[00:02] Hey.

[00:02] Hey, guys. What is up? Welcome back to another episode of the Smart Flip. Today, guys, we have Dakota Bailey with It's Easy Electronics. Right?

[00:10] Yeah.

[00:12] So we got Dakota here today. He's a direct buyer in the phone flipping space.

[00:16] And we're going to be interviewing him today on how he got into the business, what he's doing now, and what he plans on doing to grow his business in the future.

[00:24] And I got my co host with me, Matt, today. And we're going to be rocking and rolling. We're going to start off with Dakota. If you want to, man, go ahead and introduce yourself, man.

[00:33] Let everybody know who you are.

[00:36] Yeah, I'm Dakota Bailey. I'm a co owner at Easy Electronics. Do you want me to get into like how I started?

[00:43] Yeah, let's go, let's jump right into that.

[00:46] So Easy.

[00:50] I definitely didn't start with the company name Easy Electronics. It was just a flipping out of my house.

[00:57] I actually got started,

[00:59] I think five years ago. I was living out in California with my wife. She was my girlfriend at the time and we were flat broke. Like I was looking up online and being broke, it kind of drives you to, to figure stuff out.

[01:13] So I'm just looking up how to make money online and,

[01:18] and look. Finding drop shipping. Have you heard it? You know what drop shipping is?

[01:23] Yep.

[01:25] So basically you can build a store, like a Shopify store with no inventory and it's supposed to be low cost. There's actually some costs involved like ads and stuff, but that's what I was planning on doing.

[01:35] And I bought a laptop to do that.

[01:38] And after I bought this laptop,

[01:41] I found out that I got it super cheap. And I was like, hey, I'm about to relist this on Marketplace and if it sells, great. If it doesn't, I'll just keep doing the drop shipping thing.

[01:53] It sold in a couple hours and I doubled my money and I was like, I'm gonna do this again and I'm gonna still try the drop shipping thing.

[02:02] I bought another laptop and I relisted that too and that one sold in a day and I made like probably 80% margin on it.

[02:10] Nice.

[02:10] I was like, if I could do this a few times a day, I think I could probably live without even working a job.

[02:20] So I started to pursue that and obviously get interested.

[02:24] And that turned into consoles and then consoles turned into somebody kind of giving me a, a peek at David K's course.

[02:33] Oh yeah, he's one of the David K alumni.

[02:36] I, I all honesty, I didn't pay for it.

[02:41] I got access to it back then, but I. He didn't. The guy, the guy that let me check that out, he didn't do anything with it. He kind of just bought the course and didn't really pursue it.

[02:56] I hit the. I hit the ground running with it. And I knew some people from my hometown that repaired phones and stuff, and I'm just bugging them with questions all day.

[03:05] And eventually I was always scared of phones. Consoles were easy to test. They were easy to see if they worked or didn't work.

[03:14] Know what's funny is the song flippers think the opposite. They see.

[03:18] Yeah. Really?

[03:18] You see the consoles difficult. Yeah.

[03:21] Yeah. I just heard all this stuff about IMEIs and carrier locked, and it kind of freaked me out. But as soon as I jumped in, I started.

[03:29] I was really interested in repairing too. So I was doing repairs out of my house and it just took off. And for a while I had odd jobs out there and that supplemented me.

[03:40] And then I would literally. I had like a landscaping job one time. I'd get up at 4 in the morning, go to that, and then I'd drive till midnight to go get deals.

[03:48] Wow.

[03:49] And then I ended up doing bartending. And during bartending,

[03:54] Covid hit and I got laid off. And I'm like, I'm not ever. I don't ever want a job again. I'm just going to take this serious. And I did.

[04:04] That's freaking.

[04:06] That's awesome, dude.

[04:08] Yeah. And then eventually I moved. Eventually moved back to Ohio and found my business partner, Devin, and he actually taught me how to turn it into like a real business. And it was a great partnership.

[04:17] And we're still partnered today.

[04:19] Heck yeah, dude. That's awesome. So, I mean, I want to ask this real quick. Like, you were. You started flipping consoles first and you were. You were kind of scared of the phones.

[04:32] So we. We find ourselves in kind of an opposite position all the time. Like, we have all the phone flippers that are scared to get into consoles because, number one, they don't know how to test them.

[04:43] Number two, they. I don't know. I don't really know what it is. Matt, you kind of deal with that a little bit more than I do.

[04:48] Yeah.

[04:49] Like, what are those, like, those fears there? Like with the phone flippers? Like a new person, we don't have that issue at all. Because they come in, they're kind of ignorant to the fact that.

[05:01] Fear of the unknown.

[05:02] Yeah. Like the. The new people don't really have that fear. I've noticed.

[05:06] Yeah. I think for the, for the phone flipping people, it's.

[05:11] It's that when you have a phone, right, I. This is it, I have this. But when you have all these other components and various items, I think it's.

[05:21] I think it just concerns them. I think there's, you know, uncertainty of, you know, how am I gonna.

[05:27] How am I gonna manage all this stuff, you know, controllers and games and cords and blah, blah, blah,

[05:34] testing it. But honestly, like,

[05:37] consoles, you don't have to worry about imei, identity theft, like all these different things that generally you would. With a phone.

[05:46] Um, I don't know, I think if any. If anybody's listening to this and your phone flipper not wanting to do consoles, like, why are you not doing consoles there? I mean, Dakota could tell you, I could tell you, Chris could tell you that they're so much easier in a lot of ways than reselling phones.

