Our Story of Failure, Debt, Depression, Growth & Rebuilding (Introduction)

Welcome to the very beginning.

Before the strategies, before the tools, before the breakthroughs…

this is the story behind everything.

In this introduction episode, we’re taking you all the way back.

Back through the failures, the setbacks, the risks, and the moments where everything could have fallen apart.

We’ve:

• Built businesses that didn’t work
• Lost hundreds of thousands of dollars
• Carried overwhelming debt
• Moved across the country to start over
• Faced depression, uncertainty, and feeling completely stuck
• And now… we’re rebuilding again

This podcast isn’t about having it all figured out.

It’s about what it actually looks like to rebuild your life in real time.

Because the truth is…

you might have to start over more times than you expected.

And that doesn’t mean you’re failing.

It might mean you’re getting closer.

In this episode, you’ll hear:

• Our full backstory (the real version)
• Why we started this podcast
• What we’ve learned from starting over again and again
• And what you can expect as you follow along with us

If you’ve ever felt stuck, lost, or like life keeps knocking you down…

you’re not alone.

We’re right there with you.

And we’re rebuilding, together.

Follow along for real conversations about rebuilding your life.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

How many times do you think you can start over in life before you finally become the person you were meant to be? We've asked ourselves that question more times than we can count. I'm Ken and I'm here next to my beautiful wife.

SPEAKER_01 0:13

Kim. And we're here today to get into a little bit of our story, a little bit of our background to let you know where we've been and how far we've come.

SPEAKER_00 0:22

Yep, and I guess we have to move all the way to what? The early 2000s?

SPEAKER_01 0:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 0:27

Alright, so uh I can start us off. So young Kim, early 2000s.

SPEAKER_01 0:34

Woohoo! Oh you got uh yeah, so early 2000s, I was married to my former husband, who is the father of my son, who will be 20 next month in like a couple weeks, actually. Because when you and I met, he was three.

SPEAKER_03 0:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 0:52

So but yeah, a little bit about that story. Um I was married to my former husband, you know, when we weren't working out. And I ended up leaving him, which was a very difficult time in my life. Um, I just wasn't happy. We weren't he's he's a good guy, but we just were never on the same page with what we wanted out of life. He was very uh focused on job, career, you know, corporate world, which was has never been for me. I wanted much more different thing, much different things out of life.

SPEAKER_06 1:30

Right.

SPEAKER_01 1:31

He he always referred to me as the dreamer because I, you know, have a entrepreneur spirit and wanted to build my own my own thing, whatever that looked like.

SPEAKER_02 1:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:41

And so needless to say, we could never get on the same page about that. So it just I saw the writing on the wall pretty early on, um, despite having been with him for like eight years or so. Yeah. But I was young uh when we met, so you know, wasn't gonna work out. So I left and uh was a single mother for a while. Then you and I met.

SPEAKER_00 2:06

Yep. We met uh that was back in 2009.

SPEAKER_01 2:09

Yep, and like I said, our my son at that time was around three years old. So um, and throughout the whole thing, I was severely depressed ever since I was a teenager. I struggled with clinical depression, um, anxiety, a lot of other things that went along with that. I was in and out of, you know, depression for most of my life at that point, medications, different treatments, different things, therapies. And uh it was pretty much treatment resistant, which made it very difficult for me.

SPEAKER_00 2:41

Yeah. And then you got your degree also.

SPEAKER_01 2:44

Yeah. Then um at well, yeah, at the same time I was going through college when I was married and and had my son, I was actually finishing up my degree.

SPEAKER_02 2:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:53

Um, I started in psychology because I knew within my heart that I wanted to help people, but I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do. And I was going again, I was uh a mother and a wife and started going to school at night because I just wanted to get it done. So got my degree and then uh was working for my family business until my family ended up selling the business. Um, and I stayed home for a few years to raise my son, anyways. So I was kind of put my career on the back burner for the time being.

SPEAKER_00 3:30

Yeah. So and then we met.

SPEAKER_01 3:33

Yep, after well, after I left yeah, my husband and we were going through a divorce, then we met, yeah, in 2009.

