The Kendo Philosophy of a 7-Figure Bootstrapper

Sean Weisbrot: Welcome back to another episode of the We Live To Build podcast. After last week's difficult conversation, I thought that it would be a good opportunity for us to have an episode that's much more lighthearted. That's why today's guest is Ray Blakeney, an award-winning Filipino American entrepreneur who has over a decade of experience.

Sean Weisbrot: Bootstrapping and operating six and seven figure location independent businesses. He and his businesses have been featured in magazines such as Entrepreneur, Forbes, the Boston Globe, and Other Top Publications. He's currently running live Linga. An online language learning platform and podcast hawk, a SaaS platform that helps businesses and influencers find and pitch podcasts on autopilot In this wide ranging conversation that is very lightly edited and a very strong departure from my normal episodes, we discuss language learning.

Sean Weisbrot: Travel, bootstrapping companies, manufacturing, and kendo. I love this episode because him and I have a very similar mentality and philosophy about life and travel and running businesses, and it was really good to be able to capture that and share it with you. In this way because sometimes with different guests I'll have questions prepared.

Sean Weisbrot: Other times I don't have questions prepared, and I feel like the more interviews I do, the more people I speak with, the more I learn about them and their lifestyles and their. Mindsets, the more I learn how to become a better interviewer, and what I've discovered is the best interviews are the ones that aren't planned.

Sean Weisbrot: Now, I'm sure I could have sat him down to discuss the specifics of building his 150 plus person team, which is what I normally do. But in this episode, I wanted to do something that I kind of wanted the original concept of the podcast to be, which is like. You get to listen to two entrepreneurs having a chat, and if you weren't listening to this podcast, you'd probably never hear a conversation like this.

Sean Weisbrot: I. And that's why it's important to share this kind of an episode with you. Now, you may like it, you may not. The first few minutes, 10 minutes possibly are just about language learning, so you might get bored there, but stick with it because it leads into a much more interesting conversation and that's why I kept that content in.

Sean Weisbrot: Later in the episode, there's uh, content that gets quite silly talking about chocolate 'cause he owned a chocolate factory. But again, stick with it because it leads into, you know, another part of the discussion about manufacturing and dropshipping and things that are really important that you might find interesting.

Sean Weisbrot: Ray why don't you tell everyone a little bit about what you do right now and how you got to this point.

Ray Blakney: The short of it is I work at home in my Superman pajamas, and I have been doing so for 15 years. The long answer to it is I bootstrapped seven figure online businesses.

Ray Blakney: We own a website called live lingua.com, which is the third largest online language school in the world. My wife and I bootstrap that. I run a software company called podcast hawk.com. Um, we have some pretty well known people in the podcast space who are involved like Pat f Flynn, who's an advisor and a shareholder in that company.

Ray Blakney: For those of you who listed, throw a out of entrepreneur podcasts, and I've owned a chocolate factory in Asia for a while. I had a marketing agency for a few years. I'm a software developer by training. I quit my job. My six figure almost software engineer job to work at the Peace Corps for $150 a month.

Ray Blakney: So I've done quite a few little things, but yeah, generally I'm at home in my Superman pajamas.

Sean Weisbrot: I remember during our first call you had talked about Peace Corps and I had said, I thought about doing it like 15 years ago, but I was kind of like, I. Uh, I'd like to earn more than a few thousand dollars in a year, so it'd be nice to, nice to do something different.

Sean Weisbrot: Right. I remember it was like 5,000 for a year or something. I was like, I know I'm gonna be living in the middle of nowhere, so I probably won't spend anything but like mm-hmm. To commit for two years to do that is hard.

Ray Blakney: It is. So, yeah, you're absolutely right. So you don't, nobody does the Peace Corps for the money, not even close at the end.

Ray Blakney: They do give you what's called a readjustment allowance, which in my time, this was like 15 years ago, it was about after taxes, about $2,000. The whole idea was that, but that was basically for you to buy your plane ticket back to the US and put your first month deposit on an apartment, right? I mean, it wasn't like money.

Ray Blakney: There are tons of reasons to do the Peace Corps. Money is definitely not one of 'em. One of the reasons is if you ever wanna learn another language, um, something you know, near my heart, because I run a language school. Actually, I also ran a chain of language schools in Mexico, which we sold in 2012. Peace Corps will do it for you.

Ray Blakney: You will be fluent in whatever language in the country you, you get sent to. It's. Hands down, guaranteed. You're living there with the people who do not speak a lick of English most of the time. And unless you learn Spanish, Swahili, you know, if you're somewhere in the Pacific Islands or whatever, you are not able to communicate in order, you know something at the local store.

Ray Blakney: So you learn your language. Within six months, you'll be conversational. Within two years you'll be fluent. If you go to a part of the world where you know the language is not as commonly spoken, you might be like the only person in your state when you go back to the US who like one of five people who actually speaks that language, which is kind of cool.

Ray Blakney: Or you can only go to a place where it's more widely spoken. This is how I learned Spanish, you know, French, whatever language. You'll be fluent at those languages in two years. So you look at it that way.

Sean Weisbrot: I found that staying in China was more profitable. I was positioned where I understood them and I could help them understand the West exactly.

Sean Weisbrot: And they couldn't do that without me. And that's where my niche was, and that's how I launched my career.

Ray Blakney: So wherever you go, you can find a business opportunity there. Even if it's a country, most people don't go to. You might be the first person to import or export from that country, and wow, what kind of things could that open up or outsourcing in that country that nobody's done outsourcing in that country before?

Ray Blakney: You could be the person to open that door. Not only is it good for you, but it's also good for the people in that country who might be helping, helping them build a life that they otherwise could not have done without your help.

Sean Weisbrot: So right now I'm applying to move to Portugal. We had also talked about that on the phone and through the process, I'm, I'm documenting every tiny detail that I'm going through because I am, I may know people in the future who want to go through it too, not look, not like I'm looking to make money off of the knowledge of that process.

Sean Weisbrot: But to make it easier for the people I care about, to make it easier for them. But through the process, I'm seeing extreme inefficiencies in many different pieces of it and going, wow, if I didn't have a business I really loved right now, I could probably make multiple businesses out of these other little pieces that people are screwing up.

Ray Blakney: I like to say that there are two kinds of entrepreneurs in the world. They're the visionary entrepreneurs, those who kind of invent stuff that we didn't even know we needed, right? We're talking like, you know, Steve Jobs invented the iPhone. It's not like everybody was out there like, I need an iPhone, and he built an iPhone.

Ray Blakney: You just created something out of scratch. People wanna go to the moon, Tesla, you know, Elon Musk building Tesla. These are visionary entrepreneurs. I'm not one of those kind of entrepreneurs. The second kind of entrepreneur I is the kind I am, which is we see that there are problems. Nobody's fixing the problem or not fixing it.

