215. From Butler to Business Owner w/ Guest: Aram Street

The path from employee to entrepreneur is rarely straightforward, but Aram Street's journey from certified butler to successful business owner offers a masterclass in calculated risk-taking and resilient entrepreneurship. When faced with an impending job loss from his position managing a 25,000 square foot mansion, Aram made the deliberate choice to bet on himself rather than seeking another employer.

What makes his story particularly compelling is the practical reality of launching a business while supporting a growing family (now with five children). Without romanticizing entrepreneurship, Aram shares how he supplemented his emerging cleaning business with rideshare driving and food delivery – doing whatever necessary to keep finances stable while building something sustainable. His candid insights demolish the "overnight success" myth while illuminating what true entrepreneurial commitment looks like.

Aram's evolution as a business owner reveals crucial lessons in adaptability and opportunity recognition. Some of his most profitable business developments stemmed from opportunities he initially rejected multiple times. His transition from residential to commercial cleaning – now his primary revenue source – almost didn't happen due to his initial reluctance to expand beyond his comfort zone. This experience transformed his approach to new possibilities: "I no longer say no to anything immediately."

Throughout our conversation, Aram emphasizes the value of mentorship and learning from others who've already navigated similar paths. Had he sought more guidance early on, he could have avoided numerous costly mistakes. For aspiring entrepreneurs, his message is refreshingly honest: expect to work harder than anticipated, for longer than expected, while making less than you hoped – but for those committed to ownership and financial independence, the journey remains worthwhile.

As Aram perfectly summarizes: "It can be done, but it's probably harder than you think." With unprecedented access to information and connectivity, entrepreneurial possibilities are greater than ever – but success still demands perseverance, strategic thinking, and willingness to adapt along the way. Connect with Aram on LinkedIn to continue learning from his entrepreneurial journey.

Chapters

• 0:20 Introduction to Aram Street
• 1:33 Growing Up & Early Influences
• 3:14 From McDonald's to Butler Training
• 9:04 The Transition to Entrepreneurship
• 16:14 Building a Business with a Family of Five
• 21:18 Learning from Entrepreneurial Mistakes
• 24:05 The Value of Adaptability in Business
• 32:38 Realistic Advice for Aspiring Entrepreneurs
• 37:45 Legacy Message & Closing Thoughts

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Yeah, it's Mindset Cafe. We all about that mindset. Gotta stay focused. Now go settle for the last. It's all in your head how you think you manifest. So get ready to rise, cause we about to be the best. Gotta switch it up. Gotta break the old habits. Get your mind right. Turn your dreams into habits. No negative vibes, only positive vibes.

Speaker 2: 0:20

What is up guys? Welcome to another episode of the Mindset Cafe podcast. It's your boy, devin, and today I am honored to be on another episode with this gentleman. Right, we were on his podcast Coffee, chaos and Cashflow, and it was a great conversation and I wanted to kind of bring it back and go round two with it and kind of put him on the other side of the stool. So, without further ado, you know, I'm sitting down today with Aram Street, right, he tried to give me a different pronunciation and almost threw me off, right, but he is a serial entrepreneur and a business builder, a risk taker who's you know, walked away from a lucrative career in household management and really bet on himself to start a business, right, so that's one of the biggest things on Mindset Cafe, but also betting on yourself. Thank you so much. Thanks so much. Let's. You know, let's dive in a little bit. Yo, what's happening? So, with your whole bring up and everything, right, what? What was your background like? What was your parents like? What was your childhood like?

Speaker 1: 1:33

yeah, um, so it was interesting. I, I had a. I had a great growing up experience. Five siblings were all spread out in ages, so we're pretty, you know. It was like a couple of us on one end. Older ones were already basically in college by the time I was growing up, and so my dad was a Nazarene evangelist. So he traveled, did a lot of revivals and speaking engagements for different churches, and then when he wasn't traveling, he was building homes specifically. A-frames were just like his thing. So he was pretty much self-employed growing up, but we didn't have a strong business background. It was just kind of what my dad was doing and he was very financially on top of things. So he made a lot of good decisions.

Speaker 1: 2:14

But growing up I had a good work ethic taught to us. We all knew what it meant to work really, really hard, but not necessarily how to build a business and go out and do it. We were just. You know, I grew up thinking I was just going to be a great worker, go to work. You know, nine to five punch my time, and it really where things started to turn for me were people like Robert Kiyosaki.

