellers Mindset Podcast.
My name is Mike, also known as the used book guy on YouTube, along with my friend
and fellow full-time reseller, Johnny B.
We help people start and grow their reselling businesses from the ground up.
We also have a weekly zoom call and private discord for all YouTube members.
Head on over to youtube.com backslash use book guy to join the channel and gain
access to the full length podcast zoom call and private discord today.
Let's get into this week's episode.
What is up everybody?
Welcome into another episode, resellers mindset podcast, Mike next to Johnny,
Johnny's topic today, things that are not seen.
And I think this is kind of pivotal.
And I really, I'm surprised you came up with this topic because I do the YouTube,
right?
Like I show me out at the thrift stores.
I show me at the storage unit, but you work a lot more than me.
So there is a lot that doesn't get seen.
And you know, it's kind of hard to translate it to words.
I guess I'll go first.
Right?
So I had two pretty big bulk pickups recently and the other night I had my
little plugin USB light because there's no light at the storage unit.
It's 30 degrees.
The wind's blowing.
I don't make a YouTube video about this, right?
Cause I just want to work and get it done.
But like here I am at it.
Wasn't even that late, but the sun was down or it was like 7 P.M.
And I'm just sitting out here in the storage unit by myself, waiting for
somebody to come snatch me up in the darkness of night.
Nobody would know about it.
You don't see that.
You just see me out there when the sun's shining, things are great.
Scanning all the profit, not dealing with all the crap that I got.
I don't know, man.
It's tough for me because I can't show it all.
And I think it's hard for me sometimes because I can't show that type of stuff
because I got to get the job done.
Right?
Like the YouTube doesn't pay my bills.
Like I have to get through the inventory.
I have to get it cleared out.
And unfortunately, I don't have a videographer where I can just work
normally and someone records me and it's just too much for me.
So when I had things like this, I just have to get it done and it doesn't
content the last thing on my mind.
Right.
And even and for those not aware on group calls, a lot of people are
actually working, even though it doesn't look like they are like they're doing
the technical work on the computer.
So you're working and when you're on a call, you're normally working at half
speed or a quarter speed because you're trying to listen or somebody ask you a
question, you kind of have to stop what you're doing, respond to the question
and all that, but that's the only way we can do it.
And I agree any, any kind of call or distraction or even recording a YouTube,
you're not able to put all of your working effort into the actual work because
well, your brain's distracted because you're multitasking.
Multitasking is great, but you realize you're going to, you're not going to be
able to do it a full a hundred percent on each individual task.
There's going to be some percentages assigned to sec to a secondary or third
area, tasks that you're doing.
Um, and even me, I had a one-on-one with a lady earlier this week and I was
teaching her how to source and took her a minute to figure out what I was talking
about when we were looking at things on Facebook marketplace and it was just
little things like you see, you see that stack of comics, maybe you send them a
message and see if they have graphic novels, which are books.
We don't care about their comics.
We care about the books, right?
Ask if they got books, they're nerds.
They probably got the graphic novels of the comic books too, or, or science fiction
or fantasy, whatever nerd and they're into, they have books that more than likely
goes beyond what's being shown, which is just comic books.
I got a hot take and I might die on this hill, but it's fine.
It's what I believe in right here, right now.
If what was that Jim Carrey movie where he was like videotape 24 seven, like
around the clock Truman.
Yeah.
If I could have that Johnny for like a week, maybe it was just live stream, like
every single thing I did throughout the whole week, I guarantee you people that
were brand new or people that were starting to scale would think twice about
doing exactly what I do because there is so much that I'm doing behind the scenes.
Behind the scenes that doesn't get shown or right.
Even if you think about the person out there listening to this and maybe watches
a lot of YouTube reselling, you always see the truck backing up, unloading the stuff.
Right.
You always see the hits.
You never see the truck leaving with all the stuff you got to get rid of at the end
of the day and the long drives, right?
Like I'm just sitting in the car, listening to the Ramsey podcast, driving an hour
and a half one way that's not content.
But I do think like if I had some, some camera that had an infinite battery life
and I could record every minute of every day when it comes to what me and you do
in the group and I know like the group is, you know, you've had other, I guess,
uh, what would it be electronic, uh, jobs in the past.
So like, but you're a coach in the group.
We do the podcast every single week.
You answer questions every single day.
So this is something that people don't see.
And nobody ever they hear Johnny and they're just like, oh yeah, he's got a warehouse.
He buys books.
He sells books.
Well, they don't hear the fact.
Like you just said, you know, you sat down with somebody one-on-one and
helped them with their business.
Like nobody sees that or nobody even thinks about that about you besides probably me and
a few others, because we know you're out here doing it.
