Thank you for asking me this in open forum as I would want my answer to be seen by everyone else who may like to know.
I am going to go back to the time that I started all of this. It was shortly after I was laid off from a really nice job. So I took a few months relaxing as I had alot of money saved up..well I hate not doing anything so I went back to repairing people computers and messing around with Ubuntu (programming and bug hunting and testing). Well after repairing a few computers I had some "scrap" that I could not just toss away so I saved it and it got to a point that I had to do something with it. So I found a person on CL who was buying it...so I sold it to him.
After some time I had more and so I called him back up and went out to his yard this time and saw how much he had. I thought he buying it for parts/repair...not to sell as scrap so that got my mind turning and I started to just hang out there and he put me to work with out pay...i did not mind because I was picking up everything he told me and i saw everything he was doing from buying to selling, both vendors and customers coming and going. After some time and still sticking around there and buying his whole desktops and taking them apart and bring the parts back to him to make fuel money. I started to pick up "free" desktops from CL and brake them down and take them in pretty soon I had more and more and I alot of time to watch Netflix's as I did this in the living room.
It was a few months later some of his vendors just saw me there all the time but knew I was not a hired hand came over and talked to me to find out who I was...he was my first real vendor that I sold everything to. So now I am getting more and more e-waste and was making a few 100 a week. Then...I started buying the e-waste and my profit dropped...but the amount of money I was making sky rocketed as I had more e-waste. So about 8 to 9 months it was about this time and I said I will get my DBA on Jan first to make taxes easier for me. So thats whats that I did.
For the longest time I did this out of the backyard and in the garage/family room. That ended up filled up when I started to find weekly pick ups so I had to get a storage unit so I got one not far from my house and with in a month I had that one filled up so I got another one...shortly after that one was getting filled up so I started to send out weekly. I thought about getting a warehouse so I would have more space..but then it hit me..it would be cheaper to hire someone part time (day labor) to help me get the stuff broken down and moved out faster than getting a warehouse...so that's what I did...that was 4 months ago now I am up to 4 of there largest units and I have no space and I just sent out 8 pallets and that space is all ready taken up again. And with me having semi unloading more often its getting pretty bad that the storage place gave me the key to the unused units as over night I may need another one because I am unloaded a semi and they will come back to find a note in there drop box that unit number is now mine and to add it to my tab.
I will say networking and being able to do things like that as well many other things I left out of this post to TRY to make it shorter.
In from the time I started to now, here is a small list of things I have done for this company.
Setup a phone system,
programmed a program to run my invoicing system so it would work faster/smoother.
Setup my truck to run on bio fuels.
Networking...to hard to fully explain this. But I have recycled from State offices, schools, courts, cops, cities and so on.
Working for your self is great and can be alot of fun. But alot of people say this to me "You are lucky...you have no boss..its great working for your self." I tell them all the same thing...its not what you think...I have 20 bosses...they all want me to do blank on blank day....they don't care if you need to be across town or even in another city.
Anyway...I will end it there. Next post will address you questions better. This was more or less how I started and how I went about doing it.
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