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
used 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 episode 15.
I have 10.
These other gentlemen can figure out the other five here.
Is that three?
Episode 15 here, we are going to talk
about the importance of knowing your numbers.
And when we talk about numbers, we
mean the actual money you make at the end of the day.
You see we have our first guest here.
Paul is basically the numbers man.
He kind of was like a blessing in disguise to myself,
at least this past year, because he's real good with understanding
numbers and how to basically get to your bottom dollar
when it comes to this.
So Paul, you want to give a little introduction of who
you are and what you do?
Sure.
My name is Paul.
I spent the last 20 years working in the IT industry
before books.
And my job turned into analytics because we had so many tools
that couldn't talk to each other.
And we didn't have any way to measure what was going on.
And I learned pretty quickly, I can't just meet with management
and say subjectively that I need more people,
or I need more of this, or I need more of that.
So I had to figure out a way to get information
from these various tools and allow
them to talk to each other to do some analytics to figure out
where we were.
And that played very well when I came over here
to my resale career.
I learned very quickly that just because I
used whatever tool to figure out what my estimated profit was,
that didn't mean that was going in my pocket.
What else is involved?
What are all the Amazon fees on the backside,
all of my expenses, and allow me to figure out
the right products to buy and how much profit I needed
to make to hit my objectives where I needed to be income wise.
So that's my short journey to here.
I'll pick on myself first, and I'll pick on Johnny B here.
Personally, for me, I knew, hey, I'm making money.
You're getting a deposit every two weeks from Amazon or eBay,
either or.
But do you really know how much of that money
is actually profit?
What if you get a paycheck for $2,000,
but you actually spent more than $2,000?
So I guarantee you probably anybody listening to this
right now does not know exactly how much they're
making on a single book sale on Amazon or eBay.
If you factor in everything you should be factoring in,
and I can 100% sit here and admit to it
that it's a lot to figure out how to even go
about figuring out those steps.
And I had no idea how much you actually make.
If you're out scanning and say your trigger
sets for $5, you scan it, it says profit is $5.
Well, there's a lot of things that
are going to come out of that all the way down
to your subscriptions.
And you don't think about that, right?
Because you're just out in the thrift store.
You're not saying, oh, my subscriptions to your listing
software, your scanning software.
There's so many different things that have to be taken
into consideration.
And I wasn't doing that at all until Paul came along,
thankfully, and said, hey, do you really know your numbers?
Well, at the time, I said, yeah, I really know my numbers.
But I wasn't even close to really knowing my numbers.
And I'm curious here what Johnny B's,
if he actually knows his numbers down to that level
where everything is taken out, even your subscriptions.
I'm not as granular as Mr. Paul.
Paul is my vetcher when it comes to that,
as I think he is most people's vetters.
I have a rough idea, and I know most of it.
But sitting down and putting it like Paul does, no.
I'm nowhere even close.
I aspire to be more like Paul in that regard.
I do need to keep better track of my number taking,
as it's very important to know everything.
Somebody should ask you the baseline question
without looking at it.
You should be able to answer that.
I'm a firm believer in that.
Am I capable of doing it at this point in time?
No, I'm not.
Yeah, to their point right there.
So just take subscriptions as a, for instance,
to play it exactly what Mike was saying.
If you, you know, the tools I use are Scout IQ,
ScanLister, KEEPA, RepriceIt,
and then my monthly Amazon Pro account, right?
If you add those all up annually right now for me,
that's 1,566.
So if you sold 1,600 books a year,
you need to add a dollar to your cost right there
just for subscriptions when you're taking into account
what you're buying and how you need to price it.
So there's just one variable
that most people don't take into account.
They just put, oh yeah, I paid 2.99
at the bookstore for this book.
Whoa, making five bucks,
but you're not really making five bucks.
You make it $4,
and there's a whole bunch of other expenses
to consider as well, so.
I never took that into consideration.
Never once did it ever cross my mind from day one
until you kind of broke down the numbers
that those things even mattered, right?
You just assume, oh yeah, well, it's just part of it.
Well, not actually, because when you're out scanning
and you see the $5,
you're thinking it's a $5 bill coming to you, right?
But, you know, even if you're getting it for free,
it's still not nowhere near the $5
that you think you're getting for the item.
And I think it's super important
that a lot of resellers, whether you're doing this part-time
or full-time, is actually understanding your numbers
down to how much you're making,
how much you need to be at when you're out scanning
and sourcing, because what happens is
you just create more work for yourself.
You're not turning a dollar into two.
Maybe you're turning your dollar into a dollar,
or maybe you're turning your dollar into 90 cents,
and you're working and you're losing money,
but you don't know that because you just see
the initial number when you're out scanning.
Yeah, and that model's gonna end up being
a little bit different for everybody, Mike, right?
