Rob and Melissa Stephenson from Flea Market Flipper talk about whether you have to have storage to get started flipping.
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Do you have to have storage to get started flipping?
Rob: What's up, pro flippers? On today's episode, we're talking about storage and what do you do? How do you handle storage? Do you need storage? We're gonna dive into it in this episode.
Rob: All right, so today's episode talking about storage. What do you do because we do low volume, high profit sales, not high volume. The larger items. And it typically is larger items. So what do we do about storage? What if you don't have any storage? Can you still do this business model? We're gonna dive into that in this episode.
Melissa: Yeah. We were doing a training today with a group of people and that question came up like, so what do you do if you don't have a lot of storage?
So we kinda wanted to talk about that because that is a big obstacle for people that, that, from starting this business. And that could be growing even your volume business, it could, that could stop you. So we kinda wanted to dive into different tips and different things that you can do if you are worried about having enough storage for this business.
Rob: So what do you do? Well, for us, I started out in a two bedroom duplex. And this is after I moved out of my parents' house. You guys remember? I started flipping when I was 16 years old. So when I moved out of my parents' house, that was the only thing I did was doing it full time. I was flipping. And I had, I moved into a duplex, and one side of the duplex, I rented it.
I had two bedrooms and I used that second bedroom as my, kind of my work room, my storage. I did all that.
Melissa: Pictures there too.
Rob: Pictures, storage, shipping, everything was out of that second bedroom. And I had my other bedroom that I did, had my living room, all my other stuff, but I kept everything in that bedroom to start off.
And then as I started getting a couple more things and getting more inventory, I bought a shed and I put it out at the back of the duplex. I asked the owner of the property if it was all right if I built a foundation and put a shed out and he let me do it. So I started-
Melissa: I didn't know you built that shed.
Rob: I did. So he started, and that shed is at this house, believe it or not. Really? Which is funny, that's it. That is funny. So she didn't know that. But anyways. Anyways, the house that we just bought, belonged to a buddy of mine and, I gave him that shed when I moved out of the duplex.
Melissa: That's so funny.
Rob: It is.
So, but anyways, all that being said is then I upgraded to a shed and I still used the second bedroom. Actually, no. I rented the second bedroom to a buddy who needed a place to stay. So he actually came in, rented, stayed in the second bedroom. That's why I moved out to the shed. The shit. And the shed was about the same size as the second bedroom.
So I was still at that capacity. And then as I started making more money, I saw the potential of getting more inventory and making more and more money, and that's when we actually went to a storage unit. And the first storage unit that I bought, I, that I rented, I want to say it was 12 foot wide by 21 foot.
It was a one car garage. I started with one of those. And mind you, I'm, I'm starting to make more and more money. This is more, a real thing. More of a real business. And then I went to two, and then I went to three. I think I even got to four before
Melissa: I actually- No, you were at three.
Rob: Was I? Yeah. So once we hit three of those single car garages, though I, I was renting out, I went to the next level, which was a warehouse, a storage building that we rented out. And yeah, have, yeah, thousands of dollars, hundreds of thousands of dollars, in that warehouse. And that's what I still use to this day. We're actually getting, we're in the process of moving out of that warehouse because the house that we bought, has enough storage at the bottom of it that we can actually put everything on the property, in the house that we're in right now.
So for you, if you don't have any storage, because that was something like Melissa said, it, it struck a conversation today when we were doing a training and people are like, "What do I do if I don't have storage? Can I still do this business?" I'm
Melissa: gonna say-
Rob: Go ahead.
Melissa: Go ahead. No, I was just gonna add in, when we first got married, we lived in a 575 square foot house.
So you moved out of your duplex, we moved into the, that house. We did not have a storage unit yet. You had, you built that bigger shed in the backyard, so it just started with a bigger shed. We had absolutely no storage in that house whatsoever. Like there was, it was a tiny little house, with no storage.
So we had that other bigger shed that we used and before you went to a storage unit and then you eventually got went to a storage unit when it made sense and when you're making enough money that it makes sense. Yeah.
Rob: No, absolutely. So where, where was I? I forgot.
Melissa: I don't know. But we also used the closets and when we moved to the other house, it had closets.
Rob: We did.
Melissa: And then we used that.
Rob: We put some of the stuff in the closets, yeah.
