MBA2309 Extended Interview with Steve Chou: How to Make 2+Million Dollars per Year Working Only 20 Hours per Week

25:04A person who's really good at Instagram posts seven times a day. I have a friend who does Facebook really well, posts 21 times a day. But when you stop, the traffic stops. So I prefer to do things where I do it once and the traffic comes for a long time. So I have blog posts that I've written 10 years ago that still generate traffic. I have videos that I've recorded three years ago that still generate views. Whatever I can do to leverage my time, I try to do. I like that high leverage activity. And looking at what you do, you blog, you podcast, you have a YouTube channel. All these are evergreen pieces of content that people can find and search for.

25:39And, you know, this is all kind of backbone SEO. So I like that philosophy. When was the point where you're like, okay, I don't need to work 40 hours a week now. I'm making enough. Was that a hundred thousand, 500 ,000 in sales? Like what was it where he's just like, okay, I can now, you know, kick it back in a different gear. Yeah. So I'm going to be upfront with you, Omar. Like I got caught up in my ego. So when you're not used to making a large sum of money all at once, you tend to go crazy, or at least I don't want to speak for anyone else. I went crazy. I was like, okay, we hit this goal.

26:14Let's raise it 30%. Let's raise wife just came up to me and said, Hey, we make so much more than we spend. And I don't want to do this anymore. I'm burnt out. It sucks. Right. We had that conversation and I realized she was right because we started our businesses to spend more time with family. And here we were not even spending even a small fraction of what we were making. So what was the point? So I credit my wife for getting things under control and controlling my ego. And you can probably relate to this, right? I'm in a mastermind group with a whole bunch of really successful people. And when I hear that someone else is making millions of dollars, I want to make millions of dollars.

26:58And the way I combat that today is we don't have any revenue goals for the e-commerce business or anything. We pay ourselves what we need to live comfortably and everything else is gravy. And the way I keep my mind going, and we kind of alluded to this earlier, like we'd be bored if we didn't do anything right. Every year I focus on one thing and I go all out and I do it well and whatever happens happens. So this year is my book launch. Last year was my YouTube channel and I hit 200 K subs year before that it was Tik TOK. The year before that it was paid ads. That's how I operate today. Cool. Um, so I love everything you just said right now, because I am going to challenge you a little bit on that because, um, or maybe I'm not challenging.

27:44Maybe First, I'll ask this question. Is your goal to live a great lifestyle, making enough money to meet your needs? Or is your goal to be extraordinarily wealthy and build a business that's basically private jet money? I would say this. I've taught a class with over 5 ,000 people. Most people just want freedom to do what they want and spend time with who they want. That's always been my case. I'm not attracted to the private jet lifestyle or anything like that. You give me enough money. Here's the thing. I think anyone out there can just make a couple million dollars with very few employees and very few expenses if they want.

28:27If you want to start something really big like an Amazon or Facebook, I think then you need a lot of employees and it gets a lot more stressed. Yeah. But I would say for most of the people that I've ever met or encountered through blogging or podcasting and whatnot, most people just want to make a good living and have freedom. Yeah. Would you agree it has a lot to do with the business itself or the business model? The reason why I'm asking this question is because I run a software company, Webinar Ninja. I'm heavily in the SaaS world where it's very binary. It's like you either choose to build a software company that is a lifestyle business that makes sense to me and you keep it lean and basically no one even knows about you.

29:11Or you build a business that like makes a dent in the universe. It's like a all out sprint where you're working 80 hours a week for three years. You make your investors happy. You exit. You never have to work again. Like these are usually the two paths. And there's really very little. There's a few companies in the middle. the ConvertKit's of the world, the Basecamps, the Wistias, but they're really the exception. They're not a really good example to look at. And actually, it's quite dangerous to look at them because they have a lot of things going for them that is not typical. Would you agree, it depends on the business model, would you agree with that kind of layout in terms of software?

29:53And what about content marketing, YouTube channel, creator businesses? So I used to design hardware and software for a living at a Fortune 500 company. And I can tell you this, I think in the software space, it's especially hard because software is so easily copied unless there's something algorithmic behind it. So you might have a lead at some point, but someone can just say, hey, I want that feature to an engineer and they'll have it. Unless you have something underneath it, underlying that you have to bolster your business. I'm also of the belief though and I want to talk a little about e-commerce in this case I feel like everything in this world is pretty much a commodity there are very few things that are novel or inventions so the way you sell it has to do with everything the emotions that you can evoke in your product is everything have you heard of the company Dr.

