A garage sale can teach you many business lessons
“That’s the hardest I’ve had to work for $26 in a long time”.
That’s what I shared with my 13-year old as we were dividing up the money we made at our garage sale on Sunday.
I had encouraged the kids to help sort the toys they no longer play with, and promised we would split the profits evenly. There were a lot of items to sort and sell, and a lot of good toys too from our we-prefer-wooden-toys era of early parenthood, before Lego officially took over our bank account, err, I mean hearts. So, we knew we had a lot of good things to sell.
We postered the neighbourhood and I posted to a few facebook groups, and we were all set at 9am on Sunday morning after countless hours spent sorting toys, finding missing pieces, and organizing everything.
The problem? Not a lot of people walked by. Those that did, bought (we had good stuff!) but there just wasn’t enough foot traffic on our quieter street on a Sunday to move all the carefully organized and displayed goods.
What we thought would be a busy (and profitable by the kids’ standards) morning ended up being a bit disappointing for them.
The kids also wanted to have a lemonade stand, so we bought a lot of lemons (thank goodness my food processor has a citrus attachment!) and they were hard at work getting enough lemon juice and sugar syrup prepared to hydrate the whole neighbourhood. It felt like an easy upsell. But again, you need foot traffic for that to be a hit. So, we have a lot of freezer space tied up with lemon juice and sugar syrup until their next attempt.
Hopefully you are not relying on garage sale money as a significant income stream. So what does this have to do with your business? In a nutshell? You can have the best offer – a product that you know produces results, or a service that has the potential to increase your audience’s revenue and impact – but if no one knows about it, it will fall flat.
It’s all in the marketing.
A few ‘mistakes’ we made (and how they apply to your business)
Missed opportunity to promote:
Our school’s family fun night was on Thursday and it was packed with students and their families. If we had put our posters up beforehand (instead of Friday morning – a PA day) we could have caught a lot of people with kids… and we were primarily selling toys.
The business lesson:
Think about where your customers are already going to be (where they hang out online and in person) and find a way to be present.
Bad timing:
We noticed that most people in Guelph have their garage sales on Saturdays. We were busy on Saturday (and it was calling for rain) so we did Sunday instead. It’s hard to find a weekend where the whole family is available, so this felt like a good idea.
The business lesson:
Think about when your customers will be looking for your offer. If you know they are likely to buy during a specific month, or time period (back to school, their year end, before the summer, Monday morning) make sure your offers align with when they are ready to buy.
Not enough eyes on our sale:
At the end of the day, only a certain number of people who saw our signs or posts online would have been interested in the garage sale. My kids were speculating about what percentage of people that saw our posters would be interested, and what percentage of those would come by on the day of.
The business lesson:
It’s a numbers game. The more eyes on your marketing the better the chances of your target number of people making a purchase. There is a consistent percentage that you will convert, which will vary based on your industry and audience. The higher the number of the right people seeing your marketing, the higher the number of sales.
Now that we’ve debriefed, my 13-year old wants to try again on a Saturday. Everything is neatly organized back in the garage, larger items have been posted to Marketplace (and we’ve already doubled our profits since Sunday) so we need to decide what our plan of attack will be. We are going to try to learn from our mistakes and decide if it’s worth trying again. I’m taking any and all tips from veteran garage sale enthusiasts! It has been 20+ years since my last one, and times have changed!
Bonus lesson:
Be open to learning from your ‘mistakes’ as they are often lessons in disguise. Be ready to change course if needed, and don’t become too attached to your initial goal if all signs are pointing you down a different path towards success.
Have you ever learned a business lesson in an unexpected place? Reply and share it! We would love to hear what you learned and how that lesson appeared.
