My 6 Biggest Mistakes Selling on Amazon & eBay

What is up crew, I just realized that sun is going to be blaring in here. Uh, forgive me for the background sunlight. It's like the perfect position for when I move my head and my camera is going to be all wonky with that. So that'll be going down in the next like 15, 20 minutes. So bear with us. Welcome back into the channel. My name is Charles Leslie. Chaz, as most people know me, uh, my wife and I typical story of hustling Amazon and eBay selling out of our garage on top of our full-time jobs for two years until. Uh, we were able to quit those jobs, get warehouses and, uh, scale it from there. So that's where we are today. Welcome in, give me a quick minute while we let people hop into live chat. We're going to structure the live streams from now on where it's the first 30 minutes is dedicated to the topic of the night. So for those of you that just want the info and then you want to get out, awesome. Uh, stick around for that. And then the second half will be typical Q and a, um, session for you guys. How is everyone doing tonight? So we got glitter bug, Kevin, what's up guys. Let me know where you guys are watching from. Uh, we're streaming this over into the Facebook groups as usual. Mr. Alexander bin store conversion in process. Can't stay long, but saying, hi, hi. I can only imagine the, uh, level of work that's going into that. So I appreciate your time stopping in here, man. All right. So we're going to go ahead and get rolling with the topic of the night. I'm going to try to structure these live streams moving forward to where we are going to be focusing on a topic of the night for the first 20, 30 minutes, and then open up Q and a sesh from there. Um, and I know Thursdays are not our usual days. Usually we are Wednesdays about four, 4 30 PM Pacific time. Uh, kiddos were down sick yesterday. So, uh, all kinds of stuff got thrown in the mix, uh, yesterday. Greetings from Denver, David, Lori Eblis. What's up guys. Um, I saw your message. I got to get back to you guys. Um, I did read your message and, um, I got to get back to you on Instagram. So let's try to do that tonight. Oh, my camera is totally going to do this right now. All right. This is going to be a fun live stream. So my camera has been doing this thing and I'm plugged in via USB, which is not the best way to do this type of connection. And it's been freezing. So this is going to be fun. Hopefully you're feeling better. Yeah. They are definitely both feeling much better today. Um, so fortunately it's most of the time when our kids get sick, it's like a 24 hour thing and then it's done, which I'm super grateful for because those of you parents know it is extremely difficult. Uh, to watch your kids pretty much be sick and there's not much you can do. Um, I just realized I am live in the Facebook group and I don't have that pulled up, so it just says Facebook user. For comments. Do you guys just hear something in the background? I think I heard a whole bunch of boxes just falling or somebody in here. I'm sorry if I have to leave real quick and go check. All right. I think we're good. I think a bunch of boxes just fell outside here. So, uh, if you guys are on Facebook and you have not granted permissions, there's a little link to grant permissions, to stream yard, to view your name. It just says Facebook user on my side. Um, so I have no idea who's actually, uh, saying hi, but hello. All right. With that being said, we're going to cut into the topic of the night, which are going to be, there's way more than just six, but I narrowed down what I believe are some of my top six mistakes as a seller in the eBay and Amazon space. These mistakes have been not just early mistakes that happen for a one-time case or a few weeks or a few months. Most of the time, these, these mistakes I'm going to lay out here are mistakes. I just kept making over and over for the first several years of our reselling business. So I want to cover those and kind of get your feedback too, because I'm sure this might hit home for some of you. So mistake number one, cashflow, cashflow, cashflow, cashflow is everything in a business. And this is a concept that I didn't really wrap my head around for the first several years. Because growing up, I was never taught anything about, uh, money, pretty much anything dealing with finances, which I'm sure is the case for a lot of people here, but wasn't taught anything about finances. So you can imagine the learning that had to happen when I got into running self-employment stuff and being a business owner and trying to wrap my head around the benefit of cashflow. And what I mean by this is my biggest mistake when it comes to cashflow was we quit our jobs too early. And I'm the first to, to admit that in. Okay. Don't mind me if I have to like reach up here every now and then my camera is going to be freezing up on me. Sorry about that. So with cashflow for the first several years, because we quit our jobs too early and we, we had nothing in savings. Like we had less than $2,000 to our name, uh, when we both quit our jobs and went full-time in the reselling space. Um, so that was definitely not something I ever recommend. Um, anyone do I wish I can go back and hold on to my massage career for a bit longer, beef up the savings account. Um, same thing with my wife and her medical, um, uh, assisting career. I wish we both would have just stayed in those so that the reselling money could have stayed in the reselling accounts and grow a lot quicker. So cashflow, we kept making the mistakes. And when I say mistake, it's not that we, how do I phrase this? It's not that we make the mistakes and had a choice with it necessarily because we quit our jobs too soon. We had to live off of the reselling money. So we had our personal rent to pay our utilities. Um, our kid are a kid at the time. Now we have two, but our kid Titus at the time had to eat. Like we'd put food on the table, gas in the cars, et cetera. And so at the time we were pretty much just all Amazon in the beginning for those first, probably six to eight months