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September 27th, 2013 was the very first day that we stayed home working only for ourselves, and today we’re taking time to reflect on the last two years and talk about the most important factors in our success.
As full-time teachers, we both were working on average about 50 hours a week, even though we had summers ‘off’ but we were never ‘happy enough’.
We’re going to share the story of trigger in our lives that drove us to change our lifestyle.
We’ll walk through the exact mindset and thought process that we went through that lead us to quitting our jobs and the sacrifices we made to do that.
What we wanted out of life was freedom, so that is what we set out to accomplish and then help you do the same.
You will learn
- Success Story
- The story of where we came from.
- Some of the struggles we’ve faced over the year.
- The reasons that we made the shift to working for ourselves.
- The sacrifices we made to go full time with our online businesses.
- What this whole journey is really all about.
Links and resources mentioned in today’s show
- Flip Your Life Community
- Eric & Sally’s Online Music Teaching Resource
- Elementary Librarian
- Online Business is for Anyone but Not for Everyone
Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!
Success Story: Eric & Sally are active Flip Your Life Members they wrote:
“3 weeks ago we went from selling one off products to selling memberships. After 3 weeks we have 4 monthly members and 16 yearly subscribers = 3,750$ recurring
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Can’t Miss Moments
Each week Jocelyn and I share moments that we might have missed if we had not started our online business. We hope these moments inspire you to see the possibilities and freedom online business could provide for your family.
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!
JOCELYN: Hey y’all! On today’s podcast, we’re going to celebrate the two-year anniversary of quitting our jobs.
Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down, by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started.
SHANE: What’s going on guys? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast; got a very special and awesome, fun episode of Flipped Lifestyle podcast for you guys this week. We are taking a departure from kind of our series-based stuff, where we cover you know, huge topics and get into the nuts and bolts of online business, and we wanted to just step back and look at the last two years of our online business since we quit our jobs. We just celebrated our two-year “quit-aversary” that’s what Jocelyn calls it, the quit-aversary where we actually became unemployable, we will never go back to the nine to five ever again, and so I think what, it was September 27th?
JOCELYN: Yeah, 2013, that was.
SHANE: Two years ago, that was the first day that Jocelyn and I stayed at home and worked for ourselves. So we want to talk a little bit about that journey, we want to get into why we started our online business, why we decided to quit our jobs and kind of go into all the things that have happened since. If you are new to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, this is going to be kind of a great episode for you to catch up with who Jocelyn and myself are – is it ‘Jocelyn and I’, or ‘Jocelyn and me’ – who we are, you know what I’m saying, and if you are an old school OG of the Flipped Lifestyle community, it’ll be a great opportunity too for you guys to just reflect back with us and learn a little bit about what made us successful on the internet.
JOCELYN: And we may even tell some stories you haven’t heard before. So, if you are someone who has been with us for a while, stick around because you may hear something that maybe we haven’t told before. So throughout the month of October, we are going to be sharing some more personal things about our business, including reasons that we’ve been successful, things we would change if we started over again, and even some plans for the future. So, the month of October is going to be kind of a little bit different than what we normally do, but it’s going to be fun and I think that you guys will enjoy it. We are going to be able to talk just a little bit more candidly than we normally do, and just have some fun.
SHANE: It’s not going to be all business, you know, it’s like –
JOCELYN: So we are going to talk about our lives, and like some of the struggles that we faced this year, and what we are doing in 2016 and beyond to overcome those. So we are excited about that.
SHANE: And I just did a keynote speech at an Amazon sellers’ event for online sellers, and some of the things we went into during that speech when I was preparing that, was a lot about mindset and we kind of looked like not just the mechanics of how online business worked, but Jocelyn and I started, like Jocelyn helped me make the speech, and we started looking at all the things that are around our online business, like the things we do every day, the actions that we take that actually are what lead to our success. So, that’s what we really want to get into, is the attitude we have to have, the mindset you have to have, how to benchmark other successful entrepreneurs, how to know what to work on and prioritize. All the things that really make you successful besides just what email provider do I use, or what shopping cart do I need to install; those are all things that are important, we do talk a lot about that stuff, you know, the emails in my auto responder sequence, all those are great topics but really those tools are not what make you successful online, it’s a whole lot of other stuff. So, we’re going to look back at all the things that we are look back and said, “Oh that’s what made us successful” and hopefully we can share that with you and we can make you be successful too. But before we do that, let’s get into an actual, real-life success story from one of our Flip Your Life community members.
JOCELYN: All right, today’s success story is from Eric and Sally, I don’t know how to say your last name, I’m very sorry, and I –
SHANE: We don’t know how to read a name, go figure.
JOCELYN: They have a website that’s called activemusicdigital.co.uk –
SHANE: Representing Great Britain in the house today.
