How Finding a Copy of Crush It! Changed My Life Forever
Ive been selling used books on Amazon full-time for over 12 years and in that time, I have grossed over $4M in sales. All this started from $5 and a ridiculous amount of hustle. What follows is the story of how “Crush it!” pushed me to start social media 2 years ago, and not only changed my life but also allowed me to positively impact so many other lives as well…
Digging through the bins at the Goodwill one day, I found a copy of Crush It! Little did I know this little black & green book would change my life forever.
I grew up on food stamps and government assistance. I’m a high school dropout. I was also a young father, having my first child just after my 16th birthday and getting married and moving out to live on my own only months later.
I immediately joined the workforce and began working full time at a telemarking call center. From the jump, I knew this life wasn’t for me. I knew I was capable of much more, and just like I couldn’t stand sitting in class listening to the teacher, I felt the same way working for someone else.
Growing up poor, and never being able to ask my dad for $1, I had naturally developed a myriad of hustles. I used to recycle cans for money from the neighborhood trashcans, and then roll that money into buying sodas and water from the grocery store ($0.25 each.) I would then line my backpack with a trash bag, steal some ice from a hotel, and walk up and down the beach selling drinks for $1 each. This was probably my first legit hustle.
When I was younger I used to steal fruit from my neighbors trees and knock on their door and sell it back to them, but needless to say, that wasn’t very scalable or ethical…
When I was in elementary and middle school, I sold candy out of my backpack and even dabbled in selling weed. Thank goodness I was never caught! So one day when I was 15, my little brother tells me about this auction website called Ebay, and everything just clicked! I knew I was gonna crush it on Ebay.
I sold anything and everything I could on Ebay. I became infatuated with researching completed auctions and learning what the value was of anything. To this day, I could do it for hours on end. It’s insane that we have that tool for free. I learned how to buy underpriced items off of Ebay and sell them back on Ebay. I learned keywords and the entire arbitrage. however, I certainly wasn’t making a full time income from it so I stayed with the 9–5 slaving away and dreaming of what could be.
Flash forward 4 years or so, and my kid is 4, its 2004 and I am somewhat supported by my wife’s job. I’m relentlessly back at it with eBay to provide for my family the only legal way I know how — flipping stuff.
Every once in a while I would see people scanning books on the shelf in a thrift store with some kind of device and a laser beam. I knew it was a PDA of some sort, granted this was 3 years before the first iPhone was released. I knew they were buying books to sell for profit but other than that I didn’t know much. I knew the laser beams weren’t cheap, so they had to be making some decent money.
After tireless nights of research on google, and pestering as many booksellers as I could find, I finally got the drop I needed. I found out the name of software they were using. There really weren’t any books written about this topic yet, and there also weren’t any Youtube videos as Youtube wouldn’t be created for another year….
It was a slow learning process. I basically made every mistake possible. It turns out the booksellers were selling on Amazon, a platform I had rarely heard of at the time and never purchased anything from. Eventually I fine-tuned my methods and developed a full-time income from it. Before I knew it, my 2 bedroom apartment was full of books. My house looked like a library and my bank was flush w $100K cash and zero debt.
This was insane for a kid that dropped out of highschool and had never had more than $1K cash to spare.
I told my wife she should quit and help me focus on the books. Shortly after that we discovered Amazon FBA where we could send our inventory to Amazon and they would store it for us and ship it to the customers as well. Not only that, but we could sell the items for more as the customer was willing to pay a premium for stuff with the Amazon Prime logo on it.
This was a godsend as we were wrapping 100+ orders a day at this point.
So we modified the business model, and we began outsourcing people to help us. First it was my dad and other family members, then some friends, and eventually we hired people outside our immediate circle.
Seven years into the business solo, I decided to partner with one of my high school friends who was one of the few people I had taught the business model to and informed them to keep it under lock and key. He was doing well and we knew we could do even better if we partnered together.
Fast forward 3 years, I had now been selling books full-time for over 10 years and one day while working I find a copy of Crush it! by some guy named Gary Vaynerchuk.
I scanned it, I saw it wasn’t worth anything, and I almost threw it back, but something about the book caught my eye.
I was in fact an avid reader, and loved reading business books. This particular book was green and black and it reminded me of money.
How to cash in on your passion, sounded awesome, and the title alone, made me feel like a youthful soul had something to do with it. Someone who was cool. I flipped it over and saw a comment by Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, and I loved his book “Delivering Happiness” so that was it, into the ‘personal keeper” pile it went. I actually ended up reading the entire book that night and it blew me away.
I was already on social media but purely from a consumer standpoint and now that I had read Crush it! I knew I wasn’t playing the game right. I was pretty much treating social media like a TV and I needed to change that. I knew I was gonna Crush it, because I knew so much about reselling books on Amazon and nearly all of the guys that were doing it at the time were much older than me. They were super boring (sorry guys) and just weren’t that talented.
They weren’t entertainers and didn’t know how to keep people’s attention which I knew I could leverage my ability to speak and to make videos to do so. Not to mention they weren’t giving away information for free, which I knew would give me massive credibility.
I immediately setup a Youtube a Facebook and a Facebook group as well as an Instagram. I started to build a community on Facebook as well as Instagram and didn’t quite get serious on Youtube for a few months. I know a local skateboarder youtuber (side note: i’m a lifelong skateboarder as well) who has 500K subs now, and 2 years ago he had around 120K which was still insane to me. So, I talked with him and he showed me the feasibility of Youtube and that there was money in it as well, and really inspired me to get it going. I also learned of Snapchat and started firing hard on that as well as Twitter.