Because we're all traveling
a little bit at different distances.
We may have books being, you know,
I could order Gaylords and have them delivered to my house,
or I could be out there driving every day.
Mike's buy cost is one-fifth what mine is, you know?
And Johnny's is different as well.
So, you know, but the key is to know
what are the items that I need to measure
to determine how much I need to, you know,
sell books for to make what I need to make.
And if you don't have all that information, then...
You don't know, right?
It's hard to hit a target.
You don't, you can't, if you can't measure it,
you don't know where you're at.
You don't know what you have to fix,
and you don't know how to adjust your model.
And sales mean nothing.
Right.
Sales are meaningless.
Like if you want $100,000,
but you're buying dollar profit books,
and you can't calculate how many dollar profit books
you need to make clear in your bank account.
And then there's a secondary question,
is that after tax or not?
Is that you got to factor all of these fund numbers in.
Right.
I think it's...
I'll sit here.
I'll die on this hill that I'm gonna say
90% of resellers don't understand the actual number
that they're making on an item they sell.
I'm talking after everything.
No, I...
No, they don't.
I was saying, I was even thinking 90% might even be low.
I was gonna say 95.
Because how many people actually out there
when they scan something say,
okay, this says $5 profit.
Well, my buy cost is a dollar.
Amazon's gonna take $2.
You know, the storage fees, which you don't know, right?
You don't know how long it's gonna take
for something to sell.
It's sitting in Amazon.
There's so many other things that you don't see
on that screen that we just don't care about.
And that's the honesty of it.
Nobody cares about it because it's not there, right?
You can't plug it in Scout IQ a certain number
that, hey, this is how much it's probably gonna cost
in storage fees.
You're just like, well, none of that stuff matters.
Those are just basically things I need to have.
Yeah, there are things you need to have,
but there are things you need to take into consideration
when you're going after lower profit items.
Yeah, just your inventory fees from a storage,
long-term disposable return, potentially labeling.
You know, I spent $600 a year or $600 on that last year,
599.96.
You know, just half of that was return fees.
And my return percentage was in line,
but you're getting charged for everything.
Amazon, you know, and that's not,
none of that stuff's gonna be taken into account
on Scout IQ or Scoutly or whatever tool you're using.
None of it.
Right, I noticed that early on
when I was messing with my stuff,
I went in the backend to see what my actual fees are,
and I'm looking at what Amazon actually charges me.
It's not factored in at all, oddly enough.
Why isn't it?
Like, how do I know what my profit is?
It'd be great if it was, but they don't do that for,
I don't know why they, why don't they do this?
Why don't they factor in all the fees
that you and I would look at?
It's just one of those things where they would have
to implement, you know, some kind of average system,
right, based on the e-score.
So how long is it gonna sit before it sells?
And then you have to factor in the size of it
because it goes off cubic feet.
I think there's just too many different factors
for them to put it in.
And I just, why should they, you know?
Like, they don't care, right?
You know, they just want the software to says,
accept or reject, they're not really worried
about how much Paul's really making at the end of the day
when he scans that book.
Yeah, it'd be hard for them to project,
you know, when this book is gonna sell,
you know, based on how many are up there,
what's the demand gonna do?
You know, when we look at Keeber, whatever you use,
whatever tool you're using, this book is somewhere
between brand new high demand and in death throes
where it's, you know, FBM five dollars, you know, or less.
And it's somewhere in that cycle.
And the day you scan it is not the day it's at Amazon too,
you gotta consider, right?
You know, it could take, you know, by the time you box it
and get it there, it might be received in four days,
it could be three weeks or nightmares.
I've seen lots of people go and they haven't checked
all my stuff and yet it's been a month or two.
So, you know, your book's not, they're not necessarily
always gonna sell at what you're seeing this moment.
Sometimes they can be more, but generally it's less.
Yeah, a lot of the times it's usually, you know,
at least I would say 10% less because your repricer,
you know, if sure, you know, you're gonna have your one-offs
where it goes up or it sells right away.
But for the most part, you're always selling
at least 10% less, your price is gonna take at least
a day or two to get you the sale.
And if it's a little, you know, slower moving,
you figure if we're repricing 20 times a day at a penny,
that's 20 cents a day per book.
So if you just compound that over how much you have
in inventory, you know, you're talking, you know,
hundreds of dollars over time, depending on how quick
something is gonna sell, there's so many factors
besides that number you see when you scan the book
that a lot of sellers overlook, I think.
No, 100%.
So Paul, in your opinion, what is the most important number
on your scanning tool when you're scanning?
What do you think is the most important number?
Is it the profit?
Is it the e-score?
Is it the sales rank?