Absolutely.
And I don't take credit for a lot of it.
And, but also, I mean, like even pulling and packing orders, nobody sees from
sees what, when I do that, uh, they may see you because you may do it for YouTube or
Mel back to burnout, she does pull and pack episodes, but you don't think about
the other people around you.
You just see them on a call or.
Yeah, that's exactly.
And the only time you see them, you see them on a call and they, they're just
sitting in a chair most of the time.
Occasionally you'll see somebody working because they got the phone set to the
side and they're going back and forth.
Cause they need to do that.
They were sitting in the call.
That'll throw off their whole day with their schedule because believe it or
not, resellers are very busy people.
They're go, go, go, go, go.
And they have to get things done or else.
Well, they don't.
And then it's bedtime and then they have to get up and try to play catch up or
makeup, um, and it's just a damned, if you do damned, if you don't kind of scenario.
So you gotta, if you're going to be in groups, you do have to multitask and the
best way to do it is work on the call, but realize you're not going to be working.
To your fullest until the call is over.
Honestly.
And that that's okay.
I mean, I also, when I'm not on a call, I listened to podcasts and stuff and it's a
little distracting, a little less so than an actual call, a live call that is where
I may be called on to engage, but I'm still able to go through my day and also absorb
some knowledge while I'm doing that.
Would I absorb more knowledge if I just laser focused on the video?
Probably, but my work wouldn't get done if that were the case and that sacrifice
I'm willing to make.
And the other way around it, if I laser focus on the work, I don't learn as much.
So it's a little give and take there.
Um, other things that aren't senior, like, um, how many of us have done custom jobs?
Modifications like tables or rearranged rooms to make things more efficient.
Nope.
That's boring stuff to watch.
Nobody ever sees that they need to be get done.
Like I have a big component of having everything on wheels.
They don't come that way, by the way, you have to go to the hard store, get some
screws and wheels and brackets and washers and nuts and bolts and experiment and figure
it out.
Your drill brick breaks.
You have to go get another drill bit or installing.
I don't know if you've got a wall mount for your photo station, you got to figure
out how to do it, measure it.
Is it crooked?
Well, I got to take it down and redo all of this.
Nobody sees or talks about any of this because it's boring content to be honest.
But it's stuff we all do.
It's the stuff not seen, but the stuff not seen is what gets the job done.
Honestly.
I mean, especially with, especially in eBay land, right?
Like you, you do all this work and you sell the stuff and like you, you post the items
you sell, which 100% like, you know, what, what you got, you put in all the work.
All right.
Nobody sees you, you know, at 2am taking photos of your stinky T-shirts.
You're so tired, your red bull ain't working anymore.
You're drooling, your butt naked, listening stuff 2am in the morning.
You know, like nobody sees that content and that's, that's how you get the end
results.
And when I see these people posting these crazy numbers, like how many items sold on
eBay, and I think to myself, all right, that's like, they sold a hundred and how
many items over the weekend at six or eight photos per item.
Like my mind just starts blowing up because I have that, like, I see the next level to
the data because I've been doing this long enough.
I just don't see like, Oh, a hundred orders.
Great.
I'm like, damn, that's probably 10,000 photos.
Like you poor soul.
Yeah, that's a lot of work.
I mean, even people able to do it in a minute, a photo set for a single item in under a
minute, that's really good.
But you're compounding that, like you said, to get a hundred sales, you got to have a
lot listed.
The 10,000 photos ain't far off, maybe 15,000.
I mean, it's insane.
And if you're doing more than six, it just goes up in the amount of time it takes.
That's another thing.
All these little things we do all the time we put into these little things do add up,
but the benefit of improving our workflow, our work life experience and or educating
ourselves that pays off in the hugest dividends throughout the course of the year.
So we've got to do these things in order to be better resellers.
I agree.
And it's like, I'll give a perfect example of it.
I tell everybody, Hey, go in and do some repricing manually.
And it's like, I spent two, two and a half hours doing that.
And it took me 10 seconds to type that sentence.
So like my show off was, Hey, go do this in 10 second, one sentence line that says,
Hey, go do some repricing manually.
But in reality, I just spent two and a half hours of my life.
It took you two and a half hours.
Realize, Hey, this is useful.
I should tell the group about this.
They didn't spend the two hours to do that.
You actually save them two hours, but now they're probably going to be working.
Blah, blah.
I mean, I'm doing a lot of manual repricing right now.
It's, it's my numbing stuff, but it's got to be done.
Maybe I should just turn my YouTube channel into all the boring stuff and the non like
all the, all the things that suck in reselling, like, and sending me like scanning stuff,
like both buys all you all everybody gets is like me going to the donation bin and throwing
my stuff into the donation bin.
