The Most Underrated Side Hustle You Can Start With $0

0:00 Within the first year, we had gone from the smallest estate you can possibly imagine to a 32,000t warehouse selling $25,000 a weekend. That's wild. The great thing about starting a state so company is there's very little initial investment. Okay. Any fees that do pop up, you can just pass those along to the customer or the client. You collect all the money, too. So, you don't need to go chase down payments. You pass on the 60%. Right. Right. Estate sale companies work in virtually any community 5,000 to 10,000 and up. There's money to be made in every single aspect. The sale of the house, the sale of the contents, the move and or list the house for them. I mean, this is a time in a life when people spend money. Everyone knows death, divorce, moving, like when you move, when there's a change in your in your life, that is when you spend money. An

0:49 estate sale company is the perfect company to start if you aren't techsavvy. It's very easy. You could literally start this with no money and then be cash flow positive your first week. You could literally go there with tape and a marker. You can start it for virtually nothing. What if you could start a business for literally 0 and make $6,000 profit your very first week? Oh, and did I mention that this hops on the mega trend of retiring and aging baby boomers? It's an estate sale business and there is way more demand than supply for this business in any given market. So today I meet Braden who left a boring corporate job and started an estate sale business that quickly made him six figures a year. But I didn't find out until the end of this episode that the estate sale business is just a front. It's just a lead generation machine for a much much more

1:37 profitable business that I can basically guarantee you no one else is doing. Please enjoy. So by the end of this episode today, will our viewers have enough information so they can go out and start their own estate sale business? At the end of today, your listeners will see how anyone who is motivated can start an estate sale company in a week or less and start acquiring estates to liquidate within two weeks or less. How much startup capital? Almost nothing. You need to have tape, a price gun, which you can get off of Amazon, and a phone, a point of sale system ideally, but you can use your phone, and as many tables as you can get your hands on, and some friends and family members to help you, and that's it. You and I could leave here right now, start an LLC, post an ad online, and have a sale lined up. This is a typical result. Within two or three

2:28 weeks, you and I could have an estate sale company and our first estate sale in just a matter of days. Okay. So, you're a territory sales manager for two years. You read the book 4-hour work week, changes your life. How do you go from that point to estate sales? I had an antique store booth and uh just leftover items, collectibles from my childhood that I didn't want to give away. I'd prefer to sell. Was this at a farmers market? This was at just a huge antique store in uh central Arkansas. Okay. So, you occupied a little sliver of this store. It was like a 2x10. Okay. It was like a family affair where they, you know, my kids decorated it. I provided the collectibles and the items, the merchandise. Anyways, my buddy had asked me for years to go yard selling with

3:14 them and I or well, finally I relented and went with him and his kids and I ended up picking up, you know, old Star Wars, old antiques, old um or vintage tools, and every week was different. and flipped those items for several hundred just immediately just putting them in the antique store booth in profit. In profit from then on what? Sorry, what city was this in? This is in Benton, Arkansas. How many people live in Benton, give or take? I would guess about 50,000 in the entire county. Okay. Wow. So, I I just want people to get a scale for you don't need to live in a huge city to do this, right? So, Benton, Arkansas, 50,000 to the whole county. Let's say 25,000 in Benton, right? Your your buddy finally convinced you to go garage selling. buy some Star Wars and other stuff. You make a few hundred profit at your booth. Exactly. And then from then on,

4:02 we went out every weekend, like super early. I'm not a early person, but every Saturday we were getting up at like 5:00 in the morning, mapping out where all the yard sales were posted, hitting those yard sales, you know, buying super collectibles, clothing, vintage clothing, vintage, you know, everything. anything we knew we or thought we might be able to resell and we just put them in the antique store booth and you know make several hundred dollars a month. What we ran into is when the fall and the winter rolls around, yard sales stop because of the weather. So we started going to estate sales and what we realized pretty quickly is not all estate sale companies are the same. where we're at or at the time there were se there were a couple of really good ones but for the most part the existing estate sale companies weren't that great. Now explain what an estate

4:51 sale company is. An estate sale company where we're at basically contracts with the homeowner to liquidate the entire contents of the house. Okay. Unless specified not to sell, literally everything in that house will get a price tag and will be offered to sell, including and sometimes the the vehicles. Mhm. Um sometimes the house itself occasionally that that's a good good point. Nine times out of a 10 an estate sale comp right after estate sale company is contracted, it's because they want to put the house on the market as soon as the contents are out. Mhm. They're not necessarily selling the house, but they the urgency is to sell the house. Therefore, they hire a company to manage the sale of all the stuff, right? And in some instances, the house had

5:40 already sold. Oh, yeah. And they had like a short window where, you know, to get the items out and um sell as much as possible. Now, you say estate sale company. Is this like a formal company or like a small business that's local to the area? That's correct. Okay. At that time, there were no franchise estate sale companies in central Arkansas. And what year was this? This was 2017. Okay. Okay. Eight years ago. You're selling these, you know, buying at garage sales, selling at your booth. Winter hits. What do we do? Let's get creative. You find estate sales. Where were you even learning that these estate sales were happening? Nationwide, there's a service called estatesales.net. Okay. And if you want to find out where estate sales are or if you want to contract out an estate sale, you you can go to that website, okay? And it'll tell you who

6:31 the estate sale companies are and what sales are upcoming for this that particular weekend. Okay? So, if you typed in your email address today, today's Wednesday, you'd immediately get notified of the estate sales that are coming up in your area for for the upcoming weekend. Okay? And for the for the near future, okay? Now, in a city like Benton, give me a a sense of the scale. How many estate sales are there every week or every month? On average, I'd say there's between five to 10 estate sales every week. Wow. That that number dips in the well around holidays, especially December and January because the weather's so bad. But on average, I'd say about 10 for the whole county or just for Benton for the I'd say in a 40 mile radius around Little Rock. Oh, around Little Rock. So that's Little Rock and surrounding areas. Five to 10 a week. Yes. Okay. That's a good That's

