Shouldn't have been comparing my chapter 2 to someone else's chapter 200. I want to tell you about what it was like for me. Just before I made the jump to a million bucks a year at Scorchmarker, how was I feeling? What was I working on? What was going through my head? What were my struggles? I remember talking to a business coach, Lauren, a wonderful coach. I remember telling her specifically, I don't want to work this much anymore.
I start working at 8 or 9 o'clock in the morning, and I don't finish until 8 or 9 o'clock at night. I don't spend enough time with my kids. I want to do something else with it. I need to fix my schedule. I need help. I remember that. That was definitely one symptom of what I was feeling. Another thing was my wife and I were shipping our products every single day.
We'd print out the orders in the morning, I'd put them in the garage, she would find some time, while either pregnant or with a newborn, she'd go into the garage and she'd pick and pack and fill up everything and put the boxes on the front doorstep for the mailman. When it came to managing the business, I had a little bit of help with customer service. But even then, they were just college kids. And I was a terrible boss.
I just wasn't good at management, I wasn't a good leader, I didn't set expectations, and I let them fail. I didn't know it at the time, I didn't know I was letting them fail, but in hindsight, I'm like, Whoa dude, you let them fail, you could have been way better. There's a lot more you could have done for them. So, let's see, how was the finances of the business? had a bookkeeper and I knew approximately how much money I was making, but I didn't have the categories broken down properly.
And I didn't know it like exactly how much I was profiting. So I knew how much money was coming in, but I didn't know how much money was actually being made. And that was probably one of the biggest problems. I was spending based on the amount of money I was earning in sales, not in the amount of net profit my business had. So technically I was spending money I didn't have, and I'll give you an example. Let's say I was making 50, 000 in sales.
Well my costs and my advertisements and my pay and my overhead and all the things I was probably only making 5, 000. Month, six max, but I was spending like I was making 50 I buried myself in some debt because I wasn't clear about how much profit I had, you know And that cash flow was really is important, but I honestly I didn't even know how to figure it out. I didn't even know 2020, I was still working at the fire department and I was grinding it out, right?
I was running calls all day long at the fire station and, as it got slower in the evening time after dinner, I would open up my laptop and I would work on my business. I'd work on Scorch Marker. I would, rebuild the website or work on these things or do customer service or edit videos or post on social media. I was doing all the things, wearing all the hats. I believe that 2020 front loaded a lot of customer demand. I don't think it changed that much.
I think it just took existing demand that was spread out over the next three or four years. And it brought it all into one year. And just, increased customer demand for a short period of time. And it gave us a shot in the arm of demand from online shopping. That year, our business grew a lot. Without even me doing anything, I was just existing, you know, trying my best Facebook ads were still working. I was getting customers for like five, six bucks. Attribution was great.
And I was like, Oh, I can just run Facebook ads and I can sell this product. That is so cool. And then 2020 came around. I remember the election, November, 2020. The reason I remember the election is not because of the politics, but mainly because my Facebook ads started to change. My Facebook ads started to get more expensive. I couldn't get customers for the same price. Costs were going up. It doubled to around 15 a customer.
And it quickly brought me out of profitability range for customer acquisition costs on Facebook. But I kept going. I didn't know. Because I didn't know how much cash, how much profit I was making. I thought I could afford it. You see, that's the problem. I was making all my decisions based on the top line revenue, the sales revenue. Not the profit. So I, behind the scenes, slowly started to bury myself in debt. My business started to work less and less.
But I had all this demand from 2020, and I thought it would continue. I thought it would continue to go up and to the right. I thought that people were going to continue to buy Scorch Markers as much as they had. I was wrong. They did not. Advertising costs went up, as they always do. The market got more competitive. Demand died off and then we hit seasonality of our business. Summertime months in 2021 and sales started to slow down because of seasonality.
And to cap everything all off, my product wasn't that good. It was an okay product. That's it. It didn't change lives. I had to make the customer. Problem aware, and then I had to make them solution aware, and then I had to teach them how to use our solution. So, I first had to get someone's attention and then be like, hey, by the way, you have a problem. I do? Yes, you do. And here's the solution to it. Really? And it only costs this much. You know what I mean?
