Dating, Entrepreneur, Life, Life Rants, Thoughts

Updates & Just checkin’ in withcha

August 19, 2017

Updates & Just checkin’ in withcha

It’s been awhile since I blogged and I said I would blog every week. Well, that just went straight out the window. My last update was end of June 2017. It’s now August, 2017.

Since then I hiked half dome (the cables way). I went to a friend’s wedding in San Francisco and took the time to bike for miles and miles around the area and across the golden gate bridge. I visited Matthes Crest by roping up and down it, soloing a part of the traverse for 6 hours of my 17 hour day. I climbed at various other places, visited 15 cities and 42 locations (random restaurants, etc.). Went through another staff rotation. Launched another product. Life has been busy.

Free solo’d the traverse of matthes crest. Had one of the most memorable moments of my life with an awesome group of people. What a damn good day. #optoutside? #iloverockclimbing #matthescrest #lovethislife

A post shared by Kim Dang (@kimpossibledang) on Aug 14, 2017 at 6:54pm PDT

I was with someone on and off for many years and for the first time in my life I’m not anymore. For good. Like this usual feeling of permanence has disappeared. And I’m okay with it.

To improve my writing, no matter how short the update, I’m just going to post it. I don’t network enough to get rid of the fob voice in my head. HAHA. So writing the shit out of it will help (I think).

I think this update is really about how I feel as I age. I’m 30 now and it seems like I’m less hardcore (in my own perspective) in looking at the world in an idealistic way. The older I grow, the easier it gets to just surrender to life being one chaotic blessing. My world changes almost all the time. I take off, on short notice, to what I believe are grand adventures. I do not care as much about what people think. I listen to my body a lot more. Every week, every month is different. Sometimes I crave consistency. Sometimes I get irritated at the tumultuous nature of it all. Sometimes I lie in bed all day while listening to YouTube in the background.

After living this life for years, I don’t know what a normal schedule is like anymore. I don’t feel envious of anyone because I see everyone as living their separate lives with their own imperfections and happiness sprinkled with moments of melancholy and life crises. I guess it’s more like “what the fuck is next?”.

And my biological clock is eerily silent. I have no desire to have children (yet), I do not look my age so I feel like I have borrowed time. Is there a desire to leave behind a legacy? No. All I’m waiting for is just enough capital to acquire more….. things? I feel like I’m living now just to continue living. Like eating to enjoy food and keeping myself alive. I’m not ambitious enough to have “milestones” and I’m not lazy enough not to have short term goals. I’m not superficial enough to own a bunch of shit and I’m not dirtbag enough to just abandon it all for a long period of time.

I don’t see an end to this. I am content and then discontent for being content. I experience moments of such joy when I stare at some cloud formations on top of a beautiful landscape and then my period comes and fucks it up for 2-3 days as I agonize over inconsequential shit. My parents are doing fine and my brother will become a legit doctor in 1 year. No one in my life is suffering (knock on wood), and all I have to do now is LIVE. WHAT. THE. FUCK.

Even while supporting other people by providing them income, is that not enough a sense of purpose for me to not feel aimless? No. Not enough. Still feeling aimless (but not in a sad way, more like a feather in a Forest Gump movie type of way). Even while using my money to donate to charity… feeling less aimless? No.

This is how I feel now that I’m no longer in my twenties. What’s the goal, now? Try not to get too irked by everything happening with politics? Some of my friends have found purpose by impacting a bunch of people in their lives. Maybe that’s next, but I’m in such a hypnotic lull of my own freedom that I don’t feel pushed in any which way all the meanwhile questioning the validity of it all. Questioning if this life is now a valid one.

Some of my friends have kids and their “why” is so defined, it feels nice to be around that sense of certainty. HAH. Okay, /end rambling.

Some tips I’ve learned:

If you are going to try and solo Matthes Crest (even a part of it), do it at the very beginning so you don’t feel like your rope is a life line you can’t kick. My climbing partner Clark taught me this mental trick and it worked! It was only at the end of the day did my mental strength started draining and I had to be rope rescued because I froze literally some meters before our point of descent (AFTER I soloed up a peak already and had to down climb).
Mole skin is the best.
Listen to your friends when they tell you Gladiacoin is shady. (haaaahhh)
Sometimes reading a 5 page PDF guide on how to do something is better than thinking of all the hurdles you’ll encounter trying to do said thing.

