SPI 675: The Two Teachers That Became Millionaires — An Update!

SPI 675: The Two Teachers That Became Millionaires — An Update!

Shane Sams: You know, it’s not just the money, it’s not just replacing our income. It’s not just giving our kids a better future. It’s, we are all equipped with God-given gifts that only we have. And there’s a group of people out there that only we can help and they don’t get help until we cast our stone and cause the ripple, man. So, you know, that’s what we try to do every day, man.Whenever, whether I’m speaking on stages, doing podcasts, or whatever it is, you know, we’re just all casting our stone with our unique gifts out in the world, man, so we can make a difference.

Pat Flynn: This podcast has been running for over 13 years now, which is wild. That’s a very long time. 675 episodes in now, and the number one guest that we’ve ever had on the podcast as far as download numbers is not Tim Ferris, or Gary Vanerchuck, or Amy Porterfield, Ramit Sethi, and all these big name people in the entrepreneur in business space.

It’s Shane and Jocelyn Sams, episode 122. These are two teachers from Kentucky who had a crazy idea to start an online business one day after listening to this podcast, this very podcast you’re listening to right now. And they started a business, quit their jobs and they’re millionaires. And not only did they just make some money, but they’re helping so many more people now as well.

Those ripples from that rock, that stone they’re throwing, I mean, it’s skipping along and it’s creating ripples all around the world, people. And you’re here in session 675 to listen to Shane and Jocelyn Sams today, I think over 10 years now since that last episode came out, episode 122, and we’re back with them to get a life update.

But more than that, many of you might not have been introduced to this episode because we’re that far out now. It’s way deep in the archives, we needed to bring them back. We need to retell the story. We need to go deeper into it. And I ask questions like, well, how did the people in the neighborhood react when you quit your jobs?

How did your family react? How did the people at your church react? And it’s a really interesting story, and you’ll see some parts of human nature that you know, maybe aren’t always so great, but what’s amazing is they keep going and things are happening for them and the people that they touch, and I’m so happy.

Shane and Jocelyn Sams are back and here they are, an amazing couple and duo, business partners. Let’s have some fun.

Announcer: You’re listening to the Smart Passive Income Podcast, a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network, a show that’s all about working hard now, so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. And now your host, he quotes Zig Ziglar more than anyone else in his presentations. Pat Flynn.

Pat Flynn: Shane, Jocelyn, welcome back for now, I think, the third time to the SPI podcast. Thank you so much for both joining me today.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, thank you so much for having us. We’re really, really happy to be here.

Shane Sams: I’m super happy to be here because I somehow, I can’t get Jocelyn to do a podcast anymore, but Pat Flynn can get her back on the microphone, dude. So you got Jocelyn outta retirement man.

Pat Flynn: That’s awesome. I know you guys, at one point, we’re doing these podcasts like very regularly, and obviously that’s changed and a lot has changed since the last time you were on the show. And, and for everybody who doesn’t know Shane and Jocelyn, when they were on the show and back in episode 122, I mean, that was a long time ago.

That is one of the most all-time listen to episodes of the, the entire library was both of you. And I think, you know, a lot of it had to do with just how down to earth and how relatable the story was. So maybe we, we restart there because I think there might be a lot of people who maybe didn’t listen to that episode.

So, so maybe Shane, we could start with you. How did this all begin for you and, and how did you even get into online business in the first place?

Shane Sams: Sure, man, you know, I’ve, we’ve not always been like entrepreneurs. We’ve not always even business owners. We actually used to be school teachers in southeast Kentucky.

I was a history teacher. I coached football. Jocelyn was an elementary school librarian, and you know, we probably would still be on that railroad track if something had not happened to us. And one day when I was going to school, I was taking my son to daycare. I was late for work and I was trying to get him in the daycare and I was trying to get him out of his car seat and he was like fighting me.

And out of nowhere my son looked up at me and I wanna stay with daddy, she scares me. And we would find out much later that there was actually a lot of like abuse going on in the daycare center. My son was being punished for potty training accidents. This lady was locking him in a bathroom for like hours at a time.

So like when he would’ve a potty training accident, instead of helping him clean up, she would just put him in there and turn out the lights and leave him in there. Now, I didn’t know this on this day. All I knew was that my son was telling me someone was scaring him. He told me the name of the lady and I, I just had a bad feeling that I needed to stay home from work that day.

The problem was I couldn’t get ahold of Jocelyn. I couldn’t get ahold of my boss. And you know, I’m a teacher, I’m responsible for other people’s kids. I taught high school juniors, dude, like if I didn’t get there, those kids would probably like burn down the building, right. Like adult supervision, you know, and I didn’t have any information.

So I actually took Isaac over to my little girls’ daycare as a different building and I said, Hey, I’ll be right back. I need to run in and tell my boss that I’ve gotta take the day off work. So I actually went to work that day really fast. Drove there, really quickly, went down to my boss’s office and I told my, my boss, Hey, something’s wrong.

I don’t know what it is, but I, I need help. Can you watch my class? I don’t, I know that it’s too late to get a sub, but if you can watch my class for me, I can go investigate this and, and figure it out. And my boss asked me a question that was very surprising. She said, is your son in immediate danger right now?

And I said, well, I don’t, I don’t know. Not right now. He’s somewhere else, but I can’t leave him where he is right now all day. And my boss looked at me and said, Mr. Sams, I know your son needs you, but your job needs you to, and you’re gonna have to handle your personal problems after work. I can’t find a sub, I can’t watch your class.

You’re gonna have to deal with this after you get off work if your son’s not in immediate danger. Geez. And I actually got really mad and I left work that day. I said, that’s unacceptable. And I actually left and I, and I went home and I went to try to figure out what was going on with my son. And that was kind of the day that I had made the decision, I didn’t wanna work for anybody else. Because I realized in that moment that I had traded all my freedom for my income, and someone thought that they could tell me my child was not important, that my job was more important, and that was because they were giving me my paycheck. So that’s actually what led me to searching for business podcasts.

I started looking around and trying to figure out a business, and I was looking through my podcast one day before I was about to mow my grass. And I saw that your old podcast are people now may not even remember it, but it was just like your, your googly little eyes looking over the bottom of the, of the thing.

And dude, I clicked on the website first before I listened to you and I, I will never forget this. I saw the, your old website had a picture of you in the upper corner holding your son. Do you remember that picture that you used to have on there?

Pat Flynn: Yeah. Yeah. He was a tiny boy at that at that point.

Shane Sams: Very tiny, man. But he, our kids are about the same age, and I was like, oh my gosh. Like, look at that. Like this guy has a son, I’ve got a son. I’m trying to quit my job for my son. I’m gonna listen to you. So that, that’s what made me relate to you is just that picture on your website.

Jocelyn Sams: So these were back in the dinosaur times, you know, when there were like 14 podcasts or something, right?

Shane Sams: Exactly. Right, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh geez. This was a long time ago. Yeah, man. I mean, it was a, it was like, I think you were in like the, it was, it was below a hundred episodes when I think I found you. But I started listening, man. I heard your story about how you took your knowledge and wisdom.

