How a “One-Stop Shop” Idea Turned Into $60M+ on Amazon | Steve Rolle

What if the path to freedom isn't found in following the traditional playbook, but in learning how to own your decisions, your time, and your future? 

In this episode of Above & Beyond, host Jän Simon sits down with Steve Rolle—entrepreneur, investor, US Army veteran, and author. Steve grew up in a low-income environment in Washington, DC, and went on to build, scale, and exit multiple companies across e-commerce, manufacturing, and distribution, with over $100 million in combined sales.

Steve shares his "Freedom First" business mindset, explaining why most entrepreneurs get stuck being "operators" when they should be striving to be "owners." He breaks down his four-part system for business success and shares the "Rule of 100" that helped him master everything from engineering to e-commerce.

Topics Covered:
• Rejecting the "future chosen for you" and taking agency
• The Rule of 100: Why repetition beats talent
• Why "Product" is only 25% of the business game
• The 4 Pillars: Product, Margin, Distribution, and Customer Acquisition
• Moving from CEO to Owner: How to delegate using SOPs
• Balancing "building the kingdom" with being a present father
• Why failure is the ultimate building block for success

Transcript

SPEAKER_05 0:00

And there's a lot of entrepreneurs and aspiring business owners that are really good at making a product. I don't care if it's a SaaS product tool, they're vibe coding right now, or they've made a Shark Tank style product. They're good at making the product. Product is 25% of the game. Everyone wants to make the product and say, okay, the thing should sell itself. I built it.

SPEAKER_01 0:20

Hey there, welcome back to Above and Beyond where Excellence meets Elevation. I'm your host, Jan Simon. And this season we're raising the bar, diving into the passion, purpose, and defining moments of leaders who don't just aim high, they live there. Big ideas, real stories. Let's get into it. What if the path to freedom isn't found in following the traditional playbook, but in learning how to own your decisions, your time, and your future? Today I'm joined by Steve Roll, entrepreneur, investor, podcast host, and soon-to-be author. Steve grew up in a low-income environment in Washington, D.C., served in the U.S. Army, and began building side businesses while still wearing the uniform. Since then, he has built, scaled for, and exited multiple companies across e-commerce, manufacturing, and distribution, generating over a hundred million in combined sales. But this conversation is just about business. It is about mindset, discipline, calculated risk, and learning how to build something that doesn't just make money, but creates freedom. Steve's story is about taking control of your path even when the odds, the environment, and the expectations around you say otherwise. Steve Roll, welcome to Above and Beyond.

SPEAKER_05 1:42

Thank you, Jan, for having me on. We're excited to be here.

SPEAKER_01 1:44

Yeah, well, I'm excited to have you and we're talking a little bit, but Steve, this is actually our first remote recording of Above and Beyond. So I appreciate you being the guinea pig, the test subject, the petri dish, however you want to throw that out there. But I love the fact that we're kicking it off with you. I've read a bit about your story and done some background checking on you and really, really think that you've got a powerful story to tell. So I'm excited about it. I'm excited about learning how you've navigated ownership, some adaptability stuff, and just really truly building beyond the limits of we'll say what your circumstances were growing up. So thank you.

SPEAKER_05 2:25

Well, I appreciate the gracious introduction that you gave as well. And I'm excited to be on here for the first ever virtual that you've ever done. So we're breaking the ice, and I'm a great guest to have on for breaking the ice. I promise you that.

SPEAKER_01 2:38

Awesome. Well, this is awesome. So thank you very much. So, Steve, let's let's do this a little bit. For those who are are uh watching the podcast, why don't you give me a little bit about who you are, where you're from, and uh why you matter?

SPEAKER_05 2:51

Well, I'll tell you, my whole story starts off with powerlessness. And if you compare where I'm at today from the environment that I came from, I learned powerlessness from my neighborhood, from my family, from my environment, from the church that I was in, where I realized at a young age we were not in control. And so many people find themselves in the same situation, the same upbringing that I was raised in. Little poor black kid on the East Coast, growing up on the outskirts of DC. My dad's a government contractor, and my mom was trained as a nurse. Both of them had associates' degrees. And we didn't have two pennies to rub together on top of them taking care of just the basic necessities. And there were times when the basic necessities weren't there. One of the funniest things I remember from my childhood, if it's funny being poor, is every year they would have this Thanksgiving food drive where you would bring items to the church and they'd have this box set up. And I remember going to the store with my mom, and she she was really scrounging to find some extra money just so we could go and contribute to this thing. You remember Ragu spaghetti sauce, that brand ragu? I think it's still around now. We got one of those double containers of Ragu, and we came and we brought that, put it into the box, and feeling like, okay, the roll family has done their part. Tell me why it's hilarious that four days later it was a knock on the door, and that food came right back to our house with that double pack of Ragu spaghetti sauce because we were the family in need. That's who they were raising it for.

SPEAKER_01 4:18

That is awesome.

SPEAKER_05 4:19

As a six-year-old, that's where I realized and understood for the first time we were living at the expense of others and at the mercy of others, and didn't have enough for us to overcome that. And I hated that because it showed from the cars that we drove to the house that we lived in, to people bringing food over to our house that we weren't in control. Life was happening to us. And so one of the biggest things I learned is that if you want to go after the future that you've decided to go after, and the future that you want for your life, there's a future you have to reject first. And for me, it was rejecting the upbringing that I had and my parents scrounging and working as hard as they could, but not being able to get by because of decisions that they had made and the environment that they put us into. Wonderful people. But it was the agency to know that they chose that for us. They chose to have a lot of kids when they couldn't afford it. They chose for us to live in that environment, a really expensive place to live. And so coming out of that environment, a very religious environment, I went out and got an education, went to Bible college first because I was required to for my parents. Again, a future I didn't choose for me, but one that they chose for me. Two years of Bible college, come back out. I have no direction in life, don't know what I want to do. And I was lucky enough to get influenced by some people that really cared about me who were not my parents. I wouldn't have listened to my parents at this point. Coming back out of Bible college, I'm 19 years old, but there was someone else, a friend's dad, who pulled me aside and goes, Man, what are you doing with your life? Like, you got great scores in math and science. Go out, learn something, do something difficult, and better yourself. Like, go have a better life than what you've had up to this point. And that motivated me to go out and earn an ROTC scholarship. I studied civil engineering at California Baptist University, got as far away from home as I possibly could and studied engineering, got a four-year degree out there, joined the Army, got my master's while I was still in, and did a bunch of construction while I was in the Army, some demolition, and had the chance to go work for the Corps of Engineers. And when I got to the Corps of Engineers, I went from working 15 hours a day to now working eight hours a day. I'm working in a civilian corps of engineers office. And that's when I really started to take the entrepreneurial drive that I had and start businesses while I was still in the military. Culminating with starting one that was quite successful. And now at this point, it's been seven years since I've had a W-2 job, which is six months after I got out of the military. The business was far more successful than I ever thought, but the real lessons in that business came on the back end of learning how to grow it, how to scale, how to add people to it, and make it so that it didn't require me anymore to be able to grow, which is where we find ourselves today. It's allowed me to become more of an investor, start other side hustles and other businesses, and help other people to do much of the same. And it gives me the opportunity to write a book during the free time that I have as well. And so that'll be coming up this summer.

SPEAKER_01 7:18

Okay. What's the name of the book? Do you have a name out yet?

SPEAKER_05 7:21

I do. So the book's called The Future You Choose, and it's a lot of what I just articulated there. Rejecting the future that others chose for you, that your environment chose for you, and digging into the one that you want to reverse engineer for you. Yeah. And how do you make that happen? Well, like it's possible for you to live the life that you want. It's possible for you to have the freedom that you desire. But there are inputs you have to put in to achieve that output. And that's what the book is all about.