I’m sure you went here thinking you’d learn something about passive income and I’m just rambling on about life. Seems like that’s the trend here. Maybe I’ll write enough so that not EVERY blog post is a ramble. Just every OTHER blog post… is a ramble. =)

How do you feel once you’ve hit your thirties? Or how do you feel approaching 30? Is it a lot of “what the fuck? what the fuck?… what…..the fuck…happens…now?”. Let me know. I’d like to know.

24May2017

ABOUT, Auto Dismantling, AUTO PARTS ADVENTURES, Entrepreneur, Life, Thoughts, What I Know About

autodismantling, importing, taiwan, travel

Failures and Truths

May 24, 2017

Let’s face it. There’s no such thing as “passive income”. It’s all… really fucking hard work. And a lot of failures (for me). This BLOG is about my own personal recount of whatever the heck it is I do to form an existence where I at least earn a living because I definitely know by now that I am almost unemployable.

Okay.

Maybe that was a bitch/bit too melodramatic. I honestly by now don’t see how I can function as someone who can stick to a set schedule every week. Because literally every single week is a different story. I was all gung ho with creating this shopify general store one week, plunging myself into 15+ hour days of study self study with a store that has “viral” products. Then I went to Taiwan and immersed myself in the city and country life while rock climbing/hiking/scootering/biking around all the meanwhile ordering knives for importing and auto parts. Then I came back to city violations because the fencing around the warehouse needed to have slats in order to remove the view from the general public. And the list goes on and on and on…

In the past 5 months I’ve:

Invested 16,000 in a project that BARELY just now is starting to pan out with imported products from China and Taiwan.
Invested 2-3,000 in selling a beauty product that did REALLY well for a few months and then got taken down by Amazon which crippled the hell out of sales and now I am back to square one.
Had to let go of a few employees.
Traveled to another country to visit suppliers as well as just taking a fucking break from the chaos for several weeks.
Sales of used auto parts increased dramatically while I was gone to the point where one of my virtual assistants encouraged that I stay away from the business more often.
Joined an ecommerce forum where I’m not obsessively combing over every post I deem relevant.
Just finished with jetlag yesterday, waking up at 3am in the morning on the daily and now 2 days ago I started my period. And it seems as though my lactose intolerance has increased as of late to the point where ANY cheese exposure = DEATH. (TMI???)

LIFE. KEEPS. ON. HAPPENING.

Don’t get me wrong. Every month is an adventure. Every year is improvement. I’m grateful for being able to do what I want with my life without worrying where my next dollar will come from. But godamnit.

I feel like the overwhelm has made me shut down. I need longer breaks and the time I traveled solo for a month was not long enough. I’ve gotten to a stage where I’m constantly consuming media/audiobooks and I’m addicted to just consuming and consuming. Granted I’ve been back to the states for a little more than 1 week but I should have hit the ground running like “RELEASE THE KRACKEN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”.

But.

Why do I feel like I’m in this no man’s land? Stuck? Stuck physically, but definitely moving mentally? Do I need a life coach?

Things I’ve learned about business which blew my mind because I’ve traveled:

You can have a multi-million dollar company with just 1 employee. MANY MANY people have done this and it is not uncommon.
Intense focus gets shit done. But people who are more ADD-like should focus intensely for a few months each on random different projects and sometimes it works out anyway.
Kickstarter is really a cool platform. Met some people who are super successful at kickstarter campaigns.
Net profit is more important than gross sales. By far.
No job is beneath you if you want to be successful.
Shit is hard. “If it’s easy, everyone would be doing it!” – wise person told me.

This is from speaking/talking to successful people and spending days with them. Also, I’ve found out what my priorities are and I should be shifting that this year and next if I want to “grow” things.

