Rob & Melissa Stephenson from Flea Market Flipper share three things to know before you take your flipping business full-time.
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Reseller Hangout Podcast - 3 Things I Wish I Knew Before Going Full-Time In Flipping
Rob: What's up, guys?
Melissa: Today, we're gonna dive into three things we wish we had known before we went full time into our flipping gig.
Rob: So today we're excited to talk about the three things we wish we had known before we went full time into this gig. And what was it like six or seven years ago?
Melissa: Six years ago. And we definitely were thrown into it, which we'll talk about in just a little bit, if you haven't heard our story of how we went full-time flipping, we had to get shoved off a cliff pretty much.
Rob: That's it.
Melissa: But the first thing that we wanted talk about is that it is your, once you go full time, that is your income.
So it is a lot more stressful when you have to pay your bills with that income.
Rob: Absolutely. And we, like we said, we got thrown into this. We didn't really have a choice, but this was our best option is to go full-time into this. But that is something you have to remember when you're going full time into it.
Yeah. You got nothing else backing you up. This is it. You gotta work. You gotta get that money coming in. So, definitely huge.
Melissa: And because when it's your side hustle, like it is an amazing side hustle. We love like we've done it for he's done it since he was 16.
Rob: Yeah.
Melissa: I married into it. So we've done it, our whole marriage.
And it was always our extra money for vacations, fun money, if we needed medical stuff, or we needed a new car or whatever it was, it was always there for us. So let's go make some extra money. We needed it for this. So once it's your full time income though, you gotta treat it like a full time income.
It actually, you know, it has to pay your bills. So everybody knows probably if you're listening to this and you're reselling, you know that income can fluctuate. So if we prepared for those bills and, and on the good months, put some money away. So on the lower months that you have it there to pay your bills.
Rob: Yeah. But I definitely think you hit the nail on the head by saying if you treat it like a business, that's where you're gonna get paid like a business. You can't treat it as a side hustle. Like a lot of people, when you go from side hustle into full time, you can't treat it like it's still a side hustle.
You gotta put the hours in. You gotta put the work into it to grow it. Now you don't always have to do that. In the beginning we had to do it a lot more to get our inventory up. But once we did that, once you throw that time into it, that's when you start getting paid the big bucks.
Melissa: Yeah. So the second thing was, this is really beneficial if you're doing it as a side hustle or full-time, but more important, even as full-time is to keep a reserve of money, that you can use for refunds.
Don't spend everything that you make. So you know, you need to reinvest in your business, obviously, and you need to pay your bills. So, but try to keep a, a little egg of money if you get a refund or, or whatnot.
Rob: Absolutely. When I was a kid, I was a kid when I started this business, in my late teens and I would make money and I would go and spend that money.
And then right away, that's it have something come back. And one return, something happened in shipping, something got damaged, and I would not have that nest egg or that money saved up from the sales that I did. And I got in trouble in the beginning like that. So make sure that you're doing that, setting some money aside, even if you're doing it for 30 days, you, you try not to touch the money on your sales, for 30 days.
Just because that's where eBay can require you to take refunds on some stuff. We do not.
Melissa: You mean the, the money from those sales?
Rob: The sales in the 30 days. Exactly. So you just want to have something, and this goes a little bit more when you're doing like, we do large items. Some of our items are $5,000 and $10,000.
You do not want to be stuck with something happening and you have to refund money for shipping damage. And then you don't have the money cuz you went out and spent it. So that's definitely a huge point is you wanna keep that money if something does happen if you do have to issue a refund, so that's a huge key.
Melissa: And most of our refund requests are actually damaged in shipping. So last year we had three requests. Two of them were damaged in shipping and one of them was your fault and we just refunded it and took it back. But the other two were shipping. So we still have to, there's a timeframe before we cut the check from the shipping company. So we have to be able to pad that and just like, we're still getting paid, which is good. You know, if it's a shipping claim, you still get your money. The buyer gets their money back. But you still need a little bit of padding so that you can refund that.
