PP 194: Flipped Lifestyle with Shane and Jocelyn Sams

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(Transcription not yet cleaned up but thanks for checking it out!)

Welcome back to the Positive Productivity podcast. This is your host Kim said and I am so thrilled that you’re here to join us today and I’m also thrilled to introduce our guests Shane and Jocelyn Sams. They are the founders of Flipped Lifestyle and have a phenomenal story to share. So I’m just gonna throw the mic over to them. Thank you so much for joining me.

You too. Hey, Kim, thank you so much for having us. We’re really excited to be here with you today.

We are honored to be here and we’ve just been laughing off air with you and had a great conversation and have so much in common about our lives and our kids and everything else and we’re just super excited to be here.

Oh yeah. So much listeners. I had to let you know that I was listening just prior to us jumping on together. I was listening to the flipped lifestyle podcast. I was listening to our story chapter three. Listening to Shane and Jocelyn share the story about their wedding. absolutely hilarious, so many similarities to my wedding. And you two actually have inspired me to see if I can convince my husband to get on an episode with me.

Jonathan Ross, I are like we’re so much better together. Jocelyn always says we bring out the best in each other. But sometimes we bring out the worst in each other. And when we get on the bike together, our show is much more entertaining, because it’s just both of us bouncing off each other and acting crazy. So it’s good time,

Shane, when you didn’t know, and I’m sorry, I like we’ll get here introduction like a real introduction. But in the episode you forgot the year, I think that you got married. And then you said it’s just a man thing. That’s so real. It is a man thing. And I should not be putting this out there. I’m going to have to go change all my PIN numbers because I’m telling you all this. We use our anniversary for our pin number. I know that’s so bad. I’ve gotten a month before this episode changes or this episode airs. I really should have done that. But my husband can’t remember because he can’t get the year right. So he just can’t get into things the bank account the access to the daycare. He just can’t get it because he can’t remember the year.

That’s pretty bad. You would think he would at least remember it from use from doing it over and over again. So no, absolutely not. Got the ball. I know I do know the day. That’s how I compartmentalize thing. I think that’s what men do. I do know the day it’s July 3, I know that for sure when I reset, but sometimes the older we get the foggy or everything gets in the past. So

Kim Sutton: Jocelyn, does he have your birthday down?

Jocelyn Sams: No. Well, he does have my birthday because my birthday is actually the day before him.

Kim Sutton: Okay.

Shane Sams: Her birthday is March 27. And mine is March 28. And it was so funny when we first met because when we we first met, we kept having all these similarities. Like we drove the same model car and all these things. And I was saying like, when’s your birthday? And she said, March 27. And I said, No way, months, March 28. And this was the first time that we had ever hung out together.

And Jocelyn goes, show me your driver’s license, because she was like she ID me to make sure that I wasn’t just lying to like, get her to go out on a date with me. And I was like, I know you’re the one baby when you’ll tell me to get out my driver’s license right in the middle of our first

Kim Sutton: Wait, you two drove the same model cars were this. Were they the same color?

Jocelyn Sams: No, they weren’t. They were not the same. But we’re talking about you know, different things and he was like, Well, you know, what’s your birthday? And what kind of car do you drive? And I’m like, okay, buddy, too many similarities.

Shane Sams: So she thought I was just saying whatever it took to get her to like me,

Kim Sutton: My husband and I drove the same model same color car when we met.

That’s crazy.

Kim Sutton: Chevy Cobalt, the same exact, like, greenish blue color. Yeah, that’s and I didn’t believe him either. There’s so many were similarities. I can’t believe this is the first time that we’re talking okay. With that said, listeners, you know, you can hear my excitement. I want you to just like jump in and share how flipped lifestyle came to be because I know like i’ve i’ve read the chair, please.

Shane Sams: Okay, so Jocelyn and I, actually a few years about five years ago, we were schoolteachers. I was a history teacher. I was a football coach. Jocelyn was an elementary school librarian. And we always like to say that we were living that good enough life. You know, we had a house, two cars, two kids. Kids, we had decent jobs. I mean, there’s not a lot of great jobs where we live in southeast Kentucky. So being teachers is pretty stable, you know, you get a steady paycheck, you know, your paycheck kind of runs out on Thursday, and you get paid on Friday. But you know, you’re paying your bills, and you’re living your life, and you’re just going to work coming home doing your thing. And what happened was, we had a really, really negative experience in our life. And at work, we discovered that our son, he was three years old at the time, was being mistreated at a daycare center. You know, we were just like everybody else, you know, if you got to go to work, you gotta have somebody watch your kids. So we, you know, had to make the hard choice to put our kids in daycare. And we found out through a couple different ways that they were punishing kids at this daycare center by locking them in a bathroom for hours at a time. Oh my goodness. And it was really really, they were doing a lot of other things too. We go into that a lot in a recent An episode of our podcast. But it was really really traumatic because we, you know, we we felt so guilty we we didn’t know what we were doing and you know, and we just had to get him out of that situation. So what happened at work though, was I found this out one morning I put all the pieces together and I was like, Oh my goodness, this is happening to my son. What do I do? Well, I was a really good employee. Jocelyn was really good employee. You know, we we definitely prioritized work and putting, you know, work and family and all those things on pedestals. And we had responsibilities that we had to meet. So I actually took my son over to another facility where I knew a lady that had kept him when he was a baby. It was a person I trusted. And I said, Look, it’s you know, 7am I’ve got a classroom full of high school kids, I’ve got to be at work. To keep him here. I’m gonna go tell my job, because I couldn’t get ahold of my my principal that I worked for it right. Tell them that I’ll be right back. I gotta go tell them that I need someone to cover for me today. Okay, so I dropped Work, just stunned, shocked all this, these things that we had discovered that morning. And I went in and I settled by class down, and I went next door and got the teacher that was in the class next door to come watch my class. And I said, I’ll be right back. I’ve got an emergency, I’ve got to go tell the principal, I gotta leave. So, you know, I thought I was doing what I was supposed to do. You know, I’m a good employee, I’m a good worker, got a got to meet my responsibilities and take care of my family. Well, I went down to the principal’s office, the main principal wasn’t there that day. So I had to talk to an assistant principal who was serving at the time. And I walked in and explained my situation. And I’ll never forget her looking at me really coolly and calmly, and kind of taken off her glasses. And, you know, she heard me out and listen to the problem. And, and, and I said, I’ve got to go, I’ve got to leave right now. Can you get someone to cover my class? Or can you go watch my class? And she looked at me and said, is your son in imminent danger? And I was like, you know, he’s not playing in the street, right? He’s not, you know, in that kind of danger, but You know, this is a really big deal, I gotta go. And she said, Well, I’m sorry, I don’t have time to watch your class right now. And I don’t have time to go find a sub for you. You’re gonna have to work today and you can take care of your personal problems after school. I know your son needs you, but your school needs you to so she so when she said that, to me, my first instinct was throw something at her. Right, right. I mean, I was furious in a moment at her but then at that moment, I became furious at myself because I realized I had given someone total control of my life, I had given up all of my freedom. We had given up everything for a steady paycheck and a little bit of health insurance. This person thought they had total control over my life, and my son needed me and my job was telling me I couldn’t go be there for him. So that was kind of the start of what made us look for something else. Look for another way to make an income and really free ourselves from having To work a nine to five, and that’s eventually what led us down the path to online business.

