In today’s episode, Toby Mathis, Esq. welcomes Shane Sams, CEO and Co-Founder of Flippedlifestyle.com. Shane is one half of the dynamic duo at FlippedLifestyle.com with his wife Jocelyn. The Sams Family built an online membership business that generates hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in profit, while only requiring a few hours of work per week. Now they help other people build & grow online memberships of their own.
Highlights/Topics:
- Shane’s path to finding his own side gig
- Librarians and their challenges
- Selling what you know and solving problems
- Startup costs and hosting platforms
- The moment Shane decided to change paths
- Yard sales to get start-up money
- The Toddler Apocalypse blog
- Some great monetization ideas
- What are people charging per month?
- Crazy ideas that worked – chickens and needle felting
- You can probably achieve your goals with an online business
- First steps to take
Resources:
Full Episode Transcript:
Toby: Hey, guys. Toby Mathis here. You’re back with the Anderson Business Advisors Podcast. I have a really good guest today named Shane Sams. First off, welcome, Shane.
Shane: What’s going on, Toby? Good to see you today. I’m feeling like I’m walking down a library with you right now. We’re going to get some books off the shelves.
Toby: Reach right over. We’re going to grab some ancient texts.
Shane: Ancient texts telling us the best side hustle gigs you can have right now.
Toby: We got to do this. This is a buddy of mine named Mario Basner, who takes photographs of libraries and architectural work all over the country. That’s actually a photograph of Admont Abbey in Austria.
Shane: Unbelievable. Looks like a painting.
Toby: People don’t believe it’s a photo, it’s actually a photo. If I move my head, you can actually see down the hallway. Hey, there’s a hallway.
Shane: The floor looks like a photo, but it’s the books that get you. The books look like Leonardo da Vinci, DiCaprio, or somebody painted it, whoever it was, I don’t know.
Toby: If you look up here, all that painting was done by a guy who was 80 years old. Looks like Michelangelo, it was gorgeous. Anyway, I want to go there, stand in the middle of it, and then say, see, it’s real. There should be me back there waving. See, it’s a photo.
Shane: And then when you move your head, you’ll be there. It’ll be good.
Toby: It’s about right. All right, so we’re going to hit the best side gig you guys can enter into right now. I’m just saying this because I work with people all over the country and all over the world. Hey, inflation is a real thing. They printed a lot of money during Covid, and it’s had a pretty negative impact on a lot of people’s lives.
The things that tend to get buoyed when inflation goes up for businesses are things that have growth and assets. They get pushed up, too, like your real estate. The main drivers are inflation and growth in any business. We want to have you in something where we can help you get that income going.
I’m a tax attorney by trade, so all I do is I look at businesses all over the place. I look at things that people are investing in, and I pick the best ones, because I can actually see the results. Shane here happens to be very focused in one area. Let him do the introduction on it. This is something anybody could do. If you have a passion about something, you can turn it into a business, and this is a great way to make money.
Once you do it, the beautiful part is that it’s a residual model. Put a little energy in the beginning, let it start to compound, and I’m sure Shane, you got a million stories because I know you’ve been doing this. Why don’t you start by telling them who you are and how you got into business?
Shane: My name is Shane Sams. I have a company called Flipped Lifestyle, flippedlifestyle.com. What we do is we teach people how to start online businesses based on memberships and content.
I have not always been an entrepreneur. I used to be a school teacher in southeast Kentucky. A lot of different things happened along the way that made me realize I had no control over my life. I figured out that a W-2 employee becomes a W-2 employee because they control your time. I was like, this is not good. Someone owns me. They literally own all my time. I started looking for other things to do.
I didn’t have money to start a business. My wife and I started looking for all kinds of things. We were going to start a clothing store at one time. But I did the math on it, and it was going to be $10,000–$20,000. It was just going to be so much money to start a clothing store.
I’m not a very good cook, but we opened up a pizza restaurant. That’s $500,000 to open a pizza restaurant. It’s crazy when you look at all the cost of all this stuff.
Toby: It doesn’t stay cheap.
Shane: I know. Not at all, dude. Additionally, everything back there, like the people. We had to find something else.