Ray Blakney: Well. And we build a business around that. So if you are that kind of person, then traveling is amazing, right? Because if you're stuck, so I lived in Ohio for a while, so if you're stuck in Cleveland, Ohio and you never leave, you might never get exposed to some of these problems like what you're having, Sean, when you're moving to Portugal.

Ray Blakney: You never would've known until you tried to move to Portugal that this was a business opportunity. So, you know, these are the kind of things that when you travel and go to other places. It might be something that you'll see that missing because you're trying to move there. Or you might go to another country and see that they do something better there that they don't do back at home really well.

Ray Blakney: So you can go back home and suddenly you're like, Hey guys, have you ever thought of doing this here? Let's build a business around that. And it's, you know, could take off. And a lot of this, you know, food is an easy example. Poke bowls, which they seem to be on every corner now. 10 years ago, I had never heard of these things before.

Ray Blakney: Right. But somebody went to Hawaii, saw, hey, this is cool. Brought it back, and now it's like this pH phenomenon, CREs or another thing. There are all these different things out there, um, that people have gotten from traveling that they bring back to the United States and it works. Or you bring something from the US to Latin America and that it takes off.

Ray Blakney: Right? Or to Europe or to Asia. And build the equivalent over there. That is also business opportunity for sure.

Sean Weisbrot: So let's talk a little bit more about some of the details of your businesses. You said that you've run multiple seven figure businesses. What would you say is the one that you're the most proud of and why?

Ray Blakney: I would say probably Live Lingua right now is the one that I'm most run proud of. So Live Lingua is one of the top online language schools in the world. There are some competitors that have gotten up to $60 million in BC Capital Live. Lingua was started with me and my wife. So I made the first website as my background.

Ray Blakney: So I'm a computer engineer. I like to clarify here, I'm not a graphic designer, so I made the website, but it looked awful. I mean, I can do the code, but I mean, it was really, really ugly. It was like five pages. This is back in 2008. So there was like WordPress barely existed. You know, I just made this really awful.

Ray Blakney: Five page website and it was primarily to help find, you know, tutors for, you know, students for my, for my wife, who's a Spanish teacher. And yeah, I learned something called SEO Search Engine Optimization back in 2008 as well. Not that many people were doing it.

Ray Blakney: It was kind of this gray area. So I like, eh, lemme just mess you see what happens.

Ray Blakney: At the time we were running a brick and mortar language school as well. To our surprise, within three months, we, three to six months, we were actually making more off of our online tutoring. My wife, obviously with 'em like a week, she had like a hundred percent close rate. So, you know, within a week she had more students and she knew how to, had to wait to start hiring other students.

Ray Blakney: And that's how we built this business up. And had competitors have come since then with a lot of money. But one of the beautiful things about it, since we are the only mom and pop quote unquote operation here, we get to personalize it a little bit more. We're a little more boutique. So our prices are a little higher than the competitors, but the competitors need 10,000 students.

Ray Blakney: I mean, you know, they have to pay back the guy who gave him $60 million in vc. So do you really think that person is out for the best interest of the students? Probably not, right? They're trying to make as much money as possible, as fast as possible so that some VC person and then can make a big exit, and then they all live rich.

Ray Blakney: For us, this is, we did it year by year. We had, I joke that if I ever wrote a book, it'd be called seven. Seven years to seven figures and nobody would buy it. That's what it took us. I mean, you know, we built it bit by bit every year. First year was like $40,000 and we went up to $60,000, like about 20% every year.

Ray Blakney: But you do that for 14, 15 years consistently, and you have a very successful business at the end of it. Um, so we've been successful. I'm proud of Live Lingua because we've been successful because we've just, you know, we wake up every morning, we take one step forward, trying to make a better quality product, you know, give better classes to our students.

Ray Blakney: Treat our teachers better and that's it. That's all we do. And we do one step forward. One step forward. We don't have to grow a hundred percent every year 'cause we have nobody to pay back. Um, I live in Mexico, so my cost of living is a fraction of the United States, and we just keep doing that. So the business is registered in the US so I still pay taxes there, all that kind of stuff.

Ray Blakney: It's an American business, but the people who come and study with us are not paying for me to live in an expensive house in the United States.

Sean Weisbrot: So how many employees do you have? How many teachers do you have? Do you have like a leadership team or are you still running the day-to-day on this?

Ray Blakney: Depends on how you count on employees.

Ray Blakney: So technically speaking, it's an LLC, uh, you know, with an S-corp. So it means I am technically the only employee. That being said, we have 150 people working with us. It's a technicality for the IRS, right? Almost all of my employees are foreigners. So they're contractors, even though they're full-time. We have a leadership team.

Ray Blakney: I have a COO who takes care of most of the day-to-day operations. I'm more kind of, this happened in the last year and a year, year and a half. I'm pulling back kind of more into the visionary role, kind of coming up with ideas, kind of motivating the team. So I kind of give the speeches at the team meetings, or we afford a vision.

Ray Blakney: CTO, academic director, marketing and COO kind of thing. The kind of general operations, those, that's my leadership team. So they're the ones who report directly to me. Of that 150, most are, most of them are tutors and teachers that work for us, right? So we run a really lean ship. We have no office anywhere, pay, no rent, none of that kind of stuff.

Ray Blakney: My entire team's remote has been way before this whole thing, remote thing became trendy. I mean, you know, we're talking since 2008. I've been doing this. So when COVID came around, I'm like, oh, people were asking questions like, how has this affected your work? I'm like, no, not at all. I mean, you know, so it has made no difference to me or anybody on my team.

Sean Weisbrot: I imagine that it may have actually bolstered your business because more people were at home and had the time to take classes.

Ray Blakney: So 2020, in that March, we had had this. The biggest spike we've ever had, right? When everybody, suddenly all the restrictions got put in place. The spike in the sense, so we have, if you know, if you're looking at the hockey stick, we had like a little hockey stick moment.

Ray Blakney: It's flattened out since then, but it hasn't gone back down yet. You know, the world has come to the realization that these kind of things exist. You can learn things online and languages is one of 'em. So people are like, wait, why would I have to spend an hour in traffic to go to my local community college to pay, you know, $500 a month to be one person in a group of 12 when I can go online for half of that, have a one-on-one tutoring session.

Ray Blakney: From home in my pajamas with a professional tutor, right? I mean with a native speaker for a fraction of the cost. And now that people realize that like, I'm not going back to that. I'm just gonna do it here. I can do it whenever I want, whenever I want, even while I'm traveling, right? I can continue taking my Spanish.

Sean Weisbrot: Are you attracting mostly Americans or depends on the language?

