Don’t Sleep on This Specific $0-to-Millions Reselling Strategy

You can start this with nothing. The money is never a problem. If the deal is good enough, you could go get the money. Over three years, just by myself sold about $4 million worth of handbags and made $557,000 net profit. We bought the deal for 28,000 and sold it for 103. We did it in our garage. My wife just shipped it out. This is repeatable stuff, man. I tell this story every single day and less than 1% take action.

The biggest barriers in your brain, Hypothetical scenario. You wake up, all you have is your resale knowledge. What's your first go to right now?

I believe the huge opportunity is.

You don't have to believe me, and that's fine. But I promise you, this is one of the best episodes I've ever recorded. And I'm not in the business of letting you down. I'm not going to hype you up just to let you down. I had my friend Shannon on today. This was his fifth time on the podcast. Shannon is a reseller, a flipper, a liquidator. He buys pallets and truckloads of random items and resells them. He'll buy them for 2 to 5 cents on the dollar and sell them for 20 to 30 cents on the dollar. And holy crap, this is the most tactical get your hands dirty specific advice you have ever heard. Whether you want to make an extra hundred dollars a week or an extra hundred thousand dollars a week, this episode will apply to you. It was so good, we had to split it up into two parts. Part two will be a week from today. Exactly. If you want to hear the other four Shannon episodes, go check out episode 38, 41, 61 and 64. That was in July and September. And I promise we're going to have them on again. Enjoy.

I founded like 10 companies. I've sold some of them and then it was just like, okay, what else can I sell? And I love to resell. I love to buy at auctions. I love the liquidation space. Once you build the systems around it, you can really apply it to any category. Right. From selling iPhones, I sold. I took about a year to learn a new product line. I looked for a high end product that had money. And I sold handbags, luxury handbags. And over three years we sold. I just by myself sold about $4 million worth of handbags.

Oh, man.

Made $557,000 net profit. And it was great. And then I got sore.

You went straight to handbags after phones in 2017?

Yeah. So I sold and I was like, Okay, I don't want to retire. Then I was having, I do a podcast called Business Brain and a lot of people were talking about social commerce and stuff. And I didn't know anything about that. And it's like, what, how does this work?

So I just started talking about it. I feel like people are still saying it's the next big thing.

Yeah. And I didn't know anything about it, so I was like, well, I'm gonna. My whole life I've tried to just follow my curiosity. Like, that's interesting. Can I monetize it? You know, some way to do it and kind of just pull the string. So I did that and I started buying low end bags. I had this system in my head that I wanted to make 500 bucks a day. I'm like, I'll sell 10 bags, make 50 bucks a bag, and I'll just. But I only want to work like an hour is. I just built this business up and I wanted some time to kind of relax. But it turned out as I worked my way up the food chain, you know, I could sell one bag a day and make 500 bucks. So I was like, wow. So I moved up. And it takes the same amount of effort to sell 10 bucks than it does a thousand, right? Yeah. So I just moved up the food.

Chain and sometimes more effort to sell 10 bucks.

Yeah, more. More effort, probably. Yeah. Yeah. And I learned a lot. I had a great time. And we talked about this a little bit when I was on your show last year about getting involved with the company. You know, I've sold most of the stuff on Poshmark and ebay and I work with those people. I get really as close to them as I can via LinkedIn. I find the product managers and the category managers and I reach out. And then that's how you avoid somebody complaining. Like, I got banned on ebay or my account got shut down. Well, when you know people, yeah, that's how you avoid that. And then you volunteer to speak at their events and stuff. And they know who you are.

So you started by reach, like strategically reaching out to category managers to like build rapport and a reputation.

