The argument in one line.
Money isn't what keeps most people from starting a business — fear of others' judgment is; the fix is finding one customer before building anything else, then repeating that bias for action until it compounds.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- Anyone thinking about starting a side hustle or service business who keeps stalling on setup steps (LLC, logo, business plan) instead of finding a first customer.
- Someone with a spare skill or a few weekend hours looking for a low-capital way to add $5-10k a month.
- Anyone weighing living organ donation who wants a plain-language account of the actual risk and process.
- Anyone stuck in analysis-paralysis who wants a concrete framework — bias for action, the boot camp method — for testing an idea before fully building it.
SKIP IF…
- You want a technical, step-by-step guide to one specific business model — this is a wide-ranging conversation, not a how-to manual.
- You want tactical AI-tooling instructions — the AI-consulting section is a business-model pitch, not a software walkthrough.
The full version, fast.
Chris Koerner has launched dozens of businesses, starting with an unlicensed iPhone-repair store he learned to run from YouTube videos between customers. His core argument: people fail before they start because they 'play business' — filing an LLC, writing a plan, designing a logo — instead of finding one paying customer first. He walks through reselling, manual-labor services, and AI consulting as near-zero-capital paths to $5-10k a month, all built on a 'bias for action' habit of resolving curiosity immediately. Halfway through, the conversation turns personal: his daughter's double lung transplant, the stranger's family who donated the lungs, and why he and his wife each later donated a kidney to someone they'll never meet.
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Create a free account →Who's talking.
00:23guestChris Koerner
00:00hostLewis Howes
Where the time goes.
00:00 – 01:10
01 · Intro
Edited cold-open montage of later lines ('sell it before you have it', 'fear of the perception of failure') plus Chris Koerner's bio as a 75-business serial entrepreneur.
01:10 – 04:16
02 · Zero-Dollar Businesses
You don't need money to start a business — find one customer, even an unpaid one, before writing a plan or filing an LLC. 'You can't be prideful and broke at the same time.'
04:16 – 07:33
03 · Constraints & Creativity
Chris calls himself a 'walking contradiction' about money; deliberate financial stretch (an expensive first house) worked as forced motivation, though he warns against misusing that as an excuse to overspend.
07:33 – 10:21
04 · Parkinson's Law
Time and resources expand to fill the space allotted to them — applies to money the same way it applies to deadlines. The busiest, most successful people reply the fastest.
10:21 – 13:36
05 · Reselling to $10k/Month
The barbell method for picking a business (manual-labor extreme vs. AI-heavy extreme); reselling VCRs, camcorders, and furniture bought cheap on Facebook Marketplace and sold at fair value on eBay.
13:36 – 17:43
06 · Manual Labor Side Hustles
America is short ~3 million tradespeople; home-service niches (window washing, TV mounting, gutter work) pay well and are listed for free on TaskRabbit, Google LSA, Thumbtack, HomeAdvisor, Angie's List.
17:43 – 19:42
07 · The Bootcamp Method
Sell a live cohort or webinar before the course exists, then record and repackage the delivery as the product — paired with generous refund policies.
19:42 – 24:47
08 · iPhone Repair Story
Chris signed a five-year retail lease at 2,300/month with no repair skills and no money, then learned to fix iPhones from YouTube between paying customers — including breaking a $700 screen along the way.
24:47 – 26:01
09 · The Real Fear of Failure
The desert-island analogy: fear of failure isn't real, it's fear of others' perception of failure. If you do fail, people forget within moments.
26:01 – 32:40
10 · Delusional Optimism
Chris calls himself 'the most delusional optimist ever' — any business can succeed with the right distribution. Opportunity cost, not lack of focus, is often the real reason to walk away from a business (the 2016 Bitcoin distraction story).
32:40 – 37:19
11 · AI Consulting Hustle
85% of small business owners know they should use AI, only ~12% do anything meaningful with it. The service: record a free conversation with a business-owner friend, feed it to an AI, bring back concrete next steps.
37:19 – 42:48
12 · Bias for Action
Resolve curiosity immediately instead of letting it pass — pulling out a phone mid-conversation to research a question, or doing quick math on a restaurant's line to estimate its revenue.
42:48 – 49:14
13 · Avoiding Lifestyle Creep
Lifestyle creep shows up as giving a shrinking percentage of a growing income to charity; withholding certain luxuries (a private chef) until kids are grown to keep them grounded in normal chores.
49:14 – 55:19
14 · The Lung Transplant
His daughter's pulmonary hypertension required a double lung transplant at age 9 or she would die within a year; the family relocated to Houston with no notice, and Chris learned the donor's identity mid-surgery through an unrelated Facebook message.
55:19 – 1:06:57
15 · Donating a Kidney
Chris researched altruistic kidney donation, found the risk comparable to childbirth (3 in 10,000), and donated on the anniversary of the donor boy's death; his wife donated three months later. A National Kidney Foundation voucher program now guarantees his family priority access if they ever need a kidney.
1:06:57 – 1:11:35
16 · Teaching Kids About Money
Three money lessons for his kids: be generous (treat service workers like unpaid volunteers), no one is coming to save you (treat entrepreneurial skills like food storage), and convert liabilities into assets (rent a room, drive DoorDash).
1:11:35 – 1:14:00
17 · Three Truths
Closing 'three truths': impatience with action, patience with results; be more bold; do things for the story. Ends on 'greatness is simply being a net positive to the world.'
Lines worth screenshotting.
- The fastest way to fail at business is to spend weeks on an LLC, a logo, and a business plan before finding a single paying customer.
- There are very few businesses that genuinely require more than $1,000 to start — even a $500k restaurant idea can be derisked with a pop-up or a rented food truck first.
- First customers almost always come from friends, family, and existing social circles, which means pride about looking amateur online is the real obstacle, not lack of capital.
- Parkinson's Law applies to money exactly like it applies to deadlines: give yourself financial pressure and you rise to meet it.
- The busiest, most successful people are consistently the fastest to reply to messages — people with less going on are the ones who take days.
- Reselling underpriced goods bought where sellers don't know the value (Facebook Marketplace) and sold where buyers do (eBay) can scale to six figures a year with almost no starting capital.
- America is short roughly 3 million tradespeople, and unsexy niche services like gutter cleaning or window washing are chronically underserved and hard for AI to disrupt.
- The 'boot camp method': sell a live cohort or webinar before the course exists, then record the delivery and repackage the recording as the permanent product.
- Breaking a customer's $700 iPhone screen while learning repairs from YouTube in real time still cost less than the momentum and sales lost by waiting six months to open fully trained.
- What people call 'fear of failure' is really fear of what others will think if they fail — and in practice, onlookers forget within moments and move on.
- 85% of small business owners know they should be using AI, but only about 12% are doing anything meaningful with it — that gap is a service business.
- 'Post and ghost': publish something to social media and don't read the comments, because the anticipated judgment is almost always worse than the actual reaction.
- Lifestyle creep isn't just spending more — it's giving a shrinking percentage of a growing income to charity even as the absolute dollars available to give go up.
- Living kidney donation carries roughly a 3-in-10,000 risk of death, comparable to the risk of childbirth, far lower than the popular perception of the surgery's danger.
- If 1 in 10,000 healthy adults donated a kidney to a stranger, kidney-transplant waiting-list deaths — currently around 5,000 people a year — could drop to zero.
Sell it before you build it, then let momentum do the rest.
WHAT TO LEARN
The gap between people who start something and people who just talk about starting is one habit — finding a customer before building anything else — repeated with bias for action until it compounds.
02Zero-Dollar Businesses
- You don't need money to start a business — go find one customer, even an unpaid one, before spending time on an LLC, a logo, or a business plan.
- Most people can derisk almost any business idea, even a $500k restaurant, with a pop-up, a farmer's-market table, or a rented food truck before committing real capital.
03Constraints & Creativity
- Deliberately taking on a financial stretch can function as forced motivation rather than recklessness, as long as it doesn't become an excuse for reckless spending.
- There's no meaningful correlation between how much you paid to learn something and whether you actually follow through, so a pricier course rarely buys more commitment.
04Parkinson's Law
- Parkinson's Law applies to money exactly like it applies to deadlines: give yourself financial pressure and you tend to rise to meet it.
- The busiest, most successful people are consistently the fastest to reply to messages — people with less going on are the ones who take days.
05Reselling to $10k/Month
- Reselling underpriced goods bought where sellers don't know the value and sold where buyers do can scale to six figures a year with almost no starting capital.
- Documenting a resale or flip journey on camera turns the process itself into an asset — an audience that roots for the comeback can eventually replace the need to keep flipping.
06Manual Labor Side Hustles
- America is short roughly 3 million tradespeople, and unsexy niche services like gutter cleaning or window washing are chronically underserved.
- Listing a skill on free platforms like TaskRabbit, Google LSA, Thumbtack, HomeAdvisor, or Angie's List can generate six figures a year in leads without paid marketing.
07The Bootcamp Method
- Sell the delivery of a course before the course exists: run a live webinar or paid bootcamp, record it, then repackage the recording as the permanent product.
- Pair a pre-sale offer with a generous refund policy so the risk of selling before you build sits with you, not the customer.
08iPhone Repair Story
- Signing a five-year retail lease with no repair skills was reckless on paper, but learning to fix iPhones from YouTube in real time between paying customers still worked out ahead.
- Breaking a customer's $700 screen while learning on the job cost less than the sales and momentum lost by waiting six months to open fully trained.
09The Real Fear of Failure
- What people call fear of failure is really fear of what others will think if they fail — and onlookers forget within moments and move on.
- Alone on a desert island you'd build a raft without hesitation; imagining an audience watching is what triggers perfectionism and stalling.
10Delusional Optimism
- Believing any business can succeed with the right distribution removes the pressure to find a perfect idea in the first place.
- Opportunity cost, not lack of focus, is often the real reason to abandon a working business — a distraction can sometimes outperform staying rigidly focused.
- Forgetting the failures and moving straight to the next attempt is a deliberate practice worth building, not just a personality trait.
11AI Consulting Hustle
- AI consulting is accessible to almost anyone with a few hundred social-media connections, since roughly 1 in 10 adults owns a business.
- Record a free conversation with a business-owner friend about what's hard in their business, feed the transcript to an AI, then bring back one concrete next step — that's the entire service.
- 85% of small business owners know they should use AI; only about 12% do anything meaningful with it, and that gap is the opportunity.
12Bias for Action
- Bias for action means resolving curiosity immediately rather than letting it pass, because the habit compounds the more it's practiced.
- Quick mid-conversation market research — counting a restaurant's line, checking menu prices, doing the math on busy-day revenue — is a repeatable way to evaluate business ideas in real time.
