David: (00:00)
Now If you go to your compensation adjustment meeting and you think you’re worth $10,000 more per year, dammit. Build a business that pays you twice what you’re being paid right now.
Ken: (00:10)
No, there’s no excuse of, Hey, I don’t have you know, connections or I don’t have a lot of money, or I don’t have this. I don’t have that. You don’t have, you don’t have to.
David: (00:19)
I hope to share these types of stories with our listeners to help them avoid the 40 to 50 hours of learning how to do Photoshop when there’s a $10 option.
Ken: (00:30)
One huge mistake that I made early on in my business and it cost me tens of thousands of dollars,
David: (00:37)
literally every topic I feel like I’ve learned from the school of hard knocks and I want to share every single one of those with our listeners
Ken: (00:46)
and I want to live my life doing the things that I want with the people that I love.
Intro: (00:51)
Welcome everyone to the firingtheman.com podcast, a show for anyone who wants to be their own boss. If you sit in a cubicle everyday and to know you were capable of more than join us, this show will help you build a business and grow your passive income streams in just a few short hours per day. And now your host serial entrepreneurs, David Schomer and Ken Wilson.
David: (01:15)
Today’s episode is the first step on your journey to achieving freedom and firing the man. Today, Ken and I are going to talk about what firing the man is all about, specifically what you’re going to get out of this episode and what you can come to expect over the coming months at firing the man podcast. So Ken, what can our listeners expect to gain from listening to this podcast?
Ken: (01:42)
The listeners for this podcast, they’re going to learn how to start their own side, hustle their own business. They’re going to get insights from, from you. And I, uh, you know, we each have, you know, between the two of us, five or six years experience, recent experience of starting multiple businesses and bringing them to six figures. And along the way, we’ve made probably dozens of mistakes. I don’t know about you. I don’t wanna speak for you, but I’ve made dozens of mistakes myself and I’ve learned from those. And you know, I’m going to share everything I’ve learned with the listener. So in a sense you get to kind of skip the line, you know, um, what, what else, what else are the listeners going to get from the show? David?
David: (02:29)
One thing I want to do to make this podcast different is to tell the listener everything I know. And I’ll give you an example. When I first started out, I watched a lot of viewers on YouTube and they would tell you, you know, say the topic is PPC. They’d give you a little teaser. They tell you 30% of what they knew and then they always had something to sell. If we’re covering a topic like PPC, I’m going to tell you what’s working for me. If I’m not the expert, in fact, I not, I sub that out to a consulting agency that we’ll be bringing on the show. Sure. We’re going to bring those experts on. And when you listen to this podcast by PPC, you can be damn sure that you’re getting all the relevant information.
Ken: (03:12)
Yeah, we both have analyzed our entire business and thought, okay, well you know, these are some things that I like to do. These are some things that I do not like to do. These are some things that I enjoy and these are some things that are not a good return on my time. And you know, so that’s more stuff we’re going to discuss on the show is, you know, what’s, what is a good return on your time and what’s not.
David: (03:37)
One thing that makes our situation unique is we have full time jobs and I think a lot of people start that way. They have a full time job, they have an inflexible schedule, they have a boss they hate, they have something that just isn’t it, just have something that that isn’t jiving with, with their lifestyle and they look to something like e-commerce or, or building an income stream so they can spend more time with their family, spend more time doing hobbies. And I would not advise, you know, I think the wrap that we’ve taken is the right one. Don’t quit your job tomorrow and then start something, start something, build a platform and give yourself an excellent exit opportunity. You know, if you go to your compensation adjustment meeting and you think you’re worth $10,000 more per year, dammit, build a business that pays you twice what you’re being paid right now. I mean, go, go out and get it. And after some time, you know, it’s not easy and we’ll just be sharing our story about that. But, you know, if you think you’re undervalued, go out and build something that properly compensates you for your time.
