Part 2 - How One Gut Feeling Led To A Life-Changing Business Idea

Welcome to this edition of the Million Dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on winning. I'm your host, Larry Wydell.

Now, so talk about what you, what led you to do what, what you're doing right now, and I'll let you describe it and, and, and, and tell everybody.

Yeah, so as coming off of being this, this fitness influencer and in this space, right? So I went from being the fitness stuff, people asking me how to work out, then it turned into, hey, Sam, how did you grow your social media? How are you getting these sponsorship deals? How did you create the workbook for that you sell? And then it was like, okay, entrepreneurial bug again of like, well, I keep getting these questions. I could totally teach people how to do this. So then it turned into being a social media coach. Then from there, people that weren't influencers are not interested in being an influencer. They wanted to grow their accounts for their business or learn how to start a business, like I did. Okay. Then I pivoted once again to being an online business coach because I knew how to do all of that stuff. I'd been doing it at this point for like six years, so I did that. And, and then up until when the pandemic hit is when I saw my community panic, right? Because I'm here teaching people how to make money online, basically how to set up their. Right, they're panicking or they had side hustles and they're now losing. People are losing their jobs, their income, they're stressing out. They're like, you know, we all were, right? It was a traumatic thing that happened to the world. So I just started sharing my morning routine, and that's journaling, just staying focused, meditation, how I created vision boards, how I really set up myself every single day to keep my eyes on the prize, like, keep on going, just like I did my entire life, whether it was, you know, competing in sports or, you know, wanting to be in the fitness magazines. Like, that was all, like, ingrained in me for so long of like, stay on track, stay focused no matter what's going on, people doubting you, all these sorts of things, right? So I just started talking about that on social media, on Instagram stories, and then people asking me, hey, Sam, like, where. Where can I download these journal prompts? And I'm like, I don't have a download for this. Like, like, I'm just sharing my personal thing. And then once again, it Was that intuitional gut feeling. It was like, you have something here, you have something here and you need to share it with the world because what you have done throughout your entire life, people don't do that on a daily basis. People don't think about their goals every single day. People definitely don't reflect on their days or what they want to accomplish or get super clear on what it is that they actually want and also deal with the things that maybe that were traumatic experiences or limiting beliefs, stuff like that, that is holding them back from their truest potential. So immediately I felt that again, that, oh gosh, here is that gut feeling. It's that pivot feeling. And I was making really good money as an online business coach and I'm like, here I am. This needs to be a physical product. I don't know anything about E commerce. I've never done anything remotely close to manufacturing, shipping, inventory, any of that stuff, right? But I'm like, I'm going to figure it out because this needs to be birthed into the world. So immediately I just dove straight head first into that, creating a, you know, a kind of a sample journal. I got like 20, 30 girls into a little group that were interested. I was like, okay, you guys need to test this. Like, it works for me. Will it work for you? Sure enough, every single woman in that cohort had exceptional results in 30 days. I'm like, that's it, we're going to manufacture. And I just literally YouTube listen to podcasts on E commerce. I just infused myself into that space, learned it all, had first couple thousand journals manufactured within I think three months, started selling them and I never looked back. And here we are almost three years later and now I'm at a point in my life where I am fully in alignment with what I'm doing. I'm obsessed with this company, I'm obsessed with the like, what it's doing. For right now, we just have a journal for women. A men's journal is coming early next year. But I'm just so in love with what I am doing. And I know that every single thing that I had done throughout my career, from being the influencer, learning how to manage social media, learning how to build an online business, you could never connect the dots forward to where I am today. But looking back, nothing was a waste of time. Everything that I did has equipped me to be the founder of an E commerce business today that is just impacting the world in such a positive way.

Now, now how many of you? So how did the sales go? Because you again, you hadn't done this before.

Yeah, the first sales were great. I think within the first year it was like, okay, we did not hit six figures in revenue our first year, I'll tell you that. But here's the difference. If this was me in a different space, like in. As an online business coach or in social media, stuff like that, that would have looked like a failure to me. But what was really cool was to hear the feedback on this journal that women were having. And for that, like, my driving factor was like, it's not. It wasn't even at the money about that at that point. It was that this is a concept that's proven. I know what it takes when you're first, like starting a new company or a brand or anything like that. It's going to take time to build. I had things to learn as a founder. I'm actually grateful that we didn't even break six figures in our first year because I had so many lessons that I needed to learn before we could blow up and go really big. So that's kind of how it all went.

