Book Bros Amazon Book Reselling Entrepreneurship Blog

Book Bros Amazon Book Reselling Entrepreneurship Blog
4/20/2018 - 5:26PM EST

If you are interested in what building a business looks like, you’ve stumbled onto the very beginnings of the blog of a grassroots entrepreneurship adventure of a 29-year-old business owner. Hi! My name is Chris and legally on paper I am the CEO of B1Q Studios, LLC. I hope we will get to learn a bit more about each other.

So how successful am I? Financially speaking not much... certainly not as much as Steve Jobs who at this point was a multimillionaire. In that fact we, you and I, probably have something in common. All I have is knowledge, an ever-growing amount of experience, continued action, and an established LLC on my side. But my greatest advantage is that my investing partner is my identical twin brother, Steven.

But what do we do? We’ve experimented in quite a few ventures. We own a duplex. We started an entertainment business (currently stalled but that’s for another time) by the name of B1Q Studios on YouTube. From there I introduced and successfully established my friend's helicopter touring company in Key West (another long story). And now, naturally, we are Amazon Booksellers… go figure. My blog posts are going to centralize around the general concept of entrepreneurship with daily updates on how the bookselling business is going so I think it is best that we start there.

It was January of 2017 and Gary Vaynerchuk was throwing out the proposition of the 2017 Flip Challenge. Naturally drawn to the challenge, I decided I was going to try my hand at reselling. Simply put, Gary (and if you don’t know who he is you really need to click here to check out his YouTube) challenged his viewers to make an extra $20,170 just in reselling for the 2017 calendar year. I signed up for eBay, took some money, and invested into the business of fixing and flipping older gaming consoles. The plan was that eventually I would move into the Amazon market with these consoles and make some decent profit.

From my previous failed ventures, I learned the importance of cash flow and I discovered the amount of work needed to fix these consoles versus the profit was just not translating, especially if I wanted to complete the challenge Gary Vee arranged. I was trying to build a business and not a hobby even though I did enjoy the repair process and learning about the different systems. It was time to change gears and I was ready to sell just about anything. Amazon only came into the picture around May. I started signing up for it and midway through the process, I decided to shelf the idea only to revisit it later.

The next five months centered around my brother joining into the reselling game with me and us buying pretty much anything profitable under the sun to flip on eBay. The finer details can be saved for another time because come October, I realized that my chances of completing Gary Vee’s challenge were very unlikely. I wasn’t going to give up though.
In my mind, I was haunted by the thoughts of Amazon reselling. I started looking into videos on YouTube for information on what I needed to know. I followed my own steps though what can only be described as a hodge-podge 101 beginners selling course from many different pros in the game. This led me to sign up for different Facebook groups and invest in a lot of the equipment that came highly recommended for my entry into the Amazon reselling game. Like most people, I started in books. Books give an excellent foundation in the Amazon principles and are arguable one of the cheapest/highest ROI items in the game. My plans were to settle into Amazon reselling books then graduate into retail arbitrage (buying new items from stores and selling them Amazon). After my first month, my brother took notice and was ready to jump in with both feet as well.

Now, almost six months in, we have decided and committed to jumping into the deep end. The idea of retail arbitrage is now a thing of the past (for now with no immediate plans on returning) and we are fully invested in books. How deep was the deep end, you may ask? Well we purchased the inventory in two bookstores that went out of business and are in the process of cleaning out the second one now. We estimate that there are around 25,000 books in the second store and let me tell you… it is a lot of books.

Profit-wise, we are in the black. We do not have thousands of dollars in the bank but in a few short months there is no reason why we wouldn’t. It is going excellently and I can’t wait to share some more details about everything in the future. I just wanted you to basically be up to speed on where we are at. One thing is for sure, I can drag out a story. I thank you for your time and welcome to the beginnings of the adventure! If you have any questions feel free to jump in and ask. Much love!

-Chris