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 sitting next to Johnny, and I'm going to word the topic today,
even though it's his topic, I won't put him on the spot.
The idea of you start making money as a reseller, so we have to buy more
inventory to scale our business.
So just because we have money, we still have to be strategic and make good
buys when it comes to finding more inventory, especially when you're
buying in larger amounts.
So usually what happens here when we start, we're scrappy, every dollar matters.
You get some money coming in and all of a sudden maybe you can go spend
a thousand dollars on a pallet or $500 on this bulk lot.
And Johnny brought up a good point that just because you got it and it seems
like it's a good deal, a lot of the times you need to step away from it.
So Johnny, take us away.
Yeah, I've been seeing it going around lately, not just amongst new
sellers that are just starting to make it, but even intermediate and advanced
sellers.
I mean, there are a lot of Facebook marketplace ads that involve,
hey, you can buy pallets, but you need to fact check where these
pallets are coming from.
Are they the leftovers or are they from some guy who gets something else,
their pallets of books, CDs and DVDs and wants nothing to do with media.
Those are two different scenarios.
You're going to get the cream of the crop with option B and you're going to
get mediocre to slightly okay to just flat out garbage with option A.
And then you got people that, well, they got section three, they're looking to
get rid of their Amazon business, but they want to make a buck too.
Now in reselling in general and in sales in general, there's a chain order of
everybody's taking a little, as the inventory gets processed down the chain
from retail to wholesale to it fell off the back of a truck.
I mean, everybody's taking their little piece along the way, and then eventually
it ends up with you.
As long as there's, as long as you're comfortable with the meat left on the
bone and you're not hosing your business, like you should use your funds wisely.
You should be buying the stuff that's going to produce you the most margin,
even on the, you just started to make a few bucks.
Now, if you've been at it a minute and you have more than a few bucks in the bank,
then maybe you just want to offset some slowness in the market.
You want to pick up some mediocre stuff, just to get your volume that we
mentioned out the door, there's all kinds of ways to play.
But even going in a thrift store, a pawn shop, a mom and pop, depending on their
buy costs, they got to mark up, right?
They got to clear some money too, but you got to make sure you're clearing the
most money.
That's the point of media.
We want big rates of return.
We absolutely do. We want a 75 X our money, 10 X our money, because we could
do that media.
You can't really do that in a lot of other categories, but you can certainly do
that media.
And as you're going along, you should keep that mindset.
I want the most money I can get.
Now, some things change along the way is your time.
You don't have the time you did because you got so many more balls to juggle and
or employees to manage and or, well, the semi is coming today.
Guess what I'm doing all day.
Processing and unloading the truck.
Yeah, for me, it's, it's not only the money part of it, but you just hit it on
the head.
Like, dude, how long do I got to be out of the storage unit?
Johnny, if you tell me more than an hour, I'm going to be highly upset.
I may quit this job and you see the, you see it, you see the Facebook marketplace.
I've seen lots of these, right?
I'm guilty of this.
I want to scale my business more this year.
So I'm on Facebook marketplace and everywhere you look to DVDs, DVDs, DVDs,
you know, even Gaylord's of books, Gaylord's of books, you know, you know,
Gaylord's of books.
And the first thing I think about is the work that goes into it.
I have to mentally prepare myself before I get into Facebook marketplace that,
okay, whatever I do is probably going to eat up a day of work, right?
A day of me thrifting.
So I have to equate that automatically is basically probably at least a thousand
dollar. I'm going to source when I'm out thrifted for the day, full day.
So this deal needs to be at least worth a thousand dollars before I even pay
what I'm going to pay for it.
The idea that having more inventory automatically translate to success is
100% a lie.
It does not equate at all because you can have other people's junk.
Johnny said it all the time, especially in media land.
Johnny's going to get me all fired up because I know some personal experiences
that I'm not going to get into.
Not going to get into them.
Johnny, you got me all fired up this morning and that's okay.
But you're usually in other times, like Johnny says, you're taking some
somebody else's, we call them duds, things that are not good for their business.
Now it's not to say that just because it's not good for their business, you
can't make money off it, but the majority of the good, the home runs, the
triples, the doubles, that's already gone from the stuff you're getting when
you buy from another reseller.
And I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I will do it.
I won't make Johnny do it.
Resellers ain't going to tell you that they took all the good stuff and left
you all the junk.
