Launching an Offbeat and Sustainable Business w/ Jason Zook #953

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Out of Money. I'm Joel, I'm Matt, and
today we're talking about launching an offbeat and sustainable small
business with Jason Zook.

Speaker 2 (00:26):
Yeah, Joel, So my goal for this episode is for
folks to finish listening and to be completely inspired to
start their own little business. And in part because I
think that, unfortunately, there can be this aura around starting
a quote unquote official business that just keeps individuals who
are creatives like these are folks who have great ideas,
but it keeps them from pursuing something that is going

(00:48):
to light them up in such a way that it
is like so contagious that it almost can't help. But
to be a successful adventure, a lot of folks gravitate
towards like, oh, yeah, I want to get that NBA.
That's how I'm going to get ahead, and might be
the best path to take, I think for a certain subset,
but there are a lot of folks out there who
might be better served by just going for and fearing

(01:08):
it out along the way. And we're joined today by
someone who's basically done that his entire life. Jason Zuke
is an entrepreneur who takes a very unconventional approach to
starting a business. He and his wife currently run Wandering Aimfully,
which seeks to help creative entrepreneurs to build sustainable businesses
that fit with their lifestyle, all while avoiding, you know,

(01:30):
the just the burnout that tends to come with that
hustle culture. And so to talk about that today is
Jason Zuke. Jason, thanks for taking the time to speak
with us today.

Speaker 3 (01:40):
Thanks so much for having me. Can't wait to share
some stories. And I've got some big inspirational shoes to
fill that you set up there, but I will do
my best.

Speaker 1 (01:49):
Oh man, You've got a lot of stories. Can't wait
to delve into some of them. Jason. First question, though,
what do you like to supoort? John. We know you're
being smart, you're thinking ahead, saving for the future, but
there's got to be something that you're sporting spending big
money on in the here and now too.

Speaker 3 (02:05):
Right, Yes, I'm going to answer this two parts because
I think it deserves two answers. One is a very
specific one. I used to have what I would call
the Ugmunk budget, and my friend Jeff Sheldon runs this
incredible company called Ugmunk ugmo NK, and I used to
just buy pretty much every single thing that he made,
and most of his stuff was like accessories for your desk.

(02:26):
Used to do a lot of T shirts, but they
were all like very well crafted, beautiful things. And so
at a certain point, like my wife and I would
like we review our expenses, like you're literally spending like
forty dollars a month on ugunk ugmunk. Can we just
make it a budgetary item so that like we don't
have to think about where to put it, just like
you have an ugmunk budget. And so that I think
is like my first thing, Like if anybody has a

(02:47):
company they love to support, you want to just make
sure that company exists in the world, love.

Speaker 4 (02:51):
It, create a budget for it.

Speaker 3 (02:52):
But what that has evolved in for us because we
actually moved to Portugal now, so it's very hard for
me to buy things from the US because I don't
want to ship them across the conon and if I
don't have to or the world if you will, is
we just have what we call a life improvement budget,
and this is where we just have a certain amount
of money every month and it has kind of gone
up since.

Speaker 4 (03:08):
We got out of debt.

Speaker 3 (03:09):
When we first started it was twenty dollars a month
and that was the budget, but now it's somewhere closer
to like two hundred dollars a month than like last year.
I don't think I used half of it, but we
have this money set aside, and like this past year,
I bought a kitchen aid mixer, like for the first
time for my baking habits because I bake like two
batches of cookies a week for our little neighborhood because
I can't eat them all because I would, you know, die.

Speaker 4 (03:31):
Of sugar overdose. But health reasons, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 3 (03:34):
But I just found myself, like, you know what I'm
gonna treat. I've been making cookies for probably like ten years,
and I've never had one. I was like, I'll just
splurge and buy it, and like it was really hard
to press that buy button. But having that little discretionary
budget that we have set aside made it.

Speaker 4 (03:46):
A lot easier.

Speaker 3 (03:47):
So yeah, just this little like personal life improvement budget
or having like a specific type of company you like support,
that's always been fun for me.

Speaker 2 (03:54):
Okay, So how do you discriminate? How do you decide
whether or not what you're succumbing to lifestyle creep as
opposed to what you're calling a life improvement line item
on your budget every single month.

Speaker 3 (04:07):
Yeah, I think the thing like we, my wife and
I just defined pretty much every year, we set like
our life budget, and that's based on you know, our
business and financial goals that we have and then you know,
obviously an amount of money that we can spend each year,
and it you know, some years it has been a
little bit more than others. Like when we first moved
here to Portugal, our life improvement budget was you know,
much higher for that first year because we had nothing,

(04:29):
like we moved here with just two suitcases and two backpacks,
and so there were many things that obviously we let
go of when we left the States that we needed
to buy, so it was spent. It was more spent
that year, but it was still within the budget that
we set. So I think the budget for each of
us was like two hundred dollars per month in that
first year, and we still spent under that. But it's
because we set that budget ahead of time, where we said,
we think this is a fair amount for both of

(04:50):
us to spend. So for us, it doesn't feel like
lifestyle creep because even if that number maybe goes up
fifty bucks a year or something like that in the
monthly budget, it doesn't feel kind of like it is creeping.
We're just defining it, but it doesn't feel like so much.
So it feels like we're being intentional about that spend,
and we know that that spend is doing something that
we like doing in our life. And it's not just

(05:11):
like buying a consumable thing because it looked cool on
an Instagram ad and we felt like we needed to
buy it.

Speaker 1 (05:17):
All right, I love that good explanation. Let's we have
a lot we want to cover, specifically on the small
business front with you, Jason, and I can't wait to
kind of talk about some of the methodology and your
approach to the starting small businesses. But we've got to
start with kind of maybe some of your random and
humble beginnings. You might literally, and I think you wrote
this in a blog post on your website, you might

(05:37):
be the origin of the modern day influencer. I think
there's some truth to that. Talk to us. Maybe start
with the I Wear your Shirt campaign that you launched
many years ago.

Speaker 3 (05:48):
This was two thousand and eight. I need everybody listening
to hear that two thousand and eight. That's seventeen years ago,
which Wolf that's crazy. I basically had this idea standing
in my closet one day. I was looking at a
bunch of my T shirts and I was about to
put one on. I think it was like a Nike
shirt or something, and I was like, wait a second,
I'm putting on a shirt that I've paid for that

(06:08):
represents this brand and I'm giving them some type of advertising.
And something stuck in my head. And at the time,
I had a design business that I was running with
a friend, and we had clients of ours that were
obviously very very forward thinking because they were asking us like, hey,
Twitter is starting to get some traction. Should we be
on it? What should we be saying? What should we
be doing. I was like, first of all, I don't
know why you're asking us. We don't even have Twitter

(06:29):
accounts right now. But I guess they thought we were
kind of cool at the time. And I started logging
into these platforms, and that moment in that closet and
being on these platforms really clicked for me of like, oh,
there's going to be a connection at some point between
people and brands and eventually through just thinking about this
idea for a while, I just thought about that moment

(06:50):
in the closet. I was like, what if I just
charged people to wear T shirts? And I'm not going
to go walk around like a mall because who really
cares anymore? You're not getting that many eyeballs on you anyway.
But the Internet open you up to this amazing space.
And I'm saying this now, explaining this to people who
are like, it's twenty twenty five, come on, like we
all know, but in two thousand and eight, this novel,
it literally blew people's minds. They're like, there's no way, Like,

(07:10):
no one's going to see you on Twitter, no one's
going to look at your Facebook account. But sure enough,
like as I started that project, I set it up
where it was a dollar on the first day, and
then two dollars in the second day, three dollars in
the third day, and I basically sold the entire calendar
year at face value of the day of the year
by the dollar. And this pricing scheme ended up becoming
its own little business called bump Sale. But I sold

(07:32):
out that first year in just a couple months, and
it was very difficult like I've written about the story
and you can read a lot more if you want
to read about it or hear about it. But once
it got going, it really picked up ahead of steam.
And before I knew it, I had Warren shirts for
sixteen hundred brands. I had worked for five years as
a professional paid T shirt wear, which is ridiculous, but
it was hard work. I mean I was filming a

(07:53):
YouTube video every day, editing a live video, or filming
a live video show every day. You know, Casey Nistat
very famous in the YouTube world for going you know,
doing live video or daily video vlogs for a long time.
I did that for eight hundred and eighty nine days
straight before taking a break. Wow, and that was There
were terrible videos. Let me just be clear, They're not
the quality of Casey Nystat's amazing videos. But I really

(08:16):
I just found something early on in that kind of
business idea. And I don't personally like to say that
like I'm the first social media influencer. I think if
anybody is, it's probably I Justine. I think she really
would get that crown because that was the person that
I looked up to on YouTube at that time. But
I was very much the first to really tie brands
into people talking about them on a consistent basis.