SPEAKER_00 3:39

2009. Yeah. So um I'm from Columbia and I moved in 2009 to Connecticut. Uh, I had a call from my aunt asking me if I wanted to move to the US to finish my degree in engineering. My mom's side of the family uh was living in Connecticut, so she was just inviting me to, you know, to basically move overseas, you know, just kinda live in the US and finish my degree or so.

SPEAKER_01 4:03

To the podunk town of Durham, Connecticut. Durham, Connecticut, that's right. Where all the cows live. Yeah. From the beautiful coast of Colombia to the cow country.

SPEAKER_00 4:13

Yeah, from Cartagena by the water, uh, Colombia. And so I got a call asking, hey, do you want to finish your degree here in the US? And I uh I said yes. I went to the embassy, I got my I got my visa, and I started working in Durham, Connecticut. In the beginning it was really hard for me because I had a girlfriend back then in Colombia, I had a rock band, and I was always into music.

SPEAKER_01 4:37

I always been into music another dreamer, just like me.

SPEAKER_00 4:40

Yeah, so when I started working in Connecticut, I was working with engineers and I and operators, machine operators and designers and we were doing medical devices and I was just so depressed, sad that I was like, this is not for me. You know, I I I was like, what the heck am I gonna do with my life? I don't even know if I wanna finish my degree. I don't even know if I wanna do this anymore. You know, so it was really hard for me in the beginning. And like you said, I I used to live in a city that wasn't near the water. And then moving to Connecticut to live in Durham was really hard for me. Yeah, I think that that was the countryside of, you know, Connecticut or so or the US.

SPEAKER_01 5:24

It's a very small town in Connecticut that's surrounded by farmland.

SPEAKER_00 5:28

Yeah, it was was kind of hard for me in the in the beginning. And then we met. I remember that we met one of my friends, co-workers who invited me to a party.

SPEAKER_01 5:36

You were there, and then Yeah, it's it's a funny story actually, because I almost didn't even go into the party. Your friend, oh, you were there with your friend, and then um I was with my friend who was seeing a girl who was at the party. Yeah. And the girl called my friend and said, Hey, you and Kim should come down to the party and you know, hang out, or they were doing salsa or something.

SPEAKER_03 6:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 6:02

And I was like, Well, that sounds fun. Yeah, but I that it was like late at the end of the night, and we had already been out, you know, had a few drinks or whatever. And by the time we get there, I'm it was not far, but I'm already like, you know, half asleep in the car, like, eh, maybe I don't really want to go in. But and my friend was like, No, no, no, no. You wanted to come, you made me drive down here, you're going in. And I'm like, all right. So I sucked it up, had my second wind, and thank God I went in because that would have been our only time meeting.

SPEAKER_00 6:34

Right, right. And I was just funny because uh uh the my co-worker that invited me there, his brother had like a salsa studio or something, and I was really actually into rock, believe it or not.

SPEAKER_01 6:46

Like into salsa, hardcore, you know. Like screaming.

SPEAKER_00 6:50

Uh-huh. And and I'm like a salsa, and I'm like, okay. And I went, you know, and and then we met there. And then actually we started we were dancing.

SPEAKER_01 7:00

We were both dancing salsa, which I've never done.

SPEAKER_00 7:02

Trying to dance salsa because I nobody neither of us knew how to do that. I was trying, I was pretending, being honest with you. Which is weird because again, you might think like, oh yeah, he's he's from Columbia, he might know. Yeah, you know, but no. But we had a good time, so we met that day. And but I was very immature when we met.

SPEAKER_01 7:23

And had a girlfriend.

SPEAKER_00 7:24

Yeah, I had a girlfriend in Columbia. So was it wasn't easy, you know, the whole transition, the whole again, like you said, me uh being a uh dreamer as well, dreaming about how am I gonna you know start my music career here instead of engineering and or start a business. You know, because again, we were I was trying to find myself at twenty-five. Yeah when I when he met you, I was we just turned twenty six. Twenty-six when we met. I was very immature, very immature for a long time.

SPEAKER_01 7:59

Long time. For a long time, uh yeah, we had struggles a lot of struggles because I had my son and and I was a single mom, and I'm like, I can't I I need something serious, I can't be with somebody uh doesn't, you know, ready for this. Yeah. Because I I had to be ready.