As soon as I knew what I was going to sell, really, if you want to sell car parts, you should. You darn sure better know the auto category manager on ebay. And he should know who you are. And you don't want to ask him for anything, but you want to get in his conversation flow. You want to reply to his posts and congratulate when he does stuff. And your Name just gets out there. And then the DM you send them is, hey, I'm in the car parts. I sell X dollar amount on your thing. Ebay. I love it. Thank you so much. Great cat. Great platform. Yep. And then stop and hopefully they reply. And you say, if you ever like somebody to talk about what it is, like building a business on ebay, I'd be glad to talk. That's how I got invited. So then I started. For almost five years, I spoke to big groups of new ebay employees. It was called becoming ebay. And then I spoke at their ebay live stuff. And so you just make yourself available. And then I got in there, they did a 20th anniversary commercial slash video thing, and I was in that. And it changed my whole life at ebay, man, when you can pick up the phone and talk to somebody. Yeah.

I feel like the negative thing that everyone says about doing stuff like this is the platform risk. Platform dependency. Right. But what you're talking about is an insurance policy against that strategically upfront, not when you need it, but way before you need it.

Yeah, you can't do it because I get messages from people all the time. My. My account got whatever Amazon gatekeeped me. Poshmark did the. It's too late. You have to. You're nobody to know you.

Yeah.

So once I started selling a ton on Poshmark, I was just doing the same thing. I go on LinkedIn, I find what they were doing, and I'd be like, man, I'm having such a great time. And then I sold a million dollars, and I just. That's all I said. I went to the CEO and I was like, man, I'm loving Poshmark. I just sold my first million. And like, what. What do you mean, sold your first million? I was like, yeah. Because, you know, it turns out most people are hobby sellers, right?

Yeah.

And I was grinding, you know, I was, you know, trying to build a system so they were like, come to our building and come meet us and this and that. So I did that. So you do it back. I do most things backwards in my life, but you go around the backside so they know who you are and they trust you and you're reliable. And, man, when you have a problem, you just pick up the phone. It's just, like, fixed.

On a recent episode with this guy named Jordan. He talks about permissionless marketing and how just, like, doing these projects without permission to get someone's attention. And he calls it the third door. Like, you got to find the third door. Maybe like, It's a, it's an ebay executive that you can't get their email or they won't respond to email, but you find them on Strava. Comment on the recent Strava Rider Venmo or something. The third door. I love that principle.

Yeah. And it's just getting your name in the flow of conversation, because then it's like, oh, I, you know, I've seen that guy. Or I've seen that guy comment on this, or he spoke at this, or he did. You know, I got invited to speak to the top 500 eBay executives and just share my story. You got to talk. And if you don't like to talk, have one of your people talk, your employees or whoever, your partner. But that. If you, if you like talking and you know, it'll change your life too. I get invited to all kinds of stuff.

Or if you like not getting shut out of business because of some algorithm. Right. Doesn't care about you.

Yeah. My selling limit on eBay is $5 billion.

Oh, my gosh.

Yeah. I post about on an X. I'm like, you know, you want to learn how to get a $5 billion selling limit back up five years. Yeah. And do these things now for your business.

You know, most people don't realize how big of a deal that is. I, I'm. I've sold millions on ebay over the last 15 years. You probably used to do that every year. Yep. But, like, you've got to work up to that. They've got to see 99 +% feedback score. Like, you got to ship same day, maybe next day. And like, especially when you find a winning formula, that's what you're up against is your selling limit. Because as I understand it, if you list one product with a thousand items for $10 each, then that's $10,000. Right. Like, they don't care how many listings. They care. The. The total volume of your inventory on those listings. Right. That's how to count your selling limit.

That's right. And you got to build credibility over time. And I still remember the first comment I ever made to an ebay person. I was at a conference. Excuse me. And I was just in line. I was in line to get coffee in the morning. I was talking to somebody, and I was like, yeah, you know, it's really frustrating. I'm selling like a hundred thousand dollars a month, and I don't have an ebay rep. I don't have anybo even talk to. And this lady turned around line, and she hands me A card. And she goes, now you do.

Wow.