Speaker 2 (08:37):
It's a new way of thinking about, Yeah, these different
businesses out there and what they're looking after, the eyeballs
and the attention which we hear a lot about now, right,
the attention economy that we live in.

Speaker 4 (08:46):
Exactly.

Speaker 2 (08:47):
Then you sold your last name and not just once,
but twice?

Speaker 1 (08:51):
Is that right?

Speaker 4 (08:51):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (08:52):
Yeah, tell us about that.

Speaker 2 (08:53):
Because it sounds a bit more like a stunt than
an actual business. But you did actually make money by
doing this.

Speaker 4 (08:59):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (09:00):
Sure.

Speaker 3 (09:00):
I grew up I had three different last names, which was,
you know, kind of a bummer growing up as a kid.
Your last name is changing, and that happens to a
lot of people. And as I actually found out when
I launched this project called buy my last Name dot com,
I really loved very like straightforward domain names. I wear
your shirt, buy my last name like very just like,
you know, to the point I found out that a
lot of people were actually in a kind of a

(09:20):
similar situation that I was, where they kind of got
left with a last name they didn't want. And so
it was twenty twelve and I my mom had been
through a divorce and I now had this last name
I didn't want any more. And I was like, well,
what do I choose? And I had been doing this
I we your shirt project for a couple of years
and in that time I had like a sponsored road
trip and my dog got sponsored for like a month,
and like I'd been doing all these weird sponsored things

(09:42):
and I just had this moment. I was sitting with
my my then girlfriend now wife, and a guy who
worked with me, and we were sitting at a cafe
or something, and I was like, what if I sold
my last name for just like a year. And they
were like, oh, geez, here we go, Like what what
do you want to do?

Speaker 4 (09:56):
And I was like I don't know.

Speaker 3 (09:57):
Just like I had this thought of like I could
do it as like an ebase auction started at zero
dollars and just let people bid for thirty days and
just see where it ends up. And in our minds
we walked away from that lunch like great, let's do this,
Like what's the worst it's going to happen. We'll set parameters.
It's not going to be anything like bad or salacious.
I'm gonna let be my last name, but maybe we'll
make like five or ten thousand dollars, like that would

(10:18):
be amazing. In the first twenty four hours, the bidding
got up to thirty three thousand dollars. I gets and
I was shocked and immediately got like phone calls from
USA today. There was like a bidding war on what
a program I would show up on to announce my
last name when it like finished at the end. And
so for the first year, it finished with the company
headsets dot com, and so legally I changed my name.

(10:39):
I literally went to a court and changed my name
to Jason headsets dot com. And I remember the judge
looking at me. Now, remind you it's twenty twelve, so
like we're still not like that far into the like
weird internet space. He was just like, are you serious?
And I was like yeah, and he was like all right, man,
and just like hit the gavel and I was like, well,
that was fun kind of funny.

Speaker 4 (10:59):
And then I did it.

Speaker 3 (11:00):
This second year, I ended up writing a book about
my kind of I rearshirt journey, and you know what
we ended up calling my creativity for sale years, which
is what the name of the first book was that
I wrote.

Speaker 4 (11:09):
And I had that.

Speaker 3 (11:10):
Book fully sponsored. There was a sponsored message in every
part of that book. And I sold my last name
for a second time, same auction style, to basically be
on the front cover of that book, because I figured
that was a good bit of real estate. So in
two years, about one hundred thousand dollars generated from selling
my last name and now the last name Zuk or
Zuk however you want to pronounce, it doesn't matter to me.
Is my great grandfather's last name, who was an entrepreneur,

(11:30):
and I'm basically like trying to carry his name forward.

Speaker 1 (11:33):
Wow, there you go, incredible man, I'm getting guinea big
pig vibes from you. Are you? Are you just like
willing to sign yourself up for just think of the
most outrageous things and give it a go and see
if you can make money. Like, I don't know where
does that sort of spark come from to try things
out in this fashion.

Speaker 3 (11:53):
I think like I grew up and I moved around
a lot as a kid, and so I was always
experiencing change, and I think that always being the new kid,
you kind.

Speaker 4 (12:01):
Of have to prove yourself.

Speaker 3 (12:03):
You have to be able to entertain yourself, you have
to be able to kind of stand on your own
two feet, like you're not going to get you know, friends,
right away. You have to kind of like figure things
out all the time.

Speaker 4 (12:11):
And I think that.

Speaker 3 (12:12):
Really served me well as I started to get into
the like business phase of my life. I also had
a lot of odd jobs when I was growing up.
I pumped gas at a gas station. I worked as
a produce boy at a grocery store. I worked at
a Verizon store selling beepers tells you how old I am,
And all these things, I think just led me to
this idea of like, there's not one way to do business,

(12:34):
there's not one way to do life, There's not one way.

Speaker 4 (12:36):
To do anything.

Speaker 3 (12:38):
And as I kind of like got into the I
rear shirt thing, it really opened up my doors because
it proved to me that like, oh, this is a
crazy idea, like why would anybody pay this absolute nobody
who lived in Florida at the time, with no social
media following to do this. And then you fast forward
to five years later and sixteen hundred brands and over
a million dollars generated for this business. Yeah, like anybody

(13:00):
can do these things. And so you know, whether it's
like the idea of being a guinea pig or just
being someone who's like I'm so curious about trying to
think outside the box and to push whatever box exists
to its full edge.

Speaker 4 (13:12):
And then go beyond. I'm not going to do anything weird.

Speaker 3 (13:15):
Like I guess this is all weird to people, but
like to me, they're very like considered ideas, They're very thoughtful.

Speaker 4 (13:20):
None of them are like.

Speaker 3 (13:21):
I always got the joke of like, oh, what are
you going to do get like sponsored tattoos? Now I'm like, no,
I'm not an idiot. I don't want to end up
with like dumb things on my body for my entire life.
Like everything I've done has been very temporary and easy to.

Speaker 4 (13:32):
Move on from.

Speaker 3 (13:33):
And so yeah, I just look at all these things
as like incredibly interesting ways to turn different ideas that
have always existed on their heads slightly and to just
think outside the box and kind of look at different
problems in different ways and see can I make money
doing this? Is this a fun thing that can also
help people and get their businesses seen by other people.

Speaker 4 (13:50):
Let's try and make that happen.

Speaker 2 (13:51):
You're obviously not afraid of failure either, and on your
website you'd e document and you detail some of the
different projects that you've attempted and how they didn't pan
out or how they're even just pipe dreams. But I
think what's fascinating about that, Like there's one that you
list out at something human or only human or something
like that, But you talked about how that just led
to so many other opportunities, Like I guess at that

(14:14):
point in time as a designer, it led to a
whole lot of business from a design standpoint, Like we
were just talking about how like there's certain deal makers
who are willing to throw everything out the wall to
see what sticks, and the ability to quickly like leave
things that don't stick and move on. Do you feel
like that that's a big part of how you see
launching some of these different businesses is the fact that, well,

(14:36):
like what's the harm of it? And there's a whole
lot that we could potentially learn one.

