My biggest mistake: Yasmin Grigaliunas, founder and CEO of World’s Biggest Garage Sale

Yasmin Grigaliunas was standing in a bowls club with $10,000 in cash stashed in her pockets, after hosting her first garage sale event when she knew she was on to something.

 In 2013 when she was trying to raise money through her triathlon club, she saw donor fatigue kicking in; everyone was raising money for something worthy. When she noticed all the unused items sitting around her house, it prompted the idea of holding the ‘World’s Biggest Garage Sale’. 

She started by advertising the event on social media and friends and family soon caught on and began donating what they had. It opened up a unique opportunity for time-poor people to sell unused items that they didn’t want to donate. 

“People were giving me brand new items with tags, things they’d never used, high quality toys, electrical goods, I thought this is good stuff that you don’t see in charity stores,

“A couple of days out of the event, I knew I couldn’t have it in the garage anymore because there was too much stuff, so we moved everything to the bowls club and we had the event,” Mrs Grigaliunas said. 

After the success of the first garage sale, Grigaliunas knew she had to try and hold the event again, this time with a longer lead in time and the decision paid off; in 2014 it raised $60,0000 in 2015 it raised almost $100,000. 

“Customers were saying how do you more of these, can you diversify your money donations, what if you didn’t donate money and instead you created jobs, could you create employment out of this,” 

“I felt the impact, I could feel the collision of commercial and community,” she said. 

The event has morphed into social enterprise that provides employment opportunities and saves items from landfill.

But Grigaliunas knows her job as a founder is to ‘fail often.’ She doesn’t shy away from what she describes as the “shitty, gritty and unpretty” and there’s one mistake she’s learnt from the most.

The mistake

Grigaliunus quit her job in 2017 to start working on the social enterprise full-time and while she was financially secure at the time, she does believe there was more she could have done to provide financial security to her marriage and family while building the business.

“We were using our own money and boot strapping this business and we were the poorest we had ever been because we’d sold everything to put into the business,” she said. 

For the first few years, Grigaliunus went without a salary, she was on the books but didn’t pull a wage to grow the business even further and says she was blind to the unconscious bias on how much harder it is for women to raise money.

The context

After three successful World’s Biggest Garage Sale events, Grigaliunus took a trip with her family to America, which would provide life changing. She spent 10 days volunteering for the Bainbridge Island Auction and Rummage Sale, which has been running for 59 years and raises more than $500,000 in just one day.

She knew straight away she needed to leave her job and convert the World’s Biggest Garage Sale from a way to raise money into a social enterprise that would create employment opportunities and ultimately reduce landfill.

“I was shitting my pants quietly, but I trusted myself,” she said. 

When she returned home, she started, pouring all her time and money into the start up. Grigaliunus used all the family’s savings in starting the business in the hope that one day the business would return the money.

“I had some personal wealth, but I put everything into the business, and paid everyone else but myself,” she said.

For four years, she went without a salary.

The impact

While Grigaliunus admits she’s comfortable in the hard, it was hard on her family life. Her relationship with her husband, who was also her business partner, broke down during the development of the business, partly due to the financial pressure on the family.

“When a family is in financial difficulty it has a major impact on their life, major,” she said.

“Now I’m a single woman and a single parent who’s poured everything into her business and you can’t crawl that back, there’s no capability to draw back on that,” she said.

During that time, she admits she saw the ‘ugliest version of herself’ often worrying about how the family was going to pay bills. The business now has more than 15 investors, including the most recent to come on board, Officeworks, but her personal wealth is still struggling to catch up.

“Five years on, I’m so far behind my age group peers in terms of financial stability now, how long will it take me to catch up, at what point will I have some oxygen in the tank financially,” she said.

The lesson

Grigaliunus can’t fix the mistake and doesn’t regret any of her choices, but hindsight has given her a chance to evaluate the direction she chose.

“It was what I felt like I had to do at the time, but if I could do my time again, I would probably try to find a way to ease the pressure,” she said.

The key lesson Grigaliunus learnt was to have more foresight in the balancing act between business growth and personal sacrifice.

“I would have liked to have more awareness, whether your bootstrapping, fund rising equity raising, crowd-funding, friends and family, you definitely need to have a solid plan on how you are going to keep the oxygen mask on you,”

“Many founders do experience a massive pain train, but we need to find ways to minimise the pain train,” she said.

World’s Biggest Garage Sale estimates is diverted 4000 tonnes of potential landfill since it began in 2013 and created thousands of hours of employment for all abilities.

The business is on the brink of evolving in to Circonomy, which will offer a full suite of repair and recovery services.