#34: Ray Blakney, Founder & CEO | Rayvensoft Ventures

In this episode of “In The Thick of It,” we're joined by Ray Blakney, a serial entrepreneur and co-founder of Rayvensoft Ventures, a holding company for multiple successful online businesses. Ray recounts his diverse upbringing, from his birth in the Philippines to his childhood in Turkey and eventual move to the United States. He shares his experiences in the Peace Corps, which led him to Mexico, where he met his wife and started a language school together.

Throughout the episode, Ray discusses the challenges and triumphs of building and scaling various businesses, including an online language school, a marketing agency, and a chocolate factory in the Philippines. He emphasizes the importance of understanding the lifetime value of a customer, learning how to have constructive disagreements, and trusting business partners.

Ray also opens up about his own struggles with depression and the lessons he's learned from his entrepreneurial journey. He stresses the significance of getting good at something to find enjoyment in it and the value of persistence in the face of failure.With 22 profitable businesses under his belt, Ray shares his insights on what it takes to succeed as an entrepreneur and the importance of focusing on what you're good at to build a lasting legacy.

About Ray:
Ray Blakney is just your typical award-winning Filipino-American entrepreneur who grew up in Turkey and lives in Mexico. He has nearly two decades of business experience that have included starting, growing, and leading over a dozen profitable companies along with hundreds of staff from across the USA and Latin America.

Marked by a fearless approach to opportunity and a creative entrepreneurial spirit, Ray has always found fulfillment in the electric exchange  of collaboration among colleagues and peers. He unintentionally stumbled upon business coaching in early 2023 and quickly found that the greater impact was  not hidden in immediate conversations about business strategy but rather in helping calibrate and strengthen a person’s foundation first.

Thus began his executive coaching ventures within the online education industry. He often tells his clients, “You are my client first. Your business comes second.” And the results speak for themselves. When the entirety of a person’s life is in alignment, a business can’t help but flourish.

After hours, Ray can be found spending time with his family, traveling, or teaching semi-professional sword fighting. He lives in Playa del Carmen, Mexico with his wife and son.

About Rayvensoft Ventures:
To learn more about Rayvensoft Ventures visit rayvensoft.com.

Creators & Guests

Host

Scott Hollrah

Founder & CEO of Venn Technology

Guest

Ray Blakney

Founder & CEO, Rayvensoft Ventures

What is In The Thick of It?

Join Scott Hollrah, founder of Venn Technology, as he takes you "In the Thick of It" with the real stories of founders who are actively navigating the challenges and triumphs of running their businesses. This podcast goes beyond the typical entrepreneurial success stories and delves into the messy, gritty, and sometimes chaotic world of building and growing a company. Get inspired, learn from the experiences of others, and gain insights into what it truly means to be in the thick of the entrepreneurial journey.

If you're working for somebody else, your

range of happiness is, let's just say,

you know, five up and five down.

But if you're an entrepreneur, your range of happiness

is 100 up, but it's also 100 down.

That's the difference of being an entrepreneur.

Welcome to in the thick of it.

I'm your host, Scott Hollrah.

This episode of in the Thick of It

features Ray Blakney, a serial entrepreneur

who's built multiple businesses over the years

under his holding company, Rayvensoft Ventures.

Born in the Philippines, Ray spent most of

his childhood on the move, relocating to Turkey

and eventually landing in the US.

After five years of corporate life post

college, Ray joined the Peace Corps and

traveled to Mexico to teach computer programming.

During this time, he met his wife and

together they started their own language school.

Ray has started 22 profitable businesses over

the last 17 years, including a marketing

agency, social networks for schools and a

chocolate factory in the Philippines.

During this episode, Ray shares the importance

of lifetime customer value, learning how to

have constructive disagreements and trusting business partners.

So joining us today is Ray Blackney.

Ray, thanks so much for being a guest.

Normally when I intro the guest, I talk about their

company name as part of it, but the list of

companies is so long that I think we'll just save

that until a little bit later in the conversation.

Scott, thanks for having me on.

Yeah, I tend to have business adhd and I've been

doing it for long enough that that kind of builds

up quite a portfolio of businesses that I work at.

We've had a handful of serial entrepreneur

guests on in the thick of it.

And, man, your list is long, so we'll get there.

Man, you're growing up is incredibly interesting.

And actually, let's get this out.

You're not in the US right

now, you're in Mexico, right?

I'm about 150ft from the beach, the caribbean beach.

Yeah, life is good.

Yeah, not so bad.

But you didn't grow up in Mexico,

you grew up all over the place.

You were born in the Philippines, right?

Yeah, that's right.

So having a filipino mom kind of makes

me look Latino, so I blend in pretty

well here in the Caribbean, but, yeah.

So I was born in the Philippines.

My dad was actually a peace

Corps volunteer in the Philippines.

How he met my mom.

My dad is originally from Boston, but

he grew up in Rhodesia, in Zimbabwe.

They met in the Philippines.

I was born there, I think at around ten months old.

They moved to Istanbul, Turkey, where I spent

the next 15 years of my life.

Then I went back to the United States.

Went to a prep school in New England there for

a year or two, went to college, did my tour

of duty in Silicon Valley as a computer programmer and

consulting, Anderson Consulting, kind of the big five for a

few years, and decided I don't want to sit in

a cube anymore and quit my job.

And I also joined the Peace Corps, which

is how I ended up in Mexico.

So that's kind of the long story

of every place I've lived with.

So when people ask me, where are you from?

I'm like, how much time do you have?

You know, I can give you a quick one.

I'm american, but I also have

a Filipino and a mexican passport.

So, like, what do you mean by that?

Or I can tell you really like the background, right?

So how old were you when you moved back to the States?

You were a teenager?

1515. Okay.

Yeah, man.

Take us through Ray's life as a

young kid in the Philippines and elsewhere.

Were you in sports?

Were you artistic?

Like, what did you like to do? Yeah.

So, no, for both of them, in a way.

And I'll kind of give you the story as to why that was.

I only know this kind of looking back as an adult.

It was not something that kind of registered as

I was a kid kind of going through it.

So when I moved to Turkey and I started school

just because I was born in November, I was one

of the youngest people in my class, just because the

way the calendar year is cut off.

So I tended to be on the shorter side even

when I was in first grade, second grade, I think

my filipino blood was a little more prevalent back then.

And my mom's five foot one, so

kind of on the short side.

So I would be like the last person

picked for dodgeball and everything like that.

Like I jokingly say after the girl in

the crutches, then they pick me, like, you

know, to play on all those teams.

Then I went back to the US for two

years in fourth and fifth grade as my dad

was studying his doctorates and I skipped grade.

So now I was two years younger

than everybody else in my class.

They don't do that anymore.

Then there's a reason for it, right?

Because the difference between a twelve year old

and a ten year old, as far as,

like, emotional and physical development is huge.

My grades were fine, but, like, you know, I just.

I was always the shortest one in the school.

I had really low self esteem most of my.

All the way through college, you know, I was

16 when I started college, and so as a

result, I never really played much sports growing.

Many sports growing up because I thought it was short

and I thought it was really bad at sports.

But my classmates were always, you know, at

least half a head taller than me.

Try playing basketball with everybody.

You come up to everybody else's shoulders

and like soccer, they're more coordinated.

And then it's kind of that downward spiral.

If you read the book by Malcolm Gladwell where

they talk about, like, all the hockey players, you

know that our star is being born in January.

I'm like, exactly the opposite of that.

Exactly the opposite happened to me.

So I was really bad at sports as a kid.

Isn't that stat just absolutely astounding that the

month you're born statistically makes a major difference?

My son's born on January 13, and

when he came out, I'm like, sweet.

Like, you know, one, I'm never allowing him

to skip grade, and now he's, he is

the oldest one in his class right now.

He's four years old.

He's the oldest one in class, and he's

like the best in sports and all the

rest because he's the oldest, right?

And I'm like, finally, you know, karma is coming

back in itself from like, oh, my childhood.

He's going to experience the opposite end of things.

Now.

I did become good at sports when I was graduated college,

because once you get to, like, 21, 22, and you're out

of college, then it's not about what grade you're in.

You're all 22, like, just hanging out

with a bunch of 22 year olds.

And then I actually competed at

a national level in martial arts.

And for the first time in my life, I

realized I'm like, I'm actually good at sports.

I never wasn't an opportunity where I was competing

against people my own age and my own size.

And I'm 6ft tall.

I'm not short, right.

But, you know, when you grow up short, it took a

long time for my mind to catch up to my height.

So until I was about 26 or 27, I actually

thought I was the shortest one in the room, even

if I wasn't usually the shortest one in the room.

It was just like this mental block I had in place.

Yeah, you mentioned martial arts.

Was that your outlet when you were

young, or did you have something else? Yeah.

So I tried martial arts, like, everything.

Like, I think the mental side where I

just didn't feel very good at them.

For me, it was more the outdate myself a little bit.

Back in the eighties, those whole, like, ninja and

martial art movies were like, popular, you know, when

the geeky kid goes and learns karate and suddenly

it becomes, like, popular and saves me, girl and

all that kind of stuff.

And I remember I used to grow up watching those things.

I'm like, I want to do that.

So I'd be at home kind of trying

to kick stuff and do all that.

That's what attracted me to martial

arts in the first place, right?

Because I wanted to go through that

transformation that martial arts gave me. I just wasn't.

I didn't find any that I was very good at.

I tried taekwondo, I tried karate, I tried kung fu.

I tried a lot of them.

And then after college, I was going through all

those steps of just trying other martial arts, and

I came across this one called kendo.

I had no idea what that was.

Showed up for a practice, and I was ready to,

you know, get in a stance and punch somebody.

And then they handed me a bamboo sword.

I'm like, let's get going.

And I'm like, huh?

This isn't what I expected, but I fell in love with it.

So I've been doing japanese fencing now for

20 years, and I actually run the local

school, and I teach there right now.

I even tried out for the US national team.

Didn't make it, but I went to the actual

tournament to qualify for the US national team when

I was doing it back in the United States.

Like I said a minute ago, you've

got such an interesting background, and it

just got even more, even more interesting.

So born in the Philippines, moved to

Turkey, back and forth to the US.

What language did you all speak at home?

So my mom spoke to me in

Tagalog, which is the Filipino language.

My dad spoke to me in English.

All my friends outside were Turkish,

so I would speak that.

Technically speaking, my first language is a Turkish, just

because my first word apparently was in Turkish.

So they tell me.

I have no memory of that.

And then I said something in Tagalog later, and

I said something in English a few weeks later.

So I jokingly, when, I remember when I

was going to high school saying the sat,

and they're like, is it your first language?

I'm like, no.

And, you know, I was able to do that.

I scored pretty well on the verbal section of the sat,

but, I mean, my dad's American, ran a publishing house.

Perfect English.

It was a little bit of a misdirection there on

my part, but I was able to see it.

But I grew up speaking three languages.

I studied French in school, and then

I've picked up Spanish since then?

Since I've lived in Mexico for so long. Yeah.

Are you still pretty fluent in all the other languages?

My Turkish is rusty.

I haven't used it in a long time.

I can understand most of it,

and I'm able to actually communicate.

Just pure coincidence.

I reconnected with somebody I went to school with in Turkey

two weeks ago, reached out to me in LinkedIn, and we

just jumped on a call and we had a little bit.

The first part of the conversation was in Turkish.

She's a doctor and speaks fluent English, lives in LA.

I mean, so she does, but we just started speaking

in Turkish to start, and we flipped into English because

it's definitely less uncomfortable for me to speak English than

it is for me to speak Turkish.

Now, you mentioned you've got a four year old.

How many languages does he speak?

He only speaks two for now.

Okay, well, at four years old,

we'll give him a little pass.

He's got until five to learn his third language. Right.

I'll give him till then.

Otherwise he's out of the house. Right. All right.

So as a 15 year old, you moved back

to the US and you went to boarding school.

What was that transition like?

Your parents are still in Turkey and you're

half a world away in a boarding school.

What is that transition like?

I'll be honest, I didn't fit in very

well to the boarding school on multiple levels.

So my parents were not wealthy. They.

We were able to get into the boarding

school because I had pretty good grades.

And they also wanted to check off some of the.

About 20% of the school. They always.

They proud of them.

They were proud that 20% of

the school was always international.

So I came in as an international

student because I get multiple passports.

I didn't use my us passport.

I used my filipino passport.

So, yay, demographics.

They were able to kind of check that out.

So they give us a scholarship because

it costs as much as college.

My parents couldn't afford it to pay that without.

But my school in Turkey ended after my

sophomore year, so there was no choice.

I had to find another school somewhere else to go to.

My family had gone boarding school in that area in

New England for a few generations, so we kind of

knew the scene, so to speak, of the boarding schools.

When I got there, a few things happened.

The first is I was surrounded by, like, the elite of

the elite of the elite, as far as finances were concerned,

not the world that I'm used to coming from.

Some of the stories I'll tell is my there was

a saudi prince who wanted to date my sister and

offered to fly her home in his private jet.