JOCELYN: And it is an online music teaching resource, and they have been very active members of the community for quite a while now, and they write, “Three weeks ago, we went from selling one of products to selling memberships. After three weeks, we have four monthly members and 16 yearly subscribers –” which is great. “This has brought in sales of 3750 dollars recurring. We are quite pleased with that” and I should say so.
SHANE: That is unbelievable to go from literally zero recurring income, you know, Jocelyn and I are all about the memberships and recurring income now, and to go from zero to 3750 dollars a month recurring, that is a huge success story. And a little background about Eric and Sally as well, they were recently just selling their products on DVDs, like physical products that they were mailing out to their customers. So, not only did they make the switch from, you know, physical, labor-intensive, high-cost products to digital products to deliver these music – it’s like for little kids, it’s like videos for watching, you know, like songs and things like that, like all of our little kids do, but they not only switched from physical to digital, but from digital to the membership model. So they have had a huge success, they have taken tons of action, they have done so much to make this happen in their online business, you know, none of this happens by accident, and we are just super proud of Eric and Sally and we wanted to brag a little bit about them today. If you would like to become a Flipped Lifestyle success story, all you have to do is go and join our community. You can learn more about the Flip Your Life community over at flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife and we would love to help you take your online business to the next level as well. We have had a lot of zero to thousands-of-dollars-a-month success stories lately; it is starting to compound as our members are really getting online, and getting this recurring membership model in place for their online business, and we would love to help you too. So once again, if you would like to join our Flip Your Life community, head over to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife and we will check out your business and we what we can do for you.
JOCELYN: All right, so right now what we are going to do is we are going to go back in time –
SHANE: We are now in 2012.
JOCELYN: We are going back to 2012, so we are just going to tell you a little bit about our lives back then. So in 2012, we had a – let’s see, how old would Isaac have been? He would have been four, or three–
SHANE: When was Ana born? Was she born in 2011?
JOCELYN: Yeah. So we have like a almost four-year-old and an almost two-year-old.
SHANE: Yeah, right.
JOCELYN: So, we are living in a very nice neighborhood, we have a very nice house, we have a pool in our backyard –
SHANE: It’s a redneck pool, it’s not the in-ground model, you know what I’m saying? We can get wet when it’s hot, we can go swimming.
JOCELYN: And for all intensive purposes, I mean we were happy enough, like everything was going okay, we went to work, we came home at four o’clock, five o’clock –
SHANE: Seven o’clock during football season –
JOCELYN: Shane would come home at seven or eight o’clock, we had our kids, they were being taken care of at the time, and you know, things were just okay. We had summers off, that was always being a big perk of being a teacher –
SHANE: Except for football season.
JOCELYN: Yeah. Everybody loves being a teacher because of the summers off, unless you are a coach or a coach’s wife, when you have like no time off, but you know, things were okay. We didn’t hate our lives –
SHANE: We lived paycheck to paycheck, but I mean, we never had any problems. We had a mortgage and we had a little credit card debt here and there when we wanted to buy something extra, but noting major. There was really nothing like oppressive about our finances or anything really.
JOCELYN: And so we were just living day-to-day, things were going all right, we didn’t hate our lives, we did not intensely love our lives, we were just sort of –
SHANE: Happy enough. I love it when you say happy enough basically.
JOCELYN: Yeah, we were happy enough.
SHANE: So we were kind of just like marching on, I guess toward retirement, you know, that was kind of like what we always talked about like, “Oh, well, we got insurance, and we got enough money you know, to live pretty comfortably, and some day we will get to retire and we will have some money when we are 60 years old, 65 years old. We can just kind of, roll on out into the sunset but we’ll live then, that’s what we’ll do.” We were just kinda going through the monotony of life and really, if nothing had changed the status quo, I’m not for sure that we even would have started looking for anything new like online business, because we both had our degrees, you know, we just were following the status quo, you know, you’re taught your whole life, “Get an education, go get a job, an employer will take care of you, you’ll get insurance and then you can retire and get your pension.”
JOCELYN: And I guess in a way, we were sort of comparing it to the way our lives used to be because before I started teaching, I worked in the corporate world, which was actually a lot worse by my standards than working in education because I worked a lot more, I had to travel all the time, I was gone all the time, and at least at school, I can come home, you know, by like four or five o’clock most days, and my day was done. I mean, I didn’t have to do the emails at home, and I didn’t have to travel on the weekends like I did in the corporate world, so as far as that goes, our lives were, I guess “better” than they had been before.
SHANE: And mine was too because I was a college football coach which was like working every single day of your life from 7AM to 10PM with like no weekends and anything off. So, when I became a high school teacher and a football coach, I was getting home at seven o’clock; I was gone from 7AM to 7PM. I was like, man, this is better, I’m actually home before people go to sleep and before the sun goes down.
JOCELYN: Barely.