And that was my first con. I was like, really? I was like, cool. So I followed up and then I just, you know, you just keep building it out and yeah, LinkedIn is amazing for that man. You know, and even suppliers. You want to sell luxury handbags, you should be connecting with everybody that's in that food chain up on LinkedIn. You know, today, Prada just bought Versace. Well, if you want to sell Versace or Prada, you should be up there. Congratulations. This is a great deal. Stop. Don't say anything. Yeah, yeah, you know, just. Just get in there.

When you said earlier that you wanted to spend a year learning a category, was that like a very deliberate decision up front or looking back? You ended up kind of learning it for a year.

That's just how long it took me. Yeah, I'm super impatient and I don't like to wait, but the research is so crucial. I wasn't even sure that this was the right category to sell. I didn't know which was the right platform, of course. EBay. Yeah. Right away. Cause I'd done so much business there. But I knew there was other like, you know, this new Mercari and Poshmark was new and, you know, whatnot and all this kind of stuff. And now it's all live selling. So that's a whole new thing to learn. So studying that when you can make small mistakes is really powerful. And that's what I was doing. I was selling stuff for like a couple hundred bucks. But I didn't quite understand how the photography worked. And I didn't know what a credibility statement was until I came up with that concept. And I didn't understand about I could just make my own authenticity certificate because I was guaranteeing that it was authentic and I didn't have to pay somebody 30 bucks. But that took me time and then on and on and on. So it was like eight to 12 months before it kind of started getting steam and, you know, before I realized, oh, this is going to work.

What? First put handbags on your radar of. Of all things. I know you wanted nothing electronic, something higher ticket. Why handbags?

I bought a lot of stuff from Costco over the years from their auction, the liquidation site. And you get loads of. There's this famous suffix they always put on it. They'll say, oh, it's patio furniture, barbecues and more. And there's, ah, that kind of stuff.

That's a very weighted.

Yes.

Like suffix to ascendant.

Yes. Very powerful. And there's a manifest. So, you know, But I don't. Okay. I paid much attention to it. And I got some stuff in, and again, I'm like a hardware guy. I like stuff, and I still like buying, like, black stones and this kind of stuff. And I got some bags in there, and I brought them home and I set them on the table at my house. And it was like my wife was, like, calling her friends over, and my daughter was excited. And I was just, you know, I thought, this is weird, man. Like, I've got 80,000 iPhones in my warehouse, and none of the women in my life are impressed at all. But I bring home 10, you know, Louis Vuitton and Burberry and Prada, and it was like, they're out of my mind. So I was like, well, there's something here. So could I find a supplier? And who. How do you do it? And so I started buying from other sellers to learn how they were packaging.

Knowing you're not going to make much money. This is your education, right?

It's tuition. You have to pay tuition. And so it's your, you know, experimenting and trying to figure stuff out. And who's the. Who can you study and copy?

Who can I copy? Yeah, yeah.

Who's. Who's got. I always say it's best practices, because that sounds better, you know, so. Yeah, who's doing it the best so you can figure out how to do it better? Can you take better photography? Like, I have one of my students in my mastermind. He does pressure washers, and his hack is. He's like, I just include a video Facebook marketplace algorithm. Just puts me on top every time.

Yeah. Oh. On his Facebook marketplace, there's a video of it.

He's like, 90% of other sellers just take photos. And I got video of me walking around, or if it's used, I have.

A video of it working.

All that kind of stuff. So you're trying to find all the ways to differentiate yourself, because I have found what you. What you need to be successful. And I call it, what is your unfair advantage? What do you have that other people don't? It could be money. It could be a big warehouse. You could have a. You know, you could be able to handle big things like appliances, if that's whatever. And so I was looking for this. What is my unfair advantage? You know, and what I could do better. And I knew the number one thing I knew I could do better was customer service, because I know that so well, because, you know, everybody's a psycho in the tech world. And their phones and their laptops. So I knew that really well and I talked that up and I leaned into that a lot. I took, I did free returns for anybody that was not happy at all. It was just like it got rid of a whole, you know, what could have been arguments about stuff. And I did unbelievable shipping and packaging like it was a gift because that's. You want somebody to spend a thousand dollar on a handbag, they already don't trust you. They think you're going to scam them. Your customers are prepared to be disappointed always.