30:44Squatch Omar? no they sell soap, soap for men but they're a multi-million dollar company and they sell soap But the way they sell it is very interesting. If you ever watch one of their commercials, it's of like a guy and his girlfriend and the girlfriend's like sniffing him and go, oh my God, you smell so good. I want to take you right now. What they're selling really is sex. Right. And I don't know if you've read the book Cashvertising before, but it states, yeah, the life force eight. If you can evoke one of the emotions of the life force eight, you can sell anything. And once you have someone and once you've established a brand and all brand really is, is repeated exposure to a name, people will become loyal to you and they'll use your service.

31:26Like I know Webinar Ninja isn't the cheapest service around in that webinar space, but you guys have created a good name for yourself of trust. And that's why people will sign up for your Webinar Ninja over other tools. Yeah. And I agree with you. Branding has a lot to do when you're in a commodity space where you have to differentiate when you have to have a USP. you know we have like the survey that we ask people when when people buy and we ask them like why did you buy and most people say uh things that have nothing to do with the software like we align with their values i really liked the fact that you have a community i really like uh you know uh that nicole is pretty cool like whatever things have nothing to do with software yeah exactly and the interesting thing is that it has to be something other than the software if you're going to be able to compete.

32:18And if I look at some of the businesses and the brands out there, whether it's e-commerce, whether it's like Dollar Shave Club or whatever, that kind of blew up. It's because they have personality and it has a lot to do with that. You talked about not loving social media and you had a year of TikTok goal. What did you learn in that year? And how do you marry having a brand and being not like a lover of social media? because I'm in this camp. I do not like social media. I don't like being on it, but I know it's kind of like one of those things that we kind of have to dance around in our business.

32:54My mom always tells me I don't have the face for social media. That's beside the point. But YouTube, you're good in YouTube. All right, so TikTok was an experiment because I think of TikTok as one of the better kinds of social media. Do you consider YouTube social media? No, I don't. I feel like it's, to me, it's an alternative to Netflix. TikTok is similar because I have posts that I put on TikTok that a year later are still generating views. It's not like Instagram. It's not like Facebook. The life cycle is not as strong as YouTube, but it's still there. I'm just not a fan of things where you post it, it might go viral in two days and then that's it.

33:35Twitter. Twitter. Yeah. So I actually paid someone to operate my Twitter and I didn't feel comfortable doing that for Instagram or Facebook because there's photos involved. But for Twitter, you can just tell someone, hey, here are all my blog posts, here are my podcasts and whatnot, and just have them extract out nuggets in a spreadsheet that you can just quickly approve. I think social media is actually a good way to grow if you have no money at all. And certain industries, I think, lend itself to social media more. Like if you're selling apparel or jewelry in the e-com space, I think social media is probably your best bet because SEO and that sort of thing won't work as well.

34:16Yeah. I'm a big believer in that, that if you're B2C, if you're going straight to consumer, social media is great. It's actually really good, especially if you have like, what do they call like branded content or native content? Like TikTok is big on native content where like you have an influencer, you know, demoing your product, your physical product. There's like this teeth whitening toothpaste that's like all over the place now because all these people are using it and it's very it's very powerful and it's interesting because b2b the market i'm in they're migrating off a lot of the paid ads a lot of social media because the cost per acquisition is getting bonkers now and they're looking for other ways they're looking at like you know freemium they're looking at you know kind of acquiring customers even through sales calls and even webinars, things like that.

35:08So it's just interesting to see how each market, but you're right. I think it's also good to be on social media if you're a beginner because it gives you reps. It gives you a chance like, hey, I'm gonna vlog every day. I'm gonna put out a little message every day. I'm gonna just produce content. Yeah, and my only thing is that like, don't just stay there. A lot of people just stay on social media and they never build their brand outside of social media. Here's what's interesting about your last statement. So for our store, Bumblebee Linens, I actually started doing an analysis on all our channels.

35:39And I noticed that Facebook was the worst performing channel in terms of revenue per visitor. And the reason why is because a lot of our big customers are event and wedding planners who buy our stuff in bulk. And they're finding us through Google, whereas those people don't really live on Facebook. So it pays to check, right? Yeah. Know your audience. That's true. and that's and it's the opposite for us because our audience are mostly entrepreneurs are in their second career um so they're maybe mid-30s and above they've built a business they want to be able to promote or market their business through content with webinars and uh facebook is the main game facebook is where they are you know and and and i don't want like for me like i we've tried some mediums that are have a younger audience whether it's you know ads on tiktok or otherwise.

