Continuing our discussion with Chris Miles

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer podcast, where we work on getting better step by step professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well, hello and welcome back. We're continuing our discussion with Chris Miles. This is our interviews 2.0 season and we are solidly into this. This is part three and we sort of were a little bit on a cliffhanger and we're going to start right in with that conversation with Chris, where we're talking about sort of the tail end of launching his businesses, some of his mindset, and we're going to dig a little deeper into that sort of where that came from. You'll find that it has some something to do with his parents and how he was raised and a little bit of their aspects, how they see the world and how that has shaped how he sees the world and how that has been a benefit to him and how he's embraced and taking risk and doing a couple of things that you would more or less expect from an entrepreneur such as him. We do shift a little bit as we go through the conversation. We sort of meander as we go through the topics, but I think these are some useful little things to think about and some ways to view some of your tasks, whether it's very mundane, like mowing a yard or sweeping snow or something a little more complicated like building out a website or creating a web podcast. And I think that's enough of me. So let's get back to our interview, our discussion with Chris Miles. Yeah, that's very much. It's interesting. You talked about the debt reductions that was, you know, there's all the, that's another area where there's all kinds of people, you know, get rich quick and reduce your debt and all these different things. But that's one of them that Ramsey talks about that I like when he talks about people reducing debt. It says, hey, you know, I mean, most people are stuck. They said, well, I'm going paycheck to paycheck now and say, well, okay, go get another job, go sell something, go because it's, I mean, it's there are ways to do that stuff. I think people don't think about it, but it's like, look, if you want one of the ways you can reduce debt is, you know, you stop spending money, but also earn some more somewhere else. Yeah. And it's going to take more time. And it does, like you said, it takes, it's not without work. It's not without effort. I love that about your, your introductory video that you do for people is that that's early on you say, look, if you're looking for easy, if you're not going to, if you don't want to work, then it's not going to work for you. This is not some secret magic thing that you like wave a magic wand and stuff just suddenly happens. You've got to put the time into it. You've got to spend, there's got to be some effort involved. Yeah. If it was easy, you know, everyone would do it. Right. I mean, there's a reason why there's, you know, I forgot how many the actual percentage is, but most people are built to go to work and get a paycheck and come home. That's just, we're the weirdos, right? The outcast to go out here and like, you know, let's go ahead and give this a try. But you know, when it comes to like this whole money thing, I learned once it kind of became more of a game to me than anything else is when it started to make more sense, especially when it came to investing and investing in myself, investing in my own knowledge, investing into index funds or a business here or a business there and thinking, OK, yeah, it might be expensive, but if I get the return on investment back, then who cares how much it costs, you know, if you really think about it that way. So once I started putting those things together, then it really started to to to work out, just let me find a way to generate more income and then that way I can, you know, do what I want. Well, that yeah, that goes back to like your your your ad example earlier is that it's it may be very expensive to do ads depending on where you do it and how you do it. But if you're you know, you spend five hundred dollars an ad, but your product is generating you an extra five hundred bucks when all said and done, then it doesn't matter that you're spending like, hey, you're you're still coming out money ahead and you just yes, some of those are those kind of business. And I've dealt with people like that where the business those businesses are sort of nice in a way because you say, OK, how much do you want to throw at it? And for the most part, some of it's like, you know, you want to do 100 ads, you want to do 1000 ads, it's going to cost you 10 times as much. But on the back end, you're going to make, you know, and maybe hopefully 10 times as much or even if there's some reduction in value, at least you've gotten something to say, OK, you're going to spend money, but you're going to make money as well. It's straight up investing at that point and just looking at your return on investment. Yeah, you got the whole I don't know if you remember or familiar with the Kevin Kelly thousand true fans theory. He basically says, you know, if if you can find a way to make one hundred dollars off of a thousand people, that's a six figure income right there. Right. So you start to really realize that Google, I believe actively every single month has around three point seven, almost four billion active users. That's billion with a