PP 042: Identifying Your Entrepreneurial Focus, Passion and Priorities with Billy Murphy

Billy and I chat about his journey as an entrepreneur and the importance of knowing your focus, passion and immediate priorities as you are growing your business..

Listen as @BillyMurph and @thekimsutton chat about the importance of knowing your focus, passion and immediate priorities as you are growing your business. https://thekimsutton.com/pp042/ #positiveproductivity #podcast #smallbizClick To Tweet

Resources

Todd Herman
Dream Life
How to Achieve Goals
The One Thing

Episode Transcription

KIM: Welcome back to another episode of Positive Productivity! This is your host, Kim Sutton, and today I am thrilled to have Billy Murphy from ForeverJobless.com with us. Welcome, Billy.

BILLY MURPHY: Thanks for having me.

KIM: Oh, I’m so thrilled to have you here. Listeners, I was introduced to Billy – not directly, not like this – a few months ago through a podcast that I was listening to, and absolutely loved your story, Billy.

So I am going to ask that you share a little bit about your entrepreneurial journey with the listeners, and more about what you are doing now.

BILLY MURPHY: Sure. So, I guess – I’ve always kind of been entrepreneurial ever since I was a kid. But I’ll start, I guess from – I was a professional poker player after college, so I played poker professionally for about four years. I didn’t want to do it forever, so I decided to start a poker company, and the goal had always been to work for myself, and invest, and start businesses.

So the next step after poker was to invest some of the poker earnings in starting a poker company. So I started a poker company, and then maybe two years later, branched off into e-commerce stores. So I probably had about 20 small-niche e-commerce stores. And then somewhere in the middle there, probably either right before or right after the e-commerce stores, started Forever Jobless.

And just kind of started sharing the stories, decisions, I was making – why did I buy know a certain store, why did I sell a certain product, why I didn’t get into a specific niche, how was I marketing, and that kind of stuff. And that’s where Forever Jobless kind of came about: I just enjoyed sharing the adventures of being an entrepreneur, and I thought I could help other people go through the same journey.

Because I try and look at things from a pretty analytical, logical standpoint. And I was sending articles to friends – most people don’t know this, I was actually – friends would ask me business questions. And I would write them huge – if you’ve read my posts, you know that I tend to write really, really long content – and I’d send friends these basically blog posts, but I didn’t have a blog. And so finally I decided, why don’t I put all these e-mails that I’m sending friends – why don’t I start turning future ones into blog posts?

And so I started Forever Jobless. I guess probably, maybe a couple of years later, launched the Forever Jobless podcasts as well. And so now, basically, I just got back from a year of traveling, where I was just traveling around writing, and so really haven’t had a big business focus this last year, just kind of traveling. But yeah, starting to ramp up Forever Jobless, probably Quarter 1 this year coming up, and working on the Incubator.

The Incubator is basically, we help people start profitable businesses. And so we’ll take a group – the group size is 36 – so we take 36 people and basically help the launch companies from scratch. So we help them find the idea, we help them figure out how to market it, we show them how to do due diligence on competitors, and then we basically look at their what their goal is. And we make sure that the business that they’re thinking about starting matches up with their goal.

And that ties into what we’re – you know, you had mentioned before – the “Dream Life” article, very related. Because a lot of people don’t match up their “dream life”, so to speak, with whatever venture they’re pursuing, and they don’t match up, and obviously it causes problems. Either they’re making – they’re working too hard to make more money than they need, or they’re in an opportunity that is not going to make them enough money for the life they want.

So yeah, most of my time right now is, now that I’m done traveling, for a little while is probably going to be writing content for Forever Jobless, and just helping people start businesses.

KIM: Oh, I love that. Where were you traveling?

BILLY MURPHY: I was all over. So I started in Columbia, and then I went to Bali, and then I did South Africa, and then I hung out for a while. My parents have a summer home on the East Coast, and so I hung out a while there as well.

KIM: That’s incredible. I would love the “digital nomad lifestyle”. However, I would need to send my kids to you for a bit so I could make it possible!

