Interview with Brian Burke Founder of SellYourMac – Small Business Show 199

The Small business show episode 199 for Wednesday, November 28, 2018. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the Small Business show here at BusinessShow Co the show by, for and about small business here today in midtown Manhattan. I'm Dave Hamilton.

And out on the west coast, I'm Shannon Jean. How are you, Dave?

I am traveling, but all is well. Yeah, it's good.

Right on. That's great. Yeah, I just left Manhattan. I left California and it was covered with smoke and now I come back and we're getting some rain, so it's fantastic.

That's a good thing about that. Yeah, it's great.

So it's always a good thing. So it was great and it was interesting. I've never seen so many people concerned about California as when I was out in Manhattan last week. So it was great that, that we were all talking about the fires and everything. Glad those things are wrapped up out here. But today we're going to talk about technology. You know, we're both have been in the technology business in one form or another for many, many years. We both know how quickly the hardware changes and all the problems you have to deal with with finding a home. What do you do with your old laptop, your iPhone, your iPad or tablet?

It's ironic you mentioned that this is the last podcast I'm gonna record on this old MacBook Air here. So the new one's on.

There you go. Yeah. So, you know, I don't know about you, but I have a drawer with some old iPhones in it, a couple of MacBooks sitting in my garage, I'm sure. So today we get a chance to learn more about the business opportunity that this type of situation creates with our guest, Brian Burke, owner of sellyourmac.com. thanks for joining us today, Brian, having me on, guys. Yeah, we're really happy to hear you.

Sounds like good timing that you have a MacBook Air you're going to be selling here in.

Yeah, yeah, maybe. Maybe you can. Maybe you can advise me on what to do with it, man.

Yeah, it's fascinating. That's for sure. One of the things. I just brought a new MacBook Pro out to my daughter when I was out in New York and brought her old one back. So it's. It is. It is good timing. So, Brian, let's talk for a few minutes.

They're all Apple.

Yeah, of course. Yeah, absolutely. That's the value. You know, I've been in the hardware business forever and that's definitely the market that's better to be In. So let's talk for a few minutes about how you got started. Why did you start sell your Mac? What's the story that led you to get the company up and running?

Quick backstory is I didn't get the job I wanted out of college, really wanted to be a stock trader at a big hedge fund or investment bank in New York. Didn't get the job right away. So I came back home and what better way to get some cash and sell some stuff on ebay? I had done a lot of ebay during my college years for my friends because they were too lazy to sell their stuff. So I charged them a commission and sell it for them. So I had quite, quite the knack at the selling game on ebay. So it was easy for me to get involved there at a deeper level kind of right off the bat. And that was my outbound. But trying to get more product to sell was really the problem at the time. And I had built up a network of people that were working for Verizon and basically collecting phones back then from customers because there weren't many trading programs. So at first I started buying all these phones off the Verizon reps and that was great. But I truly am not that passionate about the phone market itself. My passion lied with Apple. So I saw an opportunity to buy a bunch of Apple product. That is when I kind of had the idea that I need to start focusing on Apple. You know, the customers that buy Apple products are always happy. It's a great market to work in, you know, great company, they make great products. And I started for about a year or so just buying or selling Apple products on ebay, not having any truly inbound sales channel. And that's when I had the idea for sellyourmac.com I needed a way to get more product and to give people cash back on a consistent basis online. So I made a really easy website and for people to navigate, tell me the product and specs they had, find out instantly what the product was worth, and then send it in.

That's killer. So let me ask you a question about this business model, because I'm always fascinated with it because I've often thought about setting something like that and I know there's a lot of challenges involved. How do you offset the customer that says, well, you're not going to give me as much as I can get selling it on my own. It must be a constant battle with the perceived value of an item versus what you're able to pay for it and process it. And all that kind of thing is.

Definitely a very key challenge. I'm glad you brought that up. You know, I think years ago we used to try to combat that, you know, much more often than we do now. We're not really trying to convince people at this point if to be a customer if they don't understand the value we're providing, that we're going to save people so much time, hassle and ultimately money if they value their time. So to kind of, you know, kind of break it down like you said. I mean, there's so many other costs that go into, you know, running the business. Not just the overhead and the rent, it's all the team members, all the technology behind the business, you know, keeping the website up, all that stuff. So yeah, there's a, there's a huge cost to that. But you know, fortunately we've always been able to get the good customers that understand the value prop that we provide that, you know, you know, let's say you're only going to get 200 on eBay and we're offering you $100 that a hundred dollars of your time could be spent answering questions, dealing with the shipping and ultimately you might end up being scammed and at that point you're out all your money or product. So this is a much safer, hassle free way to cash in your goods and not spend time doing it.