SPEAKER_00 8:18

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then uh we had a lot of issues, you know, at the beginning again, like you had a you had a kid, and one of the things was like, all right, so I moved to the United States. I didn't know what to do either, you know what I mean? When I met you, and I didn't know if I want to like start a new relationship or like uh live together or raise a kid. Right. Like it's just and again, I was very immature.

SPEAKER_06 8:40

Right.

SPEAKER_00 8:41

I was 25, but I was probably acting like I was 19.

SPEAKER_06 8:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:45

So after the the time went by and we went through a lot of ups and downs.

SPEAKER_01 8:50

Well, you went through a lot of moving back and forth to Colombia to Connecticut.

SPEAKER_00 8:54

Yeah, I moved, I moved back to Columbia. Breaking my heart. Well, I I went back to Columbia a few times or so, and I was like a I wasn't a freaking limbo at all.

SPEAKER_01 9:01

And you kept me in a limbo.

SPEAKER_00 9:02

Yeah, so it was just really bad. But then so after we went through all the issues that we had after going back and forth to Colombia and actually growing up, finally for me, you know, growing up and making a commitment to okay, w I want us to be together. We decided that we wanted to to start a business together.

SPEAKER_04 9:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:24

I've always been business oriented, you were as well. And we wanted to start a business, you know. We didn't know back then what we came across to this uh restaurant opportunity that we bought and unfortunately. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:39

No, it's I I say unfortunately because it was an expensive learning experience, but I don't regret it because we needed that experience to figure out what we didn't want.

SPEAKER_00 9:50

Yeah, exactly. So it was an opportunity back then that was I think 2014, that we were just kind of looking online. Hey, we need to start something.

SPEAKER_01 10:01

Yeah, we were looking at all types of businesses.

SPEAKER_00 10:03

All type, yeah. And then we said, okay, yeah, I guess this is it. We negotiated with the owner, we bought it after I think after a year or two, we bought a second location, but it was a freaking fiasco, you know, the whole fame.

SPEAKER_01 10:17

They were both failing restaurants locations, and we, you know, after doing our due diligence, decided that we would be able to revive them to their once flourishing restaurants that they were. We thought that we could revive them, but times had changed, locations had changed, um, one of them. Other businesses had come in, different things.

SPEAKER_00 10:42

One thing I learned was that if their business is not working and still making money, that's the way I see it now, because I didn't know back then. I don't even want to entertain the idea.

SPEAKER_01 10:51

Oh no, absolutely. That was the biggest mistake up front.

SPEAKER_00 10:55

If you think that you don't buy a failing business, never, ever, ever. For whoever is listening, don't ever buy a failing business. Thinking that you can do something. No. It's not gonna work out.

SPEAKER_01 11:06

No.

SPEAKER_00 11:06

It's not gonna work out.

SPEAKER_01 11:07

I mean, I'm sure there are instances where that can work out.

SPEAKER_00 11:12

Unless you're like a bar rescue type.

SPEAKER_01 11:14

Yeah, well, unless you have massive amounts of um cash to inject into it, which we didn't.

SPEAKER_00 11:21

Yeah, if you're a professional, if you know what you're doing, but it's just, you know, I won't entertain an idea.

SPEAKER_01 11:25

No, never again.

SPEAKER_00 11:26

If the business is not making money, I won't even entertain the idea. No.

SPEAKER_01 11:30

And after we bought those restaurants, we're running them for a while, we had our daughter in 2016. Um, we got married then, seven years after we got together.

SPEAKER_00 11:43

Yeah, right, right. Right, yeah, we had a we had a beautiful, beautiful daughter. She's 10 now.

SPEAKER_01 11:49

Yep, just turned 10. After we had our daughter, we decided that we needed to build a better better life because we were struggling financially from the restaurants. And that's when you said to me, like, I can't live here anymore. I cannot live in Connecticut anymore. And I was like, what the heck do you want me to do? I have a son here. He's, you know, very close with his father. They we shared 50-50 custody, and it wasn't an option for me to pick up my life and just move because I didn't think that my son's father was gonna let me do that. But you were adamant about it, you were just miserable, and so I decided like I have to do something if we want to improve our family's life, then we need to figure this out. So I talked to my ex-husband and told him he, you know, he knew the whole story of what was going on with the restaurants and how much financial debt we were in and how much we were struggling, and he knew the whole thing. And he's he's a good guy. And he not easily, it wasn't like, yeah, sure, go ahead and go do that. It was like a year of convincing him that I needed this and it would be the best thing for me and my son. And, you know, of course, he wants the best for his, he wanted the best for me because that made me a better mother.