I find it very interesting that you’re helping people through the incubator, how you are, and I am curious – how much their passion plays into finding the opportunity that’s going to work for them. Because so many entrepreneurs that I’ve come in contact with know that they want to start a business, but they really don’t know what they’re passionate about before they do. And they look at it from the standpoint of money, and not about what they really want to be doing. Is that something that address in the incubator?

BILLY MURPHY: Yeah, quite a bit actually. In the early stages, that’s something we talk about a lot, because there’s – I think that people do often view “profit” and “passion” a little bit incorrectly. And by that, I mean, usually people are basically all-in on, “I need to find something that makes the most money,” or they’re all-in on, “I need to find something that I’m passionate about.” And neither is optimal, in a lot of cases.

And what I mean by that is, if you just chased an opportunity that made the most money – which I think we’ve all probably fallen in the trap in some way before, we just do something because we do we think we can make money with it – if we don’t like it at all, then we’re likely to have fun. And the byproduct is, we’re probably not actually going to make the money, even if it was a great opportunity, because we don’t love it enough to get to the end result – which often involves, if you do something, being good enough at it to make the money.

Where a lot of people start out, and they don’t know about a certain subject, but if they like it enough, they can become good enough to get the end result of whatever that venture or activity would have brought them. But the way it works is often, someone just going after the money, and then they say, “This is hard, it doesn’t work.” And if they’re not passionate about it, they won’t often get to the end result that they wanted in the first place.

However, a lot of times people can be – if you’re passionate enough – I always tell people, “You either need to be passionate about what you’re doing, or passionate about the end result what you’re doing will bring you.” So, in other words, to reference the “dream life” again, it’s – if there’s something that you didn’t like doing, but you wanted it a certain life, and you knew that a certain route could get you there.

Now if you’re so passionate about that life that you wanted, or that thing you wanted, or basically just the result, it would probably inspire you to go through the hard parts to get to the end to where you would create the result that you wanted, even though you weren’t necessarily passionate about what you’re doing. In other words, for example, let’s say there was a task that someone wanted you to do, and they said, “I’ll pay you $1,000 an hour.” Even if you didn’t like the task, there’s probably quite a few things that could potentially change your life if you started working for $1,000 hours an hour.

So you might be passionate enough about, “Okay, I’m going to save up an extra thousand dollars, and I’m passionate about – I’ll be able to… whatever it is: buy a new car, or go on vacation with my family, etc. etc.” Whatever it is to the person doing it. So I don’t think working for money is bad – if you have an end result that you’re passionate enough about.

On the flip side, I don’t think it’s bad to work on an opportunity where it’s not necessarily the most profitable, but if you’re passionate enough about it, number one: You’re going to like it the whole time. But number two, often what happens is you’ll get significantly better than any of the competitors in the market because of the fact that you like it so much more than them.

So basically, they’re not going to be able to compete with you long-term because you like it so much more. They’re doing it for the money, you’re doing it because you actually enjoy it. And so what actually ends up happening a lot of times is, the people that just like it more than others stick it out longer, become better. And a couple of years into the business, or blogging, or podcasting, or anything else – they actually have significantly better results than they expected because of the fact they liked it so much.

KIM: That is so powerful. And that is actually a struggle that I have experienced myself, in this past year, was transforming – or transitioning, I should say – from doing what was making money to what I am truly passionate about. And I’m already seeing that the money is starting to flow for that, so I love that you brought that up.

I also found that when I was working on tasks that I wasn’t passionate about – like you were saying before – I would procrastinate on them. We didn’t say “procrastinate”, but I would procrastinate, the results would come back really not as good, clients wouldn’t be as happy, less referrals would come. And it was a vicious cycle of downward momentum, I would have to say.

BILLY MURPHY: Yeah, totally. No, I can relate. I think most things that remain on some form of “to-do list” for me are just the stuff that I don’t have any interest in doing. If I like them, I would’ve done them, but I wouldn’t have done them because they were on the to-do list. I would have just done them because I liked them, and it was something that I liked doing it.

Actually, one of the things I do now is, I track all my tasks. Every week, I set basically the next week’s plan for the week. And I input the really important things into the week. “Monday, these couple things gotta get done. Tuesday, these couple things…” And then I’ll have kind of a pile of to-do lists that, if it doesn’t get done, it’s not important, but I try to get done if I can. And what I do over time is, I start looking at all the things I was doing. And then anything that I’m not enjoying doing, I try to completely eliminate from the list – either by stop doing that activity in general, if it’s not important enough, or outsource it as soon as possible.