Ray Blakney: So obviously for Americans it's Spanish, that's the biggest one for English, not so much Americans, even though amazingly we have quite a few students in the United States who take English lessons with us, but they're generally immigrants who are trying to get their, their levels of English up around flexibility.

Ray Blakney: And we're talking, again, we're not the cheapest. So if somebody's looking for like the cheapest English teachers, they don't come to us. They look for quality. So, you know, we've worked with like VPs of banks and presidents of banks who, you know, maybe went from Europe. To the US and they're trying to keep it up and they, they take classes with us on their schedule.

Ray Blakney: Like in the middle of the workday. I have, I have an hour free on Wednesday at three o'clock. Can we have lessons? I'm like, sure. They schedule it right in our system and they're done. Um, we have a lot of people in Europe and a lot of people in Asia taking English and you know, French is the next one. And French, yeah, US, Europe.

Ray Blakney: We get a lot of those people over there. Then. Portuguese, Italian, all the rest kind of go down from there. Um, as far like Japanese, even Mandarin, we don't have a huge demand for, 'cause as you say, there's a much higher demand for English in China than there is for Mandarin in the United States.

Sean Weisbrot: And that’s an interesting point that I noticed because Americans want to do business with China and the Chinese want to do business with Americans. The cultural gap is far larger than the linguistic gap, and you can teach language, but it's hard to teach cultural patience. I don't know how to say it, but like I can easily speak Chinese and understand why they're saying or doing or feeling what they are, but if you expect me to mirror that myself, it's hard as an American because even though I spent 10 years there.

Sean Weisbrot: If I'm mad, I'm mad. And like it's hard to control that once you feel that. And it's easy to get mad talking with Chinese people and especially in business because they'll be pretty blatantly like trying to get you to show your emotions because for them, showing your emotions is something that like you're not supposed to do.

Sean Weisbrot: And. If you show your emotions, you basically lose the game. And if you lose the game, they don't really wanna do business with you 'cause they feel like they can't really trust you there. There's a lot of nuances to it, so. So you can teach an American how to be fluent in Chinese, but if you don't teach them how to also adopt the cultural aspect when you do it, like it's basically useless to learn the language.

Ray Blakney: Exactly. And that's why, you know, I'm biased, but we work with tutors who are native speakers in whatever language we're teaching. Right. Because these are people who have grown up in that culture. Exactly. The culture you were talking about.

Ray Blakney: Right. They can. Explain those kinds of things. It's not, we would not hire, for example, an English tutor.

Ray Blakney: We get hundreds of applicants every month, but an English tutor, an example is we've had English tutors with PhDs from Russia come and teach, you know, apply for jobs with us. I'm like, we can't hire you. Your English is, I'm sure it's better than mine. Like if you ask me some grammatical rules in English, I'm like, I don't know.

Ray Blakney: But you would not necessarily understand the American culture. Even though you speak flawless English, if somebody asks you like, why do people do this? What is this? I'll be honest, I didn't grow up in the United States. Right? I sound American. Everybody who's listening to this podcast is like, wait, raise American?

Ray Blakney: No. I am 42 years old and of lived 27 years outside of the United States. I've lived way more time in, you know, in Turkey and in Mexico than I have in the us. It gives me a weird culture shock because if somebody tells me about American football, I'm like, I vaguely know the rules, but I've never been to a game.

Ray Blakney: And you know, I think the only thing I liked about the Super Bowl was the guacamole dip. I mean, you know, that's why I went to Super Bowl parties was to eat the food, right? Because I just did not grow up in that culture. I would not make a good English teacher as a result of that. Our Chinese teachers are from China.

Ray Blakney: It's the same. Our Spanish teachers are from Latin American. We'll assign you a Spanish teacher from the country you want to go to because even though they all speak Spanish, there are cultural differences, right? If you go to Mexico, if you go to Peru, you go to Argentina, they have different accents, British English, American English, Australia, and English, same thing.

Ray Blakney: They'll all understand you, but you might say something that like, yeah, we don't say that here. But if you say, you know. In Spain, it means the get a Ride. If you say it in Mexico, it means you're probably trying to have kids with that car. So yeah, I mean it, it's, you know, totally valid in some countries, not so valid in other countries.

Ray Blakney: That's why you need a teacher from that country teacher, the culture as well. 'cause otherwise you'll say some words that'll embarrass you a lot.

Sean Weisbrot: I was an English teacher in China for the first five years I was there, and something that I noticed was. Even though there were other people who were native speakers teaching alongside me, almost every single one of them had never taught themselves a second language.

Sean Weisbrot: And so I found that they didn't make good English teachers because they had no frame of reference for the student learning the language. And therefore it was necessary to explain this specific thing because you know, they're never gonna get it if you don't. And the only way you know it is if you.

Sean Weisbrot: You've been through the process yourself, and having taught myself Spanish, German, and Mandarin, it was easy for me to relate to different students at different ages, different cultural things. So while it is important for that person to be a native speaker, there are things that they won't understand or even necessary without specific training.

Ray Blakney: That's another requirement from our teachers, not only native speakers, they have to have college degrees. Most of our teachers have masters. But they also have had to have learned at least one other language. Now, in most cases with our teachers, it's English, right? Because most of their students are English.

Ray Blakney: So I'm a native Spanish speaker. I speak English, I'm a native French speaker, I speak English. Um, but we do have some teachers who are polyglots, they speak five or six languages, and we find that generally those are the best teachers.

Sean Weisbrot: Well, something else that was funny was when you're dealing with like high school and college age, even some middle school students.

Sean Weisbrot: If they start asking you things like, oh, is that an adjective or a noun? A lot of native speakers would be like, I have know what you're talking. No, I dunno.

Ray Blakney: I put myself in that bucket. 'cause I'm like, I don't know. I have no clue why, why isn't Ed pronounced as a T sometimes and it's an ED the other times.

Sean Weisbrot: Right? So like sometimes they'd be like, uh, you should just ask the Chinese, like, because all, you always have like a Chinese teacher. With you who also speaks English so they can help to like explain. 'cause they know the grammar, like they know the rules, they know all of that stuff. They're trained really hard in it.

Sean Weisbrot: So like especially in China, it wasn't like the foreign teacher was actually teaching you the language. It was trying to make the language learning process something you enjoy. Where the Chinese teacher actually teaches you the things you need to know and you practice it with the foreigner.

Ray Blakney: And that's actually, you know, in a way, an ideal situation because we all, we all know this, right?

Ray Blakney: In high school, we took Spanish or French or whatever we had there, we were missing that second component. So we had somebody who knew the grammar, whoever it is, whether it was a native speaker or not, that you took Spanish with an high school. You probably know how to conjugate the main verbs and all the rest.