I think that's true on ebay with any category in my experience.

Yeah. Anything you order online, your customers, is it going to show up? Are you going to ship it on time? What's it going to look like when it shows up at your door? What's the boxes are using some ratty old Amazon box or did you have your own box? And is it wrapped really nice? Is there a thank you card, maybe a coupon? All that like what seems like basic stuff. But 90, I would say 95% of sellers don't do it.

It's negative confirmation bias. Let's say that a handbag that comes exactly as planned but for whatever reason it doesn't have like a wallet attached. But you didn't advertise a wallet. And they see that and they're like oh, perfect. Just what I thought. I knew this guy was going to screw me. They're ready, then they leave you negative feedback and then you're true.

Yeah. And so the way you avoid that is you do free returns and you use this. I posted about this on X. But the two tokens, customer service, you know there's only two tokens in customer service. There's the it's really no big deal in the end of the. Or it's the end of the world. As a seller, you must choose because the rule of that is you can only choose one. So if you choose, it's no big deal. The customer chooses. It's the end of the world. So you always choose the end world token and you say oh my gosh, I'm so sorry, that's so good and this is so bad. Let me tell you what, I'm going to send you a prepaid label immediately and I'm going to send you a coupon for $50 off or another purchase in the future. And it just like stops them.

So you take the opposite of what they're doing. Basically, yes, you have.

Well, you don't, you don't give them the choice.

No, no. Okay.

Yeah. If you. If you have the choice, you always choose. It's. Oh, man. I understand what you're just trying to. You. You're pushing massive empathy at them. Right. You can't get in the. You're right. I'm right, you're wrong. That. That's a loser. So what you want to do is get up from the negotiating table and go sit next to them and you say, yes, this man. I can. I really understand how disappointing this is to you that USPS delivered this box two days late. It's not my fault. But I understand that that's a nightmare. If it's a birthday present or whatever, let me get you a label, I'll send it right back. And, you know, oftentimes they go, oh, you know what? I don't. I don't have to send it back.

But if you say, that's not my fault, I'm not in the delivery business, then they triple down and their ego gets involved.

Yeah, yeah. So you have to. You know, it's doing things backwards. You just. You're not saying it's your fault. And maybe if it is, then you say it, but you're just taking accountability. That's what people want. They want you as a seller. It doesn't matter if you're selling them a phone, a bag, a car, or whatever they want. You're accountable for the sale and how it all happens, even until they get it and everything. So you have to take care of them.

Now, what do you do in a category where the margins aren't there to support such generous customer services?

Why are you in that category?

Let's just say you wake up one.

Day and you are.

And I chose this category. This is where I am.

This is why we don't sell iPhone repair anymore, right? Yeah.

I mean, because I've been in these low margin categories a lot and, like, I want to be that nice guy when it comes to returns when UPS screws up, but I like. And a lot of times, you know, but if there's no repeat purchasing behavior, I know I'm never going to get born money out of them. It's genuinely not my fault. Like, what?

That's just the cost of business though, right? If you have like, like ebay the way they do it, if you don't offer returns at all, they bury your listing. Okay. And they'll tell you, they'll say, hey, it's up to you, but we're responding to the market, and if you offer free returns, we're gonna bump your Listings up. Right. More engage, more exposure. Because we want our customer to have the best experience in the world. Right?

Yeah.

And so there is a cost of doing business, for sure. And if it's low margin, things like I try to head it off of the past and say, like I tell everybody I work with, don't sell consumer electronics. Just don't do it. Unless you're going to take them apart and sell components. And there's more money in that. If you know that that special, that's your unfair advantage. That's one thing. But try to go buy, you know, phones and consumer electronics from the auction sites. There's no money in it anymore. There was.

Yeah.

But guys like you did it 10 years ago. Yeah, you know, I did it too, but. So you keep moving to the next thing. For us, first it was computers, printers, monitors, and then all that stuff went out. And then laptops, and we rode the laptop wave for five years, every part that could fail. But then there became less parts, less components that would fail, less moving parts. No floppy drive, no optical drive, no this, no that. Well, you have to work your way out of business. You do it or someone else will.

