Ben Schlichter has been fixing washers, dryers, and refrigerators out of a small appliance shop in Circleville, Ohio since 2018.
In 2022, almost on a whim, he put on a Maytag uniform and filmed a comparison video for the shop’s YouTube channel.
He stood in front of a row of washing machines and walked viewers through which ones were worth buying and why.
The video crossed a million views in 30 days.
Last year, that YouTube channel made $1.8 million. It earns four out of every five dollars his business takes in.
He still puts in half his hours at the shop, but the way he’s approached the digital space is a masterclass in classic sales that any creator could benefit from.
And the first move happens long before the camera comes on.
A Workshop, An iPhone, And a Sales Talk He’d Been Doing for Years
Schlichter spent years working on appliances before he ever opened a shop of his own.
A repair technician’s day is mostly conversation.
Someone calls or walks in with a broken machine. The technician listens, asks questions, opens the unit, finds the failure, and explains what the customer is looking at.
Then comes the recommendation. The customer decides. The technician moves on.
The trade trains you to read what a customer wants, show them the problem in plain terms, and offer the fix in a way they’ll trust enough to pay for. That’s selling.
Do it five or six times a day for years and the moves become unconscious.
In April 2018, Schlichter opened Ben’s Appliances LLC in Circleville, Ohio.
Same work he’d been doing, only now under his own name. A small shop, a workshop, a steady flow of broken machines through the door.
He decided to start filming repairs on his phone.
The shop served Circleville, but YouTube reached anyone with the same broken machine, anywhere on the planet.
In order to add to the shops bottom line, he posted videos with Amazon affiliate links in the description and earned a small cut on every part his viewers bought.
What he didn’t realize at the time was that the conversation he’d been having with customers at the counter for years carried over to the screen in the same way.
Diagnose. Show the fix. Recommend the part. The customer buys.
The work was the same, it was just a different medium, and it was about to find customers at a level Schlichter had never imagined possible.
How a Tradesman Went Global
Finding those customers meant learning where they were already looking.
Before he began filming any old repair though, he decided to look for something that would tell him what people were actually looking for themselves, and landed on the keyword research tool SEMrush.
He looked at search volume and keyword competition.
If the signals were weak, the video didn’t get made.
“I want to know not only what the keyword needs to be,” he later said, “but is it even a good idea in the first place to create that video?”
Once a video earned the green light, the work in front of the camera looked exactly like the work at the counter.
He filmed the actual repair on the actual broken machine, explained what failed, and showed exactly what needed replacing.
Then the recommendation came.
The part he was recommending would appear in the YouTube Shopping carousel under the video.
The link to buy lived inside the demonstration itself.
He had tested the reverse early, calling out the product before delivering the value, but both retention and conversions dropped.
So value first, product second became the rule.
Which products to recommend was a question the affiliate data answered.
He’d started as an Amazon affiliate before he was YouTube-monetized. Lowe’s, Home Depot, Best Buy, Samsung, and LG joined the rotation as the channel grew.
The income was modest at first. The shop paid the bills, the affiliate cheques covered more filming, and the channel slowly built up.
The conversion data, meanwhile, was showing him something specific.
In 2021, with 4,000 subscribers, one product was converting at a rate that stood out from the rest.
Amazon was keeping most of the margin on every unit, but if Schlichter sourced the same product from a manufacturer directly, that margin was his.
So he did exactly that. He found a manufacturer, sourced the product himself, and started selling it through his own channel.
He continued to add more products. The first one is still a top-three seller four years later.
By last year, all his revenue arms had cleared $1.8 million in revenue.
Roughly $1.44 million of that came through the digital rails: parts he manufactured, affiliate commissions, and YouTube AdSense.
The remaining $360,000 came from the brick-and-mortar shop and eBay resale.
Schlichter has said affiliate revenue is now roughly matching his AdSense earnings on the channel. If the parts business runs at similar scale, each of the three digital revenue streams contribute somewhere around half a million dollars a year.
By his last public disclosure, the affiliate stream alone was up 400% year on year.
The shop had taught him how to sell. The screen had just taught him how to do it at scale.
Find demand. Demonstrate value. Capture margin.
The architecture underneath these moves is where this gets interesting.