B. Right. Active users every single month. And that's that's a big number. Right. So all you need to do is get in front of a very small, minute fraction of those people who are interested in what it is you have to offer. And you can make a six figure income. So I think when I saw that number and realized that because of all of the people that are out there, you don't need that many people in order to make a full time income online. You just need to get in front of the right people at the right time with the right offer. And you'll be able to make almost as much money as you want. So when you're throwing in ads and everything, you're just putting yourself out there in front of more people. As long as you're going to get the return on your ad spend or the return on investment for what you're spending on ads, then you're going to end up getting that money back at that point. How much money do you want to spend on it? You know, is really what's going to limit you at that point. Now, was that a mindset change for you? Have you always been sort of an investment mindset kind of because you said you've never never really been risk averse? It's intelligent risk and and understanding what your risk level is. Was that something that you somewhere along the way realized there was like, you know, sort of a flip where you said, oh, wait, I'm investing in all these things and it changed stuff. Or is that sort of how you were, you know, how you're raised, how you sort of part of your nature? Yeah, no, I've always looked at OK, so my mom is she will try stuff. She doesn't care what happens afterwards. Let's just try it and see what happens. My dad's very conservative. He's like, all right, let's let's think about this before we go through this. Let's try to figure it out. Let's see what's going to happen. And I think because they were kind of the two extremes, I kind of like to think that I'm like the middle of the road. I was able to learn the best and the best of all worlds. So even though I didn't necessarily know it was investing, I guess you can say, I did understand the idea of paying out to make more back, even though that is what investing basically is, I didn't see it as that at the time. So I'll just give you an example. When I was maybe 17, 18 years old, I remember just going online and seeing the iPhone, I forgot which one it was, but the iPhone was kind of newer at that this time and it was coming out and I was like, OK, let me is there where I can make some money on this? And I found online an overseas retailer or wholesaler who was going to sell me iPhones for like 300 bucks each. I was like, wow, that's pretty good because they're going for like a thousand in the states. Right. So I didn't have any money at the time. So I remember going to my dad about it and I was like, hey, I think I got an idea here. I just got to buy these phones. I can turn around and sell them on eBay. It'll be great. You know, and to his credit, I'm pretty sure he probably thought that I'm going to lose my money with this. But he went ahead and gave me the money anyway. So I went and bought like 20, 30 of these phones. And when I got them, they weren't iPhones. They were M phones. And I was like, what is an M phone? Right. And I really didn't know if you can still Google it today and you'll Google M phone, you'll see us out there. And they're just cheap iPhone knockoffs. It's basically what they were. And they were only worth about two hundred dollars. So I ended up losing quite a bit of money with that. But I did just try to send it back to him like, hey, these aren't iPhones. You told me it's like something I am overseas, like way on the other side of the world. And it got stuck in customs for like six months. And then at that point, I was like, OK, well, just send them back. And then when you send them back, I just I put them on eBay and try to get back what I could from them. But. Even though I that didn't work out, a lot of people might go through that process and think, OK, I'm done. I'm never going to try this again. That just was like, OK, I learned something from this. It was an expensive lesson, but I learned from it. And that's one thing my dad always say, like he's the kind of person where he'll let you borrow 20 bucks. And if you say that you're going to pay him back in two weeks, when two weeks comes and goes, he probably won't ask you for it. But the next time you ask him for 20 bucks, you ain't go see him anywhere. So I kind of learned I learned a lesson. He paid twenty dollars to learn that lesson. I paid or he gave me the money, but I ended up paying, you know, that few thousand dollars lesson right there. So I learned early on that you do have to spend money in order to make money. You're going to spend it in either your time or money. So I was OK, let's just give this a try and see what happens. That's kind of where my whole investment ideology came from. And it got better as I got older because I started watching YouTubers and podcasts of people who are doing it the right way and was able to get pretty good at it. Well, and you got your own lessons like that. As you know, it may be I think of that as you invested 20 in that case, you would invest 20 bucks or, you know, a couple thousand dollars to learn some lessons and add your own experience. And those painful ones are more likely to stick with you. Yeah, they do. Sure. I want