06 Mar Ep. 64 Kevin Kelly of Snake Bite Co. and Anti- Agency on Living Where You Work

TRANSCRIPTION

Hey this is Adam Kruse owner broker of the Hermann London real estate group and host of the St. Louis REALTOR® podcast and this is Shannon St. Pierre a REALTOR® at Hermann London and co-host of the St. Louis REALTOR® podcast before we begin we just want to say that we are REALTORS® which is different from someone who is simply an agent the term REALTOR® identifies a real estate professional who is a member of the National Association of REALTORS® and subscribes to its strict code of ethics and even though it’s called the St. Louis REALTOR® podcasts this show is for everyone who’s interested in real estate buyers sellers REALTORS® HGTV Watchers everyone so if this specific episode isn’t exactly what you’re looking for go through our past episodes and I guarantee you’ll find a topic that interests you if there’s a topic you want us to cover email us at podcasts at Hermann London calm that’s Hermann H er ma & N London calm and we’ll talk about it on an upcoming episode thanks for listening and enjoy Live from the rooftop of the Hermann London real estate group in beautiful downtown Maplewood it’s the St. Louis REALTOR® podcast with Adam Kruse and Shannon St. Pierre welcome everybody to the St. Louis REALTOR® podcast I’m your host Adam Kruse here with my co-host Shannon St. Pierre hello and we are super excited today’s topic is all about this concept of working from home and we have a very special guest here today a longtime friend Kevin Kelly Kevin is the owner of snake bite which he’ll tell us a little about an anti agency which I’m sure it’ll tell us about but he is a guy who I helped buy a building a while ago that we wanted he wanted to make sure that he could work from home and this this kind of work from home concept I think is growing and so we wanted to really get into it with you today thanks for being sounds good man thanks for the invite I was very pumped to be on this podcast yeah in HL HQ my first video podcast which I sprouted a beautiful zip for kind of its keeping it at bay well we do appreciate you being here yeah and so you are a guy obviously you’re an entrepreneur both of those companies as I mentioned are your companies yes I know you’ve had an ty for a very long time huh and snake by you’ve had actually for a pretty long time to a couple sixth year sixth year okay so I have some still I have a few of the custom Hermann London totally supportive oh yeah well it’s instead of saying snake bite on the leather part it says Hermann London on the leather part yes so basically custom wholesale is a huge part of the business um take a company’s logo we make a die for it and then you heat treat our heat stamp that dye into the leather you can do foil stamps and things like that and then it becomes kind of a promotional item no promotional trinket yes that’s pretty nice yeah in the beginning I didn’t really want to do that because I was trying to have some kind of concept of this is a heritage product you know we’re not going the whole samples route and putting other logos on it and that quickly fell by the wayside because I realize don’t want to make money yeah so well you guys have always been focused on kind of the snakebite brand and I know we’re off topic that’s what we’re saying yeah that’s right because like the Hat you have on I bought in one of those hats yes am i proud to wear a snakebite hat yeah and when we we did it we both did an event a long time ago and in on Cherokee and we were giving out koozies with our company brand on it and you guys were selling koozies you know yeah people were buying them yeah and because it’s it’s kind of like the Adidas concept where people want to pay to have the brand on there and I think well that’s a cool logo Nick bite it’s like turns into a lifestyle brand is what you would call it yeah they’re proud to wear a snake bite shirt or whatever well the whole concept kind of stemmed from t-shirts you know t-shirts were really just a perfunctory item people put their logos on them and then just give them away Joey can you put a link to dictionary.com for pre functor ii perfunctory perfunctory yes that pre-filtering okay sir I’m whipping up on Spokane I’m just pumped we’ll change the pace but anyways they were just given away you know they weren’t really a collector’s item people don’t really pay a lot of money for t-shirts and then all the sudden with rock bands becoming more and more popular then they became kind of collector’s items for people that went to live shows and fast forward 20 30 40 years and the t-shirt is obviously something that you don’t mind paying 30 40 50 bucks for anymore even up to a couple hundred dollars depending on what that t-shirt is I’m saying in general I don’t either but like I mean I now will spend $30 on a t-shirt that is like oh yeah that’s a great t-shirt of a local band or artist or yada yada yada whereas before I couldn’t imagine more than like $15 on the t-shirt so we took that idea of like okay t-shirts have done really well this is a bottle opener a lot of people make bottle openers on people give away bottle openers how do you make something that has that kind of appeal that people want to own it and so if people are not familiar with you thank you I say that I have bought one long before I actually even knew you or knew that I knew you yeah and because it’s a really cool gift sure yeah so it’s more like what you describe as like a church key it’s overly designed bottle opener right and it has instead of the traditional one point church key traditional like come from anyway for that thing the church key