The Side Hustle Show - Full Episodes - How I Make $100k a Year Flipping Random Products

Side hustle show 298. Bilo, Selhigh, repeat. This is the return of the flea market flipper. What's up, what's up Nick?

Looper here, welcome to the Side hustle show because the ability to find profit is the ultimate job security. And the good news is, it's a skill that can be learned. Today on the show, I'm excited to welcome back to someone who I think is particularly skilled at finding profit, usually in places where other people can't see it or don't see it. One of my favorite guests, Rob, the flea market flipper, Stevenson.

Now we last heard from Rob in episode 147 back in late 2015. At that time, he was earning 30 to $40,000 a year, flipping random products on the side from his day job. Since then, the father of three has taken his Bilo, Selhigh model and turned it into a full-time six-figure operation. And when I say random products, I mean it.

As you're about to hear, Rob doesn't discriminate what it is as long as you can pick it up for a great price. And I can't blame it because some of these single deals are worth thousands of dollars in profit. In this, where are they now episode? I invited Rob back to learn how he scaled up his business, what his buying criteria or flipping process looks like today, and what he's got cooking next.

Notes and links for this one plus the free highlight reel summary are at sidehustlenation.com slash flea market to flea market all one word and the number two. Now whether your business involves flipping prosthetic legs or providing service to clients, you're going to need a reliable way to get paid. I rely on our sponsor, FreshBooks, when I need to send an invoice to clients or advertisers. And I know I'm just scratching the surface of what the award-winning cloud accounting software can do.

But know this, FreshBooks is trusted by more than 10 million customers and recommended by 97% of small business owners. So odds are you're going to like it too. Visit freshbooks.com slash side hustle to start your 30-day, completely free trial today with no credit card required. That's freshbooks.com slash side hustle and enter the side hustle show in the how did you hear about a section.

What if you could sell a product before you ever bought it? Pretty nice to take all that inventory risk out of the equation, right? Well that's what drop shipping allows you to do. And if you visit dropship lifestyle.com slash hustle, you'll find a free drop shipping toolkit put together by side hustle show alum Anton Craley in his team.

The toolkit includes 187 drop shipping niche ideas. Anton's niche selection guide access to his free 10-day drop shipping mini course and more thousands of students have gone through it. In fact, we just heard from one of them, Renee Delgado, in episode 294, how he sold 300,000 dollars worth of bounce houses of all things in his first year. Definitely worth a listen if you missed it.

Side hustle nation.com slash 294 will get you there or scroll down to that episode in your podcast feed. A big thanks to dropship lifestyle for sponsoring this episode again. Check it out at dropship lifestyle.com slash hustle. I'll be back with my top takeaways from this call with Rob after the interview.

We kick this one off with his family's recent trip to the world's longest yard sale. Ready? Let's do it. Yeah, the thing was awesome 690 miles and it's spanned across six states.

So we had a blast. We took the whole family up. We spent a week traveling and then a week up in Michigan where the yard sale actually ended. So we had a great time.

So this is nuts. I just looked this up at 127yardsale.com. So runs along highway 127. Are people just set up on the side of the road?

Yeah, it's crazy. We didn't know what to expect. We actually took our enclosed trailer. We took our bikes, our pull behind trailers for the kids and stuff like that.

We didn't really know what to expect. But come to find out it's along this road that goes all the way from Alabama up to Michigan. And yeah, they set up in tents. There's a couple of different designated areas where they put probably 100, 200 vendors in a field in the middle of nowhere.

And then you just drive in there, you park and you go look at all their stuff. And in some places, people that just live on the side of 127, they just set stuff out. It's like a garage sale there. But there's just, there's got to be thousands and thousands of vendors along this route, which it was awesome.

It was a blast. Tell me about some of the best stuff that you found. We ended up spending about $560 on the way up. We bought 12 items and we should be able to make between $4 and $5,000 once we flip them.

Two of our biggest ones that we bought. I bought a concrete polisher, Husk of Arna, which was really cool. The guy was asking $550 for it. I talked him down to $360.

I mean, I should be able to sell that for roughly $2,000. And then our other big one that we bought was a stepper, a pro form, stepper trainer, like an exercise machine. And we paid $75 for that. I should be able to get about $850 for that.

