Almost the Day I turned 40 years old I had somewhat of an awakening about my life. Turning 30 wasn’t really even a thing.. probably because I got married 9 days before I turned 30. So that was a little bit of a bigger deal. Also at 30 I was just getting started with my own business and as funny as it sounds just happy to be alive. After all it was only a couple years before that when I was 420 lbs, unemployed, and having to have a CPAP and oxygen when I slept. Man how life changes on a dime.
The last 10 years have flown by so fast. I bought a house, made a lot of money, had 2 kids, and a thriving business… well for most of the time. Turning 40 hit me pretty hard and put a lot of things in perspective. Bother personally and business wise. I’ll keep the personal things out for now just so this doesn’t turn into a giant F.R.A.T. (fuck reading all that).
Business wise overall the last decade financially has been amazing. But its not all roses. In 2009 ish I decided I needed to move out of my house and have a “real business”. I wanted to have a midwest Google. I hired people, paid for all their phones, bought all kinds of snacks, pop, whatever. Had video games and whatever. I was now playing CEO. Playing being the keyword.
Long story short I continued to make more and more money every year… but profited less. The first year I moved out of my basement was the first year I made less than a million dollars in profit. I know cry me a river…
I realized I was a really bad CEO a couple years ago but kept thinking I could figure it out. I felt constantly frustrated. Felt like most of my day was answering questions about employees… so and so wanted vacation so and so had a problem with someone else… stupid ass drama. I felt like I got more done before 9am and after 5pm since most of my day was sorting out bullshit. Bullshit that comes along with running a “real” company but it was killing me.
On May 31st, 2014, the day I turned 40, that it was time to make some big changes. I was gonna kill the office. It was costing me about 15k a month just to have the office. Everyone was gonna work from home. But most important I was going to find some partners that were operating successful companies to team up with and grow PAR and the new self service platform to where it needs to go.
July 1st I started to negotiate out of all my contracts for the office to terminate them early and on August 1st we moved completely out of the office.
I also found some incredible CEO and CIO or should I say ironically they found me. I will save that story for another day. I couldn’t be happier with the way things operated in August. We drastically increased sales for the PAR Program and made significant headway on the self service platform. The best part is my overhead has been reduced by 60% and I have that off my back.
Also working from home lets me spend a ton more time with my kids. My home is less than a mile away from their school so I get to go and eat lunch with them whenever I want and instead of all the overhead of coming from downtown and back its less than an hour until I can get back to work.
Where all this is headed I don’t know. But I do know that I haven’t been this happy in many years. I get to focus on what I am good at and let go of the things I am not (for the most part) and I think this is going to work out very very well.
I am super happy to be back in the basement.
My wife the other day told me that should be the next book I write – “ShoeMoney Story Part 2 – Back in the basement”.
Here is your August ShoeMoney recap. Here’s to a GREAT September!
