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How Two Teachers Earned 36 Years of Income With One Exit

Shane Sams is the Co-founder and CEO of Flipped Lifestyle, a firm that teaches people how to find financial freedom and gain control of their time by starting an online business membership using The Flipped Lifestyle Blueprint. Shane and his wife figured out how to make their entire living online, and now they help other people do the same. He is a blogger, information marketer, speaker, and host of the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. Before Flipped Lifestyle, Shane was a high school football coach and social studies teacher and created an elementary education business that sold for over $1 million.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

[03:31] Shane Sams shares his motivation for becoming an entrepreneur
[05:34] How Shane and his wife started Elementary Librarian and US History Teachers and quit their jobs
[10:20] The genesis of Flipped Lifestyle, what it offers, and how it generates income
[14:39] The process of negotiating the sale of Elementary Librarian
[17:02] Flipped Lifestyle’s ideal client profile — and Shane’s “life-work balance” philosophy
[23:21] Shane explains how the Flipped Lifestyle program is structured and how it functions as a community
[26:42] The business model that Flipped Lifestyle teaches
[30:46] The investment required to start an online membership business and what it takes to make it work

In this episode…

Are you tied down with a job that doesn’t provide the income you need to create the lifestyle you want? Would you like a business that frees up your time so you can spend it with your family while generating the income you need to achieve total financial freedom?

Shane Sams and his wife worked as full-time teachers, not making the money or having the flexibility they wanted. After being denied permission to leave work and tend to an emergency in his son’s life, Shane decided to make a change so something like this would never happen again. That’s when Shane and his wife went into business for themselves, eventually quitting their jobs. They were yielding high incomes without being chained to traditional employment. Figuring out a business model that could be replicated, they now help others overhaul their lives to create a better family-oriented and secure financial future.

In this episode of the Quiet Light Podcast, Joe Valley sits down with Shane Sams, Co-founder and CEO of Flipped Lifestyle, to discuss how they’ve flipped their lives and become family-oriented entrepreneurs. Shane shares his entrepreneurial journey, how he and his wife were able to quit their jobs and spend quality family time while achieving financial freedom, and the business model they use to help others do the same.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Sponsor for this episode

This episode brought to you by Quiet Light, a brokerage firm that wants to help you successfully sell your online business.

There is no wrong reason for selling your business. However, there is a right time and a right way. The team of leading entrepreneurs at Quiet Light wants to help you discover the right time and strategy for selling your business. They provide trustworthy advice, effective strategies, and honest valuations. So, your Quiet Light advisors aren’t your everyday brokers — they’re your partner and friend through every phase of the exit planning process.

If you’re new to the prospect of buying and selling, Quiet Light is here to support you. Their plethora of top-notch resources will provide everything you need to know about when and how to buy or sell an online business. Quiet Light offers high-quality videos, articles, podcasts, and guides to help you make the best decision for your online business.

Not sure what your business is really worth? No worries. Quiet Light offers a free valuation and marketplace-ready assessment on its website. That’s right—this quick, easy, and free valuation has no strings attached. Knowing the true value of your business has never been easier!

What are you waiting for? Quiet Light offers the best experience, strategies, and advice to make your exit successful. To learn more, go to quietlight.com, email [email protected], or call 800.746.5034 today.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:07

Hi folks, it’s the Quiet Light Podcast where we share relentlessly honest insights, actionable tips, and entrepreneurial stories that will help founders identify and reach their goals.

