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 episode 20, the last episode where we'll be able to throw our fingers
up and do the amount of episode number we are at.
It was nice knowing you hands.
No more of this nonsense over for those watching on the YouTube.
Today's topic is a, I think it's an important one because, you know, it really
kind of affects your actual health and life.
We were going to talk about basically reselling business obsession and, you
know, kind of the rabbit hole.
A lot of people go down and you see a lot of the, oh, just keep grinding,
comments on social media, everywhere you look, just keep grinding and grinding.
Well, what happens if, you know, what happens if you never, never stop grinding?
Right.
How many years of your life are you taking off by, uh, investing all this time?
And this wasn't my idea or Johnny B's idea.
So we're going to credit Terry G over on the YouTube.
He's been around on the YouTube before, you know, I was even anybody, not
that I'm somebody now, but he, you know, he was probably one of my first few
subscribers and he always has, you know, he used to be a wise crack with his
comments, but he put a comment out there.
I'll read his comment.
Just kind of give you guys the context of the topic today.
He says, get the impression that many resellers are totally obsessed with their
business to the exclusion of everything else involved in having a balanced life.
This is especially true for a one person solopreneur like myself.
I hear sellers talking about starting at 5 a.m.
and working until late at night.
Is there anything else in between?
What about addressing and taking care of one's health, social life, spiritual
life, hobbies, plain old, relax and time travel, et cetera, how to balance all
of these things out, and you're going to get two different sides of the spectrum
here because Johnny B works a lot harder and a lot longer hours than I do.
So I don't want to seem like I'm picking on the guy, but he's going to have a
a little bit more of a, a true, true life, you know, kind of relation to this
topic than I do because I don't put in the time he does.
So I don't even know where we begin with this.
I guess we just begin with what a normal day looks like for you.
Me.
Well, I feel like this question is calling me out, but no, I actually
responded to this one specifically and he's not wrong at all.
I am trading my time now for more freedom of a balanced life later.
Because my business is working and it's growing and it's going up.
So I will get my time later.
I've started having employees to free my time up even more able to clock out a
little earlier these days now.
So it will get easier over time.
However, let's start at the beginning.
When do I wake up?
I do wake up at 5 a.m.
Just like he said, amazing.
Oh my God.
Right.
Don't think we're doing podcasts at 5 a.m.
No chance, buddy.
I mean, if he could start to my day, right?
I'll be a little groggy.
I don't have a coffee yet, Mike.
Hold on.
But no, I have to do it this way because I have to work harder than a typical
nine to five in order to accelerate my business's growth.
And it has worked.
That statement is true.
It works just like that.
So maybe I work like the equivalent of two to three people.
And you have to do that as a solo person, just like me.
A solo person, just like he said in his question in order to make it grow faster.
The only real hack in this business is time.
You get in what you get out, what you put in, essentially, especially on eBay.
I'm very eBay intensive.
Amazon, I could see a little bit more relaxed in that state.
I mean, other than maybe you have to drive if you're doing the full time Amazon,
literally full time drive along way, have a longer route, all that fun stuff.
Maybe go state to state kind of deal.
I could have seen doing something similar on that.
If I was solely Amazon, I was got a big old truck or maybe a trailer on back or
maybe one of those by my own box truck, do it that way.
What do you give up doing this lifestyle?
You give up a lot.
I don't go out on Friday night and hang out and pitch back a few beers with friends.
I don't do that.
I prefer to work personally because I know I'm invested in my goals and my dreams
that I have.
I call it a purpose driven life.
My purpose is to do this business and get it out of the way in the sense of I built
it up enough where I can get to those fun things.
Yeah, I want to travel.
Yeah, I want to have those Friday night beer nights, man.
That sounds like fun.
I have no fun right now.
Well, that's not true.
I do have a lot of fun with what I do.
I'm doing a podcast, so there's a little break right there, right?
I think an important thing to preface here is that before we both got into reselling,
our previous jobs were 50 plus hour weeks every week on call around the clock.
So that is something to put out there because our experience with work prior to doing
reselling was if the phone rings, you got to pick it up and you got to be at work.
There's no negotiating that.
So when he sits here and says he's putting in these hours, he basically just said,
I'm going to start putting in these hours for myself versus somebody else.
So it's not like he went from sitting on his butt doing nothing to working 80 plus hours
a week.
This was something we were already doing prior to reselling business.