SPEAKER_01 7:46

I I think that is so powerful because uh similarly, I grew up in a very small town, northeastern Washington state, not DC. We didn't have money. I mean, my my dad was a teacher and my mom worked minimum wage jobs or very close to minimum wage jobs most of the time. And so all the clothes that I pretty much wore were handmade for the longest time. And I just remember thinking as I was growing up, I'm gonna give my kids more than I my my parents ever gave me, right? But but being able to step back and and take a look at you know, if you if you call them societal norms or whatever it is, where we get stuck in that spot where it's well, this is just the way things are. It's like but it doesn't have to be the way things are. It doesn't have to be be what the future is. Now you can't just be a passive recipient of what it brings because yeah, you're gonna st it's gonna stay the same. You're never gonna, you know, never gonna get out of it. I've I've never lived in the inner city and I've said that before on the podcast. I've never, you know, had to deal with, okay, how do I get out of this situation? But I mean, I took myself to a point where I'm like, I'm not going to be stuck you know, in in in education, not that education's bad. It's you know right for some people. It's funny, the longest for the longest time growing up, people told me, you should either be a pastor or you should be a teacher. And I'm like, don't want to be either one of those.

unknown 9:14

You know.

SPEAKER_01 9:15

So it's it's it's interesting though, because I I relate very closely to what you're saying, and I think it's very powerful that yes, we all have some semblance of control over where we're going, you know, not necessarily where we're where we've been, and we don't have to let our past define what our future holds. And it's not easy, not easy at all. But but that's that's incredible. Now, when you went into the military, was Army, you said, right? Corps of engineers. How how did you was that all mostly based here in the States, or were you traveling all over, or what did that look like?

SPEAKER_05 9:53

Yeah, so I have a really interesting military background in that I never left America. So when I volunteered and joined ROTC, this is 2010, when I started ROTC, height of the Afghanistan war, Iraq's winding down, and and I'm a kid that wants to go and fight. I'm all spun up from 9-11, you call me Mr. Patriotic, I was ready to go and go fight a war. And my mom was terrified, thinking, you know, I'm the only one of her seven children that was going to join the military. But college isn't free. And I wanted to get a good education that was gonna cost some money, so there weren't that many paths to do it. And an ROTC scholarship was actually the easiest path to get because back in 2009, they were accepting 97% of uh applicants who qualified for it. So, like if you wanted to go get shot at, like, you could sign up for it. So I did ROTC from 2010 to 2014. And by the time that I got out, two things had changed. Number one, I had no desire to go fight a war. I I had seen some things and people had to come back that I was like, that I don't want to do that. And number two, the war was really winding down at that point, too. And so I bounced from duty station to duty station, and it seemed like every time I would bounce to one, the unit I was a part of would go either to Iraq or Afghanistan or to Kuwait. Oh, that's like one of those three. And so I just kept on missing it. But I didn't mind the fact that I was missing it. You know, I volunteered to serve, I wanted to go and fight. Uh at this point, I'm glad I never had to go, you know? Yeah, and it seeing how that changed people, and I have so much respect for those that that not only joined the military, but the ones that that are deployed for long periods of time and they come back, and you come back a different person than when you go. And some call it a growth experience, other call it a life-changing experience for those that are going out and fighting. And we have we have we owe such a debt of gratitude. Even those of us who were in, we owe a debt of gratitude to those who went and fought and the warriors that and I am not one of those warriors. That's not me.

SPEAKER_01 11:52

Gotcha, yeah. Did did you play sports growing up? Or what were you involved in extracurricular? What got you kind of focused on the military? Was it just 9-11?

SPEAKER_05 12:03

Well, I'll tell you, I I played baseball uh all growing up as a kid, really went into basketball because uh it became kind of a family thing. Now I'm only 5'11, so there was a peak to how good I could get at basketball. So I never could have qualified to go play division one anywhere. I really wasn't good enough. But I promise you this at Bible college, there weren't that many black kids at Bible college. Okay. I was a star at Bible college. So it was we played in the NAIA Division II or Division III, like basically nobody basketball, a bunch of guys that don't want to be there. And that's how we competed. But to me, it was a college basketball experience, and I thoroughly enjoyed it before I ended up flunking out of Bible college and had to leave and go back home. So sports was a huge part of my life. Sports taught me that there's nothing you can apply yourself to in life and do over and over and over again that you can't become really, really good at. Now, you may not become best in the world, that requires talent and the persistence of repetition. But part of the rule of 100 that I use in my own life today that keeps me from failing quickly, people call it failing quickly, it's more like quitting early. Is that the rule comes from understanding if I shoot free throws and I'm going out and I'm playing basketball, I shoot 100 free throws, I'm gonna get better at that thing. And I may not be perfect after 100, but I will have learned what it takes to get better from zero to a hundred. And that's fundamentally where that starts. And the sports can teach us so much the hard coaching, discipline, working out as a team, but really understanding that you can dedicate yourself to something and you will get better. I tell my kids this to this day. Look, you may not be the best in the world, but hard work, determination, and repetition can get you top 10% in anything. I don't care what it is, it can get you top 10%. And so sports taught me that. That pushed me into the military because with sports comes along this idea of you want to be elite. And so I thought the Marine Corps, those are the hardcore guys. I wanted to go enlist. My parents wouldn't let me out of high school. And so ROTC in the army became a hey, I gotta figure out my life. I want to go get educated, a good education, and I can't afford it. What are my options? Okay, they're handed out scholarships over here. That pushed me to the military. Whereas otherwise, I probably don't think I would have joined if I wasn't getting the benefits from the education. But it's great that they have those. And so that pushed me towards the military. But in the military, I learned a whole lot more and reinforced what I learned when I was playing sports because it's the teamwork, it's it's the determination, it's doing really hard things. It's learning to be a leader and to be confident. And how do they teach you confidence in the military? By forcing you into situations that most people don't want to do. And that can be as simple as becoming a leader at 25 years old and being in charge of 40 people and a couple million dollar property book that you're responsible for. But it can also be things like a water confidence course because I'm black and I used to not be able to swim. I was terrified of water.

SPEAKER_01 15:04

But I probably say white wire sealed seals, not black guys, you know. It's like I'm sorry, but it's true, you know, it's like it really is.

SPEAKER_05 15:13

And it's not that I didn't grow up near a community pool. I did, but something happened between six and eighteen, and all of a sudden I can't swim anymore. But you know, you do the water confidence course from the military, and it's really hard, and it's difficult. And you're not just swimming, you're swimming with a full pack on and clothes that you were not designed to float in. And you learn that it's not that I'm a good swimmer now. I learned two things. I know how to survive, and I've been there done that before. And that's confidence that comes from being forced into a situation that you didn't want to do that most people don't want to do, and you say, I survived, and now I can tell people I've been there, done that. Like, okay, that's where confidence comes from. Yeah, and I think that a lot of things in life can come back to that army water fitness test and just saying, okay, well, do it anyway, and you will be confident.

SPEAKER_01 16:06

Yeah. I I liken that to I I fought forest fire for six years, and part of that time I repelled out a helicopter. So, you know, and we're 250 feet. And you don't start at 250 feet, you start gradually 50 feet, 100 feet, you know. But I can remember the first time having to climb out on the skid on the on the helicopter and having to repel, it was scared to death. But then pretty soon you're Jones in for it. You're like, come on, let's go! Can we do it again? Can we do it again? So, you know, same thing. It's like, yeah, it's scary the first time. It might even be a little bit scary the second time, but after that, you know what to expect, and it's just there. So yeah, where at a young age, did you feel like you knew you wanted to be an entrepreneur? Did you have any clue what an entrepreneur was? Or or or was your path more? I mean, obviously, we talked about sports and military and you got an education, but at what point did that switch flip where you you said, Yeah, you know what, I'm I'm doing this myself?