Joe Valley 0:32

Hey folks, Joe Valley here, welcome to another episode of the Quiet Light Podcast. Today’s guest is Shane Sams. He is a Quiet Light client. We’ve sold his business in 2016. He’s referred many clients over to us. He’s a former high school history teacher, former football coach, his wife was an educational elementary librarian. And they built a course to help other elementary librarians not have to work 12-hour days and they sold courses, teaching them curriculum and things of this nature. It took them about six to eight months before they were able to make more money, selling courses and programs and helping people in the history education field and elementary education field before they were able to quit their jobs and make more money on a monthly basis than they did teaching. And since then they’ve actually tell you what, Shane talks about. He sold his elementary education program or website for $800,000. And he said it would have taken me 36 years to make that much money as a history teacher. And I wouldn’t have had any money left because I was living paycheck to paycheck. It’s quite a success story. And now they own a company called Flipped Lifestyle where they, you know, they’re helping other people, not build businesses and flip them. But instead of work-life balance, it’s life-work balance. They’re helping people build businesses starting with less than $500 a month. And it’s really education-oriented businesses. And they’re very, very successful at it. It’s very family-focused. It’s all about lifestyle, first work second, focus on the family, not grinding it out, working 80 hours a week. It’s a fascinating story. His story is fascinating some of the things that you’re doing. They’ve had a lot of students that have built businesses and sold them through Quiet Light as well. Some you’ve heard on this podcast before. It just it’s a great lesson. If you have any inkling about starting a education program, whether it’s raising chickens in your backyard or teaching, football coaches, how to run defensive plays. There’s all sorts of ways to make money this way. So check it out. Here we go. Shane Sams from Flipped Lifestyle. Here we go. Shane, welcome to the Quiet Light Podcast. How are you man?

Shane Sams 2:57

Joe, I’ve been looking forward to this. Oh, man, I love you guys. So glad to be here. Dude.

Joe Valley 3:01

We’ve been around a while, before we hit record, you’re talking about working with Jason and selling your business. You’re helping other people build businesses. You’re referring them to us. We should have you on our website right on in terms of about us. You should be there. Is that right?

Shane Sams 3:17

I should be right there. And I’ll just tell him everybody just come here and it’ll be okay. Everything will work out okay. When you end up at Quiet Light.

Joe Valley 3:23

Everything will be okay. That’s right. That’s right. For those listening that don’t know who you are, can you give us a little background? what your story is that kind of stuff?

Shane Sams 3:31

Sure, man. My name is Shane Sams born and raised and remained today in southeast Kentucky. I actually used to be a school teacher I wasn’t an entrepreneur wasn’t a business owner wasn’t a coach. I used to be a schoolteacher. And dude, probably I would still be a school teacher, teaching US history and coaching football, if something crazy had not happened in my life. One day, I actually found out that my son was being violently mistreated at his daycare center. There was some clues that had revealed themselves but I didn’t have the whole story. And I needed the day off work so that I could go investigate the situation. But the problem was the day had already started. And in the district I was in it was almost impossible to get a sub when that happened. But I actually got my son out of this place, went and told my boss I said, hey, I need to get the day off work. I know there’s not any subs, whatever. Can you go watch my classroom till we sort this out? And my boss actually said to me, if your son’s not in immediate danger right now, I can’t help you know your son needs you. But your job needs you to and you’re gonna have to handle your personal problems after work.

Joe Valley 4:38

Easy to sing. Goodbye, right?

Shane Sams 4:40

Goodbye. Yep, I got up and I said, you know, thank God, I didn’t lose my job. But I did walk out that day because that was what I would have been half my income, right, like gone in a moment. But I did. I left and I made a promise to myself that day that I would never work for anybody. Again, I would find a way to control our own income, write my own checks. And that way I would never have to ask for permission to be there for my family. Went through a lot of failures and starts and stops and didn’t know anything about online business and I heard about online business one day on a podcast. It was a podcast called the Smart Passive Income Podcast, Pat Flynn. Yeah, Pat’s a great guy. He’s become a great coach, mentor me. Still, my coach to this day is my CEO coach. And, and I was just listening to his story about how he took knowledge inside his head, put it out in the world and like a PDF, and people paid him to email them this PDF, and it was called online business. So me and my wife, we go down this rabbit hole of looking up online business, how does it work? What can we do, and we settled in on really like focusing on what we were good at, which was teaching. And my wife started a business. She was also an educator, she was a librarian, she was an elementary school librarian. And people may not know this, but librarians have to teach like six classes a day. And every class is a different age group. So every class is a different prep for a different lesson. And I’m a history teacher, I’m teaching history four times a day, it doesn’t matter. It’s the same thing. I say the same words over and over again. But for Elementary Librarian, you got to spend an hour, two hours on every prep six a day, you could be spending 12 hours just to plan the lessons for one day. A lot of work, man. And we realized that like what if we could take make lesson plans, put the classroom on autopilot for the librarian and create bell-to-bell instructions, we could do it for them, and they could not have to plan the lessons they could just teach. So we started this company called Elementary Librarian it would later grow into we have another website called US History Teachers, we started cookie cutter in this process rinse and repeating it. But Elementary Librarian was the first one. And I only needed like $2,500 a month to replace my income. And Jocelyn made the same amount I did. So together we combined made $5,000 a month. So our theory was there’s 8 billion people on the planet. There’s hundreds of 1000s of these teachers and librarians if we could just get 100 people to pay us $50 a month, we would replace our income or we could quit our jobs and work from home. So the we started a podcast called the Elementary Librarian podcast. And Jocelyn got like a couple 100 people listening to this thing. And we rolled out our lesson plan idea we didn’t even have it made Joe it was pre-launched. We just wrote an outline of what we were going to create. And you know what man like 50 people bought it, we made $2,500 In that first email. In the end, it was unbelievable. We just freaked out because we like, gosh, we made money online. And so every month it kept growing and went from November was like 5000. July of the next year was $15,000 in a single month, which is like that’s only 300 people on the planet, right? So it wasn’t like a huge, huge…

