BC Business
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How an out-of-work Surrey ?butcher found a surprising career shift on eBay. When his most affluent customers began buying ground pork instead of porterhouse steaks in 2007, Mike Winkelmann of Surrey knew his days as a high-end butcher were numbered. But what to do? He and his wife Joanne had everything invested in their high-end business, their bank account was empty, they couldn’t make the rent on the shop and they had two young daughters to feed.?
When his most affluent customers began buying ground pork instead of porterhouse steaks in 2007, Mike Winkelmann of Surrey knew his days as a high-end butcher were numbered. But what to do? He and his wife Joanne had everything invested in their high-end business, their bank account was empty, they couldn’t make the rent on the shop and they had two young daughters to feed.
It was time for drastic measures. Hoping to raise some cash, Winkelmann took a photo of one of his two sausage stuffers, a big machine “as heavy as a Honda,” and posted it on eBay. To his surprise, a butcher in New York bid the machine up to $3,500 – twice what Winkelmann had paid for it at an auction two years earlier. It was Winkelmann’s eureka moment. He traded in his butcher’s apron for a BlackBerry and a PayPal account, and virtually overnight Mike the Butcher became Mike the Liquidator.
“I’ve been cutting meat since I was 16,” says the stocky 36-year-old, “but I found my talent was buying and selling.” Within weeks Winkelmann had sold virtually all his equipment, right down to the delicatessen scales, and he went looking for more stuff to sell. The economic downturn that had killed his Surrey meat business also set off a rash of restaurant foreclosures and bailiff seizures, and Winkelmann seized the moment. Today he scours auction houses in the Lower Mainland looking for bargains: ice-cream machines, deep fryers, popcorn makers, espresso machines – all the wreckage of distressed businesses, all of it available for pennies on the dollar. Winkelmann finds that most of it sells in a matter of days, even hours, after he posts the equipment on eBay.
In the first 10 months of business, up to August 2008, Winkelmann sold $150,000 worth of other people’s second-hand goods. Roughly a third of that was profit, more than he ever earned in a year as a butcher. He shipped most of the goods to the U.S. (“They’re buying this stuff like there’s no tomorrow,” he says.) Winkelmann became an eBay gold-level Powerseller in his first year, and this fall eBay Canada awarded him its first annual Comeback of the Year award.
His market research is seat-of-the-pants. “If I’m at an auction and people are bidding for an ice-cream maker, I’ll go to my BlackBerry and type in the make and the model. If the bidding is at $1,100 and I see the going price in the States for a second-hand machine is $4,000 or $5,000, then I’ll bid and buy it. It’s all on the fly.”
Overhead costs are minimal: $300 a month for a 300-square-foot storage space. He does his own repairs, and his advertising consists of a free eBay account with testimonials from happy customers. Mostly, the buyer pays shipping, but Winkelmann offers to pick up the cost for bigger items. Recently, he paid $1,100 to ship a small home elevator to Florida, but he still made an astounding 500 per cent profit on the deal.
Does it bother him that he’s a professional scavenger, feeding on the distress of others? “I’m profiting from other people’s miseries and broken dreams, it’s true,” Winkelmann says with a shrug, “but I had my own broken dreams, so I don’t feel so bad about it.”
On the advice of his father, who dealt in elevators, Winkelmann has branched out from restaurant equipment into mobility gear for the handicapped. His storage space is filled with second-hand mechanical patient lifters, chairs for the disabled and other specialty items.
Winkelmann is convinced his liquidation business is sustainable. EBay, Craigslist and other online ventures have created a new market for used stuff and with it a new economic model based on recycling. “I’m loving what I do,” he says. “I wake up laughing. I get up and even before my coffee, I’m checking my email to see what I’ve sold overnight, and I just get blown away.”