7:21 a good amount. Yes. And what we noticed is some of the estate sale companies at that time were not that great and we didn't particularly care for our jobs at that time. We just started throwing out the idea, you know, we could do this. Yeah. And uh and that's what we did. Now, what about them wasn't great. Some estate sale companies, the ones that were not ideal, didn't price everything, maybe didn't focus on arrangement of items. This one in particular is all cash and made it seem a little shady whereas, you know, most of the other estate sale companies, you know, offered credit card sales as well as, you know, checks cuz I'm presuming these estate sale companies take a percentage of everything sold. Yes. So, if there's cash, then who knows, right, what, right? Right. some of the not uh prestigious estate sale companies would bring items left over

8:11 from the previous estate sale to the next house. So, they would look trashy, wasn't organized. Um maybe some of their staff members weren't very helpful or they didn't have any staff to like help carry out items and some weren't even pricing all the items, right? They're they're hoping that like you they could get a better price, but everyone has to ask manually, what does this cost? What does this cost? Right? Okay. Now, are most of these business owners local as just an individual, maybe a couple employees? Where I'm at and and probably nationwide, too, they're locally owned. Yeah, there is a growing emphasis on starting and owning your own franchise, and there's there's three big players when it comes to franchising an estate sale company in the US. Okay. Now, if I'm hosting an estate sale or if I have a need for an estate sale, I'm going to go

8:57 on Google or whatever Facebook Marketplace, find someone to host it for me. What percentage fee do they charge and is there like an upfront fee that they charge as well? That's a great question. The great thing about starting a state sale company is there's very little initial investment. Okay. And to host an estate sale, any fees that do pop up like marketing, that's the big one. You just you can just pass those along to the customer or the client. Okay. Typical industry average is 35%. Okay. If it's a multi multi-million dollar home with cars and jewelry and so forth and you really want to and and you know there's going to be competition, you probably an estate sale company is probably going to offer less than 35%. Mhm. On the flip side, if it's a small home with

9:43 chunky stuff. Yeah. Um which maybe just barely meets your minimum threshold. Mh. You can char you can offer whatever you want. I mean it can be as high as 45 to 50%. Okay. And it's a good business because there's not like there's not a payer like the the people that are, you know, representing this are the heirs of the deceased. Right. Right. So they're probably not as price sensitive as the deceased would have been. That's a good point. There's four typically there's four groups of people that need an estate sale. Deceased. They call the four Ds. Deceased, divorce, debt, and downsizers. Okay. The downsizers maybe would be a little bit more price sensitive because typically that's grandma or grandpa going to assisted living, but usually in my experience the

10:36 homeowner just wants to get rid of the contents as soon as possible so they can liquidate the house. Would you say it's you listed those in order of commonality? Like deceased is the most common, divorce is the next most. Yes. uh deceased, well, excuse me, divorce and downsizing would be probably equal, but deceased is is the number one. What's the fourth debt? Okay. Is where does that rank? Occasionally, we would find ourselves in a situation where there was a foreclosure or the the homeowner had just like literally moved out of the country and left it and their kids or the bank needed those items. Yeah. Needed it gone. So now, is there any upfront fee that the the estate sale company takes or is it all based on how much they sell? It is all based off of how much they sell.

11:22 However, if you if you suspect that a house might not gross what you need to cover labor expenses, you can set a minimum a minimum threshold guarantee where you say, "My my fee is 35%. I think we're going to gross 10,000 bucks, but for sure we're going to set a $2,000 minimum. Okay? So that if it's rained out, if the people don't show up, because you know, you're posting pictures online of what you're going to sell through estate sales.net. If it's just not a good turnout, whatever the reason, you still make that 2,000. So in that instance, if you only grossed 5,000, you're still going to get 2,000. Yeah. Okay. Hey, believe it or not, about 62% of you don't actually subscribe to this channel, even though you see my videos in your feed. So, just take a second, hit

12:10 the subscribe button, maybe even the notification bell, and it would mean the world to me. 2017, you start seeing how poorly these other guys are doing it. Then you start thinking, you're like, man, this probably a lot more profitable than 300 a month of, you know, Star Wars memorabilia. What do you do next? We started an LLC and started brainstorming on we asked ourselves that same question like you know now what uh we went to or I went to the premier estate sale company at the time they since retired. It was a husband and wife team and they were fantastic. Everybody loved them. High quality. The clients loved them. They had a huge following. And I went to him and said, "Listen, I'm thinking about starting a state sale company. You know, I I love the business. I think I do. would you consider letting me work for you for a while? And or actually I volunteered

13:00 to volunteer. And they said, "No, you cannot volunteer, but yes, you can come work with us and just see how a sale goes." And and they paid me. I picked their brain, asked them questions, asked them if they would send us small leads that they didn't have time to fool with or didn't want to. And they did. So you have essentially approached them and said, "I want to compete with you. Can I work for you? I'll do it for free and they're like yes you can and I'll pay you. Exactly. Yeah. Why do you think they said yes to that? Just law of abundance just kind good good people or in my opinion at least where and where we're at. There's a significant amount of business out there in estate liquidation and it's only growing. There's a company called Cerulean Associates. I may not be pronouncing that correctly, but they anticipate $124 trillion of wealth transfer in the US in

13:51 the next 20 years. Wow. And approximately 20% of that is real estate. I couldn't tell you how much of that is personal property, but the numbers are headed straight through the roof. And even, you know, 8 years ago, it was it was still trending upward. So, there's there's more clients than there are estate sale companies, at least where I'm at. So, they were more than happy. And a state sale company never wants to tell a client, I'm sorry, I can't I can't. Whether it's schedule or it's just too small, they they love having an alternative. and they can say I can't do it but XYZ company can and we became their XYZ company. Okay. But you didn't have like at the time you didn't have any reason for them to trust you enough to start sending you business because you didn't have any experience yet, right? The only thing that I had is a previous relationship

14:39 just going to their sales and saying hi and buying it. Had a relationship with them which is a competitive advantage for sure. Right. Okay. And this was a couple that owned the estate sale business locally or they had like a big business that was in multi- city, multi-state. This was a a small business, small estate sale business and all they did were inhome estate sales in the central Arkansas area. Okay. What did they pay you? I I can't remember whatever minimum wage was at the time. It was a 3-day sale, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. If you're familiar with estate sales, you know that the first day is full price. Second day is typically 20 to 25% off if if there's any items left. And then the remaining items are 50% off on Sunday. And I worked all three days. Those are like industry standard numbers. Very standard. It just work. It must work, right? Like Yes.

