G Sale
Mike
Interview Download mp3
The G Sale Mike Interview and Transcripts
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Life Long
Lesson & Money Making Adventures of Mike, The Garage
Sale Guy
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15 years ago I
stopped at a little garage sale on Clairemont Drive. This is a
busy street that I drive every day close to my home. My son Joe
must have been only 6 or 7 and there was a guy named Mike having
a garage sale.
It's was a glamorous
garage sale. From your car window, you could see the spray painted
wood sandwich sign "SALE", the tall colorful surfboards, The beach
cruiser bikes, art work and more.
Mike knew how to stage a
sale with colors and attention getting items to get people to stop
and shop.
His same was different.
You had to stop.
So we stopped and found a
yellow push sweeper. I wrote about it 8 years ago in an email called
"Germans Make Good Stuff".
Over the years, I would
see Mike set up at different homes on the same busy Clairmont Drive.
Mike was having sales
during the week not just on Saturday and Sunday. And from what I
could tell by the amount of people at his sales, he was making some
good cash money.
We must have shopped his
sales 20 times over the years. Each stop we could find something
different to buy. It was a treasure hunt.
So Recently, Mike and I
stated talking about buying and selling. We got to know each other a
little better.
I would tell him stories
about our finds and he would start to tell me and my sons these
amazing stories about his life.
I wanted my boys to hear
his stories. There were business lessons to be learned.
I had to get and
interview with Mike. I wanted to share his story with you too.
I asked him three times
if I could interview him for my web site and news letter. And each
time, he would decline my invitation. He told me he did not want to
reveal his garage sale secrets.
On my next visit with
Mike, I printed out a physical version of June's Money Shot
Newsletter. I give him a copy to read. He could see all of the
buy sell case studies we had documented.
I invited him again to
let me interview him about his methods for buying, selling and how
he sets up his sales.
He was afraid to share
his methods about his street sales but agreed to let me interview
him about his other business and money making ventures.
And that is exactly what
I did.
I have broken this
interview down into six thirty minute digestible segments.
Mike talks fast and
shares in a colorful descriptive style.
I know you are going to
learn a lot from Mike's money making ventures, stories and ideas.
Get ready for a wild ride
and adventure from Mike, The Garage Sale Guy. Now let's get going.
Part One:
How To Think Bigger:
An 8-Year-Old Who Makes More Than His Parents
Mike grew up at a time
when it was perfectly okay for parents to drop their kids off at a
museum or park for the day while they went to work. And Mike found
his love of art during those times. He also found he had a knack for
it. So when his dad brought home a Creepy Crawler kit, Mike was soon
making the most realistic bugs around, selling them at school for a
profit, and also at a bait-and-tackle shop as lures. But when the
owners of the shops started ordering 10,000 at a time, that’s when
the real lessons came out. And in this audio, you’ll hear Mike’s
amazing story of how he overcame the obstacles of mass-producing
Creepy Crawlers, and how he started making his own allowance.
You’ll Also Hear…
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What happened the
day they wanted to expel Mike for taking the other kids’ lunch
money for Creepy Crawlers
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The simple
business lessons you can take from a museum – like ones about
exclusivity from Jackson Pollock, Claude Monet, and the guy who
“stole” the Mona Lisa and sold forgeries of the painting like
they were the real deal
Mike found out early
on that when it comes to entrepreneurialism, it helps to think
big right from the beginning, and in part one of this six-part
audio series, you’ll hear lessons about thinking bigger that are
so easy to learn and apply that even an eight-year-old can run
with them.
Part Two
Why It’s Vitally Important To
Control The Channels and How To Do It
If someone has control
over any part of your business, your business is vulnerable. That
was the hard-knocks lesson Mike learned when he was eight years old
and Mattel discontinued the Creepy Crawler kit because kids were
burning themselves on the little oven it came with. Mike wasn’t even
using that oven. He was mass-producing at that point, but he was
still tied to the goop they used to make the crawlers, and could no
longer find anything to replace it when it was discontinued.
It was a lesson that
stuck with him into his older years. And in part two of the series,
you’ll hear how he used that lesson when he opened up a shop in
Pacific Beach and started selling Redwood bear sculptures. Once he
found out how good his margins were, he followed his source all the
way up to Northern California, but still found things weren’t
reliable with the Native American artists carving wood there. And in
this audio, you’ll hear all the business lessons, tips, and tricks
he learned along the way.
