Hi Gram,
I woke this morning just before my alarm, got cleaned up and did my stretches and brain exercises. Since it was early in the morning and I’m proud to have caught up on my blog the day before, I decided to update the blog with one more day so I remained caught up before heading out. I went downstairs to grab the free hotel breakfast and found that it was bread (for toast, I presume) and cereal – not interesting to me – so I headed back up to the room and packed up and headed out. I grabbed some yogurt from the gas station next door and got on my way.
I didn’t realize that I was so close to I-80, so I blew right past it and had to loop around at the next exit. I was a little over two hours from my next stop, which was meeting up with my friend Robert for some lunch and to see his operation. A couple of podcasts later, I got to his storage warehouse and let him know that I was out front. He came down and let me in and vouched for me. A guy that was leaving thought that I was sneaking in the open gate and, understandably, wanted to stop a hooligan like me from stealing his boxes of flotsam and jetsam that wouldn’t fit in his basement. Robert and I chatted on the way up to his unit, telling him all about my adventures in the past few weeks. As we got closer I saw a long row of open doors and thought “who left all these storage cubbies wide open? It looks like half the tenants up here just up and left without closing up behind themselves.”
Well, it turns out that all of those units belong to Robert! When I first met him, he had just started making a go of this side hustle and was working out of his basement. Now he fills SIX 10×20 storage units to the ceiling with rows and rows of shelves packed full of consoles, games, carrying cases, and other accessories that he’s sorting through and staging to be shipped to Amazon’s warehouse. He turned a side hustle into a full time job, the Entrepreneurial Dream, and plans to bring on employees in the coming months to help him grow and expand the business. I was really impressed hearing about his systems for acquiring, sorting, refurbishing, packaging, and selling his products. I was even more impressed with all the things he’s NOT doing.
It’s easy to get caught up in the low margin busywork, such as unpopular games, that comes with any new enterprise or get tempted by the high margin but infrequent projects, such as mint condition rare collectibles, that pay a lot but also come with big headaches. He’s found a great niche of high volume products that he can churn through and sell to keep the revenue growing. I grew prouder and prouder as he told me of each decision and pivot that he explained.
After a tour of his workshop, we headed to grab lunch at a Hawaiian restaurant a few miles away where I tried a spam and rice “delicacy” while we discussed more about his business, heard about some of his upcoming trips, and I regaled him with more stories of my travels. We tried saying goodbye a few times so he could get to an appointment and I could finish my drive to Illinois, but we kept falling back into conversation about credit card points, airlines, and hotels. Eventually, we agreed to talk more in a few weeks when we see each other in MN and went our separate ways. I really enjoy conversations with friends where it just feels effortless. There are always more ideas and topics swimming around in our heads than we can find time to cover; we could have talked for twice as long and still have had to cut it short!
The rest of the drive was boring, having seen the scenery of Iowa and Illinois more times than any human needs in a lifetime. The last hundred or two hundred miles always feel the longest. My butt was sore, my body was aching and exhausted, my mind was worn down, and each mile seemed to go by slower and slower. When I got to the house, I carried in my luggage, put the linens from the guest who left today in the washer, and headed to the grocery store to pick up a couple things for this week. I stopped by the car wash to rinse off the car and bike before returning to the house and decided to let the bike and rack dry overnight. I’ll unload that and the rest of the car tomorrow. For now, I’m off to bed.