15:25 That's the typical structure. If you have a small window because of an HOA or if it's a small house or the estate's not massive. Sometimes you you can have a two-day sale where first day is full price, second day in the morning from 9 to noon is 25% off and then from noon to 3 is 50% off. Okay. How long did you work for them before you branched out on your own? I worked for them on two sales and all the while they're just sending us typically smaller leads. you know, an estate sale company, the existing state. We did that with multiple estate sales companies and they were more than happy to find somebody trustworthy that they could send smaller estates to. So, we went from, you know, grossing a,000, $2,000 a weekend on these smaller estate sales to 5,000, 6,000,

16:19 7,000. Started just we started building our own network. We we set a good example of, you know, we knew what worked and or what we thought worked and we definitely knew what didn't work and what you shouldn't do. So, we just focused on on doing the the things that the really good estate sub companies were doing and just built up from there. We wanted to, you know, dip our toes in. Yeah. We didn't at that time, you know, these smaller estates, we were still doing that on the weekend on top of our our full-time job. And within six to seven months, we landed our first million-doll property with like a $30,000 estate sale. They had sold their home and they had to be out in like 30 days or less. And all the other companies were booked after that job. Uh my business partner at

17:05 the time, he quit his full-time job and just dove, you know, straight in. And a couple months later, I did too. Wow. Okay. You you got your first jobs. Now, if they were 5 to 10 in a week, how are they getting so many leads? Are a bunch of those leads just not closing? How are estate sale companies getting this company you were working for? They were getting a ton of leads even right off the bat when you started working for them. But you said on this website, there's only 5 to 10 per week in all of Little Rock. How are there so many leads if there only ends up being 5 to 10 a week? That particular company that I went to work for was very well regarded. the husband and wife born and raised in Little Rock, very connected and just an amazing couple. It didn't take much for them to build a huge following. And then all the real estate agents and you know,

17:52 uh, attorneys that deal with Elder Law knew them as well. So, they were very well connected. One thing we also did that I didn't mention earlier is I went to real estate brokers and said, "Hey, can I bring you guys breakfast, coffee, donuts, etc. at your next broker meeting and just tell you tell your staff about, you know, for like for 10 minutes about what we do?" And nine times out of 10, those brokerages were like, "Sure." You know, because otherwise they'd have to pay for it. They're going to have the meetings anyways. Yeah. So, I heard that so many times like real estate offices are very receptive to stuff like that, right? Whereas it's really hard to get in at any other type of office typically. I agree. Okay. So, you're making minimum wage. You only need to do a couple weekends worth of sales. You're feeling good. You're feeling confident. What

18:38 types of things are you learning working for these people that you didn't know before? working for an existing sale company could just confirm some suspicions that I had and just solidified what makes sense, which is be nice to the customer, keep an eye on merchandise, don't overpric items, don't underpric items. They enlighten me on how much staff is required. For example, you want people obviously at the cash register. You want wanderers or floor managers kind of just walking around making sure the customer doesn't need anything and then also people aren't stealing stuff. Depending on the size of the house and and depending on what the contents are, you want to have somebody to help load furniture. And working for an existing stay company, you just kind of really kind of opened my eyes and uh on what staff Yeah. looks like. And maybe most importantly,

19:29 it just gave you confidence, which like that's an intangible thing that is so valuable. You're like, "Okay, yeah, like I feel like I've d-risked myself." Not that there's a ton of risk going into it compared to other businesses, but is it true? It just gave you confidence to to do this on your own. For sure. And they were very supportive and and told me, you know, if if you have any questions or, you know, concerns, you feel free to call us. They gave me my they gave me their cell phone. So, anytime I had a question about staffing or paperwork or percentage or a neighborhood or uh an item, I could call them. To this day, I still uh they one of the the husband of that team is a guitar expert and anytime I have a, you know, question about a guitar or musical instrument,

20:15 I'll just shoot him a text and say, "Hey, what can you tell me about this cuz I don't want to mispric it." Yeah. Okay. So, not only are they paying you, but then they're giving you leads while you're still working for them. What does your first estate sale look like? What was the situation? How big was it? What did you make, etc.? The first estate sale that we we received was from a real estate flipper who and real estate investor who was a good friend of mine. And he said, "Uh, Braden, I bought this house. It's a three-bedroom, two bath. It's full of stuff. Do you want to sell it?" Cuz he knew I was going to do estate sales. And I said, "Sure." Because otherwise he was going to have to run the sale himself or just throw everything away. And uh really quickly we priced everything in the house. We held an estate sale. Uh it was a smoker's house, which we knew,

21:03 but we thought the walls were orange, and when we started taking items off the walls, like the gun rack, there was a you could tell exactly where the guns were cuz it was white underneath there. Oh man. And uh anyways, that was our first sale stay. And we we sold basically everything in there. Wow. Uh any items that were left we got rid of. And uh soon thereafter is when we got that million-dollar house. Okay. What did you what did you make from that? And what percentage did you give him? That first estate sale, he let us keep everything. He just wanted us to get rid of get rid of I mean that's a val that's a value to him, right? Right. He would have to pay somebody to get rid of those items. Yeah. And uh he he actually sent us more leads after that. Um, one in particular that was a hoarder house, which I can talk about later, but that first estate sale, I want to say