I actually stumbled across the knowledge industry, where people are literally taking things that they know. They’re either doing coaching, consulting, or they’re taking those things and putting them online, and people can buy them all over the Internet. I’m just thinking to myself, there are 8 billion people on the planet, I only need 50 to 100 every month to buy something from me, and I’m probably good. I could replace my teaching salary.
My wife and I started looking for ideas. We came up with two ideas in the beginning. These are both a little off the wall. Our first idea was this website called elementarylibrarian.com. My wife was a librarian, and we thought, hey, wait a minute, teachers hate lesson planning. Let’s make the lessons for them, they’ll pay us every month to get access to them. We built this business. Lo and behold, we ended up having hundreds of them out there who joined us.
Toby: Is it still out there? If I look at that, would I still be able to see it?
Shane: Yeah, elementarylibrary.com is there, but we no longer own it. We actually sold that on a contract for over a million dollars. We sold it. It got big enough. It was an asset we sold back in 2017.
Toby: Oh, my God. There it is. Library lesson plans.
Shane: Library lesson plans, yeah. What people don’t realize is if you can solve a problem, then people will pay you for the solution. Elementary librarians have a really unique problem of all teachers. They have to teach six classes a day, not six classes the same lesson every time like a history teacher. They have to teach first grade and first period, second grade, third grade, fourth grade. They have to prep for every one of those things.
Our tagline was, never plan a lesson again, go home and hang out with your kids. That was our value proposition. It really went over well. We repeated that with another website called ushistoryteachers.com and started selling lesson plans to teachers.
My passion though at the time, I was a football coach. I loved football. I specifically loved the 3-5-3 defense. Nobody knows what that is, but I loved it. I wasn’t a Super Bowl state championship coach.
Toby: I could see you as a linebacker, by the way.
Shane: Oh yeah, I was an outside linebacker. I was a fullback outside linebacker. I was too slow to play anything else, but I could run around the box a little bit. I started my career as a football coach, 0-10. My first year as a head coach, I lost every game, Toby. Every one.
We eventually got pretty good. My team started winning seasons almost every year. We never went to state or anything, but I was like, wow, we win more than we lose. We go home happy, more Friday nights than not. I started selling my playbooks to coaches.
My whole pitch on that one was, are you sick of getting up every Saturday miserable, because you’re 2-8, 3-7, whatever? I ain’t here to help you win a state championship, but I can get you to 500. That was the whole pitch. Dude, I freaking sold $7000 on that playbook the first time I ever did it.
I even had a clinic. I hosted a clinic myself out in Atlanta, Georgia. We started just doing anything we knew about that we thought we could help people with. We turned it into online businesses, and that’s how we were able to quit our teaching jobs and become entrepreneurs.
Toby: It sounds like Snapple. Do you remember they were like, we’re number three.
Shane: A hundred percent, dude. Yeah.
Toby: We’re not going to beat Coke or Pepsi, but number three.
Shane: That’s exactly right, 100%. I just want to wake up happy more on Friday nights than not. If I get six and four, then I was only miserable four times. That was my promise to you. You could be miserable less. It worked. It’s all pretty good.
Toby: Let’s digest this a little bit. You set up businesses where people would go in, they subscribe, and you’d send them playbooks and stuff?
Shane: Yup. Basically, how it works is there are three tiers to it. You set up a membership site, let’s say it’s $50 a month or whatever. Inside your membership site, you’re going to do three things. You’re going to make courses where people can go in and learn things. Stuff that you say all the time, they can go watch like a training. The courses inside my football coaching website were how to install the defense to your team. It was the practice scripts and stuff.
The next thing you set up is a community, where people can talk to each other. All of this is done in a simple platform that does all this for you, but these are just the components. Now you create this energy in the community. It’s not all based on you, they can talk to each other. If you want to, you can have higher levels of services. You can actually coach people one-on-one, you can build a coaching team, or you could do what we did.
I actually had one where people could buy these live events, where we would go and do a clinic in-person, and those were expensive. Those three elements make up the membership model. The goal is, if you get 100 people to pay you $50 that’s an extra $60,000 a year. If you do that 200, you can get it to $10,000 a month.