term came from monks carrying around a key man this is really testing my memory to the cellar and monks could only have like two beers a day so the monk that had the key he held the church key to the the craft beer art to the beer cellar you might want to look that fact up I don’t know if I’m accurate but some things are having to do with monks and their allotment for beers each day and to its huge key but on the bottle it is just a bottle opener it’s the can where the magic of the snakebite comes into play yeah wow this is really turning into advertisement for Snake Bite keychain yeah and it’s all made in America and most and all the components are then shipped here from other states and then we make it down on Cherokee Street and so the point is you can pour your beer faster you can drink it faster and that’s really what we’re looking for and it’s local business and local goods if you know all of that whole world we’re trying to encompass and just having a good time honestly so and the real point is that means this master that I did it from home he’s a master ministry but you work from home I guess you would kind of call it like corporate headquarters is where you live because a lot of them like making and stuff goes on somewhere else that’s correct but the corporate headquarters of snake bite and anti agency is from your house right so I think something interesting is to preface with when I quit my job I contacted you and I was looking for a dual live-work space and just something funky I know we were looking at old churches you didn’t just like I don’t want to be your office yes oh you wanted like something different I wanted something strange that you could retrofit and I don’t know where that idea even came from it was probably from movies and TV watching some spy live in an airport old airport hangar or something yeah I’m like that’s what I want and so we start looking at places and I think it was almost you didn’t even really know what to look for like shabby looking commercial should I be looking at funky home should I be looking at mixed-use and so we kind of just cast the MLS map pretty wide open for all these funky properties basically in the beginning of the ad that category by the phone yeah I mean and I’ve seen some people try to own a specific thing that isn’t like the church lady that steal church lady yeah and which is very interested in me interesting to me from like a niche perspective just like yeah the church lady has sell churches it’s kind of smart in a way but I it took me a long time but eventually we found this kind of situation that was completely rehabbed that was an office on the first floor and then the four units above were all residential we walked into that and I was kind of feeling and thinking to myself and like this is a little too little too done you know yeah there’s some nice exposed brick but there’s granite counter-tops there’s brand-new hardwood floors carpet and so this is a little too West County for me but they still straight they straight up had like the lady at the front desk right yeah they had the lady at the front desk they had the giant conference table and then the two separate rooms were two offices for the presidents and the vice president of the business so you said what do you think about this and in my head I’m like now this is way too done you know it’s weird there’s a weird neural there’s a weird funky window on the bedroom wall or what was going to be the bedroom wall but I stopped and just kind of thought about it and we came back and shot him a very low ball number two which hit us quite a wonderful reply and back and forth back and forth and eventually got it for a really nice price now this was seven years ago so yeah well it’s interesting because I think what you’ve you sort of probably grown into that space kind of I guess and maybe it may be even too small for you now grown into and now starting to grow out of yeah because part of your business I think you do like photo shoots do it through the anti side maybe more you do like right have you ever recorded anything with that kitchen uh video wise yeah like a didn’t you do like commercials and stuff like that we I have done a series of commercials mainly in the living space because it does have that nice exposed brick wall okay throw some leather couches up there and then just looks you know like a cool set but initially it was that I was interested in just having a space that clients could come in and that they wouldn’t feel like they’re walking into a home and later Webster Groves oh that’s pretty smart right it does feel like that right it was more commercial first and it’s like a part of it yes yeah and and so that was the idea and so I did start to have some meetings there and this was in the year what is it now 2020 so this was like 2013 2014 and what I slowly started to realize is that I didn’t even really need to have meetings you know or I would just come to the person’s place of work so the whole idea of this being an office kind of fell by the wayside within the first two years and then it just kind of became like a public office like a public office now it’s just your home office and you didn’t want the guests come in and go there’s his towel from this morning you know yeah yeah like I had to maintain some sense of decorum and you know public feel to it where people weren’t grossed out by a towel or underwear on the corner right but you know I think that that’s funny because that was the idea of what I was going to have and then what the reality actually became is that nobody really wants to come visit you anyways if they don’t have to and as a marketing professional