Yeah, right.

And then we moved to phones and then iPads. And at that point, we were in the glass business. Right. That was really what we were in. And at that point it was like, maybe we should sell it. Maybe we should, you know, and thankfully, somebody came to me and wanted to buy me, which was great.

So we had the same arc.

Yeah, I went through all that, squeezing the margin. I don't sell the bags anymore. I still think it's a great business model, but you have to be different. I don't want to do live selling. I'm a dude with a beard. I'm not going to connect with people. I know I could hire somebody to do it for me, but that's not it. But live selling is the where.

It's where. That's how handbags are sold.

It's most fashion items and stuff like that. Live selling, man, it's hot. And Poshmark knows it. Ebay has it, whatnot does it. It really works.

Conversely, that could be your unfair advantage. If you're really energetic and you're good on camera, handbags could be an even better opportunity today than it was when you were in it.

Yeah, that's it. And it's just such an important part. It's a. The only constant is change. Right? Yeah. Nothing stays the same. And if you don't continually evolve what you're working on, you'll be left behind.

Here's a question. So let's say I want to pick a category. I want to buy a liquidation lot from Costco. Was it bstock.com?

Yeah. B stock is the marketplace for a lot of these big companies.

Okay.

And you go up and get registered there, you need a resale permit and Costco is a great place to start up there.

So let's say I want to pick a category. What percentage of the importance would you assign on the category to how much supply and demand there is? So do your research. Find it. Find a category where there's a lot more demand than supply. And then what percentage of your potential success would you say is dependent on you just having a good system in process? Categories kind of irrelevant. You just need a good system and plug any category into that and you'll win. What, what percentage would you ascribe to either one of those?

The system is like 70%.

Okay.

The underlying infrastructure that I have a system, I bid. I use math to bid, not emotion. I've studied, I've done my research. Let's say I'm in Florida, so I know that in most of the other parts of the country patio furniture in the winter is going to be very inexpensive. But In Florida it's 68 degrees out in the winter and people are sitting outside. So I should be selling that product and buying it in the winter and selling it all year long there. That's my opportunity.

If you have a way to get it to Florida.

Yeah, yeah. All those places ship. You got to just factor in your, in your shipping or I have some big guys that I work with and I've got a warehouse and I know that scratch and dent appliances are wildly profitable and people want same day delivery. They don't want to go and order and wait to, you know, that kind of stuff then. And we have a way to deliver that would be your unfair advantage. But both of them require the same underlying system.

Yeah. So 70, 30, 70% just have a good system in the process. 30% is the category.

Yeah. And also your awareness, like right now, I believe the huge opportunity is in industrial stuff. We have all this tariff stuff going on or whatever and I think companies are going to be buying tons of industrial products here in the US Refurbished, you know, whatever it is, used, even restaurant equipment. It's just going to be a great time to sell that kind of product. And I'll give you an example. Signature Hardware, this big company called Ferguson and they're using it to liquidate a ton of industrial stuff. And they sold. Just a sale, that was a couple weeks ago. It was like $1.8 million, their store price. And I always say the store price is a lie. So let's cut it in half. Say it's 900,000 bucks. Okay, well, it sold for $13,000. Oh, right.

And anyone on the planet with a resale certificate could have bought this.

Yeah, yeah, check it out. It's. So it's not worth 1.8. So I said, okay, let's say 906. 9006000 half. But let's say, let's, let's be really cynical and say it's only worth 25% of the store price. So $435,000. So you buy it for 13 and you're into it 10 grand for freight. So 23 grand. The first, the most expensive item on the list sells for 10k. And I post a picture online. It's this big valve at Home Depot. It's $12,800. Right. And so the second most expensive item on the list is 8K, and there's three of them. So you sell four products and you get $34,000 back. And there's still 3,000 items in this. In this left for you.

