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Last week, we had a blast sharing our college days with y’all.
We’re now moving on to the next chapter of our story, what happened after we moved out of our dorms, graduated from college and suddenly catapulted to what we thought was the vast, fun and glorious real world.
Our epic adventure starts with us moving to my hometown, where we took off our part-time adult training wheels, and went in to do some serious, “real world” adulting.
You’d think that after getting our college degree we’d be all cozy and comfy, but we were in for a really big surprise. The real world wasn’t what we expected it to be, jobs were hard to come by especially since we lived in a very small and rural area.
Come to think of it, there were lots of times where we had to really reflect on our next move because there were crossroads everywhere.
As a young adult, the corporate environment can be a pretty scary thing to conquer.
Zero experience, zero assurance, and with no idea of what’s going to happen next.
This Chapter’s highlights
- how we forged our career paths
- how we started figuring out what we wanted to do for ourselves
- how we supported each other to get to that next level
Here’s where you’ll see most of our early entrepreneurial tendencies kicking in.
From Jocelyn’s setting of expectations, to Shane’s just-do-something-and-see-what-happens, everything that happened then was preparing us to become the people we are today.
If you’ve ever been a struggling 20-something years old, this is going to bring back so many feels.
Tune in this week and keep tuning in, who knows? You just might connect the dots in your life and realize you too have the puzzle pieces you need to succeed online.
Bonus Trivia:
- Jocelyn didn’t love her MBA classes, and is officially an MBA dropout.
- When I actually moved from Daphne (AL), Jocelyn and my dad went and rented a big van. This is how I knew that Jocelyn loved me, by the way, for sure. Even being apart, being stupid, and being immature, Jocelyn got in the truck with my dad and drove 13 hours to help me pack and move back home.
- How to propose to a Jocelyn: “Basically, if we don’t get married now, I don’t know if we’ll ever have a chance to do it.” / “Are you free on the 3rd?”
- Jocelyn’s engagement ring had her birthstone on it, instead of a diamond.
If you enjoyed this week’s chapter, let us know in the comments or better yet, leave us an iTunes review.
We will continue our story again next week!
Here are the links to S&J’s Our Story podcast series
- Our Story – Prologue: A Couple of Kids from Kentucky
- Our Story – Chapter 1: Love at First Sight
- Our story – Chapter 2: Welcome to the real world (maybe we should get married?)
- Our story – Chapter 3: The worst day of our lives
- Our Story – Chapter 4: How a lawnmower and 11 cents changed our lives forever
- Our Story – Chapter 5: The Promise Land
You can connect with S&J on social media too!
Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show!
If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week!
Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below!
Shane: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams.
We’re a real family who figured out how to make our entire living online. And now, we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? Alright. Let’s get started.
What’s up, guys! Welcome back to another episode of the Flipped Lifestyle podcast! Super excited to be back with you again today where we are continuing with our story of our entrepreneurial journey.
We are taking you back to where it all got started, and we are giving you some information about our background to show you what it was like before we were entrepreneurs and basically take you on the journey of us starting from nothing and building a massive online business that has just produced a lifestyle that we could never have even imagined before we discovered online business.
Last time we left off, Jocelyn and I had graduated college, we moved out of those dorms and out of the apartments and out of the college life. We moved ourselves back to my hometown, and we did not get married at this time, we actually each had our own apartments, we had our own jobs. I was selling insurance for my dad. I did not really know what I wanted to do when I grew up. I went to work for my dad at his insurance agency.
Jocelyn: I had to start looking for jobs. This was no longer practice adulting, this was real adulting.
Shane: Take the training wheels off, right?
Jocelyn: Yeah. For me, finding a job was not exactly easy. I’m going into a town where I know absolutely no one. Shane and I, we thought we were too young to get married. I decided, “Okay, well, I will just move to your hometown and try to find a job.” I, as a 21-year-old female who has been dating her boyfriend for three years, thinks that hopefully, Shane will start to grow up at some point. Maybe he will be interested in getting married, but we were still kind of just not really ready. We decided just to move into our own apartments.
Shane: We did live in the same apartment building though. That was pretty cool.
Jocelyn: It was sort of like the dorm.
Shane: It was sort of like Dorm Plus. What floor was I on? I was on the third floor?
Jocelyn: You’re on the third.
Shane: And you were on the second. We had our own apartments, we had our own things. When we moved back here, my dad would pick up Jocelyn and drive her around town just introducing her to random people, as many people as possible.
Jocelyn: In every industry you can imagine.
