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i'm 100 happier now than if i stayed
with my traditional nine to five job
in this episode
how i make seven figures every single
year running my businesses
without our businesses there would be no
way that we could live the lifestyle
that we could live today i don't
actually even know how other parents do
it they have to hire help
and with our businesses we can always be
present in our child's lives whenever
they need us
the flexibility that is so important to
me so that we can be very very active in
our kids lives
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my name is steve chu and i'm 46
and i'm jen chu and i'm 45 and together
we make over 1 million dollars in the
silicon valley
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let me just text him really quickly i'm
just gonna text her be quiet could you
guys jump around upstairs we can hear it
he still has his halloween candy so he's
probably eating a lot of it which camera
are we supposed to look at just for this
one oh that one okay thank you i run and
own bumblebee linens where we sell
hankertis and linens for special
occasions
i'm a blogger podcaster youtuber
ticktacker and i also teach an online
class on e-commerce combined our
businesses make over 2 million in
revenue but our net income is around 1
million
million dollars anywhere it sounds like
a lot of money and it's more than enough
we don't even spend a fraction of that
amount we don't budget per se but we
definitely spend less than we make and
really there's not that much that we
really splurge on i would say i splurge
on maybe travel and steve splurges on
game tickets besides those we really
don't spend a lot except for maybe on
our kids activities and their schooling
my wife and i we are an extravagant
people so even if our businesses were to
just completely dry up overnight we
would still be able to live 20 plus
years given our current expenses
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i purposely looked for handkerchiefs and
it's really hard to find in the u.s you
can find men's ones but you can't find
ladies
and so i was able to find some hankertis
from a chinese vendor but i had to order
a lot our first order of handkerchiefs
was around 240 which amounted to about
500 handkerchiefs in total when we first
used handkerchiefs for our wedding and
we sold off the excess those sold like
hotcakes because we listed them on ebay
when we first started the business i was
massively pregnant and we were running
the business out of our house we started
the business for 630 by the end of the
year we made over a hundred thousand
dollars in profit i think it was 102k
fast forward we moved out of the house
and into a warehouse space
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my goal was to make maybe five thousand
dollars to just help with bills steve's
goal was to replace my entire income
e-commerce was actually not our first
choice but we found that starting those
brick-and-mortar stores would cost us
over five hundred thousand dollars to
start whereas with e-commerce you can
start with 600 bucks or less than that
and that's why we ultimately settled on
e-commerce
so bumblebee linens did much better than
we expected and it allowed my wife to
quit and then all of a sudden i had
friends asking me how we did it because
they wanted to quit their jobs
and i got a little tired of answering
the same questions over again so i
decided to document that on a blog over
at mywifequitterjob.com that blog served
as the diary or a journal of our
business
and what ended up happening is none of
my friends actually read it my mom
didn't read it but it attracted a bunch
of random strangers who were interested
in what we were doing and from there the
audience just grew
in year two it started making tens of
thousands of dollars and in year three
it hit six figures
and today fast forward is now a million
dollar business
and the way it makes money is a
combination of advertising affiliate
revenue course sales the blog actually
led to a podcast and sponsorships which
led to a training class which then led
to an annual ecommerce event that
actually run over at the seller summit
you get a quick show of hands of how
many of you are new to the seller summit
this year
wow
okay
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on an average day or average week
besides holiday season i work probably
about 20 to 30 hours a week i rely
heavily on my employees i'm there just
to help manage and to help basically
support them if things are falling
behind i start the work day at around
eight and then i usually stop at around
12 30 and then the rest of the afternoon
i'm actually a full-time uber driver
chauffeur where i just shuttle my kids
pick them up take them to basketball
volleyball and all these other
activities
i don't actually don't think it's a good
idea to work with your spouse things
always come up steve had a lot of
suggestions on how to improve our
business and i must tell you they were
horrible because he had an idea of
picking certain handkerchiefs that were
but ugly just because they were cheaper
and i was like absolutely not let the
professionals do this
and
i actually make all the product
decisions for our business because he
really has horrible taste
so the way we have it now is actually
really good she runs the day to day i do
the marketing and we do not step on each
other's toes we all have full control
over our own domain
so early on when we ran bumblebee linens
we actually had the pedal down in the
metal and after a while of this rapid
growth my wife came to me and she's like
this isn't fun anymore
it was definitely not fun my goal
initially for the business actually was
i think 5 000 a month and so at the time
i was like if i can just help pay the
bills that would be awesome steve
definitely wanted to push it a little
bit faster and when we were pushing it
faster and faster i was like i just
can't handle all this stress and one
time we hit the nbc today show monogram
is everything and i love it on bumblebee
linens and this is 15.99 oh that's nice
and all of a sudden our orders were 7x
the normal sales volume and it was
actually very stressful when you're
running a physical products business
it's generally uncomfortable to grow
fast
i
really honestly thought that our goal
was to just have a little bit of income
to help with the bills there's no way i
would have guessed like so many years
later that we would be as large as we
are
we joke that we're going to move out of
california as soon as the kids go to
college because it would be so much
cheaper to live out of state employees
would be cheaper the location would be
cheaper in terms of rent for our um our
office i think he would be all in right
now like he'd be like hey let's move i'd
be all in because california taxes are
really high
let's just take vegas for example
there'd be no state income tax
really we can run our businesses from
anywhere we're not tied to any location
whatsoever so financially at least it
probably makes sense to move somewhere
else once our kids are off to college
when i used to be a finance analyst
prior to this role i worked crazy crazy
hours with this position at bumblebee
linens having that creative freedom to
do basically what i need to do i can
work around my schedule if it's slower i
can fully like take that time off and
not worry about it and work at my kid's
school for example
in my past life i was an electrical
engineering director in charge of
microprocessor design that's a lot to
take in there but basically i just
stared at a monitor all day
it was a pretty demanding job i used to
work maybe 50 60 hours a week
and it wasn't as flexible because i
actually had to physically be in the
office
having the flexibility is super
rewarding for me and i feel like it's a
win situation for me because i'm able to
do something that i love and also be
able to be a really huge part of my kids
education
growing up i actually didn't see my
parents as much as i would have liked
they were first generation chinese they
actually came to the us with no money at
all
one of the reasons i'm really passionate
about being really present for my kids
is because my parents really worked
really hard growing up but my mom also
passed away when i was pretty young so
now i just want to take that time back
and make sure that i'm present for them
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it's delicious right
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