Why Resellers Waste TONS of Time and How You Can Avoid It TRP #92 w/ @technsports (Full Episode)
welcome to the resources podcast with tekken sports and daily refinement we've helped thousands of people save time and make more money by improving their online stores check out patreon.com resource podcast for thousands of hours of full-length ad-free podcasts and coaching calls join our facebook group with thousands of sellers making the transition from hobby to business see you in the show what's up guys welcome to the restart podcast with tech and sports and daily refinement and today we have a special guest isaiah isaiah is going to introduce himself right now but tech's feeling a little bit under the weather today so what we're going to do is talk about why resellers waste so much time and i'm going to give everybody every single tip i know to get more out of your day and before we get into that and isaiah is going to sort of interview and hopefully expand the subject a bit but why don't you introduce yourself to the people who don't know you yet um outside of the facebook group so yeah so if you don't know me again my name is isaiah i've been in the group since uh december of last year and i've been reselling since october 2020 that was my first time started with shoes before that i was selling laundry supplies in like august of 2020 but after joining the group i was able to greatly increase my business to the point where now i am number five in women's athletic shoes i'm number two in boys shoes number one in girls shoes so for me i'm primarily a shoe seller and um like my goal for my store is to make a store that someone can come in buy shoes for themselves buy shoes for their wife buy shoes for their kids and then be able to serve all of those demographics at the same time and you know like like chris said earlier tech isn't feeling his best so i am yeah december 2028 um so i'm kind of subbing in trying to learn a little bit from chris and tech about how to get more out of my day because i'm at a level that i feel is good but i want to go to a another level much beyond that um if they can you know get me there which they should okay i'm super excited about this episode also a reminder you are number five in women's shoes yep um number one in girls shoes and you're also ranked in in boys shoes i'm number two in boise number two employee shoes yeah like two in boys one in girls five and baby uh and then uh number five and women's women's athletic okay i love this so we like to go by the listing quality report and if you guys are new to listening to us that's sort of our bible because ebay tells you what they want for you to go higher in the search algorithm so if you take the time to learn the listing quality report if you're in the patreon group listen to isaiah's walk through of its about 13 minutes and it will really educate you on exactly what ebay wants to to rise higher in the ranks so today i want to talk about why restarts waste so much time and after co-hosting this group of tech since october 2020 i've realized most of my day is wasted you can be a lot more productive and just the overall theme of this call today i want people to recognize when people are old and they're about to pass what they wish they had more of is time that's it everybody wants more time more time with their loved ones the saying goes when you're in your 20s you want to become a millionaire you want to be successful when you're older you want to be in your 20s with no money no just to have that time back people would give anything people would give anything just for another week with their family so that's why we want more time and i realize now after doing this now thinking about every single second what's fastest what's smoothest what has the least defects what has to be replaced the least the shortest path between two things that you want to accomplish that each time you improve that you get more time back so now i realize you know i guessed on the monday call that i take 200 days off but it's more like 300 days off because just reselling the first 66 days of the year i make enough for one year of bills so now looking at that when you run your own business you call the shots you set your own schedule your business is open 24 7. so it's different when you work a nine to five you only get paid nine to five when you set up a company it works even if you're not working when you install things like ebay or poshmark or mercari or amazon that's the software it works for you it finds customers for you even when you're not working it's the marketing arm so think about everything as traffic how to get people to see your items and services and how can you be more efficient with your time so time is huge and now that i think about everything in units of time i've got some really amazing nuggets to share with you today but where do you want to start all right so i mean the biggest thing is so i joined the morning caller like eight o'clock i wake up at probably like 7 30 or so most of the time a little bit earlier periodically but i'm like up and rolling for real around 7 30 and then i joined the call at eight and that's when the day basically starts me because i have a beginner call at nine from not from nine to nine thirty um my goal like however even though i start at eight i'm not finishing my day until like 10 p.m 11 p.m one o'clock in the morning