Shane: Oh my goodness, not even related to your degree.
Jocelyn: I probably applied for 50 to 60 jobs, all different kind of jobs. Because you have to remember that where we’re from is a very small area. There is not a huge amount of job opportunities available.
Shane: Especially professional job opportunities for young, college-educated women, basically.
Jocelyn: As someone with a business degree. I started learning that business probably wasn’t the right choice for the area that I was in. First of all, there are a lot of professional types of jobs around here, but they all require specialized degrees. You can get a medical job, you can get an education job.
Shane: A lawyer, something like that.
Jocelyn: Yeah. Other types of professional jobs. But there just aren’t a lot of big companies around here. The population just doesn’t support that. I got probably 30 to 40 rejection letters. I joked and said I was going to start wallpapering my wall with, “Thank you for your interest but…” I got so many of those. I cannot even tell you. You start to feel down after a while.
Shane: I can remember how demoralized you were because it was like, “What are we going to do? Am I going to have to fold sweaters at JCPenney?”
Jocelyn: At that point I was even starting to apply for things like that because I had to pay my bills somehow. I was really starting to get discouraged. Back in the 80s, people would tell you, “Okay if you go to college and get a degree, you can get any job you want.” Well, I was just laughing because I’m like, that is not happening for me. It wasn’t this magical experience that I thought it was going to be after I’ve got my college degree.
Shane: And that kind of was something that changed around 2000 when we graduated. College degrees started becoming worth a little bit less. It was harder to go out and get a job and be competitive especially in smaller, rural places where everybody was a doctor, lawyer, teacher or a coal miner or a railroader or they worked at Walmart. That was pretty much what everybody was doing. There wasn’t really a lot for Jocelyn in the area. So then, what happens, Jocelyn and I were out on a walk one day. We ran into a lady that I knew. I went to school with her son, and by total chance, Jocelyn actually knew him. She had met him before she met me.
Jocelyn: It was a mutual friend.
Shane: A mutual friend. I introduced her to Jocelyn. They realized there was a connection there.
Jocelyn: All right, we were walking around in town just exercising. We ran into this lady, and her name was Frances. I will never forget her. Anyway, she just happened to be the vice president of human resources for a corporation in the next town over. I don’t even know this company existed. She was asking me, “What are you doing?” I’m like, “Well, actually I’m looking for a job.” At the time I didn’t know she was in human resources. I just said, “I’m just looking for a job, applying for different stuff.” She said, “Well, it just so happens that we are looking for something called a technical writer at this company.” And I’m like, “Well, okay. I’m kind of a technical person. I can maybe do that.”
Shane: What kind of technical? What is this company?
Jocelyn: It was basically like an engineering position for a corporation, and what they did is they manufactured commercial dishwashers. These are the kind that you see in big restaurants, big stainless steel things, that is what they manufacture. I have no idea what I am going in for. I’m so inexperienced. I have such little interview experience.
Shane: Definitely never had to write technical books for designing dishwashers in the old college days.
Jocelyn: But I felt it was something that I could do if I had to. I’m like, “Yeah, I could probably do that.” I go in and I talk to her and she is like, “Well the president is going to be here next week. I’ll let you know if we want you to come back in.” I’m like, “Okay.” The next week, she actually called me back. Now, this was one of the first calls I’ve gotten back so I’m really excited about it. She’s like, “Okay our presidents here, and he wants you to come in because I don’t know that the technical writer is a good fit for you, but we may have something else.” And I’m like, “Okay.” So I get dressed up, I will never forget. I wore this skirt and a gray buttoned top, it had short sleeves. This was like a little suit. It was really cheap, I probably bought it for like $30 or $40.
Shane: I remember that outfit that you wore. I totally remember that.
Jocelyn: I don’t remember where I got it, but I’m sure it was just like a department store or something. I was really nervous, I’m 21, I had no idea what I was doing. I go in to talk to the president of this company. He was interesting, telling me about he had gout and stuff. I can still remember this stuff vividly. I go in and talk to him.
Shane: That is what you want to hear on an interview. “So, about my gout, have you seen my gout? I mean, have you ever seen gout this bad, dear? I know you’re 21 and gout is not in your radar, but it is on mine.”
Jocelyn: He really did talk to me about gout. But anyway, what came of this, though, he told me that they were looking for somebody to work in the marketing department. They needed basically a marketing assistant. I was like, “Okay, now I think I can do this.” He seemed to like me, and Frances was in there, too. She kind of was talking about me, and I ended up getting the job and had absolutely no idea what I was doing.