Ken: (04:49)
My, my background, my story includes, you know, I have a large family. I grew up, uh, not in poverty, but, but, you know, we were not wealthy. Uh, I, you know, I have no wealthy relatives and I have no, uh, connections, right? Like, I don’t have a, you know, uncle Bobby that’s a Senator or anything like that, you know, so everything that I’ve done, I’ve, I’ve had to learn and build slowly, right? So you know, there’s no excuse of, Hey, I don’t have you know, connections or I don’t have a lot of money or I don’t have this or I don’t have that. If you have a goal and you know, you set your priorities straight, right? You take the time every day, spend an hour or two every day and build towards something, it’ll, it’ll be there through hard work, determination, consistency.
David: (05:39)
You know, one thing you, you mentioned was, was starting out part time and with hard work, determination and consistency, figuring out a way to make it work with your full time schedule. And I think that’s something else that people can expect from this podcast is, you know, I spend one or two hours a day on my business. It is before work, that’s when I’m working on my business. But then I have a full time job and I think a lot of our listeners, they have full time jobs, they have families, they have practices and it’s tough. It’s tough starting a business and it’s really tough starting a business when you already have eight hours of your day eaten up or 10 hours of your day eaten up by full time job that forces you to be efficient and look for ways to be more effective in building your business.
Ken: (06:32)
You know, like you said a few hours a day, you are, you’re working eight hours a day. You know, everybody has 24 hours in a day. It’s how you choose to spend it. So for me, early on I had a one hour commute. I would listen to YouTube videos and podcasts for one hour on the way home, and then I would execute on what I learned that day. Once my family went to bed, we had dinner, you know, and the kids went to bed and I would spend one hour every night executing, taking action on what I learned. And over, you know, a period of, you know, three, four months that adds up.
David: (07:05)
I think you would agree if I could do it all over again. Oh man, there’s a lot of things I would do differently. And that’s what I hope to bring to this podcast. You know, one story that comes to mind on Amazon, you need to have an all white background for your hero image. And I could not figure out how to do that. I had no background in Photoshop and if I would’ve known that you could have outsourced that for 10 bucks, that would have saved me 40 to 50 hours. You can have this done. I would have never even bought the license for Photoshop. And, and so I think I, I hope to share these types of stories with our listeners to help them avoid the 40 to 50 hours of learning how to do Photoshop when there’s a $10 option.
Ken: (07:55)
One huge mistake that I made early on in my business, and it cost me tens of thousands of dollars, so anything over 18 inches in a box over 18 inches is considered large size and the fees are astronomical if you’re selling products that are less than $20. And my product at the time was a, I think it was like maybe 12 or $14 at the time, and I packed it in a box that was 18 and a half inches. Right? So the fee was, uh, I think the fee to ship that damn box was like $11. Right? So I, here I am, I, I purchased this. I have, I think I made, I think I bought, I don’t know, 5,000 units, 3000 units. I can’t remember. I had them sitting there all in a, I had him in the warehouse, eight and a half, 18 and a half inch boxes, and Amazon started shipping them and charging me. So everyone that I sold, I lost like $4. Uh, that was, that was a really big mistake. And um, yeah, that’s so, so Amazon has a, there’s, there’s lots of tools out there and, and we’ll, we’ll share them as we go along and on the show and, you know, how to, how to vet your products, how to size them, how to package them, you know, packaging is huge. Uh, you know, not only the size of the package, but what’s on the package, you know, how does it look to the consumer? Does it have a, let’s say user experience and opening that package and the product. Like, you know, David, you and I have been through lots of times where we, you know, Hey, let’s, let’s improve this. Let’s change this. And, you know, so our customers are, are, are happy. So yeah, we have a lot of experience on tweaking those and making sure they’re the right size and you know, user experience, what’s, what are they going to get when they open the package. Uh, but yeah, that that’s, that’s one mistake that comes to mind that, um, I am happy to share. So, so if it helps someone else not make that same mistake and yeah, we have, you know, between David and I, we have a book of mistakes that we’re going to share on the show.
David: (09:56)
Absolutely. Every topic, right? PPC. I’ve screwed that up. Listing optimization, I’ve screwed that up. Online marketing I mean, literally every topic I feel like I’ve learned from the school of hard knocks. And I want to share every single one of those with our listeners.