Like, I mean, that level of people that were there.

My roommate, my first year, had crashed five cars by

the time I met him for himself when his mom,

because he had a problem with drugs and alcohol.

Really nice guy, but he just

drank, and he went into rehab.

Later I found out, but his dad was

so wealthy, was a super wealthy real estate

developer in New York City, and it was

just, like, inconsequential, like, okay, another car.

Here you go.

I mean, that kind of stuff.

Not going to say they were nice.

Like, I met them, they were polite,

and they were nice with me.

There was no kind of outward shunning,

but I just didn't fit in. Right.

Because that is not the world that I grew up in.

I, you know, they would say

things and I wouldn't understand.

So there was this one level of separation there.

The second level was a little more subtle

in that if you're listening to this podcast

on your earbuds, I sound 100% american, right?

You know, I should understand all these american

references that you make, but I didn't.

And that was my next level of separation.

They would make cultural references like american football,

which I vaguely know the rules now, but

at 15, I have no idea.

You weren't exposed to it.

Like, I couldn't tell you the first.

Yeah, I didn't grow up in the US. Yeah.

And this is pre cable, you know, big cable tv where

you can watch NFL on Netflix anywhere around the world.

Like, that wasn't it.

I vaguely knew it existed.

I might have seen a game on a movie once.

Like, I didn't know what that was.

So people started talking about

baseball teams and football teams.

I have no clue what you're talking about.

Popular shows on tv again, pre streaming,

pre all the rest of it.

I got reruns that were, like ten years old.

Like, I mean, I have no idea what

the latest shows here in the United States.

So they would look at me odd when I would.

They would make a joke and

I wouldn't get the reference.

It's like, wait, you're american, but

why don't you get it?

I'm like, I'm american, but not really.

And that was kind of a thing.

So they actually have a name for kids like me.

They're called third culture kids, right?

Where you have parents from two different cultures and

you can grow up in a third one.

And there's a bigger population of us now, but back

in the day, like, there was no definition to that.

So unless you are a person whose parents are from two

cultures and you grew up with a third one, like, a

lot of my life experience is very hard to relate to,

and I didn't realize that as a 15 year old.

I do realize that now.

And now that with digital nomads and people

living around the world, it's like, I find

a lot more people who understand me.

But back in high school, that

was definitely not a thing.

You know, it's so interesting.

You spoke the language perfectly, and to your

point, you sound like any other American.

Maybe not with that thick Boston accent,

but the cultural references are so important.

I remember, like, in high school, taking spanish class,

like, we'd read books, and we would watch, like,

spanish soap operas and things like that.

And at the time, I don't think I understood, like,

it wasn't just that we were learning the language.

It was that we were learning some cultural references.

When I was in college, I

had an upper level marketing instructor.

My degree is in marketing.

And she and her husband had both taken jobs

at Texas A and M, and they had moved

from India to come teach in America.

And I will never forget, there's this one

day, she's talking the class about a merb,

and she keeps saying, merb, merb, merb.

And, like, we are all just lost.

I mean, we're literally looking at each other

like, what on earth is she talking about?

And after, like, the fourth or fifth time she

says it, she realizes that we're totally lost.

And she looks at us like we're crazy.

And she says, merb, mercedes Benz.

And we're like, that's not a thing here.

We don't call it that here.

But to her, like, it was totally normal.

So I got to believe that that

fish out of water experience was.

Was probably pretty similar.

The example I would use is, you know, british humor.

In the UK.

In the US, we speak the same language.

I mean, different accents.

We speak the same language.

But most Americans, when they watch BBC comedies,

they're not rolling on the floor laughing.

I mean, we physically understand what's going on.

We just don't get.

We don't have the cultural culture

behind it to make that funny.

Same thing with the British,

if they watch our comedies.

And again, a lot has changed because

us culture has become, like, global culture.

But, like, back in the day, they would watch

us comedies and, like, why is everybody laughing?

Like, this isn't funny to us?

And I'm sure in Australia, it's the same thing.

And as you said, in India, it's the same

thing we speak, especially in the educated class in

India, they all speak fluent English, but there's just

so much other culture behind that that they can

say certain things that mean nothing to us, even

though we understand the words.

For the record, the US office is

far superior to the british office.

I actually totally.

I entirely agree.

Even though so many of the jokes from season one

were the same, it was far better executed stateside.

We might be biased because at least in my case, I

saw the US office before I saw the british office, even

though I know the other one was around before.

So maybe a little bias there. Fair enough.

All right, so you've got these

different layers of separation, differentiation.

I forget the word you use, but that

had to have been a little bit awkward.

How did you get through that?

Okay, I'll put the premise in there.

You're assuming I did in the sense that

I was able to kind of acclimate myself. Culture.

I was able to. At least.

One of the things I learned growing up was I

was able to fake fitting in very, very easily. Right.

I was able to do that kind of adapt

quickly because my school in Turkey was the international

school, so about 67% of my class was new.

Every single year, they'd be expat parents who

would be coming in for one or two

projects and us companies or other foreign companies

studying the school that they'd be gone.

So I might like my class one year,

then the next year I don't like it

anymore because the students are entirely different.

So what I didn't when I came to the United States

was I learned to fit in like I, you know, I

learned to pretend to know what was going on when we

watched the Super bowl and I learned the rules of baseball

just so I could sit down and actually knew what people

were talking about when they were doing it.

I still didn't have the passion that

somebody would have grown up watching a

baseball team and following them as.

So, you know, if you tell me what player was on

the Red Sox in 1996, I'm like, I have no idea. Right.

But at least enough that I could

actually pretend that I belong there.

And I actually did that all

through high school, all through college.

I even joined a fraternity in college because I

thought it would make me belong more in college

than just kind of being a GDN, I think.

So what we call them. Oh, GDI. GDI.

Goddamn independent is my call.

Everybody not in fraternity, I was like,

what was that phrase we used? Yeah, exactly.

So I joined one just because I'm like,

okay, this will make me blend into this,

make me fit in a little bit better. And it did.

I mean, you know, it helped me and kind of acclimated.

You kind of get a certain status

and social standing by joining fraternity.

You don't even have to go out looking for parties.

They just come show up to you. Right.

So it's kind of that kind of environment.

That's how I did it for the next about ten years.

And where did you go to college?

I went to college in Ohio at

a school called case Western Reserve.

Okay, having spent most of your life outside of

the US, how did you pick that school?

They gave me a full ride.

Okay, that made it easy.

No, that was pretty much it, yeah.

I mean, like, you know, I got into some better schools.

My dad's went to Harvard and my aunts

and uncles and went at MIT, all that.

But we couldn't afford it to go to any

of those, and case Western gave me a full

ride, so that's why I went study there.

Makes for an easy choice.

Exactly, exactly. It was a money thing.

And what did you study again?

I studied computer engineering.

All right, so there's computer science and

there's computer engineering, and computer engineering, I

think, is more of like a blend

of, like, the hardware and the software. It's not.

It's a little bit where I

think computer science is more software.

Is that a fair, kind comparison?

That's absolutely right.

So I studied computer engineering because I wanted

to be called an engineer, even though I

have no interest in the microchips and cmos

and, like, getting all those things together.

I had no interest whatsoever.

I just did it because I wanted to be able

to say, I'm an engineer and a computer scientist is

technically, I mean, it's a bachelor of science.

You can technically say it's an engineering degree.

You study the school of engineering.

But then, you know, people look at you

and you're not an engineer, you're a scientist.

So you had to go through thermodynamics

and all kinds of physics and.

Oh, that was awful.

Pv equals nrt. That's all I remember.

I don't even know what that stands for, but,

like, that was a formula from thermodynamics that for

some reason is, like, implanted in my brain.

But, yeah, I have to do thermal, like

at least two semesters of thermodynamics, even some,

like, structural classes on struts and strains.

I remember doing that at civil engineering school, so I

had to do a lot of those kind of things.

I was listening to Mark Rober, the youtuber.

I was listening to a podcast with him just yesterday, in

fact, and he threw out y equals mx plus b.

And I'm like, I totally remember that.

I couldn't tell you what YMX plus B equals.

I know it's important, but I don't know.

I couldn't tell you today.

I was telling my son, like,

sohcahtoa the other day for, like.

Cause he was learning triangles.

I'm like, soh cah toa.

Like, I don't remember what it means, but it's

got something to do with figuring out how long

one of the sides of this triangle are right.

Like, just left from high school.

It's like, sine cosine something or other hot noose.

Or there's like, a botanist, and

they're like, what's the o?

I don't remember.

I'll figure it out when you're, like, twelve and

you're studying, and I'll reread it again, but right

now I have no idea what's going on.

All right, so computer engineering.

And did you have a clear sense of what you

wanted to do on the other side of college?

So I'll take a step back to

kind of my life in Istanbul, Turkey.

There's actually an interesting change there.

Again, I was the smallest one in my

class, so we were lucky to get, like,

a computer lab at a pretty young age.

Like, I started learning how to code when

I was nine or ten years old, right?

We're talking, like, these old Apple computers called Apple

two GS's, where floppy disks were really floppy, and

we'd kind of put them in there, and I'd

learned to code on one of those.

And instead of going out and playing with the

other people in the class during recess, because I

was really bad at sports, I would go in

there and I play with a computer.

I remember that I would actually be helped, you know?

I would know way more than a computer science

teacher was just like, she did that on the

side from, like, teaching history or something like that.

It wasn't like teaching computer science was

not a thing back then, right?

So she would go in there.

Within three months, I knew way more about how to code

this thing than she did, so I would actually help teach

classes and stuff like that when we were doing it.

So at that point, I fell in love with coding, and

I'm like, okay, I think I want to do this.

Obviously, like most geeky ten year olds.

Why do you want to code?

Well, I'm going to make computer games

because that's going to be amazing.

They're so much fun to play.

Imagine how much fun it is

to actually make these things.

So I go into college.

I kind of followed that step

all the way through college.

And then while I was in college, I took

a class on making computer games, Ms coding.

And I'm like, wow, this is nothing like playing them.

This is awful.

Like, I mean, you know, this is just, it's work.

It's drudgery.

And since then, I've actually learned about how

bad the industry of computer game programming is

and how they burn out their programmers.

I mean, it's a, they're essentially sweatshops

to meet meet the deadlines of releasing

the games and stuff like that.

People think it's a sexy thing and it's really just,

just grinding and grinding and grinding out code that's with

a huge deadline with managers on top of you.

Like, the business can go bankrupt next week because

if you just, if the release does not go

perfectly and the sales doesn't go perfectly, you're out.

Like, it's not usually sustainable.

Businesses like these computer game companies can be

top of the world for like five years

and then bankrupt like a year later.

I mean, it's not a stable business.

I would never go into it. I never invest.

Like, I mean, it's just not something that's stable.

I learned that in college.

So I'm like, okay, let me go and do what

most people are supposed to do after college, right?

Our parents taught us to do.

Go and get a good job, work there for

30 years, retire and get your gold watch and,

you know, and then start living your life.

So that's what I was planning on doing when I left

college, was to get a good job and work there.

And real quick, what kind of work

was your dad doing in Turkey?

Was he still with the Peace Corps or was he.

No, no, he was the head of a publishing house.

While we were there.

He was the editor of publishing house.

And they would print books.

They would translate books from English into Turkish.

So that was kind of their specialty.

And they had ran the number one dictionary, actually,

there's a green one, if you're watching on the

video up there on the back, that little green

book that is actually still a copy from back

then because my parents had a whole bunch.

So I carried one around with me.

It's called the Red House press.

I don't know if it's still around.

They sold it off to a local company back

in 96, 97 when you say they sold it

off, were your parents owners in the business or.

No, they were not. They were just editors.

They, as the owners of the business, sold it off.

And so at that point, my dad lost his job because

he was the editor, and they didn't want him on the

payroll, so he had to move back to the United States.

He made a career shift at that point.

All right, so you graduate college,

and this is, like, late nineties.

The graduate college would be 2001.

So just after the late nineties. Yeah.

Okay, and so you moved to Silicon Valley,

and if this is zero one, then this

is, like, right after the.com bust.

Right before, actually.

So I graduated from college after

I moved to Silicon Valley.

I dropped out of college for, like, a year and

a half, two years, to go up to Silicon Valley.

So I went over there.

I had not completed my degree yet, but, yeah,

it was the roaring end of the nineties.

Everybody needed programmers.

I had, what, two years of college

programming experience, which really amounts to nothing.

Like, I learned way more when I

was working out there than anything.

Any college professor that would teach me, I'll

admit I might have fudged my things.

Do you know how to code Asp?

I'm like, sure I know how to code Asp.

So I had this code Asp in 21 days

book I was reading on the flight over.

I'm like, let me learn how

to code Asp while we're there.

First few days, I was just kind of fudging

it, kind of copying everybody else's code stuff.

But by, like, month three, I was able to do it.

They were paying me pretty low salary because I

was kind of a very entry level coder.

