Have you ever sold something on Craigslist?
It's an experience, that's for sure.
You'll discover that most people are really excited to get stuff right up until they have to put forth any effort at all.
I told you I'm moving offices, right?
We're moving from the historic Pickwick Theatre building in Park Ridge, IL (where I grew up) to this upscale outdoor mall in Skokie, IL..
I'm super excited about it.
And when I'm excited, I make no small moves.
As soon as I signed the new lease, I hired an interior designer to give me a furniture plan and design suggestions.
(An interior designer is way cheaper than you think. We hired ours for $80/hr and dramatically improved our house for about $200. That's why I'm doing the same for the new office.)
That also means it was time to start fresh and ditch the bootstrapped crazy cornucopia of furniture I had.
So my wife put up an ad on Craigslist that read basically, "Free furniture from a startup. As-is. You must disassemble and move yourself."
I loved that idea because when we started our business in 2009, we scavenged a lot of our furniture. I'd much rather pay it forward than send the stuff to a landfill.
Within four hours of posting, we'd gotten rid of 90% of our stuff.
Craiglist is basically a free junk removal service.
Among those people, we're some scary folk. Not intimidating scary. Scary unprepared.
Three people separately arrived to haul away our massive HON desk. (A picture was included online, it was a hot item.)
In all three cases, they took one look at it, and said, "So I have to disassemble it? Do you have any tools?" ಠ_ಠ
As stated in the listing, yes you do, and no I don't.
All three immediately abandoned the idea, took something else random to justify their trip, and promptly left.
I really can't complain. With no effort on my part beyond answering the door, I was unencumbered of all my old office furniture. It was disturbing to see how little thought and effort was going into these folks' decision-making.
By virtue of being on my list, I know you're not like them. You're leveraging free resources like this one. You're thinking ahead, planning, and taking action.
We're not putting our Black Friday plans off to the last minute either. We need to start planning our Black Friday sales now.
The most important channel in your Black Friday success plan is email.