SHANE: Barely – so some things did – like we said, things weren’t bad, and they weren’t better than what we had before what we got into education, so we were pretty happy. We did not make a lot of money; I think our combined income was about 5000 dollars a month, so we – together, we were both working you know, probably 50 hours a week by the time you stayed a little after school and got there a little early, and so that’s about a 100 hours a week that we were putting into this to get – so that’s 400 hours, we were working 400 hours a month, together combined probably and only bringing home 5000 dollars, what is that hourly?
JOCELYN: Okay, that’s math I can’t do so –
SHANE: Jocelyn has a calculator out here, hold on.
JOCELYN: Yeah, so that’s 12.50 an hour, which is what we took home.
SHANE: Exactly. So, basically we were making 12 bucks an hour to do this, and working lots of hours to do it. But then something happened that really changed the entire outlook that we had on life and it really shook us to the core a little bit, and this is a story that we have really never shared publicly; you know, and it’s kind of very emotional for us but, this trigger is what led us down the road of, “There has to be more to life than this, there has to be a way that we can control our time, control our schedule and you know, be free from the shackles of employment” and it all kinda revolves around our little boy, Isaac. In the spring of 2012, you know, there was kind of a down period because football was over, I was in that weight-lifting type season, so you know, you had a little extra time in the afternoons, and you know, just kind of going through the motions of going to school, teaching, going to the weight-room and coming home at five or six o’clock, you know, playing with the kids for about an hour before they went to sleep, maybe watch a TV show with Jocelyn and go to bed. We were kind of in that routine, everybody’s routine that you go through throughout life. You know, you go to work, you come home, see kids for a minute, have dinner, watch TV and go to bed, whatever. Everything was just rolling along and Isaac, at this time, his behavior was changing. He was really, really afraid of the dark, he kept getting more and more afraid of being in the dark, he was really like afraid to go to the bathroom, and he was like really clingy to us. He was like – he was afraid of like be away from us or apart from us at any time, and he wouldn’t go into the bathroom, like it was like scary for him, and he would say, “I’m scared of the bathroom” and like, you know, but we just kind of summed all of this up as basically part of growing up. You know, potty training stinks, every parent listening knows that potty training is, by far, the worst time of your life, agree Jocelyn?
JOCELYN: Yes. It was really rough.
SHANE: And then kids are clingy when they are three or four years old, and all kids are scared of the dark. So, I mean, we really didn’t think anything about this and then Isaac started saying some things to Jocelyn, like he didn’t want to go to the daycare center anymore. And we were like, “Why are you not going?” And he was like, “I’m scared, I don’t want to go” but we just once again, you know, kind of chalked it up to kids, they are scared of stuff. Well, one morning, we dropped Isaac off, I came to school and Isaac got dropped off for daycare, and I got a call from Jocelyn and said, “We’ve got to go get Isaac and take him somewhere else, there’s something wrong.” What we found out was that one of the workers there was using time-outs to punish the kids but that worker was putting kids in a dark room for time-outs. And it was like a dark room with no windows, and it was terrifying them, and when that worker – when the kid had to go to the bathroom then that kid was locking them in the bathroom, in the dark, to try to make them hurry, so that they would get out of the bathroom quick and they didn’t have to worry about that. And we found out that his has been going on for a long time and this was the reason that Isaac was being more and more terrified of going into bathrooms of all kinds, and darkness. He was scared of the dark, and he was really terrified to be separated from me and Jocelyn because you know, we didn’t know this was happening, and we were dropping him off and he knew that when he was separated from us, that this scary thing was happening to him. So, once Jocelyn and me figured this out, you know, I was at school and I said, “I got to go, I got to leave, I got to go take care of this right now” because Isaac was actually there, he was at the day care, and we had to go and get him out and take care of the problem, which I was pretty mad at the time.
JOCELYN: And we were just trying to get some more information, you know, we’ve got a three-year-old telling us some things, and we really needed to deal with this. We needed to go and confront the people and it ended up being a lot deeper situation, and we had to get some other people involved at the state level, but anyway, that’s not really the important of the story. The important part is we needed to take care of something and we needed to take care of it right then.
