MI287: Online Cash Flow to Physical Assets w/ Connor Gross

23:32The LTVs are insane. They don't cost a lot to ship. And yeah, that's kind of what it comes down to. So then the other thing you were talking about CAC to LTV, do you have a specific percentage that you look for? Does CAC have to be half of LTV, 75%. What do you think is generally a winner there? I don't have a metric off the top of my head. I bet some guys who are in the e-commerce world have better targets. I can tell you at least what we do right now. We have pretty much our LTV on one of our brands right now is about 279, a little bit roughly in that ballpark. And our CAC is 65. I don't know what the math is on that.

24:10It's like 20, 25%, something like that. Yeah, I would say that's where we're at today for what it's worth. And this is why you have to spend... Have you ever read... I think I've recommended it to you before, dot-com secrets. Yeah. Yep. This to me is the golden rule in e-commerce. Whoever can spend the most amount of money to acquire a customer is going to win. And so that's important because if you and I are competing in the same niche, and we are both selling, I don't know, candles or something like that, and I can spend$100 to acquire a customer because I know that they're going to spend$1 ,000 me over my lifetime, and you can only spend$10 to acquire a customer, I'm going to have such a bigger business than you are.

24:50And so if you're able to, whether it's build up an entire value ladder of, I can get somebody in the door cheaply for$15 for a trial pack. But then I know that this one guy, Dan, he runs this whole creatine gummy business. And his whole pitch and his whole shtick is like, he'll get somebody in the door, he'll break even on that first purchase, and he'll go and acquire a customer and get them onto the creatine gummy product. And then people, he knows that people take creatine all the time. And so they're going to go, the second order is going to be profitable. And the third order is going to be really profitable.

25:20And then you start having this subscription-based revenue system that you can rely on and have this idea of what your free cash for looks like on a monthly basis. So it makes inventory planning easier and it makes forecasting easier and all of that kind of stuff. So I would definitely say it's important to have a pretty high LTV if you can push that. And LTV is based on the revenue, right? So if a customer... It's how much a customer spends, not how much you make off of them. That was something that I've always wondered. And I Googled it quite a bit and I could never really find a good answer.

25:49But yeah. Okay. Revenue. And so you mentioned the competitive advantage. I want to talk about this. This is something we haven't had a chance to talk about yet. But I'm always looking at the marketplaces that buy and sell online businesses. And I saw an econ business the other day for sale. Didn't have a great multiple. There was not a lot of brand or equity value there. It just wasn't worth a lot of money. But we talked earlier too about your passion project for a podcast. And this e-com brand was actually pretty relatable to me. It was something I was passionate about. And I was like, okay, this seems interesting.

26:21And so because they were publicly listed on this marketplace, I was able to get their financials and I had their full financials. I was able to see how much they're spending on ads, how much they're making, etc. But they had no competitive advantage, like you said. So I was like, okay, well, I think I could try to compete with these guys. And they're just a dropshipping company. And I tried for a couple of weeks and I just wasn't able to do it. But to your point, it's like, I tried to compete with them or I was able to compete with them so fast because they had no competitive advantage. Nobody cared about their brand.

26:51I was able to use the same supplier as them and we just dropshipped right away. So it was an interesting lesson in brand and logistics and competitive advantages for sure. you want to hear a story of how like i learned this lesson the hard way so after we sold our business then the cell phone accessory space there was like a couple months where i was like i don't know what i want to do i'm just gonna like do a bunch of random stuff and so i bought like a tiny house blog i thought i was like oh maybe i'll do like a marketplace for tiny houses or something what is lightroom preset business it's called like hashtag presets i don't know if it's even solved we might have shut it down basically found this guy on a facebook group bought it from him paid him like 26 grand.

27:29The business itself had been like in business for three months or whatever, but it was like, it was the last two months, he's making five grand a month in profit. And like, I verified that through Shopify and the P &Ls and all this stuff. And I was like, oh, all right, little fire sale. The guy's just bored of it like five months, you know, in five months at the maximum. And this is what I'm thinking in my head. I was like, five months in the maximum, and I'll get all my money back. And like, let's be honest, like, I can probably crush this even better. I bet the payback is going to be 90 days of the full 26 Gs back in my pocket.

27:58And then I'll have this easy cash flowing digital product business. Bought it from him, did the escrow, signed it, whatever, transferred all the assets. Month one of owning the business, we did three grand in profit. I was like, ah, okay, the ads aren't converting as much. Let's make better new ads. Made a ton of new ads, had a bunch of videographers and guys and all that kind of stuff. We're selling a$29 product, I think, just a bundle of Lightroom presets. I was like, let's set up email marketing. The guy was doing no email marketing. And I quickly realized from owning this business, you know that feeling of when you get an idea and you're like, wow, why has nobody thought about this?