And we said, wait a minute, if we invest all this time that we're investing in these
companies for ourselves, then the potential is unlimited.
We're going to be doing this for the rest of our lives.
The potential is unlimited.
We can achieve anything we want to achieve.
I think that has to be said because people, this isn't something where we just decided
to start from nothing.
Like we had no obligations.
But prior to this, we got out of terrible situations where we were working long hours
and just put them on ourself, just put them on our own bank.
We answer the phone to ourself now, not nobody else.
Right.
I mean, I spoke about this previously.
I was a partner in one company, had my own side company on the side.
That was my own business, that side thing.
It was OK money.
But I would still have to, like you said, pick up the call when it rained because I
was the smallest partner there.
I didn't own the majority share of that company.
So I was pretty much an employee, even though I was a partner.
It didn't matter if it was 3 a.m., 2 a.m., 4 a.m.
They called, you answered.
It's not like I didn't have fun at that job either, but it's not something I would like
to do for the rest of my life.
Here I call the shots.
I get the majority of the money and I'm running a successful business, all things considered.
Is it the end of the rainbow on my journey?
No.
I probably got another two, three years before I'm OK.
Somewhere on this rainbow is kind of toward the end.
I've got all the things going.
Maybe I don't get up at 5 a.m.
Well, that's probably not true.
I probably go to bed earlier is what's going to happen.
But yeah, instead of like 5 to like 11 or midnight, 5 a.m. to 11 or midnight, maybe
it's 5 a.m. to like 5 p.m.
That sounds good to me, right?
Or 5 a.m. to 4 p.m., 3 p.m.
That kind of thing.
My day's done.
I did everything that needed to get done.
All the cogs are in the machine.
They're turning away.
Full on automation, essentially.
Get to that point.
That's what I'm growing, too.
That's the appeal, right?
That's the appeal to Amazon, eBay.
We can sit here and say this.
I'm confident in saying this statement here is that you're going to get more results on
eBay, the more time you put into doing the tasks that eBay requires.
So if I'm listing one a day and you're listing a hundred a day, well, then guess what?
You're going to make 100 times money than I'm going to, right?
In the businesses we have when it comes to media.
If we're comparing apples to apples, I'm not selling Rolex watches and you're selling
crusty old books.
We're selling the same thing here, right?
If we were both selling Rolex watches, you would still make 100 times more than I would.
That's just the law of averages, the way things work.
So it's time intensive, eBay is, but you're only going to get in what you put out when
it comes to eBay, in my opinion.
If it's something where you just...
Part-time eBay does exist, but it's a hard thing to kind of manage because it comes with
all the customer service, a lot of your own packing and shipping.
And I think that's where a lot of people, at least a lot of people, other YouTubers
I see get caught up with just eBay consumes their whole life.
You rarely see kind of Amazon YouTubers where they're consumed by everything going on within
the business because a lot of it's hands off.
You just pack it and ship it, source it, pack it, ship it.
And you kind of forget about it.
And eBay, like you said, it's an all day event if you want to do this full time, there's
no little hacks to do eBay.
You can't do eBay one or two hours a day and have a full-time eBay business, unlike Amazon,
where you probably can get away doing that.
Now that being said, I know people who work really, really hard at eBay, quote unquote
hard, but they're doing it wrong.
And they're doing it wrong because they won't listen to it.
Why is there successful people?
They ask questions, they get an answer and they don't do the answer.
They don't execute how to make their business better.
Their content and for whatever reason, doing it wrong and they aren't successful and they've
been doing eBay 20, 25 years, 30 years.
And that makes me sad.
Now when I get told something by wiser, more successful people than I, I listen to what
they have to say.
Do I do 100% of what they say?
I can't say that truthfully.
There's some things where I just don't disagree where it makes sense for their business, but
it doesn't make sense for my business.
But for the majority of the answers I get, I do listen and I follow through with that.
And if they're wrong, they're wrong and I adjust for that wrongness.
But if they're right, I stick to it kind of deal.
I'll at least try what they're saying to see if it works for me.
Whereas others, like I mentioned, sadly, they don't even try.
Burnout, burnout happens a million times faster if you're not seeing results.
So if I'm sitting there like you, doing the same exact schedule you have, and I'm using
the stock photo, the same description for everything on eBay, I'm going to be burned
out after a week.
Now you see results.
