Hey, man, where are you at? fungus, are you okay? What's wrong? I just came back from the fish store, man.

With everything going on with COVID they're out of everything.

They don't have any guppies or betas.

Or yellow tangs, nothing. But worst of all, they're out of dwarf shrimp, my favorite aquatic animal. What am I going to do, Rob?

You could order on Joe Shrimp shack.com and stop being a bitch about it. You can use promo code Aquarium Guys to check out for 15% off. Now get off the couch and order some damn shrimp.

Oh, that's a great idea. I think I will go order some shrimp.

Joe shrimp shack.com. suck it up, Nancy. Also, don't forget about our friends at the Ohio Fish Rescue. We should be having a video coming out about me becoming part of the Minnesota branch of the Ohio Fish Rescue. So why not just go to their website on YouTube and subscribe to their channel? Because I'm on there. I mean, what better reason do you need? Maybe give them a couple of bucks. I mean, they need the money they put up with me. Here's the podcast. Welcome to the Aquarium, guys. Podcast with your hosts, jim, colby and Rob. golson. I got to restart. That not because you said turn wagon. Okay, three, two, one. I got to say turn wagon this time.

What are you talking about?

Well, welcome to the podcast, everybody. jimmy's being difficult today. So, again, I am your host, Robbie olsen.

And I am Jim colby. Your mom's a big fan.

And tonight's special guest is Adam El nashar. How are you doing, buddy?

Pretty good.

How about you?

No shar? No shar.

So kombucha loving. Adam, we're so happy to have you as tonight's featured guest by popular demand. Put it we've had feedback put in multiple times that they want to have a special episode dedicated to Adam and talking about him owning a pet store. So it's going to be all about you today, okay? You planned notes, man. Come on, now, don't pretend. I didn't pretend to be surprised. You did make notes. Excellent. Now, did you draw a puppy dog in the middle? Because I feel like that's normally your notes.

No, I had my littlest one scribble.

Wonderful. So you dictated the scenario to your six year old?

My two year old. That's my youngest.

Wonderful. So it's probably in crayon, and there's probably not a lick of English.

No.

They know English.

Well, guys, before we start our topic, which is, again, owning a pet store by popular demand, we, of course, always have news, and I think Jimmy came into the studio and he's been just.

Stressed out to not happy, so all hell.

So let's just start with your problems, shall we?

I have a problem today. Today I learned that two of my childhood friends childhood idols had their guns taken away today.

That's just wrong. But who were those idols?

Elmer fudd and yosemite Sam have gotten their guns taken away from Warner Brothers in the new looney tunes series coming up on I think it's smacks HBO, if I'm not mistaken.

Communist.

I know why. Because they don't want him to have a gun. Because he's a reckless gun owner. And so they're going to let him still have dynamite and blow bugs bunny up, but he can't have a gun anymore. And I'm just pissed.

So funny you say that. Me being on the Internet side of things and crawling around the epic horrible potholes. I'm finding that Warner Brothers has been going really ham on a lot of people's, parody contents of bugs bunny and elmer Fudd and all those and they actually just copyright band striked a video. And I wanted to share this with you, Jimmy. I figured this is a better time than ever. So for those that are listening, this is the part of the episode where we're going to play something that doesn't swear, but it's not necessarily family friendly. So please clear your ears. Here we go. Jimmy, are you watching the screen?

I'm watching the screen.

All right.

That looks like elmer Fudd.

I'm hunting wabbits.

What's that, Mac?

You got a tight little man put me on you, don't you? No.

This is really children's childhood now.

This is ruining my childhood up and down the funny that I know.

Why is this going on the podcast?

What is that about?

That was on I just realized that only the people live on discord can see your face right now.

That is not nice.

I've been saving that all day for you. I saw the news. I knew you'd be upset.

Oh, I was not happy. Yeah.

This got copyright crane by Warner bros. Because they're trying to do new content now.

So we must be very quiet for wheel hunting weapons. You stink, don't it? My whole day was ruined and now my evening ruined because I just saw this and I can't unwash it from my eye.

You can't.

That is horrible.

You're going to need some eye bleach later.

Eye bleach.

The other meme that comes to my mind is the Tom and Jerry one where tom's stick in the double barrel inside of jerry's mouse hole and it pops out the other way about the one in the face.

Exactly.

Those gags are classic and they've ruined my childhood. Now I have nothing to look forward to. I'm going to go home and die a miserable death.

Nothing ever again.

No.

Well.

My news this week is I have decided that it is a long time to have a diet. Rob used to weigh £416. I went down to 350 and I went on the scale and I gained about 13, £15 since then. So I call that maintaining in my world. Maintaining. That's maintaining. But me and a couple of buddies were in a weight loss competition and essentially one of them is in west virginia. One of them is in Minnesota, close by. And we have a competition where whoever wins, we have to go to their location for, like, a weekend, and whoever loses has to help pay the other one to travel there. So we have to lose our goal weight by Thanksgiving.

And then they're flying you in first class.

Oh, no, we're probably going to drive, but who knows? Flights may be cheap by then.

I was going to say our gas could be $19 a gallon by then.

We don't know, but we don't know. circumstantially, we're going to do our best.

Yeah. So I am not part of this, and so good luck to all you guys doing that. Well, you cheat.

All you got to do is go on a slight diet because you work, like, 97 hours a day. So all you would do is just it would just fall off your body.

Yes.

We don't want to go against bones.

We've all seen me. I'm just skin and bones, right?

Besides that belt buckle that was eaten.

Ten years ago, that belt buckle used to be huge. It's still huge. You just can't see it. It shrunk in the wash. Well, after.

The first week on this diet, I lost £12. £12. That is me going off pump, low sugar diet. And I'm so sick of people on social media being like, oh, you got this, and then giving me all kinds of recommendations. It's not the encouragement I want. I just want to ignore the whole process.

What are they recommending?

Everything from Adam even was telling me that I should just go to bed on time, drink nothing but water for five days, go on a yogurt diet. I mean, all kinds of crazy things to extreme versions of keto. I just hate diet people. Maybe that's just me.

So what did I tell you to do?

Jump off a bridge? No, I told you I was going.

To lock you in the bathroom for a week. You just eat soap while you're in there?

I just thought that was part of the podcast prep.

No, that's what I wanted to do.

Okay, well, wouldn't eating soap be kind of like what his mom did to him?

That's kind of jim's fetish, to be honest. But as far as soap in his mouth spank him and that type of thing?

Yeah, blow bubbles.

Blow bubbles.

But wasn't bubbles Michael jackson's chimp?

This is very tangenty. Normally we do something about fish, but we'll get into that in a minute, eventually. But on Facebook today, I said that I'm so sick of having people like, oh, good for you, you can do it. Encouragement. I'm like, I don't need any of that crap.

You don't need encouragement?

I need fat shaming.

That's what I need, fat shaming.

So I went on my Facebook, I posted on there, right, and I said, Give me your best fat shaming. And I think the best one that I've seen all day. And trust me, I've only done this for half the day, and people have gone hog wild with fat shaming me. Apparently, they've been waiting for someone to ask. They said, hey, if this diet thing doesn't work out, at least your tits could make an Instagram account and they become famous. So that was the best one I've had so far all day.

That's incredible.

I laughed so even though that was better than mine. Yes.

What was? Adams what did you tell him? Adam?

Well, see, Rob said that he fell out of his chair laughing, and I asked him if he really fell out of the chair if the chair just finally gave up.

Oh, put it on hill from there.

Wow.

I love you, too.

And I can't believe that I'm the nice one of the whole bunch tonight, right? I know. Pretty cool.

So you got any other news, Jimmy?

No, I'm just upset about the elmer fudge thing, and I'll probably get over it.

But you got some news, adam no.

I'm good right now.

No. Is your governor opening up the state down on your neck of the wood?

He's your governor, too. First of all, let's not even go with that guy, because that'll give me a two hour tirade about limiting no.

We'Re here tirades for pet store. All right, so we'll get to that in a minute.

Yeah.

Hold on to your news.

We have news.

One of our fans was listening to the podcast and contacted me a while ago. His name is Dan B. For the sake of identity, right. And he's in southern Minnesota, closer to the cities, and he decided that he wanted to try doing some aquarium stands. So he contacted me and sent me a prototype for two and a half gallon on the wall stand. And it's amazing. I put pictures up on the lead to the group, my Facebook. You can go check it out. But it turned out really well. So shout out to you, Dan. He has a company that he does online, custom fixtures. Looks like kind of country style fixtures. So he'll be putting together something soon. But I wanted to give a thank you on Aaron. You'll be hearing a little bit more in the future about his endeavor. So, number one, thank you for the prototype. It worked out really well. Happy to give some feedback on that. And thank you.

And you put it on your new stand? Yeah.

And you gave me new lights.

Yes. Well, I've built your stand, too.

Yeah. We got a shrimp rack. It's capable of holding 22 and a half gallon tanks, so that'll be fun. Get that shrimp life going, order more shrimp from Joe Shrimp shack.