28:32And why is nobody doing this today? And you're like, this is such a good idea. I'm going to spend all this time doing it. And you start doing it for a month and you're like, oh, there's a lot of competition. A lot of people are doing this actually. So a lot of people were running these Lightroom preset businesses as well. And so I was like, all right, ours aren't better for sure. But maybe we can just do better advertising. I was like, their advertising is pretty good too. They're running pretty good ad sets. And so what I realized that I bought after two to three months is I realized I bought just a really good ad.

29:05And if you know anything about advertising, especially on social, ads fatigue, meaning they target the same audience after enough time. and eventually the effectiveness of the ad doesn't work anymore. And so you just need to keep on recycling new ad creatives. So we tried like 50 new ad sets over the next two, three months, whatever. And we did like that first month, three grand in profit. Second month, three grand in profit. Third month,$2 ,000 in profit. Fourth month, like$1 ,500 in profit. And this whole time I'm like, dude, I'm busted out here to be making$3 ,000 in profit a month. I was like, this is not worth it at all.

29:37What am I doing here? Ended up, I don't know, if we spent$26 ,000 on the business, ended up spending more time than I should have and probably made back like$16 ,000 or something. But then ultimately I was like, oh, this is just a bad idea. I'm going to stop this. There's no competitive advantage here. We bought a really good ad set in hindsight, but the products aren't better. You know, the marketing is not even that much better that I'm producing competitors. Like I need something more here. And I think like in hindsight, if I partnered with like famous photographers and got them to like do like limited edition collabs, and if I were able to go and like, I don't know, do some kind of guarantee or like if there was a more competitive moat, there might've been a better opportunity to go and compete.

30:15But in my mind, I was like, this is just a bad idea. I got to get out of this business and do something else. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. Even Einstein had blind spots. That's why modern science is built on the idea of peer review. Investing may be more art than science, but that doesn't make peer feedback any less valuable. The tricky thing is finding qualified people who are interested and willing to help vet your investment ideas. That's why we built the Intrinsic Value Community. It's a place to connect, share ideas, learn, and get feedback. Nobody ever wishes they'd spent more time buried in spreadsheets, but connecting and building relationships with others who may be smarter on a topic than you, but who are also schooled in value investing, that's valuable.

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32:19But it's never too late to get smarter about stock investing from the ground up. At The Investors Podcast Network, we've made a habit of studying the world's best investors. And now I'm distilling those learnings into a simple course for you or for anyone in your life who you might want to share the gift of knowledge with. With my How to Get Started with Stocks course, you can master the principles of excellent lifelong investing with valuable insights for both beginners and pros. The course covers 10 different sections, beginning with the basics of what a stock actually is and how the stock markets work, to strategies to optimize your retirement savings, how to pick great companies for the long-term, what to look for in ETFs, and how to monitor your investments, plus so much more.

32:58To begin getting smarter about investing, just visit theinvestorspodcast.com slash get started with stocks. That's theinvestorspodcast.com slash get started with stocks. And for a limited time, you can use code stocks15 for a 15 % discount at checkout. All right, back to the show. Do you think something like that could work if there isn't a lot of competition? Oh yeah. I think the reason that there's a lot of competition is because it was working. So that's why I was really interested in this. I was like, okay, I can see that they're doing half a million dollars a year. So they have a real business.

33:34They have product market fit. People want this, but there's nobody else doing it. It's just this one company. So I was like, okay, yeah, there's no real competitive advantage here. But I'm literally using the same supplier as them, but there's no competition. It's just them and me. So I was like, I think there might be an opportunity here. And I just put it on pause for now because it's the middle of summer. And it's definitely a product that will do better from probably October to right after Valentine's Day. It's like a relationship type gift. So basically October to February 15th, I think it'll crush it.

34:11And then the summer is probably going to be nothing. So I'll probably try to work on it again come the fall. But I don't know. I'm a little bit concerned because of the competitive advantage. But then I'm like, There's no real competition. So I thought it could work. And the margins are really good. So I think the other thing to consider is people hate this answer. They love it and swear that it's the only way to go about it. But brand is a really big play here. The reason you're buying... I don't know what you're wearing right now. Probably Nike's if I had to just pull out of a hat. But the reason people wear Nike's...

34:41It's not because they're the best shoe in the world. Let's be honest. There's better shoes out there. But it's a good brand. It's a really good brand. But the truth is, if you want to go and do something in a space that you're passionate about, you can recognize that, hey, if I just chip away, make really good content, get people to really make sure the product quality is truly the best. And I'm partnering with all of the right people here. Look at Nick Baer with Baer Performance Nutrition. The dude spent over a decade filming lifting and endurance videos and all that kind of stuff just to promote a supplement brand.