SHANE: Right then. At that moment in time, there was no waiting till after work, period. We had to go deal with this, and Jocelyn wanted me to come down and deal with it right then and there. So, I go next-door and I tell my buddy, I said, “Hey, come watch the classroom a minute, I got to go get the principal to get me a sub, and have them come up here an watch my class till my sub gets here ‘cause I got to go. There’s something wrong with Isaac.” And so he goes over and watches, I go downstairs, the main principal was gone that day, and there was an assistant principal there, and I go in and I say, “I have to go, there’s something wrong with my son, something has happened and I have to go deal with it right now.” So I asked the assistant principal, I said, “Can you please call a sub, and until the sub gets here, go wait with my class so I don’t have to wait until the sub gets here? I really need to leave like right now.” And I’ll never forget this, the assistant principal looked up at me and said, “No, I can’t do that.” And I said, “What do you mean you can’t do that?” And the assistant principal said, “Is your son in danger? Is he hurt? Is there something wrong? Is he in the hospital?” I said, “Well no, I mean no, but there’s something I got to deal with right now.” And the assistant principal just looked back at me and said, “Well, I’m sorry, you’re going to have to deal with it after school if your child is not in a danger. There’s no protocol that says I have to let you go or I have to get a sub and I don’t have time right now to go watch your class.” And I just couldn’t believe it, I couldn’t believe that someone was that callous and said that to me, but by protocol, in this corporate government structure, I guess that because my son was not bleeding out, they had – they thought that they could just like totally tell me I couldn’t go anywhere. And I looked at the assistant principal and I said, well, what are you going to do if I just leave? And then said, “If you leave, you could be fired or you will definitely get in trouble because, you know, you are under contract to be here today and you are being paid to be here.” And it really hit me at that moment that this person thought because they paid my salary, they could totally dictate all of my time and my life to me. Even when I had something way more important than a job going on, they thought that they had control over my life. And it’s actually kind of true. That’s how most people live their lives; they trade time for dollars and when they trade time for dollars and when they say, “I’ll give you my time, you get control of this time, and you give me my salary,” you basically enter into some kind of servant-master relationship. This is something that we have learnt lately as our team has grown. The IRS, the government, actually defines an employee as “Someone who receives money in exchange for control of their time.” If I can tell you when to be at work, and when you can leave, and what you have to do during those hours, and I can tell you when you get sick days and when you get vacation days, then that is what defines you as my employee. It is when you relinquish control of your time and time is life. So, you are actually saying this to an employer, “Here, have my life for a little bit of money.” So I just didn’t even know what to do at that point and I just said, “Fine, do whatever you got to do because I’m leaving.” And I left, and we went down and we got my son, and we took him to a safe place and he got to a new place where we were going to let him stay, and then we dealt with the issue later, and I actually did get – not in trouble bad, but I actually got kind of a “Hey, don’t ever do that again.” I got called in and was talked by the main principal about this, because I had broken protocol and I had left the building when I wasn’t supposed to. That was actually – I was under contract, I had to be there because, yes, my son needed me, but my students needed me too. So, that was kind of the catalyst for this entire endeavor that we are in now. As I was driving back that day, that 30-minute drive to get to my little boy, I said to myself, “I’m going to whatever it takes, whatever it takes to get out of this situation where someone else controls my time; because time is life, and I am not going to exchange it for a couple of thousand bucks anymore.”
JOCELYN: So it was at that point that Shane started, rather obsessively, looking for other opportunities –
SHANE: Me? Obsessed?
JOCELYN: Yeah, he gets a bit obsessed with pretty much everything, but he started really looking for other opportunities and I just want to follow that story up by saying that everything is fine with Isaac now, we dealt with everything that we needed to deal with, and we have moved forward, but it was at that time we realized that maybe this is not the right path for us, and maybe we were meant to do something else. And I think it should also be said that we are not people who missed work very often; in fact, we hardly missed it at all. I know there are some people out there who might be thinking, “Well, he did this all the time.” No, that wasn’t the case, it was just that we felt like we were locked into this system that didn’t even appreciate all the things that we did. So, Shane is looking for something else, he is tossing around some ideas, he talked about mowing people’s yards in the summer time –
SHANE: I was like, man, I’ll just go mow people’s freaking grass and I will shovel snow, if I have to, just to control my own schedule basically.
JOCELYN: But I was kinda against that because in my opinion, it was more time for dollars –
SHANE: I wanted to wash cars, like I would go pick up people’s cars and just go wash them and then bring it back for like thirty bucks.
JOCELYN: Yeah, aside from the fact that you would not have been very good at that –
SHANE: Not a lot of attention to detail.
JOCELYN: Yeah, so he wouldn’t have been very good at that, but then also like I was saying is, more time for dollars, we’re already spending tons of time for dollars, and now he’s talking about on summer breaks or on winter breaks, taking on these more-time-for-dollar type jobs. And I’m like no, there’s no way we can do that. So time goes by, the semester – this is the spring semester at school, so the spring semester is coming to a close; in education, it sort of goes in seasons like you start out really fired up and ready for the new school year, by the time fall break rolls around in October you get a nice little breath of fresh air to take you through to the holidays, after the holidays you have a lot of snow and you get a few snow days, so that’s kind of good, and then it’s the long haul of like February and March, which are like never-ending –
SHANE: Miserable, and it’s twice as miserable now because I hate everything around going to work after that incident, and I’m just like, I felt like that I was just like a worker going to build the pyramids every day and this whips to my back. And just – like every time I would get there at seven o’clock and leave at five or six, I just felt like my entire life was being wasted at this nine to five job, working you know, just in some system for someone else.