These are my specific goals for the near future:

Don’t go camping/climbing every single weekend of the year. Moderate this. (I know, BOOOO!!!!)
Think more, do less non-thinking work.
Even if shit gets hacked, keep on producing/who cares if things are corrupted. Fix it later. Putting shit out there is better than nothing at all.
Create a course on Udemy (even if it is a crappy one) just to test it out. Why? Because I do a million How-To videos and instructions for my own organizations and so WHY THE HELL NOT?
Run through at least 20-40 facebook ad campaigns for auto parts AND knives. Yes. I’m going to be providing knives now.
Follow the Profit First theory.
Post/blog at least once a week. Even if I don’t have any pictures to show.

Below is a picture of me enjoying the rock in Taiwan at this beautiful location called “Long Dong” which translates to Long Dick.

Just kidding! “Dragon Cave”.

Climbing at Long Dong. Or as the locals call it.. “LD”.

I will be updating a post a week if not two posts a week even if I’m too lazy to compile any pictures for you. I’ll be posting numbers but right now it’s past midnight and I don’t want my enemy Jet Lag to win.

KEEP ON, KEEPIN’ ON.

P.S. Let me know what you guys think about the layout of this blog. It’s pink, which is my favorite color because Pink to me represents ABUNDANT HAPPINESS and I celebrate it. But if it is too distracting, let me know.

-Kim Dang

Auto Dismantling, Entrepreneur, Life, Life Rants, Startup, Uncategorized, What I Know About

automobile dismantling, Entrepreneur, Life, work hard play hard

February Progress Update

February 27, 2015

February Progress Update

Howdy folks! So I have to kick myself for saying I’ll update every Wednesdays. THIS time I mean it, I’m going to keep it up.

I just want to pop in and give you guys a quick update on the two projects I have going on thus far + life stuff [do you even care?]. So seriously, if you don’t care.. you can skip this whole post. =) No hard feelings.

Automobile Dismantling company – sales are steadily climbing. It’s not where I really want to be since I just cruised it for the first half of the month (I focused on dismantling the 7 engines we already have versus buying another car).

So far for February 2015.

Separate credit card sales.

This is what happens when you cruise.. you think you will push sales to $15-$20K and you might be lucky if it breaks $13K this month. There are still FOUR days left!

So in the spirit of NOT cruising/coasting along.. I went and bought another car because it’s ABOUT TIME to keep on gettin’ it:

My 22nd car is a 2003 Range Rover. Vroom vroom.

I’m also working on a software company. Software company sales comparison of all of last year to the almost three months in of this year:

Last Year’s Sales when we launched in August 2014. Total sales for last year.

This is this year’s sales. My projection is.. at this rate… our sales will be maybe $4-$5K IF there is no progress whatsoever. But I am going to try and create a community with the software company. Wish me luck. & Provide input if you can!

Total sales from January 2015 to now (February 26 2015)

Still made time for rock climbing:

Climbed at Fairview Mountain in Apple Valley with old friends and new friends!

Still pushing myself to lead ’em routes!

Still made time for Valentine fun in Vegas.

Climbed at Red Rocks

Saw the O Show at the Bellagio. Awesome show. $197 buckeroos/ticket. It wasn’t cheap, folks.

Oh! And I’m starting to eat healthy again. SMOOTHIES EVERY MORNING with a touch of virgin coconut oil. Yum.

Where I’m going next:

This meetup event. It is for High Desert Entrepreneurs. This is where I’ll be on Saturday 2/28/15.

http://www.meetup.com/High-Desert-Entrepreneurs/

In MARCH 14th, 2015 I will be teaching a group of writers how to set up their wordpress websites. I’ll begin filming the tutorial videos for that class this upcoming week. I’ll update this post to have the link for that event soon. << I AM DAMN EXCITED ABOUT THIS EVENT BECAUSE IT IS ONE STEP CLOSER TO WHAT I REALLY WANT TO DO … HELP PEOPLE DO SOMETHING WITH WEBSITES! (AND EVENTUALLY EARN THEM $$.. OR SOMETHING ELSE… RECOGNITION? SELF LOVE? ENLIGHTENMENT?)

Giving inspiration is going to feel great. It’s one step closer to feeling less selfish about this life.

What I should be doing next:

1) Creating a good email response system of the 700+ emails for the automobile dismantling company & the 70+ subscribers for the software company (including a 3 part launch).

2) Focus focus focus.