Okay. So you had the little flat bed trailer pulling behind your car or pulling behind the SUV? And then closed trailer. Yeah.

We have an SUV and we pulled the enclosed trailer behind it. So we were able to put, you know, our luggage in the front of it and then we had plenty of room for storage and stuff like that. So that was, and hindsight 2020, I should have brought a bigger trailer. We have bigger trailers, but I wanted to get better gas mileage.

So we took the smaller trailer that was enclosed. Yeah, I missed out on a sweet deal because the trailer wasn't big enough. So a little upset about that one. I feel like everywhere you go is a business trip because I get your emails and you're like, well, we were over in Texas and we found this thing and we brought it back.

Or we shipped it out. It's like, hey, everything is a write off these days. That's it. Our account nap, absolutely loves us.

Not really, but yeah, everything that we do. Yeah, it's, we're able to incorporate our business into it and we just have a blast. That's a great time. So with the, you say concrete polisher?

Yeah. So how did you go about figuring out the value of that or what that might be worth on a flip? Yeah, definitely. This is actually crazy because normally if I see something with $550 price tag, that was what was on this thing.

I would just walk away and not really think much of it because that's a lot of money to invest. I walked away from it. I took mental note of what it was. I looked it up and I found out that they did have a couple of them selling the retail on.

It was like 30 between 26 and $3,600. So I went back to the guy after about 10 or 20 minutes of walking around at the other vendors. I asked him what his best deal he would take on it was and he told me $400 cash. So I didn't have enough cash with me.

Another lesson we learned on this thing. Yeah, that you need to carry enough cash with you. So we ended up having a drive 10 miles to a gas station, go to the ATM, get some cash and come back. But I came back and offered him 360 cash for it.

He jumped on it. He took it because it was the end of the day and we took off with it. So it was a cool experience. Anything that you wanted to get the one that got away or anything?

Yeah, that was probably the big one that I just touched on. We found a lift. There's like a scissor lift. I don't really know how to explain it.

It's got like a basket on top. You get up inside of it. It's got hydraulics and it lifts you up to about 20 foot. And this one was, I forgot what brand it was.

But when I looked it up, the guy wanted $500 for it. It stood at six foot, four inches tall. Our enclosed trailer has a roof on it and it was at five foot eight inches tall. So I could not get it in there for the life of me.

I tried to figure out how I could do it, how I could take it apart. There was no way to do it. So we missed out on that deal. It was $500.

And yeah, I could have made at least, I'd say, between $4,000 and $5,000 on that flip alone. So that one was a little, a little upsetting. But you know, it is what it is. You live, you learn.

There's inventory and space limitations in this business. Is there such thing, and we talked a little bit about this last time on episode 147? Is there such thing as a sourcing process for you or is it literally just, well, I'm going to go through this 690 mile-y along yard sale? I'm going to go to my local flea market and just take a look around.

It's you, what looks interesting to you? Yeah, definitely. We have routines that we're in for a lot of the stuff that we buy. The flea market is one of our routines I go to every Saturday.

Most of the kids come with me usually, but sometimes I'll go by myself if I get up early. But yeah, that's one of our main sourcing routines is there. And then the relationships that I build and our business, relationships are everything. People that I've met, our vendors I've met at the flea market and I've built relationships with them through the last two or three years.

They'll actually text me throughout the week. Hey, I got this, I found this. The oil are you interested? And yeah, they'll do that throughout the week where I don't even really have to go anywhere.

And I don't have to compete with other people because of those relationships that I've built. They give me first crack at whatever they find and then I can negotiate with them. That's the biggest thing. But another thing are apps.

There are so many apps out there right now that are just coming out every day with you stuff, used apps. And one of the big ones that we use is offer up. I play on that daily. I'll spend a couple minutes a day just scrolling through it, seeing what pops up and what people are trying to get rid of.

And that's how we source a lot of our stuff as well as on that app. Yeah, I was surprised by that because at your recommendation, actually listed some stuff that we were trying to get rid of on offer up and had offers right away. I'm old-schools. I normally would use Craigslist and it's just a clunky interface and offer up made it really easy.

