American Pickers - Thanks to Flicker.com
I was at the health club last night and decided to watch American Pickers to see what great treasures they might find. It is a great show and should be around for several years. If you read my opinions on C.Dianne Zwieg's blog on I Antique Online, there is no doubt how I feel about the show. They do find treasures and they let people know the profit they think will be made on their purchase.
The show interests me because the two gentlemen aren't afraid of getting dirty or searching through what most would consider trash to find that one item that is a treasure. The old scooter was really neat last night but the memory jug is what caught my eye. If you don't know what a memory jug is, I will try to describe it. Often middle aged people will accumulate items that show events in their lives. Then they take a whiskey jug or large glass jug and put clay or other types of material around the outside and press their keepsakes into the soft clay. These could include small toys, scouting pins, jewelry and most anything else that they chose. We would call this folk art and to a true collector it could be priceless.
However, what I want to share with you isn't our similarity but how different we are from the pickers. The American Picker is all about finding something that is rusty, badly damaged or in rough shape. Their reasoning is that someone else will want to buy their items to restore them and thereby increase their value substantially. To do this, you must have a tremendous knowledge base of what an item would be worth once it is restored. These gentlemen are true professionals so don't let their lowbrow demeanor fool you. I don't believe for a minute that they make many mistakes.
You must be asking how that differs from our philosophy. First of all, we don't recommend buying damaged goods unless the damage is appropriate to the item. Being able to judge what it would take to restore an old rusty bicycle takes years and year of experience. This isn't something for the amateur because he or she would only get burned. I believe that to duplicate what the pickers do, you would have to have many, many years of experience.
Now for the system that we use for success. Ours does include knowledge but it can be obtained very quickly using the Daryle Lambert's Antiques and Collectibles Club guidelines. We don't have to know what the cost would be to restore an item because generally we leave those items for others to buy. So that only leaves us to know the true value of the treasures we find and then it just becomes a matter of being able to buy them at a correct price. It seems that we do the direct opposite of the pickers. However, there is one element of how we conduct our business that is the same.
Can you guess what that is? If you guessed that we both use the rule of compounding, you would be right. Watching the show last night it became very apparent to me that when they ran their totals, the profits were at least double their cost. Do you think they could have read my book? No, they just understand the principles needed for success and apply them to their business.
Both ways will get you to the same spot, which is success, but I just don't have twenty five years to get there. I don't believe that most of my readers wish to wait that long either and, by following the guidelines in my book 31 Steps to your Millions in Antiques and Collectibles, you should become successful in a much shorter time.
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