I’m so not focused. I get easily distracted and I’m easily influenced by my environment. It’s a trait I’m not proud to have but I am what I am and it is what it is. OH WELL! The main thing is I don’t quit. Most importantly I’m not quitting on not being so distracted so in the end I’m constantly trying to re-focus myself and it works (sometimes).

I really don’t know how people who have a billion things going on .. do it all. They say the average millionaire has seven streams of income. I have… less than four. Hence, the non-millionaire status. They must have a personal assistant at their beck and call because frankly… trying to run 2 businesses + have other nagging businesses snipping at my feet because I’ve started them & have yet to do anything with them, maintaining a healthy lifestyle, maintaining a relationship, blah blah blah.. whine whine whine… HOW DO YOU DO IT?

It’s amazing everything hasn’t gone to shit.

This has been an extremely selfish post. The next post you’ll get is a video series (maybe part 1) of how to go from NOTHING to a wordpress website.

Until next time.

Toodles.

Ecommerce, Entrepreneur, Life, Personal Lessons About, Thoughts, Uncategorized, What I Know About

adventure, automobile dismantling, Entrepreneur, nonstop, work hard

Goals for 2015 – Number 1: To remove myself completely.

January 28, 2015

Goals for 2015 – Number 1: To remove myself completely.

You got me sippin’ on something
I can’t compare to nothing
I’ve ever known, I’m hoping
That after this fever I’ll survive
I know I’m acting a bit crazy
Strung out, a little bit hazy
Hand over heart, I’m praying
That I’m gonna make it out alive.

I love the melody of that song. Not so much the melancholic meaning of it all.

A lot has happened since about a month ago. I haven’t posted anything for January and before the month is over I told myself I’d get something up at least.

I feel like I am eliminating most distractions out of my life and just mainly focusing on two things at the moment. That is namely rebranding my old site to AUTOPARTS LAB. I started the social media accounts for AUTO PARTS LAB and I’m positioning myself to switch my entire eBay store over to the new name. I was wondering why for the longest time I’ve been putting off marketing my old site in any manner and that’s because I’m a stickler with names.

AUTO PARTS LAB will be hip and funny and interesting once it is launched. I already had my developers set up the site, a few virtual assistants are working on the social media accounts, and things are moving along. For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about it’s a company I started a little over a year and a half ago. It went from garnering less than 1K in sales a month to now 10-11K steadily at minimal commitment. This is with no social marketing.

I’m going at this full force so I’m hoping to push sales to 20K/month within the next four months [this might be a bit of a reach]. My competitors might be laughing at me on how slow I’m growing this company… but I go at my own random pace.

Super Fast Listings was a company I co-founded with Ron and we recently garnered another subscriber to that business. Making a total of 8 paying subscribers if no one cancels. It is a software/excel sheet available for download.

We launched I believe July of 2014. This was 2014 sales.I am also by default still improving my rock climbing abilities and taking it 1 week at a time.

I’m going to tackle trying to make money online and so far I have two areas that are semi-working for me. Am I making real money? No, I’m not. Every cent I earn goes back into the companies. So that’s why this is not enough until at least another 6-8 months of effort channeled into pulling away from the business.

I recently spoke to the CEO of a competitor and after 5 years of work he is starting over from scratch again – he can afford his expensive toys of course (by now) but he fired everyone and had to start from scratch – still chugging away at the daily grind.

I don’t want to be in that same position. Many have reached freedom one way or the other. Many do not want freedom because they are happy with what they have. Many chose a limited freedom. I want to walk towards a type of freedom that is generous on my wallet and easy on the soul. In documenting my efforts maybe it’ll help someone realize their own desires to be free as well. Chris Ducker’s work is going to help.

I wish I quit school while in college and started companies a long time ago. The reason I did not is because of my parents’ completely traditional almost crippling attitude of choosing the safe route – “BE A DOCTOR! BE A PHARMACIST!” or just chalk yourself up to being a complete failure. The other reason is I was a too afraid to go out on my own and just do it.

I am comfortable not becoming a doctor or pharmacist because while I was studying for those classes and taking those tests … none of it made me happy. I imagined my future and just dreaded all of it. This made me change my mind a dozen times throughout college and take classes that were a waste of my time. It was not my calling but I kept going at it hoping that someday a light bulb will go off in my head and a warm glow starts resonating in my heart for being what my parents wanted me to be.

