Car Parts Employee Finds Shocking Surplus Suspension

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

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Friends, listeners and community, guess what today is? At least the day this episode is going out. It is February 14th, which means I'm gonna wish you a happy Valentine's Day. And, you know, for all the lovers out there, we thought we would do a special episode, just a really special episode, all about drop shipping car suspensions. Okay, so just full romance mode here.

I hope you can handle it. When a director of marketing feels like he isn't taken seriously at work, he sets the wheels in motion and starts selling car suspension systems on eBay with shocking results. That last part was just too easy and just wait. There's more. Car parts employee finds shocking surplus suspension is coming right up.

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Sean Reyes was in his mid 20s when he was hired as the director of marketing for a car parts company. It was a hefty title for someone so young and it caused some issues in his work environment. He often felt like others at the company didn't take him seriously. He would make suggestions that were ignored and devise strategies that weren't followed. It made him consider looking for another job or at least another source of income in case he ever felt like quitting.

So Sean got to thinking. One type of part the company sold was car suspension systems, otherwise known as shock absorbers. The large springs that sit just behind the tires to help cars drive smoothly. It was a specialized product but one that Sean thought could sell well online. He decided to see if his suspicion was correct.

The plan was to keep things simple, cheap and efficient. He didn't want to outlay a bunch of money upfront buying parts, especially when he didn't know which ones would sell. There are literally thousands of different shocks for every make and model of car and it wouldn't be fun if he was left holding onto them. After doing some research, he decided that drop shipping was the way to go. Drop shipping is a method of selling products where you don't actually need to store any stock.

Instead, after you sell something, you pay the supplier to ship it to the customer on your behalf. To start, he did some research and compiled a list of available shocks, including part numbers and which type of car they go with. From the list, he picked a few carefully selected models and created eBay listings for them after he got home from work. And what followed was totally shocking. Within two days, Sean sold his first two shock absorbers, followed by two more a day later and more than 10 by the end of the week.

As he puts it, he felt like he had found a gold mine. He'd always suspected was there, but was too lazy to dig. Within a few months, he was spending every spare moment of his evenings listing shocks for sale on eBay, answering customer support and processing orders. And by that time, he was already making around $5,000 a month with almost no startup costs. It might sound like a fluke, but Sean has some theories as to why he was able to achieve success so quickly.

First, the automotive industry was incredibly outdated and there are ways of operating. They still had an adapter to the internet, even though this wasn't that long ago. For example, Sean noticed that all the other shocks for sale on eBay were listed by part number, not by car model. He suspected that most buyers didn't look up part numbers. Most likely they searched for something like front shock for Ford F-150 or shocks for Toyota Corolla.

So that's how he titled his listings. And second, many of the shocks being sold at the time were only available individually. If a customer wanted a whole set, they would have to make four purchases, two for the front and two for the rear. To counter this, Sean combined four shocks into one product bundle. So with a single click, a customer could buy everything needed for their vehicle.

While this might seem obvious now, again, no one was selling that way at the time. It meant customers could more easily find the products they were looking for, which in turn meant they were more likely to buy. Bouncing off with momentum, Sean decided to branch out and began selling through Amazon as well. He continued down this smooth road for the next few years, easily making a good amount of money outside his day job. And eventually he began questioning why he was working that job at all.

He figured he could easily quit and dedicate a little more time to his shocking side hustle, as well as a lot more time to his hobbies. So he did just that. After quitting his job, he began listing more and more shocks for sale on eBay and Amazon. That kept the wheels turning. In his first month full-time, Sean sold $35,000 worth of shocks.

Six months later, the amount had jumped to 80,000. Now there wasn't a 100% profit margin, but the margin was very healthy. It was doing quite well. And once again, Sean felt like this was a business that should be taken seriously. It had the potential to become something much more, even more than his one-man full-time operation.

So to move things along, he hired a customer support person to help with all the email requests. Then he chose to build his own website, shocksurplus.com. Although eBay and Amazon were fruitful, having his own entity would provide legitimacy and another marketing channel. He invested in content and SEO in order to try to find more customers through Google. And like a coiled suspension being released, that's when the business really bounced.

Over the next year, Sean turned his shock surplus from a side hustle into a million-dollar business. Having stumbled across a dated industry that hadn't yet been shaken up by internet marketing, he found innovative yet simple ways to market old products. Shock surplus was able to rev to the limit, avoiding many bumps in the road. So let's do some analysis here. And by the way, Sean, congratulations, love the story.

I always love hearing about people that are selling ordinary things and have been able to do quite well with it because they're solving practical problems. Nobody could find how to buy these replacement systems for their car. Other people were listing them by part number, which, who's gonna search by your part number? You're gonna search by your vehicle. So let's talk about the story.

Now you might think, well, this is great for Sean, but the automotive industry has now caught up, right? So how can I apply this myself? I think there's two ways to think about it. First of all, what dated industries still exist? Like what industries are actually still stuck in the past?

I bet there are a lot of them, all right? And it might be something that you know through your work or through a hobby or through something else that you're interested in or have access to or knowledge over what dated industry is still out there, what system is still left behind. And then secondly, you could also ask, okay, what was innovative a few years ago, but is now again once dated? Because it's not like updates are a one-time only thing. You have to continually evolve.

If you think about social networks, MySpace and Friendster, remember those, they were once highly innovative. They were once high tech, but where are they now? So you can still find industries that are lacking or that have peaked, thus presenting you with an opportunity to profit. And again, in this case, one of the smart things Sean did was listed those parts by the car model. He allowed people to purchase a bundle so they could just do that in one click.

And if you wanna take advantage of some discrepancy or inefficiency, you find one of those dated industries, you need a similar angle. You need to also find a similar improvement just like Sean did. So really big success here. I hope you enjoyed it. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better.

Today's romantic show notes, it is Valentine's Day after all. Just come to sidehustleschool.com/1140. You're gonna learn about candy hearts and shock absorbers. All good things. You got a comment or question for the show, just go to sidehustleschool.com/questions.

We're taking them all year. And in fact, I've got one coming up for you tomorrow. Thanks so much. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School.

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From the Onward Project.