JOCELYN: So, spring break rolls around and again you are sort of getting a breath of fresh air into May, June, when school is out. So school is finally out, it’s summer time rolled around, you know, we’ve kind of – I won’t say we’ve forgotten about everything, but it’s kind of lightened up a little bit, so Shane is not quite as obsessed until one day he started mowing the yard. He decides he’s going to listen to some business podcasts, I guess, to get some inspiration for what we can do for the rest of our lives.
SHANE: Yeah, when we left – when school came out, I was determined that summer that you know, I had about four weeks for vacation, until football started, and I was determined that during that three to four weeks, I already had all my playbooks ready to go, so I really didn’t need to do anything much in June besides you know, actually be on vacation. So I said, “I am going to find something this summer, that is going to get us out of the nine to five. I don’t know what it is, I don’t know how to do it.” And I would always look at Jocelyn and say, “Look, all we got to do is get a hundred people to give us 50 dollars and that’s 5000 dollars” and Jocelyn would be like –
JOCELYN: What?
SHANE: How are you going to do that? I said, “I don’t know how I’m going to do it, I don’t know what I’m going to sell, I don’t know where I’m going to sell it, but if I can just get 100 people to give us 50 dollars a month in profit, then we can quit our jobs ‘cause that will be enough to make a living.” So I was determined in June to figure this out.
JOCELYN: So, he’s outside doing some yard work, he’s listening to podcasts and he comes busting in the door one day, we told this story on a lot of podcasts but he comes busting in the door and he’s like, “I got it, this is our ticket to freedom, we’re going to quit our jobs.”
SHANE: And sell emails. We’re going to sell things on email, we’ll sell PDFs of information.
JOCELYN: Yeah, and I’m like “What? I mean, people do that?”
SHANE: Yeah.
JOCELYN: So, to make a long story very short, we started our websites later that month, we started actually a series of different websites just to see what would happen, and things started selling. We started making money, and it wasn’t a ton of money at first, but it was enough to at least open the door and just turn the light on and say, “Hey, this is possible.”
SHANE: And we got a lot different stories, there was an awesome blog post that we’ve got on our website where we talk about the first money we made online, and we always say 11 cents changed our life. We tried a lot of things but failed that summer, but when we actually did start like making a little money, then we started making some digital products, we started selling those and in I think August, was it August of 2012 that we made the couple of thousand bucks?
JOCELYN: And it was like July or August –
SHANE: Yeah, July or August, we actually made over 2000 dollars, and that was when we realized that we might have a chance if we can make this grow. Yes, we have to go back to work this year, yes, we have to go grind through it and we’re going to have to figure out a way, we’re going to have to put the time in at night, stay up late, get up early, help each other and work as hard as we can to build this, but if we can make 2000 dollars in a month, it wouldn’t be that much more difficult to get up to where we can replace our income. We needed about 7000-8000 dollars a month we figured, that way after taxes we would still have that 5000 dollars a month. We had to figure out all kinds of things like you know, how are we going to have insurance, how are we going to do this, how are we going to do that and we are going to save that for another story another day, but we knew it was possible when we started making that first money online, and we knew that we had a chance to really free ourselves from the corporate government society machine that says, you know, you have to trade your life to other people.
JOCELYN: And you know, there might be a lot of people out there, I was just thinking about this as we are talking about the story that might say, “Well, you should be thankful that you have a job” and we were.
SHANE: Yeah.
JOCELYN: It’s like I said before, we were happy enough, I mean, we were thankful for what we had, I mean compared to a lot of people out there –
SHANE: Especially then, this was right after the big recession, so yeah, we were totally grateful and blessed to have the jobs that we did.
JOCELYN: But, it’s just that we felt like there was something more out there, and that we could sharing things that we had, the gifts that we had with other people out there. And so that’s why when we got this opportunity, we were so passionate about it, just freeing ourselves from just what we thought was, I guess, being restricted, or having to keep the gifts that we have to ourselves.
SHANE: And we also realized too like it wasn’t about making money; like I think that’s what a lot of people try to get into online business for, and if you are doing that just because you want to be rich and be an entrepreneur, “working on the beach in Bali” like we always say, you know, that’s not what it’s all about. It’s about time freedom. That’s one of the biggest catalysts for our journey starting was that someone else was dictating our time. If you’re employed by someone, they own you, they really do, the government says they do. The government defines you as someone who gives up their time, who let’s someone else tell them how to live their life, and that was what started this whole journey and that is what we worked for today. It’s not just for making more money or bragging about seven-figure launches and all that stuff; to us, every day we wake up and say, “Are our needs meet? Yes. Do we have enough extra to be free in our time, in our schedule? Are we location independent? Can we work from anywhere?” Can we go to our – couple of weeks ago, we went to our son’s first swimming event, his first swimming race, we were free to do that, we could take our computers and between races we checked emails, we checked on the forums in the Flip Your Life community, that’s what this was to all of us. Especially looking back now, was to find that freedom in our life to live life in our own terms, not just have millions of dollars laying around.