13Avoiding Lifestyle Creep
- Lifestyle creep isn't just spending more — it's giving a shrinking percentage of a growing income to charity even as the absolute dollars available to give go up.
- Deliberately withholding certain luxuries until children are grown can be used to keep kids grounded in normal chores and habits despite the family's actual means.
- Increased wealth carries a real risk of treating people at a lower socioeconomic status as lesser, when the instinct should run the opposite direction, toward more empathy.
14The Lung Transplant
- A double lung transplant is one of the most invasive transplants possible because lungs, unlike other organs, are constantly exposed to outside air.
- The family relocated with no notice to be near the best pediatric transplant hospital, since only about 8-15 lung transplants happen nationwide per month.
- An unexpected, unrelated connection to the donor's family mid-surgery became a defining emotional turning point, separate from the medical outcome itself.
15Donating a Kidney
- Living kidney donation carries roughly a 3-in-10,000 risk of death, comparable to the risk of childbirth, far lower than the popular perception of the surgery's danger.
- A National Kidney Foundation voucher program lets a living donor guarantee priority access to a kidney later for themselves or up to five named family members.
- If 1 in 10,000 healthy adults donated a kidney to a stranger, kidney-transplant waiting-list deaths, currently around 5,000 people a year, could drop to zero.
16Teaching Kids About Money
- Treat entrepreneurial skills like emergency food storage: not needed day to day, but a self-sufficiency skill set worth having in case circumstances force reliance on it.
- Converting liabilities into assets — renting a spare room, driving for a delivery app with a personal car — is a practical, teachable money habit.
- Small service gestures, like using a customer's name or adding a moment of personality to a delivery, measurably increase tips.
17Three Truths
- Be impatient with action but patient with results — pursue opportunities immediately, then give the outcomes time to compound.
- Err toward being more bold; it's rare that someone is actually too bold, but common to hold back more than necessary.
- Do things primarily for the story they'll produce — a good story, pursued honestly, tends to create its own long-term value.
Terms worth knowing.
- Parkinson's Law
- The idea that work — or spending — expands to fill whatever time or money is available for it, so a two-month deadline gets used in full even when the task takes two days.
- Barbell method (business selection)
- Deliberately building at either extreme of a spectrum — pure hands-on manual labor AI can't touch, or pure AI-leveraged digital work — while avoiding the disrupted middle ground between them.
- Boot camp method
- Selling and delivering a live cohort, webinar, or pre-sale offer before the product fully exists, then recording that delivery and repackaging it as the permanent course or product.
- First sale doctrine
- The legal principle that lets someone resell a genuine branded product they've purchased, as long as they don't imply an official partnership with or endorsement from the brand.
- Altruistic kidney donation
- Donating a kidney to a stranger without payment and often without ever meeting the recipient, motivated by wanting to help rather than any personal or family benefit.
- Post and ghost
- Publishing something to social media and deliberately avoiding the comments afterward, so anticipated judgment doesn't stop the follow-through.
Things they pointed at.
17:08toolTaskRabbit / Google LSA / Thumbtack / HomeAdvisor / Angie's List
56:37toolNational Kidney Foundation voucher program
Lines you could clip.
00:00
“People are masters at playing business and not doing business... Sell it before you have it.”
02:47
“You can't be prideful and broke at the same time.”
25:29
“It's the fear of the perception of failure from others. That's the only thing we're afraid of.”
26:16
“I am the most delusional optimist ever.”
37:24
“Bias for action.”
59:16
“If one in ten thousand healthy adults donated their kidney to a stranger, no one would die waiting for a kidney.”
1:13:30
“Greatness is simply being a net positive to the world.”
Where the conversation goes.
00:00 – 13:36denseStarting a business with no money / zero-dollar businesses
13:36 – 19:42denseManual labor and service side hustles
19:42 – 24:47denseLearning by doing — the iPhone repair store story
24:47 – 32:40steadyFear of failure, delusional optimism, distribution over ideas
32:40 – 37:19denseAI consulting as the easiest niche right now
37:19 – 42:48steadyBias for action and momentum
42:48 – 49:14steadyMoney mindset — lifestyle creep, giving, scarcity
49:14 – 55:19densePersonal story: daughter's double lung transplant
55:19 – 1:06:57densePersonal story: donating a kidney to a stranger
1:06:57 – 1:14:00steadyTeaching kids about money, three life truths
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metaphoranalogy
00:00People are masters at and not doing business. They go get an LLC. They make a business plan.
00:06A logo. They start talking to their friends about it. I'm making moves.
00:10You don't do any of that. Go find a customer. I don't care if it's your mom, your best friend.
00:14I don't care. You gotta start somewhere. I don't care if it's an unpaying customer and you do it for free just to get a five star review.
00:19Go find a customer and then figure everything else out after that. Sell it before you have it. He is a serial entrepreneur who has launched 75 businesses with multiple of them becoming 7 and 8 figure brands.
00:29He's here to teach you the fastest way to add 10,000 plus dollars a month to your life. You have the inspiring Chris Kerner in the house. It's the fear of the perception of failure from others.
00:40That's the only thing we're afraid of. It's not one of the things. It's not the fear failure, it's what will people think about me if I fail.
00:46The thing is if you do fail, they're probably not gonna think anything about you. How does someone develop a more resilient mindset
00:54when they launch something, they get laughed at and they lose money and they fail. How do they not let that insecurity or that self doubt stop them from trying again? It's an overly simplistic answer, but we I've always heard people say that it takes money to make money.
01:13Is that something you believe?
01:14Maybe thirty years ago that was true, but that's no longer true. Why is that? We have more resources, tools, everything at our disposal today that we've never had before.
01:25We could use an AI tool on a free trial to launch a service business and sell something to a business owner that pays us 2,500 a month. Right? Um, you don't need money to start a business, period.
01:38What do you need? You need to shed your ego. You need to stop thinking that people care about what you're doing or saying on the Internet.
01:47You need to just let go. Like, as cliche as that is, you need to just do your own thing and stop worrying about other people. But what if someone spends a lot of time, energy, and money launching something,
01:58and they get zero results, and they lose their money? Well,
02:02how much money did they spend, and why did they spend it? Right? What business did they pick is what I would ask them.
02:07I can think of very few exceptions where you need over 100 or $1,000 to start a business. Even if I were to start a restaurant that costs half $1,000,000 to open, I could still largely derisk that idea by going to farmer's markets and having people taste my recipe or a pop up or, you know, renting a food truck for a weekend just to see if people come or people come back or if they care.
02:29There's a thousand creative ways to launch a business without money. And testing it first to make sure the model works, then scaling it, then getting the half $1,000,000 investment in the storefront or whatever it might be.
02:40Once you know you have customers, once you know that there's product market fit or whatever it might be. Right? Correct.
02:47And you told me beforehand that you can't be prideful and broke
02:51at the same time. Mhmm. Why is that?
02:53Because we are most likely to get our first customers from our friends and family or from social media, from our Facebook page that has 300 followers or Instagram page that has 262 followers.
03:05The people that trust us, not like us, know us, know our background, they are most likely to want to support us. Right?
03:12But so many of us are too concerned about what that guy from high school twenty years ago will think about me if I post a selfie video talking about my new service business. He doesn't care. He doesn't know.
03:24And if he cares, he's not a person that you should care about. So we we just have to let go and realize that people have more distractions than they've ever had. We're swiping so many things.
03:35They're not thinking about you. They don't care about you. Just do your own thing.
03:39Let go of the ego, and you will win. Were you always good with money?
03:44I grew up poor, so I've had to be good with money. I'd I've I've had to have a kind of a scarcity mindset around money because I grew up poor.
03:55Do you still have a scarcity money mindset around money? Sometimes. Yeah.
03:59Depends on the thing. Not around food. I'm a foodie.
04:01So You'll spend it all in food. Where I ball out. Right?
04:04Yeah. Yeah. Around a lot of other things I do because those habits are hard to break.
04:07Yeah. So you don't wanna go back to being poor. Right.
04:10So would you say you have a scarcity mindset or a frugal mindset? Or live beneath your means mindset?
04:16I think I'm a walking contradiction. Yeah. Yeah.
04:20I could point to like, I built a house more expensive than what I could afford in my twenties. Mhmm. But at the same time, there are other decisions I make that show my frugality mindset.
04:29Yeah. It just I'm just I don't know. I guess I'm a hypocrite.
04:32I'm inconsistent when it comes to money. It it just depends. But I will say this.
04:36I like to say constraints equal creativity, and building a house more expensive than I could afford in my twenties was one of the best things I could have done because it was a motivating factor to just to work harder.
04:50Mhmm. And I don't want people to misinterpret that, misunderstand. It's like, well, I can go buy that $13 avocado toast because it'll just motivate me to grind more.
04:58Like, I think that's kind of a weird quirk of mine. But for me, it worked.
05:02Like, I I also had my first kid when I was 23. Wow. And my fourth when I was 29.
05:08Right? And so that's always been the the forefront of my mind is providing for my family. And so if I did make a poor money decision, I always knew that, a, I could think of a creative way to start a business and and make it back, um, or, b, I would just have to work harder to be able to afford my lifestyle.
05:26So interesting because
05:28in my twenties, uh, my first apartment was $250 a month, and I thought it was a lot of money.
05:35Then it was $450 a month. That was a stretch.
05:39Then I went from that to in Ohio, to to New York City, and it was 2,600 a month for a for a rental for one month. And I go, this is, like, six months of rent in in Ohio.
05:50And I was like, this is insanity Yeah. That I'm spending this to sleep. And then the next month after that, I went to 3,600 a month, and I go, this is this is way too much.
06:00And it was, like, $6 a few years later, and I was just like, are you kidding me? My younger self would be saying that you're just wasting your money.
06:08But for whatever reason, every time I stepped into a new environment in my living space that cost more Mhmm. It's like I unlocked financial abundance.
06:18Like, I it's like I got creative. Yes. Maybe it was a certain level of constraint by that framing where it made me think in a different way.
06:26I was like, I need to go earn way more to be able to pay for this so that my bank account doesn't go down. Yeah. And, again, like you, it doesn't mean to go spend as much money as you can next month's rent, but that pressure caused me to figure out how to provide at a different level of thinking than the lower level of financial pressure.
06:47Yeah. And maybe not maybe there's limits to how much pressure I could handle Sure.
06:54Before it's like, oh, and I actually break down. Right. But incrementally going into that new level supported me in being creative Yeah.
07:04Financially. Yeah. And taking risks and not worrying about looking silly and just being risking, like, failure.
