hello everyone today's video should be very short and sweet I just wanted to briefly talk about my first business that I ever started and why It ultimately failed slash morphed into what we do today so back in 2017 Haley and I had just gotten married and I was working as an insurance agent which was not a super prosperous job some months were pretty decent you know I might make two or three or $4,000 other months I would make $400 it was very feast or famine so I needed something to kind of supplement the income I was making there and it wasn't a full-time job technically I was probably working like 25 30 hours a week so I had some free time to devote to something else that could maybe make some more money I don't remember exactly what got me into it but at some point that year I developed an interest in woodworking so I bought a couple tools off Facebook Marketplace and just started making basic things like you know cutting boards and little wall hanging things you put coats and keys on and just simple stuff like that that wasn't incredibly difficult to make but it was like really satisfying like taking raw wood and you know turning into something useful that people would hopefully pay for I was like okay we'll do this it's a passion and I think I had maybe sold one or two things on Facebook to my friends and so I thought this could be my new thing that I did with my extra time during the week to make some extra money for our little family I do remember taking it very seriously like I made an LLC and a business bank account and I just really wanted it to be like a like a real business I didn't want to be like some little silly side thing that everybody has like I wanted this to be like a thing maybe even a full-time job in the future and that's very funny now now that I know what I know so I started this business I named it Blackwater refurb in design and it was probably like 80% woodworking like taking just wood and creating furniture or Decor out of it and other times we would go to the thrift store and buy like a little side table and we would just you know sand it down put a new coat of stain on the top and maybe paint the bottom and and sell it like that and what I realized first in this business was that the woodworking portion like actually using raw wood to create things was significantly less profitable than Furniture flipping because the wood if you use pallet wood that's super cheap it's free you know so that stuff was slightly more profitable but if you go to a store to buy like a plank of black walnut that's super expensive like a one single board could be50 60 $70 sometimes and there's only enough wood in there to make maybe I don't know three or four cutting boards maybe you can mix it with some oak or Maple or other types of wood but either one of those is expensive so like one cutting board like a 12 by8 cutting board would easily be $30 to $40 just in Wood like depending on the type of wood you use and then when you add in the two to three four hours of Labor it takes to put that together and make an actual cutting board you've got to sell it for $100 and why would somebody buy a $100 cutting board from me when they can just go to TJ Max or HomeGoods and get one that looks to the untrained eye looks exactly like the one I was making it's significantly worse quality though but people don't care about that they could get it for $12 like the the general population of humans that don't understand woodworking do not see an 80200 difference in the quality of a cutting board if they don't understand Woodworking and I don't blame them for that that was just the first thing I I realized that people didn't appreciate what I was doing enough to pay enough for it for it to be worth my time which reminds me of a really interesting thought that I was talking with my friend Blake noblock about the other day I had posted on my Instagram asking people what's the worst piece of advice you've ever received in your life and his answer was that hard work always equals success and that's so true cuz people say that to like encourage you to work hard and like if you just work hard it'll be okay you'll be successful but obviously that's not true because I worked really hard making those cutting boards and it was super difficult to sell them at a price that was profitable and I think I might have sold two or three maybe through like different craft shows and and Facebook Marketplace and honestly to people that knew me that friends and family you know uh but outside of that it was super difficult to sell them for enough money for it to be worth it so I realized early on that I'm spending a lot of time and money making this stuff but people don't want it for the price that I need to sell it at so I need to shift and come up with something else to do because the whole point of starting all this was to make money so I think at that point was when I began the shift over to just Furniture flipping I just realized The Woodworking stuff wasn't profitable I still did it for fun you know making stuff for personal use but for the business perspective making money I just switched to buying cheap stuff at thrift stores that was damaged or just kind of ugly and then spending time to flip it and making a profit and that worked fairly well I I was probably making like 500 to 1,000 bucks a month you know extra on top of the insurance job doing that and I really enjoyed it like it's really rewarding taking something ugly or damaged and fixing it up and then some stranger paying you money for it to put it in their house like I love that feeling but I quickly realized too that after I did the math I realized I was just