Yeah, I mean, you're selling safety and convenience. Right? I know that I just put it in a box and forget about it and you send me a check and that's the end of it.

Ask us how they can trust us and we point to the tens of thousands of five star reviews that we have online. And it's seemingly hard to believe that someone wouldn't put trust in that. But some people out there are never going to be a customer so they can sell the products themselves. There's certainly a lot of places they can do that.

Yep, sure, that makes sense. Okay, I want to go back a little bit again. When you were just starting sell your Mac and I read up on your website and as you commented here, weren't able to get the job that you really were looking for. We have a lot of listeners that are at that critical stage of moving from Dave and I always call, you know, employee to employer, you know, somebody that's trying to start the business. What was the toughest part of that transition from, you know, working for somebody else or getting a paycheck at some point and then, you know, going striking out on your own if you could talk about that. That'd be great.

I haven't worked for very many other people. I had some summer jobs in high school, but out of college, I just ran right at this opportunity to have my own ebay store and grow that market. So there wasn't really much of a trend transition for me. You know, I kind of bit the bullet and dove right in. I didn't have a backup plan. I think that's one of the kind of key things.

Yeah.

If you have this huge safety net and backup plan, chances are you aren't going to be as gung ho and go all in. And the amount of time it takes to start a business is. Is incredible. And if you're not willing to put in, put in that effort on the front end, there's no way you're going to have success in the back end unless you're just incredibly lucky. So it's really, you know, bite the bullet, throw the safety out and, you know, go for it. And if you have, if you're truly passionate about the business you're in, there's a great chance it's going to be successful.

Yeah, it's true.

I love that. Yeah.

I was, I had that same thought just driving in the car today. Like, you know, there's, there's people out there that have backup plans. And for me, like, I do my backup plan every day. That's what I do for a living. That's what I've always done for a living. But I know that I could do, you know, I would come up with another thing to do if. If this didn't work out. Right. You know, there's always. You learn to trust yourself. And that's the best backup plan to have. Right. Is.

Yeah. You. You are the backup plan.

The backup plan. That's it.

Great point. Yeah.

Yeah.

You're not only relying on yourself, you're not relying on an employer.

Exactly. Oh, and, and, you know, I mean, we say this as employers, but then it's not great when our employees listen and hear us say this. But, you know, you can't really rely on an employer. Right. Anything could change. And in most states, it's employment at will. So you're better off relying on yourself. Except people that work for me know how much they can rely on me. Of course.

Of course. Yeah. You build a culture, but you build.

A culture and trust. Yeah, exactly.

That's a really good point, is the backup plan and that the risk. And I always tell people, you know, it's like, oh, all these risks you've Taken. It's like, well, you know, it's a risk depending on someone else to give you a paycheck every couple of weeks and, you know, build a career with a company that may, you know, take a different course that doesn't include you. So that's a, that's a risk as well. So. Okay, Brian, so you're, you're selling Apple devices online. You have a retail location, I believe, and I think, you know, you mentioned selling on ebay. Talk if you can about about each of those channels, like your retail store versus marketplaces like eBay, Amazon. What's, what's the best, what's worked best for you, maybe with some of the pitfalls of that, that kind of stuff.

We do a few different markets, we plan. We do have the retail store, as you mentioned, locally here in Greater Cincinnati. And our biggest selling channel is still ebay.

Oh, nice.

And, you know, we started off that way and we focused so much of our effort on that channel that we have a very large number of trusted reviews. And right now we have 100% positive feedback and more than 33,000 reviews. So that is one of the reasons why we stay on that platform is that the trust we built up helps really drive the sales. Amazon. And one of the things happening with Amazon, if anyone out there has heard, is that Apple is partnered with them now and there's going to be no more third party resellers unless you're authorized. Yeah, so that was kind of big news and I'm glad that we have a very small percent of our revenue on there because that could be detrimental to many businesses.

Sure. That's a great argument for multiple channels, you know, because things change all the time, right?

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Yeah, that's great. So since you've been done so much business on eBay. If I hear people talk a lot about I'm going to start an ebay, this, I'm going to ramp up very quickly. What advice can you give someone that's maybe just starting out with ebay? How can they kind of, I mean, you've got thousands, tens of thousands of reviews. How do they get started and build that trust? And, you know, everybody's in a hurry and they want to ramp up quickly. And I know there's some controls that ebay puts on new accounts. What would your advice be for someone looking at that?