Joe Valley 7:49

Huge, as a former teacher. That’s what you made in a year,

Shane Sams 7:54

Bro, we were making that I remember the first Christmas that we made $5,000 online, over five grand and we were making five grand. So we had doubled our income. And it was our first five-figure month. And my little girl was like, Daddy, can we go see Santa Claus this year? And I just looked at her and I was like, baby, he’s bringing the whole bag. We’re gonna go talk Santa Claus. I’m at work, right? And so. So then, in August of the next year, when we started our business, we made $36,000. In one month, it was our entire annual salary as a teacher, wow. And that’s when we were like, dude, I’m just going to come up, we’re going to quit our job. Let’s go. We launched that year to two other businesses. One was called cocheco. It was a football playbook company where we sold defensive playbooks, the specific defense, the high school coaches who were losing because it would help them win with less athletes. So that went really well our first launch made like seven grand on that one, on top of what Elementary Librarian was doing. Then we launched US History Teachers that comes out of the gate, we get a bunch of members in that. And we found this process that we could just repeat over and over and create knowledge-based businesses.

Joe Valley 9:01

Which one of those did you go with the same approach as the first one, which was, do the outline, see if there’s interest and buyers and then create the program?

Shane Sams 9:12

Yeah, yeah, we always created a little bit of content. Got a little bit of audience. Maybe I would go guest on a podcast or something just to get some people to know about it. Yeah. And then we pre-launched because Why make a giant product that’s not gonna sell it didn’t make any sense to us to do that. And also, nothing will light a fire to create your courses and trainings, like taking people’s money that for a course that doesn’t exist. Exactly. I was good, very motivating.

Joe Valley 9:39

Exactly. I had a guest on the podcast a few months ago. It was German. And he gave us this analogy and this plays right up, in terms of your rally and what you are as an entrepreneur, he said if you’ve got 100 Americans and 100 Germans, and they’re climbing to the highest peak of a mountain, the 99 Germans will get to the top. But the first one to the top will be the American. It’s because we just were just like, Okay, let’s go. And that’s the mindset. We don’t fully think it through. We don’t plan it out. Whereas German engineering, right, they’re all you know, he could find engineers.

Shane Sams 10:20

I’m a ready-fire aim guy. That’s ready, fire aim, baby. Yeah, man. So it was really good. We quit our jobs. We found a lot of freedom through that. And actually I was ready to like, ride off into the sunset, because we were creating passive income businesses. I mean, we were working maybe two to four hours a week on each business. It was not like we had to do a lot because I mean, basically to record a couple podcasts released some content, and people came in bought. And then one of our friends, her name was Lindsay, she asked, she was like, hey, you want to quit your jobs? Like, how did you do that? And we were telling her about online business. And we were showing her the companies we had created. And she was like, well do you think I could make money online? And we’re like, I guess, like, let us show you how she wanted to stay home and homeschool her kids. That was our goal. And she did a bunch of different things. And she went online, and she created some stuff. And you know what, she made enough money to quit her job. And she found this whole new avenue of life with online business and working at home and being able to homeschool their kids and her and her husband basically, were just like, wow, this really changed our life. And it was funny, we were going out to a mastermind with Pat Flynn out in San Diego. And we had this idea right after we helped Lindsay we’re like, I wonder if we could help other people because you know how this world is man. Like there’s all the Cardones and Tim Ferriss and Gary Vee and all these people that are like, these crazy things that they’re saying, and, and we were kind of like, we’re just a couple of kids from Kentucky man, we’re just like, we did this working full time and raising kids. I wasn’t trying to make anybody $10 million. I just wanted you to replace your income and have choices. So like, we thought, could we help other people and we went out and talked to Pat about it. And he really helped us come up with the idea for Flipped Lifestyle, our vibe, like how we help people like, we were so worried when we launched this business that people would judge us because of our accents and stuff and all that, am I expert enough kind of nonsense that we all go through. And but he really helped us do that. And we launched Flipped Lifestyle, and it just out of the gate blew up, man, we have like 120 people join our membership, like the very first webinar we ever did.