JOCELYN: So we went through that year and had quite a nice string of four-figure months back to back, and that was just fantastic; we were thrilled with our progress.
SHANE: What was our highest month do you think like? 3000 dollars?
JOCELYN: Yeah, I think I had a sale and it was maybe like 3000-4000 one month, something like that, so it was great; I mean we were thrilled because like we said before, we were bringing in like 5000 a month from teaching. So that added on top of what we were making from teaching was great, I mean, it was a great income and the bad thing was that we were almost working two fulltime jobs because I was coming home from school, and I was working on all the website stuff.
SHANE: Plus, we had two kids so we were constantly trading off like between our online businesses; like I would come home from practice, take the kids, Jocelyn would work on her online business, she would then – then we would put the kids to bed, and then Jocelyn will take a break and I would stay up till 11 or 12 to work on the online business. And we just kind of were killing ourselves but we weren’t making enough money yet to clear our jobs. We weren’t confident that a couple of thousand bucks a month was going to cut it because we needed, you know, 5000 dollars a month. So, we decided in 2013 that we weren’t making enough money yet and we had to go back to our teaching jobs.
JOCELYN: Yeah, we were sort of on a little edge of success, I guess you would say, in the summer of 2013 because the Elementary Librarian website was about a year old and it was really picking up, and June and July, it had a really, really exciting couple of months. June was the high four-figures and July ended up being a five-figure month and that was the first five figure month that we had had selling stuff online.
SHANE: But it still wasn’t like – but we were like, is this just the beginning of the school year, is this just a one-time fluke, I mean it still wasn’t like – yeah, it was five figures but it wasn’t like 99,999 it was like 15 or 12 –
JOCELYN: I was like maybe 15 or something like that. I can’t remember exactly, but we had to go back to school like in the beginning of August. So, even though it wasn’t a five figure month, it wasn’t really convincing enough to say, “Oh, we really shouldn’t go back.” Well, the next month, August 2013 was a really exciting month, that was like 36,000 dollars, which was nearly what we made as a teacher, one of us. So we were really, really excited about that –
SHANE: But we were still kind of like, “Is this real?” We knew that the months would go down a little bit, January and February had not been great in early 2013 just because it was winter, there were snow days across the country, and people weren’t buying the digital products that we were selling. And you know, my products were being sold but they were only for like during football season, so that definitely wasn’t going to be producing a ton of income during the spring, and we had no clue if that was going to happen or not. So, we had a tough decision to make in August 2013; right towards the end, we were looking at the numbers, and we realized that we probably had enough money to make it on the bills that we currently had for like 8-9 months, with the money that we had made in July and August. And I started looking at this really closely, and I was doing some serious math because Jocelyn was not quitting her job at this point –
JOCELYN: No, I was convinced that I was going to be at school until May, and there was no way, we just could not do this for 8000 reasons; I mean, that’s just the person that I am.
SHANE: I was in the middle of football season, school was going on, we had just started school about a month in, and nobody quits a teaching job except for like at Christmas and in the summer. That’s just not the way it works.
JOCELYN: Well, mostly in the summer. I mean, you almost always finish up your contract, and it was becoming time for contracts to come around, they usually come around like the first couple of weeks of September –
SHANE: And we had not actually signed our contracts yet, because you were just assumed that you were going to come back for employment, and then they get your contract and you sign it kind of at the beginning of the year. Now, I want to preface this next part by saying that Jocelyn and I had made some serious sacrifices to prepare ourselves to quit our job. When we started making money online, we knew that it someday might be possible, if we were ready when that moment came. So, we made sure we had all of our debts paid off, we didn’t have a car payment or anything like that, and we had actually sold that big, nice house with the pool that Jocelyn was telling you about earlier in this episode and we bought a little bit more modest house. We had a house that was sitting on half an acre, we now sit – our house is now on a quarter acre, we still have a two-car garage, we have like 1900 square foot house, really nice house, we love it, good yard for the kids, but it is a little bit smaller, a little bit modest than the house that we had before. But we knew that one of the conditions for quitting our job was being able to reduce our bills. So we had sold our house, we had cancelled cable, we weren’t getting anything kind of extra because when we got to the point where we were making enough money where we were close, we wanted to be able to pull the trigger and have that little bit of security because we had built a life that was easily sustainable by that online business. So, I am looking at this at the end of August and I am a jump-off-the-cliff person, Jocelyn is not. Jocelyn is prepping parachutes for three months and testing them five times before anything happens.
JOCELYN: Yeah, and I even said, I was like, I am not quitting until May.
SHANE: She’s not doing it.
JOCELYN: Yeah, will not do it.