SPEAKER_05 17:03

Yeah. You know, everybody has that story of I had a lawn mowing company, I was shoveling snow, like I was an entrepreneur, you know, at a young age. And and I don't know that I really like that articulation of being an entrepreneur and that, okay, you washed some cars and you made some money. Because it really is one thing to go out and learn a skill set and get given money for it. It's a whole other thing to learn to build a system around that money becoming predictable and you learning how to really leverage other people's time and ability into a repeatable system that feeds you, that pays you for a long time. And so if you articulate business ownership and entrepreneurship as the latter and learning how to use other people's time, learning how to use systems and make it repeatable so that you have revenue and repeatable profit that's coming in. I knew nothing about that. I knew two people growing up that owned businesses. And in my church, very small community, in the church that we went to, those two people had the most money. And I remember everybody knew it because you knew who was tithing what, who was supporting the church. Like they were given these extra special treatments, you know, because they had a lot of the church funding coming through. And so you knew that as a kid. We all worked for them at one point or another in these side tasks. They had enough money to kind of just hire people at will so the teenagers would all go and work for them. And I had the opportunity to work for one of them who owned the largest plumbing heating and air conditioning company on the East Coast called FH Fur when I was growing up. And just being around and understanding that this is the richest guy that I know. He has the biggest house in northern Virginia, the richest guy that I know. And I I never saw him taking a hammer, I never saw him going out to a sales call. I didn't, he had hundreds of people, but he had started it with him in one truck. And we all knew that story. And so I was so inspired by what he had done that I knew, even going into the military, I want to own my own business. And at the time, what I was really saying was, I want to have freedom of my time, you know, I want to be financially independent. I didn't really have a concept of understanding the repeatable systems and leveraging people in time at that point. But I knew I wanted to be like this guy, Floyd Fur, who had hundreds of employees and was doing really, really well, and he wasn't doing the work himself. So I would have these little side hustles as I was in college where I would come up with these ideas. And Shark Tank was new at the time, so all of us were watching Shark Tank, and we're like, oh, I could have built that, I could have done that. You know, the product is the business. And so I was developing this idea at the time that man, people are willing to pay more if you kit items together than if they're separate. And I just had this epiphany one day, and I thought I was a smart guy. I wasn't that smart. A lot of folks have figured that out long before I had. You walk into any Walmart and you see, okay, you can buy an individual set of plates, or you can buy the set. And it's a little bit more expensive, but you're getting the convenience of putting it all together. And so they're making probably a higher margin on that set than they would on the individual items. And that was a concept I started to play with. I tried to build businesses around. And you'd laugh if I told you how I tried to apply this new knowledge of kidding into initial businesses because they were just absolute failures. They're embarrassing to talk about, but I love talking about them. And ultim all in the end, I actually ended up using that concept to create my first successful business. And so it was failing a couple of times in a really embarrassing way that ultimately led me to, oh, this is working. Hey, I wonder if that kidding thing is still a deal. And that's a business to this day that does $10 million a year that I'm in no way involved in, but I built it like Floyd Fur, like the plumber that I worked for, with one guy in a truck. Like I have that story now to lean on. And so it was inspiration from seeing these entrepreneurs that I didn't really understand what they were doing and how they had done it when I was young. And I knew I wanted to play, I w I wanted to be in that barbershop. I didn't know what it meant, but I started cooking a little bit early. And even as I was still working full-time jobs and in the military, I was actively pursuing figuring out what's my side hustle gonna be that turns into a main squeeze. And to be honest with you, the ones I thought were gonna work are not the ones that worked. It's the one that I didn't think was gonna be that big, that was always just gonna be a side hustle. That's the one that ultimately found the most success, which is hilarious because sometimes it's better to not know than to know which which business is going to be successful.

SPEAKER_01 21:46

Well, do you do you feel that was because there was some passion about whatever that project was that made it successful, or was it something else?

SPEAKER_05 21:57

Well, I'm a firm believer that Naval Rod. Avican's idea of you've got to find the thing that looks like work to other people, but it's play to you. And you can do it and you're passionate about it. And most people wouldn't want to spend their time and effort doing that. And I ultimately found that thing that nobody wanted to touch with, nobody wanted to mess with it. But I was interested. And so I leaned in. I started reading books about it. I started doing it, and it was successful. And it wasn't life-changing money, but I was making enough to have signals that, hey, this is working. Hey, if I keep doing this, like this could turn into something huge. Now I had no idea how big it could get. But I thought, huh, I enjoy doing it. So I can repetitively do this over and over and over again and learn and get a little bit better at it. And it ultimately that was a decision that changed my life. But I I learned from that that it's people ask, well, if I was as motivated as you were, if I had as much dedication as you did, it's like I wasn't motivated. I just enjoyed doing it. It's like for someone that plays basketball. Like I just enjoy playing basketball. Like that's why I'm getting better at it. And so when you find something that feels like work to others, but isn't work to you, I would look very closely at that because ultimately that changed my life. And I think it can change a lot of other people's lives as well when they find that thing that, well, I don't mind working on this. It is that concept of never working a day in your life if you enjoy what you do. But people think about that the wrong way, I think. And and there's things that naturally, like, oh, I'm really interested in this. I would really enjoy doing this. And I would do it for free. If you turn that into a business, it you'll be dangerous.

SPEAKER_01 23:41

Yeah. Well, it's funny because I on the side I do woodworking, so I like to make things. It just gives me a release. And people said, You ever thought about selling those? I'm like, no, because as soon as I do, I don't think I'd like it anymore. But I'm this I could work sunup to sundown and not even think twice about it when I'm in my wood shop. It's like just doing stuff that you know it allows me to be free and in my mind and create. And but anyway, so do you do you feel like being in the army or or I should say, how did being in the army and and going through maybe some of the trials and tribulations of the army and and having that structure forced upon you, did that help you in your businesses and in your in your path to entrepreneurship as far as your decision making and and then you know maybe how you approached setting up the business?

SPEAKER_05 24:39

There's a lot of elements from the army that I ended up applying in my business, but probably the one that I applied the most was learning to manage people whose job I did not know how to do myself, whose job I did not understand. And knowing that I have to find a way to motivate them to do their job really well and to get better at their job, even though I can't say I've done it before, I know exactly how long those tasks take, you're doing it the wrong way, here's how you fix it. And so a lot of times what I see with other entrepreneurs who came up from being a business of one and they did it all themselves, and then they hire people who are going to come and do a task like you gotta do it my way. Like this is the way to do it, and I don't want you deviating from it because then I don't have my checks over here anymore if you're not doing it my way. And so they'll hire really well-intentioned people to come in and do a task, and then they'll get upset at them for doing it a way that's different or finding a way that they think is better. And ultimately, you're gonna kill the motivation of your employees by not letting them naturally get good and learn and fail in their own job so that they can do more for your company. And that's a problem. But in the military, my first day in the military, I walked into a platoon and I was the platoon leader in charge of 50 to 55 people, depending on the day. And I had a really seasoned, really experienced platoon sergeant who had 20 years of experience in the army, who was the the second in command. And really, they call the platoon sergeant was like the dad of the platoon, and then the platoon leader, me, I'm the mom. You know, I'm kind of transient, I'm coming in for a little bit, I'm gonna leave, and he's still gonna be there. And ultimately, the way that the officer-enlisted relationship worked was I had been given a general, broad understanding of all the jobs that my soldiers were going to have. And I started off in a construction platoon because I had plumbers, I had carpenters, I had electricians, and I didn't know how to do any of that work. But I was the one responsible when it was time for us to go build a shoot house or for us to go build a lodging facility for someone that needed plumbing, electrical, and carpentry done. I'm responsible for deploying those resources to go and get the job done. And I noticed that there was great benefit to me of not knowing how to do their job. Because I had to find other ways to motivate and get the mission accomplished without being like, you take the nail, you put it into the wood, you take the hammer, and you hit it. Like that's how you do the job, right? Right. And I think that is an unlock that happens when you realize, oh, okay, so I'm the manager, but I don't know how to do it. So what can I focus on? I can focus on the people, I can focus on the environment, I can focus on the systems, and I can make sure that I make their life as easy as possible. And from a logistics standpoint, they're not standing around waiting on stuff because I've thought about that long ahead. And so there's things that I can be good at to help them to be good at their job. And I call it just creating the environment for other people to be successful in the workplace. That's the largest takeaway I got from the military. And there's so much more from my time that I was in that I still pull from today about leadership, about the confidence, about doing really hard things and challenging yourself and doing hard things with other people and the bond that comes from that, that if you can incorporate those into your business. So the military, although I never deployed and went anywhere, was one of the biggest leg ups I ever got. They educated me, they put me into a leadership position. I worked with really, really wonderful and talented people and saw why we're the greatest fighting force the world has ever known, even though I never actually went to war and used any of that myself. But I use it every single day in my businesses, and sometimes very unconsciously, I'm using what I learned in the military.

SPEAKER_01 28:23

Yeah. Tell me a little bit about early on, the early on businesses that you started, because you were still in the military when you started, it was an e-commerce, is that correct? That's right. That's right. So talk talk to me about starting business and what what it what you did.