And then when I got the product, it didn't even work as well as I showed it had to work. And that's because it just has a learning curve. It has a learning curve and it's not perfect technology. There's a lot of variables, and it's something that we're still honestly working on. And I believe we have solved. 242 formulas later, five years later, we finally cracked the code on this scorch marker formula. And we're going to release it as a paint this year. But it took a long time to fix.
A lot of hours, a lot of trial and error, a lot of money. So we get into 2021, we have all this front loaded demand, I am naive in my business journey thinking that things are going to continue this way. And I'm like, okay, what next? Now, something really special happened in January, January, February of 2021. This is right after I quit the fire department. I quit December, 2020. They tried to force me. to work on Christmas Day and Christmas Eve and I was like, I got kids man, fuck you.
Like, the rule is we only have to work one of those days and you're forcing me for both? I was like, I quit, I'm out. And I remember my captain was like, are you serious? And I'm like, yeah, cap please. Help me put in my two weeks, I'd appreciate it. Nothing against you, I love you guys. But, um, yeah, I was making 24 an hour. I had a 66 percent chance of getting cancer. I, uh, was working 22 days a month. I was gone. So my family would see me a week, every month.
Uh, I didn't get a lot of sleep. My health was deteriorating because of how rough the job was on us. So I quit. This was right in 2020, you know, we had all this demand from the business and it allowed me to pay myself 6, 000 a month. And that was the number that I needed. And I think that's important to touch on really quick. I worked out the numbers. I needed 6, 000 in take home from my business to replace my firefighter job. I needed 4, 000 to take home in cash to replace my paycheck.
I needed 1, 200 to replace my health insurance for my family, and I needed 800 a month to put into a Roth IRA. Technically it's like 600, but a little padding went into our brokerage accounts. But nonetheless, I needed at least 600 a month to put into my Roth IRA so that I could build my own retirement system up. I took my retirement from the fire department, it was a 457B, I rolled it over into my Roth IRA, paid the taxes on it and everything.
I cashed out my 401k at work, rolled it over into my Roth IRA. But as soon as we hit that 6, 000 a month, I quit. I was out. I wanted to try this thing full time. Now that was a crazy time in my life and one of the hardest things I've ever done. I spent five years trying to get this job at the fire department. I went to EMT school. I went to a private fire academy. I moved all over the country in search of the right education. I worked for free. I worked on an ambulance.
I went to paramedic school. I became a paramedic. I, I tested. I did, 57 tests and 22 interviews and 13 chiefs interviews and six background tests.
I did a lot, like eight psych evals, and I was just trying, and the process shaped me into the person they wanted me to become, and eventually I got the job, and of course I would get three job offers at once, and I chose San Bernardino County, the first three as a paramedic on the ambulance, and the last five as a firefighter paramedic, which was my dream job. And after five years, ten thousand hours, it was no longer my dream job.
I wanted more. And, I'll, I'll end with this in regards to the fire department staff, there was a piece of information, a calculation that I did that changed everything I was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee, and I was hanging out with some of the other firemen. There's three firemen, an engineer and a captain at that station. We had two units. And I was the senior fireman.
I remember pulling out my notepad, and I still have the calculations to this day, and I decided to figure out how much I would make if I worked every single day for the entire year. What if every day was overtime? What if I never went home? What's the maximum amount of money I could make? Well, after taxes, um, and everything else, it was about 210, 000 a year. Wasn't good enough for me. I wanted more.
So I knew that even if I climbed the ladder, did the things, worked as much as possible, I still wouldn't be able to hit a certain tier of living and I would only be able to provide so much. I knew deep down that I wanted a different opportunity vehicle. An opportunity vehicle that had more potential. An opportunity vehicle that Had the ability to take me to a different place. I just wanted more. So in 2020, I quit. Yep. And after I did, I didn't even tell my dad.
You see, my dad's been in the fire service for 44 years. He retired at orange County fire and pin my badge on me. And he wanted me to continue. He wanted me to retire as a fireman and carry on the name, but I didn't tell him when I quit. And he asked me about that one day and he said, why didn't you tell me when you quit? This was two months after I did. And I straight up told him, I said, you would have killed my dreams, old man. You don't have what I want.