And I was just like, okay, there's definitely a critical mass of buyers there. Yeah, it's a great app and we absolutely love it. So like I said, that's probably my favorite app and the one that I use the most. Yeah, exactly.

For sourcing. I don't sell as much on it, but sometimes we'll cross-post and we'll throw some stuff on there. You never know what you're going to get, but it's definitely, it's got the avenue for both. Any other app that you like?

I don't know. I don't know. I don't use Facebook. My wife is definitely the Facebook queen.

But I got turned on recently to Facebook Marketplace and I still don't know how to use Facebook, but I know how to get in there and search for deals on Facebook Marketplace. So that's probably my second favorite. It's offer up and then Facebook Marketplace. Okay, interesting for the stuff that's not.

It's local, but it's not like in-person local. Exactly. Yes. I imagine do some research, or do some preliminary research before, I know we talked about before, just awkwardly walking around the market, like, look up stuff on your phone and circle around to the same guy.

Is that still the process for the in-person stuff? That's exactly how I do it. I try and make a note kind of like I just told you about the concrete policy. I just take a mental note.

I try to remember what the name brand is, what the model is. Then I walk away. I walk away and do a little bit of research and see what I can come up with. Then I'll walk back and actually make a deal if it's worth it.

I leave it and don't mess with it. That's my in-person, but yeah, it's way, way easier online on the apps because you can do all that research before you send them an offer or try to make the deal. One thing that is interesting about your business, at least from the outside looking in, is your category, agnostic, it seems like where we talked to Ryan Finley from Recreigslist. He was doing a similar business on Craigslist, but specialized in flipping appliances.

It seems like I'll do industrial equipment, I'll do prosthetic legs, I'll do exercise bikes, I'll do anything. Have you considered or is there a specialty that I'm not seeing where it's like, okay, I'm going to become the go-to guy for product XYZ? Yeah, not really because what we look for when we're out there is the stuff that's discounted most of the time. It's stuff that people don't think is worth money.

Then we take it from a local market and we put it on a national market. People go anywhere, once you throw it on eBay, you get millions of people looking for it all over the US and all over the world. There's not really anything that we specialize in. It does make it, the experience makes it nice because if I do see another prosthetic leg or another prosthetic foot when I'm out there, I know that they're worth money in the back of my head.

I'm going to negotiate a deal right away and I try to get them and then try to resell them. Okay, imagine the more you do it, the more experience you have on what sells, what's it's around for a while, what can command a good price? What kind of time are you guys putting into it these days? We have three kids, three young kids.

Our oldest one is starting kindergarten this year. We don't spend, we're definitely not at 40 hours a week on this business. Probably I would say between 30 and 40, I would say, but we don't usually go over that. Yeah, it's Melissa and I doing it and the kids jump in and they'll go into the flea market and yard sales with us and they have a blast.

It's definitely under 40 hours a week for our full time gig. Did they bring you deals? Hey daddy, come look at this or something. Surprisingly one of my vendors that I met at the flea market, he's the one who text me of stuff all week long, I go over to his house sometimes to pick up stuff and I took my oldest daughter over there probably a month ago and she got out of the car and we open up the gate, she goes in the backyard and she just starts tearing through stuff in the backyard, looking for stuff, looking for toys, looking for all kinds of stuff and she's calling me over there and my vendors like, man, you've trained her well, she's just like you.

And I was like, yeah, that's right, that's how it goes. So yeah, they're a blast. So the vendor is calling you with deals or texting you with deals and he knows you're turning around and flipping it for a profit. Like, why doesn't he put that stuff up on eBay?

Honestly, I don't know other than it's just what people know and that's how he makes money. One of my main vendors is a scrap guy so he all he does is get stuff from the trash or from businesses and he takes it to the scrap yard and he scraps it. He just wants his money right then he wants his cash. For me, I take it and I'll, you know, clean it up, take some pictures of it and I'll list it and then my return on it is like 10, 20 fold on what he sells it to me for.

So which is crazy. He's got the same option. He knows exactly what I do. It's not like I hide it from him but he just chooses the quick money and that's what he wants and that's how he makes his living.

Is there a target markup that you're trying to make on each deal? Not really. There's not any specific markup that we look for. We usually make at least 10 times our money on what we invest in.