It's never going to happen out there.
Yeah.
I mean, I not to name names, but I'm going to name a name.
I watched a video recently, a Lindsay Glenn video, and she was talking
about DVDs of the new gold mine.
She's been around reselling a minute, doing everything under the sun,
involving reselling.
And she goes in this, I can tell it's a reseller store.
It's a physical location because they can literally have pallets in the
middle and bookshelves in between the pallets.
It's a nice store.
Don't get me wrong.
I'm not knocking the store in this situation.
I'm knocking what she's doing because the buy cost is anywhere between
a dollar to $3, depending if it's a box set, a CD or a book, right?
They got all the media in there and she's pulling up.
I'm picking this up, but it's an $8 item.
I'm picking this up.
It's a $12 item.
And I'm thinking of the buy cost in my head and she's selling on eBay.
I know all the fees to go along there.
That's not a winning proposition.
So in 45 minutes she pulls maybe $85 worth of stuff to me in 45 minutes
in a regular store that's been untapped.
I could 4X, 6X what she's doing, maybe even 8X that the price is right.
Or I get a deal, maybe 10X man.
And I'm like, don't do this.
This is bad information.
Do not be telling people in a public platform that are trying to hustle and
grow this bad information.
This is terrible information on how to source.
All right, Johnny, I'm glad we finally have crossed this threshold
that episode 120 something.
We have officially called out another reseller and I think I got, I didn't
watch this video, but I think I got recommended it, dude.
I just, I, I stand behind whatever you say, right?
I never, I don't got to watch the video to know like I'm in line behind
Johnny, right? Like it's, it's like step brothers when they go to the interview
and the other one's sitting behind them.
That's how me and Johnny are.
So I got to watch this afterwards, but I, I, you're probably, I'm going to
send you the link right now.
I put it in another group and they tore it to shreds too.
So we'll be, we'll be getting drug all over social media and YouTube, but
that's a okay, because you have to value your time.
And I remember a while back, Johnny, we were talking about somebody that was
trying to sell DVDs on eBay.
You remember that conversation we had?
And the way we can get away with it and Amazon land is we don't pack.
We don't ship to the customers.
We never have to answer a question.
It goes in a box once a week.
We never see this stuff again.
There is no shot.
I'm listening to DVD on eBay for $10.
Like there's no way Johnny, I just would never do it.
You got to be doing tremendous volume, like a 40 K plus store, 40,000 item
stores, what I mean by that.
And you got to be dealing in multiclips.
And you got to be dealing in multi-quantity, a hundred sales a day.
And you may be, may be doing okay.
Uh, I still question it because most of those people they're doing.
Like I was mentioning those numbers earlier, eight, 10, $12 per, but then you
have all the fees that come out of that.
You're maybe looking at two to three bucks back at you, maybe.
What's up Amazon sellers.
We wanted to take a second to talk about go-to lists or the software me and
Johnny both use to list and manage our inventory and grow our businesses.
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Mike, or using the link in the description below.
I got a, I got a, I got one since we're calling people out.
It's not a, not a YouTuber reseller, but it's a reseller on Facebook marketplace.
He does a gay Lords of media and he tries to sell his thoughts.
And unfortunately people fall for it.
Right.
Cause it sounds so good.
Right.
He even has free, free gay Lords of all the junk he don't want of media.
So like I could go today and get an endless amount of gay Lords of media for
free and it's all just broken cases, scratched this, pick through everything.
And the normal gay Lords that he sells, it's the same exact way.
Like this guy is the ultimate scumbag.
People don't care about nobody but themselves.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news and the reselling space.
There's a few good communities and a few good people out there.
If we take the comparison of how many resellers are doing good versus all the
negative kind of scammy stuff that goes on and it exists and that's how it is in
business, people only look out for themselves.
That's just the reality of it.
So if I have all this inventory, I need to get rid of it.
I don't care what, if Johnny finds anything, I don't even care what Johnny's
business model is people don't care.
You just give them the a hundred dollars, 200, $300 for the gay Lord.
And that's it.
It's gone.
They don't care if you get anything from it, they don't care what you're doing
with it, if you're watching it, if you're collecting it, if you're trying to resell
it, as long as it's out of their hands, the burden now falls onto you.
And that's all of their junk.
You have to be smart as you scale this business.
You have to make strategic decisions.