It was definitely an eye-opening experience, going into this corporation where you know no one, and you know basically nothing about working, and a real job. That was in August of 2001. For anybody who knows anything about American history, you know that one month later, on September 11 that everything changed. For someone who was brand-new in this corporate office, I have no experience. I have nothing. I don’t have any friends, really. It was scary.
It was scary for everyone in America, but it was really scary for someone who did not know what was going on. I can still remember; I was in the restroom of the place that I worked when I heard about all this. Anyway, people a few weeks later started losing their jobs. This was just a common thing. The markets kind of crashed, everybody started losing their jobs. Even the person who helped me get the job, Frances, she got laid off.
I felt terrible. It was just a really scary time. I had no idea what was happening. One month after I get the start, people start getting laid off, and not just a few people. It was a lot of people. I ended up surviving a lot of different rounds of layoffs at that company through the years. But I can just remember that being a super scary time.
Shane: Jocelyn was in this new environment, new place, it was always crazy when they were laying people off at that place because it really did happen right around September 11 when the markets got disrupted by the war and everything else. It was like it really hurt your industry a lot. They just laid off so many people. It was like when you started there, compared to when you end there, there was a couple people left. Even the presidents and CEOs and vice presidents and everything else.
While Jocelyn was going through all of this, getting a real corporate education in as fast a time as possible, I was working at my dad’s insurance agency. He had a little satellite office in the next town over, it was this little room. It could not have been, oh my goodness, it was 10 x 12. It was a glorified cubicle, basically, on this highway that kind of connected my town from the next town over. It was just very secretarial, somewhat sales work. It was kind of an automated system. People would call in, get a quote, come in. You would write their policy.
Jocelyn: It was very procedural.
Shane: Very procedural and robotic.
Jocelyn: If anybody knows Shane, that is not the kind of work he enjoys at all.
Shane: No, no. Two weeks into it, I was contemplating ways to bash my head through my desk. I was so bored all the time. I just really did not like the job. It wasn’t because of my dad, or my family who was in the business with us, it just wasn’t for me. I can actually remember standing one day. How long were we there? It was like a year and half or two years, maybe?
Jocelyn: I think we lived there for two years.
Shane: Yeah, it’s close to two years. It was almost 2 years. I can just remember about a year and half in, I was standing on my filing cabinet. I had my final filing cabinet by my desk of insurance policies. I would lean over on the filing cabinet, and it was a really slow day. Nobody was really coming in. I was looking out the window, and there was this cow pasture–
Jocelyn: Because it was Kentucky.
Shane: Because it was Kentucky. There was 100 head of cattle walking around in this pond. I remember looking over at those cows and be like, “Man, those cows are free. Look at them. They just walk around, eat grass, jump in that pond. Whatever. They’re doing whatever they want. I’m trapped in this little thing. Am I really going to do this for the rest of my life?” I could, and I would sit and think about things like, I can make a living. If me and Jocelyn get married, then we can afford and support everything, and my kids would have food, and all that good stuff. But I really just started asking myself: do I want to live like this? I’m not knocking it. Some people love it. My dad loves the insurance agency. He loves it.
Jocelyn: I think part of that is because your dad and your brother sort of built that business. It was already an established business when you came in. They wanted you to do things their way.
Shane: I don’t do things people’s way. I just don’t dig that. Even though I felt like I maybe had my own office someday, I just couldn’t do it. I just could not do that. I started really thinking about my life, and of course I had my teaching degree. I thought of being a teacher. But even that wasn’t totally appealing to me because it was still the same thing. Being structured, being on a schedule and everything else. I started thinking how could I have fun and make money.
Jocelyn: Shane was still, well, to put it nicely, a little immature.
Shane: I’m still a little immature. I’m 39 years old, and I’m still kind of, you know, a kid.
Jocelyn: Yeah. I think what I was expecting when we came to this town is that, okay, we are out of college, we’ll have a couple of years to get our career started, and then Shane will grow up and become the husband-type figure that I need in my life.
Shane: Are you say that I wasn’t a husband-type figure?
Jocelyn: Well, not at that time, no.
Shane: Because you were totally like grade A, 100% quality wife material at that time. You were hot, you worked hard. You were just perfect wife material, and I was sitting over there not being husband material?
Jocelyn: Well, I’m not saying that you weren’t husband material in that way.
Shane: If you are saying husband material meaning like you have a giant stone, and you would cut the statue out of it, and somewhere deep within all that marble is something that resembles husband material, then maybe, yes.