Ken: (10:12)
Uh, you know, I get questions all the time and it was one of the things that, you know, made me want to, I want to start a podcast is to share, you know, uh, there’s so many people out there that want to have a side business. They want to, you know, sell an Amazon. They want extra income. They want to, they want the freedom. Right? Uh, and you know, after speaking with so many people and, um, you know, answering lots of questions and I thought, well, let’s just get a podcast going in and we can reach more people than, you know, standing in a corner at a meetup and talking to two or three people, you know, we can, we can help as many people listen to the podcast.
David: (10:55)
Ken, when I met you, one thing that really stood out was that you were an avid reader, an avid podcast listener, and you had attended more trainings than anybody else that I knew. I really like wrestling and wrestling. You always describe the person as the technician. He’s not the strongest. He’s not the fastest, but they really know the fundamentals. And that’s one thing that in our earliest conversations, I knew that you were, you were a technician. So talk to me about your learning path, how you got to where you are and how we can take that and leverage it and deliver value to our listeners.
Ken: (11:39)
Well, thank you for that. That’s very nice. David. I would say that I’m half of the half of the technician and the other half. I’m a steamroller. So I study something to the point of knowing as much as I can about it. And then I run right through it and then I pause and then I see what worked and what didn’t. And then I go from there. So, yeah. You know, um, when I, when I first, uh, discovered, you know, Hey, I, I, I’ve wanted to be a business owner my entire life and I did not have confidence for that. We’ll talk about that later on, another show on how I overcame that. But when I, when I decided, Hey, you know what, I’m gonna start a business. And so I spent roughly two months studying everything I could, reading books. I purchased multiple courses on e-commerce, specifically Amazon sales channels and e-commerce in general. You know, I consumed hundreds of hours of podcasts, multiple YouTube channels. Like I said, I absorbed as much as I could to overkill and then I steamrolled right through it. And I started…
David: (12:43)
say for say you consume a hundred hours of content, whether that be podcasts, YouTube, you name it, out of that a hundred hours, how many hours actually deliver value to your business?
Ken: (12:58)
Uh, for every hundred hours of content, you know, uh, it’s tough to say. I, I would, I would probably peg it to maybe, you know, maybe 5% that that’s like truly, you know, action items where I can take action on. Um, so yeah, maybe it takes, you know, a hundred hours and you get, you know, five hours of action items
David: (13:21)
and it’s those five hours, then I’m excited to deliver to them, to the, to our listeners. Yeah, absolutely. You know, if you’ve ever read a business book, you know, I’m a self admitted business book junkie, but God, it’s, there’s got to sift through the shit to get the good stuff right. And if you’re short on time, you don’t have time to sift through the shit. If, I mean, if I’m doing dishes, man, you know, I’m listening to podcasts, but more or less, I’m sifting through through a lot of information to find that 5% that you’re talking about. And in that 5%, man, it’s so valuable, but there’s not a great spot to go out and get it for listing optimization. You could write an entire book or you could listen to a podcast with, you know, 30 minutes of all the need to know stuff, you know, the nuts and bolts, nothing speculative, nothing flashy. What’s working right now for us?
Ken: (14:22)
So David, uh, you know, on the, on the topic of the, you know, content, can you share with our audience, you know, just some of the sources. Where do you get your content? Uh, you know, what do you like? And, uh, you know, what, what are you going to share with the listeners?
David: (14:37)
So like I said, I am a self admitted business book junkie and you know what, I’m going to be honest with you guys. I also like self help books and self improvement books and there’s a negative connotation there. But you know, one thing that that’s really helped me in my eCommerce business is optimizing my life. You know, I’ll take a book like miracle morning and we could do a whole episode on that, but I optimize my mornings in that allowed me to, to really start grinding on my business in the mornings.
David: (15:05)
It wasn’t just wake up and do a couple things. It was wake up, get energized and get rolling. And so there are in the same thing with self help books, you can help. 5% of it is great stuff that can really make a difference. But the other 95% of it’s kind of fluff. And fortunately I enjoy sifting through that. But, and just to give, give some specifics. Uh, we’re sitting here in the, in the podcast studio, I’ve got a line of books behind me and I really think you can tell a lot about a person by looking at their bookshelf. And so I’m just gonna pull a couple of books off the shelf and show you what I’m reading. So we’ve got tribe mentors by Tim Ferris. That is an excellent book. It’s interviews with probably about a hundred of the top performing people in the world, a snowball by Warren buffet.