21:50 we grossed five or six thousand bucks. Wow. And, uh, holy cow. I mean, you grossed really netted like your costs were very little, right? Right. Right. Did you have people help you on that one? One positive thing about estate sale companies is it can be a family business. So that particular sale and almost all future sales, my wife was there, his wife was there, our kids were there, and it was basically a familyrun deal where there was virtually no no expenses other than buying a few tables and the uh pricing guns. So, in other words, correct and correct me if I'm wrong, you started this business and your first week, your first week that you were really in business, your first job, you made about $1,000 profit, right? That's incredible. How much was left on

22:37 the second day and the third day? Did it take you a while to get rid of everything? Are we talking about the smoker's house? Yeah, the first one. Okay, let's say that one grows 6,000 bucks. industry average on a on a good estate sale or with a good estate sale company, you're going to have you're going to sell about 70 to 80% I'd say 75 to 85% of the content. So, what was left, we took to an auction and resold it there. And when you take it to an auction, at least in our area, nothing's coming back. They're going to sell everything. It may be for pennies on the dollar. Yeah. And instead of selling all the pots and pans individually, they're just going to bundle it into one one, you know, one cost or one price. But uh that's what we did with those particular items. And how much does the auction take? That particular auction keeps 35% as well. So, but you your cost on it was zero. Exactly. You just had to get it there. Some labor, right? Okay. So, of that

23:28 $6,000, what are some examples of some higher ticket and lower ticket things that you sold there? that particular item or that particular house. There were vint v vintage clothing, vintage cookware, Dutch ovens, there were a handful of guns. More expensive items would be uh mid-century modern furniture. Those are the big items that come to mind. Okay. So, there's not like one or two things that are carrying most of the weight on this. Maybe on some, but not on this estate sale, right? Because I was thinking like, you know, this sectional or this piece of, you know, electronics or whatever car gives 500,000 2,000 bucks. It's kind of like the 8020 rule, right? Like 10 items bring you 80% of your revenues and 100 items bring you 20%. It doesn't really work out like that. Not on that particular sale. One aspect of that sale I forgot to mention

24:17 is the garage, which can be a huge center of of revenue. Mhm. Um and it can be very timeconuming to price a thousand different tools tools and but also that's where a lot of people typically guys you know store their their uh beer memorabilia and uh $3,000 lawn mower. The lawn mower. There was a lawn mower. Yeah. Uh and that can actually be the number one um income generator for a house is the is the man cave/g. Okay. Was that the case on this one or no? Yes. Yeah. As I sit here and thinking about it, I can remember spending hours in the garage, which was not air conditioning,

25:02 pricing out every single tool. Yeah. Uh the beer memorabilia, the lawnmowers, the the equipment, the old equipment that doesn't work anymore, but some some people are still interested in old boat motors uh in particular can be uh very collectible. Even old grills. H really? Yeah. I wouldn't think so. There's a there's a brand of grill called PK Grill, which is an aluminum type grill, which is actually making made in Arkansas. And there's and there's others similar that retain their value like crazy, like $200, $300 uh grills that are 20, 30 years old. Wow. Now, that's probably an overlooked aspect of this is the tediousness of pricing. You're not really listing. You're taking pictures to promote the estate sale, but unlike Facebook Marketplace, you don't have to photograph each individual item. Right. Right. You want to photograph

25:50 and post the most valuable stuff. Yeah. The good stuff. Lawnmowers, vehicles, mid-century modern furniture, clothing, collectibles, you know, if you've got Star Wars or coins or jewelry, those are those would be the items you want to focus on, not necessarily a hammer and a, you know, set of screwdrivers. Yeah. Heads up, this segment is sponsored by BlueVine. And the reason I get behind BlueVine is because almost half of small business owners that are using AI are getting back at least four hours every single week. That is a real number from a new study that BlueVine just put out. And honestly, it's kind of low. I see even more than 4 hours of savings every week. But here's the thing. When you have a small business, you don't have a big team to just hand everything off to. So, when a tool gives you back 4 hours per week, that's like a whole Friday afternoon that

26:36 you didn't have before. It's four hours you could spend hunting down the next opportunity instead of just doing the stuff you already hate doing. And the stuff you hate is the stuff you want to hand off first. Sorting through numbers, drafting the same email for the 10th time and tracking down who owes you what. None of that actually grows your business. It just eats your day. And that's the exact category that people are handing to AI first because it's low risk and it's the stuff that quietly steals your evenings from you. What I like about this study is that it's specific. It actually looks at how small business owners are actually using AI in their regular lives. These are real people running real businesses like a lot of you watching this video right now. 74% of small business owners are already testing or using these AI tools. So, if you've been sitting on the sidelines and realizing that this whole AI thing isn't for you, just know that your competitor

27:25 right down the street is stealing your business and they're doing it because they're implementing AI. So yes, it's worth spending 20 minutes a week seeing what this one tool can actually do for you and your business. BlueVine put this report together because they are in the corner of small business owners like you and I. It's worth your time. There's real data. It's a quick read and it will probably make you rethink how you run your business. So go check out the full Blue Vine study this week. The link is in the description. Read it. Find the one thing that applies to you and transform your business. All right, let's get back to the episode. on this first one. How many hours in total you plus your help spend pricing and like cataloging all this? Starting an estate sale company, there's definitely a learning curve. And when you first start off trying to figure out how to price and how quickly to price, pricing quickly and pricing accurately accurately don't typically

28:13 go hand in hand. Uh so on that particular that first estate sale, it took us days and days and days of of pricing and researching. But, you know, fast forward to today, I can walk into a room and have everything priced in an hour cuz you've seen it all. You're like chat GPT when it comes to this type of stuff, right? So, you've got a price gun with a little sticker and you just type in a price and you stick it on there. Exactly. If it's a higherend home or item, we'll put like a special tag on there. Okay. If it's a tool in a, you know, garage, we'll put a piece of blue masking tape on there or painters tape, okay? And just write it on there. And then that's customary for, you know, for those items because a lot of tags won't stick to tools and um the items you typically find in a

