From Side Hustle to Big Hustle - Inside Garry Ray’s Online Arbitrage Account: January 2022 Numbers
By Garry Ray – February 24, 2022
Introduction
Hi everybody.
Gary Ray here! I wanted to do a little bit of number-crunching today about my January numbers. Just in case you don’t know me, I co-lead a group of Amazon Sellers with a terrific partner of named Gaye Lisby.
The Amazon Seller Tribe With Gaye Lisby
Gaye started the Amazon Sellers Tribe about four and a half years ago at the time of this writing. Then, about three and a half years ago, she asked me to partner with her and help build the group.
Her goal was to create the most 7-figure Amazon sellers in the industry. We believe we’re doing that right now. We do a coaching round twice a year. Recently, we just launched Tribe 7. We’ve had six previous ones and a lot of people join these.
The best part is that many of these people have succeeded in their Amazon business venture. Many have built a 6-figure business, while some even reached 7-figures. Sounds amazing, right?
We’ve created a Facebook group where we do in-depth training on the philosophy of running an online arbitrage and how it works. To be honest, it’s truly a unique system to do. We have been doing it now for seven years. We’re not shy to share our numbers within that group and that’s what I’m about to show you here in a sec.
But, before we go into that, here’s a little bit you need to know about how I started my Amazon adventure..
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How I started my business?
We have no previous e-tail experience. When I say “we”, I meant my wife and me, Kimberly Joe. Everyone close to her calls her Joe. That is because when we got into this it’s, we were called “empty nesters” because Joe loves to shop.
I used to jokingly always say, “if I could ever find a career where you could shop, we would make a fortune”. And sure enough, that is exactly what happened! One night, I stumbled onto the Amazon business through Facebook. I contacted the group, paid money, and learned everything I needed to start my own business.
Gaye Lisby was my first coach. I loved to say to her privately and openly that she was the best coach I ever had. I paid around $5,000 and a monthly fee just to learn from her.
We paid to join this coaching round of her to have her coach us and other coaches. They were all terrific coaches and I learned something from every one of them.
Now, seven years later, we sold about $2,500,000, mostly through online arbitrage.
We have a separate private label account where we have employees that work for us that buy and do the shipping. Then, the rest are online arbitrage accounts.
To be honest, my numbers might look lower than the others. But just keep in mind. This is a totally separate stream of income. I own an insurance agency and that’s what I have done for 41 years.
This Amazon business was kinda like a side hustle side gig for us. Every year, we’ve made over or a hundred thousand dollars net after all expenses.
Now I am a big fan of capturing all expenses. A lot of people want to try to avoid it and I get them. It’s kinda like not stepping on the bathroom scale because it’s scary to find out what your weight is.
Well, I’m a big fan of stepping on the bathroom scale and I’m a big guy so my bathroom scale tells the truth.
In business, you got to know your numbers. I’m a big believer in knowing what your numbers are. If you don’t, you’re just fooling yourself.
The Inventory Lab
We use a tool called inventory lab and it is very popular in the Amazon space.
When I first started, I used Microsoft Excel to track expenses. After two weeks, I realized, “whoa, this is too much nickel work”.
I teach a session inside the Amazon Sellers Tribe called “nickel work and dollar work”.
Now, what’s the purpose of this session? it’s to get people to understand that the way that common people get ahead in life is understanding what is nickel work and what is dollar work is all about.
Dollar work is where you make your money while nickel work is all about earning small amount without thinking of reinvesting it to create a second stream of income.
Now, truthfully, I grew up in an environment full of people that are nickel work. Most of my peers are common people. They are wonderful salt of the earth, God fear and hard working people that work overtime just to get by.
Truthfully, most of my people never really made a lot of money in life but they’re still wonderful people. I’m not judging their value based on their profit. Growing up, we were poor and I didn’t like it.
This is the reason I’ve tried to make money. God blessed me with that and I’m very thankful to him for doing that.
Why Do You Need it for Your Amazon Business?
Now a lot of people would say, “why use tools?”
