That’s a five gallon can so you need to go
Posted: Sat Jul 12, 2025 6:20 am
The guy that runs Penguin Books probably doesn’t know how to do all the things that are in all the Penguin Books but he makes a lot of money selling books. You are going to be a publisher.
I learnt from my dad and his Reynolds Hardware shop about profit margins. I learnt that you can’t make money if you are buying something for 66p and selling it for 99p, there is not enough money left.
The things we are talking about this weekend you buy something for £1 and you sell it for £150, that’s more like the sort of margin you need.
Andrew Reynolds: Another lesson I learnt from my dad, he email data to sell bags of cement and compost and all this sort of thing. He used to sell paving slabs; he used to sell big bottles of gas. And if his customer wanted those items they would have to be delivered because they were too big to go in the customer’s car so he had to run the Reynolds Hardware van. Huge great things.
He used to have and again, so my brother’s in the room somewhere, he will remember this, he used to have a big pump for paraffin and it had a bloody great handle on it. Basically you see the two globes on that pump there, you had to pump that full of a gallon of paraffin and then release the catch and it would come into the drum. So every single gallon you’ve got to do about 12 twists of this manual handle to pump that up and then you go — and you got a gallon in the can. — another 12 so you do 60 flashes like that to fill that can. When that can is full it weights three stone. My dad used to carry two of these cans, it’s no wonder he had a bloody bad back.
Andrew Reynolds: The lesson I learnt from my dad is that I don’t, I send out… Dad used to sell thousands of gallons of this paraffin stuff, thousands of gallons a month, all done by hand. I send out thousands of packages a month and I don’t touch one of them. I don’t do all the manual labour, I don’t do the stuffing of the jiffy bags, somebody else does that.
The lesson that I learnt was not to run the van yourself, not to do the fulfilment yourself, we use fulfilment houses to do that stuff.
I learnt from my dad and his Reynolds Hardware shop about profit margins. I learnt that you can’t make money if you are buying something for 66p and selling it for 99p, there is not enough money left.
The things we are talking about this weekend you buy something for £1 and you sell it for £150, that’s more like the sort of margin you need.
Andrew Reynolds: Another lesson I learnt from my dad, he email data to sell bags of cement and compost and all this sort of thing. He used to sell paving slabs; he used to sell big bottles of gas. And if his customer wanted those items they would have to be delivered because they were too big to go in the customer’s car so he had to run the Reynolds Hardware van. Huge great things.
He used to have and again, so my brother’s in the room somewhere, he will remember this, he used to have a big pump for paraffin and it had a bloody great handle on it. Basically you see the two globes on that pump there, you had to pump that full of a gallon of paraffin and then release the catch and it would come into the drum. So every single gallon you’ve got to do about 12 twists of this manual handle to pump that up and then you go — and you got a gallon in the can. — another 12 so you do 60 flashes like that to fill that can. When that can is full it weights three stone. My dad used to carry two of these cans, it’s no wonder he had a bloody bad back.
Andrew Reynolds: The lesson I learnt from my dad is that I don’t, I send out… Dad used to sell thousands of gallons of this paraffin stuff, thousands of gallons a month, all done by hand. I send out thousands of packages a month and I don’t touch one of them. I don’t do all the manual labour, I don’t do the stuffing of the jiffy bags, somebody else does that.
The lesson that I learnt was not to run the van yourself, not to do the fulfilment yourself, we use fulfilment houses to do that stuff.