A tidal wave of good deals...

This is from late April, and now it's playing out.  Neiman Marcus, J.Crew, J.C. Penney's, and Hertz are the big names that we know have gone bankrupt, and are trying to restructure, buy time, and become viable businesses again.  We'll see, eventually, who succeeds.

"There are tens of thousands of small and medium sized retailers, throughout the United States, that are closed, that are facing an existential liquidity crisis..."

-Mark Cohen, Former Sears Cananda CEO, in clip above

I've written this in several blog posts before.  Recessions (or depressions, like this one) are when the whole world goes on sale, and almost no one wants to buy.  That means deals on all kinds of stuff, including liquidation sales, bnakruptcy auctions, and other places. 

As those of you who read my last blog know, I've been struggling to make a living selling my Sharpie art for the last few years.  It's a long crazy story, but I was at a place in 2015, where I couldn't find ANY "real" job, and focusing on my artwork to earn money made sense.  I didn't have many viable options.

Now I'm back in the L.A. metro, and the economic collapse I've been writing about for three years has finally begun.  The artwork isn't going to make me a living in this environment.  I'll keep drawing, and selling drawings.  But I"m making a big pivot back to something I did as a side hustle back in the 2000's, mostly while I was a taxi driver.  When I was a kid,my dad called it "wheelin' and dealin."  These days, it's known as "flipping"... buying deals on houses, cars, and merchandise of all kinds, then reselling it for a higher price.   I got into buying storage unit auctions in about 2004-2005, and bought and sold several, while working 70+ hours a week as a taxi driver.  I actually tried to go full time into doing that, to escape taxi driving, but wasn't able to make it happen then.  I made money on every deal except one (which I'll write about soon).

The point of this blog post is:

Damn near everything is going on sale!

 It's not a single blow out sale.  There are several huge, long term, social and economic cycles and trends that are converging.  This convergence is wreaking havoc on the business world, and especially brick and mortar retail stores right now.  The Retail Apocalypse is hitting Ragnarok level.  There will be bankruptcies and liquidation sales all over the place.  That's on top of all the auctions and deals already happening in the world.  The time to flip everyday items for cash has never been better.  I'm writing a big zine on this idea, for people interested in flipping items as a side hustle or a business.  Here are a some of the random deals I found yesterday, doing a bit of research for that project:

 This Ford pickup truck is on a government surplus auction site right now.  $50 minimum.  No bids.  It's somewhere in Arizona.

 This boat is also on a government auction site, $25 minimum.  No bids.  I think it was in Louisiana, maybe Texas.  Somewhere on the Gulf Coast.  I know there are people in Louisiana that like to fish (or catch alligators).

This drum kit is on a government surplus auction site.  $10.  No bids.  OK, it's in Wyoming, a long way to travel for drums.  But somebody in Wyoming likes to play drums.  

This leather couch and chair were listed on Craigslist, FREE, in the L.A. area a couple days ago.  My point is, thee are a lot of good deals out there on everyday stuff.  I'm going to change my focus from trying to make a living off of artwork, to flipping stuff, like these items, to get back to making a decent living again (which will allow me to do other projects, like The Ultimate Weekend II video).  With the economy collapsing, there's never been a better time to do this.

 If you're looking for a good deal on something- pretty much ANYTHING- now, and the next 2-4 years, will be a great time to do that.  Cool furniture, a great guitar, cars, trucks, real estate, whatever.  If you like finding deals and reselling them for a little (or maybe a lot) of cash, it's a really good time for that, too. 

Stay tuned to this blog for more ideas on finding deals, flipping used items, and other ways to start or build a small business in today's crazy world.  

Why I started selling artwork 4 1/2 years ago...

Kurt Cobain, Sharpie scribble style drawing, 18" X 24", November 2017.  This was the first drawing that sold at my first solo show.