So when you see the business actually working the way it should, the burnout kind of, I
would say almost takes a backseat for a while because you're like, hey, look, what I'm doing
is working the money's coming into the business.
I can pay my employees.
I can pay myself.
I got everything in place.
Everything's working the way it should.
So burnout really kind of, sure, I'm sure you have days where you're like, man, this
sucks, but it's not as bad as it would be if you weren't getting results.
You'd be done.
You'd be like, I'm not doing this.
This is stupid.
Right.
No, I definitely have those days where, man, I do not want to list, but I have to list.
I have to get it done because this is again, my purpose driven life.
And part of my purpose, unfortunately, is doing listings every single day, no matter
what.
Just kind of like the post office, except I'm better than post office.
I do remain open when it rains, sleets or snows or hails or tornadoes.
Doesn't matter.
Power goes out.
It doesn't matter.
I'll use my phone to do my listings, launch my listings, whatever.
It's a 20, it's an everyday thing.
Amazon's a little bit more forgiving in that fact.
It doesn't have to be an everyday thing.
And I'm very envious of the people that can make Amazon their full time business.
Could I do that?
Do I have to work as hard as I do?
No, I have options.
I could be a full time Amazon guy, but I'm so invested in eBay.
I like, I'm going to say it.
I do like eBay and I built up something and it's something I'm very proud of.
And I'm continuing to build with that.
That's what I've chosen to do.
So I'll kind of jump into like health here, right?
So before I started YouTube and the membership and everything, I was just kind of, whatever,
I just got to get it done.
I'm going to lift up these hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pounds to my third floor,
carry them back down.
And I really didn't really start-
Well, how do you did that for over a year?
I didn't really start caring until a bunch of the old guys joined the membership.
And they're like, Hey, you can't keep doing this.
Like your health is the most important thing you've got.
And if you ain't got that, then you don't exist.
You're not here no more.
And health is very, very important.
I think a lot of people kind of overlook it because even if you know, kind of just doing
what you're doing, where you go to your warehouse, there's really, you got to stay active with
everything you're doing.
If you just sat there in that chair all day, you would be miserable and your body would
ache like you wouldn't believe.
So it's one of those things where it's a balancing act where you can't be basically killing yourself
with what you're doing, but you have to stay active with things, whether that's going out,
going to the thrift stores, bending down, lifting things up.
But there's a fine line where you don't want to be lifting all this weight all the time.
I can tell you right now, I got all those damn mystery boxes from that estate sale.
I didn't know they were in the basement and they all weighed 50 pounds.
So I got to carry them off the steps.
I'm just trying to think to myself, like if maybe an older lady goes in there and doesn't
know they're in the basement, there's no way you're going to be able to carry one of those
boxes out rather yet 10 of them.
So that had me thinking a little bit.
And I think about it all the time is like, how can I continue to get the inventory I
do and the mass amounts that I do without having to carry all the weight?
Because that's the big thing, carrying all the weight.
The storage unit has alleviated a lot of that for me.
I'm not carrying stuff up here just to carry it back down and then figure out what to do
with it.
But it's something to think about.
I'm curious, what happens if you get real sick in your business?
You have a plan here, say if you need to take three days off because you got pneumonia or
bronchitis or something.
I have two answers to this.
One I wouldn't take off for those silly illnesses.
The only way they're going to get me to take off is if they're trapping me in the hospital.
Well I am serious about the first one too.
I have what it's called a draft bank, meaning I have listings ready to go.
I didn't have one before employees because I knew I would come in for reason A. I'm just
going to come in, don't matter what.
But they are not going to have the same mentality and the same investment I do because they're
an employee.
They aren't an owner.
This isn't their business.
This is just a job to them and that's fine.
So now we have a draft bank and that could apply to me too if I get the said bronchitis
pneumonia.
It's not people.
I'm still going to come in.
But I have the option if I wanted to not come in that day.
Now I'm going to roll back to what you were saying about the health thing issue.
I was chained to this chair with my other two jobs.
I was 60 pounds heavier then, maybe 70.
I weighed myself this week.
But because of this job, I have lost a significant amount of weight.
I was not active before.
I am very active these days.
My diet still isn't the best.
If I switch that up too, I could probably lose another 50, 60 pounds to be honest.
I have plans to.
I just haven't had time to sit down to work out a diet kind of plan.
But I was a much heavier guy.
I really was.