And what was interesting is it was pretty solid when we first started building it. I was kind of concerned about that, but it's rock solid. Yeah.

I sat on it.

So we know that it didn't break.

Like my chair. That's a lot of weight. I did not know that.

This is where we insert some boat noises.

There we go.

It's got to be a motor boating joke in there.

Oh, man.

Not on rob. I'm not a chance.

This is getting real classy. So since we have no other news, if you guys want to be part of the debauchery, come and join us again. Our website is Aquariumguyspodcast.com. At the bottom of the website, you'll find a link for discord. That's where we actually record these podcasts we do. We try to do every Monday night around seven Central. So join us. We have a bunch of people in Chat right now. And let me tell you, the Chat is blowing up gun control no bounds as I eat rv sandwich on Cam hashtag not my governor. So join the debauchery with us. And this is the only way you get to listen to the podcast and see us in person. We have cameras on. We're not that beautiful. Of people. And we're waiting, frankly, for this Joe rogan thing to pan out. So we can do video on spotify, because that'll be pretty awesome.

That'D be really cool.

That way we're not pulled off for saying the word COVID on YouTube.

COVID or turd wagon.

Right? That turd wagon. We have to incorporate that word. I forgot we had a meeting about this.

Yes.

Turd wagon. Yeah.

Turd wagon. Indeed. We're just going to change the name.

Of the podcast to the Turd Wagon, guys.

There we go. You know what? You can just name the whole podcast the Turd Wagon Podcast.

So before this gets flushed, Adam, let's get down into our normal topic. Sir. So we always ask, how did you get started in the fish hobby?

Well, to be quite honest, I actually started when I was like six or seven. I lived in Peru and they had a pond in my school there and.

They had wait, how was Peru in the was?

Not in the was in the late 80s, early 90s. God, you're a dick.

Okay, thank you for clarifying. Continue.

He thought you were with me for a second.

He was in Peru. He found a white lobster and like, I'm going to sell that for fish.

No. Were you in Peru, like, on one of those, you know, where you're hiding from people?

No, no, no. My dad had a job there, so I had to live there.

Continue. Ignore.

I'm sorry.

So anyway, they had this pond they were draining because they were going to clean it out and everything, and in it were basically feeder guppies, not endlers.

Endlers and pressure. They only have good fish down there.

Yeah.

Okay. I went and I took some home and I had them in a jar.

Did you have a license for those?

No, I did not. I brought them home and I just kept them in a jar and I changed the water out and feed them breadcrumbs and whatever flake food I could find. And that's when I got started with it. I was always in animals ever since I was little.

I thought that you're going to say your guppies had gluten allergy or something. I didn't know that's where that was going to go.

No, I've just always had animals ever since I could I would I've had them.

So what made you decide moving forward? You start in Peru, you start with feeder guppies. And you collected animals since then. Right. So what decided, hey, I should start selling these because I no longer like them?

What happened was in my town, they opened up a pet store. And this is in Peru? No, this is in when we lived in Grand rapids.

So when did you guys leave the witness protection program?

I was never in the witness protection program.

Jim.

Wait, he said 90s, right?

We missed so much space from how they went from Peru to the United.

States like 2 hours story here.

Okay, you go ahead. We'll quit interrupting. What? Quit being dicks. I don't think that's going to happen.

I don't think so either.

You're such a turd wagon.

Yeah.

Anyways, so they had the pet store there and they had opened up like a few weeks, I don't remember exactly, but it was called Pet North. Mark was the original owner. Mark and his wife carla, I think. And anyways, I found the pet store, of course, because you know how animal we are, we just find animals and we stick with them. So I volunteered my time there from twelve to like 14 or 15. And then Mark sold the store to another owner. And then she hired me because I would come in and volunteer and buy volunteer. I mean, I'd clean cages of like hamster cages and lizard cages and help people out and ring stuff up on the till. And I've been doing this since basically I was twelve. I'd read all kinds of animal books and that's how I kind of got started in the pet trade. And then when I graduated high school, I went and there was nothing else really there that I could do because I wasn't going to go to college. So I became manager of the pet store. And then I just like two years.

Later turned around and bought it at Grand rapids.

The one in Grand rapids. There was two. There was one in brainer and one in Grand rapids.

Yes. And our friend ty, his wife used to work at the one in Grand rapids and that's how she got started. So Adam, what age were you when you started out owning your own pet store?

I want to say I was 23.

23 years old.

I bought it at 23.

So after having at least eight or nine years of experience, you felt you could just step in there and handle this on your own, correct?

Yeah. Well, I was already doing a lot of it. And by a lot of it, I mean I was already doing the ordering and doing the purchases for two weeks, and I was keeping track of everything, the money, the deposits. So I was like, well, and the owner at the time wanted to sell it, and she wanted to be done with it, so I figured out a way to buy it.

Basically you sold a kidney?

Was that no, I had some money saved up, and I got some other.

Funds, and my grandmother peru the drug money in Peru?

No, my grandma helped me out a little bit, and I set up a business plan, and I got a loan from the bank, and there's a lot of steps to even buying an established business. And if you find a pet store that is the owner is getting old and wants to retire, try looking at seeing if they'll sell it to you first if you want to do it instead of starting a brand new one. Unless it's like a really crappy one. Because once your reputation goes, then it's not worth you know what I mean? It's not good anymore. You you can always like, everybody at the store knew me as the pet store guy. Like, everybody in the town knew me as the pet store guy, and then they knew my brother as a cell phone guy because there's literally only two brown people in the whole town of Grand rapids that aren't Native American.

It sounds like you're profiling to me. You're profiling your own self. I can't believe this.

Well, this is how it is. It's northern Minnesota.

And what's your brother's name again?

Omar.

That's right. Omar and Adam.

Yeah.

And so I was selling to the previous owner, and I've known Adam since he was about 15 years old. How old are you now, Adam?

I am 38.

38 years old. So we've known each other a long time, and so that's why you get a lot of crap from us, and it's just a lot of fun. But there are so many life lessons that you've learned with the pet store and the do's and don'ts. Why don't you tell us some of the things to do with a pet store that would make you successful when.

You had it, where you're spending your money? I don't know.

Down to the tricks and trade, man. I want it all, man. There's foreplay before these questions.

No, we know each other. There's no foreplay.

All right, what is all your secrets? How did you make your empire?

It's a lot of work. You basically have to it's like 80 hours week. So the one thing that I did was I literally did everything. That means I would come in in the morning, clean up the whole store, because I carried at the time, I was like an original mom and pop shop. And by that it wasn't dedicated to just one thing, it was dogs, cats, birds, small animals, everything that you needed, except for, like, I didn't do horses and that type of stuff, but fish, of course, that type of thing. And eventually I kind of had to angle it more towards a specialist store, towards what I was interested in. And I tried to do more of that stuff because there's like, dog and cats are pretty common, and they carry the same stuff. And so I went to the stuff that has a higher margin and a higher markup. So my reptile stuff, fish stuff, fish, livestock, reptiles, feeders, that type of stuff is where you make your money. You don't really make it in the dog food. Like a bag of dog food costs. You sell it, everybody goes, oh, dog food is expensive, but not even really. The stores make it, make their money on dog food. I had for my store, I was on a third tier level because I bought so much dog food. And then just down the street, it's an lnm Fleet supply. They were selling the dog food cheaper than I could even buy it. And when I called the wholesaler on it, they go, well, they just buy more volume. And I'm like, how is there another tier above third tier? Well, that's for specialty stores, so it goes off into those things. So you just have to be very careful where you spend your money, and you have to build your reputation. Like I said, everybody knew that they could come to me, and I'd help them. This is kind of pre Internet thing. So I tried to learn as much as I could with books and everything, and I'd read fish magazines and reptile magazines and bird magazines, and I try to keep up with stuff as much as possible.

We get a question a lot of times. What's the markup? You're no longer in the business, so you can give us a lot of secrets. So what is the average mark up on some of the products? Because you're mentioning before that dog food costs $50 a bag. You sell it for $55. That's not a lot of percent. So on your items that you are trying to really make money on, what's the percent point that you're seeing on the cash value items?

Oh, that's where your markup is. It's like 75.

What is the markup? Buy something for five, sell it for nine. There you go.

Adam and I have had so many conversations about dog food. And Adam, how much money did you have tied up in dog food?

I want to say there was like when I first bought the store, there was $20,000 worth of dog food sitting.

There and 400 bags of dog food. He would make $5 a bag. So four times five, he'd make two grand having $20,000. And you could make more money off a pair of guppies than you could off a bag of dog food and Not Have $50 Tied Up.

Yeah, I mean, those would be some guppies, but we get the analogy.

I mean, you buy a pair of Guppies for what, $2 a pair? And you're selling them for 899 a pair? You just made the same amount of money on a pair of guppies.

Same Percentage.

Same percentage, same dollar. $5, $5. You're making $5 profit or $5 profit. You've got $50 tied up or you've got $2 tied up in a pair of guppies. And so you could have a hell of a lot more livestock than you could food, because you just can't compete against the big box stores. Unfortunately.

