Rob and Melissa Stephenson from Flea Market Flipper talk about how to make more money on your flips in less time.
Part 1: 3 Reasons Why Your Flipping Side Hustle Is Not Profitable
Part 2: How We Made Over $20,000 On Free Items
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You can find us at: https://fleamarketflipper.com/
How To Make More Money On Your Flips In Less Time
Rob: What's up, Pro Flippers? On today's episode, we're talking about how to make more money on your flips in less time.
Rob: All right. So today we are tackling how to make more money in less time in your flipping business.
Melissa: This is video three in a mini series and we are excited to dive into this topic.
Rob: And if you don't know, we're Rob and Melissa with Flea Market Flipper. Guys, and we have been doing this for 27, I've been doing it for over 27 years now.
Melissa married into it. 17 years ago and we've been teaching other people how to do it for the last nine years.
Melissa: And we are excited to dive into this topic. Just a quick recap before we dive in. So we are going to talk about making more money on your flips and it really boils down to three things. But we've been talking about kind of three reasons why you might not be profitable in your flipping business. So we'll we definitely go back to that first and second video We will talk a lot longer or talk more about them.
But the first one was, you haven't started. So we want to encourage you to start no matter where you're at. If taking one foot in front of the other has stopped you, get started.
Rob: And you're not the only one who's there. Go back and watch that video. But it is, you are there with a lot of other people who are in analysis paralysis.
Don't worry about it. We are walking you through that process in this three video series. Yep.
Melissa: And once you get started, you just gain the confidence and you can grow from there. So the second one was, you might be scared to lose money on shipping. That is a big obstacle for a lot of people getting started.
So we talked a little bit about that on ways that you don't have to lose money on shipping. So that is on the first video. Yep. And on, then we went into, you might be spending too much on inventory. Which we're going to elaborate a little bit more on today too. But we did, we talked about all that in video two as well.
So, and how to find free items. Cause there's so many ways to find free items. What did we, we found, how much, was it 12 items I think that we found for over $20,000 in the last two years? Like. And we don't even go out there looking for them, so no, they just show themselves to us. Go back to that video, you guys can do that.
Rob: We have a lot to cover today, so we want to jump into that. If you need to go back and reference it, video number two. Go check it out.
Melissa: Making more money on your flips really boils down to three things. The first one is you might be spending too much on inventory, which is what we just talked about. So, you don't have to.
We do not like to spend a lot on inventory, and our goal is to 10x what we spend. So say we spend $100. We want it to sell for $1,000 and that is pretty much our mark for the last couple years And I actually just ran our numbers and we 12 we 12.7X'd our investment.
Rob: That's right guys. If you don't know around here, we love the high profit items and that's really what we seek out and that's what we do in our business is look for those high profit items that we have high ROIs on those items.
Melissa: We're not really in the market to spend five dollars and make ten dollars.
That's just too time consuming. It's a lot of work when you could spend the same amount of time sourcing and listing the item that you would have to do for something that's going to bring you in a lot more money. So that's kind of why we gravitate towards this business model. So.
Rob: Let's jump in and figure out why exactly we can make more money on our items. And it really boils down to something that I was modeled at a young age. I come from a big family, have,six older sisters. I am the seventh. And I am the youngest and only boy in my family. But at a young age, since we had a big family, my parents would go to yard sales. They would do this for two reasons.
One reason was it was a big family. It was a lot of money to take care of us. So they would get stuff from yard sales, secondhand stuff that we ended up getting from yard sales to provide for us. But the second reason was they had a they would go to yard sales and find items undervalued items. They would bring them back and they would post them in the classified section on the weekend.
Now, back in the day, this is before the internet. This is before smartphones. This is when you really had two sources to be able to find items, at yard sales, well you had also flea markets, thrift stores, and stuff like that. But my parents did yard sales, where they would go and they'd find a good item at a yard sale, they'd bring it back, list it in the classified section, and they would sell it, and that's how they made extra money.
This was their side hustle. I got modeled this at a young age, but the reason that it worked is because at a yard sale, at any given Saturday, Friday, Saturday, whatever it is, Sunday, you might have had two or three hundred people visit that single yard sale. My parents would take it from that small audience, where they only had so many people able to reach that and then they would bring it back and post it in the classified section of the local newspaper, which are classified, probably reached 30,000, 40,000, 50,000 people back in the day, it had the potential to reach that many more people.
So they took it from the smaller market and put it into the bigger market. And that's what we do nowadays. Now we've gone to the next level because. We have the internet, we have smartphones, we have apps, we have all these places where we can pull stuff out of the local market, and then we can throw it into the either nationwide or global market, and we're able to sell stuff quicker, we're able to sell stuff for more money because of that.
Melissa: Yeah, just to give an idea, so like you said, bringing it from a couple hundred people to thousands of people in the, local market, or in, sorry, the, yeah, local back in the day classifieds. And then now we're taking something from the local market of thousands of people. Or you could still do hundreds if you're going to yard sales because you can find some great deals at yard sales too if you love to treasure hunt there. But you're bringing it to the nationwide market like for example eBay has one point what is it?