29:03 in a garage. So, on this first estate sale, 6,000 bucks, how many man hours in total did you and your help spend on it versus today a $6,000 estate sale, how many hours would it take in total? I know these are guesstimates. So, that that first estate sale probably took us 40 hours, okay, 20 hours each cuz there were two of us pricing. Mhm. To get it ready. Nowadays, we could walk walk into that same house and potentially and this is like a,200 foot house potentially be done in one day. Wow. Like an an eight hour workday pretty much. Okay. So, the first one 40 hours, I'll do my math. All right. For $1,500. So, that's still $150 an hour. 150 time 40 $6,000. Uh, but today

29:48 it would be more like $800 an hour. Well, today you might not. It's I guess it's not common to make full profit like the flipper gave you. Right. Right. That was kind of unique. So if it were that divided by three, 200 plus an hour. It can be very lucrative. Is that how you look at it? Are you optimizing for like dollars per hour? What is your metric? That's a great question. I I probably should, but the metric we use is what we typically do is we'll walk the house with the client, take pictures, and then I'll walk the house again by myself. And I'm just have a cash register going in my head like this room is 2,000 bucks, this room's 3,000, so forth. Once I'm done, uh, and I'm I'm writing notes in my notebook, too. It adds up. And nowadays, and this probably applies

30:38 to most estate sale companies, it reaches that $10,000 or more gross mark. Mh. And the house is, you know, relatively clean. We'll make an offer to the client. Typically, they say yes. And uh I'll go back through my notes and say like this is going to make 4,000 bucks. Yeah. 40%. Well, this is going to gross 10. Yeah. We'll probably make about four. We'll offer them, you know, 39% to make it sound a little sexier than 40%. You know, use the nine numbers. And then we'll try to knock out the pricing in as little time as possible. Yeah. So, I don't typically account for my time pricing. Sure. even though I should, but I am accounting for, okay, I'm going to need a staff member on here Friday, Saturday, and Sunday or two staff members at least. Yeah. Uh or more for,

31:27 you know, six hours each day, plus uh there's, you know, social media marketing fee. If you post the sale on estates.net, that's going to be a fee of 100red to 200 bucks. It it it's changing and it depends on how much you want them to promote it. Yeah, I work myself back from there. So, if it's a $10,000 gross budget in, you know, my time, the labor in particular for employees or family members, any social media marketing costs that the customer that we're going to absorb if if we absorb it, which we usually don't. And then, uh I've done it so many times now, I just know, okay, this is going to be for sure three to $4,000 net. Yeah. This particular weekend. Okay. So, if it's $10,000 in sales, you take home4,000, but you pay your help, everyone else. Is it reasonable to net

32:18 3,000 of that four, or is it going to be less than that? Anywhere from 2500 to 3,000 per weekend. Okay. So, great margins, right? And if you're your friends or family member, then especially if it's your family, then right your margins go up even higher. Well, and you collect all the money, too. So, you don't need to go chase down payments. You pass on the 60%. Right. Right. uh industry average usually takes about two weeks for most estate sale companies to reconcile credit card statements, the cash and there may be a handful of items like maybe a vehicle didn't sell that particular day but you know you can sell it someplace else. Yeah. You know the customer will give you and you may work this into your contract like two weeks or sometimes more before you'll receive a check from us. Yeah. So that's a positive cash flow conversion cycle and it it enables this business

33:08 to be one of the few ones that technically don't require any money. Like you could if you had to borrow tables, borrow packing tape, you know, you could literally start this with no money and then be cash flow positive your first week. If you got hired to do an estate sale for a friend, family member, or whoever, you could literally go there with tape and a marker, borrow tables from a church or friends and family. I'm talking about like the six foot lifetime folding tables from Costco, right? 50 bucks or 50 or you can rent them for two bucks, right? If you really need them. And in in many instances, the customer already has tables at their house that they want you to sell or there's just so much counter space. Exactly. Yeah. Okay. You can start it for virtually nothing. Okay. So, how much marketing is required to get enough people at this estate sale? Cuz more

33:58 eyeballs equals more money, right? more demand for the supply. The nationwide number one resource and the one that most if not all estate sale companies use is estates salesales.net. Most estate sale companies are listed on there as a resource to be, you know, um the client's resource. So there'll be, you know, in my area 10 to 15 estate sale companies listed on there, I'm guessing. So there's that resource, but also uh once you're on estate sales.net net as a partner or vendor or affiliate, then you for a discount you you can post your I believe there's a discount to to post your sale for that upcoming weekend. So, if I know I'm going to have an estate sale 3 weeks from now, I can go ahead and post the sale, post the date, you can post the address, but typically that's

34:44 hidden until about 72 hours or the day of the sale. That way, you don't have a million people showing up to the house, which happens. To answer your question, the main resource that most estate sale companies use is estates salesales.net. Okay. So, that that website is a marketplace. There's people like you, vendors posting on there and then there's people, consumers, homeowners, whoever in Little Rock looking to buy stuff at estate sales, right? And to to get access, they have to give their email. And once estates sales.net gets their email, every Wednesday typically or more, depending on your settings, you'll get an email for sure weekly about the upcoming estate sales. Okay. All right. And then Facebook Marketplace. Facebook Marketplace is a good resource and that's what we did initially and do occasionally still uh post upcoming estate sales and that that's been

35:33 very effective. What are some like how do you how do you post something that people will search for? What keywords do you use or tricks or whatever? That's a great question. The Facebook ads were set up a long time ago. If I recall, we would use estate sales, estate liquidation, yard sales, garage sales as the keywords. Okay. And then do you ever list individual items on Facebook Marketplace as like a ethical bait and switch to get people there? So like here's this dresser for 50 bucks at the estate sale, right? On our Facebook page, we would we would post all of those high dollar items uh as well as on estatesales.net that on the Facebook ads. We haven't talked about a warehouse sale yet, which we may get to, but that's really where we focused our Facebook