Joe Valley 12:31

And you were working four hours a week anymore. It sounds like Flippped Lifestyle is not a passive income stream, or am I dead wrong?

Shane Sams 12:39

No, no, it’s, well, it’s kind of I mean, I’ve got a big team now. So I’m not doing everything. I mean, I try to keep all my workload below 20 hours if I can. That’s my goal. I usually work between 10 and three. And it was like we take the kids like this morning, I took the kids to school me and Jocelyn went for a walk or up to coffee at the coffee shop, came here to talk to you, I got a few more things to do. I’ll pick the kids up at three o’clock. But it’s definitely not. But I actually learned something through Flippped Lifestyle and other companies. I got really bored when we were doing the four-hour workweek kind of stuff. I mean, I took Tim Ferriss to heart broke, and I said I’m gonna do this. And I got bored and there was no purpose, there was nothing in it. And I realized that like, life is more about finding the thing you want to work 40 hours on, not about removing work, I think the goal of removing work comes from everyone hates their job, and they’re just trapped. So you think that the four-hour workweek is what you want. But now you want somebody with purpose and mission and drive. It’s like I’m obsessed with it, I can’t stop thinking about it. And that’s what Flipped Lifestyle kind of became to us. Now, what’s funny is how he came to you guys was when Flippped Lifestyle took off. We were about, I don’t know, five years out of our jobs. And Jocelyn wasn’t a librarian anymore. I wasn’t a football coach anymore. I wasn’t a history teacher anymore. And we were like, we should go all in on this thing that’s bringing purpose and scale to our life. We should probably do something else. But I don’t want these to die. These are beautiful things that we’ve created. And that’s when we decided to look to sell elementarylibrarian.com It was the biggest of the three companies at the time. And we want to do invest that forward into our new business venture. So I think I swear I think we just found you guys like out of a blog article or a podcast or something. And the first person we call it was Jason. Yeah, man.

Joe Valley 14:29

For those that don’t know, Jason was my broker as well back in 2010 when I sold my business. So how long ago was it that you sold Elementary Librarian?

Shane Sams 14:39

I think we started the process in 2016. We came and Jason coached us up you guys were great on like, you need to do XYZ to make it really sellable and get your maximum value out of it. So we did a few of those things. We started negotiating in like 2017, I think, which I have a hilarious story about that. I’ll tell you about it. The when we were doing that, and it was really fast. I mean, we went through all the interview processes, had some great offers, talked it through if he was going to take care of the business, we thought the best and really super smooth man. So you had multiple authors, you got to choose your buyer. Well, yeah, we did, we actually turned it was funny because so we were asking 1.1 million is what we really wanted to get out of it, right. And the contract was written that way. It was like, We got 800,000 down. And there was a buyout for two or three years or something. You know, it goes through when you structure a deal that for a couple of teachers, not bad for a couple school, it would have taken me 36 years to make that much money. told the story before I’ve done them that, yes, 36 years, and I wouldn’t have had any left because I was living paycheck to paycheck. But that it was funny, but one of the first guys we got on, I’ll keep it a little vague. But like, it was like a guy from another country and had this really thick accent. And he was telling us all these crazy stories about like, how he had started amusement parks and all this stuff. And it was so funny, because I’m a guy from Kentucky that was literally calling football plays on the top of a high school press box. And now I’m negotiating with this boring guy on how to buy website. And he offered cash, he offered cash for it. And then like we had, we had like three or four really good offers. And it was just such an interesting process to go through that situation and hear different, how it all works. But then we can’t pay I’m with this company that was just a great company that they kind of collected education websites, and really liked what we did. It was very unique. And they said, yeah, but still running today. I think that they resold it, I think that that’s what they do. They come in, they fix it up, they make it and I think they resold it. And now there’s a company it’s still there that was still running and still going strong man. But I think another company owns it now.