We're not in this business to make, you know, $5, $10 per flip. You know, it's got to be worthwhile to us and most of the time we want to make $3, $300 to $500 at least on our flips. So we're a little bit more picky. That's kind of where we're at nowadays.

That's incredible to be able to flip something for 10 times what you paid for it. I'll compare that to like the Amazon FBA, like retail arbitrage, you know, stuff that I was playing around with a couple years ago, whereas like, okay, if I can double my money, like I'm happy with that, right? Like that's a nice return on investment away to multiply a dollars a lot faster than a lot of other investment channels, but you're saying, well, shoot, I can 10X it. Yeah.

And a lot of our stuff we even go higher than 10X. So it just depends on what we find and what we get. So it makes it interesting and it makes good money. Once you're like, I'm picturing across between like quarters and some like, you know, makeshift garage situation, like what's your place look like?

Or how do you store this stuff? Like I imagine not everything is going to like flip tomorrow. It's going to sit over there for a while. Yeah, definitely.

And we have three storage units right now. We didn't start out with these storage units. I started out just with my spare bedroom is how we started our business using that as my office to take pictures and store stuff. So we're up to three storage units right now.

We have a two car detached garage that we have stuff in. So yeah, we definitely have and we're doing larger stuff now. There's a lot more payoff on the larger items for us. So yeah, we definitely have a lot of stuff in we're hoping by the end of this year to be into a warehouse that we can consolidate the storage units and put it all in one place.

That's our plan. But yeah, it's something that we're trying to grow into. It's not something that you start off with to start this business. Did you have a bus washing machine or something?

Yeah. Yeah. We bought that. We bought it for a little while and I actually just took it over to my buddy's house.

He was going to help me put it. We needed a motor on the bottom of it. We got to rebuild and we haven't put it back on. But yeah, that's one of the weird things that we invested in.

And I haven't flipped it yet, but I haven't even listed it. So it's not even out there for sale yet. But we should make some really really good money on that one. That's going to be like 30 feet long.

It's huge. It stands upright. So it's upright on wheels and it's I think it's about 15 foot tall is how tall it is. So yeah, you walk it around the bus to wash the bus and it's got that spinning wheel on it that cleans it.

So yeah, that's a really cool. Like I said, that's a weird thing that most people wouldn't would walk away from, but I like that stuff. Okay. Because you're like, well, to the right buyer, this is worth a lot.

Yeah. One of our flips we got from an auction. I think this was last year we did. We ended up buying a parking lot security tower.

It's a little, I guess you get into it. It's a little room that has an air conditioner inside of it. It lifts you step into it and then you can lift it about 25 foot off the ground and they put it in the middle of a parking lot to theme parks and stuff like that to where you can get a view of the whole parking lot. So we ended up buying that from a local auction.

We paid $6,000 for it, which drove Melissa crazy. She hates when I invest that much money, but I did look at the retail before I bought it and we ended up buying that for $6,000 and then we flipped it in less than a month for $25,000. So yeah, that was a huge one of our flips. It was awesome.

Not quite 10x, but you did very well on that. Exactly for that kind of turnaround. So yeah. You just do anything repairs to it like you mentioned the bus thing needed a new motor.

Is it common to have to put some labor into this stuff? Yeah, sometimes it is and sometimes it's not. That one we didn't do anything to it was on a trailer. So we had plans of putting a camera system and all that stuff on it, but I was like, no, let's just sell it as is and we ended up just selling it as is without doing a thing to it.

Okay. It's like you found a niche to speak of. So it's to go back to the point about picking a category or niching down. It's like it sounds like a lot of the stuff is bigger, bulkier items where there's probably less competition, right?

If people are flipping baby clothes or stuff they can carry in a backpack, like smaller stuff, there's a much broader market for that. And it's like, well, a 15 foot bus wash or this parking lot, lifter air condition device thing. There's fewer people that can take that. Has that been a contributing factor in kind of the revenue growth that you've seen?

I believe so. I believe that we're into larger items now. A lot of people are scared to ship large items. They think it's going to cost an arm and a leg, which we've been into it for so long now that we've narrowed down how to ship stuff.

