Yes, you can start a multimillion-dollar business with only 50 dollars. It just takes patience, hustle, and a really supportive partnership.
The Loseke’s didn’t set out to become big company owners – Ben simply started flipping items from estate sales. Learn how Ben and Jess found a super unique niche in the re-sale market, and together have grown it into a thriving company.
Who are you and what business did you start?
We are Ben and Jess Loseke, and we are the co-founders of Midwest Barrel Company.
In the simplest form, Midwest Barrel sells used barrels. After a barrel is emptied at a distillery or winery, we then come in, partner with the primary distillery, and find the next stopping point for a barrel.
Most of our barrels typically go to domestic breweries or international distilleries. Because not every barrel is refillable, to hold another spirit, we also have a product line selling barrels and barrel parts for furniture grade.
Our vision is to make barrels accessible to anyone and everyone. So whether you’re the largest distillery in Scotland, or you’re someone in Lincoln, Nebraska, who wants to put a barrel in their basement, we want to make used barrels accessible to each person.
Today, our business is located in Louisville, Kentucky. In 2023, we relocated the business from Lincoln, Nebraska to Louisville, Kentucky to pursue growth opportunities.
We’ve grown significantly year over year at a really rapid and steady pace, but it’s been quite an exciting journey!
Jess’s Background
So I’ll lead off here because Ben has the more interesting story, but I kind of have a hodgepodge of background and experiences.
The highlights: In my 20s, I went to Metro Community College and pursued paralegal studies. I moved to Jacksonville, Florida in 2008 and got a job as a paralegal. I realized, pretty quickly, that it was an area that I did well in – I knew that I either needed to go to law school or find a different way to apply the legal field because I knew that I wanted to do a little bit more.
And so I moved back to Nebraska with the intent that I was going to go to law school and that’s when I met Ben.
And pretty quickly, I knew we would never leave Nebraska – his whole family was there, my whole family was there. I put the law school dream on hold – when you are falling in love and you are thinking about the family you want to have, I didn’t want to work 90 hours a week.
I decided to figure out another way to apply this legal background. And I selected HR. First, I got into recruiting and from there, I moved into HR consulting. I worked for a company that’s pretty well known in the Lincoln, NE market called Talent Plus. I would work with executives and CSuite leaders, focused on coaching and development. I would interview their candidates and help them with their hiring process.
At the time, I never knew how impactful that was going to be as an entrepreneur. I had the honor of being able to interview CEO after CEO and hear their stories and their struggles and what helped make them successful.
It’s so interesting now today, being able to go back and pull from the life experiences that these very tenured CEOs had. To think through what they were doing in their lives that helped them be successful, and what I want to replicate in mine.
But while all this was going on, I traveled a lot. I would be gone probably half of the month, working with different clients. Ben and I were newlyweds and he quite frankly was kind of bored while I was gone. And so that’s how this all got started.
So I always tell people that my background is in HR and that’s how I got into business. But I love people and I love the intricacies of how businesses wor. Creating a mission and a brand is something I’m super passionate about it.
Ben’s Background
So I am from just out of the Lincoln, Nebraska area. I decided in high school that I was going to go into the field of horticulture, which is the science of plants and growing plants. My parents had a vineyard on their acreage, and so that’s how I got exposed to grapes for the first time.
So in college, my undergrad was in horticulture. At the end of my degree, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I didn’t want to go work in a greenhouse and make $12 an hour or whatever it was back then.
I asked one of my professors, “Hey, Would you take me on as a Masters student?” His name is Paul Reed and he was a department head for a long time.
He was like, “Oh sure that’d be great. We actually have a lab tech that is leaving, you can take her job. As an employee, you get 12 hours a semester paid for. So you could pay for school and get paid by the University to run my lab.” I was like, that sounds like a great idea.
So I started with Paul, I was running his lab, and my research for my master’s was all about grapes. I was getting towards the end of my master’s, and I was like, I still don’t know what I want do to. So I asked Paul if I could do my PhD with him too. He agreed, and I started working on my PhD.
Well, in the midst of that, Jess really started traveling quite a bit more for her job. My PhD was intense, but not so intense that I didn’t have time to do other things.
What were your first steps to starting the business and coming up with your product?
So what really started all this was I purchased a truck.
So I’d always been driving a car up until this point. And I was like, I’m ready to upgrade to a truck. So I bought a white Chevy Silverado. And the first thing I did (I think it might have been the same day I bought it) was drive by an estate sale.