[06:01] Easier to close, easier to find more deals.

[06:04] Most of the time,

[06:06] yeah, the people selling consoles really want to get them sold a lot of times.

[06:10] But I think a lot of the reason too is I,

[06:14] at least I didn't think it was fun flipping wasn't really as public as it is now. It wasn't.

[06:20] Yeah.

[06:20] Hustle that everybody knows, like five, six years ago. You were one of the first people I've seen, Chris.

[06:26] Oh, really?

[06:26] Yeah, yeah. And I was working with Dave, so.

[06:29] I kind of had a little. I hit a. Had a little pick me up there. But I was client success director for.

[06:35] But Dave was one of the first guys to really put out a big course. And yeah,

[06:40] it was a little more hidden, so I didn't really know about it, but I knew how to work a game console, so. Yep, I think that's what a lot of it was.

[06:48] Yeah.

[06:49] No, I mean, it's funny.

[06:52] So we have a.

[06:54] So you got the course basically for free and you took advantage of that. And like, a lot of people I've noticed don't do that. Like,

[07:03] you know, we put out a good amount of content on the YouTube channel here for the podcast and just. I have a ridiculous amount of videos. And it's funny,

[07:12] there's all this free information out there, especially for. For flipping phones and everything now.

[07:18] And people just don't take advantage, right?

[07:22] Yeah.

[07:23] When the information is literally there. I mean, even when people purchase a course, most of the time they don't take advantage of it. But what I wanna ask you real quick, why did you take, you know, advantage of that knowledge when you got it?

[07:38] Like, is it because you kind of Fell into the industry first and then you were like, oh ****, I can make money. And then you actually found a, a way to make it happen more often or instances where you buy and sell.

[07:51] Is that kind of what happened?

[07:53] Yeah,

[07:55] so I did kind of fall into the industry and I was trying to figure out ways to scale and it was really a blessing that he reached out to me seeing me post all these consoles and stuff.

[08:07] And I, I think the price of the course had me interested too. The fact that I just kind of got blessed with this and yeah, I just wanted to scale and, and grow and figure out everything I could about like ebay.

[08:21] And I was in a really good market, so I just, I.

[08:27] The desire to, to grow and not be broke was a big motivator too. So I had a family, we were living with her parents and California, California Palm Springs is super expensive.

[08:42] So yeah, I was trying to build us up to the point of getting our own place.

[08:48] And see, I think that is for sure one of the biggest things is like just being broke, you know, I remember whenever I first started in the business, I had $200, wife was pregnant.

[08:59] That's what I started with too. I borrowed it from my mom, my wife was pregnant.

[09:04] We were. I remember I. I was also a server. I wasn't a bartender, but I was a server at a restaurant called Papado's. And we had a hurricane or it was a tropical storm or something.

[09:16] Either way, everything was flooded and we couldn't do anything. I couldn't work, couldn't make money. $200 in the bank account and I started. So I started surfing the web and that's when I ran across Dave's ebook where he was like, hey, you can flip electronics and make money.

[09:32] I was like, well, that sounds like something I can do.

[09:35] Yeah.

[09:36] First two phones I ever bought were icloud locked. But you know, learned with that.

[09:41] Man, you gotta get burned to learn.

[09:44] Yeah.

[09:44] Oh, that's really good. I'm writing that down. I'll quote that with Dakota Bailey. You gotta get burned to learn.

[09:53] It's true. Like all the guys that I try to help get off the ground, they always get hit some way. But it. That when it hurts your pockets, you learn.

[10:03] It's for. No, that's, it's.

[10:06] We have a student who,

[10:08] who I talk about pretty often now. His name is Devon. You might work with him at this point or know of him. Devon Navon. Yeah.

[10:16] Starts with an N. But he, he. He joined recellarator and one of his first deals he bought a Fake iPhone for a couple. Quite a few hundred.

[10:29] He had an employee that did that for 800 bucks a couple months ago.

[10:32] Yeah.

[10:33] Oh, man.

[10:34] And he. He messaged me and he was like, I don't know if I can do this. Like, I don't know if this business is right for me. And, like, you know, you kind of have to talk them off a ledge at that point.

[10:43] Yeah, like, hey, dude, it was just an $800 learning opportunity. Like, you'll be okay. Like,

[10:49] you'll never do it again now, you know,

[10:52] I was like, keep the phone.

[10:54] Learn what to look for.

[10:57] So, like, if I. Whenever I come across, like, newer fake phones, like, I let people know, like, that I'm buy. Like I'm going to buy it from them for like a hundred bucks.

[11:07] That way I can have something to compare it to because some of them are getting really good. I actually, myself, I actually bought a fake Samsung a few months ago.

[11:16] It was so good that I could remember that it was. There was. The only difference you could tell was there was a slight delay that a Samsung shouldn't have.

[11:27] Yeah.

[11:27] And that was the only thing. And I. And I.

[11:31] It's got the Android operating system, too.

[11:33] I couldn't tell. I was like, there's something off with this phone. Like, but I can't tell what it is. Like, it reset. Did everything it was supposed to.

[11:43] Yeah. We still have the 15. It was a 15 Pro Max.

[11:47] He bought it after hours, which he definitely shouldn't have been doing.

[11:52] New employee, and we still have it on the shelf. It looks really real. Like, if I didn't know no phones.