Put it on the internet and started helping other people with your online products, you know, for for months. I had been telling Jocelyn, man, if I could just get like 50 people to give me a hundred dollars, we could quit our job. Like there’s eight, 7 billion people on the planet. I just need 50 of them to give us a hundred dollars and I can quit our job.

And I just heard this guy start an online business, sell something for $19 and get like 400 people to pay him money. Like this, this online business thing is probably how we can get 50 people to give us a hundred bucks. And that’s what led us down the rabbit hole. I told Jocelyn about it and I said, Jocelyn, there’s this thing called online business.

This guy named Pat’s making money online. And how did you feel about that?

Jocelyn Sams: I was like, this sounds like a scam.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, yeah, man. Smart Passive Income that sounds shady.

Shane Sams: Yeah, man. I was like, I was like, I was like, Jocelyn, no, listen, it’s smart and passive. What are you talking about? This is incredible. And so, so I, John, she basically was like, okay, cuz I have a lot of like wild hairs that I, you know, chase after and stuff.

So she’s like, Shane, you, if you can make any money online, I’ll get on board, but leave me alone until you do. Okay. So it became like my mission in life, dude. Just make anything online, like I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t really like listen to my own self when I was listening to your podcast.

Like I knew that you needed to make products and you needed to build an audience and, but I didn’t really know what to do, so I just threw myself into this world. I started building websites. They were all terrible. They would crash. Nothing was working. I didn’t even try to collect emails in the beginning, but my only goal was to make some money.

So I actually heard another podcast where, and I, and I’d heard you doing affiliate links and I thought, oh man, I’ll use like Google ads or something and maybe I can spam up a website enough where someone will accidentally click something. Right. And I, and I built this little website for US History teachers where they could download websites.

And it was, if, if you saw it, it was embarrassing. It was surrounded by flashing lights.

Pat Flynn: And it was like a MySpace page.

Shane Sams: Oh yeah. It was terrible. Pretty much. Yeah. But nothing was working. It was, and I was really about to give up, man. And one night we were sitting in our bedroom. Jocelyn was like reading a book and I was sitting there and I kept hitting refresh over and over and over again, and every time I hit refresh it was a zero.

Have you ever done that? Like with your podcast downloads or something, you just keep hitting refresh? Oh yeah. And all of a sudden I hit refresh and it came back on. And where there had been a zero there before, now there was 11 cents. There was like a, like a dime and a penny was in my account. But you, it was like I’d won the lottery.

Man. I like jumped out of my bed and started screaming and hollering and I said, Jocelyn, look, look. 11 cents, man. I did it. I did it. I made money on the internet. I made money on and like, and she looked at me and was like, you did it. You made money on the internet. How did you do that? I was like, I don’t know.

Jocelyn Sams: If that worked, maybe something else can work. So, Let’s try it. So, yeah. You know, we did, and that was back in 2012 I think.

Shane Sams: Yeah. That’s, that’s when Jocelyn got on board. And I don’t know about everybody out there, but like men need their wives to help them. Cause we’re not capable always by ourselves. Right. So, agreed, we, we started brainstorming ideas and I actually went back to your podcast and was talking about how you created like a, a, a digital product that you could basically email to people if they gave you money.

And that’s kind of what we started looking at. And Jocelyn started ElementaryLibrarian.com and she started podcasting and blogging and, and we started making lesson plans for librarians. Jocelyn started getting a little following, you know, she kept putting content out there and a couple hundred people started following her.

So we said, Hey, let’s take our shot. And we ask them, would you buy lesson plans if we sold you something. And a lot of people said, yes, but as an entrepreneur, I’ve learned to only trust people that vote with their wallet. So we sent them a link and we made around $2,500 on that very first email we ever sent.

Wow. And that just started the whole thing. Within, within a year we had replaced, not only replaced our income, but we had launched some other sites. And in August the next, we made more money in a single month than one of our salaries in a year as a school teacher. It was in August of 2014, and that’s when we just, no, it was 13 or 13.

That’s right. It was 13. So that was when we both looked at each other and we were like, Hey, if we can do this part-time, what in the world could we do full-time? And we quit our jobs on the same day. It was crazy though, because you went to work and like you told your boss, did you, was your principal there?

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, so my, my principal was there, but Shane’s was not.

Shane Sams: Yeah, man. And we live in a small town, bro. So like, we were trying to do it on the same day so the, the wildfire wouldn’t spread. And, and I was like, Jocelyn, don’t do it. And she’s like, I already did. So I was like, oh no. And like, so we had to like wait until the next day and then I finally quit my job.

It was just shocking to everyone in our, in our life because school teacher don’t quit in the middle of the year.

Jocelyn Sams: So we’re coming up on 10 years and you know, it’s been a, it’s been a wild ride since then.

Shane Sams: Wild ride, man. That’s, that’s kind of where we, September started 10 years from quitting our jobs where we are.

Pat Flynn: That’s amazing. I, and I obviously wanna know like where it went from there, but I’m curious, in that moment when you told everybody, what was the reaction? You said they were shocked. What does that mean? Was there any pressure? What did, did you have regrets like, Going in, in a small town, I can imagine just what would happen.

But tell us, tell us what went on.

Jocelyn Sams: So what a lot of people probably don’t understand is that in, in Southeast Kentucky and just in Kentucky in general, you know, teaching is considered to be a good job. You know, everybody thinks that’s, that’s a really great job. If you have two teachers in a household, you know, to live here, that’s, that’s decent money for where we live, and people just thought we were crazy. They’re like, what are you doing? You know? Are you doing something illegal?

Shane Sams: Like what’s happening? Yeah. We, I think we got questions like, all right, which one of you is on drugs? You know, where, when does rehab start? Oh man. People were like, are you getting divorced?

Like what is going on? Like what are you doing? Like is there something going wrong?

Jocelyn Sams: Like, well, and where we live, it’s not particularly entrepreneurial. You know? This is not Austin. It’s not San Diego. Yeah. It’s not something, it’s not normal for people to start a business here. So that was quite unusual.

Shane Sams: Dude. Dude, we went to church on Sunday. You know, we didn’t, we hadn’t told anybody. And like me and Jocelyn we led small group at Church of other couples who had young children and you know, and it’s common, you know, where we are to like, if you have a big life moment to say, Hey, will you pray for us? Right?

So I, we had like 10 people in there, like five couples. And I went, Hey guys, you know, me and Jocelyn are both quitting our jobs. We’re going into business and starting a business and we’re not telling anybody about how much money we’re making at this time. Right? And I was like, I would love it if you guys would pray for us.

And no one said a word. Every mouth around every single person’s jaw just went wide open for like, and we sat there awkwardly for like 30 seconds and I was just like, geez, you know what? I’ll just pray for us. Let’s go back your heads. That’s what happened. So that’s, yeah, man, it was nuts.

Pat Flynn: Oh man, that’s, that’s, wow.

But you still persisted through. And so ElementaryLibrarian.com was there, and I think you started something as well, Shane, right? Like you what, like what other projects came as a result of the initial success that you had?

Shane Sams: Once we saw digital products work, we were like, okay, well what else can we do?