Ray Blakney: If you went up high enough, you know, you, you might have even gotten to, uh, what do you call it, subjunctive or something like that. Right. So you understood the general rule of it, but you had no, you never used it. You had no cultural context for it. So, you know, a few years after high school, other than Buenos Diaz and you're, you're gone.

Ray Blakney: I mean, most people don't know any of it. They're missing that kimon because they, you know, if they had had somebody from Spain or Mexico. In the classroom, classroom making the language come alive and talking to 'em about it. I bet you would have a much more successful language program in the United States and more Americans would be at least conversationally bilingual than they're right now.

Sean Weisbrot: I think the bigger problem there is that America has no incentive to know other languages because to the north they speak English to the South, they speak Spanish, but like, ah, they're Mexicans.

Ray Blakney: Yeah. And if, well, even if you go to the south, most of the places Americans go to in Mexico, the beach areas, all the Mexicans speak English.

Ray Blakney: Everybody there speaks English, so you know, you'll get by in English. And that doesn't only apply to Mexico, probably applies to most of the world. I mean, you know, you and I are lucky that we speak like the language of the world. I've been to Thailand, my taxi driver, when I got off the plane, you know, in, in Bangkok and you know, tried to take a taxi to, they were like, yeah, I speak English.

Ray Blakney: He spoke fluent English. He's like a taxi driver. I'm like, that's embarrassing. I, I learned how to say, you know, KRE, which is thank you in in Thai. And that was pretty much the only thing I knew the whole month I was there. That was my last big trip before COVID. Right. But you'll find people who speak English almost everywhere.

Ray Blakney: We went to, my wife and I spent about six weeks in Japan and we went there with the idea that. Nobody, you know, there's this myth that nobody would speak any English while we were there. You better learn some Japanese, all the rest. Well I learned some survival Japanese before we went and then everybody spoke English.

Ray Blakney: I think a part of it was 'cause they were preparing for the Tokyo Olympics and like, you know, we went to Tokyo, like all the trains had English signs and they were, you know, native English speakers saying, you're getting off at this stop next. You know all the places that we went, which were more or less touristy.

Ray Blakney: Tons of people spoke English. Oddly enough, we met an old man who gave us a tour of a castle, who spoke fluent Spanish. He was like eighties, like when I was in my forties. I studied in Spain for five years. I haven't used in 40 years. Can I practice with you and give you guys a free tour? So he gave us a tour of this castle in Spanish, so that was kind of cool as well.

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah, that's awesome. I I love that. I remember I was in Vietnam for the first time in 2011 and I did like a one month tour, uh, starting in Saigon and going all the way up to Hanoi. Actually de saa, uh, I'm sure nobody knows what SAA is. It's a very, very, very tiny little village at the top of a mountain in the middle of absolutely nowhere bordering on China.

Sean Weisbrot: It's so high up that like the clouds go through the town so often the town is completely covered in fog and you can barely see in front of you as you're walking. It's a, a starting off point for like a multi-day hike through the forest and the villages of. Of the northern region of Vietnam. Probably to this day, the most amazing three days of my life.

Sean Weisbrot: Just, no, no telephones, no internet. Barely any electricity at all. Yeah. Staying with these families and they're, let's have pig tonight. You want pig? Yeah. Okay. And they just killed a pig and then make it for you to eat.

Ray Blakney: Yeah, we did the Inca Trail. It was a similar experience, like no cell phone, nothing on the entire day.

Ray Blakney: We have a picture of us on the highest point of his. The Inca Trail was funny. It was like our group was about 10 people, but we're all like professionals, lawyers, entrepreneurs, business people. We, we took a photo of ourselves at the highest point with our cell phones trying to catch a signal just as, just as a joke, because like we had all gone two days without checking our email, which like hadn't happened in years.

Ray Blakney: So we're like, we're in withdrawal. We need to see if everything's okay. So yeah, I've been through that. It's amazing. I recommend it to everybody who's busy. Go on a hike where you have no internet for three or four days. You'll feel totally rejuvenated at the end of it.

Sean Weisbrot: Well, so back then, smartphones just barely existed.

Sean Weisbrot: I don't think I even had one, but I was in this random little. Village in the Mekong Delta and it was on the way to the border with Cambodia. I just happened to like walk up to a little shop and there was this guy that walked out, a little old man speaking in, in fluent English. He's like, yeah, I used to like work alongside the Americans during the war and.

Sean Weisbrot: So like, yeah, I speak English, but then he, he heard me speak Chinese to my partner who was with me, and then he started speaking to me in Chinese. He's like, oh yeah, like, you know communism, right? It's like there's Chinese and we do business with them. It's like, I learned Chinese when I was younger and it's like, yeah, we just get, it was just like really strange.

Sean Weisbrot: This, you know, this little guy in this little place, like nobody ever visits and everybody in Morocco speaks

Ray Blakney: like 12 languages. So generally my wife and I, we speak a few languages, so we always have like a secret language while, you know, while we're traveling. Yeah. Did not work in Morocco. Like whatever languages we spoke, everybody spoke.

Ray Blakney: I'm like, come on. I'm like, you know, what can we do? I actually, a funny story, not to go too far on that for us was we went to New York City, uh, a few years back and my sister lived there at the time and she was, she's kind of a foodie, so she kind of gave us a little list of all these restaurants we had to try around the city.

Ray Blakney: So we there for about a week. Remember one night we went to a Jewish deli, right? So we go in there and. They gave us this menu, it was like six pages long and I was like, she was like, I don't know what this is. And, but in Spanish, she was the wait it was waiting for us and she's like, I dunno what any of these things are in Spanish.

Ray Blakney: She's like, you know, I answer in Spanish. I'm like, I don't really know. I've heard of matza balls before, but otherwise I really don't know any of these things are either. And we just kind of kept on talking for a minute. The wait it kind of si patiently and kind of looks down at us and. Fluent Spanish. He is like, look, if you need any help to figure out what's on the menu, I can just tell you what this stuff is.

Ray Blakney: He was like Jewish, but he was like From Puerto Rico or some like that. Absolutely fluent Spanish. While we were there, we were like, embarrassed you. I'm like, yeah, Spanish is not a secret language in the United States because like too many people actually speak it. So yeah, that that was our experience with trying to get away with that.

Sean Weisbrot: I feel like if you tried to speak Mandarin in Morocco, you probably would've succeeded in having nobody understand you.

Ray Blakney: You might be surprised they are. Yeah. I mean, well we did the tour. We kind of came in from 10 years and we had that, you know, we went into Chef, we went to the Sahara Desert Fizz, kind of did all the thing, ended up, ended up Marrakesh and yeah, like all the drivers of these cars, because the way that works there, you've been there, you've probably experienced the same.