SHANE: So, I just went like I always do, I just started getting really excited, and I just laid it all out that I knew we could do this, this was the moment that there was no reason for us to wait until May; I said, “If we can do this part time, what happens when it’s full-time?” That was my whole belief in us that we could make this happen and take it to the next level beyond anything in our wildest dreams, if we pushed all the chips in and said, “We are quitting,” if we went all in and said, “Now is our time, we can do this,” if we burned the boats and we leave ourselves no retreat, no way back, then we can make this happen. So, I don’t even know how I talked Jocelyn into doing this –
JOCELYN: I really don’t either.
SHANE: I have no clue, I don’t remember like the specific conversation, I don’t remember if it was just me, sometimes I just keep talking until Jocelyn agrees with me –
JOCELYN: Yeah, most of the time.
SHANE: – which drives Jocelyn absolutely crazy, but I just was so convinced and I believed so much that this was our path and that we had to do this, that somehow, by mid-September, I talked Jocelyn into quitting and we did. We walked in on the same day, and turned in our letters of resignation, and our principals were shocked at us, I mean, totally like mass confusion. They couldn’t even believe it. I’ll never even forget my principal saying to me, “How long have you been teaching?” “I’ve been in nine years” and he said, “Wow, you’ve only got like 18 years left and you could retire.” And I remember thinking to myself in that meeting, “Dude that’s 18 years, that’s a long freaking time, I’m not going to sit around for 18 years waiting for retirement.” But that’s the mentality of people who are locked in the nine to five system, the society teaches. “Oh, you just put in your time and you’ll be okay when you are 67-and-a-half.” So we went in, we put in our letters of resignation the same day and then two weeks later, on 9/27/2013, it was the first day that we got to stay home and work for ourselves.
JOCELYN: So that first day that we quit, I mean, it was just really surreal; we woke up, we put on our robes like we do most days now, and we just sat around and worked on things for our own business. We had people from school that would text us, and be like, “Oh, I’m so jealous” because they had PD that day, Professional Development, or continuing education –
SHANE: Which sucks, which is terrible.
JOCELYN: Yeah, and that was the day we decided to quit because we really didn’t need the continuing education, obviously.
SHANE: When I talked Jocelyn into quitting, she looked – because Jocelyn is a very meticulous person and had to plan exactly the day that she had to not be at work, and she is like, “Oh, this is the day we have to sit in Professional Development for eight hours, that’s the first day we should not go to work.” So, we put our two week notice in to line up with that day so we could just wake up and sit and drink coffee together.
JOCELYN: I don’t drink coffee, I’m a tea drinker.
SHANE: She drinks tea, I’m sorry.
JOCELYN: Yeah, so we got up and we are just hanging out, and I remember the very first day, it was a beautiful late September day in Kentucky, and I just took a quilt into the backyard and I just went out and read a book for a while, because first I’m a nerd and second, it is a beautiful day outside and just because I could. So, it was pretty cool, like I still remember that day and exactly what I was doing
SHANE: And what was exciting to me, just kind of to wrap up this part of the story, and then Jocelyn is going to let you know what we are going to talk about next week on the show is, it wasn’t the – making 36,000 dollars in a month for the first time was incredible. It was amazing, it blew our mind that that was even possible because you can’t imagine it’s possible, and you just don’t believe the gurus and they say they make money like that, and you just think it’s not real until it kinda happens. Even the six-figure months, like we’ve had months where we’ve made a lot of money, but like nothing was as satisfying as looking out of the window, and seeing Jocelyn reading her book on a quilt. Nothing was as satisfying as knowing, any time anything happens, like when Isaac or Ana get sick at school, we leave, we take care of it. We can drop anything at any time, and that’s what our quit-aversary reminds us of every year. We have built this freedom business, that allows us – we control how much money we make, we control how much time we spend on our business, that’s a huge goal for us right now is to removing ourselves from work, so that we can focus more on helping others, focus more in doing things for people, focus more on our kids, and our families and our relationships. So that time freedom, that was the original goal after that incident with the principal at school. That was the trigger that said, “What do you want out of life?” And really what we wanted was freedom and that’s where we are today and that’s where we are – right now, we have total freedom in our time, in everything, and in our life and that’s what we really want for all of you who are listening to us. Our goal is to not always just to teach you how to start a webinar, our goal is not to teach you how to just write emails, our goal is to inspire you and show you that a couple of regular kids from Kentucky figured out how to make some money online, and freed themselves from the shackles of employment, to free themselves from being a part of the system because you don’t have to do that. Anyone can do this, not everyone will, but anyone can make it online, if they put in the effort, they have the right mindset and they do the things that lead to our success.
JOCELYN: And more than anything, we just want you to know that we are regular people. We know what it’s like to be where a lot of you are. I mean, I still remember it very clearly, even though it was two years ago, I still remember what I felt like –
SHANE: Getting up on a Monday and –
JOCELYN: Yeah, and getting up at 5:40 to go to work every single day –
SHANE: And seeing that paycheck and wondering, “Where is the rest of it?”
JOCELYN: There’s got to be something more –
SHANE: There’s got to be something more than that.
