hey Eric here with 30x40 design Workshop I wanted to set up this video I asked my wife Laura to join me in the studio to have a chat about some of the personal and financial challenges that we've faced together as we've run 30x40 design Workshop over the past 10 years now Laura is not an employee of the business but I couldn't have done any of this without her support her guidance and her financial buyin of course and I think Business and Entrepreneurship often times is glorified and you only see the bright shiny aspects of it but there are some behind the scenes challenges that everyone faces and it can be easy to look at someone else's business and someone else's success and think they had it all architected out and planned from the beginning and that they fac no hurdles and that's just not true so I wanted to ask Laura to join me for this behind the- scenes chat on Lessons Learned 10 years in so rewinding back to early days uh right before I started 30 by 40 I had been telling you I was a little bit unhappy with my professional situation and we had talked a little bit about me starting a business and going off on my own but that was always kind of this precious idea that I never really yeah we didn't have a timeline we didn't have a specific plan all the advice I had heard was you have to save 12 to 18 months yeah of Revenue and all of this money in the bank it just didn't even seem possible we weren't really saving that much and in fact I think we were just enjoying the fact that the kids were out of daycare we had some extra money and we had had spent a lot of money on a vacation when the time came that you quit your job it wasn't quite planned you know it was a little bit unplanned so we definitely financially went into it with very little saved and some credit card debt and of course we had the mortgage and so it was um you know thankfully we already had I had my job and we had benefit health benefits through that to set the stage though the employer that I was working for previously had cut our pay by 20% and so that gave the freedom to go off and look for supplemental income MH which we knew you could find you did find I did find some everyone gets to this point where you know staying in the status quo maintaining the status quo staying in a painful situation when that pain exceeds the pain of actually making a change and going off and starting something new yeah that's the point when you're actually going to make the change I got to a very painful moment and I just decided it's now or never cuz you you can plan the dream forever but at some point you have to step into the dream and actually do the thing and I thought you know I have to be that person who does that and I remember calling you on the phone the day that I gave notice do you remember that yeah it I mean in some ways I wasn't surprised because I knew you were unhappy and I really was excited to hear that you were willing to take that risk because I I want I knew you needed to make some kind of change so it it precipitated pretty quickly I remember in that moment feeling as free as I've ever felt and and this amazing feeling of empowerment and then the next day getting up and I was just working in the house from the couch I move my drafting table up to the corner of the living room and I I was kind of filled with this sense of dread like okay now I actually have to build the plane that I'm flying in do you remember the exercises that we went through financially to do to make it work well yeah we had we went we sat down and did an our budget um pretty in great detail because we were trying to figure out uh what the minimum was we needed to live off of month to month uh so we we did come up with a a minimum monthly income that we needed and I think like we were just hoping to to not lose the house so it was like make all the bills well not only that the house not only that but I didn't want to go back to working for someone else yeah so I knew setting that gap between income and expenses is getting that Gap as narrow as possible so that it just felt like this minimum viable income that I had to produce um felt motivating to me you know once we looked at what that actual Gap was and you know for people who are doing this on their own um without a partner I was lucky to have you you had health insurance you had a stable job and for people who are going in this alone saving a Runway is probably necessary you need some cash buffer we did not have that at the time and I have to say for me person I found it very motivating that I knew I had to make up that shortfall because I was determined not to go back working for someone else and in some ways you just have to do it and sometimes just the sheer pressure Financial pressure and the fact that you like you've jumped off a cliff and now you're falling through the air so you better do something sometimes that in and of itself is the motivation that you need to just do it um because you there's a lot of of fear Associated I think with doing something like this and uh Fear Can can be paralyzing yeah um for people um we did this exercise called fear setting early on I don't know if you remember that it's the Tim Ferris exercise like what's the worst possible thing that can happen and I think the conclusion that a lot of people reach is I have to go find another job and you know it may even be a better job than the one that I have presently and I think that there's some freedom in that you know like nobody wants to fail at starting a business useful exercise you're right and I forgot about that yeah especially if you're writing the stuff down because once you write down all of the worst case scenarios and you look at them it's like okay in the grand scheme of them things this is not all that scary yeah and if the business had been a complete flop and a failure it would still be a net positive yeah I still had skills that I gained and people that I met and experiences you I think for anyone who looks at this and maybe did more planning than we were doing it's never going