And I just lived there working six, seven days

a week, one room in a triple apartment for

about a year, year and a half.

The company I didn't view guest

stock options was at 18.

I had no idea that that was something I

should be asking for in the first place. We went up.

We showed up on CN's tech minute.

I actually wrote one of the first applications that would

send money out via phone, ever like on the old

phones where you have to, like, you know, hit the

button three times, put a letter in there kind of

thing, using something called lap wireless application protocol.

And I wrote one of the first applications

for that, and it was on CNN. They showed.

My application showed $50 or something from one

person to another, and everybody's like, wow.

Yeah, this is, like, as PayPal is,

like, really becoming a big thing.

And it was across the street from PayPal

we would sneak into PayPal's cafeteria because they

had much better food than we would.

And we'd just tell people, hey, hold the door.

And we would run in there because they didn't check.

Once you were inside, it was just like a cafeteria.

So I have eaten in PayPal's cafeteria multiple times,

pretending to be an employee there because it was

a lot cheaper than paying for my own food.

Did you ever run into Jack Dorsey or Elon Musk?

Or would you even known who they were back then?

No, I wouldn't have had any idea

what these people were back then.

I'm sure like Elon Musk, if they walked into

the cafeteria, I'm sure the whole cafeteria would have

been enough of an uproar that I would notice.

But like, no, I did not

run into those people back then.

So you did get to be part of the.com bust then?

Thats why I went back to college. Bust.

So we went down.

Within six months, the company ran out

of money, went back, finished my degree.

Lets go back to when you decided to drop out or

take a break or however you term it these days.

You talked a minute ago

about your parents being conservative.

You go to work for the big company, you worked

through your whole career, you get the gold watch.

When you said, hey, mom, dad, im going

to step away from college before I finish

my degree, what was that conversation like?

It actually wasn't that bad because they understood.

And this is the same thing I'm teaching my son.

You can always go back and complete college.

You can be 60 years old and get your degree.

It's something we grow up with at college,

is what you do right after high school.

I don't really think that's the right choice

for a lot of people looking back. Right?

Like, I'll fill in with a story there as well.

So I went to that New England prep school.

A lot of people very well to do there.

And I remember one of those days, the people

from D A R e came over talking about

drug abuse and all the rest of it.

They split us up in these small groups.

So we kind of go into different parts, parts

of the campus, and we're all sitting on the

floor, about 20 of us in a room.

And the person who's with us, the recovering drug

addict who's speaking with or the recovered drug addict

who's speaking with us, asks, so how many of

you want to go to college after high school?

We all kind of look around the room confused.

Like what?

We all raise our hands, like, obviously what

else do you do after high school?

You go to college like that.

Just, it's like you go to second

grade after you went to first grade.

That least is what it felt like to us.

It wasn't until years later that I realized,

you know, this person probably goes to hundreds

of other schools where, when he asked that

questions, maybe 10% of the answer.

But at least the way I was brought up,

you know, it's junior high, high school, college.

It's like, that's just the progression

of going to going to school.

But at least my parents understood enough that

when I took a, you know, like, hey,

I'm going to take some time off. I'm going to try this.

They're like, okay, you can always go

back and finish your degree later.

They had the understanding that I would finish my

degree like, it just like, maybe not on the

exact time frame that anybody else wants, but then

I go back and finish my degree.

So they were not really that against it, right?

That was the plan going into it was, I will finish,

but I need to try this for a little bit.

Yep, that was it.

And it served me, too, because I got jobs

because of my work experience, not because of my

college degree, because I graduated right after the bus,

and there was not that many jobs out there.

I had two years of experience actually writing code.

While some of my classmates who had better grades

than me had never actually worked in a company

before, I had three job offers when I graduated.

I know many of them, you know, waited three,

six, nine months before they found a job.

Thinking about how you approached class before you

took the break and how you approach class

afterward, was there a shift at all?

Was the teaching more meaningful?

Did you get more out of it, or

did you get less out of it? Less. And I'll tell you why.

So for high technology jobs, universities are not.

I'll use a kind of blanket statement.

I'm sure there are certain universities out there that are

better at this, but the whole university system is, if

you want to teach a course, you have to propose

it to a board of professors, and it may take

three, six months, a year, two years for the course

to actually get approved before you can actually teach the

course in tech, that's a lifetime, right?

You know, if you propose, I want to teach

whatever the latest.net or PhP ten or whatever that

people are using right now, and two years down

the road, you get approved for it.

By then, you're on to Php 15 or the

new Laravel instance, or whatever it is, it's useless.

So I would go there.

I remember I took c in college when I was in college.

That was old.

Like, I have never used c in the

real world since college, like nobody else did.

But that's all the professors knew, because that's kind

of the academic world that they lived in.

And I remember going in there, I didn't take

a single class in databases in my entire degree.

Like, not a single database class while I was there.

And I would go into the classes, and

they were talking about these theoretical, like, design

patterns and all the rest of it.

I was like, this is not what people use

when they actually go out and do their job.

Now, my grades did go up when I went

back, but there were two reasons for it.

The way my university was set up.

First two years, you have to do all these

core classes that weren't really in your specialty anyway.

And I was like, why am I doing

a year and a half of chemistry?

A c in alignment.

A c, like it means something,

but, like, I don't really care.

Like, this got nothing to

do with writing computer code.

When I got back, junior and

senior, it was almost exclusively encoding.

And now that I have real world experience, like,

I could blow through most of those assignments because

they were just like, this, do this.

I'm like, yeah, I did that, like, 50

times in a week back in my job.

Like, this is not any challenge at all for me.

Like, figure it out yourself.

I'm like, I didn't figure it out.

Somebody else showed me, and I just copied it a hundred

times, and eventually I knew how to do it right, man.

Well, so after you, you graduated, you, if I

understand correctly, you kind of did go do the

corporate America thing for at least a little bit.

About five years. Yeah.

And you went to Sherwin Williams. That was the last one.

So I did consulting in one of the big five for a

year and a half, two years, and then I ended up at

Sherwin Williams, and I worked there for four or five years.

Four years.

So added up to about five years.

Five or six years while I was there. Yeah.

And that was my corporate experience.

I tell people I worked in LeBron James's

armpit for about a year or two because.

The Sherwin Williams building.

Akron, Ohio.

Yeah, back in Ohio.

So the Sherwin Williams building is the one where

there's this big believe, black and white believe poster.

Right, with his arms outstretched.

That was the building I worked in.

What you can't tell when you look at it on

the tv is there are actually little holes in that.

Right.

So from people behind that can actually see

outside my window was LeBron James's armpit, and

I could actually look out through there.

So I worked at LeBron James

armpit for, like, two years.

I tell people that needs to be

on your LinkedIn profile, I think.

So that's my biggest claim to fame to date, is like,

I've worked in LeBron James Armpit for about 24 months.

That's great. All right.

At that point, when you went to work at Sherwin

Williams, were you on the 20 year gold watch plan,

or did you have kind of a restlessness still and

knew that that was just going to be a.

A stop for a season?

Yes to both of your questions.

So I went in there and I thought I wasn't.

Was it 23 at least?

Speaking for myself, I wasn't really thinking

of future plans when I was 23.

Like, 23 is like, make a paycheck to go out

and, you know, maybe meet somebody and all the rest.

Like, that was kind of my focus.

And put an outpayment on your

house, pay off your car payments.

Like, I wasn't really thinking past one or two.

You know, I put my money into a 401K.

That was my long term, the limit of

my long term planning while I was there.

So I'll tell the story of what kind

of jumping ahead while I was working there.

And the thing is, when I worked

at Sherwin Williams, everything was fine.

And when I talked about this, I actually want to

put the capital letter fine, because the problem is, a

lot of us get stuck in jobs that are fine,

and that's what's the hardest thing to break out of.

If everything's going badly, you

have an incentive to change.

If you hate your life and you're

miserable, you have an incentive to change.

The thing is, most of us are not miserable.

We're just okay.

We're good enough.

And that's where I was.

They treated us well.

They paid me well enough.

I could have probably stayed there 30

or 40 years and been fine.

But three things happened, actually to change my life

after about three, three or four years into it.

The first one was, I remember I was

in Cleveland, Ohio, and I went out to

a bar called the blind pig on Halloween.

And I remember I was standing on stage, not

because I was actually performing, but because the ground

floor was, like, crowded, there was no band.

So a bunch of us got on stage

because it was just easier to stand there.

And I was sitting there drinking a beer, talking

to some friends, looking out over the crowd.

And I remember thinking, I'm like, I'm 25, and a

lot of the people in this room are 510 years

older than me, and I know they've been in the

same bar, at the same party with the same people

getting droned for the last five or ten years.

And I remember my drunken haze you were

talking about, like, was it a nagging feeling?

This is when it came out.

I'm like, I don't want to be in this bar

ten years from now with the same people, getting drunk,

doing the same thing, like groundhog day every single year.

I don't want this to be my life.

So the next day, I wake up hungover, go

to work, because when you're 25, you can get

drink, wake up the next day, and at least

pretend to function at work the next day.

So I go to work, I'm sitting there in

my cube, and my boss comes in and says,

hey, ray, there's a team lead who.

We're celebrating his anniversary here at the company.

I was also a team lead at the

time, so I vaguely knew who he was,

but we weren't, like, good friends or anything.

So I get up, and we walk

into one of those conference rooms.

Any of you are listening who kind of been

in the corporate world will recognize the conference rooms.

It's one of those in the middle of a

cubicle where there are actually no windows, and it's

those kind of squishy walls for sound absorption.

And there's a full wooden table in the middle and

these kind of, like, obnoxious lights at the top.

And on top of the table, you'll see

the cheese platter with the grapes and those

little plastic plates for you to go there.

So I go and get my crackers and grapes and

everything, and I'm eating it, and I go and say

congratulations to the person who was celebrating the anniversary.

He looks 80 to me, but he was probably

in his fifties, because when you're 25, anybody older

than, like, 40 looks really, really old.

And after about five minutes, the CEO of a company

walks in, and he walks up to the guy at

the end of the table and says, congratulations.

Thank you for 30 years of

dedicated service to a company.

And he gives him a watch and a plaque.

And I remember sitting there looking at

him like, huh, this guy's been working

here longer than I've been alive.

I'm sure his life is fine.

You know, he's a team

lead, probably making six figures.

Kids probably went to a good college.

He probably is almost done paying off his mortgage,

but he's been, you know, he's been coming to

the same office doing the same thing.

I'm sure it's changed stops a few times, but, you

know, generally the same thing for the next 30 years.

So for the second time in 24 hours, I thought, I

don't want that watch and I don't want that plaque.

So that night I went home and both

those things would go through my head, right?

What happened in the bar the night before

and what happened at work that day.

And there was a commercial on tv that I'd seen before.

But like, you know, you have to kind of sometimes

the messages, you need to hear them at the right

time in your life for them to actually register.

And this was for the US Navy and all my respect

to those in the Navy, but if you start shooting at

me, I start running away as fast as physically possible.

So it did not inspire me to join the Navy.

But there was a quote.

There was this particular scene in the commercial where it's

nighttime and there's these waves rolling up on the beach,

and out of the darkness a dinghy comes out.

Six Navy seals dressed in black jump out

guns are then up there in the stars. They write.

If they were to write a book about

your life, would anybody want to read it?

And I remember sitting there, all those past thoughts

going through my mind and just looking at that

and thinking, no, I wouldn't read my own book.

What I was going to say, I sit in

a cube every single day and I write code

and then I write drive home, like, no.

So the next day I went to work, got home,

got on my computer, applied for the Peace Corp.

Usually it takes one to two years for the

whole process to finish mine took 90 days.

From the day I hit submit to the day I touched down in

Mexico, I had to sell all my goods, quit my job, sell my

condo, sell my car and everything I owned in 90 days.

So that's how I transitioned

out of the corporate world.

Trey, that's a dramatic, dramatic change.

And the fact that at 25, you had that

maturity to look at what was going on around

you and recognize, I don't want this.

But then also coming from a background where your

parents were, hey, this is what you do.

You get that gold watch to say, nope,

im going to do something about it, and

fairly drastic, I might say thats huge.

Had your parents talked to you growing

up about doing the Peace Corps?

Had you ever considered that this was

something that you would want to do?

Did they influence that? Yeah, a little bit.

My parents met the Peace Corps.

My dad was a peace corps volunteer

and my mom was Peace Corps staff.

Ironically, I ended up marrying Peace Corps staff.

Thats how I met my wife.

She was a Peace Corps staff and I married her as well.

So im joking with my son.

Get to your mid to late twenties, have fun

till then, join the Peace Corps, get married.

Like, you know, don't worry about it

until that phase of your life.

Yes, they told me about the Peace Corps.

It was kind of always in the back of my mind,

even after college, like, I thought about it, but I'm like,

Peace Corps volunteers make a few hundred dollars a month.

From a financial point of view,

that's not exactly the best move.

So even for me, my plan was not to

join the Peace Corps and get become an entrepreneur.