[12:00] I would probably fall for it too.

[12:02] Bought it after hours. Like, after store hours or.

[12:06] Yeah, it was after five and he was there by himself. He just. He broke a bunch of rules that we told him not to do, so.

[12:15] Oh, great.

[12:16] Yeah.

[12:17] That's why you follow the sop, right?

[12:20] He's not with the company. That wasn't the reason. That wasn't the reason. But ice. It was just a mistake.

[12:29] Yeah, of course. But I mean, that's how you come up in the game though, right? Like, you have to. You have to make those mistakes sometimes. Yeah.

[12:37] He thought he was doing well. He.

[12:38] He.

[12:38] He thought he was just getting a deal and. Yeah. Gna make some money.

[12:42] Yeah, I mean, we. We see it all the time. I call it the.

[12:47] The Valley of Despair. I have a. I have a little chart that I have people go through to kind of figure out where they are. It kind of starts off like you start with this new opportunity Right.

[12:56] You're excited. You know, you get that burst of excitement when you flip your first device.

[13:01] Then you kind of go over the hump a little bit and then you start realizing, holy ****, I gotta start marketing for this business.

[13:07] Yeah, I gotta start doing stuff to get more people in kind of deal, you know. And then you realize it's not as easy as you thought, you know, because you got, you might have gotten that first deal by, you know, just being excited and you're on that little high,

[13:23] you know.

[13:24] Yeah.

[13:24] And then, and then it comes down to what I. What we call the valley of despair is where they like, they, they have their first loss.

[13:32] Right.

[13:33] And it always happens in any business. You're going to have some sort of loss in the beginning that's going to shape how you move forward.

[13:43] And like I tell people, you either have to get through that through. You either have to do it through experience or you have to do it through learning. The faster you learn, the easier it is to get through.

[13:54] Or if you have somebody that can kind of guide you, it makes that a little bit easier to get through. But yeah, I mean, and then, you know,

[14:05] it's kind of a make or break situation at that point, like, can you do this business or not?

[14:10] And then if they can't, they just move to another opportunity and the cycle continues, you know.

[14:14] Yeah, they just keep going in a lot of it.

[14:16] New opportunities, kind of like what, you know, you talked about drop shipping. That's one of the ones that phone flippers fall into a lot of the time trying to find an easier path all the time.

[14:26] Oh, I don't know.

[14:27] This is a super.

[14:29] If you're in like a decent market, this is a super easy. Like, you don't find much, many better opportunities than this. Like, yeah, there's stuff that the market's down right now and there's stuff out there that you can make more money on, like if you're, you know how to do real estate or something.

[14:47] But the barrier to entry in this market is very low.

[14:51] You might need like a, a thousand bucks to do decent just because phones are so expensive nowadays. But yeah, it's, it's super low barrier. You just have to put in some work.

[15:03] Yeah,

[15:05] and I think that's what some people just don't realize, you know, in the beginning. But. So we're talking about kind of getting started and everything. But I want to move to how did you go from local phone flipper to what you're doing now, like direct buyer type deal?

[15:24] Like, how did that yes.

[15:27] So I moved back to my hometown, like three years ago back in Ohio,

[15:33] and I kind of came back with nothing.

[15:38] Whole different story for a different day. But I moved back to Ohio alone for about four months, and I moved in with a friend. I was like, broke again, but I had.

[15:49] I had a client base in. In my hometown,

[15:54] knew how to run ads. I had a little bit of cash, and I just really focused on building it back up. And it got to the point where my wife moved back with me and we got our own place.

[16:05] And I'm growing to the point where I either need more cash or I need more hands.

[16:10] Yeah.

[16:11] And I. My business partner now, I reached out to him for a loan and he offered me a partnership.

[16:18] And it's been kind of a roller coaster since then, but it's been steadily going. Going up.

[16:23] Yep.

[16:23] And guys just. He knew. He had ran a couple businesses and knew the ins and outs, and he knew, like,

[16:33] he loved doing like, software and accounting and stuff like that. So he implemented like a POS system and it was just a really good partnership.

[16:41] He.

[16:42] He has strengths where I have weaknesses. So, yeah, I kind of grew from there.

[16:46] Yeah.

[16:47] I've spoken with him. Good guy.

[16:49] Oh, yeah. I. I think you have.

[16:52] Or I remember when you did. And yeah, it's.

[16:58] We got into direct buying kind of on accident. We kind of sat down and talked about it, and we're like, who.

[17:04] Who's the leader in this. In this industry? And I was like, atlas. That's who everybody knows. And how do we become Atlas? And it kind of took off.

[17:20] Gotcha, dude. That's awesome. So what does it look like nowadays, like, when you get how much are you moving or how many devices you guys move per month, what does all that look like.

[17:32] We'Re doing? I can't remember how many devices, but it's about 300, 350,000amonth in revenue. It's awesome margins.

[17:43] What do you guys.

[17:45] Mostly used stock. Honestly, I take a lot of new in bucks and break even on it just to keep it moving.

[17:51] I tell people that all the time and they never believe me.

[17:54] It's. I. Yeah. People try to squeeze me for every dollar on new inbox and I'm like, dude, I'm really not making nothing on this.

[18:00] Yeah.

[18:01] But I'll take it just to keep. Keep your business. But.

[18:04] Right.