SPEAKER_05 28:40

So I I was always dabbling, and I was dabbling in different avenues all at once. So on one side, I have this understanding of kitting products together that I now understand I can charge more, a convenience tax of people, if I can figure that out. And on the other hand, I was also learning professional services at the same time. And we'll start there. My twin brother had for 10 years had worked in professional services in recruiting specifically. And his company had this hole where if they weren't able to do the work for someone, they would pass it off to somebody else. And he goes, Well, shoot, why am I passing it off to somebody else? If I could just pass it off to the company that my brother owns, that I can actually be active in. Now, the thing to know about my twin brother is that he looks just like me. We are identical twins. He sounds just like me. So if he popped in the door right now and came and sat down, you wouldn't know the difference. We look exactly the same. There's there's no differentiating facial features. And so it was a beautiful opportunity for us to learn how to start a business that was the realm that he knew, but I was the face of. Because he wasn't allowed to have another side business or hand work off to a business that he knew. It had to be a random company. And so instead, he was funneling business to his recruiting company that I was the face of. And so I was learning how to operate and run a recruiting company. Here's how successful it was. In our very first week of being in vis in business, our very first week of being in business, we did three placements and landed 100K. 100K. I'm still in the middle of this. This broke my brain. I'm in the military and I'm making 80,000, 85,000 a year as an officer, a couple years of experience in. And we build this company for 100K in a week. And two months later, when the bills came due, the checks came in for 25, 30. It's just like, this is unbelievable. Like, who would work the way I'm working right now if you can just go out and do it that way instead? And so it literally broke the way that I changed. That changed my mindset of how I thought about money. But that was a business that I was involved in that I was the face of, but I was learning it from him. Now, that's the one I thought was going to be successful. 100K in the first week, and it was crickets after that. Because we had one really desperate customer. And we didn't understand at the time that a business needs to have systems and outreach and customer acquisition. And you can't just have one success and one good customer. You have to have a way of attracting more of those customers to come to you. We didn't understand that. We had a desperate customer and we thought, let's go ride this gravy train, how far it can go. Well, when that customer went somebody somewhere else and realized they can get a lot of recruiting services from a lot of different companies, well, we're out the door. Okay, let's go find the next desperate customer. That's what we thought. We already found one. How hard could it be to find another one? Really hard. Really hard. And then we started trying to build the nuts and bolts of a recruiting inbound business of us going outbound, us doing marketing, us making cold calls, trying to get these different requisition orders to find people. We had a really hard time. And that business would ultimately fail because we weren't putting the time and effort into it when we didn't have desperate customers. But we made money in it. So that was a good thing. Now, the ones I didn't make money in over here on this side, my product businesses. So when I was still in college, that's when I had this epiphany, and I came up with this idea. I was dating my wife at the time. And every time she would have her period, she would ask me for the same. Can you go to the store and get me this and get me that? And I thought, man, if I can make a solution for this that's a one-stop shop, then I can just go get you the kit and I can sell it to other people as well. And so we go to Walmart one day, and we're walking through Walmart, and I go, okay, you always ask me for those pads, you always ask me for these tampons, you're always asking for like Nutella or Reese's Cup. And then, you know, what if I got one of those like 99 cent like red box cars? You just go there, scan the card, and you can have a movie to watch, you know, and I'm thinking like, I have solved all the world's problems. I fixed PMS, you know? And this is a recurring business model, you know. Like, you know how what the TAM is the total discipline market of women who get periods who need this problem solved. I'm thinking, it's unbelievable. And by the way, I've gone through that period of my life where I think I've solved all the world's problems. I'm about to make billions and billions of dollars, probably a dozen different times. This was just the first time I would go through it. And so it this is, I was learning e-commerce, I was learning eBay, and so we went to Walmart and bought a bunch of each of those items. And I was I was kidding them up, and I kid you not, in Ziploc bags, because I didn't know how else to put them together. And I didn't know how to like label the Ziploc bags, so I took a piece of paper and printed out what I called Lady Days. And what did I call the business? I called it one stop shop. But somebody had already bought one stopshop.com, so I added instead of S-H-O-P, I made a S-H-O-P-P-E instead. I did one stopshop.com and we had Lady Days. And the idea was born. I sold one. I sold one on eBay, I put it up on an auction, somebody bid 99 cents for it. I lost money on the product and the shipping to get it to them. But I had I had a product, I had a problem I thought I'd solve for someone, but I had no margin on that product. I had no way to distribute that product. I had no way to acquire more customers for that product. All I had done was built the product. And there's a lot of entrepreneurs and aspiring business owners that are really good at making a product. I don't care if it's a SaaS product tool, they're vibe coding right now, or they've made a Shark Tank style product. They're good at making the product. Product is 25% of the game. Everyone wants to make the product and say, okay, the thing should sell itself. I built it, and I was no different. So one shop, one stop shop lady days that I called it, was just an absolute failure. An absolute embarrassing failure. Like not good. Not good. Massive, massive failure. I took a second iteration of it. Get out of college, I'm in the military now. I'm I'm at my first duty station, and I fall in love with a game of golf. I think, man, when I go to the golf course, when I'm traveling, I got to buy balls, I gotta buy a glove, I gotta buy a divot repair tool, and you know, it would be nice to just grab a kit. So again, I go, I'm not done with the idea, I'm gonna go and make this kit for the golf shops instead. And this time I put a lot of effort into it. I'm not using Ziploc bags anymore. Now I went out on Alibaba, I found a box manufacturer, I had them make the perfect size box to fit two sleeves of balls, a nice glove with my logo right in the middle, with a nice like cellophane so you can see through it, some teas that are in the back. I even added a branded koozie in the back to keep your beer cold. And I was gonna tell guys at the Pro Shop this is gonna get you more beer sales if you're giving this to people because they're gonna want to put something into this koozie. Like, how how difficult can this be? I had it all figured out. Again, I had a wonderful product. Like the product solved my problem, and people that would be around me, it would solve their problem too. And so this time I'm like, this is not like lady days. Like this actually solves a problem. But again, product is only 25% of it. Because if you have a product and nobody knows you have it and you don't know how to distribute it, like, well, what do you do? So I think, okay, I'm gonna get my courage up here. I had my little green army notebook come home from work one day. I get on Google Maps and I write down all the names of all the golf courses in the area. Pick up the phone, I start cold calling. Because what am I afraid of? The worst they can say is no, I've solved an unbelievable problem here. I couldn't get a single person to ex to agree to buy these from me and put them into their pro shop. They admitted, like, yeah, it solves the problem, but like we have a system for this today. Like people come in, they're buying balls, they're buying gloves separately, and you know, we have deals with this distribution company that comes and gives us, like, why would I put yours in? I got one pro shop to agree to take them on consignment. And so if somebody bought them, I would get paid after the fact when it happened. A week goes by after I dropped off these 10 kits, and I called them up and said, Hey, how's it going? Like, we haven't sold any yet. You go, really?

SPEAKER_01 37:14

Oh no.