So I started a football playbook website where coaches could come and download playbooks and practice material. To help them win more football coaches.

Pat Flynn: So you were, you were a football coach?

Shane Sams: I was a football coach, yep. I was the defensive coordinator. So I started a website and a podcast about that. That was a really interesting learning experience too, because like Jocelyn’s podcast was, she was doing li like talking to librarians, doing solo shows.

But when I started my podcast, I was like, well, I wonder if I could reach out to famous people and they would talk to me. So I started reaching out to these famous football coaches and like all of a sudden, like these hall, this Hall of Fame football coach said yes, this like weightlifting legend guy said yes.

And I was like, man, Jocelyn, you can just ask people so come on your podcast and they will, and like Hal Mumme was, is his famous football coach, you invented like the air raid offense. And at, after the podcast was over, he is like, man, you need to come over and have dinner. And I’m like, what is happening right now?

You know? That is crazy. And then we went to then we, we repeated another website. We had another website called USHistoryTeachers.com. Right? We still run that today. And we just repeated what Jocelyn did. We just built more lesson plans. We just. Repeating this over and over again. And we had this system where we could basically roll out a website really fast, build an audience really fast, and go make money really fast.

And we, again, we, we probably could have kept doing that cuz we, we bought into passive income, man. We were like, let’s build websites to take four or five hours a week to run and just let them be automated and let them go. But then that, that same small group of church, you know, where everyone was like looking at us, crazy going, what do you do?

What are you doing? Why are you doing this? Eventually someone asked us how, like, how did you do that? I, I want to do that. Her name was Lindsay. She came up to Jocelyn and just said like, do you think I could make money online? I’d love to stay home and homeschool my kids. Justin was just shockingly, he was like, yeah, sure.

Why don’t we do this? And what did you do with Lindsay? You just started picking.

Jocelyn Sams: So we just kind of started working together and I said, okay, this is how you do this. Let’s, let’s put something out there and see if it sells. And then her products started selling as well, and she was able to make enough money to leave her job and homeschool her kids.

Shane Sams: Yep. And, and it was, it was funny. We just thought it was cool. Like, oh wow, we helped someone quit their job. That’s pretty neat. And, that means Jocelyn, and we have friends to hang out with during the day now because everyone else is at work. Yay. Right. So I didn’t think anything of it until a little while later.

Her husband came up to me after church his name’s JT and he had like, dude, he was crying, like legit tears in his eyes and he said, Hey man, I haven’t had a chance to like, thank you and Jocelyn, like teaching us how to do this has like, changed our life. Like we’ve Lindsay’s home homeschooling the kids.

We’re taking a vacation that we didn’t think we were gonna be able to take. I’m gonna go back to school and get my PhD cause I wanna be a professor. And he was telling me all these things that had changed in their life since they started making money online, working at home and out of nowhere he just said, this changed our family’s future.

And I told Jocelyn about that on the way home that day and I said, man, if what we’ve done changed our life and has changed their life, like maybe we could help other people do that. And you know, we really weren’t convinced that we should do this until we came out and talked to you. At that one day business breakthrough in San Diego and we kind of, you know, were telling you about what had happened and you were just so encouraging.

Like, dude, you gotta start something. So that, that’s how we started Flipped Lifestyle, which is the brand we run now.

Pat Flynn: Flipped Lifestyle podcast, a website. And I know that you’ve run events. You invited me to want to to your events before and I was able to, to meet up with you then after several years of now you doing.

What is, what has it been like now teaching it, and this is a very common thing for people who find success to, to then want to teach each to others. What, what were the challenges around that? Because I know some people, they, they kind of e can, can either like, go all in on that and lose track of where they were coming from or like kind of, I don’t know, just, it gets very confusing when you’re, when you know how like 10 things going on.

How did you manage, like where your focus was and, and such?

Shane Sams: Gosh, I, Flipped Lifestyle, we had a lot of insecurities when we first started out. You know, we had the, who’s gonna listen to us? We’re just people from Kentucky, you know? And like I remember we had a really long discussion about how we were gonna handle our accents.

Because if y’all have been listening now for this podcast for a little bit, you can tell we kind of talked funny. Okay. But like, spoiler alert, we didn’t change them, we didn’t change the ag. Yeah. We didn’t try to cover it up. We just said let’s go with it. Right. You know, so there, there was a lot of hurdles to that, like imposter syndrome, like, I mean, I, I knew we had succeeded and I knew we had helped others and we did a beta group and we had helped about 20 people do this, right.

We were like, man, we’ve, we’ve done this, but we actually just kind of embraced who we were. We said, you, the best way to do this is to, one, have a mission. So like we have a mission to help a hundred thousand families work at home. Like that’s our mission for Flipped Lifestyle. So we focused on that and made all our decisions based on, well, how do we help families?

How do we help people with kids? How do we help people who don’t have a lot of time in their schedule? We went out and started the podcast. We just got really consistent, you know, we tried to have a podcast every week. I, I think we’ve had a podcast every week since June of 2014. We’ve never missed an episode, you know, and we went out there and it grew and it grew and it grew, man.

People just really liked our message. I mean, me and Jocelyn will tell you we don’t know everything. We’re still trying to figure it out all the time, you know? And I think people liked that a lot. But it did get overwhelming with ElementaryLibrarian.com was growing, the lifestyle was growing. We did have multiple things.

And we actually got, we actually sold Elementary Librarians so that we could focus all on Flipped Lifestyle, tell you a little bit about that.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, I wanna ask about that. And like how, like why did you sell it? What was like, was, was there any, it’s hard to sell your baby sometimes. Like the thing that you created, like what, what was going through your head and and why?

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. I’ll tell you, it’s funny because we sold it, was it in 17, I think?

Shane Sams: I think it was May of 17, maybe June, something like that.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. So I believe we sold it in 17. And to this day, in 2023, I don’t think I’ve been to the website. Like I just, you know, mm-hmm, it, it’s a like really emotional thing for me.

They’ve, they’ve made some changes or so I’ve heard, you know, people have told me, and, you know, that’s fine. I mean, it belongs to them or whatever. Yeah. We, we just decided that, you know, we could try to run multiple businesses or we could put most of our focus into a couple of businesses, and that’s. Is the route we decided to take, because, you know, there are two of us, and at that time we didn’t have any employees and so we were just trying to kind of run everything on our own.

I was no longer a librarian, so a lot of the things that I had been talking about, you know, they, they weren’t really happening anymore. I wasn’t teaching classes every day and I wasn’t going through the same types of pains that those people were going through. And so at that point I was like, okay, well, you know, this is not really what I’m doing anymore.

I can’t. I mean, I can intelligibly talk about it, but I, I just didn’t feel as comfortable talking about it anymore because I was out of that space for, you know, four years at that point.

Shane Sams: So, a authenticity is very important to us, and like, we just felt like e even with the football coaching site, we ended up shutting that down too, because I wasn’t, I hadn’t been on the football field in five years.