Speaker 1: 2:35

I remember the first time I saw the cashflow quadrant and heard about it, it was like brand new. I had no idea. Even though I grew up my dad was making money other ways than as an employee, it still didn't hit to me personally that's something that's attainable, right. So I was seeing the S, the B and the I quadrants and even knowing that they existed as viable options for people was kind of an epiphany, if you will. Options for people was kind of a epiphany, if you will. So that's, people like him really got me thinking in the direction of hey, what would it be like to create income rather than just make it from a paycheck? So a little bit of background there, yeah.

Speaker 2: 3:14

So what was your first? What was your first job in? In what did that? You know what was your, basically your career path to becoming an entrepreneur.

Speaker 1: 3:23

Yeah, my first job was McDonald's size 16 16. Nothing particularly sexy or interesting about that. It was just, like you know, we had to start buying our own stuff. Uh, I think at 12 was the age when parents like, hey, you got to get your own clothes, your own like, you got to provide for anything that's not food, basically. So as soon as we could legally start working it was, you know, we had to get income from somewhere. So, other than the roof over our heads and the food in our stomachs, we were paying for everything. So I got a job as early as I could. That wasn't, you know, nothing exciting to write home about, but that was my first thing.

Speaker 1: 3:54

And then, when I moved to Lexington in 2012, lexington, kentucky I got this job as a what was called a house house man, basically glorified housekeeper for this 25 000 square foot house. Was this like mansion on a thousand acre horse farm? Beautiful 18th century French architecture just an incredible massive place. I tripped into that job accident. They ended up making me the household manager a couple years into it, which basically is a butler, a North American equivalent for the for the butler role, and so that's how I started out my adult career. I was just kind of in this didn't have any connection to it sort of tripped into it. They sent me to an academy in Toronto and I got certified as butler, so I had a cool career, I suppose.

Speaker 1: 4:37

And then in 2020, I got fired from that job. And it's without going into a lot of detail. It's kind of funny because I knew for a full year that I was going to be let go before he fired me. Uh, it was just some like it's just discussions about, uh, about a compensation that just ended up not going well. I was, I was really really underpaid and I was like, hey, I think you know I could get a bump here and my employer was super not happy about it. So I knew for a full year he wanted to fire me, but it was so hard to source my job he had to wait till I found somebody train them and then, when they were competent, that person took my place. So I basically trained my replacement, got let go in April, I think, ish of 2020.

Speaker 1: 5:17

And by that point, I'd read enough and and kind of done some side hustle things to know that I really wanted to be an entrepreneur. My wife and I had talked about it and it was like look, this is we can do it now. We can either stay in household management I can we can move and I can get a different job you know making much, much better money even than I had been making but we're always going to be at someone else's web, there's someone else going to be citing what we call the front of the check and we're just going to be signing the back of the check. So I kind of wanted to flip that script a little bit and we thought, hey, we just got let go, we've got a month to figure this out and see what we could do. So that's how I got into entrepreneurship. I was sort of halfway into it, knew it was coming, and that's what got us out of the nest, so to speak.

Speaker 2: 6:07

So I want to rewind something that you said that kind of intrigued me. Did you say that you got certified as a butler?

Speaker 1: 6:12

Yes, so there's this place. There are basically a handful of internationally known academies for butlers and household managers and I was certified with the Charles McPherson Academy in Toronto, ontario, back in the I think 2016 is when I went up there, went through their program and it's like a month long program that you just learn every in and out from an international perspective on what it means to be a household manager or a butler, and it was great. Learned a lot of really cool stuff, stuff I've been working in for a while, and then a lot of new insights. So, yeah, I'm trained at a very unique background.

Speaker 1: 6:51

Most people I'll tell them what I used to do or even when I was working like wow, I've never met a butler before. It's like I'm usually a first time for most people there and it's kind of funny too, because I'm in Kentucky, so it's not exactly like LA or New York City, where there's a few more of those people. We're just like there's like three of us in this greater Midwest area. So it's a really interesting, very, very niche markets workforce. But it was fun. I learned a lot, had a great time and don't plan on going back, but you know, cool stories.

Speaker 2: 7:20

No, I mean, the reason I asked is because, like, when you hear Butler, I was thinking of, like Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and you know, and everything is like, is like, did you wear? Did you wear the suit? Is it like? You know, is, how is that whole?

Speaker 1: 7:34

process. It was slacks and a dress shirt and that was about as formal as we got. They never had us do white tie or anything like that, so it was somewhat laid back. The setting itself it was a formal, semi-similar dress setting but very, very formal interaction. So it was just the principal was just the man and his wife and they ran everything really, really, really, really well.