which like that shouldn't happen under any circumstances i'm listing 28 items per day right and of course there's other things that i have to do as well but like when i look at you and tech like you specifically you're producing you can produce 120 items per day every single day and i'm producing 28. so you can do like four times as much as i can and i'm working 17 hours you're working eight so like how like what is what is like on paper it looks like my day should be you know 10 11 hours um maybe 12 hours sometimes eight but in reality it doesn't work out that way so like what are you doing that's making it so that you're not you know being knocked off course and your day actually goes as scheduled okay so i don't know how i came to this conclusion but some somewhere along the journey i recognize that the way tech looks at ebay is mechanically so what are the pieces of the puzzle that you need to do so for photography what is photography it's pressing down the shutter button it's staging the items it's reducing the staging time by having items prepped before you go to the photo area it's making sure you have extra memory cards in case one fails it's reducing the transfer time to zero by plugging in an sd card versus the literal transferring the photos through the air through airdrop or maybe plugging in a cord so when you think about it mechanically it reduces the time down to whatever your mechanics are so as an example when i did the resaw nirvana experiment i tried to do a 1 000 a week income in as least amount of time as possible starting with zero i really only had an hour a day to do that so at nine o'clock i was thinking okay i need to take 10 sets of pictures i need to list 10 items i need to put them away and because the inventory system was just a box it was just photograph these items list and put them in the box and i never got over 200 items in that store before i had a full-time income and it was just three of those boxes that i got out of the garbage just three moving boxes that i got that held my items and it wasn't the best system because i had to kind of look through the big box but it wasn't fancy and i didn't want to spend any money on things like that so when you're just starting you you have time but you have no money so i didn't spend any a single penny on supplies no rolo printer nothing i in fact even tested going to the post office and having them scan a label for me with the ebay qr code so i only had an hour to do it so i thought about it mechanically 10 sets of photos 10 listings now where people get tripped up is the extra stuff involved and now that i learned about this mechanical nature i applied it to everything so this entire time um that we were running the group my wife got pregnant we had the baby the baby's now 15 months old and this is how i look at it now a mom told me this is i don't know if this is going to piss people off for now but she said having a baby is like running a business okay there's the feeding time there's sleep time there's play time these are all different departments in your baby business and the goal is to help uh have a self-sustaining baby at the end of this whole 18-year journey a self-sustaining baby would be the goal but if you treat it like that and you think about how many hours each part takes i think it takes 12 to 14 hours to take care of a baby there's a lot to it there's meal prep sleep time play time the more interaction then what you want to do is try to avoid bad habits so if you're doing 12 to 14 hours on baby yeah and then eight hours on ebay like how do you how could you do both of those at the same time that's like four hours i'll explain it to you plus because right now this is so insane because i pay my bills in 66 days a year just reselling income but also i have a youtube group also i have this group and then also i just launched the wholesale company but we're not even really launch it but i sell some wholesale so looking at the different situations one thing that tech said that's very difficult to do but it resonated which was you have all these ships that are in the ocean these different projects that you're running you can't let any of them start to dip because it brings down all of them they have to all maintain a certain level so for me how i organize it is in the morning we have the morning call that's the second part of my day first day is do some exercise then do the morning call all of my things this is my personal hack are tied to other people so the morning call i have to be on time i have to knock it out at seven o'clock is my turn to take care of the baby so from seven to eight my job is to feed her play with her working on walking now reading to her they said if i want her to like reading then i need to read to her so i'm doing that eight o'clock she goes to child care um it's interesting looking at that because it's almost like the child care representative we use family care which is a family like a lady that takes care of a few families kids she's like an employee essentially she takes care of the baby and the baby has a schedule so there there's play time reading time outdoor time indoor time time when she's talking to the other babies all it's pretty structured right you go there and in fact a lot of child cares they have like whether you like it or not nap time so however however old the kid is you have um like the baby sleeps between 12 and 2 regardless of how old even though that might not be ideal for the baby it's just how the system is set up so if you did it yourself you could cater your schedule more to the age of your baby and that definitely affects it but i sort of consider family care like a employee because i'm arbitraging it takes me because i live in california an hour and 40 minutes to take her to and back child care even though it's four miles away and then the um what she does she's a set we're essentially outsourcing a couple of her meals one of the nap times play times and whatever then go get her come home then at that point when i go and get her and come home there's no more business at all i don't have a very long business day that's why like i'm so intense about it because there's not much i don't have that much time to work on business i look at other people who do not have a business i'm sorry they don't have a baby business they have 12 or 14 more hours in their day because they don't have a baby business so you need when you break down the math it's so interesting because when you add on another baby it doesn't become 24 to 28 hours there are things that are condensed because you can make meals for two babies in the same time as one there's certain things that do literally add time to it so i don't know yet but if we make another baby soon i'll be able to give you guys an idea what i think the additional time is but for me reselling we talked about leverage in the in the morning call i'm currently leveraging other people's time to do my reselling if it was just me solo i would be more realistic about