they appreciated me just coming to their office yeah that’s so interesting that you you you know I guess most of the people that we think of working from home it is more of like working from home and your underwear kind of thing yeah they like stand up in they’re wearing shorts what about that video with the guys on the news and his baby and his kid comes walking yeah you think of people sitting like one of my favorite things in the world to do is sit on my sofa with my laptop and watch TV like while I’m working yeah it’s amazing I can’t do them but I respect that you can that’s because you’re not doing it all day long yeah that’s because you’re trying to knock out a few more emails which is probably a typical um habit of a lot of people but you’re not doing it all day long right so I’d have meetings all the time where people are like man I really got this idea I’ve got $50,000 I want to make the next Pandora meets Facebook meets Twitter and I after probably six of those meetings I’m like okay I can’t do these meetings anymore they’re not beneficial people have no idea how startups actually work so let me figure out a way to kind of put up yeah put a safety gap or moats in between these people taking my time so when you say okay shoot me an email 50% of people already just don’t bother and then when they when they do shoot you an email and have focused questions that they’ve taken the time because most people don’t even really want to have that much focus when they’re meeting they just want to like bitch about something and have you give them positive platitudes about how they’re you’re doing great man just keep it up you know let’s touch basis in another month which is just kind of if you’re really trying to get something done that’s the first thing to say send me an email they send you to email I reply and that really sums up the remaining 50 percent or 25 percent you answer my questions great we don’t need to meet and then your days not broken up and you’re able to get more things done throughout the day so how often do you go out for coffee Winston never no never my system throughout the day is that the mornings from about 7:30 or 8:00 a.m. to 1:00 you know whenever I wake up I go make coffee chill out try not to look at my phone read I read every single day and I try to get about 45 minutes in then I’ll slowly know just any any topic that interests me a lot of nonfiction and I’ve tried to introduce more fiction here and there because I think that if it’s a good book like I just read Lonesome Dove last year and into this year it’s about a 900-page Western but it’s incredible and I really enjoyed it so much more than all of these pop psychology and self-help books that we kind of innovate ourselves with it’s information overload so the fiction it is passive yeah yeah instead of being talked to you’re being I’m feeling like oh gosh you need to do this I need to do that and yes I actually yes you know I found a lot of the pop psychology books and self-help books all file the same damn format and after a while I’m realizing like I read a ton of Cabot’s and I read I don’t trying to remember the last one that I read I have to be careful because some books don’t necessarily follow the mold and I like those authors but like you know some of the top ten books in the past five years and they all say here’s the problem here’s a bunch of anecdotal stories about why it’s good or bad or how to beat it there’s way too long it’s just people following the New York Times bestseller format of writing a pop psychology self-help book and after a while like they all kind of blend together so that’s where I started reading fiction again and really if you find good fiction it kind of helps you more than any of the self-help books like there’s ideas in Lonesome Dove that I’ll remember until I die really oh my god it’s such a good book I mean just quotes and you know I mean if you get into the western genre you know it’s a lot of stoicism and blunt violence and things and he was trying to write a novel that went against the romanticized version of the Western novel which is like oh you know damsel in distress come in six-shooter blazing this guy wanted main characters to just kind of die off bluntly like and quickly kind of like the original game of Thrones was the novel the Western novel Cormac MacCarthy is another component of this I know we’re going so far off topic but anyways all that to be said I read slowly start to introduce social media then I probably won’t check my email until about 11 o’clock because I just don’t want that kind of urgency that early on you know if you live your life waking up and introducing urgency from the moment that you’re awake then you just notice that everything starts to go much quicker they start to fly by you don’t really remember a whole lot of things it’s just like wow when was Christmas I feel like it was yesterday and it’s already March 4th right now so it’s it’s just trying to introduce slowness on a daily basis before I do my emails and have my core productivity session from about 10:30 till 3:30 and that’s when I try and get all my items done for that day and then I’ll slowly take phone calls check back in on things that I’ve been you know following up on all with always just trying to have a healthy mental attitude about working for myself and working from home to bring it all back around well at all I mean that all is it’s very interesting you know yeah all that you’re saying and part of the questions we’re gonna ask about is like dealing with distractions when you’re sharing home and stuff like that and it seems you know I can kind of go off on the little interesting