to get a little bit this this is going to be a little inside baseball or geeking out a little bit as. Yeah. As you're doing like your recordings and podcasts and stuff, go about that. Is this one of these things that you sort of like you go in and you set up a studio? And I know you use some you've got some virtual assistants, stuff like that. Is it something where you just sort of you go in, you record everything, you have a good time and then you send that off and they do all of it, do a bunch of work or especially because you got that IT background. Do you find yourself going in and working in some of that and then working it through the production process? Yeah, that's actually where the IT background actually does come in handy, you know, because I mean, it's not super duper technical, but there are a few things that, you know, it's easier and better probably to pay someone else to do it. I don't claim to be the greatest writer in the world. And spoiler alert, you don't have to be a great writer in order to be a good blogger. But I find sometimes that hiring out someone to write it, there are better writers than I am. You know, so sometimes I can be hurting my business by doing it myself. But there are certain things where like I just do get technical. I just go online, find a few YouTube videos of someone who did it. And I can figure it out. I can put it together because one thing that I did in my old job was I would take complicated concepts and then break them down for the end users. And I would put together procedures and instructions on how to do this. And that's really tough to do when you really think about it, is put together instructions because it's got to be pretty much dummy proof, right, for anyone who's going to run across it. So I just took that skill that I develop while working a regular job and then just turned it into what I'm doing with my business. So I come up with procedures and I come up with SOPs or, you know, standard operating procedures that I give to people. They look at them and they go through the whole process. So when it comes to the blogging business, a lot of that is kind of outsourced. But I did have to, you know, do a lot of it myself early on. Nowadays, when it comes to like my blog or the main blogging in the YouTube channel and things like that, I do a lot of that work myself. A lot of it is kind of zen like for me. I like editing videos and everything. You don't have to edit videos. You don't even have to do YouTube at all if you don't want. Sticking with a blog is just fine. So it just depends on if you feel like putting yourself out there versus not. You know, so sometimes I do a lot of the work myself, usually because I might come up with the process of what I want to do. Maybe right then and there. I don't have time to explain to somebody else. So I do a lot of the work myself, but I actually am and talks with a guy right now who wants to take over. He reached out to me after for a while and wants to take over doing my editing and cutting it here and cutting it there. He took one of my videos and put it together and he made it look pretty awesome. And I was like, wow, I could have never done that. So I'm like, yeah, let me go ahead and pay this guy to do it. And because I am in the position where I am, where I do have, you know, money to invest in that, I'm going to be buying back my time now. So instead of spending an hour editing a video, I can just record it, drop it in a in a drop box or something and then go on with my day. Yeah, I think that is something that people. You know, if you've got a regular job, it gets it so easy to say, you know, my hour, my time is X dollars an hour, whatever I get paid. That's what my time is. But even then, I think you undersell yourself when you do that, because there's I think there is a different value to what you're you know, that's what you get paid by your boss. But probably there's something else where it's like, hey, you could go. It'd be worth it to you to not get, you know, if you have 50 bucks an hour, you may be where you say, I would rather not have 50 bucks for that hour and go spend it on the golf course, hanging out with my family or something like that. Of course, on the golf course, then you're paying to be on the golf course. Right. And that's the whole look. I guess. But you know, that's the point is that it's is it's figuring out where there's those things that it's like, you know, I do it because I've always done it. And you've you've touched on it several times, is there is a level of I think that anybody that's really successful, particularly passive income type approaches is because there's a level of automation and processes and stuff. And even if there are things that you manually do, but you you refine them down to a point where you can like you can just whip through that thing or you can be thinking about something else while you get it done or something. So it doesn't feel like the cost of getting that produced or getting to that product or that content is now lower than it was before, whether it's because you've outsourced somebody or you just made your your life easier as well. Yeah, it's funny that you mentioned that, because when it comes to like a good example, like growing up, I grew up in the South in Louisiana. And because it's hot 10, 11 months out of the year, the grass is always growing. You