07:13Yeah. Because I was like, I need a yes. I need people to consume or buy or whatever it might be.
07:17Yeah.
07:18And is that something that you've experienced as well? I think we don't put enough pressure on ourselves. We need like, we hear a lot of people like, just let you know, just don't be so hard on your I think we need to be a little harder on ourselves.
07:31We need to put a little pressure on ourselves. You're familiar with Parkinson's law? Uh-huh.
07:36So for those watching, Parkinson's law is the is the theory that time and or resources expand or contract to fit the space allotted to it.
07:45Right? So in high school, if my chemistry teacher said, we've got this project due in two months.
07:51It's a third of your grade. We were gonna take two months to do it. What I normally did, I have ADHD, is I would completely forget about it To last night.
08:00To the last night. And he would tell us, this isn't the type of thing that you can progress in. I'm telling you, I'm like, okay.
08:04We'll see. And last night, I would forget. I'm like, oh, crap.
08:08I have that project. I would stay up all night, and I would submit something amazing, Like, objectively, he wouldn't have never known, and that's Parkinson's law. And that's pressure.
08:18Whether artificial or natural, that is pressure. And what you're describing is the same thing. It's just not in a time format.
08:24It's in a monetary format. Yes. So there there are pressures that are outside of our control.
08:28Like, if I took out an SBA loan to buy a business and then it turns out, like, the business was all a sham or fraud, and I could declare bankruptcy. Like, that might be way too much pressure for me. But for what you're describing, it would motivate you to go do a little more, try a little harder, do this, you know, stay clocked in a few more hours.
08:47And when that pressure is applied is when you unlock these amazing things. And a lot of pressure over a long period of time compounds to an insane amount to where at the end of ten, twenty years of doing that, you're, like, you're insanely productive and efficient, and you have all these revenue streams.
09:06And these beautiful things have happened because you've you've allowed that pressure to affect your life. Yeah. They say if you wanna get something done, give it to a busy person.
09:14That's Parkinson's law. That's Parkinson's law. It's like it it's so funny because
09:19I've had the, you know, the the honor of interviewing a lot of people on this show and, you know, stay in touch and stay friends with a lot of them over time. And it's the people that you wouldn't expect to get back to you the fastest, the people that are the most successful, the busiest, that have the most on their plate.
09:35I text them. I call them. They text back within minutes.
09:38Yeah. It's the people that are not doing as much that take days.
09:43Yeah. And I'm like, really? It makes no sense to me.
09:46Yep. I'm like, you can't reply within a day or at least just a thumbs up, an acknowledgment. You know?
09:51So Yeah. It's so funny that the most successful people usually are the fastest to reply, or if they see it, they're gonna give you some acknowledgment or say, I'll get back to you tomorrow. They give you something where they're saying, I wanna take action now.
10:03Yeah. And that action snowballs into more results.
10:07Yeah. Typically. You are a master at showing the world the easiest ways to launch a business and make 5 to 10 k a month Mhmm.
10:17Pretty quickly with a little amount or no money at all. Mhmm. Which types of businesses are the easiest to scale to 10 k a month right now?
10:25I like to think of it like a barbell when it comes to businesses.
10:29Very on one side of the barbell, you have no AI, no tech, no Internet, sweaty, hands on, difficult.
10:38I love those businesses because people don't wanna play there. Manual labor Yes.
10:43Plumbing, the lawn mowing, the freaking tree removal, the the dirty work. Right?
10:48Which you can charge a premium for, I feel like, right now. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
10:52AI isn't about to disrupt that. No. On the other end of that barbell, you have AI heavy.
10:56Right? All online content, AI heavy. That's where I like to be.
11:01I don't wanna be in the messy middle where either side of that can be disrupted by the other side. So I really like reselling right now. Reselling anything.
11:10I don't know when that's gonna go out of business. I talked to guys just yesterday that are reselling VCRs.
11:18They're paying 5 to $10 for VCRs and selling for a 100 to $150.
11:22They might have been getting for free some of these probably. Right? It's like some of these things you just, like, find donations Yeah.
11:27And then fix it up. Right? These guys are in, like, the middle of nowhere Virginia.
11:31And so when we were talking, I pulled up Facebook Marketplace, and I live in Dallas Fort Worth. There's 9,000,000 people, and I typed in VCR. And I just watched their eyes lit up because there were hundreds of VCRs for 5 to $10.
11:43And they were like, that one's worth 200. That one's worth 75. That one's worth $1.50.
11:47And and I crunched the numbers, and I'm like, you could make 6 figures a year if you lived in Dallas Fort Worth buying VCRs on Facebook Marketplace where people don't know the value and selling them on eBay where there's a fair price, a fair market value for it. Wow. VCRs.
12:02Right? Yeah. And you could you could rinse and repeat that category with hundreds of others.
12:07These guys were selling camcorders, all types of stuff. So that is a business where if Reselling. Reselling.
12:12Anything. Could be clothes. It could be games.
12:14It could be toys. It could be whatever. I know a guy that makes 6 figures picking up free or close to free couches on Facebook Marketplace and selling them on Facebook Marketplace.
12:25Like, people that only buy on Facebook Marketplace and then sell on the same platform to the same people for a profit. Yeah. I think I've seen a lot of people on Instagram.
12:34I love people documenting their journeys of, like, reselling Oh, yeah. And picking up whatever $50 furniture and selling it for a thousand.
12:41Yeah. Now maybe they put a couple days of, like, labor and paint and sanding it. But if you have that skill Yeah.
12:47To refurbish something and then resell and make it look nice Yeah.
12:52That's, like, $800 right there in profit. It was just a couple days of work. But if you're willing to hit record on the camera, put your phone on a tripod, and you like, you're not embarrassed, then you can grow an audience who's cheering for you and rooting for you.
13:04And then eventually, you're gonna have an audience that won't necessitate you to go buy dressers anymore. You can do whatever you want with that.
13:10Exactly. It's almost like if you can create content showing the launch of an idea Yes. Is more valuable than the idea itself.
13:18And that's okay. That's okay. Because people are good.
13:22They wanna support people. They wanna support the underdog. And if you're the underdog and they're watching your come up from zero to something, they're gonna support you.
13:29Yeah. Okay. So restyle is one.
13:31Mhmm. What other couple of ideas you got? I mean, I had a couple come to my house just last week.
13:37They wash windows. That's it. I paid them $500, and it was a husband wife.
13:43They're, like, early mid twenties, and they wash my windows. And the like, this isn't how it worked, but this is how it could have worked.
13:52They could have said, Chris, can we wash your windows? And I'm like, sure. I wanna support young entrepreneurs.
13:57So, okay, we need to, uh, require deposit. No problem. How much?
14:01Half. Here's $2.50. Okay.
14:03They could have had $0 to their name. No car. No LLC.
14:07No insurance. Anything. They could have Ubered to Home Depot, used that $2.50 to buy all the equipment for $50, come back to my house, spent five hours.
14:16Well, like, it's hard work. I'm not saying it's easy, And put hundreds of dollars of profit in their they could have been paid to start a business. Right?
14:24That's a business where you would need money to start. You get paid up front. It's not unreasonable to ask for a deposit.
14:30That didn't happen. I just paid them. But I'm saying, like, back to our you don't need money to start a business.
14:34That's one. So any any service business that you start with your hands that's unsexy, that's physical, we're we're missing, like, 3,000,000 plumbers, HVAC, and electricians in America right now.
14:45We have a shortage of, like, 3,000,000. And those are just the big three that home services that everyone talks about, but there's thousands of home service niches.
14:53If you look at just gutters, you have gutter repair, gutter replacement, gutter cleaning. Like, there's thousands of home service businesses. So anything you do with your hands that, you know, robots aren't about to take over because the smart people developing robots are making robots that can, you know, package orders and and do things at scale, not Yeah.
15:12Replace a toilet. A few years ago, I was you know, we bought a home, and I was, you know, trying to hang stuff and curtains and TVs and all this stuff. And I was like, I don't have time to do this right now.
15:21And I what is it? TaskRabbit? I went out there, and it's like, I think I paid someone like 4 or $500 to hang a TV.
15:28Mhmm. You know what I mean? And it took them maybe an hour and a half.
15:31And there was probably 50 people on there that this is all they did full time. Yeah. And they're making bank.
15:37I know. Like, this is insanity. Yeah.
15:40But I was also like, I don't wanna spend three hours doing this right now, and I need to get it done. Let's go to the top person ranked on, you know, TaskRabbit. And, okay, they have a 100 reviews.
15:51Good enough for me. Let's do it. And it's like, you know, I'm sure that I paid a tip probably or something.
15:56It's like, you're making bank doing service work That is good money. And they own their they they own a business.
16:03They own it. And, literally, all they have is, like, a little tool belt with maybe some nails and a hammer. Yeah.
16:08It's it's not expensive to start that and put up a profile on TaskRabbit. Right? And I was just thinking of, like, window washing.
16:15They probably these guys or gals could have said, hey. We're gonna come once a quarter. Can you give us a deposit for the next one and have these this clientele
16:23and then just go around the neighborhood and have a full schedule Yeah. Cleaning windows. You could do that with cars, boats, anything.
16:29Well, it's funny you bring up the the TV hanging because I tweeted I have the same experience, like, a year ago, and I tweeted about it. And every time I have a contractor come over, I always pick their brain. I'm like, how does she make?
16:39What do you I said the same thing. I'm like, dude, you're making $80 a year hanging TV. Yes.
16:43So this guy comes over. I paid him, like, $2.75 to hang a TV. And I was like Texas is little cheaper.
16:48You know? Yeah. I was like, how many of these do you do today?
16:50He's like, eight to 12. And I'm like Holy cow. I was like, you're making $300 a year?
16:54He's like, yeah. It's like, varies. Some months are $10.
16:57Some months are 40. And I was like, okay. Where do you find customers?
17:01Are you good at, like, SEO and ads? He goes, no ads. He says, I have a profile on Google LSA, Thumbtech, HomeAdvisor, Angie's List, TaskRabbit.
17:10They feed me all my leads. I do good work. I ask for five star reviews.
17:14They take some of them take a cut. Some of them don't. Some of them, he boosts his profile to get more jobs.
17:206 figures a year, and he doesn't he's not a marketing. He just lists himself on these free platforms. Crazy.
17:26Never been not that hard. No. I mean, it's like, if you're if you spend a week or two to learn the skill Yeah.
17:34Of that type of skill and you master it Yep. You could get really good at that skill. Yeah.
17:38And people are always gonna need that. Yep. Well, what is the thing most people do first that immediately puts them behind before they even start when they're trying to launch a new side hustle or project or business?
17:49Yeah.