Ray Blakney: It's not like these big tour buses, you kind of rent like cars to take you around for like a week, right? Or an SUV and then you have like a private driver for the week. So that's what we did. And he's like, yeah, yeah, I speak like seven or eight languages and we would like stop, you know, at these, the more touristy places.

Ray Blakney: And these tourists would walk by speaking random languages and you just turn to 'em and speak to 'em in their language. I'm like, I don't even know what language you just spoke, right? I'm like, I do this for a living. I, you know, I get language lessons. I don't even know what you just spoke. So I was really impressed by Morocco and the way they learned language.

Sean Weisbrot: What I enjoyed about Morocco was that I was able to take a train from Madrid to Kadi, and I took a ferry across the street of Gibraltar. Landed in 10 jis.

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah, that's what we did. Then I, I took a taxi to the middle of town. I just started walking. I found a hotel for like $5 or whatever for the night, and then the next few days I would just look like researched Morocco and then I was able to get on a train.

Sean Weisbrot: I took a train overnight to wherever it was I went. I stayed with like this, this family, they had like a five story house that's like very narrow and you go up the winding stairs and there's a few other couples kind of staying there. I was by myself and I stayed there for a few days and then like I hired, uh, van.

Sean Weisbrot: But it wasn't just me. There was like a bunch of other people that I didn't know and we drove into the desert and then we got off and we got on camels and we went to like a place to sleep for the night. And, and then like from there, we got back into the van after, after breakfast we got on the, we got on the camels again, went back to the town and showered and all that, and then went back in, the van drove back towards like the western part out of the desert and all that.

Sean Weisbrot: So it's just like really cool because. There's all these different modes of transportation and, and all these different kinds of people, and you, you don't really experience that in a lot of other places. And I think it's a North African kind of desert style life.

Ray Blakney: Yeah. It was the Betterman lifestyle while you're there.

Ray Blakney: I mean, we did, we did exactly the probably most exactly the same thing you did. Right? So we did that. We went, got on a camel. My camel's name was Jimmy. He almost, he, he tried to kill me, um, which is why I remember his name. Uh, but yeah, we did the same thing. We camped out, it was a little bit of glamping, so our, our tents were actually had showers in them with like, you know, real western bathrooms and all the rest of it.

Ray Blakney: But we spent like two days out there out on the dunes. Um, and then came back in, went to a whole bunch of other sites and on our way to Marakesh. Um, but that was like, I think a whole week that we tried. So we didn't go all the way east that you did, but we went kind of south to Fiz and kind of went out from there.

Ray Blakney: Definitely a trip worth doing.

Sean Weisbrot: Well, I spent about three weeks in Morocco. 'cause whenever I travel, like I have no plans. I kind of just, I was in Barcelona, uh, seeing my friends and I was like, okay, like, you know, I've been with you for a week. Let me just keep going. And then I took a train to Madrid and I was in Madrid for a week and I was like, you know what?

Sean Weisbrot: Forget Europe. Like, I'm next to Africa. I've never been to Africa. Let's go to Africa. So I was like, all right. And book the next train down to ez.

Ray Blakney: Yeah, we started in Madrid, we went down to Granada, then we went down to cas, but we had to go somewhere else 'cause there were too many, too much wind. So we went to a little town over, got another ferry over there.

Ray Blakney: And yeah, that's how we ended up in 10 years. So for us it was a little, little, we had to kind of stop at Choal for a day because the wind was too high and we couldn't actually go across the street of GI for a day. But this is the fun of traveling for all the people that are listening. Be open to this kind of, you know, flexibility because stuff happens and just enjoy it.

Ray Blakney: You know, we would've never gone to the Rock of Gibraltar if we hadn't been stuck there for a day. With all due respect to the people in the united ca, United Kingdom, the food is British and it was really, really bad. We tried to get a breakfast in Gibraltar and yeah, it was really, really bad. It's actually not a really pretty city.

Ray Blakney: You know, you go there for the rock, but the city at the bottom is like a port town. So it's like all ports with these big freight boxes and stuff like that. So it wasn't like that nice of a place, but you go and see the monkeys on the rock and you know, it's kind of fun.

Sean Weisbrot: So you had told me before that you went to Japan to learn, uh, how to use Kendo. Talk about that a little bit.

Ray Blakney: Kendo for those of you don't know is Japanese fencing. If you don't kind of picture that in your head, imagine Star Wars and the Jedi fighting because that's actually, um, Steven Spielberg apparently saw Kendo in Japan and that's what he based.

Ray Blakney: Like the Jedi look off of. Um, so don't think European fencing, uh, it's quite a bit more violent.

Ray Blakney: We wear things that look like American football here. Uh, and you know, when you hit somebody over the head, it's with a bamboo stick and that's the main target area is the head or the, the arms. And if you miss, because you know the arms, the target areas are protected. But if you miss. You're leaving a wel or a bruise on the person.

Ray Blakney: So generally beginners miss a lot more than advanced people. So I don't like going up against beginners 'cause they're gonna whack me full strength on my arm coming home black and blue, uh, later that day. So I've been practicing since my early twenties again, so going on 42. So I've been practicing for on and off about 20 years, a little off for the Peace Corps.

Ray Blakney: Because there was no kendo in where I was going, but I picked it up again afterwards and I love it. So I started in the us, but you know, I have a chance, I've had a chance to practice in Japan as well. My dream is to move there for a few years and practice. In Japan with the native practitioners who start when they're like five.

Ray Blakney: Right. You know, I started when I was 20, not that old by Western standards, but by the time I started there were already people who, you know, who've been doing it for 15 years, which is the reason why Japan and Korea always win the world championships and like everybody else is just competing for the third spot.

Ray Blakney: Like nobody else is even close to those top two spots because nobody else starts when they're five to practice. That kind of thing. But it's, it's. Like a lot of the west, you know, the eastern martial arts, it's got a lot of kind of a zen aspect to it. We meditate at the beginning of each class. We meditate at the end of each class to kind of come in and out of it.

Ray Blakney: There's a lot of philosophy into it. Where in Kendo, there are no blocks, there are only attacks, there are only four attacks. Technically speaking, there are like techniques you can do, but you know there are four target areas and there are four attacks and you practice for 50 years. To perfect these four attacks.

Ray Blakney: That's all there is. Good. I could teach you the four attacks in Kendo in five minutes, and there are people who've been practicing it for 70 years and that's all they're, you know, because there's the philosophy, your mind and body, you know, there's actually taiichi, which means mind, body, and spirit are one.

Ray Blakney: And that's a lot of what's kendo is when you hit somebody on a target, you actually have to yell what the target you are aiming for is so you don't accidentally hit a target. You know, if you hit your arm and you yelled out the wrong target, you would not actually, you know, you wouldn't get the point.