tangent about the coffee meetings that you mentioned mm-hmm and I think that a lot of people probably would be more likely to say yes to the coffee meeting a because I like the social pressure of it yeah but be because if they go to the coffee meeting they feel like they’re working right yep feel like oh I’m getting up I got to get my dress shirt on I’m going to Starbucks yeah I’ve got a business meeting I’m taking notes in my business you’re and field notes Here I am like I’m out doing business at a coffee shop and like your point is then you go home and you didn’t actually do anything further your business you didn’t make any money yeah you didn’t whatever and you just wasted probably two hours of your day at least right and you know I guess I was lucky in that I quit my job when I was still relatively young so I was 25 right before the recession barely ever even worked well I know I worked a job I worked full-time for three years about 50 to 65 hours a week do it doing art direction and graphic design okay so it was before that I freelance so I I got out of school a little bit earlier than normal and then I freelance for two years with a bunch of agencies around town and then I needed to go full-time to really understand you know the sacrifice and what it means to show up to the same place every day so I did that for three years straight when I turned 25 I realize this is not for me it’s nice having a salary it’s nice having a constant paycheck and Austin health benefits but this is life this is not my path I just knew it then quitting the job and slowly getting introduced into freelance and slowly cultivating personal responsibility and good habits that probably took about six years you know it wasn’t an overnight thing I had the leeway and I had the way to be in a band and not really worry about money cuz I had saved all my money working full-time and then I slowly you know this wasn’t like an overnight thing it took me a long time to cultivate my ideas of what a good productive day looks like and how to get there quickly now other people I know who have quit their job and trying to start working for themselves immediately they have to they don’t have the luxury of time that I had being in my you know mid-20s so there are tips like get out of your pajamas as quickly as possible and put on your work clothes and to get into the work mindset that’s yeah that’s an obvious thing I don’t necessarily like have to put on a three-piece suit and you know say it’s work time Kevin but I probably would have benefited having done that when I was 26 or 27 you’re right I just didn’t have the personal self responsibility at that point well yeah I mean this we’re kind of talking about working from home today but yes different types of people that work from home right you’re sure entrepreneur category yes people who are employees that work from home yeah right and then there’s some which is a different ballgame whole other ballgame and then there’s employees I know a guy who works from home and his company tracks him more than I think they would if he worked at the office so interesting and so he gets a break he walks around this house with one of those like old kitchen timers yakking minute break and he’s like walking on his house like whatever oh well the software just by being on the computer what’s what’s he do he’s like taking calls and stuff okay for like insurance related stuff so that’s pretty easy to try out a lot of other people like I’ve got another friend who works from home like on Mondays you know her company lets her do that yeah and it’s that that’s one of those things that’s super taking advantage of where it’s like as long as my mouse moves every 45 minutes I’m working you know but they can’t really track what she’s doing yes I guess there’s the trackable work from home there’s the non-trackable work from home and then there’s the entrepreneur there’s probably other categories but sharing so one of the questions I was gonna ask about is like staying motivated mmm but that probably has nothing for you in your category honor that probably has nothing to do with working from home it has a lot more to do with just I want to be successful in my business yeah I mean Wow what’s my go-to line is that you’ll never be happy until you work for yourself but I don’t recommend it to anybody and that is the truth it’s a double-edged sword yes you get your freedom and yes you are fully actualized in your professional mind of dictating what it is that you do but yes you never stop thinking about business and you never stop thinking about what you can do and vacations are the biggest litigation when you have a full-time job you’re able to disconnect fully because it’s all in the office when you work for yourself you take that with you you still have the mental office right and I just went on a vacation two weeks ago and it took me for three to four days that even snap out of the productivity mindset yep I think it takes me about three days the first three days I’m sort of on stressed a little bit you know yeah we’re going go-karting or whatever and I’m kind of like cool do you mind if I sit out and like check my emails you know or even trying to maximize your vacation like we were in Central America I’m like okay I want check out this volcano we want to go to this small little town and check out the market and once we got to the place and three days later of saying why are we trying to run around why are we trying to do all this let’s just stay here and decompress and turn off and then I was finally able to get to like Beach brain and when you get to that point then the ideas start to come in passively