it i would say you know what 12 to 14 hours of baby time maybe i really realistically only have one or two hours to work on reselling a day so that was the case and i didn't have any leverage so i had to do it all myself then you count that let's say seven days a week so you have seven to 14 hours a week maybe three or four hours of that is sourcing and in my listing habit let's say it's between five and ten personally i would not get upset with that because that's all the time that i have depending on the amount of time that you have you need to set your expectations what people do is they have the 7 to 14 hour window and they expect a full-time income paid time off huge savings account but that doesn't that doesn't come from that effort it's just a different stage in your life because you're also running a baby business which has a different different solution now i would say that i guess you could and then when we talk about leverage using other people's time there's people like sarah blakely that she runs a billion dollar company and has three or four kids like how is that possible it's because she's leveraging a thousand employees at work and every single kind of nanny that you could have at home all the meal prep all the laundry that's all been leveraged to somewhere else that's how she has more time so so let let's dig a little bit because i'm listening i'm listening to you talk and it reminds me of kind of how techno not with without the baby part but it reminds me of how tech um kind of describes the way his day looks in the same way how's employees days look and i want to run this theory by you and you tell me if it's if it's accurate sure it seems as if um like my issue isn't efficiency in task right like i can do the listing in under five minutes i can do the photos in a minute and 30 seconds i can clean shoes in under five minutes to prepare pretty easily like each of the individual attacks and for most people like you gotta say like let me stand behind you and you take five minutes and take a set of photos it's hard to pull it off right so it's not the time in the task that takes so long and another example of this is when i was looking at um beth in the group we were going over her process of listening and i was looking at the um i was looking at all of the little things she was doing the way she transferred her photos she like transferred photos by um taking the photos on her phone and then using the ebay app to transfer them over to the listing and i was like even if i gave you a highly efficient way to transfer the photos like it would only save you two minutes out of the 11 minutes that it took to do this listing so like most of the time spent during this listing was you were not super strong with what the item specifics were you are not super strong with how you should structure your title you're not super strong with how to price the item the research was taking you too long it was thing one is that she just wasn't an expert in the thing that she was listing and as a result 90 of the time 80 of the time was spent trying to figure out what to put in these blanks that was number one and then number two which is something that i run into a lot is so one not enough of an expert number two is how like when text people finish taking photos they take their 120 sets of photos now they're done for most of us we go all right now i'm gonna go uh watch i'm gonna go take lunch i'm gonna go watch a youtube video on my computer i'm going to spend 10 minutes trying to find a youtube video and then i'm going to eat lunch for 45 minutes and then i'm gonna kind of dilly dally while i'm getting ready to do the next task right so the time between the two tasks usually expands and expands and expands however if text people finishes photos at 12 o'clock by 1201 they're on listings and it sounds like that's the exact same way how your day is set up too when you finish baby time you're straight to the office once you get to the office you're straight to this task what my stream starts you're straight to the next task so it's like there is no expansion in time between tasks so how exactly have you achieved that in your business where like you're not getting pulled in these different directions even if you are you're allowing yourself to snap back into it very quickly this is great i think when you get started already people are 15 20 minutes behind it takes some 15 or 20 minutes to get started so for me i drink coffee while i'm doing something right today i haven't even had time to have lunch yet so i grabbed one bite of a burrito during your question so sometimes when you are when you're starting i think people take such a long time to immediately get into it they need to watch people do contract work any kind of contract work because let's say you hire someone to do a garden or put up a fence for you or roofing or insulation when they arrive at your house to start doing it less than one second later they've started the truck parks they all jump out start working on it immediately and that's how i think tex said most people start their day with the break with the coffee he just wakes up and starts working the amount already he is maybe completing your entire day by the time you're done with coffee because you're just immediately getting into the emotion and when you start working on higher leverage tasks so as an example my um worker she's getting she just moved into a new apartment so i told her you're greatly underestimating how much time it takes to move you don't you think it's only going to take you a couple of hours it's not i don't want you to take off two or three days of partially doing it just take up one whole day and do the whole thing hire a mover if you can't afford a mover get a haul truck and do it all in one day don't do three or four partial things because what happens is you end up it takes you an hour to get into moving because you're not a moving expert then there's one or two hours of inefficiency because you're not a professional mover so if you do that over the course of three or four days you're using that you that inefficiency is spread out every day because it takes you an hour to get started so for me if