Introduce yourself and your family!
Hello! We are Joe and Jessica from The Family Flips! We are natural living advocates, homeschooling parents to our three children, and entrepreneurs. We chose to live a lifestyle that allows us to be at home with our children, have a flexible schedule, and build a fun and exciting business that we can share with others!
What do you do for a living?
Our business, first and foremost, is purchasing liquidation pallets and lots from various places around the country and resell them for profit both locally and on online platforms. But we also educate and entertain a diverse group of people on our YouTube channel and build community with those people on our social media platforms.
We love being able to make a living from the things we love! The entrepreneur inside of us is always looking for a way to monetize and feed our families with things we love to do, so we don’t have to settle for jobs that make us dread getting out of bed in the morning. These two things gave us the opportunity to be featured on A&E’s Extreme Unboxing. Jessica has a couple of side business passion projects in photography and as a labor and postpartum doula.
How you started your YouTube Channel The Family Flips? Where you get the idea?
Underneath all the unboxing videos and vlogs, we have always been people who have lived with plenty and also experienced having nothing at all. We know that many people in the country could not float an unexpected bill of $400 or more! We know because we were there. There was a point in time where we watched our PayPal sales by the hour until we had enough money to buy the next meal at our grocery store. We stayed there while our business was in its infancy stages.
So, our channel was originally called “Cellular Resale”, because we sold cell phones, but it was based around a technique called “phone farming”. This was where apps would pay you to play and watch ads for fractions of pennies. Doesn’t seem like much, until you had 20, 30, or even 100 phones “farming” those fractions of pennies. It wasn’t a sustainable business model, however, and so we decided to move on to documenting our reselling process.
Eventually, we discovered that people LOVED watching us unbox stuff and were curious as to how we resold those items. And thus… The Family Flips was truly born. It was definitely a long process to get here, and we’ve got so much farther to go!
It is easy to manage your own business with small kids?
Absolutely not! Honestly, if we didn’t have kids, we could probably grow this into a large, full scale operation. All kids, but especially small ones, have lots of needs. As homeschooling parents, we are with them all the time, so managing our time has become integral to making it all work. Through learning how to do this, we’ve made mistakes and learned from them. But we do this FOR our kids. So, it’s not an option to let the business overshadow the reason we did it to begin with.
Does this way of living and working is better for raising three kids, being able to be near them most of the time?
There are pros and cons to every lifestyle, and it’s up to each person to decide what works for them. We chose this life because we evaluated our beliefs and what was most important to us and tried to build a life that operated by those beliefs. But, we didn’t get there overnight. It was a process of trying things and keeping what worked and throwing out what didn’t. We’re still in that process, always paying attention to the routines, schedules, ideas, and techniques and how they’re working. Sometimes what works in one season of our life doesn’t work in the next and vise versa.
How you source products for your Amazon sellers account?
We currently do not sell on Amazon. We tried it (because we’re always down to try something new), but it didn’t work out for us. We source so many different types of items with a lot of diversity. Because of the limitations and risks of selling certain items on Amazon, we decided it was not profitable for our business model. However, I know that there are tons of resellers out there who love and swear by Amazon! So, it depends on how each platforms fits in each individual business model.
Continues in Part 2 ….
You Can Watch Joe and Jessica 888Lots videos videos, where they present our liquidation lots with their unique style doing wholesale unboxing.
On The Family Flips YouTube channel is a great source of information about liquidation websites and their way of operations.