before Trista started incorporating the eBay side. So for those first, really the first year, if I had a thousand dollar Amazon payout from sales that I made from the previous two weeks, then I would have to take like five to $800 out of that paycheck to be able to help pay for rent and all this stuff on top of what Trista was bringing home. Um, from her, her job at the time. And then when she quit, then it was all on us. And at the time we were building up YouTube and affiliates and we had a little bit of income streams coming in together. This is going to make for some really nice glow, by the way, as that sun setting, my hands are looking a little weird. Um, so we had no choice but to use the reselling money when we got paid from our to pull a big chunk of it out every two weeks and use that to pay our personal bills. And so out of that thousand dollars, if I had to take 500 out, I then only had $500 to reinvest back into the business. And if that cycle keeps continuing, which it did for the first couple of years, even if I, at the, at the time I was able to use credit cards, take out a few small loans and start to scale up the inventory. So even on the bigger paydays of having two, three, four or $5,000 payouts every two weeks from Amazon are, we still had to personally live, right? So I was taking out several thousand dollars a month to help just with the personal bills and expenses. That meant that month over month, we were making about the same because we were always investing the same. So the biggest mistake was not understanding cashflow. And at the time I was also having a very big issue with buying inventory and trying to hold out for every last penny that I could. So I wanted to double my money or get 80% ROI, 60% ROI. And the idea of letting something go for only a 20 or 30% return was not even, not even a thought in my mind. Right. I think a lot of us in the beginning go through that phase of wanting to always just double or triple our money. Um, especially if you are somebody that's coming from an eBay selling background to Amazon, very difficult to flip your mindset around to fast selling inventory at a low ROI versus something like eBay, which is. Pay a dollar for an item that sells for 10, 20, $30. You're 10 X-ing plus your money. It's very difficult to wrap your head around that. Um, so that's why I put number one is our biggest mistake. And when I say I, or we, like I'm referring to my wife and I, cause we've been in this together for the entire six and a half years we've been reselling. Um, but cashflow is everything in your business guys. If you are not keeping your, your money in your business and, and going in and out of your business account, um, of course at some point you've got to pay yourself, you've got to take personal expenses, et cetera, but for the most part, the biggest tip I give people when they come to me and they say, Hey, I'm new to reselling any advice. I usually tell them, keep your, your reselling money in the reselling business as long as humanly possible. It's going to make it so much easier for you to scale. If you have a job, a full-time job that pays all of your personal expenses, it's a lot easier to scale a reselling business on the side, because when you get paid from eBay or Amazon for your sales, you don't have to take that money out to live on. You can just reinvest all of it. Um, until you get to that point of, of quote unquote, paying yourself, um, every two weeks or every month or whatever you do. So cashflow is everything. And if you are stuck in that position of constantly pulling from your business account, sometimes you might need to just bite the bullet and as much as it may suck, go get a part-time job that will pay for your personal bills so that you can keep growing your side hustle, your reselling business, um, and scale up from there, uh, go door dash on the, if I were to do anything and I was in that position that I was a couple of years ago, and of course, a couple of years ago, DoorDash was not, uh, very popular at the time, but if I, today's day and age, if I needed to do what I just said, I would DoorDash to pay my personal bills so that my reselling money can stay in my reselling business and keep scaling quickly from there. If you are stuck in a constant position of only reinvesting the same amount every month, it's going to be very difficult for you to scale up from there. So number one mistake that I personally, both my wife and I, um, kept making for several years was cashflow. Um, and also tied in with cashflow is number two, buying inventory because it was cheap. What I mean by that is not doing your research just because you find something cheap, doesn't mean it's necessarily going to sell a lot of people make the mistake. And when I say these things, it's coming from personal experience. Ultimately, I used to buy things at garage sales and thrift stores. I've even done some buyouts from fellow resellers from, uh, even Walmart managers that I have connections with that would hit me up with all these great cheap deals and I would just fill up carts full of stuff just because it was cheap and then I get it shipped into Amazon or listed on eBay and it sits for six months because it wasn't actively selling, which meant there was no demand for that supply. If you were looking at eBay comps and you have something that has 20, 30, 40, 50 listings, and there's one or two or three solds in the last 90 days, probably not a great item to pick up, um, in bulk. That is, it might be fine to pick up every now and then singles, but do not buy inventory just because it's cheap. I know, especially starting out when you are new and you are on a budget, very, very easy to get into that mindset of. I just need to buy cheap stuff, right? You've got to look at the data that we have access to. Fortunately with, with a platform like Amazon, we have a ton of data that we can go by. If you are not using Keepa, that is your absolute must. That is the first and only tool. Now, let me take that back. There's three tools I recommend as an Amazon seller. And in this order, one is Keepa. That's