Right?
Like nobody ever knows if I even made any money.
Oh, I got to go take, I got to go get rid of stuff today.
I got to go pay my storage unit bill.
Like all this shit that just sucks about reselling.
Yeah.
It's the work, right?
It's the actual work.
Showing off sales that that's not the actual work.
In fact, you're stealing from your work time by taking the time to do that.
But it's like, that's just the end result of what all this bullshit we did ahead of
time resulted in.
Cause it is bullshit.
It's the suck.
It's the grind.
It's the horribleness, but we do it for this one little thing over here.
And you notice, and if you're a reseller, you know what I'm talking about.
Those little, those little good sale things.
And then once that becomes the norm, it's never good enough.
That you're going on and you repeat it and you repeat it.
And that's why when you see a seasoned reseller, they usually don't brag anymore.
And they're just like, yeah, it was a good sales day.
It was a good sales weekend.
And that's only if they're really asked really, because they don't, they don't
care anymore when you're new, every sale is a magical experience.
It's Disneyland.
It's the best place to go.
It's a magical experience, it's Disneyland, rainbows and unicorns galore.
But after a while you get really jaded and really like, whatever, I made
800 bucks, whatever, I made a thousand bucks, whatever, don't care.
We've got to get on with the day back to the grind.
And you're just in this, this cycle of, yep, just doing the day to day.
But we don't become so miserable that we stop doing, well, some people do, but
most people just keep on going on because they're seeing this growth wine.
That's what they get excited about.
They, they, they less focus on the individual day or the weekend or the
monthly, and they focus about the year.
They're trying to make that yearly graph go up in comparison to last year's
yearly graph that was here.
They want to overlap and go up, right?
That's what people are looking for these days.
If you've been at it a minute.
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Uh, perfect.
I've got another good example.
I got plenty of these good examples because I actually been working a
little bit harder lately.
So I had a bulk DVD pickup and, um, I couldn't fit any more banana boxes in the car.
Right?
So now I got to play the game while I'm just taking them and throwing them in the
back seat and everything, right?
Like the front seat, the back seat pot anywhere I can fit a DVD.
I'm fitting a DVD and, uh, I take photos and Deb's like, what are you going to do?
Text all your friends and show off.
I'm like, I gotta enjoy some part of this because on the back end, I literally,
every DVD I threw in, I have to take back out every individual one to get them.
So I need like my, my five second enjoyment of being like, Hey, Johnny,
look at this and Johnny's like, you can fit more in there.
And then this is like, no, I said that to you.
I was like, you still got room.
It's the truth though.
Right?
Like we have to relish on these little things because you can get miserable
real quick in this and it's not even like gloating.
It's just funny to be like, Hey, my car is literally stacked to the ceiling with
DVDs, but you gotta, you gotta see that as, okay, yeah, this is cool.
Right?
It's cool to have a car full of DVDs, but you better believe that day, the next
day I got through almost everything.
And now I just have a little bit more to get rid of because yeah, it's fun.
But like Johnny said, she need growth.
Your bank account needs to be growing.
Um, if you're working more and you're not making more than, you know,
that's what people don't see too.
The bank accounts, Johnny, maybe we, maybe we need to have like a
little, like a box with like, you know, how the stock market goes up and down.
And we can just have like our active bank account over the last three years
on every YouTuber's video.
I think that would be great.
No, no.
What I would love more than that is, you know, those like thermometer bars that
should color in over the, over a period of time, that's what we need for the year.
When it gets full, you did a good job.
You did the thing for the year.
Good job.
And then you need an extra sheet of paper because it was more than you
expected that you use little masking scotch tape on.
Yeah, it's, uh, like every day I go to the storage unit and I see if I, if I
grew somewhere, I shrunk some good pencil above my head.
It's, it's tough, man, because there's so much people don't see.
And I do think it does attribute to a lot of people that start kind of
quitting before they get a real sense of what the business could be, because
all of a sudden they're expecting to see, you know, uh, 3000 DVD pickup and
you're making all this money, but they don't see, Hey, well, what am I going
to do with the 2,700 DVDs that are not worth it to me?
And I hate to tell you, like they got to go somewhere.
You just sit around speaking of that.
Let's look DVDs.
That's a special, special place.
Cause you know what?
You got to clean some of those.
You got to buff some out.
You got to throw them in the JFJ or whatever disc cleaning machine.
Nobody wants to see anybody clean this because if they knew, if they knew
how bad that is and how mind numbing that is, it's horrible.
That's not to mean we don't pop on some music and we're kind of swaying side
to side as we're staring at the JFJ every 20 seconds and cycling out the
desk, putting in the case, wiping the disc off and then putting in the good to go
pile.