Well, here’s something you should think of: Imagine going to a home builder and saying, “I want you to build me a house.” Then he says, “Okay, I’d be glad to build your house.”
Then, after you signed the agreement, you showed up at the job site the first day with the builder.
The builder talks and says, “Now go ahead and pay me so I can buy the tools to build your house. Your first reaction would be, “Why didn’t you have all the tools you need to build my house?!
The same thing applies in ALL types of business.
If you wanna be successful, you need to have the right tools to smoothly run your busines. You can’t build a house without the tools. The way you become successful in Amazon is to clearly understand what it takes to be successful. And one of those things is gotta have the right tools. So inventory lab is one of those.
My January Numbers From 2019 to 2022
Today, I want to share with you my numbers from January 2019 to January 2022.
So, the way my wife and I run is business is we hire people to help us run our Amazon business. Don’t be surprised to see some of our numbers and find out that our expenses are so high. Don’t focus on that. You’re focusing on the glass half empty focus instead of on the glass half full. This is because even if our expenses are so high, we’re still making profit in our own business model.
We don’t buy and ship the products ourselves. We hire the right people to do those things for us. I call our method as “recliner work”, which means that the evenings are night times. We turned 60 years old this year. For us, the evenings of the nighttime is when we’re sitting in our recliner, watching TV. Then, we each have a computer set up at our recliner and we go through and do things like repricing, things like that.
But as far as the buying or the shipping, we hire people to those
Now, let me show you my January 2022 numbers for my online arbitrage account
In January, 2022, we made a net profit of $10,327. Now again, this is after all expenses were deducted and all returns were added.
In terms of expenses, I’ve included everything here. From cardboards, to boxes, tapes, and even workers’ comp are calculated here Now let’s look at January, 2021.
We made $12,753 net.
“Well Gary, what about 2020 2020 January?”
Now, just hold your horses because I’m going to show it to you as well.
As you can see, we made $6,287 on January 2020. Now folks, even though $6,000 is less than $12,000 a year later, $6,000 in a must time where I’m from is a lot of money.
When you multiply it 12, you can imagine that it’s a lot of money for someone doing Amazon business as a side hustle. Take note that this is January. For most people, this is supposed to be one of the worst months of the year for selling. Well it’s not.
Now, for January 2019, we had almost $8,000 that year.
As a quick recap, In 2019, we made $7,900, then $6,200 in 2020, $12,753 in 2021.Lastly, $10,327 for January 2022. Again, this is including all of our expenses.
Verdict
The point is to let you know that whatever those numbers are, I’m showing you that we’re not here to elevate and inflate the numbers like other people have done so. And I’ve actually seen people do that.
I could have gone in there and deleted those expenses and my net profit would’ve been. But if I do that, I’d be cheating on you and on my own business.
But, I’m a businessman. I’m not here to showboat or flaunt my success. I want to and need to operate using my is real numbers to make sure I know what I need to improve in our business..
Now as you can see on the numbers above, January was a great month for us. Anytime I could make $10,000 in a month from a separate stream of income, I’m proud of it. I’m very glad I stumbled onto this business venture. Like I said, I own both a private label and online arbitrage.
I have people working for me from their homes that buy and ship our products. It’s just that simple. And we’re a believer in one of the things I like to encourage people on. That is to approach arbitrage as though it’s a commodity like orange juice, corn soybeans, pork bellies, coffee, crude, and all those things are traded.
We approach Amazon arbitrage the same way. It’s a commodity process. Various factors make it go up and down. We teach those factors and how to watch for those factors. But we do not preach to people to go deep on stuff.
We kinda approached this as a mutual fund approach. I used to day trade and I used to trade futures as well. I lost a ton of money in that stuff. So, I took a lot of my hard licks there in that arena.
Brought those experiences over to Amazon and they worked like a charm. We made some really good money.
And, if you join Amazon Sellers Tribe today, these things are just the tip of the iceberg that you’ll learn from me and my partner, Gaye Lisby. So, I invite you to try and check it out for yourself to see if you’re a good fit. Click here to find out more details about this amazing group.