SPEAKER_05 37:15

I find that really hard to believe that we haven't sold any. I had a wonderful product. It was a great product. I never thought about margin, how to make money on it, never thought about how I'm gonna distribute the product, and I'd never thought about how I'm gonna acquire more customers on my own. And so that ultimately failed as well. Now, did that one have more potential than the lady days? I think so. But to turn it into a business, there was a whole lot more that I had to do if it was going to be a path that was predictable. Lo and behold, years go by, and I'm aware of this amenity company, little soaps and shampoos for hotel rooms. My wife's mom owns a piece of the company. And so I'd been exposed to it when I was in college. And they asked for help with their Amazon store. So, my full-time jobs in the Army, my wife is helping out to stand up their Amazon store and doing e-commerce for them. And she's making a 10% commission on these items. So she's making two or three thousand dollars a month. She was doing okay, pretty decent-sized company, only selling wholesale and really designed for hotels, selling like 500 shampoos, uh, a thousand bar soaps in a single pack. Her commission started to drop, and I go, Well, that should be working. I don't understand why that's not working. Do you mind if I take a look under the hood and see what's going on here? And it was like I stood in front of the Amazon system and I remembered my eBay days and the one-stop shop lady days and the one-stop shop golf round, and I see this like, man, all these Airbnbs are looking for an opportunity to buy these little soaps and shampoos so they can be like the hotel and give the hotel style experience, but they don't want to buy 500 of these shampoos. They got a house, they have a little closet to put stuff in. What if we gave them like 10 shampoos, 10 conditioner, 10 lotion, and 10 bar soaps to go along with that? That could be really killer. Now, here's the distinction. We had now a product that was already made. I didn't have to figure that piece out. I already knew it was a good quality product, but then we already knew that there was margin there. And we already knew that people would be willing to pay more because it was literally in the reviews telling us, I don't need 500, I'd pay you way more if you just let me buy 10. Like, can you please make something that solves my problem? So you've got product, you've got margin, and now Amazon is the distribution channel, and no one was leading into this, and then customer acquisition. Well, Amazon ads like were brand new, like nobody was using them whatsoever at all. So we had the opportunity to take the four-part system of building what I call a freedom first business and apply all of that all at once. And from 2018 to 2021, we were the only ones that ever paid to do an ad for hospitality, soap, and shampoo on Amazon. And we captured tens of thousands of repeat customers in that period when ads were dirt cheap. Fast forward today to 2026, you can't sell a customer and advertise them and make money at the same time. Like it's so competitive. There's so many competitors throughout there doing the same thing that we were doing, but we were picking up repeat customers back when nobody was doing it. So you'd make wild amounts of profit on the first sale. I'm talking 40% net margins after paying advertising on the first sale, and then 50 to 60% on repeat purchases that came after that. The interesting thing is that company today is called OneShop. We lost the stop. It's still a one-stop shop. It's still spelled S-H-O-P-P-E with a one before and a hyphen in between. It's the same idea I was working on was in college, but I had to fail on it, and I had to fail miserably, and I had to be embarrassed about those failures to then find an opportunity where I could get the full four-part system of product margin distribution and customer acquisition all figured out in this kidding product and be able to go out. And that has successfully at this point done over $60 million in sales in that one business alone because of an idea I had back when I was in college. I didn't recreate the wheel, I didn't do anything really special, but we found an opportunity that no one else was paying attention to. You call it a boring business, if you will, and we were able to exploit customer acquisition and distribution at a time that most people weren't thinking about that. And so I challenge people to think about that four-part system. Okay, you have the product, do you have enough margin where you can make profit after you've paid yourself and you still have money left over? Are they willing to pay you for the service and more than it costs to give a profit margin? And then do you have a distribution channel? Okay, if you don't, like you should be thinking about where the customers are already coalescing at right now, so you have easy access to them. Then inside that distribution channel, how are you acquiring customers? What does it cost you to acquire those customers? And can you do it profitably on the first try? Because if you have all four parts of that system, your odds of business success go from 5% like everybody is when they start to make a million dollars. It it skyrockets if you have all four pieces of that all together. And I only know that in hindsight because I failed so many times at it. At this point in my life, I've started over a dozen businesses. Only one has been wildly successful. There's another one that's well on its way right now. But I'm I'm going one for 12, 2 for 12. Those are not great options. But the beautiful thing about this country is you only have to be right once. That's all it takes. You can fail, fail, fail, fail, fail. I don't give a crap what anybody thinks about me and my failures and how public they've been. I don't mind. You know? Because I get judged now by my success instead of being judged by the failures. And I get to now argue how do you think failure was a good thing.

SPEAKER_01 42:58

Yeah, how do you how do you approach that? Because I think a misconception in the we'll say the marketplace, but the world, whatever, is that because you're successful, you've had it easy, you haven't had the trials and tribulations. And how do you deal with that when you're meeting with people that are looking at you going, oh, well, you you've you know done a hundred million dollars in e-commerce business, and you've, you know, you've uh you're obviously gonna be successful at whatever you touch because money just makes money.

SPEAKER_05 43:31

People get it so wrong, they get it so twisted, and they think you haven't failed. And I tell this to people frequently. I say, you know, I'm gonna tell you a secret that you want to know about successful people. Every successful person that you know has failed way more than you have, and probably way bigger than you have. And they've embarrassed themselves, they've sometimes bankrupted themselves because they had enough risk tolerance to put it all on the line to go and make it happen. But they failed and they failed and they failed. And after starting a dozen businesses and really only one has been uber successful, I've learned that the secret to success in business and the secret to success in life is giving yourself the opportunity to fail in a safe place. Where when you fail, it doesn't require you to go bankrupt. You don't lose your house over it. You don't go negative in the checking account. But if you get into that environment, failure is just the building block of success. And you're giving yourself more at bats to do it. Go back to my rule of 100. You can't do it a hundred times without learning what it takes to be successful and starting to understand, ah, don't do it that way. Let me go over. Okay, so failure can become the building blocks of success, but only if you put yourself into a scenario where failure does not mean shutting the doors. It means you have to go backwards. You're paying off a bunch of debt from that business. And so I was fortunate enough early in life to be able to fail because I had enough of a safety net that allowed me to go and take risks and to go invest my time elsewhere. So I never quit my job when I first started the businesses. Even after the military, I got a job for six months as a sales guy. I couldn't even get enough income from my business, although it was booming, to showcase that I could go buy a house with it. They were discounting my non-W-2 income. So I had to go get a job for six months to buy a house because I had a baby on the way. And leaving that job, I didn't leave that job until I was making $30,000 a month in profit from the business that I had. My rule for me was I want to make three times as much in this side hustle as I'm making in my day job because that tells me that I've learned enough not just to make the money, but I remembered the lesson from my twin brother and I starting a business and not knowing the system of how to make the money and making it repeatable. So I don't want to be that guy. That I understood the inputs and the outputs. And for me, it was dollars into advertising equals customer acquisition equals lifetime value of repeat business coming back to me. And when I understood that formula, I go, my odds of failure are so incredibly low. I don't need the day job. I don't need the benefits. I don't need this safety net anymore. But that safety net was really damn important to me to be able to get started. If I didn't have the safety net, I never could have taken those risks because I had to give myself room to fail, fail, fail, fail, fail. And the beautiful thing is the failure for me became the building blocks of success. But I tell this to people who ask now because they make this assumption that okay, you've been successful, you just keep on. You have money, it's easy to make more money. I go, man, I fail more now, and I fail bigger now than I ever did before. I've got two, three instances now where I've lost almost a half a million dollars on a new venture or a new business that I thought was going to be the next huge thing. And that's something that if I was taking that risk 10 years ago, it would have bankrupted me. But the beauty is that my safety net's a little bit larger now. I can make a little bit bigger bets, but the bigger bets come bigger failures where now you're not just closing a business, you're laying off employees. Like there's people that signed on who are working with you. Sometimes they were working for free, they're working for equity. There's people who feel burned from that. Like you're taking larger swings than you used to. It's not just about you anymore when you do it, and you never get away from that failure because failure is learning. See, it's when a kid learns to walk, we put them on a carpeted surface and we tell them walk a step forward, and then they fall after one step, and then seven steps, and then 13 steps, we're counting their steps, we're all excited for them. Well, they're learning by failing. Every time they fall down, that's a child failing to learn how to walk, but they become a building block of success. Now, if we change the environment for that kid and say, I'm gonna teach you how to walk today, put them in the middle of a highway. Cars are buzzing around. Now, failure is catastrophic.

SPEAKER_02 48:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 48:17

And a lot of people that are aspiring business owners will try to go learn how to walk in the middle of a highway with cars zooming all around them, and when they fail, they're $40,000 in credit card debt, and they've got a big hole to dig themselves out of. And like, what did I do wrong? I put it all on the line, I did what everyone said to do. And it's like, that's not the environment that most people that are successful found their success in. You know some stories of people that put it all on the line. Of course, you know about Elon Musk putting it all on the line. He is the exception, not the rule. Like, most people gave themselves room to fail frequently and often enough that the failures became the building blocks of their ultimate success. And they did it by doing it in a very safe environment, whether it was them providing a safety net or somebody else providing a safety net for them to be able to go through those learnings and failures. And so I think failure is the best thing for you. And the more you fail, the higher the chances you're going to ultimately find success because nobody likes to lose. Losing stings. But when we lose frequently and often, we learn ways to not lose. And I think that that's why you should put yourself in an environment where you can fail. And if you're not failing frequently enough, and you're not failing off and not failing large enough, you probably need to challenge yourself with something a little bit harder. If you're winning too much at life, where's the growth? Growth comes from failure. I'd say take off a bigger swing, man. Like, don't put yourself in an environment where you're always winning. We all want to do more, we all want to grow and progress. And to the extent that that's the case, you're gonna fail an awful lot. And a lot of people don't understand that.

