This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
He wanted to start a side business and put his engineering degree to good use. And when he stumbled across 1950s radios, he found an idea right on his wavelength. Hey friends, what's up? Welcome to Side Hustle School. Chris Guillebeau here, your host.
This year I've been bringing you some remixes of our best stories over the years, especially the early, early years, a long time ago, 2017, 2018. If you weren't listening back then, these stories are completely new. And if you do happen to have an incredible memory, each one is being rerecorded. We also include some new updates in some cases. So for this one, you're gonna hear about an IT professional who decides to start a side business, what else, and put his engineering degree to good use.
And he finds these 1950s radios, I'll tell you all about it in the story, goes on to create a business buying, repairing, and reselling them, working about five to 10 hours a week and earning an extra $50,000 a year. Does that sound good to you? It sounds pretty good to me. He's also doing something that he really enjoys. So that's all the more exciting.
I'm gonna bring you the details in this story. IT guy earns extra $50,000 a year restoring vintage radios. It's coming right up after this quick shout out to our sponsor. [Music]
For IT professional Alan Chang, it was a trip to the flea market that gave him the inspiration for his hustle. Despite not being a regular, Alan found himself enjoying a leisurely stroll through the stalls, looking at the items on offer.
He'd been selling random stuff on eBay on the side for years and was hoping he might stumble across something new. On one of the tables, he happened to cross two original 1950s radios. They looked a little worse for wear and weren't functional, but they were bright, colorful, and bursting with nostalgia. If he could restore them, he thought he might be able to sell them online. And for $15 per radio, it wasn't a huge investment.
Alan spent the next few days researching those radios. He looked for answers in blog posts and asked questions on antiqueradios.com, which turned out to be a very helpful resource. Much of the technology in older radios isn't used today, and there was a steep learning curve. But Alan enjoyed the labor of love. And when he finished work on those first two radios, he listed them on eBay.
He looked at the prices of other similar radios that had sold and priced his similarly. And much to his delight, the radios sold within a few days, one for 50 bucks and one for $200 to a buyer in the UK. That's when he realized he had a business on his hands and he decided to look to grow it. Now, the first step was to find more radios because just like your grandparents told you, radios do not grow on trees. Alan began attending regular flea markets and garage sales, but he quickly found this to be too time intensive.
He already had a 50 to 60 hour work week and a young family, so he needed to be more efficient. He decided to buy them online, then resell them online, buy from one source, fix them up, sell them somewhere else. His business model was to buy those old radios, refurbish, and then resell at a markup. Much of the pricing was kind of trial and error, but he always wanted to maintain an average earning rate of $100 per hour for his time. Remember, this is a side hustle.
He already had a busy day job. So the average radio takes Alan about two hours to fix, but sometimes this work can spread out over the course of a couple of days, depending on what's going on and how cooperative the radio is. As his business grew, Alan moved away from eBay and created his own standalone store called Retro Radio Farm. That gave him more control over his marketing and design, and being an engineer and an IT guy at heart, he loves tracking the numbers and seeing the metrics that help him grow the business. To promote the new site, Alan invested in advertising, to which he devotes about 20% of his business's profits.
Mostly he's toyed around with Google AdWords, and that was also a process of trial and error. One of the big mistakes he made in the beginning was setting the country parameters wrong and having a site promoted in countries that had no interest in buying. There's a good lesson there for somebody. Be careful about that. Set your country parameters when using advertising.
And the most successful mode of advertising for him has been retargeting. That's where the people who visit your website then get shown ads on social media and in Google elsewhere. That's helped him to get a lot of repeat views to his site and drive customers his way. He also looks for related tribes of people who might intersect with his target audience. For example, he looked for people in the vintage trailer and motor home market.
Okay, let's talk about the money. Startup costs were just $230. Whenever he made a profit, he took that and invested part of it back into the business, so he was never out of pocket. And for all of his efforts, Alan generates around $50,000 a year from this hustle, again, five to 10 hours a week. He takes 50% of that as his earnings and invest the other 50% back into the business to help it grow further.
He also started repairing people's radios. He started getting requests through his site to repair the radios and return them. And for that, he also tries to achieve a $100 an hour price point. When we first ran the story, Alan estimated that he bought, repaired, and resold more than 1,000 radios. And he's still going strong.
He's currently exploring options to sell his radios in a standalone physical store. He also wants to incorporate some new technology with these bold style radios. Clearly, he's on the right frequency. Alan's website, retroradiopharm.com, is still up and running. He's got all kinds of media features.
He still has a whole bunch of radios for sale. Looks like he might have some at higher price points now, which, you know, good for him. He's got some lower price ones too, but just some really beautiful vintage radios. I might've mentioned this in the original episode, but my grandpa used to collect old radios. So working on this episode was fun 'cause I got to see a bunch of pictures and just kind of remember that process of being at my grandpa's house and looking at all these radios.
So check it out, retroradiopharm.com. Could be a great president for a dad or grandpa. And I don't mean to make it all about the guys, probably some grandmas and other folks out there. I mean, anybody can appreciate this cool vintage tool. So again, retroradiopharm.
Listeners, thank you for being out there. Thank you for listening. This was episode 3,168 of the podcast. New episodes drop every day, seven days a week, always completely free. My name's Chris Guillebeau.
You're listening to Side Hustle School. [Music]
From the Onward Project.