I would say, you know, first you can build your feedback just by buying. I mean, you can get your first, you know, 10 or 20 reviews by, you know, buying products that are $5. And at least having some feedback up there will help. You know, won't be that you have seller feedback, but I think just in general, good feedback is a strong indicator. And then when you're selling stuff, you know, you have to start off small. I mean, don't expect to sell thousand dollar items for full value, you know, if you only have a few feedback. So I'd suggest, you know, selling items maybe just out of your house to build some reputation before you go all in on some more expensive gear. And like you mentioned, kind of the restrictions, I know that it's hard to remember all of them on top of my head, but I think it's until you have 100 feedback, you have to wait 21 days or until you have positive, positive review from the buyer until the funds are released. So that is an incredible challenge if you're trying to, you know, run a small business out of your house and you're waiting, you know, a month to get your cash back. So to that end, you know, maybe just starting off small and selling some trinkets to build up your feedback past 100 and then you won't have to have that pain of waiting for the cash for the whole month.

Yeah, I want to, I want to.

Circle back to something you just said where, you know, you, you talked about, or we asked you, how do you get to begin selling on ebay? And your answer was buy first. This is, this is a tactic I've heard a lot of business owners do. We did it actually when we moved, you know, we started 20 years ago with the Mac observer and Backbeat Media on the web. And when we moved into podcasting, the first thing I did was I started buying ads on podcasts that we might want to rep. And not only do you learn how the market works, when you're buying things so that you know what as a seller you need to deliver to these buyers. But you also gain some trust with ebay. It's a very explicit thing with trust there. But even in a market where there's not a public job or a public review system, anything where you can spend a little bit of money, that's a good way to get people to trust you. So yeah, that's a really smart way to do that. You kind of glossed over a little bit. And I think there's more to that than just a quick mention. I just wanted to shine a light there for a second.

Yeah, it's a good point since it.

Can be translated to a lot of different business models.

Yeah, yeah, exactly, absolutely. So let's talk about marketing. Yeah, let's talk about marketing for a minute for sell your Mac. Are you constantly pushing people to your ebay store or I mean, does it depend on the channel that they're coming from? What, what kind of marketing do you guys do? What's worked best for you?

So we basically do zero marketing on selling products. All our marketing is focused on buying. Oh, and the reason is that ebay is a channel. They have, you know, half a billion eyeballs on there. So it's fairly easy for us to sell our products. We don't, we only run into many challenges really, just trying to, you know, get more products, you know, at the right price and you know, by offering a great value on our site. We want to be one of the top paying websites for Apple trade in so that not only are we trusted, we're actually offering a great value. So to that end, most of our marketing has been investment in the website really in the SEO, the search engine optimization efforts and not that much outside marketing these days. Initially when we started, we were in all the Apple publications, the Mac World and Mac Life and doing the Mac World Expo and stuff like that, but we have not really invested in many marketing channels like that as of late.

Yeah, that makes sense. So your focus really is when somebody's coming in, they're doing a search and trying to find, okay, you know, trade in my Mac or trade in my, you know, iPad, trying to draw those customers into your website and get them to online.

They're searching for exactly what they want to do and you know, we're popping up the number one in the world for a lot of these, you know, Apple or Mac related searches. If you search for sell my Mac, we're number one. So that just drives a ton of traffic our way, I bet.

Do you use an outside SEO company to help you do that kind of stuff or are you doing that yourself or someone in house?

So it's not necessarily in house, but a very close person to the business. Our webmaster helped us out with that, you know, as we got started and, and you know, he has done a lot of research in his past on SEO and it really begins at the core of the website. It's certainly content driven. You know, we have these Mac guys that help deliver a lot of different search terms and stuff like that. And only as of late have I reached out to a SEO specific firm and now we have a little bit more of a tight strategy on our focus on how we're going to grow that market.

That's great. So now we've talked about all the good stuff and things are going great. Let's talk about struggles. What's been the biggest struggle for Cellular Mac and what steps have you taken to overcome it to grow your business?

Tough question. One of the struggles is growing the right team of people. And I love my team and I would bring on everyone again in a heartbeat. But managing is not one of the traits I was gifted with. I'm really great at attracting people, but my heart does not want to manage and hold people accountable.

So that's a very good thing to admit right there.

That's really good. And it's kind of because I wear my heart on my sleeve and I'm just so passionate about people. I want everyone to win, but I don't always want to hold their feet to the fire to do it.