You don't know how to go where I want to go. I want more. So why would I ask you how to get it? You don't know. You know, if I wanted your life, I would absolutely follow your advice, but I don't want your life. I want my life. I died to my dad that day. Since then we've repaired the relationship. We've, we talk a lot. We're really good friends. But it was tumultuous. It was hard. I had to die to my dad. I had to die to my crew.
My co workers, uh, I had to cast my life aside and serve it up and freely give it away to have my new life. I'm glad I did, but it was really hard. One of the more difficult things that I've done, you know, at least emotionally, I've done some really hard things physically. I can't, you can't break me, but mentally you can get close, but luckily I've had a lot of training. I've been pushed to those extremes and that's what being a fireman really does for you.
And that's one of the character traits that I'm really quite grateful for is tenacity, grit, determination, discipline. I learned a lot of that and having no quit really. Carries you far in the business world. You'd be surprised. There's a lack of grit out there. So I quit the fire department. I'm a free agent. Vanityr's blowing up. I'm getting followers on TikTok. Brand deals and podcasts and all kinds of fun stuff. It's a shiny object. It's new. It's fun.
Scorch marker is starting to get neglected a little bit. Then I read this book by Ryan Daniel Moran, called 12 Months to a Million. And I bring this up because I remember the conversation that I had with him. I read his book, thought it was really insightful, talked a lot about selling products online and you know, the process you go through to make a million dollars a year selling products. And I was intrigued, so I reached out to him, I DM'd him. Hey Ryan, I read your books.
They were amazing struck up a conversation, found out that he has programs. He had two programs. He had a membership and then he had a training program called the incubator. He had one program that was a hundred bucks a month and another program that was 18, 000. So I remember talking to him and talking to his sales reps and being like, something special just happened to me. And I don't know what to do. One of my previous partners offered to buy the business.
He offered me, uh, 1. 2 million for it. And I don't know that I'm ready to sell it. I kind of want to grow it. We did a little over a million dollars a year last year in sales, in 2020. But I don't know what to do next. And I'd really like to take it to the next level. I just, I just don't know what to do. Remember justice, the sales rep who I'm friends with now said I'm really quick. That's what I think. I think you just need to talk to Ryan. And I was like, okay, so I talked to Ryan came in.
I don't know what to do. We did this much in sales. Um, what's next? Do I get a warehouse? Do I cut costs? Do I, you know, what do I do now? And it's like, oh, you're going to launch more products. Yeah. Okay. Whoa, how do I do that? You know, join, if you're, if you're open to it, join my incubator. We'll, we'll teach you. So, I talked to my business coach and my wife, and we pulled the money out, and I paid them the money, and I joined the incubator.
And that was a pivotal, and, and that was a pivotal time in my life, and I bring that up for a special reason. It was a path split. I started to learn and understand that there were people and educators out there who knew how to do what I want to do and have gone where I want to go. So I showed up and I did the best that I could. I gave 100 percent effort. I put in everything that I had into this and it worked. It worked. I learned a lot. The training left something to be desired.
There was something there that was missing, something I was looking for. And the program was great. The people were great, but I missed the camaraderie. I missed that togetherness. I missed the, ah, the brotherhood. And in this program, new people would come in. While senior people were still in, and so the questions and the discussions would inevitably keep reverting back to the new person as they would come in, and it degraded the group.
And it degraded the substance and the quality of what we were building together. And I remember that very distinctly, I was like, oof, yeah, this isn't, we've already gone over this, like, I don't, I don't need to be here for this right now. I remember that because that's one thing that I wanted to change when I did something similar, which I am doing now with Operator Academy. So I promise you I'm learning from somewhere. So I go through this program.
It's a year long, 18 grand, I learned how to pitch my business. At the end, I create this wonderful pitch. You can see it on YouTube if you like. I tell the investors, this is what I want to do. This is where I want to go. And they excited. They offered to give me money. So much so that they gave me money for just inventory on debt.
And then also offered to, you know, buy in for, 100, 000, buy some equity in my business to hitch wagons together with, you know, deals on the table for some other ventures down the road. And then things took a turn for the worst. You see, remember how demand was front loaded in 2020 remember how it just kind of squished all that consumer demand into a short period of time. And in 2021 seasonality, a bad product, rising customer acquisition costs, iOS 14, all of these things hit.
