Rob and Melissa Stephenson from Flea Market Flipper interview Jenny, a stay at home mom, about making an extra $8,000 in her flipping business.
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How This SAHM Makes An Extra $8,000 Per Month With Her Flipping Business!
Rob: What's up guys? Welcome. Welcome. We are excited to be with you today. We have a special guest very excited to, chat with Jenny, Flipper U alumni, who's going to jump in and kind of give you a back story of her, her business, you know, how she got started and just a little bit more information. Hopefully it will be encouraging, encouraging, inspirational for you guys to see what the potential is.
So yeah. Let's go ahead and bring Jenny on.
Melissa: All right. Welcome Jenny.
Jenny: Jenny. Hi, how are you guys?
Melissa: We are good.
Rob: So thanks for jumping on, Jenny, spending some time with us. You have been killing it lately and we definitely wanted to talk to you and chat with you, kind of your business, what's going on and how it's moving forward. But before we get into all that, let us know a little bit of background.
How did you get into flipping?
Jenny: Well, I got into like basically reselling, after the birth of, our third child I had ended up quitting my full time job and became a stay at home mom. And I would just basically sell things when the kids were napping, just to kind of bring in a little extra income and kind of purge things that we no longer needed.
So that's how I started. It wasn't a business. It was just basically like reselling a little bit here and there. And then my, my husband kind of got into it as well. He had always loved going to estate sales and, and garage sales and things like that. So he would find things that I could sell locally.
And that's kind of. You know what? We did for a couple of years. We never really thought about making this a business. It never even occurred to us that anybody could do that. And I guess at one point I was just feeling a little bit inundated with kind of the amount of items that my husband had accumulated for me to resell.
And I was just trying to figure out if there was a better way to do it. And that's when I kind of first came across the two of you.
That's
Rob: awesome.
Melissa: I think it's a really cool that you guys do this together, but the fact that like he was in this, the more smaller stuff, and then you really gravitated towards the larger stuff to get stuff sold and make more with the individual items. I think it was pretty, pretty cool. And I, if I recall, I, when, when you first jumped in to our world.
You had a canoe, right? The end, but you hadn't listed it cause it was too big to ship. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And then you got that canoe for $5. And then you listed it on eBay and sold it for. $2,300, am I correct?
Jenny: $2,300, yes. And it wasn't just a normal canoe. It was a canoe that my husband had found that ended up having collectible value.
It was a model canoe. But yes, absolutely, that was one of the I think that was probably one of the reasons we jumped in. Because I was doing different Google searches to try to figure out who was doing reselling better than I was that I could learn from. And I think I might have put in like you know how to ship large items, how to resell large items, and that's probably how I came across the two of you.
Rob: That's so cool.
Now. Did you ship that canoe? Was that a box or was it a pallet?
Jenny: Yes, that was a box. You basically ship it very similar to how you would ship like a Nordic track. So at the time, we were really stressed out trying to figure out how to ship it. Now, I mean, it would take me like probably a half hour to ship it and we wouldn't stress at all.
We would probably wait until the deadline and be like, oh, hurry up. We better get this out the door.
Melissa: That's so cool.
Rob: That's so funny. That's true. And that's how the more experience you get, the more times you do something, how, you know, you were stressed out about that one. Cause it was your first one.
And now it's like, give me a break. I'm going to wait three days until I have to get the things shipped out. And then I'm going to get it done in 30 minutes and I'm going to get it out. It's really cool how that, that works out.
Jenny: So it's probably, it would probably be shipped better now than when I first shipped it because I've learned so many things and it's like, oh, this is just easy, you kind of, you know, figure out how to do the shipping and you can apply it to a lot of different, a lot of variety of different items.
Melissa: We did, on Friday, we did a start to finish, cooktop, cooktop. So a glass cooktop too, right? So we had like, it was a good box. And so it was pretty cool. Like everybody got to see the, the whole process of doing a larger item that's breakable. So, yeah, it was pretty cool to see the different, the start to finish.
But, and hopefully everybody got a lot out of that.
Rob: Awesome. So fast forward, your husband kind of is bringing stuff home. You guys have a lot of small stuff. What are you doing right now? Is it, are you still doing smalls? Are you still doing, are you doing like, yeah, just give us a breakdown of kind of what you're selling right now and how your business is going.