Speaker 3 (14:39):
Hundred percent Okay, I think two mottos kind of come
to mind immediately, which is number one, what's the worst
that's going to happen? Like, Okay, I put up a website,
I say I want to wear sponsored T shirts. No
one buys, no one has interest. Six months later, maybe
three months later, maybe one month later, I give up cool,
Like who cares, you know, Like, let me move on
to my next idea. And I think the other thing

(15:00):
that I have really learned over the years is you
don't get what you don't ask for. And I literally
use this in my daily life, like this is something
like I'll use almost anywhere in all aspects of life.
And my wife really hates it sometimes where she's like,
don't ask for that thing, Like you shouldn't ask for that,
like they told you what the offer was to buy
this car or whatever. And I'm like, yeah, but what

(15:21):
does it hurt if I just ask for something different
and the worst thing they're going to do is say no.
And yes, I get it. It can be uncomfortable and
it can be really difficult. But when it comes to
building businesses and like chasing down ideas and trying to
do things that people haven't haven't done before, or even
trying to do things people have done before and just
doing them differently, Yeah, you're gonna run into resistance. You're
gonna run into people who don't like what you're doing.

(15:43):
They're afraid of what you're doing, especially friends and family. Boy,
they are going to push their fears on you like crazy,
and they're going to tell you everything you're trying to
do is a bad idea. Take it from someone who
wore sponsored T shirts for a living for five years
and sold their last name. But it's not about that
to me. To me, it's about going, yeah, but I
love the Steve Jobs quote, and I'm not going to
nail it. But it's like you look around and everything

(16:04):
around you was created by people just like you, right,
and so it's like just accepting this idea that like
no one else is really that much more special than
anybody else. Granted, there are people who are geniuses and
like building things that you and I can't build. But
I think the reality is that the time that we
live in right now, the opportunities are endless for trying
to chase down your ideas, and the worst thing you
can do is stop your own idea from having a

(16:27):
chance to even happen by not even giving it a chance,
by just saying like, oh, I don't think this is
gonna work, or I've tried it for a week and
nothing really, you know, went Well, I don't have a
million dollars in my bank account, yet so I'm gonna
give up and that's not really gonna get you anywhere
in life. And so I think it's about trying to
like push things forward, embrace that failure, see what happens,
and just keep asking questions, keep trying to do things

(16:49):
that maybe feel uncomfortable. But you know, if you do
it a little bit more than somebody else, you're going
to get further than anybody else.

Speaker 1 (16:54):
Will I like that. Yeah. One of the things too.
It seems like, at least as I look around on
your website, calm is a word I saw a lot,
and that seems to be kind of like what you're
striving for in your business now, what you're trying to
help others achieve. And this kind of flies in the
face of something Matt mentioned in the intro, kind of
maybe that early Gary Vaynerchuck vibe of like hustle till

(17:18):
you drop dead. Why is calm such a core tenet
for you guys? And is it just kind of a
pushback against that hustle culture that got out of whack
for a while.

Speaker 3 (17:27):
Very quick funny story, I did not know who Gary
Vaynerchuk was in like twenty ten. I think we were
both speaking at a conference and I sat down to
do my live video show. It was at three o'clock
every single day, and I was doing it like in
the kind of like the off area of the conference,
and so I'm on video and I have like my
like setup and my camera and everything in a mic.

Speaker 4 (17:47):
And Gary walks by and he's like, what are you doing? Man?

Speaker 3 (17:50):
I'm literally talking like I'm doing I'm live and he
just like interrupts. Now, anybody who knows Gary is like,
of course. And I was like, oh, I'm doing this
live stream on ustream and he was like, oh I
know Ustream And I was like, okay, cool man. I
was like waiting for him to leave. He was like,
do you mind if I hop on? And I was
like I guess, Like who are you? And so he
sits down, and I think at the time I had
I'd gained a lot of traction on ustream and I
was a good partner with them, and they would put

(18:12):
me on the homepage and so I would get like
twenty thousand people watching my daily live videos. And he
sat down and people were like, oh my gosh, it's
Gary Vaynerchuk, Like Gary, what's up? And I was like, wait,
who is this person? Like that's how I got introduced
to him, like I was doing live stream and so
I actually I was very inspired by Gary because we
were very i think kindred spirits in the hustle at

(18:33):
that time in life. But I very quickly realized, like,
that doesn't suit me forever. And also I'm not Gary Vaynerchuk.
I don't have all the resources, I don't have all
the energy, I don't have the drive and like the
goals that he has, And I think that really threw
a curveball to me for a few years where I
was really striving to match the goals and the things

(18:55):
that those types of people wanted that I was kind
of surrounded by in some capacity and definitely included in
a lot of different articles and things, But that wasn't
for me. Like I didn't want to be a person
who hustled all the time. I didn't want to be
a person who had to hire a team of twenty people.
I just wanted to run businesses that felt calm, that
were fun, that solved a problem for people in interesting ways,

(19:15):
that felt like they were different from anything else people
would sign up for or buy or what have you.
And yeah, my wife and I really started to kind
of construct what felt like was a departure from what
most people were doing in business, which is like trying
to work all these hours to make all this money,
to do all this stuff, and instead go, well, what
if insaid, we just decide We're gonna work probably for
more years, but we're gonna love what we do. We're

(19:37):
gonna love the audience we build. We're not going to
have a packed schedule.

Speaker 2 (19:40):
That we have to work eight hours a day or
five hours a day or four hours a day.

Speaker 3 (19:43):
We traveled full time in twenty twenty two and we
ran two businesses, and I think we probably spent combined
ten hours a week working on those two businesses.

Speaker 4 (19:51):
And it could have been.

Speaker 3 (19:52):
Less, Like I could have probably outsourced five of those
hours to someone doing customer support emails. But I just
like doing them because I love our customers.

Speaker 4 (19:59):
So yeah, we I've really.

Speaker 3 (20:00):
Shifted into this idea of helping creators build calm businesses.
And a lot of that is just ignoring a lot
of the noise of like you've got to be posting
on Instagram or TikTok seventeen times a day so that
you can get four more email subscribers, Like what is
the point of these things as opposed to being like,
what are the systems that run your business?

Speaker 2 (20:18):
Like?

Speaker 4 (20:18):
What problem does your business actually solve for who? How
do you do that? In an interesting way?

Speaker 3 (20:23):
What marketing channels are you using that you actually like
spending time on that you don't hate logging into every
day of your life. And I'm not going to say
that starting and running a calm business is easy. It
takes years. It took us four years to get our
wandering aim flee business to profitability, but that four years
spent has now afforded us three years after that and
now years beyond, where we can run calm businesses that

(20:44):
we love and that we are so passionate about running
in a way that feels in totally alignment to what
we want in life.

Speaker 2 (20:51):
I love that that makes so much sense. And it's
worth mentioning too that we're talking about twenty years of
you having try some of these other off the wall
sort of ideas and say, like you you know, you
quickly run through them and it's just like this dude
is anything but calm. But then you kind of you
outline where y'all are now, And I think that's that's awesome,
and you kind of you're hitting on a key point

(21:12):
where early on into business, I think there is a
lot of hustle. You are working a lot harder than
maybe you want to. And one of the things you
said was that early on you're kind of drawn into
that hustle, hustle culture, but you realize that this is
not something I want to do forever. How do you
help folks to think through where that line of demarcation
is as they're thinking, Okay, well, we've got to get

(21:33):
this thing off the ground. Is it once it's you know,
once it starts bringing in profit? Is it when you
have systems in place? Like what does that look like
for someone to kind of make the decision to to say, hey,
how do we how do we make this a little
more automated, a little more on cruise control?