The only trade off I'm seeing now is I'm a lot sore because of all the moving stuff around
as heavy stuff.
Those things back there, I lift them myself.
Sometimes I'll get some help doing it these days because I have employees.
But I used to lift everything myself.
It sucked.
You got 80, 100, 120 pounds, those little tubs back there, depending what's in them.
They're not light, folks.
And then when you got to heave ho them up or heave ho them onto the rolly cart or heave
ho them onto the racks, it's a workout.
Social and spiritual life, what kind of social and spiritual life do I have?
I would say a lot of my social life, I have friends I grew up with down in Philly that
I talk to all the time.
Sunday is kind of my day off, even though we're recording this and then we have the
YouTube members call after this.
Sunday is my day off.
You're not getting off either, Mike.
We have the Discord and YouTube and being around other sellers.
And then I got my friends in the background.
One of them is my YouTube editor, kind of try to involve them in everything.
So I do have a social and spiritual life.
I haven't drank an ounce of alcohol since my college days.
So that really doesn't concern me.
I'm not excited to go out to do anything or anything like that.
Me and Deb kind of just lay low.
We go for walks as much as we can when it's not freezing cold out.
We just stay active and kind of do different things.
When the kids are in school, we'll go to Dave and Buster's, go to the arcade, play
the arcade when there ain't no kids running around.
We do plenty of different things, but it's different for everybody.
I'm sure Terry G's social life is different than ours.
So it's what you want to get out of it.
And I agree with Johnny B is like, I'm working hard now so I don't have to in the future.
I'm going to be able to sit back when I'm older and I can't work as hard and be able
to kick back a little bit and relax.
That's another thing for another topic is reselling retirement.
What's that look like?
Because you never see resellers talking about putting money into any kind of retirement
funds or things like that.
So that'll be another topic.
But social and spiritual life, you make the most of what you can.
I don't put in the hours Johnny B does necessarily with the reselling business.
My parts are a little bit eBay, a lot Amazon, probably medium time consumption when it comes
to YouTube because I do kind of edit my own things and I have the discord and everything
I try to keep up on.
So that's my social and spiritual life.
I'm curious to see what your spiritual life is, mister.
I mean, sure.
Here's some background and I mean no offense to anybody I may or may not offend.
No, you better not even say it then.
Okay, fine.
Moving on.
I don't do like churches on the weekends or anything.
I can see how that does affect a reseller because a lot of people source yard sales,
flea markets on the weekends.
So if you're religious, Sundays, I know a lot of people can't make the calls on Sundays
for religious reasons and that's fine.
You just have to figure out, just accept the fact and don't let it beat you up.
It is what it is, faith before your business and that's perfectly fine.
But don't let it eat you up inside like, oh man, I could be at a flea market right now.
Well, if you want to be at the church and that's where you need to be and that's where
you got to be at the time.
That's no big deal.
There's always another sale, right?
There's always somebody else looking to get rid of their stuff.
You just got to be there when the time comes, have some lines out there.
So you don't have to be obligated to rely on that one flea market that's every Sunday
that takes place while you're going to do your religious beliefs or anything like that.
There's always something else down the road.
Don't feel like that's the only opportunity.
And there's plenty of times where you walk away from opportunities.
That's never the only opportunity and it's okay to just say, hey, it is what it is.
We'll figure out a better way, different way.
So I thought about it in the minutes he stalled for me.
So here's the most polite way I can put it.
I was raised a Southern Baptist person, but I'm very much agnostic.
I have read the Bible.
I've read the Koran.
I've led the tenets of Buddha.
I've read them all.
Now my personal perspective is I believe that there is something, but I believe I personally
am not smart enough or an enlightened enough individual to know what that supreme being
is.
Now, whether I can have a personal connection with that supreme being, I don't know.
And that's why I'm the agnostic king.
I believe there are a lot of good things in all of these scriptures, no matter who you
are, Catholic, Jewish, Buddhist, doesn't matter, that make you a decent human being at the
end of the day.
That's my personal beliefs.
And I do apologize if I offended anyone listening here, but that's this is I'm talking about
me here, people.
So I got to speak from my perspective.
This is about as honest and non-offensive as I can try to be about it.
Now as far as my social life, now we're going to segue here.
I have colleagues is what I call them.
I call you a colleague.
I do consider you a friend though on top of that.
And I have other people just like that.
But most of the people I interact with these days are other resellers.
That's my social life.