17:50Are masters at playing business and not doing business. Yeah.
17:54What does that mean? It means they go get an LLC. They make a business plan.
17:58A logo. They start talking to their friends about, I'm I've got I'm making moves. You don't do any of that.
18:06Go find a customer. I don't care if it's your mom, your best friend. I don't you gotta start somewhere.
18:11I don't care if it's an unpaying customer and you do it for free just to get a five star view. Go find a customer and then figure else.
18:18Figure everything else out after that. Sell it before you have it. I call that the boot camp method or the Kickstarter method.
18:25Like, launch the sale of something first before you launch the business. And this is something I did early on.
18:32I would do a free webinar. If I ever wanted to launch a new course product offering event, I would do a free webinar, and I'd ask for a sale before having anything to give people.
18:43Mhmm. It's, like, fifteen years ago. And then I would do a boot camp around this.
18:49I would teach and train, and I'd say, alright. We're gonna do a six week boot camp training on this thing that you wanna learn. Mhmm.
18:55I would record that, and then I'd sell that as the course. Same thing. Yeah.
18:59So I just called the boot camp method. It was like, do people really want this? Before I build a whole site and landing page and this and that and run it, let me just see if I can get a few sales.
19:08And if it's exciting enough that people really want it Yeah. Then I'll record it live, repackage it, and sell it over and over again now that people want it.
19:18Yeah. And try to go the least amount of well, maybe not the least amount of effort, but the least amount of work building the business and just create the sale first. Yes.
19:27And then do the service Yes. First. Yes.
19:30And have very generous, like, refund policies. Yeah. 100%.
19:33Whatever. Yeah. You don't get the results?
19:35Alright. We'll refund your money. I got a story that perfectly exemplifies
19:39what about that I did right and what about that I did wrong. My first, like, real business was an iPhone repair store. And I had it in my head that I need to open a retail store.
19:49I was a student at the University of Alabama. I met a guy that was doing it out of his dorm room, making good money, and I was like, that's my business. I don't know why.
19:56I was just like, the iPhone was a year old. These are gonna start breaking. And I read an article about some guys at LSU that were making, like, $20 a month from a retail store.
20:04So I alright. I need a retail store. So I had no money.
20:07I I got a credit card advance. I got some of my Pell Grant, and I got this retail store. And this was the dumb thing to do.
20:14I was playing business. Right? It worked out.
20:17So that's what you shouldn't do, but I did it, and it ended up working out. But another thing I did is I never even learned how to fix iPhones.
20:24When I signed a five year lease with a personal guarantee, 2,300 a month, my mortgage was 500 a month. Oh. K?
20:30I had a $90,000 house. This was 2,008. Oh my gosh.
20:342,300 a month, five year lease personal guarantee. And people would come in with their iPhone, and they say, yeah.
20:40I was like, oh, okay. Yep. Yeah.
20:42$90. Okay. Cool.
20:44Come back in three hours. Okay. They'd leave, and I go to YouTube.
20:47And I would just type in what they tell me, and I would learn how to repair iPhones on their phone. Wow. And this was the thing that I would suggest people do.
20:54Now a couple times, I screwed up. And I remember I put a screwdriver through someone's screen. I broke their screen.
21:01I was fixing the battery, but I broke the screen. And it was a $700 brand new iPhone four.
21:06And I had to go to the Verizon store and spend, like, a week's worth of sales revenue on a new iPhone. And she was okay.
21:14But, like, had I waited six months to learn and perfect, a, I'm gonna lose momentum, probably.
21:22I'm probably gonna lose steam. I never even open. Who knows where I am now?
21:25Right? Or b, if I do end up opening, I miss out on tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of sales waiting six months to open. So net of net, the 2,000 I had to spend in broken iPhones
21:38made me an extra 6 figures because I opened that much sooner, and I didn't lose the momentum. Yeah. So that's one example of doing it right and wrong in the same It's like learning on the fly instead of waiting till you feel like you're perfectly mastered the skill.
21:50Yes. A lot of people wait until they feel like, I need to get more degrees, more education, more training until I can launch. Yes.
21:57They play the perfection game, and they never make any money or they never launch something because they need it to be perfect first before just launching. Whereas you launched, made mistakes, lost money, but learned through the mistakes, and then kept earning on on the way.
22:14Yes. And that is the difference between someone who's a perfectionist and someone who's an entrepreneur willing to get dirty Yeah.
22:21And messy right away. I'm the opposite of a perfectionist. Yeah.
22:25Yeah. You could use more of that in your life, probably. Like, okay.
22:28Let's try to optimize it. Sure. But But look at I look at it as tuition.
22:32Yes. Of course. We'll go to university and spend 8,000 a semester,
22:36but we won't, like, be willing to lose a couple $100 on a couch on Facebook Marketplace. But we're if we make a couple $100, we're being paid to learn. It's like going to a state school, and they're paying you to go there.
22:47That doesn't happen. But in business, if we're willing to learn as we do the thing, worst case, we lose a little money, but we learn.
22:55It's just tuition. Or we get paid to learn, and we have a little extra stress along the way. Why do so many people
23:01lack the mindset to learn and make money rather than pay to learn?
23:09Mhmm. You know what I mean? So many people feel like they have to spend 200 on a degree until they can start making money.
23:18Whereas you started saying, even though you went to school and and paid tuition, but you said, I'm gonna not go to business school. I'm just going to start running a business and learn while I get paid.
23:30And I might make mistakes and lose money along the way, but that's my price of admission
23:35Yeah. To learning. Yeah.
23:38I think people create artificial stakes for themselves because they think if I pay to learn this thing, I'm gonna be more likely to do it. Because they they look back on their life in a negative way.
23:51They're like, you didn't do this, Chris. You were supposed to do this. You didn't follow through.
23:54You so if I pay 2,000 for this thing, I'm actually gonna do it. It's gonna kick my butt into gear. What I've noticed is there's zero correlation between how much you pay to learn the thing or to learn the skill and you actually following through and doing it.
24:09There's no correlation. So just do it. Just go watch YouTube.
24:14Right.
24:15But why are people afraid of launching something? Why are they afraid to start the business?
24:21Is it the fear of failing and it not working out? Is it the fear of what other people say about them when it doesn't work out?
24:29Is it the fear of success? What if it does work out and I make all this money? And now I have all this people and team and taxes and problems that, you know, come with that as well.
24:39What is the greatest fear about being able to launch something and make money around it?
24:44I I don't think that fear of failure is real. I don't think that exists. I don't think anyone has an actual fear of failure.
24:52Here's my analogy. You're stranded on a desert island, and you know that the mainland is, like, 30 miles away, but you gotta get there.
25:00So are you gonna be too afraid to fail at building your boat to not even build your boat? No. Like, you're gonna try to build a boat.
25:07If you fail, you know, you get a mile out and it fails, you have to swim back and build a better version. Fine.
25:12Who cares? You, like, you have to do it. But if you were if someone was livestreaming you to the whole world or to your 300, you know, Facebook friends or to the six people that you played high school football with, you would approach that completely differently.
25:29You would, like, really want to perfect that raft because you're embarrassed. You don't wanna be put on the spot. So what you said is the absolute truth.
25:37It's the fear of the perception of failure from others. That's what that's the only thing we're afraid of. It's not one of the things.
25:43It's not the fear of failure. It's what will people think about me if I fail. The thing is if you do fail, they're probably not gonna think anything about you.
25:53Maybe for a moment, and then they move on. It doesn't matter. Yeah.
25:56It doesn't matter at all.
25:58Which business did you think this is gonna be a home run And when I launched this, that you're like, man, these other people are doing this.
26:07It's working. Like, this is gonna be a home run. It's gonna be easy.
26:10That was actually kind of like a dud or a failure for you.
26:13Which one did I not think that? I am the most delusional optimist ever. I got tested for ADHD in college, and she said, you don't have ADHD.
26:25You have delusions of grandeur. I was like, wow. I paid $1,800 as a poor college student to learn that.
26:31Thank you so much. So I'm just, uh, I'm just an optimist, unashamed optimist.
26:37Right? So I launch businesses because I believe they'll be successful, and I truly believe that any business could be successful with the right distribution.
26:47I could tell you the dumbest idea in the world right now, objectively dumb. Right? And if Elon Musk tweeted about it, he'd sell thousands of units.
26:55Distribution. Distribution. So there with the Internet, that's the asterisk.
27:004,000,000,000 people are on the Internet. With that, if you can find the right message, the right offer, the right pricing, the right audience, the right channel, is it Facebook ads?
27:09Is it Google ads? Whatever. If you can find it, you can sell anything.
27:12And I firmly believe that. So with that framework in mind, I love every business idea. Even with a horrible product, you can sell you can sell it well online, you think?
27:22Yeah. Because you could position it as a meme or as like a I mean, this guy makes a million bucks shipping potatoes to people.
27:29Really? Like, it's like a prank potato or, like, vulgar things to people or glitter bombs. Like, if you can make it a meme, like, if you can make like, sell farts in a bottle or something, it's like Yeah.
27:40Crazy. Right? Iraq made millions of dollars.
27:42That's true. That was, one of the first meme products. That's true.
27:45So I think anything I start, uh, will be successful because I know that it can be. What thing hasn't been successful?
27:53You're Most of them. Really? Like, I'm I forget I I forget all negativity.
27:57Like, I just I just You're like, on to the next. On to the next. How long will you you
28:03create, launch, and try to market something until you say, oh, it's either not working? And is it because it's not working, or you haven't found the right distribution yet?
28:11It always comes down to distribution.
28:14So if I pivot it all to a different business, it comes down to opportunity cost for me.
28:20You wanna keep working on this one until you find it. That might be months. It might be years.
28:24Who know? It might cost a lot more money for the distribution. There's a lot of people out there saying that you should focus, focus, focus, and there's a lot of truth to that, but no one's talking about opportunity cost.
28:34I was trying back in 2016, I was really trying to focus on my business.
28:40I had a good business. It was doing millions of dollars a year. I had no reason to be distracted.
28:44Then I started learning about Bitcoin. Right? Bitcoin, and I was just like and my business started to slip.
28:49Because you're putting more time and energy and focus on Bitcoin. Like, what is this? Why?
28:53And I bought a bunch of Bitcoin, and I still own it today. And net of net, I did much better being distracted by Bitcoin. But it could have been a Sure.
29:02Worse. You could have lost loss. But you either win or you learn.
29:07Right? I I would have you know, learnings compound just like money does. So if I would have lost it all, then those learnings would have compounded for the for the better in some other weird random way that might seem uncorrelated on the surface.
29:19Mhmm. So I I don't launch something that I'm not excited about, but I don't launch everything I'm excited about because I'm excited about everything.