Yeah, that's. That perspective probably came from early experiences you had. But it. When you're starting business, you're always, you know, out of time, out of money, and wishing you had all of the venture capitalists just pouring the money at you. But the deal is you don't always recognize how stupid you really are in your first year or two and how likely you are to make stupid decisions based off lack of information and experience. You know what I'm saying? You don't always have the best advisors with you. That will come around later. You know, you'll find, you'll be able to find. That's part of growing in the business to find what do other people do, you know, who, who advises in this work, you know, know what are smart business practices. And it's easy to get caught up in the tyranny of the moment and running around there and spending money here.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And, you know, it's just like software. If you ever hear a software company, they just blow through so much money because they're trying to figure it out as they go, you know, and they can have a great idea, get it all built out and say, oh, that didn't work. But then, you know, as hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars later, they say, okay, now we're going to go this way and they're going to pivot, but that money is burned. And if you're a venture capitalist, you'd like for Them to be a little bit more judicious in making those decisions and find out a little quicker. Now you did that. What would you. Let me ask you this. Well, what can you think of is a dumb thing you might have done that would have been costly early on had you had more success and had more money. Can you think about that? Something you learned not to do, but it was like your second year or after you were down the road a little further.

Yeah, I think if our first year, if we had more money because we're still self funded, bootstrapped company, and our first year, if I had more money to put into it, I probably would have bought way more inventory than I needed out of that first manufacturing thing.

Right.

Let me tell you, it's interesting getting that first shipment of journals even like I thought it was like the greatest thing on earth. Right. And so did everybody else. But seeing what the journal is today, like, it's evolved. It's like gotten better. It gets better and better with each production run. But there were mistakes in that journal, even though it had multiple people read it. So we had lots of like different little mini misprints throughout it. So that would have been a big thing. With just like over purchasing journals that just were not 100%, that would have been bad. We probably would have poured a lot into advertising, which at that time, like again, I, as a founder didn't yet have the space and the capacity to hold space for this many customers. Right. It was just me. I was packing and shipping the packages every single day for I think a year and a half. Like, I just didn't have, we didn't have the space, we didn't have the setups, we didn't have the systems in place, like nothing. So I think we would have just, I would have just blown through that cash so quickly without understanding and learning parts of the business that needed to be understood in order to scale it and make it, you know, the quote unquote success that it is today.

Well, allow you to staff up for one thing. And you know, if it's any encouragement, Jeff Bezos talks about when he got started, they were, they were shipping things out of his garage and it was him and one other guy and he said one day he had the great idea, a light bulb lightning. You know, it's like unbelievable. You know, the angels, Clouds parted, the angels sang. He had this new revolutionary idea and he turned to his second in command and said, I've got it. You know, I figured it out, you know, how we can improve our shipping he said, knee pads. He said, rather than be on the concrete, on our knees, we could get knee pads. And the guy looked at him, he said, I've got a better idea. How about tables? But he tells that story on himself, you know, like out of humble beginnings, breakthroughs like that, you know, if he could have bought knee pads for everybody. And then someone said, well, how about tables? Then you throw the knee pads in the trash.

Wow.

So it's just those kind of basic type things you don't even think of until you get in the flow. And the longer you postpone getting in the flow and jumping in, you delay those kind of revelations. But now, as you have moved forward. So how has sales gone now?

Fantastic. We are, you know, three years later, and now we're, we're doing multiple million revenue per year. So that's.

Yeah. In three years, the multiple million in revenue from this book you created to journal. So this is a book you're selling a little journal, hard copy, when nobody uses hard. Are you writing an app?

No. No, no, no.

Tell me why you're not doing an app. Why, why you're doing. Why the journal is more important than the app.