Jenny: Yes. Well, my husband has always loved smalls, so that is always going to be a part of our business because he loves it. He loves like the historical aspect of it. And, but I have, I've kind of implemented some guidelines that at first didn't go quite so well. Like, a lot of the things that you guys would do in your business, we would apply to our business.
Like, okay, it has to be 10 times profit. It has to be a minimum, a minimum of a hundred dollars. If he's going to do a small, we've got to like, we don't want to be inundated with smalls again. And so now we do a combination of high profit smalls, that he's learning more and more, and he's getting better at. And, and so he's, he's going through picking small still, but only the best.
And then freight shipping and appliances and durable goods. Sorry, my dog's kind of running around. Yeah, you're good.
Melissa: You're good. Our dog barks all the time.
Jenny: Okay. Is definitely the backbone of our business. That probably makes up maybe 70, 75 percent of all of our sales is, you know, the, the durable goods.
Items that need to go freight, items that need to go in larger boxes. We love it. And now he's completely on board with that. That is definitely the backbone of our business. Smalls sprinkled in for sure.
Melissa: For sure. It's fun to learn about that stuff. I love the stuff you find. Like you like to find the interesting, like vintage, like stuff that has stories.
It's super fun to see what you've done, but then you do the regular appliances to that, you know, bring in the money. So, so that's awesome.
Rob: Smalls are fun. Smalls are fun. Only if it is a higher, I think about a humidor. I had a small humidor. We sold for like a thousand dollars because it was a name brand humidor.
And those things are fun when you, but they are, I feel like those, a lot of people think high profit is like this white elephant. It's like this unicorn that you can't find them all over the place. And I feel that way about small high profit that it's not that you can't find them. It's just, they're a little bit harder to do.
Now, when you're willing to do a big item, I can go out and find you 10 items right now worth $10,000, $15,000. And I can do that at the drop of a hat because they are everywhere and you can do it. You just have to know how to fulfill it. So, I totally, I, I relate to Teal. It is cool. And especially because he's honing in his skills on, on these, these small items that are worth higher profits.
So that's really, really cool. It's exciting.
Jenny: Yes. And higher profit, smalls, there's more risk involved because they're items that are really hard to comp. That's the other thing. And so, you know, Yep. Some jewelry or just historical things where you can't necessarily like use eBay comps because there are none available.
And so you bring it home and it requires lots, lots of research. And then sometimes you might have a winner and sometimes you don't. And you just wasted a lot of time and money and, and some money on, an item that just takes. a long time to figure out what it is.
Melissa: How long do you think it took you to really gain confidence to ship some of this bigger stuff?
Like the first sale, I know in the past we've had people that come that list stuff and then they're like praying it doesn't sell. I don't want to ship it. Like I'm not, I don't want it. Like I don't understand. Oh, Stacy and Joanna have both said that. Like, I don't want to ship it. So like where was your confidence with shipping and how did that grow?
Just like per item or?
Jenny: Let us know how that happened. Yeah, I would say it grew per item. I just needed experience. You know, I think I first started out with Nordic tracks and then went on to cooktops and then we tried freight. And it's just like the more items that we would package and the, the, you know, the different variety of items that needed, you know, that you just had to package differently in order to be able to successfully ship that just all added to to our comfort level where right now, I mean, we would pretty much ship anything. I remember Rob, when you sold that bus wash and, and I don't know how many years ago that was, but I remember like looking in my local market and we found one and my husband and I both looked at it. I mean, not in person, just on Facebook and be like, wow, that's cool.
But, and we had all these excuses for why we. Couldn't, you know, we didn't have a trailer. We didn't have storage. We didn't know how to ship it. We didn't know how to freight ship. And now if that item came about locally again, we would jump on it. We wouldn't be concerned about a bus wash. We, you know, we would figure things out where, you know, back when you sold that, maybe that was two or three years ago.
That was way outside of our comfort zone. There was no way we would be willing to, to take that challenge then. But now we'll do basically any item.
Rob: That's awesome.
Melissa: That's so exciting. Even in just a few short years, cause that was two, two of them. So two and three years ago, I think that was, so now you would tackle that you tackled, what is that one big one you did that was, it was great.