I hadn’t called a play like, so we just didn’t feel authentic anymore doing those businesses. So we tried to get them into the hands of other people that would, man, it was a crazy situation selling a business is weird, dude. Like I’m gonna tell you, lemme tell you the story. So like we were, so we’re two kids from Kentucky who’ve only been in business for about four or five years, getting ready to sell a business that potentially en ended up being sold for seven figures on a contract.

Right? And we get on there and the guy who’s brokering it for me goes, okay, this first guy we’re gonna negotiate it with like, he’s from Russia. He’s from Russia and he is a little weird. He loves to tell stories and he wants to just let him tell his story. And let’s see what happens. He buys things with cash all the time.

Okay? He’s like, I, the guy, he later told me he thinks the guy was like the son of a Russian oligarch, okay? And this guy gets on and he goes, hello, my name is Sergey and I am from Russia. The honest to God, that’s exactly what happened. Like, and like when he came on, like it was like there, he didn’t have a screen, it was just a his name and he then all of a sudden he starts talking and it was like a James Bond villain.

Right. And he’s like, hello, my name is Sergey. Now I like your website, but let me tell you what my passion is. My passion is for robot dinosaurs. This Justin, this is a true story. I can’t this up. Hundred percent true story. And I go, oh, you do? And rock robot dinosaurs. He goes, yes, like the Jurassic Park, have you seen the film, right?

I’m like, yes, I’ve seen Jurassic Park. And he goes, that is good. Did you know that I started a robot dinosaur amusement park in Moldova? Did you know this? And I was like, this is the first time I’m hearing of this, bro. Congratulations. Congratulations. Like you built, you did it right? And he’s like, he goes, we had the T-Rex and the brontosaurus and the triceratops.

We had them all, but we opened the doors and nobody came to my robot dinosaur amusement park. And then he just pauses and he goes, do you know why if anyone from Russia, I’m sorry about my Kentucky Russia accent? Yes. Right? Stick to that southern accent. I’ll stick to the southern accent, but this is a true story.

I go, why? And he goes, because the people of Moldova do not have any money. And he just starts dying laughing and like, then he finishes his story and then outta nowhere he goes I will buy your website. Where do I sign? And this guy was gonna give us full asking price, like a million dollars for this website.

And it was hilarious because we, we got off there when we were at the, to talk to our broker. And then me, I was looking at Jocelyn and I was like, Jocelyn, we’ve got an offer for a million dollars. This is life changing, but do we want to really sell the libraries of America to the Russians. We can’t, we can’t do that, man.

But that is not possible. So like, dude, we, we actually turned down the first offer for the website, man. Oh man. It, it was crazy dude. And like, then, what was it, like two or three calls later, the guys that actually bought it bought it? Something like that. Something like that.

Pat Flynn: You could have lifetime access to a robot dinosaur park.

Shane Sams: In I know, I know, Russia. So we have, we now we have a 10 acre pond now. Right. And we were, and we had bought this house at that time and I was, Jocelyn, if he would throw in a brontosaurus and we could stick it in the middle of the pond, that would be the greatest deal in the history of website sales. Oh, that would be amazing.

I know. So, but we did, we, we, we protected your children, Americans.

Jocelyn Sams: Sorry about the hate mail that you may get.

Shane Sams: Yeah. You gimme a hate mail for that. Just send it to me. Forward it all to me. Yeah. But. Yeah.

Pat Flynn: Oh man. Crazy story, man. What a story. So, so it was sold for a good amount.

Amazing. Yeah. At that point, I’m sure it was like, okay, now we have options, right? Like, how do you, how do you deal with a large influx of income and like that, and you just keep doing what you’re doing and you save it all? Like, I don’t wanna necessarily ask you where you put every single penny, but like, what happens at that point in, in, in the journey?

Shane Sams: You know, there was, there was good things and bad things. Okay. We, we learned a lot. One, like Jocelyn’s already kind of alluded to selling a business. There are ramifications for that now. There’s lots of good things and lots of bad things. The good thing was we had this big sum of money, so we went out and paid off our house.

Right? We paid that off. Didn’t have to worry about it. We enjoyed it. We took a trip to Jamaica and then we just used it to basically invest back into like the business that we have now. For that, but I think Jocelyn could probably speak to this better. Like there was, you know, it was, it was difficult there for that first year or two.

Like there was some directional problems that we probably experienced that nobody really talks about.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, so, so one of the things when you sell your website or. In, at least in the sale that we did, is that you have to basically have a buyer’s representative that’s kind of your go between. So they’re responsible for, you know, learning everything about the website and figuring out where everything is and how to change everything, and how to update everything.

And, you know, you have to kind of work with them for a while. So in our contract, I think that I had to work with that particular individual for, I think it was like three months or possibly six months. I can’t remember.

Shane Sams: It was, it was quite, it was too long.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. She was a very interesting individual. She was like, from New York and, you know, we’re just very different types of people and it just, you know, it was, it was really difficult to work with her.

And, you know, that was really hard for me because I was already kind of passing along the thing that I built and then she was just very, very difficult to work with. You know, just all of those things together were, it was a very mentally trying for me.

Shane Sams: Like I think people think that you just, you know, it’s like all entrepreneurship.

Everybody’s gonna put the sugarcoated candy version on Instagram, right? But you don’t see the iceberg below the water. You know, when we were going through the negotiation things were very pleasant. Everybody’s doing due diligence. We’re trying to work really, but there was a, and then you are on the hook.

Like if you sell your business, nobody’s just gonna like, here’s your money. See you later. Like, you’re gonna have to sign a contract, stay on for a while. You’re gonna have to sell employees with the business. Like our employees had to go with the business. We had to try to protect them and make sure they were gonna be taken care of.

The aftermath of that was very challenging, and it kind of left us in a little bit of an emotional hole there for about a year or so which is actually probably why we started doing live events in the first place in 2018. It was your idea to do Flip Your Life Live?

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. I had gone to an event actually out in California and it was just really interesting and I was like, we should totally do this for our people.

So we decided in 18 and 19 to host some live events, which was really fun.

Shane Sams: Yep. So we went out and started doing those. It was kind of like a new challenge, like can we get a hundred people to fly in? Can we get, can we fill a ballroom? Can. Can we afford to do this? You’ve ran a live, you’ve ran a live event before Pat.

You know how it goes, bro. It’s not easy. It’s not easy. It’s not, it’s like an empty swimming pool filled with alligators that eat money. That’s what it is. That’s pretty much what a live event’s all about. Right? Okay. And like, so we’re just throwing money into the alligator’s mouths, right? The whole past.

This sounds great. This is sounds amazing, amazing fun, right? But it, but it was, and we, and we made it profitable and we figured out ways to do.

Jocelyn Sams: And by some miracle, we didn’t sign a contract for 2020. We decided to take a break. Oh, thank God. I don’t know.

Pat Flynn: Oh wow. Well, good on you guys. Wow.

Shane Sams: Yeah, man, because like we were, I dunno how it worked out, but I’m very thankful. We had the venue, we had everything picked.

I actually had to write a first refusal on a venue in Lexington, Kentucky for 400 people. And we were gonna do it. We were gonna scale it up, we were going all in on it. And then the whole world shut down right before we were gonna sign the actual contact.