Speaker 3 (21:47):
Number one, I think people have to define what their
enough goals are for their business. And I think this
is like the number one problem that a lot of
business owners miss out on when they first get started
is they just have misaligned goals and so they go, well,
of course I want a million dollar business this year. Well, yeah,
so does everybody else, But are you willing to put
in the time and effort that it takes to build
a million dollar business, Because for the majority of people,

(22:08):
and not just all the clickbait crap that we see
online that tells you that that can happen in like
thirty days by spending one thousand dollars on some course,
it takes so much effort. And so I think the
reality is for probably all your listeners, I'd listened to
a bunch of episodes of your podcast, I can tell
that you guys are thoughtful, you care about your listeners.
You're not trying to have get rich quick schemes that
don't work. It's about being super honest with your life

(22:31):
and what you want and what you're trying to build.
So I think for a lot of people, when they
say I want to build my own business, maybe what
they want to actually build is like five hundred and
two one thousand dollars in like side hustle income that
you only have to spend five hours a week on
because that's all the time you have, Like you're a parent,
you have a full time job, like it just you
don't have the time to build a million dollar business

(22:51):
in a year. But what you do is you look
at and you go great. So in my first year,
a win would be making one thousand dollars a month
with this business and not spending so much time that
I'm feeling like I'm burnt out working on it. Then
in the second year, maybe I'm able to double or
triple that income through finding out like what marketing channels
are working, what audience am I actually attracting, What problem
am I solving that I can amplify that problem to

(23:13):
more people, and then you kind of grow from there.
And this is like the antithetical advice to what everybody's
looking for online, which is how can I do it fast?
How can AI help me solve all these problems? And
like get my business going and listen, I'm all for
doing things as fast as possible, but I will tell
you from twenty years experience, as you casually mentioned, the
faster that you try to work, the more you are

(23:35):
going to burn out on what you're doing, and the
more stress you're going to cause in your life. And
it's kind of that classic thing of like you can
go into the gym if you haven't ever worked out before,
and you can lift all the weights as heavy as possible,
but you're gonna your body's gonna feel like absolute crap
for like the next week, and then you're gonna not
want to go to the gym for six months. Or
you could just go do like five push ups, a
couple jumping jacks, go for a walk around your block,

(23:57):
feel good about yourself, and then tomorrow maybe do one
or two more of those things, and then the next
day do one or two more, and you start to
build this compounding effect of better habits.

Speaker 4 (24:06):
And I think the same thing is true for business.

Speaker 3 (24:07):
It's just people start out with misaligned goals and they
don't really define what enough looks like for them when
they're getting started.

Speaker 1 (24:13):
Yeah, that's great stuff, Jason. All right, we get with
so much more we want to get to with you,
including like, well, I don't know, how do you come
up with a business idea. You've come up with a
bunch of them. We'll get to that and more right
after this.

Speaker 2 (24:32):
We are back from the break speaking with Jason, Zeke
and Jason. So, before the break, you mentioned the misaligned
goals a whole lot when it came to I guess
how a lot.

Speaker 1 (24:43):
Of folks get off track. So for you.

Speaker 2 (24:45):
So, like we are going to talk about your business
and how it is that y'all shepherd along new business entrepreneurs.
But what exactly is enough for you? I guess, like,
what are your personal goals right now? Is it to
be able to work a little bit less? You mentioned
a couple or a few years ago. Now you and
your wife traveling a whole lot where you weren't working
a ton? What does that look like for you now?

(25:06):
What are you trying to achieve?

Speaker 3 (25:07):
Yeah, I think it's actually helpful to give a little
bit of like quick history on this is you know,
when I first started setting goals, it was exactly what
I just talked about, which is like, I want to
make a million dollars per year. Why, you know, because
like I've seen other people do that, And when I
actually like looked at what it would take to do
that and I tried to do that myself, it just
wasn't sustainable for the type of business I was running.

Speaker 4 (25:26):
So as we.

Speaker 3 (25:26):
Started to get better at these goals, it really started
to shift into exactly what you're talking about, which is like, well,
what do I want my week to look like? What
do I want my day to look like? And what
money would actually be enough and when we sat down
and did and this actually only came because that I
re shirt business ended up actually in debt, and it
ended in debt because I tried to scale it too quickly,
too fast. Again, I was chasing hustle culture. Gary Vee

(25:48):
was influencing me like crazy, and.

Speaker 4 (25:51):
I got to this place.

Speaker 3 (25:52):
We got to this place, my wife and I where
we said, like, we've got to draw a line in
the sand, and what does this look like? What do
we really need to survive? And so we really started
like thinking through this stuff and after like a year
or two, we kind of came up with two formulas.
One is what we call the number MMM monthly minimum
magic number. And this is just figuring out what your
baseline baseline expenses are. And I'm sure you guys have

(26:14):
talked about this with other people at nauseum, so I'm
not going to go too far into it.

Speaker 2 (26:17):
We call it the paraones budget.

Speaker 3 (26:18):
Also the BBB fantastic BBBBB mmm. Yeah, but so many
people don't even know those numbers. And once you have
those numbers as a baseline, which is why yours is baseline,
is you can figure out Okay, great, I know that.
Now what would an enough number look like? That's like
my next number, that would feel really good, but it's
actually kind of achievable. And so for us, what we

(26:39):
ended up doing is we sat down and we looked
at what that number could be and we just we
just thought about it. We just talked about it. We
just said, okay, well, how much money would we want
to spend on rent a month for a house or
if we want to buy a house of mortgage. How
much money do we need for food and for stuff?
And as we talked about the beginning of this, are
my personal baking expenses, budgets? What are those things? And
we got to a number and this was actually in

(27:00):
twenty eighteen. We set this number of thirty three thousand
dollars a month. It just kind of felt nice that
it was like a weird number, and we wrote about
this entire journey. You can actually go read about it
at Wanderingamfay dot com slash three three zero if any
of your listeners want to read about it. It took
us four years to achieve that number, but once we
I think it was three years once we got to
that number. By the time we got to it. It

(27:24):
didn't feel like we had to move the goalpost. It
felt like, oh, we set this number. This number was
for us to live a good life and have enough
money every month to be able to afford the things
we want. Now we don't have to go chasing a
bigger number. However, life changes, circumstances changes. We want to
start a family, we have parents who are getting older.
We need to start setting money aside so we can
take care of them. If that needs to happen.

Speaker 4 (27:45):
Great.

Speaker 3 (27:46):
So we reassessed that number and we set a new number,
and it was based on a lot of new circumstances.
But I think the real value is in creating an
enough number you'd decide for yourself what matters in your life.
Because it's so easy to scroll through Instagram or TikTok
or whatever and see all these lives of people and
who even knows that they're making it all up. But
it looks amazing, But it might not be amazing for you.

Speaker 4 (28:09):
It just looks amazing.

Speaker 3 (28:10):
And so I think the biggest thing is to really
do some self reflection, really sit through and think about
like what really.

Speaker 4 (28:16):
Like, what do I want?

Speaker 3 (28:16):
What would make me truly happy? And don't just go
with the things that are out in the ether that
seem cool on the internet. Actually really get introspective with
yourself on the things that you want, and you might realize, oh,
I actually want a lot less than I think I do.
I'm just being sent a bunch of messages that I
need more when I really don't.

Speaker 1 (28:32):
Did the artificially impose constraints of your enough plan? Did
it ever make you feel like you were doing your
business a disservice, like, ah, man, I really could grow
this thing, and maybe it would be more fun to
just kind of plow more effort and try to grow
it even bigger, even though yeah, it's enough money. Did
that ever feel like, ah man, I wish I could

(28:53):
put more into this business. But now it feels like
I've kind of told myself no.