29:29So you're excited about everything? Yeah. Yeah.
29:31Yeah.
29:32What is the thing that launched in the last three years that was the easiest to make money with that you did? It always comes down to, like, product market fit.
29:42The right pricing, the right offer to the right person, and the right time. Mhmm. And that doesn't usually last forever.
29:48It might be a six month window or something. Right? Or Yes.
29:50So in few years ago, four or five years ago, I went to this gas station called Buc ee's, and there's only 50 locations.
29:59It's a huge gas station. There's big as grocery stores, and they did not sell any of their products online.
30:06And that seemed like a missed opportunity to me. So this is one of those business ideas. I'm like, these guys, they're a billion dollar company.
30:13They don't sell anything online. They have shirts. They have they're like the .
30:16It's like a cult cult following. It's mostly Texas or where is this? Yeah.
30:20They started there, but now they're everywhere. Uh-huh. They're in Utah.
30:22They're they're going to Washington, DC. They're all over.
30:26And so my business partner and I launched a store to get their attention, and it worked. And it was just What do mean?
30:32Like, an online store or what? A Shopify store to get their attention. With their stuff and sold their stuff?
30:37To their store with my four kids and wife. We bought one of everything. I hired a photographer.
30:42One of everything? One of everything, and I just started cold emailing reporters. I just did what anyone in the world could do.
30:48I used my Gmail account. I went to Southern Living, Eater, Texas Monthly, and I just found, oh, who wrote this? So and so at texas and mullie dot com.
30:57I started emailing, hey. I like Bucky's. I launched a store for them.
31:00Um, I thought you would find this interesting. And they need stuff to write about, so they did, and it went mega viral. We did hundreds of thousands of dollars our first thirty days.
31:09Selling their products. Their products, just marking it up. Did they sue you for this or no?
31:13No. They just wanted us to make sure it wasn't confusing to the customer. They didn't want us to look like them.
31:19It's called first sale doctrine. Any like, I can go sell a Nike T shirt. I just can't pretend to be Nike.
31:24Sure. Right? Yeah.
31:25Yeah. Yeah. It's no different.
31:26So we did that. We started that six years ago, and it does millions of dollars a year today.
31:31Still? Still. Yeah.
31:33And there we have a ton of competitors too. And you're selling their gear.
31:36Mhmm. And you don't have a partnership with them. You just do it on their own.
31:40Correct. Wow. Yeah.
31:42That's interesting. And it's still doing millions in sales a year. Yeah.
31:45And I think it's important to talk about opportunity costs and distraction and all that because the backstory behind that was my partner and I had a fulfillment company. And part of the reason for us launching this ecommerce brand was to generate attention to get more customers for our fulfillment brand. Uh-huh.
32:02At the end of the day, you know, that fulfillment company was doing 300,000 a month in revenue. Wasn't very profitable. We ended up shutting it down to focus on this full time.
32:12So at the time, we had every justification in the world to say, okay. That okay.
32:18Cute. We're gonna you know, viral marketing's not cool. But, like, we've got we're doing 300,000 a month.
32:23Let's keep our eye on the prize. You don't realize that business is gonna fail a year later Wow. Even though we kept staying focused on it.
32:30So had I not been distracted, this business today would never would never exist. It would be someone else's story to tell.
32:35In the last year,
32:37I feel like I've seen so many different individuals launch side hustles, businesses online specifically that are bringing them 6 figures a month or 7 figures a year.
32:48Mhmm. What are a couple of things that you've seen that anyone with a small audience has been able to be successful with if they really focus their attention on that? I'm gonna say small audience is, like, 400 followers.
33:00Okay. So anyone this could apply to anyone.
33:03AI consulting. That's it. Everyone needs it.
33:07Everyone needs AI. It's so AI is is not like the mobile wave or the Internet or crypto or NFTs or Web three. A large percentage of people on all of those things thought that they were fads.
33:20Right? Nobody rational thinks AI is a fad.
33:24Nobody thinks, like, AI is just gonna go away and fizzle out. Nobody. It's here to stay.
33:30They've done surveys of small business owners, and 85% of them know they need to use AI, and, like, 12% of them are in any meaningful way. And of those 12, they're, like, getting ChadGPT's help with emails.
33:43So there's this massive disconnect between what it's like cognitive dissonance. Like, we know we should be doing something and we're not. And so all we need are individuals with a ChadGPT account, a Claude account, Grock, whatever it is, to just learn some skills, learn how to prompt.
33:5910% of all adults are business owners. K? So there's 350,000,000 Americans, 35,000,000 business owners, which means that if you have 400 Facebook friends, 40 of them are business owners.
34:12You sit down with your friend, go to Starbucks with them, open the Voice Memos app on your phone, hit record, and just say, tell me about your business. Oh, well, you know, okay. What sucks about your business?
34:24Oh, man. Hiring is can't find customers. And then just keep peeling back the layers.
34:29Why? Like, why is that hard? Like, just get to the heart of what they're struggling with in their business.
34:34And the framework for having this meeting is, like, I'm trying to learn AI, but I need something to learn with. Like, I need something to hold on to that I can learn AI with. I'm not gonna charge you anything.
34:45I just wanna, like, learn AI skills around your business. You go back to ChatGPT or Cloud or whatever, upload the transcript of that conversation, and just simply say, my friend needs AI in their business.
34:58They want to make more money or save more money. What suggestions do you have? Here's 13 suggestions.
35:04Okay. Number six sounds really interesting. Tell me step by step, how can I do that for them?
35:08Because I don't know what any of those words mean. Hey. Start here.
35:11Download this tool. Do this. Then have another meeting at Starbucks with them and say, dude, look at what I learned.
35:17You could be doing this. This guy over here has the same type of business, and he's doing this. And they're gonna look at to you now as, the AI god.
35:24You now know more about AI than anyone in their life, and they're gonna say, take my money. Like, how do we do this? And you don't have to go learn how to find customers.
35:33You just have to let go of your pride and your ego and be willing to talk to a friend about things that they're struggling with. Be willing to serve your friend. Be willing to help them because that's we're not talking about, like, you know, a a multilevel marketing scheme here.
35:46We're talking about helping our loved ones by solving problems with them for AI. But how does someone develop a more resilient mindset
35:56When they launch something, they get laughed at, and they lose money, and they fail. Yeah.
36:02How do they not let that insecurity or that self doubt stop them from trying again?
36:08Post and ghost.
36:10What does that mean? Post something to social media.
36:14Don't look at the comments. Like, hey. DM me if you wanna learn more.
36:18Go stay in the DMs. What they'll find is if they do look in the comments, there's not gonna be much there. Yeah.
36:24Right? Anyway, but just psychologically, sometimes it's just ignorance can be bliss.
36:29It's an overly simplistic answer, but we just have to get over it, and we have to get we we have to get to our own personal rock bottom with regards to anything.
36:39Right? If I'm an alcoholic, I've gotta get to my rock bottom before I start going to AA and turning my life around. If I wanna start a business and I'm just not able to get it together, I need to hit my rock bottom in that area of my life.
36:51And so if I'm not willing to get over that mental block, then I'm just not I'm not ready to start a business. But maybe something happens. I heaven forbid, I lose my job or something or this bill comes up, an unexpected emergency.
37:04That's gonna be my rock bottom, and then I post about it. And it doesn't have to be on social media, but I just start talking about it. I'm willing to open myself up and put myself out there.
37:13Sometimes that's what it takes for us to step out of our shell like that. What would you say then is the number one skill that successful entrepreneurs have over those that aren't successful.
37:23Bias for action. They just have to be impatient with action, but patient with results.
37:31Both of those at the same time. How does that look? So we're all curious to an extent.
37:36We all have questions about the world. The question is, what do we do with that curiosity? So if I'm I was on a walk with my daughter.
37:45We were walking down these railroad tracks, and I see that some of the railroad ties are wood and some are concrete. I'm like, wood?
37:53Railroad ties. It's 2026. Why are we using these?
37:56Why not why not they're all concrete? So it's like, pull out Chad GPT, and I just start like, what are they wood? Why are concrete?
38:02What are the cost differences? And at the end of it, it's like, oh, that's really interesting. Okay.
38:06Cool. Something that simple, we when we have a question about anything, not just business or money related, we gotta get an answer to it as soon as possible.
38:15Even if we're mid conversation and it's rude, it's like, hold on. I gotta figure this out. Right?
38:21The more we train that bias for action muscle and we we start answering these questions about the world and about ourselves immediately, the more we do it, the more it snowballs and it compounds. And then the the answer to the question turns into action.
38:35If I'm in a restaurant and I love making tacos and I'm at a taco restaurant and I see this place has a line out the door and everyone is there for these birria tacos, And it's like, oh, I love I can make really good birria tacos.
38:49I wonder how much money this place makes. Well, don't just go on to the conversation. Go outside.
38:55Look at the line. K. 86 people in line.
38:58Look at the menu. $7 for two tacos. 86 times seven.
39:02Oh my gosh. Okay. Let me throughout the rest of this hour, I'm gonna see how many wow.
39:07The line got even longer. Okay. This is a Tuesday.
39:10If they're this busy on a Tuesday, they're gonna be way busier on a Friday. Okay. Wow.
39:14They're doing 3,600,000 a year just in birria tacos. That's not including drinks.
39:18And you're just doing all this mid conversation. And it's like, if their margins are this and then okay. What?
39:24Oh, okay. Then go home and, like, make tacos and give them out to your friends, like, that night. Yeah.
39:29Do like Take action now. Now. Like, the time frame.
39:33Because we talk a lot about focus. We don't talk about momentum.
39:37We are human. And if we're gonna lose excitement, we're gonna lose momentum over a thing. So we need to be impatient with that.
39:44So there's something you do that I don't know if I could ever do because
39:49I also like to think about the time, the attention I put on certain things. And I feel like I did a lot of different businesses, products, programs, things like that to make a lot of money and revenue streams for many years.
40:00And then I felt like my time was stretched thin. I felt a little burnt out. I felt overwhelmed.
40:05I felt like I I was putting lower energy in lots of places, and nothing really was building exponentially. Where does making money, making a profit, and using your time, energy, talents with your purpose tie into building a business versus here's an opportunity that I see you can make tacos, million dollars a year with tacos or selling toothbrushes, but is that the best use of my time and talent and purpose towards launching that business for a profit?
40:35Mhmm. What are your thoughts on that? Is it kind of like the passion versus profit question?
40:39Like I guess it's just merging both of them. You know, just because I can launch a shoe company doesn't mean I should launch a shoe company. Just because I can make money in an iPhone repair shop Mhmm.