Speaker 1: 8:00

So we were just managing this massive home, making sure everything was getting done, from housekeeping to contracting to just any random thing. It could be landscaping. You're just overseeing the estate, essentially right. So there wasn't a ton of. They were really private. So the one thing they didn't do was entertain a lot, which is one of the hardest jobs in private services having to entertain a lot of parties.

Speaker 1: 8:22

So thankfully for me that my principals just didn't love to have a ton of people throw a lot of parties. So it made my job much, much easier than most of my colleagues, cause you know people at that kind of net worth they're having, you know, two 300 party person parties like every other weekend and if you can imagine the background work that takes to put that together. So I was fortunate to not be doing that all the time. But yeah, it was. It was a pretty interesting realm. I mean, it's a big house, you know, like a really, really, really cool place, and it's the kind of thing that you just wouldn't find yourself in, unless you're in, that you personally have that kind of network. You know you're you're building those kind of homes. So it was. It was unique, for sure.

Speaker 2: 9:04

No, that's, it is super. That's why I had to ask it's you don't? It's not every day you come across like that kind of background and that kind of story. So you know, one thing I do want to ask is like OK, so now that you got let go or you're transitioning, instead of trying to pivot and do something similar, you took a different route right. You went the entrepreneur route. Do something similar. You took a different route right, you went the entrepreneur route. And so what was that mindset shift for you? And let's dive into what your next step was.

Speaker 1: 9:38

For sure. So from a mindset perspective. So the year I told you about that, I knew for sure he wanted to let me go, but he just didn't have to take my space. I did interview for several other household management jobs across the US. I got fairly close to taking a job in Cleveland, ohio, but the biggest thing was that it was in Cleveland. It's like who wants to go to Cleveland? Always this on Cleveland. I got some friends up there, so whenever I get a chance I kind of throw some shade that way.

Speaker 1: 9:56

But no, we got to the point where again, my wife and I sat down we had four kids at the time and we're like look, we can keep doing this. We can make a lot more money than we're making right now. But I'm going to just continue working the same schedule. I'm going to probably spend more hours 60 to 80 hours working for somebody else and we're never going to build anything unless we get control of it and build it. So the mindset shift was just getting to the point of thinking about okay, what can I do? How quickly can I implement it?

Speaker 1: 10:28

And the reason I started a cleaning company was I'm much more of a black and white person than I am like a super creative individual, so I like to think of things in as logical terms as possible. I thought, hey, if I start a cleaning company, I can build a cool brand around that, because there aren't that many clinic company owners that were trained butlers. Right, I have a really, really weird, specific high-end I guess you could say training here, so I can capitalize on that and that's why I started a clinic. It just made the most sense and if I was going to create, go to a market and create customers there and find them, that was the easiest thing for me to get into. That made the most sense. I look at I talked about this when I think of like business. A lot of people want to go into business and they talk about like doing something that they love. Right, I think that's great if you can do something that you love, but you need to do something that's going to make more so than do something you love all the time. If, if both of them line up, that's amazing, good for you, but if they don't, like, I'd love to skydive. I just don't have a way to make a lot of money with that because I'm not going to teach people how to do it. I just want to do it Right. So that's going to cost me money. It's not going to make me money. So for me it was just a. It was an X's and O's thing. I'm just lining up the play and I have a really good network.

Speaker 1: 11:41

People know my background is in household management. This should be pretty easy and it was the best thing for me to do at the time to start creating income. Because when you go from working to building a business, I mean literally, it's like one week I had a paycheck every Friday and I knew what the amount was. It was the exact same for like years, with very minimal adjustments, and then all of a sudden it's not was? It was the exact same for like years, with very minimal adjustments, and then all of a sudden it's not there.

Speaker 1: 12:07

It's like you have to create it, like you have to go out and find value in the market and give people a reason to write you a check and that's that's a shift and it's sort of scary. You know starting out because you're hoping that it happens quickly and that you can cover your bases as quick as possible, so you're not just you know losing money and homeless for long. So it is a bit of a shift. But I think being, you know, not super risk averse helps and for whatever reason I am oriented towards risk, for better, for worse. I probably err too much on the side of doing a lot of risky stuff. So that that was just a personality, you know, psychological composition. That really helped me there too.

Speaker 2: 12:47

No, I mean, you said, you guys had four kids.

Speaker 1: 12:50

Yeah, we have five now. So we had four when we made the transition and then, a little over a year after that, we found out we were having our fifth. And so, yeah, we were man, we were in the thick of it, it was going down, yep.

Speaker 2: 13:04

Man, I have one and one on the way and I can't even fathom three, let alone five. That's intense, Yep, it is.