I'll give you an example. We shipped a dining room table. This was a, I think it was 12 chairs and the table was 8 foot long if I'm not mistaken. And it had a buffet with it.

We shipped all that on one pallet and we shipped it for across the US. We ended up shipping it for. I believe if I'm not mistaken, it was $300 right around $300 and it weighed over 2,000, 2,500 pounds. Most people, if you would have called a normal shipping company, that would have cost you a thousand, fifteen hundred dollars to ship.

We built these systems. We've learned how to do this and worked relationships out with the freight companies that were able to ship this stuff really, really cheap and it makes it a lot easier for us to sell stuff online and then be able to ship it. Okay, interesting. So, everybody else is competing locally and you say, well, I'm going to compete nationwide, maybe even international through the marketplace of eBay and I can ship this stuff because I know how.

Yeah. So, where do you go to ship something like I wouldn't even know where to start to get something like that across the country? You ship is the name of the website that has changed the industries just because they've gone out there, they do it competitively. So you can start, that's where we always start as you ship.

You can find local carriers that are traveling up the US down the US, whatever it is and they'll bid on shipments, whatever if they have room in their trailer and they might be doing it in a small and closed trailer, they might do it in the back of their pickup truck but they'll actually bid on your shipment to actually take it down or you can name your own price to do it. So, you ship is changed the industry for shipping and ever since then we even, we deal with a local freight company as well that we've worked deals out with, that we can get, we know we can go to them all the time and we can use them locally to ship stuff across the US. So, this is letteruship.com. Do you go on there first to get an estimate of what it's going to be before you list that item or how do you, you know, how do you price that into your listing?

I kind of don't have to because I know if I'm shipping something, you know, for me the furthest shipping, the furthest I can ship is the California from Florida. So, I kind of have an idea of what anything is going to cost me and I can pretty much ship anything across the country for 200 bucks. So, I know that going into it plus our items that we're shipping have such huge markups. If I got to pay $250 or if I pay $150, it's not going to break into my profits that I'm going to make on the item.

So, you know, I kind of estimate when I'm listing something like a lot of our large items right now that we list, I list it with free shipping. So, we have a Harley Davidson sign on there right now, though we just sold one not that long ago, but we have another one on there. This thing's like 12 foot tall. I think it's 16 foot long and I put free shipping on that.

Yeah, this one I'll actually drive. I won't ship it in a freight company and with a freight company, I'll actually put it on the back of my trailer and I'll drive it wherever it's going. But being said, that's what we kind of know because we've been in the business so long or we've done these shipping for so long. We know what it's going to cost us to to ship something.

So, say somebody wants to buy that from you in Alaska. So, you know, just take an epic long road trip. Not to Alaska, we won't do that. It's got to be continental, but definitely we'll take a road trip and I'll go do it.

And I've done it before, but that's the other beauty of our business. We're not responsible to somebody else who says you can take four days off here and that's all you get. You know, my wife and I and the kids, we can get out and do some fun stuff like that. Yeah, it's cool to have that freedom and flexibility in your day.

And then, of course, you're going to find more inventory while you're out on the road. Exactly. You ever afraid of the deals drying up? It's like, you know, this is a really cool business, something that you can get into.

You can start small, you can scale it up. But you've got to go and hunt for that profit every month. It's kind of starting from scratch. Yeah, great question.

And other flippers that I have talked to that don't do the large items. They only do small stuff. Yeah, they're scared about that. No, I could literally buy stuff every single day.

That's how much I, how much stuff is out there. And we just did that yard sale through six dates. And I only scratched the surface of, you know, those small areas that we went through the states and I still was able to find good deals. So there's deals out there everywhere.

So no, I'm not worried about that one bit because I know if I wanted to buy more items on a daily basis, I could easily do it and make more money. It's just restrictions for your storage and your time to turn around stuff. That's what we're limited to. Have you ever had something that just didn't sell and ended up eating it and or just scrapping it?

Yeah, this is a great question. This is hilarious. We started at the beginning of this year. We started a challenge with our community 2018.

We wanted to start with a $5 to a $25 purchase and then we wanted to keep rolling the profits back into the purchases and see how much we could end up with at the end of the year. This is really cool. The only problem was I bought an inflatable boat in February, hindsight 2020. I shouldn't have done that for my second flip.