And we get around, we joke around, we talk about some things that have nothing to do
with reselling.
But at the end of the day, everybody is a business associate and an acquaintance and
a colleague to me and appear.
And there's friendships amongst that.
So that is my current state of social life.
I got something that's going to break the internet.
I'm going to start doing a once a week reseller bingo night, right?
We all have the same bingo card and I'll sit here on YouTube and spin it and pick the number
and you know, there'll be millions of us on here playing bingo together.
There goes our social life.
You know, you want to drink booze, you want to drink whiskey, you know, you want to smoke
a cigar, do whatever you want, right?
I can create a social life for everybody.
That's what I'm saying.
I'm giving people a utopia here, reseller night bingo.
Love it.
reseller night movie night.
That's all the book movies.
The Worcester, even The Neverending Store.
We're just going to watch book movies.
On the count of three, everybody hit play.
So we're all watching at the same exact the scene at the same exact time.
Yeah, that's gonna be great, man.
Hobbies and relaxation time are kind of the same thing, you know, comes with the social
part of it for me.
My hobbies, I spend with the people, you know, that I enjoy spending time with.
I do travel.
Travel is weird for us.
We have our cats and you know, they need around the around the clock.
We have one that needs around the clock medical attention, special needs.
So traveling and staying overnight is not an option for us unless we were to pay somebody
a lot of money to take care of the cats.
And then that's a whole ordeal because they got to come into the apartment.
So whenever we take trips, most of our family is either in Philadelphia or Pittsburgh.
So opposite sides of Pennsylvania, we just take day trips.
We'll go for the day.
We'll drive drive to three hours one way, hang out for the day and then drive back at
night.
It's not a big deal for me down the road that might change.
You know, we always have talked about getting an RV and just traveling, traveling the country
kind of doing a thing.
But Deb has her business as well.
So we'd have to be able to fit an embroidery machine inside of the thing and run one.
But yeah, so travel isn't a huge thing for us.
But in the future, I can see it being something and there's options, right?
So there's options on these platforms, you can put your store on vacation and you can
still sell things on eBay and you know, it'll just say, hey, you're not going to get shipped
until whenever you decide to come back.
So I think I think people maybe have to utilize that option a little bit more vacation mode
on eBay that need time away.
And you know, maybe you just need a week off from it.
And that's perfectly fine.
Don't think, you know, it's the end of the world if you have to take time off.
You know, it happens all the time.
I've been ever since I quit CVS and not being around sick people all the time.
My immune system doesn't exist anymore.
So I've had, you know, solid two months where I was really, really sick and I couldn't function
at all.
And I didn't have a merchant fulfilled an eBay store bill to the point I do now.
But if that happens, I will be putting them on vacation, even though my storage unit is
only, you know, a seven minute drive down the road.
I timed it.
You can listen to Freebird will still be playing.
If it comes on when you leave the storage unit to happen the one night.
And I said, I wonder if I can make it home before Freebird's over.
And it was still going by the time I parked.
But I will put it on vacation and kind of focus on getting better, feeling better instead
of dragging myself out to the unit, you know, with bronchitis or something like that.
So that's my take on time off.
And I think people need to utilize it more often to take some days to yourself.
Do you have like a certain day off?
Like, do you have a day off a week?
Not necessarily.
I have hours I take off like to do this podcast.
This is a lot of fun for me, guys, if you didn't know, I like enjoy this.
I'm not a day off isn't like, you're not there and the employees aren't there.
Or maybe you're there, but you're just doing like little odds and ends because we're always
going to be working right.
That's every day, you know, customer service is going to pop up or, you know, like tomorrow,
the holiday, I'll just be cleaning up the storage unit, something along those lines.
I mean, it's not really work, but you're still working.
I would say it's Sundays actually, because there's no post office on Sunday.
So it's a lot less.
There's no time sensitive thing that happens on Sundays.
Same for when there's a federal holiday, there's nothing time sensitive other than the listings,
but that's just an everyday thing.
I usually get those done earlier.
It's been later these days because I'm messing with employees and certain things come up
and I have to stop my listings to go handle that.
So but normally Sundays on federal holidays and Wednesdays will be Wednesdays because
I'm going to pick up my sourcing again now that I'm getting closer to the Amazon launch
window.
So Sundays, Wednesdays and federal holidays are my less intensive work days.