Nobody sees any of that because again, that's very boring, but we've all been
well, if you're in this media, you've been there, you know exactly what I'm
saying.
You put on the tunes and you grind it out for an hour or two, and then you
grab your pile and then it's back to normal.
Maybe I'll record just me carrying my boxes from the third floor down to the
car.
And it will be like an hour long video of like a month of me just carrying my
stuff up the steps, just to put it in a cardboard box to carry it back down.
All it is is just my hallway.
My steps, that's all the video is.
And even like shipping, I mean, that's, that can be boring at times.
Even Amazon shipping in big boring times.
So you're packing your box, your pre packers, see how many you can cram in.
And then, okay, I had to put some out because whatever reason the ranking went
down or now it's an E score zero or it missed scanned, or you changed your mind
on it or you're restricted.
Okay, let me repack the box and pull it out of the box.
Now let's lust it and let's put it back in the box and sticker it and then put
it over there and then do it again.
Do it three, do three boxes.
And then they're like, okay, well, there you go.
There's, there's three hours of really boring stuff.
Not fun, dude, but we enjoy it because why do we enjoy it?
Because our bank accounts go up and we have processes in place to make it, I
guess, more enjoyable, not as miserable.
Um, it's, it's hard though, because if you're the person that is out there
grinding, you don't have the processes.
Your bank account isn't going up quite yet.
Do you got it?
You got to self check yourself quite a few times throughout the days just to
keep being like, all right, this is something I want to do.
And, uh, I've been there.
I've been broken, you know, I've been trying to grow a reselling business.
All I can say is give it an actual chance and give yourself a chance by
getting around like-minded people and, uh, basically just being a fly on the
wall and consuming information that can and will help your business because.
You get in the dumps real quick.
Those bank accounts are hard to get up and resell it.
It sounds glorious going to buy an item for 10 and sell for a hundred, but
those are just one-offs, right?
The most, most of my sales are between 15 and $22.
Like that's not exciting.
I can, if I did a what sold video, Johnny, and nothing was over 20 bucks.
Like who cares?
This is going to sound really masochist of me, but what I really love in a group
and I know other people are the same way is when you see a new reseller, they're
doing something miserable and they're talking about it and you know, there's a
better way, and then you see all the old timers that kind of get a smile on their
face, like I've been there.
That was me.
Let, let me help you out here.
Cause we're smiling at our own misery.
We're not smiling at the person that's having a bad time.
We're smiling because yeah, I was in the suck one time too.
Now you're just laughing at yourself at that point, but you're, then you're
going to help the individual out and try to help them, but we all have to go
through these trials and tribulations of the suck, the grind, the
horribleness of reselling.
Cause if you're not constantly thinking about how to make the suck less suck,
you're doing a service to your business.
Honestly, cause we always have to like, okay, this is, I hate this.
I hate this.
So much, how can I make this slightly better?
Cause that that's it.
It's like being in a desert and it's 150 degrees.
You're just looking for a shade tree.
How can I get shade for just a minute before I go on another two miles?
And then you're just going from shade tree to shade tree kind of deal.
Until all of a sudden you're just walking in the shade.
This ain't so bad.
All of a sudden, this is pretty good.
Yeah, it's, it's hard when you really, but I always think of this way.
When I was trying to get out of my job, like I would have did anything
to get out of it, right?
Like I was willing to do whatever it took to get out of the reselling business.
So like, do we just assume that if we create the content around things that
aren't seen the non fancy, the non bull lows, the non, you know, extravagant
videos, do we just assume that nobody would watch the content or maybe, maybe
that is a super niche where if one of these reselling channels just started
showing the stuff, nobody else does.
Then, then maybe they get traction on the channel and wouldn't it benefit us
because most people are going to run away because they see me throwing
thousands of DVDs and into my car and then unloaded them just to throw them
back into the car to go get rid of them somewhere else.
Like that would just mean less competition because less people would do it.
But I don't know, man, it's, it's hard to get rid of them.
No, man, it's, it's a hard balancing out.
This is kind of a nut.
It's usually done in groups.
They'll, they'll record themselves doing a process.
Then they'll upload it to everybody to critique that like, this is how I do
photos and everybody chimes in, no, this is how you should do it.
No, this is how I should do it.
No, this is how you should do it.
That other guy's way wrong.
And you get a whole lot of feedback and that person can take what they want, try
a couple of things and find out what works for them and then I'll do it for
another process, like listing.
They'll just screen record.
This is how I'm listing this type of thing.
And the same thing happens.
Everybody critiques it.
And that aspect, I think it's really good for resellers to engage like that.
It's for the general consumerism of YouTube and content.