And I know I'm not the only one that feels this way. There's a lot of businesses that are closing their doors right now because of it. All of this stuff happened, sales started to go down, profits went way down. I was burying myself in debt and I was rapidly trying to figure out what was going on and how to stop the bleeding. Luckily, joining this program brought me to someone special. During the pitch process, there was a panel of investors.
Um, one of those investors, his name was Nick, he really liked what I had to say. He really liked me as an individual, as a human, he's like that guy. And so he hit me up afterwards and just wanted to talk. So we started talking, and six months later, we decided to join horses and he became my CMO, my chief marketing officer, and really honestly, my partner. I say CMO to explain the type of work that he was doing with me.
I was sticking to operations, product development, content creation, leadership, vision, and Nick came in and was helping me get better at managing the numbers, the analytics, the finances, the marketing, the sales. We had excellent synergy. Polar opposites. Very complimentary skill set. And we hit it off right away. So the most valuable part of that program wasn't what I was taught or the pitch process or the investors.
Granted I learned a lot and it was something I wanted to learn so I chose to do it, but it was meeting Nick. Finding the right who. I didn't know what a good partner looked like until I met him. I didn't know What to look for, even. I knew I needed to find skills, time, and money as qualities in future partners. Um, he brought time and skills to the table, but also very complimentary skill set. He was very different than me.
Good at things that I'm not good at, and I'm good at things that he's not good at. And it was just amazing, and it has been amazing, and we are literally like best friends now. We talk every day, and He's helped me grow this business. You know something special about Nick? He cut his teeth at a holding company where he would scale pet brands from 1 to 10 million dollars a year in sales.
There would be one team that would get the business started 0 to 1, get them to 1 million in sales a year, and then they would pass the business off to Nick. Nick and his team at least. And he would go from 1 to 10 million in sales. He would scale it. And then he would pass the business off to the next team.
And they would scale it to around 30, 40 million and then bundle them together and then sell them as a group of businesses, a portfolio, private equity, holding company, aggregators, all words that make sense to describe this type of business model. That's the world he came from. Now, Nick also is a partner in one other business. a thyroid health business and I'm not going to share anything else without his permission because I respect him.
However, it's a great company and a really great company and he's done some incredible things with them. So in 2021, I showed up to Ryan, not knowing what to do next, thinking that I was the bee's knees, the cat's pajamas, thinking that I knew what, what I needed and You know, just trying to learn more 2021. I was humbled very quickly. I was cut down at the knees by iOS 14 and customer acquisition costs and seasonality and a bad product. All 21, 2021 went okay.
But it really hit us in 2022 because I thought Q4 would pull us out of 2021, you know, and turn us around, but didn't. It didn't. So, I had to spend a lot of time getting better. I had to spend a lot of time leveling up. And that's what the last two, three years were like. It was 2022 and 2023 were years where I needed to learn. Where I just had to start eating shit.
I don't know how else to describe it, but You know how when like your, your books are all kind of like fucked up, like they're there and you see how much money is coming in and how much you made at the end of the day, but the categories are weird and you can't really trace it and figure out what's broken and where you're overspending. Yeah, I did things like going through QuickBooks every single transaction for the last two years. I went through every single transaction, I categorized all of it.
I had to, I had to know where the money was going. I had to have hard conversations with people I overhired. I hired a bunch of people and couldn't afford them. I paid for a bunch of things and I couldn't afford it. We were going into debt and we didn't have the profits to cover it and I needed to make cuts. I needed to make cuts to people, to software, to initiatives, to advertising, to spend, um, mainly to myself. I stopped paying myself.
So I paid myself for two years because the business needed me to. So now I had to find another way to earn money because I was paying myself, you know, 12, 15 grand a month, scorch marker. Now I needed to figure out how to earn in another way. And that's where brand deals and sponsorships and things like that came into play. But that's also when I really decided to monetize my gift of being able to teach other people.
The gift of bringing other people together and filling up their cups and creating something new and special. And it worked. It worked. But what really worked was doing the hard work. Was doing the boring work, was doing the work that was really uncomfortable. That's what made our business better. Half of 2023 we were profitable. We pulled it off. We turned the thing around. We launched a new product that changed the game for us.