My plan was to join the Peace Corps, come back and

get my MBA because a lot of universities offer full ride

scholarships to people who've been in the Peace Corps.

That was kind of the play that

I was going for over there.

So I do two years, learn another language

which I knew was gonna be a bonus.

Then I come back here, get my MBA.

I did want to get international work, but getting

work internationally, at least back then, had this catch

22 where you needed to have international experience in

order to get an international job.

But without an international job,

you wouldn't get international experience.

So how's it going to work? So like Peace Corps will

give me the international experience.

I'll come here, get my MBA, and

then we can move on from there.

And that's kind of what was the

plan when I joined the Peace Corps.

This whole entrepreneurship thing kind of just happened by accident

when I found the Peace Corps and I'm sorry, you

were in the Peace Corps for three years?

Four years, something like that.

It's 26 months is the term.

So it's three months training, three or

four months training, and then two years.

And did you spend your whole time in Mexico? Yeah.

So the Peace Corps sends you to specific countries.

So the Peace Corps works in, I don't know the

number, but 50 to 100 countries around the world.

When I was there, you didn't actually get to

pick the country they sent you to, right.

You could just say, this is my skill set.

You have to be willing to go

wherever you could be the most help.

And when you apply for the v

score, they give you this code.

Like, this is your application code.

And there's like, there were these forums online trying

to break the code down and decipher it.

The main thing everybody wanted to know was

like, which countries they might be going to.

And there was this one letter in the code

that I couldn't figure out what it meant.

Like everything else I knew, like the date and all

that kind of stuff, and it had k on it.

So I'm like, okay, k.

It must be a country that's starting with a k.

So I read everything I could

find on Kiripati, Kenya, Kazakhstan.

Like all these countries, they're like,

nope, you go to Mexico.

I'm like, oh, after all that time

researching these countries, you get sent to.

You know, I get sent just out of

the border, but it worked out the best.

Where did you want to go?

I had no real bias.

I didn't really care.

I've grown up overseas.

I alluded to it with this kind of story

earlier that I actually feel more comfortable when I'm

not supposed to fit into a country than I

do when I'm supposed to fit in.

In the US, I'm supposed to fit in.

So I feel very uncomfortable here

in Mexico or wherever I'm at.

If a local tells a joke in a language

and I don't laugh, nobody looks at me weird.

No, he's american. Obviously he's not.

I mean, he might speak Spanish, but he's

not going to laugh at the joke.

It's because he's american. Right?

Totally understandable.

If somebody makes a joke in the US and

I don't laugh, everybody looks at me weird, right?

Because I just don't get the cultural side of it.

So I'm like, I don't really care.

Send them over wherever you want.

I'll do whatever you need to do.

What kind of work were you doing in the Peace Corps?

Ironically, I came down here to teach people how to computer

programs, so I was doing a very similar job when I

was doing the United States, but they sent me to a

state called chiapas, which is on the Guatemala boards.

The poorest state in Mexico, or at

least it competes to be the poorest.

Every year, the two states that kind of

alternate positions, and I was like the only

certified Java programmer in the entire state.

So I was kind of working at the equivalent of

the US National Science foundation, like one of their centers,

and I was kind of helping foment that and also

helping with a small business of the local indigenous people,

which was kind of my first slight step into business.

Obviously, they sent me there like, you're

american, you must know business like.

No, they knew way more about business than I did.

These people have been it for generations.

What was I going to teach?

What was I going to teach them? Nothing.

But I went in there with, ostensibly to

help them on their marketing and their business.

All right, you get to the end of your time.

You've met your wife.

Did you propose, like, quickly?

Did you guys date for a while?

We lived together for about a year and a half.

Two years. Right.

So what happened was we dated while we

were in training in the central Mexico, which

is where we were doing the language lessons.

Then I moved out to southern Mexico, and she came down

a few weeks later, and she stayed at my place while

she said, can I stay at your place for a few

days while I look for my own place? Right.

So she stayed at my place, and then the whole

looking for my own place never quite panned out.

So she lived there for about two years.

Right at the end of the Peace Corps.

We started talking, was like, okay, well, I proposed to

her about two years in, so, you know, about three

or four months before it was done, and we started

talking about what we wanted to do next.

And she's like, I've always wanted

to start a language school.

So she was actually the one who kind of had that idea.

And I'm like, oh, that sounds like fun.

Like, you know, we're both young.

Luckily, you know, we have parents that love us.

The worst case scenario, we're just gonna go, you know,

they take us back in for a few months.

She's a bilingual trained teacher.

I'm a computer engineer. We'll get jobs.

I mean, you know, that's not gonna be the problem.

Let's give it a shot with no real expectations,

no real business background to fall back on.

And so we decided on the language school.

We actually had our wedding in the same

building where we opened our language school because

we couldn't afford to have anything anywhere else.

We asked for money instead of gifts for the wedding.

And then we had money come in.

That was just enough to cover the wedding.

Like, we broke even.

Like, on our wedding was like, zero.

We'd like your guests funded your wedding.

Our guest guests funded our wedding. That was it.

Like, you know, we asked for the money.

It was like, our wedding was, like, cheap.

This was at a property.

We brought in taco ladies who,

like, made tortillas and stuff. Taco.

I think the whole thing came out to, like, 1500 bucks.

And we got almost exactly to the dollar.

Like $1,500.

People give it $20, $50, $100,

$200 for, like, more direct family.

And it ended up paying for the

wedding, but, like, no money left over.

And then the next week, we put

tables in half those rooms, because we

couldn't afford to furnish the whole thing.

We opened up our business and

we'd sleep on the floor there.

We used to have an inflatable mattress

that had a hole in it.

So I always used to say we fall asleep on

a mattress and wake up on the floor because it

would just slowly deflate as the evening was going on.

We lived there for about the first two months.

The business, we'd roll it up, put it onto the

office desks, put on, like, what I thought was business.

So like, you know, button shirt.

My corporate days.

And students would show up and

we would give them classes. She was the teacher, I was

the administrator when we started.

And who were you teaching?

You were teaching local indigenous people?

We were teaching, actually, foreigners who came to Mexico

to learn Spanish, so they would fly in there.

During that time.

The last six months in the Peace Corps,

we knew we were going to do this.

So I threw up a website, and for

those who are, like, thinking, oh, that must

have been easy, it was computer programmer.

Look, computer programmers are not

people who make websites.

Like, you know, I was the guy at the bank when

you hit submit and it makes all the payments go through.

I made that happen, making the button, the payment button look

pretty, that I had no idea how to do that.

Making the whole website look pretty.

I had no idea to do this again.

This was 2006, 2007.

You could not go on a theme forest and

buy a really pretty design back then, like, you

had to do, do it from scratch.

I went onto a website and I thought was okay, I would

say view source, and I copy and paste the HTML code.

And then I just started playing with it from there.

Like, that was how I did it.

Our first website was probably God awful.

Not probably, I will tell you, it's got awful.

You can still find it if you go to, like,

you know, the archive.org and see the history of it.

Like, it's a really, really bad looking website.

Yeah, the wayback machine. Exactly.

So if you go in there, it is really, really awful.

But I also learned something called SEO

at the time, so search engine optimization.

And I ended up being really good at that as well.

And essentially, we were the only language school in

Mexico at a full time SEO on staff. Right.

So before we even launched, we were number two

in the country if you ever looked for any

language schools in Mexico, which means within 30 days

of launching, we were fully booked.

And people, we would ask for a 50%

deposit for anybody who would come down.

So they would send the deposits ahead of

time we would use that to buy furniture.

So we actually had tables and chairs in the room.

When they showed up, we were lucky.

One family of nine came down.

They said, couldn't you just pay everything upfront?

We're like, yes, please.

And that might help furnish, like, half

of our school just for that.

And that's how we started our school up, because I only

had $2,000 in my bank account when we launched that.

That was what the Peace Corps gave me to pay, buy

a plane ticket back to the United States and to get

a deposit on my first apartment when I got back there.

But we used all of that to start the business. Wow.

So these reformers that were coming to Mexico to learn

the language you've done, the SEO business is booming.

Did people choose to come to that particular part

of Mexico because that's where your school was?

Or were these people like, hey, we're

just going to go to Mexico.

We'll find a school when we get there?

Or were you the draw to

that particular part of the country?

So the keywords we would go after in

those days were like, spanish schools in Mexico,

because for the specific city we were in,

there wasn't enough search volume for that.

We ranked number one in that city, too, but we

wouldn't be able to build a business off of that.

We did more general, learn Spanish in

Mexico and spanish schools in Mexico.

And we were number one, number two in all of those.

And then I was customer service.

And arguably I blew people out of the water.

It wouldn't be more than 30 minutes

to an hour before I answered.

It was 11:00 at night.

I would wake up and get to

my computer and I would answer you.

And I'd be right.

Dissertations with all the information you wanted,

like detailed answers, every single one.

Because I didn't know it was called that at the time.

Essentially, we were doing high ticket sales, like,

you know, as you come down to Mexico,

this is not a $50 trip.

You're spending $1,000 on your plane ticket.

Plus you stay with us, which

by week we were probably undercharging.

But, you know, you stay for a month.

Some people give us four or $5,000

for like a two month stay.

We put you with a mexican family to stay

and with your housing and all the rest of

it, it needed to be white gloves.

So I learned a lot about customer

service while I was doing that. I also.

I gave the tours in the schools.

I would wait for them at the school when they arrived.

So I'd be there from midnight to people showed up,

introduce them to the mexican families, and I'd wake up

5 hours later the next day and go back into

school, take out the trash, and welcome them to school

the next day so they could start their classes.

So no days off for about a year or two, man.

So I didn't even think about this.

You started with, you know, this is a very

poor part of the country, so it stands to

reason, like, there's not a Marriott, there's not a

Hilton there for people to stay in.

So you had to actually, this wasn't

just, hey, come and find your own

accommodations and we'll teach you the language.

You had to provide a turnkey service for every

aspect of their time there at the school. That's right.

It was also the full immersion experience.

Because when you came with us, I'd speak

English to you, but I'm like, starting Monday,

I'm not speaking English to you anymore.

I'm only going to speak to you in Spanish.

If you need anything, you need

to speak to me in Spanish.

The families that we put you with

do not speak a lick of English.

So you want some salt for breakfast?

You better learn really quickly how

to say salt in Spanish, right?

I would bet we didn't come up with that.

That's how the Peace Corps taught me languages.

That's why within three months, I went

from zero to conversational in Spanish.

Not fluent conversation just means I could go

out there and hold basic conversations with people.

But that's if you really want to learn

something, immersion is the way to do it.

You want to learn how to code?

Sit down, just start coding 10 hours

a day for the next 100 days. Ill narco.

You want to learn Spanish?

Go to Mexico, dont speak any English, and try

to survive only with Spanish for 100 days.

Will you be a native speaker?

No, you never will, because we talked about

it before, the cultural baggage and all the

kind of stuff about the jokes that you

want to understand, but within three to twelve

months, you would probably be conversationally flawed.

At my level, after a year, I could talk

about philosophy and history and all that in Spanish.

Sarah, I make degenders would get wrong every

once in a while, and I conjugate.

They have multiple people b's.

I get those wrong every once in a while.

But that didn't keep other people from understanding

what I was saying, and I could understand

what they said back to me.

That's kind of the lovely

most people should aspire for.

So it's safe to say you're

not still running a language school.

How long did you guys do that?

Actually, I am, but not a

brick and mortar language school. I'm sorry. You're not?

So running that language school,

is that that language school? Exactly. Exactly.

I'm not running that language school.

From that language school.

We had an online language school that we launched three

years into it, and there's a bit of drama there.

We sold it and then they didn't pay

us and we had to get it back.

But we have, we still now, from that

launch, one of the largest online language schools

in the world, which we still run.

I'm not involved in the day to day.

There's a CEO that's operating it, and I'm

just on the board and I'm there.

The CEO has some equity, and there's a small investor

in there as well, but I'm majority owner, about 75,

80% of it, I being me and my wife, not.

And so when you launch this online language

school, this is like 2008 world 2008. Yeah.

So that's incredible because the state of technology,

the ability to deliver something like that over

the Internet, I mean, it was there, but

it had to been very crude and rudimentary.

Is that a fair. Just Skype?

That was all we had.

You had to do it on Skype?

There was no other option for us there.

Like, right now, we have integrated classrooms that

were built into our system and all the

rest of it that did not exist.

There was no zoom.

I think Microsoft might have had their version, but

that was just way outside of our price range.

Skype had just come out.

So the story behind how we launched this was

we had the brick and mortar school, and we

actually expanded it out to multiple locations.

And then mexican swine flu happened.

And for those of you who don't remember,

it was supposed to be COVID, right?

Like, everybody was worried that this was going to

be some global pandemic spread across the globe.

So they closed off Mexico borders, and all

of our students came from other countries.

So suddenly, boom, all gone in a

matter of about a week or two.

We had been running about two years then, but

we didn't have very much of a Runway, right?

Like, our margins were about 20%.