40:50Doesn't mean it's the best use of my time Yeah. For me personally. Yeah.
40:54But, sure, there's a million dollars to be made there. There's a $100 to be made here. There's a and there's time managing of people and restarting the business and taxes and breakdowns that you have to manage Yeah.
41:05Of those things as well. So how do you navigate that? Yeah.
41:08That's a great question.
41:10Um, I like to say chase the profit until you can afford to chase the passion. So I'm in love with business. So if it's iPhone screens, you know, Texas snacks, whatever, I Doesn't matter.
41:23It doesn't matter to me. Yeah. Yeah.
41:24Most people won't have the luxury of loving business that much to where they're they're agnostic about what they they go after. But to answer your question, people should chase the energy.
41:35Like, they should go to where the energy is. The excitement, the joy, the the rush. Yes.
41:40Because that's what's gonna be sustainable for them. So let's say they're they love watercolors, but the market is telling them that people want these tacos.
41:50You don't have to choose one or the other. Number one, your passion doesn't have to be your profession. They can be two separate things.
41:58Number two, there's enough time in the day to do both and to even test both as a business concept. Have you ever seen a taco shop where you can paint watercolor at the same time? No.
42:08Might be because it's a bad idea. It might be because it's a great idea that no one's thought to put together yet. Uh-huh.
42:13Right? So what are you trying to optimize for in that moment of your life? If it's making more money, then you should put the passion on the back burner for now.
42:22Because if you can develop first principle skills around making money, then you can direct that at whatever you want in the future. On your passion later. Right.
42:29On your hobbies or your side projects that you, like, really love. Yes. But if you have a full time job and you're making good money, then you might have the luxury of being able to chase your passion right now and then finding out later, could or should you even monetize that?
42:43Yeah. What do you think is the biggest problem that people make once they start making a lot more money? It's almost like the same problem of playing business.
42:51They play the role of someone who makes more money, and lifestyle creep creeps in.
42:56It's happened to me. Spending more and Yeah. Because they have it.
43:00And I don't wanna contradict myself because I do think that can be a good thing. But if it keeps you away from your kids or your family more because you want that second or third home, then I don't think that's a good thing.
43:12People, they contribute less and less as a percentage of their income to charitable causes, which I don't like.
43:22Um, like, let's say you're used to giving 1,000 a month to charity and you make, you know, $10,000 a month. You start making $50,000 a month, and you give 2,000 to charity.
43:32If you give 5,000, it's the same percentage, but you have 45,000 to work with. You're you're able to afford much, much more. You're able to be to do much more good with that money.
43:43It doesn't have to be a percentage or a or a real dollar value. So I think that's a mistake on how how much people give.
43:51I don't like, at the end of the day, we're not gonna bring any of it with us anyway. Mhmm. I don't want my kids to be hyper wealthy from stuff they inherit from me when they're 50 or 60.
44:01So I don't think at all about my second or third generation and how much money they're they'll have. I don't care. I want them to work for it too.
44:07Right? So I think that's a mistake people make. And I think that people are likely to get prideful, um, and to treat people on a lower socioeconomic status than them as lesser than them.
44:22And I think it should I think it should go the opposite direction. I think they should get even more empathetic because they've been there before as well. What's
44:30your thoughts on the more you give, the more you are able to earn of your money, time, resources? Have you experienced that personally as someone who gives?
44:41Oh, yeah. And what's your philosophy on how much you give every year? Yeah.
44:45So this is quote. I'm gonna try to remember it. He who gives his his money gives some.
44:51He who gives his time gives all. Right? Something like that.
44:55I I try to give even more. Um, I pay tithing to my church 10% as, like, a baseline, and then I look for other charitable causes on top of that to donate as well.
45:07But more importantly, I try to give of my time to younger people trying to start businesses, um, in ways that don't necessarily scale.
45:17And, yeah, mission trips. Our our kids are gonna go on mission trips.
45:21I went on a mission trip. I plan to go on more. Over two years.
45:24Right? Where'd you go? Hungry?
45:25Hungry. Yeah. Very good.
45:26Yeah. Yep. Were you 18, 20?
45:28How old were you? 19 to 21. Did you learn the language too?
45:32Mhmm. What did that mission trip teach you about life, business, relationships?
45:40Every year that goes by, I realized that it was everything to me. When I got home, it was just like, alright. I'm you know?
45:46First of all, I got home with a ton of confidence. I got rejected tens of thousands of times. I felt like I was able to run through a wall and do anything, which is huge because I was not much at all in high school.
45:57I was very average, and I was not, like, the valedictorian type, the the freak athlete type. I was playing video games, delivering pizzas, waiting tables.
46:06I was very average. The mission fundamentally changed. It rewired me at my core.
46:11Really? Yeah. What shifted about your identity
46:14after two years of being rejected over and over and over again in a language that you didn't know? Mhmm. How did your identity shift afterwards?
46:23Just resilience. Like, I I don't talk about this much, but I knocked on tens of thousands of doors.
46:30And I flew all the way there to teach people about the gospel. Even so, I'm an introvert. I don't like talking to people.
46:38I don't. And so I would knock on a door. And even though I flew there to do that, I would silently hope that they would never open the door.
46:45Of course. Who wants to be rejected? Who wants to deal with that fear?
46:48Yeah. But it's like I felt guilty too because I I also genuinely wanted to teach them. If they did open the door, it's not like I was bummed.
46:55It's like, alright. Let's do this. But if they didn't, I kinda had to skip my skip step to the next door.
46:59Next one. Yeah. No rejection.
47:00Right. But then shortly after my mission, I got a a job, a a calling, an unpaid calling in my church to teach early morning seminary to high schoolers Uh-huh. At six in the morning every single day.
47:13And I'm not a teacher. I don't like teaching. I don't that's not my thing.
47:16I don't like waking up early. And it was the calling that I always dreaded. Always dreaded.
47:21That's why you had it. Yeah. So I got it.
47:23And every single night, I would just dread having to plan my lesson. Then every morning, my alarm would go off at 05:25, and I would just dread.
47:31I've gotta stand in front of 30 kids who are, like, Exhausted. Exhausted. They're, like, looking at their phones.
47:36Some of them would have their phones sideways with headphones in, like, playing games, and I would dread it every day. Right?
47:43How old were you? 28. Yeah.
47:47I did it for four years. Oh, every day? There's Yeah.
47:50Every day's a A while. Five days a week? Yeah.
47:54Four years? Four years. Holy.
47:56Yeah. But what I realized is those moments in our lives where we're just like, I don't want to do this, but I will.
48:04Right? That's what I would summarize in this. I don't want to do this, but I will.
48:07I'm dreading this, but I'm doing this anyway. Some people, you know, they'll do that hundreds of times in their life or tens of times, maybe low thousands of times.
48:16Like, we go run a five k. We go to the gym. But if you do that tens of thousands of times, I don't want to do this, but I will.
48:24I'm dreading this, but I will. It changes you. You can do anything.
48:30And to this day, if I got that calling again, I would still dread it. I enjoy like, I loved it. It's like this very weird thing.
48:37Like, my mission was the best ever. I loved it. My calling with those youth, I I loved it.
48:42Like, I look back, and I don't think of the negative. I think of the positive. And at the end of the lesson, I would be, like, uplifted.
48:48So I don't wanna say it was all negative, but I would still dread it. Just like you might Go to the gym. Going to the gym.
48:53Yeah. It's like you don't wanna get on there, but then afterwards, you're like, I feel better. Right.
48:56And that's a more practical way of approaching this. Running at five in the morning. Like, those things change you.
49:02It's cliche. We've all heard it. It's nothing new.
49:04But if you do that thousands, tens of thousands of times, you can do anything.
49:09Anything. Did I also read that you had a kidney transplant? Mhmm.
49:14How did that come about? My daughter was born with a rare lung disease, pulmonary hypertension. It's high blood pressure in the lungs, which is very dangerous because it forces your heart to pump really fast and really hard to get the blood through your arteries.
49:29Right? There's no cure for it. So we we had her on medication from three to nine.
49:35Three years old or three months? From three years old to nine, and she was just constantly worsening. She had an oxygen tank.
49:42She had blue lips. Ugh. It was mostly an invisible disease.
49:46Other than the blue lips, people thought she wore purple lipstick. So it was tough because she had this disability, but people couldn't see it. You know?
49:55And so she was nine, and the doctor's like, you she she's gonna be gone within a year unless you get her double lung transplant. Really?
50:03Yeah. And double lung transplants happen That is intense. Yeah.
50:08Invasive. It's it's as invasive of a transplant as you get. So lungs are the only transplantable organ that are exposed to the outside air.
50:17Everything else is protected, liver, kidney, all that, bone marrow.
50:21But the lungs get all of this air twenty four seven, and so they're they're fragile. Ugh. So
50:28They said, open up your chest?
50:31Yep. Yep. So they did they did the surgery?
50:34Yeah. So they said, basically, you don't have a choice.
50:37You gotta move to Houston. We were in Dallas four hours away because it's the best pediatric hospital for lung transplants.
50:43To keep in mind, there's only, like I might get this wrong, but I think there's only, like, eight to fifteen lung transplants a month nationwide or worldwide. They're very rare. Wow.
50:53Very rare. So we moved to Houston as a family with no notice right before Christmas, and we got her on the transplant list.
51:01We rented a house, and we got a call at 10PM one night. And they said, hey. We got we got some lungs.
51:08We think they're gonna work. The doctor's on a private jet flying to Nebraska. Um, he's gonna inspect them personally, but it sounds like they're good, so we need you to the hospital, like, now.
51:18So that was a call we're waiting for. And there's no guarantee she wakes up afterwards. Right?
51:23No. It's like, it doesn't mean it's gonna work. No.
51:26No. But they were but they were saying, hey. If you don't do this next year, she's We didn't have a choice.
51:31She's like, yeah. She's gonna die. Yeah.
51:34So we went to hospital, and I had to sign these papers. And it was like, the chance of death is low double digit percent. Wow.
51:41But what do you do?
51:43So, um, they took her back. We said goodbye. And Holy cow.
51:47What was that like before your daughter goes into surgery? Oh, man. It was Like, did you think this might be the last time I let her?
51:54Oh my gosh.
51:56Yeah. That is rough. It was rough.
51:59And you had three other kids at the same time? Or Three other kids. Wow.
52:04Yep. Three boys? Three boys.
52:06And one girl. Yep. Is she the oldest?
52:08Second oldest. Holy cow. That must have been emotional.
52:11Yeah. And then what happens? She goes into the Operating Room, and then She goes back there.