It was my second flip. I paid $225 for this inflatable boat and motor and I ended up selling it. I was like two or three months later and I sold it for $190. So I lost money on that flip itself.

But I'm not worried about the overall because easily $109 we can turn it into crazy money. But that was definitely not a good investment at the time. Because of seasonality. Exactly.

Season wise and the boat, it was a brand new boat but it had never been inflated. So it wasn't in perfect condition. Some of the scenes had come undone from it and I didn't know that before I bought it either. So that's definitely an item that we lost money on just a little bit of money but at the same time we'll be able to recoup it.

Any other stories from that from your community on that? I really love the idea of starting with a really low dollar amount, $5 and like multiplying money. I wish I had moved some stuff quicker to get further along but I did it with something that I pulled out of the trash and I did it with a $5 investment and I think on the $5 investment I think if I'm not mistaken we're up to $400 or $500 and the one that we pulled out of the trash. I think I'm a little bit more.

I think I'm closer to $2,000 on that one. Okay. What was in the garbage? A battery charger for a handicap or a power wheelchair is what we pulled out of the garbage to start that second flip with.

We sold that one for $50, rolled that one into, what did I roll that into? Another charger, a battery charger for a golf cart. I bought that one for, I want to say it was $40 and then from that one we went up to two something and then from that I bought a commercial stove for $450. Yeah.

That's the crazy part is yeah. Out of the trash we started and I think we're up to two, if I'm not mistaken up to $2,000 on that second one. Yeah. I love it.

It's like the red paperclip guy. I haven't heard that story. I remember him and so this was probably 10 or 12 years ago. So guy started out with a red paperclip and just made trades.

Trade it his way up to a house. I think in 14 or 15 trades. Really? Yeah.

I think that's really cool to me. Starting with these small items or these inexpensive things and then just keep leveling up in terms of what you buy and what you flip and so I think that's cool. Heck yeah. There's a time commitment in like sourcing and hunting and getting a knack for what sells.

I don't know. There's like an X factor or something. You've got the Rob special sauce or something. Do you find other people having success with this following your model?

Yeah. Of course. We actually teach that course. We have an online course that we teach and we've had, I believe we have over, it's like 253, 100 people in our community right now.

The skill can be learned but you need to like going to flea markets, yard sales. If you like to hunt for those deals. Yeah. You can definitely learn the rest.

We have a little bit of an edge on people because I've done it for so long. We built, I guess a repertoire of what we've sold and what when we're out there looking, we know more of what to look for that will sell because we've probably sold it in the past. But yeah, all it is is experience. It's just like every job, the more you work at it, the more you spend time in it.

You can get better and better at it. What's next for you, Melissa? Right now, like I said, we're going to try to get into a warehouse by the end of the year. We also have been approached by, this is the second production company who's approached us and we're in the process of creating.

We don't know if it's going to go through. They're actually seeking us out but creating a TV show. So we'll find out, hopefully within the next couple months, if it's going to go through. And then that's a possibility.

We might be on TV. You're going to be on TV? Yeah. It's possible.

So we'll see how it goes. But as for the business wise, our big thing is to actually get a warehouse. Let's go back to the TV thing. So like how do these people find you?

That's super cool. Yeah. YouTube, we do YouTube videos and our website and our blog and stuff like that. Like I told you guys before, we have three young kids.

My wife and I were all involved in the business. They make videos with me and these production companies, this is the second one that's approached us. They find our family, say we look adorable and they love our business model. They love what we do.

It's just very, very weird. They think it'd make a good TV show. So that's kind of how we've got found by them. Most like storage or is took off.

It's like these kind of turning trash into treasure kind of stories. Yeah. That's awesome, man. We'll have to do another.

Where are they now? I've said what's going on. Follow up are super famous. Fleamarketflipper.com and flipper university is the course.

So fleamarketflipper.com is the code side hustle 100. Still valid for people if they want to check that out. I believe it is. We'll talk to Melissa does all that kind of stuff online.

So but I'm pretty sure it is. I'm pretty sure if not, Melissa will renew it, whatever we got to do. All right. We'll link it on it.