Yeah. So for one thing, we are so connected to these things, right? We are on our phones 24 7, we're on a laptop. We're in, we're in everything, right? And then what happens there? You pick up your phone, you get a notification, you open up Instagram, you open up your email, you open up your text messages. Within two seconds, you're gone. Right? You're gone. So the reason for doing a physical product is the morning routine should be disconnected, you should be unplugged. It's the first thing you should be doing when you open up your journal. Let's tap into this first. And when it comes with chasing your dreams or creating your new life or whatever that is, right? The last thing you want to do is open up your cell phone first thing or computer and start being impacted by everything else that's flooding in. Right. Like you want to get your mind right first. So having this journal, and it's a beautiful, beautiful journal. It's, it's, it's spiral bound. It's either it's got gold accents or holographic silver accents on it. It just, it feels so luxurious. So just to even start with that, just opening it up and you have different prompts every single day, it takes about five, 10 minutes a day, depending how long you want to write in it. But just by going there and the first thing it kicks off is like, you know, that gratitude, the affirmations, your, your daily habits, the three things that you're going to take action on that day in order to get you closer to your goals. And then just like journaling out all of those things that are going well or that you desire and all of those things, it's putting that into your mind first. Because that way, your mindset, if it's in that place starting the day, you're going to take action on that. You're going to use that to make decisions whether you feel like doing things or not. It's like, wait a minute, this morning, morning I wrote down, I'm gonna do X, Y and Z. Like I'm gonna stay committed to that. So having this beautiful morning process of just like taking that, you know, 5, 10, 15 minutes for yourself to just get your mind right is so, so powerful. And then just writing it down when your, your mind, your eyes, your brain see you writing things down, you're going to be more likely to go after that and accomplish those goals too.

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I'm a have to get one of your, what do you call it? Manuscript. Manuscript, yeah. I'm gonna have to get one of these and try. I, I use a online app, but what I do find is you're right, you know, and you know, I've got it all. You, you know, you can populate it the way you want. You have templates and this, that and the other. My, it's pretty, pretty darn elaborate. However, you're right, you know, you get on there and before you get started in the morning, it's like, let me check the news because, you know, if the aliens invaded the White House last night, I don't want to hear about it from someone else. I want to find that out or, you know, or if, you know, if, if something tragic happened, I at least want to be aware of that. But then I'll find out, you know, Then what pops up is Britney Spears did something here, and it's like, what? You know, and then you're off to something over here. Justin Timberlake says, that's ridiculous. And then all of a sudden, you got at least a minute or two. It's like, wait a minute, this is not why I went.

Yeah, and you're lucky. Yeah, and you're lucky if it's a minute or two. Usually it's like 5, 10, 15. All of a sudden, 30 minutes, an hour is gone, and you're like, oh, my gosh, like, what am I doing with my life?

So, yeah, yeah, because the news media knows they can keep you if they hook you on all this craziness, you know, the nonsense. But all I want is the news. News. But. But then, no, it doesn't work like that. And then the other side of it, of course, is to know that down through the years, the people who have been. Well, the phrase I heard earlier about here, Samantha, is you've got to be specific to be dynamic. And so that's why I've always been. You know, and coaches. You know, the great thing about athletics is you have a season, you have a season, and then you have games in that season, and then you have a preseason, and then you have, you know, you cycle. You know, you got to divide it all out there. And the, the, the elite coaches have, like Dean Smith, who. University of North Carolina. His practices were organized down to the minute. You know, those players went in there because they only had so much time to get college players that, you know, the NCAA would allow for practice, and they, they headed down to the minute. And Roy Williams, who was his assistant coach, when every player went in every day, every player at the front of their locker had a list of how it's going to go, what they were supposed to be doing, what their role was, and every, you know, organized. And so all that's. And they had that ready day by day for every player before the season started. And so, you know, and then you hear things about journaling from, like, I'm sure you use this with Leonardo da Vinci. You know, he had 1500 pages of notebooks, and they were very. I mean, you know, he probably had 500 words at least on every. And diagrams on every page. So it wasn't like he, he wrote. You know, I had a. You know, I heard a great joke today. I mean, it was really detailed information. And so you've got, You've got history on your side, you got logic on your side. So I'm gonna have to get one of your manuscript and, and, and, and play with that. But what. Why did you. Let me ask you this. Usually there's good reasons and bad reasons for people making major route. Why did you leave Marina del Rey? The real reason. Tell me the real reason.

The real reason. I don't know if I could. I mean, real reason is we're on it.

We're just friends. It's just me and you. We're just. Nobody's going to hear that, you know.

You know, I'd lived in LA for nine years.

Look at that expression on your face.