SPEAKER_02 13:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:11

And of course, you know, his son was his number one priority. And although that put a strain on their relationship, not a strain, but it it caught it was a distance. Made it difficult, yeah. Yeah, made it difficult because um we ended up moving to Arizona where my family, my mother was living, and she was encouraging me to move there because move here because she could help us rebuild. Yeah. And that was probably one of the most difficult parts of my life. I well, it was one of one of the most difficult parts of my life was moving my son away from his father. It was the best choice for everyone involved, even my son, who, you know, we moved here when he was 12. But he wasn't building a life in Connecticut either. He didn't have good friends, he didn't have nothing. He really didn't have anything. We lived in a small condo. He just didn't have anything going for him. It's not like he had this great life that I was taking him from.

SPEAKER_04 14:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:15

We didn't have any opportunities, nothing. We just wanted to get out of there. So that's when we made the difficult decision to move. So when we decided that yes, we're gonna move, I talked to my son's father. It took him about a year to come around to the idea and be okay with it. And within that year, we had to sell two restaurants, two failing restaurants, which was a chore in itself. We had to sell our condo, which was also a chore because the market was not good.

SPEAKER_03 14:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:47

And you know, we had to uproot my son's life, I had to disturb his father's relationship with him. I had to we had a our daughter that we had to move, and somehow managed to move across the country to Arizona.

SPEAKER_04 15:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:03

So it was a really challenging, difficult road to get here. But we knew it was necessary, and it was either stay there and struggle and kind of be miserable or start fresh and rebuild.

SPEAKER_03 15:18

Right.

SPEAKER_01 15:18

And as scary as it was and as inconvenient as it was for the people around us, both of our families lived in Connecticut. Although I had my mom here in Arizona, I had other family in Connecticut, you had your whole family in Connecticut, and my son's family in Connecticut. As scary as it was, we managed to get it done.

SPEAKER_00 15:38

Yeah. And it was um, it wasn't easy because uh it took us a whole year for us to sell the restaurants, sell the condo, move to Arizona. So it wasn't just like that, like, oh yeah, let's go.

SPEAKER_06 15:51

Right.

SPEAKER_00 15:51

No, it took a lot of a lot of preparation mentally, a lot of planning. I remember that we used to take our daughter and her stroller, walk around the neighborhood, yeah, and thinking and planning how to do the move.

SPEAKER_01 16:05

Yeah. You know, so we and struggling thinking, is this going to work?

SPEAKER_00 16:09

Yeah, how are we gonna do it?

SPEAKER_01 16:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:10

Because it required like all so many things, money.

SPEAKER_01 16:14

A lot of moving parts. A lot of moving parts that we're just so unsure of, but we stuck to the belief that this was going to work out. That was gonna work out.

SPEAKER_00 16:24

And it was really hard. Like, are you how can you see right? Right, like how can you project that? Right. Like we again, like the restaurants are in between.

SPEAKER_04 16:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:33

That is not like something that you sell that easily and then we're failing. And a condo, and like, all right, even if we move, we have so much so much debt.

SPEAKER_01 16:41

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 16:42

Like, was really, really hard.

SPEAKER_01 16:43

But couple hundred thousand dollars worth of debt at that point. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:47

Like, what are we gonna do? And so we're gonna do this.

SPEAKER_01 16:49

Right. So it wasn't like we had all this cash, just like, oh, screw it, you know, whatever. We'll just get up and go and do it. It was it was a lot of planning, a lot of blind faith that the plan was going to work out, how it needed to work out.

SPEAKER_00 17:03

So if you think about it, I was basically I didn't finish my degree in engineering.

SPEAKER_01 17:07

Right.

SPEAKER_00 17:08

I was still thinking in the back of my head about music. You got your degree in public administration.

SPEAKER_01 17:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:15

And you had uh the student loan.

SPEAKER_01 17:18

Still have the student loans.