Melissa: So you just kind of use the space that you have. Yeah. You don't have to, you know, go crazy. And I think the biggest thing is like we wouldn't need storage, as much storage if things would get listed faster. Yeah. So that's something that, one of our members, Stacy, she had, she ended up, just using her garage for the longest time and then she eventually got a pod.
So that's an option. I think her, maybe she shared it with somebody and they shared the expense of the pod. Isn't that what's called a pod? I think so. Those little-
Rob: Yeah, the thing they moved to your property?
Melissa: Yeah. It's like a semi trailer or something. Yeah. And you can put it in it. So they got a pod and she shared that for a while.
But she would not put anything in there until it was pictured and listed and then it went in there. So it was a, a great system because that's the biggest thing. If it's not listed, it can't sell. So that's why like people ask us how long stuff takes to sell. I'm like, well, it's not really fair if it's not listed because
Rob: usually sells quickly.
Melissa: Usually sells quickly.
Rob: 'Cause we buy it, we look at the comps before we buy it and we know it, but I have to get it listed. So- And that's my biggest, that's our biggest downfall. Yeah, is getting stuff listed. But if you do not have any storage, does that mean you can't do this business? Absolutely not.
You can start right like we did, with nothing, with a closet. You can start with a closet. And that's why this kind of, prompted this, this podcast today because we did a training and I found three items throughout the country. I went in three different zip codes, people that were on the training.
I found some items. The first item I found, what was it? Was it a cookup? A cooktop, yeah.
A cooktop that would stand up into a closet and take up less than 12 inches wide, probably it was 48 inches, so four foot tall. 12 inches wide, you could stick it into a closet, any closet, it would easily fit in to be able to store it until it's sold.
Now what was the profit on that? The profit was gonna be around 2,000 bucks, profit on that. So could you find a little spot in your closet that you could do that if you didn't have a garage, if you didn't have any place to do it? I hope you could because $2,000 was a lot of money to be able to do one flip like that.
The second thing that I found, what was the second one that I found?
Melissa: Was there, was it a range or was it?
Rob: It was, it was Ohio. That one might have been a bigger
Melissa: Oh, was the fryer or a
Rob: That's right, a fryer. So that was a little bit bigger footprint.
Melissa: But it wasn't that big.
Rob: It wasn't. It was still the size of what could you compare it to?
Smaller than an oven, your kitchen oven, it was smaller than that, probably about the half the size of your kitchen oven. That two people could easily pick it up. I mean, a big guy, I feel like maybe I could move it around. No, I, this one was the flat one.
Melissa: It was a smaller one, yeah.
Rob: That's right. So I absolutely could pick this up myself and I could move it where I wanted to.
So yeah, you totally could do that. Could you find, and the comps on this one was 3,700 bucks, and $250 was invested to make around $3,000 to $4,000, could you find a little spot? I mean, for me, I'd find a spot in my bedroom if I had to, to make 4,000 bucks on this bad boy. And the other thing was it was selling quick.
There weren't a lot of active listings. There was a couple comps, so that's one of those things that absolutely ... And then the third one was a little bit bigger is the size of a range, a 36 inch wide range, so a little bit normal, a little bit bigger than a normal range. And that one I believe was $4,500 for a $250 investment, $4,500 return on that.
Could you find a place? And this one would definitely take a dolly, like a hand truck, that you would have to pull it on the hand truck and move it around. So it'd be a little bit bigger. But about the size of your stove inside of your kitchen, could you find a place somewhere to store that? And one, you start with one, that's all you have to do.
You don't have to get hundreds of thousands of dollars in inventory. Start with one. See if you like the process. See if you like that cha-ching hitting your phone and the $4,000 hitting your bank account to be like, "Well, wait a minute. I'm making a little bit of money. Maybe out of that $4,000 I can go get a $100 storage unit and I could buy a couple more of these $4,000 flips."
So yeah, you just start where you're at and we never tell people, "Don't go out and buy a storage unit right now or rent a storage unit so you can start this business. Start where you're at. Once you get a little cash flow, once you got a, a bank roll coming in, that's when you go out and maybe spend $100, $50 on a storage unit, but there's many, many ways you can do it.
You don't have to get a storage unit like Melissa talked about a pod our, one of our coaches split with a friend, put it on her property to where they could actually store stuff inside of it, and they shared that because they were flipping together and they had a relationship like that. So still not costing a lot of money, but that's, there's so many options in this business.
