¶ Small Business Success Stories
Hello everybody , this is Mark Zweig , and I'm here with my buddy , eric Howerton . Good morning , good morning , and this is another episode of Big Talk About Small Business . Now he says business . I don't know why do you do that ?
I mean it's just trying to be cool . I guess it's part of the fight .
You don't need to try to be cool . Thanks , man , you are cool . Okay , everybody hear that , everybody .
Okay , not that my proclamation means anything , by the way , the other day , when you made your LinkedIn post which I appreciate about my birthday party and stuff but you said that I was officially retired from White Spider .
Is that not true ?
No , it is . But I mean , like a lot of folks have been coming up and saying so I heard you're retired , now what are you doing ?
Yeah , oh yeah , I used to get that all the time too .
It's like I just have six other jobs .
Yeah right , You're in the same boat . That's just one .
I'm not playing golf in retirement ?
No , no , we also have a guest here with us today , and this is one of my former students , jacob Ray . What's up , jacob ? Hey , how are you ? Good man ? So Jacob is one of those guys . He's very unassuming , he sat out there .
I had him for two classes , and my first class with him was last fall and you know he's out there in the audience and and I don't remember if it was after class or whatever he told me about this little business he has and um , so he and I got together and I learned more about it . I was absolutely blown away by this guy .
Yeah , I'm telling you . So I'm assuming that hanging out in class , just , you know , not talking much , not causing any ruckus .
Exactly . But when you see what he's done , with what he's done in an area that so many other people have done poorly , it's really impressive . So , jacob , why don't you tell everybody a little bit about yourself and what you do ? That is making you a whole bunch of money .
Yeah , so I buy and resell stuff online . It can be Facebook or eBay mainly , but I normally just go to garage sales . Normally just go to garage sales . I'll go to thrift stores and estate sales and pawn shops and try to buy stuff at a reasonable margin to where I can make some good money .
So let's just cut right to the chase .
The first four months of this year . What kind of revenue did you do and how much did you net on it ?
I don't know about first four months , but I'm doing like okay , so far this year . I know you know your numbers well we can pull it up really quick I'm
I'm not a hundred percent sure , um , but it's definitely a lot more than it was last year that's the main thing , that matters , right yeah , I think I was doing like uh five to six thousand dollars in sales a week . I'm not quite sure what it'll .
I'm on target to do like 340 350 000 so in sales for the whole year and then like 200 to 250 000 uh in net sales after shipping and all that stuff , and then probably 150 to 200 000 in profit , depending on . Can you believe ?
I love it , I freaking love it . How many people do you have on your ?
team . Uh , just my sister . She does packages for me .
Love that yeah it's just gone straight up , and when you see what he does with his money , that's the other thing he's got . Not only does he have everything fully accounted for , he always carries his laptop around with it .
Yeah , tell us about what you do with your money uh , I reinvest like 80 of it into the stock market and then , through the dividends , I drip , which just means that it reinvests the dividends that it pays me back into the stock market . So I normally just don't touch any of that . And then I opened up .
My dad helped me set up a solo 401k , so I was able to pay myself through that as well . Um , so just trying to save as much as I can while I don't have as many expenses .
That's awesome , man . Yeah , so when you buy your stocks , are you making your own decisions on which ones you're buying ?
I can't take that credit . My dad loves doing that kind of stuff and kind of just took it over for me .
Uh , but it's mainly . But you give him the money and he invests for you .
Yeah , it's , he pulls it out of my account and just does it for me . Basically , well , you got an online online account .
You track everything right . Yeah , so just out of curiosity . You've always been willing to share your numbers . How much you got salted away ? Now you just graduated , okay , I ?
think with my card around a quarter of a million that you what that you say in cash , yeah , no , yeah , job running .
That's what I'm talking about you see why I like this guy ? Yeah , he's just amazing . Okay , awesome , man . And and your plan now is to what ?
just keep on doing this , because I mean whenever I was a , because it's rocket shipping whenever I was a freshman , I only made like 30 000 , and then it just only made 30 000 as a freshman doing this .
Yeah and then so where are you at now , though ? Are you great ? Have you graduated ? Yeah , I just graduated , like two weeks ago okay , so in the last four , four years ago , basically you're making thirty thousand a year . Yeah , I started .
I started as a freshman in high school and then I was just making a couple hundred bucks and then it just slowly kept on to where . Whenever I gave a presentation in your class that previous year I did a hundred thousand in profit . And now it's gonna in profit ?
is that after paying yourself as well , or are you concerned like ?
that's paying , that's his yeah all right , yeah , or whatever .
Right , yeah , yeah , I got you . I'm keeping all the money that I get besides paying my sister .
Yeah , is she full time ?
No , she maybe gets like 10 to 15 hours in .
Yeah .
Because she has to do like 120 , 150 packages a week .
So , however long that takes her , where's your ?
fulfillment center at . I have two storage units in Johnson .
That's my fulfillment . So tell these guys what exactly you buy . Now , I know you've been trying to push your average sale up and you got it up to around 90 bucks now , don't you ?
Around there . Yeah , it's like 80 .
Okay , so you figured out like . You want to have an average sale that's higher . Is that kind of your point ? You want to be able to sell more expensive things , yeah .
So , unless I want to hire somebody else to like take pictures for me , I have been sticking to trying to still find as many items , but just the more expensive ones and not like if I had another employee that was taking pictures for me , I would pick up a lot more stuff um to like fill up their time , which I'm starting to .
So , guy , like there's like niches in what I do like . So some people know a lot about like antiques , some people know a lot about like name brand clothing or like electronics , which is mainly what I do . Um , but this guy is like really , really knowledgeable in toys and with some of the stuff I brought you I'll show you um .