SPEAKER_00 17:20

And we were like, how the heck are we gonna do this? Right. Yeah. You know, but we managed and we did it. We moved to Arizona. We're here now, we're happy. But then when we moved, of course it wasn't easy in the beginning. We we moved with your mom, we stayed there for eight months or so.

SPEAKER_01 17:36

Six. Yeah, well, no, eight, you're right. Six to eight months. Whatever.

SPEAKER_00 17:39

Um, and then we our engine was still running, like, hey, we need to start something.

SPEAKER_01 17:44

Yeah, what are we gonna do? What's next? What's next? How can we get a house with 200,000 or so in debt? How can we get a a nice house for our family? We didn't want to move here and move into a small little c condo again that nobody fit in, that we had outgrown.

SPEAKER_00 18:02

Yeah. No, we we have big dreams. We we knew what we wanted.

SPEAKER_01 18:06

We weren't gonna go back here.

SPEAKER_00 18:07

We always been like I have this big vision. Yeah. You know, we always share that. So and then we were like, all right, what can we do?

SPEAKER_01 18:14

Right.

SPEAKER_00 18:14

And then you decided to get your real estate license. We were kind of thinking to flipping some homes.

SPEAKER_01 18:20

Yeah. Well, when we did move here, when we were running the restaurants, Ken was running the restaurants during the day. I still had my daytime job because I was kind of the breadwinner at that time.

SPEAKER_03 18:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:32

And I was funding through my job our household and our payroll and the lack of whatever the restaurants weren't making, I was funding with my paycheck. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:44

And I was working seven days a week.

SPEAKER_01 18:46

Yep. And then I was too because I was not there on the weekends with you, you know, when we had our daughter, then I started going less. But yeah, I was working seven days a week at nights on weekends. We were exhausted, we were stressed out, all that stuff. Then when we finally moved to Arizona, I was still working for my company, but remotely in Connecticut, but they were going through a closing. They were closing.

SPEAKER_03 19:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:13

They were going out of business. So I knew that that was coming down the pipeline rather quickly. They went out of business within a year of us moving here. I think I worked remotely for about a year.

SPEAKER_03 19:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:25

And it was good money, it was decent money and 100% paid healthcare. Yeah. So that was really held us over well, you could get a job. But then when we get here to Arizona, you're looking for a job and you're stuck again because now you have to go into another job that you don't love.

SPEAKER_00 19:45

Yeah. And that's not that wasn't the plan.

SPEAKER_01 19:47

That was that's well, I mean, it was the plan to get us to rebuild. It was a stepping stone. But it it's not our life plan.

SPEAKER_00 19:55

Exactly. That's what I meant. Yeah exactly. Like I say, you got your real estate license, thinking, all right, what about if we flip some homes, if we kind of fix them up and blah, blah, blah. We kind of thought to do that, it wasn't easy. That there was a lot of competitors or a lot of buyers. But again, and then we thought so we didn't go that route. And then uh we started e-commerce. And oh, I forgot to actually mention that we started uh a Shopify or drop shipping back in Connecticut before we moved.

SPEAKER_01 20:23

Yes, we did.

SPEAKER_00 20:24

Yeah, we did a little bit about that also. That didn't really work out. We started selling products online, but we didn't like the business model, and then we're like, okay, this is not for us.

SPEAKER_04 20:34

Yeah, shut it down.

SPEAKER_00 20:35

Shut it down, the drop shipping. But then we went back again in Arizona doing e-commerce, and that's what we do now.

SPEAKER_01 20:42

We started an e-commerce business in 2019, and then all of a sudden 2020 hit, right when we were trying to really get into it, but kind of worked out to our benefit because people started doing a lot more online shopping.

SPEAKER_02 20:56

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 20:56

So that's when we were able to grow our business a little bit, but we didn't know exactly what we were doing. So we had a lot of issues with that as well. And as you know, we were still carrying all of that debt from the restaurants in Connecticut, trying to manage that. We had moved out of my mother's house and bought our own house. Um, so now we had this new household bills. We had the restaurant debt we were paying off. We were trying to start a new business, and then I lost my job.

SPEAKER_03 21:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:28

All all within a very short period of time. I lost my job right before COVID hit. So that income stopped.