36:22 or social media spend is just a flyer about the warehouse sale with no particular items mentioned, unless there was a vehicle, but just promoting the address and the date and time and what kind of sale it was, which was warehouse sale. I love the principle of surface area. A lot of surface area. Like if I'm promoting one of these podcast episodes and we talk about seven different business ideas, that's seven different angles I can take when promoting the full episode. So if you have seven different things at this estate sale that are unique or like inherently viral, like an old collectible or something, that's there's seven different personas out there of people that would want to they would not want to come for the six things. They don't care. But for that one thing, they would. But when they get there, they might end up buying two or three other things as well, you know. Exactly. And then on estates sales.net or any of your marketing,

37:11 you're writing descriptions of everything that's there because a lot of the a lot of the items offered are your typical kitchen wear, you know, garage items, tools, but occasionally there's a super collectible item. I know I keep going back to Star Wars, but if you have vintage Star Wars or any vintage toys, uh, you know, from the 80s in particular, that's going to draw a huge crowd. So, in the description, you want to list any potential niche that's that someone might be interested in because they're going to your customers are going to read that description and if they don't see it when they get there, they're going to ask you about it. And a few years ago, you would have to just take time to learn and to get a trained eye and to just know the industry well enough to be able to spot those cool things. And I'm sure that's still, you know, helpful today. But today,

38:00 you just take pictures of everything, upload it to Claude or Chad GPT and say, I'm totally ignorant to this. I know that's a dresser. I know that's a Star Wars thing. That's a Lego set. Like, what of this is interesting or valuable to people? What of this would get clicks? You ever You ever use AI in creative ways like that? We don't. And I'm glad you brought that up because I am I'm learning more about AI. I definitely don't know anywhere near as much as you do and and others. And there's a lot of people in the estate sale bit industry who don't. Uh I would guess that a majority of estate sale company owners are in their 60s and 70s and have not considered AI whatsoever, which is okay in my opinion. An estate sale company is the perfect analog company to start

38:46 if you if you aren't tech-savvy. Yeah. Uh it it does take a little you know background in um working with websites to post your information to stay sales.net but not a lot. I mean it's it's very easy and we all know what it's like to post on Facebook. It's not that difficult. Yeah. You could literally as far as your techsavviness go just know how to post or have a friend help you post on estates.net and that's all you would need to know as far as being techsavvy. Yeah. Now on the flip side, so so there there are those companies that have no are not using technology at all or very little. Uh on the flip side, that is changing. Many companies, especially franchises, are using online auctions to sell their items. They may not even have an estate. So they may

39:35 just put everything online and sell everything on the on the auction. or if they have high value items like precious metals, guns, well uh maybe I shouldn't say guns, but definitely precious metals or extremely valuable collectibles artwork. They may sell that only online because of the risk of those items walking off. Yeah. At the estate sale, are people using whatnot or Tik Tok live for stuff like this? I know that our customers are on whatnot because they'll come and buy, you know, FisherPrice items from the 80s and so forth and or or collectibles in some instances, uh, coins and sell those on whatnot, but I think that's a small percentage right now. Okay. How often do you come across things and you're like, "Oh, this is too good. I'm going

40:22 to take this for myself." That's a great question. the company that I, you know, volunteered to work for initially and worked a couple sales with, they under no circumstances would buy anything from their particular, you know, estate or their clients. Conflict of interest, right? However, if if that item was still left over, yeah, at the end of the sale, they would ask the customer, can I can I buy this? Every estate sale company has their own policy procedure. In many instances, estates and the heirs don't care for the contents at all. They they want them gone as soon as humanly possible. They don't care who buys it, whether it's the estate sale company or not. Yeah. Uh so that's in a case- by case basis. But yes, that is one perk of owning an estate sale company,

41:11 especially if you dibs. Exactly. cool clothing, cool furniture, cool collectibles, and you know, if you have a certain niche that you're into and you come across it, you know, it's it's common courtesy to ask the customer, the client, hey, I collect these. Do you mind if I, you know, pay you full price and have first dibs on this and uh but not all the state sale companies do that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, cuz I come across like a holographic Charizard or something like I'm I'm going to want to pay them full price, but I don't want it to go to the general public, you know? Right. But I can also see the logic and the ethics in just saying we don't touch that. That's we want to serve their best interest, which is putting it in front of as many eyeballs as possible. Exactly. What are some cool things that you personally have found or walked away with? That's a good question. At one

42:00 point or the other, every piece of furniture in my house came from estates. Really? Yeah. Wow. Uh, I own some Airbnbs. We have purchased an entire estate and not even gone to not even held the estates out. We just bought the whole house. Wow. And put every single item in the in the short-term rental. Yeah. I collect certain aviation items, certain pieces of clothing. Um, that's a good question. I'm going to as soon as I leave here, I'm gonna think of different items I collect, but I can't think of any in particular right now. I just know it when I see it. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of times my kids will see items and they'll ask if they can buy it. Okay, so your first one is $6,000. What do your next few look like? What are some like hard-earned lessons that you you learned early on? Well, we noticed just immediately it was just kept growing and we kept getting calls.

42:49 We kept getting the small estates. It started at 2,000, then 3,000, then 4,000 gross a month, and then eight, then 10. uh where we really 10xed and I don't know if this is the answer to your question is we we got access to a warehouse through a family member and for just a phenomenal fee he would let us borrow this 8,000 ft² warehouse and to hold estate sales in. Wow. And what what we started offering is because we' gone to these other estate sale companies and asked them to send us our small their small leads or the leads they didn't you know weren't profitable enough all those leads started coming to us and what we started doing is instead of having two instead of merging you know instead of having an estate sale for one estate that has like $2,000

43:39 worth of stuff we would start accumulating 10 15 20 estates states. Wow. That had a,000 to $2,000 worth of items. And every estate was different. You know, some might have might might be heavy on Christmas decorations. Some might be heavy on toys, clothing, furniture. And what that evolved into is a 2025,000 $30,000 weekend sale with 30 different estates. Wow. and uh which brought in tons of people because crosspollination, they're all coming for something else. Every single person was there for something for something else. Were you able to sell the same item in the warehouse for more than you'd be able to sell it at the individual estate sale? That's a great question.