So how did you go through $20,000 of dog food before the expiration date went out?

Well, that was easy. He's Busy.

I was busy. I was the number. So for neutral. Natural choice. Before they got bought out by Mars, I was the number one or two distributor of it in the northern half of the state. I mean, I was doing huge, massive orders from the wholesalers. They loved my orders because I was doing so much.

You had several pallet racks full of dog food. Three levels of dog food. Yeah.

And that's what they did, was they brought it in, and all it did was it rotated your money. You never really made anything. So what ended up happening is Mars bought out neutral natural choice, and then all of a sudden, you couldn't get neutral. So for two or three weeks I had enough stocked up. But then they had an issue with the dog food, so they couldn't get it to people. They couldn't even get it to the wholesalers.

They had distribution problems.

Yeah, it was a distribution problem, and it was a it was a manufacturing problem.

And this is the Mars Candy Company? Correct.

Yes.

The Mars Candy Company owns, I want to say, three or four different brands of dog food.

You just saw snickers and start barking.

Well, believe it or not, that's what some of the food waste goes into.

Make snickers and then throw the rest of the snickers into the dog food.

Not the chocolate part, but yeah, they throw the byproducts into the dog food and that's how you get a bunch of the different meals and stuff. Every dog food is good to a certain extent. But then we could go into some horror stories of what I heard about neutral and some of the other ones. But let's not do that because that will get us sued anyway.

You Sued?

We're here at the store.

But we're here about the store. So what ended up happening was I want to say well, Jim would know. He was in my store. I mean, what was about a fourth of the store was dog food. Dog and cat food, basically.

Yeah. You had a lot of money. Most of your money tied up in dog food, not producing a whole lot of profit. And $20,000 sitting there to make $2,000, where if you had $20,000 of other product being at fish supplies, rodent supplies make a hell of a lot more money.

But that's also part of the business. I mean, you need traffic. And if every month I have to go buy a bag of dog food, suddenly I'm walking in your store.

Yes. But then what ends up happening is you come into the store and you buy the dog food and you buy maybe a treat. I actually, believe it or not, made a better profit margin on the dog treats than I would the dog food, because there are little treats that people see and then they grab as they walk out the door, my dog would like this or my cat would like this. And so the profit margin for my fish and basically every other section was dar near triple my dog food section. So I started to focusing more on that, especially after I lost the number one dog food that I had due to distribution problems.

So you lost your number one dog food and then you started turning to other things, correct?

Yes, that's exactly what I did, is I turned more to rodents and reptiles and fish, that stuff, and it's not really the livestock. And that brought me more money for my buck than the dog food. It took a little while because my store was so used to having just this massive cash flow, but it was never any profit. And so I turned it into more profitable. And then the cash flow, the numbers went down, but the profit went up. Does that make any sense? Did I explain it right?

Total sense. I got a buddy that owns three gas stations and he told me, I'd rather sell you a candy bar and a bottle of pop because I'll make more money than I will off of a tank full of gas. I mean, on a tank full of gas, these guys are making five to gallon. Consider you're taking 1520 gallons, you're making a buck 40 and stuff, and they'll make that off of a bottle of pop and a candy bar. Today I paid for a candy bar, a dollar 79 for Snickers, and now a bottle of pop out in the country, in this neighborhood is 229 a bottle. And you can go to your local Walmart and buy a two liter bottle for a buck any day of the week. That's where these stores, these Sea stores, are making more money off of the pizza and the other crap they sell you than they are on the gasoline. So gasoline is kind of a lost leader, as usual. And there again, they've got all that money tied up. Gasoline has to be paid for within, I think, two or three business days, if I'm not correct. They don't get any leeway and waiting to pay for the gasoline. So to be a small business owner. You have to have a lot of cash just kind of sitting there on the shelf looking at you.

I mean, that's what to learn about any business working for Walmart. I was for a manager for about two years, going to clean up other stores and just in the electronics department, right. The entire department is if they can break even, it's a great year. So if you go to that back TV wall at any department stores, they're losing up to 5% per TV, losing money to sell tvs just to get to the door, not on sales. That's just tag price. So any sales go further than that to get you in the door. So most of those tvs are either break even as menial as 1% or as a loss of 5%. But they'll make 120% on the hdmi.

Cable, on the cable on the wall mounts. I mean, the walmarts are anywhere from $75 to $150 for a Walmart.

It's not just a walmart. It's Target. Pick a department store. It's all the same business model.

Exactly.

So after you figured out that dog food was a loss winner, right. You moved in all the diversity and you said rodents, reptiles, snakes, birds, all of those diversity, what were the biggest winners? Because, again, people are going to listen to this, and maybe they're thinking of opening up their own pet store. A lot of these people are just thinking of like, I want to do just fish. Well, as much as this is a fish podcast, it may have not been the most profitable. So what was the most profitable besides accessories for dogs in your pet store?

Believe it or not, it was actually my fish and reptile departments. I don't know if that was because I focused on them more. Yeah, somebody put on the chat. hermit crabs. hermit crabs are very profitable. But what it is, is I can get a Baby Leopard gecko because I have reptile contacts. I can buy a baby leopard gecko for $4, maybe $5. I get it shipped in. By the time you have shipping and everything in you have that baby Leopard gecko is going to be eight, nine, and then I'd turn around and have $30 on it. And this was pretty major Internet days where you could order a live animal, and then it would be shipped to your so you'd order it on Monday. Tuesday it would be shipped, and then Wednesday you'd have it. They had to come to pet stores to buy stuff like this. And so that's where your markup is. What the hell was it, like $20, $27.

You'd have to sell four bags of dog food, have $200 tied up into four bags of dog food to make $20, or have $9 tied up into a leopard gecko to make $20.

Yeah. And then on top of it, people would go and they'd want to buy a kit. So then you'd get a kit set up but then they'll come in every week for feeder insects, for that leopard gecko, whether it's live crickets, live meal, worms. And that's where I really made a lot of money because I was selling in my area, I was selling, I want to say 15,000 crickets a week. And I had priced it out to what did it come to? Like nine cents a dozen or something like that. But I was selling them for a buck 37. So that's where you make your money on, is the food for that? When I had snakes before the city got all pissy, that's another story.

Oh, city got mad.

Oh, yeah, I remember that. But back to crickets really quick. Adam sold 15,000 crickets, and these are people that have to walk in the door every single week, 52 weeks out of the year, because nobody goes home with more than 100 crickets if they're feeding a lot of stuff, because crickets grow fast. And Adam, how many different sizes of crickets did you have that you have.

Three different I had three different sizes. I had small, medium and large. And as I thought about, I should have charged different prices for the different sizes, but I was making such a big mark up on them that it was kind of like they're all the same price.

Yeah, the cost is the same. Yeah.

I know some stores will make a different price, and I know that some of the stores up north would in like two towns is over. They would charge different prices for different sizes. But I'm like, you buy them from the same place I do, and people would realize that and then just come to me because my prices ended up being cheaper, even though my profit margin was better on them, just because I was honest and sold them all the same price.

Yeah, I mean, pinhead crickets, which literally are the size of a pinhead, if you can imagine what a little snuff box is like for copenhagen or whatever you want to call it. I mean, they would send like a thousand in one of those and it would be the same cost as a thousand extra large crickets, which you'd have to send in a box the size of a twelve pack of pop.

How do you divvy those out? Do you use like a scalpel and a magnifying glass?

Oh, penhead crickets. You just put them in tubes. You put old toilet paper rolls in there, not full ones, but like empty toilet paper rolls. And you put egg crates in that in there. You also put a lot of moisture because they have a tendency to dry out, and you want to put them in a smaller cage. Also, for the Pin heads, I always put vaseline around the edges of the cage because they have a tendency to climb. They find the littlest nook and cranny and then they get out. So the vaseline stops them from getting out.

I'm writing this down. So lube your crickets. Keep going.

Yes, lube the cricket. I think what Rob is talking to is about how do you count them?

That was my question.

See, I just dump a tube in the bag and then I pinch off the corner. And after you do it for so long, you get used to what size get pretty. How many dozen is you count out.

A dozen, you just like tap out. That looks like a dozen. Here's a dozen.

Well, okay. So I tap the tube into the bag and then I flatten the bag out a little bit without smushing the cricuts. And then I knew kind of where a dozen were. And by a dozen I mean I was given like twelve to 14, sometimes 15. That was my dozen. It was like a baker's dozen. And people like that, because they got a couple of extra, they thought it was good. I got to the point where I could just tell by looking at them how many were in there and throw them in there and be good to go.