36:28And like, I can't sell to these people. They're on money. Yeah. They're too young. But yeah, that's definitely, it's definitely good to know your demographic. So I want to get into your new book, The Family First Entrepreneur. I'm going to ask you a little bit about what that exactly means. But before, why did you decide to write a book? Because I've met and talked to many authors and everybody has a different why. Yeah. And I want to hear your why. So I'll give you two answers. The first one is that I've always felt that most of the entrepreneurship advice that I see out there doesn't apply to me.

37:11It's from single dudes who have all the time in the world to do whatever they want. And I have kids and I'm trying to juggle all these things. And I want to see a book from someone who has a family who actually has family values other than just killing it, man, or driving these Ferraris and Lambos and that sort of thing. The other reason I wanted to write the book was because it was on my bucket list. And quite frankly, I want to take my kids to the bookstore, show them the book and say, hey, your dad created this. You guys can do anything that you want. And the other reason is I've been blogging for over a decade now.

37:48I've had my YouTube channel, my podcast. My mom has never listened or read a single thing that I've ever done. But as soon as I told her that I was writing a book that was published by HarperCollins, she went nuts. And all of a sudden she was like, hey, where can I get the book? Can I read it? I really want to read it. And I'm like, all right. I finally hit the Asian nerve. Yeah, you're all the respect in my mom. Yes, that is worth writing a book right there. It is. We all have that scenario. I could tell you my parents, my dad vaguely understands what I do. my mom has a better understanding because she's a little bit more tech savvy but there is a difference when you you basically uh resonate with them in an area they understand you know um and uh i think of hassan minhaj who's a comedian yeah he talks about um you know uh his dad didn't get his respect until he was on the daily show because he understands the daily show.

38:48It's like the news, they wear a suit, they're respectful. You're not like hawking tickets outside of the comedy cellar, you know? And I think that was kind of, this is kind of your moment, your daily show moment. So tell us a little bit about what's your definition of a family first entrepreneur? Yeah. A family first entrepreneur really is someone who prioritizes family or free time over just the pure drive for money and scaling is really in a nutshell what it is. And I've just come to look, have you ever heard of the four burners theory? Yeah. Yeah. So here's in case your listeners haven't heard of it, your life is defined by four burners, family, business, sorry, family, work, friends, and health.

39:32And in order to do one thing well, you have to turn off at least one burner. If you want to do two things well, if you want to do it even better, you have to turn off two burners. And if you're Elon Musk, you turn off three and like work is your only burner. Basically there's trade-offs in life and you basically have to prioritize what you want. And family first entrepreneurs prioritize the family burner. And I'd probably say the health burner. Yeah. And, and I like this analogy and I like that you said this because, um, it reminds me of a conversation that Joe Rogan had with, um, Ryan holiday.

40:05And he was, he was asking him like, Why are these great leaders, all these amazing people, Winston Churchill, Gandhi, Marcus Aurelius, why were these people – their offspring is often – they're often horrible people. Why are they such bad dads? And he's like, because they're busy. They're just like – they're overworked. Their whole life is their mission, and therefore, that is the price. like and i think why why your book is so important is at least highlights do you want to pay that price whether your family is is like the you know your wife or your your partner and your children or even just your your partner in life if you don't have children do you want to sacrifice those relationships at all costs um and the reason why i'm bringing this up is because i feel like you probably felt compelled to write this book because you probably had a moment where you had to ask that question to yourself.

41:06And tell me a little bit about that moment. And what was the kind of the wake up call for you to say, you know what, I need to reevaluate. Yeah, I kind of alluded to this earlier. But we got on the Today Show for our store. And we were only on for 12 seconds. That's it. But that led to 7x the daily order volume for a period of about two weeks. And at the time, it was just my wife and I and this one other person. And, you know, publicly, you think it's cool. You hit the Today Show, you hit the jackpot, and you're getting 7x your average order volume. But fulfilling those orders nearly broke us.

41:42And that was actually the period where my wife said she was burnt out as well. Meanwhile, I was planning other media opportunities, but we had that talk when she broke down, crying, not tears of joy this time. It wasn't the wedding. and she was like, I don't want to do this anymore. Give me a hand. And that's when I realized, right? And this is what most people don't realize. I want growing fast, no matter what you do is always painful. It sucks. And I've interviewed so many people on my podcast, 450 people. And I remember this one dude who hit 2 million bucks in like six months. And the whole episode was like, you know, rah, rah, you know, how'd you do that?