know, there's always some grass that's got to be out there. That's got to be good. And I remember with my dad, I'm cutting the grass like literally every three to four days, I feel like the grass is just going so fast. So as I got older, I started just like really just hating cutting the grass. And then when I finally, you know, had my own house and had one of the first things I did was I hired a lawn service to go do it for me. And is now I paid a lawn service, you know, 40, maybe 50 bucks to go ahead and do that for me. But if I did it myself, it would take me three and a half hours to go out there. Now, unless it's like a zen like feeling for you where you just, you know, some people just like just to get on the lawn more and just go. But I look at it as a waste of time for me, you know, so I'd rather pay a guy to go out there or his team or whatever, pay him 50 bucks. He takes care of the whole thing in 20 minutes. And then I can concentrate on something else that, you know, that won't take me three and a half hours to do so. I can make more money in that time doing something a little more focused than spending it out there, you know, working on the grass. But nowadays I live in the Northeast. And since I didn't grow up with snow, I actually like the snow and the cold cleanup process. Yeah, I'm a weirdo. But I like the whole process. But now what I do is I just plug in a podcast and I go out there and work. And that's the I like that feeling. So I just try to my best to make sure that the time that I am spending doing stuff is actually advancing something, whether it's my knowledge or the business. Well, that's a good that's a perfect example right there of a niche and being able to provide a service, somebody else that, you know, they go out. And I say I did it. I go back and forth, depends on how much my yard has been. How big my yard is at various times and stuff like that. But there's a while that I had a troop that came in and it was. Yeah, it was literally the same thing. It probably would have taken me four or five hours and it would have. And I would have had to. Yeah, you got them. I have to like at that point, I had to go back and get a riding mower and you have to maintain that and all that kind of stuff. That's just like the costs are, you know, become pretty high. And then you go looking like they're like, well, hey, for whatever, well, I think it was 50 or 60 bucks. And then they are a machine. They like roll up in a flatbed. They got six mowers going in different directions. They got guys with blowers. They got guys with weed eaters. And they just like cover a place like a plague for about 20 minutes. And then it's gorgeous afterwards. They roll everything up to the truck and they go down to the next block. And it's you know, and so they've you know, they've whatever they charge. Everybody, you know, they just made probably, you know, a couple hundred bucks an hour for that, which means you can easily cover all your guys. You can cover your stuff. And it's just it's one of those. It's like, hey, if if I can find a way to improve this process enough, then I can cut the cost. I can go do it for you. You win. I win. You know, that's just it's the best way to grow a business, I'd say. And that wraps up part three. But never fear. Part four is right around the corner. We will wrap up our discussion with Chris and we're going to just continue moving along. Got a lot of little topics that throw up a lot of noteworthy items that we discuss. I think as we've gone through this and more, we've gone through it, the more we've talked with Chris, the more I'm hoping you realize that he's just a regular old guy, just like us. He is not some Superman. He is not some mega intelligent, you know, super awesome person. Great guy and all that. I don't want to take away from it, but he's no different in many ways from you or I. So I think the moral of the story is with a little bit of some work and intention and sort of that that attitude of, hey, we're just going to keep trying. Is something that can get you where he is, if that's where you want to be. As always, though, you know, that's part of the goal is getting you where you're going to be happy, because where somebody else is and how they got there may not be exactly what you want to do, may not be your cup of tea, as they say. So figure out what yours is. Pursue that and you're going to find happiness that makes everything else worthwhile. That being said, I'm going to let you go back to your day, hoping that it is all worthwhile and go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Nor podcast. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, anywhere that you can find podcasts. We are there. And remember, just a little bit of effort every day ends up adding into great momentum and great success. One more thing before you go, the Develop-a-Nor podcast and site are a labor of love. We enjoy whatever we do trying to help developers become better. But if you've gotten some value out of this and you'd like to help us be great, if you go out to developernor.com slash donate and donate whatever feels good for you. If you get a lot of value, a lot. If you don't get a lot of value, even a little would be awesome. In any case, we will thank you and maybe I'll make you feel just a little bit warmer as well. Now you can go back and have yourself a great day.