One Man's Junk Is Another Man's Treasure
How Kanban & Agile Have Helped Me Side Hustle My Way to a House
One of the reasons I wanted to start writing Tuesday Tidbits was to tell you guys about how I don’t just teach Lean and Agile principles, I live them. In fact, the reason I decided to pull a career u-turn is because once I started to learn about this Agile mindset it resonated with the way I am as a person. In this edition of the Tuesday Tidbit, I want to tell you about how I am using Kanban and Agile methods to manage a new side hustle. My hope is that you can take some inspiration and take your hobby or side gig to the next level of awesome.
Goals & Selling Second Chance Items
As part of my drive to reach some financial goals, I started a reselling side hustle. It started small with a few household items and quickly grew to a weekend warrior, yard sale obsessed mission to connect gently loved items with new owners. In my opinion, the world is full of unused gems in need of a second chance, and there is almost no reason to buy new. That’s where I come in. I wander from sale to sale looking for that antique metal hair trimmer that someone across the country has been dreaming of but can’t find.
One thing I realized almost immediately was I would need a process for managing the work. It was early on and I only had maybe five or six items. I realized I had done, roughly, the same process for each item:
Items To Sell - Just a bunch of stuff in a box I want to sell
Inventory - Take an item out of a box and add details to a spreadsheet
Clean/Test - Make sure the item is in working order and is presentable
Take Pictures - Most platforms like eBay, Mercari, and Amazon require great pictures of the items to sell
List - Actually list them for sale on a platform
Done - They are listed and ready to sell
This felt like a great opportunity to create a kanban board, so I did! I added the activities as my columns and then just put a sticky note with something like, “XBox 360,” or “PlayStation 2.” When I was ready to inventory the XBox I would just put the sticky in the “Inventory” column. I didn’t go crazy with it. You can over do it and before you know it you are spending more time managing the process than actually doing the process. It’s not an exact science, and I have had to refine it along the way.
Daily Stand-Ups
As I mentioned before, my wife joined me pretty early on in the process. We are a dynamic duo when it comes to yard sales or thrift shops. A proverbial Batman and Robin. (Obviously she’s Batman) We were getting in the car one morning on our way to get neck deep in some front yard negotiations for old video games when she said, “Let’s do a quick standup.” Of course, we were in the car, so there was no actual standing up, but for the next five minutes we got a game plan for the day. I think Mike Tyson was the one that said, “Everyone has a plan until they get hit in the face.” That’s how yard sales are, but I would say it’s been better charging into these battles with a plan. The current plan is, “No more hats, Tristan.” What can I say, I love hats.
You may be doing your side gig alone and a daily standup makes no sense. That’s fine. It’s also not the point. My point here is to illustrate that, when two or more people are involved, having clear communication does wonders for how you work. Even beyond that, just taking five to ten minutes to collect my thoughts before the day helps me focus on, as my wife puts it, “What’s the Why?” Since the current goal is to save up and buy a house, I normally remind myself that I need to find things that are super cheap, sell quickly, and are not difficult to ship. Daily standups. Tell your friends.
That Was Awful, Let’s Fix it
One of the more recurring themes that has really helped the reselling side hustle has been that of iterative, small experiments. And experiments are pointless if you don’t learn from them. “How does one run an experiment on a reselling business,” you may be asking? An example.
One of the things I wanted to try was selling on a new platform. Instead of going all in and listing multiple items, I started with one item that normally sells easily on that specific platform. In this case is was plush on Mercari. I took a lean approach just to learn on the platform while at the same time discovering if being a new seller would impact my ability to sell. After about a week, my wife and I had a quick conversation, or retro, to talk about what we learned and, at that point, decided not to sell on that platform at that time. All because of a small experiment. You don’t have to go all in to learn something. Small, incremental experiments are your best friend.
The second experiment was when I wanted to try selling shoes. I had never done that before and I wanted to make sure the investment was worth it. Instead of buying every shoe I could find, I bought one pair from a friend of mine that also sells shoes and then listed them myself. It took a few weeks, but the shoes got caught up in a massive bidding war and finally sold for 4X the price I paid. Score! I have to admit though, I was sweating bullets for the first few weeks. But with that small experiment out of the way, I started posting more shoes and for a few weeks they were actually my highest source of sales.
The last example was probably the biggest upgrade. Once my wife started helping me she immediately noticed we needed to take our process to the next level. We didn’t want to over engineer it, but we did need a few improvements that would help us take control of the growing business. We were on our way to another yard sale (shocker) when she asked if we could have a quick retro on the process. We discussed what wasn't working and some possible tweaks we could make and landed on a few experiments we could run on how we log and store inventory. So far those changes have made organizing toasters, blenders, and video games almost effortless.
A Rose By Any Other Name
I will land the plane on this one by telling one last improvement that, for some, would have stalled the whole side hustle project. The name of my reseller store. Heck, even the idea of having a reselling store. Long story short, I did not jump out of the gate by buying a store. I sold some items, had some wins, learned some things, and when I noticed it could be a sustainable side hustle, put all my proverbial chips on subscribing to a store. With that, I had to come up with a wicked awesome name. We started with Tristan’s Trinkets because who doesn't love alliteration? That worked for about a week or so until, when making the logo, my wife realized she put “Tristan’s Treasures” instead. But, it worked far better. With that, my side hustle had gone from a quick way to flip a few toys and games I’d had since I was a teenager to a great way to fund some of our bigger life goals. At the current pace, we will be ready to buy a house by the end of the year. Something as a kid I never imagined I would ever do.
I’m not saying Kanban and Agile is the reason I was able to get a house. Or maybe I am. What I do know is these concepts are not just things I teach at work. They are things I live and breathe every day and they actually work.
Visit my store. You may find that vintage toy from your childhood or last collectible that finishes your prized collection of guitar picks from 80’s hair bands.
Until next time,
Keep on learning. Keep on growing.