SPEAKER_01 49:50

It's extremely wise because I think that I well, I think from a very young age we're taught that failure is a bad thing. And I think I might be breaking up here. I'm not sure what's going on with that. Well, I got you. You're good. Okay. I feel like I feel like you know, we're taught at a very young age that failure is a bad thing. However, I like your analogy of teaching a child to walk because it is true. It's it's you know they can't hear, oh, you fell down, that's horrible, you're a bad person, whatever. It's oh it's okay, get up, let's do it again, one more step, you know, type of thing. And and we're constantly cheering them for the next step versus uh pointing out the fact that they failed because they didn't take the next step, they fell down, or whatever it is. So I think I think that's extremely powerful. You had mentioned at one point creating processes and procedures that that can help you be successful in the things that you're doing. How have you used that to help you manage the businesses so that you don't have to be ever present in that space in order to make sure that the business is successful?

SPEAKER_05 51:04

That's a great question. And I I love the the thought process of your response to my analogy, first off, because I I do think that when it comes to business versus the baby learning how to walk, so many people like they're not cheering for you in that business the way you cheer on a baby. Oh, you got seven steps to see if you can get nine. Oh, you only got three. It's okay. Do it again, try it again. We don't encourage people like that in their business. It's like, what are you doing, man? You keep failing at this. You're not cut off for this. Go get a job. That's what jobs are made for. People like you that are failing, okay?

SPEAKER_01 51:38

Right, right, exactly.

SPEAKER_05 51:39

That's considered friendly advice for people, you know? Okay.

SPEAKER_01 51:42

My best friend, go get a job. I'm telling you this because I love you.

SPEAKER_05 51:46

People love to give hard advice, especially when someone's punching above their weight. They love to give you the advice that, hey man, you weren't cut out for this, you know? Come back down to earth, come get a job, be dependent on the man, chain yourself to this desk for 35 years. That's how you're supposed to live a life, a responsible life. And I ultimately reject that. I think that's the future that most people probably should be rejecting and reverse engineering a different one. Now, this idea of systems and processes and making yourself not even in the business. Everybody wants to be the CEO. We we glorify this title of CEO, like it's something that everybody should want to do. And I found after being a CEO, starting my own business, merging, and becoming the CEO of the larger one, I don't want to be a CEO. What do I mean by that? I mean, I don't actually want the lack of freedom being tied to the business where I'm ultimately responsible to the ownership and to the board for getting the business accomplished. I don't want to be the CEO. I want to be the owner who's above the CEO. And that's what most people, I think, really want. They want the freedom. You ask them at first, what do you want in life? Oh, I want freedom and flexibility to do whatever I want. And you want to be a CEO? I don't think you want to be a CEO, okay? Those two don't really go together. What you really want is to become the owner on top of the CEO. And so people start their business, they're doing everything themselves. You're a business of one. I started my business, I was a business of one. I had to do every single bit of it from figuring out the product, the logistics, the customer service, sending stuff in to the platforms and dealing with pricing and making every single decision myself. And it's a very safe space to be when you're doing it all yourself. It feels safe because you have control, your fingers are on everything. And people really fall in love with that idea. They have a hard time giving up the control. And so they start hiring people, but they don't ultimately give up control. They give up the task without giving the why behind it or the control and the ownership. And they wonder why somebody fails in that role because you set your employee up not for success, you set the employee up for failure. You never gave them control over the process that you said you wanted them to own and take something off of your plate. So, how do you elevate yourself from being the business of one to becoming the owner who's on top of the CEO and all of the employees, and you get the economic benefit of owning the business without having to be required to do any of the work. And it's a process of understanding all the things that you know how to do as a business of one. There's a system, there's a process that you're following. There's a why behind it. And most people haven't written that down. And I was no different. When I hired my employee number one, who would ultimately become my business partner? He goes, Hey, you got to teach me how to do some of this stuff so I can take it off of your plate. And he had the wisdom that I didn't have. Meaning, he said, Every time you teach me something, let's do it on a recorded Zoom. And I'm gonna take the notes from that Zoom and I'm gonna create an SOP from that. I I didn't know this. I should have known this, right? Seems like common sense. It was like, oh, you gotta have your SOPs, you gotta have your processes written down. I hadn't I just had tasks that we had to do, or the business would not be successful, or we wouldn't have family or food on the tables for our families. Like we just have to get this stuff done. What he did was he taught me the power of having a written standard operating procedure, SOP, so that he could pick it up and he could also teach somebody else to go and pick it up. And ultimately, he filled a CFO COO style position in our company where I would teach him things. He would then take it, standardize it, create a procedure for it, and then he would hire somebody else to come in and specialize in that area. And I remember having this braggadocious idea and telling him, you know, like this is all stuff that I used to do. There's no way that someone else is going to care as much as I do about that thing and get it done to the same level that I'm doing it right now. And he didn't set me straight on the spot, but he goes, hey, just watch it look. Here's what I saw. When I was working 50, 60 hours a week as a business of one, I had 40 different things on my plate, these different hats that I would wear, and they each got my divided attention, not my undivided attention, my divided attention for an hour a week, an hour and a half a week. So while I thought I was doing it really, really well, I was distracted and doing it, getting it done to the bare minimum, and then moving off to the next fire that I had to do. It was a really humbling experience for me to think to myself, I am the best at doing this job. And then watch an employee come in who could focus on just that for 40 hours a week. And I used to tell my first employee who would build all these processes, hey, you know, if someone can come in and do it 80% as good as me, I can live with that. Like I'll be good with that. It was humbling for me to find out that when they came in and focused on that one thing, it wasn't 80% as good as me. They were doing it 300% as good as me and actively getting better at it and becoming more efficient all at the same time, where they were able to do that and then ask for more work. You see, where we focus and where we put that rule of 100 to work and do something over and over and over and over again, we get better at it, we get more efficient at it, we begin to flourish. And when you're an employee is in an environment where it's not like you got better at your job, okay, I'm gonna pay you less, and people think that way, which is stupid. It's you get better at your job, hey, ask me for more and ask me for more pay at the same time because now you're taking on more responsibility, you can own more and have a larger function inside the business. And so I learned from him, it wasn't me. I learned from this first employee of mine how to create a system, and now we've got a procedure, and now we can train somebody on this procedure, but then give them the ownership of it and say, this was why we did it this way. But I want you to know why we were doing it, because ultimately I want you to build your own standard operating procedure for you that's going to be more informed with someone who's doing this as a job on a daily basis. And this took us three or four years to get to a point where we took the functions that was just me and the functions that were just me and him, where ultimately it ended up with about 25 people that came onto our payroll that were replacing functions that I used to do on my own. Now, here's the funny thing. You would think at that point I would have realized I don't have to be the CEO anymore. I can just go and be the owner up on top. My mindset was all skewed. I wanted to be the CEO. I still wanted to be the guy. And so when given the opportunity to go and say, hey, I'm not needed in e-commerce, let me be the CEO of the overall company because we had merged our company with a wholesale distribution company where we had two different sides of the business, e-commerce and distribution. Let me go be the CEO of that one because I I want more. I want to grow more. Two years into that role, I realized being a CEO is not for me. I don't want to be accountable to a board. I don't want to be tracking KPIs and meeting friction and resistance from a board or owners who have a different idea of the vision for the company than I do. I just want to be the owner. I want to be the guy who's up here who gets paid a lot of money and isn't dealing with any of the problems down below. Here's the funny thing. I left that job. I come back and say, I guess I'll get back involved in e-commerce again. And I realized, ooh, they don't need me. Like, there's nothing for me to do. And and it's and it's hard to say I did such a good job of delegating. No, like I was fortunate enough to be around such quality people that they taught me to delegate and how to create systems and processes that when I came back to do the job again, I realized there is no job for me here. And so it forced me to go all the way up to the top level of just being an owner, which as an owner, I go, okay, I'm not putting any time and effort into this. Yet it does $10 million a year in revenue, and it's being managed by people that are all they know my process, they know the why, they've built their own process on top of it. It now is growing on its own. Man, where do I want to spend my free time? And I'm the idiot that decided to go out and start more businesses instead of going out by the pool instead. But I'm driven that way, and that's the way I like it because I want to go and grow more. But there was a process to go from being a company of one to being a company of 25 that didn't need the one anymore. And I wish I would have understood that sooner, but I'm so glad that at this stage of my life, I know, man, what I want to do is I want to be the owner of more businesses. I want to be the owner of more, but not the operator of that. And it's not that you want to go and skip the operator level. The operator level is very important for people to go through, but your ultimate goal is not to be an operator forever. It's not to work 50 hour weeks forever. I write my book about a freedom first business mindset. And the goal is to fast track your way up to owner as fast as possible. Now, for most people, it's gonna be a period of years before you get there. And that's okay, right? It's not that you have to get there fast, it's about achieving that and knowing what you've built, because a lot of learning happens here, and then getting yourself to a point where you can now go out and fail more, fail bigger, but here's a silo that keeps on paying you for a long time to come. You still own this, it still runs, and it's still your impact. But you go from being the guy that does everything to being the guy that can still add some value, but the value you add is knowing that you built all of it and knowing, hey, if we bang on that pipe, I bet it fixes that problem. That's the kind of stuff that you know. You become a consultant in your own company. And who wouldn't mind building a company, working one hour a week on it, saying, hey, bang on that pipe? Money comes out of it, and that's your week. And that's the goal that we're all ultimately trying to get to. Forget being the CEO. The CEO's job sucks. You want to be the owner.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:50