Toby: This is the tax attorney sat at me. He immediately says, structure that business because chances are you’re incurring a whole bunch of expenses that your employer is not reimbursing, everything from home offices now, cell phone, computer, everything. If you can use it in your business, your business can reimburse you if it’s the right type of business.
The shameless plug is structure it right so it’s tax-free money. Obviously, you can make $5000 a month. If we can write it all off, then that’s more like making $7500 at a job. It goes a long way. How much did it cost you to actually put one of these businesses together? It sounds like it just took time, but you used a platform and you did some things. What did it end up costing you?
Shane: It was a lot different back then because you had to work with a server host company. You can still get server hosting really, really super cheap, like $25–$50 a month probably for your own server and things like that. There were a lot of things you had to duct tape together.
I’d say in the beginning, we were spending maybe $500 a month on the business itself before we started marketing, before we did anything. That’s like opening the doors kind of money.
Now there are programs. We use a platform called Kajabi. What Kajabi does is it has all this stuff built into it. You can build your website on it, you can build your sales funnels on it, you can do all your marketing, it hosts your contacts, it hosts your products. You just sell everything through this one platform. That can range anywhere now from $150 a month to maybe $600 a month depending on what you have.
These platforms are all in one platform as they literally are all you need. As long as you can take a payment, host your products and services, do your email marketing, build your website where people can come to it. Social media accounts are basically free to set up until you start running ads on them. All this stuff can be set up probably for $500 a month or less.
Toby: Yeah, I’m looking at this. The best place for creators to make money, Kajabi.
Shane: They’ve got a low tier, too. I think they’ve got one that’s a couple of hundred dollars a month for one site or something. We got multiple sites on ours, so we did 500.
Toby: Let me take a look at the pricing of it. Again, they have stuff that’s $100.
Shane: There are lots of platforms like this. I shamelessly plug Kajabi because we use it. All these new platforms have just consolidated everything. People see these all the time on TV, too, like Squarespace and stuff like that. These platforms do everything you need them to do to make money. You just got to put in the time, the investment, and then come up with a great idea that you can take to the marketplace where you can solve a problem for somebody.
Toby: All right, let’s talk about that. You’ve already hit two. Here you are. You’re a school teacher. You and your wife are like, you know what? I don’t want to be beholden to have to work all the time. Was there something that’s an impetus that said, this was an incident that made me realize this was not the path I should be going down when it came just to being a public school teacher?
Shane: There was. Long story short, one day, we figured out. My son told me one day. I took my kids to daycare every single day. I was dropping my kid off one day, and he told me that one of the ladies in his daycare center scared him. I was asking him why, and he started saying some things that were a little off. I was like, well, I got to figure out what’s going on here, but I didn’t have enough information to go burn down daycare centers.
The day had already started. I was running behind for school, so I couldn’t get a sub. I’d taken Isaac (my son) somewhere else. He was out of that situation, but I needed to go and figure this out. My boss basically told me that she knew my son needed me, but my job needed me, too, and I’d have to handle my personal problems after work.
That was the incident. At that moment, I realized, well, this person really thinks they own me because they sign my paychecks. That was the impetus for making me go down this rabbit hole. Is that what you’re asking?
Toby: Yup, that’s exactly what I’m asking. Usually, there’s a moment. Some people say there’s a calling, some people say they had an epiphany. Some people will say they just had this compulsion. They just feel like they need to share something, or they knew they’re on the wrong path. I talked with entrepreneurs all the time, especially wealthy people. Wealthy people often feel it’s almost a compulsion to do something. It sounds like you had a realization.
Shane: It was an obsession at that point to get out of that situation. I could not think, I could not eat, I could not drink. I just started going all-in on learning everything I could, but back then nobody taught you how to do it. You just had to read blog articles and try to guess what other people were figuring out, because the industry wasn’t as developed as it is now. It became an obsession to quit that job and work for myself.
Toby: Was your son okay? Did you get him out of that situation?