[18:05] Say that for everybody in the back that wants to become a direct buyer that reaches out to me and buy only new in box and make 50 per unit. And I'm like, bro,

[18:15] I. Who have no idea what you're talking about.

[18:19] That's painful seeing like 15k invoices and we make a hundred bucks on it or we've lost on stuff like. Yeah, it's ridiculous.

[18:28] My favorite thing to buy is. Is broken all day long, broken stuff. Because.

[18:33] Yeah, me too.

[18:34] It's so much more profitable. Ridiculous. Like, even the B stock stuff like is. Is not as profitable as broken. Like cracked. Especially if you can fix and flip. I don't fix and flip.

[18:46] But.

[18:47] But if you know how, like I got some students that have that experience and they fix and flip and it's ridiculous. Like margins and like, I'm telling people because everybody reaches out to me and they're like, chris, what if I.

[19:01] What if I just drop ship the b. The, you know, the B grade phones? And I'm just like, why don't you just do the way that works, bro? Like, why don't you just run some ads and talk to people?

[19:12] Literally just put yourself out there.

[19:14] Nobody wants to, you know.

[19:17] Yeah. Oh, yeah. That's one thing that helped me build. I. I printed like 500 or a thousand business cards and I'm literally handing them out at McDonald's, at Walmart.

[19:29] Yeah, If I'm going to get food somewhere, I'm handing a card out. And then I was hitting every store in town just trying to network. Like, you got to put yourself out there.

[19:38] Yeah, 100%. I think that's one thing that people just don't realize in the business is like, you have to talk to people, especially in a local market. Like once you have like a reputation is a little different.

[19:51] You know, you can start playing in the Facebook groups and you can start getting the mail in stuff because, you know, a lot of people I talk to, they're always talking about like, I want mail ins, I want mail ins.

[20:01] I'm like, well, how many followers do you have?

[20:03] Yeah.

[20:04] Oh, none. Oh, nobody knows you.

[20:06] You know, like, takes capital too. It's like, I mean, a good example of this is actually Felden. You know, like, Feldon has a massive following on Instagram, on TikTok, on all of this.

[20:19] And that gives him a lot of leeway when it comes to getting mail ins. Like, there's a level of trust there that he's built that a lot of direct buyers don't have.

[20:29] Like, I mean, it's kind of ridiculous actually. Like,

[20:33] I think he's up to. I think it was 99,000 followers last time I saw on Instagram.

[20:38] Wow. Like, that's insane.

[20:39] Like, that builds a lot of trust.

[20:41] Yeah.

[20:43] And that's just, you know, him sharing about the business and repairs and I don't know what it is, but he, he's really good at sharing the repair stuff, so it's kind of cool.

[20:51] Yeah, I've seen. He definitely has a knack for it. I've seen his ads pop up and stuff. I'll have to follow him.

[20:56] Yeah. But so you guys are moving about 350,000amonth in that.

[21:04] What do you like better? The local stuff or the.

[21:07] Or the. All the mail and stuff. What's your favorite one?

[21:10] I would love to capitalize on like a.

[21:14] If we had a big local market, but we don't. We're in a kind of small town. It's like 35,000 people and we actually have our tech running the repair side and we funnel all the ad stuff to him.

[21:27] He's commission based, so he gets to.

[21:29] Yeah.

[21:30] To eat. Eat off those. So. Yeah. If I was. I seen you had Brandon Schumer on.

[21:35] Yeah, Brandon's awesome, dude.

[21:37] If I was in a market like his. Because we work with him.

[21:40] Nice.

[21:41] Right on.

[21:42] He's killing it with local stuff. It's crazy. Yeah.

[21:48] I was talking to him the other day about some stuff and yeah, he's. He's killing it. Like I have his. I have access to his like resell deck stuff and I'm just like, gosh, dude, stupid.

[21:59] Like, and his night dude is just.

[22:02] So like I'm always having a recharge freaking phone number credits for that, man. Like, because he's just talking to so many people every day, it's ridiculous.

[22:12] But I mean, he likes to learn too.

[22:15] I mean he's. He's.

[22:17] Yeah, absolutely. He's always messed up new stuff. Yeah.

[22:20] Tries to pick my brain and he takes. Takes call notes in our messages and he definitely likes to.

[22:26] Yeah. I trained his team a while back too. We. He paid me for a couple of months to train his team on sales calls and.

[22:34] Awesome.

[22:35] One thing I noticed that with especially people in the local market is people don't like especially phone flippers. They just don't make offers fast enough.

[22:43] Like, I do a lot of mock phone calls with. With my clients and like, like where I pretend to be the customer and I'll tell them what device I have and they go through this like spiel of like, what company is it with?

[22:57] What's the battery health percentage? What's this? What's that? They ask like 20 questions and I'm just like, bro, just get the device and get what's Wrong with it and make an offer.

[23:05] Like, stop carrying around carrier.

[23:08] Yeah. Get the carrier and get the condition. That's all you need.

[23:12] I don't even have to carrier anymore. Like, I just really. I just stopped doing it.

[23:16] You just put on carrier locked. Awesome.

[23:19] Yeah.

[23:20] Happy when?

[23:21] Yeah. We just assume now that it's carrier locked and if it's. And that it gives us another question.

[23:26] Right. Yeah. If they.

[23:27] We just lowball the hell out of them. Like.

[23:30] And they're like, wait, what? You know. And I'm like, oh, you know, my bad. Like, sorry, what company is it with? Oh, it's unlocked. Oh, my bad. And they go up by a hundred.