You know, estimated profits, you know,
is always gonna be the first, you know,
as we've talked over time, you know, I mean, I just,
without even getting deep into the analytics
in the beginning, I knew that I had to sell books
for more money, you know.
So $35 profits fix a lot of wrong, right?
Fixes a wrong e-score or a long tail book, you know,
it fixes, there's 15 copies up there.
So I think that's the first priority
and then the other two come in there,
yoke pretty closely, but we need to take,
you know, it's a triangle, right?
We need to take those three components together,
but stop buying $5 profit books, people.
Just stop, stop, stop.
If I could give any recommendation out there,
you know, be looking, if you're an FBA model,
you know, for where I am, you know,
I don't buy much under $25 profit,
unless it's, you know, it's got a 151, you know, e-score.
You know, I had one month last year of over $12,000
only having 540 books in stock.
So it can be done, but if you don't know your numbers
to know where you need to be,
I think a lot of people are working potentially really hard
for, you know, very different results.
Just keep scheme.
Keep up to it.
I am this person.
I did that for this year.
It sucked.
It sucked so much.
Just keep scanning.
There are profitable books out there.
It might not be the right store.
You might not be on the right route, you know,
depending on what you wanna call your days
that you go out in different directions
to different places.
And it may take you a quarter to figure out
what are the right places for me to go to to buy books at.
It's not instant.
We all know that.
You don't just start this business
and you're making money tomorrow.
But if you figure out the right locations
and just scan books, raise that profit number, Johnny,
I think that fixes a lot of wrong to answer your question.
I think so too.
So, well, I guess I'll bounce it over to Mike.
In your opinion, one of the most important numbers
is like I asked Paul there,
what are you thinking is the priority when scanning?
Is it the profit?
I mean, it has to be, right?
But I would contest that the sell through
matters just as much, right?
But the profit is the ultimate driver.
But it's like, if something's a super slow mover
and the profit's there,
is it worth taking a risk on that?
Or if it's the other way around,
the E-score is super low and the profit's super high
and you send it in and it never sells
and it sits there for five years,
all the fees you've accrued on that,
then all of a sudden it doesn't make it worth it.
It's like, you gotta find a balance between both of them
for it to make sense.
And I mean, I just kinda think about,
let's break down a five-hour profit book
with no buy costs that you scan out in a thrift store today.
So you see the $5 on Scout IQ,
whatever scan and app you're using.
So that's gonna take into consideration the base FBA fee.
So the base FBA fee is out of the way.
They're gonna factor in your storage fee
forever, however long that is.
We all know the fees are gonna continuously go up
and we're kind of in that situation now
where fees are gonna be going up here this year.
So it doesn't take that into consideration.
Your buy cost,
because most of us use zero buy costs
because everywhere we go is a different buy cost.
So that's another thing we gotta take into consideration.
And then your subscription fees.
Honestly, I would say you'd probably make around two bucks
if that's on the high end on a $5 book.
If you're taking into consideration
every single thing that's supposed to come out
that you're not thinking about.
Fuel, wear and tear on your car.
There are a lot of things to consider in all this.
So let me ask you this, Paul.
I mean, you kind of mentioned this 151 e-score.
Would you pick up a $5 book with a 151 e-score?
No, absolutely not.
Really?
I like it. Absolutely not.
Now, what's the minimum you would pick up
on a 151 e-score?
15 bucks.
15 bucks. Wow.
Because there's a lot of demand
and there's a lot of jokers out there
that are just gonna undercut, undercut.
Now that repricers hit those,
it's gonna get undercut profit-wise.
And at some point the demand is gonna come down.
So 15 bucks.
I still gotta handle it.
It's still my time.
I'm still out there driving.
I don't even give it a second thought these days, Johnny.
And a year ago,
I would have snapped that book up in a heartbeat.
Nope, 15 bucks.
I'm gonna ask you the same question, Mike.
151 e-score.
It's gonna sell, man.
It's gonna sell.
What's the lowest you would take?
In my defense,
I have not been living the Paul life long enough to-
Peter, if I-
To leave the-
I know it's gonna be half the number Mike says here.
I'm gonna say,
I'll say seven bucks.
See, I'm picking mine up to three.
350.
I mean- Or what?
It's crazy to think about though, right?
We all have completely different things
than Paul's talking about, you know.
He sold the half amount of books that I did.
So he basically labeled half the amount of books,
peeled half the amount of stickers,
selling books on Amazon,
and basically made the same amount of money as me.
So it's crazy to think about
when you really start looking at the numbers.
Just because something's profitable
doesn't mean you should buy it and try to sell it.
That's 100% not the right way to look at it.
You should be analyzing what you're sending in
and have a business model that makes sense.
Because if you just go in and buy everything that's green,
even if you have Paul's triggers,
you're still gonna be buying stuff
you shouldn't be buying, right?