35:16and on that brand, I think it does like close to 100 million a year or something, something really high like that. And I think like, if you were to launch a supplement business today and try to scale it up entirely through Facebook acquisition, you'd have a really tough time. But if you started a supplement brand today, maybe focused on like more of a niche thing so that we're not competing with just like head on of like on nutrition and all those guys. And you say, okay, I'm going to go after a supplement brand, but I'm specifically going to target like moms who like wants to go and work out with kids or something like that.

35:43And then for the next 10 years, all you did was partner with moms and influencers and make content for workouts for moms and all that kind of stuff. I swear to God, it would work if you were to go and target moms for a supplement brand and just focus on really good branding, product quality, service, and content for the next 10 years. The issue is the reason that people don't do that is because it won't work for the first three years. But you just have to keep on doing it. Have you done anything with supplements? Do you know anything about supplement suppliers? Do you know how you'd go about getting one?

36:16There's a lot of consignment stuff out there. So there's a lot of co-packaging. To answer your question, first off, no, I have not. I have a lot of friends who have. But I know that there are a lot of manufacturers out there that will work with you on your own specific formula and then just go and co-pack it all for you. So this conversation gave me an idea for another e-com thing that I might be interested in trying. So yeah, it's good to have this conversation. What do you think has been the most challenging part of running an e-com business? I think people get into e-commerce because it's sexy.

36:47And I think that there's some inherent love and joy for building a physical product, especially in such a digital driven world. I think the hardest part is just remembering that it is a blue collar business, despite the flashy, sexy marketing that people try to preach. The reality is on Black Friday, Cyber Monday, we have to figure out how to go and staff seasonally more warehouse workers in order to go and ship out more production than we normally do for the rest of the year. We also have to now go and focus on all entire supply chain stuff with ordering inventory, with also going and dealing with shipping and fulfillment times, with dealing with customer service, and also going and dealing with product quality issues.

37:28The marketing is easy. And I like the marketing side. That's the part I do, right? So it's like, I'll make the ads, we'll send the emails, we'll send the texts, we'll do the retargeting, whatever. We'll build out a really sexy, pretty website with pastel colors that everyone loves to dream about. But the reality is, I think the tough part is like, yeah, you're also like manufacturing products and shipping and distributing those products. And when somebody says, hey, my shipper or like my shipping carrier lost my products and need you to do something about it, that's coming out of your bottom line.

37:58because FedEx isn't going to fix that. They're not going to replace that. So I'd say it's a combination of just managing expectations with the blue collars out of things and also just constant, relentless focus on the P &L on the bottom line. Earlier, you mentioned high gross margins, factor in shipping costs, focus on shipping costs, lower them as much as you can, customer acquisition costs, a lifetime value, and needing some sort of competitive advantage. And you also mentioned the book, Dotcom Secrets. I've read all those, all the secret books, expert secrets, traffic secrets. I've read a bunch of other marketing books like you.

38:33I've been really interested in marketing lately. And some of those books talk about customers and who you should sell to. Do you think a fourth or fifth maybe bullet point to those you already listed would be, if you can, a cherry on top maybe is to find the right type of customers. Have you found selling to high school kids is probably way worse than selling to a middle-aged mom with kids or something like that? Who have you found works really well? oh my god sell to people with money please sell to people with money like like not even like age or what i think the thing that i think makes a lot of sense is sell to people who have specific like passion projects and they're willing to spend a lot on it right so like if so like okay like two niches come to mind right off the bat it's like skiing like if you're if you're buying 200 lift passes you've got cash right and if you really like skiing you're gonna spend a lot of money on the skis, right?

39:23Just bought new skis two seasons ago, spent$800. Just bought new boots, spent$500, right? I'm going to be buying new gear this year in terms of probably a jacket and pants. So my LTV is already in the thousands of dollars for some of these different brands. And obviously, it's not going to all the same brands. So maybe you can't quantify it that way. But I spent a lot of money on it because I really enjoy it. And it's something that if you are struggling paycheck to paycheck, you're not going to be spending a lot of money on skiing. So you're already self-selecting based on that hobby, right? Another one could be gardening, high-end gardening, where people just really care about getting the best plants.

39:58Actually, I take that a step back. I don't think gardening would be good when I had a friend who ran a succulent business and shipping plants sucks. So maybe I take that one back a little bit. But I would say that overall, if you can find something where people really love the thing, and by loving the thing, it means that they are in a higher demographic already, then I think that you would do better. Positioning something as not a Walmart brand can do really good for you. Yeah. Motocross. We talked about that. You're into skiing. Motocross for me, my bikes are tens of thousands of dollars. Gear is expensive.

