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 guide 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, everyone?
Welcome to episode two of the Resellers Mindset Podcast.
Mike here with Johnny B.
As always, today's topic was his choice.
We rolled with when to grow first, when to maintain in your reselling business.
I think it's an important topic because a lot of resellers, they don't think about this.
They kind of just, you know, just you just keep going and things just keep happening.
There's no kind of rhyme or reason to it.
And that's going to be the topic.
So we're going to hop right into it here.
You know, we're both eBay and Amazon sellers.
So you kind of get a perspective from both sides.
And we'll touch on both sides of it and see what we can get ourselves into.
So I will let Johnny B.
kind of kick it off and get us into this topic here today.
Well, if you're brand new, you're just in grow mode, apparently.
And so I guess we'll we'll angle it from that side of things.
So if you're new, you're just buying, you're getting the hang of things.
But there comes a point, I promise you, there will come a point
where you've bought too much and it's like, well, do I continue to buy more
or do I stop and get rid of what I have?
Yes, you stop and get rid of what you have.
You may be jonesing to go sourcing, but it's just like gambling, man.
It you can't feed that beast.
And I've seen people get in trouble where they just continue to buy and not sell.
And they just are in a pile of, well, their own mess.
So. Everybody wants to get to the finish line as fast as possible.
We all do. It's natural.
But I think if you're new.
If you have more than a week's worth of things, you can get out the door.
You need to stop and get rid of that week's worth of supply out the door
before you continue to buy more.
That's from a new person's perspective.
What do you think on Mike?
I I agree.
I mean, everybody likes kind of sourcing, right?
Everybody likes finding the stuff and buying the stuff.
But, you know, like you said, at some point you have too much of this.
The the crap laying around.
I mean, I ran into it when I first started on eBay.
You know, you buy something and it seems like a good buy
when you're sitting in the store, but you get home and do you know,
really feel like listening that thing you never heard of.
All you did was type in the the brand or, you know, and you got comps on it.
And you seen you're going to make money on it, but you don't know anything about it.
So it kind of just sits in a pile.
But I mean, it's one of those things, right?
Grow into versus when to maintain personally for me, like
until you brought it up as a topic, like I never even thought about it, honestly.
I always just thought, you know, hey, if you can find something
and you can sell it for profit, you know, you get to a point where,
you know, why would you kind of take a step back and look at
maintaining where you're at?
But that's different, right, because, you know, it's accountability
at the end of the day, right?
I know if I buy something, it's going to get listed.
It's going to get sold.
So it's one of those things where you can grow and grow and grow
as long as you you can get the work done.
I think that's the big thing, right?
You make you maintain when you get to a point
where you're capped out with work, you can't fit anything else in.
But like you said, in the beginning, a lot of people kind of just,
you know, the thrill of the hunt, I can easily see like
you almost got to pump the brakes a little bit and make sure, you know,
you're you're maintaining where you're at.
It's not like maintaining like maximum.
It's maintaining like you start out.
So, hey, you're maintaining one list in a day.
Then you want to maintain two listens a day, kind of like that.
It's not you're maxed out completely maintaining.
It's maintaining what you're doing right now and then adding more to it.
Don't just jump in like a crazy person and buy all this stuff
when you don't even know what you're capable of doing on these platforms
when it comes to listing and selling or if it's even really profitable items.
Right. So I think starting out, it's different than definitely
kind of having a huge business.
But I think it's more important when you start out to kind of understand
your limitations with inventory and your sell through rates and things like that.
Sure. You know, you go out.
I'm not going to sit here and say, hey, if you go out
and you find all these profitable items, right, if I go in a thrift store
and I scan 50 or I get 50 profitable books,
but I know I can only list 30 this week.
You know, it's hard to say, leave those 20 books behind.
You know, you got to figure out a way to make it work because you're going to,
you know, if you want to grow this, then you got to take the profitable items
because, you know, there's no guarantee every time you go out,
you're going to find them.
But, you know, it's a double edged sword, right?