What I do at my store is I have a cricket counter, which is a looks like a tube, and it's got a square lid on top. And you can go up the side of the cricket cage and catch all these crickets. And when they sell you crickets, they're sold to you by weight. So at this size, you get this many and they're pretty damn accurate. So what I do is like over my store, I've got a cricket counter. What it's called? It's just a plastic tube. And we have it marked off for 25, 50, 75 and 100 crickets. And it's really pretty accurate within five, eight crickets. And we use that over there in our store. And once I got those cricket tubes for my store, my profits went up. The amount of crickets they were giving went down because they were always giving extra. Like Adam said, you know, try to give bakers dozen, but rather than give you twelve, they're getting them 20. And that's where my profitability went up too. Once they got these cricket counters, and I think you can get them from bought any cricket company for about seven or $8. And it's the best money you'll spend if you're selling crickets and you can make a ton of money off of crickets. Adam, what's the price of a 1000 crickets right now? Wholesale?

When I did it, it was $13 a thousand? I want to say wholesale.

Yeah. I think right now they're up to like $16 1000 or $15 a $1,000.

Okay.

And that's at the one in Minnesota, right?

Yes.

Okay. And also the one in Minnesota is the only one left, I think, in the country that does the domestica cricket. Everybody else had to switch over to the banded ones.

They have another warehouse down south where they're raising cockroaches now.

There's big money in cockroaches too. I never really had too many cockroaches, but I started getting into them and I started breeding those too. And people with bearded dragons and that really liked them. And those things were basically I'd feed them vegetable scraps and some high protein dog and cat food samples that had very low on the pesticides and stuff in it. And I would sell those for, I want to say like a bucket of cockroach.

Yeah. And they are not cheap at all. I just did the math on 1000 crickets. I sell crickets for a dollar 44 dozen. So you get 83 dozen of 1000 crickets. That's $120 from $120 retail from $15. So there is money to be made in crickets. So Adam was making selling 15,000 crickets. So you're making about fifteen hundred dollars a week on crickets and you can pay your rent on that?

Well, that's another story for rent. But yeah, if you're smart with your store, yes. And that takes almost no square footage either. That's the best part of it is because how big was my story? I want to say it was like.

If I remember correctly, say almost 3000 square foot.

I think yeah, I want to say it was almost 3000 sqft. So you have to divide how much you need each square foot to make. So each square foot I think, had to pull in like $14 in sales. I went by profit and that's how I tried to figure my stuff out.

If it's not paying the rent, then it needs to go or it needs to be changed up. And we've talked about that too before with your tanks. If your tanks aren't producing what you need it to produce, then it's time to I think everybody needs one favorite tank to hold your favorite stupid ENDLER guppy in. But you want to try to make some money. But crickets are very profitable. And the store I have in my little town, we're doing 4000 crickets a week and I have automatically being shipped. I don't have to touch them, don't have to look them, because my help does it all. But I tell you what, that pays a lot of rent and you can get yourself a nice cricket keeper for about $150. They will keep the crickets in so they don't get loose in your store. They're nice and deep. So as long as you cut the crickets low, you're not going to lose any in the store and have them running around. So crickets are very profitable. What else made you get a lot of money?

Light bulbs. repel light bulbs, fish tank heaters. Fish food was really profitable. I tried to carry the high end stuff whenever I could find it and people could tell the difference. Frozen fish food was really profitable. That would always go. But what ended up happening was pet stores started disappearing after 911 and I don't know exactly why. And then 2008 happened. And so a lot of stuff got jostled, especially up in my neck of the woods, because there was a pet store in just about every town. There was one in bemidji, one in Grand rapids, one in hibbing, one in duluth, and those are the big main metropolitan areas for northern Minnesota. And the stores just started disappearing after 2008, and I think it was a combination of rent and then people losing their jobs and just the recession itself. And so you lost your wholesalers. I had a hard time finding wholesalers, and the wholesalers would combine, and it was just hard for them to deliver to me. So I used to be able to get stuff once a week from wholesaler a and then they're like, yeah, we're only coming up once a month now. Why? Well, you're the only store that's left on our thing, so that's what we're doing. But I needed stuff every week, and so I had to turn around and find other wholesalers and the territories. I did not realize how territorial wholesalers were to keep their stuff.

So wait a second. You're saying that they're territorial on one hand, but on the other hand, they're like, you're not that important that we're going to come out there very often anymore?

Well, it was because of the distance I was from a and by major metropolitan I'm like the Twin Cities is considered metro. duluth is borderline metro because it's not that big. It is, but it isn't. And so it wasn't worth it for them to ship fish or ship dry goods and stuff.

Well, it used to be easy when you would order, you'd have to have a $500 minimum order. Then all of a sudden, now we're going to come once a month and you have to have a $3,000 minimum order.

Yeah.

And then all of a sudden you're looking for stuff to buy to get it in that one month. The second you get something delivered, then somebody walks in your store says, yeah, I need this. Well, I can get it to you in 30 days crap. Because now you've got the Internet to deal with.

You've lost the sale, right?

Yes. And that's about what happened, is stuff started changing and the Internet came out and they would sell stuff online cheaper than I could buy it, like I was saying earlier, a third tier market from the wholesaler just because they would set it all in a warehouse. And then a lot of, like, Ralph C. hagen was one of my number one stuff, and I brought it in because it was a European company and it was a little bit better quality stuff, even though it was made in China, the stuff seemed to last a little bit longer. And then they said, to hell with wholesalers. And then they became their own wholesaler. And so there's a lot of competition, and it changed very quickly, like within six months to a year, from the way it was going. And I don't know if it was just because so many stores were going out of business or the internet opened it up that much that fast, or.

What was going on to paint the whole thing before. Come 2003, we had stabilized internet where people could shop online. Come 2008, the internet was prepped and suddenly we had the economic crash. No one's putting money into hobbies, they're trying to save their pennies. Just like the beginning of COVID No one's going to go out and buy a brand new TV until it was stabilized. So now we're starting to see people are opening up again and now there's demand back, so there's that fluctuation. So all these pet stores, all the wholesalers come 2008 all started suffering because no one's buying hobbies, they're buying necessities, they're buying other things to try to prep for the economic stimulus and the first thing to get slapped is entertainment and hobbies. So all the wholesalers suffered conglomerates and made it difficult for pet stores to own and they may still have had traffic. You were a good pet store, you did your homework. That's why you're probably confused all I couldn't just order well, you're not one of the stores affected because if you're weak, people aren't just going to show up to the weak ones. If they're going to spend any dollar, it's going to be the one that's worthwhile. And you may have the destination station. Just Like I Like To Pick On Some Of The Diversity We Have Now in the Metro because there's Plenty Of Fish Stores Down There, and given The Destination stores versus Me visiting Ten Stores In A Day for A Trip Down To The Cities if I Don't Have The Money In My Pocket. And I want this one thing. I'm not going to suddenly visit all these stores. I'm going to go to the one store that matters because I'm driving three 4 hours to these different stores. Pure economics is clearly what did all these pet stores and that's why you saw like you're talking your Ben Franklin, which is kind of like a hobby Lobby of the past, is what died throughout the recession. After the 2001 to 2010, most of.

Those stores dropped face in our neck of the woods. Once the big box stores got up here, the walmarts, the targets and stuff and then you can go there and get your dog food and your fish food and yeah, it might be just the cheapest crap you can get, but all of a sudden that was go to one store and get everything. I remember when I was in the grocery business and we made fun of people, we said, oh, nobody going to go buy their groceries at Walmart and buy oil for their car and put it in the same cart. Boy were we wrong. Hugely. People just right now all they want to do is save a buck and have instant gratification and and that's what back to the pet store. So you have all these local suppliers. You have your guys breeding angel fish, you got your guys breeding canaries, you guys breeding parakeets. And all of a sudden, they were selling to five or six stores. All of a sudden, one store goes away and stuff. Eventually all these guys quit, just quit doing it. And so all of a sudden now it's hard to get hold of some of this stuff. I had a person that I bought all my birds from, and I would sell 75 to 100 pair keeps. Every week, I get four cages from her on Tuesday night and Wednesday, I'd go out there and I'd sell them all. And what she tried to do is she tried to get into the high end stuff like the macaws and the African grays the birds are getting $1,500 for. And what she found out after about two years is that she still had to go back and raise parakeets and canaries the cheaper birds because she could move them a lot quicker. And that's what paid for her big birds. And so she just wanted to do big birds, which a lot of us want to do. Like, we're talking about Steaver bickie from Angels. Plus, he says, I'd rather sell 100 high end fish than sell 100 cheap fish.

The stores evolved into the service centers that you can get stuff and get the expertise where no one offers anything else. And that's what Adam did in that clear conversion. He went from being a dog food store to being a specialist store. And that's why you didn't get to see a lot of the change. So, for instance, the crickets that you guys hammered home, walmart is not going to carry crickets, not any dogs. That's the thing that will keep people through the door. It's high margin. It's unique. That's just one example. The others, like you said, the fish department or certain heaters and lamps, they sell one size of heater at my local department store. That's all they sell just to have something on hand. And I'm surprised they sell heaters at all. You go to an actual pet store, they're going to have every variety that you need, plus an expertise of, hey, what's right for me. And they know that that's what's going to keep it. That's the only way stores run nowadays, at least successful ones. And now we're seeing the rise from the traditional pet store to these extremely specialized physical locations like we talked about Steve ricky, he's online. He sells exclusively online. He sells at one high end angel. He'll go upwards of $60 for a single, $600 for a pair, right at really high end best quality angels, award winning, that type of stuff. But we're also seeing like you were talking about your buddy Paul from tamed Waters. He's an example of something that all he brings in is just the purest, most specialized fish. He doesn't have a lot of bread and butter stock. And this is a gentleman in St. Paul, correct.