I decided to stop in – and I had never done this before – to just look around. I noticed this pull-behind lawn sprayer. And I bought it for like 50 bucks.
And I got it home and it didn’t work. I was like, well, shit, that sucks. I just paid 50 bucks for this stupid thing and it doesn’t work.
But I started tinkering around with it and I got it fixed. I didn’t really have a need for that sprayer. So I ended up listing it on Craigslist for 125 bucks or something. Within a day, somebody came over and bought that sprayer.
That was a light bulb moment where I was like, “Oh, I could actually buy stuff, fix it, or buy it for cheap and flip it.”
So I started to pursue it. It was more of a hobby to begin with. I was going to garage sales, estate sales, and auctions, and slowly started buying stuff. It ranged from antiques, to furniture, to farm equipment; just a random collection of things.
At that time, I was selling the stuff out of a garage. Eventually, I bought so much stuff, I had to rent some storage units.
And that was for two reasons.
1) I had so much stuff I was buying.
And 2) Jess was like, “I’m tired of all these random strangers and ‘Craigslist killers’ coming over to our house (at all hours of the day), to buy this stuff.”
So I moved my ‘business,’ (it wasn’t a business at the time), to South Street Storage. At the height of it, I rented four of their largest storage units. I would meet people there all day, every day, to buy and pick up their stuff.
So up until this point, it was more of a hobby. It was fun for me – I like going to auctions, and I like being the one who wins the bid. But, it was also fun to see my 50 bucks slowly snowballing into more, and more, and more money. I was able to start buying larger items, or more things, and make more money – it was really fun to see.
I officially turned it into a business in 2013. I went on Legal Zoom, I was like, oh, I got to pay taxes. I registered an LLC and called it Loewski Trade (super creative and unique, I know). I kept track of all of my sales on an Excel spreadsheet. I tried QuickBooks, but it was way too over-complicated for me to start off with.
No more weekend estate sales
We had our first child, Theo, in 2015. That’s when my days of auction hunting and garage sales, came to an end. I couldn’t be gone all weekend anymore and had to stay home to watch this kid.
But, I still want to do this, but I want to buy something more unique.
Something I can buy consistently. Something that I can order, it shows up, and then I sell it. Something I don’t have to go and hunt for.
Since I had been studying and working in the viticulture industry (wine and grapes), I started thinking there. I knew all the local wineries and the people in it. I thought, “Well, I have this background in grapes and wine, maybe I should sell wine barrels.”
No one else in the area was doing this, so I started looking for where I could buy these wine barrels from. You could buy a full truckload from California, but that was 20-30 thousand dollars. I ended up finding a broker in Milwaukee that I could buy 40 wine barrels from and ship them to Nebraska.
And it’s a bit of a funny story about how they showed up.
40 wine barrels take up some space and it came on a big FedEx truck. The truck couldn’t unload at my house in Lincoln, since I live in a residential neighborhood. I shipped them to my parent’s house in the country.
When the truck showed up, my mom was the only one home.
I quickly got out there, and when we rolled open the back of the truck, we saw 40 barrels just loose and scattered around inside. I didn’t know how to unload these, and I looked at the FedEx guy, and he didn’t know how to unload them. We didn’t have much choice, so my mom and I unloaded every single one – and they weighed a good 120 or 130 pounds each.
The first customer
I started trying to sell them around Lincoln. I listed them on Craigslist like I had been doing with my other items. But because of the huge shipping expense, I had to sell them at like $300 a barrel to make a profit. I intended to sell them to homeowners that would use them as furniture and decoration, I had not thought of selling them to be refilled.
They weren’t selling well. They were too expensive, I think that was the main reason.
But eventually, someone told me craft breweries are now using barrels to age their beer.
I was like, “Oh, that’s interesting, I had no idea.”
There are quite breweries in the area, so I decided I was going to try to sell one of these Chardonnay wine barrels. So my sales tactic was, put one in the back of my truck and drive out to go meet with all of them.
I didn’t really know what I was doing, or who to talk to, so I walked in and asked, “Can I meet with your brewer? I’m selling barrels in Lincoln.”
“They smell really good, can someone come smell this barrel in the back of my truck.” – That was my sales tactic.
After a few rejections, Blueblood’s owner Brian, agreed to talk to me.