Wow. And it’s a school. I’m just blown away that this woman not I mean, it’s besides the point, but did she don’t have a case? She’s working in a school. I’m just shaking my head. Yeah. Oh my gosh, it’s crazy.

I don’t know. I mean, I think that a lot of people would have been understanding of that. But just in that situation, she was just very cold and indifferent.

Yeah. Yeah, it was tough. It was tough. And, you know, I was a good employee, like, I came to work. I never missed work. You know, I was a football coach. I was adamant about not missing anything, unless it was life or death. And I really felt like this was kind of a life or death situation, right? not physically dying, but mentally and like our son had become one of the clues that we knew something was wrong was our son was deathly afraid to go into a bathroom. Right? And it was because they were punishing him for like having potty training accidents by basically locking him in a bathroom in the dark with no windows, right? And he he didn’t even go into and he became deathly afraid of the dark and he had this Weird separation anxiety and it was all these things started adding up. And you know, it was just a horrible situation to have to go through.

I don’t want listeners to think that all daycare centers are scary places because they really aren’t. I’ve seen awesome. Yeah. And yeah, but I’ve seen bad as well.

And we want to stress that this daycare center. What happened was when we first started putting our kids in this facility, it was the premier facility within you know, 50 miles of where we live. It was amazing woman ran the facility. And what happened was she retired and she sold the daycare center to people who had worked for, but they ended up hiring some bad people to staff it. So all this happened, like overnight, like within a few months. It happens so quickly. There was no way that we could respond to it. But this was an amazing place. An amazing woman was running the facility, and it’s just circumstance led to a couple bad Apples getting in and just running the batch.

Oh, yeah.

I’m gonna circle back around to that in a second. But I’m sure when you said you, you stood there and you felt bad. I mean, all of a sudden you get home, I’ve gotten mama guilt because all of a sudden, I have to figure out what do I need to do? Do I need to stay here and keep my job? Or can I go? Like, is it safe to go? What did you do?

Yeah, it was terrible. This was probably like the worst I’ve ever felt in my life. Because how did I allow my child to be in a situation like that? You know, I don’t even know. And basically, we ended up contacting the person who used to own the daycare because I wanted to talk to her about what we needed to do about the situation. And she ended up agreeing to watch them until the end of the school year for us and she was somebody we trusted when your kids were safe with her. So we ended up pulling them out of the daycare and she started watching them for us what was supposed to be until the end of the school year, but like five years later, she’s still watching them.

And I kind of felt like I had leverage at that point to when that happened. I went I left, of course, you know, I’m gonna stay there. You know what I mean? I felt I had a little leverage because I was the defensive coordinator on the football team. We’re right in the middle of football season, you know. So I did. They did reprimand me though, for leaving school. I got a note in my file. And the principal at one time was like, Yeah, well, I’m not gonna fire you this time. Like to try to make me feel like bad about it a little bit. So while there were some repercussions on it, I didn’t feel like I would exactly lose my job at that moment. Right. But I didn’t I didn’t know there would be consequences. But it was but when I when I left and I was driving home that day, I remember just being so furious at myself for putting myself in that situation. And come heck or High Water. I just knew I had to find another way for our family to generate an income online and that’s what so after that point, I became obsessed with figuring out how to not work for Somebody else how to totally, you know us take over our own life work for ourselves produce our own income, which kind of was crazy, because, you know, we were both very educated people, we both had master’s degrees, we were both educators. And it was kind of a dramatic mindset shift to, you know, completely get off the path, and the trajectory that you had put yourself on for your whole life. You know, we were I was eight, nine years into teaching. So I was like, okay, when do I get to retire? How do I plan this out? And we just decided to change everything.