I, I require, I require that from everybody. If you were coming to me and I'm going to coach you in the Amazon world, Keepa, that is an absolute requirement. Keepa alone will give you all the data. It's like 18 bucks a month. Um, and it's a business expense, right? Keepa will give you all the data you need to make a lot of decisions about your inventory. Number two, um, not a requirement. You could do, uh, Amazon shipments through Amazon seller central, but inventory lab is my number two. Number three, um, you know, leased on that priority list is going to be an Amazon repricer. Those are my top three that I recommend. And if you are using a tool like Keepa and doing your research, you should not be buying inventory. That's going to be sitting for six plus months, right? Especially in today's day and age with Amazon's, um, IPI scores, storage limit issues, all this different BS we keep going through as Amazon sellers. You want to have very quick moving inventory. Amazon does not want your stuff sitting on their shelf the same way. We don't need it sitting on their shelf either. We need that stuff turning and burning. Even if it's at a 10, 15, 20% ROI, if you were able to get a hold of quantity that moves quick and you can make 10, 15, 20%, that's an amazing deal in the Amazon space, eBay, eBay does not allow the backdoor key. The I, the API is not open to the general public. And that means that these programs that come in, like Keepa and inventory lab that we have for Amazon, eBay has got that on lockdown. That's why there, you don't see softwares out there for eBay, the same way you do Amazon, but we have Tara peak, which is built into eBay now, which, where you can see a whole year worth of, um, sales history on a product. So you have a little bit more data than we used to. And then you also have just the general eBay sold items. Now, typically when you're sourcing for eBay, you want, it depends on your business model. So everything I'm saying, just it's kind of generalized advice here because you can play both worlds. You can play stuff like collector's items. That's one niche that I'm into is collector's items, action figures, sealed video games, graded games, that kind of stuff. You maybe won't see active sold history for the last 90 days because they're very high dollar items that sell a couple of times a year, right? So you've got to make sure that your buy cost justifies waiting that long for your profit. But on the flip side, same thing as Amazon, I'm perfectly fine making 20, 30, 40% ROI on something that I know I'm going to take easy. It's quickly listed, meaning easy photos, just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, like five or six photos, and then it's easy to list. Preferably new in box. So you don't really have to fill out too much. You could just do the sell similar as, as far as the listing goes. And then from there, it's going to be easy to ship and it will sell within a couple of weeks. I'm perfectly fine making 20, 30, 40% ROI on easy to list, easy to ship type of items like that. Stop buying inventory just because it's cheap. Trust me. I get it. If you're on a budget, we had a very tiny budget when we first started out. We started our entire reselling business with $500 and a 500 credit score, which meant I couldn't go spend thousands of dollars on a credit card because no credit card company wanted to touch us. I had a credit card with a $300 limit when we first started reselling. So keep that in mind, just because you're on a budget doesn't mean you need to go buy just cheap inventory. Focus on sell through, meaning you buy stuff that's going to be moving quickly. Even if you have to take a lower ROI and your business will naturally scale up. And that just ties into your cashflow. Um, cashflow and buying quick moving inventory is the name of the game. Um, as far as the terms of scaling up. Number three, organization and systems. Something I failed tremendously at for many years, really until we launched our prep center, which is where, um, you know, it was just me and Tristan in the beginning, but now it's fully staffed. So until we launched the prep center, the prep center taught us scale. It taught us handling things at volume. That's where we learned the power of organization and systems. And we learned how little we had of both. Tell you what, if you ever want to see how organized and how great your systems do something at scale. Um, so if you're selling a hundred items a month, push it to 500 a month and a thousand items a month, and you'll really see, uh, see where your, where your holes are in that boat. So organization and systems, I reflect it's easier now that we're in a warehouse where we have space to put up tons of shelving and tables and all these things that help with, with organization and systems. But I'm speaking in terms of when we were, when we were in our garage and how many of you follow our Instagram, by the way, Instagram is where I document nearly every single day, whether it's my food pictures, I, I, I love to cook. So it's like one of my things, uh, whether it's my food pictures or what's going on at the warehouse, uh, the kids sometimes, like I just post our daily life on there and a couple of weeks back, I had posted a kind of a throwback. Um, uh, throwback. I don't remember if it was a photo or a video, but I ended up doing this, this throwback where I showed, uh, it must've been a video because I remember going sideways and I was showing our garage from like six years ago when we first started, it was a disaster. And I remember at that time, we thought this is fine. I know where everything is under those piles. It's fine. And then as you start to grow and scale, you look back and realize that is not okay. It is not, it's not, if you don't have a system and organization, it's going to be very difficult to ever grow your business smoothly. And I'm telling you what, something as simple as just having a dedicated work desk or table or space. Excuse me, having a dedicated work to workspace that is clean and organized at the start of the day is literally where you