I didn't know anything about, like, six months

Runway kind of thing, because we needed.

It was 20% before taking out our living expenses.

So, like, you know, we were living month to month,

and we would pay our teachers week to week.

So if we didn't pay them for a

week, they were even worse budgeting than me.

They wouldn't have money for next week's food, right?

So we got to figure something out.

And it was actually my wife who said, how

about we email all of our former students and

see if anybody wants classes on Skype?

So we had a really good school, very good reputation.

Students would come back every single

year to study with us.

So I emailed them.

Not a huge bomb, you know, we

had four or 500 over two years.

Like, it was breaking more to school.

Maximum 20 or 30 students at a time.

It was thousands of students go through.

I hope we can get, like, two or

three people to sign up for this.

And I remember back then it was again pre

active campaign, so I would actually copy and paste.

I believe the limit was 150 per

bcc and gmail at a time.

And I would just email them that way.

Like, that was the only way I could do it.

I had four massive bulk emails

that we sent out to people.

To my surprise, 20% of them said,

heck yeah, we'd love to sign up.

20% of 500 students, 100 students just came back to us.

I'm like, I think we might be onto something.

So I throw up a website real quick.

I do SEO on Skype spanish lessons, which I'm

like, I don't know, does anybody look for that?

I'm like, we'll find out.

So within 90 days, two things happen.

This wine flu just fizzles out.

It doesn't actually become a thing.

And our school is fully booked again.

Our schools are fully booked again, but we're making more money

off of this little dinky website I made as a side

hustle than we are off of these three schools that I'm

working on about an hour, 2 hours a day.

You know, my wife was the first teacher, and she

taught the first five students, and pretty much then the

school backed it up, you know, came back up again.

She just didn't have time.

So we figured out how to hire teachers and

put them online and all of that, and that's

how we were able to build it up.

Today, we are one of the top

online language schools in the world.

But everybody else has massive vc funding, like, up to

$60 million, where the only one is, like, bootstrapped the

whole way up because we wouldn't have been able to

do it without that long term early mover advantage.

And then we just grew 20% a year for 17 years.

That's kind of how we got there.

No hockey stick moment, none of these.

We want entrepreneur magazines like best small

business us at some point in 2015.

And I'm like, this is it.

This is where we're gonna take off. Nothing.

Like, I think we had like a little spike,

like when that happened, that edition of Entrepreneur magazine

came up and then just like crickets after that.

So it was just like this

pretty steady growth over 1718 years.

Two big takeaways from that.

Number one, I love the stories of how businesses get

birthed out of necessity and like, just the scrappiness of,

okay, how are we going to keep the lights on?

How are we going to keep our team?

How are we going to make sure

that they have food for their families?

And I think that also says a lot about

your heart and your caring for your people.

That that was a motivating factor.

But I love the stories where this

incredible thing that goes on to be

something significant gets birthed out of necessity.

But, man, the other big thing, and I think this

is really important for entrepreneurs, is understanding the value, the

lifetime value of a single customer, and the fact that,

yeah, these people came down, they spent a bunch of

money with you and then they left, man, staying in

contact with them, keeping that relationship going and having them

repeat business with you is huge.

And I think that a lot of people going into a

business, they don't understand the value of that repeat customer, especially

in a, b, two, c world where it is in theory

like a one time kind of a thing.

I agree with Scott, and I think that shows

the difference of people who are in the game

for a long time, and those aren't.

A lot of people come in today and it's not their fault.

It's because they're sold.

This, it's a cash grab.

Make your million dollar business in 30 days or

whatever thing that they're selling you online, right?

Like e commerce, and make a

million dollars in twelve months.

Even that to me is like that timeframe

is so short that that's not really realistic.

Has somebody done it?

Maybe there might be one or two people out

there who've done it, but this is not.

They just happen to find the right product at

the right time, and then 10,000 other people will

try and they won't be able to to it. What is it?

They say that 10% of businesses succeed.

Only 10% of businesses make it past one year.

I think that's actually way overestimation, because if

you count online businesses, which is like the

number of people throw up a website, start

a business that fail, it's like 1%.

Most people do not even make it to the first year.

They hit their first wall, their first challenge.

And they just absolutely stop because they're

like, this is supposed to be easy.

That's what somebody sold me.

While business is going back to the phrase that I

live my life by, if they were to write a

book about your life, would anybody want to read it?

Business is a good book. Good books are not.

You started the me, you succeeded.

Anybody out there who's read shoe dog, the Nike

story, it's not like I launched a shoe company

and I was on the Nasdaq in twelve months.

Like, read it like 50, like, I don't

know, 30 years where, like, they were barely

making payroll for like three decades before something

actually happened and they were out.

They became, we know today, even apple, if you

look at it, when I was in Silicon Valley

in the late nineties, they were a joke.

Like, Steve Jobs just came back, like, written

around, I believe, when I left, like, oh,

they just brought back that founder guy.

And I remember people talking about, but I

was like, that company's not going to survive.

Like, that wasn't it?

That's a good book.

It's the hero's journey.

It's like you have the ups and the

downs and the ups and the downs.

If you're not one to put that

for that, then don't become an entrepreneur.

I actually have this framework, this theory on,

like, happiness, where if you're working for somebody

else, your range of happiness is, let's just

say, you know, five up and five down.

But if you're an entrepreneur, your range of happiness

is 100 up, but it's also 100 down.

That's the difference of being an entrepreneur.

You can absolutely be happier as

an entrepreneur than an employee.

But be ready for that bottom part, too, because you are

going to be a lot more stressed and a lot.

You probably will have depression at some point.

Like the number of entrepreneurs out there go through

depression or anxiety at some point in their career.

I have no statistics to back this up, but if

it wasn't like 60, 70, 80%, I'd be shocked.

I mean, it's just part of it.

Go to job, you know, it's not for everybody.

It's become very sexy these days.

Say, ah, you should be an entrepreneur.

I believe 99.9% of the people on this

planet would be miserable being an entrepreneur.

But for us, that 1% or that .1% that it is,

we'd be miserable being on the other side of the equation.

Right?

So that's kind of the difference in that think long term

and just make, get ready for the ups and downs.

I love your illustration there of kind

of what the range of happiness is.

And I phrased it a little bit different, but something I

learned in my first year running my business was, your good

days are better and your bad days are far worse.

The highs are higher and the lows are lower.

And I think that's a pretty universal truth

for most founders actually related to having kids.

Because if you are, you're a couple without

kids, your range of happiness is here.

And then once you have kids, it

also expands in the same way.

Like, you could be much happier. A wow.

If your child is sick.

Like, I'd much rather be sick

myself than have my child sick. Right.

Like, it's just a total order of magnitude worse. Right.

So businesses and kids are the same thing.

Two big decisions for people to take in their lives.

Well, talk for a minute about

running a business with your wife.

I know plenty of people that

that has worked really well for.

I know plenty of people that

that has not worked well for.

It sounds like it worked well for y'all,

but, like, did that create some tension when

you weren't working, or were you just working

so much that there wasn't time for that?

So a few things I'll start with don't do it.

Even though I've started multiple businesses with my

wife since then, it's not something I, in

good conscience, I would recommend to anybody else.

We're lucky that it worked out for us.

So my theory about working with your wife

is you only have two possible options and

either a really strong relationship or divorce.

There is no middle ground.

If you launch a business with your wife, it's not like

things are going to stay the same as they were before.

That does not happen.

And unfortunately, I think it's 80% divorce and

20% coming up with a stronger relationship.

We didn't know any better.

We just got lucky that we kind of fell into the 20%.

A little bit luck and a little bit.

I'll give credit to her.

So my wife is.

She studied college in the United

States, but she's a Latina.

And in the US, again, I'll give a blanket statement.

We try to avoid conflict.

We don't really want to argue if we can

avoid it and all the rest of it. Yeah.

In latino culture, that's not really a thing.

Like, you know, a small thing bothers you.

You bring it out right there at the beginning.

In our relationship, the first year or two we

were married, that was, like, really uncomfortable for me.

But now, looking back, I actually give

a lot of credit to that.

To the longevity of our marriage.

We're going on almost two decades

of being married right now. Right.

And it's because those little arguments are the

equivalent of a pressure cookie letting off steam.

As opposed to in the US, where we

kind of, you know, that little pressure cooking

thing, we kind of push it in. It's like, no, no, no.

None of that steam is coming out here.

Everything's fine.

And then one day you have this big

argument where, like, for the last ten years,

I've been miserable because you've been doing this.

You can't change anything.

I spent ten years of somebody doing that.

Like, it's just calcified as part of the relationship.

As opposed to ten years ago.

If there'd have been a small argument

about it, people could have adapted and

the relationship could have gone forward.

So that's one of the things

that helped us get through it.

The second thing is my wife and I have

very different skill sets and personalities, and we made

very clear in each one of our businesses the

divide, which tasks were going to be her responsibility.

And I don't step across that line.

And it's the same thing on my end.

I'm business and marketing.

Like, if it's HR education, that's her.

I just trust her decision.

I'm like, we need this stuff working over here.

You do it.

You ran as your team, that's all.

And then same thing on my end.

And, you know, anytime we did have an argument

was when we tried to cross into each other's

area, and that's when we had the argument.

So we try to avoid doing that as much as possible.

We've started, let's see now.

We're running a coaching business together.

We had the online language school together.

We had a chocolate factory that we ran together.

Oh, and the brick and mortar language school.

So we've done that. We've had four exits.

Three of those companies I exited with her.

So it's worked out well with us.

So two big takeaways are, know what your

strengths are, know what your spouse's strengths are,

and then once you've done that, clearly define

your lanes and stay in your own lane.

I'll also add, learn to argue.

Learn how to argue in an adult way.

And I think that'll.

Because that's also in human relationships.

You need to be able to have

with your employees, with your coworkers.

You need to be able to disagree with them. In a way.

It can be rough in the moment, but you

need to be able to go back to work.

The next day and work together again

and kind of get past that.

So learning how to argue is a skill

that I think a lot of, not only

couples, but actually entrepreneurs, should develop.

All right, you just listed off four other companies.

Let's walk through some of the things that

you were doing in between the first language

school and what you're doing now. Now.

All right, chocolate factory.

How did we get into the chocolate business?

That was actually an accident.

I got introduced to this girl in the Philippines through

a family member, and she was looking for a mentor

to start a BPO, a business process, outsourcing business.

Now, I didn't have experience in that, per se.

I had a lot of experience.

This was but seven to ten

years into my entrepreneurship journey.

So I've been doing her for a while, and

I'd used filipino virtual assistants before, so kind of

I knew what the customer would be looking for.

So she reached out to me as a mentor,

and I don't remember once a month calls.

I wasn't a charge thing at the time.

It was just once a month calls, and

it was helping with the business she launched.

It grew to a certain size and then kind of fizzled out.

But we stayed in touch, and I don't remember the time,

but maybe a year or two years later, she reached out,

and she's like, ray, guess what I just heard about the

scholarship to go to Belgium to study chocolatiering.

There's a background to it.

Her family used to have a small cacao farm,

and they would grind out their own chocolate, make

these, like, really low quality, like, chocolate milk in

the Philippines, which is really popular, called tabla.

So she came from, like, a chocolate

family, but this is, like, literally.

Yeah, people with their hands grinding it

down, like, there's not a high quality

production thing going on here.

So she applies to this program, which is meant

for people from third world countries to learn chocolatiering.

And she gets in.

So she goes again, Belgium, and

she studies chocolatierium, belgian chocolatiering.

For the next year, she goes back to

the Philippines, maybe one of the few certified

belgian chocolatiers in the entire country.

And she's like, I'd love to open up a belgian

chocolate factory, but, like, I don't have the funds.

So she reaches out to me.

He's like, ray, would you, like.

Would you invest in me in order to do this?

And I turned to my wife.

I'm like, honey, would you like free

chocolate for the rest of your life?

And she's like, yes, I'm like, okay. I said, yeah.

I'm like, let me go and tell her yes. So I went.

Told her yes.

From a financial point of view, it sounds more fancy

than it is, because starting a factory in the Philippines

is very different from starting in the United States.

Like, the level of capital you need

is an order of magnitude smaller.

Like, yeah, I was going to say, like, I would.

Is that a 10th? Is it a hundredth?

Like, I don't even know what it would be in the US.

But, like, in the Philippines, to get a

factory to $100,000, that's the basic materials.

Because labor is so cheap, you don't

need to automate most of the processes.

There are certain things in chocolatiering.

There's something called a conch, which just needs to rotate

around the chocolate for, like, 24 hours at exactly the

same temperature so that it can get smoother.

Crystals can do it.

You can't really get a human to do that.

Like, we needed a factory for that.

It was also this roller machine that we

had that weighed multiple tons, which would just

pass the cacao through it, like, multiple times

to come up with a cacao paste.

And that's not something a human can do as well.

But a lot of the stuff that there are

machines for, we'd have humans doing the peeling of

the cacao nibs and stuff like that.

We don't know what she's doing.