without even thinking about it so you’ll just be sitting on the beach sipping on a Corona and just an idea will come out of nowhere and you’re like oh my god that’s great let me grab my phone and just write that down you know and that’s a beautiful place to be too and then you know coming back from the trip it’s hard to snap back into productive mode because you’re still stuck in beach brain and you’re wondering why am I even here why don’t I live in Central America you know you’ve romanticized the trip already being back it’s so easy to come back to me it’s easy to come back and get back into that rat race or whatever it took me three four days okay here we go well it’s a no it took me long time yeah I got back last Tuesday and I was really suffering with like you know the existentialism of being an entrepreneur and like why am i why am i responding to this email and then then it was you know I had a fun weekend and then Monday it was like okay I’m ready to do this again now by the way oh yes sales have dipped a little bit yes well you’ve talked a little about kind of how you organize your day it’s not you know which I think we were interested in I think you talked a little bit about sort of being motivated one one of the things that we that I’ve seen in REALTORS® people have their corporate job yeah they decide they want to become a REALTOR® they quit their corporate job probably way too soon they become a REALTOR® and then day one they sort of show up yeah well yeah how you doing you know here’s some things to do you know day two they show up an hour later no one gets mad at them going on right day three they don’t show up at all yeah nothing bad happens to them and then day four they’re at home watching Oprah and like doing their laundry you know yeah and so I I guess I’m just and that doesn’t work for people so this whole like being renovated that’s the starter thing is what yeah but there you know that’s a nuanced conversation and you’re talking about a lot of different things you’re talking about people’s purpose you’re talking about what they have anticipated being a REALTOR® what they think it’s going to be like and then they’re they have to embrace the reality of the situation which it’s a because people try to like just like simplify it down to like yeah I don’t have to go in so you know I’m just gonna watch mama’s family reruns all day and just you know the zone out with Oprah so are you really doing what you want to do in the first place I think is Realty if you say I don’t have to go in then right maybe you shouldn’t the word happen exactly so I think that that’s the first roadblock people are looking for these quick fixes and they look at Realty is saying wow look at the money I can make just by showing people homes and you know taking you know getting a little bit of an education and and they don’t realize that it’s just like any other entrepreneurial effort you have to be good at marketing you have to be good at in person-to-person you have to be good over the phone you have to be considerate all these different skill sets that people just don’t even think about when they get into any field the one the one field that is fairly entrepreneurial that people do have a motivation and I would say is legal lawyers are like they’re all entrepreneurial and the system of a law firm is set up similar to the system of a Realty agency right more or less I I don’t I don’t think exactly I mean sort of well in terms of everybody has their own portfolio of work and if you sell more homes or do more cases you’re gonna be making more money probably like eventually a might and maybe you’re right but my impression was that a new a lot of new attorneys they sort of start out as a more salaried person yeah working for what the more entrepreneurial type of it would be a partner Yeah right but eventually they definitely become the entrepreneurial type yes exactly and then you know there’s no lack of motivation then when it comes to being on you know a partner in a law because once you got that first big check bill because it’s the concept of ownership and so once you start off at a real estate agency you probably don’t feel that concept of ownership as quickly as you would hope right right and again I’m pretty I don’t really know how the real estate market works well just like everybody else you probably know a lot of REALTORS® and yes some of them some are very successful and so yeah what was the initial question it was it was kind of just more about like the staying motivated oh yeah kind of stuff yeah I think you have to determine if it’s actually what you really want to do in the first place and I think that people I guess I wanted to ask about dealing with distractions you know because I you know and a lot of these questions are sort of tied together like how you organize your house versus your workspace whatever me yeah I get the impression a lot of people that work from home it’s like I need to do some emails I need to do some laundry yeah I need to eat lunch I need to design that new flyer for people or whatever yeah laundry it is yeah it’s easy to get distracted and I think there’s a bunch of tips and hacks and all that kind of crap I think it is I’m starting to realize like being productive as a form of meditation which I don’t meditate but the only idea of meditation is that any time a distraction happens you acknowledge it and you don’t you don’t chastise yourself you just acknowledge that it’s a distraction and then you push it aside and focus back on meditating I think work is the same way you know I think that you can have a streak of very like my dick I’ll have a very productive day typically