to look like a great decision to walk away from a steady Shore Fire paycheck and step into off a cliff into nothing well yeah because you're not just it's not just yourself and your own happiness it's also feeling the responsibility of supporting a family and kids yeah and for some people it could be supporting parents or or other loved ones uh so you feel like you can't make all of your decision decisions just for yourself but also the people around you want you want and need you to be happy and fulfilled so for myself I really wanted to see you happy as the number one thing um and then we would make the finances work however we could yeah if we made this decision purely based on the financial motivations it we never would have chosen to do this so if you do the math and and you say well you know that a steady paycheck completely going away it's going to hurt the budget it's it's going to feel like a big Financial Risk also we were not thinking about the future future you know at that time we were not thinking about it was survival mode saving for retirement and it was literally month-to-month survival and I felt motivated by the fact that I didn't want to be the dad who couldn't provide the vacation for his kids I didn't want to be the dad who failed in his business like I found those things very personally motivating and so having that some kind of financial Edge that I could brush up against and really work toward was motivating for me those first early jobs I had some Moonlighting projects that then transitioned to full-time work I was undervaluing my services oh yeah so we did this budget yeah and the numbers weren't correct no they were I was under billing I was you know only planning on working part-time on these jobs and so they were really small jobs I worked through them quickly and the whole thing was as much as we tried to plan I feel like it just was it it was an imperfect exercise we were bound to get it wrong and what about the other things that you were experimenting with as products building furniture and and things like that I think um you know neither one of us really thought about like what's the cost benefit of this as a product like how much time does it take for you to do this versus how much are you how many of these will you sell and um neither of us had that kind of business background so every time there was an idea about a cool product that you were making I thought they were all pretty cool so we were sort of like yeah let's do you know you should do that too so there was actually like a a a lot of experiments happening all at once um but in the end I think that was an important thing to do I mean I think you have to do all of those experiments to figure out what works one of the early sort of rubrics we put in place was as long as we made that Gap in our budget as long as we made that difference we would take anything that was left over and we put it in a Runway account yeah and that business account just held that as a cash buffer and over time that grew larger and larger but I never wanted to get to the point where I had to go back and search for another job go back to work for somebody else and what I did with that kind of white space that buffer that was creating was run those experiments so like YouTube was an experiment that I ran it was and I ran it out of financial motivation I thought I could earn advertising you and but also I thought it became a creative outlet for you because you were always very interested in film and photography and the film part of it I think picked up a lot because before that you had identified photography as something you really enjoyed and you were good at I don't think that you had experimented a lot with film until you started playing around with YouTube and then it became a really driving creative um outlet for you other thing that we weren't ready for and this is where the again where the runway came in is the bumpy income right it was very difficult to predict uh and I think people who have had businesses or grew up in in families where there were businesses is they're used to that idea but you and I were not raised that way steady paycheck it felt like not having a steady steady paycheck was a very hard thing to adjust to for both of us and and plan we we like to plan generally so having kind of like the runway was was very created space for you to experiment but also created I think there there was space that you needed and you also needed to remove some of the anxxiety about what the income was going to be so having that Runway also alleviated some that so you could focus on being creative yeah from a personal relationship standpoint big change from me working in an office and having a Social Circle there to me working in the house by myself yeah I think you know I was spending my whole day interacting with people at work you know with my employees and my colleagues and a lot of intense interactions and then I would come home just wanting to take a breather and you'd be like ready to talk about your day like bounce ideas off of me me and I think sometimes it was you know probably on occasion I would stop paying attention and you probably felt like I was ignoring you so that was one one thing that we noticed and another one was like because you were working at home you were just available so like if when the kids were at done with school at 2:30 in the afternoon and they didn't have something after school it was very natural for you to just be like oh I'll go get them you know but then as that progressed we quickly realized like even though you're here and maybe your schedule was more flexible we had to really try to keep everything 5050 um because it was very easy for us to sort of drift into the Zone where you were just dealing with everything that was happening in the middle of the day if someone got sick at school it fell to you to go get them because you were here it's a big challenge working out of your living space I had the drafting table in the corner we had our couches right there so you know