Joe Valley 16:48

So with Flipped Lifestyle, like what type of people are you helping? I mean, are they people that are trying to leave the I want to say corporate world or blue collar world and do this as a side hustle first or what’s typical client?

Shane Sams 17:02

It get started out, really being families who were working full time with school-aged kids, that’s kind of who we were. But our message really resonates with a whole lot of people, especially as we’ve gotten more bonafides jobs in the entrepreneur world. And like I speak now in stages, I was I did la I was in LA that a few weeks ago talking to 9000 people. So as our profile elevated, more people came. But I would say the majority of people are people who are sick of the hustle culture entrepreneurs to people telling you, you got to work 80 hours a week. And if you’re not doing that you’re not a good business owner and all this stuff. It’s definitely people who want freedom, I would say our general demographic is probably like 30 to 60 I’d say most people are working jobs, they want to leave their jobs, we have a lot of side hustle people, a lot of entrepreneurs now are realizing even if you’re in a real-world business, you need online revenue if you’re going to survive in this current economy. So we do a lot of taking people who already have businesses and adding on membership revenue, where they got recurring revenue, they can predict six months in advance kind of stuff like that. People who are really family focused, we have a really family-focused, one of my tag lines is we don’t have it’s not work-life balance, it’s life work balance, we go life First, Flipped Lifestyles, the concept is we want to do everything opposite of what we were taught growing up. So the world says you got to have one person write you a check. Now I say you get 1000 people to pay you $50 a month, the world says work comes first and work-life balance, we flip it upside down and we say lifework balance. So we really focus on structuring time, time is a big thing we coach on of how to build a business where you can go pick your kid up off the school bus, this is really good, man.

Joe Valley 18:46

This is why you and Jason got along. So well. Jason is so efficient with his time. I think he makes more per hour than anybody I’ve ever met. Well, not quite any Well No, I haven’t met any.

Shane Sams 18:59

It’s the only resource you can’t get back and I think that’s what people miss is like money is an exchange of energy. That’s really what money is money is a physical representation of time spent. And like when we make money it’s not just the bias things it’s the bias time like that’s what we want that’s why like our company we actually we have a bunch of employees but like it’s you know full time here’s 35 hours that’s it show that that extra five get out of here you don’t want that well we got to figure something out where those people are living the Flipped Lifestyle just like me and Jocelyn are so we eat it breathe it sleep it I mean we drink our own Kool-Aid around here, man.

Joe Valley 19:37

That’s great. That’s great. And it brings in people that are like-minded as your students, I guess, right? They’re called students. Look, I stopped using it as much, you know, grinding it out as an entrepreneur since 1997. And it’s exhausting, right? You wake up in the middle of the night thinking about what you got to do and who you’re responsible for that kind of stuff and flipping?

Shane Sams 20:06

It’s too much for humans. Like one of the things I learned. And there’s somebody out there is like, No, man, you can’t do that. Like, when I have an appointment, it’s for an hour, even if it’s 15 minutes, because like, I can’t have like right now like me, and you’re doing this podcast my team knows don’t ever schedule back to back podcast. Because there’s only so much we’re made and really supposed to do. I can do it. Like I could do 10 back-to-back podcasts in a day. But then like, am I showing up for myself? In my personal life? Am I showing up for my spouse? Am I showing up for my kids? I take a day off anytime I go on a speaking trip the day after, because I want to be there for my kids. I never take red eyes. I know people are freaking out about getting red eyes and all that stuff. And I’m like, no, man, because when I show up, I’m going to be tired. I’m just gonna get up in the morning and have a coffee and fly home. And at three o’clock, I’ll see my kids. And I’ll actually, they’re not three of them because they’re so blurry because I’m tired from the red eye. Yeah, I’m big on that. Dude.