But he's just like really , really good at like he loves playing with legges and like um doing that kind of stuff . So I don't have that patience to like build something and then sell it for 100 , whatever . I can just take pictures of things that already cost 100 and I don't have to put any time into it .
But he can uh , instead of just listing it all as a lot like , I brought a bunch of gi joes from the 80s and those are really good and lots . But if you you individually put the GI Joe and you put the gun that it goes with it and , like all that stuff , it just uh they sell them individually that the value just goes up a lot .
So that's how I'm learning with him that I can make a lot more money off some of the stuff that I'm selling as well .
So show us some of the stuff you're saying . I mean , I think it's interesting .
So I went to this estate sale uh yesterday and spent 230 and we drafted everything and there were 61 items and it was four thousand dollars worth of stuff for 230 spent . And then I paid cameron to mess with all these toys and take pictures for me and paint them 150 . So I'm all in like close to 400 for four thousand dollars worth .
And that's like before taking offers and shipping , because I do free shipping . But , um , some really fun like retro stuff cool .
Show us what you did this . I remember back in the day playing with those things , man yeah , this is pretty cool .
You never , never , see it in the box . Um , this is just a power glove for the nes and they're notorious for not working anyways . Like this was a terrible product . Um , but collectors love it .
So , like , still in the box yeah just the glove itself , like if it didn't have the box and the manual and everything would have been like 200 bucks roughly um , but since it had the box and everything , I'm gonna try to charge like 500 hopefully . But they only wanted 15 dollars at an estate sale for this that . That was 10 minutes from this location .
What Jacob does is he mates up the demand with the item . The marketplace is so inefficient , yeah , like , if somebody wants that , where are they going to find that ? Right , right , you know what I mean ? Yeah , if you sold it at a yard sale , you're going to get 15 .
But if you get 15 bucks , I probably would have charged five bucks Totally or given it away .
Yeah , I'm giving it away . I mean , if they didn't sell it by two , it'd be like here you want a power glove and that's that's . You know , a lot of people yeah , a lot of people will either do that or just donate the stuff , oh yeah , that's .
And then I find it at the just take it in boxes over to goodwill or potter house ? Yep , exactly , but um so , wow , that's a great find . So what else did you get so ?
this is like a super , super old atari system . I listed this as untested , not working , uh for 200 , just not knowing anything about it . Um , and then that is , has it sold yet or you don't know yet so I have like 150 things drafted on my store and I try to list 15 things a day .
That way ebay , like ebay , promotes stores that are more active and constantly listing every single day . So if I listed all 150 but then didn't work a week , then it wouldn't promote my items as much .
So that's what I've learned over time , figured out a little bit about the algorithm .
It's important he knows the like . Whenever he buys anything , he immediately looks it up and sees how many of them have sold . Yeah , so he gets a sense of the volume um the demand for it by looking at the quantity of sales of that item on eBay .
So a lot of these like these are Gen 1 Transformers from the 80s . This was like all in the same bag together and he was able to like find every single piece and part that went with it . There was instruction manuals with a lot of them , so he was able to figure find every single piece and part that went with it .
There was instruction manuals with a lot of them , so he's able to figure it out . But , like just this fighter plane uh , I think he drafted it for like 150 bucks just for like this one little thing and these were like original gi joes with their guns um , those are many yeah , so those were came out in like 1982 to 84 range .
Yeah , um , so yeah , and each of these are different , but the lowest one is like 20 and the highest one is like 100 and I have like 40 of these and I was paying like 10 for a bag of 10 and each of them are at least 20 .
You just find a bag like a bag of 10 and you're like are at least 20 . So you just find a bag like a bag of 10 and you're like oh , those are GI Joe's . I have a suspicion this is going to be worth something . Yes , you buy it , and then you go back home and then you start investigating what you actually bought .
Yeah , so with like Facebook marketplace , I'm able to scout out like garage sales and estate sales before time . So this estate sale opened up at nine o'clock . I woke up at 3 15 and was at this person's driveway at four o'clock .
Yes , with my chair and my and my girlfriend , I dragged her along with me , um so you're the first one there yeah , the next person showed up at 4 30 and then there was somebody at 5.30 and then they slowly started showing up throughout the day . But I mean to came out .
What did you do ? You camped like in your car .
It felt weird . It was pitch black , it was in Bellevue or not Bellevue , bentonville , downtown . So it was a moving sale and they just wanted to sell everything that they had sale and they just wanted to sell everything that they had . And , um , I've I've been to like three estate sales before and I'm slowly starting to learn like that they're really good .
Um , but so me and my girlfriend pulled up to this house and I felt so weird setting up lawn chairs in this person's driveway at four o'clock in the morning you set up a lawn chair I thought I was gonna get like shot or something , I wasn't for sure . Like it was super sketchy like .
But yeah , we this nice older couple came like 30 minutes later and we were just talking to them for like four hours before more people showed up . But wow , to camp out for four or five hours , then work for another four or five hours , listing all this stuff to make that amount is pretty
¶ Reselling Vintage Items for Profit
good at all . And this is like very nostalgic retro stuff that um is very , very in demand for people .
That , like my dad , I was texting my dad after I was super excited , telling him about this sale that I went to and everything , and he was like send me some pictures of some of these transformers that you got , because he used to have some and he had like three or four of the ones that I had and like , so that's , it's kind of the same thing , like with
vintage clothing , like people that went to the championship game like want to have that shirt because they were actually there and they'll pay me more than right , a lot of other people , but you have no idea what these estate sales .
What's going to be there ?
obviously that has been his primary vehicle , yeah , in the past ?
it has not .
No , okay , no , I've only discovered this yeah , I've only been to three estate sales . Um , I mainly go to like citywide garage sales . So , like bella vista had their citywide like two or three weeks , maybe a month ago , and there was five or six hundred houses participating .