40:32It's the same idea. So that's one of the reasons I was interested in that niche. But for someone who doesn't have a social media following and doesn't want them to be the face of the brand and they don't want to sell to their friends or family, how should somebody get their first customers with their e-com business? Just Facebook ads. I think realistically, this goes back to the whole brand versus performance side of things. And there's a lot of different opinions on this in e-commerce. But realistically, if you can't scale up with Facebook ads, and there's exceptions to this rule for sure, but by and far, most e-commerce companies are also performance marketing companies.

41:09If you cannot scale with Facebook ads profitably, I don't think you have a real business. and there's people who are like, I have a$5 million business and all we do is word of mouth and influencers and we do events and whatever. Yes, those exist. I'm not saying that they don't. I'm just saying that they are way more rare than companies who are able to turn to meta, put$1 ,000 a day spend on and acquire$4 ,000 worth of revenue. That's really the playbook that you should be going for. How do you get started with Facebook ads? What is the very first step? Do you start with$1 ,000 a day? Do you start at$20 a day?

41:41How do you get started? I think it depends on who you are and what your thing is. If you're a college student, you probably can't spend$1 ,000 a day plus a week passes and you're like, there goes my bank account. But if you have a couple hundred bucks, the reality is the cool part about e-commerce versus real estate, you know if it's working really quickly, you are not going to spend$100 a day on Facebook ads. And mind you, there is a ramping up period and stuff like that. Maybe give it three or four days and you'll know. But if you spend$100 a day and four days passes and you haven't made any sales, it's not working, change something.

42:12And so I would say our goal overall, and this goes back to whoever can spend the most on the customer wins, we have a specific target cost per acquisition that we try to go and target. And we try to spend as much money as humanly possible so long as it does not pass that. That's how we think about it. And so when you're first starting off, you don't know what a good CAC is realistically. You're just trying to go and do some rough napkin math. You'll learn it over time as the business grows. But I would say try to go and identify some kind of number that you're comfortable acquiring customers for and then spend and then start doing the math in your head of, great, I just spent$90 and I got three customers.

42:48I have a$30 CAC. Is a$30 CAC good relative to my product's price point? I'm on my margins. And if I think that they're going to go and come back and purchase again. So it's not crazy math, but it's just like simple napkin math to know if a funnel is working. That's one of the reasons why I like that business that I saw because I had their whole P &L. I saw how much they spent on Facebook ads. I saw their revenue. I could estimate based on their product cost or how much it cost to buy the product. I could estimate what their LTV was and how many customers they had roughly. And then I could come to a CAC.

43:21And I was like, okay, $40,$50 is probably their CAC. And so I spent like 400, 500 bucks maybe on ads, didn't get a single sale. So I was like, okay, well, that's not very good. yeah it's i don't know it's a weird world like like sometimes it's also just the ad set too i'm like we've run ads before and it's so weird because like i think we got lucky with one of our brands where like the first ad worked and then we should probably launch like 20 more ads after that and they didn't work as well and then we launched you know some more after that and those ones worked better so it's like you just really need to test the positioning and like the message that you're delivering to the audience over the ads but what's tough about it too is the first ad we launched worked.

43:59So we are lucky. Next 20 didn't work. They just weren't that profitable. But what would have happened if we launched those other 20 before we launched that one? We probably would have not pursued the business, truthfully. I don't know. That's why part of it's skill. Part of it's just being willing to test a lot. Part of it's having deep pockets. That way you can afford to test a lot without having to go and give up because lifestyle reasons. But I think the other side of it too is just there's luck involved for sure. And knowing ahead of time if somebody's going to want a product or not is a little bit more helpful.

44:26It's that way. Oftentimes, if you're selling lampshades and your Facebook acquisition is not working, the reality is you know that people want to buy lampshades. Maybe they just don't want to buy your lampshade. Maybe they don't want to buy it because of something you said in the ad copy. If you're selling something that's never existed before, that's a different story. Yeah. My situation, I also thought it was potentially timing. Yeah, I probably could have improved the ads, probably could have improved the site. But what I was doing was very typical of like a... It's a relationship type gift.

44:57And so Christmas, New Year's, and Valentine's Day are probably going to be the biggest sales. So trying to do this in the middle of June is probably not going to be the best results. Yeah, that's fair. Do you do any SEO for your e-com stuff? Do you do blog posts, anything? Obviously, you probably optimize your product pages, but do you do anything else SEO-wise for e-com? We have, I don't know, 50 blog posts that we probably put up like last year. I haven't really done one in the past couple of months. And they're just kind of targeting specific keywords. I kind of just wanted to get them out there just to do them.