Jenny: It was a fryer. It was a six foot long, restaurant, commercial deep fat fryer that weighed about 1200 pounds. That was a big undertaking. But when we found that my husband was on board, that was the big difference. If I would have just found that on my own, I probably would have been way too intimidated to try it, but we had done some freight shipping.
We had done, I don't know, probably a dozen freight shipments at that point where we understood the basics and when this amazing deal came around and we saw this, you know, $20,000, $30,000 deep fryer for $200 or whatever it was, we, we just, we couldn't pass it up, because it was such a great deal. And shipping it was shipping.
It was easy. It wasn't hard at all. The hardest thing for us shipping that was dealing with the weather because it's sold and it sold in December and we don't have a big enough garage to be able to package it. So we had to package it on the trailer and it was sleeting that day. So just fighting the elements and, and.
You know, getting it, getting it, you know, secure down properly and, and being able to like apply the stretch plastic because when it was close, yes, when it was cold and when it was snowing out, like nothing wanted to stick to it. So just learning some of that stuff, but it wasn't really, it wasn't that hard.
Rob: That's cool. That's really cool. No, how much did you sell that for? So you paid $200 for it?
Jenny: Yeah, I think it was $225 and we sold it for about $6,000.
Melissa: That's awesome. It was just under $6,000. I remember that you said.
Rob: Yeah. That is awesome. How did you move that?
So I know Jenny does not have, we have forklifts. We don't always use them. Typically we don't, but Jenny does not. So Jenny, how did you guys move that thing around and how did you do all that it home and?
Jenny: Yeah. Yeah. So when we picked it up, we knew that they had a forklift, so they just put it onto our trailer. And it was on casters. So some of the stuff I had figured out before, so I knew it was on casters and so we knew that we could roll it. So we knew we could get it loaded because they had a forklift and they had guys to help us. So then when we got home, it was just my husband and I trying to figure it out.
So we had to, we put down a plywood sheet on the back of, on the, the ramp of our trailer. You know, a thick plywood sheet because our trailer ramp has like slots in it and we just basically rolled it down. I think my husband put in different, like, maybe different, I think we use some blocks to kind of prevent it from moving too fast because that was our thing is like, if this starts rolling and it's so heavy, it's gonna.
We could easily lose control. So he had different things in place so that it didn't, we didn't lose control and we just pushed it. We pushed it off the ramp. We pushed it into our garage. We cleaned it, we photographed it, and then it sold within six weeks. And then we pushed it back onto the trailer. And then my husband made like a mini ramp so that we were able to like push it onto the pallet itself. And we had gotten this amazing pallet from, like the, the local, like industrial park. It must have been like a piece of I don't know, military equipment or something on it. Cause it was this, it was the heaviest duty pallet I've ever seen, which was perfect.
It was a gift from God, literally, because we needed something big and heavy duty. And so we just pushed it onto the pallet. We got our kids to help us and, it wasn't that terribly hard. Now if it wasn't on casters, we probably would have passed because, you know, we didn't have a way to move it around.
Melissa: But one thing I was going to add with that, like you have so much profit in that item. Even if you hired out half of that stuff, like have somebody move it for you, it still would be way in the green, like, you know, in the black or whatever. Yeah. Like, you know, you'd still have a lot of profit in that item because even if you hired half of that out, because there's so much there and it's sold in six weeks, that's great.
Rob: When I hear that, I hear where there's a will, there's a way. Cause you can always make excuses for not being able to do something. But if you have that will. You know, you're going to do it and you just figure out how to do it. Like you said, your husband made a ramp to get it up onto the pallet. You guys put a piece of plywood down to get it off of the trailer.
And Melissa, a hundred percent, right? You probably could have paid somebody a hundred to $200 to go and pick it up for you, bring it back, put it into your garage, and then you probably paid another person, $200 to come and pallet the thing up for you. And you still would have made thousands and thousands of dollars.
Now, another question is. Is this the like unicorn or are you still doing like high profit appliance flips and other flips? So, because a lot of people might hear that and be like, okay, that's one time that you made some good money. But is that something that's a normal occurrence for you?
Jenny: Yeah, that's a good question.