Jocelyn: No, I just don’t think you were in a place where you are ready to get married. I’m not a hundred percent sure that I was either. But I think part of it was just because we realized we never talked about this before. We were preparing for this podcast, and he was like, “Why did you let me move away,” which we were getting ready to get to. I was like, “I just knew that you would never grow up.” Shane is what some people might call a mama’s boy.
Shane: I am not a mama’s boy anymore.
Jocelyn: Not anymore.
Shane: Not anymore.
Jocelyn: But at the time, he was just really still dependent on his parents a lot. I was very independent. I’ve been very independent since the age of 17. I just really didn’t need people to affirm my decisions, or take care of me in anyway. I felt like we just weren’t on the same mental plane at that time.
Shane: I agree with that.
Jocelyn: That was a nice point. That’s a nice assessment.
Shane: That was a very diplomatic of you. Thank you. Thank you for holding back on me. I totally agree. I just felt so much uncertainty. I think that was another reason why I was really hesitant to get married, too. I recognized that I just wasn’t ready for that. I didn’t know what I wanted out of my career, out of life. I did know that I wanted to marry you. I knew that eventually, I wanted us to get married.
Jocelyn: I think that both of us knew that would happen eventually. But at that time, I think we were just at a crossroads. You weren’t happy, I was not insanely happy, I was happy enough. I just knew that without some major catalyst, we were not ever going to be on the same page.
Shane: What happened at that point when I was standing there, watching the cows swim in the pond, eat their grass, and I was longing to be the cow, to be free like the cow in the field. I was like, I can’t do insurance anymore. I can’t do this. I basically said, “Hey, what about football. I’ve gotten hurt in high school. I was a really good football player and it was kind of what defined me. I remember just such a mental change in my life, how different it was after I got hurt and I couldn’t play football anymore. I always regretted it.
Jocelyn: I think you just felt incomplete without being able to close that chapter.
Shane: Yeah. I felt like there was this open chapter in my life that could never close because I never got to finish my career and do those things. I can remember on senior night, I walked with the players and everybody was on the field. I went out on the field in my street clothes and my jersey, and I just stood there in between my mom and dad and just cried. I just cried my eyes out because I didn’t get to play my senior year. I didn’t get to enjoy the thing you had worked so hard for since you were a kid.
Jocelyn: And if you missed that episode, this is because he had a major knee injury.
Shane: Yeah, I had a major knee injury. I blew my knee out. It was a horrific injury.
Jocelyn: If you see him today, you will see very large scars on both knees.
Shane: I started thinking about football again. I loved games, I loved strategy, I just loved all those things. I love competition. I am so competitive.
Jocelyn: I think you just felt like you needed to use your mind for something other than robotic tasks. You needed to be able to blossom and get your ideas out there, be a leader, be a strategist. That was something that was really important to you, and I don’t think you had that opportunity.
Shane: No, I did not have an opportunity selling insurance. No, I did not. I started thinking, man wouldn’t it be awesome to prepare for a new team every week, to go to war on Friday nights and to be able to lead kids into battle and be able to unite with a bunch of men and create war plans and all that stuff? I was like, man I’m, already a teacher. I’ve got an education degree. That is an ends to that means. Maybe I can do football. I started looking around on the Internet for how to get into football coaching. I figured you had to have been some collegiate player or something to do it. I ended up finding this school in Daphne, AL called the United States Sports Academy and they had a Master’s degree program. It was for sports coaching and athletic directing.
Jocelyn: I think at the time though you had your sight sort of set more on a college football career.
Shane: I did. For sure. I was thinking something bigger than that, but that was my backup plan was to coach high school, worst-case scenario. But I wanted to coach somewhere big.
Jocelyn: So that’s like you really wanted to get around some people who were big names in the industry so that you could make connections that would help you in the future.
Shane: Right. I figured out that Mike Leach, the head football coach at the time at Texas Tech went to the school. I was like, “Huh. I’m going to call him.” I don’t know. I’m just going to call his office–
Jocelyn: Because that’s how Shane rolls.
Shane: — Because that is how I roll. You call the head football coach at Texas Tech when you need an answer, right?
Jocelyn: And he called him back.
Shane: And I called him, and he called me back. He sure did. I was sitting in my dad’s office, working at his office that day. I get a phone call, and I hear, “Hey, Shane. This is Mike Leach, head football coach at Texas Tech.” I just looked at my phone like, did that really just happen? I called him and left a message, and he called me back? He basically told me that he went to school there, he loved it, he was in a similar situation.