Phil.

Not Paul.

Yeah, in Minneapolis.

Yeah.

He brings in the high end betas, and he brings in like, the high end, super rare fish. That's what gets people in the door, is the super high end stuff. And that's what I ended up doing, Phil. He's got a nice little shop, little.

Tiny shop, the Giants, and he had the most beautiful pair. And I sat there going, do I spend $80 on two fish? Do I spend $80 on two? What am I going to do with them? But they're gorgeous. Never seen them anywhere else. I've been to a lot of wholesalers, never seen them. And so gives your wallet a heat wave. Yes, very much.

Now, you have a lot of specialty product. What type of hours? Because you didn't have staffing, did you?

No, at first, I basically did everything for the first let's see, I had it for six years. I want to say, I want to say six years.

So you said 80 hours. What does that equal on a weekly regiment? Like you were doing? X water changes. So all tanks had to be changed once.

Yes, all tanks had to be changed.

Through maintenance, not sales.

Okay. So basically I would come in in the early morning, and because I still sold puppies, that's a whole nother thing. Puppies brought people into my store. Before you guys say anything, they were not puppy mill puppies. Because there's a way to tell. I literally got them from local people. But the stupid thing is, in Minnesota, the way they write the regulations are you have to kind of almost buy them from puppy mills. What I would consider a puppy mill. So it's kind of a catch. Eventually you just kind of have to stop carrying puppies. But everybody likes to come in and see the puppies. So I would get up and I'd be at work. I'd open at ten in the morning.

Puppies make a huge mess. I mean, you got to come in how many hours early just to get the puppy pen cleaned up before customers came in.

Well, then what was the checklist? Clean the puppy pens, change at eight.

In the morning, clean the puppy pen, make sure the store doesn't stink, throw all the garbage out, check all the food and water for all the birds, check all the food and water for the hamsters, make sure they haven't killed anybody, check the rodents. Then in my rodent breeding room, check everybody in there, make sure they've got all food and water, and hopefully, if there's no problems or complications, you're done by the time you open up at ten in the morning. And then you close at six. I'd close at six, and I'd be done by sometimes seven or 08:00. Trying to recheck on water, recheck on food make sure everything is clean. I had it so that like mondays were fish cleaning day, tuesdays was reptile day, wednesdays was bird cleaning day. Everything was cleaned once a week. Sundays were hamster days because Sundays I had shortened hours. But just because I had shortened hours didn't mean I wasn't there long. Eventually I got to just being closed Sundays because it wasn't a busy day. And I just took that to clean up a lot of stuff around the store that was usually rodent cleaning day. But, I mean, you're busy all the time and that was one of the things that I should have done better, was bring employees in.

Did you get a half day off? How many? You said 80 hours. Was that an accurate figure?

I did 80 hours weeks, easy. Well, and that might even be short. I mean, there were 1012 hours days. And then if you get orders, orders are towards like a Thursday, Friday. I always tried to bring in my fish and lizards and everything and have it here by Thursday. Dry goods was also a Thursday, so that weekends are your busy time so that you have it ready for the weekend because everybody's out of work. And so that's when you really get hammered on your Friday afternoons. And saturdays is when you get super busy.

So yeah, and then throw in an account. You have late trucks, early trucks. They'll call and say, we're going to be there at 09:00 tonight because we're so far behind or the roads are bad or there's been a blizzard or just a thousand other things. So it's a lot like farming. I mean, you just got to decide, you know, there's a thousand fires, which one needs to be put out first, and so it gets to be a whole lot like farming. So, yeah, to have some employees would be very helpful. But there's very few things that you can control when you own a business. And labor is probably your number one, because you know what? Your rent is still the same every month. Your electricity bills can be the same within 25, $30, unless you have a really cold winter. And there's very few things that you can control, but you can control labor. It can control your buying. And you have to buy with your head and not with your heart. Just because you like these big ARANDAS and you haven't sold one, but you've got a tank full of 20 ARANDAS that cost you $20 a piece. If you're not moving them, you probably should get that tank, turn around to whatever else you can sell and make a profit. I make more money on neons, and I have up to 50 on a price break. So if you buy one, it's this price. If you buy ten, it's this price. If you buy 25, it's this price. And if you buy 50, it gets to be pretty cheap.

If you have a rob. He buys 200, he gets a special, special price.

What you need to do is you need to set yourself apart and try to stay ahead of everybody else. And just when you think you got to figure it out, the rules change.

And that's how it usually is. Every time you get something one fire put out, you're like, yes, I can take a break. No, something else comes up. And then you got two more fires to put out because you didn't notice things.

Yeah, I remember when you used to have all these puppies, and then you'd have to load them all up in your van and take them to the vet, and you'd have 15 puppies, and it's like wrangling cats. You go there and people go, well, puppies are expensive. Well, go get shots for 15 puppies, and vet checks on 15 puppies, and there goes a lot of money out of your pocket before you even try to sell these darn things.

Well, then the guarantee them for a year in the state of Minnesota, which I had no problem with doing any of these things, but it's like every time then you have to deal with animal nut job, animal rights, people that go and they go, you're buying from puppy mills? And it's like, no. It got to the point where I literally could show people the addresses, and they'd be like, oh, that's 20 miles away. Yeah, that's not a puppy mill. That's private person that just had an accidental litter. And I took them in, and I vet checked them, vaccinated them, made sure they were dewormed and everything, and put them in the put them in the tank or not the tank. Sorry.

Yeah, don't don't put the tank in the tank. I remember people would come in and razza, saying, well, you have too many puppies in this cage. Well, this, first of all, is not their forever home. They're on display for the day they're going back to a bigger thing. And you know what? If this dog doesn't sell in the next four weeks, we're not putting it down. We're not the pound, you know? Yeah. I mean, these puppies are here until they they go to a good a good home. Then, like Adam said, you have to guarantee them for up to a year. So now this dog, after it's a year old, has hypothesia, which, of course, you have no idea if that's going to happen. Then you got to go back to the breeder, and it's just so much work and so much time consumed just trying to sell puppies. That that gets to be where a lot of our stores that I used to deliver to kind of got out of puppies, too, because it was just killing them, the amount of money being spent. And then people would come back a year and a half, two years later and say, well, this dog had a defect. When did you. Discover that. Well, my cousin Bob says he's got hypophagia. Well, have you taken him to a vet? Well, no. Are you going to pay for it? Well, you pay for the vet first and then we'll talk about it. Where else do you get a one year guarantee? You can't get a one year guarantee on a clock radio for $12.

I've literally never heard of a one year guarantee. That's why I'm like beside myself.

No Minnesota State. Yeah.

Minnesota State.

Exactly.

What if your dog or if your chihuahua jumps off the couch and breaks his leg?

What if it's snuck of snickers bars in the Mars dog food?

That's correct.

That type of stuff, it happens. So Adam going through this and I just want to clarify some things because we take a lot for granted, right? I have a lot of friends that have had pet stores. I deal with pet stores in the regular Jimmy wholesales. You've had a pet store. There's a lot of things that we take for granted. So some of the things that have been brought up and I just want to state the obvious, right? In a pet store, especially for fish, you have to have at least 20 tanks. That would be like three Mars racks. You want your bread and butter stock, which is your guppies, your neon tetras, your corridors, play goes, stuff like that. You want your semi aggressive product which start with angel fish going all the way up to some of the cyclists oscars, stuff like that. And then you want your feeder array, which is some of the cold water goldfish, and then some of your feeder fish, which you may not encourage most people nowadays, really, if you hear all the professionals don't feed feeder fish, but people are still going to have a demand for it because they're looking for a very cheap fish to try out a tank cycle. A tank. Whatever the case may be, you still have to have them on supply. So that is the bread and butter stock. Past that, past those 20 tanks, those three racks, that's where you get into some of the specialty stuff. That's where you have your weird laymandlers. That's where you have maybe a salt water rack. That's where you have maybe those seahorses that people throw pennies in because they hope to make a wish.

Now you're just being a dick.

Yeah, he is right.

So those are the obvious and turd wagon. Again, more obvious things that we take for granted is how the filtration does. Everything is done on a budget. You want to make it look presentable. So if you go to different pet stores, they'll have a lot of old decorations on hand. They'll make it look nice, they'll put live plants in and generally they'll only have stuff that they sell if they're going to put decorations. It's going to be a live plant with a price tag. If they're going to have gravel, guess what? They have a bag of it below that you can buy yourself. So it's stuff that they have on hand. And as far as the functioning items, they're heating the room, they're not necessarily heating the fish tanks, because again, that's more costs on your bottom line. I mean, how as big as your electric bill at them?