[23:38] Oh, I can offer you. Yeah. And then they're.

[23:40] Makes them feel like they're winning the conversation, you know, so.

[23:44] Fine.

[23:44] Yeah.

[23:45] I mean, I did that with. With somebody the other day. I actually did that. Did it live on a call, I think last week with somebody. But I want to go back real quick.

[23:54] You said the town you're in, it's 35,000 people.

[23:59] I want to talk about that real quick.

[24:00] Quick.

[24:01] Cause we have a lot of people all the time that are. That complain about how they don't have a big enough area to be successful in this business. Can you talk.

[24:07] Can you speak to that a little bit? Like.

[24:10] Yeah. Don't be afraid to promote the **** out of yourself on your personal Facebook. That's what I did for a long time. I was making posts. I. I'm into, like, graphic design a little bit too.

[24:22] Just like, you've probably heard of Canva.

[24:24] Yes.

[24:25] I would make my own ads on there all the time and posting my stories, and I'm posting on Snapchat and Instagram and making local posts and probably lost some followers from it, but I didn't care.

[24:37] I just. Yeah,

[24:39] I was using those apps to build a business, not to make friends, so.

[24:47] Right on.

[24:49] So in a town of 35,000 people, we have another person who I think you guys might have worked with him before. Alex. He's in Kokomo, Indiana.

[25:02] Is he? Last night? I think so.

[25:04] Losing his. I can't remember that name.

[25:07] Vasquez.

[25:09] No.

[25:12] Okay, well, I can't. I can't remember his name at the moment.

[25:15] It'll come to me. Anyway, he's in a really small town in Kokomo, Indiana, and it's kind of same thing. You know, he just. He's been doing this for four years or five years now, and small town just kept plugging away.

[25:29] You know, I had him make friends with all his **** Shops, all the repair shops, freaking everybody, you know, like, and that's what you gotta do in those small towns.

[25:38] You gotta make friends with everybody, literally, like all the competitors, you know.

[25:44] But I've also noticed that in the, in the local market, I did a poll a while back.

[25:49] I found out that most local phone flippers, repair shops, stuff like that, they don't sell online. It's like 2 out of 10 that sell online.

[25:58] And I was like. And like that ship stuff, you know.

[26:02] It blows my mind when businesses don't ship online.

[26:05] Crazy.

[26:05] Yeah, I guess people hate money.

[26:08] Yeah, right. I went into a.

[26:11] A nutrition shop not too long ago and the dude said he doesn't sell online. I'm like, what are you.

[26:18] Yeah, you have a store in here waiting for people to, to just walk in, hopefully from the gym next door. But you could. There's a whole market online that you could sell into.

[26:27] Yeah, yeah. My next door neighbor sells supplements. He doesn't even have a. He doesn't own a store. He doesn't own a gym or anything. He just sells. Yeah,

[26:36] he sells. You know, we meet, taking the garbage out all the time, you know, he's like, Yeah, I sold 15 today, you know, and I'm just like, that's awesome. That's amazing, dude.

[26:45] Like,

[26:47] like, yeah, but if he can sell supplements, you can, you know.

[26:50] Yeah. As far as, like being in a small market, like, I don't care if you've got 10,000 people in your town, that's 10,000 people that probably have a phone.

[26:59] Yep.

[27:00] You just have to get out there and talk to them like you said. So.

[27:03] Yeah, we get a lot of people like that all the time that just think that there's not enough opportunity in the area. And really what it just comes down to is they're just too lazy to talk to enough people to make the opportunity happen.

[27:14] Right?

[27:15] Yeah, I think 500 or it might even be a thousand business cards from Office depot or like 40 bucks and you can just commit to three to six months of talking to every single person you can.

[27:29] And I guarantee you get results from that. So straight up.

[27:33] One thing I noticed with people too.

[27:35] Oh, yeah, absolutely. One thing I've noticed with phone flippers is there's like one per every hundred thousand people. Like, that's one thing I've noticed just doing this over time and running ads for hundreds of accounts is.

[27:48] I've just noticed there's usually one per 100k people, which is a good number. Right. Like,

[27:56] we're still very minority, but out of Those people, most of them don't sell online. Most of them don't even know what direct buyers are, which is wild.

[28:06] So I've actually made a point to reach out to a lot of those people on Marketplace,

[28:11] trying to, you know, get them weaved into the industry a little bit, like, get to know people more.

[28:19] But I want to go back to the small town thing here real quick before we move to the. The higher end DB stuff.

[28:29] The one thing that I like about the small towns is you can become the guy.

[28:33] Like, yeah, I was. I was about to say that. I'm glad you did. It's super easy to.

[28:39] To blow your competition out of the water. Like, literally, just do what you're supposed to do and treat people good and keep your word and respond quickly. And it's super easy.

[28:51] Like, a lot of the people in my town,

[28:55] even the people that I help like, or that I learned from,

[28:59] they do kind of shady business. They lowball you or try to squeeze you for an extra dollar because they don't care about the future business from you.

[29:11] Crappy repairs, stuff like that. It wasn't hard to. To be the best. And I'm not even bragging, like, it wasn't hard to. To be the best in our. Our area because usually your competition isn't much competition.

[29:24] Like, they just are. They don't have anybody that has done what they've done that'll.

[29:31] The bar's so low, you know, welcome. Yeah, like, if you. I tell my students all the time. And I. I made it a point yesterday because I. Yesterday or I guess two days ago now, I bought.