Ray Blakney: Because they're judges there. That would give you the point.

Sean Weisbrot: It's like the final ball in billiards.

Ray Blakney: Exactly. Exactly. You have to call it, right? If your foot doesn't hit the ground at the same time you hit the target, you don't do it. 'cause your body wasn't one with your sword. So all of those things have to happen at exactly the same time.

Ray Blakney: Otherwise you don't get the point. You know, I could hit your target and it's like, oops, it was an accident because I didn't yell at my foot, didn't hit there. My body was misaligned. So there's a lot of that. That's what you spend all the time doing at Kendall, and I find that applies to entrepreneurship as well.

Sean Weisbrot: I was just gonna say that if you say you're gonna do something, but then it doesn't connect then like you've just missed the point.

Ray Blakney: That's exactly, and it's not just about connecting at one level in business. Right.

Ray Blakney: Which is like, let say I got the Facebook ads to work, but then I don't deliver the product at the end of it.

Ray Blakney: I got somebody to buy, but then my delivery was awful. Or I got somebody to sign up for my lead magnet, but then I had my email sequence afterwards. To get 'em to buy the product was awful. So if you look at it from like a sales funnel point of view, generally speaking, you know, you can complicate things a lot.

Ray Blakney: But you know, you want to get people in the top of the funnel, move to the middle of the funnel, move to the end of the funnel, make the sale, four steps. That's all there is to, and if any one of those steps is off your funnel is not gonna be profitable. That's what kendo is as well. If any one of those steps is off, you're not getting the point.

Ray Blakney: And that's why I love the philosophy. I mean, I, you know, I use it in my entrepreneurship. I actually appoint paintings and quote quotes of kendo around my office that, uh, that kind of inspire me every day.

Sean Weisbrot: I feel like I should give all of my executives free Kendo training.

Ray Blakney: In addition to that, one of the things I jokingly say, so Kendo, essentially you yell Kiai and you hit somebody on the head with a stick.

Ray Blakney: And I always joke that I'm like, look, you can go to a shrink and pay $150 an hour to get a little styrofoam thing where you hit everybody and you yell and you get stress out. Or you can go to Kendo and do that for free. The difference of kendo and a lot of other martial arts between commercialized in the US and around the world.

Ray Blakney: Nobody makes money off of Kendo. There is no like professional kendo teacher in the United States who doesn't have a day job. Kendo is a passion. We all do it. If there is a charge for your local Kendo Dojo, it's usually to pay the rent. You know, karate teachers, they have a karate school. That's it. That's what they make a living off of.

Ray Blakney: Almost everybody practices kendo, and I think it's because the, the gear is very expensive. Like at entry level gear for Kendo, Kendall's about 500 to a thousand dollars. So I think that pushes a lot of people out of it. Like almost all of my senses have always been doctors, entrepreneurs, CEOs of companies, because it kind of attracts a certain kind of mindset and certain kind of people.

Ray Blakney: 'cause not everybody wants to do the same, same thing every day in and day out for 40 years. But if you wanna be really good at your business, you know, at business, that's what you have to do. I have 15 years of providing language lessons to people to get to the level I'm at you. There's no shortcut to this, right?

Ray Blakney: There's no like, you know, you can't build up the experience necessary to get to a high level of business without really putting in the reps. You know, without actually doing the work, without building the experience, without failing. A few times you hear about the people that they put on Forbes 30 days and you've got a business and you exited $40 million.

Ray Blakney: The unicorns. We think that's the norm. I guarantee to you go out and interview a hundred, 7, 8, 9 figure entrepreneurs, and that's not their story. They probably woke up every day, worked their butt off doing pretty much the same thing and executing well every single day, and that's how they reached their success.

Ray Blakney: Why don't they write a book about it? Because nobody wants to hear that, right?

Sean Weisbrot: Nobody wants to hear. How do you get successful?

Ray Blakney: You kind of have to work at it, you know, I'm sure in Chinese philosophy there's that, you know, there's no, there's no shortcut to the top of the mountain. You take one step every day and you climb the mountain.

Ray Blakney: And entrepreneurship is exactly the same thing. So that's my. My behind, you know, back in the napkin philosophy or theory as to why people who are high level Kendall tend to be, tend to be very successful professionals or entrepreneurs as well.

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah. So the Chinese, uh, phrase you're thinking of is, uh, the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Ray Blakney: You don't jump a thousand miles, right? You just have to keep on taking steps till you get there.

Sean Weisbrot: You were talking about interviewing a bunch of people and, and seeing how they did it. I've had conversations with over 200 company owners, of which just under half, I've actually published the recordings. I would say a few percent of them have raised money from investors.

Ray Blakney: That's the non-sexy story about startups that most people don't wanna hear. Right? Because the, you know, I raised $500 million in capital that makes the news. I worked for 20 years to, to bootstrap my business from, you know, with $5,000 in the bank. It was not an overnight success. I wasn't driving a Rolls Royce.

Ray Blakney: Six 90 days after I launched, I just worked every single day. One of the books, one of my favorite books, and I'll recommend it to everybody who's listening, is called The Millionaire Next Door. Now it's, the numbers in there are a little bit dated right now. This is about 20 years old, so it talks about millionaires, but inflation just multiply everything by two or even three.

Ray Blakney: To get it there. But they actually examined in that book, like you know, who the real millionaires specifically in the United States were. The first story is the one I remember the most from the book where they were apparently working at some kind of financial organization, you know, like say Fidelity or something like that.

Ray Blakney: And they were, they wanted to invite a hundred richest people in their portfolio to find out a little bit more about them so they could get more people like them to join. So they invited them all to this fancy restaurant in New York City. They flew 'em all out, all that kind of stuff. So they're waiting there the first night for the people to arrive.

Ray Blakney: So they put out a caviar. They have a Michelin star chef, high-end champagne, and this guy walks in, he's got like a t-shirt, a cowboy hat, you know, a white t-shirt, a cowboy hat and jeans on. And they're like, somebody got lost. You know? He is in the wrong place.

Ray Blakney: And so he kind of walks up and they look at, they look at their list and they're like, he's, he's like, what's your name?

Ray Blakney: He's, they see his name's like the third richest person on their list. Like, holy crap. Oh, that must be a coincidence, right? So he sits down, they ask him what he wants, like Gimme a Bud Light, you know, he doesn't want the champagne, he doesn't want the caviar, he doesn't want any, he is like, just gimme a Bud Light.

Ray Blakney: And then the second guy walks in. And it's like the same thing. Then the third guy, then the fourth guy, and they're, by the end of the night, they're like, okay, the people who look rich, the ones who had the Rolex watches and the suits and all the rest of it, they weren't actually the wealthiest per people in their portfolio, right?

