IT Guy Earns Extra $50,000/Year Restoring Vintage Radios

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

[Music]

Hello, what's up? This is Chris Guillebeau, your host of "Side Hustle School." Got a great story for you today. Great story, has some helpful lessons as well. And as I was working on it, it reminded me of one of my earliest memories. That memory is of my grandpa, who passed away when I was quite young, I believe I was five or six, but I remember that he was really into old radios.

His hobby was collecting and restoring vintage radios. Now I use that word vintage there, but of course for him, they weren't necessarily vintage. They were from an era that he grew up in. And today's story is about an IT professional who wants to start a side business and put his engineering degree to good use. When he stumbles across two 1950s radios at a flea market, he finds an idea that is right on his wavelength.

He then goes on to create this business buying, repairing, and reselling radios working only five to 10 hours a week and earning an extra $50,000 a year. Like I said, a great story. I think it perfectly illustrates the side hustle school model of finding a way to do something that you're good at that doesn't take a ton of time and something that you can do while also managing other responsibilities. Oh, and I believe he also has really low startup costs as well. So it definitely checks all the boxes.

Let's say thank you to today's sponsor and then tune in for the story. [Music]

For IT professional Alan Cheng, it was a trip to the flea market that gave him the inspiration for his side hustle. Despite not being a regular at this flea market, Alan found himself enjoying a leisurely stroll through the stalls looking at the items on offer. For years, he'd been selling random stuff on eBay on the side, was hoping he might stumble across something else he could sell. He was hoping he might stumble across something else he could sell.

On one of the tables, he happened across two original 1950s radios. They looked a little worse for wear and they 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. At the whopping price of $15 a radio, it wasn't a massive investment. And he figured he could put his electrical engineering degree to good use trying to fix them.

Alan spent the next few days researching the radios. He looked for answers in blog posts and asked questions in forums like antiqueradios.com about anything he couldn't find a solution to. 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 still to this day he says he'd be refurbishing radios even if nobody bought them. Fortunately, that's not how our story goes because side hustle school isn't about hobbies, it's about making money.

When he completed work on those first two radios, he listed them on eBay. Much to his delight, they sold within a few days, one for $50 and the other for $200. That's when he realized he had a business on his hands, and he decided to see what he could do with it. The first step was to find more radios because just like my grandpa told me, radios do not grow on trees. Alan first tried attending regular flea markets and garage sales, but he quickly found that to be too time intensive.

He has a 50 to 60 hour work week and a young family, so he needed to be more efficient in how he spent his time. That's when he decided to buy them online, get them shipped to his home, repair them, and then turn around and resell them online. He created a simple business model where you would buy old radios from eBay, refurbish them, and then resell them through his eBay account at a markup. As he got better at it, he set a goal of maintaining an average earning rate of $100 an hour for his time. Remember, even though he enjoyed it, this is a side hustle, and Alan had a busy day job.

The average radio takes him no less than two hours to fix, but sometimes this can spread out over the course of a couple of days, depending on what's wrong and how cooperative the radio is. As his business grew, Alan moved away from eBay and created his own standalone Shopify store called Retro Radio Farm. This gave him the opportunity to have more control over his marketing and design. Being an engineer and an IT guy at heart, he loves tracking the metrics that help him grow the business. To promote the new site, Alan invested in advertising, to which he now devotes 20% of his profits.

Mostly he's toyed around with Google AdWords to help him show up for antique radio related search terms. He admits he spent a lot of time and money getting it right, and he's still learning now. One of the significant mistakes was setting the country parameters wrong and having his website promoted in countries that had no interest in buying. There's a good lesson there for somebody. Make sure you look really carefully at which countries you're paying for advertising in.

The most successful mode of advertising for Retro Radio Farm has been retargeting. That's where you take the people who have visited your website once and then show them advertisements on social media and in Google, and those ads just go to those people. This has helped him get a lot of repeat views to his site and drive customers his way. Another successful approach has been finding tribes of people who intersect with his target audience. So for example, he currently sells radios to a lot of people in the vintage trailer and motorhome market.

