In this candid vlog, Tami Grgas, a former professional hairstylist and military spouse, walks viewers through the chaotic rhythm of life that comes with moving every 2‑4 years, homeschooling her son, and trying to sustain an income. She recounts repeatedly restarting her hair‑business after each PCS, the slow build‑up of clientele, and the eventual pivot to affiliate marketing after discovering Russell Brunson’s OfferLab. Tami explains how OfferLab provides high‑commission opportunities and a supportive community that counters the loneliness she’s felt as an online entrepreneur. She also shares her recent experiments with AI video tools (HeyGen), creating avatar videos of herself and her cats for fun content. The narrative then shifts to her family’s relocation timeline (England, Nebraska, DC, upstate New York, back to Nebraska), the challenges of maintaining a jewelry direct‑sales business, and the decision to homeschool her son using an eclectic mix of methods after confronting a school’s attempt to hold him back. Tami celebrates her son’s current pursuit of a film degree, reflects on her own early aspirations to be an actress, and mentions that she is halfway through writing a memoir about her life with her husband, a retired Air Force linguist. Throughout, she offers encouragement and practical shortcuts for other military moms navigating homeschooling, online business, and creative pursuits.
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Hi, I'm Tami, and I want to talk to you about the chaos, the craziness, the "what the heck am I doing" moments of being married to a military member and moving every 2 to 4 years, or PCSing. And homeschooling, and then on top of that you want to create an income too? What you talking about, woman? Well, that's what I was doing. Um, it was a lot, and I've learned a lot through the years. And one of the things I wish I had known about when I was living overseas, because Okay, so I've done hair for a living most of my life. So for me, trying to create an income meant starting my hair business all over again every 2 to 4 years. It was a lot. It was, you know, in the beginning it would be very slow. As the word got out that I did hair, A few people would trickle in. It just wasn't anything. It wasn't like 500 people all of a sudden, "Oh, you're doing hair? Okay, I'll be there." It took a while, and by the time I built up a clientele that was actually bringing in enough income that I started thinking, "Hmm, maybe I need to start tracking this." Mm-hmm. That's when we'd move. So it was kind of like, what's the point? So what I have discovered is this affiliate marketing thing, but right now I don't— if— I don't know, have you heard of Russell Brunson? This dude is a genius when it comes to marketing. He really is. And coming up with creative ways to market. So Russell just launched this thing called OfferLab, and I can give you an invitation to come to OfferLab where you can get in just for free. So I'll put the link in the description for you so you can go check it out. Um, affiliate marketing is basically other people who have products or courses or like almost every company out there that is doing well does affiliate marketing. So they offer— Amazon does it, Walmart does it, most of the stores out there do this, okay? So what they do is they say, okay, 'If you sell this item, you'll get a certain percentage of the sale sent to you because you referred the person who came to purchase it,' which is really cool, you know. Like, um, I did it with Amazon for a while. I wasn't like really, really good at it, but I thought, why not? I love Amazon. Still love Amazon. I should probably do it more with Amazon, but Amazon's percentage is generally very, very, very, very low. So you'd have to be selling a lot of Amazon items to make it lucrative. Well, in this OfferLab, it's— oh man, some people are giving 100% commission on a sale of their course. Um, basically for them. Okay. So for the person who has created offers, and if you're one of those people who's created offers, I would like you to go there and check it out and potentially sign up with your offers in there as well, because I can go in there and I can create an offer to share with people that has something as the front-end offer and then something as an upsell offer from there that ties with that front-end offer. It's not always by the same people though. Like, it's— you can mix and match. You can do all this kind of crazy stuff in there with that. Um, I'm just blown away by what Russell has created. Now, back in the early days of building building an online business, there was much more, um, community involved with it, much more collaboration. Um, it was about getting together with like-minded people and helping each other out. That's kind