Wow, that is such an incredible story. I have to tell you, though, I appreciate hearing the fact that the former director is still watching your kids because I know there’s so many parent printers. I’m just gonna call him that to generalize because it’s not only mompreneurs anymore, it’s not just dad printers, its parent printers. Who can have some type of parent guilt for not having the kids at home while they’re building their businesses. But I don’t have my kids at home. I would be insane by the end of the day, if they were at home with me all

day. Exactly. And you know, we we knew that we couldn’t build our business without help. We just had to find the right kind of help. And going back to the person who kept them before that was the right answer for us.

Yeah, I think people confuse being a work at home dad or I work at home mom, with a stay at home dad or a stay at home mom. Both are valuable. But like if you’re if you’re a caregiver for your kids, and you’re staying at home, that’s amazing. But that’s your job. You can’t is a job. It is a job like you, but you can’t possibly work at home and raise your kids totally no matter what ages they are, especially when they’re, you know, when we started this, our kids were like four and so they

were three and 18.

Yeah, three and eight. Well, that’s when we first started the business. But I’m talking about when we came home full time. Well, yeah, they were like four and two, when we started this. So there would be no way that we could be give them what they needed and create income that would support us while trying to do two things at the same time. There’s no possible way. Even today our kids are both school age now and they’re in school. But the lady that keeps them she picks him up off the bus sometimes for us, so that we might have an interview like right now our kids are getting off the bus and being picked up right now. But we had an interview today, it’s 330. So we had to, you know, work that out. And you just got to be able to balance that and separate those two things so that you can be a successful parent and a successful entrepreneur.

Oh, absolutely. I have one last question about just thinking about my husband and the experience that we went through at our daycare. I was surprised that my husband didn’t wind up in jail. How much restraint did it take you?

It was hard, more more for me cuz I’m the same way like, you know, I want to like attack and fight back. But, you know, we did get the authorities involved. We did

social services involved. It was a tricky situation because he was three and it was basically a three year olds word versus an adult’s word. So it was a little bit difficult. We had to leave it to social services to sort everything out. So, you know, that part was really hard.

And we were both teachers. I was a coach. I mean, we were definitely in a profession where you had to have restraint. And I think actually, working in education for so many years had given us a lot of restraint in those situations, because we had heard of it and seen other people going through things. So it was we knew the process of getting this reported getting the authorities involved, and things like that just from seeing kids in school. Right. Right. So I think our background really prepared us for that. And it was hard it was, it’s really, really hard. You know, but I think Jocelyn and I are both also without being guilty. Look, we’re inward looking people and it was I was more concerned about what what did I do to put us in this situation? What could I do to prevent this situation from ever happening again? And how could we work together to make our life better and protect our children more? And I think that taking that personal responsibility helped us not become as angry about it, and go Go out there and look for another path and find another path ultimately,

yeah, I flat out told my husband I said, I don’t have money to get you out of jail. And it’s not being a good role model to the kids. So don’t do anything stupid, are one of our twins got his finger in a door at daycare. And it wasn’t the first time that a kid had gotten the one of our kids or any of the kids there had gotten a finger shot in the door daycare. And we know there’s mistakes. I mean, we we do things as parents, we’re not perfect. And, you know, my butt can bump kids over sometimes, you know, it just happens. But the the daycare director actually said, Well, these are two and three year olds, we can’t be watching them all the time.

Really, because I’m paying you to watch them all the time, but his

finger was severed and required stitches. And because it wasn’t the first time we actually we were just so fed up because it was the third time that either of our twins had had their finger stuck and outside like one of the heavy outside doors. So we filed the complaint and they knew it was us. And they actually created a false CPS claim against us of a sexual nature. So we had a social services come, but it pays to be good people. And I’ve always told my husband, he had to be careful what you post on social media at all. Because you know, when things like this happen, they are going to look at all your channels.

Yep, we kind of there wasn’t a lot of resolution, but we had gotten our kid out, we had spread the word to other parents what was happening. So a lot of people pulled their kids out. And later on the person who was doing that would end up in jail for something else at the daycare center. So, you know, we kind of just let the system take care of it. Let the evidence mount up. And, you know, and like I said, I think in any situation like that, you’ve got to look at the positive things you can do. You got to look at the things that you can do to make things better and not rely on anyone else to make your situation right. Because you have the power to fix things. Everything is a choice. You may feel we may have felt hopeless at the time like, Oh my gosh, what are we going to do? Where are we going to put our kids? How are we going to go to work? No, the answer is, hey, we’ve got this. We screwed up, something bad happened. Let’s fix it. Let’s find a solution to the problem. We’re not going to dwell on the problem. We’re going to follow the right channels. We’re gonna do all that, but we’re gonna solve the problem. And that’s how Jocelyn I’ve looked at everything in our life is what can we control? What can we change? What choices can we make to make it

detour amazing, anytime you want to drive up 75 and come up to Dayton, Ohio, you’re welcome in our house. So you got inspired, you knew that something had to change? What did that journey look like to you? Or for you?