Ray Blakney: It was these millionaires next door. Then they wrote a whole book about what really makes a millionaire in the United States. Um, you know, how do they live? Do they live in these fancy lifestyles that we see on the rich and famous? Did they become overnight successes? Absolutely not. Do they look badly?

Ray Blakney: Don't get me wrong, they do. You know, average millionaire, according to their study, drives a luxury car. It's usually a used luxury car. 'cause you know, we're cheap. We don't want to pay full price. I wanna pay 40% less, uh, two years later. So like, you know, buy A BMW, buy a Cadillac, just buy a 2-year-old Cadillac.

Ray Blakney: So somebody else paid that, you know, ridiculous sticker price and you're still getting a car that looks like fancy and you can drive it for the next five years. And then you sell it for probably almost the same price you paid for it. 'cause luxury cars retain their value more. Do they live in like mansions?

Ray Blakney: No, they live in nice neighborhoods, but they live in the same house for like 30 or 40 years. Right, so their house is like totally paid off. They have no mortgage. I mean, we're, my wife and I are lucky. We have no mortgage, we have no rent. We have not had mortgage rent for almost 10 years now. Those are the little kind of things that real millionaires do.

Ray Blakney: Also, don't buy your kids a car or a house, but I'll let you read the book about that and find the studies behind that. But yeah, highly recommend the book.

Sean Weisbrot: In Asia, you can see that in play. There's a lot of people that were extremely flashy. It's not like America where I can't just go, Hey man, how much money do you have?

Sean Weisbrot: And you'll be like, well, I've got about $15 million. You're not gonna tell me. I'm not gonna ask. But in Asia, like you know these things, people will talk about them quite easily and it's obvious, even though they're being honest, the ones who have less money are trying to pretend as if they have more, and so they'll be more flashy and they'll have like a hundred thousand dollars watch.

Sean Weisbrot: And you're like, but why, man?

Ray Blakney: My Fitbit will tell exactly the same time that you're. A hundred thousand dollars watch does and it counts my steps. Does your a hundred thousand watch do that?

Sean Weisbrot: Probably not. I learned that the best way to enjoy your wealth is to make it so that nobody knows you have it.

Sean Weisbrot: Because if people know you have it, then you can't trust that they like you for who you are.

Ray Blakney: I drive a Mazda. My wife has a Hyundai.

Sean Weisbrot: I don't have a car.

Ray Blakney: The story here is interesting. The first car we bought in 10 years was a 14-year-old Nissan Rogue that we bought because our friend, she was getting divorced and needed the money.

Ray Blakney: All she got in the divorce was the car and she needed the money. So, and it was like $3,000. I mean, it was like, you know, it was a junker. It had like 120,000 miles on it. We bought that like three years ago now. And then since my wife got pregnant and we're like, okay, we need a car that that won't break down on the way to the hospital, so let's buy something.

Ray Blakney: So we bought a Hyundai. Then our red, unfortunately our Nissan Rogue broke down. I'm like, we actually need two cars now because we have to go around. So I bought a Mazda. But I mean, those are the only reason. If we didn't have a child, we'd not have a car right now because. Uber in Mexico is like three bucks to get across town.

Ray Blakney: It's like having my own private driver. I don't have to worry about traffic or anything. I can listen to something, I can get some work done. I don't have to do any of the driving. We just did happen when he had kids. And you know, once he gets older, I think by the time he's five, I, I'll put him, I'll put him to work in the office and hopefully he can, you know, he can, he can drive himself to school after that when he is five years old.

Ray Blakney: So, uh, that, that's my plan. At least I don't think my wife will.

Sean Weisbrot: When I was living in Vietnam, we would use, uh, not Uber, but grab. Mm-hmm.

Ray Blakney: That's the Southeast Asia, right? That's the big one. Yeah.

Sean Weisbrot: Right. And I could pay a dollar to $2 for a motorbike to pick me up. And if I wanted to splurge for a car, it would add an extra dollar two to the ride.

Ray Blakney: I would splurge for a car in Thailand. Right. I'm like, it's raining here. I'm like, I don't wanna, but it's like three or four bucks. I'm like, look, yeah. Owning a car plus insurance, plus gas. Even if I took one every day, let's just say I worked in Vietnam or Thailand, right? We took one to work and back every single day you do the math and you're like, yeah, that's like 500 bucks a month.

Ray Blakney: But what's your car payment, insurance and gas in the United States for a car way, probably way more than that. Let's just say you have two cars. Talking 12, $1,300. Yeah. I'm like, it's crazy when I hear some of my buddies in the US and I wish they're paying for cars and we're not talking luxury, right? If you're trying to buy your, uh, Tesla, you're paying way more than that for your car as well, and this is money you throw down, drain generally, right?

Ray Blakney: This cars are not appreciating assets. I've started bid, you know, my chocolate factory, I started for $20,000. That's a car I started a frigging chocolate factory that made me that money back multiple times over. For less than, you know, most people spend on the car. I'd much rather spend it on something that's gonna earn me money than something that, you know, wasted on something that's just gonna get me to the grocery store once a week.

Sean Weisbrot: Did you make a car out of chocolate?

Ray Blakney: No, unfortunately we did not. Even though now I might have to go and buy, so I sold my shares to my partner. So I'm still good friends with, I mean, it was totally amicable sale. I'm gonna have to contact her after this podcast and see, see if we can get on that for the next time I visit the Philippines.

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah, just be like, Hey, just make a card that's made out that you could eat. Like, who doesn't want a car? You can eat

Ray Blakney: marketing, pure marketing, right. People would visit us to see that.

Sean Weisbrot: Especially if you have nanotechnology injected into it so that as you eat it, it repairs itself so you could keep eating it over and over again.

Sean Weisbrot: So it's like a perpetual, not not a perpetual motion machine, but like a

Ray Blakney: perpetual chocolate machine or something like that. Right. I'm gonna call Elon, see if he can get on that. I think this is almost the high priority. It's colonizing Mars for him. So I think I can get that work out.

Sean Weisbrot: If you could keep the people on Mars supplied with per, you know, chocolate for their entire life, I think it's a good deal.

Sean Weisbrot: May maybe he would be willing to buy it. Buy into the factory.

Ray Blakney: I might be able to get an intro. I actually, I was lucky, but I. Eight weeks ago, or I guess nine weeks ago, I was on Richard Branson Island that was actually hanging out with him. So apparently he, he knows Elon pretty well, so, we'll, I, I might try to ask, I'm like, Hey Richard, gimme an intro to Elon.

Ray Blakney: See, see if we can get this old nano chocolate thing that Sean mentioned going. So I'll, I'll send an email after this. See, see if we get that ball rolling.