SPEAKER_00 21:34

Yeah. But then when COVID hit, I remember when uh the news published about that we're in a pandemic. Yeah. Our sales skyrocketed.

SPEAKER_01 21:44

Yeah. But we still didn't know what we were doing and have anything in place. No idea. So we were still like losing a ton of money. Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_00 21:52

Losing yes, yes.

SPEAKER_01 21:54

And we didn't have a ton of money to lose.

SPEAKER_00 21:56

No, no, exactly. Then yeah, our sales went up. The RC was increased and then we saw it as an opportunity, and then we continue grinding um e-commerce. I think I said in a previous episode that we're just building pallets from home.

SPEAKER_01 22:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:12

And it was crazy, it was breaking my back.

SPEAKER_01 22:15

Oh, while you were working full time. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:16

I got a job here in Arizona, and then right after work, I'll just go home and start packing and sending stuff to the warehouses.

SPEAKER_01 22:24

So it was a lot of time consuming trap work to get the orders ready. We're talking like thousands of items that all needed to be packaged, labeled, bagged, uh bubble wrapped, whatever the item was, and and and then packed in a box and put on a pallet, shrink wrapped. We'd have a 18-wheeler come and pick these large pallets up out of our garage.

SPEAKER_00 22:52

And I'm calling these companies just to the logistics to see when are they gonna show up.

SPEAKER_01 22:56

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 22:56

And all this kind of, you know, again, we're we're living in a residential neighbor neighborhood.

SPEAKER_05 23:01

Right.

SPEAKER_00 23:01

And no one was expecting to have this 18-wheeler.

SPEAKER_05 23:04

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 23:05

You know, to pick up those pallets, but you know, we were doing the work, we're kind of planning to open a warehouse at some point, and then we're like, no, I guess we're not gonna go that route. We don't want employees, yeah, we don't want any uh rent again, and you know, all that. So we decided, hey, no, I guess that that's not gonna be it.

SPEAKER_01 23:23

Right.

SPEAKER_00 23:23

And then uh but we're still doing e-commerce again.

SPEAKER_01 23:26

We scaled back that business because part of it was failing miserably because margins were so low and we just couldn't find any suppliers.

SPEAKER_02 23:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:36

The supply chain was getting ridiculous with COVID. That happened. We couldn't get so much stuff that we needed.

SPEAKER_00 23:43

Yeah, it was very challenging.

SPEAKER_01 23:44

It was challenging and very slim margins, especially for the way we were doing it. Yeah. I know that people are very successful doing it, but not the way we were doing it out of our house, which was very limiting, but we didn't want to we didn't want to build a business and have the same mistakes made again where we were tied into a location, tied into employees, tied into rent on a warehouse, something like that. We didn't want to make those same mistakes. We already learned that lesson the first time, and we already learned that that we don't want that out of life. We want to be, we wanted to build something that was location independent. So we were we had time freedom, we were able to travel when we want and build a life on our own terms and do what we wanted. So yeah, we kind of scaled that back, and so now we have a portion of that business still running that's a little bit different than when we started. Yeah, than than how we started.

SPEAKER_00 24:41

Yeah. And then so as we were just navigating this e-commerce, uh, we thought, hey, you know what? This is a lot of work. Yeah. You know, I'm breaking my back in the garage. Packing pallets, packing pallets, wrapping them, lifting, paletizing. I'm just like, yeah, lifting. I'm like, oh my god, no, this is too much. We found an opportunity online where someone will build a store for you.

SPEAKER_05 25:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:07

And we thought, okay, wait a minute, let's check it out. So we started watching videos about the the strategies and about the business model, and then we thought, hey, you know what? I guess this is it. Yeah. This makes more sense. We were excited. We were excited. So, and then we had some cash in the bank, and then we deployed the money.

SPEAKER_01 25:26

We had very little cash in the bank. It was like the last cash we had in the bank. And in fact, we didn't have enough cash in the bank, and we had to bring in a partner, yeah, a friend that we met here.

SPEAKER_00 25:39

We had some stocks and I had to sell them all, cash them all out, and I was like, all right, so that just and then I think it was like 15,000, 20,000. I don't recall.

SPEAKER_01 25:49

We were twenty thousand and and our partner was twenty thousand and yeah. So that we had to hand over up front. Up front, yeah, just for them to build just to build the investment for us, the store.