Pat Flynn: I had signed a contract for 2020 and then the whole world shut down.

That, that was not fun. But did they let you out? They did because it was a, it was a act of God essentially, which was my only way out.

Shane Sams: To was that, wow. Man. We know a lot of people that they didn’t, you know?

Pat Flynn: Yeah. I mean, I was on the hook for 50 K.

Shane Sams: Oh, wow. Bro. Man, I, we were, we were happy dancing. I actually came out to San Diego, I think I saw you at Azul’s event, and then when we came back, the world shut down and we were like, seriously?

High five. Air High five. We look so smart. You know, it was scary, man. Cause we were like, oh my gosh, that would’ve been terrible. I’m glad they let you out of it because that’s awful, man.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, me too. So live events, and I know that you also centered a lot of stuff and maybe this happened. Right after that or during, but you were very focused at some point on community and teaching community and memberships and, and that kind of like model was different than, you know, what I was doing, which was online courses.

Where did the idea for getting memberships going and having this monthly recurring payment come in?

Shane Sams: You know, I we were actually on an airplane one day and we were talking about this and we were looking at our revenue and we were still kind of really early on. Selling things one off, like really early on.

What always scared us was, I guess, coming from that paycheck mindset a little bit. It would be like, man, it wouldn’t it be nice if we knew there was money coming instead of having to go sell it all the time? And we started thinking about like memberships. Like what if we just got people to sign up once and then charge them forever, you know?

Now this was after, we had, we had actually built the business up ElementaryLibrarian.com. Just backing up a little bit. So this is before the sale. Before the sale. We, we had hit six figure months with it, so it was really going well. So this was a dramatic shift cuz we were gonna, instead of charging, you know, hundreds of dollars for an annual plan or, or an annual access pass or whatever, we were gonna be like, Hey, pay 49 bucks a month and you can get access to this and just keep paying every.

Jocelyn Sams: And so for most teachers, that’s a big win. You know, instead of having to pay four or $500, they’re paying 50 bucks a month.

Shane Sams: $50 a month. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it, it was like, I think it was, I don’t remember what year it was, but the August we were doing it, I remember we were so nervous to switch to this, but man, it was crazy good.

Like it was still almost the same amount of revenue up front. We, we sold a ton of them in the very first month, and then we started looking at it, and as we tracked it over like a year we realized that, you know, the average customer would stay like nine months or something, whatever it was, and then it flipped in my brain.

Oh my gosh. We can predict the future now because if some, if, if Pat joins our membership at 50 bucks a month and the average person stays nine months, well if we have a hundred or a thousand of those people, we know how much money we’re gonna make in the future. So we can hire safely. We can know, we know if we have a bad month that there’s gonna be renewal the next month, and we changed everything to that model at that point because it was just so much safer and more secure. And that’s what we taught. When Flipped Lifestyle kind of rolled out, we started teaching people about memberships and how, because that’s what most people really want. I think their first goal is not to be a millionaire.

It’s not to be driving their bins or their private jets or whatever people are posting on TikTok these days. Just some consistency in income. Dude, it’s, it’s replace your income. Like if you make $6,000 a month, if you could just replace that and count. You could take control of your family’s. And that’s the model that we, we just believed in it so much, man.

We just went all in on teaching that. And you know, we’ve helped a lot of people start memberships.

Pat Flynn: Oh, I know. I, I hear feedback from people who have taken your programs all the time and it’s just like they, they end up hearing the story of how you started and, and it comes back to me and they’re like, Hey, thank you Pat cuz you got Shane and Jocelyn to the point at which they could then help me. And then if that’s just like you, you talk about this all the time. I, I mean, you, you were both on stage with me at FlynnCon and brought me to tears when you brought out your skipping rock.

Shane Sams: Oh yeah, baby. You got, I got one right here.

I got one.

Pat Flynn: Tell me about that. Why is that significant? It’s like a very smooth, flat river rock that, that he’s shown me right now. And, and there’s some significance to that.

Shane Sams: So I’ve got, I’m like the hillbilly philosopher. Okay? So I like to read quotes in stoic stuff, you know what I’m saying? I’m just not expecting you to say that.

Sitting on, I’m sitting on a mountaintop with the foggy smokey mountains over here. You know what I’m saying? Thinking about life. But there’s this amazing quote by Mother Teresa where a reporter was asking her, do you really think that you can change the world? Little woman in the middle of nowhere, all by yourself?

Do you really think that you can change the world? And Mother Teresa said, No, but I can cast my stone out upon the waters and cause many ripples. And you know, as I looked at Flipped Lifestyle, it was crazy because we help people start communities and we have this big community of people doing online business, entrepreneurship and things like that.

But Jocelyn started a community of librarians, and she was the only one who could cast that stone and let her ripple go out and help all those teachers go home at three o’clock, so they could be with their kids instead of making lesson plans. And you know, you cast your stone like you could have just sold architect stuff or whatever you were doing, but you started your podcast now that was casting a stone and like your ripple came all the way across the country and hit me.

And like, you know, and now everybody that starts a membership, everybody that starts a community, an online business at Flipped Lifestyle, you know, they’re reaching all the people, they teach how to play guitar or help restore their marriages, or go out and raise chickens in their backyard, whatever they do. And that’s what we’re all really doing online, is we’re casting our stone out upon the waters and causing many ripples.

So yeah, so I gave this to you, man, but I, I give this to people who make an impact on us because it says actually flip your and life on it. And as some of them I can hand out say, cast your stone. But it’s just a reminder that, you know, it’s not just the money, it’s not just replacing our income.

It’s not just giving our kids a better future. It’s, we are all equipped with God-given gifts That only we have and there’s a group of people out there that only we can help and they don’t get help until we cast our stone and cause the ripple, man. So, you know, that’s what we try to do every day, man.

Whenever, whether I’m speaking on stages, doing podcasts, me and Jocelyn are Jocelyn’s working behind the scenes, trying to put together all the stuff I break or whatever it is, you know, we’re just all casting our stone with our unique, gifts out in the world, man, so we can make a difference.

Pat Flynn: That’s so lovely.

Thank you for that. And thank you for the stone. I have it in within arm’s reach all the time. Here at my desk, you had mentioned speaking on stage and, and Jocelyn, you sort of taking a role now more in the behind the scenes thing. When did that shift happen? Because. For the longest time, it was both of you, the face, if you will, of the podcast leading these communities, leading Flipped Lifestyle.

And it seems to, when we reconnected Shane, and, and, and now we’ve been talking together almost every week now, I noticed very quickly like, wow, things have changed. Things are very different. Jocelyn, maybe you can speak to like your role and how it’s changed and, and why things are the way they are now.

Shane Sams: We had some choices to make Pat.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, so actually you know, we were talking about Covid days and all of that. Things started to change around that time because, you know, life changed for everyone. And instead of our children being at school every day, at that point they were at home every day. And you know, we were trying to help them with their work.

We were trying to run a business, we were trying to be on podcast. You know, there’s only so many things that a person can do, and I had just kind of reached my limit and I told Shane, I’m like, I just, I can’t do the podcast anymore. So that was kind of our first step. And I was just like, you know, I, I need to be here for the kids.