I would say flips like that are, you know, at least for us and we're in, we're in Wisconsin, we're in, we're in, an area that doesn't have a high population. So for us there, the, the deals, deals like that come around, but they come around, I feel like once a year. but I've got to be looking for them and I have to be able to act.
So yes, I do still find stuff like that. I can find flips that are more in the $50 to $100 purchase price that I can sell for $115. I can find those regularly, but the turning $200 into $6,000, I've done two of those already. And they, they come around about once a year and I have to act very, very quickly when I see them.
Like if I would have been a bit more experienced when we saw that bus wash for sale, we would have gone after that. That might've been a $200 item turned into a $10,000 item. I don't know. But just trying different kind of commercial grade items and learning how to ship it. It just builds our confidence and builds our experience where we are.
We're ready to act when we see those items. Love it.
Melissa: But then she says, but the thousand dollar items, we got those covered, right? Like those are, those are pretty regular, right?
Rob: Yes. For most people, that's a $20 item. I make $20 on a flip. But now you're at $1,000 to $1,500 or those are easier to find and you're able to do it.
So that's huge.
Jenny: And the key to finding those items sometimes is making the most out of every trip. So anytime I'm going to visit my parents. Or if we're traveling for, you know, a kid's sporting event or something like that, or wherever we go, we look for those items because if I was only going to find those items in my town of 40,000 people, they're still there.
Like since Christmas, I found three cooktops. Two of them were $25 a piece. One was $75. All of them will, will sell for probably $1,200 to $2,000 a piece. But those are three items in six weeks. And that's pretty much all that I've found so far in my small town of 40,000 people. But if I like open up my geographic area and I like take the most out of every time I drive two hours to visit my folks or, you know, an hour to visit my husband's folks, it starts to open up the amount of items that I can get without.
Without having lots of like time chasing items because I'm going a place anyway to visit somebody or to do something and then I just make it a business trip by finding items that I can make money on.
Melissa: Absolutely. I love that because yeah, then you the trip's a write off to it's your business trip and you're making the most out of it.
And we love to do that too. Sometimes I can't, I'm like, no, you don't have to fill the truck every time we go, make the money.
Rob: The other thing is it's business, but it's fun. It's awesome to be able to go on a trip to whether it was like you, to your parents or for us to go up into the mountains or do something like that.
Pick up a $1,000, $2,000 item while you're up there. We spent less than that on the whole trip, and the trip was just paid for, you know, as a business write off because of your working while you're doing it, but it doesn't feel like working. It feels like fun. It's just a blast.
Jenny: Yes, that is a very strange concept for me.
The last vacation we went on, we made money going on vacation. We're running out of inventory now because we've had so many freight shipments and I'm telling my husband, we need to go on vacation so we can make more money. Like that is such a strange concept, but being in this business, it's true. Cause sometimes you do need to travel a little bit to, to be able to expand the business.
And, hey, if we can make a vacation out of it and find some items, great!
Melissa: That's fun. I love it. I love it. Stop making excuses and just make it happen pretty much, right? That's it! That's it! Yes! Because you didn't have a trailer when you first got in the bigger items, did you?
Jenny: No, we still don't have a trailer.
We, we, we still don't have a trailer. We borrow our neighbor's trailer. There you go. He's very gracious. And then we'd share, a contractor's trailer with my in laws. But they store the trailer, the, the contractor's trailer. And so it's like an hour and a half away. So it's not convenient for us. And in fact, that's a goal of ours this year is to be able to purchase a trailer that's ours. Because our business has grown to the point where we really need one that we own, that we have access to locally, that we don't have to drive an hour and a half to pick up.
Rob: Yeah, but that's such a great point because this business is not about going out and spending a lot of money on equipment on trucks on trailers and you still can do it. That's how us too. I didn't have trailers in the beginning when I started I didn't have a storage unit. I didn't have a place to store stuff I used a spare bedroom inside of the duplex that I was living in and if you have if there's a will, there's a way. You just have to start slow.
And as you, you can clearly see, Jenny is killing it right now. She does such a, she's doing all these different flips and she's doing it to where you grow the business and you see what the potential is, and then you can find a trailer, you can be on the lookout for a trailer or truck or whatever that you need, but only after.
You prove this business and prove that you're good at it and that you enjoy it, then you can actually go to the next level with it. So that's awesome.