The first two decades of the 21st century have been a rough ride for me.  My weird line of odd jobs led to a good paying job as a lighting technician in 1998.  Basically, I was a lighting roadie who didn't go on the road.  I worked in a warehouse in North Hollywood, cleaning and prepping lights to go out to TV shows, movie premieres, and corporate parties.  I made $14 and hour, got a fair amount of overtime, and liked my job.  But I had what appeared to be a tiny hernia when I started.  That turned into a huge hernia, due to the daily heavy lifting.  I had to take time off, had issues with my insurance, was unable to get surgery, and wound up working as a taxi driver in late 1999, back down in Huntington Beach.

In 5 months, I went from a cool job with money in the bank to living in a taxi, working 7 days a week.  That was my situation as I watched the new millennium roll in, on New Year's Eve 1999.  I soon had a room to live in again, but a long period of struggle began.  My car got towed in 2000 for parking tickets, when I was just starting to get back into the entertainment industry.  Back to taxi driving, an industry which soon got disrupted by new technology.

That intro into the 21st century led to what has now been 20 years of financial struggle.  I just figured out that I've spent 11 years and 9 months in some form of homelessness, since August 1999.  I was working full time (or far beyond full time in the taxi) for 7 1/2 or 8 of those years.  And I've now spent 3 years and 9 months actually living on the streets, in three states.  There have been a whole bunch of reasons for this struggle, and that list does not include alcohol and drug use.  Those aren't my issues.  I don't drink at all these days, I just quit when driving a taxi.  I don't use drugs, other than the occasional prescription for an illness.  The stereotypical homeless issues aren't what led to this struggle.  I had an incredible amount of pressure from outside forces on my life, I didn't have a real strong direction at times, and I just couldn't find a "real job" for years at a time.  Nobody wants to hire a former cabbie for a "real" job.

By November of 2015, I was living with my mom, at 49 years old, for three years, after my dad's death in 2012.  We lived in a small apartment in a tiny town in North Carolina.  I couldn't get hired for any job at all, not even for a restaurant or gas station clerk.  We lived off my mom's social security check, and I drove her around for doctor's appointments, shopping, and scraped by.  The only thing I did that made any money was my weird, unique Sharpie marker art.  I'd occasionally get asked to draw a kid's name, by their mom, to put up in their room.  I'd done those drawings for my niece and nephew, and others wanted drawings.

So I decided to focus on my Sharpie marker art.  It wasn't some idea of "I want to become a famous artist."  It was simply that nothing else I was doing then gave me any chance of making any kind of living.  So I stepped up my artwork, started drawing people, and promoting my drawings on Facebook.  I had a following from doing several years of blogs, for the Old SchoolBMX freestyle world.  While I have always been a creative guy, I was never known as a visual artist.  I literally didn't have a dime when I started.  I only had some art supplies, and a $65 refurbished laptop, still running Windows XP in 2015.  I had no idea what would happen.

Because I was just scraping by for so long, and in and out of homelessness, I couldn't raise any money from family or friends to give my little business idea a real chance at "success."  But I started getting orders.  I learned how to promote my art well online.  I started selling artwork, originals that first took 22 to 25 hours each.  These days, my large drawings take 40 to 45 hours each, and I can sell them for $150-$160 pretty easily.  So I can sell art, at least until this Covid-19 shutdown hit hard.  But I was never able to make decent money for the time I was putting into my drawings.  But I HAVE been able to scrape by, as a working artist, for 4 1/2 years.  I had no idea if that was possible when I started. And now I have about 120 drawings to show for this time period.

With the Covid-19 pandemic, and the economic downturn, things have finally slowed down, though I was doing better when the virus first hit.  But I'm back in Southern California, where I want to live, and in a big metro where other options are available, now that the virus and recession have slowed down buying of almost everything.

I'm now going to head in another direction to work on earning money, though I still want to spend some time doing artwork nearly every day.  But I somehow managed to survive, though homeless much of time, as a working artist, starting from nothing, in an obscure, rural, North Carolina town.  I have very little money, but I have this body of work online, and have established myself as a unique and halfway decent visual artist.  And that's pretty cool.  I've sold about 90 originals and maybe 120 prints, over this time.  My art has sold, and is hanging on walls, on 6 of the 7 continents, a 8-12 countries, and a dozen U.S. states.  Really.  I never expected that back in 2015.