We just had, like, a dozen

people just out there manually.

They had the calluses on their

fingers in order to do this.

That was kind of the way that we

had the factory working while we were there.

We still pay better than most of the

local employees, but in the Philippines, that's, like,

a dollar to $3 a day, like, whatever.

It's pretty low salary.

So buying a $50,000 machine is just not worth

it when you can just get a decade's worth

of labor for exactly the same price.

Did you go spend a lot of time in the Philippines

when you're getting this off the ground and building it up?

Yeah, we'd go every year for about two months.

My partner was the operational partner, of course, so she

would take care of the day to day operations.

She's become known.

Even so, we sold off our shares to her.

So she owns the entire company right now.

It was a very amicable split.

We decided that the money wasn't worth the amount of

work for us, so we sold her our shares.

She bought it over two years. She's actually.

If you go to the Philippines right now,

she's on the tv shows, if you see

the chocolate princess, she's our partner, right?

So she's kind of getting known to

be for her chocolateiering in the Philippines.

And you can go to, like, the high end

stores just for the price point of belgian chocolate.

Like, we're not at the local convenience store.

It's like the kind of market, the

Whole Foods equivalent of the US.

That's where you can find.

It's called Kinto is the brand

of chocolates that are over there.

We would go back every year for two or three months.

It was a great opportunity for me to connect more

than my filipino family because I didn't really have much

interaction with them for most of my life.

Also with that side of my culture.

My wife was first time she was able to

go to the Philippines, and she fell in love

with the people in the Philippines and all that.

It was great.

And obviously, all the trips

for business expenses, right?

All the plane tickets and all the hotels

and stuff like that while we were there.

And we got a chance to meet governors, kind

of local dignitaries, because we were kind of known

in the area as the owners of this factory.

Having a business partner in and of

itself requires a tremendous amount of trust.

But when your business partner is on the opposite side

of the ocean and you're not there day to day

to be able to keep an eye on things, how

did you build trust such that you were comfortable making

this investment and making sure that your funds were being

put to good use, that they were actually doing what

they said they were going to do with it?

There are two different levels of this.

There is monitoring as closely as you physically can

and then accepting what you can't, because there is

only so much that you can do.

I'll start with the trust factor.

I default to trust until somebody doesn't.

And in my experience, most people

in the world are trustworthy.

99.9% of the people in the world

are not out to rob you.

They're not out to steal you.

It's that 0.1% that give everybody else a bad name.

And we put all these laws and rules in place just

to account for this odd outlier that's out there, right?

So if you don't know any better and

you trust somebody, you'll probably be okay.

That being said, I think it's not

the most popular politician, but the dondas

rum self code of trust, but verify.

I also verify, right?

Like, you know, they're do as what you can to verify.

And for that, I'm actually a big fan.

Of having books, really accurate p and ls and

balance sheets and stuff in place that will catch

any major mismanagement that's going on at the company.

Right.

Because, like, where did those $10,000 go?

Sure, you probably could have sold $50 from me.

I wouldn't have noticed that.

But as long as the business is profitable and maybe you

took dollar 50 and took your friend out to lunch on

a crumpy credit card that I didn't know, that's not something

I'm going to be losing any sleep over.

And since I run multiple businesses, I

need to be able to do that.

Like, a lot of my companies are in the US, so it's a

lot easier to kind of keep track of those kind of things.

Just the laws are a lot stricter here.

And the final thing is, when I

work with partners overseas, I make sure

I have majority ownership of the company. Right.

So I actually can go and kind

of put my foot down if necessary.

In this company, I have 52% ownership of the

company, so I could put my foot down.

I do have my filipino citizenship, so it's not

like this foreigner owning a filipino company, which the

law will always default to the local.

But I actually did have a lot of

say in what could happen to the company.

Well, luckily, my trust was founded.

Actually spent money on things that I might not have done

it myself, but that was not in any malicious way.

It was just like, I wouldn't have done that.

But you're the operational partner.

I need to give you a little leeway.

I'm not there to make day to day decisions.

You can't wait for me.

There's a twelve hour time effort. There's an emergency.

Like, you can't wait till the

next day for me to decide.

So just do it.

Don't sweat the small stuff. That's exactly.

Yeah, I'm sure I could find

some stuff if I audited them.

Like, oh, you stole two bars of chocolate.

Like, I don't care. Enjoy.

I mean, that's it, right?

You had invested in.

You're spending time working on this business,

but you've got multiple other businesses going

on at the same time.

Your language school.

What else did you have going on in that period?

And shortly thereafter, my timeline will probably be

a little bit off because I don't remember

exactly which business started when and where.

There's overlap with all these businesses.

I've started 22 profitable businesses

in the last 17 years.

Now, profitable is not always that impressive.

It means it made at least $1,000

a month for at least three months.

That's how I define profit.

And if it didn't grow much of that,

I might have just let it fizzle out.

So still sitting there, like throwing in a

month, showing up in the bank account, like,

no real work on my work.

In order to do these websites, some of the

more notable ones were I launched a marketing agency

for a bit until I realized I'm like, wow,

I don't actually like working with clients directly.

Besides the face, I was like,

I was essentially the account manager.

And I'm like, wow, that's not fun.

And it never grew to the size.

It grew the mid six figures. It didn't grow to the size

where we had multiple account managers.

Take it over from me.

I sold that to my partner as well.

As I started that with a partner.

Most of my companies these days, I start with partners.

I simply don't have the bandwidth to be running.

I am currently involved with seven companies.

I'm part owner of seven companies, majority owner, and

a lot of them, I wouldn't have time to

do that if I was the mover and shaker

and every single one of them, that's not it.

I'm the one with two decades of experience

and 20 profitable companies under my belt.

That's what I bring to the table.

Usually I want to work with somebody who has industry expertise

or is willing to put in the work and learn.

I'll tell you what to do.

I know how to build seven figure

companies in twelve to 24 months.

I know how to do that.

It's a lot of work and I

don't need to do that work anymore.

But if somebody's willing to come in and

do the work, I'll work with you.

And I, right now I'm focusing a lot more on education.

Even though a lot of my previous companies are not in

the education field, I'm kind of in my old age.

I'm ditching down a little

bit more into specific businesses.

So I had the marketing agency.

Oh, I had a social network for

schools called Twitchcape with 200,000 users.

I had a website for how much toilet paper

during COVID That was fun as a calculator.

I made like $30,000 on the march of

COVID per month and fizzled out pretty quickly.

Oh, learning style quiz. I'm still running that.

600,000 people have taken a quiz on what

their best learning style is out there.

We have an ebook kind of tied to the

back end of that, and a mailing list which

I get sponsored posts on that that's still going.

I have to bring up my list of

all the companies that I launched, and I'm

probably forgetting some of them somewhere.

You've got a few where you're really

spending the bulk of your time today.

So let's start to focus in on current day.

Walk us through these different entities and what they

do and what your level of involvement is, because

with this many active things, you can't be spending

40 hours a week on three different companies.

Absolutely.

I spent 40 on one and I spent my 20

hours a week across the other projects that I'm at.

So I do work quite a bit by choice,

so I can take days off whenever I want.

So I would probably say that of those seven, there

are three that takes the most of my time.

So I'll kind of go through the four

that don't take the most of my time. Just real quickly.

So I have a SaaS company called podcasthawk.com, which

helps people get booked on podcasts on autopilot.

I was a partner there.

We grew a certain size.

I put my partner in charge as the CEO and he runs it.

And I meet once every two weeks for an hour and

we just kind of sit down like how things going.

More of a strategy session.

So that's one of the businesses

I'm involved with as well.

There's another one called Titan Talks,

where we arrange trips with billionaires.

I'm actually going on one in

four weeks over to Portugal.

That also, as long as it's not a

major trip going on, it's about an hour

a week that I'm involved in that business.

So I'm a minority partner in that one.

The language school that we talked about earlier.

Right now I'm just on the board, so

I don't really have to do very much.

I might, I have an optional bi weekly

call, but I usually don't go to those.

And then I have once a month board meeting

and I show up to those as well.

That was yesterday.

I believe that I did that.

The three projects that I am working on very with a lot

more time right now, I'll give them a kind of order.

At least amount of time.

Up to the most amount of time

is for the least amount of time.

Probably podcast talk would be the least amount of

time from the ones I was talking about there.

But the two that I'm spending the most on,

I'm drawing a blank on the third one.

I actually have a chart somewhere to keep

track of which business I work on.

That is called productized education.

So it's the coaching business that

I'm launching with my wife.

I currently do coaching and mentoring to mid

six figure, low seven figure online education businesses.

So I help them scale and I

take a limited number of clients.

I'm currently at the time of

this recording full of clients.

But if you're listening and

you're interested, email me.

I'll put you on a waiting list.

But I kind of help online education business

scale to about the eight figure mark and

we are just starting on the courses.

We want to actually help

people launch online education businesses.

My whole premise is every business is an online

education business, whether you know it or not.

Like even Apple when they watched the iPhone was an

education business because nobody knew what an iPhone was.

So every business should start

a simple education business.

And then if you want to go to e

commerce and stuff afterwards, you can do that, right?

SaaS, e commerce, whatever it is,

but education record each business.

So what we're doing right now is actually

helping people want to quit their jobs.

We have a course debate is going to

start in June where we're going to help

people take the skills that they already have.

So we call it wisdom into wealth.

Take the knowledge you already have and

create an online education business out of

it with your existing skillset.

My wife helps you with the curriculum design

and actually making it a cohesive education product.

And I do the business side together and

we have math to help figure out whether

the business is viable before you even launch.

For those, do they already come to you with

the business idea in hand and say, this is

what I want to do, or are you digging

into their background, digging into their skillset, digging into

their education and helping them kind of refine and

craft where they could be successful?

A little different from that.

So I go, I approach things as an engineer.

I tell people, like, I'm not actually emotionally

attached to any of my business ideas, right?

I would sell donkeys online as long as it's

humane and it was a good business idea.

Like, you know, it doesn't really matter

to me what the product is.

I love building a business.

What we do is I actually go through an

exercise that I call the adjacent possible exercise.

It's actually a computer programming paradigm where the

whole premise of the adjacent possible is that

all of us, our lives is this one

big house full of thousands of rooms.

And when we're born, we open one door and we

walk into that room and there are three other doors.

So each room has four doors, right?

We're born.

Oh, we walk in there.

Open our eyes means we open another door.

We walk into the next room, but we still have those

two doors left unopened in the room at the back.

What's behind those doors is our adjacent possible.

As a baby, it's pretty much the

same as long as we're healthy.

For the first few months, we reading, we

start walking, we start doing all that.

But as we become an adult, we start

opening doors that are unique to us.

And we now have a combination of

open rooms that, like nobody else has.

So the example I give is Steve Jobs, right?

He studied calligraphy in college, then he

went off to start a computer company.

Now, how many people in the world had

studied calligraphy and had a computer company?

Probably not too many.

And as a result, he was able to invent fonts, right?

Because he had these.

That was his adjacent possible that would not

have existed to anybody who just had a

computer company or had just studied calligraphy.

I have a series of exercises you go through to

figure out what your adjacent possibles are, because you, Scott,

me, we have very different life experiences, and a combination

of whatever those life experiences are might actually come into

some kind of, might serve somebody's needs in a way

that nobody else in the world could do or very

few people in the world could do, because we have

a third adjacent possible that if you run our course,

it means you actually want to teach this.

So you might have two things put together, three

things put together, that there might be 100 other

people out there doing it, but how many of

those are actually trying to get on the Internet

and teach people how to do it?

Now you've gotten down to something that's very, very

niche, and we start in the high ticket, so

you don't really need too many things.

So that's step number one.

Step number two is we actually go online and use

marketing techniques, which I know you know, what's gotten.

We figure out, is there anybody actually looking for

this product and how strong is the competition?

And I have formulas and math and sheets that

you go through, and we run through that.

So before you even started your business, you'll

know you can teach it because you have

the skill set to do it.

And we'll actually tell you feasibly how much money you

can make off of that business based on the current

search volume ad costs, how much you're going to be

charging for that estimated LTV, because it's education.

I have a pretty good idea of how long

people stick around for these kind of things.

And you might look at it like no,

there's no way I can make money. Okay, good.

Go back and redo the exercise we just did.

You might have to spend a week

doing this, two weeks doing this.

But that's a lot better than trying ten different

business ideas to figure out one that works.

You can figure all of this out. That works.

So that's the adjacent possible kind

of exercise that we do.

And that's why people don't have to

come to us with an idea.

If you don't come, listen to, great.

But we'll still run it through the limited

test that I run through to make sure

that your idea actually is financially feasible.

You might find out it's like $5 per widget.

You'll only send ten months.

Are you gonna watch a whole business?

It'll make you $50.

I'm like, sure, if you want, like, you know, we'll help

you do it, but that's not what I would recommend.

That's brilliant and very interesting.

How do you find a customer for that?

Is it SEO?

Is it through your network?

Is it people hear you speak?

How do people find you?