I tell you, I lived in la. It was, it was, it was a great. You know, I moved there for a reason, to take on modeling and acting. Was successful in that. And then it brought me to meet my fiance there. And I loved, like my dream was always to live at the beach. And, you know, when the pandemic hit, everything changed. Everything changed out there. And it was, you know, it was just that again, had to follow my gut and intuition. It was time for us to go explore, live somewhere else. And we ended up, we ended up here. But LA will be a big place in my heart forever.

Well, you polish, you polished, you polished it up, you finessed it. You should, you should think about a career in politics. But what would you say changed for you? That you said, okay, there's gotta be something better for me, and then why Austin, of all places? So what, what changed?

What changed?

What did you start noticing? What? Started to get not as happy as it was before, honestly, that you can actually tell the world, you know, how.

How people treated each other out there.

Talk about that, talk about that, how.

People treated each other. And for example, like, we lived on the beach, right? We lived on the beach. We, we walk the beach. Very amazing. Beautiful, clean, fresh air. And, you know, for multiple years, you know, you'd be out there just walking your dog, having fun, and people would walk by and yell at you and be really mean to you about, where's your mask? Where's your mask? What are you doing? And it's like we are out here and on the ocean air, which is. There's a breeze, there's a breeze. You're like 50 million yards away from me. And this, this was happening all the time, to be honest. And it was just, it was just, it was just that. It was just this constant. And, you know, even after mandates were lifted, people were still very. Just not nice, like walking into stores and stuff like that. It's like, oh, it was. It was just. And we're not in alignment with a lot of that stuff, to be honest. And I, you know, being from a place of, you know, being very holistic and knowing how to heal your body and all these other things, and just seeing when your eyes are truly open, when you. And awake to what's really going on. It's like, it's really hard to be in an environment like that 24 7, where you're in a good mood, leaving your house, and the second you step outside, someone's all up in your face and it's like, all right, it's time to go. But I really did feel like that chapter of my life was wrapped up. I feel like I kind of squeezed everything that I could out of LA with the purpose and intention that I had. And we decided it's like, all right, it's time to go. It's time to move. And actually, we were wanting to move to Florida. And for over a year, we were looking at places in Florida because we're. We're very much beach people. And for. We took many trips out there and just could not find the place that's like that. Like, oh, this feels great.

Called me. You should have called me, Samantha. I could have helped you.

I should have called you. Well, maybe soon. I know. I know. We love Austin. I know it's probably not our forever film. I don't. I don't know where that next would be. But all I did at that point. And this comes back to, like, your goals, your dreams, your visions, and being super clear on what it is that you want. I decided to just get on Zillow and type in all the specs for the house that I wanted and just zoomed out on the map of America. Because we're like. We're at this point really, like, we gotta go. We gotta go somewhere. We gotta get out of here. We continue with. With everything here. And I zoomed out, and then I just started zooming in on different pockets. And all of a sudden, like, even though a lot of our friends had moved to Austin or people that we knew, a lot of people came here right from, especially from la. But that wasn't a reason why we chose here. I just, like, literally found this one house here in Austin. It looked amazing in the pictures, had all the specs that we wanted. We wanted more space, we wanted land. We wanted to be out in the country, out of the city. Like, I had lived in the city for so long. It's very energetically draining. We wanted to breathe the fresh air, not see neighbors, have our dog, like, be. Have Milo, our dog, to be able to run around freely. And I zoomed in on this one house, and it had everything. And we're like, let's go check it out. So we got on a flight, like, a couple days later, came to check it out to make sure it was real and legit, right? And then signed. Signed up work that day. And within a week, we had our entire place packed up on a container to come here. And we just. We just did it there. It was that again, what we've been talking about this entire podcast, that intuitional gut, that feeling that, let's do it. Because at the end of the day, like, say you do make a decision whether it's moving, whether it's quitting your job, career, whatever. If you hate it, if it sucks, if it doesn't work out, you can always go back. We know we can always move back to LA if we wanted to, or somewhere else. But you'll never know the potential and the success and the happiness if you don't try. So we just trusted our gut and we love it here. We are so happy here.