Well SCREW all of that.

I have my own private online journals as well as my physical journals which I use to document my failures or successes (or emotional outbursts/breakdowns). The reason why this is public and I’m not afraid to put myself out there is because ALTHOUGH I am not yet truly successful, I have talked to many friends who have tried again and again to make some type of living outside of their 9 to 5 job without a pint of success.

Can I help you now? To a very small capacity in that maybe I can show my direct friends what is possible. In 6-8 months I’m hoping to be able to actually help because by then I’ll have everything set up more correctly [assuming best case scenario].

Goals for 2015:

1) Put in all the steps enough to truly remove myself from my main business.

2) Help others get started (If they want to).

3) Start a podcast

4) Write an ebook.

It is quite boring and almost depressing to merely survive as I go about building this business and other businesses. It was so depressing at some points that I even hired a therapist to help me with my personal as well as professional life. I even went and hired a personal trainer to help me cope with how my body was taking everything (different city, different weather, forever-alone feeling). I want to feel grateful and surrounded even in the solitude of a job where I am 99% on my own. Maybe one way to get there is to help others realize… yes.. you can do this too. Yes, my motive is very selfish. I am tired of feeling alone. I always tell others, “It’s not rocket science! You can do it too. Easy,” but I don’t provide any tools for them to start and realistically I just don’t have to energy to devote in order to truly bring them massive success.

I’ll only share what works for me. There is plenty of free information about creating money somehow online, many of them might be scams or gimmicks and none of those will apply.

THE POINT IS (If you think everything was TL;DR):

1) I don’t know how to make MASSIVE amounts online because I have implemented only 10% of what I know so far and I’ve yet to execute on the 90% that is advised of me to do. But I’ve started and I’ve earned TINY small successes which are real. None of it was earned by tricking anyone or by being gimmicky.

2) I want to stop feeling alone. So I’m going to share pretty much everything to see if it helps anyone and EVENTUALLY when I am more on my feet – I will be able to genuinely help without feeling guilty of the half-assed nature of it all. And by helping maybe I’ll feel a lot less alone.

3) To never. stop. moving. To continuously strive to be more healthy physically, mentally and spiritually (I bought this device to help me meditate).

I will choose to stick to an update schedule.

I will update EVERY week on WEDNESDAYS.

I guess that’s all. If you like to join this journey with me and have posts delivered to your email… sign up below:

Auto Dismantling, Ecommerce, Entrepreneur, Productivity, Projects, Uncategorized, What I Know About

just do it, not caring to fail, projects, who cares

The Momentum

December 24, 2014

The Momentum

The momentum matters. And not caring to fail matters. At least that’s what I’ve learned. Crawling out of my auto dismantling hole for a bit to check on other things I’ve started months ago I noticed.. oh sh*t! There is genuine TRAFFIC to the other sites! Time to improve on them some more…

I chip away at each thing whenever I can for however long I can. Sometimes there is no chipping away at all. But it’s better to throw it out there then to have it be absolutely nothing…residing in my head.

What failed for me:

I hired a bunch of people to post on social media accounts – this is a MISTAKE. Hiring random people to post for you really hurts your reputation and decrease the number of users to subscribe. Our subscription numbers went down dramatically because … well, people are smart. They can tell if something feels scammy. Our product is not a scam at ALL but seeing grammatically incorrect posts coming from India did not help our reputation. DO NOT DO IT!

Sourcing out EVERYTHING was a bad idea. Sometimes you just have to do the work yourself because at the level of a founder you see 1000 details that needs to be attended to and at the next level of a hired out manager, they only see 100 details at most. Kind’ve like how James Altucher were his first 200 users for one of his websites. A website that later grew to thousands of users. Do not be afraid to be your first 200… something (users, reviews, posts, etc.)

Not focusing on ONE thing DOES NOT WORK! (Like the double negative?) I focused on too many different projects and end up abandoning all for 1. Once I believe I provided adequate care for 1 I can poke my head up to look around to see if the rest are still standing.