You’ll Also Hear…
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The crazy reason
Mike’s shop had things hanging from the ceiling on wire – even a
piano – and other “out-of-the-box” ways he used his artist’s eye
and entrepreneurial know-how to sell a ton of stuff
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The
little-talked-about benefits of having qualified customers
already lined up and waiting: That’s what Mike did with his
Redwood sculptures. (Customers paid top-dollar and bought them
straight off his truck, sight unseen, too)
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The strange way
Mike figured out he was “buying himself out of his own product”
and what he did about it
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The biggest (and
easiest) secret Mike learned from his unusual trip down the
freeway with a humungous covered Redwood sculpture strapped to
the back of a flatbed truck that demonstrates the power
presentation has when it comes to getting top dollar
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The unexpected
lessons that come up when you’re dealing with artists and their
one-of-a-kind pieces, and how to deal with them
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Why you won’t be
able to believe how Henry Ford secured his production channels –
all the way down the line to the crates the timber he was using
was shipped in – and what you can learn about securing your own
business from that.
The bottom line is,
if you want to have a viable business, you can’t just think
margins, especially if someone else has control over them. Take
control over as many aspects of your business as you can so no
one can hold you over a barrel later. And in this audio, you’ll
hear real-life examples of how to do that.
Part Three
The Art Of Negotiating
When Mike got sick of
dealing with unreliable chainsaw artists who would constantly leave
town on him without notice, he decided he needed to gain more
control over his products and his income stream. He bought a
chainsaw and moved up north. And in this audio, you’ll hear the
business lessons he learned about supply and demand when it came to
dealing with locals and securing wood for his production, strategies
for increasing his productivity at a skill he knew very little
about, and also how he managed to make $2500 on a day’s worth of
“rough” sculptures he ended up making (an amount the locals thought
was impossible for him to get).
But Mike found,
sometimes, it’s all in how you negotiate with people.
You’ll Also Hear…
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A word-for-word
look at how Mike approached gift shops with his rough sculptures
and negotiated reasonable deals that totaled up to huge profits
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The one-and-only
proven-effective way to deal with locals and negotiate
dirt-cheap prices for goods and labor
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Little-known
wood-carving secrets that will give you a whole new perspective
on the art
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The craziest
stories about small towns you’ll probably ever hear – from the
time Mike gave an acquaintance a pair of Levi’s (you’ll never
believe what the guy did with them) to the jaw-dropping,
dangerous ways he’s seen people carving out their sculptures
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The scary side of
entrepreneurialism: the one day Mike got ripped off, and what he
wishes he’d have done differently
There’s a hard truth
when it comes to business: Once you’ve got a reputation for
making money, people may want to charge you more for their part
of your business and increase their piece of the pie too. It’s
all part of the negotiating process. And in this audio, you’ll
hear strategies for keeping your margins the highest they can
be.
Part Four
The Power Of Asking
Mike was at the
supermarket one day when he was about eight years old when he
noticed a woman struggling to bring her groceries out to her car in
the middle of a snowstorm. He asked if she needed help, and couldn’t
believe it when she paid him for it. Soon, he was helping everyone
he could, and was surprised when the store manager called him into
his office, told Mike he could keep the money he was making, and
even thanked him for helping customers. However, it wasn’t long
before the bigger kids took over. Instead of going home defeated,
Mike went to the manager and explained his situation. The manager
kicked the other kids out. And Mike secured his exclusivity again.
Mike figured out a
powerful lesson that day: no one is going to walk up to you and say,
“You look like you could use some help. Here you go.” It just
doesn’t happen. In fact, you’ll rarely get anything in life if you
don’t ask for it. This includes closing deals, blocking the
competition and securing your exclusivity, and even asking for
business in the first place. The worst thing that can happen when
you ask is “no.” But there are far worse things that will happen if
you never ask at all.
And in part four, you’ll
hear a few stories that illustrate this, including the crazy way
Mike ended up using those bigger kids that day when demand for his
services in the snow outweighed his supply.