42:17It was so cool. As soon as I hit the stop button, I was like, Hey, how sucky was that? And he was like, dude, it was terrible. I was so burned out. I was so stressed out. You don't actually hear those stories. So slow and steady growth is almost always better than sudden unexpected growth. One of the things I tell myself, I try to remind other entrepreneurs is exactly what you're saying right now is to remind yourself why, why are you doing this? Like the funny thing about your story that I find incredibly interesting is that your wife quit her job so that she can spend more time with the kids in the family.

42:53You then build a business and you find yourself right back where you were before. And you're like, oh, we're mission not accomplished, right? Like we're off course here. And then you had that wake up call. And by the way, like it's actually as bad as it was, it's actually a good problem to have. Like, okay, we learned through success that this is not something that we should be doing because it's hurting our family. What are the changes you made at that point where it's like, okay, how do we realign ourselves? Yeah. So number one, no, no revenue goals. I think revenue goals are kind of dumb. Instead, you just have like a goal that's related to some sort of metric in your business, maybe.

43:38Because there's always ways to play around with revenue too. And once you hit certain goals, you know, you always just move the goalposts. The other thing that we do is really, we, here's one thing that your listeners can take away. We focus a lot more on our existing customers. I find a lot of people don't do that. They spend all their money and time on new customer acquisition when it's a lot easier to just get someone to open up their wallets again. I think I mentioned earlier, or maybe I didn't mention yet, but we're in the wedding industry and you would think that there's not a lot of repeat business, right?

44:08The divorce rate is high in the US, but it's not high enough that people get married multiple times. So 12 % of our business is repeat, just 12, but it represents 36 % of our revenues. And we already talked about a little bit. Like I go through and I find our best customers and I call them on the phone. Like I pick up like this thing that you talk into. Most people can't relate to that. And I say, Hey, do you happen to be, we noticed you purchased an abnormally large number of linens. Do you happen to be a planner or do you have future needs? And if they say yes, I go, okay, here's a coupon code.

44:39Here's a dedicated rep. We'll make sure your order makes it to its destination. And from there, we have a customer for life. And by doing that, we have a solid foundation for business going forward. And we just keep doing this and keep attracting larger and larger customers every year. I love this because one of the things I learned the hard way in my over 20 years of entrepreneurship is that hard work does not pay off. Now, hard work is important, But hard work alone is actually really detrimental. You have to work smarter. You have to work on the things that matter, right? If I spend 16 hours a day on things that really are like$10,$100 tasks that don't really bring in the money, that doesn't really actually help our customers or grow the business, it's really a waste of time.

45:29And I just end up with a year of exhaustion, right? Versus eight hours or four hours of things that really move the needle. Like you just mentioned that bring in 10 ,000, 20 ,000, a hundred thousand dollars in revenue. And I just work smarter. I just work on the things that work. I double down on the things that, that, that work. And it took me a while to get to that point to realize, oh, I'm doing like 10 things. What are the top two things that are actually moving the needle? Those two things are actually making like 90 % of all my revenue. Why am I doing all these eight things? Just delete them.

45:59Right. And I think I think our immigrant parents kind of seeped in because like, hey, that's 10 percent of like the whatever dollar. Why are you going to throw that away? Because it's costing me eight hours, you know, but you have to retrain yourself. And I think you you feel me there. Yeah, I do. I definitely do. I do have those where I'm like, I should be cutting this, but it's it's a good amount of money and it's not that much effort. I could I could do this. But all these little things add up over time. Totally. What now? You got your book coming out. Um, and I want to just kind of step back a little bit.

46:33Um, and what are the next 10 years for you look like? What's your focus? Like you, you kind of have an established business. You've kind of focused on a few things every year to, to build your businesses in different ways. Uh, what is this all for, for you? What are you, what is your goal in life in terms of like how the business can help you enrich your life? So the great thing about all of my businesses have been, they've been, they've been all synergistic. So I'll start something like I had the store and then I started the blog, but the blog relies on the store. So I, I use the store as a laboratory for my content and that leads to other things.

47:13Likewise, my YouTube channel and the conference, they all kind of add value to that. I think that if you want to go out like five or 10 years, I think once my kids go to college, I might try my hand in the SaaS game just because it's something that I have a background in and it's something I've always wanted to do. In the meantime, while my kids are here, my focus is going to be on them. But I'm like you, I always need to be working on something. And what's great about already having these businesses is that I can use those businesses to fund whatever I want and not have to worry about the money or the risk.