If you can only list 30 and there's no no other way you can list
more than 30 in a week and there's 60 items,
is it smart to do?
I would say no, because then you have 30 items that you can't list that week.
And that's basically already your next week's quota.
So that's putting you behind two weeks, basically, on sourcing.
So people kind of, you know, you just you just think it's just going to magically
do itself. But if you know that's what you're capable of,
then you basically have to stay within those limits
because that's all you're capable of. And that's fine.
You know, there's nothing wrong with, you know, doing this part time
and just making extra money on the side.
Just be smart about it.
Understand what you what you can get done within a week
because times, you know, your most valuable thing.
And when you're doing a part time, you don't have a lot of time.
So be smart about it when it comes to inventory and just, you know,
whatever your cable is perfectly fine.
I mean, if I had, you know, 20 boxes of books to send out this week,
I'm screwed. There's no way I'm getting through 20 boxes this week.
So then you got to start planning ahead for next week. Right.
Am I going to go out on source on Monday?
No, because I already have inventory.
So I need to work on getting that out. Right.
Because people just be like, I'll get to it at the end of the week.
And, you know, it can sit there.
No, if it sits there, then it's never going to get done.
We all know how that works.
That just leads us right into the death pile conversation.
And that's that's not what you want.
I'm glad you mentioned that.
So let's bump it up a notch here.
So we're going from new guy to let's say
he's been doing it three or four or five, maybe six months.
There's a difference, like you mentioned, between a death pile and a queue line.
There's a very fine line and you can very easily become a death pile.
You can source more.
You can get out of that week at a time threshold.
Once you're once you got the lay of the land, you got to process that.
You got you got your sources that are repeatable.
So you're keeping that supply chain going.
But eventually, if your output is
your output is not as if you're bringing in more than your output
and it's continuing that way, well, a couple of things need to change
at that point, either you need to you either need to do more yourself
or you need to get help to help you get through that queue line
because you built your business to a point where the supply is there.
It's good stuff. You know what you're buying.
It's steady. It's flowing.
But you got the kink or log jam or cogwheel malfunctioning on the output,
getting it out the door.
It's again kind of like the new guy just over by.
But you want to keep your business flowing where it comes in and it goes out.
So I would say for a midsize guy who still has space
and I'll get to the space point in a minute, probably for a third point here.
But anyway, you want to get to the point where maybe no more than a month
is worth at a time at that point.
I was going to say, so if you had to put a time frame,
so how long does an item have to sit in your house
or wherever your storage unit, wherever before you list it,
before it to fall into the death pile category?
Like how long does something have to sit until it's basically,
you know, declared as death pile stuff? Right.
I would say I would say about a month.
I said I was going to say a month. Right.
So if you have things queued up here, you know, a month is fine.
You know, whether you're however many listens you're doing a day,
you know, you do a lot more listens than me on eBay.
And that's kind of where the death pile hits hard as compared to Amazon.
And, you know, you have thousands and thousands of books
basically waiting in queue, but they're in queue.
It's a big difference than a death pile.
But for the average person, right, if you go buy something
and, you know, you don't have stuff to list and that's just sitting there
in a in a tote or in a bin like, you know, most people do starting out,
you know, that that's a death pile basically immediately. Right.
I would say within a week, if you have nothing to list
and you go out and buy stuff and it sits in a bin for a week
and you don't feel like listening, then that's a death pile.
Like if you're not if you don't have the motivation one day out of the week
to just get that stuff listed, then it's a death pile right away.
So I guess it really depends on the situation.
But yeah, I think over a month or if you just have nothing to list
and you go buy stuff within the week and you don't have it listed within a week,
then, you know, it's probably never going to get listed.
It's going to wind up getting redonated or yard sale somewhere along the way.
So just rough numbers here.
So if you're doing if you're the 20 a day guy listing, this is eBay.
You're the 20 day guy, which is 600 pieces a month.
So two library sales, essentially.
You bring home 1200 pieces.
Well, you're good.