SPEAKER_00 26:03

Guess what? Not even a year. They just sent them.

SPEAKER_01 26:06

This was all during COVID, by the way.

SPEAKER_00 26:07

Yeah. And then a year after or sell, they say, hey, we're going bankrupt.

SPEAKER_01 26:11

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 26:12

And we lost the money.

SPEAKER_01 26:13

We lost even more money.

SPEAKER_00 26:14

More money. And they're now what the heck are we gonna do?

SPEAKER_01 26:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 26:18

So yeah, that's another story there. So we lost money.

SPEAKER_01 26:22

We lost twenty thousand there. We lost also when we sold the restaurants, we sold one of the restaurants, we sold them to soup two separate buyers. One of the buyers, you know, we financed part of the transaction for them.

SPEAKER_00 26:36

27,000, I think.

SPEAKER_01 26:37

27,000 they owed us. And when we moved, finally moved to Arizona, they were like, Oh, by the way, I'm I'm going out of business. Yeah, like a few months in, I don't even know how many months he had. Six months or so. He was doing a full build out and barely opened his doors before he couldn't continue paying rent. And he said, Sorry, I'm going out of business. So that$27,000 I owed you, yeah, don't don't count on it.

SPEAKER_00 27:06

Didn't even see a penny.

SPEAKER_01 27:07

Never saw a dime.

SPEAKER_00 27:08

Yep. So now we lost that money. We brought so much debt from Connecticut, and then when we kind of started rebuilding, we lost money again with that investment.

SPEAKER_01 27:19

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 27:20

And here we are in Arizona.

SPEAKER_01 27:23

Um like boom, boom, boom.

SPEAKER_00 27:24

Yep. We're still rebuilding. And then recently, two months ago, I lost my job.

SPEAKER_01 27:34

Not even two months ago. Not even two months ago.

SPEAKER_00 27:36

I lost my job.

SPEAKER_01 27:37

So here we are again. Here we are. Trying to rebuild once again.

SPEAKER_00 27:41

But you know, it seems like an interesting story. It is an interesting story, but we have accomplished so many things. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 27:50

We have learned so many things.

SPEAKER_00 27:51

Yeah, so many things. So we have a beautiful family. Uh our kids are thriving, they're healthy. We are healthy.

SPEAKER_01 27:58

We have a great marriage.

SPEAKER_00 27:59

We have a great marriage. We don't have that much debt anymore. We have a beautiful house.

SPEAKER_01 28:05

Beautiful family.

SPEAKER_00 28:06

Beautiful family.

SPEAKER_01 28:07

Beautiful life.

SPEAKER_00 28:08

Beautiful dogs that they were parking a minute ago, and I have to yell at them. So, yeah, so beautiful weather. Beautiful weather, yeah. Except summer.

SPEAKER_01 28:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:19

But we we go to Connecticut at least one time a year to visit our parents. We are still building.

SPEAKER_01 28:26

We're rebuilding again.

SPEAKER_00 28:27

We're rebuilding again.

SPEAKER_01 28:28

We are in the depths in the depths of it again.

SPEAKER_00 28:31

Yeah, yeah. So, but but we're happy. Uh believe it or not, we're happy after all these losses. They're just lesson to us. Right. You know, they're just lesson to us, and then that's why we decided, hey, we need to, we need to get some microphones and kind of, you know, put our life out there. And because I know this is gonna resonate with so many people that they're trying to rebuild and uh and or they think, oh man, shit always happens to me.

SPEAKER_05 28:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:58

Like, no, like things happen, but you have to pick yourself up and make things work. And we've been doing this work for like what, can ten years?

SPEAKER_01 29:07

Yeah, you have to look at you know, that mindset of, oh shit happens to me. You have to look at it as like, no, this is happening for me.

SPEAKER_00 29:16

This is happening for me, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 29:17

And that's how we're choosing to look at Ken's job loss is this is happening for us because we know that he was not happy in that job. He was stressed out, yeah, miserable. The work was okay, like and he liked some of the people that he worked with, but we know that that's not our ultimate goal in life, is for him to work a job. It is for us to build something that's more meaningful, more impactful, more soul fulfilling. Um, that's our dream, that's our goal.