Well, okay, so my electric bill, it was like $700 a month. And then what I ended up doing was I had in my store 56 fish tanks. I had the whole gym remembers, I had the whole wall, and that was fish tanks. And then in the back I had brackish and salt water, and then basically the whole wall, it was 255. And then it was tens, 20 longs and 15 gallons all alongside the wall. And it was, what, a 30 foot wall? Jim, I want to say I would.

Say it's probably a 50 foot wall.

Okay, yeah, so that makes more sense. And the first two rows are fished tanks and full of fish, and then underneath it, I had the bags of gravel, the bags of sand, that type of stuff for people. And then I had fish food all along, fish food and fish heaters and fish plants and decorations and that type of stuff there. And when I bought the store, she had every individual tank hooked up to a back filter, and then on top of it, it was hooked up to a gravel system. And then on top of that, there was air blowing in to hook up the underground system, so it made it easy to clean. And then what I ended up doing was I ended up putting sponge filters in every single tank, and my electric bill dropped over $300 in one month. I actually had somebody from the city coming in because it dropped so fast.

They were like, what did you do?

And I'm like, I just switched out from every tank having a back filter, and every tank had a heater. And so it was actually easier to just heat the whole area than it was to keep my store up a little more. It was cheaper to heat up the store a little more than it was to have a heater in every tank on the back for the room.

I mean, to go down the whole thing, you're having way easier luck doing these things. That's why if you see a lot of the old pet stores, they haven't converted from these undergraduate filters is because they work. They're paid for, and they don't break. They're just there. They work, there's. No pumps, motors, anything they have to do, it makes water changes for them easier, just general maintenance, so it just makes sense. And they don't have to worry about cycling a tank because they have a tank filled with sponge filters that are already pre cycled. So if they need to start up a new tank over, they drain it, wipe it, throw a sponge filter in and it's holding the cycle in the giant sponge filter. So it just makes sense to do everything as low cost as possible while making your tanks look presentable.

And the other thing that Adam did that was really smart is he moved all his goldfish up towards the front door which was constantly being opened in our Minnesota winters. It's cold as heck and those goldfish just thrived up there right by the door. So the first thing you did when you walked in his door, you saw 55 gallon tanks full of goldfish and 30 gallon tanks full of goldfish and stuff. And those tanks were nice and cool. And in the summer, sometimes Adam would have to put like a curtain over it so they wouldn't get so much sun, so they would start alging up and stuff. But those goldfish did great and sold a lot of them.

So Jimmy has this wonderful way. You have a tipper tie. It's an old unit that they use to clamp sausage, right, for food products.

Yeah. What it is, it's just an aluminum staple that's put on like when you go to your grocery store and you buy your Jimmy Dean sausage in that roll and it's got that metal clip on the end. And when I was at Sequence Farms 20 some years ago, they have pneumatic tipper type machines, which is they're air driven and so all they do is they twist the bag, they put it.

In there and it pneumatically just slaps on a ring.

It slaps on a ring and cuts the tip of the plastic off. And those are dangerous as heck and you have to be really careful because it will cut your finger off if you would have to get your finger in there. When I was under 20 years ago, I bought a tipper type machine for $500. And I remember making payments on it for a long time and I remember explaining to my wife at the time why I bought this. But you get 10,000 staples is about $100, bill. 10,000 staples will go a long ways. So for me, when I was doing wholesaling doing a lot of stores, I could go out there and do 200 bags in an hour by myself and not burning my fingers up with the rubber bands. And now, just recently, our friends over in Wells fargo, Nancy, fell and broke her hand and she was unable to use the rubber bands that they've been using for years. So I gave her my tipper time machine to use and now she's holding it for ransom. She says she's not giving it back. Little does she know, storm the store and riot and take it back someday here when her hand is better. But she goes, I can't believe I've been tying rubber bands for all these years when you can just take this big staple machine. They're very simple, they're very expensive. They're made in Germany. And my first show that I went to down in Florida in Orlando, the tipper tie guys were there showing their wares and stuff. But it's very expensive.

So if you're looking to find one for yourself, for your own fish room, or for your own store purposes, we have stores that listen to our podcast. You can look on Amazon or a lot of the food packing places, and you can find yourself another type of tipper time machine. Again, it's the same thing that you see, like, in a Jimmy John sausage container. So, again, these are all food grade products to try to make a full on seal, which is what you need for airtight bags. And you can get them for about that $500 price still.

Yeah, that's where it starts out. And you can spend a lot more money on the magic ones that are run by air and stuff. But what I really like about them is you have a small tech oxygen. You squirt in the oxygen, you spin the bag, you crimp it, and you go on to the next bag. It's none of the wasting. I mean, when I helped Nancy and Jeff up in fargo not too long ago, before I gave him my machine to use, I was using rubber bands, and the cuticles of my fingers were bleeding. After about 15 bags, I stopped up there on a Saturday afternoon. They were super busy. I helped him out.

Hey, Rob, how badly did you want one of those machines? When we were bagging all those cichlids.

That scrap our editor, and we went down to southern Minnesota in the Metro and went to Andrew Henderson. He's the breeder of the year currently for the Minnesota Quarantine Society. And we did that big rescue. It's on Ohio fish rescue. YouTube we still have to upload part two on their YouTube. But, man, we went through we filled a, uhaul, trailer full of fish, like, top to bottom.

It was about 25% of a, uhaul, trailer. The the one whole side of it was mostly taken up by a big fish rack.

Right.

So but it was mostly full.

It would be the small, uhaul, trailer that we would have filled. And my hands were raw, chapped and bleeding, like, by the end of it, because I did all the bagging. Oh, man, my hands hurt. So I would have tend definitely like that tipper time machine.

Yeah, it's the best money you'll spend. If you're a busy fish store and you don't have a tipper time machine, you definitely need to do it. I don't know how I'm going to get mine back from my friends that owned the tropical fish shop up in West fargo. But I'm going to have to go back and take it back, because tonight, before I came over, I did six bags of fish for somebody, and my fingers hurt from using rubber bands.

Well, then you had tourette I don't have tourette just when you're doing the bag.

Yes, temporary tourette. I was f bombing.

So the other things to take for granted is nets. People talk about net dip. You've seen an offer, maybe Walmart had a bucket that they threw stuff in that they never washed out. And when you do this, make sure that you're putting the entire net in solution when you're doing this because you have essentially a giant petri dish. Adam had almost 60 tanks and you're using nets left and right. And when it's busy, especially when it's busy, you can't keep track of what you're dipping in where maybe it's a new fish stock that hasn't finished quarantine yet that someone had to have you're going left and right. So make sure that you have a full bucket that covers from net tipped all the way to handle to make sure that you're getting everything dipped on the nets for fish door.

One of the best things I saw when I was down in Florida, they had a six inch deep plastic container and they threw them in there horizontally. They just laid them in there in six inches of water with the solution in there and stuff. And they're the ones that explained to me that you can't just have the handle stick it out because that's where all the crap and that little spiral wire, that's where all that crap settles and that's where you're going to transfer your ICS and your different meta what I'm saying, your different diseases.

So, Adam, before we get on, because I want to talk about where some of the futures are going on in the pet stores. We have some fans that desperately want to know some crappy customer stories or some notable customer stories you've had before you told us about the infamous seahorses flipping a penny in the tank and watching them die. Sad story, but do you have any other notable stories to tell our ever endearing audience?

Yeah.

So my favorite one is I had a cockatiel and the lady who had it, she had trained it, she'd had it for like six months, but then she ended up falling and breaking her hip and she gave it back to me and wanted me to resell it. And she was getting some of the money, but she taught it to wolf whistle. So this one morning I was getting stuff done and I was still working on stuff and this good looking blonde lady walks into my store and the bird wolf whistles at her and I instantly get this withering glare of death from the lady. I'm like, that wasn't me, that was not me. I go, that was the bird. And she goes, no it wasn't, it was you. And she literally was pissed. And I said, no, walk by the bird again. And she walked by the bird again and it wolf whistled and she goes, oh, how nice of that bird to like me.

And I'm like, oh, it's okay with the bird. So the sexy brown guy whistling isn't kosher, but when the bird does it, it's cute.

That's called profiling.

That's exactly it.

I had not heard that story.

I thought I told you that one. She is, like, just livid.

So that night, he went to some restraints house and found the pedal. That's the moral of the story, right? What are the stories you got?

Well, let's see. I had a person bring in a bobcat. A pet bobcat? Yeah. I had a customer bring in a pet bobcat once. No, they brought it in like a.

Wild bobcat that he somehow tamed. He brought it in saying, hey, I'm trying to find a toy for it. And you're like, Get that wild creature out of my store. Has it had it shot?

No, they brought it in because it was literally their pet. They bought it from another place as a cub, and they brought it into my store, and it was actually probably one of the best behaved animals I've ever had. Come into my store.

Like Carol baskin, I'm calling it. It was Carol baskin. Was she blonde, wrinkly and filled with hate?

No.