I need to help them navigate this difficult time in life and, you know, I just need to step back from that. And so he was very understanding about that. And, you know, I, I stepped back from that a little bit. Fast forward a little bit, you, three years later now, and you know, we, we had kind of just reached a point where we’ve been working together for a long time.

We’ve been married for a long time. We’ve been married almost 19 years now. We have been working together for over 10.

Shane Sams: And we’ve been working together more than we’ve been married, not working together. That’s weird. I just realized that. That’s pretty cool. I didn’t know how.

Pat Flynn: Interesting. Yeah.

Jocelyn Sams: So yeah, e, even just like about a year ago, or probably about six months ago, things were just kind of difficult.

Shane Sams: You know, a lot of friction. Jocelyn always says it. We bring out the best in each other, but most married couples also sometimes bring out the worst in each other. And we were together all the time working, raising kids and everything it was just blurry.

Jocelyn Sams: Well, and things were getting more complicated in the business too.

You know, we then had a lot of employees that we were bringing on. We are both leaders in the business, but we both lead things very differently. And so there was a lot of just, I guess, friction there because I wanted to do things one way and Shane wanted to do things another way. And basically it came to a point probably about six months ago that I was like, listen, It, either this relationship is going to work or this business is going to work.

Yeah. But both probably aren’t gonna work. Oh, wow. Yeah. So straight up. So we’re gonna have to make some choices. Yeah. So we decided that I would step back from the business and I, I still am. I still own it. I’m still own 50% of the business and I’m still involved in like financial, it’s basic stuff.

Shane Sams: She’s the CFO now.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. Yeah. I, I’m still involved in some financial stuff, but otherwise I’ll leave all of the operations and stuff to the team and it’s worked out really nicely. You know, I’m really happy with it. I’m gonna look and start doing some other things out on my own, some investment type opportunities and just doing some different stuff.

So I’m really excited about that. And yeah. Our relationship has been much happier.

Shane Sams: Much better. Much better. Yeah. It’s funny because it’s. You know, I heard this amazing quote one time. It was you. When you have someone you love, you have to fall in love with them again every 10 years because literally they’re a different person.

Not only emotionally, spiritually, and phys, but physically, literally you’re br you’re different selves, like you’re totally different. And it was funny, we went through this season of life where we were school teachers for like 10 years and we went to this season of life where we were entrepreneurs for about 10 years together and we were business together. And then it was just like really, really hard as, as that complexity came in to to it, it was impossible at five o’clock to say, Hey, let’s lay our C E O, C O O hats over here and go be a married couple and watch TV together. Or let’s put the conflict we had over the latest speaking contract with our partners over here and argue with our daughter over whether she’s gonna do homework or not. And it was just complex, it was so, so complex, man.

Jocelyn Sams: Well, and we’re, we’re both really hard workers. We really enjoy what we do, and so it was hard just to even turn it off, you know, just all the time we were talking about something about work, and I’m just like, we can’t do this. It’s crazy.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. Well, it’s good that the friction came and that moment happened because if it didn’t, you know, who knows? It’s really important too, and I’ve learned this in my marriage too. It’s like, you gotta talk about the tough things, right? Or, or they’re just gonna get tougher and tougher.

Shane Sams: I, I think the pandemic was actually kind of a godsend because this could have naed gone longer without the everything, it was there together in that little brief period of, so we actually, it was very bunch of blessing to go through that and a lot of good things in our business came out of the pandemic.

Pat Flynn: So yeah, I mean, same on my end too. I mean, I slowed down with the speaking because I was speaking a lot and was saying yes to more than I should have.

And the pandemic, April’s been super supportive. She, she’ll never tell me like, I can’t do something, but during the pandemic when things slowed down, she was like, you know, it’s nice that you’re home more often now. And I was like, what do you mean? And, and we got to really talking about it and it, it allowed me to understand that I was going too fast at that point.

So, you know, in, in a way it was a blessing as well. And, and then that’s, SPI and SPI Media and Matt and I and the team put together what eventually became SPI Pro and now our community in our first time getting recurring income. That happened as a result of the pandemic, cuz our way to connect the community was going to be Flynn Con year after year.

And. It’s much easier to do it online with a membership like we are now. Like as, as, as you know, so, so that was good in that way. So Shane, you’ve been now actually doing a lot more stage work and putting your face out there a little bit more, tell me about what that’s been like. You are, I know a top tier, an S tier speaker.

Is that just natural to you? Or like how did you become such a prominent presence on a, on a stage?

Shane Sams: You know, I did not anticipate being a speaker. I’ve always just called myself a podcaster. I really enjoy podcasting. I’ve done hundreds and hundreds of podcasts, and so I think, I think the reps that I’ve had, plus some natural bill de definitely the reps of podcasting and webinars transferred when I started speaking, but the speaking thing came kind of out of nowhere, and I wasn’t even supposed to be a speaker.

Right, it was like, Halfway point of the pandemic when like Florida was kind of opening back up, but nobody else, or Texas, we got this wild email that said, Hey, my boss’s name is Joe and he’s gonna start a live event company. And here’s our website and we’re gonna have Tim Tebow and we want you guys to be partners with us and this adventure.

Jocelyn Sams: We were like, it’s a live event company in the middle it 2020.

Shane Sams: I’m like, are you watching the news? What are you doing? And like, I go to their website and it looked like, it was like someone had like cut out Tim Tim’s face with Microsoft Paint in 1997. Right. I was like, it was like, what is going on?

Jocelyn Sams: And and it had like the, you know, the lorem ipsum, some text on the website.

Shane Sams: Yeah, they did. It had Laurem Ipsum text. Oh, really? On the website. They had just put it up. Right. And they had some laurem ipsum text there. Okay. Red flag. Red flag. So I’m like, exactly. So I told my assistant I, that was at the time, I said, just ignore that person, you know, and they were really persistent and they finally told me who they were.

I looked it up. And this guy his name’s Joe Johnson, he has, he had a lot of bonafides in the speaking industry. So I talked to him and he was like, Hey, I’m starting this live company. We’re mission driven. It’s called Life Surge. He said something really interesting to. They were actually recruiting us as fulfillment partners.

He heard about us through our podcast. They had discovered our podcast. They really liked our vibe and they were like, man, we really wanna work with these people. They seem like awesome people. Let’s go do this. And so they wanted us, they wanted to, basically, they were gonna have stadiums where they had seminars and they would sell Flipped Lifestyle products.

That’s what they wanted from us, right? Because they knew we were a family brand. They, we had a mom and pop vibe. They knew we took care of our customers. So they were like, we would love for you to be a fulfillment partner with us. And I was like, cool. So we went down to this first meeting we had. It was like, The guy and like two other guys in Jocelyn, it looked so janky.

We were like, I still think this might not be a good thing. Right? And like, but we were like this, we were like, he had this grand vision and I asked him, I said, how are you gonna start a live event company when 48 of the states won’t let you have a live event? And he said, well, we’re planning on it here.