followed up by a less productive day and some of that is kind of this whole reward thing that we have in our mind of like the dopamine rush of checking social media like I had a great day yesterday so I can slack a little starting off today but then the slack starts to take over until one o’clock and you’re like I am done anything today and then you start to feel guilty about it so then you start to really focus again but then some I text you or you know you get hungry and you go make a sandwich and then you’re off track again and I think the key is really acknowledge that you’re being distracted do what you do and then just try and make a concerted effort to get back to the place where you are being productive so do you have your home like set up though in a way that allows for productivity you know because you have your pressure like your work space in your personal space always just somehow come together yeah I mean I have my office room you know and I don’t ever take my laptop outside of that you don’t know no I don’t I don’t multitask at all I think it’s a lie a dirty lie suppose I’ve been to a few speakers about that where they try to get you to multitask Yeah right many might ask yeah nobody can multitask yeah focusing on one even for women who are yeah typically better at well I think that’s stigma I think what did know our brains are actually wired differently I have like I’d like to see that source pull up that source no but I think what it is is that what multitasking or the concept is is that you do certain things over and over and over and it becomes kind of like muscle memory so yes I can talk on the phone and fold clothes now for a while no but I’m saying like I can I can amazing yeah I can I can you know I can do physical labor and I involve the conversation yeah yeah the if you introduce more complexity to a certain task then either the phone call or something else is going to start to suffer but in a great example that is though talking on the phone and driving right so yeah the muscle I can sit there and talk on the phone and you can fold laundry you can cook you can do whatever you want you know whatever it is that but at the same time it is also proven over and over and over again that you cannot talk on the phone and drive right I do it every day that’s like well no you can but your inspiration sorry is is it has been proven over and over like if you get in front of a simulator and they start challenging you almost everyone fails yeah I guess I should say I talk on the phone mainly I’m going kind of going places where I know where I’m going is that but even that no because even then it just you’re but it’s a yeah the same science of it is you know pretty it’s simple but complicated I guess but it does speak to the fact that you cannot multitask right I mean you can drive I think what is hindered is your awareness of what’s going on you can’t drive they’re both like you’re some memory actions of sorts you can drive drunk but your awareness is still just saying if you like because when you bought the property that you live in which if you now knowing that you’re not really gonna be hosting meetings there you don’t have a company sign out front or whatever mmm what would you do differently if someone was listening would you have bought the same space would you have bought more of a traditional place and just had a bedroom beery office yeah because I also looked at a mixed-use or commercial space as also a more of an investment than a home so again being an entrepreneur I’m saying okay if I’m tired of this space eventually I could turn it into a coffee shop or turn it into a really crazy Airbnb someday if I need to do that so the fact that it’s unique it’s not like every other house on the same street exactly yeah it’s got some curb appeal it’s interesting people always ask me what it is I think I sent some pictures over for you guys to take a look at the facade so it’s got garage doors people always want to know the history of it I don’t really know the history I just know kind of anecdotally what I’ve been told and I look at that as more of an investment than a house because that you know people I don’t know if you agree or disagree but like it’s not wise to tell people that a home is an investment anymore or I don’t know what your stance is on the I mean it’s obviously an investment but it’s not a you shouldn’t always expect it to appreciate I don’t want to ever like guarantee in return this is a great deal or this is a great investment or I don’t want to give any insinuation that I have a crystal ball about what the markets going to do is sharing in theory it’s better than renting but still your if your property value goes way down then maybe I was worse than anything right exactly but I looked at it as a funky enough space where I said okay I can turn this into another business down the road if I leave it and move somewhere else but it’s true because you kind of have this commercial aspect feel to the front of it and then you know the inside could be a multi-use space and then yeah yeah I could rent it out as a commercial space is really unique in that way from a from a working from home perspective Shannon I was actually interested in asking you about this because you work a lot from home as a REALTOR® but one of the things I hear from people is that when they’re working from home their spouse sort of assumes that they don’t work and so you hear about a lot of REALTORS® who are like yeah my spouse wants me to pick up their dry cleaning in the middle of the day or pick up the kids from school or take their grandma out of the doctor or whatever like that you know you’re