Then I would have known it was Carol baskin. But no. These people had a lot of exotic animals, and they've always had exotic animals. And they said they had a pet bobcat. And I'm like, yeah, okay, whatever. And then they brought it in, and it was really cool because when they were walking it to my store, there was almost a couple of accidents in the parking lot. People just, like, staring at it.

Or dogs, and they're chasing after it.

No, it literally sat. She told it to sit, and the thing sat and was just staring at everything. I was impressed.

Definitely.

Carol baskin, you say this thing is the best behaved pet you've ever had. What about my dog? When I used to bring my dog.

Over there, he would sit on my floor every day.

Every time my dog came in, he would make it in 10ft and take a dump on adam's foot every right.

Side of the entrance. And then you give him a treat. Good job.

Every single time. I had gus up there 100 times, and he pooped a hundred times every single time.

Like, here's a question. Do you need any kind of license for a bobcat or something like that? Because to me, I'm hearing this and I'm thinking of, like, the guy walking into a gun store that doesn't have an ffl for a fully automatic weapon. And you lay like an M two or something like that on the counter. Like, here, here's my fully automatic belt fed. Here you go. This is a killing me.

On a side note, I'm going to your place. During the zombie apocalypse.

At the time, this was before the kid got his arm ripped off by a tiger in Red Wing. You didn't need a permit in the state of Minnesota to have anything exotic. So you could have anything from timberwolves to bears to tigers, lions, anything that you wanted. But then after that happened, they ramrodded a bunch of legislation and then you couldn't get those types of exotics anymore. People used to have pet monkeys. I used to have monkeys come in. We used to be able to sell like, ping pong, mice, all kinds of cool stuff until somebody got monkey pox in Wisconsin. Typical Wisconsin. People wreck everything for everybody else. We used to be able to have really cool pets back in the day that people could bring. And then once that law got passed, you were grandfathered in, but then you couldn't get them again after that.

Well, the law has manipulated we had the dusty from the local zoo that we have and he went over that. It's mainly a lot of the usda, dnr, and then local cats. Those are the three people that you have to get for these exotic animals. So if it's big cats, if it's monkeys, deer are one of his biggest problems because dnr requires so many levels of health quarantines testing and then continual updating on vaccinations for different deer because they don't want, you know, some terrible disease getting into the native deer population. So native species are the most difficult. But as far as like, if you have like a like he has Arctic wolves right now in the Arctic wolves, he had to get passed by his penning from the usda and then he had local permission from the local chief of police saying that he could have them. So once that was all done, he's good to go. But yes, that's all legislation that you have to get. You have those three hoops you have to jump through in Minnesota.

I know Adam has been to them. I've been to a couple of exotic animal auctions and they're fun. Yeah. And you see all kinds of crazy stuff. I mean, I watched a girl walk around with a bear cub that she had bought and it was probably a 1920 year old girl.

Please tell me she named it winnie the pooh.

No, but I want to tell you about how just disgusting this thing was. So she's carrying this bear around and this bear is still being bottle fed and she's letting it suck on her neck. So it looks like she literally has 1000 hickeys all over her neck from this bear cub that she's carrying around and taking pictures with people. And it just looked really bad. But I mean, as long as it's.

Not over £35, it's legal in West Virginia.

Those dating or marrying your relative in West Virginia, £35.

Are you talking about girls or are you talking about bears?

I love you, dabby. If you're listening from West Virginia, that.

Was our dig on dabbie.

All right, so we're going to save the other stories for story time. But we want before we leave, the podcast is talk about some of the futures that we're seeing, some of the trends we mentioned before the micro stores. Joe Shrimp shack is a fantastic proof. He's got a small store, the overhead specific. Again, he has a variety of products, but it's very much geared to the nano tanks and shrimp.

That's it.

He doesn't sell large cichlids. He doesn't have a bird in the place. It's very just specialized to the one product and then having a high bread of a local store in a metro area. And online sales. Phil tamed Waters, he does auctions online on other websites and has just nothing but specialized products. You don't see bread and butter stock at his place at all. And that's where we're seeing everything happen. Those are popping up, but even a bigger trend. And we have a gentleman sheen, I'm going to butcher names here, so forgive me, but this is a gentleman that has a local fish store in Malaysia, and we see this a lot again, studying, talking with different people. But he just reminded us that having fish on different displays, like, for instance, Jimmy, when you went down to different fish auctions, you hung up a pegboard, you filled up the put fish in bags, rolled a price on the bag, hung the bag, and it was oxygenated. A bag of fish with oxygen and sitting in that bag for what, three days?

Yeah, depending on how many you have in there. Yeah, right.

So you hang these bags of fish on a pegboard, people just really grab the bag, pay you, and walk out. So that's the big transition they're seeing, is you do that for a trade show in Malaysia, the local fish store, he says that he's doing that, and he sees that his sales are going up, people are grabbed. They don't have to wait. They're not making a commitment on the sale. Hey, I got to go grab an associate. They just grab the bag, bring it up front, and pay as you go. They're trying to make that faster, quicker, more reliable service on the specialty products. Even going further than a lot of these micro stores are going back to crickets really quick.

We were down in Florida. We went to a place, and they had crickets already in a bag. So did Adam. And I think I came back and told you about it. You did. And what happens is all of a sudden now, nobody that one person is coming in for their bag of crickets for the week, and you're busy. It's Friday afternoon. It's Saturday afternoon. They can just go over to the little strip and grab a bag of crickets, go up and pay for it, and be gone. That way, Adam doesn't have to dig them out or the store owner doesn't have to dig them out. And everybody I've talked to, including Adam, talked about how they increase their sales just because, like you said, instant gratification. I'm in and I'm out. everybody's busy. No matter who you talk to, you talk to people who are unemployed. They're really busy.

So I just got a clarification that those are happening in fish markets in China for tropical fish to be grabbed.

That's what I watched the other night.

He's in Malaysia. He's seeing the trend, but he's meaning over in China. So I just want to clarify that. He just messaged on the board here.

Yeah, over in China I just watched the other night and stuff, and I've never seen somebody dang fish in my entire life. And some of those, and they have Chinese markets where it's just store after store after store after store of fish. And that is my bucket list of things to do. I really want to go to China and just go see these things. And it's just incredible. All the stuff they have.

I've seen a bunch of them. aquarium co op.

I think it was a co op. I think it was a co op. So, yeah, it's just incredible what people are doing over there to make sales and stuff. And there's still a large amount of people in this world that still love their fish, and you just got to reach out and find them.

And the other thing I would do is do definitely Internet stuff. Yes, pardon me, wants to do this again. And I would definitely put everything that I have right on the Internet. Also, like, some of my rare and exotic stuff that I like to bring in for me, I would have that online, because then I can get everybody in the country, and I can ship it out. And that's what Phil does, too, is he puts stuff online, and they'll call in, and he'll do, like, a live stream. And that's something that I thought of. He shows everybody what it is, and he's getting orders for stuff as he's doing the live stream of, oh, I'll take this, I'll take this, I'll take this.

What a great idea that is. rob's a big believer of Facebook. I'm not even on Facebook, but our friends up in West fargo, once again, when they get a bunch of shrimp in from me, they'll put on a Saturday morning, they'll say, fresh shrimp in. And people just come in from the woodworks because people are watching their Facebook and they go, oh, they got new shipment, and let's go.

Well, your buddy Steve Rebecca, he told us right on the podcast that he doesn't do hardly any marketing anymore. All he does is just some small Internet marketing. All he does is post a single fish and says, doesn't that look pretty? And he has eight people PM, and I want that fish, right? He only sells X amount of fish throughout the year, but people are making this quite easy for themselves. You don't have to be a tech expert to make yourself a website. You can go to these wix squarespace shopify. They have templates you can build and just take pictures are the hardest thing. You're going to have to grab your phone, do some filters, trying to get those pictures of your content on there. And the stores are easily done. You can do that. Otherwise, even like I said, Facebook right now, the fish hobby as a social media is on Facebook and Instagram. Those are the two places that if you want to find knowledgeable groups, share content, those are the places to be. So Facebook has a band that you cannot sell any live pets. You can sell plants, you cannot sell the pets. So people don't use the dollar symbols. There's secret groups that talk amongst themselves, but the best way is just showing like, hey, there's this I have anybody interested, I say, what's the price? And your private message them. So there's still a lot of trading advertising that goes online. Otherwise you can always advertise on your everyday friendly podcast. Give us a call.

There you go.

We'll make it fun.

A couple of other things. An app called Band. I heard there's some fish groups on Band that do that kind of thing. I see a lot of fish on craigslist here locally when I'm searching for aquariums at under a dollar a gallon. But yeah, that's a couple of things.

And just don't order bob cats from Carol basket.

All your cats and kittens.

I did have a question about the cats thing though, because he was talking about having the puppy mill thing here locally. One of a couple of our stores will work with the local animal shelters and they'll rotate stock in from them to try to sell them. Did you do any of that kind of stuff at them or maybe even take in fish from people that couldn't keep them because they got too big? So we can give a shout out to ofr on the back end of this.