So I brought like two or three thousand bucks and just tried to go to as many houses as I could for like three days straight , like thursday , friday and saturday , and I spent all the money . But I got a lot too , I think , for that one weekend , which that they do that every single year .
Um , so every single city for the most part in this area will do one city wide every single year , and so that's how I'm able to get a lot of inventory . Um , but I think for the bella vista one I spent like $2,000 to do like $8,000 roughly Nice . But people like are just giving away stuff .
Like I can find Carhartt jackets , patagonia like sweaters , whatever , for like $1 or $2 a piece and sell them for $50 . So it's just like people don't want it anymore or like they've lost 100 pounds and they can't fit into this anymore and so they're trying to sell their old stuff .
So it's just really good how many items you have listed on ebay at any one time typically uh , I currently have like 650 listed currently and in the last three months I've sold over 1200 .
So my ebay's still a lot broke . Oh , yeah , yeah , it's alive and well . My , my inventory completely flips over twice in three months . So I'm just constantly having to get this kind of stuff because this is the stuff that if I , if I listed this , it probably would sell before the podcast was over , like that kind of thing .
Dang . What kind of that was a strong statement , I know .
We can try it if you want . That'd be kind of a cool experiment . But this is a little bit of a departure for you . I mean , you were big on Goodwill bins . Is that still a big part of what you do ? Yeah , so explain how that works for people , because I never heard of it until you educated me .
It's there .
It's maybe a five , 10 minute drive from here and basically what they do is they just push out tubs of inventory like big it's as big as this table a tub with like rolling uh wheels , and they'll roll out like eight of them at a time and all the inventory is stuff that , like the goodwills tried to sell in their own stores for like absurd prices .
They've started marking stuff up because they see resellers but they don't like do product research and like they just put , like they see Patagonia , so they put 50 bucks on it and unless somebody is walking in the door and wants that exact thing , they're not going to sell it for even $20 .
It's an inefficient marketplace Again , the real buyer that doesn't find that they're walking in , yeah , and that's what's nice about eBay is because people are specifically looking for that item and I can charge what the going market rate is for yeah you can put in the brand name that pops up in the results because your store is doing so well .
eBay is like this is a trusted seller .
You can hire the results that my dad gave me . It was a ski jacket and it was the same jacket that one of the guys in dumb and dumber had , like Jeff . Um , what's his name , bridges ? No , he wasn't a dumb and dumber .
Um .
Jeff Bridges ? No , jeff , um , shoot I , I can't remember . Um , he was the guy who was on the TV news show and all that anyway . So I just put on their dumb and dumber jacket , yeah , and I got a ridiculous amount of money for it , it's , you know , because somebody was searching for it .
And that's so . There's another niche that people do is vintage clothing and cause that's like extremely popular with college students and like I'm sure your daughter like wants vintage clothing , like if she could well they wear .
So yeah , my girls will wear like vintage rock band shirts exactly , and I'll quiz them too , like they'll walk in . One of them walked in with the door shirt and I , okay , stop , give me three songs by the Doors right now , or you need to take that shirt off and change it .
You know , I mean , they're like I don't know and I'm like why do you have that on ? Because it's cool , it's like it was blasphemy man .
I know , jeff Daniels , that's what I was thinking of . Okay , Jeff Daniels , it's like the . Acdc shirts though .
Yeah , yeah , yeah . Those are extremely popular , I'm sure the original ones , thanks to Beavis and Butthead .
Yeah , that helped . So these bins now . So they've got these they bring out . You said like eight of them every 20 minutes or something .
It kind of depends . It's normally around every hour .
And then people are just all lined up just to rummage through these things yeah , like you basically and how do they sell the product then ?
um , so basically they push everything out and then there's normally between 50 to 100 people like that are there at a time normally , so it gets pretty busy . Uh , because most people want to look at the new product that nobody else has dug through and probably 95% of it's trash .
But there's multiple different people going for , like , there's older ladies that have antique booths that they'll grab like house decorations and sell them there . Or there's people that sell electronics , like me , or books , and there's just a whole bunch of different toys , that kind of stuff . How do they price ? that though so they pay by the weight .
So basically , um , like if I found this , which I have found one gen 1 transformer at the bins before , okay , um , but this would be like maybe 50 cents at the bins , but normally I'm grabbing like I actually have some stuff that I got from the bins . It's just very , very random stuff that people want .
I've sold this about 10 times and it doesn't look like anything really , but it's a kid's like car seat , booster seat , I don't know , it's something , something like that , but it sells for 40 bucks and I probably paid like a dollar for it I mean , what is it ?
you don't even know what the thing is and you're selling it not really it's .
It's a booster seat for the car , but like I have like dyson head like this is 50 bucks 50 bucks , because somebody doesn't want to buy a 500 dyson to replace just one thing that's broken on their uh vacuum , so that kind of stuff , and so you bought this by the pound yeah , it's like what do you pay by the pound .
Uh , the camera it's like a dollar , 50 dollar , 80 a pound , so this is maybe a dollar , dollar fifty , something like that . Just random railing stuff like that is , can you ?
believe that the kind of stuff you're awesome . I love it man . Yeah , it's hustling man it is , it's .
It's definitely hustling . Now what about pawn shops ? I know you bought stuff from them .
Yeah , how do you do that Every time I ?
go in one , the stuff all looks bad and it's all way too high . You never buy it , yeah .
So that's the kind of I don't buy those like $40 or $50 items because the profit margins like it's not worth the pawn shop's time to mess with something like that .
So I'll be going after like things that they have priced for a thousand dollars , like cameras or super high-end music equipment , like these kind of mics , like that kind of stuff that just costs a lot of money , um , and so it's kind of like goodwill and like those kind of places where the only traffic they're getting is people that walk into their door .
Um , so if some there , if somebody pawned this camera to them for 150 bucks and they're trying to sell it for a thousand and uh , it doesn't sell for like a year , I can offer them 500 bucks and they'll probably take it , and then I can sell that camera on eBay for a thousand and a week .