moving between work and personal life there is no boundary and if I had a difficult phone call or something with a client interaction I couldn't really leave it behind there was no disconnect there and it also meant that when I got up in the morning I was staring work at them in the face and I would just work all the time and I I think that's a challenge for anybody building their own business in in their home or even I mean this studio is 17 Paces away from our house but I spend almost as much time in here as I do in our house and so I I think that's that that's a boundary that um you know you were working pretty hard at that too to try and make up for for the budget shortfall that I was had created by starting the business so you were working a lot I was working a lot it felt like a season of life where we were really investing a lot back into our professional development yeah I was traveling more for work too so but you sacrific time with family with kids you're not going down to visit your parents as much I think that we had some distance we did we I felt like we spent a lot of time navigating our time or trying to negot neate our time that's true and I and I think that's true for a lot of people where you know it's a family where there's kids that need to be taken care of and so I hated the fact that we always felt like we were like negotiating who was going to do what CU it was our like a chore you know like I didn't want it to feel that way but it defin we both had different pressures and we were trying to balance all those things and still respect each other's time and I don't think I really fully appreciated how hard it was to work out of the living room until Co hit and I had to work out of the living room which was just a few years ago uh and I found it really difficult I mean first because the kitchen was right there and everybody else was home and they were coming in and making lunch while I was trying to focus and um I I remember distinctly realizing like this is what it probably felt like when you were and even though you told me it really wasn't until I actually experienced it when I realized like how distracting even without people walking in it could be just being in that room yeah so I remember a moment I had a client meeting at the kitchen at the dining table and we have a big open living space so kitchen dining living and my meeting space was the living rooms which meant I had to clean the whole house before any you know new client was coming by for any meeting but we also have a cat and this cat is like a cat that you didn't want is a terror and so during this prospective client meeting I'm sitting at the dining table the house is in pristine condition you know I'm all excited for this I'm presenting my portfolio and the cat climbs between the slip cover on the sofa and the the inside of it and I couldn't extract the cat so he's like clawing his way up this thing and this client is looking over at it I'm trying to extract the cat from it and this is someone who wants me you know to design a $3 million house for him right and he's looking like sideways like is this the guy I'm going to hire to do this I don't think so I mean impostor syndrome is real but that's r large that's like that's I'm an amateur and if you're spending that much on architecture do you expect to be in a professional office space that's right not somebody's living room with their cat tearing apart the coach embarrassing yeah so maybe the beginning of the second phase was when we decided to take some of the money that the business had made and we built the studio with it yeah we started taking the runway and investing that using it to build this which also felt scary because we're like okay we're going to take all the runway money and build a studio with it well it was a challenge to me because I thought you know if I can prove this passive income model yeah for the business you know splitting the business between services and products like this is the perfect experiment and it's also ends up being a portfolio piece you know so many people ask you know if I don't have the perfect portfolio how do I go and you know secure more projects like the dream projects that I want and you know this is one way of doing that by it's a great way actually too because you sell fund it and then you're not paying rent so you don't take on any overhead and you have a beautiful office space that showcases Your Design skills and there's no cat in it and it looks very professional you don't have to worry about you know seeing clients in this space because it's dedicated to that yeah I think phase two for me is characterized by like leaning into entrepreneurship really thinking more about more strategically about what I want this business to look like the first phase I had designed a business that looked like everybody else's every other employer that I had served clients one to one and I knew that having a whole huge stable of projects that was super stressful you know and just the intrusions in our personal life it became a lot and so I think phase two was okay how do I design this to be more in the likeness of something that I want at this point we start building a longer Runway than necessary because I still had that fear of is this all going to end tomorrow do you remember that I was like this could go away yeah next month yeah and I like that idea that you're trading time for dollars I mean I think the early stages of the business definitely felt like that because it was like just whatever you can do to get the business successful also we both felt like amateurs in terms of taxes and all of the operational aspects of the business because neither of us were business majors or learned any of that right so um you know that was a huge learning curve and a concern sometimes at least that I felt like it would it was good to have some kind of buffer in the bank because what if we were making a huge mistake with taxes or right or or in budgeting you know the income for the business plus and the expenses are