And again, when we do the podcast or the group meetups, I also do a media call and an Amazon
call on Thursdays and Friday evenings with my other group.
I consider that time away, even though my time away is education or hanging out with
other resellers and figuring out ways to do things better along with our call here in
the Use Book Guide group on Sundays.
So if we hadn't kind of narrow this down to a list, health is first because if you're
not here, your business doesn't matter.
Your business has to be second.
I know some people sit here and argue that social life has to be second and spiritual
life has to be second.
But if you want to have a business and treat it as a business and support yourself from
that business, I guess it would be a full time business.
It has to be second before the social life.
Now if you're doing this part time, then maybe you can flip flop the social and spiritual
life with your business as long as you're accepting the fact you're doing this part
time and you're going to get part time results from it.
No, no doubt.
So an interesting thing here, you mentioned part time specifically.
I want to break it down even more to the hobbyist, the person that just dabbles here and there.
Maybe they do eBay or Amazon once a week or once every other week kind of deal.
He could even make it your business at the bottom rung of that totem pole, honestly,
if you're a hobbyist.
Yeah.
I mean, you could forget eBay.
You just do Amazon.
You could travel the country and list something, throw it in your RV and if it sells, it sells
or you can send it off to Amazon and not even have to worry about it.
So yeah.
I guess somebody like Tommy Boyd.
Hey Tommy.
He just travels around for funsies, right?
If he finds books, he ships them in or list them up on eBay.
If he doesn't, he doesn't.
But his main thing is travel.
The hobbyist side of it comes in where he just finds a cool thing here or there and
maybe he does it.
And then he does whatever on his trip.
Like, let's say he went up to New York.
Maybe he wants to see Niagara Falls.
He strikes me as a Niagara Falls kind of guy, whatever.
And then he could do some book sourcing if he wanted to or not even.
That's what a hobbyist can do.
You have all the options at that point.
So it looks completely different depending where you're at in your business and where
you want it to be.
So I do 100%.
If you're full time, it's got to be your health and then your business.
There's no chance you can throw in social life before your business or travel before
your business if you want to do this full time.
Down the road, maybe there's times where, I mean, even when you start out, if you're
doing this full time, you can plan vacations and things like that.
But I'm talking about priority wise.
Travel can't be a priority over your business.
Social life can't be a priority over your business if you want it to be a full time
thing.
And like we said, that changes from part time to hobbyist and you just find out what works
for you.
There's plenty of people that travel and do Amazon and make lots and lots of money and
have no warehouse, no nothing.
You don't even need it.
You just need an address for Amazon to have on file.
You can never even be in one single location.
You can just continuously travel.
I mean, there's plenty of people do it.
Look at some of these online arbitrage guys.
They're never even in America anymore.
They're just living in Colombia and wherever they want to live.
And hey, they have a business that runs for them.
So hey, it is what it is.
It's crazy the opportunities.
And you do see a lot of it on YouTube.
A lot of it is it's grinding content.
A lot of the reselling stuff isn't fun, kind of laid back, easy going.
It's like, well, you got to get out there and do this and this if you want to see these
results.
And I would argue that there's always a different way for every single person to get results
in their reselling business.
Just because Johnny B has a warehouse of 10,000 books doesn't mean I need a warehouse of 10,000
books.
I don't want that life.
And yeah, sure.
If 10,000 books came upon me, I would scan them and get rid of them.
I'd probably send most of them to him.
But it just goes to show that you can have a completely different business model within
a business model to accommodate your time off.
And if he's making sales again on the call here, and if it comes down to it, prioritize
your health over going to pack an eBay order or Amazon order, you can always message the
customer and say, hey, something came up.
Life happens, right?
Things happen.
And that was one of the big reasons I wanted to get out of CVS was because what happens
if something happens to Deb or one of the cats and I got to go handle it right now or
like, you know, maybe for you as a family member, although I think you should get a
few cats, you know, for the book warehouse there, you know.
I'm allergic to them.
I can't.
I'll get a dog.
I've been thinking about getting a dog actually.
Listen, you get the cats.
I'll send you a lifetime supply of Benadryl so I don't got to hear you whine about it.
It's only if I touch them to be fair, because I'm actually allergic to their saliva.
So as long as I don't touch them, I can be around them.
No book master, bookkeeper in the history of the universe didn't have any cats.
I mean, that's just rule number one.
I'll keep it in a cage or like a bird cage.