not at work for since I was 25 the kids well and when I was working out for home I worked for a corporation now I traveled all the time so I would spend a couple days in the office a week maybe a bit office being my home office um but then I transitioned into you know I built websites for a while after that job and then I became a REALTOR® but I think the difference between there is it’s not that you working from home you don’t get the credit it’s I don’t have like I don’t get a steady paycheck I don’t have that corporate job to say and I don’t have to clock in clock out somewhere so then nobody I think that in general that people just assume that you have this extreme flexibility either of you guys including me but either you guys deal with people just assuming that you’re available because you’re not a corporate worker right because you’re not having to clock in clock out yeah sure anything early on and I just basically just stopped answering the phone or replying to people you know and I think that kind of got the point across I’m not driven by like the notifications of email or phone calls or texts I just don’t look at it I really wonder what it would be like if I did that because I’m always replying I’m always I think replying to who like the agents where we have questions about like the contracts or the deals are you talking about no if some like random person off the street emails me and asks like to go to coffee I would go yes that is your yes that is your I do I go and it’s a lot of the times it’s a real totally yeah I mean time is the only you know it’s the most precious currency that people give away so freely I’m holding on to probably that’s a common thing yeah but if you charted it out and took a look at all those meetings and said what actual good came from these then it would probably [Music] mean you’re making a good great point yeah oh my god I’m touching my face well this Shana was making a joke about how this topic oh yeah great now my favorite story was that was perfunctory this is more perfunctory no no this is more prevalent potentially people will be doing more working from home California Washington State well my favorite story is that they are now this you know zoom the telecom or video-conferencing software so zoom the stock symbol 0 om when surging upwards with notice of like people having to work from home but that wasn’t even the stock symbol for the video conferencing software ZM was the actual stock symbol for zoom the video conferencing company yeah I do I hate video conferencing I hate all sorts of group conferences I’m in a few from time to time Microsoft teens all that junk the best one I found as a one-on-one video-conferencing software is called whereby w-h-e-r-e-b-y dot com if it’s if it’s one-on-one what’s the difference between zoom and whereby a Facebook chat well I think the ease is that people’s platforms depending on if they’re PC or if it’s an old PC or whatever this has been the most hassle-free video-conferencing software okay not an ad that I’ve ever used because people it just works so instantly quickly the bandwidth is great there’s no lag but like things like Microsoft teens and one-on-one and or join me and all that crap I always found like you’re they’re quitting or the audios cutting out or like are you here Bob yeah I’m here can you hear me and then I surf rose yeah yeah the lawnmowers you know and all these group conference calls I I’ve been working with this firm recently just as a kind of a design consultant and they have like nine person video conferencing meetings on Mondays and it’s hilarious I’m just sitting there laughing while I’m getting paid listening to how much work they’re not getting done you know and maybe part of that is you know their system and their you know their their model but the other thing is just this is ridiculous to have nine people trying to talk to each other on a video chat why are you doing this yeah well there’s probably tons yeah don’t get me started on corporate America and how inept it is so for you you do work from home but you have you know on the anti side I guess you’re saying you kind of have meetings if necessary and try to avoid it but at there yeah earlier on I was trying to like prop up this Wizard of Oz mentality of my agency being a we and us of who knows how many people you know I put on LinkedIn like oh it’s a 9 to 15 people which is not true and then eventually once I started making money and having clients that like that did not matter nobody cares so then I started owning it just being like yeah it’s just me this is how I work but then snake but you have kind of other spaces that the business is operating then we’re writing the product and do they ship from there – yeah so the product is assembled and made and then it’s fulfilled from that location but you never felt like you needed an office there or you needed to be there on a daily basis to watch anything like that correct yeah technology’s giving you the ability that sort of track it hasn’t you know I think you can’t expect people to do the same job that you would do I think you know depending on what it is but like if I was shipping all my products then I would have it done 100% or maybe probably 98% correct most of the time into what I want if you teach someone else they’ll probably start off at like 85% and eventually start to slip down to like a 75% you know depending on how you have an employee they are that gets write it away but if they suck then they’ll just keep slipping down the 60 50 percent and then you start getting emails from your customers saying hey I ordered this and that too and it wasn’t in there or or the