These people have trailers from the early 20th century, and they want to customize them with accessories from the period. Alan, of course, is happy to provide his radios to them, and that's led to lots of word of mouth sales. Okay, speaking of sales, let's talk about the money. Once he switched from eBay to Shopify, his initial startup costs were just $230. Whenever he made profit, he took that and invested part of it back into the business so he was never out of pocket as he went along.

And for all these efforts, Alan generates around $50,000 a year for five to 10 hours work a week. Another income stream that developed for Alan, which he didn't account for in the beginning, was repairing other people's radios. He'll often receive requests through his site to repair radios and then return them. He charges a flat fee for this service but tries to maintain the same $100 an hour price goal. Since starting the business, Alan estimates that he has bought, sold, and repaired more than 1,000 radios.

He says it could be up to 2,000, but he's lost count. He's currently exploring options to sell his radios in a standalone physical store. He also wants to incorporate new technology, such as voice activation and control, with these old-style radios. Clearly, he's on the right frequency, so tune into his broadcast and see what happens next. [Music]

Well, I love this story, and not just because of the nostalgic element of retro radios, but also just because there's so much to take away from it.

It's super practical, it's fun, and you can see a through line to how he's grown the hustle. So what do I mean by that? Well, if you start at the beginning, he has a bit of experience buying and selling things on eBay, which is not that hard to acquire. If you haven't done that before, you can start doing that this week. Then he thinks, okay, what else can I sell?

Because, you know, I need some more items. And while he's at the flea market, he sees these old radios. He has a degree in electrical engineering. He's an IT guy, that's his profession. So for a lot of us, learning to repair old radios would be pretty intimidating.

At least for me, it would be. But for him, it's right up his alley. Like he's able to figure out how to do the research. When he encounters problems, he goes to these forums to find the solution. He only spends $15 each on these radios, but when he lists them up for sale, he makes $50 for one of them and $200 for the other.

So he realizes, wow, there's actually something to this. Like maybe I should focus in on this a bit more. So then he goes out and seeks more radios. Eventually he realizes, oh, it's actually not very time efficient of me to go around to flea markets and garage sales because he doesn't have much time. He's got a family.

He's working 50 hours a week already in his day job. That's when he thinks, okay, I'll go and buy them from eBay and fix them and then resell them. The one thing I was wondering about there is if he has a different account for buying and selling. I would guess so. At least I would assume so, but I don't know that.

And then as that gets better, he says, okay, I'll make my own website because then I'll have more control over the marketing. Then he takes some of his money and invested in advertising. Then he starts a side business repairing radios for people because they're asking for it. So just a very natural transition, this through line, all the way to $50,000 a year working five to 10 hours a week. And at each step along the way, it seems he's getting better.

First of all, presumably he's getting better at fixing the radio since he's done more than a thousand of them now. But he's also getting better at the marketing and understanding where to find people. Presumably as time goes by, he gets more and better rankings in Google. So it just kind of builds on itself. And it goes to show if you pick the right project in the beginning, which can be a bit of trial and error, just like he had, as you double down on it, as you continue to invest in it, once it is working, then you're not really taking much risk at all.

You're just kind of putting more time and effort and a bit of money into something that is successful, that you know is gonna be more successful if you put a bit more time and effort and money into it. So big congrats to Alan. I think this is great. And definitely check out his website as well, which we will link up in the show notes. If you're interested in learning about radios or just seeing what he's done, those notes are at sidehustleschool.com/535.

That's for episode 535. Don't forget friends, listeners, community, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. It is my hope that this short daily program will get you thinking. It will challenge you a bit to think, okay, what could I do to make something like what Alan has done? Or the person you heard about yesterday, or the person you hear about tomorrow.

Like I really, really believe, as I said recently in the recap, there is something out there for you. And I hope you do everything you can to find it. So I'll do everything on my end to keep bringing you great stories, and not just stories, but hopefully some information you can take and apply to your life. Thanks for listening. I'll be back tomorrow.

My name is Chris Guillebeau, and this is "Sidusleschool." [Music]