Joe Valley 21:09

I’ll agree with that. Although, the first time it took a ride, I slept like a baby. And I thought this is awesome. I’m always going to do this.

Shane Sams 21:15

I caught the bulkhead bro. The first time I ever did one, I was like, oh, this is terrible.

Joe Valley 21:23

The next time I slide into the seat, the guy next to me says something that I said it’s not an issue. I’m going to sleep all night. I didn’t sleep awake. And he let me know that I didn’t sleep away. He was like, yeah, he didn’t really, he’s kind of cocky about it. But I haven’t taken a ride. I said so I feel you there.

Shane Sams 21:40

Yeah, bro. Get up and get home dude. So that’s, that’s who we are draw you in. And like we’re really big on culture with our brand. Like you said something about drawing like-minded people. We really do draw a lot of like-minded people we draw from all walks of life. But like, I learned something a couple years ago, one of the things we did with the money from the sale is we started hiring people. And I made some mistakes of hiring. And I realized like, why don’t I just hire my successful students. And now my entire team is basically I think 90% of my team is built on people who went through our program and launched a business and made money. And so my director of fulfillment, his name’s Steven Faust, he’s got an awesome business where he helps noncommissioned officers get promotions in the military, it’s a really cool little side business. He got to that business to six figures working two hours a week. And he sent me an email and said, I’m bored. Can I come work with you. And he joined my team, because his business was only a couple hours a week. And I was like, oh, I’m onto something here. I just started reaching out to everybody that looked bored, because their business was well, and I just hired them. And now they’re like my coaches and my directors. And they just, it’s amazing. That’s brilliant team.

Joe Valley 22:54

It’s kind of the model here. Everybody acquired lights built, bought and sold their own online business and now help others as well. So yeah, having people that have gone through your programming course makes a whole lot of sense. Like, tell me about the program, you know, pulled up the site, I’m looking at some of the things here, you’ve got a podcast, you’ve got a whole bunch of different stuff. If I resigned from Quiet Light, and I want to start my own business ain’t going to happen, by the way, what am I gonna learn? What am I going to do? Where do I start?

Shane Sams 23:21

I’m very convincing, Joe. I’m very convincing. I might have you here in about five minutes. Well, we can at least start stop and you can sell them over and over. Yeah, so what happens is, you know, we have a free podcast, I come out every Tuesday, we have a big podcast, we’re actually coach people on air, go to YouTube channels, all the general marketing channels to get audience and things like that. If you join our program, you go into a course that we call the Flipped Lifestyle Blueprint. So this is the exact step-by-step process that me and Jocelyn used to start all of our businesses that all of our successful students are starting their businesses, and it’s really this like, ever-evolving, ever-growing thing. It started out with like eight to 10 courses. And just basically, over the last few years, I think we’ve recorded like the answers to over 2000 questions we’ve got when anyone asks for a product, if it’s not there, we create it. And we just built this amazing step by step thing where it’s like, start here, do this video, take action now do the next video. But the heartbeat of what we do is called the Flipped Lifestyle community. Joss and I realized that our journey was hard. Because we were alone. In Kentucky, there are no online entrepreneurs. So we actually have a community of 1000s of online entrepreneurs who are meeting every single week. We have an online forum. But we also have 15 live calls that happen every week. You can come to one you can come to come in as many as you want. But they’re all different themes. Like we have women’s calls, men’s calls. And basically you’ve created a community where you’re never alone. There’s always somebody to talk business with 24 hours a day, seven days a week in our community. So you got to have it like we actually call it the community was the time we don’t really call it the program because the community is what makes the magic happen. The process is the process to follow the process. But the accountability comes from your community. And then we have one on one coaching all of my coaches are people who have built full-time incomes online with our program, I think two of the four or six-figure entrepreneurs have themselves and that’s designed for that one-on-one help to guide you through the blueprint. So you can sit down one on one and talk to people. Everything’s based on that. And then I do Q&A, like, once a month, I’ll do an all call or I’ll come in and I’ll do a Q&A as well. And then there’s a VIP group that you can work with me too. So the whole process is basically just immersive, like become a part of this community. Get inspired by the other people in the community. Like, we have hundreds of documented success stories. There’s people every week celebrating successes, launching podcast launching businesses, so it’s just this dynamo where people can come in and be a part of something bigger than themselves. We view it as a movement. And yeah, it just works. Man. Our stuff just works. Like if you if you do the blueprint, and you show up to things are going to happen. And our goal is to help 100,000 families do what we did say worried about. They were somewhere between six to eight right now. I think 60,000, yeah. And our community like yeah.