I don't care how much money you have.
That's got nothing to do with anything.
If you're buying junk, then your money's going away.
Not only that, your time is going away.
That's why I straight away from being the huge bull person because it's
going to eat all my time up.
And I tell everybody, if you can just take the good stuff and leave everything
else behind, that needs to be the play 100% of the time, but it's not as cool.
It's not as, you know, catchy and flashy as rolling up and having the gay Lords
in the storage unit and all that type of nonsense.
Yeah.
Okay.
So I just pulled up while he was talking about the, the, the, the, the, the, the,
he was talking there about very important things, a couple of marketplace
gay Lord things, I just typed in the word gay Lord in my marketplace.
Here's a few of them, book, gay Lord, unscanned resellers and collectors,
$200 to me, just in the title alone.
That's red flags when you're using words like resellers and unscanned.
I got questions.
I got lots of questions there.
And you can have it pick up or they can mail it to you.
Perfect for entrepreneurs utilizing sites like Amazon and eBay.
Huge red flags there.
Like, no, thank you.
Let's look at another one here.
These, this one is kind of just correct in the title scan, mixed media,
DVD and CD gay Lords are telling you upfront that they've scanned it.
So thank you for the honesty.
It is appreciated.
And they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they,
they say, I'm pretty selective.
So there can be value possibly left for Amazon.
However, I do not make no guarantees.
No.
And thank you.
See Johnny, but that's the, that's the catch, man.
We can sit here and say no, but to the next person, maybe somebody that's new
or somebody that has the money and really doesn't know what they're getting into.
Well, Johnny's business is different than mine because we say it all the time.
Everybody's business is different than the next one.
So maybe if I buy it, I'm still going to be able to make money because maybe Johnny
don't know what the hell he's doing.
He's got some trigger set that's busted.
So he's leaving lots of money on the table.
My argument to this every single time as we live in the world where there is an
infinite amount of media that you can go and scan, I don't care where you live.
I don't care if you're living on the mountain behind Johnny, if you're watching
on YouTube, he's got a little Bob Ross looking mountain behind him.
You can live at the top of that mountain.
If you just come down from the mountain for one or two days and go all to your
local areas, it's everywhere you look.
So why do we throw large amounts of money at situations like this?
It's just the appeal of, I don't know.
It's like the allure of bulk.
And I've never been like, it's never that it doesn't shine when I see it, Johnny
anymore, it never shine because I know the damn work that goes with it.
I've had the microwave cookbook pickups where it's all literally microwave cookbooks.
So I know like, yeah, it sounds cool.
It might make a cool YouTube video, but honestly, I don't want nothing to do with it.
Right now.
Here's where I think it's slightly acceptable.
Let's say you got some money in your pocket.
You'll find somebody and they're honest with you.
Kind of like that second one I was reading off, like our metrics are $20 and higher
profit.
Okay.
There's some meat in the bone there, assuming they've been honest, but still
there are better ways to do it.
However, I'm going to give the exception of a couple exceptions of maybe why you
should pull the trigger.
Your time.
You are crunch for time and you want some extra inventory.
You're still working a full-time job.
You got a great business going, but you can only go cherry picking so often.
So this is extra, especially when you hit a dry run, like you went to 10 for their
stores and you brought back 10 items.
That's not enough for a box, Steven.
So picking up something like this for light days like that, because you're crunch
for time, you're still doing your full-time part-time job.
Makes sense.
You're in a remote area where your drive time is three hours to the nearest store.
It kind of falls in that first scenario where I think it might be okay to pick up
something like that in that scenario.
But if you're full-time and your job is to go out all day and then process when
you get home and you don't have any other responsibilities outside of that, I'm
going to say, I'm not including family because hopefully you made some family
time.
That's the route you should be going.
Now, eventually, if you have a bigger op, you're busy managing more.
So you need more to come into you.
Again, that might be a scenario where you bring some of this in, but outside of
that, you should really be going out and or ordering stuff, making connections and
the networking.
I think that's more important than trying to get the quick flip that comes to you
kind of deal in Gaylords and or trucks or whatever.
Yeah, I agree.
I agree.
We don't get it as much as we used to.
And we have plenty of people in the group that get Gaylords, but they're all from
connections that they've built and they know exactly where the stuff is coming
from.
It's not some random person on Facebook marketplace using all of these reseller
keywords and their title, right?