i were gonna list the lamp it would take me an hour to get started i don't know you don't want to list the lamp i like it you don't want to listen and you don't know how to listen i don't know how to listen yeah so it would take me a second to google it find where on the lamp i'm supposed to be looking for the right markings maybe i do a google image search all these extra steps versus if i was listing a pair of shoes i could immediately start taking the photos write the title i'd do some item specifics if i had never heard of the shoe before it would still only take a couple of minutes to list because you don't have to um i don't i don't have to take the first hour to get started so if you have eight listings that you've never heard of eight hours of it is just getting ready to list that item yeah and the workers i can tell them there is now now that finally thank god i switched away from per piece and it's hourly they know that all eight hours of work at work our work when we're done doing this you're doing this you're unboxing this then we're moving to that you're not photographing you're listening you're not listening you're you're sorting everything is just i know how long it takes and i can tell them kind of like it's almost like if there are more tasks throughout the day i know they need a break so i'll build that in so it's almost like on the days that we do more things i already know it's going to take longer because the people each time you switch tasks you need a breather so if you're going from what not streaming into shipping that's a good time for them to take lunch in between those two tasks because they're so different we lost isaiah for a moment hopefully he comes back um but as far as like how i set up the employee's day i just look at it as in and they're an extension of me so i i inherit all their problems like if one of my workers had a cat problem i have a cat problem so i just look at it as in they're an extension of me they're completing tasks there is a better way to do it like a more advanced form of ebay i mean delegating where they can make their own decisions but i'm not that level of entrepreneur yet right now the level of entrepreneur that i'm at they just do things i don't have time for and i think watching meet kevin really solidified my thought and i think you know jack's listening right now he's he's experimenting with with hiring others and kevin said something that really struck me he's like sometimes you hire someone for eight hours of work for something that you can do in 30 minutes and that is like so hard that delegate because you're like i'll just do it myself the thing is you don't have half an hour when you're really trying to get to a high level you need that half an hour the half an hour if you're if you're if you're making 500 an hour it's 250 dollars for half an hour and that person's wage is less than 250 a day so when he said that i finally realized wow okay um when you start becoming worth 100 200 500 an hour you really need to think about your time and unfortunately it doesn't transfer over people can't do things like you do like as an example the reason why i'm gonna make a video coming up soon why ebay is way better than live auction i'll tell you why you don't have to make a game okay like i'm very creative i've been doing business for a long time i can make an interesting game that somebody can bid on and make a show that's interesting that's why i'm successful and whatnot if i just treat it as here's one item here's one item i would i would go bankrupt because i wouldn't be able to get enough money per stream you have to make it interesting that takes time though on ebay you don't have to do that on ebay if you do a good job describing the item good pictures good listings good item specifics good price good shipping policy good return policy it's fine ebay will do the lifting for you on amazon it's even easier like you're not even allowed to be creative on amazon it's just what is it tell us what it is we'll do it we don't even trust you to do it you just tell us what you have and we'll update the quantity and we'll even ship it for you and do the customer service for you that's the ultimate leverage this is why when i look at the group the most leveraged people in the group are jack weaver with his video game business and tech they're the most leveraged because they use the most other people's time other people's resources to to grow jack's running like a 30 person business by himself essentially because he's utilizing all the fba and all the shipping same as tech same of all of us because we're using the post office we're using ebay and we use youtube for information the knowledge that you that people have now is unbelievable you could listen to youtube for one weekend and and have an idea on a hundred different categories to start in that's how that's how free-flowing the information is it's truly amazing um vanessa is saying underestimated time required can set off your whole day can set your whole day back i agree with that i think that to fix something in your life printer jams any of that stuff takes a half day so now that i know that i just really think about okay no batteries hell no has to be plugged in because that's going to go down way less i don't have to find batteries i think about okay can i sell this forever can that's why clothing has become so interesting to me because you can sell forever shoes you can sell forever books you can sell forever there's always a need for that rare cool things are fine but the value of them is so volatile and i want something that's that's more stable that's been around forever so antiques is actually a good business you just need a large inventory because they're going to be around forever it's just um it's something that people want not need so let's say this i'm i'm 15 listing guy right i'm less than 15 items a day and i'm listening to you right now you're explaining how you're producing this much stuff you're utilizing leverage by having your employees but i don't have any employees you know it's just it's just me by myself listing these 15 items but it's taking me all day you know so like like how do i um as an like how