Right now, since we're this business,

we actually just launched in January.

Depending on what the business we're

going to do the SEO play.

But SEO is a twelve month, 18 month kind

of play that we're going to do over there.

Generally speaking, there's a methodology I would use

when I'm kind of launching any new business.

Obviously, first you reach out to the warm

network, see if you know anybody or anybody

in the warm network knows anybody.

That's how we kind of got

the first beta group in there.

The second one is I borrow audiences.

So I go in front using my network, I go

in front of some audiences or I'm going to cold

outreach to other places where ideal audiences are, and I'm

trying to get in front of of them.

Obviously it's gonna be some kind of affiliate deal

when I do that and get in front of

their audience because I'm gonna be trying to build

a community of this as well. Right? Like Odikate.

I want to become known as the online education guy.

A few people called me that.

Some of my groups, I'm like, oh, that's good.

I'll try to kind of own that

and that's how we're gonna do it.

And while we're doing that, since I don't need

the cash right away, a lot of it gets

reinvested into the business and that'll build up the

social media, that'll build out the SEO which I'm

familiar with, and we'll start doing that.

But I've also done the mathematical thing.

I take my own medicine.

I know I can run ads to this

kind of thing and do profit, right?

Assuming I at least get average conversion rates from like,

leads to sales to all that kind of stuff.

As long as I build up the basic sales team, I

know this can be a profitable business in the long term.

So that's the anchor we're going to

go with when we're building this business,

your higher education consulting business.

Talk to us about that.

What all does that entail?

Yeah, so that business is called Eagle

Lock, which is just actually college backwards. So.

E g e l loc dot co.

Somebody else has.com, comma.

We'll buy it later in the future, but it's for sale.

But we don't own that one right now.

That's actually a holding company.

Under it, we have companies that

are called the college admission secrets,

financial aid secrets, and math Quala.

And it's going to become qualitutoring pretty soon.

So what we actually do there is we specialize

in getting high school kids in the United states

into the top colleges in the US.

And we have all the services that go with that.

So college admission secrets is we actually have

coaches that coach kids from freshman year.

It's one price, and from freshman year all

the way through the end of high school.

And we advise on which

classes to take, which extracurriculars.

A lot of our college admissions people worked at,

like, Harvard and Stanford and Yale, like, they know

what they're looking for on the college admission.

Right?

So they'll kind of coach your kids all the way through

the entire process and say, this is what we recommend.

Okay, you need to get grades up over here.

Let's add this extracurricular activity over here.

Unlike the bad reputation you see online, we're not

going to Photoshop you on the rowing team.

You actually need to join the rowing team.

We don't guarantee you're getting it in college. Right.

You have to follow our curriculum.

We have a very high admittance rate.

When you do with financial aid secrets.

We have a package where you pay us $5,000 and

we'll get you at least $20,000 in financial aid.

These are not loans.

These are actual financial aid.

Otherwise we give your money back. Right.

So it's pretty easy sell there. But we're trying to make

college more affordable for people.

And then with our tutoring,

we specialize in AP tutoring.

This actually saves you money on college.

For those of you kids who are in AP class

and know how that works, essentially, when you get.

If you go to public high

school, even better, you take AP.

You just got a semester of French, a semester

of math, a semester of college, and that's three

to $5,000 in savings, depending on how expensive credit

hours at the university that were there.

So this business, I actually came in as a mentor.

He was my first coaching client, and he

was bringing in 20, $30,000 a month.

I started working with him.

We got him $150,000 in the next six months.

And at that point, he asked me, he's like,

hey, would you like to be my partner?

So I came in as his partner, and we've been growing

at quite breakneck speeds for the last year or so.

Beginning of January, we had six people.

Now we have 32.

So we're four months into the

year, so we're hiring really quickly.

But we'd like to grow this into a figure

business for the next two or three years.

You've got lots of ideas of your own.

You've got people coming to you with ideas, things they're

looking for you to invest in or advise in.

How do you decide what to say yes to?

I don't gather you say yes to everything. Not anymore.

I'm a recovering people pleaser. Right.

So, like, you know, saying no was. Was a learned skill.

It wasn't something that I had.

One of the things that helped me a lot was

kind of focusing on who I was and who I

wanted to be, in the sense, professional sense. Right?

Like the online education guy phrase.

I didn't come up with it.

Somebody else told it to me, but when

they did, I'm like, boom, that clicked.

And anything that's not in that niche anymore, now, I

do have some companies that are not, but they came

before I kind of decided niche in there.

That makes it an easy no for me.

Like, I have been approached by people, start

another SaaS company, all of that, and like,

oh, it's got nothing to do with education.

I'm not interested.

So that helps me say no.

I also run through my own process and

see what the possible profitability of this is.

Like, I don't need money right now, but is this

an exit play, or is this a cash flow play?

Right now, I'm a little more interested in cash flow

plays because after my exits, I'm like, wow, taxes.

Like, I mean, you know, you just

lose a third of it to taxes.

I'd much rather this business just generate dividend for me

and gets me the dividend tax rate of 20% every

single year that you maybe became a Facebook, but most

businesses aren't going to get up there but get to

5 million with an EBIT of $2 million and a

dividend of a million and I own 20% of it.

So you're just sending me $200,000 a year.

That's the kind of thing that I'm more interested in.

I am looking for more base hits, not home runs.

There are too many people who are

much better at me than this. Much better at me.

For the unicorn plays like, I don't know, like,

I've never built a billion dollar company before.

I wouldn't know how to spot one.

Like, let's be honest, I do not built

two, three, four, $5 million companies pretty well.

I can do that.

I know what steps are required

to do that, especially education business.

I probably have your orchard already ready

because I've done this for so long.

Like, oh, you're this kind of education business.

Here's your chart that we hire in this order.

Start by hiring this one, then this

one, then this one, this one.

Let's work our way through the chart.

I'm an engineer, so let's go

through the p and l statement.

And I'm like, okay, I know when our profit is

here, we'll do some projections based on your current growth

and we'll have the over chart ready by 2026 September.

And at that point you're ready and you

should be able to find $6 million.

We know our profits.

It becomes plug and play after a while, once product market

fit is in place, which is why I start with half

a million, 1 million when I do the coaching.

And that's kind of the space that I want to play in.

Like, I'm not going to go in any

more to a business, just startup myself.

If anybody wants to start a business

up, I encourage go to my productized

education.com and join our cohorts there.

I want to help you get up to half a million dollars.

Look, I'm not going to pretend I invented this thing.

If you're online, there's somebody who's called

Alex Formozzi who's doing the same thing

for different kinds of businesses.

I do forbid my education business.

I've been doing it for a little while.

Alex Armozzi didn't invent this model either.

I think he's popularized right now.

But basically you come with me, I help people, the

half a million million dollar education business, and then if

you want, you partner up with me to take it

to the next level, you pay me a small amount.

But we all, me and my team, a small amount.

And we also help you scale when we

bring in our resources and stuff behind you,

and then we plug you into our network.

It's a little different from the Alex Formosi,

which has got businesses of different kinds.

Like, we're all education businesses.

We won't bring in two that

are competitors to each other.

It's really easy to bring in a complimentary one.

Like, we're talking right now to somebody who has

got a history tutoring business in high school.

Like, we could bring you and plug you

into our network of thousands of students that

we already have grow your size tomorrow.

We already have Facebook and a sales team.

And SDR is like, they already

do half your business model. Like, we can take that.

It's usually at 500,000.

There are one or two man shops, not to be sexist,

woman shops as well, but, like, they're very small teams, and

we can give you the team, we'll help you build it.

And usually my equity pitch for people to join us

is this is not exactly it, but if I offer

them, like, hey, how about we triple the size of

your business and reduce your work in half?

But you'd have to give us 30%

of your business if we did it.

And most people are like,

yeah, because they're burned out.

They can't work anymore.

Like, they're doing everything from sales to

their own delivery of their own products.

And I'm like, yeah, we'll take 30% of your business.

You'll make twice as much money, work half as much.

But on paper, we now have 30% of your business.

Is that okay with you?

And they're like, well, yes.

Like, yeah, absolutely.

Like, okay, let's work together.

What I heard there in terms of evaluating these

opportunities is kind of going back to what you

talked about with working with a spouse.

Know what you're good at, right?

And know what you're not good at.

Know the areas that you know

and really focus in on those.

Don't try to get too broad or

you're not going to be as successful.

I made the mistake of going too

broad and spreading myself too thin.

It wasn't some kind of grave insight

that I had in the beginning.

And I'm like, oh, I've always been swaying.

I'm like, no, no.

I messed up first to figure out, like, way,

maybe I should probably start focusing in a little

bit more on my niche, which is like online

education, which for those who are watching, aren't watching.

I'm putting air quotes up there, but niche, still.

Multi billion dollar niche.

It's not that small either, right?

Yeah, I play at the low end.

By BC standards, I play at

the lower end, but that's fine.

We talked a little while ago about the

highs being higher, the lows being lower.

You go from five to 100, but in either

direction, in 22 profitable businesses, I got to believe

that there have been some low points.

Pick one or two and just kind of

walk us through what those were like. Okay.

To put it in, you remember I

mentioned that 70% of entrepreneurs had depression?

I'm definitely in that category.

In fact, it took me two weeks to

figure out that was what I had, because

I'm like, nah, I don't get depression. That's not me.

And then I googled what the symptoms are, and I'm

like, oh, wait, no, I have most of those.

It took me a little while, and it took me a while

to admit it too, because it was like a pride thing.

No, I don't do it.

The biggest thing that happened

was actually relatively recent.

I mentioned that we built one of the largest

online language schools in the world, and we actually

sold it about two years ago now.

And then we found out it was sold to

somebody who I thought was a friend of mine.

And apparently the whole thing was a scam.

And he, I know it for five years, he

just built it up for this kind of thing.

And he did a seller financing or the

kind of thing, but I'm like, ah, whatever,

he's a friend, he'll give it to me. Nope.

Stopped paying, took out loans against

the business, ran into the ground.

I found out he'd done it to dozens if

not hundreds of other people around the world.

And there is now currently

an SEC investigation against them.

I sued, got my company back a few months ago,

and, you know, I've been working to turn it around.

After everything there's.

But when in the middle of there, when I

sold it, I thought, my wife, my family, now

set for life, maybe not private jet set for

life, but not really worrying about money anymore.

And then that whole thing happened.

And no, I entered depression for two to four weeks.

I don't remember how long I was sleeping.

4 hours a night, wake up in the day, I'll

be honest, like, some days, the most I could do

was not break down before my son went to school.

I would just have to kind of keep it

together until I took him to school in the

day because it felt like 20 years of work.

Somebody just burned it to the ground.

Two decades of work while we were there.

And you forget about like all these

other things that you have going, right?

Because you kind of, you fixate on this

one, one bad thing that was there.

I'm actually giving a talk about it in

four weeks in front of people and the

things that help you get through it.

So it is kind of top of mind for me right now.

But the five things that got me through it,

hopefully nobody see my speech is going to listen

to this podcast beforehand is family and friends.

I started reaching out to them, families kind of, in

a way expected, but like, my wife was my rock.

Like, I mean, it would not

make it through without my wife.

She's definitely the stronger too, but it's stronger of

us as far as the spare is concerned.

Reaching out to friends and this was

kind of surprising thing to me.

You have to swallow pride a little bit

when you go through that, because I was

the first people reached out to for help.

I was not the person who reached out for help. I did.

And every single person was open handed.

Like, how can I help?

Even if they had no real way

of helping, like, they were there.

And that really helped me get through it.

I sought professional help with a therapist.

Once I got to a good enough place, like sitting

a plan in place, that really helped me get through.

So that was number three, I made a

plan in order to get out of it.

Number four that I learned was patience, because nothing

solves itself as fast as you want to be.

And if you're an entrepreneur, it's even worse

because we want everything done yesterday, right?

And I went to a lawsuit with them like

five months before we actually got our company back.

Even though we obviously have paperwork

and they were preaching contract.

It's just not that easy.

Shouldn't we have been done like in a week?

No, that's not how the law works.

And then the final thing that kind of

got me through is remembering who you are.

I told you at the moment, I felt

like, oh my goodness, everything's taken away.

But then that's the reason why. Now I know.

I've launched 22 profitable businesses in my life.

If you had asked me a year ago, I

had no idea because I never bothered to count.

Take store of everything you've actually

done and write it down somewhere.

So I went through my whole list of

everything I worked on and I'm like, holy

crap, I've launched 22 profitable businesses.

People told me I'm like five or ten.

That's usually what kind of came out of my head.

No, I've done 22 times.

I keep feeling like it's luck, but it can't

be like, statistically speaking, you're not going to do

this 22 times if it's just luck and all

these things kind of help me get through it.

But that's why I know I have a lot more

empathy for like entrepreneurs who had difficult times right now

because until then, like it been pretty smooth ride.

No, I know what it is.

And in depth somebody's offering, I'm

like, please reach out to me.

I know what it feels like. I've been there. It is awful.