Joe Valley 25:39

So, with, let’s say e-commerce tool there, you know, it’s a community for physical products. And then there’s specific things for Amazon specific things for content or SaaS, what is the most started type of business with a Flipped Lifestyle,

Shane Sams 26:42

We only teach? So education, style businesses, courses, coaching and communities. It’s very based on a lot of our mentalities like, our mentality coming out was we wanted something low capital risk, we didn’t want to have to invest 10s of 1000s of dollars into something. So e-commerce was rolled out. We wanted to create stable, predictable revenue, because we wanted to paycheck right from coming out of it, we want to be like a one-hit wonder. So its monthly subscriptions. That’s what we teach. Yeah, people do. Like there is a value ladder like we teach, like there is a monthly subscription is the core offer. But then, like we teach people how to offer high ticket coaching on top of that, to help the 20% of the people that want that core sales are dropped down. So we teach people how to do that. But it’s very much work once get paid forever, on your core style. Create evergreen content when you can. The community build communities, we teach people how to build like-minded communities, like you may teach people. Like I got a guy named Kenny Triano, and he lives out in San Diego. And he came into our community. And he was like, guys, I love chickens. And I’m like, you love chickens? He goes, Yeah, I love chickens. Man, I raised chickens in my backyard. And I’m in San Diego, and I consider myself one of the world’s leading experts on breeding backyard chickens. And I want to start a membership for other people who raise backyard chickens, do you think I can make money off the chickens? And I was like, well, I’m from Kentucky, and Colonel Sanders made a whole lot of money eating chickens. So I bet you can make some money raising chickens. And so let’s figure it out. So he starts a podcast, just like we teach a podcast, a membership community where other backyard chicken farmers can come together. And dudes making like 110 $120,000 a year right now just not a chicken membership. So it’s just that’s the concept is take what you already love you already learned you’ve already lived through, figure out how your story can be your marketing, we teach people how to tell their story, look back behind you, for people who are two or three chapters behind in the journey, okay? And go help them go help as many of them as you can listen, there’s 8 billion people on the planet, you need 200 of them to pay $100 a month and you’re making ridiculous amounts of money. So go do that. That’s all you got to do. So everything’s based on that it’s pulling those ideas out of people. And then teaching them how to turn it into a membership product. And then teaching them how to get recurring revenue. Start building it brick by brick, once you get 100 people paying you every month, add some high ticket so you can really blow the ceiling off of the revenue. And you’re off to the races. And you don’t have to think about…

Joe Valley 26:49

It’s funny we help people exit businesses, obviously. But we’ve had Walker on the podcast, who is one of our advisors who wrote Buy Then Build his approach is that, it’s much less risky to buy a business than it is to build a business. Whereas Amanda, who’s been around as long as I have she’s all about starting them. She’d rather start one versus buy one. I’ve bought one it didn’t work out so well. I started all of my businesses in the past because I was golfing with Uncle Walter at one point and he was brokering like Lumberyard for half a million bucks or something like that. I’m thinking to myself, seriously for 50 Grand I can really put my heart and soul and, and whatever into this other business and make a whole lot more and more money than that guy that’s gonna buy that lumberyard and with much more flexibility. But that was 50 grand and I had it and I had it to lose. How much does you know a typical student of yours come to the table with what kind of risk? Are we talking about financial risk in terms of getting started.

Shane Sams 30:18

Now besides what we charge for coat, like for example, like I would say for 500 bucks a month, you can start a really successful online business. It cost me and Jocelyn price about 1000 back in the day, but like now, like for example, the website that you know, marketing all that, like you can get a product like Kajabi, which is a platform where you can build your website, you can do your email marketing, you can build sales funnels, you can manage your contacts, that’s 150 bucks a month.