glasses weren’t packaged correctly and they all broke on arrival but you have to get comfortable that people won’t do things the Kevin Kelly 100% method right for the Adam Cruise 100% not that they’re gonna do it the 80% method that’s interesting because I would have thought as you have a product so you can measure like I sold one snakebite they shipped one snakebite I paid whoever that was for one snakebite yeah but there’s other issues that come up but quality control is constant versus if you tried even with a Prada agency and you had a salesperson and the other graphic designer than you really like what are you doing for the eight hours a day that I’m paying you would be harder for you to track it right and you know I it’s very hard onboarding people I think finding good employees is the hardest thing to do and I had I had these dreams of growing the agency into a bigger agency and then I realized you know I kind of had that moment where I said is this really what I want to do or is this just the look like what I want to do you know just because I’ve been involved in marketing and design for 15 years do I really want to own a agency or a studio and I realized no I don’t that’s where you get into that whole concept of like if you would grow your company now you’re no longer doing what you love about it now you’re managing people you’re managing people you’re building and you’re writing contracts you’re not doing anything creative whatsoever that’s like the e-myth thing where like you’re no longer making pies yeah right yep and I think I’ve gotten into sort of a sweet spot where I have some good client connections to where they don’t require a lot of work and then I have a product to where you can make money passively mm-hmm and so these both allow me to focus on them for a segment of my day or my week and then also allows me time to focus on new things that I might be interested in whether it’s investments or another creative outlet or another product or whatever it may be but I don’t want to say that I’m lucky because it’s taken me ever since I quit my job 12 years ago to cultivate this into what it is now and it’s in it took a lot of mistakes and laziness and getting over that laziness and reading things and and thinking that I’m not the best example of entrepreneur in order to pick up the habits and the methods and the systems right because like I’m not what I be what I’ve changed is that I don’t really have goals I don’t have these lofty huge goals because those can change the older you get or you just realize you don’t want to own a studio or an agency so I have systems and they’re just small things you know I do my systems every day I’m productive I keep thinking about what it is that I want to do and slowly but surely I find out that opportunities are presented to me that might represent what I would have thought of as a goal you just kind of keep it flexible you know you don’t you don’t you don’t live and die by one thing happening in your life so well this turned into being a lot more interesting topics than kind of what we had planned on you know I hope that people listening that are either working from home or considering working from home can get some tips yeah and about how to stay motivated feel free to reach out to me I won’t get coffee with you but I’ll yeah find me online at at Kevin Kelly USA that’s on Twitter and Instagram you can email me through snakebite co.com all the emails come to me and I have a podcast too called anti that I’ve been I think this is the first time I’ve been the guest in a while since I’ve been hosting my own podcast so check that out on on wherever you get podcast int I – with Kevin Kelly what a nti in the – the – yeah anti and Kevin Kelly so if you search anti Kevin Kelly you’ll find the podcast love it and then I appreciate it thanks for letting ya know I mean I you know I’m just getting warmed up I could go for another two hours that’s my form yeah well thank you for being here what’s it Adam learns nothing that’s why we love them well thanks I mean I could I think we could get into asking you more detailed questions but I think we got the point across yeah and for sure you know I I have you know I’m kind of exiting the whole working from home thing after 12 years and so maybe I come back on and talk about not working from home and and and getting into you know a new business you know that’s interesting like sometimes I think switching it up and having your office off-site does make you more productive honestly I think it’s just switching it up yeah if you’re gonna end with we have to I don’t need to know like what this opportunity is but I want to know because people listening are gonna say are you taking whatever this opportunity is because you’re gonna be more productive or just a great opportunity it’s a great opportunity and I’ll be more hands-on with my products a product side of my business so designing and making more products I’ll be working out of a retail location and a warehouse that’ll be so interesting to follow up with you in here yep like how your perspective changes in a year from now yeah totally and you know I think the the takeaway is just keep an open mind with whatever it is that you think you know and and question yourself and what you think it is that you’re an expert at are you gonna have flexibility or will ya be a nine-to-five kind of person or what no no I’ll still be my own boss you never happy unless you’re your own boss don’t recommend it to anybody all right well thanks very much anybody listening we’d love to hear from you podcast at Hermann London com any topics any questions you want to ask and thanks for listening