[29:44] I made an offer on an iPad for $100. IPad, 4th gen.

[29:48] And then I asked what else she had. Like, what else do you have? Like, I upsell all the time. This is something Dave so important.

[29:56] Important question. Yeah.

[29:57] Yeah. Dave taught this all the time. And, like, I've taken it a step further and just like, I hammer people. Like, go to your house, find your stuff, bring it with you.

[30:07] You know,

[30:10] whatever you can think of. Bring it with you. She ended up beats headphones,

[30:16] an Apple keyboard, a MacBook, and AirPods. I actually have the AirPods right here. They're engraved, but they're worth something, you know?

[30:24] Yeah, for sure.

[30:26] But, like, that's something I have to. It's. It's so easy to beat your competition in your area by, number one, responding to your leads, number two, following up with your leads, and number three, buying more.

[30:39] More things outside of iPhones. Because if you buy more things outside of iPhones, you become more valuable to that customer. Right.

[30:46] Because I mean, think about it. If they're at a party or something, somebody breaks their phone or break something, be like, hey, I know a guy that'll buy that.

[30:55] Yeah.

[30:55] Like that's where the stuff comes in that people don't realize for sure. But that's how you beat people being.

[31:03] Yeah, I'm just being consistent.

[31:05] A lot of people aren't consistent. They'll blow all their money or they'll fall off for a time. And that's when you come in and do better.

[31:15] Yeah.

[31:17] That's why we make a big point of buying game consoles because it's so easy to get in with people because they'll remember you forever at that point. Once you start paying GameStop.

[31:26] Yeah. Literally.

[31:27] Which isn't difficult.

[31:29] Let's be real.

[31:32] Like where are they going to go now? They know that you pay more than GameStop every time now. So it's like they're always going to come back. And one thing we've tapped big time is the VR.

[31:44] The VR market.

[31:45] You can piece them out, can't you? I still haven't done much of that.

[31:48] We're. Yeah. I mean Matt is the console king over here. He's so good at it and like he, I mean he finds 15 to 20 deals in people's area on the onboarding call.

[32:00] It's stupid. Like, wow. How many stuff, how much stuff is just sitting there on Marketplace,

[32:06] That's.

[32:07] That was a big thing for me getting started too. Like if you do sell on Marketplace,

[32:13] obviously like you want to move your money as fast as possible if you have a direct buyer or you want to sell on ebay and get it going. But if you do sell a Marketplace,

[32:22] where I killed it at with consoles was I would find like beat up crappy looking ads and then just go home and wipe, wipe the consoles off. Clean my camera lens off before I took the picture, put some lighting on it and take a better picture of it.

[32:38] And something that sat for three weeks on Marketplace and didn't sell. I sold in three hours just with a nice listing. So stuff like that makes a big difference too.

[32:50] Yeah, people really like that.

[32:53] What I try to tell students is like try to create your stuff so it feels like a turnkey experience. Like if you can get that as close to like a retail esque, you know, situation,

[33:03] you're going to make more money than the next guy. And it's not too difficult to clean it a little better, to put it in better lighting, to take a better photo and oh, my gosh.

[33:11] I made more than you know. People will be like, oh, it's only selling for this on ebay. Be like, okay, well, mine just sold for $40 more, so tell me why.

[33:19] Tell me why. Mine's doing better. So I. I love that, man. I think that's awesome. I'm curious, Dakota. You said you moved back to Ohio and kind of had to, like, re up and like, start over,

[33:32] it seems, I think, I feel like, you know, from the.

[33:35] We talk a lot about the practicals, a lot about the facts, but I. I think between Chris and I, sometimes one of the things I really enjoy talking with resellers and business people about is the intangibles that are necessary to keep people in the game or, you know, kind of interaction point with their business.

[33:52] What do you feel? What was it like? A couple questions here. I'll ask you the first one. What was it like? Or what would you say to people that are scared of stepping out?

[34:03] And I feel like there's a lot of fear that we deal with students where it's like, oh, you know, I'm going to lose everything. Which to you, on your end, it sounds like maybe you kind of did and you had to start over, but the experience there seems like maybe it helped you to make that transition that time around a lot easier.

[34:22] Could you. Could you kind of speak to that for a second? What was it like moving back to, you know, your hometown and feeling like maybe you had to start over?

[34:29] Like, what? Like, how did that challenge you? And what were maybe some of the obstacles you felt like you had to overcome?

[34:36] Yeah.

[34:38] This.

[34:40] The skills, like you said you wanted to know, like, the skills needed for that?

[34:45] Um, yeah. What was it like navigating that process and I guess what. What convinced you to kind of stay on the bike rather than just quitting and going back to a traditional job or situation like that?

[34:58] Just because I've seen how promising this business could be. And I've.

[35:04] I've always, like, ran Facebook ads, and there's always leads flowing in if you do them right. And yeah, that was a huge thing for me was to get those running right away.

[35:13] And I was just. I was hungry. Like, I was. I had a bone to pick with life. That was kind of a rough patch in my life. Um, so, yeah, I just buckled down and took this, like I said, the self promotion really serious.

[35:28] I was reaching out left and right, making posts left and right on Marketplace and then scouring ads and even scouring, like, surrounding towns. Like, if I.

[35:40] If I wasn't getting leads. I'm looking in cities around me.