What I’m going to try:

Actually try more tactics/techniques – put in the time for these techniques now, they will pay off later!

Publish an eBook, any eBook about stuff I want to talk about. Who cares if no one buys it. I’m going to do it.

If I have an idea – I’m still going to set something up. I’m still going to erect something and put an effort into growing it whenever I can. HOWEVER … this time… I’m going to do background research on how to approach it the right way & I’m going to focus on the details a bit more before implementing techniques. Everything will still launch, no matter how messy. Techniques will be tried with a more careful eye.

Traffic numbers for the random websites started because failing doesn’t matter:

Went down from $2K. OH WELLS!

Went up from $0. Yay!

3) Coming up next –

(dot) com. Yup.

WELPS. That’s all folks. A very short post but at least I made one. The message here is: JUST DO IT.

Happy Holidays!

Auto Dismantling, Entrepreneur, Life, Productivity, Thoughts, Uncategorized

afraid, automobiledismantling, dreamweaver, fear, Life, microsoft web expressions 4.0, procrastination

Things I’m Afraid Of Are The Things I Should Do

December 16, 2014

Things I’m Afraid Of Are The Things I Should Do

I have a checklist of 10 things that will make my business better and out of the entire checklist I’ve only started on 1 or 2. This checklist remained unchanged for the better part of a year. Why? Why do I not go about doing the things that will directly positively affect my business? Reed told me I run around creating infrastructures on how to get things done (video training, training material, setting up a program management system, etc) versus sitting down and actually getting it done.

There must be something there I’m afraid of. And when I looked at it more closely, it’s true. There are definite fears.

The owner of an auto auction proposed to buy into my company in order to propel it to the next level. I am considering it and I told him I’d send over the numbers. I haven’t done it yet because I’m afraid of losing my freedom with the business.

I have over a thousand emails from customers yet I have procrastinated building a good mailing list. What am I afraid of? I’m afraid of my customers thinking that I’m spamming them. I know mailchimp, yet I’m hesitating to jump in and do it.

I’m afraid of training anyone to take over completely because they might just quit. I need to get over this fear.

I wasn’t afraid of moving to city by myself and to rent out a warehouse but I’m afraid of being alone meanwhile providing an environment of isolation.

I’m afraid of creating a facebook page because out of the hundreds of customers served, one might be dissatisfied and try to ruin the reputation of the company. WHAT. Why am I not doing these things due to these fears.

I’m inspired by James Altucher. He really emphasizes just doing it. No matter how small or messy. Just do it. Nike could’ve also subliminally affected my thoughts on this “just do it” mantra.

Logo

So I’m going to just do it. I’ve re-written my list of things I should do to make my business better and I’m going to do them:

1) Add emails to mailing list & send out a first email. Use mailchimp.

2) Create an after-delivery automatic email to ask about the progress of a person’s order.

3) Send the business proposal, however draft-like it is.

4) Create a better shipworks template for both emails AND shipping labels. Using Microsoft Web Expressions 4.0 which is a FREE alternative to Dreamweaver. Great program.

5) Train assistant to do the pictures.

6) Reach out to other Dismantlers and ask them out for coffee. Stop isolating yourself, Kim. (I noticed I am subscribed to California Dismantling… so I’m going to start reaching out today.)

7) Get M2E running with Magento.

8) Transform Dropbox into a shared space instead of for personal reasons.

9) Switch over to the new listing template. Enlist Ron’s help.

I stopped at 9 because I don’t want to overwhelm myself.

YOU SHOOT ME DOWN, BUT I WON’T FALL. I AM TITANIUM.

That’s the song playing in the shop right now. It is fitting.

What are you afraid of? Is it just a small fear that stops you from MASSIVE success?

Auto Dismantling, Challenges ACCEPTED, Entrepreneur, Life, Startup, Uncategorized

9-to-5, entrepreneurship, jumping in, leading the life you want, quitting, Startup, why quit, work

How To Get Over Your Fear Of Quitting Your Job

November 13, 2014

There was less fear than there was pure unadulterated outrage at my disposition with a 9 to 5. This might not just be me, but before I quit I was on a nonstop binge of podcasts or blog posts by Pat Flynn, Tim Ferris, Ramit Sheti, etc. It was to hype myself up and it took a whole year to hype myself before D day. It also took over a year because I needed to save up money before I quit (I am not THAT reckless).