Stop buying until you've listed at least 600 of those 1200.
If you're listing more than that, obviously you can have more numerically.
So just expand out what you're capable of.
You're doing 30. Obviously, your numbers are going to go up.
We're doing 50. Your numbers can go up.
Amazon's a whole different thing.
It can all go out on the same day or at least a good chunk of it.
It can go out every, every single day.
But eBay is a little different as it's a little bit more time.
And well, a lot more time intensive.
So only so much can go out on any single day.
So know which know how much you're buying.
You don't have to have an exact count, but whatever you're using to haul stuff
back and forth with.
So let's say it's a tub that well, 50 books are in the tub on average.
So don't buy more than whatever you can maintain, at least on the eBay front.
Amazon front, as long as you're sitting down a box a day or more, you're good.
See, here's the thing with that, Ray.
I'm going to blow up some people's faces out there that are probably listening to this.
I 100% believe that there is a lot of Amazon death piles out there that just,
you know, it's not talked about because eBay is kind of the platform where death
pile kind of originated and rolled from.
But I guarantee it.
There's people out there that have books they source a month plus ago that are
still sitting there and not shipped out.
That just doesn't make any sense.
Why Mike?
Tell me why.
Well, it's the same for anything, right?
You just don't feel like doing it.
You're not motivated to, you're not motivated to do the work on the back end, right?
Sourcing is fun.
It's like a treasure hunt.
You're out there looking for stuff.
That's the fun part of it.
But you know, like you said, why?
Because Amazon's, you know, especially FBA, it's so much easier.
Even merchant fulfilled.
You don't even got to take pictures.
There is no excuse to have things sitting for, you know, that long for Amazon because
all you got to do is scan it in, slap a label on it, throw it in a box and it's
out the door, right?
Your hand's free.
But I guarantee you they're out there.
I guarantee there's probably a lot of people.
No, I believe you.
I'm just trying to figure out why.
Because it's so easy to get them out the door.
You can get out what takes me a week to list on Amazon in a day, honestly.
I think it's the mindset of being eBay sellers that we are, that we understand
how hard it actually is to list things, right?
So maybe they're not doing eBay.
Maybe they don't know.
They don't know.
And that's, you know, that's probably honestly the case with a lot of people
because now more than ever, a lot of people jump right into Amazon, right?
Amazon's a flashy thing to do right from the beginning.
eBay, you know, there's a lot of people in the group that don't even mess with eBay
and there's nothing wrong with it.
I have 100%.
If I had a different business model, then I 100% would just wipe eBay off the floor.
And I did basically for, you know, the first three months of this year.
But when you start getting large volume of products to sell, you have to utilize both
platforms because there's different customers and, you know, different
marketplaces for different things.
But Amazon death piles are out there.
So it's like, you know, it's almost like a double edged sword.
You want to grow and grow and grow.
But what really is growth, right?
What are we defining as growth?
Is it just how much crap you got sitting around that's unlisted or is it actually,
you know, is it how many listings you're doing a day or how much money you're making?
It really can't be money because it depends on the item, right?
Maybe you go out and you find like, you know, like I did that, that Pennsylvania
railroad set and, you know, sell for 350 and you only spent a dollar 50.
So it's like, that doesn't kind of, you can't go off revenue because that's not,
you know, that's why I always say like, for me, my goals are in the
inventory base now, especially with Amazon.
It's, Hey, I want to have X amount of inventory at all times.
It's not, Hey, I want to make X amount of dollars.
It's, Hey, the more you have in there, the more you're going to sell.
It's going to translate the sales no matter what, but to see your growth is
your inventory, right?
Cause that's how much you're finding and send it in.
That's how much, you know, you're capable of basically having in stock.
So I think the growth thing's kind of like a loaded question, but, um,
well, I think growth, I think you're right.
It is a loaded question.
So let's define it for me.
I would define it as milestone markers for your business.
Do you want an employee?
Do you want a warehouse?
Do you want to, do you want a large commercial vehicle to pick up your stuff?