He had been a lawyer, and he wanted to get into football coaching. He looked for this place, and he found this place, went to school there, and it led to his football coaching career. I was like, “That is awesome.” Jocelyn really encouraged me to do this. As soon as I brought it up, she was like, “You have got to do this. You’ve got to try!”
Jocelyn: I just saw how defeated you were as a person. That is not who you are. I just knew, deep down, that if you don’t do this, it will never work out between us. We will never be happy. I just knew that it was time for you to leave the nest. Now or never.
Shane: Jocelyn got in the car with me, and we drove 13 hours down to Daphne, AL, checked out the school, asked them some more questions, hung out there for a little while to get used to the area. Driving back, we came back and talked about it. I just decided I had to do it. But it was scary because at the end of that conversation, we both basically looked at each other, and we knew that this meant we were going to have to separate for a little while. Jocelyn couldn’t go to Alabama and look for another job, and all that stuff.
Jocelyn: I was climbing the corporate ladder.
Shane: Climbing that corporate ladder, baby. We knew that we were going to have to separate. She wasn’t going to stay either because she had nothing there.
Jocelyn: I didn’t have anything here.
Shane: If I wasn’t there, nothing was there for her. Jocelyn decided to move to Lexington. Did you commute back to the thing? Or did they let you work at home at this time?
Jocelyn: Basically, at this time, I started out as the marketing assistant. Well, things happened, people got laid off. I ended up becoming what was called the marketing coordinator, I think was my title. Basically, I was responsible for all marketing for this corporation, which is a little scary. I actually did a really good job. I traveled a lot, I got to go to trade shows, I traveled to many states in the United States, I got to go to Europe, I got to go to Canada a couple times. It was a really exciting job for most early 20-year-olds. I was not incredibly happy. It was okay.
Shane: It paid the bills.
Jocelyn: It paid the bills. But at the time, I was just a little bit sad because Shane and I were parting ways.
Shane: And we really didn’t know was going on. I remember your mom and dad had come or something. You all packed up your stuff to move to Lexington. I vividly remember me driving out of the parking lot that day and seeing you in the rearview mirror. I can remember almost throwing up, going, “Oh my God. Is this the last time I’m going to be able to see her or something?” It really scared me at that moment to go down there, it really did.
Jocelyn: I really didn’t know what was going to happen at that point. Let’s back up a little bit. Basically, I went into my company, I’m like, “Look, I’m not going to be living here anymore. There is one of two things that is going to happen: either I’m leaving, or you guys can let me work remotely.”
Shane: Man, we were hard core.
Jocelyn: For me to say that, that was like– okay, I was an early 20 something-year-old person. I’m not even comfortable say things like that now in my late 30s. I still, to this day, cannot believe that I went in there and gave them this ultimatum.
Shane: This was before people did stuff like that, too. This was before people could work remotely, really, on the Internet. It wasn’t like the culture of working remotely existed really. Especially not in a small manufacturing corporation that was a part of a larger corporation in Southeast Kentucky.
Jocelyn: That just was a thing. My original plan, and I had already signed up for classes. I was going to temporarily move home with my mom and dad just until I could get back on my feet and figure things out. I was going to leave my job, I had already signed up for classes to do pre-physical therapy. That is what I thought I wanted to do with my life. I was interested in fitness; I was interested in health.
Shane: That would have been the worst fit. That would have been worse.
Jocelyn: Like being around people all the time?
Shane: Jocelyn is an introverted kind of person. She doesn’t even like to touch me when I get sweaty. We’ll be walking outside, and we will be taking a walk. We will hold hands for a minute, that she will be like, “Okay. You’re sweating know. I am not going to hold your hand anymore.” But I can imagine you rubbing someone’s thighs. “This is really going to bring back the musculature in this.”
Jocelyn: That is so not how I roll.
Shane: That would be the worst job, worst possible job ever.
Jocelyn: I don’t know. I don’t know what I was thinking, but I already had signed up for classes and everything. I go in and talk to my company. I’m like, “Look, I’m going to have to leave because I’m moving out of the area, and I just don’t think this is going to work.” And they’re like, “Whoa, whoa, hold on.” They’re like, “We really, really want you to be here.”
Shane: They loved Jocelyn. They adopted her. She was not only really good at her job in an adult fashion, but all the people in your company were older.
Jocelyn: I was like their little sis.
Shane: Yes, you are like the daughter of the organization, basically.