Like you've got to run away from this stuff.
And it's a lowering, dude.
People make a little bit of money and all of a sudden they want to spend all their
money on one or two deals and it is good to I think you hit it on the head.
A lot of part timers have commitments, have kids, have families that work a
full time job.
We got plenty of people in the group that operate like that.
And so you have the inventory sitting right there in your garage.
So when you have an hour downtime, you can go grab a box, process it, get it
knocked out of the way.
You have to accept the fact that when a lot of these cases it is picked over.
So it's going to be harder to find the $200 DVD, the $300 book.
But if you accept that, hey, let's knock it out.
Fast movers, turn and burn, lower profit inventory as long as it's going to sell.
And you accept, hey, your average sales price is going to be $17.
There is nothing wrong with that as long as you are okay with that business model.
But that's not the case.
People don't accept that when they go buy that Gaylord that says it's been
scanned, they still think they're going to find a hundred dollar item.
And I'm here to tell you, it doesn't exist.
It's not in there.
There's nothing in there.
Right.
And yeah, I mean, that's pretty much it because I think early on, and even when
you start to make a couple of dollars, you really need to network.
It's different when you've vetted the stuff, you've vetted the location.
And now you're talking about, okay, I'll buy a Gaylord and put it in the back room.
I just want you to fill it up.
And then you just pick it up and, or have one of your minions pick it up, like off
TAS rabbit or something versus you going on Facebook, like I just did, click in a
couple of things.
Yep.
I'm going to buy that.
No, no, you didn't even vet it yourself.
You didn't even maybe read the description.
All you saw are Gaylords and everything else you had your blinders on and ignored.
You need to fact check this stuff.
So what I would do if I had questions like I did, I would message the person
like, look, I get it.
I'm a reseller too, my man.
Just be straight up with me.
What, what, what are your metrics here?
Um, are, are these shelf pulls or are these just literally your trucks coming
from X, Y, and Z you processed it.
This is the leftover you're just trying to unload.
Um, I, I would want it in raw condition untouched, like, like I mentioned way
earlier on in this video, some guy who just happens to get media with whatever
else he's buying and doesn't want anything to do with media.
That's good.
Yeah.
That's a great one.
Yeah.
That's what you need to be finding on the market.
Yeah.
Well, even it's hard to come by those on marketplace.
I've only come across one or two where I've gone to bought, uh, like it was all
DVDs and it was from people that were doing flea markets and I didn't want to
be bothered by DVDs anymore.
Exactly.
Like that's where you find it.
It's not the other media seller that's just trying to off put their dots.
And I'll tell you this, dude, there's not a lot of people like, I try to get rid of
my stuff.
So like I have my library pickups.
I don't mess with any antique books no more.
I don't care what it is, Johnny.
It just goes into the, I don't want to see a pile, right?
Um, so that gets, goes all the way.
I scan everything.
Um, and then I'll just put it on Facebook marketplace and say, Hey, free carload
of books, uh, I scanned it for Amazon.
So it's not good for Amazon.
Could be some value on eBay with the antique books.
And I can't get a consistent eBay seller to just be my, be my offload person, dude.
I'm not even charging.
You just show up to the storage unit every single month.
I'll give you a heart, a whole carload of books for absolutely zero dollars.
I don't know.
It's like, do people, do people really want it?
I'm giving it away.
I mean, if you sell on eBay, I've done this, I've done this exact thing.
You've told me to do go search on eBay with your zip code.
I even have a message sellers, nothing back, man.
I don't know.
I get frustrated because there's, there's both sides of the coin.
People want bulk, but do you really want bulk?
Right.
It's the idea of I want to Gaylord, but then it shows up out front and all of a
sudden I'm like, Oh, how am I getting in this six foot cardboard box?
Do I need a step stool in my case?
Yes.
I'm going to have to like, what am I going to do then?
And then.
It's outside, right?
Is it a dark and stormy day?
You're going to need a tart and pray that you can get that
underneath the roof sometime soon.
There's it's tough, man.
It's, it's tough when you scale and I'm glad that I'm, I'm like Mr.
Krabs, even though I've made more, making more money reselling it.
And Karen, Mike, the current point I'm at in my life is the most money I've made.
Like, we just look at it at a monthly basis, the most money I've ever made in
my life and I am still broke dollar menu, McChicken Michael, and it has
benefited me so much because.