So I think those are the growth milestone markers is how I would define growth.
You may have a different angle of how you would define growth.
I agree.
I wouldn't do it financially because that's whatever I would do business wise.
That's me.
I think financially is like 100% the wrong way to look at growth, but I think like
99.5% of new people starting out, look at it that way.
Like they think that, you know, Hey, I made more money this month.
So my business is growing when actuality, maybe you didn't list anything this month
and you just sold that $1,000 item that's been sitting there forever.
Right.
So, um, yeah, that's a good point to bring up.
You know, I agree.
Have, have goals, realistic, tangible goals that are related to something
that you can control.
You can't control how much money you're going to make off items, right?
Because you don't know what you're getting.
You're going to a thrift store.
You can't control, you know, X amount of dollars.
You can build towards that with your inventory levels.
So your goal would be, Hey, list more so I can make more.
And your goals don't have to be big.
Your goals can be as small as, Hey, I need to get a Rollo printer or, uh,
I forget what you use the fancier one.
Dimeo.
You want to, you want to Dimeo printer.
That can be a goal.
It certainly can.
Or if you want to get, I don't know a second monitor, cause that
improves your workflow.
Um, that those are as valid as getting a warehouse, any goal.
There's no goal.
That's more important than the other.
It's your personal goal and what you need to do.
What's, what's your purpose to achieve your goal and then go out and do that.
But figuring out when to do that.
Yeah.
A little bit of financial comes in there.
Certainly.
So you need to figure out, well, can I really afford to do it this month?
Or will that affect the business as a whole?
And I think that is a medium, not a new person question, but a more of a been
doing it for a little bit per type person type of question, like, well, maybe
I can't afford to get this thing instead of going out, I don't know, steak
dinners every night with my resell money.
So you got to invest back in you.
Oh yeah, for sure.
And I think another point is when you're new, right.
It's you, if you can go out and you walk into a thrift store, you know, you just
started, maybe you're like one month, two months in and you find, you know,
30 items to resell, maybe it's good that you buy all 30 and just see what you're
capable of getting done within that week.
Right.
Because you don't know, you know, what, how much you can get done in a week.
It's different for everybody.
Some people take longer to list depending on what you're selling.
It takes longer to list.
So you're going to, you're going to learn the hard way, right?
So one way or another, you're going to learn what you're going to learn.
One way or another, you're going to learn what you're capable of doing.
And that kind of brings us into like when, when you decide to
maintain your business, right?
So like what, what, what kind of key factors do you think will cut you off
where you're at today to maintain where you're at, like what, what would be
comfortable for you to maintain and not continue to basically look for more?
I think the point where I want to get to and maintain for.
A couple of years would probably be.
If one full-time employee and one part-time employee, um, the space is debatable.
I don't know what that workflow would look like until they were on board, but
I would like to maintain one and a half employees, I guess, would be the thing.
Cause that gets me my time back right now.
I have none and I want to invest in people both financially and just as a good nature.
Just as a good natured thing, um, to get my time back.
There's a couple of people, I mean, I live in a rural area.
I've had my eye out on a couple of people that I could probably do them a favor
by bringing them on board because jobs ain't great where I'm at.
They really am not.
So I think that's a very rewarding experience that I going to
probably embark on in 2023.
Um, and I'm going to see where I can go from there.
May it may mean me getting a bigger space because of that.
Cause well, we can't just sit on our hands and do nothing.
We need to have more volume.
So the adjustment may be need as physical space, but again, this is a more higher
level point to the smaller, to the person just getting into it.
I think when you have, when you bought in all your initial shortlist, like your
diamond or your Rolo, maybe that second monitor, we talk about your tools.
What are the tools you need to do your job better before you go off the employee
route, before you go off to the warehouse route, before you go off to don't do it.
Gaylord route, get your essentials bought first is my point.
So I'm going to throw this right back at you.
So I want to hear what, what could you maintain this week?
If you had the profitable inventory, how many listings could you do in a day?