45:31I think they rank decently well. Honestly, I don't really track it that much. Right now we do like backlink building. And so just getting our site featured on a couple of different related sites, especially for like, you know, specific gift giving holiday times. Like, you know, hey, here's the 13 best gifts for, you know, the mom in your life who loves this. Like getting a feature on that is helpful. because I think it just increases the overall relevancy of the domain, but it's not a huge driver for us today.

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46:57If something piques your interest, just start listening. No hard feelings. I'll be waiting for you back here. Just like everybody else, there was a time when I was a beginner investor, and I have to say, investing is particularly filled with jargon that can just make it so difficult for new investors to understand what is going on. But it's never too late to get smarter about stock investing from the ground up. At The Investor's Podcast Network, we've made a habit of studying the world's best investors, and now I'm distilling those learnings into a simple course for you, or for anyone in your life who you might want to share the gift of knowledge with.

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49:22All right, back to the show. I want to get into two different things you've tweeted. The first one really resonated with me. You said, the biggest returns come from compounding efforts. If you switch the business you run every two to three years, you're constantly playing the game in hard mode. Pick the right project and commit for a decade. First, I want you to expand on this message for us. And then second, I actually responded to your tweet and said this, but how do you pick the right project? To expand on it, right now, the two businesses that I run, one e-commerce business and the self-storage portfolio.

49:56Both of those businesses have now been operating for just about two years at this point. And both of those businesses, I would say, I can look at them confidently and know what levers to pull, how to grow the business, how to run the business. I think oftentimes the issue with entrepreneurship is you become friends with other entrepreneurs, and then you see all the ways that they're making money. And then your brain inevitably doesn't turn off. And you're like, wow, should I be doing this instead? Should I be starting an agency? Should I be starting a software business? Somebody was just talking about the benefits of RV parks instead of doing self-storage and how their contractors came by and built them a $60 ,000 fence.

50:31Like, oh, should I be getting in the fencing business? What do I know about the fencing business? Like your mind is racist and you get so many ideas. Like it's infuriating. And so the never ending battle is essentially going and figuring out like how to stay focused on your thing. Keep the main thing, the main thing. And obviously I have two main things right now. So it's kind of contradictory to that piece of advice. But like it's the business that produces a lot of cash flow and then the asset to go and park all that cash into and try to have that appreciate through aggressive value at real estate, right?

50:59That's been my bread and butter. That's my strategy. And what I'm just noticing now is that we have a lot of opportunities that are popping up as a result of us being in business for two years. So we'll have sellers we haven't talked to in 12 months come back to us because they're like, hey, you guys made me an offer 12 months ago. Wasn't the right time then? Let's go and talk again now. That's a huge benefit of a long tail interest. Same thing on the e-commerce side. We've had people who gave us their email 15 months ago, and now they're buying. And so I think that just comes down to there are huge long tail benefits.

51:36Long tail benefits? I think that's how I would say. Just long-term benefits of doing the same thing, getting a little bit better at it every single day, and just doing it for a decade. The first one to two years of any business should intentionally be very very hard. You're figuring out a lot of new things. You're convincing people to trust you, right? Like if somebody from Nike, I'm sorry, if somebody goes to Nike's website, this was like the e-commerce conversation about trust earlier. If somebody goes to Nike's website and wants to go and buy a pair of shoes, never in the back of their mind are they thinking, will I get these shoes?

52:10But I just bought a t-shirt on Instagram two weeks ago. And I like, it's this dumbest t-shirt I'm literally holding in my lap right now. Like this, this t-shirt, it's literally just a joke with some friends. It's like a mad dog, like 40 ounce bottle basically. But I bought it on Instagram for like$32. And like the thought, it's definitely a dropship store. The thought in my mind for sure went through of, I might not get this t-shirt. I don't trust this shop. I've never heard of this brand ever. Like why should I trust it? Right? So the difference between that and Nike is I can go and buy a new pair of Jordans on Nike tomorrow.

52:43And there's zero hesitation in my mind that I'm going to go and get those. Therefore, I'm willing to go and spend more and pay more, whatever for it. I think that the longer that you're in business, the more trust that you have with a consumer, with partners, players in the space, you can realize that not all of your efforts are coming from performance driven stuff. A lot of it can come from brand and reputation, which just takes a really long time to go and build up. And so if you're still in the space, and you know it better than anyone else in real estate too, it's not the right time for every seller to go and sell.

53:15The next thing you know, there's a death in the family, there's a divorce, So, you know, something revenue dropped and I'm struggling to keep up with my debt payments. Opportunity presents itself. And if you can be that person that has sent them a couple of gift cards, that's been in contact with them on the phone or over email every few months, you're going to be top of mind for them when it comes time to go and sell. And you can find opportunities that people who are just entering that space for the first time and they are day one in their journey do not have. That's kind of what I meant by that.