No, it'd be boring as hell.
Nobody would like it outside of people that are actually in reselling.
I mean, I guess you could be, you could have like a super quick bait title, like
how I make $1 and 50 cents an hour reselling, right?
Like that definitely would work.
And on the topic of that, we haven't talked about in a while, but like profit
per hour, right?
Like, of course you're not going to continue to resell if everything you do is
such a grind, right?
And you're making no money.
It's different, right?
If you told me or Johnny, Hey, you got to go work hard for the next 12 hours, but
you're going to make $50 an hour.
We're like, Hey, I'm ready to go work.
Right.
But yeah, let me put on the Rambo red bandana and let's do this thing.
Yeah, let's just sit side, Johnny.
And the reality of most resellers is, Hey, you got to go do this hard work for 12
hours and you're going to make a dollar 50 an hour.
Well, no shit.
These people go away and quit because you're not making no money.
Yeah.
Early on, you're, you're lucky to be making minimum wage because you're
learning, you're making mistakes, you're doing bad buys, bad pickups, or you get
so many returns because your processes aren't down or you didn't know to notate
flaws and your photos are bad, nothing's selling.
So you're, you may be making negative dollars actually, or very low minimum
wage, two minimum wage dollars.
And it's very hard to power through that process because in the outside reselling
world, you do an hour of work, you're going to get noted for an hour of work and
get paid accordingly for that hour.
Me selling, it's not that way because you have to earn your way to that by
learning and doing honestly, and we learn by doing most of the time.
It's, I like the thing of it this way too.
It's kind of impossible to see content from resellers that are brand, brand,
brand new, right?
Like it's, you're always pushed out the biggest resellers on social media and
YouTube realm, so you don't see the person that's literally day one in their
business, like from the very, very start.
So you can see all the trials and tribulations they go through to kind of
get to the point where maybe they have a successful business.
And I kind of wish, I don't kind of wish, I wish I had all of those stupid
mistakes, me taking four hours to do my first box on video, because we can talk
about it, right?
We're talking about all these things that you don't see, but the words, they're
nowhere near as impactful as what you experienced, right?
Like four hours to do a box.
Somebody hears that and like, oh yeah, wow, four hours to do a box, but you
better believe when I'll sit in there for four hours, I was like, this is dude,
I'm done with this.
I'm ready to, I'm ready to call it quits.
Deb's like, you're not making it.
The cats are like, dad, you're not making it, dude.
You need to get back to work.
You need to go back to CVS.
No, it's interesting.
Like on YouTube, there's these things out there where somebody builds an entire
cabin in the woods, right?
And it's sped up like drastic.
There's somebody builds their house.
I would love to see something on a business like that, but how do you do that?
I don't know how you would film that at all, but you're seeing it from, there's
the empty plot of land.
There's this poor sap dragon, all this wood off his truck and it's just him.
He has to go the other side to put it on the horse and then they do the other side.
He's doing it all himself, but it's super sped up.
So it's a, even a lengthy video sped up.
It's like an hour long.
And then you see this beautiful end result.
Their blood, sweat and tears are probably a year's worth of footage, honestly.
It's amazing.
And I'd love to see that in the resale.
I, but again, I don't know how that would be done.
You would need like 24 seven cameras in every corner of the room.
And it's going like lightning fast.
Like you're just seeing a box after box after box or package after package of
a Z Bay.
And then eventually, Oh, here's my bank account worth it.
Yeah.
You got to have the payoff at the end or, or, you know, it's not worth it.
And there's going to be plenty of suck.
And I hate to break it to you.
A lot of the suck, no one can relate to because we've experienced, but we've
experienced in the past.
So it's like, when you tell me kind of like what Johnny said, you tell me, Hey,
you were at the storage unit last night, unloading your car full of books and
you were there for three hours and you didn't find much.
Me and Johnny just smirk and say, he had been there before.
Welcome to the club, right?
You know, like welcome to the party and you're never going to have the
justification.
And it's a good thing and a bad thing because you can't always be looking at
it for, you know, somebody else to justify the crap in the business or the
good in the business.
It's easier for me because I have a YouTube channel, we have the group.
So like, I can just put my stuff out there and people be like, Oh my God,
great job, Mike.
Oh my God, you're crazy for doing that, Mike.
And I don't, I don't think that's necessarily a good thing when you're
always trying to look for a pick me up because at the end of the day, the
stuff's got to get done, dude.
We got to, we got to get to work.
We got to have things selling.
We got to put in the time, we got to put in the effort.
I'm tired of it being spun as resellings easy, start open your eBay Amazon
account today and start making money, you know, next week.
That is not the case.
We have to get real with this business.
Yeah.