The, he said, the live events will eventually come back. We all know that. So he had great hope and belief in that. And he said, and every other live event company just fired the best talent on the planet. I’m gonna go hire ’em. And he had had some capital that he could use for that resource. So yeah, so that vision really inspired us to get on board.

And so we did and we went down to this meeting and each of the different companies involved got to go up there and tell who they were, right? Nobody know who anybody was in the room. So we got together down in Florida and you know, all these speakers got up there. And I think, you know, when I say speakers, I think a lot of people think of a speaker right now.

Everybody. It was that guy. Okay. That’s who was up there, right? It was like, you know what I’m saying? It was like, what am I buying here? Is it a car, is it whatever? Some of ’em were really out there. Oh wait, there’s more genuine. But it was always, wait, there’s more. And all of ’em went like 15 minutes over their time.

Right? But then we didn’t have anybody, everybody else had like 15 people in their entourage, and it was like me, Jocelyn, and our assistant. That was it. So we’re sitting back there at the table and I had to get up there and I told our story, and you know, I was the last person to go as fate would have it and there’s probably, how many people were in there?

A hundred, maybe 50 to a hundred? Yeah, something like that. Yep. And some, there was some really legendary speaker, some really good speakers in there. Crazy people. And I told our story, nobody said a word for the entire thing. And then, and I just finally ended and I said, that’s who we are. And that’s what we do.

And the whole place stood, standing ovation exploded, went crazy. I told our story about quitting our jobs, and the guy that owns the company went out to the minimum, goes for all my employees please don’t quit and start an online business. Cuz he was like, everybody was like, how do we do this? You know, and like, and he came up to me and he was just like, I want to put you on the big stage at this event.

So that led to an opportunity where I got to go out at this event called Life Surges in Tampa, Florida. It was about 3000 people. I’d never spoke in front of a hundred people before. And it went over really well. And then I did, then they wanted me to do a two day seminar. I did that. That went really well.

And all of a sudden now I’m flying all over the place talking and speaking and then I, I spoke at some other places that year, like FinCon and Podcast Movement when it came back open and yeah, it’s just really gotten like kind of crazy. You know? It’s funny you said you were going too hard, but kind of piggybacking off of this, me and Jocelyn realizing that we were just way together too much, we were with our kids too much. So it’s actually been like super healthy for me to travel a little bit and Jocelyn to travel because the kids as they’re getting into their teenage years, don’t want to be around us anymore. So that separation has actually been really good for us in this season of life.

So yeah, now, and now we’ve got a speaking team. I’ve got like something like 31 salespeople out on the road. I go out on the road and do the, I just smoke to 9,000 people in la, 3000 people in San Diego,

Pat Flynn: 9,000 people in the audience?

Shane Sams: Yeah, man, it was bonkers.

Pat Flynn: What’s that like?

Shane Sams: You know, it’s funny, it’s, it’s more intimidating, I think the smaller audiences when they’re closer right on top of you because you know when you walk out and it’s a sea of people in the LA Convention Center.

After about the fifth row, they all just blend in like some kind of wallpaper on your computer, right? Yeah. But like, but you hear the laugh when, when you, when you tell your joke that, you know, always lands and it lands with 9,000 people really hard. Like it’s kind of awesome, you know? Yeah. And there’s this one part in my story.

That I, you know, I, I work really hard at speaking man. I’ve probably, in between every one of my big stage talks, I try to put at least like an hour of thought and preparation into every minute.

Jocelyn Sams: Like that’s how much, not just thought, also talking it over and over. Yeah. Saying it out loud, saying it in the shower.

Shane Sams: Jocelyn, Hey Jocelyn, listen to this five minutes. You know, but they’ll, they’ll, they’ll let her kid you, she writes half my jokes or all my jokes. Pretty much, pretty much all of them. She fixes my jokes, so they’re actually funny. Right. That’s so good. But there’s this one part that’s really emotional in our story.

And it’s, it’s kind of how, you know, how you’ve spoke. You know how like, you know when you’ve got the crowd, you know that moment where you’re like, all right, if I get ’em here, I’m solid the next 25 minutes. Right? And like, I had 9,000 people and I just paused and I didn’t say a word after this part in my story and in my presentation.

And there was no noise in that entire auditorium, which was way better than a standing ovation man. So it was like chill inducing, you know, so speaking. Speaking’s interesting, man. They tried to get Jocelyn up there, but she’s like, maybe there’s later.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. I’m not all about that, so I, I get tickled at these. So, so, you know, I’m out in the audience a lot of times at these events. I don’t get to go to all of them, but I go to some of them and the first time that he spoke, you know, the AV people, I’m standing behind their booth because, you know, I’m just. Trying to get outta the way, but I’m standing back there and you know, they’re like on YouTube like, you know, they’re, they’re work today.

The guys at work for the venue basically. And so, Right, right. That was the first time he spoke. The guy who had his laptop open watching YouTube and he like closed it and started listening. I was like, okay, great.

Shane Sams: Like I got him. That’s a good, pulled him in, man.

Jocelyn Sams: Then other times I’ve been sitting in the audience and people are like, that’s her, you know, it’s so funny cuz he puts my picture up there, you know, they’ll be like, oh, that’s her.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. Yeah. I’m like, okay. Don’t see, that’s been so awesome to see. You know, I’ve been, or you know, when I was speaking a lot, I, I, like you, I was so focused on it and, and, and the audience’s reactions, adding the jokes, all this kind of stuff. It’s such a magical thing to be able to perform in that, in that kind of way.

And not only that, knowing that you’re going to help people after who resonate with your message and such. And, and I know that this has obviously helped with business and and lifestyle. Where do you go from here? Because I know that with new levels come, new devils often. What are the challenges that now you’re you, you’re here you guys might be facing.

Shane Sams: For me, it was kind of like I had to, well, one, we had to build a team. You know, our, our W2 team now is 12 people and our 10 99 and sales people, everything is up to, I think 37 or something crazy, like people that go out on the road. That’s a lot. And like all that’s happened basically in the last like 19 months or something like, So just having to learn how to be a ceo, having to learn how to lead people, like, it’s like my job is dramatically different now.

Like I’ve got, I have to focus constantly on the community that we lead, the people that I lead, and just really be. As outward focused as possible while still being able to get up there and focus on the stories and command the audience and things like that. So it’s not been more hours necessarily though, I don’t think.

Like we still, you know, when I’m not traveling, which is probably twice a month maybe right now. Just on the weekends, you know, when I’m here, I mean, we pretty much stop work at three o’clock still. You know, we might, I start a little earlier. I usually get going now as soon as I drop the kids off. Or I used to, we used to go to the gym or something, but then my son started lifting weights, so that fixed that problem.

Now he can go spot me on bench. That’s, that’s pretty awesome. He’s big enough to do it now, but, you know, just, just becoming a leader, becoming a CEO dealing with imposter syndrome again at this level, you know, every, every time you step up to a new challenge, things like that creep back in all those same devils, I guess.

But what’s awesome is, is the more successful you get and the more successful people you hang around, the more you realize none of us have any clue what we’re doing, and we’re just trying to figure it out every day, right? So everyone looks at us and looks at you and pigs, oh man, they got it all. They got it all figured out.