53:41I meant to mention earlier when you mentioned brand is Nike. you mentioned the shoes. And that's actually a really relevant example for me because I've never really been a huge fan of any brand for shoes, really. I've always just bought, gone to the store and bought whatever I thought looked cool. And then I read Shoe Dog, which is Phil Knight's memoir. And then the air documentary, movie documentary thing came out about Nike. And I read the book, watched the movie, and I was like, wow, I love this brand now. Just both of those things. I have such an affinity for Nike now. And I've bought three or four pairs of shoes recently.

54:18And they're all Nikes. So you could just build brand in so many different ways. And I've seen firsthand how powerful it can be. But it's hard because the same conversation that we had around e-commerce earlier, where I'm telling you how metrics-driven you have to be and tact and LTV, the tough part about brand is you just have to trust it. And you just have to trust that by spending and doing the right thing for a long enough time horizon, you will build brand, which is ultimately the reason why people spend, why Apple's customers have the highest LTV of every customer, right? It's because they trust Apple.

54:52And how are you supposed to go and quantify the investment that you're making into marketing to build brand better? It's virtually impossible, especially at a small scale. So it's something that I don't think I do super well, but I think something that can sometimes happen just by doing the right thing for a long enough time horizon. man i would love to know my ltv with apple i've had so many phones computers tvs watches ipads man i would love to know my ltv is very very high with apple i was gonna say on airpods alone i think i go through like three sets of airpods a year honestly at this point like every few months i'm like lost another case a lot like i always lose the cases never the pods which is the weirdest part and like the replacement case basically cost as much as a new set of airpods and you have to go into the store to do it.

55:37So it's just horrible. It's a horrible experience. So I just buy the new set of AirPods. But they say that like every, I think the rough thought process is you should get a new iPhone every three years. You should get a new MacBook Pro every five years. Well, I think the weird part for me is I think I'm coming up on this point where like, it's going to be like a 15 year period, which means that I think I'm overdue for a new iPhone and Mac in the same year. So yeah, I think Tim Apple might be getting a nice$5 ,000 paycheck from me and then the coming months. Yeah, they've got that for me a couple of times.

56:09So you explained, you expanded on that tweet, but how do you pick the right project? We want to find something to commit to, but how do we find that right thing? And when do you know to quit? How do you know when to quit too? Because that's the hard piece. You can be committed to something, but you also have to have enough humility to be like, all right, you know what? I committed to this for 10 years. I wanted to do this for 10 years, but it's just not working. I have to go on to something else. How do you find that balance? How do you find the right thing? The right thing probably comes down to...

56:38And it depends on what you're trying to optimize for. You're trying to optimize for lifestyle. If you're trying to optimize for lifestyle, probably don't go be a doctor. If that's your goal is you want to be home by five every single day and take care of your kids or whatever, I don't think being a doctor makes a ton of sense. You're going to be on call. You're going to be getting up in the middle of the night, especially if you're doing surgery work. Figure out what you're trying to optimize for. And so then the flip side is, okay, you're trying to optimize for money. Cool. Where are people making the most money.

57:02People make the most money by owning their own businesses. They make their most money by selling very expensive things typically. You look at somebody like Warren Buffett, Warren Buffett buys and sells businesses. You look at somebody like Elon Musk, he acquires and builds massive brands. You look at the Stephen Arnold guy. I think that's the guy who runs LVMH, right? No. Is it Bernard Arnold? Either way, getting the name wrong. But he sells things to really expensive things. And so I think if you are trying to play a game where you're looking around and there are very few millionaires and billionaires and you're trying to go make a lot of money in it, you're probably playing the wrong game.

57:41First, figure out what you're trying to optimize for. If it's time, if it's probably some kind of hybrid of making a good amount of money and having a good amount of free time, your answer is probably go and start a small business. That's probably the highest likelihood of success. And then I would say, just do things that scale. I have a friend who works a couple months out of the year. And his main job is he helps companies raise money and then takes a percentage of the money that he raises for them. He's super tapped in from his investment banking world. And he recognizes that he works like an absolute dog for three months out of the year, gets a$500 ,000 paycheck and then stops.

58:15I don't have a super good answer because I think it's such a case-by-case basis, but figure out what you're trying to optimize for. Find people that you believe are currently doing well on that and study their field and then just do the same thing. Do you think somebody can make 300 to 500K a year and not work that much? Not more than a full-time job or maybe even a little less than a full-time job with e-com? Oh yeah, definitely. 100%. Not even a question. Yes. The tough thing I would say is that it's not going to be like that for the first couple of years. Once you build out your team and you have people who are under you who can help you run the show, then yes, absolutely.