Speaker 1: 13:13

I will say three is the magic number. I always tell people if you can get to three and get a handle on it, you're fine. After that, like one and two was whatever. We had three, we had no idea what was happening. We thought we had just like forgotten everything that there was to know about parenting. Once we got sort of the hang of three, four and five, you heart, you don't even notice that you got. It's like oh yeah, we're, we're on autopilot, we got this. So I just tell people just get to three, get it on lockdown, you'll be fine.

Speaker 2: 13:41

From there you need seven, ten, it probably doesn't matter so, with that being said, are you guys good planning on more?

Speaker 1: 13:48

oh yeah. So I've told, we've said for like since the beginning, people like, are you gonna have any more kids? I'm like, oh yeah, double digits, baby, we're gonna, we're gonna get to 10 plus. Um, that's, that's sort of lighthearted because we genuinely don't have a number. We've never come up with Like, hey, we didn't plan and decide, hey, at this number we're done. We've just always been like, yeah, you know, not right now, we'll wait a little bit. But we've never had a hard and fast cutoff date.

Speaker 1: 14:13

So part of it whether or not we have any more biological kids we definitely want to adopt down the road. We kind of have a plan mapped out for that and that's going to be three to four years probably, conceivably, before we start on that journey. But that is definitely like something that we want to do. I grew up with foster kids growing up in our house. My wife's actually adopted, so we have a lot of firsthand experience with those realms and see a big need there. So a lot of desire to do that. We want our kids to get a little bit older and develop different routines and stuff before we jump into it. But yeah, I think it's definitely foreseeable that we'll hit double digits. I'm still holding out for that.

Speaker 2: 14:53

So that movie Cheaper by the Dozen is going to be your lifestyle? Yeah, it's so funny.

Speaker 1: 14:58

I still haven't seen that. I don't know how many times people reference that and I'm like, oh yeah, I need to watch that because people keep saying it and. I still haven't seen it, so got to put that on the playlist at some point.

Speaker 2: 15:08

but no, yeah, I mean, that's awesome though. So I mean, many people, though, leave fear, leaving a stable income right To to essentially take that bet on themselves and take that leap, even though you know you think that it's going to be a great, you know transition or a stable, a stable transition, right, but at the end of the day, everything is still a risk in. You know, you had a family, you had four kids, so what was like the, the mindset of you know trying to subside that you know uncertainty, or that negativity of hey, it didn't work out off of day one and I'm growing this to be stable and support a family of six, essentially with you, your wife and your kids.

Speaker 1: 15:53

Yeah, Well, for me, I can just tell you what it was for us. Everybody's story is a little bit different for us because when it was kind of our choice to have a large family and to jump into that and and grow that early on, we we were a little bit more financially limited, you know, for for obvious reasons, than a lot of people. So we were working with a smaller budget, I guess you could say, in terms of free cash to just throw around and experiment with different ideas. So, knowing that out of the gate, I knew, particularly in building a business, you know, in the early stages, I was probably going to be hustling a lot on the side to help out and get that moving. So that could like for me for a couple years early on.

Speaker 1: 16:36

It was I was doing a lot of rideshare driving, I was doing food delivery along with building a business and getting it to a point of sustainability. So I never had a complex where it's like, oh, I'm too good to do this, I'm going to be an entrepreneur, so I'm not going to do all these other things that sometimes people look down on. I just threw that out from day one. It's like, look, our goal is to get here. We want to become financially independent and if we're going to build it ourselves, we're probably going to have to do a lot and work a lot in a lot of different areas and pull money from wherever we can to get this thing off the ground. And so for me, it was like look, this is my responsibility, I got to make this happen, providing for the family, and there's nothing that I'm too good to do. Essentially, I didn't have a line there. I'm surprised, like it's not across the board. A lot of entrepreneurs aren't this way but I'm surprised by the number of people I've talked to who are like oh yeah, I would do that, like I would, I'd never drive for DoorDash, like I'm just not going to do that, right, it's almost like it's a little. It's a little too, there's a little bit too posh for it. So that's that was one thing that for me personally, I just got past. I wasn't going to not do something because I thought I was too good for it.

Speaker 1: 17:47

And again, I think you have different options. If it's just you, especially if you're single, or if it's just you and your wife you don't have kids you kind of have a lot more freedom to experiment and try things, because you don't have as many you know mouths to feed lives on the line. In my case, we're just, you know, our backs were a little bit more up against the wall, so that might have helped. But, again, being not being risk averse and being willing to do whatever you need to do to make it happen really, really, really helped us in a long way.