[35:44] Yeah.

[35:44] And if I'm not making any money today, I'll go drive for 50 bucks.

[35:48] Like, yep, let's go. I'm saying.

[35:49] Yeah. So.

[35:50] Yeah, so it works if you work it.

[35:54] Yeah, for sure. Yeah, that's the way it works.

[35:59] Like I tell people that all the time. Like if you put the numbers up, like your bank account will follow suit kind of thing. You know, like we in, in accelerator now.

[36:09] We, since we've, since we've automated reach outs on Marketplace, Facebook, Google.

[36:15] Like there's no excuse at this point to why somebody can't be in 50 conversations a day. Like there's.

[36:22] Yeah, it's over a hundred some days.

[36:24] Yeah, I mean, I mean our automation software now sends, you know, you can send 50 to 70 a day. You know, just reach outs automatically just by pressing a button. And it's like you don't have excuses now.

[36:37] You just have to talk to people kind of thing.

[36:41] So.

[36:43] But like we see that. We see the difference between people who have it and who don't know. Like, like you can have all the tools in the world and still suck or you can have all the tools in the world do very well.

[36:57] Learning sales and negotiations help too. I was studying a lot, a lot on that in the beginning. I was reading sales books, I was reading negotiation books because I realized I wasn't.

[37:07] Deals were coming in, but I couldn't close them.

[37:10] So that was a place that I hit hard on too.

[37:14] Yeah.

[37:16] As far as where your business was and where it is now,

[37:24] what do you think are maybe like just some other characteristics that have kept you focused and staying the course?

[37:33] Resilience is just such a big thing in my opinion, in this, in this industry. And so I'm curious, like, what are kind of the common motivators that really keep you focused on what's ahead of you?

[37:48] Having good business partners, because Devin's not my only partner in Easy. That has been very helpful knowing that there's other people that are counting on, on the business besides myself,

[38:00] my family.

[38:02] Yeah, stuff like that has just been really helpful. And we've had our ups and downs. But yeah,

[38:08] it's just I, I've always had that, that drive to like keep things going. But I am a procrastinator too.

[38:19] I, I do well under pressure and I'll kind of, sometimes I hurt myself and I'll let it dip a little bit and then feel that pressure and bring it back.

[38:28] But yeah, having, having good people around me to, to Keep it consistent has been really helpful.

[38:34] Yeah. So nothing wrong with some healthy accountability in my opinion. Um, I mean, I think if it weren't for the collaboration between Chris and myself, like, I mean, we've both talked about, like,

[38:45] at the end of the day, this is a. This is a good, I think, enterprise. I think it's a good money making enterprise. But it's also sometimes just boring.

[38:52] Oh my gosh. Yeah, it can be. I hate looking at spreadsheets, but that's what I do every day now.

[38:58] Right. And you know, that first, that first phone flip feels sexy. And when you start, when you make that first grand, it feels great. And then you're just like swimming in a sea of electronics and you're like, my house looks like Best Buy.

[39:12] What is going on over here?

[39:15] And so getting that kind of stuff organized. And you know what I think is interesting is I heard a story once about the rapper Eminem and he was doing a collab with somebody else and he showed up to the studio and like 5 o'clock hit and he like, was like,

[39:29] all right, man, see you tomorrow. And he left the studio. He left the studio like it was a job. Like, he went to the studio and he left the studio like it was a J O B.

[39:39] And the dude was like, what? You don't just record late into the night? And are there any specific disciplines like that that you've sort of centered your life around that have helped to sustain your business and make it more profitable?

[39:52] Honestly, man, I'm dealing with that right now. I'm actually trying to be very ritualistic with my schedule because I've never.

[39:59] It kind of comes and goes. I'll. I'll stick to it and. But then the next week I'm working until 10:00 at night. Now I'm trying to cut it short at like 6pm Hard to do.

[40:12] I still do.

[40:12] Yeah, it is hard to do. I work with.

[40:15] I work at night. I work very well at night.

[40:17] Me too.

[40:18] I have a problem with that. I don't work well in the morning. I get too distracted, I guess.

[40:23] Like I can wake up early and everything and. But I still, I just won't get anything done.

[40:29] Well, 5:00 seems to be my sweet spot when everybody goes home and I get less texts and I honestly shut that part of my brain off. Like, I'm not responding to you right now.

[40:40] I need to build this stock list. I need to get this stuff organized.

[40:45] But I've been getting up earlier around like 6. I'll get started at 6 or 7 and work for a couple hours before 9 before we even open and not. Not respond to any messages during that time.

[40:58] And that's been helpful.

[41:00] But as far as like feeling overwhelmed with. You said your house looks like Best Buy. Definitely take the steps to organize before you feel like you fully need it yet.

[41:11] Because you don't. It's super hard to go backwards and change.

[41:15] You'll do is you'll start weighing yourself down and just doing it the same way over and over and you'll just put more time in.

[41:21] That's good.

[41:22] Yeah. Start organizing soon. Sooner than later. Wholesale IO that was a game changer for us. I don't know if you guys use that.

[41:31] I don't. Aaron might. Aaron runs the direct buying part of our stuff. I don't handle all of it.

[41:38] I know people that do use it.

[41:39] I hate inventory.

[41:41] Yeah, it's a super good, like it's not a good POS system. We had to force it to work for POS for the shop and stuff. But it's a amazing inventory system for what we do.

