From $200 to $13 Million: Flipping Used Books to Amazon Empire (with Corey Ganim)

Sarah St John : Welcome to the Frugalpreneur podcast. I am your host, Sarah St. John. This episode is what I refer to as a showcase episode where I feature a bootstrapped entrepreneur and they briefly share their tips, tricks, tactics, techniques and tools that help them bootstrap their business and the successes and failures along the way.

My hope is that each of these showcase episodes will provide at least one valuable takeaway that you can implement with right away in your own bootstrap business journey. Now onto the episode. Corey Ganim : So I remember pretty much the exact moment that led me to starting, not necessarily starting my business, but what led me to taking it a lot more seriously and wanting to pursue it full time. And this was back in around 2019.

So I was 24 years old at the time. I'd been out of college for about two years and I had been working for IBM for about two years at the time. So I was working for IBM selling data storage. I was on a team of pretty high level salespeople who were selling IBM storage products into some of the biggest companies in the country, right?

Like UnitedHealth Group, Humana, some of the biggest state and local government organizations were buying from our team. But I remember I had a second line manager. His name was John. Corey : And John lived in Minnesota.

I was living in Chicago at the time. And a lot of my team was based in Chicago. And so we'd have a lot of happy hours and events and team meetings and all kinds of stuff happening in Chicago. And somehow John was always at these events.

He was at every meeting, he was at every happy hour, at every client function. And I remember one day just asking one of my team members, I said, hey, how is John always here? He lives in Minnesota, yet we're in Chicago. But he doesn't seem to miss an event.

Corey : Like, how does he do it? And what this person said to me, I'll never forget it. It's burned into my brain. And this is kind of what made me decide, like, all right, I've got to do my own thing a lot more seriously.

He looked over to me and said, corey, you probably see John more often than his own kids do. And I remember that really struck me thinking, ooh, John was probably in his 40s or early 50s at the time. And I just remember thinking to myself, the last thing in the world that I want to be doing at that age is running around the country to every corporate event that I can possibly attend and missing my kids growing up. And I remember at that moment in time, I'm like, you know what?

I've been doing this selling on Amazon thing on the side up to this point, and now I've got to take it a lot more seriously because the last thing I want to have happen is to end up like John 10, 15, 20 years from now. So I really bootstrapped my business from day one. Corey : And keep in mind, when I started this business, I started it on the side. It's just a side hustle as a kid who had just graduated from college.

So I graduated from college on May 20, 2017. On May 21, my mom gave me a label printer and a scanning tool and basically all the supplies that I would need to run around the town and find these used books at thrift stores that I could buy for 25 cents or a dollar or $2 and turn around and flip on Amazon for 10, 20, sometimes 50 or $100 is how much these textbooks can go for. So the equipment that she gave me cost probably around $200 total. And then I had about an extra $100 and just startup capital that I was going to use for inventory.

Right? So remember, these books only cost 50 cents or a couple dollars apiece. So if I had $100 in starting capital with which to bootstrap my business, I was actually able to buy a good amount of inventory and a good amount of solid, profitable books with that hundred dollars. Corey : And the beauty of this business is, well, yes, I did invest more money into it down the line.

I didn't need to. This is a business that has snowball potential. So when I invested that first hundred dollars into inventory once, all that $100 worth of inventory had sold. Now I had, let's say, $300.

And then I go and spend that 300 on inventory. And now I have, say, 700 and the cycle continues. So bootstrap from the ground up, starting with really a couple of hundred dollars for equipment, about $100 for inventory, and slowly snowballed that capital over time. Corey : Like I said, yes, we did end up putting more money into the business down the line, but not an astronomical amount.

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Corey : Biggest failure when it comes to bootstrapping my business is really just the mindset along how long it was going to take to scale. Because when you're bootstrapping an inventory based business, the only way to grow is by reinvesting as much of your profit as often as you can or by taking outside capital. And again with the the concept of bootstrapping in mind, outside capital really wasn't an option, at least not for the first few years. I'd say my failure.