Yeah. Speaking of ownership, obviously, ownership, I feel like definitely for you goes way beyond just owning a business, right? Talking family, life, personal, you know, the mindset that comes along with that. How do you balance the leadership of the business and the leadership of the family with regards to intermerging them? Are they the same or do they look different?

SPEAKER_05 1:02:23

You know, I was really fortunate that when I started my business, it was the same time that my first daughter was born. And so I've now got two beautiful daughters, and my wife got a six-year-old and a four-year-old. And I have very much siloed the business portion away from the family portion. And so there are things that I know that I care about. My freedom first business mindset is I know I want to grow businesses. I know I want to be involved in my own failures and growth and building more, and there's a kingdom that I want to build over here. But I know that the more important thing I'm doing in life is being a father, being a husband. And so, how do I get myself to an environment where it's okay to do both? And where doing one is not taking away from the other, but they're in fact complementary. And so the journey that I've been on over the last seven years is trying to figure out how to be a present father, a present husband who has business interests and a growing business at that and can go and attack all things at once. And so I found what works for me, and this may not work for everyone, but what works for me is when my kids are home from school, generally speaking, I'm home. The hours that they're at school, I drop them off at eight o'clock in the morning and they don't come home until 3, 4, 5 p.m. Generally speaking, from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., that's dad's go build the kingdom time. Like I'm gonna go out and hustle and I have zero distractions. If anything goes wrong, I know my wife's got it. She's handling it down at home, handling the pickups from school, handling whatever happens after school. And when I come home, the business stays there and I'm present with the family. Now it's not always that way, but it's what I strive to do, to leave the business and focus on the little ones because they're not gonna be little for that long. Right? And so that's it's very pressing on me. I become more emotional about it as time goes on, especially being a girl dad, especially having my youngest being four. So we don't really have, like we're at the mercy of the school system now. And so when they're home, I know I want to be present in ways that my dad wasn't capable because we didn't have the technology we have today, and he also had to go out and provide. And so, in my situation right now, I'm not trying to bring my family into the business and bring those two together. I like having them separate, but I want them to be complementary to each other. And I want my kids to see me going to work every day. I want them to understand that dad still wants things, dad's still trying to grow something. I want my wife to see that. I want her to respect that about me. But I also want the business side to respect that, hey, I'm dad first. You know, I'm husband first. And this over here, I can live without this. Here's what's important. And trying to get what getting yourself to a point where you know what pipe to bang on, so that it only requires you to do an hour a week or an hour a day, so that you can spend the time with the ones that you love and still know that your kingdom is being built over here. There's something beautiful about the freedom that that gives you the opportunity. Now, not everybody wants to be a family man, not everybody wants to do the things that I want to do, but I love to say this. The best part about not having a nine to five is having nowhere to be on a Monday morning. What do you want to do on Monday morning? Do you want to go play golf? You want to go spend time with your kids? You want to go on a date? You want to go for a hike? You want to become one with nature? What do you want to do on a Monday morning? If you have a nine to five, there's someone else telling you what you must do on a Monday morning. Morning, and that's the worst part about it. And the best part about not having a nine to five is just I got nowhere to be. What do I want to do today? Where do I want to grow? Where do I want to invest my time? And ultimately, that to me is much more the symbol of success than becoming a billionaire. It's saying, hey, I get to invest my time and my efforts and my dollars wherever I want to. Like I'm in control of that. That's the freedom that I have. If I want to work this week, I'm going to work. If I want to be with my family this week, I'm going to be with them. And I think ultimately that's that's the goal is to get yourself to where you're free and you get to decide where you spend your time, where you spend your resources. That's what we're going after. And so I don't really bring the family and business together. To me, they're very separate, but it's where I invest a lot of my own personal time outside of the business.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:48

Gotcha. Talk to me about your business right now. So you've got Roll with Steve, right? Podcast. What is the podcast about?

SPEAKER_05 1:07:00

The podcast is all the lessons that I wish I would have learned before going to the school of hard knocks and learning them that way. And so I bring people onto the podcast, and I'd love to have you on as well, where we just dig into their lives, their businesses, and all the lessons learned along the way. But with a really big emphasis on betting on yourself. Because I believe that most people are okay losing if they bet on them. But you don't want to lose on somebody else's call. And so I want to talk about the areas that you've bet on yourself. So the podcast is really about that. And so I'm I'm Roll with Steve on all the channels, and I've got a YouTube channel called Roll with Steve that does host that podcast. And then I post daily business content on those channels as well.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:45

Very cool. And then you've got the book. And then what's the name of the book again? I'm sorry. The book's called The Future You Choose.

SPEAKER_05 1:07:53

And it'll be coming out in July of this year.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:56

Okay. And then outside of that, do you have other businesses that you're currently working on that you can share with us or that you're growing? What is it that Steve does for a job?