Yeah, I would always take in fish from anybody. And then I ended up doing kittens also because kittens are just rampant unless they're wild. I didn't do the humane Society, the local places, the rescue groups, because they always had a paper saying that if their dog scratched or bit somebody, I was liable and not them. So they were trying to control their liability issues. And it was just kind of one of those things where it's like, yeah, I'm not going to get involved because they had more adult dogs rather than puppies.

Yeah, it was kind of sketchy. Sorry, it was kind of sketchy for us. We even fostered a few moms that were pregnant from them or like ones that when they had kittens where the moms would abandon them. And then our local humane Society would like say, oh, we're going to check on you. We'll give you a little food and help you out. For helping us out. But for the two letters we had, they didn't do they did the initial like, hey, here you go, here's the paperwork, and then here's a little food. And then they were like, farts in the wind.

All these groups that are out there saving cats and dogs, god bless them. But here's a problem that I have. I went to I think it was pet. Pet smart, to be honest. I think it was PetSmart. They were they had gently used cats. I mean, gently used cats.

They were under 100,000 miles, right?

I'm talking about one eyed.

Excuse me. They're certified reused cats felines by your pay here.

They had a one and a half year old tomcat with one eye. Do you know how much the adoption fee was?

I called them lucky $500.

$200 for a one eyed Tomcat? And I'm just going, okay, I understand you have a little bit of a vet bill in this cat. You know, they they always want them neutered and whatnot, but after talking to some of the vets up in the area, these groups normally beat up the vets pretty hard for prices. You know, they said, we'll bring you X amount, so you got to give us a better price. And they they normally want to work with these folks, too, and stuff, but I'm just going, why would I want a one eyed tom cat for $200 that's that's a year and a half old when I could get a a persian cat for $200? That's cute. I don't know. That's just me. I'm a jerk.

Definitely with you.

So French online just messaged that it should have been half price with one eye. It might have been $400, it might have been 400. We don't know.

But it's freaking ridiculous. I mean, I just I'm sorry. $200 for a one eyed tom cat?

Is that where you go to PetSmart to get the certified reuse, you know, BMW model cats?

PetSmart also only sell you what is it, Adam? Is it male?

I heard the intermediate cashmere, they only.

Sell you only male gerbils, rats, mice, right? Yes.

They'll only sell one sex because they don't believe in breeding, unwanted breeding.

They didn't hear Bob barker's message that they need to spay and neuter.

No, not at all. Crazy. I want to add one thing, too, for you folks that are thinking about starting a pet store, and it's still your passion. I delivered to about 27 pet stores at one time, and the pet stores that I saw that were successful and what I mean successful is that they paid their bills. They had money to take home. They made a living off of this store.

They had birds whistling at their customers.

Yeah, they had birds whistling at their customers. And no, they had grooming, and they had grooming. And grooming is where you can make a ton. And when I say a ton of money, I'm talking a ton of money. I know the numbers. Three stores that I dealt with, I talked to them behind closed doors. So an average groomer can take in somewhere between six hundred dollars to one thousand dollars a day, depending on how good a groomer they are and how much they charge. We get our three dogs done and they charge us $200. And it's 3 hours that it takes to get them done. But on specialty cuts and whatnot, they're charging $150 for one dog. And normally how it works in a pet store is the groomer works for themselves. They're independent contractor. But what you do is you provide them a place in your store. So you see, you can take this back room and I will supply all the supplies for you. I'll pay all the electricity, I'll pay the water, I'll pay the sewer. And all you have to do is bring your tools of the trade, your scissors and whatnot. And then I'll pay for all the shampoos and whatnot. But I get 60% of all your grooming and all your grooming is then rung up through me. So if somebody comes in and pick up their dog, it's $100 they pay me. We keep track of it. At the end of the week, I cut you a check. And what some groomers love about that, it kind of takes their liability away of owning their own building. They've already got the generated walk in customers and stuff. And so if you're talking a good groomer doing, let's just say $600 a week, that's five days a week, that's three grand. And you take home 60% of three grand for giving them a little room in the back, you're going to make yourself a ton of money. And that's the good stores that have good groomers. And when I say good groomers, you have to have a good groomer. You can't have somebody who got self taught on the internet and practice on their mom's wig at home. But if you're thinking about doing a pet store, consider having grooming in your store to see if you can increase your profitability. And there again, these people aren't your employees. You're not paying them, not paying their taxes, you're not w twoing them, you're paying them their wage. And then they're responsible for taking care of all that themselves.

And this is a similar process to normal beauty salons, actually.

Correct.

Beauty salons do two models, either charged by the chair that is your chair to rent, you bring your scissors, we'll supply everything else. And you have to pay a flat fee or again, we get percent of whatever cut. It's a common practice that brought me.

A lot of money because I had grooming at one time.

Yes.

And then the groomer thought she could do better by herself and owning her own store and she didn't last very long.

Yeah, what a great deal. Everybody says I'm going to own my own store and you don't consider snow removal more in the yard maintenance for the building. Everything just keeps adding up, like owning your own home. So it's just all things to consider before you make that leap into your life. You want to own a pet store. I know it's a lot of people's dreams and stuff, but you might want to just really step back and learn from other people's mistakes and do it right the first time.

So I'm going to make a prediction. Right. Go ahead, Adam. First.

Oh, no, I was just going to say and then the other thing is know your customers and get to know have a place that does data so that you can keep track of it. That was probably the one thing that my point of sale system didn't do very well, was keep track of data so that I could know what my customers were buying and I could always run a report and see what was the best selling item for that week. And I could notice trends happening beforehand. That's important too.

That was like every other business in the world. You also could have a frequent flyer mile type thing. You buy four or five fish food, your fifth one free, or you have a buy one, get one free on Saturday afternoon on your busiest day on tetras. I mean, the big box stores are doing that. There's just a ton of different things you can do to create sales.

So this is all recommendations on what we recommend on the pet store, adam's experience and how he owned a pet store in the past. But we did not talk about we talked about profit margins. We did not talk about owning a business. So do not let this podcast be a replacement that now you have all the information you need to know. This is scratching the surface. And if you want to own a business, go to your local community college, find courses for entrepreneurship or get an aa and business management that helps you run any businesses, books that tells you how tax liability works well, how shrink measurement is done, how to just run a business period. This is specifically just the ins and outs of the entertainment fish business. We're not telling you how to manage your accounting, any of that. So do not take that as replacement. Go out. Some of these classes can be done from community ed. Look in your local areas and don't start a business without having at least some experience in that.

In Minnesota, they have a free book that you can get. You contact the state and they'll send it to you.

Minnesota has a small business Administration, something like that, and it allows you to be included on grants, marketing help, and there's a lot of free stuff that Minnesota specifically has. Check your state. A lot of them may even have business classes that they offer for free or at a grant check you never know. But as far as my prediction goes, right, we talked about the future, and I thoroughly believe that from our last podcast. Again, we're recording these ahead of time is the Jars podcast, episode 41. That now people are going to establish jars, get them going, get the plants in there, snail shrimp, whatever else, and that they're going to have these one gallon to three gallon jars that they're going to just sell online fish stores, whatever else. It's going to be a new trend.

Jimmy, when we started it right here yeah, jar.

Just think about all the substrate, all the work, the labor. $100 a jar. Boom. Everything is set. They just go home. They set it in the window just.

On the internet last night. And I was talking about those biospheres that we saw in a trade show. $80 for sealed jars with shrimp in it.

And those look like crap. They're just a piece of glass with a half dead shrimp that you're torturing. This is a real thing, guys. Get out there, make your jars, make a business out of it. I want to see it happen.

There you go.

Well, anything else from you, Jimmy?

From me? I've been in this business for so long, I want to get on, get in, get out, get out, get in. And it just keeps dragging you back in. It's just like a bad sickness, right?

That's why we started the podcast, because this is a low cost, and frankly, we can be humiliated when people laugh at us.

There we go.

Also, we did not say turd wagon enough.

Noggin wagon.

Adam, have you got anything else, buddy?

No, I think I'm good.

Well, Adam, thank you so much to be our guest of honor on this podcast. We really do appreciate it. You went out and about. You walked all the way into your bedroom. We appreciate your effort.

And your voice is so sexy.

And I think I figured I finally figured out the working title for this podcast. And I was thinking earlier Pet Shop Boys, so I could get a music reference in a a little background music for Jimmy. But I think it's going to have to be Turd Wagon. It's going to have to be it.

I still want some Pet Shop Boys in there.

Right here, right here. Okay, as we go out, we bid you would do. And stay safe.

Out.

Later, guys.

Later.

Thanks, guys, for listening to the podcast. Please go to your favorite place where podcasts are found, whether it be spotify, itunes, stitcher, wherever they can be found, like subscribe. And make sure you get push notifications directly to your phone so you don't miss great content like this.

I never knew that a Minnesota accent could be so sexy until I heard Adam's voice. Go, Frank. Kiss out.

Don't you know that for my boy? Don't you know.