No, 135 million registered users. Now, not all those people are looking for your item, but not all the thousands of people on, you know, on local apps are looking for your item either. So, but your chances of that, of the person who's looking for your item are a lot higher whenever it's a bigger market.
Rob: So, absolutely. And now the next thing that we're going to talk about is time. So the big thing about what we do, we do not have a lot of time. We have three kids, we have a coaching business, we have a flipping business. So we have so much and you probably relate to that. You have so many things that you're juggling in every direction everywhere and you want to be able to do something in less amount of time.
Now, how we've really found out that this works for us is we're able to sell the high profit items so I can sell an item that I might pay $100 for and say I sold it 10X and I sold it for $1,000. That one single item may have taken me about two or three hours to fulfill that item versus me having to sell, me having to sell a hundred items at $10 to do that. When I have to sell a hundred items, I have to take that many pictures, a hundred pictures. I have to list a hundred times on eBay or wherever you're listing at. And then I have to fulfill it. If I'm selling it and I'm shipping it, I have to package a hundred items individually to do that.
Now you can know how, you can, you can understand how time consuming that is versus doing one single item. This is the trick that Melissa and I have found. Years ago, this is what we found out is go for that one single item and do it again and again and again. That way it requires less time and effort from us to be able to do that and more time that we can do what we want to do with our families, with each other.
We're able to do that because we've really honed in the business on these higher profits.
Melissa: And we've gotten to a point now that we really only do those kind of items, but when you're first getting started, like, thinking about just adding one of those kind of items into your mix every month, is really helpful.
So it brings your numbers up so much, and your profit up so much each month, just by adding one of those kinds of items. Yeah.
Rob: Oh, I was just gonna say, I think about our last 90 day total of what we did, and we were averaging like $1,700 per flip. This was only like, I think 10 flips that we did in the last 90 days, but $1,700.
What if you did that one a month? What if you did that one a month and got to a thousand or $2,000 extra a month just by doing one flip? Now, these flips aren't taking me hours and hours on end to do these typically about. Two or three hours to totally fulfill a flip that I can make $1,500, $1,700, $2,000 on that flip.
So what would that do for your business right now?
Melissa: And there's one other main reason why this business model works. And it really boils down to, again, the third one being shipping. So we offer shipping on our items. And somebody commented this the other day, or on social media because we posted a cooktop that we bought for $65 in the local market on Marketplace and sold it for $1,500 in two weeks in a couple weeks.
You just got to get it listed and they sell. So, but she was like, I have this really nice cooktop I've had for, for three years, I think she posted, I've had this for three years and it's not selling what's going on. And then I replied back and I said, are you offering shipping? And she said, no. So she's just in the local market.
And I said, that is the reason why the person we bought it from was only able to get $65. And he actually told us, he's like, if you didn't show up, I was about to scrap it. He was a scrapper. And he's like, I just, I felt bad scrapping it. Cause it's such a good cooktop. I think it still has a lot of use. So I just wanted to post it on marketplace, see if I got any bites, but nobody bite so nobody bit or whatever. So you if you weren't going to show up then I was going to just scrap it the next day. So but he's got $65 from it but had he posted on a larger market and offered shipping. That is a game changer and it is a skill totally worth learning.
Rob: That's it and I think about I put a slide together recently for a workshop that we conducted about this one cooktop. And I specifically remember looking right after I sold this cooktop, found the exact same cooktop that was listed for $400. The problem was they were not offering shipping. Mine I sold for $1,500 and I offered shipping on it. Why would somebody go for?
Melissa: Same platform, same on eBay.
Rob: Exactly! Side by side, two listings, the exact same listings. It's because this person would not offer shipping, so they were limited to the local market. Ours, we did offer shipping and we were able to sell it for, what is that, 3 times more?
4, 8, 12, over 3 times, 4 times as much money just by offering shipping to it. Which it made it even sell quicker! Like this lady said, for hers, she's had 3 years and can't sell it. It's because you're limited to the local market. You have to get out of the local market. You have to learn how to do shipping to be able to do that.
And then you can sell stuff quicker and you can sell stuff for so much more money.
Melissa: And a lot of these items are available. And we talked about not spending too much money on inventory. You can get these items for such a cheap rate because people don't want to ship. So, it's definitely a skill worth learning.
And it's something that we would love to help you with. If it's something you want to learn so you can add these higher profit flips to your business. So.
Rob: Alright guys, so you're not going to want to miss the next video, coming out on Monday.
Melissa: As a sneak little preview, we are opening Flipper University for the last time for this year.
Rob: Guys, we've had so much fun talking with you over these last three videos. Thank you for participating. Thank you for commenting.
Please do the same thing off of this video. Comment below. Let us know how we can help you and what your business is doing right now.
Melissa: We want to help you overcome those obstacles so this year you can really grow your income from your flipping side hustle.
Rob: You guys rock can't wait to see you on that next video.