My point for this post?  I tried something that sounded ridiculous, and had a lot of success in spending time doing work I loved doing, but didn't make much money.  In crazy times, when options seem limited, you never know what is possible, until you try.

Kobe Bryant tribute art skateboard deck, one of my recent works. #sharpiescribblestyle

Seth Godin interview at the beginning of the Covid-19 period

It's May 20th, 2020, as I'm writing this, and our world has changed radically and dramatically in the last two months.  Seth Godin has been one of the most forward looking, well thought out, and informative voices on marketing and entrepreneurship, of the internet era.  This is a great interview sharing his thoughts as we head into an era where every manual about how things are done just went out the window.  As always with Seth's talks, listen, learn, ponder, and then put the ideas that grab you into practice. 

The economy is nuts... I need to make money somehow... now what?

Here's one of the many reports  about the 22 million Americans that have filed for unemployment in the last four weeks, as the Covid-19 shitdown goes on.  It's Sunday, March 19th, as I write this.

In November of 2015, I was living with my mom, at 49 years old, in a small apartment, in a small town, in central North Carolina.  It was a toxic living environment, in a town where I couldn't even get a restaurant or cashier job, in a part of the country I hated being in.  My life sucked on pretty much every level.  The only thing that made me any money then was doing drawings with Sharpie markers, in a unique way that I invented, that I call "scribble style."  Unable to get hired for any job, after filling out around 140 applications in a couple of years there, I decided to create my own job.

Here's a drawing I did of Kurt Cobain, that was in the first, and only solo, art show I've done, in November 2017.  The owner of Earshot Music turned it into an online flyer. This drawing sold the day before the show, an hour after going up on the wall, which was awesome from my perspective.  Several sales came from that one inty show.

So, like most things, that didn't go as  planned.  I started, literally, without a dime.  I had some art supplies, a bedroom to draw in, a $65 refurbished laptop (still running Windows XP), and a following in the Old School BMX freestyle world, from my blog.  That has been my main customer base.  I've become a working artist, if not a profitable one.  I've scraped by, homeless most of the time, but working drawing, and blogging and continually learning about online and social media marketing, to promote my work.  In 4 1/2 years, I've sold over 80 large, original drawings, each of which takes 35-45 hours to draw.  I've also sold 100 or so small prints.  While this is by no means a raging success, most artists don't sell that much work in their entire careers.

I've done some things right, and made plenty of mistakes.  I've had a lot of headwinds from outside sources that have slowed my progress down dramatically.  Now, about 4 1/2 years later, I'm back out in Southern California, the place I call home.  Still homeless, but I'm able to keep working, to some degree, even while the Covid-19 shutdown goes on, and while the long anticipated "next recession" takes hold.

I've been blogging about the loss of jobs to new technology since at least mid-2017, maybe before.  This post, from June 2017, is the first remember doing on the subject.  I've been an amateur futurist my whole life, and have watched the big house of cards of our current economy stack up into place.  It was obvious, to the few watching closely, that this "recession" would be a bad one, at least as bad as 2007-2009.  I personally think it will be much worse.  But I also know that recessions are the greatest times of opportunity for many businesses, and especially for starting new businesses.

While I work to build my own little business in today's high tech enabled, hyper-connected world, this blog is going to be things I've learned, and ideas from others about how to start a micro (1 person) or small business, in today's world, how grow a small business, and hopefully how to thrive in the craziness of the next few years.  That's the basic idea.  I've done several blogs, fairly consistently since late 2008, and they always wind up going in directions I didn't expect at the beginning.  So we'll see where this one leads.

My main blog over the last 2 1/2 years, Steve Emig: The White Bear, is creeping up on 100,000 page views, and I thought it was time for a change of pace.  I have a couple different directions I want to work in now, and helping people (and myself) start and build small businesses is what this one is about.  Lots more to come...