You have to analyze every single book.
And I've been getting better at doing this
because previously I was just like,
oh, it's an accept, throw it in the cart.
I'm not even looking to see what's going on
with the screen, with the offers.
We all know the FBA offers get way out of line sometimes.
So there's a lot that goes into it,
kind of that I used to overlook.
And now this year I'm trying to pivot
and be more smart about my time, my money,
and the bottom line.
So basically you create less work for yourself,
but you make the same, if not more money.
No, I agree.
Now, Paul, your model that you've been working with
is essentially anti-bulk model.
It's very choosy on what you pick up.
Now, thinking about your own business here,
if you were to scale up what you did in bulk,
how would you imagine that working with employees
in a factory kind of the other way?
The only way I could do more of it,
yeah, get one of my less than exuberant grandchildren
involved or somebody that I gotta teach the business to
a little bit involved.
But yeah, it would have to be other people.
I know my area, I know where the profitable books are.
I have a lot of competition.
But yeah, there have to be other people involved
sending them out to get books for me.
Do you have stores that you just never go to?
Absolutely.
But you know, or stores that the frequency,
you know, you hit them enough times to know that, okay,
and once you ask the question,
how many books do they get in, how often,
depending on their operations,
you know, you hit them once every two weeks or once a month,
or you just hit them by happenstance when you're by,
because the bottom of the barrel gets to that point, right?
And again, the numbers tell, right?
I track every one of my SKUs has coding information into it.
So I can tell you what store I bought it from,
the day I bought it from, how long it was at Amazon.
And I do that with a minimal amount of effort, you know,
I have Scanlist to do most of that work,
just by encoding the beginning part of my FNSKU number
with some information that has date coding in it.
And source information, you know, in there.
So, you know, time will tell, okay,
how many books are you buying there?
And what, you know, what percentage are you flipping them at?
You know, I can tell you I bought 1,750 books last year
and I sold 1,800 once.
So my sell through at least on a 365 day basis is 102%.
So I'm selling everything that I get, you know,
and a few of those were left over from the previous year.
So if you're not tracking, you know,
you'll eventually figure it out just by memory, right?
That, hey, these are selling, these are not, you know?
But tracking it properly will answer the question for you.
I admit that was kind of my big thing was
understanding your sources and how profitable they are
with your sell through and just in general, right?
Because he's talking about,
he's selling 102% of stuff he lists.
Now for me, it's probably closer to like 80, right?
So then I got to factor in, not only am I doing more work,
but I'm also paying more
because I have to get all these things removed
and, you know, liquidated.
So there's even more expenses by not being as picky
and smart about what you're buying
than just being dumb when you buy the thing.
There's actually long-term repercussions,
not just right then and there at the buy.
Now for you, Paul, do restock limits matter?
No, nope.
Care to expand for the audience out there?
Well, again, it depends on your average sale price, right?
My average sale price is 36 and change and, you know,
12 grand in a month is, you know,
income wise, there's nothing to sneeze at.
And again, I did that one month,
and that carried me through the end of the year.
I stopped scanning and sourcing then
because I knew that social security was coming
and I was starting my retirement phase of life, right?
I'm still scanning, still selling now
just on a smaller level,
but if you can sell 12 grand in a month on say 600 books,
do you need to worry about storage limits?
Only if they go to 599.
Again, it's all about, you know,
for me it was about average sale price, right?
And like Mike said earlier, yeah, you know,
it's a triangle, right?
You do have to factor the other items in.
I'm not buying, you know, that I,
I think I sold three or five books last year
for over $300.
You know, I remember one of those distinctly,
it was about mechanics of heat pumps
and heat transfer or something.
It was a book from 1994, wasn't even a modern book.
And the E score was two.
So I'm like, all right,
it's gonna take me six months to sell this book,
but I bought it for 299 and it was listed for 333 or 338,
one of those two.
I sold it in two months.
It got returned eight months later
and Amazon accepted the return.
And I was thrilled about that,
but then it sold two weeks later for 333 again.
So I sold the same book, you know, twice.
So yeah, I mean, if, you know, long tail is okay,
as long as there's hundreds of dollars
of profit involved in it, you know,
was there some risk there?
Yeah, there was $3 worth of risk
and maybe a little bit of, you know,
but I think the key, you know, again,
is just keep scanning until you find
the more profitable books.
So to answer your question, I'm not worried about it.
I just, I'm not worried about it.
I didn't need to scale beyond that.
And again, I might be in a little different boat.
My house is paid for, my cars are paid for and all that.
So I didn't need as much income,
but I know if I hit that number one month,
I could hit that number every month
and that's going out four days a week
and putting four good days in
and one day of processing, we'll say.
A fairly normal work week.
Nice.
Now, do you do anything besides Amazon
as far as the book business goes?