Side hustle 100 for 100 dollars off. Flip her university if you want to learn more about the fleamarketflipper.com business rob. Always a pleasure, man. I'm excited to catch up with you.

Everything that you got going on. Let's ramp this thing up with your number one tip for side hustle nation. Yeah. Definitely stick with it guys.

You might not find stuff when you're out there every single time you're trying to source on your phone. You're out of the thrift store yard sale. Just stick with it. If it's what you love, if you love hunting out those deals, stick with it into how you make it work.

So that's the best advice I could give you. Absolutely. That echoes the number one tip from 2015, which was consistency. So stick with it, which is exactly what you've done and have turned this into a really cool business that's supporting your family.

So Rob, once again, man, thank you so much for joining me and we'll catch up with you soon. Awesome. Thank you so much for having me. It was great.

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All right, my top three takeaways from this call with Rob number one is to be consistent in sourcing. This kind of piggybacks on Rob's number one tip. But to make this hustle work, he's got to be constantly sourcing new inventory. You heard it a couple times in this conversation.

I'm at the market every weekend. I'm on offer up almost every day. The deals are out there, but you got to be out there too. It doesn't have to be all day every day, but I think the consistency is key to keep the deal flow flowing.

And also to spot those rare random products, it seems to be the most profitable. It's a little bit of a treasure hunt, a needle in the haystack kind of thing, but I imagine that's also what keeps it fun. I remember job shadowing a real estate broker back in college who specialized in these million dollar houses. And I was doing the math like, oh, you can make 30 grand on this one deal.

And at the time, of course, to me, that was an obscene amount of money. And it still is in a lot of ways. And I remember telling him, I'd have a hard time coming to work the next day after closing that sale. Like I'm good for a while.

And that's when he explained that the prospecting and the consistency, just like Rob, was really the key to his success. So I'm sure the big paydays are nice, but there's a lot of hidden effort to get to that point. And let's take away number one, to be consistent in your effort and your sourcing. Take away number two is to do your homework.

Similar to a real estate flip, or maybe this is attributed to Warren Buffett. But the profit is really made when you buy, not when you sell. What I mean by that is getting into the deal such that you're setting yourself up for a profit. You're paying well below retail.

So the worst case you're breaking even, it sounds like Rob is willing to sit on inventory a little bit longer than his suppliers to, which can work to his advantage in getting the price that he wants. But it comes down to knowing what an item is worth to the right buyer. That comes with research, that comes with practice, that comes with experience in the simple example of my experiments with Amazon FBA and eBay. The Apple tell you, you know what the items are selling for or recently sold for.

There's always still going to be risk when you're putting the cash up front. But for the bigger deals, I get the sense that Rob knows going in, what he expects to make on it because he's done the homework. So that's take away number two, do the homework in advance. And take away number three is to simply make it worth your while.

I think in our original recording, Rob said his minimum desired profit was $100 per deal. And that's to compensate him for the time sourcing the product, cleaning it up if necessary, relisting it, and then sometimes packaging and shipping it out. It echoes what guest writer, JV Ortiz said on the site hustle nation blog. He started out flipping t-shirts and making five or ten bucks on each sale.

It was okay, but it was a lot of work. So looking for ways to scale up, he moved into rare or limited edition sneakers, sometimes earning 500 bucks on a sale. So it took a lot less work to make the same amount. Of course, higher upfront investments and risk too.

I remember one time back at my whole job, we had a company event up at Lake Tahoe and after dinner, we're in the casino and my coworker and I over at the penny slots, our boss comes by and is like, guys, what's the point? You know, maybe gambling isn't the best analogy for this because if you follow Rob's process, I think you're able to take a lot of the risk out of the equation. But what's your take? How do you make it worth your while?

Once again, check him out, fleamarketflipper.com. I think I have an affiliate link for his course that interests you and you want to support the show. You can find all that and all the other resources mentioned at side hustle nation.com slash fleamarket2. I love the idea of multiplying money, starting small and leveling up.

That is the side hustle way. But that's it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. Until next time, let's go out there and make something happen and I'll catch you in the next edition of the side hustle show.

Hustle on. Thanks for listening to the side hustle show at www.sidehustlenation.com.