putting so much work into it in terms of time and energy and and labor that even that really wasn't worth it the one of the best flips I ever did I had this this buffet that I got on Craigslist for like 40 bucks it was like had two drawers up top and two doors at the bottom botom I don't remember what it looked like when we started but it was pretty ugly and it was broken and I fixed it and I was super proud of it it was like gray on the bottom we put chicken wire in the front again 2017 2018 chicken wire Farmhouse stuff very very popular stand stained and sand at the top and all that stuff it looked great and then I sold that for like I think it was like $220 or so it sold pretty quickly in like three or four days on Facebook Marketplace but I paid $40 for the buffet I probably had another $50 or $60 in material between the paint the stain the chicken wire put new hardware on the the drawer PS and stuff like that so I've got you know almost $100 into this dresser and I probably spent 10 to 12 hours of my time doing the labor to to make that dresser and then sold it for 220 so when I got the 220 I was very excited I was like oh my gosh I just turned 40 into 220 but then I slowly like Unwound the situation and realized how much actual money I had tied up in the materials how much actual time I spent I was like oh my gosh I'm making like $ n10 an hour for this labor that you you know it's not worth it why don't I just go get a job at this point so I still kept Furniture flipping for a little bit but eventually I realized that even that was just not quite profitable enough and it may have been that I didn't really know what I was doing like I know a lot of furniture flippers nowadays really focus on staging they make their furniture look super professional on online photos so that kind of allows them to get top dollar like full market value basically for their refinished Furniture so maybe I was undercharging a little bit but but hindsight you know 2020 whatever and at this point I also had to start dealing with a little bit of competition on Facebook Marketplace a lot of people were getting into the furniture flipping business and there was some differences between like you know the type of the the quality of materials I was using versus what they were using you know spray paint versus like really high quality paint properly sealed and even though like the stuff I was making was better than the competition theirs was cheaper and again to the untrained mind of the Facebook Marketplace buyer they don't see the value why would they pay $200 $250 for my set of white nightstands with dark same tops when they could just get the S very similar set of of nightstands from somebody else for half the price you know and I don't blame them for that and instead of trying to train the buyers and to or or teach them why my stuff was better I just kind of G gave up honestly at that point but then I kind of leaned in to embracing the competition I was like okay so if so many people are getting into Furniture flipping they're going to need Furniture to flip so instead of me putting all the time and effort into flipping it and trying to comp compete with them why don't I just work on sourcing furniture for them and sell it to them for you know a quick profit without any work and embrace that so I did that for a while going to thrift stores buying ugly dirty stuff whatever cleaning it taking some pictures very simple pictures and listing it on Facebook Marketplace as like a DIY project or whatever and that worked for a while and I like that because it was very minimal work up until then I had been you know spending three hours making a cutting board or spending 10 or 12 hours refurbishing a piece of furniture and now all I was doing was spend spending you know 10 or 15 minutes cleaning it taking a couple photos and and making almost the same amount of pro profit as I was you know actually doing all the work you we bought something for5 or $10 at the thrift store clean it and sell it for 50 bucks that was very quick money very little work involved and that was really nice I thought that could be something that was sustainable on the long term as well I can't say there was one particular thing that caused the demise of this portion of the business I think it was just a mixture of like inventory became tough to find like I just I was buying pretty much any piece of furniture that I thought could be salvageable in selling it but then there wasn't anything left and we mix what I was doing with the other Furniture flippers still thrifting for inventory and regular people you know just trying to do it on the weekends it became difficult to find enough stuff for it to be something that was worth taking up my 10 to 15 hours a week that I had to devote to Something That was supposed to make money so that's when I started researching reselling just like reselling everything not just Wholesale Furniture but shoes and clothes and hats and Funko Pops obviously I I I realized that there is a huge Market of stuff out there but I was really intimidated by shipping I liked Furniture cuz I could just throw in the back of the truck take it drop it off whatever but I did not understand how people understood shipping like how do you ship stuff what do you mean you just put in a box and take it to the post office like it was it was so over my head that I just postponed getting into reselling for probably at least a year because I was so overwhelmed with the idea of having to ship stuff so over the next couple months as I was researching reselling and how to ship stuff or whatever I came across a YouTube channel called rally Roots a lot of you