Did this go for sale on B stock? Where was this?

Yeah, I posted about it. It's at the Signature hardware link. And I posted a link. I'm here, go buy this. You know, this is here. I'll give you the. You want me to. I can share my screen.

So what's like the, what's the gotcha? What is the asterisk? You got to find buyers and it's hard to find buyers.

It's a ton of work.

What type of work? Like it's.

To sell it, you, you gotta call, you gotta go there. I just put the link in the chat. You, you have to. How would you sell that big giant industrial thing? Most people aren't gonna wanna talk to you. Right. But this is not a deal that I would recommend the first auction to be. Right. But if you've been buying a little at a time, if you made your first thousand dollars, you flipped that thousand dollar switch in your brain. You buy a deal like this, it's insane. Yeah, I'll give you another example. I like boring stuff. So I saw, I found this auction. It was, you know, Grainger Granger's huge equipment, huge company.

Yeah.

So there's they. I looked up and it was, there was like an auction for a thousand door hinges. But they were these specialty hinges like they put in Hotels where the Hinge runs all the way down the door. They're like super security. They put them in apartment buildings and stuff. Really obscure. But I posted in my mastermind. I'm like, hey, this is going to be a good deal because no one's going to buy it. They're all brand new. I had a guy come up, one of the guys I work with, he says, okay, I just checked the scrap value, and it's probably $3,000 for aluminum, because they're aluminum. And so he's like, all right. He's like, I'm gonna go ahead and bid. And I'm like, do it, dude. This is a great deal. He wins the auction for. If you buy the hinges, they're $220 each. Okay, there was a thousand. It's $220,000. He bought the load for 985 bucks. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. And so Jim then gets on the phone, calls the Hinge company when they seven pallets of hinges he gets. And he calls the Hinge company. He says, hey, funny story. I just bought these young. They go, oh, matter of fact, we're out. We don't have any right now. Let me give you the name of a sales rep, because I'm sure we have clients that need some calls. A client sells 200 hinges at 40 bucks a pop. $8,000, and he still has 800 in stock. These deals are happening every single day. This is like, I always post this. That. That industrial thing, that 1.8 million that sold for 13. My first line in the post was, I swear this is true. People don't believe it, but then I just show it. I'm a.

Look here.

This is it. And it's. It's insane.

In full transparency, I will say to the listeners, shannon's not paying me. I'm not paying him. We're just friends, and I want you guys to have amazing info. His mastermind is $5 a month.

Yeah, it's five bucks. And. And I don't get anything from these auction companies. B stock. I don't. I make nothing. I. I've done this for 25 years, and it's so fun. I can't stop talking about it, you know, My poor wife. Because I commit them all. Look at this deal. It's crazy.

Oh, my gosh.

Yeah.

And that is incredible. He could have sold it for scrap value and tripled his money.

That's it. So the way I look at these auctions, the way I always think about them, the first question I ask is, what do I have to do just to get my money back. That's all I'm thinking about because I'm going to invest. I'm trying to learn something new because I don't know anything about these industrial products. But can I, can I protect my $13,000 investment and then wind up with thousands of other things that I can sell for the next year or two? Another good example is Kohler. You know, the plumbing people, they make like lights and sinks and all kinds of stuff for homes, too. I posted about this on X. Let me just read you this. This one. Auction, $23,988. Sold for 500 bucks. Brand new. This is all brand new stuff. It's like bathroom faucets, sinks, lighting. 36,533. Sold for 2,300. All brand new. And the way you sell this stuff is I don't want to sell it one at a time, but I want to go out to contractors, house flippers, real estate agents, designers, and sell this stuff for 20% of what Kohler is. And you're buying it at 5 cents on the dollar. Yeah. And it's all brand new and it gets delivered to. You can have it delivered to your house. Most accessible form of entrepreneurship, in my opinion, is reselling some. Unless you're, you know, you're going to build us an app or some kind of, you know, people that are far smart. I'm just a simple man.