Like so just where it's been sitting for them for an entire year . But just since I can sell online , it'll sell pretty quick for the most part . So that is how I make a lot of money on pawn shops is just try to buy stuff that they've been sitting on there . It's a really good sale .
So I don't understand , like that kids booster thing Like this intrigues me . You don't , you don't know what that thing really is .
So I don't kind of know , yeah , like .
but then how do you sell that though ? How did I mean ?
just cause you take pictures of it and people I don't know , like I didn't know looking at this bag , that this was Dungeons and Dragons figures . But there's this thing called Google Image as well , where you can just take a picture of any single item and it will tell you what it is a model number on it .
I can look it up and see how many are listed versus how many are sold in the last 90 days , and that just tells me the demand of the item and if it's worth my investment so if you buy that kind of stuff , like at the bed , you get back to your storage and then you're .
Then you have to go do some research , like you're just talking about . Do you end up getting rid of some things because you don't like it doesn't have have any listings ? You're like , oh man , that's actually trash .
Yeah . So , like at garage sales , like the citywide garage sales that I go to , sometimes like I'm just trying to move as fast as I can because there's other resellers in the area that I know that are doing the exact same thing , so you got some competition going on , yeah exactly , and there's regulars at the Goodwill bins .
We set up in a line like chairs and we just sit and just wait and we just talk . But yeah , for the bins every single place is a little different . At the bins I'm able to look items up because it takes them a little while to push out the next section and I can do some research and I normally just draft the items there .
Um , most people are just like sitting around like talking , but I'm like drafting it that way whenever I get home , because I'm there from nine to four most days drafting , so you're going like on ebay , you're already making his ad yeah , making his ad getting ready .
That way you get all I have to do is take pictures whenever I get home and then that way I can stop work around like five , six , instead of researching all those items whenever I get home and take
¶ Estate Sale Profits and Partnerships
a long time . But , like at this estate sale I I waited from four to nine just to get into the garage and I was out of the garage in my car at 9 15 with all of this stuff like .
So it only took me 15 minutes to get this stuff out and then it took me another six hours , with the help of my buddy , to list all this stuff and I like this is just like , it's just rando stuff . You , you never , ever see this kind of stuff like you never see inbox . Uh , castlevania like this is over 100 just in that condition .
But if it was loose , just cartridge only , it would have been play those on .
Uh , the nes the way , I don't know what that is it's a nintendo nintendo entertainment system .
Yeah , go , mark jeez dude , I don't know . I sold it on .
PlayStation the other day . What model ? Do you remember ? What model ?
it was . It was an Xbox , okay , xbox 360 .
Okay , so he bought one from you .
Yeah , I went to his garage and bought some stuff .
I sold him like four or five bins worth of crap .
He's not going to tell you how much profit he made , he'll make , he'll make money on it all , but that's fine . I I wanted to get rid of it spa versus spa .
That's so old school , yeah , so so you're even getting into motorcycle parts like like uh , yep , just basically .
Anything that people spend a lot of money on I'm interested in , so as long as it's not medical . So , ebay , there are some things that you're not allowed to sell , like guns , guns or any medical equipment , because if I sell somebody a respirator and it doesn't work , then they can sue me and I'm not trying to have that happen .
So , um , yeah , but at the bella vista citywide I went to this garage sale and he had a bunch of Harley parts that he only used like for 500 miles and then decided to get new ones . I don't know what the deal was .
So you just picked the Harley parts , you bought them , came back researched it .
I did a quick lookup because he was asking a decent amount and I didn't want to spend . I think I spent like a thousand at his garage sale , uh , but I didn't want to spend that without where are you when I have my garage sales right ?
I'm like I'm sitting there all day and I made 400 bucks or whatever right this sucks , you know .
Probably gave five thousand dollars for the stuff away , but so a thousand bucks for the harley parts and how long did those take to sell um , so I sold one like trailer , uh hitch attached to like an rv , that way you can have your bikes behind them or something behind it , uh , tow bar , and I sold that for a thousand .
So I made my money back just on that one thing . But I was selling like the wheels , like a front wheel to harley sold for 800 and multiple parts just like added up to where .
It was just ridiculous do you do commissions like ? Would you ever do commissions with people ?
uh , it just depends on what it is worth it yeah , I haven't gotten into like any connections to like , let's say , canon or something was just like hey , I want you to sell my cameras that we don't sell on the floor like buy it at cost and then I'll sell it like that hasn't happened to me yet okay , buy it bulk , but it could happen .
That's sort of's sort of a supplier .
If , like I , didn't have to go anywhere and I just if the margins were good enough for me to just do that yeah , so your sister , like her role is , so you're doing all the the picking , you come back , you take , you take pictures , you do the research yourself , and then but your sister's just fulfilling , so you get the order in .
But your sister's just fulfilling , so you get the order in from eBay and then she goes and grabs it out of the storage and drops it .
She just called me 30 minutes ago and said that she got all the packages and she's going to do all that for me .
She loaded it up and take it to the post office and drop it .
Yep , it's so simple , I love it post office and drop it .
Yep , it's so simple . I love it . But it's nice because she lives right across the door from me , so she can ask me whatever or be in her pjs doing packages instead of going yeah into a workplace and doing the same thing , so she enjoys it it's a great business , I I .
it just blows me away
¶ Entrepreneurial Lessons and Work Ethic
that you guys . So why do so many people do so poorly at this ? You think it's like , well , I've tried buying it , I made 500 bucks a month and I gave up on it . I had to go get a job at Starbucks . Yeah , what are they doing ?
wrong . The real reason on why people fail is because they don't understand the sell-through rate with the demand , sell-through rate with the demand .