guys know them Ryan and Ally I would consider Ryan a fairly close friend at this point we talk pretty much all the time uh we played pickle ball together and we went to the list perfectly event uh he's he's a really cool guy and I appreciate them because they are The Channel that I found that got me into reselling they they they had videos about shipping they had videos about how to list on eBay I know Ryan right now is filming like an updated series on how to sell on eBay for the first time so he's always been really focused on helping new people I can really appreciate that about him so I was watching their videos their tutorial stuff their like Vlog footage when they were in thrift stores finding you know Tommy Bahama shirts for $4.99 and selling them on eBay for 25 and I was like okay this is interesting by the way that's not a really a good thing to buy nowadays like the market shifts but at the time that stuff was still selling really well so I was like okay if they can do this I I like that like buying something for $ four or5 dollar and selling it for 25 like that's some pretty good margins and I don't think a shirt and clothing is super tough to ship and again they had videos about how to how to do that stuff so I I I spent a ton of time researching before I got into it which I don't really recommend like just just try it just try to sell one thing and then just learn as you go don't wait until you think you understand everything to start cuz then you'll never start so remember I started our eBay account on Halloween October 31st 2018 and the first thing I listed was an Adidas windbreaker jacket I don't remember if I thrifted it to resell or it was like a I know I thrifted it I just don't remember if I used it and then sold it or bought it specifically to sell but that was the first thing I listed and I just kind of forgot about it I think maybe I listed four or five things the first day and I kind of forgot about it and then like maybe a week later I got this weird like cha-ching notification on my phone I was like what the heck is that I'd never heard it before and it was the Adidas jacket that sold it sold for $19 I think I did free shipping because I'm a dummy I was like oh my gosh Haley look I just sold that jacket on eBay like I was so excited and then I had no idea how to ship it I remember I went to like the dollar store and bought like a a padded envelope and just took the padded envelope and the jacket to the post office and I was like uh here's the eBay address I need to send this to can I send it I'm sure they charged me like $25 to send it out i' made no money on that first sale but it was very exciting and then that gave me so much momentum to keep going list more things and just figure out reselling again that was 2018 now we are in 2024 we have a warehouse now we you we still sell on eBay a lot of people think we don't sell on eBay all this stuff over here that's all eBay stuff like we we do we do well not as much stuff on eBay as we used to because whatnot just works well for us um but reselling in general is still a lot of our income so at one point it was like 70% of our income was coming from YouTube ad revenue and only 30% was coming from reselling stuff but now it's kind of balanced out it's about 550 right now we've increased our sales on the reselling side and the YouTube revenue is slightly down so it's it's evened out now but even so even the YouTube videos are about reselling so like finding reselling and starting it and giving it a chance and learning about about it and just you know growing over time and incorporating social media into it has absolutely changed our lives and I just love how the business has shifted over the years but it still stayed the same like we just want to do this to make money because we need to feed our families and stuff but when stuff doesn't work out we have to make a choice you know when when you're in business you're going sorry I'm back camera died been filming this video for a really long time but essentially when you're in business you're going to have a lot of roadblocks no matter what those roadblocks are it could be inventory could be competition whatever we you know all the stuff we talked about in today's video but when you come to a roadblock you have to make the decision to either push through it stay on the same path push through that roadblock and figure out a way to to to keep going forward or you can shift your path go around the roadblock and kind of go off on a little side Trail that's similar but you know just an adaptation to get you moving forward again or sometimes hear me out sometimes it's okay to just stop turn the car around and just go in a completely different direction maybe that direction is back to traditional employment like you don't have to be self-employed to be successful there's plenty of successful people that work for other people there's no shame in in doing that you know I'm I don't personally want to ever work for anybody again I don't think that's going to happen but if it ever came down to that I you know there's nothing there's nothing wrong with that you can actually make really good money and have great benefits and insurance and all that stuff working for other people as well so there's no shame in that at all but if you want to stay on the self-employed path just know that it's not always easy it's often hard actually but it is ultimately very worth it thank you guys so much for watching today's video thank you for all the support in our business over the last five years at this point I think you guys are awesome couldn't do without you and we will catch you guys on the next one [Music]