Well, we didn’t really know at the time. Shane was especially adamant about doing something different. For me. I wanted to do something different in that I wanted to control my life, but I really wasn’t sure how it was going to work. Like I just didn’t really know how to wrap my head around that. So I kind of just left all that up to him. One day, okay, so this happened. This The daycare situation happened in March. And in Kentucky school gets out in May. So that may Shane’s just mowing the yard. And the next thing you know, he comes like busts in the house. And he had been listening to a podcast about online business, just kind of randomly, and he’s like, this is it, this is what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna quit our jobs and we’re gonna live happily ever after. And I’m like, okay, so

and I don’t want to say there was a lot in between here. Like, you know, there’s a lot of things happen. We I’d come up with all these ideas like, john, we tried to like, hey, maybe we could make curtains and sell them on eBay. Maybe I can mow grass and pressure wash. Maybe I can fold sweaters somewhere I don’t care. I don’t even care about money anymore. I just want to like work myself. So we had, we had we had thought of all these crazy ideas that we could do mostly shy, mostly me. And you know, I was probably at this point getting on Jocelyn serves at this time. And one day in the car, we were driving, and I was just kind of looking off into space. And I was like, Man, what does it really take to make a living? Well, you know, like, you know how How does somebody make 60,000 bucks a year? You know, cuz how do you do that? And I said, Well, you know, that’s about 5000 bucks a month, I said, Well, how do you get 5000 bucks a month? And I was like, Well, most people go to a job and you know, maybe they get paid 5000 bucks a month. That’s what they do. So one person gives them their 5000 bucks. And then I started saying to myself, well, what if more than one person could give me that? $5,000? What if I could get 100 people to give me $50. And I could just do that. Every month, I would make 60,000 a year. And basically, my thought was, man, there’s like 7 billion people on earth. I only got about 100 of them to make a living, right, and I just bolted up out of my chair, and I got really excited that y’all have figured it out. All we have to do is get 100 people to give us $50 and we can quit our jobs.

Now like okay, well, that sounds nice, but how are we actually gonna do?

And I was like, I don’t know, but I’m gonna try and figure it out. So as I’m listening, I’m mowing my grass one day listening to this podcast. And it was the Smart Passive Income podcast Pat Flynn. And Pat Flynn is a very well known internet marketer. Okay, Pat lost his job. And he was forced to figure out a way to provide for his family. Well, he had started a blog about the architecture licensing exam. And he had basically blogged about him studying for this exam. He used to be an architect, and someone told him, Hey, why don’t you put that together and create a study guide as a PDF and sell it for like, $49. And he was like, You think I could do that? And he’s like, yeah, so Pat put all of his stuff together in a study guide, and he sold it. And he made like, $9,000 he got like, you know, x people to give them $50 and it added up to nine grand. And when I heard him say that on this random podcast that I just happened to download, I hit the brakes on my lawnmower and like fishtail to a stop, and said, Oh, my goodness, that’s it. That’s how we can get 100 people to give us $50 we can put things we know into a digital form. They can pay us and we can email it to them. And that was kind of what started us down this digital product journey of trying to figure out what could we create that people were searching for online and be able to go sell it and make that money. And that’s how we came to our first businesses online. We created digital products for teachers, I created playbooks for football coaches. Jocelyn created lesson plans for elementary school librarians. And lo and behold, we Jocelyn launched our first product, which was a month of lesson plans, and it ended up making about 20 $700 the first month, and right then we knew we were onto something, and we were off to the races.

Oh, wow. It is stuff that you already knew. It’s not like you had to go learn something else. You already knew how to do it.

Yeah. And that’s the thing is I’m very practical. So when he comes to me with this crazy idea, I’m like, you know, that’s fine. But I’m not going to make something that it’s not going to be beneficial to me if it doesn’t work out. So if people don’t buy these lesson plans, then at least I can can use them in my library. Yeah. So that’s why I started out with that.

And we realized that everyone knows something that someone else doesn’t know. Like, that’s just true.

And I have been a librarian for a whopping three years. Yeah, years. Like, it’s not like I’ve been doing it for decades,

and I’ve been a football I’ve been a football coach for a little bit longer. But when I was a head coach, my first year I was Oh, and 10. It wasn’t like I was winning state championships and getting into the Hall of Fame. Like we just but I did understand. My defense Jocelyn knew what she wanted to teach in her classroom. And we realized, well, wait a minute, every year, there’s new teachers every year, there’s new coaches that might want this information. If we just make this once we’ll never have to make it again. But we can sell it forever. Because, you know, reading doesn’t change the alphabet doesn’t change. We have a website that sold history lesson plans, Abraham Lincoln will always be the 16th President, right? We have we know one guy that made a PDF on how to keep a goldfish alive. That’s not changing any made like are you serious selling

20 grand on a PDF on how to keep a goldfish alive.

Yeah, we had one guy you know bonsai trees like but you know like that you gotta cut them and keep them alive and all that stuff. We had a guy come through our flip your life community one time and one thing that we do is look at people’s Avatar and their product, like who are you selling to and what are you selling? And he was like, Hey guys, you know bonsai trees. Well, I sell Venus, I do that same thing. But for Venus flytraps I have a product that shows people how to prune and keep their Venus flytraps alive. And the guy was making like 30 grand off of this. He had like people, Venus flytrap enthusiasts from all over the world. were joining his community on how to keep their Venus flytraps alive. Because it goes back to the numbers. There’s 7 billion people, there’s probably thousands of people that have a venus flytrap in their house, and they want to keep it alive. You just have to figure out how to find them and how to get your product in front of them. So you know, we’ve seen every product you can imagine come through our community people, teaching Guitar Lessons people, you know, teaching other musical instruments, people doing marketing people. One guy that we found a digital product on one time, he created a business like picking up people’s parking lots. So he created a course on how people could do that in their local communities. And lo and behold, he made a living doing that

to any of your community members have a course on how not to burn dinner, even when you’re cooking it out of a box.

Well, we do know a lady named Aaron does that. Basically, I have

a friend Erin Chase. She does $5 dinners as her website. But yes, she does something similar to that. So I mean, that like pretty much anything you can sell online. It’s crazy.