They got no, we don’t. There’s curve balls every day, and there’s no answers. There’s just no answers to any of it, and you just have gather the best you can. You have to do your best and be outcome independent. So I think that’s probably what I’ve learned the most of. And Jocelyn’s is on, she’s on a completely different journey, so I’ll let her speak to that.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah, I mean, you know, I’m just trying to figure out kind of what’s next for me because you know, Shane is taking care of the business. I do kind of step in occasionally on customer experience. That’s something that’s really important to me. And if I feel like something is happening and you know, I’m not happy with it, or that the customers are being misled in some way or anything like that? I try to intervene on things like that. I get involved in some refund situations. We had, we, you know, sometimes we have some unusual situations. I had to be involved in.

Shane Sams: Some, and with so many salespeople, some Jocelyn’s eye is best to watch that because the, the message from us down to the salespeople out in LA may be a little different than what we’re want.

So then we’ve gotta fix that problem cause there’s so much going on, so many moving parts.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. So I mean, I’m, I’m doing that and just kind of seeing what happens next. You know, I’ve got some education that I’m wanting to dive into that I’ve purchased from other people about investments and that’s kind of the next step for me, I think.

Shane Sams: Yeah. And fig that, going back to your question about when you get a bunch of money, none of us are truly prepared for seven figures, eight figures, and I don’t think our brains are really hardwired as humans to like know that far into the future. Like most of us live most of our lives, paycheck to paycheck, and we’re looking for something more comfortable or more, more distance between us and life.

And like when you start thinking about things like, wow, I can leave an inheritance to my kids. Wow. I can do some of these things. Gosh. It’s just there’s so much out there, you know, to do. You know, that’s, I think what Jocelyn’s trying to figure out now is what do we do with all this? What does the legacy look like?

What does all this happen? But, you know, we have no clue what we’re doing, but we’ll figure it out. And that’s the way it is. So, well,

Pat Flynn: it’s been about a decade almost since you were first on the show, and I know that episode really inspired a lot of people. And again, it’s one of the most, if not the most downloaded episode of the podcast.

And so I think this would be a very, very nice way to catch people back up on where you’ve been and also reintroduce you to people. Or introduce you for the first time, just the journey that you’re on, and I’m just so proud of both of you and very grateful that you guys are still in my lives and still a part of the community here.

And Shane, I know you’re working on a book. I’d love to to ask you about that real quick. I know you’re still in the works at the time of this recording, but perhaps when people listen to this, it might already be available. I know you’re working with Azul who helped me on my first book. Like tell me about the book, the experience of writing it and and where people can potentially get it.

Shane Sams: Well, I mean, as always bro, like you. We love you, man. I mean, you’ve always inspired us and like I think I sometimes just look up and go, what has Pat done that I need to do next? You know? And I know that books have been a really big part of your story, and I’ve wanted to write this book for a long time, not just to, you know, I go out and tell my story and I tell our story like how we built this business and people get inspired, but I realized it’s not because it’s Shane and Jocelyn or because we’re special.

It’s just because we’re one story of a couple people from a regular place that made it right. And as we’ve seen so many of these stories come through our community, I just get, I get so inspired by them. Like we’ve got people that like literally started online businesses, teaching people how to raise chickens in their backyard, teaching people how to draw superheroes, teaching people how to play guitar.

Like there’s so many stories teaching people how to sheer sheep and sew them into stuffed animals and creating an empire around that. Can’t make that up. Can’t make that up, Teresa. But like I started looking at this, and as I was telling our story, I, you know, through this book, I realized, man, there’s so many of these other stories and all of our stories, whether it’s your story, Pat, my story, Jocelyn’s story, Kevin’s story, you know, Kenny’s story, Evan’s, whoever it is, there’s patterns to it that emerge, right?

There’s things that we all do and I really wanted to get that down into a book, into something that people could just read and be inspired by and go out and flip their lives. So the book is coming out very soon. It’s gonna be more detailed version of this, of our story. So you can get all the details of behind the scenes of how we built our business.

But then we break down like, you know, probably about 17 or 18 case studies of other people in our community I have a whole how to section of how we teach our flipped lifestyle blueprint in there. I just hope that it can inspire more people. I can only talk to so many people on podcasts and stages, but I can send this book to anybody, right?

That’s the goal, man, is to let this be the spark that gets a hundred thousand families to change their life with online business.

Pat Flynn: It’s gonna happen, man. Where can people go to get word of when this book is out and available?

Shane Sams: Now, I did not know I was doing this until like yesterday. Okay? I talked to Azul.

Okay. Azul’s our book coach and Azul said, I was like, yeah, I’m gonna send them to a page and I want to give, I want to give people a copy of the book. Or, and, and he said, well, I don’t know if the print copy’s gonna be out. And he said, what can I do? He goes, you should give everyone the audio book. You should give everyone in Pat’s audience the actual audio book.

We’re gonna read it and record it pretty soon. And you should just give ’em that. Oh, that’d be awesome. So I think that’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna go to, if you, if everybody goes to FlippedLifestyle.com/pat, right? FlippedLifestyle.com/pat, on that page, you’re gonna put your name and email in.

We’re gonna send you the audiobook, and I’m also gonna give everybody a training that we have. It’s called Find Your Idea so that people can start going down the rabbit hole and think about their idea, how they could go out and get a hundred people to pay ’em $50 a month. Get 200 people to pay ’em $50 a month, make 60, 120 grand a year.

How can they go out and do it? So just, just a thank you man for all you’ve done for us. I just wanna give everybody, we are a part of the SPI community, you know, and I want to give everything we can back to them so they can get the book for free and they can get the course for free.

Pat Flynn: Hey, thank you for that.

Thank you both. I, we will remind people of all the links and stuff at the show notes page and, and whatnot, but thank you so much for this hour today. It’s been amazing to catch up and good luck on the book launch. I’m sure we’ll talk about it a lot together and looking forward to crossing past in person again.

Thank you both.

Shane Sams: Love you, buddy.

Jocelyn Sams: Thank you, Pat.

Pat Flynn: I’m telling you that’s why they’re one of the most downloaded, or they are the most downloaded couple and single episodes ever here on the podcast back in episode 122 and back again in session 675. Two important links for you. Number one, the one that Shane just mentioned, FlippedLifestyle.com/pat to get all the goodies there.

And then finally to get the resources and the links and everything else that we mentioned SmartPassiveIncome.com/session675. Thank you so much for listening in. I appreciate you and hope we’ll see you soon and big shout out to all the members of the All Access Pass. You guys are doing amazing. We’re in the middle of some accelerators right now and just keep up the good work SmartPassiveIncome.com/allaccess.

If you wanna know what that’s about, peace out. Thanks so much. I’ll see you in the next one.

Thank you so much for listening to the Smart Passive Income podcast at SmartPassiveIncome.com. I’m your host, Pat Flynn. Sound editing by Duncan Brown. Our senior producer is David Grabowski, and our executive producer is Matt Gartland. The Smart Passive Income Podcast is a production of SPI Media, and a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network. Catch you next week!