we really doing this right um so that was also something that we struggled with and I I think other people probably do too unless you happen to be you know really well educated on you know running a business already well this was you know it's still that scarcity mindset that I had like I was still trying to build this Runway bigger and bigger so that I go away because it's going to go away and in that sense I didn't hire the professionals that I could have at that point I didn't hire people to help me do drawings I didn't hire accountants I was still doing it all I was still wearing all the hats and I thought this is still the best way to do it yeah and you did that for quite a while I mean yeah it's a huge mistake you know looking back and you know if I think I'm in phase three or maybe ending phase three you know that's something I've learned and I'm I'm changing now but you know as I think back to some of the the personal frictions that happened in this second phase you know I'm comfortable I can put food on the table like I feel reasonably um assured that I could do that but you know work was starting to fill all the space I was just letting it be everything yeah that and I would be out here all the time and when you start getting more projects and there were more projects that like looked like the things that I wanted to be doing it comes along with all of the liability issues and you know when yeah we have a big storm on the coast here I remember getting phone calls like the windows are leaking hey let's have a chat you know and you start to you open this door and you go these are all didn't think about that the scary things that I didn't think about and so I I remember getting really serious about contracts about insurance and about choosing better clients yeah because you know choosing the wrong client can have massive financial implications and I think you know more than once you and I made the decision to you know do we go on this vacation or do we Bank this money just in case X happens yeah and I had to anticipate sometimes we didn't go on the vacation we didn't yeah and it's that's a real that's a concern that kept me up at night I think I was pretty Cavalier in the early phase about insurance like do I need insurance for doing a screen porch Edition or bathroom renovation I didn't feel as important but did you also feel like well I mean I'm not going to make mistakes like that right like I know what I'm doing you don't know what you don't I'm not going have to worry about that that's the problem and and there's all of these you know in this business there are many things you can't control you know I don't control who the client ultimately hires to be the contractor and that person can make some big mistakes and involve you through no fault of your own yeah and I think learning to choose better clients and better projects was definitely an essential step in this phase but then there was also a progression where you were thinking about moving away from client work altogether because you also had other types of at that point I think you had written your books and you became really interested in selling plan sets yeah just teaching what you've been learning all along I mean each time you learned something you thought well maybe this is something that other people might find useful and then turning around and and providing that for other people as a teacher um through books and through the YouTube channel so I think you know that became a a a an important part of your business and an increasingly larger part of your business too right yeah for sure phe yeah and I I think building this building became kind of the stage set for that next phase of of the business and that was unexpected I mean I I didn't architect that out like it wasn't my plan I was seriously just planing on and earning advertising revenue from the videos and that was it but then and I think this is true for any creative experiment that you run you start discovering something that you didn't realize was there you know and I enjoyed teaching and sharing knowledge if phase three is is about saying no you found product Market fit you know you can get clients in like I get regular stream of new inquiries I know I I can pick any one of these projects and move forward with it and probably make something really nice out of it there's a which also comes from confidence there's a confidence that comes with that but also I have a limited number of projects I'm ever going to do in my life and so you have to you have to say no to the things that aren't the right fit and the good opportunity for but you could never do that in the beginning can't do it in the beginning saying no in the beginning is just silly because you don't even know you don't have enough information yet even if you someone were to listen to you talk about what your business looks like in phase three you wouldn't apply the same math to phase one can't no yeah and you know phase one is also about finding what you like to do what's a good fit for your personality and you know by the time you get to phase three which was you know a characterizes the past couple of years basically you have to say no because you you just don't unless you want to scale and I I never had the intention to really scale but you know I think what I did carry into phase three especially early on was this scarcity mindset that I had in Phase One you know what's going to get me to the next phase isn't what got me here and I had to kind of lose some of that and so thinking about income in the business and investing that in in ways that free up my time that buy back some of my time you know so that I can be more of the CEO in the business rather than the CEO and the worker be and the person who's ordering things and sweeping the floors and I'm just seeing the benefits of of investing in the business because things have I mean changed pretty significantly this past year and hiring different agencies to help me with things that I'm not best position for although even when you were