Jocelyn: Some of them, I really could of been their daughter, yes. Some of them, I was like their little sister. They were just very protective over me. I helped them do their jobs. I was very good at what I did because I throw myself into everything that I do. They really don’t want me to leave, they were like, “Look, what if we let you work from home?” They knew I wanted to take classes. I don’t think I told them what kind of classes I was going to take. Then, they were like, “We will even pay for you to get your MBA.” I’m like, “Huh? Okay, that is interesting.”
Then, I changed my plans. I went and canceled every class that I had signed up for. The people at the college that I went to, they thought I was nuts. There like, “Are you sure you want to do this?” I’m like, “Yeah, yeah I’m going to do this.” If you know anything about Shane and myself, we are very decisive people. Once we decide to do something, we’re doing it. I canceled all my classes, I went and found an apartment in Lexington which is where we had done to undergraduate, and I signed up for MBA classes. Because I’m like, “Eh. Free MBA, still work. Sounds good!”
Shane: They were letting her work remotely. Did you have to come down every week?
Jocelyn: I came down sometimes. Not every week, but I did come down sometimes. I ended up moving to Lexington, I was still working, still going to trade shows, still coming down for meetings, all that type of thing. Taking MBA classes. Well, I really didn’t love the MBA classes, so I am officially an MBA dropout.
Shane: Once again, decisive. I like this. I don’t like this. I’m out.
Jocelyn: Well, they were paying for it, and then when I left the company, I didn’t really want to pay for it anymore.
Shane: But that was later though.
Jocelyn: Yeah, that was a little bit later. So, I am an MBA dropout, just so you know. Fun fact.
Shane: So, Jocelyn ends up pretty quickly in Lexington and I move down to Daphne, Alabama. I started taking classes, I started going down there. I actually went to a high school and asked them if I could be an intern. They actually had had interns from the school that I was going to down there for my Master’s program. It was a high school there called Daphne high school. They were really good. It was a nationally ranked program in USA Today. They had just gotten beat in the state championship game like a year before by Hoover, if anybody knows about football, which is a really big football program in Alabama.
Huge school and I got to coach freshman, and I got to be on the high school staff. I could sit in meetings and stuff but pretty much I had to film on Friday nights. I would coach JV and freshman two days a week, and help with that, and then help at practice a little bit, and then I would do film work and all that stuff. It was ridiculous experience. We went to the state championships and got beat in the finals. We were undefeated until the finals just a ridiculous experience.
My freshman team that I was a coach on, I coached defensive backs and wide receivers, we won the County championship, we were undefeated. I think we lost one game, but we avenged the loss in the finals. I had this awesome experience. But most incredible thing was, they had seven Division 1 prospects on that football team. My goal was to be a college football coach. I wanted to climb that corporate ladder, that ladder, and try to someday be a college head coach.
I got to meet coaches from everywhere: Florida State, LSU, West Virginia, Louisville Kentucky, you name it, everywhere in the country we were recruiting players for our team because we had this really special athlete named Pat White. Basically, he had 70 or 80 scholarship offers. I got to meet all these people. I met a guy named Rick Trickett who was the offensive line coach at West Virginia, and when he met me, and I told him where I was from, he said, “Hey, we’ve got a guy named Steve on our staff. He’s from your hometown.” And I knew who this guy was, and I said, “Oh my God, I did not know he was there.”
So I got my brother, my oldest brother to hook me up with him, and we got to talking, and basically, after the season ended, I moved back to my hometown in order to start applying for college jobs because I had some experience now it all these connections I’d made. I got a hold of the guy that was from my hometown. I got a hold of Coach Trickett again, and I applied for a job at West Virginia University. They had a graduate assistant position open. I would be the graduate assistant to the head coach, Rich Rodriguez.
Jocelyn: Shane starts telling me about this., “Yeah, I’m going to go up there to West Virginia and I’m going to try and get this job.” I’m like, “Are you kidding me?”
Shane: That’s aiming high. You’ve had one season of experience of football coaching, and you were just a freshman coach. These jobs usually go to people who played at those schools. The senior graduates, they could to be a graduate assistant because you get a free Master’s degree out of it.
Jocelyn: So I’m like, “This is going to be a total waste of time.” By the way, we were still talking during this time.
Shane: Oh yeah, we’ve talked pretty much every day while we were separated. When I actually moved from Daphne (AL), Jocelyn and my dad went and rented a big van. This is how I knew that Jocelyn loved me, by the way, for sure. Even being apart, being stupid, and being immature, Jocelyn got in the truck with my dad and drove 13 hours to help me pack and move back home. Didn’t it like rain, and you about died or something?