Jenny: And when you see the amount of profit these items bring and you gain confidence, you want to make room. When I first started, that was a barrier for me is like space because we just have a one car garage and we've got, you know, you know, an average size home.
There wasn't a lot of extra space to put things. And so I think we started small with like one range. And then when we saw the profit potential in that, and then I would just start sourcing as many as I could, of the right type of items, then it's exciting because you see how much money you can make and how it doesn't really even feel like work.
And then, you know, the kids are on board. They're helping with things. You know, my husband's more on board. You know, when you see when you figure out your hourly wage for freight shipping and sometimes it's like $2,00 to $300 an hour that we're making freight shipping. It's like everyone wants to freight ship, like my whole family does.
It's no longer, no, it is no longer looked at as being work. It's like, okay, let's get this item out because that's just a ton of money for us.
Melissa: Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. And you, you, so you've done a lot of your shipments were in your minivan, right? Yeah. So you did a lot in just your minivan and made a lot of shipments just using what you have.
And I think that's, yeah, start, start where you're at. And then once it makes sense, then grow to where you need. Like we didn't have get a warehouse until years into it. We just had a shed in the backyard for forever to get started and you hone your skills and, and get good at it. So for sure. I had a question in my head.
And I can't remember what it was. Oh. And right now, like you've grown your business, you're averaging around $8,000 per month. Is
Jenny: that what you told me? So last year we averaged $8,000 a month, which is just incredible. We actually surpassed what my husband makes in his, at his like nine to five job. Crazy.
You know, when we started, you know, reselling a couple of years ago, my husband was still kind of in the mindset of like, oh, you know, almost like moving up the corporate ladder a little bit, looking for job promotions, and now it's like, okay. Let's get the easy, let's let, let's have him maintain this job that he has right now, because it brings in benefits.
It's flexible. It's easy. He can do it in his sleep basically. And, and then, and now when we have an item that we want to pick up or an item that we need to pallet, he just lets his, his job know that, oh, I'm sorry. I can't be there today. I've got to do this because all of a sudden our business is our main income.
And his job is just basically, her day job is just for benefits. It's yeah. It's a very different mindset.
Melissa: It's been so fun to see you guys grow through that too. So yeah, from where you started and being more hesitant to do stuff and now you're like, you'll tackle anything and you're just like, it's, it's so fun to see.
So what would you tell somebody who's maybe like thinking about really jumping into this and wants, wants to get into this higher profit, flipping larger items or what would you tell them? Like some good advice to help them get past
Jenny: themselves.
I would say find an item that you would like to resell and just start.
I think sleep numbers is a great item to start on because it's not very big. Most people can find storage for sleep numbers. And it's high profit. So just start looking in your local market, look daily, set alerts on your phone for whatever item that is, whether it's sleep numbers, Nordic tracks is another great item, because it just builds your confidence with shipping.
Both sleep numbers and Nordic tracks are high profit. They're easy to find locally. If you look, you might need to look daily and it builds confidence in shipping and neither of those items are very easily wrecked in shipping as well. So a NordicTrack is a big item. I remember when I shipped my very first one, I could just couldn't believe I was shipping something in that big of a box, but it's, it's not that hard. And it's not very, if it's packaged well, it's not very likely to get damaged because it is such a durable item. So I think that is just a fantastic, both of those are fantastic items to start on. But just, you know, get your feet wet, try something, try something new and get out of your comfort zone and don't spend too much money on the item either.
Rob: Key, absolutely. Our money is made in the buy. So we want to definitely get it at the right price. I love it.
Jenny: Yes.
Melissa: Awesome. So a lot of fun.
Rob: Thanks so much for spending some time with us. We greatly appreciate you. And actually just revealing, you know, what you're doing, your business, your growth, and giving people an idea of it is possible. It's absolutely possible. Like I said, there's a will, there's a way. And you're a prime example of figuring stuff out and making it work. I think that's a huge part about this business is just wanting to do it and then actually taking the action to just do it and get out of your comfort zone. Like you said, it's the biggest thing about this business. So awesome. Jenny, thank you again for jumping on and we will talk to you soon.
Have a great day, everybody. Thank you for jumping on and hope you have an amazing day.
Jenny: All right. Thank you guys for having me.