Rob: Absolutely. Sometimes it takes a little bit longer from the time that you give the refund to the buyer once you receive the item back, once you give the refund and then when you get the check from the actual, insurance company that you had insurance on the item. So, hopefully you guys are doing all that stuff, but that's another topic for another day. You just wanna make sure that you have that money in reserves that you're not spending your money as quickly as you're making it.
And you have it in reserves. If you do have something come up that you're able to give a refund if you have to.
Melissa: Yeah. Cause you don't wanna have to go in the negative, cuz that is never a good thing.
Rob: Absolutely not.
Melissa: Gotta keep that coming in. So the next one is kind of a no brainer, but it, it makes sense, but sometimes we're not doing it.
So if you wanna increase your income, you have to increase your inventory listed. So if you are in a hard spot and you find yourself, you've jumped into this full time and now maybe the sales have slowed down or something. So we gotta get the income up. Yeah. So we gotta get those items listed.
Rob: And you do think of it as a no brainer, but for us in the beginning, we didn't really realize this.
It's one of those things that going through through years and years, you realize, and it's not just really items that you're listing. It's not about the volume that you're doing. It's more about the inventory dollar amount. You wanna get the dollar up there, on your inventory. So you want to have much, you wanna have a lot more listed and it really correlates with what you're making is the, how much inventory you have listed, how much the dollar amount of the inventory that you have listed. So, if you are wanting to make so much money every weekend, you want it to be a steady income. You really gotta get that inventory up there, to where that, that will continue to sell.
And you'll continue to make that steady income off.
So as an example, if somebody wanted to make a hundred thousand dollars, how much inventory should they have?
Yeah, roughly, roughly listed. Yeah, roughly listed a hundred thousand dollars a year, I would say you want to have, between $150,000 and $200,000 listed.
Melissa: That's been the average for us and a couple of people in our members group that we've talked with.
Rob: Yeah. And that's been kind of the average that we keep on eBay is roughly between. $150,000, $200,000. And that's roughly about what we make in a year, off of our sales is about a hundred thousand dollars.
So if you're doing larger items and I don't know on small items, that's probably a lot of small items if you're doing smalls, but we like last year we only had, what was it? 70 or 80 sales.
Melissa: Yeah. Our average sale price was $1,400.
Rob: So yeah, and I think we did 70 or 80 sales last year, for the amount of sales that we did.
And that gives you an idea. We're not doing tons and tons of sales, but we're still able to bring in decent money on those sales. And, we're making good money because we don't pay a lot for our items, which is another, another topic. Another topic about buying your items the right way. But right now, yeah, the biggest thing is knowing that you have to get your inventory dollar amount up there if you want to make more money. You have to be constantly, getting that to go up and up and up so you can make the money off of.
Melissa: And then the last one was kind of, I mean, we already did three, but I had a bonus one that I thought of too, is don't wait until everything is perfect to go full time. So you might be analyzing everything.
You might be on the fence. Okay. I know like I'm making this much. Can I really make it full time? What happens if like my first month my sales just completely tank. Like, and then what am I gonna do? But if you overanalyze it, you may never do it. And we have a similar story of how we got into it. So we were doing it part-time we hit, I think it was $40,000 part-time and not a ton of hours. Yeah, I think what did we figure? Like 20 hours. Oh, 10 hours, 20 hours a week.
Rob: I can't remember exactly, but it wasn't a lot. It was definitely our part-time income.
Melissa: Yeah. And so we were like, okay, well, if we can do this part-time what if we both did it full-time. But before that, before we got to that point, I had decided to quit my job as a personal trainer, when I was pregnant with our third baby cuz I was like, this is, we had three kids three and under, this is just insane. I'm gonna stay home. I can help you with your flipping, like doing some listings and stuff for you. And then, take care of this insanity of a house of these little kids.
And then right at that point a month before we were due, your job came back and said, that cutting our health insurance, they were cutting our health insurance and we're like oh. So March 31st was the last day we'd have health insurance and our baby was due April 1st. So I'm like, all right, what are we gonna do?