You’ll Also Hear…
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Key strategies
for blocking the competition in business, even when the big guys
step in
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The very simple
tactic Mike used for buying low and selling high when he was
four years old and started collecting unwanted keys from his
neighborhood: he ended up turning those keys into jewelry and
selling them back to the same neighbors
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The
little-thought-about vending machine route Mike had as a kid and
other non-traditional entrepreneurial ideas he’s done (and the
lessons he’s learned along the way)
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The “Tom Sawyer”
method of doing business: what that means and when to use it
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How Mike used the
power of asking to create his own paper route collection agency
where he’d help his friends with paper routes collect money from
dead-beat customers – and how much he charged them for his
services
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The one goal Mike
had as a kid that helped keep him focused while fostering his
entrepreneurial ways, and the sneaky way he hid most of his
money from his parents
Nothing happens by
chance. If you don’t ask for things in life, they probably won’t
happen. But in part four, you’ll hear just how easy that can be,
the power it has when it comes to business, and how to make it a
part of your success story too.
Part Five
How To Think Bigger And Find Your
Unique Angle
When Mike found himself
at a truck stop one day, waxing big-rig murals just to make $200 a
day, he took it one step further. He asked his customers what else
they needed and discovered there were many things tired truck
drivers didn’t want to tackle after a long day’s work, but that
still needed to get done: waiting an hour to fuel up a tank,
greasing an axel, polishing aluminum, etc. It wasn’t long before
Mike had a crew and a price list together so, as soon as the
truckers would pull into his stop, he had them sitting in a recliner
with a beer and a list of his services sitting right in front of
them.
Mike says it’s a matter
of thinking differently. Whether it’s hanging a piano upside down
from the ceiling or having a teepee in the front of your business
with a Native American carving up Redwood right in it, a business
needs a reason people buy from you and not from others. It needs a
unique angle or selling proposition. And in part five, you’ll hear
examples of how to take a simple idea and make it unique (and
bigger).
You’ll Also Hear…
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The unusual #1
thing those truckers usually wanted more than anything else (and
yes, Mike’s price list included it too)
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Real-life
examples of how you can keep thinking bigger and expanding your
business: Mike expanded his business from truck stops to also
polishing up vacuums and Harley Davidsons
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The quick story
that demonstrates why it’s so important to have everything down
in writing as a contract
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The shocking
reason artists usually sell themselves short and a little trick
for not letting that happen to you
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The real reason
you should always be looking for opportunities and a few
examples of how to do that – even on your day off
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Why you won’t
believe what happened when Mike went to the owner of the truck
stop and asked if he could have exclusivity on his lot
In order to succeed
in business, you need a reason for people to buy from you and no
one else. And in part five, you’ll hear how to find that kind of
unique angle – and then take it and run with it, expanding on
your idea so you’re making more money with less time and
trouble.
Part Six
How To Make Your Own Luck
One of Mike’s favorite
parts of the museum when he was a kid was the T-Rex skull displayed
there, but since he could never find a huge, life-size,
authentic-looking replica as an adult, he decided to make his own,
carving it out of wood. He was just finishing it up outside his new
location in La Jolla when one of the richest people in San Diego,
Sandy Shapery, stopped him and told him he had to have the
sculpture. In fact, he wrote Mike a blank check for it. Every
artist’s dream. And in this audio, you’ll hear all the crazy details
behind the story, and how to make those kinds of opportunities
happen in your life as well, because believe it or not, they never
happen by chance.
Mike says he’s spent a
good part of his life reading and listening to how-to business books
– everything from Zig Ziglar to Napoleon Hill – but the number one
piece of advice when it comes to entrepreneurialism he ever received
was this: Have a goal and visualize it. And in part six, you’ll hear
what that means, how to do it, and the power that can have over your
life.
You’ll Also Hear…
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The real
difference between an asset and a liability – and why it’s so
important to always be thinking in terms of assets
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The "no-sweat,
no-brainer" business secrets you can learn from Joan Rivers and
Donald Trump
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An insider’s look
at the Shapery home (imagine secret parking garages and walking
through a geode) and exactly what the millionaire did with his
huge T-Rex sculpture
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The “ABCs” of
business (conceive, believe, achieve) and how they’re the key to
the visualization process
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Why you should
create your own “pirate booty” treasure chest of all of your
achievements and when to break that out and roll around in it
When it comes to
business, it’s hard to believe your biggest obstacle might be
your own mind, but it usually is. It’s a simple fact: if you
don’t think you can do something, you won’t be able to. And in
part six, you’ll hear how to stop being your own biggest
obstacle and how to use your mind to start achieving bigger and
better things every day using the power of visualization, so you
can start creating your own luck.
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