So like you can look up an item and if it's not selling but like they're still like good value , like if it's a hundred dollar item and there's a thousand of them listed but only three or four of them have sold in the last three months , that item's just never going to sell or it's not worth what those people are asking .
So people get excited and they'll buy stuff .
Like my lady , die beanie babies or whatever yeah .
Those are those actually . That's the funny story with the beanie baby stuff , Cause I have a bunch of them .
Yeah , a bunch of beanie babies . Yeah , they were from Christian Anna when they were little . I mean , really they're theirs , but you sell them , daddy makes profit . I , but you'll sell them . Daddy makes profit . I've got , I've got some precious moment , lots of precious moment .
Stalls wonder what those are worth , little figurines , my late they're not worth anything but we'll be by later .
We'll get them off the ground .
I sold one of them for $40 . That's why that's stupid .
But with those Beanie Babies and also VHS tapes , that's like actually pretty interesting . They used to launder money through those on eBay . That's why they were so high . Yeah , so people , people would buy them , thinking like I can sell this one beanie baby for a thousand dollars , but the only ones selling were certain people .
And it was the exact same thing like and if you did more research , you could see that exact same beanie baby being sold for 15 , but like there were other comps selling for a thousand . Interesting .
So you really have to know through beanie babies on the funny it's like I'm a drug dealer man , I gotta get some of this .
I gotta convert some of this into legit cash . So I buy my buddy's beanie baby .
Yeah , that's inflated , but that's wow that's how a lot of people fail at reselling is because they'll invest a bunch of money and then their products aren't selling and they get discouraged because they don't know what they're doing .
But that was the same way with me , like I very first started out selling video games , but it wasn't like these kind of really nice video games , it was just like your basic 10 to 60 video game um that I could get at pawn shops .
I learned that pawn shops would , instead of individually pricing out each game , they would sell every single wii game for three dollars and mar Kart . Somebody's going to pay me $30 for that instead of $3 for Wii Fit . Nobody wants to play a fitness game , but everybody wants to play Mario Kart because , everybody likes that game .
So that's how I learned as a freshman in high school like , hey , I can make some money doing this . And then I started realizing after I graduated high school like hey , I can make some money doing this . And then I started realizing after I graduated high school , like there's so much more money to be made from that exact same pawn shop .
But let me look at their cameras now and let me look at these other kinds of things you just kind of slowly graduated .
now you're yeah , now you can kind of . So you got you know . It's kind of like your analogy earlier , like about real estate , and a couple episodes ago it's like how do you know the real estate market ? Well , you look at it every single freaking day , right you ?
see how long things are on the market yeah , you see what they list for . You see what they sell for yeah , that's what he's doing .
Yeah , that's what you're doing .
You can all right . Yeah , are you worried that you're gonna get yourself too far afield from what you know ?
As you're strayed , you seem to have have opened up the the market for what you'll consider buying , because before you're pretty much staying focused on electronics and other certain items I guess cameras and things like that right yeah , yeah , I just learned that , like , taking risks are a really important thing .
Um so like , for example , if these weren't legit , gi Joes and I spent 200 bucks on it . Like that's , it's fine because I I would do the research and learn about why these were fake , and you will make that mistake again . I've learned from it and just move on , but that's just how I've learned .
I watch so many YouTube videos of people doing the exact same thing that I do , and it's free information . They're putting that information out like hey , just like this podcast . Like I'm selling all these GI Joes for good money .
If somebody watches this podcast and then knows that they have some up in their attic , they can make a quick thousand bucks on all of their original GI Joe stuff and it's just that information . I just constantly , instead of watching like sports or like that kind of stuff , I'm watching this kind of stuff or like that kind of stuff .
I'm watching this kind of stuff , um , and I just learned , like I just watched somebody on youtube selling this exact same thing for this and now I found it at the bins for 50 cents , like I'm gonna sell this like one story . There's this brand called cutco . I don't know if you're familiar with that and I had no idea about cutco and how expensive it was .
Anything about them ?
yeah , they're legit so I found , or I was watching this video and this guy was selling just a knife block to where you put your knives in right , for like 100 , 200 bucks depending . So there's like bigger ones that can hold like 40 knives and those are worth like 400 .
And I had no idea about this and I didn't even know that the actual knives sell for like 50 to 100 bucks a piece per knife .
And the very next day I go to goodwill , the outlet , same place that I source at , and there was a cutco knife block sitting in there and I paid weight on it and it was pretty heavy , it was like 15 bucks but I sold it in one day for like 300 . And if I didn't watch that youtube video I wouldn't know , I wouldn't have even picked it up yeah .
So I want to stick on that point real quick . Like from a like an entrepreneur , like I'm aspiring existing , like you said something that to me that's really important you don't watch sports , you don't watch other things . You , you're like watching your trade , yeah , and I don't think a lot of people get that man .
Like you gotta , you gotta infuse yourself Like you can't you can't start a business , you can't immerse yourself , you can't start a business and still go home at five o'clock . Yeah , Watch the sports , eat dinner to sports , eat dinner , do all these standard social things . When I cut off at five , I don't even look at my email until eight Monday morning .
Yeah .
Okay .
But wait a minute , I should be making more money here yeah .
I'll do more if they pay me more . That's right . That's called like . That's your corporate job mentality . It's just not being an entrepreneur , it's not . Entrepreneurs are watching freaking YouTube videos constantly . You know , just freaking digging in the trade yeah , and getting up at 3 15 .
Yeah , bro , so they get there at four hustling , okay , hanging out a long chair how long is it going to take the typical 22 year old graduate to get up to where they make 200 000 a year ? Dude , I think about it . I mean most will never get there .
No , no , and I mean you know another thing on this is like and you , since you teach entrepreneurship right there's a lot of people that that have this aspiration to be their own boss and you know I'm one of the management on time . I want to make a lot of money , but they don't want to freaking hustle . That's what I love about your story man .