And then, um, but I recently moved in the garage here.
I was moving things around and, um, first was like foot traffic.
I had to be able to walk free and clear.
And then first day came my order.
And the new garage set up and I know I noticed I was doing
something really, really bad.
I was walking all over the place, trying to get things like, no, Johnny,
you put things on wheels for a reason.
And I moved everything around me.
So I didn't have to move like, there we go.
This, this is normal.
This feels comfortable, but I forgotten for a quick minute because I
been over there for years and it's new setup, right?
And then new processes come with a new place and, but it's similar, right?
But it's just a different environment.
So that, that was an interesting thing, but I caught myself like,
you're being dumb right now.
You're, you're being big kinds of dumb.
How many times have you told people to do the same thing?
You're not doing it yourself right now, but it was just a temporary
hypocrisim, but, uh, no, it's simple things like that.
But if you're not in the know, if nobody ever told you, you never asked
the question, like I'm walking around a whole, well, dummy, move this shit
near you and make your life easier where you don't move and your packaging
life will be easier.
I'll say this.
I think a lot of people, if to see the things unseen, if we said every reseller
has to record their life 24 seven and upload it to the internet, I think a lot
of people, Johnny would be a lot more efficient, but I will argue my case
that when I have to whip out the GoPro, I am 100% less efficient because it
slows me down and I have no problem with that.
Right.
I choose to do this.
I choose to help people.
I'm not sitting here saying, Oh bad YouTube's ruined in my life.
Not at all.
But I think most people, if all of a sudden I'm in your house recording
you, you're not going to be wasting time.
You're not going to be scrolling through Facebook or, you know, Instagram.
You're going to be like, Whoa, I'm getting recorded.
So like, I better be as fast as I possibly can be and as efficient.
And I'm here to tell you, some of us work the opposite way.
This thing's slow.
I'm here to tell you, some of us work the opposite way.
This thing slows me down.
That's why I don't put out a video every single day because this slows me down.
But most of you get a camera in your face and say, Hey, we're recording a video.
Best behavior, dude.
All right, let's go.
I'm going to be the fastest, most efficient reseller I've ever been in my life.
Yeah, that only works for so long because everybody likes
putting their best foot forward.
But then they become complacent and then you see the real them.
And then, Oh, okay.
You're just a normal person.
You're a star person.
Yeah, you can't hide forever, dude.
Sooner or later it comes out.
And that's why you see a lot of these content creators kind of go away because
sooner or later, your real personality is going to come through.
Like I can be cheesy and like have a super fake, you know, Oh, the way I talk,
the way I talk about business, eventually it's not going to, people see through it.
Oh yeah.
I mean, what are the things are not seen?
I mean, cleanup, taking out the trash.
There's a lot of waste in media.
Well, keeping dude, bookkeeping, um, deconstructing boxes.
If you got boxes left over, right.
And if you're going to want to do with those things, or if you're a gay Lord
person, you can't, you try to sell them or this, that, and the other, but taking
those things apart and try to expose, I was always a pain, always third stores.
You go in and find nothing.
Never see that.
When no resellers ever created a video saying I went into goodwill and I left
with no items, did that, and I'm here to tell you that happens nowadays.
I mean, it might not be zero, but some goodwill is at zero for me.
And that's just part of it.
And it's not exciting to record it.
And most people, if they did record it, right.
So here's how it works.
I pull up to the goodwill, I got my camera.
I'm going to record a video at this goodwill Johnny cord to cord myself, intro,
record myself walking in.
I find zero items.
This video is not getting uploaded to, right?
Nobody in their right mind is going to upload a video where they found nothing.
Right.
So there's so much that's unseen.
And it's, we're not saying this as a deterrent.
We're not saying this to be like whiny guys saying, Oh, bad, all this stuff sucks
behind it, it sucked.
I wouldn't do this.
I tell everybody, if this was any harder than it has to be, then like, I would
just go find a job.
I don't know how some of these people were out here grinding, reselling, making
seven to $12 an hour.
Like we should be absolutely make, I don't make a lot of money, but I'm smart with
it so I can put the majority of the little bit of money I make away and invest in my
future.
You don't have to make a bajillion dollars to get ahead in life anymore.
I think that's such a misconception.
Like I got to be making all this money.
No, if you're smart with your money and you're strategic, you don't need to be
making 250 K year reselling to actually get ahead in life and have a future when
it comes to your finances.
I'm going to preface this with there's nothing wrong with hope, but I believe a
lot of real sellers hope their way into success.
They believe hard enough if they clap their hands, Tinkerbell style, and they
work really, really hard.
It's going to work.
But if you're doing all of that and it's not working and you're still grasping at
this initial hope, you are wrong.