Well, what you did was you got away from a toxic situation. And those people. What the pandemic did was allow people that are naturally nasty and mean permission to be nasty and bossy and mean and act like Gestapo agents. And even in Aspen, you know, the mountains, the breeze and the health and this, that, the other. There was one woman that one of my therapists told me about, she would walk around with her dog on the sidewalks and go six feet, six feet, six feet. You know, it's like, you know, you're 50ft away from me. Why you say, you know, what are you talking about, you idiot? And then I actually stopped skiing on Aspen Mountain because I went up two times, and one time they were yelling at this. I found that when they're yelling at someone next to you, the poison gets on you too. But they were yelling, this nice little lady, like, she's 80 years old, but she had the mask here. She didn't have it up here. You know, the nostrils were covered, but whatever. And this guy screaming at her, we're in the line to go up the gondola. And we had no idea whether it turned around and finally figured out it was like, you know something about that. But the toxin gets on you. If you got people screaming. And it happened two or three times up there. I said, I'm off. I'm off the mountain because I come out Here I live out here for fun, happy. You know, regenerating skiing is, you know, miraculous experience. And I don't want to have that poison forever, you know, and so I'm off the mountain. I'm just not going to expose myself to that toxin. And if you find yourself in that kind of toxic environment, one person can ruin things for you if it's in a company or if it's a neighborhood or whatever, but move. I mean, you can't, you know. You know, killing them does not really pay off folks. You know, that's a temptation. You want to just, you know, I'll just eliminate them. No, you can't eliminate them, but you can't eliminate you, you know, and you don't have to. And I think one thing, Samantha, we, A lot of us don't realize what that was. Well, that's verbal bully. You know, people, you know, you're being bullied. It's just like someone's hitting you with a stick, but they're doing it with words. And until you're aware of that concept, you know, it takes you a while to pick up, like, what's happening here. For whatever reason, if you're in a situation where your people, you know, people feel empowered to go ahead and be bullying to you, like neighbors in your condo association or in your, you know, your apartment building or in your neighborhood, you know, you don't have to stay there. You know, there's. There's a lot of happy, pleasant people in the world and get out and look. And so that's what you did. And I'm happy for you doing that and removing that toxin out of your life, because now you can go back down the road. Marina Del Rey of LA was not ruined forever, but it might have been ruined forever had you continued to be exposed to that. And so I'm happy. So the thing is, our environment, you hear, attitude is everything. Environment is everything. And you've got to make the choices that put yourself in a position and a geography in an occupation with support people to where you can be your best. And if there's any toxicity or poison in there, you got to get rid of it. You know, I mean, there's some people that. That we have listening to this podcast. There are people in their life they've got to eliminate from their circle of friends, you know, however you got to get them out. You don't have to allow yourself to be imposed upon the rest of your life, because your number one priority is to be productive and pursue your destiny. And that's where you're going to make an impact. And if they come in and are constantly pouring on water to put out your inspiration and your fire, they got to go, don't you think? Do you see that?

100% right. We know the saying. You are the. You're this, like, combination of the five people that you hang out with. I think it goes way beyond that. It is, you know, your immediate family, friends, your surroundings, your environment that all is a combination. Like, I think about it now, just as you're saying all this, it's like, isn't it interesting? The first year in the business, we didn't hit six figures. And granted it was a new company, but also the stuff that I was dealing with on a daily basis in my life during that period of time was a lot of negativity. And you can't just ignore all of that. Like, you can't just be like, well, I'm just going to be immune to being bullied or immune to the hate or immune to any of this stuff. Like, it's going to affect you. But isn't it interesting? After moving to Austin, where I'm feeling great every day, I'm taking care of myself. I can go out freely without being scared. Oh, who's going to yell at me today? Or who's going to be an asshole today? Right? It's like I'm feeling good every single day. And isn't that interesting that all of a sudden the business, like, 10x, right? Yeah, 10x so quickly. So it all plays in effect. And what you just said, like, I can't stress it enough. And of course, there's some people, like, for example, family members, like, if you live with your family, that's hard. And if they're toxic, that's hard to get away from. Limit the exposure. Move out. Like, you can remove yourself from these places and you can remove certain people from your life. And you don't have to be like, oh, I can't hang out with you anymore. You're toxic. It's just now you start making, you know, different plans. You start just limiting your time. Don't go out with them every time they invite you. Go do something else.

Right? So there's ways of, you know, use your brain. There's ways of avoiding that, you know, filling up your schedule. And because they've got problems that are not yours, you just can't let their problems be yours.

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