You've just been hustling , he is , he's just a hustler .
How do you get ?
$250,000 in your bank account Freaking hustle Right .
Not inventing anything new .
No , infuse yourself in hustle and don't watch sports and play golf .
I'm telling you , it's true , I never played golf either . I've played like three times in my life . Could it be fun to play golf ? Yeah , it could be . I mean , it's nice You're out there . You know , dude , back's too much time though , back in my spiderwebs man .
All I did was work , man . Yeah , I worked like a dog and I hate vacations , Hate them . I understand you want to go on vacation .
No , no , I don't . I hate vacations too . I guess it's something with entrepreneurs .
It is because you're always hustling . Well , he's got a new model , though , that you are going different places , but he's doing his job . He goes to different cities and picks yeah , I go to pawn shops .
My parents are retired and they have an rv so they just travel around . So it's kind of like a free hotel . So I just have a . I travel behind them with a u-haul and they went to florida for two weeks and I went to florida and then , like , worked up to nashville and came back and , uh , did that for two weeks .
I just filled up a u-haul and would take pictures in their rv and hang out with my parents at 22 , I mean it was your dad's retired already .
How old is he ?
he's 46 when did he retire ? Uh , like a year ago . He worked , he was the head of technology at Walmart .
Retired at 45 . Love it God , love him . Well done , yeah , I did that too , but then it didn't last very long . No , you can't sit still . No , you can't either .
No , and he's still taking these work calls . Somehow Walmart convinced him to still do something Be a consultant of some sort .
Yeah , so he's doing meetings .
a consultant of some sort , yeah . So he's like doing meetings for like 10 hours a week and yeah still doing pretty good .
Just 10 hours , but see , he was a good role model for you . He knew how to invest his money .
He's very smart and that's how like filing for taxes with something like this , where I like I can't keep up with the amount of receipts that I have just because , like I'm constantly buying stuff or paying cash at a garage sale , and like how is the government gonna know that I'm being 100 truthful unless , like I log every single item that I'm selling ?
And he's just really good at like teaching me these kinds of things and like setting up spreadsheets and that kind of stuff , and then show er , eric , your spreadsheet you have like on your sales and everything .
I think it's very interesting to just see how organized you are .
Which is another key to your success . A lot of the people probably don't do well , yep , I mean , that's how you can easily , Jacob , become a hoarder in your business . Absolutely , which is what I've . Have you ever watched the show Hoarders ? Easily , Jacob become a hoarder in your business . Absolutely , which is what I have you ever watched ? The show Hoarders ?
Oh God , yes , Dude . So I mean , that's what they do they go out and pick .
Did you ever ?
go . They don't ever sell .
Did you ever see my father-in-law's hoarding Sonia's dad ? Oh my God , was it bad . He moved from a 10,500 square foot house into like a 1,700 square foot house . Good Lord , he had so much shit in there that you could barely walk through it . Oh , that sucks , just case . And we thought we needed a dumpster .
You know when he died that we're going to have to be throwing all this stuff away , but it was actually all good stuff , yeah , but he just priced everything too high . He thought he was a pawn shop . You know , it's like selling lighters for 30 bucks , yeah and that's five bucks .
That's another thing . People , you know like , unless they're studying , they just don't know what the like . They can have a price in their mind of what it sells for .
But they don't always thought his shit was yeah you're always , you're focused on the market at all times .
that's what's driving your buying decisions , and I've been to garage sales like that , where they think their personal items are worth way more , and then I just walk away .
Yeah , sure .
Because it's like you can have it , you're never going to sell it .
Well , that's why he kept getting more and more . He's out there buying , but it's not selling .
Yeah yeah , yeah , you just end
¶ Hustling in the Resale Business
up a lot . You're a hoarder show show your show your archive . You keep your , your . This was your spread , my florida trip that I was just talking about how , um , I just would put like the price . Normally I would have like a description but , uh , this is just like a rough thing . But , um , I'm able to do like spent versus what I listed the item for .
So , like you can see , like some of these things , I'm going to a pawn shop spending 130 on one item to do 300 and then , um , so my cost of goods was nine thousand eight hundred dollars and net sales would be $21,000 . So it just , it takes a while for everything to sell , but I've definitely sold almost everything , like 90% of the stuff that was there .
That's pretty awesome . What kind of value of inventory are you carrying right now ?
My 600, . Let's see it should be like $60,000 roughly .
Is that at cost , or is that at what you're going to sell ? That's how much value .
Okay , it's at $51,000 . My entire store is at $51,000 worth of product .
That you're selling at retail .
Yeah , that's the retail value . That's what I have everything listed at .
I got you . Everything added up and what do you have in that ? You think ?
$10,000 , max $5,000 maybe so well .
So where do you go from here ? What are you going to do ? How ? What's the plan for the next five to ten years ?
just try to keep on scaling every single year is a new surprise for me , just because , like I was talking to your class and I was just like I don't know how I'm going to be able to double , because every single year I can see like my numbers are basically doubling and I'm like I don't know how , like if it's even possible to double these numbers .
But what I want to work on is the average sales price and then that it is on the track to double what I did last year , which was my best year . I'd sold 200 000 worth to do a hundred um and yeah .
So I think the next thing could be kind of like hiring more employees so that way they can be taking more pictures , like bringing on more inventory uh , doing that kind of thing or just like possibly getting into a different like field . I'm not really sure what I have in the plan yet .
I like that idea , that average price per item right , because it seems like you could be . You can make more money with just the same amount of work , so you get the people in . Now you're entering in a whole another realm .
Yeah , no , I agree it . It's just you get the same number of transactions , you just make more money on it . I also like the idea of buying in bulk , though , because that's got to take a lot of your time .