Yeah, she makes a living basically teaching people how to prepare meals ahead of time freeze them and cook. Oh, that’s

amazing. I’m, I need to know more about that. Because seriously, I cook I can burn Kraft mac and cheese consistently.

Right? Yeah. But that’s the thing is like if you can, if you know something, you can teach it. And if you can teach it, then someone else can learn it. And you just have to charge them for access to your knowledge. It’s really an amazing time that we’re living in to be able to do that. So Yeah, so we started our business. We made some money that year. And about a year later, we were able to quit our jobs. I think we made 20 $700, the first product we launched, and that was after months of trying and failing. I don’t want anybody ever to think we waved a magic wand and it just happened, right? The first money we ever made online was actually 11 cents. We were about to give up. And then one night, somebody clicked on an ad on our website. And it was like, oh, man, it works. We did something and we made money, right? So that kind of encouraged us, we made 20 $700. We did that for about 12 months in a row. And then I think in July of 2013, we made $15,000. In August of 2013. We made $36,000 in one month. So in like six weeks, we made more money than what we were making as a teacher salary. And that’s when we decided to quit

so amazing. And it’s only gone up from from there.

Oh, yeah. It’s, we look around sometimes when we don’t even know like, we still look at each other sometimes in the morning or like, is this really our life? Do we really is this really happening? Because as we learn more and as we build more More, and we took more action, we became more successful. And, you know, Jocelyn always tells the story about us quitting our jobs. Like we didn’t just walk in and quit our jobs. We had been preparing for months to quit our jobs. And we took some major sacrifices to do that.

Yeah. So we were living in a really nice house, a really nice neighborhood. We sold our house, we cancelled cable. We sold a bunch of stuff, like just to get extra money to work on the business. So we just kind of went all in and decided that we were going to make this happen.

And when we say we sold our house, we like dramatically downsized. Like in was it in May 2013.

Yeah, so may of 13. We sold our house, we moved into a lot smaller house. We went back to work in August, kind of thinking that we would leave in May if everything went well. And we had to dis huge months and we were like, Okay, well, if we can do this part time, like what could we do full time? Yeah.

And we had prepared ourselves Because in May we realized, well, this might give us a chance to quit our job maybe a year from now. So we had sold our house. So when we were ready to do it, our mortgage would be half, right. And you know, we wouldn’t have as many bills, we had a smaller house, so less electric less gas. And we took the steps necessary to do that. And once we quit our jobs, it just exponentially grew from there because we were working full time at this. And just last year, actually, we moved out of that little house that we downsized into, and we were able to buy a we call this our forever home now. It’s a big 5000 square foot house and it’s it sits on a we have a private like behind our house now. And we’re like, we were selling our house to sacrifice. We’re like, oh, man, we’re giving up this above ground pool. Like, we’re giving up all this space, and we have our house, and then we doubled the original house that we’re living in. And so, you know, I’m pretty good.

I mean, I shared with you a little bit. We had our daughter and then my husband returned to school. He lost his job and then he started school to pursue his childhood dream because here in South Western, I had to remember the map, northeast Southwest where we it’s very similar to Kentucky, I mean, it’s very blue collar. And he kept on losing his job and decided it’s time. And we had our daughter and I started my company to supplement the income a little bit. And we finally found this, this house instead of the smaller apartment that we were in at that time. And then we found out that we were pregnant with the twins. You too, are so inspiring to me right now, because I’ve had on my vision board, it’s actually the backdrop of my Google right now the 5000 square foot house that we want to build Sunday when it all goes like that.

And it will happen if you just keep doing it, like keep taking action, keep building like there were spots along our journey, where even after we quit our job, we didn’t know for sure if we were going to make it you know, so like you just have to keep putting one foot in front of the other. keep taking baby steps and keep going

and just keep making like the right kind of investments for your business. So one thing that we, we just recorded the next segment in our podcast just a couple days ago, and we were talking about how even after we quit our jobs, like it was a little bit uncertain, like the back to school period was really good. But then the income was not quite as consistent. And we were like, Okay, what are we going to do, but we invested to go to this live event across the country, which most people would think would be like, totally crazy to do. But we knew that if we could do that, we can maybe meet the right people to help us with the next part of our journey. And we did. So I think it’s just being really intentional about your time and what you invest in, and just making things happen.

And also to like, I don’t like to even use the word sacrifice, but in some situations like, it’s really it’s like Jocelyn said about being like really intentional. Like one thing that Jocelyn and I realized, you know, when we first made any money online, like when Jocelyn launched that product, and we made 20 $700, which was pretty much like a salary for us, right? So we almost doubled the money we were bringing home in one month, we stopped and we said, okay, I’m coaching football. You’re both working full time. We’ve got two children. We have no minutes in the day. What are we going to have to invest in? And what are we going to have to give up to make our dreams come? Because we’ve got a chance we kept swinging, we gave ourselves a chance. So we went to this Mexican restaurant. And I remember we were sitting there and Jocelyn had said to me earlier in the day, okay, because we were looking at our time and like, Oh my gosh, we have no time. However, we have no money, how are we going to make this grow? And Jocelyn said, Well, wait a minute, everybody has the same amount of time. Everybody’s got 168 hours in the week. Oprah, Beyonce, the President, everybody, how do they make it work? And we realized it was because they were leveraging their time they were being intentional. So we took this big sheet of paper out and Drew 168 squares on it. That represented every hour of the week and we said to ourselves, what do we have to do? Well, we got to go to work. Cuz we got to, you know, stay warm, drawn fed, we got to eat. So we had we put in work hours, then we said, we got to sleep. So we put in sleep hours we got to eat. We gotta pick up the kids, we got to do this, we got to do that we put in all the non negotiables. And then we said, Well, wait a minute, there’s a bunch of blank spaces. What are we doing with all these blank spaces. And we realized we work like everybody else who are coming home, putting the kids to bed, watching some TV, reading books, you know, fiction books, whatever we were, we had seven or eight hours staring us in the face that we could use for our online business. If we would just prioritize working on our online business. Then we looked around our house and we said, What in here means something to us, but is not doing anything for us and making us better. And we looked and we had so many things that we could sell, to create money to buy hosting to buy advertising to do whatever. I remember I had this book that was autographed for my favorite author and he had actually died. So there was like, no way to ever get this autographed copy of this book back like I had a picture of me with him and the book and I said, Man, what I wonder what I could sell that book for. And it was like $105 on eBay. And I saw that book, even though it really meant a lot to me. I knew that that was not as important as my family’s future. And that would pay for hosting for our website for a year. So we sold the book, and we just started prioritizing and being super intentional, and being super productive, and still making time for our kids. Like we always planned out every day, an hour with each kid and when we were going to put them to bed and who was going to work on what, when, but we became very intentional. And that’s really what propelled us to our success.