Shane: He was. There was a lot of stuff going on. That daycare center actually ended up getting shut down because the state investigated it. There was a lot of other crap going on in there. They were just violently punishing kids. It was pretty terrible in a lot of ways.
It was more from ignorance (I think) than malice when we look back at it in hindsight. My son is good now. Of course, there was some trauma, but we went to counseling and have worked through that.
Toby: Thank God that you did that, because other parents probably went to their job, and they said, hey, you don’t do it. Did you tell your school to stuff it? Is that what you did and just burned the bridge?
Shane: I actually left, yup. I said, nope, that’s not going to happen. I took off. I just went home that day, and we investigated the situation. There were two family incidents that happened at that school where I got wrote up for leaving. One of them was after school. I left before it was time to go. My school was already over, but they wrote me up twice. I was like, this is stupid. I don’t need to answer to these people if I can just go home by myself.
Toby: I’m going to have to take a timeout here. Hey, guys, if you’re out there listening, would you have told your boss to stuff it if you were in Shane’s situation? Put it in the comments. Just say, yes, I would, or I was in it, I didn’t, and I regret it, or you should just work for your employer and it doesn’t matter what’s going on.
Shane: I don’t want anybody to think I felt like a superhero, Toby. I was driving home literally scared to death. I only made $2500 a month. But guess what? That was half my income with my wife. We had bills and the mortgage. If I’d gotten fired, it could have gotten ugly really, really fast. I had no savings. I was living paycheck-to-paycheck.
Toby: I’m going to say you are a superhero in doing that, because people just sacrifice for the kids. All right. What did you do?
Shane: I didn’t start an online business right away. I just told my wife, I needed to figure something out. It probably took me four or five more months before I found an online business and did a podcast. I remember the first thing I did. This is the first thing I did. I said, I know I’m going to have to buy something to learn how to do this.
Everyone kept talking about email marketing, how you had to get people’s email address, and you could sell them stuff. I had a yard sale. Two or three weeks in a row, I sold everything I could find. Anything that wasn’t bolted down, I started selling. I started collecting my money. I was selling my collectibles that I had had my whole life, autographed books from authors who were dead. Whatever I could do, I could sell.
I used that initial money to buy my first training to learn how to do the marketing side, learn how to do email marketing, and then to buy my first hosting package, to get my website up there. Then I tried three or four websites. I’m going to tell everybody out there, you’ve got to go through a couple of ideas before you find the one that works. I hope the first one is a homerun, but it takes trial and error.
My first three ideas were terrible ideas. They just flunked, crashed, and didn’t even do anything. My wife’s getting frustrated at this point. Finally, I started a blog. It was a dad blog called Toddler Apocalypse. Have I ever told you this? I’ve never told you this story.
Toby: No, this is the first time.
Shane: It was called Toddler Apocalypse. I was doing it wrong at the time, I didn’t know about the content strategy method. I was trying to get people to come to my blog, read it, and click on ads. Google ads and stuff like that, and you get a commission if they click it.
One night, I was watching the stats. Somebody clicked an ad, and I made 11¢, like a dime and a penny. I was like, money, I did it, I made something. My money came back. That’s when my wife was like, hey, wait a minute, this is real, you actually made any money online?
That’s not even enough money to get the shopping cart out at Alby, but it’s money. It was a proof of purchase, proof of concept. That’s when we went back to the drawing board, and we started buying courses and stuff to try to learn how to make courses, how to lead communities, and do stuff like that.
Toby: It may be 11¢, but it’s my 11¢, and I earned it.
Shane: That’s exactly right. That’s my 11¢. I wish I actually had the physical. I should have gone to the bank. I should have deposited it, gotten a dime and a penny out, and framed it.
Toby: Everybody else makes their first dollar.
Shane: My first dime and penny. I was just thinking about math. I was like, there are a billion people. What if I had 20,000 people that gave me 11¢? That might work.
Toby: It’s all about scale. You went down this path, but it sounds like you had the elementary school librarian. I’m looking at that site now. That looks nice, but you sold that puppy for a million dollars?