do i like taylor said prevent that down time because here's the thing here's the thing and this is gonna sound a little um not not it's not as strong a heavy but like sometimes it sucks you know what i mean like sometimes you're i've heard people say this all the time they just hate taking photos they hate you know doing the listening process when they're doing it they're falling asleep and stuff like that right but like that this has never been a thing that i've heard from someone at your level i've never heard that from tech net tech has never said like yeah when i'm listening sometimes i just don't feel like hitting 3 14 today i'll be sleepy and you know we're gonna we're gonna take a nap that never happens right but for a lot of us who are doing a lot less like we get tired during the photos we get tired during the listings like why is it that you're able to just to stay so focused prevent that down time and get the 15 done so you can do other things i think i respect time so much now before i did not respect time i respect time so much now because when when you have a baby and you sleep an hour a day in the beginning after that happens to you when you sleep 30 minutes in a day because the baby needs food every hour and somehow it's amazing right so i just respect time so much i know i'm not going to get that time back so now i think i'm going to work as hard as possible be as focused as possible because this time is going to go away i'm going to get interrupted someone's going to need something um and every time you take your eye off the ball the performance of whatever it is you were looking at starts to drop do minutes matter minutes matter matter like and i was realizing that today because i'm like dude if i don't hurry up in this thrift store today because i went sourcing um right before this like if i don't hurry up then i'm not gonna be able to do the things i need to do before the podcast starts and like if you have to do the podcast as well as the uh all hands on deck call like you might not be done until seven so like you need to have this stuff done now otherwise you're gonna be in a lot of trouble like minutes really do matter and that's what it sounds like you and take both have in common like you care about your minutes like give you an idea of how extreme this is toyota measures things in one sixth of a second to them one sixth of a second matters because when when you when you have to build a million cars a year that's a lot of work that needs to get done a lot of supplies toyota factories don't have trash cans because if they had trash cans they would have to empty the trash can all that they just don't there's no waste there's no way you could produce a million of anything with it with any kind of thing that would need to be replaced or the exact amount of supplies that need to build the car arrive the exact number of everything there's no extra maybe one extra in case something is missing but very very little overage and that's how you you can actually you can actually think i just think at this point in my career and even more so each year that goes by i respect time more and more and more i think you know what you're you're spending time with your family that's time away from your business when you're with your business that's time away from your family like you really gotta think about how much like you say you love your family how much unfold how much focused time are you really giving your family my friends is good i would say that's so true dude because like i'm thinking about my the way how my last two three weeks have gone and like like i said every day wake up at eight finish at like 12 1 o'clock in the morning something like that all right and then or let's say i'm finished at 10 11 o'clock i go upstairs to my wife she's asleep right like she doesn't want to hang out with me at 11 p.m at night like she's trying to sleep so it's just like yeah the business is important yeah but you you can't like completely drop the ball in the other sector either it doesn't work i have to be better at this side in order to do what i want to do on that side with her also your relationships are glass yeah if you if you drop them they don't repair your business though is a little different your business really is like rubber ebay will forgive you if you decide you don't want to list for two weeks or whatever happens and you come back and you list two you would list a week in a row good items ebay forgives you you cheat on your wife for two weeks you can't come back and be like yo i'm gonna be good for seven days she doesn't forget it's over there's no there's no that doesn't that's not a thing so in this um this is interesting like i heard somebody say just be okay like you have a business right so that's kind of a cop-out people are like oh you know what i was at work until 11 today because you know business is business we got to do it here's the thing though it's not okay because well like you had an engagement with your family you didn't show up because you you had business you had to pay the bills it's not really it's not really okay you've done some damage so if you if you want to avoid that you've got to really really value time and then how can you say that in the same world where i'm taking was that 17 hours to do 28 and you're doing and 120 and eight like how can i say that in the same way i'm sorry i was doing business at the time but like chris is with his family the christmas lives i hear people say this all the time like oh i can't do it because i care about my family too much that's not true i spend more time with my family than you do so when you look at the like if you really care about your family you get your work done in a shorter amount of time thank you for listening to the resource podcast with tekken sports and daily refinement if you'd like to listen to the full episode please check us out at patreon.com slash the resource podcast for all information all our full-length episodes over thousands of hours of coaching and our facebook mentorship group which is 35 dollars per month just about a dollar a day to help you get to the next level we appreciate you guys see you next time
2022-07-11 11:35