52:17My wife and her are in the waiting room, and it was, like, a twelve hour procedure. So we're sitting there, and I have my MacBook out. And someone on Facebook, a stranger, shared a post of me in my DMs, and the doctor had told me the lungs were coming from Nebraska.
52:35Keep in mind, there's, like, 10 a month of these nationwide. K? And I see this Facebook post.
52:40The stranger messages me and says, you know, our boy Sam woke up unresponsive. We think he had a seizure in his sleep, and he didn't make it.
52:50And so we're donating all of his organs. This was not his lungs. Yeah.
52:56It was his. And I learned that as she was under the knife, which is, like, not normal.
53:02Like, there's HIPAA laws, like, you're not supposed to know. I didn't go looking for it. It was this was sent to me.
53:07Wow. And so I'm like, either this is a weird coincidence, but the I think they they even said in the post, his lungs are going to a girl in Texas or something. Oh my gosh.
53:16That's giving me chills. That's crazy. Yeah.
53:19So I just I remember where I was, and I was like, I showed my wife, and, like, we start crying and, like and I just started, like, looking through pictures of Sam, this boy. Oh.
53:27Oh my gosh. I felt like he was my son. I had never met him.
53:30Like, my my long lost son. And so I just had, like, this profound gratitude for him. Even though, like, he didn't choose, you know, like his parents did, but, like, surely, he would have chosen to give up his lungs.
53:43Mhmm. So I'm like, man, that kid, I love that kid. Immediately, never heard of him.
53:47You know? An hour before, I was at home, you know, watching Netflix. And I'm like, oh, how do I pay that kid back?
53:55So long story short, she gets out of surgery, and, um, it was amazing.
54:01They were like, his lungs were perfect. Everything went perfectly. She's great.
54:06The freak one freaky side note was, you know, her chest had swollen so much from the incision that was, like, this long Yeah.
54:15Yeah. That they couldn't sew it all the way back together. So I could literally see her heart beating.
54:20It was open still? They put, like like, a plastic sheeting over it. Oh my gosh.
54:25I could see her heart. Oh my gosh, man. Yeah.
54:28That is intense. Yeah.
54:30But she woke up, and she was fine. Like Yeah. I mean I mean, it sure is a recovery period.
54:34Long period. Like, a year probably, almost like six months to a year of, like, full recovery rider. But now she's fine?
54:40Yeah. So she woke up, and
54:42she was supposed to be in the hospital six weeks. It was, like, four. So we came home.
54:46They wanted us to stay in Houston for a couple months for, like, almost daily appointments. Everything went great. And so The chest finally closed and stapled it or whatever you Yeah.
54:56Holy cow. And so we had always said if if this surgery goes well, we wanna see all 50 states as a family in sixty days. So this is 2022.
55:04So in the summer of twenty twenty two, we bought an RV. We saw all 48, lower 48, and we parked it in Seattle, flew to Alaska, flew to Hawaii. In sixty days, we saw all Oh my god.
55:1450 states his family. But throughout this process, you know, I I was thinking about Sam, Sam, Sam.
55:21And I learned about living kidney donation where or altruistic kidney donation where you can you can donate your kidney to a stranger. And that that's not me. I've never been admitted to a hospital.
55:32I'm afraid of needles. I'm afraid of blood. And in fact, my brother-in-law needed a kidney a couple years prior, and I was too afraid to get tested for him.
55:40Like, I would have. You're like, I don't want it to know that that could work for him. I was waiting to be the very last to be tested.
55:45Thankfully, my other brother-in-law, who's braver than me, got tested, and he donated his kidney to my other brother-in-law. And so that just kinda bothered me that I wouldn't that I wasn't, like, first to raise my hand.
55:57But I started doing research and, a, like, I don't wanna sacrifice like, I don't wanna I gotta be there for my kids. I didn't wanna go through a surgery that was gonna be a serious risk.
56:06Yeah. Even to say things that seemed like too much, but the chance of death is, um, three in ten thousand, which is about the same as childbirth for a mom.
56:17Wow. And increasingly safer than childbirth.
56:20So I'm like, okay. Half of the humans that have ever lived have taken even more risk than this to give birth to to create a life, but I can't do it to save a life.
56:30Wow. And then it's another kept researching. I'm like, alright.
56:33What about, like, long term complications? Almost zero. Any pills I have to take for the rest of my life?
56:39None. Dietary changes? No.
56:41Just be, like, generally healthy. Already planning on that. All these things.
56:44What about, like, how painful is it? How risky is it? Okay.
56:48Well, what if my kids need a kidney? What if I give away my kidney and my kids? Well, there's a program called the, uh, it's the National Kidney Foundation.
56:55They have a voucher program where If you give one, you get one. You get to the top of the list.
57:00Wow. You or five people. So I have five people in my family.
57:04Need to protect. So I put them all on the list. So now I have an insurance policy if they need a kidney.
57:08Wow. So I'm even better off. Right?
57:10So so I keep researching, and then it's like, well, what if I need a kidney for myself? Then what?
57:17Kidneys rarely go bad alone. They always go bad together. Really?
57:20So it's like, it's I'm not I'm no worse off if I only have one kidney and it goes bad because the other one would have gone bad any so I'm just doing all this learning, and I'm a very logical person. And I'm like, there's no reason for me to not donate my kidney other than being like a little sissy.
57:33That's not a good reason. So I just I just did. I donated my kidney to a stranger.
57:39Do you know who got it? I found out. Shut up.
57:42Yeah. So I donated on the, uh, I donated my kidney on the anniversary of Sam's death Ugh.
57:50The next year when he would have turned nine, I think. And then my wife, I I was telling her all this. I'm like, dude, there's three and ten thousand chance of death.
57:58Like, yada yada yada. This and this. And, like, you can get your like, there's you don't have to pay anything.
58:02Like, if I had a job, they would pay for my time off work. Wow. Because it saves insurance companies a lot of money.
58:07Right? Yeah. So my wife's like, maybe I should look into this.
58:11So three months later, she donated her kidney Holy cow. To a stranger. She never found out who they were on the anniversary of on his birthday, what would have been his birthday, May 10.
58:22Wow. So we both donated our kidneys to a stranger. Recently.
58:25Yeah. Twenty days ago. Yeah.
58:26Yeah. And, uh, I've run ultramarathons since before and since. Wow.
58:31I almost never think about it. I have the same energy. There's been zero changes.
58:35I would do it all over again, and it was it was the best decision I could've made. Man, that's crazy.
58:40I found out who got my kidney the morning that my wife did hers. Wow. Because I went to the hospital, and they're like, Chris, we have a letter from your donor.
58:48Oh my gosh. Yeah.
58:50Was it a who was it? Like, was it It was a it was a The young person, old person? An older person in San Francisco.
58:56Wow. Yeah. And they wrote a letter saying thank you.
58:58Yep. Yep. Man, here's the stat.
59:02If one in ten thousand healthy adults donated their kidney to a stranger, no one would die waiting for a kidney.
59:10But today, like, five thousand people a year die waiting for a kidney. Man. But it's needless.
59:15Like, it's it's literally needless. That number could go to zero. One in ten thousand people.
59:20Where's the kidney business that you need to start? That's the that's the next thing. That is Launch a business.
59:25That is. I mean, that is kind of one thing I would like to do as a nonprofit is advocate for that. Yeah.
59:29That's cool. There's a couple other countries that allow the government to pay people to donate their kidney, um, and I think that should be You make a business.
59:37Do you think it should be legal or illegal? I think that should it should be legal for people to be paid to donate their kidney Uh-huh.
59:46Assuming safeguards were in place. Like, in other countries where they do it, they they interview them.
59:51Like, are you addicted to drugs? Gambling. Like, is this, like, just to pay off a debt?
59:55If they pass all these things Yeah. And it's not, like, exploiting the poor, it's a beautiful thing, and their kidney deaths went to zero. That's cool.
1:00:02Yeah. But there needs to be an incentive. It's not enough to just, like, say, you'll feel really good, you know, because most people don't have my story.
1:00:09Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
1:00:10But Wow.
1:00:11Like, how much is this I don't know. How much is someone willing to pay for a kidney?
1:00:15Yeah. How much is that? Do know?
1:00:17Tens of thousands. Really? Yeah.
1:00:2030 50,000 something. But it's like what insurance pays through this, through the hospitals, or how does that even work? Insurance companies come out of pocket, like, 1 to $2,000,000.
1:00:28For a kidney? Yeah. Like, for all of that procedure and So if they can pay someone $50, they would gladly do it.
1:00:36But everyone wins. Wow. This is wild, man.
1:00:42This is wild. What did what did donating your kidney to a stranger you didn't know
1:00:48teach you about life
1:00:50and money? I don't know if it taught me anything about money, but about life, it told me that we're here for others. We're here to serve other people.
1:00:57And serving other people is one of the most selfish things you can do Mhmm. Because it it serves us so much. Mhmm.
1:01:03Like, if you're miserable, go serve someone else, and you'll be happy, period. Doesn't have to look like a kidney, but thinking about others is the best thing we could do for ourselves. Mhmm.
1:01:12When we have two kidneys and we only need one of them, what are we doing? I mean, come on. That's for a reason.
1:01:18How has life shifted for you around making money since donating your kidney? Well, I don't know if, you know, correlation is causation, but, I mean, it's funny you ask that because I've never really correlated it to the time frame, but my financial life has never been better.
1:01:36Really? Yeah. Ever since donating.
1:01:40So call it what you want. I believe in God, but I don't know if it's correlated, but I'm not complaining.
1:01:48Yeah.
1:01:49What is the what does the Bible teach us about making money that you apply to your daily life?
1:01:55Well, the verse is not you know, money is the root of all evil.
1:02:00It's the love of money is the root of all evil. So in the Bible, they worship golden calves and idols, false idols.
1:02:08Today, we worship other idols, technology, money.
1:02:13So it it it has to be the fuel that helps us to do more good and not the fuel to help us consume more. And that's hard.
1:02:22It's something you have to be cognizant of every day. What is the biggest money trap you find yourself getting into?
1:02:29Lifestyle creep.
1:02:30Buy more things or toys or Yeah. Cars or Oh, yeah. Whatever.
1:02:35I fight it every day. My wife's a lot better at it than me. I wanna fly first class, and she's like, why?
1:02:40Like, it's an extra thousand dollars for that ticket. We could donate that. I'm like, yeah.
1:02:44But, like, we have it. We're Yeah. We work hard for it today.
1:02:46Better than I am, but I fight that every day. But is that I mean, if you work hard for it and you earn it and you
1:02:52do it with integrity and you make a you make a great product that serves people, why not spend it on yourself?