can start. So if you're looking at a death pile, if you're looking at a workspace and it's just an absolute disaster, but you think it's okay, because you know where everything is, I'm telling you right now from experience, when you get to the other side of being organized with systems and a very clean workspace, you have so much more mental clarity. Um, and I wish I can go back and just start from scratch with the knowledge that I have now. Isn't that the case with most of us? And I, I would fix everything we were doing wrong inside of that garage. So whether you're working out of your garage, um, a corner out of your living room, spare bedroom, everyone's got a different setup, but start with a very clean, organized, dedicated workspace at the, at the start of each day. Um, and then on top of that, I wish I was better at time blocking. Um, like I am now. So having dedicated times that I would, would do certain tasks rather than just walking into our garage and be like, all right, there's a lot of stuff in here. Where do I start? What do I focus on? Right. How many of you struggle with that where you just rely on what you feel like doing when you start working, right? You may look at a death pile for eBay. You have some Amazon stuff in a corner. You have this, you have a, um, other things you need to work on. How many of you just start your quote unquote work day by looking at your messes and thinking, which one should I tackle first? That is something that held me back for a long time, because we would have been so much more, uh, we would have been further along. I should say. Um, now if we had started with organization and systems, and when I say, you know, you hear the word systems thrown out there, they're literally not these huge drawn out blueprint plans of, of how your whole business operates. A system is literally just a step-by-step checklist of how you do something. You, the way that you brush your teeth every day, the way that you put your shoes on the way that you dry yourself off after a shower, like these are systems. There is a step-by-step checklist that you probably go through in a natural order. So your business should be operating that that same way. You shouldn't just be random with your different tasks that you're doing each day, because you're going to kind of get those kinds of results. If you're just doing random tasks, if you are consistent with a, a schedule on a checklist, you're going to get consistent predictable results. If I list five items a day, I know that I'm going to be having X amount of sales at the end of each week versus if I just list every now and then when I feel like it, some weeks might be good. Some weeks might be bad, but if you are having consistency in a schedule, your results are going to be gone, become predictable, so cashflow buying inventory, just because it was cheap organization and systems, my fourth biggest mistake. And I kind of tied into this a little bit inconsistent listing and shipping. So I'm, I'm, I'm saying listing and shipping, because obviously we focused on Amazon and eBay this whole time. So eBay having, and I put in parentheses schedule, right? So like I just mentioned, one thing that I would go back and do different, even from the, the OG garage days, if I can go back in time, I would have followed a much better schedule for myself because I was the type for the first two years when we were doing all these side hustles out of our garage. I would open the door. We'd have an eBay mess over here that needed photoed. I'd have an eBay mess that needed clean and tested like electronics. I'd have a bunch of random Amazon stuff. I would have customer returns in a different pile. And I would just look and choose what I felt like working on that day. And then other days we're like, well, I don't feel like working on any of that. So I'm going to go source, right? I'm going to go hit up some stores, having some type of schedule, as much as you may hate the idea of following a schedule for yourself. And you might be telling yourself, well, jazz, I like flexibility. Me too. Don't we all? The problem is if you allow yourself the flexibility, probably, probably not going to be following through with a lot of what you know you should be doing, right? So come up with some type of loose schedule for yourself, even if it's just, Hey, Mondays, I'm going to dedicate myself to picking out 10 items out of my death pile every single Monday. Just one day a week, just pick 10 items out, get them cleaned, tested, whatever you need to do to those prepped. We'll just call it prepped. Get them prepped, get them photoed, get them listed. Just 10 items out of your death pile, because I know the quote unquote death pile is a major issue for a lot of people. It was for me for a long, long time up until we did the shout out to the OG February listing challenge members in here. That was a pivotal moment for a lot of us because I had at the time, I don't even know, 500 plus items in my death pile that got easily dwindled down to like 300 after that month. And then from there, I just became a lot more consistent. And now I can probably say I've only got maybe 30 items that are not listed right now. Um, part of that's because I haven't been sourcing because we're moving to Texas. Um, but even if I was sourcing, I'm in a habit where I'm listing five, minimum five items, um, I'm shooting for 10 to 15 ideally, but I'm listing minimum five items every single day, uh, non-negotiable. So get consistent with listing and shipping. That was my, one of my top, that was definitely like top three right there was inconsistent listing and shipping because it produced inconsistent results. If you want to operate, if you are say, if you want to build a hundred thousand dollar business, you've got to do what six figure businesses do. And that's not being inconsistent. I believe you can, because we did it. You can be unorganized with no systems and hustle your way to $50,000 a year in sales. It's not hard to do, but, and you could even do, I would go as far as because the first time we hit a hundred thousand dollars in