Rob & Melissa Stephenson from Flea Market Flipper talk about what to do when the going gets rough.
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What To Do When The Going Gets Rough
Rob: What's up, pro flippers? On today's episode, we are talking about what do you do when the going gets rough, when it gets really, really hard in your business.
Rob: All right guys, so we're talking today about what do you do when it gets hard. When you deal with those hard things in business that make you want to throw in the towel.
Melissa: This is actually something that you can do before stuff gets really hard. And that'll help you stay motivated, when it does get tough. So we kinda wanted to dive into that today just really quick. It's something that is super important, but not something that you might necessarily think about so much, like it's kind of as you're getting into this business, finding out like, why are you doing this?
Rob: So that's it. Your why, what drives you? What, and it's very easy to go one level deep with this. It's very easy to say, okay, I need to make extra money. But we want you to go deeper than that. You can't just say, I need to make extra money. You have a problem, you have a return request. You have something breaks in shipping.
You get negative feedback, whatever it is. Sometimes that will not anchor you deep enough. You really need to figure out. Why do you need, why do you need to make extra money? Why are you on this journey to make extra money?
Melissa: Yeah, maybe you need an extra income, you know, to cover the bills. Maybe you're trying to get out of debt, you, or that stupid credit card fees are you know, driving you crazy, you need to get out of debt. What is it that is gonna keep you going when things get hard like that, you said like the return request or like stuff. Cause in any business there's not fun parts of the business. Like, you know, we might have a shipping claim, we might have, we have to deal with that stuff. But it's, I. Less than, I mean, there's still a lot of fun parts to the business too.
Yeah. So, but when those things happen, sometimes they do make you, you said before that you quit when things got hard. Right?
Rob: I did. Back in my early days of flipping, I've had a return request. I had stuff broken in shipping, kind of just the stuff that I said. I had that stuff happen that swayed me from my flipping career where I, I got, off course and started doing something else because I was sick of it.
I didn't think there was a way that you could actually do this business and be able to really, really make a good side income or a full-time income at it. Back in the day when I was younger, I got sidetracked and I was like, okay, well, I must not be able to sell on eBay because I have somebody who had a damaged item, or I have somebody who wants a return request and I have to find out how to get the money that I've already spent on this item. Then once I sold it, they got it in one of the return requests. So I had to figure out what to do. And it wasn't until years and years later that I figured out, okay, I need to really, hone in on my why. For me, I'm very, I'm different than a lot of people.
A lot of people run towards or is it run away from pain? Pain? I run towards vacations, towards fun, towards doing a lot of cool stuff.
Melissa: That motivates you more.
Rob: That's what motivates me to keep on going. So me, it's making extra money, but it's deeper than that. It's being able to create memories with my wife, with my kids, being able to go on vacations, do fun stuff to create those memories.
Why do I wanna do that? Those memories. I didn't really have that with my parents. My money was tight, in my family as I was growing up. And we didn't get to go do a lot of travel. I didn't go, I mean, I don't think I left the state of Florida until I was probably 18 years old, which is crazy to me.
And our kids have been all over the country, but I'm trying to create memories with them, with Melissa. And that is what really drives me to do stuff. Even when I get into a situation where I have something bad happen, in the business. That's really what anchors me in, is I know the potential of this business.
We've made so much money at this business and I know we're gonna have some bad times, or some hard stuff come our way, but I still stay the course.
Melissa: Yeah, so think, try to think about what are the, what are the things that motivate you and what would be a driving force to why you would want to do this business?
And it can be either pleasure or pain. Like people are motivated by different things and I think, for us, our kids really have motivated us and that's kind of been our driving force. We want to do, go do those fun experiences. And we even said when they were really tiny, like, we would like to take the summers off and really spend time with them.
And that was our goal when they were tiny. And now we've pretty much been able to make that happen. We're not taking completely off, but, but close. Absolutely. And we've been able to, you know, travel the country, bring our trailer, have it be a fun trip and kind of, you know, create some content along the way and it's fun and we get to go buy stuff and then come back and sell it and pay for the trip. So, so yeah, so that was kind of one of our big reasons why, why we want to work hard during the year so that we can go do that.
Rob: So take a reflection on yourself right now. What are you doing this? Why are you trying to make extra money?
Is it to pay off debt? We know debt is crazy right now, throughout the United States, throughout the world, but are you trying to get to that point so you can pay off that debt and get out of, out of the craziness of, you know, the interest, not the interest rate, the, the fees, the fees on credit cards and stuff like that.
Or maybe it is that you're trying to retire early, maybe you don't have any debt, and you're trying to stack as much money as you can that you can invest more money in the stock market, whatever it is. Really, really go deep. I think you. Said before, is it Simon? Simon Sinek, or,
Melissa: no, he did the, the TED talk on the why.
Okay. Which is a really cool one to go watch. And it was, I don't know what year it was, but, but he really dived deep into like companies that even like learned their why and what, and the consumer's why. And so it's super interesting. But it's a Dean Grazioso you'll see that you're talking about, that says goes seven layers deep of finding out what that is.
Rob: That's it. And so keep asking yourself when it's making money. That's, that's it. Exactly. Why do you wanna make more money? Well, you wanna pay off debt. Well, why do you wanna pay off debt? Is it?
Melissa: What does that look like for you? Does that, what, what would that do if you paid off the debt?
How would you feel? Like, start to think of the emotions around that. Like it debt just crushing like we've been in and out of debt a lot in our marriage and it's just crushing when you're like paying those stupid fees and it's so annoying and you can't get out of it. So yeah. So but what would that feel like for that to all be paid off?
So, and like think of those feelings and yeah. And how you feel.
Rob: So that is our encouragement to you from this episode guys. Yeah is really search and figure out why you are doing what you're doing. Why do you need this extra income? And go as deep as you possibly can. Don't just say, I need to make extra money.
That will not sustain you when the rough times happen. You need to make extra money. You can go out and walk dogs. You can go out and clean, pressure wash you, I mean, you can do a lot of different things to make money, but for us, we're very partial with this business. We love this business. We'll do this business for the rest of our lives because it is so much fun.
It's so cool. We absolutely love it, but you really have to stay grounded in why you are doing it. Yeah. So go deeper than just make money.
Melissa: And it would also, also motivate you, not just when like bad things happen, or, you know, tough things happen, but also on the day to day that some of the mundane stuff, like you love this business because everything changes so much.
Yes, you don't know what you're gonna find, what you're gonna sell, but there are aspects that in the daily, like getting stuff listed, getting stuff clean, like that stuff, you know, your death pile creeps up. That stuff's not always fun. You know, it's not all, you know, butterflies and rainbows. You don't have want to sit down and list.
But if you know like, okay, well this is my end goal, this is why I'm doing this, then it makes it a little more motivating to go get it done. Absolutely. Absolutely. So that's our little couple minutes of motivation for you today. Hopefully that helps and it motivates you to figure out why you're doing this so you can get moving and start making some money flipping.
And if you want to check out our business model, the higher profit, lower volume is kind of where we like to do. You can check out our freeflippingworkshop.com and yeah. Thanks guys.
Rob: You guys rock. We'll see you on the next episode.