This was the birth of Reezy Resells
All along, I was also consuming Gary’s content, which after a short while I stopped watching, because I felt like I got the message and didn’t need much more motivation from him. I was busy taking action. One of the actions I wanted to do was to get Gary’s attention, and to thank him more than anything for turning me onto the best opportunity ever. So, I began tuning back into the live streams and commenting.
On the day of the 8 hour live stream #askgaryvee deal, Gary was broadcasting on 3 platforms, one of which was either Periscope, or Meerkat.
During the stream there was a lull, where Gary wasn’t talking for a few seconds, and he was looking to the screen for questions or comments to engage with, and I knew I had a good at bat so I typed out in all caps “I MADE $650K LAST YEAR SELLING USED BOOKS ON AMAZON” and to my astonishment, he not only reads it out loud, but he’s pumped about it and says “You see that? Good Shit Rezzy Resells! That’s fucking hustle!!”
I about jumped out of my seat, I’m rushing around the house telling my wife, and she still doesn’t know who Gary is at this point, so I probably seemed a bit crazy. I’m a bit tech savvy so I was able to rip the video off the platform from the replay, and I decided I wanted to use it as my youtube intro. I asked Gary for permission, and he said “go for it.” So that was pretty rad.
Youtube was growing slowly.. serious, this shit doesn’t happen overnight. I was of course still doing my thing in reselling as well as social media.
Through social media I started to gain respect and admiration of sellers making much more money than myself on Amazon and other ways and they began to teach me stuff and share secrets with me I never would have known otherwise. This lead to me selling sneakers which for example is a goldmine.
Then Gary started the #2017FlipChallenge and to my amazement, he referenced me in the VIDEO!!! Holy shit, my youtube got a decent little bump, and I was pumped AF. At this point I am pretty regularly getting like 1 message a week from someone who I changed their life, and helped them quit their 9–5 and be with their kids more, and allowed them to pursue their dreams/passions, pretty wild stuff.
Things like “Hey Reezy, we’re in Disneyland with the kids today, and we never could have done it without your help”. Stuff that could make a grown man get wet around the eyes.
The bump in social media was a lot less than it could have been because Gary didn’t include any links to me or anything, just a verbal reference and he actually said my name wrong, calling me “Rezzy” instead of “Reezy” — It was all good, I wasn’t mad at him, he said he was a shit student anyways, right?
He ended up referencing me again in a video regarding flipping stuff online, to a group of people that won a private meeting with him. One of which was Stephen Petersen who’s podcast Ecommerce Momentum, I had been on shortly before.
Then came the big one, he did a follow up for the #2017FlipChallenge and in this video, the team used a funny clip of mine from Snapchat, where I’m using the Santa Claus filter and I have a carload of Nikes. The big deal was that he actually put my Twitter handle on the screen, which meant that people could find me and knew how to spell my name.
I was actually in Disneyland when the video dropped and I started getting a massive amount of followers, and I didnt know why, at the same time I was getting a ton of DM’s — I was trying to ignore them, but a couple people whom I had become close with actually texted to me tell me about the video… I found a quiet corner to watch it and I knew great things were gonna happen.
Within a week, I had started getting even more DM’s, now 25–50+ a day from people and comments on my youtube videos. Messages of .“Thank you,” and “You’ve inspired me,” and “You changed my life,” began to come much more frequently, the the point of about 1–5 a day….
This had an unforeseen effect on me. I have been a lifelong severe asthmatic. And due to all this I had an epiphany, a moment of clarity, when I realized I could really make a change in the world, just one person, like a REAL change.
And not only that, but I could find success in it myself and do it utilizing my talents of speaking, and making videos…. This blew me away, it changed my perspective on money/success and everything. In this moment of clarity, my asthma vanished. I swear to you, gone in a moment. I have not had an asthma attack or taken medicine since late Jan 2017, and up until that point I would have an asthma attack EVERY SINGLE NIGHT of my life and never went anywhere without an inhaler on me….. Seriously gone!
To put that into perspective, I just got flown to London with all expenses paid for 5 nights with my wife to do a speaking gig on Amazon, and I didn’t even bring any medicine. I don’t even know where it is, if I did need it. How crazy is that? I was just sick in my own head because I wasn’t truly happy or at ease with the world or my own accomplishments. Did I mention I did a speaking gig in London? That same kid that grew up on food stamps, dropped out of high school, had a kid and got married at age 16? That same kid they said wouldn’t ever amount to shit?
Well, guess what? They were wrong. I’m changing the world, one person at a time, and I’m having fun doing so. I’ve probably singe-handedly liberated over 1,000 people from their 9–5 and opened their eyes to the multitude of options available to us all. Because If I can do it, so can you!
Now I’m getting referenced by Gary on the shoooow when he’ sitting w/ Charlamagne from the Breakfast Club? And he’s calling me “that homie”????
And I was recently, interviewed and featured in The Wall Street Journal. That had me feelin’ like Black Rob.. I was like “Whoa.. this shit is real”, Grandma even messaged me, like I made it.
Before now, I had barely traveled outside of California, and this year alone, because of social media, I have done 3 speaking gigs, including one keynote, which had me in Philly, NYC, Rhode Island, and London.
I’m going places, literally.
There is seriously no excuse for anything anymore. Everyone has a nearly equal playing field in this world of endless opportunity. The things you can do with this device that fits in your pocket just blows me away…And most people treat it like its a damn television still!! Get with the times people!! It’s not 1920, the cellphone is not the television!! You don’t have to live your life the same way your grandparents did.
Someday, I’m gonna be on the #ASKGARYVEE show sitting across from Gary and spreading my message even farther.
All of this because I found a copy of Crush it! by chance one day.
Don’t listen to them.
Thank you for everything Gary.
- Reezy