What would be some of those non negotiable initial investments that you would recommend for anybody who’s listening to put into their business?

Well, the non negotiables are more like what you have to do every day like everybody, a lot of people listening, right? You have to go to work, you got to sleep, you got to do those things. But what we really gave up were the things that were wasting time.

Yeah, and like things that weren’t getting us closer to where we want it to be. So maybe we would give up going out to dinner with friends, and maybe we would do something at home instead. So maybe we would have them over to our house like that would be an example

we spent a lot of time instead of going to the movies, or paying for cable and watching things on TV, we would take our kids to the library that was a great way to spend quality time with them and the library rented DVDs out so the kids would still have their Sesame Street’s they’ll have their Mickey Mouse but we weren’t paying for it. We were checking it out the library, right? So we just looked at anything on our schedule and everything on our to do list and anything that said not getting you closer to your goal, not helping you make your dreams come true. We got rid of it and we just had to let it go because we knew we would get all those things back. But the biggest example is I remember that was like like crushed Jocelyn Hart when we did this is when we cancelled cable it was an Olympic year. And Jocelyn is like a rabid Summer Olympics fan like it’s

like all the Olympics like pretty much every event. But when we cancel cable I wasn’t able to To watch the Olympics anymore, because you can’t even watch that online. I mean, you can watch like bits and pieces, but you can’t watch all of the events. And so I was like heartbroken and devastated when we didn’t have the Olympics. But by the next Olympic year, two years later, I was able to then have cable back and be able to

watch the Olympics. So it’s not like we were giving it up forever. We just knew we had to give it up, then. And that’s really what you got to look at is, I think so many people get down when they have to give something up to do something. But when you choose one thing, you lose another. So what are you choosing right now? And is it getting you closer to your goal? If you’re choosing something that doesn’t help you get better and you’re not where you want to be? Then you’re not going to get to where you want to be, and you just have to make those choices, but you’ll always get them back. Now we do whatever we want. When we go on trips. We go, we have cable, right? And we get to do we take our kids to the movies and all those things. But at that time, we had to make an important decision on how are we going to get to where we wanted to be. It required giving up a few things for a while to get so much more lighter than when we bought this house. I remember it was really hard when we, I remember the emotional part of letting go of that house because we had worked hard to get into the house and the neighborhood that we wanted as teachers, right. And I remember it was really hard to give that up. And I was like, man, I just how could we ever get back into a house like this? And when we bought this house, and it’s literally over double the size, twice as nice 30 acres of land instead of half an acre of land. Like That was when I was like, not because we’re into material things, but it was just like, it’s okay to give up something for a while. When you know that the promised land is Oh,

yeah, definitely. One thing that we’ve seen, especially since having the twins, you know, when we had our daughter who’s now four, we were using Huggies and Pampers but when you all of a sudden have three and diapers, you have to evaluate a little bit so we started looking at everything you know, can be generic, and especially having three littles you know there’s things like once upon a child At least here in the Midwest, I’m not sure if it’s all around.

But once upon a child, they added

a lot of shopping their

kids have seen the value. You know, we don’t need to buy brand names all the time they’ve seen because they go with me grocery shopping. Oh, wow, Mom, we don’t need look at how much money we’re saving we don’t need even when we have millions of dollars, we’re still gonna buy this. It tastes better. So, Jocelyn, when we give up cable, we have cable right now in full disclosure, we never watch it because it got us a better deal on our internet. But I remember giving up cable and being devastated because I couldn’t watch Project Runway. And I realized after the fact that there was just so much time like how you were talking about your hundred and 68 hours, I realized, wow, that was time that I could have been spending on the business. But I I also love the Olympics. But I have to admit I when we got rid of the cable and I stopped watching TV as much as I was it’s just continued. Like now I listen to podcasts constantly.

Yeah, I can remember a time where we went on a trip like after we had cancel a cable. We hadn’t had it for probably like six months, we went on a business trip. And while we were there, we didn’t turn on the TV one time. Yeah. And like I was shocked when I started thinking about it. I’m like, we didn’t even turn on the television. Yeah. But honestly didn’t miss it. Because there’s just nothing that I really wanted to watch that much more than like meeting my goals. And you know, I watch TV now, and I don’t judge you if you want to watch TV. Like, that’s how I unwind sometimes. But I’ve already met a lot of my goals. So that’s the thing is like, sometimes you have to give up things in the short term to get something

Oh, absolutely. What was the journey that took you to starting the podcast and what are you doing in in the business today? Can you share more about that with the listeners?