Speaker 3 (28:58):
You know the only time that ever happened was when
I would go to like meetups or like little mastermind
groups with other entrepreneurs who were making a bunch more money,
but then they also had much bigger goals. Is I
would go, oh, I think I'm short changing us, you know,
like we're just trying to make them easily. Thirty three
thousand dollars a month, which, by the way, not easily,
and you know, you're hearing other people talk about, well,

(29:19):
you know they're making one hundred thousand dollars a month
or two hundred thousand or more than that, and you realize,
like you do have those thoughts. But then what we
always came back to is, but I don't know what
their life looks like, and I don't know how much
stress they have. I don't know how happy they actually are,
because it's really easy to show up in this group
and like put on a face. But I know for us,
like we work less than you know, twenty hours a

(29:40):
week most of the time, and we're super happy. We
have plenty of time for exercise, we have plenty of
times for exploring this new country that we live in,
and even before moving into a whole different country, we
had plenty of time to just chase other ideas and
have fun. And you know, when Tears of the Kingdom
came out, I had a full schedule open where I
could unload one hundred hours onto this business. And I
know that a lot of people listen, they don't have
that luxury, but we also didn't have that luxury six

(30:03):
years ago either, and we built a plan to create that.
And I think that's what so many people miss out
on is they see maybe a one year opportunity is
all they have to make a business that can support them,
And you just have to zoom the lens out a
little bit further and going back to your question, try
to get some of the people out of your view,
your immediate view, who are going to be influencing you

(30:24):
to make bigger goals than you actually need to make,
and to see your goals as not enough when they're
plenty enough because they're good enough for you.

Speaker 2 (30:31):
I think like a big part of this is, like
you're talking about choosing a weird number that you know
that y'all were shooting for. Like you're talking about leaning
into the weird. You're talking about having a ton of
fun as well. And what is it about folks who
seem to be less tempted or less allured by the
fun and the weird and instead they're maybe more intent

(30:52):
on going for like the normal. Like we've got some
friends in our lives and they're very like normal, and
there's nothing wrong with that, Like everyone has has like
different tastes and naturally abnormal, but like there's I don't like,
there's something about the weird that I think can just
open other opportunities to you. But do you end up
talking with a lot of folks who work with wandering
aimfully who where you're having a tough time kind of

(31:15):
like breaking through them thinking through what it is that
they should be doing as opposed to, Hey, what do
you actually.

Speaker 1 (31:21):
Want to do?

Speaker 2 (31:21):
What sounds fun to you? What is weird but weird
enough to provide some like spice in your life.

Speaker 3 (31:27):
Yeah, I think one of the key words that you
touched on there, and this is like one of our
core values that we have just established for ourselves in
life and business is fun. And I think for a
lot of people they don't really equate business too fun
because they don't really have any examples around them immediately
where that's even true. And I speak from my own experience,
like there was no one around me when I was
growing up, when I was a teenager, when I was

(31:48):
getting into being a young adult who had fun in
their work. It's just like everybody had a job, most
people hated that job. Whoever owned their own business, they
were constantly stressed out by that business. Like I didn't
have any examples of that looking that way, and it's
like I talked about earlier, it's like, okay, but that
doesn't mean that's the only way to do it, Like
there has to be a better way, and there are
always different options that you can chase down. And I

(32:09):
think nowadays it's very easy you can see a lot
of these examples. But I think even for most people,
like you said, you look around your immedia group, not
in social media, but just like your imdia group, there's
not a lot of people who are having fun in
business or kind of like making their own schedules or
doing their own thing in a way that they absolutely
love it. And I think the big part of that
is you do have to understand this is going to

(32:29):
be different for a lot of people around you to
see you being this way, and you just have to
be okay with that. And I think the other part
of it is just having fun does not mean you
can't make money. I think having fun actually really helps
make money because so many people are just trying to
maximize for like conversions and like slick sales funnels and
these types of things that they don't lend themselves to

(32:50):
being very fun or weird or unique, and when you.

Speaker 1 (32:52):
Do, stay lend themselves to try to trap your customer
into pay exactly exactly.

Speaker 3 (32:56):
I hate the phrase so much trip wire, Like if
I could remove a phrase from the business vernacular, it
would be trip wire because I absolutely loathe it and
I like the concept of it. I think the concept
of it is fantastic, but I really hate the phrase.
I don't want to trip anybody into anything in business.
But I do think the part of this that a
lot of people get wrong is you see a blueprint
from someone online or a video or whatever, and it's

(33:16):
very inspiring because the results are exactly what you want,
but the steps to take it are like so boring
and they're so mundane and they're so not enjoyable as
opposed to going, what if I just spend that same
amount of time doing something that's like a little bit
weird but that people could find that might be fun
and interesting. And either way, they're going to be experiments
that you don't know if they're going to succeed or not.
So why not go for the one where even though

(33:37):
someone's telling you it's like a well laid path that's
going to work perfectly, Maybe try something different and see
does that work for you? Because it might work for
you because not a lot of other people are doing
that thing that way.

Speaker 1 (33:48):
You're kind of highlighting the fact too in this conversation
that the internet and social media can work in different ways.
They can we can follow people and kind of become
damn about our own ability to crush it in the
way that they are. But then we can find the
people who inspire us in ways that we haven't seen
maybe in just the people who we interact with in

(34:11):
daily life. Right, So, you know, I do think finding
somebody like you to look up to when it comes
to creating a small business that's sustainable and fun, well,
if you haven't seen that maybe growing up, and you
don't see that in kind of the pursuits that your
friends are doing, that's a way in which you can
use the Internet and all the amazing stuff out there
to harness your you know, your pursuit of a business

(34:35):
is actually going to work for you instead of following
people who are going to make you maybe feel bad
about not doing enough.

Speaker 3 (34:42):
For sure, And I think like the algorithms don't push
the calm businesses of the world, right, Like they really
don't and I think there are actually a couple places
before AI that helped with This starter story by a
guy named Pat Walls is a really good resource for
people to be able to find great case studies of businesses.
I will say Pat does skew a little bit more
towards higher revenue businesses, but there are and there were

(35:03):
a ton of business stories on that site that I
think are super inspiring for people getting started. And it
was a place that I would reference all the time
for folks who would find our email newsletter and they're like,
where could I find more businesses like wandering gameplay And
I was like, I don't know.

Speaker 4 (35:15):
It's really hard.

Speaker 3 (35:16):
And they exist for sure, but they just don't get
the notoriety right because they're not It's what I call
the gap in entrepreneurship, Like they're not the we're just
getting started. Here's a crazy idea, let's talk about it,
And they're not the we sold our company for eighty
million dollars, so let's talk about it. It's like everything
in the middle where like no one really wants to
talk about it. But I do think another skill that
people can use is leaning on AI tools, and this

(35:37):
is where AI tools are actually getting helpful is you
could tell them selfishly. You could be like, hey, I
just went out about this business wandering amflee and can
you find ten other businesses that are like this that
aren't just trying to like make money constantly through drop
shipping or whatever, Like what are some calm businesses or
curious businesses that I can find? These tools will actually
help you find them now, Like you couldn't google this before,

(36:00):
you would not get good results. And I think that
is actually we're entering in an age where you can
actually discover some of these things which are which is
really helpful. I think it's really inspiring because it now
no longer is just well, what's the algorithm of whatever
app I'm looking at giving me? And that's the best
I can get, even if I'm trying to train it
on like only looking.

Speaker 4 (36:17):
At this type of content.

Speaker 3 (36:19):
You can now use AI tools to search and to
find things that you could really never find before, which
I really love. And I think that's like a huge
advantage that we're moving into with some of the changes
in these tools.

Speaker 1 (36:29):
That's pretty cool.

Speaker 2 (36:29):
Yeah, So those are like what I would call external inspiration, right,
So you're talking about different sites that you can check out.
You've got the starter story, You've got different tools so
that we can utilize as well, like AI. When it
comes to internally trying to find some inspiration, does it
come down to an individual thinking like reflecting a little
bit and thinking through Okay, what gets me excited? Like

(36:50):
what lights me up? Is it as simple as that
to consider launching a business around that?

Speaker 4 (36:54):
One hundred percent?