I, I'm so greedy, right?
And maybe I've missed some deals, right?
Cause that's the other side of the coin.
Maybe I passed on some deals because I was afraid of the hard work or I didn't
want to spend the 2000, $3,000, even though I have it and sure you can say that,
but I'm here to tell you everything else I've done besides buying those deals.
I'm making money.
I'm cherry picking items.
So I don't have to deal with it all.
Now, if you want to scale this and kind of grow this into a seven
figure or high six figure business, you need lots of inventory, dude.
I mean, both you and I know this, you need to have 20, 30, 40, 50,000 items
sitting there if you want to get to this point, but that doesn't mean you just
go buy anything.
Right now I'm going to shift away from the Gaylords and get a little bit
more into stores retail.
So I see a lot of the newer people and I get it.
They've been brainwashed.
They just want to hit the thrifts, right?
So I'm not, that's not where even I'm going to go.
Here's where I'm going to go.
I want to go to a tried and true.
I know where I can get books.
It's a room full of books and all they sell is books and this phenomenal
unknown place is called a bookstore, but they're asking maybe three to $10 per
item.
And you're like, no, no, no, I don't want to pay three to $10.
There's an item.
I'd rather sit at the bins all day, pay 40 cents a pound.
You say, okay, great.
But we all know a lot of goodwill scan.
Even if they don't, it's a lot of garbage.
It's been picked over a lot before it even arrived at the pens.
Bookstores collectors who pulled them off their shelf.
Here you go.
Mr. bookstore owner.
You can just have these and sell them.
Bookstore owners like great.
Okay, I'm done with the dramatics here.
The point is three to $10 per it's perfectly okay when you're getting $50, $100 pops.
And it's more likely to occur in these bookstores than it is at the goodwill bins
because they've never been scanned because everybody's at the goodwill bins.
Third, I like the fact that you've been like harping on this idea of people just going
to like actual brick and mortar bookstores and nobody cares.
Nobody cares.
I'm ignored.
They'd rather go to the bins, the thrifts, the anything, but it's like it is a room
and a building full of the stuff you want to sell.
You know what?
They even fucking categorized it for you.
Dude, look at we had Ken on the dude doesn't sell on Amazon and he's got a huge bookstore.
Like you could go in there and probably spend a thousand.
Me and you could go there and probably spend a thousand dollars on quality Amazon.
We could milk his store.
Most bookstores don't.
That's it.
This is a it's funny though, because once people, once you start saying that, Johnny,
I know everybody just changes the channel.
Three to ten dollars.
That's all they hear.
Three to ten dollars.
They're insane.
I'll go broke.
It's funny.
Could you make that argument on the book side?
And I make that argument on the record store side.
People like my record store is expensive, but I'm like the disc girl clean.
You see the data in front of you.
So it's not like you're going to lose money, right?
You're not buying stuff to lose money.
You see all the, you know what?
No one's putting items in your cart.
It's you know, in Scowling, in the upper right hand
hand corner, just change that number.
It's a, it's tough, man.
The, the, the scalability of inventory and, and it being readily available everywhere,
it should, it should work the opposite way.
I think because if we think about it, we saw in the category where it's available everywhere,
but for some reason we feel so attached that we have to go through with this deal or we have to
send this message and get this Gaylord or, or do this huge pickup that we really can't afford to do.
When it should be, well, well, if I just wait another week, Johnny, there'll be
10 more posted on Facebook marketplace, but no, you need that one right then in there for some reason.
But it's everywhere, man.
It's, it's literally everywhere.
I've, I know we're only a month into the new year, but I've been going out, you know, four days a week.
And it is everywhere.
I've gone to places that I wouldn't even expect to have anything.
And I've literally left with Ikea bags full.
And I've never, you know, since back in 2022, when the fees were different,
I've never been able to leave a store with, you know, spending $400 on books only.
And it has happened this year.
And I realized it is, if you just open your eyes and do a little bit of research on where you're
running your routes, the bookstore is 100%.
I got a lot of little bookstores and I've been going at them.
And guess what?
Johnny's not a liar.
Hate to be the bearer of bad news.
And, you know, does it pain me, Mr. Krabs, when I got to pull out a $5 bill?
No, because I know that $5 book is going to sell within the month that it gets there.
And I'm going to make $25.
You know what I say?