So how do you, how do you deal with that? I, I, I ask as, as, as a fellow, not want to be manager, but stuck in that position because I don't want to be managed. So.

I think one of the ways I've overcome that is trying to learn how individual team members operate in terms of their style of learning and how they work so we can better mesh together and then we don't have to have any, you know, conflict around holding each other accountable and kind of be on the same page. There's a lot of different tools out there that, you know, companies use to figure out their people. And the one that I've liked is called Culture Index. And you basically answer two different questions. Each one has maybe 100 checkboxes, takes about five minutes. And the, the people that facilitate the Culture Index, they can read you just from those two questions. And it really describes all your different kind of attributes and styles quickly. And then looking, comparing that to one another, you can see how you can meet in the middle and understand how people are going to work and how to make the best out of the work environment.

That's some great advice.

Thanks, man. That's great.

That's a first on the show. We'll definitely be pushing that. That's fantastic. Okay, so talking about struggles and everything, if you've listened to this show before, you know, we're big fans of mistakes and I'm making the fancy quote signs in the air here since they teach us so much. What's been the best? Both signs. Again, mistake that you've made with your business that you've learned the most from.

I don't know if I'd call it the best. You know, I've made a bunch of mistakes along the way and I think as long as you have a really great learning opportunity, it hopefully makes a mistake a lot less expensive than it really is. And I think our kind of our biggest mistakes when we were the victim of fraud at multiple points in the past and I understand how fraud works at such a deeper level now. I could probably write a book on how you could fraud someone online that I never would because our business, business gets frauded constantly. We have about one to two frauds a day.

Wow.

And now this is people trying to sell you computers fraudulently or buying fraudulently? Both.

It's on both ends. I mean, people try to send in items that are, you know, fake items and say they had the most expensive MacBook Pro in the world. People buy items, they strip out parts and try to return it. Send, send back empty boxes, you know, buy stuff with fake credit cards. You know, there's so many different ways these frauds happen. So I think just learning on how to protect ourselves from the frauds, you know, has been one of my biggest learning experiences. And expensive mistakes. You know, we've had a couple very large scale frauds that we've taken the people to court and actually won but unfortunately have not been able to collect due to them being abroad and fleeing the country.

Wow. Yeah, I, I think that.

So, yeah.

Also goes to your. From what I gather, your personality style and Dave's as well as probably mine is where you're trying to, you know, you believe in people. You're giving everybody the benefit of the doubt and it does open yourself up.

Yeah.

You. All of a sudden you're like, wait, why would anybody do this? You know, and so. Okay, it brings up a good point.

Trusting.

Yeah, that. That trust. And I think as a business owner, you have to have that trust. Especially when you're hiring people and you're giving them autonomy and things. But it can, it can, you know, bite you in the rear. Talk about this fascinating to me and I'm not going to hardware geek out too much, but so someone puts in the information on your website. I'm sending you this very expensive high end MacBook Pro or whatever it is and you get it. How do you combat the he said, she said where? Oh, I sent you this thing and then you open it up and there's you know, an old, you know, Indigo MacBook in there or something that, that. How do you guys deal with that?

The Mac would be happy. Yeah, usually it's something like a brick. Recent ones we got, we received was a box of refrigerator hoses. Oh, they had quoted out a $4,000 Mac on our website. So cases like this, you know, we use FedEx for all our shipping and they have been a really great partner. There are so many scans of that package along the way that you can go back on the history and kind of prove that it wasn't what the person said it was. There's pictures at the drop off location, you know, there's photographs of the package as it goes along the belts. So you can kind of see if it's been tampered with ahead of time. A lot of times it's not even, not even close to the right weight of what the package should be. And a lot of times too, the, the person, you know, if it's a first time seller and they're trying to sell you a crazy high end computer, a lot of times they would even have the serial number for what the computer was or if they did. Their, their backstory doesn't make sense. You go back and forth on these emails a lot of times about stuff like this and you kind of the ultimate level is bringing in the security team from FedEx. They have some like ex FBI guy there and he'll sniff these guys out and you know, kind of prove that it's fraud. And usually when you start, you know, threatening the fraudulent people that you're going to take them to court, usually they kind of just back off and go away.

Right. What a, what a waste of time though. I mean it like the fact that you have to think about how to make that process as efficient as possible is, is unfortunate. Right? But that's, I guess that's just part of what you have to do.

If these fraudsters could just do something good with their brains, they probably could make the same amount of money in the Same amount of time.