Speaker 3 (36:55):
I love There's a Mark Cuban quote that he said
forever ago, I think thirty years ago, which oh my god,
so long ago, but he was he said, don't follow
your passion, follow your energy. And I really resonated with
that because I think we're all passionate about a lot
of things, and I think especially as it relates to
like starting a business, Like, yeah, we're passionate about making
money because money makes the world go around, and having

(37:17):
money is better than not having money. But I think
where you can run into a trap is if you
get stuck in the like Okay, well, now I got
to figure out like all my marketing tactics and I
got to figure out all these hooks and like vertical
videos and like how to get people to watch them.
It's like is that Is that really something you want
to be doing? Is that something you like spring out
of bed in the morning and you have energy for?
And I really like that. I think if you define

(37:38):
for yourself, like where does energy emanate for you when
you're working on your business? Like where do you really
get lit up?

Speaker 4 (37:44):
And my good buddy.

Speaker 3 (37:46):
Mattyavella has a very popular YouTube channel, and I remember
he and I chatted. I think he had like twenty
thousand subscribers when I first met him and I was
on his podcast, and I just remember him being so
excited to make these like documentary YouTube like films, and
noone was really making them at the time like he
was going to. And I was just like, dude, you
got to you gotta go, like you gotta do this,
Like this is amazing. I wasn't the person who convinced

(38:07):
him he was already gonna do it, but watching him
now then have four million subscribers on YouTube and he
has two Netflix documentaries, and like, he's just an incredibly
talented person. Had he just followed what would have been
like something that he felt somewhat passionate about as opposed
to like where a whole of his energy could have gone.
I think that was really a big shift that I
saw in person, and one one example that was like

(38:29):
extremely clear, And so I think for a lot of people,
it's about trying to define the difference between like what
am I passionate about? But then like what do I
really have the energy toes like sustain and do every
single day to help create and grow a business?

Speaker 1 (38:39):
Very cool? Yeah, I think it's good advice. How how
can creators, people who want to launch a business evaluate
a business idea before they kind of start working their
butts off right, potentially wasting time, money, and energy in
the creation of that business. It sounds like, I don't
tell me if I'm wrong. Maybe you don't spend too
much time on that part of it. You're just like, Oh,

(39:00):
it lights me up. I got some energy for this,
Let's give it a go.

Speaker 3 (39:02):
It's funny that you say that, though, Actually everything I've
ever done has been extremely calculated. It's just the ideas
were really dumb, and I just I just executed them
with more effort than I think most people would have done,
you know. And I think that has just been a
thing that I've seen for years, is consistency is key.
So it's like, whatever you're gonna do, you've got to
be consistent. But to answer your question, so, like, how

(39:24):
do you validate a business idea? How do you know
if a business idea is worth pursuing? I think number one,
if you're going to do something weird like an eyro
your shirt or like something that's just like so far
out there, you're never really going to have a good
example of something you can follow a blueprint for. So
the only blueprint you have is the one you're going
to create. So you just have to be willing. This
goes back to the Mark Cuban quote, like you've got
to have the energy to work on that thing and

(39:45):
put time towards that thing, probably more than you would
anything else because it hasn't been done before. It's super unique.
And I know people listening this are like, what hasn't
been done before? Well, you probably did know that a
guy got paid to wear T shirts for a living
before listening to this podcast, ete, you know. So I think
there's still so much things that could be done. I
think on the other side of things, if you want
the easier mode, it's not easy mode is you have

(40:06):
to go where people's attention is and you have to
go with things that are currently working. So, like I
have a good we have a wandering AFAY member. His
name is Wayne. He's very top of mind because I
just had a call with him this morning and he
started a business where he does tutorials about Canva on
YouTube and he has a Canva course. And we strategically

(40:27):
planned this three years ago because Canba was on this
huge uptick and I don't know if anybody remembers what
Canba was like four years ago. It was not great,
but Canva has turned into something amazing and it's incredible.
And so he Wayne has basically ridden the wave of
the popularity of this app and he loves it and
he uses it and he knows so much about it,
so he's teaching people on it. So I think a

(40:48):
really good lesson for people listening to this is you
may have a business idea, but you need to understand
is this a new idea that's going to be very
difficult and it's just going to take more time and
effort than you want. That's just going to be the
reality is it's something that already exists, where there's already
people paying for this thing. Great, then you already have
an audience that's willing to buy something from you. You
just now have to create your differentiators. You have to

(41:10):
make the things that you do in marketing stand out
from everybody else by being different and unique. And then
you just have to show up consistently, and you have
to have realistic goals for what you can do time
wise and how much effort you can put in to
have that business succeed.

Speaker 2 (41:23):
So smart man, I love it.

Speaker 1 (41:25):
Jason.

Speaker 2 (41:25):
We've got a couple more questions that we're going to
get to all that right after this we are back
to the break, still talking with Jason Zuck. Zuke, however
you want to pronounce it about launching the Sweet Smart
Small Business.

Speaker 1 (41:45):
How do you pronounce it?

Speaker 3 (41:46):
Actually I do pronounce it Zuck, but I will be
it is like ninety nine point nine percent. I do
not care either way is fine. I think as the
Canadians go, it's Zuke and they will not say it
any other way, which I'm totally fine with and I
respect that that's how they want to pronounce it.

Speaker 2 (41:58):
So that's that's what I make sure we're not offending
our guests.

Speaker 1 (42:01):
So in the podcast, to ask somebody about how they
pronounced their name is the very end I think so, uh.

Speaker 2 (42:06):
Yeah, we got the other way while we've just been
doing it wrong.

Speaker 1 (42:09):
The entire right exactly.

Speaker 4 (42:10):
No, no, no, that's fine.

Speaker 2 (42:11):
We do everything correctly here.

Speaker 1 (42:12):
I'm curious to Jason, the people you work with typically
on Wandering Aimfully. Are they trying to pursue their small
business as like a full time endeavor? They trying to
quick their day job For a lot of those folks,
is it just this goal of having a side hustle
that brings in extra revenue? And how do you help
people think through whether or not the business should be

(42:34):
they should be working towards making it their full time thing,
or if hey, just hey brings in an extra five
hundred bucks a month, that's plenty.

Speaker 4 (42:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (42:41):
We when we started out with Wandering Amplee, we kind
of wanted to be the unboring group coaching is what
we called it, for existing business owners to grow their businesses.
And the problem with that we found very quickly was well,
existing business ows are actually kind of busy and they
don't really have time to do a lot of like
group coaching stuff. They would prefer to do one on
one coaching because they have very specific problems, and those

(43:04):
specific problems are really akin to their businesses, and so
it's hard to scale that type of business. We didn't
want to just trade time for money forever, and so
we definitely shifted the messaging of the business to help
people at different stages. So we definitely still help people
who have existing businesses, tons of resources within monitoring and
plea that do that, but I think we are kind
of best suited for the person who is working a

(43:24):
job right now. They want to carve out some side income.
They don't want to do the hustle game, and they
just want to know, like, what are the business foundations
that are working in today's landscape that actually don't involve
me just being on like Instagram for twenty hours a day,
and what can that look like for me as a
person who wants to figure that out. So a lot
of our content is actually it's very foundational. It's very

(43:46):
much like what I've been talking about here. It's like
defining your enough number, finding an idea that really resonates
with you that you actually want to work on, picking
the marketing platforms and the strategy that you actually feel
like you have the energy for it, Like don't plan
a business where you're going to burn yourself out in
three weeks because you have to create all this content
that you don't even like creating. And so a lot
of what we talk about with people kind of shifts

(44:06):
the way that they think wondering ify is going to
start for them, where it's like we're gonna tell you
how to build your first online course and then thirty
days you're gonna have a course in a sales funnel,
like all this stuff that a digital products business would have.
It's more like, hey, what's your life like right now?
Can you actually fit this in? Because funny enough, we
have people who join and like in the first thirty days,
they'll send us an email be like, I'm actually really
glad I'm paying for this every month because I'm finding

(44:28):
out I don't want a small business. I'm actually finding
out I'm better off staying at my job right now
and figuring out a way I want to supplement my
income through other creative means. But just in you helping
me define some of these goals has like changed the
trajectory of what the rest of this year look like.
And so I think we definitely help a lot of
people unearth some things that they haven't thought about, but

(44:49):
we definitely have. Like we've got this on Boring Business Roadmap,
which is kind of a behemoth of a product, but
we're building a smaller version now because it's kind of grown.