You need to figure out turning hope into fact and the facts come from you analyzing
your business, knowing your numbers, knowing your processes, knowing your sources.
I mean, sometimes it's just a simple shift of you're just sourcing junk.
Stop it.
Source better things.
That's easier said than done.
The things not seen when we make those statement or okay, how do I source better
things?
Let me jump on Facebook marketplace and scroll for four hours until I find that
one deal, one that's going to fundamentally change my business.
But you need to do the four hours of scrolling to find that little gym in the
well of crap that is Facebook marketplace, honestly.
Or let me send out some emails, some flyers.
Let me go door to door knocking and seeing about collections or go up making
contacts to the libraries or all these boots on the ground or fingers on the
keyboard actions that take an extraordinary amount of long hours to accomplish.
But the end result is success.
That's what we're talking about.
And again, I'm going to end it with it's okay to have hope, but be willing to do
the work to make hope into fact.
I mean, I've tried finding the end of the rainbow.
It just keeps going.
And then I never find it.
You got to, but Johnny Sane's 100% correct.
A lot of resellers hope doesn't pay the bills.
All right.
I look for a four leaf clover every day when I'm in a patch of grass.
I have no luck finding any.
I'd rather just be like, well, forget the four leaf clover.
I'll go somewhere else and do some other thing.
You have to be willing to do what you don't see when the time comes.
You have to be willing to deal with the bulk, deal with the headaches,
deal with the relationships, deal with the long hours.
I wasn't always the person that was doing this 20, 25 hours.
A week I used to be like Johnny.
And instead of having the warehouse, I was going to thrift stores
for five days a week.
And I was straight up miserable, dude.
That that's no life to lead to be in these stores all this time.
The only way it starts to kind of feel like if it's a life to leave.
Is when the green is coming in all of a sudden, when Mr.
Krabs takes over my body and I'm like, Hey, I'm willing to, I'll go
thrift in five days a week.
If I, if it's going to up my bank account to a million dollars, right?
Like you have to trade things off that makes sense and hope it's, it's
okay to have it, but when things don't work, I'll be straight up.
I've told more people this past year than I ever have.
Well, here's three months timeframe.
If you don't get results, then I think you 100% need to move
on to a different endeavor.
I don't think that's bad to say.
I just think it's a reality check.
And I thought I never would be the person to be like, Hey, like
this just isn't for you, but I do believe in everybody, Mike.
It's really hard for you.
I know it is like, and I've seen it.
I've told, you know, a handful of people this year, like, Hey, like,
cause I do a lot of one-on-one coaching behind the scenes.
And then just like, give me three months, give yourself three months.
If this doesn't work, then you know, there's always something else you
can get involved in as entrepreneurs.
Like there's a whole world of life outside of reselling.
He doesn't, it doesn't have to just be reselling.
And the actuality is some, for some people, for the majority of people,
even people listening to this, it's just not the business for you.
And that's a, okay.
You know, like go, go, there's people out there scooping poop
off lawns making a hundred K a year.
Right.
And I've seen it happen a little bit more this year than any other year.
I think it's because of post COVID times, hitting up with people hard.
Um, people are having to get part-time jobs and then do their full-time eBay
or they're, they're, they're putting eBay back to part-time and they're
having to get a full-time job.
Um, I don't think there's any shame in that.
I don't think they should condemn themselves or think of themselves as a failure.
They just realized the, it is a very long game to make it successful
and they couldn't beat the clock.
Nothing wrong with that.
So do what you need to do so you can get back at it again, more power to you.
You're not giving up in that stage.
You're just, you're taking a factual stance of I need more money to live my life.
Reselling isn't hacking it for me, so I'm going to have to get a part-time job.
It's either that or you pretty much scrap what you're doing and
reselling right now and figure out.
A new thing in reselling to do shift, stop selling what you're selling.
You're doing a bad job for yourself and your business and your family.
And you need to figure out what works.
If you're not willing to have that coming to self talk, um, you are, I
don't know what to do with you.
I'm sorry.
I think, I think I'm going to wrap this call up here because this is a super hot take.
Um, talking about things you don't see one of my biggest pet peeves, giant.
Like you really want to piss off the used book guy, right?
Like it's people that have these channels, the social media platforms
and they're consistently uploading content.
And then all of a sudden you never see or hear from them again.
Right.
It's because we can't have the realization and we can timestamp this.
We can revisit this.
The day I decided to stop reselling and move on to something else, I
1000% promise there'll be a video explaining exactly why I quit reselling
or moved on to greener pastures.
And yeah, it happens, right?
Like, uh, I think like one recently, uh, was James bold finds.