Do you do eBay, Macari?
I do have a, I do have an eBay account.
We got about 265 feedbacks over there going back to 1999.
So long, a long time.
I think I sold probably a half a dozen books last year
on eBay, not a lot, you know, things, you know,
but things that I'm picking up that are worth a hundred bucks
and they're still selling for at least, you know, $80.
I don't do anything on eBay unless it's a $50 bill.
If it's not a $50 bill, I don't know.
If it's a $50 bill, I don't, you know,
I don't do anything over there.
So I do sell some other stuff, some other-
$50 bill a while back.
So I like Paul's answer here.
I like it a lot.
You know, I do some other, you know, hard goods
and some, you know, mid-century, early-century glass.
There's some areas I have some expertise in
and, you know, when I truck around the, you know,
thrift stores, you know, pick a few items up, you know,
here and there and, you know, not enough that it's, you know,
I was having too much fun and making, you know,
much more money selling books.
So I moved away from some of that stuff.
Sure, sure.
But now that just backs up what we talked about
on our previous podcast.
I mentioned if you're pure part-time,
you probably just want to focus $50 books or more.
So I love that he said $50.
It makes me so happy on the inside.
I'm going to, I'll be the little guy here
that's probably listening to this right now saying,
how the, there ain't no way I'm finding $35
on average profit books out in my thrift store.
What would your response be to that?
I'd make sure that I'm hitting thrift stores
that are not too far from anything to do with college towns.
That's, you know, that's key, right?
Cause it's about reference, it's about medical, you know,
we have self-help, you know, in there, certainly any anime,
you know, good anime and graphic stuff, novels we could find,
but, you know, and there are some categories
that surprised me here and there,
whether they're, you know, gardening books or, or quilting
quilting books, if we went through my listing right now,
we brought up the number of quilting books
that I sold for 25 to $80.
I bought one that was on blueberry quilts of Baltimore
or some, it's like 12 pages.
I mean, you know how big most quilting books are
that sold for $85.
I paid 99 cents for it, you know?
So there are some categories that could surprise you,
but in my experience,
if you don't have densely populated areas,
the thrift stores that are in more college areas
have better books.
Cause in the end we're not buying fiction stuff, right?
Most of it is reference or teaching or it's at a, you know,
it's a vertical amount guns or, you know, war can be decent,
you know, when you scan, you know, through those.
But I love going through crafting as well,
which you can find anywhere.
You're not allowed to kind of buy eBay store then, Paul,
cause this is all fiction mainly on my eBay store.
Okay.
I agree with you on the Amazon front,
absolutely non-fiction is the way to go.
So get better sources is what this whole thing sums up to.
Spend enough time in your thrift stores
to make sure that you're getting the books
when they first come out.
Because you don't know how, you know,
unless you see them, you don't know who else was there,
right? Or how many, you know, I think Reezy Reese said once,
you know, if you go there all the time
and you're not finding anything,
it's cause one of my ninjas already knew what time the books
or whatever it was going to be out.
And he already snagged them, you know,
making sure that when they're putting books out,
you are there as first as you can be.
And then, cause that's the only way to answer the question
and ask them, you know,
are these just books that came into your store?
You know, like in my area, you know, one of my large,
actually both, you know,
Goodwill and my other large source here,
they ship all their books to a central location.
Goodwill does resell online here.
They go by Ivy League, Ivy League something,
and they have a couple hundred thousand feedback.
That's how long they've been doing it.
They have a handicap people scan the books
and then what they don't sell online themselves on Amazon,
they redistribute back out to the stores.
Now, not all of the stores comply with that
because they don't get enough books in,
they only put out what they get.
So a couple of them just don't follow all the rules.
And those folks don't catch everything.
There's a Barnes and Noble label on the back of it.
They don't peel it off.
They just scan the Barnes and Noble and ship it out,
you know, or they don't look up ISBNs or anything.
But that was as much of my success
to answer the question Johnny asked me earlier,
you know, as making sure that I was scanning
the right profit, getting to know the stores,
knowing when those books went out
and making sure I'm there first.
Now, beyond the chains,
what do you think is the best sourcing places?
Is it with estate sales, garage sales, mom and pops, auctions?
One of my favorite sources from last year
was going to Craigslist and looking up church rummage sales.
I went to a St. Mary's sale.
I don't know, I think it was like August.
This place had no AC, it was 110 degrees inside.
And there was a gazillion people in line.
I was there on Friday night, $10 early bird special.
I went in and there were thousands of books
and boxes all over the floor.
And the first four books I scanned
were all the same nurses book that all sold for $91 each.
I spent $60 that day and those books sold for,
let me see, I got my sheet up here, $1,600 in short order.
So, that's just one of them.