sales in a year, looking back, I don't think I was that consistent. I don't see my, I don't remember having, um, a super strict schedule. I definitely was not organized like I am now. So I would even say you can hustle your way in an unorganized fashion to a hundred thousand dollars a year in sales with, without much effort involved. You're going to have a lot of, um, hours that go into it because you're inconsistent and unorganized, there's going to be a lot of extra hours and, um, and, and quote unquote hustle. It goes into it versus if you follow a schedule, if you are clean, organized, um, and have a step-by-step process for how you source, how you list, how you ship, and then you can outsource some of those tasks, you can get to a hundred thousand dollars very easily. Um, six figures is not a hard thing to achieve if you are clean and organized and then through, or through being organized with systems, you can then hire, um, help a lot easier too. So if I can go back in time, that's definitely like top three that I would have fixed. Number five is going to be taking time to learn and improve on my skillset. What that means is in five and six, we'll kind of tie together. So I'll get to six in a minute, but taking time to learn and improve my skillset. This means learn. So where do I start? Started with selling on, on Amazon. And many of you have been on the channel for a while. So if you go back and look at our old videos, you can see exactly what we were doing, how we were doing it, et cetera. So when I first started, it was just Amazon. And I learned the basics of, you know, we all got our sellers app on our phones, going to Walmart, target and Walgreens. And, um, at the time, RAP, RAP was toys are us going in all these great stores, scanning items, shipping them to Amazon. And then, um, Trista brought in the eBay aspect where she started doing clothing, peaked my interest. The first time she hit a couple hundred dollars in sales for a week. I'm like, all right, I like vintage stuff. I'm a retro kid. Um, let me see if I can get into some electronics and action figures and different stuff that I like. And then we started scaling up some eBay stuff. The problem was I only learned the bare bone basics to make some sales. I didn't put in the time to learn and improve on the skillset of eBay of Amazon, because these are skillsets that you develop. Anyone can sell on eBay. Anyone can make a few sales a week or a day, but in order to scale, you have to become not, not necessarily an expert, but you've got to spend a lot of time learning the platform, learning the ins and outs of, you know, the basics are going to be your markdown sales, your promotions, uh, how many items do you need to be listing a day, your sell through rates, these are skillsets that you start to improve on. And I did not spend any time doing that for the first couple of years. Even with Amazon, everyone knows our, our OG Amazon videos. Um, and shout out to those of you that I see in the chat right now that are saying our Amazon videos were the first ones that you guys watched. Uh, thank you for the support. That's that pumps me up to see that you guys, uh, were taking action by actually watching the videos to begin with. But the problem was even in the videos, it's all bare bone, basic information because that's all I knew at the time. I didn't, I didn't take the time to improve on the skillset of selling. Um, cause there's a lot more to it than just list and ship, right? So taking time to really hone in and learn the skillsets and improve on them, um, is something that I think was a big mistake, uh, back in the day. I like that we got the glow is just getting more and more intense as that sun's going back here. This closet setup is all temporary guys. We moved to Texas in like three weeks and then we're going to build out a new, uh, official YouTube background for you. Um, so taking time to learn and improve on the skillsets. And I wrote that down cause it's something I'm going through right now where I have been on YouTube for, since I started selling even before then, technically, some of y'all don't know. I used to do some fitness videos. So I've been doing YouTube for like 10 years. Uh, basic stuff, nothing fancy, but got into reselling six and a half years ago and immediately started doing videos because I saw a, a demand for it. Because at the time there was very few, uh, resellers doing videos. You know, we had the OGs, which were, uh, Reagan. Uh, this is a little bit before Ryan and Allie rally routes even came into the market. Um, so I remember watching Reagan, um, bonafide hustler, I believe was another. Another one back then rally came in right, right after them. And then Pete Craigslist Hunter. Those were like the first ones that I stumbled onto. And then I'm like, wow, there's really not that many people in here. I know how to do YouTube. Let's come into this, this niche. And I say that because when I started doing YouTube, I just knew the basics of using iMovie, which is like, we have easy to use. And then we have like beginner level that's iMovie. As far as video editing goes, you can't do much with it. You could do jump cuts. That's about it. So I started with that. And then up until like two weeks ago, I still used iMovie because it's something that I never, uh, yeah, shout out. Um, I did not ever, I've never watched Ronnie. I probably should. I've heard that name several times. Obviously Reezy was another OG. Um, I think Reezy and I started YouTube pretty much at the, at the exact same time, if I remember right. Uh, there's like this wave of late 2015 people, uh, where we all came in together. Like, well, late 2015 to early 2016, there was this like bubble that came in of, of resellers and I was part of that group, um, lots of awesome OGs out there. So the iMovie thing, I, two weeks ago, I'm looking, I'm editing a video. I'm like, you know, if I ever want to get better at this YouTube thing, I've got to improve on my skillset. And I just, I knew how to use iMovie. That's why all my, all my edits are always jump cuts. Cause that's all I ever took