I just buy and sell. Yeah. Do you have like a mathematical equation that you look at? Like, okay, I need to buy a 5 cents on the dollar. I need to sell at 20 cents on the dollar. I'm going to gross forex my money. I want to net 2x my money.

I use a thing called, I call it the product equation where you plug in the math and it's just a big fancy, you know, spreadsheet. But, you know, you take what the store price they say it's worth and you cut that in half because it's always a lie. Costco is.

Yeah.

It's not a lie when Costco does it because they don't typically discount very much.

Yeah.

So that's why they're much safer to buy from. But I cut that in half and I was like, okay, well, I want, I'm going to pay no more. If I really want it, I'm going to pay 20% of half. So, you know, so if it's. So basically about 10% including shipping landed to my door. 10, 10% that, that you are just, you're very safe. But, but you're not. You. You can't do it if you're not willing to work. It's not passive income. I would never tell anybody. It's hard, you know, it's difficult, but very rewarding. But it takes consistency. It takes learning the system. But man, it's fun, man. And everybody I talk to about it is always like, how did you get this? My whole house is full of this stuff. I bought $12,000 worth of patio furniture last year for like 800 bucks. They were doing free shipping. Costco does free shipping days, like, wow, three, four times a year. If you're within 300 miles of one of their distribution centers, everything you buy, they delivered for free. And you know, I bought like 12 pallets worth of Blackstone grills. Everybody of mine got a Blackstone grill for a hundred bucks. And then I bought, you know, furniture, fire pits, all these umbrellas.

Is that where my solo stove came from?

No, I ordered that special.

That was customized.

Co founders. But I love the solo stove. Those things are amazing.

Yeah, I've used the heck out of it. Yeah, that's cool. Now, did all that furniture sell?

I didn't sell any of it. I sat on it. I sit on it outside of my house. So I put some at my house. I own vacation rentals, so we use them for vacation rentals. And so it's another way to save an incredible amount of money on stuff. And you pick the category. Like if you want to sell clothing, just you want to sell NFL, Major league baseball and NBA hot. Great. We bought a deal. It was about almost 20,000 pieces of that product, all brand new. And we paid $28,000 for it because my wife wanted a project after we sold Check Restore and I'm like, let's buy this deal. And I made a terrible mistake because I didn't scroll the or, you know, sometimes in spreadsheets, it collapse the cells. You know, when they send it to you a little bit. I didn't expand it. And after I bought it and I still like, oh, it's gonna be a great deal. It turned out they were like giant. They were like 3xxx, 4x, 5x 6x huge. And I was like, oh man, I've made a terrible mistake.

You know, just because the cells weren't expanded on those columns, I was in a rush.

I was kind of scrolling through.

Yeah.

And I was like, man, we're going to lose. Who's going to buy this product, this 5x kind of thing. But it turned out if you're like A Chicago Bears fan and you're 5x and you want a jersey. Do you think you just go down to Dick's Sporting Goods and buy one?

Yeah. No, no. You got to pay up, too.

They were hot. Yeah, they were. So the first thing I did was I got on the phone because I wanted to get my $28,000 back. And I sold like 5,000 pieces, got my 28 grand back. It left us 13,000 pieces to sell, and we sold them. We bought the deal for 28,000 and sold it for 103.

Oh, my goodness.

And we did it in our garage because my building was gone and my wife just shipped it out and just like I'll put it in a USPS envelope and da, da, da. And this is repeatable stuff, man.

My mind is like buzzing right now.

I haven't. Mine too. I start talking, I get very excited about it.

How much of this? So it's like buying is easy, right? Yeah. Relative reselling is the hard part. How much of selling is just being on phone calls with the right people?

Yeah. So I always have a phrase. I call it the first law of auctions is never buy anything unless you know what you can already sell it for. So you want to use like ebay, product research that. That service is free up there. Used to. They used to charge for it when it was terapeak, but now it's free. So you can search three years of all kinds of data of what it sold for on ebay, how many. That's a great place to start. But the one thing people don't do is nobody likes to pick up the phone. Right. Everything's, oh, I'm just going to email them this and that. But if you pick up the phone, you can really learn a lot. And so I called like, when that NFL deal, I called like small sporting places, like sports cards place, comic book places, small like team supply places. And I found out that for them to buy some of these jerseys, they were like 80 bucks, you know, and my cost was like a dollar 40. Right.