I love those, because they're not commonplace
and people like to donate to the church rummage sale
and mom and dad gather up whatever college books
or whatever was left.
And there was great racing books.
There was everything in there.
Obviously lots of religious books.
It was a school as well.
So they had lots of teaching material in there
from this Catholic school.
But that's one of my favorite places to go.
Mom and pops could be so hit or miss.
I'm sure you know, Johnny, I mean,
they just don't get that many books donated
a lot of times, they don't.
So I tend to hit them along the way,
occasionally in between my other stops
or just ask them some questions
about when they put them out.
Or, hey, if you get a donation of books here,
would you mind if I leave your number?
I leave my number for you.
And if you gave me a call, I'd gladly come over
if you get a couple of boxes with the books.
And that's worked out.
Just, you know, they'll let you know,
hey, somebody just dropped off a truckload of books,
you know, you go check them out, you know,
as time permits.
But for me, 98% of my books come from
two big name-chained thrift stores.
Now, I'm glad you mentioned the church rum in itself
because one of my best little pickups this year
was a pastor who died.
I got his personal library, his church library.
And after I was done packing it all,
my truck was fully loaded down.
She comes out to me, the lady who was selling me all the stuff.
It's like, you want his bookshelves too?
I'm like, yeah, I do.
I still got them.
These are custom built by him.
They're like eight, 10, 15 shelves.
I'm like, I don't know how I'm gonna put it on the truck,
but yes, I'm gonna take them.
Nice.
So when you figure out your number, right?
So say, you know, you go down this rabbit hole like I did,
and you actually break down your numbers
and you see exactly what you're making, what you're losing,
it's gonna blow your mind.
Every single person that actually sits down
and looks at that number, you know,
hey, I'll make it 80 cents per book,
even though what I'm out scanning, it says $5.
It's gonna make you think completely different
about your business and your business model.
And I know it's hard to sit here and think to yourself,
you know, wow, there's no way this works at that level,
but clearly it does because Paul's proof of it.
So, and there's many other people out there like Paul
that don't have nowhere near the inventory that we carry
and are making a whole lot more money,
doing a whole lot less work when it comes to Amazon.
So you gotta get in your head.
Sure, you can do it, you know, my way
and try to send in thousands and thousands,
but as fees increase, your margins get slimmer
and slimmer and slimmer,
and you're not turning your dollar into five anymore.
You're turning your dollar into a dollar 10.
And unfortunately, that's not sustainable in the long run.
The other cool thing about knowing your numbers, Mike,
the peace of mind you have when you know
that you can go out this week and you follow this model
and you will make money, period.
Not to worry about it.
Buy scanbooks at my model, I will make money.
Guaranteed.
You don't even gotta keep track of your numbers.
You just do it once and figure out where you gotta be.
That's why I built the spreadsheet that I did
that it requires so little maintenance.
You just, you know, you enter your receipts
and you send your books in,
and then you download an Amazon report
that the query will automatically pull in for you.
And now we have it set up so that it'll merge years for us
and we can look back across time
and the answers are right there.
So what do you see the evolution of your model doing?
Or is it just gonna be,
is this is the model never needs to change?
Well, of course it potentially would need to change.
You know, the, you know,
cause Amazon's model isn't what it was 20 years ago
or what it was five years ago, you know,
and, you know, they're gonna dictate how we need to morph.
Things are a little different in my world too.
Now that I'm collecting social security, you know,
I'm gonna keep things around a thousand dollars a month,
which means I'll work a couple of days, you know,
something in that range.
Do another grand a month for my wife on the eBay account.
I switched it over to her name
before the beginning of the year.
So, yeah, and even if I only make half of that,
I'm still, you know,
social security more than covers all of my bills
and then some, so, yeah,
but I'll still certainly keep up on it, you know,
stay part of the group and, you know, as you know, you know,
I do anything I can to help anybody out in the group, so.
Now you've gone above and beyond
and all the work you've done for the group,
all is highly appreciated, so thank you.
Oh, you're welcome.
Yeah, last week I even drugged one of the guys
and he's like, well, I'll try and figure this out.
I'm like, I got my room open, dude,
get your butt over here.
And I think we were,
I think we spent two and a half hours the other night.
And he's one of the newer guys.
It's the best thing that my membership offers
and it's not even mine, right?
I got nothing to do with it.
It's Paul and his analytics and his spreadsheet.
I'm just like, hey, I stumbled across this guy
on the corner, he knows a lot of stuff.
So someone keeps sending you a cut
of his YouTube money, right, Paul, right?
That's not why I do it.
You know, none of us get through life on our own, right?
There's no magic book in doing, you know,
I don't care what you're reselling, right?
You pay for your, you know,
you pay for everything that we do,
whether it's with your time on YouTube,
your time and experimenting, you pay with your money,
you know, and figuring this out.