That's the thing, right? Yeah, it's crime pays, but so does not crime. So yeah, you could make some money. Yeah.

There is ethical hacking. You get paid for it, Right, Right, exactly.

Well, it's called. Yeah, I mean it's what we all do. You start a business, you find an opportunity that someone else is not cashing in on and you do. And that's not illegal. That's how it works. It's all okay. Yep. Just get creative and do it the right way.

That's for sure.

Anyone too good of ideas on the show?

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, and I think there's also, you know, what we found is taking in large volumes and most of our stuff was coming from corporate and educational and leasing companies and that kind of thing. So you're getting in, you know, thousands and thousands of Macs or iPads or phones is, it's just there's also this big factor is that people often don't know what they're doing. They just inept so what they said was coming. Or you get a manifest and you're like, well wait, this is totally different. Then you have to fight that battle to show that this is actually what showed up. And we took to the cameras in our warehouse so you could see and unwrapping pallets and that kind of stuff that it was original. So I empathize with the challenge that.

You just talked about for sure. How to go back to our 4K cameras to prove exactly what the product was we opened up. But we definitely do a very full scale audit on any of these large purchases we make. And I would say 80, 50% of the companies get 90% of the stuff. Right. And you know, it's not a very high likelihood they're going to send what they say. And it's not that they're not trying to send the right product. They might just not have the, the system and processes to be able to know exactly what the item is.

Yeah, that's, that's a good point. You know, I don't want to spend too much time on this thing. We can have an off, off air talk about this for hours over a beer sometime. So let me ask you this. What are you, what are your plans for the future? Are you going to expand and, and grow, sell your Mac? I mean, you know, growth can be expensive. Or are you happy kind of the size you are now? What, what's, what's the future hold for you guys?

I'm never happy with the size that we are. You know, we've always been a growth company. You know it started out, the first, first full year was about $300,000 in sales. Last year we did a little over 5 million and this year we're going to do over 10 million. That's awesome. So really focusing on the growth front.

Thank you.

And my vision is to be to 50 to 100 million in the next five to 10 years.

Awesome.

A lot of more organic growth ahead. A lot more focus on the B2B market and stuff like that. And you're right, it's very expensive to grow. All our cash is tied up in the business. So even though we're profitable, there's not much profit to go around.

Yeah, it's always a challenge. You think, wow, look at all this money we're making. So where is it? You know, it's out in the warehouse inventory business is challenging. So okay, so got thousands of small business owners that are listening to you right now. And you know, it sounds like you've, you had a, you've got a great business, been successful, profitable, have a great team around you. If you could offer your single best piece of advice to these folks about running a small business, what would it be?

I'm going to go back a little bit to what I said earlier about when you have to kind of go all in on the business and it's kind of the pig headed discipline and determination for success. You're not going to find overnight success and be a millionaire in your third month of your business unless you are just the luckiest person alive. So really being prepared to work 14 to 18 hour days for the first few years of the business to get off the ground and surpass the competition, to have a real chance of success. And those years are a real struggle. And looking back, I didn't have a family, wife and kids at the time and I think that would be incredibly more challenging to try to pull those kind of hours with the family around you. So I'm glad that I was single all the time and could invest virtually my entire life in the business. I eat, slept and breathed Slayer Mac. If you ask my parents when they tell me to invite me over for dinner, I couldn't even show up within an hour being on time because I'm just so busy I forget everything else going on in the world. So it's kind of shutting everything else out. Focusing being that discipline, determination to keep tracking forward no matter if you're having a good day or not.

Yeah, bullheaded persistence takes sacrifice for sure. That's just how it goes yeah.

Be prepared for the grind, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, that is true. Well, that's awesome. So what's the best way for our listeners to learn learn more about sell your Mac, Brian.

I think we lost him.

Think we might have lost him, Brian. I can tell you right now, just go to sellyourmac.com you can learn more about the company. They've got just a fantastic model there to walk you through selling product and learning more about them. And we really appreciate you coming on the show. Brian, I'm sorry we lost you in the last minute here. I got you back. Awesome. So, yeah, I just pointed everybody to sell your Mac.com. is that the best place for them to learn more about what you guys do?

Absolutely. You go to our website. You can find us on Facebook under sell your Mac and also on LinkedIn and Instagram.

Perfect. Well, thanks very much for coming on the show. We look forward to watching your continued growth.

Thanks.

Thanks, Brian. Thanks, everybody. See you next week. Keep living that charmed life.