Jul-02 08:13:15 - Help me and win a grand for yourself (1 comments) Not about 2 years ago we launched a marketing platform called the Par Program. Functioning at an agency level, which included state of the art email, social integration and high level ROI tracking, we also did al…[more]
Jul-02 08:30:28 - Personalizing Automated Emails (6 comments) …[more]
Jul-03 08:30:36 - How To Choose The Perfect Name For Your Blog plus 3 Bonus Tools To Get You Started (5 comments) Whe…[more]
Jul-04 08:30:51 - Free Shirt Friday- PPC Consulting.com (4 comments) This week’s Free Shirt Friday comes to us from PPC Consulting.com. They are pay per click consultants that manage results-driven PPC campaigns that focus on client goals such as: web leads, phone calls, sales, …[more]
Jul-08 00:51:21 - Adjusting Your Content Strategy to Suit Multiple Digital Devices (3 comments) Making adjustments to your web content strategy to suit multiple digital devices is no longer just a good idea ? it?s become a necessity. With smartphones users tipped to total 1.75 billion in 2014 and tablets also rapidly increasing in profusion ?…[more]
Jul-08 07:00:27 - Pt 3 – Raising Money For My New Company – How it ended up (5 comments) This is Part 3 in my adventure in raising money for my new company – The PAR Program. If you missed the other parts you can see …[more]
Jul-08 08:30:51 - Why Again Should I Keep An Email List? (19 comments) …[more]
Jul-11 08:30:54 - Free Shirt Friday- Toothbrush Subscriptions @ToothbrushSubs (6 comments) This week’s Free Shirt Friday comes to us from Toothbrush Subscriptions. The Toothbrush Subscription process is very simple. The first thing you do is choose from one of their three tooth…[more]
Jul-14 14:26:52 - Who do I look up to as far as a mentor/guru (5 comments) A great question that recently came in through our contact us form. KingJamesCodpiece - Thanks again for the AMA ShoeMoney! Who are some people in the industry y…[more]
Jul-15 08:00:53 - What was it like to make my first million dollars? (17 comments) Stubjj844 - Where did you learn to do….whatever the hell it is you do lol?? Do you remember your first million and what was that like?…[more]
Jul-17 06:19:04 - How to Plan an Executive Workshop that WON’T Fall Flat (2 comments) Workshops in general are designed to inspire the people that attend them. They foster an environment where you can tear apart ideas and try to figure out how they work. In a sense, a corporate workshop allows you to tinker with ideas and?if everything g…[more]
Jul-18 08:30:54 - Free Shirt Friday- Navilytics @Navilytics (4 comments) This week’s Free Shirt Friday comes to us from Navilytics. Their goal is to truly optimize your website, whether you want to increase sales or just make it easier to use. Their philosophy is that you have to underst…[more]
Jul-22 08:08:09 - How I Landed a $25k/mo Client with Cold Email (11 comments) I LOVE emails. (And I’m sure ShoeMoney does too, otherwise he wouldn’t be building this kick ass PAR program.) Never in the history of mankind has it been SOOOOO easy to connect with anyone on the planet. …[more]
Jul-25 08:30:08 - Free Shirt Friday- Vapor Zone @VaporZoneMIA (1 comments) This week’s Free Shirt Friday isn’t a shirt; it’s electronic cigarettes/vaporizers from Vapor Zone! Vapor Zone is an online hub coupled with brick and mortar location…[more]
Jul-29 06:18:04 - @Wishpond – What service do you use for landing pages? (10 comments) I been playing with several different landing page services. Some have some really cool features but they always seem to have something missing. A couple days ago, after asking on FaceBook, several people recommended that I checkout …[more]
Jul-30 06:51:12 - Branding 101: Considerations For Logo Design and Slogan Writing (4 comments) Last week I wrote a post about how to choose a name for your b…[more]
Jul-30 07:22:30 - Shawn Hogan Is in Federal Prison (26 comments) I first met Shawn Hogan in late 1994 on Internet Relay Chat (IRC). Anyone who knows him well knows that he is one of the most giving people on the internet. You probably know him though from his internet marketing forum at …[more]
Aug-01 09:29:59 - Free Shirt (robe) Friday – @CBSBigBrother (2 comments) I am a Big Brother NUT. I have watched the show forever. I have applied to be on the show since Season 10 but have been denied =(. I will keep trying though! A friend recently reached out to me…[more]