Jocelyn: It was super dangerous on the way down there. I wasn’t real sure whether we were going to make it.
Shane: This is also the moment my dad fell absolutely in love with you and told me. When I got back, he basically said, after spending all that time with you on that drive, he was like, “If you don’t marry her, then I’m going to see if she will marry your brother or something because she is going to be in our family, and that is just the way it is.” Anyway, Jocelyn is like, “Are you sure you want to do this? Shouldn’t you try to get a little bit more experience or something?”
Jocelyn: In the back of my mind, I’m thinking there is no way this is going to work out. He is going to drive up to West Virginia, waste all this time, and they are going to be like, “Yeah right, buddy, we don’t want to hire you.”
Shane: But that is not how I roll. I am a big believer in walk over, kick the door in, and act like you own the place and good things will happen. Okay? I got in a car, drove, West Virginia and my dad came with me, didn’t he? My dad drove up there with me. My dad was really supportive in all of this, so my dad drives up with me and I go to this interview.
I think I went to Walmart to buy a suit coat or something. I wore the cheapest suit coat I could find. I think I spent $75 total on my suit that I wore to this interview. I went in, I met the coach, I had a really good interview. The guy that I knew there showed me around. I got to hang out with Coach Trickett, I got to meet some cool players. It was just amazing!
This big huge facility, it had a 30,000 ft.² weight room, indoor training. This was big-time college football, and they had just given a scholarship to Pat White who had played on the team I coached for. I thought, “Man, I got to get in.” All the stars aligned, this was a really good experience. The coach said, “Hey, I’ve got three or four more people I need to interview. We will be in touch one way or the other, I will let you know.” We come back home, and I remember me and you were eating somewhere. Where were we?
Jocelyn: I don’t remember offhand.
Shane: Something happened. I was out to dinner– no, it was me and you and my mom and dad. We were in a restaurant. I looked down and a West Virginia area code was on my phone. I jumped up and went outside the table and answer the phone, and I said, “Hey, this is Shane.” Coach Rodriguez said, “Hey, Shane, this is Rich Rodriguez. I just wanted to let you know that we decided to give you a shot, and we would love for you to come be a part of our program.” I came back in, and I just told them I got the job. It was just like incredible because now, here was this amazing opportunity. I was just about to go moved to West Virginia, start this coaching career that I had dreamed about a year ago.
Jocelyn: An incredible affirmation. This is what I’m supposed to be doing in my life.
Shane: Yes, this is the path I’m supposed to take. To get an opportunity like that, I can’t stress enough how huge of an opportunity that was for someone with as little experience playing and coaching as I had at a time. I was going to go get a Master’s degree for free. I could actually go get my Masters in education, and if I ever wanted to go teach or anything, I could. It was just such a good opportunity. I didn’t even know how to react to it, basically.
Jocelyn: I just want to throw in there that I think that that is where a lot of your, just-try-something-and-see-what-happens comes from. I would have never done that. I would have never even contacted them to see if I could come and get an interview. I would just assume that it wouldn’t work out.
Shane: Like you aren’t ready to have a job like that or I wouldn’t even consider it.
Jocelyn: You don’t assume that ever about anything. You assume that things will work out no matter what. A lot of times, for you, they do. It is not because of magic. It is not because you are lucky. It is because you take chances and do things.
Shane: I have people really doubt me when we went to the coaching thing. I won’t name names, but I had someone really close to me when I was leaving for Alabama. They gave me a hug, and I gave them hug. It was kind of emotional, and instead of saying good luck, or go get ‘em or do something like that, this person who is close to basically looked at me and said, “Go get this out of your system. We will be here when you get back.”
That infuriated me a little bit. It discouraged me somewhat when it first came out of their mouth. I was so furious to prove that person and all the doubters wrong. I just basically said, “Screw it, I’m going to do everything I can to go as high as I can to prove them wrong.” I think that is one reason I applied for that job. I was like, why not try? What are they going to do, say no? That was the worst-case scenario is they’d say no, and I would have to go do something else. I just went after it.
Jocelyn: And I think that that is another thing about us, too. We’ve learned to turn our backs on negativity.
Shane: And haters and doubters.
Jocelyn: That is something that is so critical for what we do today. If we let things bother us all the time… I mean, things do bother me. I’m not going to say that they don’t. But if I dwell on that, then I wouldn’t be here today. I would have given up a long time ago.