We got dialed in on our numbers and our costs, and we made sure we weren't spending more than we were making. We found new ways to acquire customers that weren't just Facebook ads. We did a lot. We did a lot. But it was launching this latest product, Maker's Magic, that really changed our business. I remember a conversation I was having with Nick. We were in mastermind. This was, I don't know. maybe a year and a half, roughly a year ago.
And I was telling him how I launched products based on gut, based on feel and, Oh, I think this would work. Oh, I think this would work. And he was like, like, Hey, buddy, like, what about the data? Are you using jungle scout or a drafts or Uber suggest, or, you know, Google, um, are, what are you doing to figure out how much demand is in these categories? Because remember e commerce was invented as a demand search solution.
People would go to Google search for an item and e commerce started to evolve and pop up to service that demand to help the people that were looking for certain things. That's how e commerce came to be. He showed me how to use data to look at search volume. He showed me how to look at products in our category that would fit our demographic and our customers that we could potentially, you know, create and release and make real.
And I remember very clearly, you know, we're looking at the arts and crafts section of Mod Podge was at the top of the list and I was like, holy shit, dude, they're selling for 10, 000 units a month. Oh my God. It's insane. I was like that right there. Let's start there. I've got a chemist that's really good at coatings. I know that world. I know these ladies. Let's serve them in this area. So I took Mod Podge, right? I went to our ladies.
Our customers, our Crafty Carols and our Pinterest Polly's and I said, What would you make better about this product? What don't you like? And they gave me a list. I brought this to our customers. Our Pinterest Polly's and our Crafty Carols. I asked them what they didn't like about it. Why would you change? How would you improve this? And they told me. They said, it doesn't work on vinyl. It's got brush strokes. Sometimes there's bubbles. It doesn't dry clear. It's not waterproof.
It's non flexible. on and on. So I took that list to my chemist and I said, Hey, can we make something that solves all of these problems? it took a while, months and months of trial and error and research, but eventually Magic Modge was created. And I say Magic Modge, not Maker's Magic, because that was the original name we were trying to capitalize on Mod Podge's success. You know, they were called Mod Podge. We were going to call ourselves Magic Modge.
Um, playing on the common misspelling we'll go into more detail another time, but I very quickly realized after selling out and launching on Amazon that 48 hours later, our listing was shut down for IP infringement, Mod Podge or the company that owns Mod Podge plaid shut us down. They went to Amazon, said these guys are infringing on our patent, using our name, shut them down. And they did. And they were right.
I talked to trademark attorneys and I got a hard, fast education in trademark law and realized that, Oh, it's all gray until it gets settled in court and in court, it becomes black and white, but that also costs lots of money. So instead of spending 300, 000 to try and keep the name, we just changed it. We just changed the name, we changed it to makers magic and we relaunched in August and it completely changed our business. It's a great product, works really well and people love it.
So this whole time, one of the reasons our business wasn't doing that well, despite me being who I am and working as hard as I did, my product just wasn't that good. It was not something that could sell via word of mouth. People weren't telling their friends about it. So we were only getting people to buy one time. They weren't coming back to buy more. People come back to buy more and repeat purchase when your product is good. But when your product is not good, they just don't come back again.
Maker's Magic is not that way. People are coming back. We have a good product. So it changed the game for us in that respect so much so that we ended up having our best year yet last year in 2023 and we're profitable. We literally make money at the end of the day. Our profit margin has been growing since we've launched makers magic started out at five and now it's up at 21%. That means for every dollar that comes into the business, 21 cents is profit. I think that's badass.
And right now in this day and age, in a recession, it's hard to do, but we did it because we had that foundation of tight books who understood our numbers, had my partner, Nick, I understood that the business was seasonal and that I needed a better product. I had done all the house cleaning and gotten rid of all the dead weight on the team. Not that any of them were dead weight. It's just, I say that as an expression, um, just cutting all that stuff off, you know, I had to thin things out.
I had to trim. And it's my fault. I'm the one that put us in this situation in the first place. I'm the one that created the problem, so I was the one that needed to take ownership and fix it. The team saw that I was taking ownership too, and they respected me for it. And you know what's funny? They could have left. They could have. But they didn't. They chose not to leave. They chose to stick by my side. And, um, I really respect them for that.