Three Jobs the Door-to-Door Salesman Already Knew
Strip the channel away from Schlichter’s business and what’s left is something almost any salesman from any era would recognize.
A buyer has a problem.
The seller shows them the working solution.
The buyer trusts the seller enough to hand over money.
That structure predates YouTube by a thousand years.
Encyclopedia salesmen used it going door-to-door.
Knife demonstrations salesmen used it from stage at state fairs.
The QVC presenter holding up a juicer used it when they took it to cable television.
It works because human beings haven’t changed in any of the ways that matter for buying things.
It’s only the delivery format that has changed.
In Schlichter’s case, he’s taken to YouTube.
The video is the demonstration. The link to buy is the cash register.
And underneath every one of these scenes are the same three jobs.
1. The seller has to be trusted.
2. The thing being sold has to be shown working.
3. And the path from wanting it to owning it has to be short enough that the wanting doesn’t fade.
Encyclopedia salesmen had to deliver all three on the doorstep, or no sale.
QVC presenters had to deliver all three before the next caller hung up, or no sale.
Schlichter delivers all three inside a single YouTube video.
Trust is already there before he says anything.
The Maytag uniform, the appliance shop visible behind him, the years of repair videos the channel has been building, the broken machine in front of him with parts already laid out.
All of it signals to the viewer that he knows what he’s doing.
Demonstrated value shows up in the repair itself.
The viewer watches the failed part get diagnosed, removed, replaced, and tested. Every time, the new part works on camera before it ever gets mentioned for sale.
The path from wanting it to owning it lives in the link sitting under the video.
No fancy funnel required. The viewer clicks once and owns the part.
By the time the viewer clicks the link, the decision to buy has already been made.
That’s the buying journey, whether in the physical world or online, and a tradesman in Ohio happens to be running both especially well.
What a Repair Video Can Teach You About Putting the Sale Inside the Content
Schlichter has a workshop, a uniform, and a decade of repair work behind him, but the architecture of how he’s built his business is portable.
The three jobs of a sale all sit inside the same piece of content: trust, demonstration, and a seamless way to buy.
This is the same logic Olly Richards built a $1.2M writing business on.
Strip the marketing complexity back and let the work itself come through.
Schlichter’s version puts the trust, the demonstration, and the sale into a single video.
Three moves apply.
1. Move the sale into the content where the value gets demonstrated.
In Schlichter’s videos, the trust signal, the demonstration, and the buy link all live in one place. The viewer who decides to act doesn’t have to leave the content to do it.
Any friction between the demonstration and the purchase is a chance for the buyer to lose the impulse.
Pull up your highest-attention piece of content right now. The one your buyer profile actually watches or reads. Check whether all three jobs are happening inside it.
If the trust signal is on a separate page, find a way to bring it into the content itself. Show the work. The work is the credential.
If the value is being described, the next piece needs to demonstrate it working in real time.
If the buy link is on a different page, move it. Inside the content. Right where the demonstration ends.
The buyer whose decision is made watching should be able to act in the same place.
2. Show the work doing the work.
In Schlichter’s repair videos, the new part gets installed and the machine runs. The viewer sees the failure resolved on camera before any product mention.
When the viewer can see the thing working, the proof is in their head before any pitch arrives.
For the next piece of content you publish, find the place where the value is supposed to land. Build that moment as a live demonstration the viewer can watch.
A real input the viewer can recognize. A real process running, with the messy parts visible. A real output the viewer can verify.
This week, pick one piece of content already on your calendar. Rebuild the value moment as a demonstration. Use a real example. Run it live. Show the output. Done.
3. Make content for the moment of need.
The people watching Schlichter’s videos already have a broken washing machine in front of them.
They typed the model number into YouTube because the unit died yesterday. They’re trying to solve a specific problem, right now.
That’s where the buyer attached to a piece of content actually lives.- inside a specific moment of need.
For your next piece, identify the exact moment in your buyer’s life when the content should arrive. What are they trying to do right now? What just broke? What decision is sitting unanswered on their screen?
Build the content for that moment. The title speaks to where they are. The opening confirms it. The demonstration shows the resolution.
Schlichter’s edge is that he never built anything more complicated than a video that does these three jobs.
The architecture has been around for a thousand years. Any creator with the discipline to put it in one piece of content can pick it up.