Shane: Yup. It’s $1.1 million, 800,000 in cash, I believe, is what it was. That was crazy. That was unbelievable. The reason they liked it is because it was recurring revenue. Of course, recurring revenue is not like stocks or real estate where you set it in there forever. All money must be managed. You’re going to have to do marketing to replace churn and people that come in and out.
What was cool about elementarylibrarian.com was people would buy it, and the school year is 9–10 months. You’re going to get 9–10 months retention, people would stay year after year. You had this nice little recurring revenue pot.
This company came in, and they actually were buying up education websites like this to build a big conglomerate or something. I don’t know what they were doing. They would buy it, and then they would make money off of it. I’m sure they flipped it later. I think they’ve sold it twice. I think that’s been sold again actually the last I heard. That’s what really opened my eyes to what was possible with online business.
I’m not saying everybody’s going to go sell anything for a million dollars or $500,000 or $20,000. I don’t know what you’re going to do. But you are building a thing that you can build that other people would want that thing. If you ever get sick of running it, you can let it go.
We’ve had a lot of students do the same thing. We just had one of our students sell a website for $700,000 or something. There’s been a couple of our students that have sold things for way more than me.
I was just talking to one of our students. His name’s Jeff, and he started a similar website in geometry, like math. He just watched our model and went with it. He sold his for $2 million or something like that, because people want those investments, dude. They want that semi-passive income rolling in, and they do whatever they want with it.
Toby: Shane, just because we don’t have unlimited time, tell people some of your favorite ideas that you’ve seen people monetize.
Shane: I’ll tell you three ideas real quick. There are three categories that we have found of ideas that I teach. You can make a business out of something you love, like a passion. You can make it out of something you’ve learned, just knowledge you have that you can pass on to other people, or you can make it through things you’ve lived through.
People who love things like passions, hobbies. Those are great ways to start an online business. My favorite passion-based business is a guy named Evan Burse. He was an animator at Marvel, but he was working 80 hours a week and hated his job. He wanted to work for himself.
We started a website called thecartoonblock.com. The Cartoon Block basically is him teaching aspiring artists how to draw superheroes. He was able to replace his salary just with a YouTube channel and an online business teaching people how to draw cartoon characters like Batman and Superman. Then there are things you’ve learned, like things you’ve just learned along the way if you’re educated in something.
One of my favorite stories is a lady named Blair Green. Blair Green was a pharmacist, and she had her own little pharmacy. I don’t know if anybody’s noticed, but the big boxes are killing the local pharmacies. They’re just commoditizing pharmacies into the stores. She figured it out, she learned how in her business, to do services and do other things that other pharmacists weren’t doing to keep it business and to make it really super profitable.
She started coaching pharmacists. She just took her pharmacy degree. Instead of doing her own pharmacy, she started teaching pharmacists how to do this stuff, and that turned into a huge business. She was doing $40,000–$50,000 a month at one point. I think the membership was $197 a month, like crazy money.
The things you’ve lived through, these can be anything, like we had a lady named Robin Fern. She came in, and she had survived breast cancer, but she had survivor’s guilt. It took her five years of depression to get her life back of all the friends that she had lost along the way. She started a community coaching women who were survivors of breast cancer to help them get their life back faster.
These love, learned, live categories, if you can just sit and brainstorm them, many of those have ideas that you can use to start an online business on because if you have ever solved a problem in any of those categories for yourself, you can go and teach other people how to solve that problem. Once you solve that problem, people can pay you for it.
Toby: The bigger the problem, the more it’s going to generate obviously.
Shane: Exactly.
Toby: What’s typical? Is everybody charging $100 a month, is it $30, is it $10?
Shane: It’s based on the person, it’s based on the avatar. For example, if I’m selling to school teachers, there’s going to be a ceiling on what you can charge a school teacher, $50–$100, probably. If I’m selling stuff to pharmacists, they’re going to have more disposable income.
The goal is not just to charge a lot. That’s a different strategy, because that’s more high ticket. The goal with this model is go wide. Go find 200 people to give you $50, they’re out there. If there are 100,000 people in an audience, there are 200 of them that will probably buy your stuff. You just got to get yourself in front of them. The mission is to go wide.