the time to learn. I didn't learn how to do cool transitions and all these like camera angles you can do and all that stuff. So that's why all my videos have always been jump cuts because I never took the time to improve on my skills. That's my skillset was jump cuts. I can make sentences flow together and you wouldn't even know I had two different clips. Um, so that's something that I started investing in. So I got final cut pro and I'm investing time into learning how to do better editing, which is going to lead to better content for you guys. Um, and then on all the backend AdSense revenue is going to increase over time, um, affiliates start reaching out. Once we grow to grow a larger audience, like all this stuff will eventually mesh together. So use your time to improve on your skillsets. And that ties into following a schedule. If you took an hour a week, just an hour a week, and invested that time into improving on your skillset or learning a new one, if that's what your goal is, that is something that can help you improve week over week over week, which is going to increase your value in the marketplace, which is going to bring you more profit over time. So if I can go back in time, another big mistake that we made, um, or at least I made, I can't speak on Trista's behalf. We'll bring her on for another, uh, another episode. Um, but improving on my skillsets and just really focusing on that should have been something that I did focus on last and not least, then we'll do a little Q and a sesh for you guys, uh, probably about 15 minutes after this to do a little Q and a. So if you have questions, now is the time, just open Q and a, whatever you guys want to ask. Now's the time to drop those in the chat. So they're ready. Number six, how are you guys doing so far? By the way, number six, taking on too much. Anyone struggle with that? Spinning too many plates, focusing on too many categories, never becoming an expert in anything, right? That is something that I have always struggled with. I am, I'm dangerous enough in a lot of categories to walk into any thrift store, um, Goodwills, Walmart's I'm danger enough, dangerous enough in a lot of different categories to make money, but I've never focused on becoming an expert in any one category. And that's definitely a mistake that I, I made early on and it carried through my entire reselling career. Um, and now that's something that I'm, I'm resolving in, in honing in on a skillset. Um, so taking on too much, you only have a hundred percent energy and focus. And a lot of people like myself make the mistake of saying yes to too many things or you take on too much as far as the reselling categories go. So if I am to restart our entire reselling journey now, I would pick one category, preferably something that I already have knowledge in. And then just like I mentioned on the, on the last bullet point, improve on your skillset. So I'd choose one category, get really damn good at it. Get it to a point where I could scale it with a system, whether that's hiring help, um, getting a software involved, whatever the case is, but get really good at one category, and then you can start bringing in the others as you get to that point, um, but taking on too much, that's not just a too many categories topic, that's a topic of life, right? If you're constantly saying yes to everything that comes your way, or you're getting sidetracked because you have FOMO and you're missing out on all these other platforms. Um, you can't keep jumping back and forth from one thing to another. That's a huge mistake that I made for many years was just chasing the next way to make money or chasing the next thing that I thought I would do well with. And ultimately it led to me having a really wide variety of skill sets, but never getting good at any of them. And over the last two years, I've really focused in on what I'm good at and focusing on my strengths. Um, and that's helped out with everything in my life, um, from the work-life balance that I have with my, my family, um, and the warehouse time that's helped with everything from our income, the amount of hours I spend versus the amount that we get paid on a per hour basis, um, as far as monthly profit goes, everything's gotten so much better over the last two years that I've really put my blinders on and focused and stop saying yes to everything and stop getting FOMO, uh, with everything. Now I tell you what, I feel bad oftentimes because I get asked whether it's personal friends, family, emails, other resellers, other social media influencers that want to like hang out and do live sessions together. I say no to almost everything nowadays. And I, I, I used to feel so bad about it until I realized it's for my own mental health. And if I'm not in a good mental health space, I'm not my best self. I'm not going to give my best to my family. I'm not going to give my best to my business, um, to my team here, right? We've got a team to lead of staff and we're getting ready to launch a second location in Texas where we'll have an entirely new team, uh, that we have to lead. So if I'm saying yes to all these things and dragging myself on late night calls that I, you know, I, I don't like to cut into my family time anymore. We spent many, many years, uh, cutting into family time and sacrificing and sacrificing. And ultimately we just hit a point where it's like, I, I value my time more than anything in the world now. Um, so if I say no to someone, just, um, it's nothing against you personally. Just remember that. But that's something that I wish I would have taken that, that type of mindset on a lot sooner, um, is really focused on what am I saying? Yes to, am I spinning too many plates? Am I constantly in a state of stress? That's an easy way for you to determine if it's time to step back and reevaluate is if you are in a constant state of stress, my camera is tweaking out. If you are in a constant state of stress and you're constantly, if someone asks, Hey, how are you doing? And you're constantly going, Oh, I'm busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy. We