Speaker 1: 18:15

I'm also really fortunate that, even though, especially early on, I really sucked at communication right You'd think, uh, be, you know, my wife and I've been married for 13 years now and she's incredible. But even like in the early years, I just I just didn't communicate well at all. So she's, she really, really hung with me through a lot of just Aaron's doing stuff, he's booking meetings, he's doing things, and then she's also find out about it when she finds out about it just was terrible at that. So I was really really fortunate that she was very long suffering and hung in there with me until I found out hey, you know I could include Beverly on this journey, right, like she's actually part of this equation maybe I could like cure in a little bit and that we could do this together and that that really was something that in the last year or two started becoming a much more common fixture in our relationship and has helped out tremendously.

Speaker 1: 19:09

And it's just silly things like that that sometimes you I think entrepreneurs were super like tunnel vision we can get very, very task oriented and close out a lot of people that are really close to us and very important in the process. So kind of, you know, loosening back a little bit. I think you and I even talked about this when you were on our podcast like just even having the wherewithal to talk with your significant other and be like, hey, you know, let's plan this ahead, let's plan this week out and, you know, be on the same page so that neither of us are getting surprised by anything. So very, very grateful that my wife was patient to put up with all this, but she also is very entrepreneurially minded herself. She started her own business a couple of years ago and that's really been taking off. So we're definitely together in entrepreneurship, having a blast, seeing a lot of struggles, going through all the ups and downs, but it's been a good time.

Speaker 2: 20:05

No, that is so awesome, and I think the communication part is such a key, and I think we did talk about it on the podcast too, because I mean, I was the same way. I didn't really say anything, I didn't really talk about it and then you realize you're starting to build two different lives and two different versions of yourself, and so letting them in allows it to feel like to them that it's all one version of you and that they get to have an aspect of essentially the business that's getting built. And I would say you've built multiple businesses, from LexClean CleanSpace a bakery with your wife, I believe, right, and. And so what were some of the biggest mistakes or challenges that you faced in your first year of business, as well as, like, once you started scaling and having multiple businesses?

Speaker 1: 20:58

When you talk about mistakes, if you're trying to rank order like the biggest ones, that's where it gets tricky, cause there are so many to choose. Let's see what were the biggest problems. I think I would have done much better if I had sought like mentorship is something that I really preach to people now because I'm on the back end of not seeking out the kind of mentorship I should have had earlier, so I can kind of see the hindsight. You know, looking back, I wish I had sought some people out that were really accomplished, like in a cleaning business that I could say, hey, this one, I'm getting ready to do. What I need to be aware of Particularly like.

Speaker 1: 21:33

We started out in residential cleaning and then, a year and a half in, we added commercial cleaning and that's where the bulk of our revenue is today is on the commercial front. Those are very different markets. You have completely different cashflow operations going between the two and it was just knowing that one was going to be different and seeing that change. If I had at least done a little bit more work to reach out to people that were already accomplished there and sat down even 30, 60 minutes, you know, been able to learn from them. That would have helped me avoid a lot of the pitfalls that we had to experience the hard way. Right, business is a big trial and error experiment, but if you can talk to people that have already been through the minefield, they can just tell you hey, don't step there, there and there, and you won't blow up. It's like that's already available, so try to take advantage of that.

Speaker 1: 22:22

And I did a little bit too much the hard way because I was figuring it out solo, so those were in any business. The times that have been hardest had just been the decisions that I made without, you know, consulting people. I have a great network man, and I had a good network even, you know, five years ago, and it could have utilized it a lot better to get ahead of things before they took place. So that's kind of to like make a summary. That's what I'd say is, if I were to do it again, I'd reach out to a few more people and be like hey, this is what I'm looking to do, what should I be on the lookout for? What should I be avoiding? What decisions do I need to be making now to, you know, forestall the things that are coming down the road in six months, and that's what I would tell people that are getting started.

Speaker 2: 23:08

It's like, if this is the industry you're picking, find three or four people you know that would sit down and you know kind of walk you through what they did good and bad and write all that down, take it to the bank and just be on the lookout for it. So definitely, I mean, mentorship is huge and I think we all learn this. You know, as an entrepreneur, you learn that you don't need to be the one that solves every problem. You don't need to be the person that does it. You know all by yourself to be classified as an entrepreneur, right? And so I'm big on mentors. You know, from the franchise and everything, we hired mentors and when you look at it and you put your ego and your, you know, have a little bit of humility, it's. You're condensing your timeline to success, right? Someone else has already walked this path. Why not just get the answers and then tweak it up and implement, right? So what role do you think that creativity and adaptability play in your entrepreneurial journey?