I had a guy last night. He’s got a website, I can’t remember what it’s about, but he’s charging $5, and he just hit 50 people in his first couple of weeks. He wants to go get as many wide as he can get, create a few thousand extra dollars a month, he’s not trying to quit his job, and just do it that way. That’s margin from inflation. That’s what we’re looking for.
Toby: It seems like anybody could do it. Is that a fair assessment? It’s like, hey, you don’t know what’s going to work unless you go out there and start trying, so.
Shane: Exactly. We’ve seen crazy ideas work. There is a learning curve. It’s simple, not easy. Let’s keep it that way. But we’ve seen crazy ideas work.
The two craziest ideas I’ve ever seen is this guy named Kenny Troiano who loves backyard chickens. He raises chickens. I didn’t know this was a thing. People do this, especially urban areas. He’s like, I want to start a podcast about raising and breeding chickens and then start a membership about chickens. You think people do that.
He started that. He has over 200 members or something like that in his membership just paying him every single month. He’s making six figures a year just arguing with people about chickens.
This is a long story, but I’ll tell you the short version of it. This one lady came in. Her name is Teresa Perleberg. She started a website. I think it’s called Bear Creek Felting is what it’s called. She starts this business. It’s something like that, I might be wrong on that. Look up Teresa Perleberg and you’ll find her.
She said, I love to do this activity. It’s a craft, and it’s called needle felting. I needle felt things into stuffed animals, and I also share the sheep, and I dye the wool. It’s farm-to-table crafting.
Toby: Is she in North Dakota or something?
Shane: North Dakota, yes. She’s got a YouTube channel called EweTube, because that’s sheep. She was like, do you think other people might want to be a farm-to-table crafter. I was like, I don’t even know what this is. This makes no sense, but you like it, and I bet you’re not the only person on earth that does this. Other people do needle felting.
She starts this website where she’s teaching people just with courses in a membership, how to build these stuffed animals. This thing blows up. She ends up getting 400 members making beaucoup bucks off this thing.
The members got it so big, they wanted her to supply them with the wool, so she started supplying them with a subscription box to get them the wool. She was making so much money and so many packages, she got to partner with more sheep, so they could get more wool.
And then they went and bought an old school house. They invested in real estate, and they turned it into an event center. Now people fly there to do these conferences, where they get to shear sheep, dye wool, and sew things into stuffed animals. That’s probably the weirdest idea I’ve ever heard. If that one works, probably anybody can come up with an idea that can make some money.
It also depends on how much, too. There are stories of these people who quit their jobs and things are great, but I always tell people, I’ve got friends, family, and people I’ve helped who went and made enough money to pay their mortgage. They have so much breathing room now with how much everything costs and how much everything is. What are your goals, you can probably achieve it if you put the work in up front in an online business of some kind.
Toby: This is wild, because I’m looking at her site. There’s a zebra on there, and I thought it was a photo of a zebra, but it looks like it’s something they felted.
Shane: Yeah, it’s a felted zebra. She calls them statues, though. She gets mad at me when I call them stuffed animals, but I think the story sounds funnier when I say stuffed animals. You apparently needle felt. When you needle felt, it’s a statue, not a stuffed animal. So I got your back.
Toby: But it’s really cool. There are all these great ideas, people can go out there. Here’s my thing, guys. Two ways to combat inflation. You go out there and you invest in things, or you create additional income that’s going to grow your income beyond what inflation is doing. What I’ve seen is wages aren’t keeping up with inflation. The way that government trends inflation tends to be hot garbage.
We know what things are up. The real estate market is up 30%–40% over a short period of time. That’s the inflation. All the costs are up, taxes are up, everything’s up. What we can do to combat it is make sure that we have other income streams, or we’re going to have to cut our expenses. I think a lot of us are realizing cutting expenses isn’t realistic because inflation is driving everything.
Everything’s more expensive, so what are you going to do? Maybe just throw that cell phone away. Guess I don’t need it anymore, I can’t afford it, or you go out and you create another income stream.