are all busy, but here's the thing is most of us that are quote unquote busy are not using our time wisely. And that ultimately became where my mindset shift was, was I learned how to cut out distractions. I learned how to be more productive, which freed up a lot more time in my day that I can spend with my family or on a business project. That's going to be the most valuable thing I can do in my business that day. Um, I started focusing on my priorities and that's when I learned to be okay telling people no. Um, like I said, I get hit up all the time, every single week. Um, Hey Chaz, can we do this? Hey Chaz, how about that? I have to say no to a lot of stuff now, not because of anything against anyone. I don't want to pow wow. Um, it's just, I've got to value my time and where it goes to not spread myself thin anymore because I know myself well enough and a lot of this just comes down to self-awareness. I know that I get stressed and busy grind hustle mode very easily. If I allow projects and things and extra calls to pop into my agenda, I get very, uh, mentally burnt out very easily if I allow myself to get too thin with that, um, and that's the only reason why I've had to really just get down to my focus. I have my, I have my top five tasks that I work on on a daily basis. Anything after that is only if I have time. If I get done with all my major productive tasks by like three o'clock and someone's like, Hey, let's do a live show. Let's do a phone call. Great. I'm free until like four 30 and then I'm out. Right. So I'm very strict with my time, who it goes to, where it goes, et cetera. Um, so those have been my six biggest mistakes, cashflow, buying inventory because it was cheap, not because it was having a quick sell through organization and systems inconsistent listing and shipping are quote unquote following a schedule, taking time to learn and improve on my skillsets and then taking on too much. Um, learning to stay focused, right? That's, that's the name of the game right there. Those have been my top six. Of course, there's a lot more than six. If you guys have stuck around this long and you have any questions, I've got about 10 minutes until I got to hit the road. We're going to actually go out on a, I think we might be doing date night tonight. We're going to go drop the kiddos off at my mom's house for the night. So cheers to that. Parents know how great of a feeling that is. All right, let me pop in here. Acknowledge some of the peeps. Vic says, hello, Chaz, my second favorite YouTuber. Only second to Chris daily refinement. Shout out to Chris. You guys want eBay knowledge dropped on your daily refinement as a place to be. So Bobby follow my Instagram. Bobby's one of our OGs been around a while. Heidi says took five years for me to get to where I am today. And honestly, life would have been so much easier if I had some organization prior. I think that's probably one of the bullet points that everyone can agree. Mr. Paul Beagle. What's up, man? How you doing brother? Yay for Texas. Oh man. I'm so ready for Texas. We're literally just in this weird standstill right now where I've got enough to keep me productive through the day. I come in, I do my eBay shipping. We have some network prep stuff that I handle, which is like client management, support emails, that kind of stuff. And then I list on eBay. We do. We started incorporating some fulfillment or yeah, fulfillment by merchant FBM for clients. So I come in, I ship some of their stuff out. And then I I'm doing a lot of writing checklists right now. We're getting ready to do a big staff training day, training everyone from scratch. So this place runs like a franchise where everything is done the same way by the doesn't matter who touches it. So I'm in checklist writing mode right now. So that's why I've been talking about so much about systems and organization. I've got notepads on my Evernote that are just pages deep where I'm just writing out step by step checklists on how everything is run under this roof. I'm getting ready to teach my mom eBay, my mom and dad. So I'm writing out checklists and like shipping templates and different stuff like that for him. Miguel, Chaz, what's up? Been following you on Insta. I go by Adam. What's up, man? Nurse with a purse. Hello from Aurora, Colorado. What is up? What are you guys all up to tonight? Do you guys have good days? Productive days, hopefully. I'll tell you what, if anyone watching this is into collectors items, I've got probably 150 to 200 action figures sealed. Spawn Power Rangers, a whole variety of different stuff. I'm going to be I just got approved to sell and whatnot today. So I am going to be transitioning a lot of stuff over there as far as collectors items go. So stay tuned. I'll be sure to do a video update on when I'm going to be doing our first live. It's probably going to be next week. There's a lot of prep work I need to do ahead of time. Getting everything organized, categorized, labeled. So it's a nice, smooth auction. But I'm pumped for that. I'm actually listing stuff on eBay here shortly. Just came by to say what up. Thanks for stopping by. Little bug listing and selling. Nice work. All right, crew, that concludes tonight's episode. If you have any last minute questions, drop those in the chat. Couple updates. One, if you are not familiar, we created a discord group, 100% free. We're we're going to do like a paid thing. We decide, you know what? I'm going to take a Gary V approach and just put out everything for free. I'll have some paid stuff coming out this year that that's been floating around my head for a while. But for the most part, everything is going up for free. We've done an inventory lab training guide. It's a four part series on our YouTube channel. It shows you step by step me doing a full shipment settings. I think if anything, if you already know Inventory Lab, the settings video probably will be the most beneficial. There might be some settings in there that maybe you didn't know about or you're not using. So all the info in there as of now is up to date. As Inventory Lab comes out