We had him on and he, now he's back to put more content back out on YouTube,
but he made a whole video saying, Hey, like, I can't continue doing YouTube in
this manner while maintaining and grow my business where I need it to be.
But that's like an outlier of the case, dude, everybody else, they just
disappeared.
The last video was them at the goodwill making a trillion dollars.
And then you never see or hear from them.
That's like, dude, that just grinds my gears.
I'm just like, you can't just happen.
What happened?
Just straight up, just come out and be like, Hey, I don't have time to do
YouTube.
I might come back in a little bit or, Hey, I'm going part time.
Um, that's I'm perfectly fine with that because that just shows your
character, right?
Like that shows, okay, you, you spent the time to grow an audience and,
uh, create content.
So you just don't leave people hanging.
It's just bad.
Look at my pain.
Like I'm going to be around somebody that's just like up and disappears
without at least throwing me a bone and being like, Hey, I got things going on.
Everybody's got stuff going on.
Okay.
It takes you two seconds to, to sit down in front of a camera, record a five
minute video with no edits and be like, Hey, here's exactly what I got going on.
So you might not see me for a while.
You know who I was really proud of this year.
Remember the interview we did with the Barbie girl?
Yes.
She's, uh, she's part time hustling now.
And yeah, I guarantee you, she's a lot more efficient.
She's probably getting crazy good numbers.
I know for a fact, Sabrina is crushing it.
Sabrina, I think put out the best video, the most honest, authentic video of, Hey,
I gave it the good college try.
It's not what is not meeting my means at the moment.
I'm going to have to do what I have to do.
And she was broken up about it.
She felt a little bit defeated, but the end, it was the side relief.
This was the right decision.
Oh yeah, dude.
She lives out in expensive land.
Can't afford nothing out there.
I'm right there with her.
You move me.
We swap places.
The situation probably changes 100%.
I literally go into her mindset of I'm, I, this ain't going to be enough for me.
And all of a sudden she's here in the middle of nowhere, Pennsylvania.
She's like, we cook and now like, forget this.
It's there's so much that goes into it.
And that's something you don't see.
Like what are people's situations?
We have commitments.
We have, uh, we have some of us take care of kids, people with special needs, where
we live, uh, disasters.
There are so much that you don't see in the reselling world.
And we're not talking about it to kind of just have you be like, oh, well, that sucks
or, oh, feel bad for this person.
There's just a lot more that doesn't get shown to you as a new reseller or as a growing
reseller and understand that there's going to be hurdles in this business.
You're always have to be learning.
You always have to be putting in extra time, consuming content that makes sense for you.
Johnny talked about it when he's on these calls.
I'll tell you right now, he's always busy doing something.
We'll, we have our call later this morning and he'll be on there listed, reprinted,
listed, repricing, things like that.
That's the trade-off, right?
If you're going to be on these calls, be involved in these groups, you can't just shut
everything down, right?
Unless you're making some type of decent money from it, then, Hey, okay, sure.
You can shut it down, but you gotta get, gotta get shit done in this business.
The only way you get paid.
It's the only reason we do this is to get paid.
And there's a lot of suck.
You don't see, and it sucks, but the money's good.
So I can't complain about the suck.
It could be a lot worse.
Right now, um, in tech screw, there's a call that does not apply to me that I've
attended a few times just out of fascination.
There's a parenting call resellers with kids and how that work life balance works.
Exactly.
I salute you, mom and dad's out there because I hear about all the things they have to do.
Same shit I gotta do, but they gotta have kids involved, constantly coming in,
constantly disrupting.
My brain would explode.
And they, and they talk about just like in reselling, how do you troubleshoot the problem
when this kind of situation happens?
They do all that.
But it's just fascinating to me.
How do you do, how do you do this reselling, which is a shit ton of work with children?
That's a tall order and secondary slew.
It's, uh, it is that, that life.
I mean, those people, those parents, you want to talk about grinding, right?
Like, holy smokes.
It's, it is tough.
And you can't give enough credit to these people when it comes to trying to grow a
business while having some of these other obligations or working that full-time job.
60 hours just to meet your bills, but you also want to try to have a business on the
side.
It's possible.
We're telling you that it's possible.
Just realize it's not all sunshine, rainbows, four leaf clovers, unicorns.
Sure, you might get to the end of the road one day and everything is great.
You feel great.
The money's coming in, but there's going to be a lot of hurdles and steps to get there.
So that's going to do it for this week's episode.
We will see you all next week as always.
And those of us that we don't see because you're listening on podcast platforms, we
appreciate you all just as much.
And Johnny would appreciate it if you just leave us a little five star of review saying,
hey, you know, we appreciate the content YouTube put out, but yeah, we'll talk to you all in
next week's episode.