And I guess, yeah, I could do that.
You're not.
You know, on the topic of travel, I've actually been thinking about maybe going to some reseller
conferences because there's plenty of them out there.
And again, that's an excuse for me to travel, socialize, interact with people, but still
keep it business related.
Also, I can write it off.
That's the beautiful part.
But that's how my business mind thinks is, okay, I do want part of a social life and
this is a way to do it while maintaining my business and educating and networking with
folks.
I have been thinking about those kind of things.
I can't do it right now because I'm still building infrastructure, getting more employees
and that kind of thing.
But I think maybe next year I could be able to do those kind of things.
I would very much look forward to those kind of things, but I'm not there yet myself.
So Johnny B's a convention guy.
Personally for me, I'm not going to know.
I mean, maybe maybe if it's in my backyard, I'm going to a reseller convention.
If there's a meetup in central Pennsylvania.
But other than that, I don't know.
I hear enough about everybody else's business in my line of work.
So I kind of get the feel I need when it comes to hearing about other people's successes
and downfalls.
And that's kind of just what I see at a convention.
That's what it would be like.
Hey.
All right.
Super nerdy stuff.
I'll talk about my previous job for a moment.
Part of my thing was going to conventions, but those conventions were fun.
A, there was a lot of booze.
B, they were gaming conventions because for those who don't know, I worked for a third
party RPG role playing games.
Not the dirty thing you're thinking about those listening here.
Company.
So we go around and drink all weekend, play games all weekend, and actually do some networking
and make some really, really sweet business deals.
Those are the kind of things are fun.
So in a reseller convention, I think the booze would still be there.
Unless it was in Vegas, maybe some games were probably not games, but also some networking
and those deals would still be done.
As far as how do you do this better?
I've been thinking about this.
What do you think person A, B, and C I really respect and want your opinion on?
There would have to be slot machines for me to go since I don't drink.
So if Gantling was involved and there was a reseller convention, you'd totally be there.
I hear it.
Yeah, I would just be sitting over at the penny slots though, just spending all my reselling
monies away.
What's the one that you go out in the water?
A cruise?
Yeah, those casino cruise thing.
Well, they don't really go out in the water.
It's kind of like a dock and you just go out in the boat.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Oh man, those are fun.
I've been to a couple of those.
Yeah, so I think you just got to prioritize what means the most to you.
Self is not negotiable.
After that, you kind of can sit here and argue either way.
Just depends what you want.
But if you're sick or something, you got to put yourself first.
And especially if you're just doing this solo, right?
You know, Johnny B didn't have any employees.
You know, I don't hear from them for three days.
It's like, what happened to him?
Is he still ticking?
Like it's a little different, right?
When you have employees or you have a significant other that you can kind of rely on or just
tell you like, hey, you know, like you look like crap.
You need to pump the brakes.
And I'm sure if you walked in there and you were miserable and you were coughing and you
look crappy, your employees would probably tell you, dude, just go sit down, relax in
the corner.
Like, well, we'll handle this.
And, you know, you kind of have somebody to watch over you in that essence of it.
But like, if you're just doing it by yourself, I can easily see you just, you just keep pushing
yourself to a point where you're going to break sooner or later, your body, your mind,
everything's going to break down.
If you don't allow yourself to have time away and time off from the business, whether that's
going for a walk, whether that's, you know, two days off a week, three days off a week,
one day off a week, there has to be certain times where you can step away, do something
you enjoy and not worry about the business.
Now, I think it was Jim Henson.
He died the exact way you're talking about.
He got pneumonia.
A, he didn't want to go to the hospital because he didn't want to be an inconvenience to the
people at the hospital and he was working and what he died of pneumonia.
And that was, I respect him Henson a lot for a lot of what he did.
And that is a tragic end to a great man in my opinion.
So don't be that guy.
Don't be Jim Henson.
Yeah, don't be that guy.
Put your health over everything.
You'll be fine.
Everything will fall into place from there.
Just because Johnny B wants to be up at 5am doesn't mean to use book guys up at 5am.
So now Johnny B is up at 5am.
He'll be thinking like, man, I bet Mike's sleeping in bed right now and he's 100% correct
at least for a few more hours every day.
And the second thought caught in my mind, it'd be really fun to call Mike right now
at 5am.
Do not disturb dude.
That call ain't getting through no lines.
Thanks for listening to another episode of the resellers mindset podcast.
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