I say, you got any more copies of this?
I'll take every single copy you have of that specific book.
And that's another benefit to go into places like that.
There's multiple quantities of some of these books.
Like I went in one of my libraries and have like an ongoing book sale.
And there was like eight copies of this kid's book for like 25 cents.
It's like it sells instantly.
And I'm going to make like six bucks.
I just I go up to check out this.
This actually happened to me at the thrift store.
Johnny, they had like five copies of Inside Out, the DVD, right?
Real popular kids movie, brand new seal.
So I get up to the register and the guy's like, oh, what are you going to do?
You're going to be playing one of these in every room.
When every DVD player you got, I'm like, dude, kiss my ass.
It's like I'm reselling these things.
I don't even care.
I'm just shameless with it.
And yeah, it's weird when I roll up and I had like the eight copies of kids books.
But they don't care, Johnny.
They just want the money, right?
That's why they have it out on the shelf.
That's why they have it.
They make their money by you buy.
Yeah, it's nuts.
Man.
Here's the other part.
You go in those bookstores, especially frequently,
assuming it produces on a weekly or whatever your schedule is, a monthly basis.
Eventually.
Hey, hey, Mr. Reseller, we got stuff in the back room.
We got in a stuff you normally buy you.
You want to come take a look?
Absolutely.
I do roll out the red car from you, sir, and get me some tea.
I don't want to get I don't want to disclose too much information on my new my new honey hole.
But so I went to my new honey hole and just stacking stuff up, right?
Like the old ladies are going crazy, Johnny.
They're like, this guy's crazy.
Are you some kind of book dealer?
And I'm like, no, I don't like the term dealer.
So I was raised on the streets.
That means you're selling drugs.
I'm a cat father and a husband.
Now, I don't know if I get any type of discount for that, but that's who I am.
And I'm stacking stuff up, right?
Like they're just tallying it up as we're going.
Like you're still going.
You're at a hundred dollars.
My guy, you've only been here like 30 minutes.
You had 200, 300, 400, 500.
I didn't even have to do nothing, Johnny.
The lady came over and said, hey, you want to come check out the stuff in the back room?
Yep.
I swear to God, just like that.
I had no conversation besides carrying my books up to the checkout and stacking them
so they could keep calculating as I was going.
And the main lady came over and said, hey, why don't you come in the back?
This is the stuff we just got donated.
I said, is this easy out here?
I mean, this is all I had to do was spend a little bit of money on stuff.
I'm going to make a whole bunch of money on it.
And it's tough.
And that's why the bulk idea doesn't allure to me, right?
It's fascinating to somebody like you who wants to build out this empire of media, right?
You want to have the employees.
You want to be able to step back fully.
And the opposite side is me where I'm like, well, if I can just go out.
And yeah, it sucks driving around dealing with stinky people, stinky thrift stores.
But if you just stay focused, it's really not that bad.
You just get out there, focus up.
And yeah, I have my bulk relationships, right?
Like after my calls today, I'm going to go to the storage unit in the 40 degree weather
and scan my library pickup that's been sitting there.
And that's quality, right?
That's the relationship Johnny's talking about.
That is how you get the bulk inventory.
And that's how you become the bulk seller that's doing high six figures, seven figures,
because all of a sudden, this is good stuff.
Get donated to the library.
It's getting donated here.
Or it's a backroom of a thrift store that gets donations.
Then all of a sudden, your business changes overnight.
You start sending hundreds, 500, and maybe a thousand items you send in a week.
And that's it.
The rest is history.
Just get a few more of these relationships, sit back, and get paid.
I got one for you.
So last year, I had a big storm.
Power was out.
It was going to be out for the entire day.
Employee rolls into work.
I'm like, let's try to see this out.
We're going to go shopping.
I haven't gotten sourcing like this in probably over a year and change.
So I go to a place I used to frequent like every week.
I go in there.
First of all, the layout, the books are in the back,
but they have a furniture section right next to the book.
I always just drag one of their stupid tables over that I'm not going to buy.
It uses my work table.
Still have the same setup.
Anyway, sort of processing stuff.
One of the employees comes over to us.
I know who she is.
And she's like, Mr. Johnny B.
We haven't seen you in a minute.
Let me go get the manager.
She's excited.
She'll be excited to see you.
So she goes and gets the manager.