Entrepreneur, Life, Life Rants, Personal Lessons About, Productivity, Thoughts, Uncategorized, What I Know About

ebook, goals, howtoniche.com, laziness, life lessons, mailing lists, manicure, pedicure, SEO, websites

How To Still Learn

October 31, 2014 /

How To Still Learn

1) By not quitting.

THE END!

So today I want to discuss several things. All the things I wrote about earlier… I moved forward in that direction but ended up not doing much of it. Probably 20% was done.

I tried not buying any cars for this month (October) and decided to “coast”… however.. sales dropped from 11K to 7.5K.

That’s what I get when I try to “coast” an automobile dismantling company.

With less to do – I sometimes just spend the whole day reading blogs.

This is not productive.

The lesson learned here is always try new things and you will figure out what works and what doesn’t.

What I discovered in my laziness is that spending MORE money by buying cars will create waaaaaay more sales than the savings I get by not purchasing more cars for that particular month. Sure, I save… $1K by not buying another car. I just lose $3K in return. If I did spend that $1K-$2K buying/dismantling that car… I would receive back 4-5K more that month.

THIS IS LIFE. A constant, continual, learning experience.

Reed told me posting pictures of my feet might be disgusting. Who cares, I’m posting it below:

Keepin’ it real with the cotton balls. Look! Halloween themed, yay!

I went to get a pedicure for the first time in my ENTIRE LIFE with my gal pal Val. It felt good, but for some reason I didn’t feel the necessity of it. I didn’t get this overwhelming itch some females have for this ritual of having to be served by hand and feet from another human being and then painted on for several hours as they gossip about you in a foreign language behind your back.

Maybe I am too manly. The urge for massages, for manicures, pedicures, etc… does not enter my mind. Maybe it comes as a more evolved form of “taking care of yourself” and I’m not there yet. Who knows. All I know is.. it cost me $37 for 10 rounded tips to be painted another color from the natural color of nude/cracked calloused. Cracked Calloused is a new color, by the way.

So.. couple of things I’ve started doing this month:

I started a podcast. So far it has two episodes.

I am teaming up with an SEO expert to write an eBook which I hope I will publish within this MILLENNIAL. I tried writing an eBook of my own and it has been 4 years. It is unpublished, gathering pixelated dust. And I will publish THIS ebook with errors, flaws and all. Why? Because it’s better than an unpublished NOTHING while I seek aimlessly for a perfection that will never come.

I sic’ed my team of developer/designer duo on automating superfastlistings.com so that once you sign up, you will automatically get an email detailing you on what to do and what information to input. After information is inputed then stage 2 is commenced. Before that I used to personally send out every welcome email (a copy and paste procedure) that was not necessary but since I was too busy to delegate this task out – it was never done. TILL NOW. They have yet to finish. I hope to have it wrapped up by the end of this week.

I am going to revamp my mailing list once and for all.

I started meal prepping for the week and I am getting better at it. Meal prepping is great!

Below are more pictures from my night out with my gal pal Val. I ordered all the sushi. Valerie is a vegetarian. I think I had 7 plates to her 1.

LESSONS BE DAMNED:

1) I best be buyin’ them cars or else I will be losin’ ’em sales!

2) I do not work well ALONE. In whatever capacity. I need people because with people I actually push myself harder.

3) Posts/Podcasts/Listings/Company stuff/Managing developers/Ebook writing/etc. = all are lumped into a massive workload. When sometimes I prefer just sitting by myself watching to stand up comedy and reading blogs at my leisure the entire day. The only way to do stuff is to do it and get’er done. (I don’t know why I chose this particular vernacular right now with all the shortened words…. but it’s fun to me at the moment. Please don’t rain on my PARADE!).

4) For my birthday (I just turned 28 years young) I chose to scale a 770 foot wall of rock. And it was massively fun. I recently spoke to a friend, just catching up on life (because that’s what friends do sometimes when it’s around your birthday and they glance your way since they received some facebook notification)… this was how the convo went:

Friend: “How’s life Kim?”

Me: “Good.”