JOCELYN: And we totally get that, like we know where you’ve been, and I think that that is something that we can say that not everyone out there who does what we do can say.
SHANE: And we made it happen too, that’s another thing I really want to stress, like I’m really proud of. We didn’t stumble on this, we didn’t accidentally make a good product, it was deliberate, it was planned, it was sleeves rolled up, nose to the ground, you know pushing the grindstone, getting it done stuff, and that’s really what it takes to make it online, is to get out there and to take that success and make the life that you want for yourself. You can’t sit around and hope that you find “the perfect 1200 dollars 20-video series” that shows you how to make online or, “This is the way to do it.” No, you just got to find your niche and you got to make it happen and you know, we did that, you can do that, we’re confident that you can make this happen to so you get to live a flipped lifestyle like we do, and you get to do the things we do.
JOCELYN: And with that in mind, that is a perfect ending to this week’s show. And we are going to be bringing to you, for the next few weeks, some success habits that we have adopted or that we have done since we started our online business, and these are practical things that anyone can do. And just like Shane said, I actually have a blog post called “Online business is for anyone but not for everyone” and there’s some really good reasons for that. So I hope that you’ll join us the next few weeks to check out our success habits, and before we leave today, let’s wrap up with our can’t-miss moments.
SHANE: Mine is definitely, 100%, is Isaac’s first swim meet. Isaac has just started competing, we’ve had a lot of trouble getting Isaac to play sports, he’s not a big sports guy, he’s really not a big team sports guy, he’s kind of an individual, he’s a little introverted and he just kind of does his own thing, but he loves swimming, he’s kind of in the pool by himself and I just had – proud papa, heart filled with love and pride watching him do his first 25-meter backstroke. It was an awesome moment, he did a great job, he came in third place in his heat, he was competing in the under eight-year-old division, and he’s only six, so he’s just done an amazing job, he loves to swim, and he just did his absolute best. So, I was super proud of that and I was – it was awesome to be able to just take off for a weekend and we actually went down, we went to an indoor water park, and we made like a little weekend vacation out of it just because we could. That was definitely my can’t-miss moment for last week.
JOCELYN: And mine was probably going to the apple orchard with our daughter Ana, she had a field trip with her preschool, and we got to go – both of us go to go, there were very few children who had both mom and dad there –
SHANE: I think I saw one other kid that had the mom and dad actually there.
JOCELYN: Yeah, it was awesome, we get to go out, we picked apples and we played on the playground and we went out to lunch with her, and those are things we might not have had the opportunity to do without our online business. So, we are super-thankful for all of that.
SHANE: So keep tuning in this month, it’s going to be a fun month as we go over our success habits and we look back at the things that we believe led us to the point that we are at today, we are also going to look back with a little 20-20 hindsight, and put a little wisdom back on the all of the memories of our journey over the last two years, and we are going to tell you some things that we did wrong. We are going to tell you some mistakes that we made along the way and we are going back to tell you things we wish we had done differently. Those things, if we could go back, you know, you never have regrets, but if we could go back a few things to maybe take as farther or maybe get us along the path to success faster, we are going to go over that as well. So it’s going to be a really fun month, and we really think even with all the great content that we put out, all the how-to stuff that we love to deliver to you guys every single week, we think the next two to three episodes are really going to be impactful, not only in your online business but in your mindset and in your life. So tune in for that, we can’t wait to help you guys out, we can’t wait to talk to you all again next week, and if you like to help you with your online business right now, you can head on over to fliplifestyle.com/flipyourlife and you can take part in our coaching community. And until next time, we will catch you all on the flip side. Thanks for listening.
JOCELYN: Bye!
Misty says
My favorite podcast to date… because achieving this type of lifestyle is determined as much (if not more) by the mindset/attitude and not just the nuts and bolts! Thanks for sharing this part of your journey S & J.
Walt says
Awesome podcast!! You really got me fired up to continue pushing on and working that much harder. I don’t want to be somebody’s servant! Just the inspiration I needed this week. Thank you so much!
Patrick J Roden says
S&J I so enjoyed this podcast. Looking forward to the next one.
You’ll never know how much I needed to hear it this morning 😉
Best, Patrick
(“Needed to hear” seems to be the theme)
Wessman Eric A. says
Howdy-
I have been getting error messages as I have tried to download this episode and your previous one on my iPhone using iTunes. Do you know if anyone else is having this problem?
Thanks,
Eric
Y. Y. says
Thanks for sharing your story about your son. Knowing your inspiration to start your businesses adds to the power of your success story. I look forward to your future podcasts this month. Congratulations!
Sarah says
This episode was so great and timely for me. It reminds me of what my ultimate goal is and just keep going! Thanks for sharing your amazing story as always.
Kristine says
I loved this episode, too. It was a good reminder of the “why” we’re working so hard and putting ourselves through so much stress. Can’t wait for more like this!