And maybe you have a friend with a garage and you don't have a garage. Maybe you can say, hey, can I give you 50 bucks a month? And maybe I can use a small section of your garage to put maybe three ranges in it, maybe it's gonna be $8,000 to $10,000 in inventory and you're paying 50 bucks a month for something like that.
Is that worth it? Absolutely. There's so many solutions if you do not have storage that you can figure it out to really make good money because there's a lot of money to be made in this, in this industry. Yeah.
And when you're talking about that cooktop today, like that cooktop for $2,000, a lot of times, you know, people are like, okay, well that's kind of big.
But if you had to have $2,000 of small items, so say $20 items, how many of those would you need? How many was that? 100. 100 $20 items. And how much space would that take up? I'd probably venture to stay pretty close to the same amount of space. So it's not, and sometimes even le- or more space for those items.
So, I don't know if you've ever seen volume sellers and we're not like the volume sellers are great. There's no, we're not saying that's wrong. But sometimes like some of their storage the way all the bins and I, I love how it looks. It's so organized, but it's a lot of stuff. So it's just, but they have to stay more organized.
That is probably your biggest, I don't know, pet peeve or like it drives you crazy if you sell something small and you have no idea where it is.
I don't because I lose the small stuff. I can't lose an oven or a cooktop. It's somewhere inside the shop. That's not that hard. But when I sell something small, that stinks because I don't know where I put it.
Yeah. Because I am used to storing or big items. I'm used to having that now because I have a warehouse that I can put that stuff in. So you don't have to start with a warehouse. You don't have to start with a garage or a storage unit. Start where you're at. And if you see what the potential is, yeah, we, we pay money in storage.
We pay money for a warehouse, but we make way, way more money in this business flipping items that are $4,000, $8,000, $10,000, $15,000 dollars per single item that will pay all of our, our storage fees for a year easily for us to be able to do this business. So that's where we're at. You start where you're at and get to the point, if you do enjoy it, if you like that cha-ching, you like the bank role coming in, then you can go to the next level and you can start up, upping your game, upping your game with a storage unit, a truck, a trailer, whatever it is, you start where you're at and then you grow into it if it's something you enjoy.
Melissa: Yeah. And one of the biggest tips I would say is to make sure you stay organized as you start growing your business. So, like I mentioned that, Stacy had, she'd take pictures and then it would go into storage. That, that is really the best thing you can do. If you have a pile, I know you've probably heard of, referred to the death pile of your stuff that you need to list or money pile is even a better term because that's gonna make you money.
If you let that get too big, it's overwhelming. So try to reduce that overwhelm and just stay organized. One tip that I had a while back, which I thought was really cool for volume, sellers is something, because I started getting into the baby stuff and we had more small stuff, so I started getting a couple bins is if you ha- if you do do a lot of some of the smaller stuff, get bins and then label them like, you know, row one, bin one, row one, bin two, or whatever it is, and then you can put that in the description of the item that you're getting.
Then you never lose an item. Be like, okay, it's in row one, bin one, row one, bin two. I can go find it, get it, I didn't lose the item, I didn't lose the sale, so that's what you need to do with your smaller items.
Rob: Absolutely.
Melissa: I know you don't have a ton of them, but so we would only probably need like two bins of stuff.
Rob: Yeah.
Melissa: to, to stay organized, so if we can get organized. Anyway, so that was just my little hack for
Rob: For sure.
Melissa: For staying organized with some of the volume stuff, so ... And you're actually in the process of getting all moved and organized, so.
Rob: That's it. Hopefully once we get it over to this house, we will get organized with it, make sure everything's, have a picture station. Everything's listed. We have a great picture station, a testing station, all that stuff. That's my goal, that's what I'm working on to setting up, downstairs in our garage for sure.
Melissa: Yeah. So don't let not having a lot of storage, you know, stop you. ... stop you because it shouldn't stop you.
Start with where you're at. Don't go out and, you know, rent a big storage unit right away, like get, start where you're at, make sure you love it, and then grow from there, so.
Rob: Awesome.
Melissa: And if you want to learn more about our business model of low volume high profit, we have a free workshop you can check out in the show notes below and we'd love to see you there.
Rob: You're amazing. Hopefully you had a great day today. We cannot wait to see you on the next episode.