So instead of all the searching , you're just buying and listing find a couple of good suppliers like you're talking about , yeah , and just like take it off get all the returns from Amazon out of somewhere or whatever .
They throw tons of stuff .
Yeah A lot of these retail stores , right ? I mean , I remember there was one back in the day that had actually asked me to help them Like , just hey , come by , put all our stuff online , We'll you know we just want 20% , whatever you sell it for or whatever , or some sort of base price . You know that could be an option .
Yeah , for sure I think it was taking a while to load , but you were asking about my numbers for this year . So for the last 144 days I've sold 135,000 and netted after eBay fees and shipping , 95 . And I think on my spreadsheet I've spent like 20 to maybe 25,000 for this year so far , so not not too bad .
Yeah , not too bad at all . So your , your girlfriend , also does this . How is she doing ? Yeah , so she met her at . Joe Goodwill , Friends or something no .
I have not . It basically was like that kind of thing . I'm just saying that .
That was a pretty good one Met her at the Goodwill Friends Met her at the Loading Dock at Potter's House .
Met her at 4 am at somebody's driveway .
Sorry , jacob , no , you're fine . So , like I was saying , with like niches , people mess with different types of categories and stuff and I just it was like sophomore or junior year of college I started getting into vintage clothes and would shop at the Goodwill bins and saw people doing that , but didn't .
I was focusing on my electronics and didn't know that I could make money . Like I didn't learn about that yet and I was watching this girl listing vintage clothes . She would model the clothes , so I knew what she looked like and I dm'd her and was just like , hey , we should go on a thrifting date sometime and hang out nice god love you .
Well done , bro , that's what a great line yeah , let's go on a thrifting date , she uh ended up on your goodwill clothes modeling you and I are in the same line of work , that's good so .
So she uh , so tell us about her deal so she got laid off of her .
She was working at a pizza shop for a little bit and selling vintage clothes just on ebay or on instagram on the sides . Like other college people that followed her would buy like these things that she got at the goodwill bins . And then I started once she got laid off .
I started teaching her about ebay and how you're only picking up vintage clothes , but right next to that is a patagonia jacket that you can sell , or uh , arcteryx is something super expensive . Do you sell that jacket ? I ? sold you already yeah , I did hell yeah , sorry , dude is uh , what was that ? A barbore jacket , okay yeah pretty , pretty high .
That's a high end , yeah yeah , bro , I mean , would you just give that away ?
yeah , you just gave him that , like you didn't , I might as well have based on when I sold him all this crap for , but it doesn't matter . It's sitting in my garage getting dusty . Before that it was in the attic of our old garage .
Why don't you just go put it online ? You could have made some money on it . I have .
But yeah , so I taught her about that . So she does a lot of jackets . She does jackets and just basically any clothing . But that's also taught me .
Uh , now that I'm helping her like grab stuff , so we both go to the bins at the same time and we're helping each other out , so she'll go to one section of the eight and I'll go to the other and we just basically it's like having four hands and it's just a whole lot better , don't ?
you love that , I love it , dude , it's so good , it's just so simple .
It just blows my mind , but he does it yeah that's right shows up yes , show up , it is so much a business . It's just you can have all your freaking coffee shop bullshit plans . Okay , but who does it ?
Yep , and that's the same like who's waking up at three 15 .
Nobody , I am but I've got a prostate condition , so I wake up at three , 15 , four , 15 , five , 15 .
I would love to get you on video . I was up and hearing how you act when you get up , like god dang it well , first , I'm like tripping over the dog that's laying next to the bed .
Now , fortunately , we have a urinal in our new house , so I could just kind of yeah and it's got lights that go on automatically .
Have you been to his house automatically when you walk into the bathroom , the light goes on over the urinal , okay , so I could just kind of stand there and lean and I don't need to like worry about you know , standing there and yeah being overly accurate yeah , or being more awake .
Yeah , Because you can you kind of half sleep in this room . I am , I really am , it's fantastic , kind of weird , I mean . So you get up every hour .
No , I mean it's really closer to like every two hours . Yeah , it's like I got a baby .
Anyway , well , we were doing a podcast one time and you got hit by I'm telling you , it's terrible , like we were doing a podcast . I'm doing it online . Right , there's a guy online . It was with the jim's place guy , I guess yeah , that was sitting there talking . You just saw , mark , he just gets up and leaves the podcast .
I'm like , well , I mean , I don't know where he's going .
I already had like six cups of coffee and three iced teas before I set foot in here . I mean that's a problem . That could be a driver for the prostate condition . Let's get back to Jacob . He gets up and he does it . It's just a matter of doing it .
And you know , instead of just going home and like I think I'm just going to go to the game and get drunk all day and go out to the lake or whatever , he's just listing all this stuff . Yeah , Turning it into cash as fast as he can so he can go out and reinvest his money in your inventory and do it again .
I think I went to Dixon maybe like five times throughout college I had .
Yeah , but it's just boring in my opinion well , you're not building anything like you're just actually you're hurting yourself , your body and wasting time , wasting money . Yeah , yeah , well done , man . There's not many people that that can see that .
Yeah , you know , and I mean , I think you're , some of your totten's in life are the ones that are driving like you are . You're gonna be all right , bro .
Yeah , I don't know where he's going to go from here , but my guest tells me that there are going to be other opportunities that present themselves . Oh , hell , yeah , he'll be buying like train car loads of stuff at some point and making $10,000 a day . Okay , I did .
It's just in his blood . One thing I do have a question on your business , though , like the part that always kind of stops me is the postage . Like how do you calculate that ? Because you said you don't charge for postage on the ebay . Are you just assuming you're just going to assume that fee because that makes that helps you sell faster , obviously ?
yeah , I have shipped out like 10 or 12 000 items since I've been doing eBay , so over time you just learn how much something is going to cost to ship
¶ Shipping Services and Small Business Hustle
out . For the most part Like um , there's different shipping services . You have USPS , ups and FedEx , just a bunch of like different ones that have different rates .