And how many boxes of media could you get sent to Amazon on a week to week basis?
And I'll you give me yours and then I'll kind of give you mine.
If you had an unlimited amount of profitable inventory.
So like, I want the inventory just there.
And it's just me and the computer all day long.
It's just you.
I'm not saying I don't want you, I don't want you working, you know, 18 hour
days, right?
I'm going to say you want me to keep it realistic for a normal.
Okay.
Yeah.
So keep it realistic.
Like, uh, just kind of, kind of wean it down from what you do now, because you're
putting away more time than that.
So,
all right, let's just say eight hours, eight hours.
We'll, we'll throw an hour lunch break in there.
So nine hours altogether, right?
Probably six of those eight hours would be eBay to be honest.
And then I put two hours into Amazon and that includes listing it, packing it,
driving down to CVS to drop it off.
So realistically within those eight hours, I could probably do maybe 30,
40 listings on eBay that includes the photo time includes cleaning and all that
nonsense.
Same for the Amazon.
There is cleaning involved with Amazon.
And then I probably maybe do two to three boxes in that single eight hour or nine
hour day, because we're through a lunch break.
We need a break, right?
We need to eat.
So eating.
So in those nine hours, that's what I could probably do, but that's me.
Laser focused, no breaks, no dilly-dallying, me knowing what I'm doing.
Full force nine hours.
I, I agree for me would probably be actually probably half of what you can do
on eBay because you, you know, you're just better at eBay than me because you
use it more, right?
You're listening way more than me.
So it would be less for me on the eBay front and more for me on the Amazon
front.
If I just had profitable books sitting here for Amazon, I could probably in an
eight hour day, I could easily do 10 boxes a day.
So, I mean, you're looking at 70 boxes a week.
If I just did Amazon alone, eBay, it probably be an experimental thing for me.
If it was just books, not like CDs or other crap, I had to look up.
Maybe, I mean, it really, I don't know.
eBay is, eBay is a lot easier to get side traffic.
Right.
When you start that shipment on Amazon, you're committed until you get those
labels at the end, eBay, I could list two things.
Oh, I've got a YouTube comment.
Let me step away for 20 minutes.
It's a lot harder to stay focused.
It is, it is because you can just step away and like Amazon, once you create
that shipment, it's almost like, all right, I'm going to get this box done.
And then I kind of can get sidetracked.
So it's, it's, it's a big difference for me.
There's no way I'd be able to list as many as you in a day on eBay.
But you can, you can, you can, you can, you can, you can, you can, you can,
you can list as many as you want.
Is it takes time?
And again, you got, you got to throw out all the distractions.
I, I turned Discord on mute, no offense to our Discord family over there.
I turn off all social media distractions.
I put my phone, I put my phone in the drawer.
I don't even look at it until I'm done with my listings, honestly.
Now, if I have, I do have interruptions just like anybody did it.
Maybe I got a dentist appointment that day.