thinking about hiring yeah we still spent quite a lot of time talking about it and okay how much is this really going to cost and you know what point are we going to know how are we going to know if it's working or not like how long will we give it we're we I remember having a lot of conversations like that and um you know so even though we're saying it was more comfortable it didn't go without some extensive conversations about process in place so we can't lose that there's also um I don't know if you feel like this because you have your own lab you're running a small business yourself um you get to the point doing 10 years anything doing anything for 10 years and you feel like is there more like am I doing the right thing what else can I do right there's there's this process of you know reinvention like what's next where do I take this do do I do I scale it do I sell it I have some of those Cravings of wanting that phase one stuff again where you have all this excitement this energy the uncertainty of that there's shiny objects yeah there's there's an appeal to that right because it's something new and I think the older you get the more intrenched in your ways and your ideologies and and ways of working and thinking and that just becomes stale after a while you know and I I mean I look at some of the videos that I'm making I'm like oh that's the same video you know yeah I got to something new you know it's and do you feel that way about your position oh yeah of course yeah I I do and um I don't have a solution or a piece of advice necessarily except that like you only you have a limited time and I mean I I can think of other times in my career anyway where I have AC I have taken on risk to change various aspects of my research program um saying yes and no to different things and I'm definitely more likely now to say no than I was before I mean I went through that phase of saying yes to everything too yeah um and you know I learned that people make things look prestigious so that you will say yes and really it just ends up being a lot of work it's really just a screen porch project yeah wait a minute I thought this was something prestigious um comes along with the title so you see those things right away because it's like the first thing that people will say to you to kind of get you to do it like wow we have this great opportunity for you and it's like okay you it's a you think it's a great opportunity for me but that's my decision to make um we're both turned 50 this year you know uh it's common to start looking at okay well what can I do next the more I build this business the more time I spend out here we still spend a lot of time talking about it too right it takes up a lot of the oxygen in the room but also it feel it it's yours it's uniquely yours because it's your business and you own all of the successes just as much as you own all the failures so I think that's a you know those are positives and negatives but I think I think owning the successes feels a lot better than the successes you earn for an institution or for someone else whatever that success looks like I think you you give your you're buying yourself Freedom with that and confidence and you know less fear so you're more willing to take more risks and to me that's real growth I mean I I think the the positives and negatives if we're looking at the two sides of this you know the positive is that you can be the CEO and direct right you're in a lab you're not doing a lot of wet bench work anymore the business that I create for myself I'm the CEO but I'm also the worker be so I'm also acting as the employee so there's positive and negative to that you know and I made that conscious choice to not hire out for that but you know I think that you have to shut that off in other parts of your life you know like I have to sometimes remember like when I'm home still have to clean I'm not telling everybody what to do you know okay yeah maybe you think I am but that's not my role so you have to really like reset your mind in the other parts of your life where you're not in control yeah the financial upside huge financial upside is infinite it's amazing it's infinite it's it's not something I ever anticipated for us and I'm I feel so grateful and the the financial downside is scary and significant you know there's lawsuits there's lumpy income there's yeah uncertainty about there will be failure for sure not just financially but you'll have a lot of failed experiments so true just assume take on that Persona of a person who just get used to failing often because you will um and be resilient yeah I mean uncertainty can be motivating and exciting and it can also be stressful there is this symbiosis that comes along with those things you know with great financial reward there's also great Financial Risk one of the that people always to asking like well you know tell me exactly how you did it I'm going to follow exactly those steps and I want you to look at my personal situation and say to me it's going to work for you and I always push back and say it's like it's just unknowable yeah you know even if you were to follow the exact same steps it's it is risk and um all Financial reward is derived from risk and and you're never going to remove all the negatives there's always going to be something this doesn't happen without the support of my spouse and my family and there's a lot of personal sacrifice made to make this happen so I'm grateful well I'm I mean you sacrificed for for my career too so I think we just try to support each other and it takes a lot of communication um but I think we've always tried to communicate fairly and tried to treat each other like equals so I think that's been really successful for us and I I I would do it again in a second so I know it's easy for me to say yeah easy for you to say it's like you don't want to go through all the the ups and downs on that note I'll be at work see you have to go through all the trials and tribulations to get to the end point but uh do you want to redo [Music] it