I’m appreciative of you coming in and sharing this, because I always learn some talking with you, Shane, because you help so many people take their passions and put it into something that can help them. You said something earlier. Here’s a guy that has 50 people at $5 a month. Okay, $250, what would that do for you?
Shane: That’s a week of groceries for a lot of people.
Toby: For some of these people, that’s a great vacation a year, my kid can now go to school, or it’s a car that operates and runs.
Shane: My kid doesn’t have to get the field trip, whatever.
Toby: I don’t get into this, but younger Toby was on team USA in the Moscow Cup, $2500 ticket. I couldn’t afford it as a young kid.
Shane: So you didn’t get to go?
Toby: I didn’t go because I couldn’t afford the plane ticket to get me over there. Yeah, it was just silly. Everybody thinks, oh, but the teams, all these us teams and stuff. I was a good soccer player, and that’s what sent me to school to college.
I was in high school, and we didn’t have a ton of money. Little things like that were actually big. Getting yourself from point A to point B was actually a struggle. If you can help somebody do a little bit, even just a little bit, it can be hundreds of dollars, it could have a pretty dramatic impact.
If you get it to thousands of dollars, it can have a significant impact. If you did it with your wife, and you have a million dollars fall out of the sky because it’s something you created, you can have a nice life impact.
Shane: It can let you fund your dreams and feel your future. There are just so many benefits of it. We get caught up in the big numbers, I think, as entrepreneurs. But the biggest difference most people tell me is, I get to do what I want every day.
When we see people that have that extra money, or they get to say screw you to that job, that boss, because they’re not worried about it, because I got this other thing on the side. It gives you a little financial freedom, a little space to work in the world.
Toby: Love it, and I appreciate you coming on. If somebody wants to get a hold of you—I can put a link down in the show notes and they can get a hold of you—what’s the first step that they should take if they’re interested in what you’re doing?
Shane: The first step should always be to find your idea. We have a little training that people can watch. It’s at flippedlifestyle.com/idea. It’s a more expanded version of what I was just talking about. If people want to go, just type your name and email. You give it to us, we’ll send you a video. You can sit there and watch that, and maybe sit and brainstorm an idea this weekend that could go out and make you some money online. Who knows?
Toby: All right. Folks, if you know somebody and you’re like, this would be perfect for him, I already have a buddy who raises his chickens, but he raises food chickens. He raised about 500 a year. It’s like, dude, all you need to do is get subscribers that even just want your chicken. No hormones, just natural chicken. You could probably go that route.
If you know anybody that you say like, hey, this would be perfect for him, just forward this to him. We appreciate it if you like and subscribe to the channel. Obviously, it helps our analytics.
On this topic, especially, if you know anybody that just needs that little bit of a flick in the eye, a flick in the butt, and a little motivation, this certainly helps when you hear that other people have done it and done it successfully.
I’m talking to a guy that literally turned his life around. Obviously, Shane, you had something that was compelling that change. Not everybody’s in that situation, but a school teacher. Did your wife work too when you guys did all this?
Shane: I was a US History teacher, and she was an elementary school librarian. We were building it. While we’re working full-time and raising kids, we were moonlighting on the Internet at nighttime to build this business. It took us about a year, because we were only able to work a couple of hours a week on it.
Toby: There you go. If they can do it full-time with kids, school teachers, then anybody can do it. I can say that because I managed to build a successful business, and I can do it like anybody. I’m pretty sure that anybody could do it.
Shane: I’m just a dude from Kentucky. We’re all still figuring it out. Toby, we probably got no business being here. Let’s be realistic. If we can do it, I’m pretty sure anybody can.
Toby: That’s my litmus test. Sorry, if I could do it, then you definitely could do it, but you’re probably smarter than I am.
Shane: Exactly.
Toby: Hey, thanks for coming on, and I really appreciate it. We’ll share your information and make sure that it’s easy for people to add another side gig that can actually make them some money, and it doesn’t cost them an arm and a leg that they can turn into some profit.
Shane: Have a little fun while we’re doing it. Have a little fun.
Toby: You got it. Thanks, man.
Shane: Thanks, man.