those are disruptions that I got to account for because I do run a schedule and if there's
disruption in my schedule well that may mean I'm staying up an hour later that night or maybe I
get up an hour earlier to account for those kind of disruptions or even something as simple as
like an emergency. I account for emergencies happening like I don't know, some bill didn't
arrive or no here's a better example USPS lost my package it was a hundred dollar package and I got
a call and jerk around with that for an hour just to find out where it's at if it's recoverable
all kinds of nonsense so Jessica what am I trying to say here what I'm trying to say is
there are things that are going to disrupt your day there are distractions that are going to
disrupt your day some are controllable some are not. I think it's one of those things right as
long as you're doing something constructive and the right way for your business even if you don't
get done as much as you plan to you know that's that's fine right it's when you're wasted time or
you're doing things you know half half-assed it's just it doesn't that's when it's bad that's when
you know your stuff's not going to sell because you're not listening correctly. Same with Amazon
right if you're not pricing your stuff when you send it in correctly like the one route you could
go with Amazon is just pricing everything at you know a hundred dollars and letting your repricer
do the work like your repricer grab it right that's that's what I'm saying so it's like you got
don't cut corners even if you can't get say hey you know like I want to get 10 listings done today
on eBay even if I go and I get five done but they're all done quality listings that's perfectly
okay right it's not every day you're going to be able to get everything done it's not a big deal
it's when you don't do things properly that you kind of run into the trouble so like the growing
verse maintaining like I would for me right now I would I'm happy maintaining at least 3,000 items
in Amazon for sale at all times so that's kind of like a mindset you know kind of where I'm at with
my business and everything doing this full-time 3,000 items in Amazon at all time is that's like
kind of where I want to be at right now maintaining that sure down the road you know maybe I have a
week where I have a bunch of bulk buys or the library says hey Mike we got a lot of books in
for you and that's going to fluctuate up and down but you just kind of set a point where you know
that's where you want to be and you'll figure that out you know with time when you first start out
you kind of just want to make sure that you're you're growing but you're growing smart you're
actually listing things you're buying you're taking the time to make sure when you're listing
things it's correct especially with eBay make sure you're taking good photos with Amazon make
sure you're getting your stuff out it's super easy Amazon makes it so much easier than eBay to list
so like the quantity you can have on Amazon versus eBay is just it's insane but you want to make sure
you know with some things right not everybody sells media with Amazon you know you got if you
want to sell something else you basically got to get ungated in that category so that's another
expense and kind of like you know that's how I look at my business growing on the back end right
I get ungated and you know Nintendo Sony Microsoft so whenever I come across those games I can sell
them so like that's kind of how my business is still growing I guess like I wouldn't say I'm
shooting for you know my next inventory goal when I first started I would say hey I want to have 500
items in inventory I get there I want to have a thousand items in inventory I would say right now
I don't have a growing inventory number in my mind because I'm comfortable with the 3000 that I'm at
the money I'm making from it and maintaining that and kind of getting some of my time back from it
now I think I'm going to ask the most important growth question and we both have done this I've
grown enough can I leave my job or what's the growing point to leave our jobs because I did
that and you did that you got to me honestly you got to you got to be making this it's the same
amount of money that you were making at your job right so for me I was working 50 hour weeks at CBS
I would drag Deb out you know one or two days a week to sell anything I could find on eBay and
kind of build up that inventory and then eBay kind of took a back seat when I started selling
media on Amazon and I built that up to a point like sure it sucked right and I can I can I can
admit it it sucked for Deb too because taking time away from her going out thrifting when I'm working
50 hours a week it just it doesn't make sense but when I got it to that point where I literally I
literally quit in the middle of my shift it wasn't even you know I gave them zero notice and I don't
feel any type of way about it right I had it to a point Deb was telling me to quit for probably
six months before I actually did she said listen you're making you're making enough money on Amazon
and eBay like you don't need to deal with this crap but I'm hard-headed and I don't quit things
right like I don't just quit and one day I got to a point and I quit and she was like even to this
day she's like I can't believe you just left your keys behind and walked out of that place. I love
it I love it now for me it was a little bit different I did I didn't I put in my notice when
I was making what was survivable as far as my bills go not as far as my paycheck went because I left
I had two jobs since I was a partner in one company and then I had another company of my own
but I had enough stock money as well when I left that I had a fairly good package because they buy
you out when you leave where I could screw up and not make a single dollar for an entire year
and I'd be able to pay my bills with that severance so but I waited until I didn't do that I could have
just quit and went in this with that money but I waited until I could at least make my bills
that's your grocery bills your utility bills your house payment your car payment if you have one of
those so I waited until I have a year to figure this out right or or not but I waited until I
was making enough money over a three-month average where I could make my bills every month
with just the reselling business where I did not need my two other jobs.
Thanks for listening to another episode of the resellers mindset podcast. Today's full episode
and all previous episodes are available to all YouTube members along with the weekly Zoom call
and private Discord. Head on over to youtube.com backslash to use book guy and consider joining
for as little as $2.99 a month.