44:24 In my opinion, an estate sale in someone's house, you can offer and ask for more as opposed to having that same item in the warehouse because you're in the house and it feel it doesn't feel like you're in a homegoods, right? The customer can picture that bed and that bed frame and that mattress in their room because it's set up in the house. Yeah. It's like staging a home for sale, right? And a lot of people, I don't know the science behind this, but I know that it's true. And that is when a when a customer comes to an estate sale and and the house is a million bucks and they buy that bed, I there's some subconscious portion of that sale that makes them think that they're right. Yeah. As opposed to selling that exact same bed for the exact same price or trying

45:10 to get the exact same price in a warehouse that has astroturf uh and no air conditioning. But yes, I'm almost certain that that items that are offered in a house sell better and for higher pricing than than what you would sell it for in the warehouse. It's like two things competing against each other. I can see the logic of why it sells for more in the house for the reasons you just said. But theoretically, if you're able to cross-pollinate and get more people, more eyeballs in a warehouse, more eyeballs equal more money, right? That's true, too. But what's working against you in the warehouse is you're more diluted. There's more people, but are there a proportionally are there a proportional amount of more people as there are more items? Because in a home, you might have a 100 items and 100 people. In a warehouse, you might have a thousand items, but 800 people. Right. Does that make sense? Right. Right. The item to person ratio could

45:59 be skewed not in your favor in a warehouse. It can go both ways. Parking also plays an issue because if if a customer pulls up to an estate sale in a neighborhood and there's nowhere to park for a mile in one direction, a mile the other, yeah, they'll leak. But at the warehouse, we had unlimited parking. So that that was not an issue. But no air conditioning. But no air conditioning. Yeah. Is the springtime the big season for you? It's springtime in the fall. Yeah. But is it this a year- round thing? Year round. What are you doing Monday through Thursday? So initially the warehouse turned out to be a huge blessing. And I I'm not aware of many estate sale companies who use that hybrid model. Uh what we did initially was the warehouse fell in our lap. We we had

46:47 the small estates bring us their items which is fantastic or in some instances if they didn't have that option we would go get them. And and then also any leftover items from the estate sale at a house, we just bring them to the the warehouse, lower the price again if they if they hadn't sold and uh and sell them there as well. The catchall, right? So we we became a hybrid of we can do the estate sale in your house, you know, which was in my opinion the ideal, you know, location. That way you'd have to move it twice. Yeah. Or if that wasn't a possibility because of an HOA or time frame, we would have the customer bring the items to us or we would go get the items. So that was that was a hybrid model that that we used. My next question was just that was just managing

47:34 the logistics of taking 15 estate sales and putting it in one place. It sounds like a pain. But if you get them to do it, it's a win-win. And they might actually be happier because their house is empty faster. They they might take longer to get paid because you need time to aggregate enough estate sales to make it worth it in the warehouse, but that's offset by them just clearing out the crap faster. Right. That is exactly right. you quickly accumulate the the warehouse uh showcase area um so to speak or or floor area was 8,000 but there was 24,000 square ft also and occasionally that entire 24,000 would fill up. No way. That's so much space. That's a half an acre. Yeah, it's huge. Jeez. But but you're selling 8,000 square feet. You you can do one every month

48:24 for sure. But if you hustle, you can do one one every 3 weeks. What you're doing Monday through Thursday is pricing like a crazy person. Yeah. And and what you're doing is you're rolling out a segregated lot. You know, the Smith family is lot number one and you're pricing all their items, you know, with a one on the the tag so that when the customer comes to check out during the day of the sale, you know, let's say it's a $5. Let's say it's a $10 Dutch oven. You're gonna ring it up $10 under lot one. And let's say they also bought a fishing pole from the Jones family, which is lot number 14. Then you're type in $14 lot 14. The customer still pays the same price, but your your

49:10 cash register separates everything out. So, at the end of the day, when you reconcile, you know, you list which family or which estate grossed what and just, you know, use a spreadsheet from there. It's not a it's not as complicated as you might think. It's just a lot number and a price, right? It sounds complicated initially, especially as we started adding like when we started getting over like 10 estates, like we had to get a different cash register that could go up to 50 different lot numbers, but at the end of the day, it's it's it's very easy. So, I was going to ask you what software you use for that, but that's just a cash register, right? What about if they pay uh in card? Do you just enter the card amount into the cash register? Yes, we we would reconcile through the cash register the lot number of the estate and then whether it was cash or card. Okay? Please,

49:56 I need you I need you to send me your stories. If you or someone you know made thousands of dollars in a short period of time with a business, a side hustle, a growth hack, I don't care what it is. I want you on this podcast to give you free publicity and to help grow my podcast. So, if that's you, go to tko yes.com, fill out the form. If it's a friend of yours, send them tkos.com. have them enter your name and I'll give you a thousand bucks for the referral. That's tko yes.com. All right. So, what I know you kind of got the hookup with this warehouse. What does he charge you? Well, I was I don't do the warehouse sales anymore, but you personally don't or you me personally, I retired, but my business partner kept going and he ended up buying that warehouse from his relative at the time. He would rent it to us for I think like $400 a weekend. It was just

50:46 it was nothing. Yeah. Or is the average state sale company going to be able to land a large warehouse for that price? Probably not. But they could find a warehouse. They could find a warehouse. They could find enough find an old Dollar General. There there are buildings out there that can be leased. And there are other companies that do this. Yeah. Uh especially once you're established and have clients coming out of the wazoo and you can't you can't manage them all, but you but you want to. Warehouse sales. I think it's the best kept secret in estate sales for estate sale companies because I know one other company that does this in the Virginia Beach area where they like us, they'll buy the contents, they'll do the estate sale, take the items to their warehouse and sell it there or auction them off. They'll move the the customer to their new home. They they do