58:50But for the first couple of years? No, probably not. Somebody listening, they're really interested in e-com, they want to get started. Where did they go to learn? What resources have you used? Books? I know you mentioned.com secrets, but specific e-com stuff, like how to run Facebook ads, how to run good Facebook ads, how to set up a Shopify site appropriately, how to... I don't know, logistic. So many of the specific e-com stuff, not just general broad business stuff. What are you looking at to learn when you were getting started? You know the quote? If people just needed more information, everyone would be a millionaire with six-pack abs.

59:24Yeah, absolutely. I always think that about audible book readers, the voices behind that. They should just start a Shopify store and start going through the process. Build out the store, find a product supplier, go and start setting up your email marketing. You will just learn so much more by doing over trying to find the right stuff. Let's be honest, You can go on the Shopify blog and read everything that you need to know about e-commerce start to finish. Everything from here's how to go and set up my homepage, which is the most basic, to here's how to go and set up retargeting campaigns using these specific UTM parameters that funnel people into an attentive flow and then drips them out like emails and SMS for the next three months until they buy.

1:00:06It's all there. Just start doing something and recognize that maybe you'll put up a little bit of an upfront investment. right? Shopify on a monthly basis, subscription wise, I think it's like$39 for their starter plan. Maybe you'll buy a couple tens of dollars in monthly recurring revenue on some of the apps that you need to set up your store. But just mess around with it and test it and see if you can sell anything to anyone. That's the best way, honestly. I don't have a course or blog post that's going to be better than anything else. I think the dotcom secrets book honestly gives you a good framework of how to market and how to build out those funnels.

1:00:39But otherwise, it's the same as what you're going to read everywhere else. The second tweet that you had recently that really resonated with me was you said, if someone in their 20s talks about the need to sacrifice everything, going out, dating, drinking, having fun, et cetera, to build a company, ignore them. I can't stress enough how possible it is to make really good money and have a ton of fun along the way. And I've often felt like I had to sacrifice... This is me now. I've often felt like I had to sacrifice everything to build a side hustle or a business. So when I read this, it really, really hit me.

1:01:13Why do you feel that way? I'm glad you asked that because I spent a lot of time thinking about that the last two weeks or so. And the reason for it is because coming up in middle school is probably... I know that's a long time ago, but that's when I realized... If you asked me in sixth grade or fifth grade, people used to ask me, what do you want to be when you get older? I used to say CEO. I'm a 10-year-old kid. And I'm like, I want to be a CEO. And I don't know why, but I wanted to be the CEO of Sprint, I think, if I remember correctly. But I didn't really care. I just wanted to be the CEO of...

1:01:47Because you're fast. Yeah, maybe. You're fast and like the name Sprint. Yeah. I think it was my phone provider at the time or something. I don't know. But I just wanted to be the CEO of a big company. And so because I wanted that at such a young age, I was looking up to those guys. And back then, again, I'm not that old. I mean, I'm only 28, but this is still 18, almost 20 years ago, the world was a lot different then. All these guys, the successful people, quote unquote, successful people, they all wore suits. They were all very polished. They all spoke perfectly. You didn't see anything about their personal lives.

1:02:17You didn't ever see them having fun. All you saw was business and them being perfect. And I realized that recently, like I said, the last couple of weeks, I realized that today you see successful people having fun. You see stuff with Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and all these guys doing all this normal life stuff that I'm sure these people did a long time ago, but I just didn't see it. So to me, it's still ingrained in my head that I have to be perfect and I have to sacrifice and I have to put everything, business and everything in front of having fun. And so this has literally been a realization for me over the last couple of weeks.

1:02:53So when I read your tweet, it was literally perfect timing. Yep, exactly. I think I'm in the same exact boat there. From my point of view, it's the idea that I only consumed content pretty much my entire life growing up, where it's like, you have to sacrifice all of this stuff in order to go and win. And I think I had that belief because I was like, I don't have other examples to prove me wrong. The best example growing up, I would say, would probably be Richard Branson. That guy seems like he was having a fun time and building big companies too. But I was like, he's the anomaly. He's not the rule.

1:03:24The rule is you have to be miserable and do this stuff. And it sounds crazy, but it's like, I don't know. To clarify, I really like Gary Vaynerchuk personally, but I think growing up, I could see how his content's misconstrued and whatever. So I would say that was what I thought was the rule at the time. Turns out it's not the rule. I'm now at this point where I'm 26. I have so many friends who go to music festivals, can take a month off skiing. They can go travel the world. They can do all of this fun, crazy, really cool stuff and literally run million dollar businesses. I was like, Like, why was I thinking that this was not possible before?

