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Nerf guns saved Larry Lubarsky's life.
Well, not just Nerf guns. But also lozenges, shampoo and biscuits and the thousands of items he sells on Amazon as a third-party seller.
Seven years ago, Larry Lubarsky was a 31-year-old college dropout who had no money saved and was $100,000 in debt. Today, he's 38 and runs a company with 10 employees that grossed 18 million last year selling thousands of different products on Amazon.
/"I was living with my mom, I was in a lot of debt, I couldn't afford my phone, my car. I couldn't afford, you know, to take a girl on a date, anything like that,” Lubarsky told CNBC Make It. /"So it saved my life financially./"
Lubarsky buys products – like electronics, beauty products or toys – in bulk, then resells them on Amazon for a profit. For example, if Lubarsky sees a Nerf gun selling for $20 each on Amazon, he will buy hundreds or thousands of toys for $10 each in bulk, then resell them on Amazon and make a profit of $5 per toy (after deducting Amazon fees). ), he says. Of course, this assumes it's a sought-after product that people will buy.
/"Basically, we're looking for the one percent of the thousands of products you're looking at that are actually selling well and generating a nice profit," Lubarsky told CNBC Make It.
At any given time, Lubarsky's business will have nearly 3,000 total products listed on Amazon Marketplace, and he sells an average of 1,500 to 2,000 orders per day between the U.S. and Europe.
Last year the company generated $18 million in revenue, including a net profit of $4 million, and Lubarsky says he's targeting $20 million in revenue in 2018.
In 2011, Lubarsky “hit rock bottom,” he says. /"I was completely broke, I kind of felt like my life was really going nowhere and I was in a really bad situation./"
Born and raised in Brooklyn, Lubarsky dropped out of high school to become a stockbroker at age 17 and spent more than a decade selling stocks, but the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath took a toll and left him left more than 100,000 debts.
Without a dollar to his name, Lubarsky moved in with his mother and began looking for any job he could find at pizzerias and other local businesses, any 9-to-5 job where he could earn / “500 dollars a week to just pay my salary”. regular bills and start paying off some of the debt,” he says.
In 2012, a friend who owned an optical store in Brooklyn hired Lubarsky to answer the phones about 500 times a week. It turned out that this same friend had a side business, buying sunglasses and eyeglasses in bulk, then reselling them on Amazon as one of the site's nearly 300,000 third-party sellers across the United States.
/“I didn’t even know selling on Amazon was a thing/,” Lubarsky says of his first contact with the company. /"I didn't even know this existed./"
But / "When I bought a product and I saw this, 'Hey, I can buy this for 10 dollars and I can sell it on Amazon for 20 dollars and make 10 dollars in the process, and it turns out sells five [or] six times a day.” ", that's when the light bulb went off for me. And that's when I realized, you know, I could grow this business./"
Lubarsky helped his friend expand his business into Amazon UK and run it in exchange for a "small share/" of the profits. Within a year, Lubarsky's share of the business was bringing in "a couple million dollars a year," he says.
The windfall from this Amazon business allowed Lubarsky to get back on his feet. He rented his own apartment in Brooklyn and, in 2014, used his newly acquired expertise to launch his own Amazon business.
/"I knew everything that needed to be done to get the company off the ground/," Lubarsky told CNBC Make It.
The only thing he needed was start-up capital. So Lubarsky pitched his idea to a few friends before one of them (whom Lubarsky declines to name for privacy reasons) believed in the idea enough to invest $60,000. Lubarsky spent $10,000 on shipping supplies and rent for a small one-bedroom house in Brooklyn where Lubarsky began working in the garage.
Read the rest of Larry's story here: https://cnb.cx/2EAJXo9
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How this high school dropout went from 100,000 debt to 18 million product sales on Amazon CNBC Make It.
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