What are they selling them for?

Well, they sell for like, I don't know, these jerseys, like a hundred and twenty dollars or something like that.

Wow.

And so I was like, hey, I can sell you these jerseys for like $30, you know, and they were like, yeah, I want to buy some, you know, so you just have to keep calling it. And most of the calls, they won't answer, or they just say, no, I'm not interested. But one person can change your entire life with that one single phone. Call. And these deals are repeatable so you don't have to rush in. Like, if you see a deal on something one week, you should start researching, not buying. That's when you go, oh, there's a company called Alpha Broader. You've probably never heard about it. Heard of it? They sell $2 billion worth of imprintable clothing per year.

These are Broader.

Yeah, Alpha Broader. Al. Yeah, Alpha and the bro.

Okay, there it is.

Yeah.

Imprintable. A parable. Let's. That's just like ready to be printed on.

Yeah. Every, almost every custom print, you know, online shirt, whatever place.

Gilgen.

Yes. They use, they use these guys.

Okay.

All this stuff. So I started seeing their auctions come up and it's because I'm, I. This is what I do. I study, you know, I don't, I don't watch Netflix. I watch auctions. And so I just, I'm like, who are these people? I didn't know anything about them, but I noticed that there was an auction with all brand new jackets, clothing, polo shirts and stuff. And this auction, it was $116,929. And the bid was 100. Somebody had a hundred dollar bid. And I was like, well, this is weird. So I just watched it and it sold for like, I think about 230 bucks. It was like eight pallets of. It was five pallets. Yeah, I'm looking at it right now. And in the old days, I would be like, I'm buying this right now. But I have vowed not to. I'm trying to simplify my life and I'm sharing this with other people. I'm like, all right, I'm gonna go post this because this is nuts. Well, they've had auctions every week like this. There's another batch that closed today. That's how you start studying. You get on the phone and you call or you go up on social media and say, who's in the imprintable clothes business? Because I had a guy come up my comments, he's like, hey, I know this other guy that does this. You're like, yeah, connect him. You know, let's. Let's figure it out so you have time to study. There should be no rush, rush, rush. It's like, okay, I'm learning this clothing market, you don't want to sell stuff one at a time, really. I mean, you may want to maybe if it's NFL gear or something, but this stuff you want to sell to other companies and other. And you know, to custom ink or one of those T shirt printable. Whoever you want to call them any.

Of the 30,000 local screen printers in the country, Right?

Yes.

You could go to outscraper, scrape all those. You could get your cell phone numbers. You could text them all.

Yes. Maybe nine out of ten won't believe you, but you have a manifest, so you actually have the list. You're like, hey, look, I have. And you have to have a good story, and the story. Just tell them the truth. Hey, I'm in the resale business, and I get all these opportunities, and I got this opportunity across my desk. Would you guys ever buy this stuff? This one's already gone. Somebody already bought it. Because you're okay now. You got scarcity. Because they'd be like, oh, I want this one. You're like, oh, sorry.

But.

But next week, I think I'm going to get another load of this. I'm going to get you other. You know, what would you pay for this stuff? And, you know, they sell these stuff for 30 bucks, 40 bucks, 60 bucks for some of these jackets and stuff. So you say you let them set the price. It's like, well, the most I could pay for these would be five bucks a piece. And you go, wow, man, that's low.

Okay.

And you leave, and then you go back and you buy them for a dollar or 50 cents, and then you call that guy back.

Okay, I'll do $5.

Yeah, I got it for you, man, because I really enjoyed our conversation. Yeah, I can sell to you for five bucks and you make $50,000.

All right, come back one week from today for part two, which is even better than part one, I promise. Please share with a friend.