And that way I’m working on things that either I’m passionate about, and that I really enjoy doing, or that I’m really good at it, and it would be hard to outsource. So in other words, nobody – if you’ve heard the term “unique ability” – unique ability of mine that you can’t just necessarily hire someone for, if that makes sense.

KIM: Oh, it absolutely makes sense. Billy, how do you track your to-do list items?

BILLY MURPHY: I’m very non-technical with it. Basically, I’ll have a list of however many things – and I don’t believe in having… I have a to-do list, but I don’t believe in trying to get them all done, necessarily. In theory, I would try to get them all done, but I basically – at the end of every week, I kind of have – take an hour or two, and go through everything I did the week before, go through everything, kind of my goals and what I’m trying achieve, look at what I think I should do the next week, plan it out.

And then, yeah – basically, I just do the best I can at doing as many of the important things as I can, and kind of disregarding the rest. I think a lot of people get distracted by – they do a lot of the little things really well, and then they forget the big things. But the big things are all that really matter when it comes to: Are you going to hit the goal or not?

So I’m probably pretty bad at getting a lot of the little things done, but usually pretty good at getting the big things done. And so I’ll take – literally, sometimes at least an hour or two – and just sit there thinking about what I need to do for the following week. And actually, something that’s helped me a lot is, every single week during that time, during the “hour or two” time, I’ll actually compose an email.

And I’ll write an e-mail to a friend of mine every single week for the last… probably almost two years now, and the e-mail basically documents, “Here’s what I did the last week, here’s what I’m doing the following week, here’s why I’m doing it.” And I often include, “Here’s why I think this is a good idea, or why I enjoy it, and why I’m not doing X, Y, or Z.” And it’s really helped clarify what I’m doing, why I’m doing it, and if it makes sense. Because I think it’s sometimes really easy to trick yourself into thinking, “Oh, I should just do this.”

But when I’ve found that the process of writing something – writing by itself helps – but writing something that someone else is going to read helps, because you’re not going to B.S. yourself into “tricking” yourself into doing something if you don’t really want to do it, or it’s not the right thing to do. So yeah, it’s just kind of – the hour or two of clarity really helps set the week for me.

KIM: Would you consider your friend to be an accountability partner, then?

BILLY MURPHY: Yeah, totally.

KIM: We were officially – I would have to say “introduced”, even though that’s not really the right word, because it was more like an “email coming with your name on it from Todd Herman”. And I went through Todd’s 90-Day Year program last year and loved part of the program where talks about the $10 activity versus the $1,000 activity.

And that’s been such a shift in my business, is getting those $10 dollar activities off my plate. And I think that’s very comparable to what you were talking about, with those big activities that really are your –

BILLY MURPHY: I know where you were going with it, yeah. And that’s – I think that’s the biggest reason why, if you ask a lot of people, that “I want to successful” is their big thing. But if you just looked at what they did that day, usually none of the time is spent on something that could make them successful. It’s usually done on the little things. whether it’s e-mail, or whether it’s commenting on something, or reading articles online, or meetings and coffees – and that kind of stuff.

And don’t get me wrong, some of that is okay some of the time. But I think a lot of people do it 100 times more than they should, where I think people – if you look at a “consumption versus a producer” mindset, I think a lot of people are not producing a lot of value. They’re basically looking at the value that someone else is doing, and they’re consuming it, and they’re looking at that as “productive”.

It’s good to consume valuable content and do some of those activities – but then they need to be put to use, or your time remains the same in terms of the value of time.

So we think about the value of time – someone that only acquires knowledge and doesn’t execute on it probably doesn’t improve their earning ability, for example, as much as they think – even though they’re busy all the time doing things that potentially made them smarter. And at the same time, they could be working 24 hours a day, but someone who’s only working on the right things for an hour a day is going to crush them at the same goal.

I think it’s just a matter of, “What are the big days?” And I’ve gotten comfortable over time, just – if I don’t do a lot of the things I was supposed to do that day, or that week, but I did the couple things that mattered? I’m okay. I go to bed feeling pretty good about the day.