SPEAKER_00 29:48

Yep, absolutely, Kim. And again, we came along like it's just crazy. Now, again, like uh as we recorded, I had to like stop a few times because so many things happen. And I ski we skipped so many things. Yeah, not all in between, not all bad things, because we manifested a lot of things right that what we have right now. Yeah, it now we are like summarizing our life and we manifested so many good things. Yeah, you know, good, good things. Things bad happened, but something good happened right after. Right. Something bad happened, yeah, and then something good happened right after. You know, so it's just like a you we are just rebuilding your kind of, you know, um tuning this guitar. Yeah. You know what I mean? You're tuning your life to kind of find where you want to go. Yeah. And we've been doing that again for a long time. And here we are recording our life and we're excited. You know, we get up in the morning, we um you exercise more than me. We do yoga sometimes, we try to do a few things here and there to kind of keep us, you know, motivated. We do a lot of meditation to set up the day, and there's uh some other episodes that we talk about what we do, how we make things work.

SPEAKER_01 31:02

Yes, you know, to we share a lot of those tools.

SPEAKER_00 31:05

Yeah, to how to overcome things in life. Uh, because they're just events. That's why we see it. Yeah. We talk about it. We sometimes we're in the backyard or in the pool or in in the living room or in the kitchen. We just talk about they're all just event. Right. We get sad or we kinda down spiral for a minute, but then or you pick me up or I pick you up. We're gonna be okay. Yeah. We're gonna be okay, and guess what? We're okay.

SPEAKER_01 31:29

Yeah. We're more than okay.

SPEAKER_00 31:31

We're more than okay.

SPEAKER_01 31:32

And it's the the thing you kind of skipped over about this was we didn't just start with this mindset because as I mentioned in the beginning, I had very bad clinical depression for most of my life. And I get into that story in future episodes. Some really interesting, really interesting how I worked through all of that. And really important for anybody who's listening who struggles with any of that. I get into that in further detail of what that looked like. But you know, this wasn't always our positive mindset and our positive outlook on these events, of course. We struggled like deeply. I had the clinical depression, you had very much situational and seasonal depression at times. And we always had to work through that. And now we have found tools and things that work for us in order for us to be in the mindset that we're in.

SPEAKER_03 32:25

Yep. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 32:26

And I, you know, said in in other episodes as well that I struggled to get out of bed most mornings, a lot of the time in my life, a good chunk of my life. I struggled to get out of bed and never thought it was available to me to get out of bed and look forward to the day and enjoy my life and be like, wow, this is my life. Yeah. But that's where I'm at, and um, I know that's where you're at.

SPEAKER_03 32:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 32:52

And so that's why we want to be here with you, sharing our story, and hopefully you can resonate with our story, and hopefully you can learn some tools that will work for you to help you rebuild your life when you have those downward moments, downward spirals, because we want to be there to help pick you up. That's our tool. That's our goal.

SPEAKER_00 33:14

Yeah, we're gonna lift you up, definitely. You know, because again, we just sometimes get so overwhelmed that we don't know what to do.

SPEAKER_05 33:21

Right.

SPEAKER_00 33:21

And we're just gonna downspiral, like, what the heck is going on?

SPEAKER_05 33:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:25

I mean, we just get sad and then you don't know what to do, you feel stuck, yeah. And then like nothing is working out. Everything is mindset. Again, in other episodes, we talk about this today. We wanted to put our story so you guys can see who we are. We're just a nice couple that had tons of uh experiences out there, good and bad, but we take the best of it every single time. So again, this is the lesson, the lessons. We do. So again, this is uh Ken and Kim podcast. We we will continue sharing more uh more content, yeah, more episodes for you to enjoy and for you to navigate live with us.

SPEAKER_01 34:02

Yeah, follow along so we can share our story with you and the tools that help us, and so we can help you rebuild along right alongside with us.

SPEAKER_00 34:11

That's right. All right, we'll see you the next time.

SPEAKER_01 34:13

All right, bye.

SPEAKER_00 34:14

Bye.

SPEAKER_01 34:15

Hey there. If you like this episode, please like, share, and join our community. And check out our website at Ken and Kim Podcast.com for free tools and resources. We'll talk to you next time.