Speaker 1: 24:05

Yeah. So again, creativity is always interesting for me because everything that has been created in any of the businesses that I have been part of or have founded in some capacity, they have all been at the hands of somebody else. I have zero new ideas. I look for systems that I can duplicate, that have worked and that I duplicate. That's all I do. So if I need something creative, if it's like a logo or something, I go to my wife. I go to a designer. We've worked with several that have been excellent. So that's just like my creativity. That's not my strong point. I don't try to do something. I'm not good at. Adaptability, on the other hand, I have had to implement a few times and I guess my biggest thing on adaptability, again looking back, is I can talk about like three different things in LexClean. I get three different points that come to mind. I won't share all of them. Where I there was a certain change, it was actually going from one really big one was going from residential to commercial. We almost didn't do that and, again, most of our revenue today in the company is commercial. We almost didn't do commercial because I was in the middle of transitioning from traditional residential to doing short-term just becoming an Airbnb cleaning company. That's kind of all the market we were going to focus in on. There was an opening in the area. I was like, okay, we're going to double down on this. My buddy is a continuous improvement leader over at a dairy factory and he's like, hey, aram, our company's on the way out. I want you to come out and give us a quote. And I'm like, oh no, no, we don't do commercial, because we'd only done some like retail commercial. It was not not good, very bad margins. And so I was. I just didn't want to do it. So I told him no, like three times. He sends me, he just keeps bugging me. He sends me a list of all the things they do day, day and weekly. He's like, well, just give me a ballpark range for what this would be. So he sends me, sends this thing over. I give him a number. I threw a bunch of money on top of that. I thought would just get him off my back. I was like, look, the range is going to be this, it's going to be stupid. And it's like, yeah, that's an all bar part. I was like, oh crap really. And so that's how we got into commercial.

Speaker 1: 26:02

And there've been a couple other events like that in various things that I've done, where, at the time, if it was just me saying no the first time, we wouldn't have done it, because my, my thought process was, oh well, I don't think it's this, that or the other, and so for me, adaptability was the thing. The things that I turned down initially, that I thought weren't going to be any good, actually ended up like seismically changing the outcome of our businesses today, and so for me, I used to think I was like a super open-minded person, very balanced and looking at a lot of new data all the time, and I've surprised myself with how a little bit closed-minded I can be on some of these topics, and so it's helped me come a long way and I no longer say no to anything immediately, like almost at all. Um, if something's completely out of our, out of a wheelhouse like I've somebody reached out to us for, like it was like a crime scene cleanup, which is a totally different certification, like you have to have a whole, that's a whole different, like I can clearly say no, we can't do that. You have to go to this like other company. But unless it's completely outside of our certification. There's almost nothing in any business that I'm part of now or like even helping my wife, like you know.

Speaker 1: 27:19

Don't say no to anything immediately. Let's at least get some more info, let's test the water, see what it is, send a quote and then, if they say no, if it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out. Send a quote and then, if they say no, if it doesn't work out, does work out. But um, I I've come a long ways in learning that you don't know a lot the way it is. So don't assume, especially on new opportunities, that you think you know what they are before you find out. Because I mean, we'd be, we'd be making a lot less money right now if the people I had turned down initially just took me at the first, the first go instead of pushing the envelope a little bit. So just ironic how some of this turns out.

Speaker 2: 27:56

No, I mean, that is so true, right. You don't know what opportunity is going to lead from it. You don't know what itself could really bear fruit from it. Sometimes you just got to take a leap, try it, maybe it may, maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. But you, at the end of the day, why limit yourself or cap yourself and say sorry, we only do it this way. And it's like you know, maybe your, your business, especially in the beginning, your business is not that big or not that established to niche down, that that much, right. So, and I was.

Speaker 2: 28:28

I was talking to someone the other day and they were like you know well, I heard, niches are in the riches are in the niches. And I was like, yeah, but you don't have any clients. So you, you can't claim that you have a niche yet if you don't have anyone to say see, this is our past results, this is why we do it with this, you know. And he was like oh, that makes sense. I was like broaden your umbrella, grow. And then, with this, and he was like, oh, that makes sense. I was like broaden your umbrella, grow, and then niche down. And then he was like that makes more sense.

Speaker 1: 28:56

But that is no, that is so true. So I'll say, like when I started out because I was had the background in in butlering my initial approach to residential cleaning was like, well, we're just going to target really, really high income households right, we can develop a really unique experience. That was a niche market that we very quickly had to broaden and, just like you said, like started out to niche so we broadened, got the customer base and then we could start zoning in a little bit. And then we had customers come to us and we're like, if you don't really fit the profile, I can refer you out. But we knew what we could offer, what we were good at at that point.