of gone away in the last 5 years or so, maybe even longer, I'm not sure. But it's gotten very lonely as an entrepreneur. And this OfferLab, I'm in a school group with them and it's a community. When I have a rough day, I can go in there and say, I've had a rough day. This has happened, that has happened. And they're all like, 'Oh my gosh, are you okay?' Like, just helping you, supporting you. Can— like, and they're from all over America, all over the world, for crying out loud. And it's just— I love the community. I went in there, I was playing, and I don't know if you might see some of my videos or not. I was— I've been playing with AI a lot. Mm-hmm. Because I like AI. It's fun. It's crazy and it's fun as long as you use it as a tool. You don't use it as— I don't know, uh, there's a lot of people misusing AI and it's, it's kind of scary what people are thinking AI can do for them. Um, so anyways, I went in to this one AI called HeyGen. Hey Jen. And I created an avatar of me, and I've also created my voice in there. So I, I'm using my pictures and I'm using my voice, and I'm creating these crazy AI avatar things in short videos right now. I don't know if I'll do longer ones, but then I thought Hey, what if I use my cats? So I've made some of the cats. They're not as good as the people ones because they haven't perfected that yet in HeyGen, and I don't know if they will or not. But oh my gosh, it is so funny. It is so funny to see my cat sitting on the top of the cupboard, my orange cat. I've got one of him basically saying, Hey! 'Hey, you should come to this homeschooler's toolbox that my owner's putting together, and please do because that way maybe I'll get some treats,' or something like that. Like, it's just— it's crazy. Crazy fun. And I'm going to create a bunch more because I love my cats, and I think it's fun. I'm just having fun with it. So, I just— I don't think this affiliate marketing is the way I should have— if I— well, it would have been around. This is back in— we moved to England in 2005. Yeah, James was 8 months old. He was born January 2005. And we were there for 3 years. And then In 2008, we moved to Nebraska, so I had to restart doing hair in Nebraska. And then I also found a direct sales company, Premier Designs Jewelry, which I adored, so I started doing that as well. But then in 2010, we moved to DC, and I had to restart my hair business and my, um— My jewelry business. My Premiere Designs business, and it just— it was hard. It was hard. When we left Nebraska, my Premiere Designs business was finally starting to, you know, get a little bit of— I'd had a few shows and it was getting a little better. I was learning how to schedule shows, offer shows, and then we move. And I have to start that all over. I— we were only there for 1 year, which didn't give me enough time to really get my feet underneath me with my business. And then my husband got a job in upstate New York. I, um— DC was good for some reasons. I mean, we got to go to so many museums and the history there and just all that fun stuff with my son with homeschooling and just like all of that was really cool. However, I didn't like the traffic. I didn't care for the weird political environment. A lot of empty promises, which I now know are lies. But anyways. Mm-hmm. It was just a little too much, to be honest. So when he got the job in upstate New York, we were like, "Yes, yes, yes, yes." And at first I heard New York and I thought, "Oh no, not another big city. No." And when he went up there for his interviews, he sent me pictures of like fields with cows. I was like, "What?" Yeah. So upstate New York is fabulous. I loved it there. We were there for 2 years. Then we ended up moving back to Nebraska. And I often joke because I had started my son in kindergarten here in Nebraska. And that's when I learned that— I had been contemplating homeschooling for years. Like since he was like 2, 'cause my girlfriend brought it to my— I didn't even know about this homeschooling thing until then. And she gave me books to read and she was doing more the unschooling method. And I was like, "I don't know about that." But I do have a little bit of unschooling elements in my homeschooling, I don't know, way. I call it eclectic. Mm-hmm. Because I kind of use a bunch of different models of homeschooling— of schooling, period. So when we moved to DC, I knew, like, from having an interview with his teacher in kindergarten, they were trying to make my son slow down and go backwards because he wasn't one of the brilliant kids. But he was smart, you know, like he was reading at 3 years old. He was doing math with me in the grocery stores. Like, just, he was a smart kid. And they were trying to pull him back because, like I say, he didn't have the strong enough capabilities