So your education gets paid for one way or the other.
And people have helped me out along the way,
just from a YouTube perspective.
And Mike's such a nice guy and everybody
in the group was great.
And I'm like, let's do a couple of classes
and make this work.
I will attest that I didn't know nothing about Excel
when I started his class.
And this is gonna be something that I talk about,
you know, 50 years down the road.
It took me 50 minutes to install Microsoft Excel
to even get into his first class.
And now I can upload my spreadsheet, you know,
it takes two seconds to do.
And I think the overall takeaway here is that
no matter what happens, sooner or later,
you're gonna have to raise your profit,
what you're looking to get.
It's never gonna go down.
Your potential when you're out scanning,
it's never gonna go from $5 to $4.
You're always gonna be working up.
So why not put the pieces in place now to be smarter,
work smarter, not harder.
This is basically, you know, the perfect example of it.
So where you're being more selective
on what you're out there buying,
you're actually looking at what you're buying.
You're not just buying it because it says to buy
and understanding your business down to that exact number
where you know, if I buy a book, I'm making money on it.
Unlike me where, oh yeah, I'm buying this $4 profit book
when in actuality I was probably losing, you know,
10, 25 cents when that sold, but I never knew that
because I was just going off the initial, you know,
scat IQ screen.
Right.
And everything does end up being averages.
You know, we need to know what our average buy cost is.
I may be buying books anywhere from 49 cents to $12,
but what's my average?
And that's what I keep in scat IQ for me, you know,
is what my average is
because that's what it's gonna be in the end.
And that's how, from an IRS perspective,
when we go to do our taxes,
it's never getting down to a book level.
I bought 50 books this month, I sold 40.
How much did you spend for the 50
and you get the right 40 of them off
because that's what you sold this month.
And it's just the average of the books that you have.
And you have a running average, you know,
each month throughout the year,
it just skews each month.
And then you have a carryover, you know,
from 2022 to 2023,
we're gonna end up with X amount of books in inventory
and an average cost price.
That's just our starting number of inventory.
So if we know what the, you know, the averages are,
because you know your numbers,
then it makes making decisions at the fields easier.
Maybe not easy, but it makes them easier
because we've all been standing up those books.
Do I get this?
When it's on the fence, if it's in my cart
and I'm at the register, I'm making money.
That's what I wanna know.
What is the most expensive book you bought this year,
dollar wise?
30 bucks.
Mine was 22.
Yeah, 30.
And I didn't buy a lot of books over that $10 number.
And I think last year it was probably about $25.
I bought a Bible that, and it didn't sell for a ton,
like 75, but you know, $50 profit is $50 profit, right?
You know, it's a high cost of goods for us, but yeah,
those have to be pretty known winners
to spend that amount of money on them.
And I think for me this year, it was a graphic novel.
Nice.
I guess I'll tailspin off this question.
What is the most you would ever pay for a book?
Or does it matter if-
It doesn't matter.
Doesn't matter.
I care about how much money I'm gonna make, right?
Now, assuming you have the cashflow,
I'll be able to do it, right?
Because if you're buying $2,000 books
and they take two months to sell and you got 50 of them,
you know, you gotta have pretty deep pockets
or a credit card with, you know, some, you know,
a deep well in it.
So, no, I care about how much you're gonna make it.
And you know, how long the tail is
does come into play there, Johnny.
I mean, if it's, you know, what it's gonna be,
but I really don't care.
As long as I can move it in a timely fashion,
it doesn't matter what I pay for it.
I was listening to some guy a while back.
He mentioned very something similar to him
that he transformed.
He was doing the like the five buck model,
but then he started upping his buy cost,
but with a higher margin at the end of it.
And he made out all right, actually.
I think he made $250,000 for the year.
I think he was on Caleb's channel at some point,
one of their little get together seminars
he was speaking about that.
Right, yep.
You don't lose money, you just find less,
you take home less.
So don't get in the mindset
that you're not bringing as many books home,
so you're not making as much money.
It's almost the complete opposite.
You're bringing less home and making more money.
Because if you look at it on the scale of Amazon,
they're gonna take their flat $758.
So you sell a book for 12,
and you're not getting nowhere near half of that
where Paul sells his book for 30,
he's probably getting closer to 55% of that sale.
So you're actually making more money
when you're selling higher dollar items on Amazon
than your lower dollar stuff.
Right, now what I'm trying to figure out in my head
with Paul's model, how do I still keep my big old dream
in the sky of my book factory going, right?
Warehouse employees.
I think he mentioned that.
It's the same thing,
except instead of staying in the factory,
I'm sending those employees more out of the factory
to come back to the factory.
Because like you said, you pick it up a lot less, right?
There's only so many mad hours you personally can do
during the day.