When I mess up and I do a lot of little things, and I didn’t get the big things done, that’s when I go to sleep knowing that, “Ah, I really messed up, I didn’t get the thing that I was supposed to do done.”

Where I think most people focus on, “I did 17 things today,” where I can say, I did one thing today. Like, I haven’t done very much today yet. I think I did a call, and think I handled a couple e-mails I had to get back on, but that’s all I did. But they were important. They move things forward for me, where there was a lot of other tasks I could have done today that wouldn’t have moved anything forward, but would have would have made me feel busier and more productive. But it wouldn’t – it would have been tricking me into thinking I was doing something that moved the needle.

KIM: Oh, absolutely. That is so important to know, and I’ve been stuck in that “busy track” versus the “productive track”. And then weeks go by, and months go by – and I’m still on the same spot as I was in when I started, and scratching my head as to why things haven’t improved, why the situation hasn’t improved.

Listeners, I want you to know that you can find all the show notes at TheKimSutton.com/PP042. The link to Billy’s “Dream Life” article – as well as another article I want to talk about briefly, if you don’t mind, Billy: “How to Achieve Goals“. Those will both be in, but you should definitely go take a look at ForeverJobless.com because these are just two articles out of many that will definitely be beneficial and not waste of time. It will be a productive use of time if you go over, not just keeping you busy. Is that fair, Billy?

BILLY MURPHY: Yeah, totally.

KIM: Is that what you were just talking about? Rather than being busy, these will definitely be a productive use of time.

BILLY MURPHY: Totally. I think if people implement the things that are in them, I think they’ll be very helpful.

KIM: In the “How to Achieve Goals” article, one of the biggest points that I think you make is how people – including myself – make so many goals for themselves. And rather than accomplishing one or two, they really don’t accomplish any. Because they’re trying to shoot multiple targets instead of one, and often, they miss them all. Is this something that – I do believe you addressed it in the article – but was this something that you yourself experienced?

BILLY MURPHY: 100%. And a lot of the things I write on, it’s because I’ve struggle with them so much that, I find it makes such an important topic to cover. Because I have the “shiny object syndrome” as much as anybody. I mean, that’s one of the things that – with being an entrepreneur, you see so many opportunities. There’s so many things I see that I could do, and then I realize, if I really try to do a lot of these things, that I’m going to be successful in none of them, which happens a lot.

And over the last… however many years, I’ve gotten better at really trying to dial back and say, “I’m not going to do these ten things. I’m going to do – try and start with this one, and scale from there.” And so whether it’s been – I’ve done a range of things, whether it’s… I’ll take short, focused bursts of time.

And basically when it was me launching the podcast, that’s really the only thing I did every day for a couple month period. That’s what I did. I had a certain goal for that, and then I did that, and hit the goal. I had fitness goals – the same thing. I said, “I’m not going to do anything for the day until I go to the gym, and these are all the meals I’m eating. I don’t eat anything else.”

And then like you hit that goal, and it’s not a surprise, because you just – that was the thing. Then you can still do other things the rest of the day, but you must do the most important thing before anything else. There’s a good book talks about this – “The One Thing” is a good book that talks about that quite a bit. But yeah, and then writing – the same thing, the same things happen.

I just, when I make something a priority goal, I do it first thing in the morning, and I don’t do anything else. I don’t worry about what’s on the to-do list, or if I have something going on later. It doesn’t matter. The first X amount of hours per day is dedicated towards making sure I get the thing that will help me get my goal done. And so that’s helped a lot.

And I think that the other thing that helped a lot that – I guess I’ve done this for quite a while, but I think most people miss the mark on is: “What is the result you want?” And work backwards from that. I think a lot people set goals in a very general way – which it’s almost not a goal, it’s a dream. They don’t have a process that’s going to get them to the end result.

So an easy example is fitness, right? So just because there are fewer variables – so if you said, “I want to be in X shape,” whether it’s body fat percentage, or whether it’s pounds and losing a certain amount of weight, gain a certain amount of weight, muscle weight – all someone would have to do is figure, “Okay, well what are the specific meals I would have to eat to do this? What is the specific exercise that I have to do?” And obviously, you can get feedback like that from a trainer, a nutritionist.