Speaker 1: 29:34

And you're spot on, sometimes coming in with a super, super niche category right out of the gate before you developed what we'd call in software product market fit is totally backwards. You have to be a little bit broader on the funnel and then cue in as you've developed that customer base. So great, great little tip there for all of you guys listening that was, that was good stuff, devin, I've never heard people like say quite like that, but that is, that is totally true.

Speaker 2: 30:00

So, and I want to say you know, I want to, you know real quick, just talk about the crime scene cleanup Now. Now, was that for like a law enforcement agency, or was it the bad guys that you?

Speaker 1: 30:14

know it wasn't the mafia.

Speaker 1: 30:19

No, it wasn't uh wasn't any perpetrators that reached out, thankfully, I mean, I'm I'm assuming that was the case. No, it was. It was really just a classification thing where they I don't know how they eventually, how they initially got our contact info but LexClean's in the name, so sometimes they could just roll through some stuff and give us a call. I don't remember who even referred them, but it was like right out of the game, like wait, wait, what is this? What exactly is the scope? And when they told me I was like no, no, no, that's not. You literally have to have a whole different set of licensing for that. You have disposal requirements. It's just, uh, it's.

Speaker 1: 30:50

And I have been in homes and we have turned some residences over that looks like someone died in there, for sure it was not confirmed. It looked that bad. But like actual crime scene cleanup is just a difference. That's a different ball of wax. Um, again, it is actually pretty niche and generally the companies that do that most of the time only do that like it is a pretty niche. And generally the companies that do that most of the time only do that Like it is a hyper niche, like this is boom and you, yeah, they're like you'll have you'll work with local law enforcement or some sort of governing body and kind of a direct line partner type of thing, just not something I was like super, super keen on.

Speaker 2: 31:25

It's also didn't fit our brand, so we just we did, we never pursued that and you definitely have it, kind of have to have a different kind of stomach for it too, yeah, which I don't personally, it would be.

Speaker 1: 31:35

It would be hard for me to train people for that because I yeah, I don't. I don't do super well with core. So that was that, was not another I dude, I this is like a dumb story. I remember in high school, uh, there was an anatomy. In anatomy class there was a lecture series and they were showing um, like the I forget now it's a surgery where they take a like a super, super small camera and they do surgery on, like you know, people, the gallbladders and stuff. So it's like an incision. They put the camera in there and there was like this little pre thing where it's like hey, you know, this might be sensitive for some people, so you don't have to watch this section If, like, you're being queasy. I was like what the heck, dude. I almost passed out. It was like two minutes in and I couldn't even handle that. I was like what the heck. So, yeah, I'm not great for gore.

Speaker 2: 32:20

Oh, that's, that's funny, so I do want to. I want to ask you know, for people that are, or what advice would you have for people that are hesitant to take that leap of faith and, you know, become a business owner, but really have that desire or that, you know, dream of doing so?

Speaker 1: 32:38

Yeah, it's a great question when I, I think, early on, when I was really getting enamored by the idea and I still am enamored by the idea of making income in any other way other than employ, I started to think oh man, everybody should be a business owner, right, everybody should do this. This is just like the best way to make money. I've kind of come away from that to a degree where I now I'm just like hey, what is your goal? If your goal, whatever that is, if your 10-year, 20-year, 30-year plan is to be here, how are you best going to accomplish that? And for a lot of people that's man, I want to do a 9 to 5. I'm going to dump a bunch of money into a 401k and I know what I'm going to have at the end of it and everything's going to be peachy Cool. Go for it, don't do it. So you should run that play For people that want to be entrepreneurs.

Speaker 1: 33:32

Sometimes they look at it from a get rich quick type of thing and there are just no legal get rich quick schemes out there, so plenty of illegal ones. And if that's what you're looking at, I'd still advise against it because it's not a great payout in the long run. But if you want to do it the right way, it's so much more work than I think a lot of people understand when they're starting out and they think that it's a really glitzy, like oh yeah, I'm going to open this up, I got a logo design and we're going to go gangbusters. It's going to be amazing. We're going to hit a million ARR in month two. You get the unicorns that pull it off. It's amazing when it happens. But for the majority of the cases, I tell people you're going to work a lot longer and a lot harder, making a lot less money, just for much longer than you anticipated. If you thought you're going to get here and make this money, that timeline is probably another year or two out and you're working twice as hard as you thought you were going to be. So you have to adjust those expectations to begin with. Now. If your goal is financial independence, ownership and being able to set your own terms, and you understand that it's harder than working and getting a W-2, then okay, good, you've at least like you've come to terms with that. So come to terms, adjust your expectations.