David: (15:57)
You know, he is the King of finance and there’s a lot of lessons learned both in his business and his life. That can be very helpful. The lean startup, if you’re planning on starting a business and you don’t have a ton of capital, this is an essential book to read four hour work week. If you’re listening to this podcast and you have not ever listened to the four hour work week, I want you to hit pause once you go over to audible or go to your local bookstore and get four hour work week. That book changed my perspective on life, on how I spend my time. And it extends beyond business. You know, that’s where I really became a Tim Ferriss fan was the four hour work week, the miracle morning. This is probably my favorite self help book. This is about optimizing your mornings and if you have a full time job, you’ve got to either burn the midnight oil or grind it out in the morning.
David: (16:52)
It’s one or the other unless you have a real push job that allows you a lot of time throughout the day. This is an excellent book and I really do think we should have full podcast about it. Rich dad, poor dad again changes the way you think about money. It changes the way you think about your house, your mortgage, buying new cars. It is just as much a life improvement book as it is a book about finances in managing your money. You know, those books are what have really made a big difference in my life in the last couple of years. And as the show goes on, Ken and I are constantly just mowing down content and if we have specific books or specific podcast episodes, we’ll certainly share those with you.
Ken: (17:39)
Yeah. So David, you know, as we sit here and you know, and tape this, this first episode, which is really exciting for me, you know, it’s, uh, it’s been a, it’s been a fun and exciting project to work with you on. Um, so, and as we developed this podcast, we thought, you know about the name, right? Every, everybody thinks that the name the name. Like what are you going to go with? So, you know, after, after a while we did, we did, we decided we’re going to go with firing the man. And so can you share with our listeners, you know, what does that, uh, what is that about? Like who is that man? And, and, and, and where are you going to fire them?
David: (18:18)
The man to me has been an ever-changing being. Couple of years ago when I got into e-commerce, I wanted to fire the man cause I wanted to go fishing and hunting and spend more time outdoors, spend more time with my girlfriend. And that was a good reason at that point in my life. A couple of years later, I wanted to fire the man because I wanted to spend more time with my wife and I didn’t want to sit in the car for an hour a day. One way, two hours round trip, going into work and a month ago my wife had welcomed a little baby boy into our family.
David: (18:58)
Yeah.
David: (18:58)
And that’s the reason currently why I want to fire the man. Um, I hate in the morning having to leave at work, leaving my son these days are limited. That’s one thing I’ve learned when I had a kid was everybody said, enjoy these days, you know, blink of an eye. They’re gone. And I think to myself on these commutes, what the fuck am I doing? Well, I am, I’m missing out on this. I’m missing out on this time with my son. And that is, you know, that is currently why, why I want to fire the man. And I think it really all boils down to freedom. And that is, that is a term that I think really gets overused in, especially in the eCommerce industry. You know, you see these people that say, do you want to drive Lamborghini and live in a mansion in LA? Do you want freedom?
David: (19:52)
And that’s fair, right? That that’s freedom to some people. But right now at this current stage in my life, freedom is, is quitting at at 4:00 PM and spending the rest of the night with my wife in my, my son. Uh, freedom is, is going on a vacation and not having to worry about working nails. Freedom is, is about doing what I want to do when I get out of bed in the morning. And it’s odd living in the U S it’s the freest country in the world is what we hear. But you asked most people, all right, you’re free. What are you going to do tomorrow? I’ve got to go to work, I’ve got to go to this meeting, I’ve got this conference call, I’ve got all these things I have to do. And I look at, you know, I look at my life, I look at the standard American life.
David: (20:46)
Have to, are you actually free? I don’t think so. And so, you know, for me, firing the man is, is getting more freedom, being a better husband, being a better father, and making the best out of my time. Like most valuable asset. My time. There’s a, I’m sure it’s out or one of the hundred self help books that I read, but it’s a, they say, you know, the average person has 30,000 days. When you can think about that from two perspectives. One is at 30,000 days, that’s a lot of days. But I would argue not, I mean, you know, you think how easy would it be to both $30,000 right? Dollar a day. It just, when you really think about it, I mean that’s, it’s not a lot of time and that’s, if you’re fricking lucky, that’s, if you know you have your health, nothing crazy happens to you.