51:37 all of that. And if if you because there's money to be made in every single aspect, the sale of the house, the sale of the contents, the move, uh, and they'll even andor list the house for them. I mean, this is a time in a life when people spend money. That's why like USPS has a program where you can put an ad in, you know, an envelope that'll go to someone's house right when they move in. Everyone knows death, divorce, moving, like when you move, when there's a change in your in your life, that is when you spend money. So to to this company in Virginia Beach, it's like, shoot, we already have their trust. They already like us. Let's get them a moving truck. Let's get them movers. Let's sell their stuff at an estate sale. Let's list their house for 6% commission. You know what I'm saying, right? And and let's sell them a coffin. Well, I don't know about that, but they

52:24 you can what's the expression? You basically get a piece of every single action vertical integration and you can negotiate. You say, "Well, if you let me list the house, I can do the estate sale for instead of 35%, I can do it for 25%." Or I can do it for free. You make a lot of money on listing the house, right? How did your next few go? Like your second, third, fourth, fifth, like roughly what were the numbers on those? We started averaging 10,000 to $15,000 per estate sale per weekend. Per weekend. So, what we would do is have one regular estate sale per month and then that same month, we'd have a warehouse sale. Okay? We would handle all the small estates. We we take the items that didn't sell at the regular estate sale at the house, sell them there. We would do buyouts from an estate that was just too small to to have an estate sale or they needed to sell

53:13 like maybe their house had sold and they needed to be out immediately. We just offer them, you know, one price for everything, right? Then you resell it. We just take it to the warehouse. Okay. So, what did your So, this was 2017. We started in 2017. This is we're getting into 2018 now. So within the first year, we had gone from, you know, just the smallest estate you can possibly imagine to a 32,000 foot warehouse selling $25,000 a week in. That's wild. What were your sales and profits like? First few months, first year, second year, third year, what did that trajectory look like? First full year, we averaged, I would say, $5,000 a month. Second year 10,000. Third year,

54:00 this is gross, you know, 20 to 30,000 a month. Wow. And then where did it peak? When I retired, we were grossing about 30 to $40,000 a month. Wow. Is one of the reasons that you've been successful or a large re reason the fact that you're in a low competition market? Honestly, this is just a question. I don't necessarily think you are in one. I think it's all about supply and demand. A tiny market could have way too many competitors and a huge market could have few. So just take it at face value. It's Yeah, in my opinion, most mid to large cities have a shortage of estate sale companies. Estates sale companies work in really virtually any community, 5,000 to 10,000 and up. Uh I would say 10,000 for sure. There you can start an estale company and

54:51 make a living. And the larger your community, the larger your county, the better. Do you have any data that says in central Arkansas we have more supply than demand or more demand than supply? Or do you not even know because it's not relevant to you to know that? You just know what you know. If you hustle as an estate sale company and build up your brand and take care of the customers, both the clients and the shoppers, you're going to build up a a huge following. And the leads are going to come. I think the leads will come anyways because I believe there's a shortage of estate sale companies and the baby boomer generation is downsizing and passing away. Yeah. So, in my opinion, the sky's is the limit as far as starting a company and being successful almost immediately. And most of your leads are just coming from being listed listed on

55:38 estatesales.net. And then you supplement them with donuts to real estate offices, phone calls to real estate investors and flippers. Is that accurate? Exactly. Okay. What is the most valuable thing you've ever found in a dead person's house? Uh, we sold a Rolls-Royce. Oh, wow. We had a Rolls-Royce. Uh, a very vintage collectible car called a Roadrunner. It's excuse me, it's it's a I forget what it is. It's like a orange Dodge that's like $100,000 or more. We found I I've bought houses just bought the contents and everything where the client didn't want the house or the contents and was digging through the closet and found a chest full of jewelry, chest full of coins. My mentor, a real estate investor, gave us a house. He's like, "You can have anything in there,

56:26 but let me warn you, it's a it's a hoarder house, and it's bad." We went in with hazmat suits, and my business partner went into this one room. He had to crawl crawl over a massive pile of clothes to get into the closet and uh he called my name. I came around the corner. He just started handing me guns. There like 20 different different guns in there. Are there any regulations to that? Every state is different uh when it comes to that. Arkansas's like we don't give a crap. Right. What we tried to do is when a collection presents itself, whether it's coins, jewelry, guns, we typically go to a collector on the side and and we'll go to two collectors. We'll get get them appraised, but then also we'll sell it to a specific person that we know buys guns because

57:13 that's not typically something that estate sales want to promote. Yeah. At an estate liquidation or can in some some instances. Yeah. Okay. We've done estate sales at murder scenes where there were was a double murder at the house. Uh, wow. We've done estate sales in homes where you could see the downstairs from the upstairs through the floor in the through a hole in the floor. We've done estate sales where there was no parking whatsoever and we had to shuttle people in. We've done estate sales in the snow, in the rain on every single holiday except for Christmas. pretty much the sky's is the limit when it comes to uh when and where an estate sale can be held. Do you ever have customers push back when you say, "All right, we did your estate sale. Here's the $4,000 we owe you." Occasionally,

58:03 customers will be disappointed in the gross sales. Uh, a lot of customers want a line by line list of what all was sold and and we tell them from the get-go, no, you know, there's literally 10,000 items in this house and there's no way that we'll be able to get No one will do that. Pretty much there's no one that I'm aware of that will do a listing like that. However, if there's a very expensive item like a vehicle or, you know, a special piece of furniture or artwork, in those instances, I will commit to providing them with a a detail on what that item sold for. Yeah. And I'll make sure that the person at the cash register writes that down. Okay. Do some of the customers that come into these estate sales just walk away with a steal of a deal? Every estate liquidator's worst nightmare is putting the wrong price on an item and then as

58:53 that customer is leaving saying, you know, this is worth $500, right? Uh that that has happened once on a piece of Native American artwork. I don't know if he was overexaggerating the value or not, but that has happened once. And for sure, that's every estate liquidator's worst nightmare. If an estate sale company owner is not sure, the great thing about being in the estate sale community is you can call another estate sale company or an appraiser and and you should and say, "Hey, I'm not sure about this guitar or this piece of art or whatever it is. Can you point me in the

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