So like , if I'm shipping out a dyson vacuum , I'm not going to ship that out usps because , um , that's mainly for like the lighter items , like those gi jokes or like video games , something that's not gonna weigh that much and they can put a bunch of packages in their uh , their car , and . But if it was fedex , they mainly ship out like bigger items .
So I would go through fedex and I may sell the dyson for 200 free shipping and pay 30 shipping but , it doesn't really for how cheap I'm getting it , it doesn't really matter that I'm doing free shipping yeah um , and I can include shipping with it or like charge shipping . I would just have to lower my price .
Yeah , and I think that your buyers , your market , like they , you know it's just one less thing that they're going to have to deal , deal with , right , yeah , and they know they're not going to get charged more . I mean , I know , if I buy a line and I'm always like , okay , add that to cart . Cart .
Proceed to shipping and then it's 20 , 20 bucks and then just exit out .
Yeah right , but if it's free shipping , I'm more inclined to buy , exactly you know . So , yeah , have you ever really lost your tail on the shipping part ? You have for sure .
Well , like what was it ? Like heavy items and stuff like that yeah , so like sometimes , um , just like pawn shops , I'll have an item that sits for a year .
That's like just not a good buy and , um , like I forget the exact item , but it was a pretty big and expensive or like a heavy item and I didn't sell it for more than like a hundred dollars and the dude was in Puerto Rico and it was like 110 bucks to ship .
So you learned , you know 48 continental States , right .
Exactly I . That's now your mark . Like you , you chiseled that out .
You don't do international uh , I do do international um . Ebay has a shipping program where you ship all of the international items to their facility in kentucky I think I can't remember the exact state , but but it ships out to eBay's facility . Ebay's employees check out the item , make sure it's all good and then they take care of all of that stuff .
So they'll ship it to China to the person that actually ordered it . Very cool , and I'm not liable if anything happens after it gets to the eBay facility , cool happens after it gets to the eBay facility , so that's pretty nice and that opens up my market to the whole world instead of just America .
Well , that Rolls-Royce bearing removal tool I told you may have to be .
That's going to be Rolls-Royce bearing removal . It's going to be a minute before that ever starts .
It may end up going to England . Yeah , If you need any help with what vehicle that ?
works . What the hell are you doing with the Rolls ?
Royce , Because I had two Rolls Royces okay .
When did you have two Rolls Royces ?
I just got rid of the last one , probably a year and a half ago .
You never told me you had a Rolls Royce , you never invited me to your house and I'm your freaking host .
You had the stars on your ceiling , sorry . No , I had old , old rolls . I'm not into that gotcha . They used to be classy , okay . Now they're like you know . Hey , I'm a rapper , I've got a rolls royce . It's bright orange , okay , no , that wasn't what I was into .
No , my last one was british racing green , with a beautiful like peanut butter colored leather with dark green piping oh , nice , see , you are car bike salesman like you just like yeah , you totally could .
No , why don't you get into this picking game , bro ?
I picked at real estate . Okay , yeah , that's true , that's my thing , and you've had some pretty good buys this year I have , I have , I mean it's and they're still out there yeah , yeah .
Yeah , you know , this is the thing we're in a very inefficient world and buyers and sellers don't always come together and things aren't always presented well or merchandised well .
Yeah , and so you know , jacob can find things that people want , but that those who want them aren't finding them , and you put them together and you take a decent photo of it and you clean it or you make sure it works , you know , so you've improved it .
Yep .
And it's just such a great formula . It just works .
And you do all that . You'll clean stuff You'll take . How about your pictures ? Do you ? Do you have any sophisticated process of that ?
Just an app on my phone , just the eBay app . I take pictures on eBay . It uses my camera and I just do .
How does it cut it ? Does it cut ? Does it put it on white ? I ?
can do that . I just have a table with lights that I take pictures on .
Just like with a white background , pop it . Yeah , basically no shadows .
It just looks professional and not like it's on somebody's bed that they just threw up there .
Like the unmade bed with like a naked foot laying next to it . Yeah , it's always attractive . I've seen house ads like that where there's people sleeping in the beds . Are you serious ? Toilets that haven't been flushed ? Oh , come on , I'm serious . That's terrible . Yeah , but good merchandising . Yep matching buyers to sellers . Get on the right platform hustling .
Get up early . Yep being open to evolve infusion focus yeah , relentlessness it's all all good stuff , and so jacob embodies all that . It's awesome man , which is why he's here on big talk about small business .
What a damn good closer that was mar so , jacob , how ? Much do you think people should subscribe to big talk about small business ?
I I think people should . I'm gonna start watching the the podcast now , for sure .
Good man , you should . We've got over a thousand subscribers on LinkedIn .
Man , we've been getting a lot of requests to come on the show and stuff . It's pretty cool .
Yeah , it's really cool we have but we still need that good sponsor . So if any of you out there are interested in a platform , right , we will talk up your stuff Shamelessly Big time . Okay , that's right . Yeah , I mean , we do want to believe in the product or service that you're selling .
Right , because who's the number one brand that we would never allow to sponsor us ? Who's the number one brand .
We've talked about it Slack , oh yeah , slack , oh yeah , slack , oh no yeah , we don't want that . Who's Slack ? It's a terrible name .
The software where you communicate . You know Slack messages and stuff . A lot of companies use it . Companies use that .
Eric and I don't like it . No , we don't , it's just one more place to go . Okay , we don't need that . Nobody needs it . No , let's , let's pick up . Let's not pick up the slack , but let's do pick up . A good sponsor Like it ? All right ?
So , hey , everybody , thanks again for tuning in and you'll hear from us next week right here on big talk about small business .
Thanks , Thank Business Thanks . Thank you everybody .
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