1:02:59Why not spend it on something new for yourself that you want? Why not spend it on first class or a nice hotel? Why not spend it on a trip Yeah.
1:03:07For your family to enjoy memories? Why be poor when you're creating wealth?
1:03:11Yeah.
1:03:13Yeah. I I think it just has to come with balance. You know?
1:03:17And I think a lot of it has to do with raising your children. I would love a private chef.
1:03:23Mhmm. We can afford a private chef. We will not have one until my kids are out of the house, um, period.
1:03:28End of story. Like, my kids need to do the dishes themselves. They have a chore chart.
1:03:33They need to help us cook food. They need to go mow the lawn. Like, I can hire a long guy.
1:03:38We do it ourselves. So I'm I'm more concerned about our approach to money with regards to raising our kids in a normal environment that teaches them healthy habits about money and teaches them that we live in a bubble that is not representative of the real world.
1:03:53Mhmm. So we send them on on mission trips, humanitarian trips, we'll go on them with them. And we try to teach them that stuff, but
1:04:00it just has to be something that you're always aware of. What is the one skill if mastered that makes every other business skill unnecessary? Like resilience, which comes from being rejected.
1:04:11Uh-huh. Sales, bias for action.
1:04:14Before you were financially successful, what was the thing you were hiding or struggling through that most people didn't see? I would call it income consistency.
1:04:25A lack of it? Yeah. Income volatility.
1:04:28It's like up I've had for the majority of my career. Yeah. Even still?
1:04:33No. Oh, yeah. But for Some months big and some months nothing.
1:04:36Yeah. I mean, until my mid thirties. Really?
1:04:38Yeah. And I'm in my late thirties now. Yeah.
1:04:41But just like feast or famine, I've had more $0 income years than I've had positive income years. Why is that?
1:04:49It comes with the territory nature of just being an entrepreneur. It's unpredictable. There's been a dozen times where I've told my wife, babe, this is it.
1:04:58This thing, this is it. This I know I've said this, and every time she's like, okay, babe.
1:05:03This is the thing that's gonna make us sick. This is the last thing we'll have to do. Okay.
1:05:08Alright. I believe you. How many times you've said that?
1:05:10So many times and genuinely believing it. But the the the fat years have more than made up for the lean years or the zero years.
1:05:19Right? So we've lived in our dream house since our late twenties. Right?
1:05:23But, like, there's been a lot of times that we've had to sell assets to just to pay the mortgage. Yeah.
1:05:31Not recently, but in twenties and early thirties. We had some rental homes that we had to sell.
1:05:37Like, we were forced to sell. And I'm not making, like, big risky decisions. It's just things always take longer than you think, and they're harder than you think, and it costs more money than you think always.
1:05:49And I'm I'm learning that still. But so from the outside looking in, we've been in our dream house since our twenties. Everything's awesome,
1:05:56but it's been very volatile. Really? Yeah.
1:05:59What do you think is gonna be the thing that actually makes it for you? When you say to your wife, no. This is the thing.
1:06:05What is gonna be that thing, do you think? Is it gonna be the sexy new AI thing, or is it gonna be something more, like, basic and consistent that just serves a need over and over that people don't wanna do?
1:06:17Yeah. I don't know. Or a combination of, like, 50 businesses all doing it together.
1:06:24Maybe a combination. Like, I could retire now if I wanted.
1:06:29Like, I could just stop doing anything and have enough money. So in that sense, it's different than that conversation has been in the past. Like, this is the thing.
1:06:37It's probably something that I have just no idea about because I've been in so many industries. I just I never know what I'm gonna get my hands into. I don't know.
1:06:47But I love I genuinely love what I do. Yeah. I can be honest about that.
1:06:51That's cool.
1:06:52If you could only teach your kids three things about money,
1:06:57what would it be? First would be to be generous with it, especially to I try to teach them to treat service workers as if they're volunteers.
1:07:11Right? Like, if I had someone that was my servant, like, serving just me all day unpaid, I would be so grateful for them.
1:07:19But, like, if you get an Uber, like, hey. Thank you for picking me up. Yeah.
1:07:22Thank you for getting here so fast. Like, they're getting paid, but, like, they've got a hard life.
1:07:27So I would I I do. I teach them that. Like, specifically, service workers, treat them as if they're unpaid volunteers and be more generous with them than you think you should be.
1:07:38Um, the second thing I would teach them is no one's coming to save you. Like, you nothing is guaranteed.
1:07:46I don't care if you have a job, a pension, a you know, you work for a great company. Nothing is guaranteed. No one is coming to save you.
1:07:54You have to be self sufficient. You I look at entrepreneurial skills like food storage.
1:08:02In our church, the LDS church, we're encouraged to have a year's worth of food storage. K? And we do.
1:08:07Uh, well, we used to before we had as many kids. We need to stock up. I don't wanna be dishonest here, but I look at, like, reselling, stuff like that.
1:08:15I think people everyone should have those skills just in case the crap hits the fan, and they can sell some old iPhones or something just to make ends meet. So I'm not, like, pushing my kids toward entrepreneurship, but I want them to develop those skills in case they need them.
1:08:30Mhmm. So treat entrepreneurial skills like like food storage so you can use it in emergency.
1:08:38And the third one is to to convert your liabilities to assets.
1:08:45Right? It's which is kind of like a derivative of number two. So if you have a car, have the skill to make income from that car.
1:08:53If it's DoorDash, a Toro, or whatever. If you have a a house, learn how to rent out a room on Airbnb because any liability could be turned into an asset with the right skills.
1:09:04So I'm actively, I guess, passively trying to teach them how to do that in just the way that we live. I I went and drove for DoorDash last week.
1:09:12Really? Yeah. Just to see.
1:09:13Try it out. Yeah. Because I delivered pizzas for pizza out in high school, and I loved it.
1:09:17And I just wanted to see how much money I can make, and it was a lot of fun. Try for, like, a few hours or something, won't you? Yeah.
1:09:22It was it was a lot of fun, actually. Really? Yeah.
1:09:24It's picking up orders, dropping them off. Mhmm. I would, like, send goofy pictures to them, like, dropping it off.
1:09:29Like, just, like Yeah. Praying over it, and it got me extra tips. Like, I I learned I was actually able to influence my tips more than you might think.
1:09:37Wow. More than just going through the motions. So I read some, like, article online years ago about how if you're a service person, how you can, like, 10 x your tips just by saying the person's order
1:09:49or their name back to them. Interesting. Like, if you were a waiter and someone gives you the order and you say it back to them and say, that's a great order.
1:09:58And and you ask them their name that guy. And you say their name, like, you know, Chris, that's a great order. That's a great choice you made.
1:10:04Yeah. Just doing that, making them feel good about their order Yeah. And saying their name, like, gets you 10 x the tips or something crazy, like, 10% more the tips.
1:10:13And, like, there's all these different strategies of being a a good service worker to increase tips.
1:10:21And it's not always about being the best at what you do. It's being best with people in how you do it.
1:10:26Yeah. And it sounds like the way you just added joy for a moment of, like, taking a photo praying over the food or, like, a smiley face.
1:10:35You brought joy to the service. Yeah. Which then they said, oh, I'm gonna give 20% rather than 10.
1:10:40Yeah. Or maybe I'll give 40%. Yeah.
1:10:42Well, and you stand out because no one else is doing it. One's doing it. So simple.
1:10:45So easy. Like, the the the the ROI, the hourly rate on taking an extra twenty seconds to do that is immeasurable. Yeah.
1:10:52You made a lot you can make 10 extra bushes like that Yeah. Just by taking one little different photo. Yeah.
1:10:57And I I actually brought my kids with me to do DoorDash. That's cool. Just to, like, teach them.
1:11:01That's cool.
1:11:03Couple of final questions for you before we get to them. I want people to check out your podcast, the Koerner office, tkopod.com at the Koerner office on social media, k o e r n e r, on social media as well, where every day you're just sharing new side hustle business ideas that people could launch with little or no money and start making money right away.
1:11:27A lot of great ideas. So if people are looking for side hustle ideas or business ideas, they can go check it out there. This is a question I ask everyone at the end called the three truths.
1:11:35So hypothetical scenario, imagine you get to live as long as you wanna live in this Earth and create everything you wanna create.
1:11:42Mhmm. Do whatever you wanna do. But in the last day, you have to take all of your work with you.
1:11:47This content, your podcast, whatever you make in the future, it's gone from this world. But you get to leave behind three truths, three lessons that you would leave with the world. You just shared kinda three money truths, but what would be your three life principles that you would leave behind?
1:12:03Impatience with action, patience with results. That's one. In anything you do, people are much more likely to be not bold enough.
1:12:14It's very rare that someone is too bold. Right? So be more bold.
1:12:19Like, with what you believe, like, just just don't just don't care about what people think.
1:12:25Like, just stop. People don't think about you. And that's not an that's not a pessimistic or negative thing.
1:12:31They're thinking about their family, their loved ones, their wife. Like, just do your own thing. And the third one, do things for the story.
1:12:40For sure. Like, when you do things, if for no other reason just to have a good story out of it, you will be wealthy Mhmm.
1:12:50And happy, and you'll be interesting. And rich.
1:12:54Yes. Rich in heart. Yes.
1:12:56Yes. That's what with the Bucky story, it was like, this is gonna be a great story.
1:13:00And you're still telling it today. Still telling it. But it's
1:13:03just that one thing
1:13:05has made me wealthy. Wow. That's cool.
1:13:07Chris, I wanna acknowledge you, man, for being of service to so many people, not only with your intellect and your skills around entrepreneurship and business, but also your service around giving an organ to a stranger and saving a life, literally.
1:13:22So what you're doing is making a difference, and I appreciate it, man. It's really inspiring. Thank you.
1:13:26Of course. Final question. What's your definition of greatness?
1:13:30Greatness is simply being a net positive to the world.
1:13:36Net positive. My man. Thanks, Chris.
1:13:39You. Appreciate it. Gotta learn how to sell.
1:13:41Gotta learn how to build. You gotta learn learn how to lead. So you gotta learn how to get people to give you money for stuff.
1:13:47Gotta have the stuff to sell them, and then you gotta have people that work on your side to help deliver on those other two. If you can do those three things, you're unstoppable. And if you do one of those three things, you can make as much like, can still make a ton of money.
1:13:58But if you can Yeah. If you can do all three.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
"People are masters at playing business and not doing business," Chris Koerner opens — and backs it up for the next forty minutes with reselling VCRs, boot-camp-method course launches, and a self-taught iPhone repair shop. Then, without much warning, the conversation drops into his daughter's double lung transplant and the kidney he and his wife each gave to strangers.
How they asked for the click.
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