Manager quickly turns the employees, tells her to go get the other employee.
We go to the back and bring out the carts for this gentleman.
I'm treating treated like real royalty here.
So the other two employees, as I'm talking with the manager, just catching up, blah, blah, blah,
rolls out these two library carts of books that weren't even on the floor for sale.
Now, like we want you to go through these.
Like I certainly will.
Thank you, ma'am.
Anyway, I ended up spending a couple hundred bucks at this place.
I said, thank you.
Like, please call when you're going to come again.
We'll have things ready for you next time.
Like I was an inconvenience.
Like they inconvenienced me by not having those carts ready ahead of time.
That's a relationship, ladies and gentlemen.
That's what we call a relationship.
It's tough, dude.
The allure of bulk.
I understand it.
I see it's a big shiny thing, but we've been trying to tell everybody for years now.
It's crazy.
We can say we've been trying to tell people for years, build relationships, go a little bit
further upstream, beat the thrift stores at their own game.
That's how you win.
And just because you got money coming in doesn't mean you got to go just buy a bunch of inventory
because, yeah, it's nice to have money in the bank account.
But you got to realize a lot of these resellers are moving their duds on places like Facebook
marketplace.
How often do you really come across somebody that it's not duds on Facebook marketplace?
I wish there was like a percentage we could look into, but it's probably like 80 percent
duds versus somebody that's actually trying to get rid of like a collection.
And Johnny, Johnny, you said the titles of these things like run in the opposite direction.
If they're not saying it's like their kids books or their own personal collection.
And the thing with that is you got to pay up.
So if you're going to be the person that's like, you're going to buy, I'm going to buy
Johnny's duds.
Right.
And he says it's picked over.
Well, then I'm paying like two cents a piece.
I'm not paying what he's asking.
Right.
There's no way.
So I'm I always low ball, even if it's even if it's not somebody's duds.
I sent an offer out the other day to somebody.
You have it listed for like 450, it's like 1200 DVDs.
I said 100 bucks.
I'll take them all.
And of course, I said no.
But like, who cares?
Shoot your shot.
Don't it's I rarely pay asking price.
That's how cheap I am.
And I think I think that's expected when people are selling their items online.
Right.
It's like they probably really aren't going to get what they're at.
It's like the best offer on eBay.
Right.
If you have best offer turned on, you're always going to get the offers.
And I always shoot my shot and I always try to get it for cheap.
And if I think it's a good deal, I always I circle back to one.
It was a pile of CDs.
Now offer 200.
It had a list that like 450.
He said, I'm going to let it sit for a week or two and see if I get any other offers.
It's that for a week or two, I went up to 300.
And he's like, no, I'm going to let it sit a little bit longer.
You know what?
I'm just going to give you your $400.
Like it was a good deal at 400.
But like, I still you know, I'm just so cheap, Johnny.
I can't.
I get a deal.
I made it.
I made a killing.
I wound up sending like probably 800 of those CDs from that palette.
So like I did really well with it.
And I you could argue like looking now, like I should have just paid the 400 because
what if somebody else could have snatched?
Yeah, exactly.
Like if I'm in the area, like that shit's gone.
And then I'm like, here I am.
Johnny makes a YouTube video.
How he made a million dollars off this palette on Facebook marketplace.
And it was my palette that should have been mine, but I was too cheap.
Oh, man.
So going back to relationships, like, okay, here's the thing when you go sourcing.
Sometimes people will complain at you.
They don't like what you're doing.
Not really the case in my area, except this one time.
And it put a big old smile on my face.
So as a library sale, I've already gone to do my initial day before the sale.
I'm the only one there.
So this is the day after the second day.
I'm like, okay, I'm going to hit this area, which were mass market paper books.
I knew it was going to take a long time.
And I don't really care if somebody buys them all.
I'm just doing it for fun.
Anyway, so I started scanning.
I load up my tub or whatever.
I guess I'm in this person's way.
I don't know.
I didn't actually see this person.
The librarian comes over to me and says, or it's what I'm checking out.
She tells me this.
Yeah, we had somebody complain about you, but they only buy one book.
You're buying a cart load.
We don't really care.
And so you just keep on doing your own thing.
I just want to make you aware in case anybody says anything to you.
We're a okay with what you're doing because of the volume you're buying.
You do whatever the heck you want.
So you're going to count this sometimes in a store.