And then, “Okay, how long do I have to do that for?” And then just do that on a daily basis, and you can guarantee the achievement of a lot of your goals that way. And obviously, as you get into business areas, there’s – the variables expander. There’s more variables, there’s more types of marketing you can do, there’s more – there’s so many other things. But also, a lot of times, they act as distraction, because there is so many other things you can do.

But you know, if you just figured out, “What is one thing – what is one marketing channel that I can just dominate? Let me go focus on that for a while.” And I tried that with, for example, Instagram. I set the same little 30-day or 90-day goal and built a very large Instagram following doing that. And I think, and now we have 100,000 Instagram followers – and it was just from setting a “micro-burst” of time, where that’s the only thing I concentrated on.

And I think most people in other things set very long goals. And basically, they’re not goals, they’re dreams. “In five years, I want to do this. In 10 years, I want to do this.” And there’s not – they’re not reverse engineering how they would get there, they’re just stating something they would like to have, which doesn’t really-

KIM: How far out do you plan, Billy?

BILLY MURPHY: So I usually – the longest I’ll go is a year, but I don’t really… I don’t set a “year plan”. Usually what I do is – and it’s probably very similar to Todd, I’ve heard quite a bit from Todd on this stuff, is that often I’ll do like a 90-day or even a 30-day challenge, where, “Okay, this is the result I want in 90 days, or 30 days – and this is a daily activity that I’ll have to do, to do that.”

So for example, let’s say I set a 90-day goal. I’m figuring out the goal, my 90-day goal that I want to achieve – and basically, I’m setting weekly benchmarks, for example, that “Every week, I’m going to do a review and see if I’m on track for that 90-day goal, see if I’m on target, see – is there anything I need to adjust? Is there – do I need to be doing different marketing? Is this marketing not working? Does this marketing need to be scaled?”

I’m asking all the questions on a weekly basis, and then setting up the next-week plan and diving back in, knowing that if I just achieve these couple of things each day, that I’ll achieve my goal. And then you can always expand it – if you achieve the daily goal, you’re going to achieve the weekly goal. If you achieve the weekly goal, you’ll achieve the monthly goal. If you achieve the monthly goals, you achieve the yearly goal.

And I think most people don’t last that long, but part of the reason they don’t last that long is because they don’t set it up like that. They say, “I’m going to hit this. This is the goal I want to hit.” And then, by February, they don’t even remember what they set out to do.

KIM: That’s just like so many people setting their New Year’s resolutions. And I’m going to use your gym – or your body comparison – the gym memberships will magically increase as a result of New Year’s resolutions. But I believe I’ve read numerous times that by the third week in January, already participation and people showing up to gym has decreased so significantly, just because people don’t have that plan in action.

BILLY MURPHY: Yeah, big time. I actually hate going to the gym in January, it’s so crowded. And then by February I’m excited – because I’m always like, “Ooh, all the New Year’s resolution-ers left, so the gym’s back to normal.”

KIM: You should have a private room at the gym, just that they only open up for the New Year’s resolution-ers. And if they graduate that month, they can move on – coming from someone who has difficulty making it through the first month.

BILLY MURPHY: Well, it’s hard. And that’s why it’s – they talk about, everyone talks about habits, and how important habits are. But most of the time, achieving a goal is just, if you can just generate a habit around the task that would help you accomplish your goal.

And by doing that, it makes it easy. It makes accomplishing your goal relatively easy. And so if you can just set things up to make achieving the habit easier – whether it’s gym, for example, a lot of people use the example of: Just to put your shoes right by your bed and your gym clothes, so you get out of bed, you go to the gym first thing, or whether…

For me, for example, it was every Wednesday I set an appointment with a trainer, and I would get everything measured: my weight, my body fat, my workout tracked and all that. And then every two days a week, I would have somebody bring me meals – specific meals that I should be eating, and nothing else was in my fridge. And so those were the two things I did that – basically, it was very hard to fail, because I’d already set things that guaranteed a habit.