He and his brewer skeptically came out to my pickup, and said, ‘Wow that barrel does smell good.’
They became my first customers and purchased a few barrels from me. That’s how we got started selling breweries to be refilled, and now breweries are some of our best customers.
Jess’s Perspective
I think one of the important things to convey, is that there were many things that Ben tested before he ever got into the barrels. Ben is willing to try anything. He is willing to get his hands dirty, both figuratively and literally. That’s where Ben is really good, he sees an opportunity and then will go and test that market.
I mean he literally started this with $50 and never took any outside money to fund the business.
Most people aren’t patient enough to let that money turn over and grow. He didn’t quit his full-time job, so there wasn’t this huge need for capital. It was more out of fun, not of need at the beginning.
I think when people think business, I think instantly they think how much money am I making?
And so this is a really important part of the story is that you started this doing this in 2013 and it wasn’t until 2018 that we ever really took any money out of the business. And so for five years, as it evolved from a hobby into a real business, you kept investing all of the profits back into the business.
And a lot of it was due to the fact that you needed to buy more inventory, whether that inventory was barrels or even before barrels like you had to take your profits and reinvest it to buy more stuff. But I think this is something really important to note for people who are thinking about starting a business is that so quickly they want to be able to quit their full-time job and be paid by their business.
How did you go about validating the business idea? How did you know there was a need?
I was selling to the Blueblood Brewery, and he started asking me to find different types of barrels. I needed to source some bourbon barrels and I started to learn about the potential of a market.
My validation point was when I sold my first barrel online. Within the same year of starting with Blueblood, I built a website for the company. I did it myself on the Wix platform, and it was terrible.
It was like a picture on the homepage of my white truck with a trailer full of barrels on it.
We made our first listing on that website. It was a Heaven or Hell bourbon barrel that I bought from a guy in Iowa. I put that barrel on our website, it was like $200 for the barrel plus another $185 in shipping. And I put that on there, thinking no way would anyone buy it.
Well, within a day or two, someone actually bought that barrel. I was blown away that someone would pay close to $400 for a barrel.
It was a lightbulb moment for me. Wow, there are actually people out there in the world who want these barrels and they’re willing to pay a good price for them.
Also, I had no idea how I was going to ship that first barrel. I didn’t think anyone was going to buy it so I didn’t think that far ahead. But we figured it out.
Did you ever have any Oh Crap moments?
Expensive Trash and Buffalo Bill’s Desk
Yeah, so when I was going to estate sales, I used to watch the show Storage Wars all the time. I was like, “I’m gonna go buy some storage units.”
I started going to these auctions where you can buy the whole unit. But I never had the ability to do it, they were always too much money.
But, I did find this guy who was trying to sell a whole garage. His garage was full of stuff. He was trying to sell all the contents for a flat amount of money.
I go and meet him, and this guy looks like Lieutenant Dan from Forest Gump.
He opened the garage, and this thing was packed full of stuff. I’m like, “oh man, this is gonna be a good deal.”
He starts telling me that there are silver coins in there, there are antiques and relics. I’m thinking, ‘Oh man, this is a good idea.’
We haggled back and forth, and I think I ended up paying $900 for the garage contents.
Turns out, the garage is full of trash. I spent $900 to haul this guy’s trash to the dump for him.
He even told me that there was a desk in there from Buffalo Bill Cody’s hotel in North Platte. I did find the desk, and there was a note in it saying it belonged to Buffalo Bill, and it smells like smoke to this day. Who knows if it’s true, but I kept it and it sits in my office today as a reminder.
Barbies galore
Another example of a failure was when I was when I decided to try to resell things for other people. I had an idea to start a side business where I would list and post things on Craigslist for people, rather than having to spend my money to buy the items.
I never got any traction on it whatsoever, except for this lady who had a gigantic Barbie collection. She called me up and asked if I wanted to list those for her.
She had more than 2,000 Barbies in the basement of her house. All in original packaging.
I started doing the math and looking on eBay on how much I could sell these for, and it was like $50,000+ if I were to sell each one individually.
So I spent months in the basement of this lady’s house categorizing all these Barbies. I would get all the information, barcodes, and details and compile it all in a big Excel sheet.
Turns out I did not have the ability or time to sell each one individually. It would take so long.
I ended up listing the whole lot on Craigslist, and a guy from New Jersey somehow saw the post. He flew in and bought the whole thing, I think he paid like $25,000 and that was the end of it. It was the last time I tried to do something like that.