Friend: “I’ve been so busy. I work 3 jobs and 16 hour work days.”

Me: “So far I am trying to run 2 businesses but I work around 20 hours of real work a week. I sometimes spend all day reading blogs.”

Friend: “I barely have time to date but when I do I can’t devote any time to these women who want my attention.”

Me:”I just recently climbed a 700 foot wall in Nevada & I now have some time to make room for more of a relationship.”

Friend:”Wow, our lives are so opposite.”

I want to say yes to more life experiences at the same time I want to continue building businesses. I want to work really hard but I want to spend all day lying on a couch in my warehouse. Some friends have figured it out and I am envious because sometimes I find myself questioning life way too much.

I am not afraid to want random opposite things and trying out a bunch of different stuff. I’m not afraid to posting pictures of my feet on the internet. I’m not afraid to fail. And that is how I still learn.

Enjoy the pictures below.

Our only picture together – and it’s blurry.

SAKEEEEE

All my dishes were served before Val got her VEGETARIAN roll (which is barely called food.)

Ecommerce, Entrepreneur, Startup, Technology, Uncategorized, What I Know About

amazon, camstudio, elance, fivrr, freelancer.com, jing, mechanical turks, odesk, redbooth, talentlms, teamviewer

How To Outsource Using Odesk or Elance

June 17, 2014

How To Outsource Using Odesk or Elance

First of all.. everyone and their outsourced MOMS communicate through Skype.

So download Skype and set up an account.

THEN….

1) Create a job on Odesk or Elance… you don’t need to fuss so much over who to choose. They’ve since merged… so you are just dealing with the same company anyway.

2) Make sure you’ve set up some training videos for your workers. You can download Camstudio or Jing for free. Jing lets you upload 5 minute videos for free.

3) Connect these videos directly to Youtube or go a step further and make training tests/exercises on talentlms.com.

4) Test them out with a few scenarios first and then .. hire!

5) Create a separate email account for them through your hosting company, maybe bluehost.com. Remotely go into their computer using teamviewer.com in order to set up whatever software you feel they might need. Create their own mailing signature. Create separate permissions restricted accounts for them across the board that links to their company email account you create.

5) Manage them with Redbooth.com while they manage your clients with insightly.com & mailchimp.com.

Virtual assistants or any type of assistant online is a great way to alleviate your workload. They are incredibly valuable people and it’s amazing companies such as Odesk, Elance, Fivrr, Freelancer.com, and Mechanical Turks from Amazon are able to bring it all together for us.

There are probably better softwares to use online and a better way to go about this but this is what I use and how I go about it on a bootstrapping level. I hope it helps!

Simple, eh?

Yep.

Anywho – what have I been doing? I have been rock climbing.. a whole bunch. I am doing more leading and bouldering as well. I launched a separate company called http://superfastlistings.com with my co-founder Ron. A franchise is in the works and…. life so far is busy/exhausting/good.

Hanger18

Auto Dismantling, Ecommerce, Entrepreneur, Life, Startup, Uncategorized

chris francy, Entrepreneur, investor, las vegas, YOLO

A Conversation With An Investor

May 13, 2014

A Conversation With An Investor

During the weekend I had the honor to go along rock climbing with Chris Francy (Owner of Edge Fitness and a registered investor). He actually pushed me to do my first lead at Red Rocks Canyon.

Below is a list of what investors are NOT looking for when it comes to pitching an idea:

1) Asking for too much money for broadly described purposes.

2) Asking for a salary.

What investors are more open to:

1) Asking for about enough or even less than what you really need. This perks their ears up.

2) If you get the attention of even one investor, you might get more from the same group. If you don’t have anyone on your side to begin with, you are basically out of luck.

This may be common sense to some but investors are still pitched ideas where these points are vastly ignored and it is unfortunate that the presenters will miss out on their chances of getting funded.

Life? Life is hectic because I purchased 3 cars within the span of 1 week (for the business). 2 of which were not intended to be purchased in such a short time frame. I am in the middle of training another worker. Life is also enjoyable because it is filled with doing whatever I want whenever I want. I am lucky to have my health, my family, and a boyfriend who understands me.

Climbing in Red Rocks Canyon, Nevada.

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