SPEAKER_05 1:08:07

Absolutely. So uh today I operate the role management group. So my last name management group. And it's got a couple different functions that it serves. On one hand, it it holds the entities that I started and the businesses that are still operating today that I'm not really all that involved in. The ones that are still my impact, but it's not me there working every single day. And so the management group really has two other functions that we're doing today. Number one, we're looking to make acquisitions in businesses. But I have a rule for acquisitions that I do. Steve Roll will never be the operator in the business that I acquire. And so I'm looking at businesses that are between 10 and 20 people with either an operator already in the business, the existing owner continuing on, or another operator that I bring in to run that business specifically, where from day one, we're creating the infrastructure for me to be at the top as the owner, not operating in the business, because they say those that work in the business have no time to work on the business. And I absolutely love that because it's so true that you know I can look at your business, you can look at my business and see things that I'm not even cognizant of because I'm so busy in the weeds, solving problems, putting out fires. The time to innovate on a business, it comes in the pauses. It really comes in the times when you're in the shower by yourself, you're reading a book, you're out on a long walk, and you go, Oh, we should be doing this. It's so obvious. Well, you don't have time to think about that when you're actually working in the business on those. And so one function is acquiring businesses that are existing. The other function is that we partner with experienced operators to start professional services businesses. So recruiting is the easy one. That is my background. Case in point, what we'll do is we'll take a professional salesperson that sells the companies, and we'll take a recruiter that is really good at recruiting. We'll take those two, pair them together, we become the third partner as role management group, where we remove all of the friction that keeps somebody from starting a side hustle. And it's intentionally a side hustle, not going out and starting a full-on business. No one's quitting their jobs, no one's jumping off the cliff. Instead, we say, Hey recruiter, you know how to recruit? All right, fantastic. Hey, sales guy, you know how to do some sales? Fantastic. What do you not know how to do? Well, normally they would start by saying, Well, I don't know how to recruiting. I'm the sales guy, so I can't start my own business, or vice versa. Okay, we've paired you together. Fantastic. Now what? Well, we don't have a website, we don't have the contracts. Like, how do you do the insurance? We don't even know where to start with this stuff. That's where the role management group comes in. And so we partner with people and allow them to do the thing that they are the best in the world at, and we create the umbrella infrastructure for them and go in and partner and set up these side hustles with the intention of turning the side hustle into a main squeeze for them and having them quit their nine to five to come and do it. But only after the safety net has been built inside that business, instead of the safety net being their day job. And so it's keep your day job, come do this over here, partner with us, and then ideally you're leaving the day job to go to a business that you own a significant stake in, and now you have a freedom first business that you started, that we've helped you to create that. And so I don't have any of those courses scams of like come join my program. I stay away from all that because I don't fundamentally believe that people who are selling courses and selling information, I don't think anyone would step away from something that they're doing that's actually working to go teach other people how to do it and make it competitive for them. And so because I feel that way, I don't have any offers like that. Instead, it's hey, you want to start a business? I'd love to start a business with you if you're the right fit and pair you up with someone else who wants to start a business who is the right fit. But I'm playing for equity, right? I can create that infrastructure, and because we're not jumping off a cliff and funding everyone with $10,000 a month in the salary, you know what these businesses cost us? Generally speaking, it's about $200 a week. And we split those costs based off equity ownership in the business. And so, someone who wants to start a side hustle, now we've removed every single barrier for them to not do it, where they can come in and leverage their relationships, their experience to come and do that exact job. And so we've run the numbers on this. The businesses that people start and side hustles that they start, the successful ones versus the unsuccessful ones. Like, what does it look like to give yourself the highest predictability of being successful in a side hustle? Short of going and driving Uber and DoorDash, things that you know you're gonna make money on. The businesses that are the most successful early on, compared to the ones that go and fail miserably, they have people who can leverage their same relationships, their same skill set, and they don't have to learn anything new. That's the recipe for faster business success. When you come in and you're trying to learn every piece of the business, of course it takes you seven years to go and figure it out because you have to get good, you have to put that hundred reps into everything. But if you can partner with someone who's already been down the path you haven't been on and partner a salesperson and a service provider together, now everyone does the same thing that they're already used to doing, leveraging their experience, leveraging their relationships. And so for 40 bucks a week of investment into basically the infrastructure, the website, the email addresses, you now have a professional company in the age of AI, you can stand a website up like that, you know, infrastructure up like that. It's can you actually perform it? Can you actually execute? Can you go out and acquire customers in a way that makes sense and do it cheap enough so that you can sustain this for a long period of time and build those four important components of the business? And so today we're really thinking about my existing businesses, acquisitions, and then starting side hustles with people who already have experience and relationships that they can leverage into those pieces, and that's what makes up the role management group.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:56

I absolutely love where you're going with that. And offline, I'd like to have a conversation because I'm working on another concept that may pair very well with that, and we can talk about that offline. But very nice. I'd love to. Couple of couple questions just kind of to throw at you, and then we'll kind of we'll wrap up. I really appreciate the time that you've taken today and and get to know you. It's it's been it's been wonderful. So thank you very much and and I appreciate it. If you could go back and have a conversation with your 13-year-old self, what type of advice would you give yourself?

SPEAKER_05 1:14:38

I would definitely be encouraging myself to go out and try some really hard and difficult things. I read a book when I was in college called Do Hard Things. And simultaneously reading that book, I had just started my freshman year of engineering school. And I remember the gentleman that encouraged me to go into engineering. I sent him an email back and I'm like, man, this is really hard. Like, I'm failing these classes, I'm getting like C's and D's on these tests. And he was a really busy guy who was a colonel in the army, and he responds very short, very sweet, he goes, Steve, it's supposed to be hard, Colonel so-and-so. And that was the email. And I realized in that moment there's so much benefit that comes from taking on difficult tasks and hitting your head against the wall and ultimately succeeding at doing those. It teaches you so much about what your potential is in life. If I talked, if I talk to my teenage self, I would be encouraging myself to bet on me to do really difficult tasks. And every time I have the opportunity to take the safe path or to take the hard path, take the hard path. You learn so much more, and you come out the other side such a better man because you did the hard things instead. You can take the easy path today and end up with a life of regret and wishing you had taken and done more on the back end, or take the hard path today, and you wake up and you go, No, I I want to do more. I want to do more, but I don't have to do more. See, I have the optionality now to take more of the safe path. And you see that happen at a certain point where you see these entrepreneurs start taking chips off the table, and they don't keep all the Elon Musk is his own beast keeping his chips on the table the way that he does. That's fine. But for most people, the Mark Cubans, the the Hirsch, all the sharks on Shark Tank, they're taking chips off the table, right? Now they're going into a life full of optionality for them to decide where do I spend my time, where do I spend my resources. But I'd be telling the teenage version of myself to go challenge yourself, go do difficult things. And every time you get a chance to bet on you, bet on you. Take the bet.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:00

Awesome. One more question. We talk about legacy a lot on this show. If you were to look back after you're gone, and you have your kids, your family, those that you've left behind, the business, what do you hope your legacy is, or do you do you care to have a legacy when you're gone?

SPEAKER_05 1:17:26

I think legacy is a loaded question. I read a lot of philosophy. I'm reading a book right now that basically says, by the fourth generation, nobody even remembers you ever existed. You know, like name your great-great-grandfather. Like, don't worry, I'll wait. Like, nobody knows who it is, right? So ultimately, you're gonna get to a point where everything you did, everything you said, it doesn't matter, right? So, for those who are religious, you're living for a higher purpose. If you're not religious, like just the point is be present. Because the gift you give to your children, the gift you give to your grandchildren is being present at a time that it still matters. And so when I think about the legacy from a business standpoint, yeah, I think that there's a a double-edged sword of my kids not having as rough of a life as I had, or having to figure out as much as I had to to go from zero to a hundred. You know, it's easier to go from a hundred to a thousand than it is from zero to a hundred. But that being said, that is a double-edged sword. Because they're not gonna have the same struggle that I had. You know, it's it's hard when you start to rationalize from a philosophical standpoint. Where do you derive your motivation from? And I would say to you today, my motivation comes from the things I want to accomplish in the future, but I'm not really sure it's not coming from the things behind me that I'm running away from. I don't want to be poor again. I've been poor. It sucks. You should you should write a philosophical book with that one. I'm telling you, it's it's it people think motivation is always forward-looking. And I think I think most of my life I was running from something, not trying to get somewhere instead. I just knew what I didn't want. And I've even heard Kevin Hart say this too. They say, Man, why are you working so hard? Okay, he's like, Look, I've been poor. I never want to go back. I'm terrified of going back to where I was. And that resonates with me. Yeah, but I do think that you know, there was a time in my life I would have said legacy was very, very important to me and how I was gonna be remembered. Right now, I'm just trying to be present and to have an impact on the people who are here while it still matters. Because there comes a time when it's too late. And four generations from now, when I'm long gone and forgotten, I'm okay with that. You know, did my kids know that dad loved them and cared about them? Did my wife know that I cared about her? Okay, that's really important to me today, and that's where I stay in the present.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:54

Awesome. Well, Steve, I appreciate it. I appreciate that answer because that's very well thought out in the minute. So uh I appreciate it. Hey, thank you very much for coming on again. Give me your your podcast one more time, and then where people can find you if they're looking for you on the internet. We will link every everything that we can can to the podcast.

SPEAKER_05 1:20:16

But awesome. I'm roll with Steve on all platforms. It's roll my last name, R-O-L-L-E with Steve. And uh that's the name of my podcast, it's the Roll with Steve podcast, and then uh on all major platforms, it's just at simple roll with Steve as well.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:34

Awesome. Thank you very much, appreciate it.

SPEAKER_05 1:20:37

Awesome, thank you for the opportunity, Yan. This is Steve Roll, and I went above and beyond.