47:48I think that's probably the biggest benefit. I love it. I want to wrap up with a question that I like to ask a lot of our entrepreneurs that come on the show. We know a lot of the same people, like our network is kind of intertwined. And I want to ask you the question, how much of your success is due to who you've known or who you've gotten to know over the years and how much you know versus like the knowledge that you've gained through uh studying and learning yeah i would say if i had to put a percentage on it i would say 65 who you know and the rest based on knowledge and here's how i think about it every person that you know is like a lottery ticket and i can just think of so many different ways that I was lucky.

48:38Like, am I lucky that my brother-in-law worked on AdWords? Am I lucky that my buddy just happened to be putting together a website? Am I lucky that a friend of mine just had me start selling on Amazon and grew my revenue? Well, each person that you meet, you don't know what's going to happen. Like, look at us here. I'm on your podcast now. And it was just luck that we met each other. And I did that by going to an event. and people are just so important. So it might not directly affect your business, but like I said, it's like lottery tickets. The more you got, the more chances for luck to happen.

49:12I like the way you look at it because I do see the more people you know, it's kind of like you're creating your own luck. Like Naval says, it's like, if you're doing a lot of things, you're trying new things, you're meeting people, kind of like kicking up dust, like you have more opportunities. You have more chances for things to work out. you know, you are into personal finance. You went to FinCon. We met at FinCon. We talked to, we talked to each other. We got to know each other. You know, we stayed in touch, but there is effort on your part. You had to buy a ticket. You had to fly to North Carolina.

49:46You had to stay in touch with me over the years. You had to, you know, take whatever advice you got from your brother who works at Google and then do something with it and implement, you know? So So what I love about it, it's kind of like a magnifier, I feel like. I feel like it really amplifies your efforts when you meet people. And I found that the more you try your best to network, and when I say network, just make friends in the industry. Make friends, meet people, go to parties, go to events, go to conferences, go to retreats, go to masterminds, whatever it might be. And the more you do that, the more you realize that people actually want to help you.

50:25Like people actually want to see you succeed almost like I don't I don't want to say that it's totally selfless. But in my experience, it's mostly selfless. Mostly mostly people see yourself. They see themselves in you and they're kind of like, hey, let me help you out. Knowing that one day maybe you'll help them out or maybe not. But the point is, is that I think that if we make the effort, it always pays off in my in my opinion. And I can name like multiple stories when it's paid off big time. some in little ways, but this is a great example. We're having this conversation because we both made the effort to network.

51:03So Steve, thanks so much for being on the show. I loved our conversation. I love having conversations with people that I know and kind of gotten to know over the years because it's really easy and fluid. If you want to leave our audience who is working day and night on their business, trying to get to the point where you are, where you have that work-life balance, what is one piece of advice you want to leave them with? I would say try to automate as much as you can. Hire as a last resort. Take an effort to figure out what you're outsourcing if you do decide to outsource it. One of my philosophies is I always try to do everything myself in the beginning, get my hands dirty first.

51:47So for example, in YouTube, I edited all my own videos and I realized I hated it, but I recorded myself editing them so that when I hired my editor, I just turned over those videos and we got up and running right away. So find ways to automate, find an app or software that can do what you want. If you can't, get your own hands dirty and then outsource kind of like as the last option. Love it, Steve. Thanks so much for being on the show and I'll check you hopefully sooner than later. Absolutely. I've been meaning to make it out to your parts, actually. It's on my bucket list. Come see us, man. I'll be there.

52:22Yeah. Take care. What an amazing conversation with Steve Chu. Steve is a no-nonsense guy. I love the fact that when something's wrong in his business, something's wrong in his life, he takes action right away. But even better, he actually shares what he learns and what he's done through his blog, through his podcast, so that we can avoid that mistake and learn as well. And if you want to continue learning on how to grow a seven-figure business, but not work your brains out and not have enough time for your family, pick up The Family First Entrepreneur by Steve Chu. You can order it right now on Amazon or wherever you buy books.

52:57But if you want to be really smart and get some bonuses, go to thefamilyfirstentrepreneur.com and you'll see some steps on how to order the book and get$690 in bonuses from Steve, including a six-week side hustle challenge that's absolutely amazing. Go ahead and pick up the book, The Family First Entrepreneur, You Won't Regret It. Thanks so much for listening. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. I love sharing these stories and these conversations I have with other entrepreneurs because it proves to everybody, including myself, that we all have our own journeys. We all have our struggles.

53:31We all have our challenges. We all make mistakes. We all stumble. But the ones that succeed are the ones that keep moving forward, that keep moving forward despite the failures and the challenges and the falling on your face. Because the only way to lose is to quit. So keep your head up, keep moving forward and learn from these entrepreneurs and their experiences. Thanks so much for listening. I'll see you then. Take care.

54:10Thank you.