Welcome to the How of Business with Henry Lopez and David Begin, the podcast that helps you start, run, and grow your small business.

And now, here are your hosts.

Welcome to this episode of The How of Business.

This is Henry Lopez.

And my guest today is John Wilker.

John, welcome to the show.

Thank you much, Henry. Glad to be here.

Excited to have John. John is a former contractor who is now a small business owner. He was a

small business owner when he had his contracting business, but he has developed a new interesting

business. It's not so new to him anymore. It's new to me.

He's been doing it for about 20 years, right? It's still fun though. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

So what he's done is he has developed a simple yet effective business model for providing middleman services for businesses that ship and receive products. Specifically, what we're talking about

here is he acquires what's called industrial byproducts. Those are things like palettes and

cardboard boxes and crates and other things related and that are used in shipping products and

equipment. He takes those from somebody who doesn't need him anymore, and he sells

them to somebody who does for a pretty good profit, and so much so that that's his full-time

business. But he also teaches people how to replicate that, how to replicate that business. He's

figured out this business model. Again, as he explains it, the bottom line is he calls himself a middleman.

And John has developed this and he requires few employees of any, very little inventory or no inventory, typically, and no big warehouse space.

A lot of the things that we're always looking for, small business owners

and that we wish we didn't have in the case of those of us who do. As he says, quote, it's quite

simple, but it has to be set up in the correct manner for it to work. And there's, end quote. And there is

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