August has been a time for trying new things. Earlier in the month, I did my first Going-Out-of-Business sale. My client had to sell her beloved business due to ill health. When she wasn’t able to sell the business as a whole, she decided to sell off its assets and she called me. I’d never sold the types of very specialized things she had and I told her about my concerns about it. I feared I wouldn’t be able to find the right buyers since most of my usual customers were buyers of household goods. In the end, it turned out to not be any more difficult than any other sale. A lesson learned.
My next sale was in a single-wide trailer. I’d done lots of low-end sales, but none from a trailer before. It, too, turned out to be ordinary with no surprises. We didn’t make much, but we didn’t have to put as much hours into setting it up, nor did we have to hire employees, so it all worked out well.
My current sale is in a warehouse with multiple families involved.I had never tried one before. It has been harder than making a sand castle in a downpour. When my first client had moved her family to Europe a few years back, she had packed the contents of her large home into several of those large, moveable storage units. Now they are back, so she needed to go through the storage so she could reclaim her belongings that she wanted to keep and to weed out the stuff she no longer wanted nor had room for since they had moved into a much smaller apartment. Unfortunately, with the moveable pods, you don’t have a physical space to do your sifting. We rented a warehouse so that she could do her sorting and then we could sell the rest. It’s a large space so we invited other families who had previously contacted me about doing a sale but that also didn’t have the space to hold one. One woman had her deceased aunt’s belongings in a more ordinary rented storage unit. Another man had the belongings of his parents, but the home was not situated where a sale could be held, so he needed another venue to sell the items. It all seemed straight forward, we rented the warehouse and lined everyone up to bring in their goods. Unfortunately, problems started coming up for each of them and we ended up with just my original client plus SOME stuff from my third. Also, after we chose the warehouse and after we did our advertising and set everything in motion, the city decided to tear up the street in front of us. Now people can only reach us by a circuitous route. It’s been fun. The sale is going on now. So far, a few customers have found us and enough things have sold to at least pay for the space. We still have two more days of the sale, so wish us luck.
I have to wonder what new experiences await us and I hope they are good.
those are fascinating. When I started the article, I wondered how you find customers for such specialized materials. I still wonder. Do you advertise? Word of mouth? Website with a long list of what’s available?
What an interesting job.
Yes to all of the above!