David: (21:41)
You don’t get into a car accident. And I want to make the best of my time here. And so when I think firing the man, it has nothing to do with my current employer, but it has everything to do with how I allocate my time. So Ken, when we were brainstorming ideas, we had a Google doc and we were just putting everything on paper and you’re the one that came up with firing the man. And I loved it. Absolutely loved it. There’s something about it that really resonated with both of us. So tell the audience what aspiring the man to you.
Ken: (22:16)
Okay. So firing the man to me, a lot of people would think, Oh, you know, you want to fire you, you know your boss, you want to, you know, you want to do this. When the guy firing the man, to me it has a lot of meetings. I think, you know, um, my mortgage company, you know, that could be the man. I have pressure to pay my mortgage, you know, my student loans, uh, my car payment, um, you know, spending eight hours a day in an office, in a cubicle, you know, so the man to me is anything that I don’t want to do, right? So it all comes to, like we discussed previously is, is freedom, right? So I want to wake up every day and I want to live my life doing the things that I want with the people that I love, you know, in my life, whether it’s a job, whether it’s a mortgage payment, whether it’s credit card debt, that’s the man to me.
Ken: (23:15)
And you know, everybody has the man in their life, right? And you know, one way out of that, one way to fire the man it’s do to build a business and to replace your income with your business income, passive income, that, that’s the man, on a side note, the man could also be, you know, the, the annoying ass person that sits next to me and the cube that smacks, they’re gum when I’m to work. Or it could be the person at two o’clock in the afternoon that makes a bag of popcorn and I hate popcorn. Right? Well, I’m forced to sit in that damn cube and work. Right. Okay. Getting paid in a little hamster hamster and hamster wheel running around. Yeah. You know, so the man is a lot of things and um, one of the things that like you had mentioned, I want to spend my time doing the things that I want to do and uh, you know, if I have a full time job, can’t do that.
David: (24:20)
Absolutely. You know, the man is a, the man is the jeans day. The man is the guy that says, Hey, we appreciate what you’ve been doing for the company. We appreciate your hard work and in exchange for all that hard work, we’re going to let you wear denim pants this Friday jeans day. You got to be kidding me. You know what I mean? You talk about freedom, you talk about being free. Yeah. You have somebody that grants you permission to wear a certain type of fabric. It’s just, it’s ridiculous, right? So Ken we like to leave our listeners with one actionable step that they can take to work towards their goals of building an online business? What’s the one action step this week that our listeners can take?
David: (25:09)
I think one easy action item that you can do, it’s totally free. Uh, you go out and you get the app meetup, right and download it and put it in your interests and find groups that can help you find likeminded people. Um, there’s actually very interesting, that’s how you and I met David at a meetup, right? You started a meetup, you wanted to find like minded people and um, yeah, there it is. So, go out and get the app meetup and go look for business groups. Um, look for you know, like minded people.
David: (25:48)
Absolutely. And just a little background, uh, meetup.com although it does sound like a dating site, uh, is, it does, I was like, what if my wife finds meetup.com on my phone and a little background on meetup? It is a, it is a platform that allows people to set up meetups. I mean, that’s exactly what it is. Set up, uh, times, uh, typically at a restaurant or at a bar to get together and talk about a certain topic. And, uh, you know, I, I founded the st Louis e-commerce club meetup and before I knew it, we, I mean, we’re at 150 members right now. Uh, yeah, that’s huge. And it, it’s a great way to meet people I think in even if there’s not an eCommerce meetup in area, if there’s something that has to do with business, I mean, we drill down to e-commerce is like, it’s this super niche area, but it’s 2019 and everyone has the internet. I mean, e-commerce is huge. And so if there’s anything business related, real estate related, just go out and meet people. And Ken you say it all the time? The fastest way to the top is to find somebody who’s already made it to the top and ask them how they’ve done it. Stay tuned for these. We’re going to have these every week actionable steps that our listeners can take. If you like today’s episode and would like to hear more content like this, smash the subscribe button now, boom.