Speaker 1: 34:55

I don't want to shy anybody away from it. I just don't want people to get into it dreaming that it is something that it's probably not, because a lot of people get burned out in the first. You know three months I'm like, oh heck, this isn't working, I haven't sold anything, I don't have customers. You know three months I'm like, oh heck, this isn't working, I haven't sold anything, I don't have customers, and that could be for a variety of reasons. But uh, yeah, don't don't romanticize it Like, I think, what you might imagine it to be in your head. Try to be a little bit more realistic. And again, that comes back to talking to people that have been successful, because if you talk to anybody that's successful, they'll say the exact same thing. They're like, yeah, this is not going to be a walk to the park and week three is not going to be the best of your life. So I would just tell people that.

Speaker 1: 35:39

And then I would ask people to kind of tell me, on a scale of one to 10, where they're at. On risk averseness, this is just something I keep coming back to. Are you super, super risk averse? If you are like, if that really bothers you, then it is going to be hard, right, you're going to have to set much, much lower limits. You know, if you're like, oh, I can lose this much, you have to drop that way down and hope that this thing takes off really early. You might have to do a lot more background work. You might have to spend three or four years on the development stage, really getting something super, super crisp before you launch. If you're hyper risk averse Because if you're like me and you're willing to try things out a lot more it's fine.

Speaker 1: 36:20

But I think people just need to be honest from a psychological standpoint with where they are personally and what they can tolerate, and then develop a plan around that with good mentorship, good counsel that can can help them. So it's, it's not. It's not like a bunch of one-liners and like super awesome, like one, two, three plays. It's just just look at things legitimately, be honest with yourself, get some outside perspective and develop a plan. It's, it's. It's a lot less again, a lot less sexy than I think people want it to be. It's like this is just how it is. But we're, you know we're we're super sensationalist culture and so we like to think of things in like bright lights and big moments and very, very quick, and we just got to. You know, dial it down and be a little bit more realistic.

Speaker 2: 37:05

No, I love that and, honestly, I agree with everything that you said. That is, that is how it is, that's the real talk, as they say. And so the last question I want to ask you know, before we wrap up, is your legacy wall, and on your legacy wall, this is not a tombstone, is not, you know, anything of that nature? So I like to say that ahead of time, because it's the message that you've learned, or the you know, the message, essentially, that you learned from your life's journey for the up and coming generations. Right, and it could be short, it could be long, but what would that one message be?

Speaker 1: 37:46

Probably it can be done, but it's probably harder than you think. But I like to lead with. It can be done because I really think just about anything's possible. Particularly, I mean, this is 2025.

Speaker 1: 38:02

Man, you and I, when we were growing up you know, not that long ago because I'm not that old, you're not that old, but I mean I remember dial-up internet and we were moving from dial-up internet like high speed internet and that was that was revolutionary, right. You weren't waiting four minutes for every web page to load while you went and you know, mow the lawn, something like that. Like like things have moved drastically just in our lifetime. I think we're way more connected. We have way more information. We have way more education available to us. You know the people that you've interviewed on this podcast. You know we can glean from all of these individuals, right, and get light years ahead of people a hundred years ago, for example. So there's much more that's possible now. So I think just about anything can be done, but again, it's probably harder. You need to come to terms with that. It's about playing around it being hard and then go for it.

Speaker 2: 38:54

I love that and it is true. And so where can people connect with you?

Speaker 1: 38:59

LinkedIn is really the best place. I'm on that, probably the most and so I'm really easy to find Aram Street. There aren't too many of us, so if you find me there, I'll link that I'll be. Uh, I'll be sure to respond. It'd be great to connect with anybody.

Speaker 2: 39:15

Yeah, and then, guys, that will be in the show notes, that'll also be in the video description if you're watching on YouTube. Um, but make sure you guys share this episode with a friend. I mean, this is straight up the real talk of you know, taking a bet on yourself, really diving in and taking that leap of faith. So you know, not only for you, but who is that one person that you know that is trying to, or, as always, talked about becoming an entrepreneur or taking their passion and making a reality. Right, send this episode to them. But, aaron, I want to say, you know, thank you again for taking the time out of your day to hop on the mindset cafe and just drop some knowledge, dude.

Speaker 1: 39:50

Devin, it's been great talking with you again now and thanks so much for having me on. This has been a lot of fun.

Speaker 2: 39:56

Of course, brother. We'll definitely connect again soon. All right, Cheers, buddy. Cause it shies, got my mind on the prize. I can't be distracted. I stay on my grind. No time to be slack. I hustle harder. I go against the current cause. I know my mind is rich to be collected.