Aug-04 06:52:52 - July Recap & a decade blogging (8 comments) In July ShoeMoney.com celebrated its 10th year of blogging. I suppose every blogger goes through this but I have gone in and out with my love of the blog. Not that I ever did not like it but my enthusiasm to blog at times just was not there. Part of…[more]
Aug-05 07:07:26 - Hotjar Now Accepting Beta Users *shoemoney exclusive* (7 comments) Conversion is the ultimate key conversion to any website being successful. Thats not a big secret. I have spent a decade constantly making my own websites convert better and used a variety of tools over the years. I recently came into contact with Dr. …[more]
Aug-06 09:00:49 - How PAR Program Client Muscle Fire increases revenue by 33% (10 comments) This month we put out a press release featuring one of PAR Program clients. I think this is the 4th or 5th one we have put out now. …[more]
Aug-08 08:00:20 - FSF – Game Of Thrones Lannister T-Shirt @ lexhed (4 comments) One of my favorite shirts from one of my favorite TV shows Game Of Thrones! Thank you Lexhead.com . Check out their site they have some awesome TV related shirts….[more]
Aug-12 09:28:16 - Get your biz on ShoeMoney FSF (3 comments) Long story short. I got 2 shirts right now in queue for Free Shirt Friday. So send me a shirt and get huge exposure for your brand/company and usually hundreds to thousands of clicks depending i…[more]
Aug-13 09:00:07 - Avoid the death of your email (3 comments) You don?t want your email message to be sent to die in the junk, bulk or spam folders. Here are some things to keep in mind in order to get your message across the right way: Use an email server platform with a good reputation. ISPs (like Yaho…[more]
Aug-13 17:42:50 - How to contact Shawn Hogan in the pen (4 comments) Shawn Hogan (Digital Point Founder / Hero to the people) is in federal prison. I wrote about it a couple weeks ago. Inmate number 1…[more]
Aug-14 09:00:14 - Check out the only WordPress Theme you will ever need (really) (13 comments) I bought probably 20 different wordpress themes and frameworks that claim they can do everything they want. You download them and then try to figure out what the hell does what. Usually the documentation sucks. Partly why I use the 2012 wordpress stock th…[more]
Aug-15 11:37:47 - FSF Ungagged Conference (26 comments) This week’s Free Shirt Friday is from the Ungagged conference going on in November. I really like the format of the conference. They are really focusing on the cutting edge gray to black hat area. Most conferences highly…[more]
Aug-19 15:51:10 - How Being A Pro At Getting Girls Relates to Internet Marketing (21 comments) Years ago I wrote about things internet marketers can learn from the pickup artist. That was when The Pickup Artist show on VH1 was a big hit a…[more]
Aug-21 07:49:37 - If the ShoeMoney empire died tomorrow… What would I do? (22 comments) Recently someone emailed me a question and in response I thought I would share it: ShoeMoney if your entire business crashed tomorrow what would you do? …[more]
Aug-22 10:33:39 - ShoeMoney FSF Total send email Newsletter platform @TotalSend (13 comments) This weeks FSF comes from TotalSend which is an email newsletter platform. Now some of you are probably thinking “isn’t Jeremy launching a competitor to this?” And the answer would be “No, ours will have 10x the features at a lower price point”. …[more]
Aug-26 09:00:17 - The ShoeMoney Show is Back (22 comments) It?s back, baby! ShoeMoney never left but the The ShoeMoney Show has been on hiatus for five years. I?m happy to announce its return on WebmasterRadio.FM! The show will be bringing you candid and honest chats with some majorly influential folks …[more]
Aug-27 09:49:33 - How Your Company Can Learn from the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge (20 comments) You might be living under a rock if you haven?t heard about the ice bucket challenge to raise awareness for ALS. All month long, social media has been inundated with videos of people getting buckets of ice water dumped on them. Those people accepted …[more]
Aug-29 08:35:39 - @SeoRankMonitor – SEO Tracking & Details – ShoeMoney FSF (14 comments) This weeks Free Shirt Friday T-Shirt comes from SEO Rank Monitor. They have pretty nice looking set of tools to help you track your SEO initiatives. You can check them out here …[more]
Sep-02 08:13:22 - Coming to Jesus Moments – ShoeMoney August Recap (0 comments) Almost the Day I turned 40 years old I had somewhat of an awakening about my life. Turning 30 wasn’t really even a thing.. probably because I got married 9 days before I turned 30. So that was a little bit of a bigger deal. Also at 30 I was just get…[more]