Like I said, it's just the mindset that I had of hey, well I'm going to scale this thing to a million dollars in sales in two years, right? And when you're starting with a couple hundred bucks, that's just not realistic. So I kind of had that failure of mindset which led me to make some poor short term decisions in the sense of the types of products we were buying and the types of people we were partnering with. When in reality if I just had a more long term vision, I would have had the wherewithal to understand well, hey, if we're going to bootstrap this thing like we did, then we can hit a million in sales.

But it's not going to come until year three, four or five, right? It's not going to happen in year one or two. Corey : Now I'd say my biggest success in the bootstrapping of my business is also a mentality piece, but it's the mentality of not having tons of capital with which to waste. So when you bootstrap a business like this with just a couple hundred dollars in capital, you've got to be cognizant of every every single penny that you're spending.

We didn't have the luxury of going and spending $2,000 on a professional website. I didn't have the luxury of going and hiring an assistant for 20 hours a week for $1,500 a month. Every single dime has to go to a certain purpose and every single dollar has to have a home. So the success when it comes to bootstrapping is just that frugal mentality of I've gotta be responsible with my money.

And that concept, and really that factor has translated into every other business I pursued and I still have it to this day. I try to be very of my funds, even though today we're dealing with thousands of dollars, whereas previously we were only dealing with hundreds. Corey : So one of the best tips that I can give for bootstrapping your business is utilize as many of the free or low cost resources that you have access to within your specific niche or your specific industry. And now this can vary widely depending on the type of business that you're in.

But I'll give you a great example from the early stages of my business. So like I said, I got started selling used books on Amazon, buying them for a quarter or 50 cents or a couple of bucks a piece from these thrift stores. Now one method that I found to be very effective is that on Craigslist and on Facebook Marketplace and some of these other platforms, people tend to give away their books, right? A lot of people just give away their books to whoever will take them.

So one thing that I did early on to really bootstrap is I would create a post on Craigslist or on Facebook Marketplace that says, hey, I'm looking to take any books that anybody wants to get rid of. I will come to your house and I will take them and I will dispose of them for you for free. And you'd be shocked how many people took me up on that offer and how many really profitable books that I was able to find completely for free by simply making use of some of the free and low cost tools out there.

Corey : Now, another tactic that I use to bootstrap my business, and I don't necessarily recommend this to everyone, but depending on you and your own personal risk tolerance and the type of business you're in, it could make sense. And that is to use 0 APR credit cards. So in the early stages of my business, we would open these business credit cards where there was no interest for a full year. And credit cards like for example, the Amex plum, gives you 60 days to pay back your balance.

And then a lot of times there will be a welcome bonus where there's no interest for a full year and all kinds of different ways to kind of financially maneuver your credit limits to help you bootstrap your business in the early stages. So to summarize, taking advantage of the free and low cost tools and opportunities in your industry and then smartly using credit cards to finance your business. So I do have a few parting thoughts to share with the audience before I let you go.

So first and foremost, you've heard me mention that my business was built on the foundation of buying and selling used books for pennies or a dollar at a time and then flipping them on Amazon. Corey : And so my business has really transformed over the years to now we no longer sell books. Now we sell everyday brand name products that people like you and me are buying from retail sites like Amazon. So we're buying these products in bulk, directly from the manufacturer, or sometimes from authorized distributors and then we're turning around and selling it on Amazon.

So if I can do anything for your audience to help them, if they're interested in this business model or if they're interested in selling on Amazon, I want them to head over to freewholesaleguide.com because wholesale is the name of the business model that I'm currently engaged in, which is, like I said, buying in bulk from manufacturers and distributors and reselling on Amazon. And@freewholesaleguide.com I put together a 100% free course that your audience can take and it will teach them the ropes of this process by following my five steps of Amazon wholesale framework.

And like I said, that's completely free available to them@freewholesaleguide.com com I hope you. Sarah St John : Enjoyed that episode and were able to take away a valuable nugget of information that you can implement right away in your own business. If you feel your story would be valuable for the listeners of this show, please visit Frugal show guests.