Shane: What did they say? It is always a strike if you don’t swing at it, right? So I just swung. Basically, what happened here then, was, Jocelyn and I found ourselves at a new crossroads. I had to move to Morgantown, West Virginia immediately. The coach was like, “I will see you Monday at the staff meeting.” I had a week or two to get there. I had to find a place to stay. I’ve gotten a hotel, then found an apartment. I got settled in within a day. I was literally in a staff meeting in a week or two.
There was no screwing around. This was like, the job starts, get up here. I had to move again. Jocelyn and I hadn’t even had a chance to even figure out what we were doing next in our relationship. She still lived in Lexington, and all of a sudden, I’m passing back from Alabama through my hometown, and back to Morgantown. I go there, I work for a couple weeks, and we have a staff meeting.
Coach Rod basically says, “I hope you’ve had a great summer and spent some good time with your family. You know what it means to be a college football coach and working for me, basically on July 5th, we are all going to go on vacation for two weeks. When we come back on July 5th, kiss your wife and children goodbye. The football season starts and you’ll see them again in February, after recruiting.”
Literally, word-for-word said that, it is a 365-day-a-year job when you are a college football coach. It is 7 AM to 11, six days a week. It is a rough, rough, rough road to hoe. When he said, I thought to myself, crap. What am I going to do? What are me and Jocelyn going to do? What are we going to do? We can’t be apart that long, and I will never see her, I will never talk to her. I called Jocelyn, and said, “We are going to be off for two weeks for vacation. I have to be at a staff meeting on the fifth.”
This was like May or something when I called Jocelyn. And I said, “Basically, if we don’t get married now, I don’t know if we’ll ever have a chance to do it.”
Jocelyn: No, it wasn’t exactly like that. You’re like, “Maybe we should get married and you could just like move up here?” And I’m like, “Oh, okay.”
Shane: Oh, that makes sense.
Jocelyn: That’s a logical choice.
Shane: Yeah, I was like, if we don’t do it now, we will have to wait at least until next year and we’ve already been dating for six and have years at this time. People were starting to wonder about us. I said, “The next time he said we would be free would be next year. You think we should just get married and move up here?”
Jocelyn: Yeah, that would be all right.
Shane: Yeah, that sounds good. Jocelyn and I decided basically–
Jocelyn: We mutually decided–
Shane: Yeah, that we would get married and we had basically July 3rd to do it because I had to be a staff meeting on July 5th. We planned a wedding very fast.
Jocelyn: In just a few weeks.
Shane: It was totally the most unromantic thing ever. There was no drop-down and proposal. It was kind of like, “I’ll meet you on the third. You will be there? Okay.”
Jocelyn: I have the third free.
Shane: I have the third free, do you?
Jocelyn: Yeah, I got the third free.
Shane: Jocelyn picked out her own engagement ring because, one, I couldn’t afford an engagement ring. It was like, $200 or something. She went to a mall and got her own. Wasn’t it your birthstone?
Jocelyn: You did go with me.
Shane: Oh, I did go with you. Yeah, we got together. That’s right.
Jocelyn: I still have it. I even got a picture of it. I still have it.
Shane: That’s right. We went to the mall, you picked out a birthstone engagement ring because we couldn’t afford a diamond, or something.
Jocelyn: I liked it.
Shane: You loved it. And it was awesome. That is how I really knew Jocelyn love me. It wasn’t about the ring. It was about the love and her heart for me, right?
Jocelyn: Right.
Shane: Basically, we went and got married on July 3rd, and we got into a car, we drove 13 hours are something back to Morgantown, I went to the staff meeting and we were married. We’ll talk more about that in a little bit more about that story next time because we are really starting to get into the meat of our journey where I feel like if you look at our life, there was a mountaintop and we were going uphill that whole time, and then we got married.
I feel like every step on the down slope of the mountain led to online business, led to the Flipped Lifestyle, led to this place where God has put us right now in our life, and I look back and start connecting those dots, and I can see where every step after we got married pretty much brought us to the place where we are today, where we do what we do, changing lives, working with hundreds of entrepreneurs from all over the world to help them flip their life, too.
It is just a really crazy story how we get from coaching football and West Virginia to where we are now.
I hope you guys tune in next week to hear the rest of that story and, maybe you can start piecing together those puzzle pieces in your life, start connecting those dots, and realize that everything you have done to this point is leading to that next step, leading to your online business, leading to your success, and where you are going to go.
Until then, we will continue our story next week. We will see you then.
Jocelyn: Bye!
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