Joe Valley 30:44

Kajabi. spell that for me,

Shane Sams 30:46

Kajabi got it. Okay. Yep, yep. So that’s the platform that we recommend to all of our students. We are a Kajabi partner, by the way, that like we it’s the best platform we can find that does everything that everyone needs. So 150 bucks a month, you’re off to the races. I mean, you’re ready to go. Now it’s just a matter of, can you consistently create content? Can you be prolific with social media and just post every day? And like, can you be relentless, like when you get a customer really serve them and get them results, because if you get three or four testimonials, you can make a million dollars, because that’s a social proof that your thing works more than once. So like other than that, man, I mean, you might have like a couple other tools online, of course, if you want to join our program or something like that, if you join anything like that, there’s going to be monthly cost that anywhere from 50 to 200 bucks a month, depending on what you’re doing. So less than 500 bucks, man, you can go out there. So it’s a really low-risk opportunity. And it also lets people equip their passion and their work and their elbow grease a little bit better than other things. And you don’t have to order the freakin shipping container from China full of dolls that you have to sell on Amazon or anything like that. There’s no basements full of inventory, there’s no equity that anyone else has, it’s literally just like, here’s your thing, here’s your story, put it out to the world, like me and you are doing right now, and let the algorithms take care of the rest. If you want put ads into it, like we have some people that have a little extra money, so they might spend 500 or 1000 bucks on ads. So now when you look at it in comparison to any other business, it’s you can’t start a business anywhere else. 500 bucks. You just can’t do it.

Joe Valley 32:23

No, no, unless you got to mow lawns for a living.

Shane Sams 32:25

Yeah, the history site that we run a lot of tape at the elementary like brand new expenses on that business, when we sold it, we’re probably like two grand a month. Right? And that business sold for over a million dollars.

Joe Valley 32:39

No I wonder you had multiple hours. And that’s the beautiful thing about this, the margins are amazing. Whereas you know, if you’re selling physical products, if you’re a 20%, you’re doing really, really well. Here, it’s probably flipped

Shane Sams 32:52

Our goal is somewhere settle out between 50 and 60% profit because what I found was we can do 80%. I mean, we can easily do that if we want to, but like, you want to hire employees, you want to have some people to take some of the workload off of you, eventually you want to run ads, you want to do marketing, maybe you do some affiliates, and you give people a cut. Right? So we found like a really beautiful place to be is try to be somewhere between 50 and 60% margins. If you’re making 100 grand, you’re keeping 60 of it. That’s amazing, right? It’s great. So it’s like go out there and do that. That’s what that’s how we teach it.

Joe Valley 33:27

I like it. I like it. For those out there that are thinking about buying it online business. I know you’re looking at Quiet Light’s Listings keep looking. But go to Flipped Lifestyle as well. Right flippedlifestyle.com? Is that it Shane?

Shane Sams 33:39

Yep, flippedlifestyle.com. And actually, if you want, if they go to flippedlifestyle.com/quiet what I’ll do is I’ll put some resources there like one I’ll put my podcast with Jason to talk about the process of me selling my business. We’ve actually had you guys sell some of our students businesses as well. So I can drop a couple podcasts there if people want to listen about how their journey about selling their business as well, too. And I’ve actually also got a little training that I do about selling our business and what to do after you sell your business. So you don’t end up like one of those lottery ticket winners. You know what I mean? So I got a ton of resources for everybody out there that’s looking to sell their business and anything like that, man. I recommend you guys too, this is a shameless plug. I’m not being paid to do this. Like I guess we’ve been together now. I mean, we’ve been working with your guys team since 2016. And it’s just always so smooth and so fun. And it’s the easiest recommendation I give on any monthly basis is to check you guys out if people are looking to sell.

Joe Valley 34:43

That’s awesome. I appreciate it. I think everybody that is building or buying or selling a business check out flippedlifestyle.com sounds like you can learn an awful lot especially if you’re in the SaaS or physical product business and you want to look at some recurring revenues that are more educational oriented. Shane appreciate your time man. Look forward to continuing working with you over the next few years.

Shane Sams 35:05

Thanks, Joe. Appreciate you man.

Outro 35:08

Today’s podcast was produced by Rise25 and the Quiet Light content team. If you have a suggestion for a future podcast subject or guest, email us at [email protected]. Be sure to follow us on YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram and subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next week.