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I'll leave an affiliate link in the description so you can try it out for So now I've got a core group of killers, a bunch of A players, the team is good, the overhead's good, the numbers are good, and we're ready to move. We're ready to scale. We're ready to grow, but not at the expense of profitability. I refuse to overspend. I refuse to go negative and build up debt. If we have to grow slower, we'll grow slower. But I don't want to pile on a mountain of debt again.
I just don't want to do that again. It's too difficult. It's too hard. And for what? To grow faster, grow faster through what? We're going to the same place. Sometimes patience is the play here. At least, that's what I tell myself. I'm sharing all this stuff with you, because it's not all strawberries and orgasms all the time. . It's not always sunshine and rainbows. Business is very real.
And we like to talk about the things that are going really well, but I think it's important to talk about the things that don't. I felt so small during that process of having hard conversations. I felt like the worst business owner felt about that big. I felt like a failure. I didn't know what to do next. I didn't think we would ever get out of it. I felt bad for my wife, you know, for hitching her wagon and my horse. I, uh, and it wasn't like, Oh, poor me. But I was just like, man, I fucked up.
It took me like two years to fix my fuck ups. Two years. I finally feel that like right now we're in a point where all the fuck ups are gone. They're behind us. But in fixing those fuck ups, there were a lot of lessons. And that's what I really want to stress today. And that's why I started this conversation off the way that I did, which was how I felt at that time when I was making that jump from six to seven figures. I believe that that was the jump that I talked about that difficulty.
That's the jump. That's what you must do. You need to get really clear about your product. Be honest with yourself. Is it helping? Is it actually good? Or do you need to fix it first? Can you get really clear about your customer and who you're serving and why you're helping them? Mission, vision, values, why you exist in the first place and how you conduct yourself. And that's important too.
But the numbers, I really think that 60 to 70 percent of why we were able to get to that point was the numbers getting really clear on how much money we were making, what our profit margins were, what our cashflow was, how much we were making on a sale, getting dialed in about our customer acquisition costs and average order value and LTV or lifetime customer value. Okay. You can look at the numbers and get an idea of the health of your business and the direction that it's headed.
But if you don't know those numbers, you don't have that data point. And that data point is really helpful, especially when you can't keep your finger on the pulse anymore, just by looking at the bank account. You see, prior to this time, I would look at the cash in the checking account, and I would look at how much I owed on the credit cards. And that's how I would kind of gauge where our spending and our cashflow was at.
I knew that if we had enough cash to pay off the credit cards, we're sitting pretty. And if I didn't have enough cash, or if it was about even, I needed to dial back a little bit, but around the, you know, three to 700, 000 a year mark, it's hard to do. Thank you. So much money is coming in and out that it's quite difficult to balance those things and just to know as an individual, as an operator. And that's when mistakes started to happen because I couldn't tell.
I didn't have my finger on the pulse. What I needed was good financial reporting, good bookkeeping, good cash flow statements, good profit and losses, good balance sheets, but most importantly, Good unit economics. I needed to understand exactly how much money I was making when I sold each one of my products. The margin, the profit margin, cost of goods.
And then I needed an offer that would drive average order value up, and I needed to focus on making good content to bring customer acquisition costs down. That was probably the biggest thing. Probably the biggest thing. It wasn't about people. I believe that we can brute force our way to a million bucks a year just as single owner operators. Maybe even two or three. But to go beyond that we need a team. Now, I look back to that time and I was very set in my ways.
I felt like I knew what I was doing. I didn't. Newsflash, right? I I had an ego about things. I cared more about product and money than I did about people. I would ask questions like, how can I do this? How do I do this? Instead of who can I get to help me do this? I didn't want to look at the profit and cash flow as a measure of success because I knew that it was a smaller number. I wanted to look at the sales, the vanity number.
I wanted to say we're doing a million in sales when in reality we're making like 6, 000 a month, if not anything. Um, that's the person that I was at the time because I didn't know any better. I didn't, I didn't know. I now measure our EBITDA or our net profit, the business profits, every month now. Because that's the real number, the real money that I can pull from. That's where my salary comes from, the profits. So why wouldn't I measure that? Yeah, I didn't measure it because I was afraid.
That's really what it came down to. I was fearful. I didn't want to admit that I was failing. I didn't want to admit that I didn't want to admit that I didn't have what it takes to get the job done. Now there's something to be said for that. The tenacity, the grit, the determination. Because I kept showing up.