Sure. So Jocelyn, not you know, everybody thought we were crazy when we were doing all this, right. Like, especially when we moved out of our house because people didn’t see what was happening in our business. They only saw that we downsized into this smaller older house. So people realize Are you all financially? Okay? They were like, Is Your Life falling apart? Or what’s going on? Like, well, you know, cuz people don’t do that, you know. And then when we quit our jobs, it was like, everyone’s eyes just open and we were like, and they’re like, Did you lose your job? Or like, No, we chose to quit because we started a business that replaced our income. So of course, all those people who are like, what’s going on? What are you doing? As soon as you quit your job, and they realized something amazing was happening. They said, Hey, what are you doing? And how can I do it too? Right. So I started getting a lot of questions. And a lot of you know, we live in a small community. So you know, you go to church, and people would stop you going in and be like, Hey, what’s happening? What is this? Can I do it and whatever. And you know, at first it was really overwhelming because we were just trying to build passive income, create an online business make it grow. Well, one day, one of our really good friends came up to Jocelyn. Her name was Lindsay and she said basically like, Hey, I’m, I’m not going back to work. I want to stay home and homeschool my girls, you know, my husband’s going to work. Do you think you could show me how to do this And maybe I can make a little extra money. So Jocelyn helped her and made some money. And she made like $500,000 online with Jocelyn help. So, you know, we didn’t think much of it. We were like, sweet, that’s amazing. Good job, right. But you know, her husband one day at church came up to me, we were kind of in the back hallway, walking up to the nursery to get the kids and, you know, he said, Hey, man, I don’t think I’ve ever really thanked you. And Jocelyn for helping us make money online. You know, that money allowed my wife to stay home with her kids. It allowed her to do what she wanted to do be a stay at home, mom homeschool. And, you know, and now that we’re making some of this money, I’m even gonna invest it back into myself, I’m gonna go back to school, get my PhD. And basically was like, none of this is possible. If you hadn’t have helped us do that. It’s really it’s really changed our life. And when he said that to me, you know, I, I was shocked. I was like, wow, no, that’s crazy. So I got in the car and we were driving out a church parking lot one day and I said, you know, Jocelyn, what we know is awesome. Somewhere making plenty of money. We’ve got this passive income thing going literally where you make something once and people keep buying it over and over again. I said, but Gosh, what we know could help other families find the freedom that we have. Okay? So we basically started talking about it. And we were like, how can we do this? How can we help people out? What can we create? Well, let’s just create let’s create a course that people can take that shows them how to get started online. And it’s funny the name flipped lifestyle, which is the name of our brand, when I quit my job, you know, my mom and dad really didn’t understand what we were doing. And my mom like cornered me one day in her kitchen and said, Shane Samms, you and Jocelyn, you flipped out you’ve lost your minds. You’ve got babies, you got it. You got you have a good job, people would kill for your job. And she was so mad at me for quitting my job. Well, she’s not anymore because she gets it better now. But like when my when she said you flipped out. I was like, that’s what we’ll call it. We’ll call it flipped lifestyle. Because we’re different than the way the world’s doing it right. And she demands royalty check now that’s what she gets. So but she’s basically what we bid was we created this course. And we launched a blog. And we started to and it was also like really a lot easier to send people there instead of constantly telling people what we were doing. So it kind of made to, you know, kill two birds with one stone. And we actually went out to San Diego and met Pat Flynn and Pat Flynn had invited us to be on his podcast. And we were like, wow, this is a great opportunity. Let’s launch this and get, you know, launched this brand on his podcast. And, and we did that and it just took off like wildfire. So we’ve, you know, had been going now for a few years, and we’ve got this amazing community of hundreds of entrepreneurs from all over the world that are just doing everything they can to flip their life. And, you know, that’s how flow

is so beautiful and amazing. And I want to know more, because listeners, you know, I’m totally transparent. Oh, you are going to see a spike on whatever. Well, I don’t know, because I’m sure you have tons of downloads every day. But if you see a significant spike, it’s because I’ve overloaded my hard drive. Download. Every single episode, listeners, you know, it’s a little bit crazy around here, I and I already, I already confessed to Shane and Jocelyn that I didn’t get to do as much background as I wanted to. But I didn’t even tell you to this when I was reading your your about page and going through your site before I started listening to the episode, like I could start feeling myself getting choked up. I mean, I’ve been in this business for five years, we’re finally at the place where we’re comfortable, like our zero has started to raise and I have a feeling that you understand what I’m saying they’re like, you know, there’s a point as an entrepreneur, maybe so many listeners can, we’re just happy if we’re in the black every month, but we have to start seeing, you know, an extra $20 an extra hundred dollars an extra thousand dollars. And we’re finally getting to that point, but five years in while I’m doing it because I want to be making an impact. I’m also like, Okay, come on, what else can I be doing it to be doing more and this is normally what I get into in the show, but now your listeners you’re seeing me beat Totally authentic. I am totally intrigued. Yeah, that’s my bit.

No, that’s awesome. And, you know, I think that sometimes people think, Oh, well, they’ve been doing this, like, forever they have it all figured out. But, you know, we we were telling people just today on an earlier show that we recorded for our podcasts, like, we still make mistakes to this day, you know, like, it’s still not perfect. There are always things that we want to do to get better. So I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that necessarily. I think that’s just who we are.

Yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s really, like, that’s what people we always try to let people know is, you know, we’re just a couple kids from Kentucky. I mean, we’re not high rolling Ivy League people out in California with a tech background. You know, we’re just people with kids and, and we get up every day and we take as much action as possible toward our goals. And if you do that, you will start stacking that extra 20. That extra there I mean, that’s how it worked for us. It was nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. 11 cents. What we made money. And then it was nothing, nothing a couple hundred dollars $2,000 $5,000 $100,000, you know, and it’s like, it just takes maximum effort and action, moving towards your goal. And you can do it, you can do it while you’re working full time, you can do it while you’re raising kids. Were the example of that. We’ve seen dozens and dozens of other people do it. Through our community. We’ve seen hundreds of people we’ve interacted with how to live events and through our podcast, you know, so people are out there, people are doing it, and the people that make it are the people that never stop.

I do have one more question for you both, as you saw the success, climbing, what systems did you put in place to make sure and I’m thinking about lottery winners when I asked this question, you know, they see a big influx come in, but they’re some of them just are so not smart about the way that they spend their money that they wind up in a worse place than when they started off. So what type of systems Did you set in place to make sure that it didn’t all just disappear and you don’t have you’re educated? pension coming up. But how are you setting yourself up to make sure that you’re going to be, you know, prepared for the future?

Well, I’ll be honest, when we first started, we were pretty much completely clueless. We had a spreadsheet, we tried to pull out an amount to save for taxes, but we really didn’t know what we were doing. So, at first, it was a little bit haphazard, but we made it work. We were able to get all our taxes paid and all that stuff. But then a couple years in, we’re like, Okay, we’ve got to figure this out and like, do something a little bit differently. So we actually ended up hiring an accounting firm, and they taught us was called the profit first system.

Yeah, that’s there’s a book by Mike Michalowicz. It’s called Profit First. Great book, if you’re, I don’t care if you’re making if you’re making $15 $10 $100 $1,000 you can apply that system to help you manage your money, right? And basically, it’s just a way to kind of psychologically Think about your money like, you know, 10% is profit. pay yourself first. 50 take 15 to 20% of your gross set aside for taxes, because that’s your bail money got the government is going to come for it, it will keep you out of jail, right? And then like, you know, set a budget for your expenses and things like that. And, you know, I think being Christians helped. Because we’ve always been fairly conservative with our money. We had done the Dave Ramsey thing we’ve gotten out of consumer debt and all that stuff. And just just being good stewards of our money has always been important to us. So when we got a lot more, it wasn’t as big of a jump as Hey, let’s go ball in and play a cruise. Right? It was more like, Hey, now let’s let’s be good stewards of this. Let’s let’s do what we’ve got to do to make our talents grow. Right. So that was part of it. I remember one time. They kind of set the stage for this back in the housing crisis, like right before 2007 when the market crashed. Jocelyn and I, of course, were looking for our first home, right, and we went to get a mortgage and here we are. I was a graduate assistant at West Virginia University coaching football. And go into grad school. Jocelyn was a young, you know, corporate person in a lower level, you know, marketing job, right. So we weren’t making bank by any stretch of the imagination. And they tried to give us a 400. And I was like, I don’t know, this was when they were just handing out money before the crash, right? And I remember looking at Jocelyn, and then looking back at that dude and laughing, because even then we were like, come on, bro. We can’t afford that, you know. So I think that we’ve always had a little bit of a good head on our shoulders. And we’ve always been pretty conservative with our money. So when this happened, we weren’t as bad as like, let’s just go spend it all and it gradually increased, you know? So I think systems in place to like, if you do make money, reward yourself, like, the first time we ever made $100,000 in a month, we went on a trip, we just spent some of it to get it out of our system. And then we came back and we’re really conservative with the rest of it. So I stuff like that, like when you start getting these windfalls like make sure you’re working in rewards, make sure You’re working in treats, but also think about the future and think about stuff like that. And as our as the retirement stuff comes into play, like what do you do with money? You know, like we’re starting to branch out a little bit. We’ve bought a couple rental homes, we pay that old house that we bought the we call it our Freedom House, the one we downsized into, we paid that off. So we have this paid off sitting there. And we’ve got a renter in it, and it’s bringing cash flow. And so we’re starting to think about other things like that. And, you know, just trying to be really good stewards with what God’s blessed us with.

That is so beautiful. And actually, that’s what we want to do with this house. When we get the dream house is rented out to other people who were actually in a land contract, because that’s how we could get this house but give the same opportunity to other people who just couldn’t get out there. So amazing. Shana. Jocelyn, thank you so much for coming on the positive productivity podcast today. Could you please share the best places for listeners to learn more about you get involved and start taking their next big step to creating the life of their dreams.

Sure, if you want to check us out, we have the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, you can look us up on iTunes, we actually just did a great series, where we tell our entire story from beginning to end. There’s an author that’s writing a book about us right now. So we decided to release all the audio, from the author interviews, to our podcast listeners, so you can learn more about our story. And if you want to head over to flippedlifestyle.com/positive, and we’ve got a special gift for your listeners, we actually have a full on training that shows how we set our goals, how we created the steps to make our dreams come true, and how we actually took that hundred and 68 hours and created a plan that would allow us to build our online business quit our jobs and take control of our lives. So that’s flippedlifestyle.com slash positive. That training is normally only available inside our flip your life community, but as a special thank you to you for having us on your show today. We thought we’d let your listeners get in on that for free.

Thank you so much. Do you have a last piece of parting advice that you can offer to listeners,

I would just say the most important thing that you can do is to take action and always say that baby steps get you closer to your goal than standing still. So just take some type of action to make things happen.