I couldn’t “accidentally” eat McDonald’s, because I would have to like leave the house and go out of my way to get something that I wasn’t supposed to be eating. All my food was already cooked and in my fridge that I was supposed to eat, and the trainer was expecting me every single Wednesday. So I think, a lot of times, you can make it easy – just by setting up a way to get the habit without even thinking about it.

KIM: Oh, absolutely. Plus, your investment – now, I’m not saying there’s not an investment for a gym membership – but your investment was stepped up just a little bit more by hiring the trainer, and by setting yourself up with the meal delivery. Going from there, I’d love to know: Were there any major investments that you made in your business that have helped you achieve really big goals?

BILLY MURPHY: Like financial investments?

KIM: Yeah.

BILLY MURPHY: I mean, just having the – being okay with pulling the trigger on investing. Like, for example, a lot of people wouldn’t have made the financial investments I would have to start companies, especially wouldn’t before I really had experience with it. But I knew “not taking the chance” means I fail by default, because I’m – the return I get is nothing.

And you lose all those snowball effect, too, where if you invest in yourself and you continually get better, you’re starting from a different point each time. So now each time I start a business, I have significantly higher upside, significantly better chance of succeeding because I’ve already done it so many times in the past. Where I can see the same exact opportunity as somebody else, but if they’ve never played the game and we get the same opportunity, it’s not going to be any surprise if I “win that game”, so to speak, because I’ve bet on myself in the past. And so I think just betting on myself consistently has helped – and obviously, you’ll win some and you’ll lose some.

But it’s given me – obviously, all my success, if I hadn’t made the investment – but I see people who are just as smart as me, and potentially just as driven, but they’re just not willing to bet on themselves, not willing to make the investment. So they lose all the upside of getting the rewards.

So I’ve made investments where, you make a five-figure investment, and you get paid 10x, 20x, 50x what you would’ve made by what you would have invested – where the same person who says, “You know what? I don’t want to risk losing $10-grand or $20-grand,” but they lose all the upside, and they can never succeed on a large level. Where, I think that’s the biggest thing is, pretty much every step of the way, I’m okay with investing money to scale something if I think I want the end result, and/or if I’m passionate about it.

Like Forever Jobless – I’ve always treated Forever Jobless kind of like a – it was just a passion project, just a side project. But in Quarter 1 of this year, 2017 coming up, I’m expecting to probably spend $100,000 on advertising just in Quarter 1, just to try and turn it into a real business.

Now, is that a risk? Would it be less risky to just write three blog posts and have pure profit margin, basically? Yes, that’s way less risky, but you also lose the upside. And so, yeah. Quarter 1, I’ll probably spend somewhere in the neighborhood of $100,000 just on advertising, just to test some things out and see how it goes. And a lot of that advertising, I haven’t done before. I haven’t done it with Forever Jobless. And so there’s risk involved, but there’s also lots of upside. I think people forget to factor in the upside.

KIM: How much of business failure do you think is associated with lack of confidence on the entrepreneur’s side?

BILLY MURPHY: How do you mean?

KIM: I’m going to use a personal example here: When I first started working with my business coach a year and a half ago, I had a lot of work coming in. And I mean, a lot of work – but I wasn’t charging enough for my services. And when he asked why I was charging what I was, it was because I wasn’t confident enough to ask for more.

And I believe a lot of people could be listening and thinking, “Oh, my gosh – $100,000 that’s such a large amount of money to be spending on advertising.” But when you have confidence in the services that you’re offering, and in the content and the deliverables, it’s easier to make big moves like that. And I feel like I’m answering a question for you, but you may very well have your own opinions – but I feel like a lot of entrepreneurs could get a lot further than they do, or did, if they just had a little bit more confidence in themselves.

BILLY MURPHY: Sure. Yeah, and I think confidence comes from just continually betting on yourself. And failure comes with it. But every time you fail, you also learn the downside isn’t really that that bad. You temporarily fail, and usually you learn lessons that you can carry to the next bet you make. So any time I fail, I don’t view it as, “Oh, I’ll never do that again.” I view it as, “Oh, this is great.” I’ll know where I failed, for next time, and increase my odds next time.

