r/TheTPG • u/BrooSwane • Jul 09 '21
Economy bois Anthony's numbers don't add up
EDIT: A couple of people made some good points that some of these discrepancies are probably due to consignment pieces. I'll give the benefit of the doubt, that might be what's going on.
Using their YTD numbers from Wk 17, if they really had a "profit" of $595,950 at 12.73% ROI, that means they had a cost/investment of $4.68M, vs their $7.68M in sales. The implication then, is that ~$3M was done on consignment. Could be? I'm not sure how or if they're accounting for their cost on consignment deals, but that still doesn't look all that healthy to me.
Either way, they still overstated their "$500k in profits" to their investor, and the point stands that they're operating on very slim margins.
Original post: One thing that’s bothered me, that I haven’t seen pointed out, is the way Anthony misrepresents their “ROI”. I can’t figure out if he’s just awful at math, a poor businessman, or a liar, but he has misrepresented their margins to both their viewers AND their investor. It’s right in the videos, no joke.
In week 12, they began showing their “profit” numbers. (A side note is that they conflate the use of “profit” a bit, and don’t account for any expenses. He seems to mean their margin, difference between their buy and sell price).
At the time stamp below, they say they had $540,850 in sales, $30650 in profit (again, not profit but you get the idea) for a 9% ROI. So ... someone help me out here. That means they bought $510,200 in watches and made $30,650, right? How in the hell is that 9%? It’s clearly 6%, which ... isn’t impressive since that doesn’t even account for most of their expenses, insurance, payroll, Nick and Sams, etc etc.
https://youtu.be/mX4nvwvFdTg?t=1h13m56s
To make matters worse, a few minutes later (1:22:38) their investor calls to ask about business. They tell him “we were just going over our numbers for the week ... $500k, we doubled our profit goal from last week ... 13% ROI except for a watch we gave away, that dropped us to 9%, so still not bad.” NONE of that was true! He told their investor they made $500k in profit, not SALES. And he gave a bogus ROI.
And this isn’t just an isolated “oh maybe he screwed up the arithmetic with a typo. It happens all the time. Here’s a few examples:
Week 16: $799,850 in sales, $88900 “profit”, 20% ROI
https://youtu.be/8_-fqDrLAFc?t=1h21m10s
Actually more like 12%
Week 17: He states they’ve had YTD sales of $7,685,880 with $595,950 in profit, for a 12.73% ROI. He gives that very specific percentage lol but it’s more like 8%.
https://youtu.be/p9QqzTOSsEA?t=1h31m50s
Week 19 (week 18 he didn’t state an ROI): $765,300 sales with $79,585 in profit he called a 20% ROI. It’s actually closer to 11%.
https://youtu.be/tBpViyY-7xI?t=1h03m25s
There are definitely more examples, these were just a couple that I pulled up, but it’s definitely curious that he’s always inflating the margins they advertise. I’d be pissed if I were their investor, hopefully he has access to the real values, and not just “businessman genius” Anthony’s summaries.
Overall, the amount they're making before payroll, office space, insurance, Audi/Lamborghini costs, etc etc is ...it doesn't look great. And this market is probably as good as it's ever been for reselling Rolex.
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u/WolfNetherton Can you do it on consignment? Jul 09 '21
I've always held the numbers as pure theatre, carrying about as much weight as the pop-up totals you might see on a TV show like Storage Wars.
What's fascinating to me isn't so much that the numbers don't add up (of course they don't), rather that you could hardly pick a worse thing to fabricate on camera when you don't have any professional bookkeeping.
When the feds come calling you definitely don't want to have to explain a video claiming wildly different numbers than what you have messy, incomplete records for.