[41:53] Even for consoles and stuff. You can create any sku, any thing like that. You can connect it to ebay and they have like preloaded stuff for most of the Apple and Samsung phones.

[42:06] Nice.

[42:06] And then you can. You can download the spreadsheets and copy it to a Google sheet. And that was a huge game changer for us a couple years ago because we had jumped through a bunch of POS systems that did not work for our industry at all.

[42:20] And spreadsheets only work so far. Like, I look at people that use spreadsheets for everything now and they build in like.

[42:29] I forget what they call it. Code the codes on there.

[42:33] Man. I had to build a crazy spreadsheet like took what, five iterations? Matt.

[42:39] Yeah.

[42:39] We have to finally get it to pull from inventory.

[42:42] Yeah. Chris. Chris was treating is like a child. Is like his other kid. For a while there. He's just like.

[42:49] Devin did the same thing with. With Sheets. He became a wizard at Sheets. Didn't know. I didn't even. Hadn't even used Google Sheets until we partnered. Now he knows the. Knows them inside and out.

[42:59] That's cool.

[43:01] I got to get rolling soon because I got to go buy some phones. But, um, what are the. What's the future look like for easy.

[43:11] Right now we're just keeping it steady.

[43:16] We actually had like, you might have talked to Devin about it. We had kind of a. A blip in our.

[43:23] Our business plan that we decided not to do with like marketing. Doing marketing for people and all types type stuff like that.

[43:31] Oh, yeah, I thought you was there. The automation thing, the marketing and closing. Yeah, that stuff is tough, dude.

[43:40] Like.

[43:42] Yeah, we looked into it too. I will say that. And I was like, I don't really want to be your business babysitter over here.

[43:52] Yeah.

[43:52] And if you can't meet up after I close a deal, we're not, we're not going to do deals together. Like.

[43:58] Yeah.

[43:59] Or you're running out of money. What?

[44:02] Yeah. And it kind of. It started to damage relationships that were good before that.

[44:08] We just decided against it. So right now we're just literally just keeping it steady,

[44:13] trying to build back up and just keep being the best direct buyer we can be because we didn't. Being in multiple areas, you start being worth it each area. When if you just focus on one path, you.

[44:26] You can grow that. So.

[44:27] Yeah, agreed.

[44:30] Awesome, dude. Well, what's your contact information? Like, where can people find you?

[44:36] I obviously, I'll put this in the first comment below as well on YouTube. But like, where can people find you?

[44:44] Yeah, you can find me under my personal name on Facebook. Dakota Bailey. You can find her business page on Facebook.

[44:52] The sheet link. A lot of people in the groups can find it. I'll send it to you. Perfect. Right on description. Yeah, I'm always. Even if I'm not working, I'm usually pretty good at answering.

[45:05] So you guys want to start buying game consoles in VR? Still looking for a direct buyer.

[45:12] Definitely open to looking at it, but I know that a lot, so.

[45:16] So let us know there's a market.

[45:19] Yeah, send me, send me a list. I'd quote anything.

[45:22] So my students,

[45:23] our students, they. They pack it in with the consoles and VR.

[45:29] We're always. There's so many. I don't know. What do you think we move now through the, through the group, Matt. Probably a good man. It's probably a good 50k a month just from consoles and VR.

[45:42] Huh?

[45:43] Wow.

[45:44] The sales maybe even.

[45:45] Yeah, I mean, what got. I would say 30 to 40 pretty steady resellers. And those guys in consoles are probably doing a minimum of 1:1 to 3,000 in console sales per month.

[46:01] So.

[46:02] Yeah, there's a big market there. We just, we thought about doing direct buyer for it, but we don't have the. We don't have the capacity. We're just going to kind of stay in our lane.

[46:12] We're good at. We're good at teaching, we're good at automating. We're good at all that so we're just going to kind of stay in that lane?

[46:19] Yeah, I would. If there's opportunity there, I'd definitely like to talk about it.

[46:23] Get a list of what we. Well, Matt, you have a. You have a pricing sheet. So we can just send that over?

[46:28] Yes, I do.

[46:31] Got a sheet that literally says, like, what you should pay for something and what, it's going to sell more.

[46:37] Do you manually.

[46:39] What's that?

[46:40] You update that manually every day?

[46:42] Yeah. No, every four to six weeks. Because consoles don't fluctuate quite as much as phones. If it were phones, I'd be doing it weekly. But consoles, we can keep it a little more team.

[46:51] That's good too. They don't fluctuate unless new ones come out.

[46:55] Yeah, more or less. Yeah.

[46:57] Yeah, they. They probably good. I mean, phones lose, what, 10% of their value every month, whereas consoles, it's.

[47:02] Been bad lately, man.

[47:04] Late lately. Yeah, there's another phone flipping apocalypse happening right now.

[47:07] The last two. Last two to three weeks, I just dumped everything at cost, just trying to get it off my hands. So I didn't hurt too bad in a month.

[47:16] Wow.

[47:16] Well, it's good. Connecting, man.

[47:18] We'll have to do this again and.

[47:21] Yeah, we'll. We'll throw your information in the. The first comment below. That way it doesn't get removed or anything. Everybody watching this first comment, you can see a sheet where to contact him, all that good stuff.

[47:31] And Dakota, it's been good having you on, man.

[47:34] Awesome. It's been an honor to be on. I appreciate it.

[47:37] Thanks, brother.

[47:39] Talk to you later.