And I became a different person in the process, just like I became a different person in the fire department process through all the testing and interviews, I became the person they wanted. Eventually I've become the person of business needed because I've cared, given attention and paid attention to the feedback, right? My team needs a leader. They need a consistent CEO who shows up, has their back and deeply cares about them and the mission.
They need to be able to borrow from my conviction, and I needed the conviction in the first place. It's just one of the many things that I needed to become. I needed to get good at numbers. I needed to become more articulate, better at managing my time. I had to cut out any alcohol or any substances that were affecting my performance throughout the week. I needed good sleep. I needed to start working out every single day so I could have a healthier body and mind.
I needed to wake up earlier so I could get more done. There were a lot of changes that had to happen and those all took place over the last three years or so. I became a different person. The version of me that you're looking at now is completely different from the version of me that quit the fire department and went all in on this. I worked on the business, but the business has worked on me more. And it doesn't matter what I would have chosen as my career. And that's a special thing.
I don't think it would have mattered what business I chose. I think as long as you have an opportunity vehicle, it doesn't matter. As long as you have a business, what you focus on increases. For me, it just happened to be a crafting company. And I focused on it, and it's increasing. And it's working on me and I'm becoming a better person and I'm able to lead the company in a better way. And it just keeps leapfrogging back and forth all the way up. It's really great.
I'll tell you what, though, you can't have any of it. If you don't start, if you don't become self aware, look at yourself. Look at the actions that you're taking, look at how you're living your life and actively evaluate yourself. You can't have it. You can't grow. It takes a certain amount of self awareness to want to grow. In fact, a growth mindset is something that I look for in everyone that I work with, whether it's customers and clients or whether it's employees or partners.
I want to work with people who want more, who want to become better versions of themselves because I know that given enough time, we'll eventually get there, as long as we have a growth mindset. And that's how I feel about me, and I believe that's what my wife saw inside me. Because she was all Team Evan all the time. Always has been.
When I was testing and getting the job at the fire department through paramedic school, you know, through quitting, through going through fire academies, through, you know, building this business to my social media and my personal brand and through Scorchmarker. She's always been team Evan all the time and she sees what is in here and she knows that I'm capable. God, I'm so grateful for her. Without her, I don't, I would not be here. I would just be a loser probably.
I don't know that there's one thing that you can do aside from paying attention, paying attention to you and the actions you're taking and how you can be better being self critical and really thinking about what about my leadership led to this result. What can I do better next time? What worked? What didn't work? How can I improve? What can I take ownership of? Oh, everything. Everything's my fault.
Yep. You can take extreme ownership, accountability, you can act quickly, you can give all of yourself to your business and your people, and you can really try. Once you start really trying and combine that with an understanding of your numbers, I think that a million bucks a year is inevitable, if not two or three million. I think it just will make sense because you'll see very clearly what you need to do more of and what you should stop doing because it gives you a complete picture.
And I think that's really special. And that's one of the reasons why one of the pillars and one of the lectures and operator academy is unit economics. We study our unit economics and we make sure that we're actually making money so that we can trace it. We can understand exactly how much we're making with every sale. Such a powerful lesson. You combine that. With a bookkeeper and financial team, you combine that with content and you start making videos.
You combine that with social media and you know, a good website and Amazon presence, maybe a tick tock shop to 10 million is absolutely achievable. Then I teach you how to hire and build relationships with the right people so that you don't have to have a hard conversations like I had. Look having those hard conversations with employees, letting them go because of my own shortcomings and my mistakes. It was absolutely brutal. I never want to go through that again. So how am I preventing it?
Job descriptions, clarity and not settling. I don't settle for employees anymore. Unless they're perfect, so no, I'm going to wait because I don't want to incur management debt anymore. I have paid a lot of management debt in my life, enough at least. I don't want to do it anymore and I can prevent management debt by being very intentional. About who I'm hiring and who I'm bringing into this company to me, that's incredibly important. So there's a lot to it. There's a lot to it.
And for all of us, it's different, but I think it's important that you hear from me that it hasn't been great all the time. In fact, it's been a battle. We just got out of wartime like three months ago. It was hard. We're in peacetime now, profitable, making money, growing, but it took a lot of work. And you know, some, I used to worry that other people would look down on me for not having a perfect business or not having it go up and to the right all the time.