What were some of the biggest lessons you’ve learned along the pathway of building? What would you tell new business builders?
Jess’ Lessons
There are two things that come to mind for me,. Number one, pick your Partner wisely.
This is a Mantra that I stand by. I don’t think we would be nearly as successful if we didn’t have a great partnership. I think oftentimes entrepreneurs rush into partnerships too quickly.
Even though Ben was spending all this time when he started, we had a good partnership. And I’m talking every weekend, all weekend long, he would be at these auctions. He would show up at seven o’clock on Saturday, and he would want the most expensive pieces of farm equipment – and those sold last. So he would stay until they close.
He would come home, we would eat dinner, and then he’d have to unload his trucker and trailer. And then we’d have to go back and reload it up.
And that was our life. But I think the partnership aspect is really important because I saw the joy and the success that he was getting out of it. So I was extremely supportive, and I wasn’t a barrier in that.
I think that’s really important when starting a business – are the people in your life going to be promoters or detractors? Because if they’re detractors, it’s a lot more difficult to make it happen.
And I think it’s a lot more fun to do with a partner. But having known quite a few people who had to break up a partnership, it can be very painful.
Also, this is kind of widely debated, but we really have grown our business off of hiring people that we know.
You often hear people say, ‘Oh don’t hire a friend because it’s so difficult, why would you do that?’. But we’ve seen a lot of success with it. We’ve had a lot of friends that have worked for us, and it creates it’s own unique dynamic. I do think it’s a lot more fun to do business with people that you know and care about.
Second, we are in a transition point right now as a business.
My team has heard me use this language a lot: we are transitioning from hiring someone as a generalist to hiring people who are specialists.
A generalist means that I want to hire someone who can do accounting, sales, and customer service when those are three different skill sets.
A specialist is someone very skilled in a specific area. Right now I want to hire somebody that is an expert in Klavio Email Marketing. That’s the system we use, and I want someone knows the system we use backward and forward. Three years ago, I wanted somebody who could do graphic design, social media, email marketing, and could support any other graphics we needed.
In the beginning, you need these generalists who can kind of do all things and be all things. As you migrate to a bigger business, you need people who can specialize in their own unique areas and skills.
Ben’s Learnings
If I were to do it again, the biggest thing I would tell people: If you’re starting a business, you can’t rely on anybody to come in and do it for you. You need to know how to do everything.
When I started, I couldn’t rely on anyone to come in and package barrels, build a website, or make sales – you do it all.
My suggestion to new entrepreneurs is to learn the business this way. I feel like a lot of new business people want to bring in somebody else to do finances or they want to hire a marketing consultant or all this stuff. They don’t build the background to listen and evaluate what those eventual experts are telling them. Moreover, anyone you bring into your business, will not be truly dedicated to what you’re trying to start. Only you are.
There’s a ton of value in learning all aspects of the business like this. I didn’t do anything really well, but I did it good enough to get this thing started. Nowadays we do hire specialists like Jess said, and I’m not allowed to do a lot of the stuff I used to do by myself.
So, you can only rely on yourself to get it going.
It’s all about the hustle. Early on it’s nonstop, hustle.
Breakdown
In this section, Humble Starts provides a summary of the main lessons from Ben and Jess’s story. Hopefully, you can apply them on your own journey towards enterprise building.
1. Start Small!
Ben is the ultimate start small story – he started with a $50 dollar lawn sprayer and grew it into multi-million dollar business. The key’s to what he did? Pick something you are interested in, start taking action, and then look for the unique niche where you can grow. Ben found this in Wine Barrels – but he had to get started to find this opportunity. Taking action, no matter the size, is the needed ingredient to build something substanscial.
2. It’s a slow burn.
Ben and Jess took a long time to build this. Ben started with only a single small sprayer, and then let the business continue to grow. Along the way he tried a lot of things – selling different things, buying a whole garage, reselling things – until he found a big opportunity. This didn’t happen overnight, and Ben kept testing avenues to grow.
Your first plan probably wont work, and you won’t find the right growth opportunity right away. Going at it with a testing or experimental mindset is the way to go. It’s not a failure, its just a test.
3. Find a good partner
Jess stressed the importance of partnership – and making sure that you are in a partnership that works. Ben and Jess compliment each other well, and have been supportive of one another as the business has grown. Take extra care when selecting your long-term partners.