I wouldn't wish it all overstepping, man, I

can't imagine how hard that would have been.

And you mentioned he had taken

loans out against the company.

And I mean, did you have to assume that debt or

were you able to unwind that as part of this?

Some of it, we assumed, actually, we think they have

actually fraudulently put my signature on some of those loans

to at least one of them that we're pretty sure

that he did, because I have a copy of it

and I'm like, I didn't sign it.

So the company kept the debt.

The company was doing well enough that

it paid most of it off.

But while they were doing it, obviously

the marketing of the company suffered.

So that was really what hit, because the

company was able to service its own debt.

They took the debt out from the company, then

they sucked the money out of the company and

then they took the CEO they put in place.

And it's like, well, it's your

problem now to pay it back.

So it wasn't like that was taken

out and invested back in the company.

They just sucked the money out.

I had no idea what it was.

I looked at the books in the balance sheet. It's a mess.

Like, it doesn't even make sense.

Some of the numbers that were on the

balance sheet, where did that number come from?

Who put that in?

We have no register of that on our bank account.

It was a whole thing.

I'll leave it to the SEC to

figure out what this company was doing. I got it back.

It's an asset purchase sale.

So like, the whole company stays over there

and the books stay over with them.

Like, that's not me.

You guys take care of that.

So for people listening who may be considering

selling their business and maybe considering seller financing,

man, looking back, are there things that you

could have done to have avoided this?

Or was it inevitable?

Were they just that good at lying and hiding things.

They've been playing me for years.

They've done this to multiple people in my network.

I got introduced to them by

another entrepreneur friend that I trusted.

This person got invited out to Necker island

with me and to meet Richard Branson.

Like, went through Richard Branson's security

check to get out there.

And that's one way to console myself.

Like, wait, if Richard Branson's background check

didn't catch him, what was I feasibly

going to figure out, really?

Was I going to get anything in there?

No, I wasn't.

And I think that's how these kind of people are

able to do this kind of thing, because I would

never expect somebody to spend, to play somebody for four

or five years to be able to take advantage.

Like, that's just not.

It's so out of the realm of something that I'd even

consider that I was just, like, invited us to his wedding.

He's got a kid.

He sent us kid photos of his child.

I visited his house.

I know this is not like

a casual acquaintance kind of thing.

And you never expected, even while it was going on.

I'm like, no, this must be a mistake.

This is, you know, they would play it and

they're like, no, the money's coming next month.

Just wait out. It'll be fine.

So that's why I didn't assume after the first missed

payment, it was like six, seven months into it before.

I'm like, come on, what's going on here?

But you even mentioned, on the whole,

necessity is the mother of all invention.

That's when I started working with this company

to grow it from 30,100, 50,000, and we're

trying to pass the 3 million this year.

I wouldn't have had to do. I wouldn't have done that.

I wouldn't have had to do that.

If all of this had happened.

I just have the big check in

the bank account, and we'd be fine.

Well, that is a very low low.

Looking back on all these others, what

are some of the high highs?

High highs would probably be.

The first exit I had was a big one. Not financially.

It wasn't that big.

It was load of mint, six figures.

It wasn't that big deal.

But I remember when that happened.

I was just like, I'd never seen that

much money in my bank account before.

I'm like, oh, my goodness.

Of course, we spend it all in the house.

So my bank account went really

low again pretty quickly after that. That was it.

Some of the simpler highs.

First sale I made on my first business

online, I remember running around the house, it

was for spanish lessons at $9 an hour.

Somebody bought 50 hours, $500 in one sale.

And I remember just running around the

house with my arms in the air.

We just stole dollar 500 worth of classes on.

That's not even profit.

Well, it was actually profit.

My wife was teaching, so for us it was perfect.

Pure profit at the time.

I'm like, this is amazing. Look at that.

We just have $500 for this class.

Like, I remember that at least the next ten sales,

I still thought it was like this amazing thing.

Like, this is amazing.

People are buying lessons off of

us while we were there.

I remember the first time we passed

seven figures in my first business. The first time?

Yeah.

Not that the business really significantly

changes when you pass seven figures.

It's just like this milestone.

And then you realize, wow, seven

figures is not really that much.

I mean, maybe if you're lucky and

it's like a 99% profit business. It is.

But like, for most of us, where we have

staff and everything behind it, we're not purely digital,

it's 30% profit margin, stuff like that.

Seven figures is nice, but it's

not going to change your life.

A lot of the moments that I can think of

were like these little ones, they aren't these big ones.

Everybody works toward these big exits.

They think that's what it's for.

It's not.

It's when somebody can take maternity leave or somebody's parents

or family is sick, and you say, yeah, go take

care of your family for a week or two.

Don't worry about your jobs here,

I'm going to keep paying you.

This is not a question.

Go and do what you need to do.

Those are really what brings me

joy more than anything else.

I'm lucky in that I love what I do.

I really, really love building businesses.

I read business books for fun.

In my spare time.

My wife went away for a week about two weeks ago to go

to a baby shower at one of her cousins with my son.

And I jokingly tell her some husband might

go out, party and do all the rest.

No, I worked 18 hours a day.

That was me sneaking in, was getting some

extra work hours in while she was gone,

like, that was me rebelling against the world.

This is so much fun.

I don't want to stop doing it.

So that's what I tell people, want to get into it.

If this is for you, and I am a big

believer in building your passion and following your passion.

So not like business was my passion, but

I've worked at it really, really hard.

Good at it, and I've never met anybody

good at something that doesn't enjoy it.

But most people think that they're good

at it because they enjoyed it.

I actually believe that they started enjoying it

because they started getting good at it.

Whether it's woodworking, whether it's business, whether

it's a sport, get good at it.

You will enjoy it.

We just happen to enjoy something that pays well. Right?

Like, that's.

That's the one difference here.

While some of these don't, I

think that's a really interesting statement.

That's something that resonates a lot.

Get good at it, and then you will enjoy it.

And I can think of a number of things

in my life that wouldn't have necessarily thought that

it would be something I'd want to get into.

But once I did it, and once I found

that I had the knack for it, it created

that energy, it created that excitement, it created that

passion, and also helped a lot with confidence.

And when you're good at something and when you can go

use that thing that you're good at to add value to

somebody else, man, that's a huge, huge confidence booster.

I told you when I was a little kid, I

had self esteem, and I was shocked, like, you know,

you would do that, I would be a wallflower.

I wouldn't make any noise.

Two things that happened that changed my life

was I found that martial art, and I

became really, really good at it.

And I realized I wasn't at

6ft tall, I wasn't short anymore.

I was actually good at a sport.

And then I got into business and a little bit of luck.

My first two businesses worked.

The first two I launched.

I had never read a business book when

I launched my first two businesses, and I

remember, why do people read business books?

This whole business thing is easy.

Why would anybody read books on this?

Then I failed a whole bunch in a row.

I'm like, huh, I might want to start

studying up on this stuff a little bit

to figure out what's going on, right?

But it's not innate talent or anything

that makes me a good business person.

It's like I've been doing it for

two decades and I've probably messed up.

No, not a problem.

I know I failed way more businesses than most people have

tried, but I have a one out of three success rate.

Like, what we teach at productized education is how to,

is the system that I use to get a one

out of three hit rate on my businesses, which is

way higher than most statistical averages are there.

But if you want to flip it around, that

still means I missed two out of three times.

That means you have to try with my system

three times before you're going to have success.

Don't have to use my system. Try any other way.

And if you want to go with the one out of ten

thing, that means you're going to have to try ten times.

If each real try is at least six months

and you're trying ten times, that's five years.

Dedicate for five years.

If there's a 10% sense of you being a successful

entrepreneur, it means, how do you make that chance 100%?

You try ten times, and most people are

not willing to do that and learn from

all those failures in order to do it.

They just give up sometimes,

I admit, life circumstances.

If you have family to support, you can't

wait five years to try to make money.

You can try cytosaur.

It's not going to be easy.

I think a lot of what's being sold these

days is this, like, easy money thing, and that's

why people get so discouraged, you know?

If you figured out an easy way to

make money, please let me know, because I've

been doing this for a long time.

I still haven't found that old easy money thing.

Like, it's.

Every business I work at is a lot of work.

Like, even the one that's

growing really fast right now.

We switched payment providers yesterday for

salaries, and boom, it blew up.

So yesterday I was emailing,

manually apologizing the whole staff.

I'm like, guys, sorry, can you

send me your wire information?

I'll pay you directly and wire.

So I was going into our bank and

manually doing wire transfers for salaries yesterday.

That's not sexy.

That's not gonna make it in the books.

But, like, that's business.

That's what happens.

I wish I could say that I haven't had to do that

a time or two myself, but there's been at least three times

I can think of where we onboarded a new person.

And for whatever reason, something with that first

payroll wasn't right, and it was scrambling as

quick as I could, because in my mind,

timely and accurate payment is the absolute foundation

of the employee employer relationship.

And you've got to make that right.

You got to make sure that they've got.

They've got money in their account when you promised it,

and so you're going to deal with these things and

those are things that nobody tells you about.

And that's why we do this podcast, is to

open people's eyes and expose them to not only

the awesome things, but like, hey, at some point,

something like this is gonna happen.

I'll put, actually, a story related to

that in all my jobs right now.

I actually have the job title of janitor.

I put that there because I mentioned

I'm, like, out of the chart.

Most of the company's done there.

I'm in the janitor because it's my job.

With my experience, I'm the best

at cleaning up the messes.

And that's really what being an entrepreneur is, right?

Like, you have a vision of where you want to

go, but half the time you're just sitting there with

a mop, cleaning up the mess on your way there.

Because to get to that final product,

that's what you have to do.

So I'm like, let me just own it.

I am a professional janitor, and I'm a

janitor in every single one of my companies.

So go over that mentality and your entrepreneurship

journey, and that'll probably help you out.

There's a humility that comes with that, too, and

I think that that's a really important part.

You strike me as a person

who is very, very intentional.

I don't think that you do anything.

You don't fly by the seat of your pants.

You really are methodical and you think through things.

You've run 22 successful businesses.

You've started a whole bunch more.

How much, at this stage in life and in

your career, how much thought are you giving to

what you want your legacy to be?

I mean, with all these different things, do you have

a sense for what you want your legacy to be?

My legacy is actually going to be really simple.

So it's.

Let's go back to kind of what we started the

whole talk about with if they were to write a

book about your life, would anybody want to read it?

Let me actually put a premise in there that I don't

really care if anybody writes a book about my life.

I'm not doing this so that somebody write a book

and I'll have a national bestseller about my life.

Right.

Because by definition, I probably won't be

here to enjoy it at the time.

Like, you know, after my life's

passed away, it doesn't really matter.

My legacy is a lot simpler than that.

I actually want my son to be happy. That's it.

I want him to live.

I'm not going to say happy.

Life is happy.

Has different connotations.

And if we're happy all day, every

day, that's actually a psychological condition.

Human beings are not supposed to be happy all the time.

I want him to have a joyful life with the

freedom to do what he wants without spoiling me.

I'm not going to be buying a luxury car if he

turns 16 and says, daddy, can you buy me a BMW?

I'm like, yeah, happy to take you to BMW dealership.

Do you have the money? Oh, no.

Oh, here's the job section.

Go and work, and I'll drive you there,

and I'll help you buy the car.

Like, I mean, no problem.

I'm not buying you the car, but I

think that'd be a disservice to him.

But I'm doing all this for my son.

It's almost selfish in a way, but that's

the way legacy that I want to leave.

No big statues, no big buildings.

People don't have to read about

me a hundred years from now.

If my business to survive, great.

But most businesses, even on the one, the ones on

the Nasdaq, like, 80% of weren't there 100 years ago.

Like, so what are my expectations that mine are?

I'm not trying to build a Nasdaq business. Right.

These are not my businesses.

So they're not gonna be there.

But if my son's happy, his kids are happy, and they're

happy for as many generations is that can be allowed.

Whether they remember who I am

or not, that'll be my legacy.

All right, so thinking about

the businesses, what's next?

Right now I'm focusing on the two we

talked about, productized education.com and Eagle luck.

I really want to get product education is with my wife.

It'll probably be lower gross, but higher margin.

So I want to get that to about 5 million.

Build a small team, five to ten people around that

probably in the next three years, and then eagle lock.

I'd like to get that.

I've never built a $50 million business before.

I'd like to get that $50 million in the next ten years.

That's ambitious. That's awesome.

Is there anything that we didn't get into that

you had kind of wanted to share, talk about?

No, I think we covered it.

I'm sure we could talk for a few more hours.

Business is my passion, like what I do.

This is just fun for me. I can go on for hours.

And my wife usually gets up and walks out

of the room about an hour into the conversation,

she's heard all the so many times before. Awesome.

Well, Ray, thanks so much for

coming on and sharing your story.

Thanks for having me, Scott.

That was Ray black. To learn more about

Rayvensoft Ventures, visit rayvensoft.com.

know would like to be a guest on In the Thick of It,

email us at [e-mail].