1:03:58And so I think now the message I'm trying to get across to a lot of people is like, you can do both. Like, there's so many people out there saying like, wow, date, like, and to clarify, I'm not judging anyone's decisions on whatever they want to do, right? Work 100 hours a week if you want to. Don't work at all if you don't want to. Do what makes you happy. I just want to dispel the rule that you do not have to be like, they're not trade-offs. And I think like, you'll have people who are saying like, I'm day 400 sober and like, my business has never been bigger. That's awesome. It's like not drinking and building a big business have nothing to do with one another.

1:04:30Maybe it can make you more productive in the morning if you're not groggy. But maybe I don't get groggy after I drink. Everyone's so unique and different. And so my only takeaway is don't subscribe to the narratives of what work to other people's lives. Let everyone be happy and do their thing. And just recognize that making a lot of money, building big companies and having fun, those are not trade-offs. It's not one or the other. you can do both. So that's kind of just the message I want to preach. Have you read Sam Zell's book, Am I Being Subtle or something like that? No, I haven't. I think I've heard of it.

1:05:05Is it good? Yeah, you should. It's pretty good. So I read that recently. And I think that's what kickstarted my thoughts. Because in that book, he wore a motorcycle outfit to these big billion dollar real estate deal meetings. And this was back in the 80s and 90s. So he was like... But again, you didn't see that back in the early 2000s. I didn't know he was doing that. Everybody just looks so buttoned up and perfect. So it's been really... It's been hard for me to accept that because I'm only 28. It's not like I'm that old. But I feel like I've operated under the wrong assumptions for 10 years.

1:05:40And now I'm finally turning that page and I can start having fun as well as succeeding in business. So it's a little bit humbling, but I'm also really excited for the future for sure. I think it's one of those things where you start reading some of of these business books and the biographies, you get it, right? You've talked about Shoe Dog, Phil Knight traveled the world when he was 26. He wasn't focused on his business at all. Go read the book, The Gambler. Realize how this dude basically developed and built all of Las Vegas and could do whatever he wanted to do. Read the classic How to Get Rich Felix Dennis book.

1:06:09The dude was a degenerate, would just drink all the time. Read a Winston Churchill book. The guy basically won a war while hammered. You keep on going down the rabbit hole of all of these prolific leaders and entrepreneurs and just people who are really good at what they do. And you'll have the weirdos. You'll have the John Rockefellers who had one scoop of ice cream every 25 years or whatever like that and was really maniacal about his health. And you'll have the guys who are like the... I think it's Samuel Zemurri, this Banana King guy who would stand on his head for hours a day to meditate.

1:06:43There's weirdos, for sure. This is my point, though. But different things work for different people. Find out what works for you and make your career out of it. Make your life out of it. I love it. It's something I'm spending a lot of time thinking about and working on myself. We're a bit out of time here. So I want to be conscious of your time. Before we go, tell everyone listening where they can go to find out more about what you have going on. I know you have a cool course going right now called How to Quit Your Job. We didn't get a chance to talk about it, but tell people where they can go to find that.

1:07:11Maybe give a quick overview of what it is and just overall where you want people to find you. Cool. Yeah, I'm at C underscore GRO, C underscore grow on Instagram, Twitter, and whether you want pretty much the same handle throughout. In terms of the actual course, yeah, to be honest, I never really thought I was going to come out with something like this. But I started just doing consulting calls because I love having calls with people all the time, just figuring out what they're working on and whatnot. And I quickly realized every call that somebody would jump on with me was like, hey, man, I want to quit my job.

1:07:39I don't know what business to start. How do I think about this, whatever. And I just had 20 of those calls. And I was like, oh, wow, people are really lost here. Because there's so many resources out there on how to go and get a job and how to switch jobs and how to negotiate your salary. There's nothing that talks about going from, hey, I'm employed. How do I keep on making money to live but not be employed anymore? So I just made something. It's like 81 slides. It's like an hour plus of me just talking through how I think about it, a framework, ways that you can make money afterwards. And that's just howtocuityourjob.co.co.

1:08:13It's 100 bucks. and if you like it, let me know. We can shoot the shit up at it afterwards over email. But yeah, I think it's just a good framework of like, you're employed right now. How can you set yourself up for the highest likelihood of success after your job? Really, because like really, the reason people work for jobs right now is that it is probably the most risk-adjusted way to go and earn, right? And I think the point that I'm trying to go and sell on in this book and in the course, the program, whatever, is like entrepreneurship doesn't have to be very risky. How can you de-risk the idea of not working at a job as much as humanly possible.

1:08:45So that's what I'm talking about there. Awesome. I'll put a link to your social and the course in the show notes below for anybody that's interested in checking it out and connecting with you, Connor. Thanks again for joining me. Appreciate it. Yeah, man. Thanks for having me on. All right, guys. That's all I had for this week's episode of Millennial Investing. I'll see you again next week.

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