Rob: And the only reason that I did have this nine to five job was for the health insurance. I made more money flipping, on the side than I did at this other job. But the insurance was a huge benefit for us. So, that's where we had to make the decision. What, what is, what is it for us? What are we gonna do?
Am I gonna go get another nine to five job? Am I gonna go do something like that or thinking about our side hustle that was really, really cool. We were making decent money at it as a side hustle. What if we really threw full hours and full time into this, and saw what we could do. And we went from $40,000 to like $130,000 our first fulltime year.
Yeah. Dumping hours into it and with a newborn. Yeah. And we had three kids, so it was one of those things. It was an awesome decision. It wasn't, I mean, it wasn't like, scot-free, this was amazing. We had trials, exactly. We had trials and we went through learning processes and stuff like that. Just like anything you're gonna do, you're gonna have that stuff.
But, that's kind of how we got thrown into it and that's been six or seven years ago and it's been amazing..
Melissa: Well, he's almost, I guess it'll be seven soon, so yeah, almost seven years ago. So yeah, and that, I don't think if that hadn't happened. I'm not sure we would've done been able to do it in like hindsight.
You're like, how could we not do this? And now we do this and we share, and we coach too. Yeah. So we have, you know, multiple streams of income that we're using. But like at that point we were like, all right, we're all in on this. Like we have to make this work. And it was the best decision because we, I was able to, we were both actually home with the kids when they were growing up.
We didn't really wanna put them in daycare. Not that, I mean, that is an option for people. And if you need it, that's great, but we didn't personally want that. We wanted to be home with our kids. They went to the flea markets with us. They went to thrift stores. We had, you know, the stroller and backpacks to go to the flea market.
We, you know, did it all as a family. Absolutely. And took them to the 127 yard sale when they were really tiny. And, yeah, they're like another garage sale. What are we doing?
Rob: Yeah, it was a blast. It was really, really cool. And it was one of those things that we would not change the way that it happened.
I mean, it was not ideal when it was happening. It's very, very hard going through a situation like that. But it has, it really, really has shaped us. It's grown us to where we are right now, which is amazing. It's a lot of fun at doing what we're doing, being able to do it together as a spouse and, being able to do it with our family.
It's just a lot of, it's a lot of fun.
Melissa: And now we've been able to, you know, be there at school events and we can both be there usually.
Rob: And the freedom it allows us to have. It's amazing. It's amazing to be able to do that.
Melissa: But we did not have a big nest egg of money sitting on the side and savings before we jumped in full time.
We didn't be like, okay, well at least we can lean on this for a little while while we get this rolling. No, and that probably helped us actually, yeah. Get a fire under our butts and get things.
Rob: Cause you gotta do it. You don't have a choice, you have to do it, you have to perform. And that's what we did.
Melissa: And that's actually the same time that you jumped into the freight shipping and the large items because that's, so I gotta figure out a way to make more money with our time that we have. And that's really what changed our business absolutely completely was the freight shipping.
Rob: From the $40,000 to 130,000. The next year it was larger items is what we did.
We really leaned into larger items and figuring it out, learning how to ship and how to do all that stuff. So that really was what took us to the next level.
Melissa: Yeah. You saw something on eBay, but I think it was that furniture set he's like, okay, well, if this is gonna sell, I'm gonna figure out how to ship it.
These ones are listed with shipping. I'm gonna figure it out.
Rob: Absolutely.
Melissa: And completely worth it.
Rob: So, yep. Yep. Been amazing.
Melissa: So if you're thinking about going, full-time just know you do have to pay all your bills with it. It is your full-time income, so be prepared, but don't wait to be everything to be perfect.
Perfect. Cuz it never will be.
Rob: Yep. Similar to kids we thought, all right, you gotta wait until you got this much money in the bank. You wait till this and this and this, but you guys, you'll never ready until you throw yourself into it. We say the same thing with this. You can definitely do some things that will help.
But just jump into it. It's gonna be amazing for you to do it. And these are definitely things that we wish we had known when we started out. For sure.
Melissa: Yeah. So awesome.
Rob: You guys rock. Have a great day.
Melissa: See you later.