KIM: Oh, absolutely. I’m looking at your “My Story” page – (and again, listeners, you can find any of the resources and articles that I’m talking about and we’re talking about at: TheKimSutton.com/PP042) but I’m looking at your “My Story” page. And you share about – your first entrepreneurial venture was when you were 17, and you bought and sold sports’ cards collections.

Now, I do have to admit, I’m a little bit worried about my sons hearing the story – because their the room is messy enough already. But I love how you say that you snuck large quantities of cards into your house when your parents weren’t home, because they didn’t want you buying anymore.

Is the entrepreneurial spirit – or is it in the bloodline of your family?

BILLY MURPHY: No, I think was the first entrepreneur, at least in my immediate family.

KIM: So how do you – I just have to ask, how do your parents feel now, seeing where you have gone since the days of slinging newspapers when you were nine, and your business card – or your sports card – collection buying and selling. What are their thoughts?

BILLY MURPHY: They like it. They’re very supportive. And yeah, I think they enjoy watching kind of what I’ll do next, and following along with the adventures, but yeah they’ve been supportive. They’re not – they weren’t entrepreneurial themselves. But I think they worried a little bit in the beginning – just because it’s not normal, I guess, for most people.

Especially when I started playing poker professionally, and so that was that was a big jump as well from the – most people go to school, and they get a job. I went to school and then became a professional poker player. So I think I had probably trained them along the way to expect the unexpected.

KIM: I love that. And I was the black sheep growing up. I was the one who went to art school while my sisters and my brother went on for their professional degrees. So I can definitely feel that.

Billy, what – I know you said that Quarter 1 of 2017 is having a major push on Forever Jobless. What are some of your other major goals looking forward into 2017?

BILLY MURPHY: Well, I haven’t sat down and worked them all yet, but one of the things on the list is writing a book. So I’d like to write a book, but again, it’s going to come down to what I have room for on the “goals plate”. But yeah, writing the book is up there. Getting back into the fitness shape I was, back when I competed in the show probably two years ago, and so I’d like to get back in that kind of shape. Yeah, and scaling up Forever Jobless. I’ve debated running another incubator, and so – if we do that again, we’d like it to be a very successful class, very successful students. So yeah, the goals will – probably most of them. There’s a couple of others that I’d like to do, but likely won’t make the list, just because it’s a lot of focus.

KIM: Oh, absolutely. How do you make the determination of what makes the list and what does not?

BILLY MURPHY: Just a combination of making sure that I’m going to enjoy it, seeing the end results, what each goal will help do in terms of: What are the next goals that I want to accomplish? So a lot of them are intertwined. For example, a book and Forever Jobless are very related. Forever Jobless and the incubator are very related. So the goals – it often allows you to have more than one goal, because they’re all pretty much related. A lot of my activities will help all the goals.

KIM: Absolutely. Better than to be jumping around all over kingdom come doing things that aren’t going to benefit each other.

I have one more question, just because I know some listeners probably heard at the beginning when you said that you had 15 to 20 e-commerce stores. How did you manage them all? Were you handling delivery and stock yourself, or did you have a drop-shipping program? How did you how did you manage?

BILLY MURPHY: I hired some employees to run the stores, and handle customer service, and make phone calls, and products drop-shipping everything, and so it was a little bit easier model to run. But yeah, I didn’t – I basically focused on acquiring the stores and starting them up, and then I’d hand off and let other people run them.

KIM: I wish I had known about that. I had a – I had my own online store when I started my business in 2000.

BILLY MURPHY: Oh, nice.

KIM: Again, going back to what we were talking about earlier, I wasn’t passionate about the products I was selling – and I was also trying to handle it all myself. So I sort of had a double whammy, and this is not the way to do it. There.

Billy, thank you so much for joining me on Positive Productivity today. It’s been absolutely fantastic. Where can listeners find you? I’m sure they’ve already picked up on the website, but where can they find you, and where are the best ways to get in touch with you?

BILLY MURPHY: Yeah, they can go to ForeverJobless.com, and they can read the blog on ForeverJobless.com/Blog. And yeah, they can check me out on the website. I don’t do a lot of social media, but if they want to follow on social media, they can follow on Instagram – the handle is ForeverJobless.

KIM: Fabulous. Well, thank you again, Billy.

BILLY MURPHY: Yeah, thanks a lot for having me.