Speaker 4 (44:56):
Over the years.

Speaker 3 (44:56):
But it basically walks you through the step by step
of every question you could have about starting what we
call digital product businesses, because that's where we exist as
your online courses, your template shop like those types of things, memberships,
anything like that, and we walk you through just a
set of things to do and questions to answer and exercises,
you know, doing offer math Like people don't really know

(45:16):
what that is when you say it, but it's like, hey,
if you want to sell an online course for twenty bucks, great,
let's do the math. How many customers do you need
to meet your goals of that every single month? And
so I'm might be like, oh, I need one hundred
customers a month because I want to make two thousand
dollars a month. You go, okay, great, how many people
are on your email list right now? Oh I don't
have one yet?

Speaker 4 (45:31):
Okay cool.

Speaker 3 (45:32):
How are you going to get two hundred customers a
month when you don't even have an email list, and
then people go, oh, okay, so I need to do
some other stuff first, And so it's helping people through
a lot of what seems very simple, but you don't
know all of the puzzle pieces that exist on the
table until kind of someone like us lays them all
out for you and you go, oh, okay, So this
is a little bit more difficult than I thought. There

(45:53):
are more things I need to do, and now I
actually at least have a plan to kind of work
through it. And I'm a part of a community where
there's other people I can chat with and I can
feel less alone. And we have this monthly call that
we do every single month that kind of brings people
together and shows them one thing to work on their business.
But then also everyone can kind of hang out and chat.
So a little bit of self promotion there. I didn't
mean for it to go that way with wandering it now,
but that is that's the way we think about things,

(46:15):
because we don't just want to promote like we can
get you a business going in sixty days or less.
Like sometimes I'm really happy when people don't have a
business because they join Wondering INFLA and they find out
there's actually a better path for them at staying at
their job, and you know, it's joying that and like
trying to figure that out.

Speaker 1 (46:29):
No, I like that.

Speaker 2 (46:29):
I like that there's a certain percentage of your members
who end up not launching a business and they're like, hey,
you might if I just like hang out for the
next few months.

Speaker 4 (46:37):
Exactly.

Speaker 1 (46:38):
Yeah, these are just kind of cool, so let's just chill.
I'm curious too, Jason. I don't know if I've actually
seen you create any content about this, but it seems
like we're entering a period where more more folks are
retiring there at a certain age, especially in the United
States of America, but across the globe, and maybe they
have a business they built up that they are willing

(46:59):
to sell at and maybe there aren't any buyers knocking
down the door. Do you think about or talk about
buying other people's businesses and does that ever really make
sense for people?

Speaker 4 (47:09):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (47:09):
I mean, funny enough, I think I've built like four
or five little software products with co founders over the years,
and we've sold I think four or five of them.
I think maybe only one went unsold. And I really
think there's a great opportunity, like if you're if you're
someone who wants to start a business, but you don't
have any ideas you're not maybe a creative person, but
you do maybe have some money set aside that you

(47:30):
could spend. You know, we're talking like I'm saying twenty thousand,
two one hundred thousand dollars in the business. Maybe it's less,
maybe it's a little bit more. I think it's a
really fantastic place to start. I think that is a
wonderful place, especially if you do a little bit of research,
like acquire dot com is a place where you can
find things. I think flip a I'm not sure if
they're still super legit, but a lot of times you
can just join business communities as well, like a wandering

(47:51):
gameplayer or things like it, and again as chat GPT
for some examples that are similar. If you don't just
want to look at ours, but you could join some
communities and find some opportunities where people have existing businesses
and clients and customers that they're just looking to move
on from and you could kind of scoop that up
and start. But yeah, I do think from the other
side of it too, like I don't think enough people
value the opportunity of building a small little business. And

(48:14):
I think tools are changing enough fast enough that I'm
not a developer by any means. I'm absolutely loving a
tool called lovable right now, it's lovable dot dev. I
have no affiliation to them. I'm not sponsored by them.
I'm not sponsored by anybody anymore, and have them for years.

Speaker 1 (48:27):
But but you might be at some point in the future.

Speaker 4 (48:28):
Yeah, maybe, I don't know.

Speaker 3 (48:29):
I got tired of that, but that tool, like I'm
now building little software products just by prompting an AI
just literally chatting with it like a chat to chat
youbet so.

Speaker 4 (48:38):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (48:39):
To answer your question, I think definitely people should look
into buying existing businesses that at least have some type
of revenue that's generating. Like I would always look to
buy a business that has revenue. I wouldn't look to
just buy ideas because I think anybody can come up
with ideas and then if you're on the other side,
like I wouldn't undervalue trying to sell a small business
you have that is making some amount of money so
that you could move on and have a little bit

(48:59):
of cash to like put into something else or just
you know, stop working and get a job, or not
have a job and just retire.

Speaker 1 (49:04):
Very cool.

Speaker 2 (49:05):
Possibly last question here, Jason, you talked about you and
your wife exploring this new country that y'all are in.
You're in Portugal. What is it about that country that
drew y'all over there? And how long have you all
been there and do you expect to continue living there?

Speaker 3 (49:18):
Man, I can tell you what drew it in a
different way of answering that, which is not the US.
And I think that a lot of people are feeling
this right now. And I feel really bad because I
don't want to bash the US. Like I lived in
the US for forty years of my life, and I
consider all of the opportunities I've had or because I
was fortunate enough to be born there, right like I
just won the born lottery in that country, and I

(49:39):
can't look away from that. Like that definitely makes sense.
But I think that there's a lot that's just not
fantastic about it. And I'm not saying that Portugal is
a perfect country or any country outside the US is
better than the US. I just think that there are
small things in life that we just were really looking
to change into something else, Like we wanted to feel
safe walking when we were walking outside. We wanted to

(50:00):
feel like we were around a little bit more history,
a little bit more culture. We wanted to be able
to afford the place that we lived, which was really nice,
and we wanted to be able to live in a
place that actually felt amazing, but that didn't like basically
take all of our income to be able to afford
to live there.

Speaker 4 (50:17):
We lived in San Diego before.

Speaker 1 (50:19):
We left in big price change.

Speaker 4 (50:20):
Yeah, we felt like.

Speaker 3 (50:21):
We were slowly getting priced out of a place that
was like the perfect place for.

Speaker 4 (50:25):
Us to live.

Speaker 3 (50:25):
But then all of a sudden, like it wasn't feeling safe,
Like you go to the grocery store and it's just
like everybody knows all these things. I'm just repeating things
people know. But the things that we loved about Portugal
we traveled in twenty twenty two for ten months. We
went to nine different countries I think it was like
fifteen different cities, and we were actually looking for a
slower you could call it, a calm little town or
city that could really kind of fit our lifestyle, which

(50:48):
is like we're homebodies. We do classic movie night on
Saturday nights and we're watching you know, Die Hard and
like another fun movie from our childhood. And we don't
need all the things that you can get from like
big cities. We don't need access immediately to like in
airport and like big city stuff and all that. And Portugal,
I think, you know, is one of the countries that
we visited that just has so many little pockets of countries.

(51:09):
And I think this is probably true for a lot
of countries in Europe where there are just so many
little towns that no one really stumbles across or knows.
And because there's just less people in these countries, there's
just so much more space to be able to live
and to be able to breathe and to feel safe
and you know, have your money go a little bit further.

Speaker 4 (51:27):
And so yeah, we've lived here for two years.

Speaker 3 (51:29):
We actually are literally just about to sign at least
for three more years, so we're going to be here.