Sean Weisbrot: Just don't forget to, to cut me in.

Ray Blakney: Yeah, well I'll give you some free, uh, I'll give you the wheel so you can pretty much just like eat as much chocolate as you want and just kind of comes back.

Sean Weisbrot: Right. I'll make sure your factory in China's up to snuff.

Ray Blakney: That. Well, yes. I said if I owned it, I might be talking to you. But getting those boxes for our packaging from China, from Shenzhen was a whole nother story.

Sean Weisbrot: That's where I lived. I know Shenzhen blindfolded.

Ray Blakney: I know. And that's, I mean, trust me, that's my experience with, that's why I know when Alibaba's bad translation, because.

Ray Blakney: I have had to deal with that myself when I was trying to first get, I didn't even know what MOQ meant when I first, you know, when I started my childhood fact. I'm like, MOQ, what the heck? I'm like Googling, what is MOQ? Oh, minimum order quantity. That makes sense. Yeah. We were trying to get somebody to send us like a hundred boxes because we were just starting off.

Ray Blakney: Nobody bakes a hundred boxes in China. Like, like nobody would even dare talk to us. Right. It was like 5,000. We were lucky to find 5,000.

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah, I was gonna say probably like a hundred thousand

Ray Blakney: 10 th A lot of people were willing to do 10,000, but we found one that was willing to do 5,000. Obviously the per unit price was a little higher, but I'm like, just give us those.

Ray Blakney: And they ended up being the people we worked with in the long term. So it paid off for them to kind of make that lower, lower deal for us. But yeah, I mean, I, it was a total education for me. I had no idea how many of that stuff worked.

Sean Weisbrot: I'm in a group of entrepreneurs that are six plus figure, and a lot of them do like drop shipping or they've got their own e-commerce, uh, white label that they do on Amazon.

Sean Weisbrot: And right now they're talking about how like China's screwing them for shipping the products on time. And I was like, guys, look, it's New Year's time for them. They're off for the next five, six weeks. You're screwed. Like nothing's happening until February. Just get over it.

Ray Blakney: If you're a drop shipper that doesn't have high volume, you really have very little sway.

Ray Blakney: I mean, if you're, if you're moving like thousands of units a month, you can probably call it a factory. They might do something for you. But if you're selling like a hundred units a month, most of these factories over there are beasts. They're producing millions of units a month. They don't care about you who have a hundred units.

Ray Blakney: They're not gonna reopen a production line just 'cause This one guy in the United States who sells a hundred, I don't know, widgets on his website, is complaining about it. It's just not high enough priority for them. If, you know, Microsoft calls 'em up or, I mean, you know, if Apple calls 'em up and says, we need more of these.

Ray Blakney: Yeah, they'll open the factory and they'll make that happen because that's millions and millions of units.

Sean Weisbrot: I've seen some of the screenshots of these guys, like some of them are, are doing hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars a month, but they don't know Chinese, so it doesn't matter. The factory doesn't care.

Sean Weisbrot: They won't do anything for them. If they were thinking bigger, they wouldn't have, they wouldn't be doing drop shipping. They'd be building their own sustainable brands.

Ray Blakney: So I own a website called how much toilet paper.com. I tried drop shipping with that. Purchased it two years ago 'cause it went viral during COVID for those of you know, SEO, it had it like, it got like 5,000 back links and we're talking, it was featured on the BBC because there were millions of visits a day for a period of about 30 to 40 days.

Ray Blakney: I purchased it from the kid who made it. I did not make it. And I tried putting up a drop shipping site on there when I, I didn't know what I was doing, so I'm like, Hey, let's throw up a drop shipping site. Yeah. I experienced everything that you're talking about.

Ray Blakney: You know, we had good enough SEO that we ranked and we started selling stuff pretty, pretty right away.

Ray Blakney: But I didn't know what I was doing, and I dropped shipping and I got complaints for like 120 day shipping times and all, all that kind of stuff. I'm like, yeah, I have other businesses I'm running right now. I don't have time to run this and build this business out by myself, and it's not my area of expertise.

Ray Blakney: It would take me years to gain what you, Sean have, and I just did not have the time to learn that stuff. Right. So yeah, if you're going to drop shipping, don't believe the courses you buy on you, Debbie. Which say you're gonna be selling a million pro a million dollars in products in 30 days. It, there's a lot more to it than that.

Sean Weisbrot: Overall, what advice do you have for people that you've learned from all of your entrepreneurial experiences?

Ray Blakney: Yeah, so I think the biggest lesson I've learned, and this is actually relatively recent, so I'm gonna share it with the audience. I. Don't, you know, about 200 podcasts, but you're one of the first ones I'm sharing this bit of advice on because it came to me in the last few weeks.

Ray Blakney: Be more intentional about what you're doing. Right? Intentional does not mean I'm building this business just 'cause I wanna make a lot of money, which honestly that's how I started as Swep. But on that recent, recent trip I had to Necker Island where I had the opportunity to be sitting down with, you know, one of the richest.

Ray Blakney: Men in the world. I was next to a Nova laureate, I was next to some, like somebody ran Google X, um, Dr. Teller, who's like the smartest guy in Google. And you start seeing things that the way that they look at the world is very different from us. We do things when we need to, but we don't necessarily do them with intention.

Ray Blakney: Right? I mean, you know, I, I ate that because I was hungry, right? Instead of eating something healthy because it's gonna make me feel better in a week. And the same thing in business. We sometimes spend all day putting out fires instead of working on what's gonna grow the business. And the final thing is we don't think about why we want the business in the first place.

Ray Blakney: Right. What's the fulfillment we're looking for? I've built businesses that have made me, that were successful and have made me miserable, and I just didn't know any better when I was doing it. So be intentional about everything you're doing and you'll live a happier life for it. And you might not have business quite as big as you wanted, but you'll be really happy.

Ray Blakney: Most of us, I think, would be perfectly happy with a business that made, you know, $500,000 profit a year, right? You're taking home 500,000, but you get, spend all your time with your friends and your family and your kids. We'll be fine. A million wouldn't make you that much happier.

Sean Weisbrot: There was actually a study that was done, which said, once you make more than 70,000, you really don't see much more happiness.

Ray Blakney: That's it. It's kind of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right? Once your food, your housing, and your health, once those three things are kind of taken care of, everything else, you know, Ferrari doesn't make you any happier. Actually, my mindset coach gave me one quote there that was kind of interesting saying that.

Ray Blakney: You know, money just makes us more of who we are instead. So, you know, if you're miserable and you make a lot of money, you're just gonna be more miserable. If you're already happy without making a lot of money, you might be a little bit happier. But it's not changing everything, right? It's, it's who you are, just amplified.

Ray Blakney: So don't look at money to solve all your problems.