to go be with the smarter kids. And I think a lot of that was part of his personality too, because he had ADHD and was a little bit, you know, unfocused at times. So they did that, and through that time of figuring that out, like, kind of— I went to hair school, got my diploma from high school. That's as far as I went. All right, and my husband went to college, was in the Air Force, he was a linguist with 3 languages under his belt. Like, he was the smart one, and I kind of looked at it like I was not the smart one. That's the, the conclusion I came to in my silly little brain. So as I'm I was thinking on our walk home from the school, from our parent-teacher whatever, I said to my husband, I was like, "Uh..." The teacher had said to me in the classroom that they were actually discouraging my son's reading because his comprehension wasn't quite up there. And this really confused me. But like I said, I didn't think I was smart, so I didn't, didn't know if I knew what I was talking about. So I asked my husband on the way home, I said, "Doesn't comprehension come as you read? Like, isn't that something you build through the years of reading?" Like, I don't know, that just makes more sense to me. And his answer was, "Yeah, you're right." And so at that moment I was like, "Oh, how do I pull him out? How do I do this?" Because I don't want him being held back like that. I want him to move at his pace, not their pace. So within the next week, we found out about the job in D.C. and ended up moving up to D.C., then to upstate New York, and then back to Nebraska. So I've often joked that God moved us up and down like that to get me to be brave enough to homeschool. So I hope you don't have to go through that kind of thing like we did, because that was a little bit crazy. Mm-hmm. My husband has retired from the Air Force, so I'm no longer in that world, but I am. It's kind of weird, and it's just— it took quite a while to transition from being fully in the military to being on the outside. It's, uh— I kind of miss the military life a little bit. When we were in upstate New York, I didn't hear the planes flying over anymore. My husband was in the Air Force, and that's one of the things when we moved back to Nebraska, I was just like, "Ah, the planes. That feels better." You know, I guess it's just weird things like that. So anyways, just wanted to tell a little bit about my story on here and let you know who I am a little more. I've homeschooled my son, uh, well, he's 20 now and he's going to college. He's studying film at Wayne State University in Nebraska and he's following his passion. And that's— that was my dream for my child to be able to follow his passion. And it's so funny because when I was younger, I wanted to be an actress. I wanted to make people laugh. I actually wanted to be Tim Conway, if you know who he is. I used to walk around the house pretending to be him. It was, you know, I loved making people laugh. I loved having fun. I wanted to make people smile. I just— and that is what my son wants to do. So— Yeah. I know I hear a lot of people say that, uh, you can't get your kid to live your dream or something like that. I don't know how that goes, but some people do, you know, like if there's doctors in the family, they want the kid to be a doctor, that kind of stuff. Um, but that didn't happen here. It's just his dream is what my dream was, and In the life I lived in the past, that was not something that was encouraged. I was, I was like one of the first— no, I was the first on my mom's side to graduate high school. I was the second on my dad's side, but my dad was— that's a longer story. He's not my birth father, he's my adoptive father, so. Um, so yeah, that's— I think I'll stop there for now. I'll probably tell more stories here and there about things that I've done and places I've been and all the craziness that my life has done. I'm actually writing a book right now, and, um, I'm about halfway through editing right now. It's not a super long book. It's a story about my life since meeting my husband. And we met, we actually met in 2000, let me think. We met, we met during 2000. And we met in person just before the New Year 2001. And then we ended up getting married 2002. But it's, it's a long, long process that I've been through. And I've learned a lot about what I've been through. And I want to help other moms who— because I feel like a lot of time has been not wasted, but I've got a lot of shortcuts that could help, especially when it comes to homeschooling and building an online business and playing with cats, even when you're allergic to them. So this one's Winky over here. Winky does one of the videos too. Gigi is the orange guy. He won't show up. Hahaha. Okay, that's it for now. I hope to see you again. Thanks. Bye.