So that's a very interesting thing for me to digest
and think on this year.
How would I do that with Paul's model?
Because I like Paul's model very much.
I'm just trying to figure out how to do that in big scale.
I think we're gonna,
we're gonna give our final thoughts here on numbers
before we get out of here.
So I'll give mine and then we can go to Johnny
and then we'll let Paul end it off
since he's the numbers guy.
So for me, like I said,
I didn't know my numbers down to the point
where I know exactly how much I'm making.
It was 100% eye-opening to me to see after all your expenses,
all your costs, all your fees,
fees you don't even see on Amazon that exist.
You're not including the storage fees, things like that,
removal fees all across the board.
It's gonna change your whole perspective on your business
no matter what you're doing,
whether you're doing media, anything.
It's gonna completely change how you source
and the choices you make when you're outsourcing.
I think that's the biggest takeaway is
you wanna work smarter, not harder,
and you wanna make money,
and you wanna know when you buy something at the store
that you're gonna make money on that item guaranteed.
You don't wanna have to worry about if the price tanks,
if it sits in the warehouse for a month,
what things you're not thinking about.
You don't wanna have to worry about that.
So you wanna have a business model in place
where you go into thrift store, whatever you leave with,
I'm guaranteed that I'm gonna make money on that item.
So I'm gonna leave it there.
I love understanding my numbers on that scale.
I know it might sound like kind of micromanaging to be like,
well, why do you gotta know
how much you made exactly on every book?
But honestly, if you don't know your numbers,
for all you know, you're losing money, right?
You're just getting the money back or less that you send out
because people aren't keeping track down to that level
of exactly what the sell through is on a book
and how much they made on a specific book.
So get smart about your numbers.
That's my last go ahead with the numbers.
I'll throw it over to Johnny B.
See, I think for me, the big learning thing this year was
how much can I make on listing very, very low?
And I got my results on that.
So I know my answer.
You can make a decent amount of money,
but you can't make a lot of money doing it,
at least as a solo person doing it the way this way is done.
And even on a larger scale,
it would require a huge operation to do
and a lot of money to sink in to do it that way.
So that's why I'm gonna be transitioning
after talking to Mike and Paul a lot to pour more,
again, work smarter, not harder kind of model.
And I think that will do me well.
I know how to do it at the lower end.
If I ever need to do it for whatever reason,
like Amazon shut the doors, I'm just stuck with eBay.
Well, I know how to play the eBay game.
eBay game is a fun game to play and I'm still playing it,
but I'm gonna focus more on Amazon this year
and using mainly what Paul and Mike's models
are going forward.
So, see ya.
Numbers guy, here we go, the grand finale.
That leaves me.
And I heard a story way back when once,
and I even forget what the initial topic was,
but it's that there's an archery contest held every year
for the best of the best of the best.
And the world champion is gonna be there.
And most of the time when this guy enters the competition,
everybody else drops out because they never have a chance.
And I tell you that you're gonna enter this contest
and you're going to beat him without any question.
You're going to beat him.
And I know you've never shot a bow and arrow.
And of course, I'll have to insist that he's blindfolded.
And you can't hit a target you don't have.
And if you don't know which numbers are,
then you're guessing.
And at the end of the year, your wife's going,
and I thought we were making more money than that.
So your girlfriend or your landlord
or your mortgage holder, whatever.
So if you know your numbers
and you want to increase your game,
it's the only way to go.
All right.
We appreciate you all listening.
Hopefully when you're listening to this on Wednesday,
you see Paul here, he's wearing a Cowboys hat.
Hopefully the Cowboys have won their game here
against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
So fingers crossed for that.
Tom Brady.
Go ahead.
Unbelievable, this guy's hating on Tom Brady,
but it is what it is, right?
He knows his number so he can hate on whoever he wants.
Cause he knows at the end of the day,
he's making a whole bunch of money selling books on Amazon
and he has a buy cost and an average sales price
that we can only dream about having as cherry pickers, right?
So get smarter.
Maybe you don't take the full leap today
and you go crazy with it
and you're looking for 25 plus dollar profit items.
But I challenge everybody that listens to this
to take a step back.
If you don't know your numbers and you're in the group,
you're in the YouTube membership,
just dive into his spreadsheet.
He's doing classes again.
He's available all the time.
All you gotta do is shoot him a message
and he'll walk you through everything
and just start being smarter with it.
You know, have a higher expectation for your time,
value your time a little bit more
and just get comfortable with leaving, you know,
five, six, seven, eight, nine, $10 profit books behind.
It's okay.
It's less work for you.
And it might be saving you money in the long run
because I guarantee you don't know exactly
how much you're making on those today.
So we will talk to you guys in the next episode.
Everybody have a good one.
Bye bye.
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