But then I asked myself that question, Heaven, who would you rather learn from? Someone who has always worked out for all the time or someone who's been through the fire, the flames, the trial and tribulations? You'd rather learn from someone who has had it handed to them the whole time or. Someone who really had to fight for it and struggle for it and deeply understand it. And that's That question started to give me confidence.
In that the struggles that I've been through are valuable to other people. Because I am not unique. I'm bang on average, okay? I'm average in every category. I'm average physically, I'm average mentally, I'm average everywhere. I got an average glove size, an average shoe, like, I'm just an average guy, man. But I find some comfort in that because if I'm the average guy, and if you're at least average or above average, then you, you got this, you can do it too.
Just do what I've done or learn from me and we can do it together. Yeah, there's no special sauce here. Just a unique combination of the skills that I've been able to acquire living life, fire department, hard knocks in business, and giving a shit. So I will say this, making the jump from six to seven figures was not easy. It's easier than seven to eight. I can tell you that, but regardless of how hard or how easy you think it might be, or it is for you, you need to become a different person.
There are things about you that need to change to make space for the new version of you. That's capable of running one, two, 3 million a year business. And it starts by taking extreme ownership and looking inside at what you've done to achieve these results. What about your leadership has led to this? And how can you be better? Being self critical and paying attention to detail and taking extreme ownership, I believe, is some of that special stuff that will really get you there.
And also, hanging out with other like minded people. See, the reason I brought up incubator and Ryan's program in the beginning of this conversation was not to sell it or to tell you you should join it or anything like that, but because it was the first time I'd gone through a training program and been put in a room with other business owners that were just like me. It was the first time I've gotten to have conversations and associate with other people who are struggling with.
Who were struggling with the same things I was struggling with, who were just as, you know, who were just as ignorant as me, who, you know, had the same feelings as me, who were in the same spot as me. That was special. I didn't know. I thought I was unique. And knowing that I wasn't unique and that I wasn't alone in this was an absolute game changer. And that's what that program did for me. It linked me to other people and helped me find who's a tribe, a community.
That's what I want to build for you. That's what I selfishly want to build for me. I want a bunch of friends in this space who are getting rich and growing together. I want a bunch of growth minded people all hanging out, meeting up in the Redwoods, getting together on Zoom, shooting messages back and forth on WhatsApp, going on golf trips, building homesteads together.
Wives are hanging out, kids are playing sports and games and There's just a special world out there, and it's all centered around people. And I have been unsuccessful in finding that group so far, so I decided I'm going to build it. It's going to take a long time. This is a 40 year plan, but I'm starting now. And if you're listening to this, I would really like you to be a part of it, but only if you have a growth mindset. I'll end with this. I have a personal mission statement.
It's our family mission statement, and it is to do meaningful work with meaningful people and to create as much abundance and opportunity as humanly possible. This is my way of creating opportunity and abundance and doing meaningful work with meaningful people. Thanks for listening. Be good to future you. Okay, let's go over the numbers just like I do in every podcast. Um, so one day after the last podcast, so the numbers are going to be virtually the same.
So let's jam through them really quick in terms of retail. And for the last 30 days, we earn a 19, 000. And that was from Hobby Lobby on Shopify. We had a total sales of 56, 000 for the last 30 days. So just under 2, 000 a day with a conversion rate of 1. 3. Um, conversion rates lower, obviously, because we've had a ton of outside traffic. I've got a YouTube video that's blowing up right now. That's not necessarily related to our customers.
So we're getting a lot of low quality traffic on our website right now. At least that's how I'm explaining the conversion rate. And then we have our Amazon sales, 162, 600 for the last 30 days with a conversion rate of 13%. Total 237, 600 in sales in the last 30 days, still coming off Q4, so a lot of Q4 sales are in there, but nonetheless, that's what our 30 day sales are out. I expect them to go down in January, February, March, April, especially in the summertime.
But if we're doing our job right, and we're growing our business strategically, we might be able to stay above that number. We'll see. We'll see. I'd like to take a moment to thank you for listening. Your attention means the world to me. It really does. If you've gotten to a point where you have any questions or you're ready to apply for the Operator Academy, shoot me a DM so I can take care of you. Otherwise, keep doing the boring work and be good to future you.