Speaker 4 (51:33):
For five years.

Speaker 3 (51:34):
We love the fact that there are visa programs so
that we can eventually earn citizenship and be dual citizens
between Europe and between the US, which gives us a
lot of advantages when we have kids. Our kids will
immediately get a passport for the EU being born here,
which gives them amazing opportunities to do whatever they want,
you know, as they grow up. So yeah, I just
think there's a lot of amazing opportunities. This is kind

(51:56):
of the it's a metaphor for starting a business. Right
on paper, you can read all the steps, but like
when you start to do it, it's so difficult. Like
when we moved here, it's very difficult, sell all your
stuff uproot your life, be away from friends and family,
live in a whole different country where you don't speak
the language. But I can tell you now that we've
lived here for two years, best decision we've ever made.
And same with building wonder and gainfully as a calm business,

(52:17):
best decision we've ever made. And I think that those
types of feelings come on the side of very difficult
and hard decisions that aren't easy and most people wouldn't do.
And I hope more people listening to this will just
take that leap, that little chance that you've been kind
of sitting on the edge of your seat to do
but you've been afraid to do.

Speaker 4 (52:34):
Just just do it.

Speaker 3 (52:35):
You can always undo that decision, you can always go back,
like failure doesn't mean that you're going to die most times. Obviously,
that weird stuff, but there's so much on the other
side of life that people aren't experiencing because they're just
not willing to take.

Speaker 1 (52:47):
That leap man. You tied the boat perfectly, Jason, incredible. Hey,
thank you so much for taking the time to join
us today on the podcast. We really appreciate it. How
can our listeners find out more about you, what you're
up to and honoring Aimfully.

Speaker 4 (53:01):
Yeah, we do a weekly newsletter.

Speaker 3 (53:02):
We've been doing it now for in some way like
fifteen years, which is kind of crazy. But at Wandering
Amfley if you want to hear us talk about ways
that you can make your business more profitable, peaceful, and predictable.
We've got a newsletter called Growing Steady. We also have
a podcast of the same name. You can find those
both at Wanderingamfully dot com. If you're interested in our
coaching program, it opens up twice per year and you

(53:23):
can check that out. We also now have a kind
of a six month version of People just want to
test the waters, so we love helping people with that.
And you can't really find too much about us on
social We kind of gave up on Instagram. Every once
in a while we pop up, but mostly just email
is the easiest way to reach out. If you want
to find us through our website, you can say hello.
We'd love to hear from any of your listeners. And
I'm sorry if you don't like sending people emails, but

(53:45):
I don't like being on Instagram.

Speaker 4 (53:47):
Or TikTok or any things, so get Yeah, I'm happy.

Speaker 1 (53:51):
To do it.

Speaker 3 (53:51):
So but I really appreciate you guys. Is a really
fun combo?

Speaker 1 (53:54):
All right, Matt, that was such a fun conversation. A
big big fan of Jason. What he's up to over there,
How you've used the world, Yeah as well.

Speaker 2 (54:03):
Yeah, we spent plenty of time talking about ThunderCats and
nerdy coffee stuff before we even hit record, guys, and you.

Speaker 1 (54:10):
Brothers from another mother, that's for sure. I kind of
I did kind of feel that way. But what was
your big takeaway from this combo? Man?

Speaker 2 (54:16):
Dude, he had so many little nuggets of wisdom when
it came to entrepreneurship and how he viewsed the world.
And I think my biggest takeaway is when he said
that there is not a single way to do business
there's not a single way to do life, and maybe
we should be thinking through like what And it's funny
because like even the language, the words that he used
are phrases and things that we've said here on the show,

(54:37):
But like, what do you want your life to look like?

Speaker 1 (54:39):
This is what it looks like for all the people
who are influencing you. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (54:42):
Yeah, And just to go against the grain a little
bit and to ask yourself as you're thinking through how
it is that you want to try and work and
produce an income for you and your family, like what
is the worst that could happen?

Speaker 1 (54:54):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (54:54):
He said there's two questions or two things that he
kind of lives by. It's that what's the worst that
could happen? And that you don't get what you don't
ask for. And the ability for us to advocate for ourselves,
whether it's within the framework of an employer or a business,
but specifically to business formation, what's the worst that can happen?
And it affords us the ability to take some you know,
some leaps that might be a little scary but ultimately

(55:17):
not permanently harmful to us.

Speaker 1 (55:19):
Yeah. I liked when he said, solve a problem for
people in interesting ways, and that's great. The truth is,
one of the best ways to start a business is
to find out what pain points you see in life
around you. Maybe it's been a pain point for you
personally or just for other people near where you live
or something, and you're able to say, wait a second,
how can I maybe grease the wheels on that and

(55:42):
turn a profit by providing a service or creating a business.
And then I also like that you said work longer,
but love it. You know, we talk about that's I
think our philosophy too, Matt, is instead of fire, it's like,
how about work less now, maybe make less money, have
a more balanced life, and enjoy what you do, and
then you don't really feel this desire, this need to

(56:03):
retire from the thing because you're burnt out by it.
It's not necessarily a race. Yeah, I think Jason would
be be on board with that. Man. And one thing
that this conversation brought up to Matt, I don't remember
if I think you probably remember this. We went to
a conference we saw live podcast taping and it was
all about how to create a billion dollar business. And
I just was thinking about that during this conversation too,
and it felt so off brand with what so many

(56:25):
people in that room were trying to create, which which
is more of like a lifestyle either side hustle or
small business that they can enjoy. And when you try
to think too big, let me, how am I gonna
make this into a billion dollar thing? You have to
go back to first principles and say, is that even
what I want to begin with? And how am I
going to potentially screw up my life pursuing something that

(56:46):
doesn't align with my values and doesn't even you know,
it's not what I want my life to look like.

Speaker 2 (56:51):
So yeah, yeah, there can be a whole lot of
misaligned goals if you were just to accept that blindly. Yeah,
let's get to the beer that you and I enjoyed
during this episode, which was a shoof, not a lushoof,
the Belgian beer that we all know and love, but nashoof,
which is their non alcoholic version, which I think.

Speaker 1 (57:10):
We're gonna be enjoying some more. And a beer's here on.

Speaker 2 (57:12):
The show because if you want that segment of the
craft beer industry to improve, we got to support them.

Speaker 1 (57:18):
With our dollars.

Speaker 2 (57:19):
We've had some athletic beers on the show before for sure.
This is the first though by the shoof.

Speaker 1 (57:24):
But what were your thoughts on this one? Yeah, I
mean I agree, I'm down to try more non atholic beers.
I can't say that my experience thus far has has
been phenomenal. They haven't been nearly as tasty as some
of the actually alcoholic craft beers, and.

Speaker 2 (57:39):
It still has that in a flavor. Yeah, like there's
something about it. Yeah, I think the athletic ones are
better than this one. I love they call it at
the bottom Belgian near beer. It's almost there, but it's
not quite. It's beer ish and the taste is like
near beer too. I mean it it's good and I
can see how this could in a pinch suffice.

Speaker 1 (57:58):
If you like beer and your like, oh this is
I want to I still want that flavor in my life,
but I'm trying to kick the habit or something like that.
There's still cut back a little bit. Yeah, but this
is that this isn't one I would turn to regularly.

Speaker 2 (58:10):
But it's it's still surprisingly or somehow had like that
Belgian week kind of flavor profile going on. But I'm
going to reserve judgment until I maybe enjoy some more
and navi. Yeah, we'll try more in the coming weeks
or months, but even still glad we got to share
this one today. But you can find our show notes
up on the website at howtomoney dot com, where we
will link to Jason Zeke's business wandering aimfully as well

(58:33):
as some of the other things that he's up to. Buddy,
that's going to be it for this one, So until
next time, Best friends Out, Best Friends Out.

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Joel Larsgaard

Matthew Altmix

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Launching an Offbeat and Sustainable Business w/ Jason Zook #953