with updates, I'll probably just redo parts of those videos. So free discord group. You can find the links in the description below. I will be coming out with a side hustle network community Facebook group, not a page. So be an actual Facebook group. Everything 100 percent free. I'm going to be selling on whatnot, which is a new auction. It's not new. It's been around for a couple of years. It's really gaining traction popularity now. I have bought. I'm not going to say out loud. I bought a lot of stuff off of there. I want to I want to build out a pretty kick ass retro slash gaming room once we get down to Texas and get settled in. These two pieces just came in today. So we got the turtle sewer play set and one of the OG. Grab this. Can I reach? I've been doing some buying off of whatnot. Just my childhood, man. I friggin love this stuff. So I've been buying a lot off of whatnot. Love, love, love the setup of this app. So I'm going to be going into the selling aspect of it now, and I'll probably create some content and videos around that because there's questions that I had. I'd email their reps to get some questions answered because my brain is logistic. So I want to have all the logistics figured out ahead of time before I do our first auction. So as I do a few auctions and get it, get the hang of it, understand the flow. I'll do some step by step videos for you guys to amazing platform. So I do have a link. They give me a ten dollar credit and you a ten dollar credit. If you want to use that link to sign up, it's also in the I'll put it in the description as well. And we're not paid. We're not sponsored or anything like that. Just I'm a huge fan and fan of the auction site that they're doing. It's it's like I wish eBay would have thought about this so much sooner than what, you know, the whatnot app did. But can you imagine if eBay had its live auction on video and just its genius of the way that they built us? I've been a big fan of it. Chaz, I notice I am more successful doing auctions on eBay versus a fixed price. Is that something that you notice, too, for you? Or do you have better luck the more that you sell? I have rarely ever done auctions on eBay, and that's something I'm actually going to be start incorporating as we look to do this transition to Texas. I've got at least another idealist of the action figure, so I can put those on whatnot, but I'm probably down to like 500 good items. Listed on eBay that are upstairs and they're all fixed price. So I think what I'm going to do is before we move like a week before we move, I'm going to put a bunch of those on auction, probably like half of them. Stuff that's lower dollar. It's been sitting for a while. I just want that stuff gone because I'm going to leave the inventory here and we have someone on our team that's going to be doing the eBay shipping for us. And I don't want to have to have them deal with that much stuff. So I will be doing a lot more auctions actually this coming week. I'm going to start putting stuff on auction. So that's something I'm curious to see is how well they do on auction versus the prices that I've had them listed at at a fixed price for a while. But Miguel, if you see that you are more successful doing an auction than do auctions, right? It's all playing on your strengths. If you guys see that one way is working better for you, then lean into that. Go that route. It's the same. It's the same way that our whole prep center operation even scaled was we never we never wanted to build a prep center. It was never even an idea. We started prepping for a few of our VIP clients. And then from there it worked like we were able to charge a premium for the service and people paid their bills on time and then we were like, OK, the money aspect works out. It's providing a service to our people, which is something I'm very passionate about. Anything we ever touch, I want to make sure it's benefiting our sellers, our clients, you guys as the audience. And so as we saw that it worked to do that, then we took on a few more clients, a few more clients, and then it went public. And then the whole wave of clients came in and boom. Next thing you know, we had to get a bigger warehouse space. We had to hire more staff. It worked. So we leaned into it and it grew and now it's built on a system to where I only have to do the back end work that I can do on my laptop from a Starbucks if I want to. I don't physically have to be here prepping and shipping anymore. And so that's my advice to people is if you are doing something two different ways and you see that it's working or maybe selling on one platform is working better than another. Don't waste your time doing the other for now. Lean into what works and get improve your skill set with it. Scale it. Build a system around it. And then you can hopefully hire out in. And there you go. You have a sellable business at that point. I just have better luck with auction. I have items sell more than what I expect with auction. I'll keep at it with auction. Yeah, that's awesome. I'm crossing my fingers. That's what happens to me. I would hate to see half my inventory sell at a loss. So that's that's awesome to hear that you're selling stuff for a higher dollar amount than what you thought. So hopefully I can have that same good fortune over on our side. All right, crew. Had a blast hanging out with you guys tonight. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you are watching the recording. Thank you. Much appreciated. What's going to happen is I'm probably going. You guys might see a second clip pop up. So this is like the full live show. I'm going to cut out just the six bullet points and then I'll reupload that just for the people that don't want to hang out for the full session. Quick shout out Daily Momentum. What's up? Getting ready to log off. Take the kiddos out to. Oh, Tristan just gave me an update. All right. We're going to head out. Take the kiddos out to my mom's. They're going out on date night. So can't miss that. I'll be in trouble. Thank you so much for tuning in, guys. Peace out, crew. See you next time.