You're going to count it sometimes in a library.
It is going to happen.
It is.
But the owner is typically okay if you're spending more than the complainer, just letting you know.
You shouldn't be afraid either.
The opposite.
I know we kind of like trying to steer people clear of this, but if it's quality inventory
and you have the money and you know you're going to make money,
let's buy, dude.
It's a buyer's game.
Cash is king.
Or if I see a good deal and you know it's going to cost me a little bit more.
Like Johnny said, God forbid if we spend more than $3 on something.
I mean, let's get real here.
If we're reselling, we've got the craziest margins on the face of Earth.
Any other business is not going to have the margins we have.
So if there's a good deal, you should have money set aside.
And I mean, Johnny talked about if you're brand new, sure, you're not going to have your little,
you know, fine sales.
Yeah, if you're moving hand to mouth, you can't really afford to do what we're talking about
because you're going to pay 2 to 3X more per item.
You are.
You may not have the bankroll.
So yeah, maybe you need to go through the trenches of the Goodwills, the yard sales,
the Craigslist, all of that.
But eventually you will have a wallet to, okay, I'm going to try to spend a little bit more to
make a little bit more.
That's fine.
You got to have some capital in order to play that game.
I don't care which category you're going in.
Some are just more capital intensive.
If you're in books, the capital intensive really is the bookstore, honestly.
Yeah, yeah.
And it's your time.
But I mean, if we look at it and, you know, the video game people,
they're paying basically 70, 75% of market value and they're operating on 20% margin.
So it's tough because like you said, a lot of people, it's a grind.
We all start reselling broke.
But I think as you scale, you should have some type of war chest or coffers, you know,
maybe that's a thousand, two thousand dollars.
Some cases, five thousand dollars.
You never know what you're going to stumble into.
Just so if you come across a deal that's actually really profitable and it actually makes sense,
then you are able to pull the trigger without any hesitation.
And I'll tell you right now, me and Johnny both have that war chest set aside.
If for some reason a DVD store or somebody's got 10,000 new DVDs sealed and I need to pony up some money,
it's there for the taking.
But it didn't start out that way.
But the allure of the bulk is a lot to the new people, right?
It's it's it's oh, man, I can see it all.
Like an easy, I see hard and you can get screwed over.
Oh, yes.
That's what I see.
Explain my mind every time I think about dealing with bulk because that is exactly it.
It's going to cost a large chunk in most cases, right?
You pay three hundred dollars for a gay or I think to myself, damn, Johnny,
I'm getting CDs and DVDs for 50 cents a piece.
I just went to the pawn shop on my videos and they were four for a dollar.
And it's an endless supply of DVDs and CDs.
I'm thinking to myself, damn, if I spend 300 bucks, I could go cherry pick 1200 DVDs and CDs
if I wanted to.
And instead, I'm dealing with junk.
So, OK, so for you, CD sellers, I want to let you know if you've never done a pallet of CDs,
half of them have opened up.
And at the very end, you're playing match this loose CD with the case I scan that was positive
or that you could send in and or all maybe, I don't know, one third of the cases are broken
or cracked to some degree.
You're going to have to do case swapping with the duds.
It's if you if you do a CD palette, you know what the hell I'm talking about?
It takes a long time, long time to get through it.
However, there may be like 3000 units in there for you to scan.
Sure.
But it's a lot different when they've been stacked nice and neat on a shelf and then you don't have
to deal with a gigantic mess.
Worst case, you open it up and the disc isn't there.
Yeah.
All right, we're going to wrap it up here.
Remember, as you scale, you don't need to spend all of your money on crazy bulk opportunities.
There's always going to be more.
It's a weekly daily thing.
Anywhere you look, there's always going to be inventory to buy no matter what category.
Now, like we kind of kept it in media, but it doesn't matter what category it is.
There's inventory out there for the taking.
And just because you got the money, we just don't want you to go spend it on something.
And then you burn your thousand dollars reserves and you spend three weeks processing something
that makes you zero dollars and it ate up three weeks.
And now you have no extra money.
So be smart about your decisions when it comes to buying in bulk inventory.
Sure.
That's how you scale a business, but be aware of the red flags.
Do your research, ask questions.
And yeah, we appreciate you all listening and watching and YouTube land.
And we'll talk to you all next week.
Thanks for listening to another episode of the resellers mindset podcast.
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