Kevin King is affectionately known as the ‘King of Amazon’, he is a serial entrepreneur and considered to be one of the most successful in the Amazon space. On this episode, we go all the way back to Kevin’s childhood businesses, a few wild (literally) stories from his time working with models, a run in with Michael Jordan and a dispute with the mob.
Date: October 3, 2020
Episode: 19
Title: Norman Farrar Introduces Kevin King, an Amazon Expert, and a Highly-sought after Speaker at Amazon Conferences Worldwide
Subtitle: “Life is not about how much money you make but about the experiences you have and the people you meet”
Final Show Link: https://iknowthisguy.com/episodes/19-kevin-king/
In this episode of I Know this Gal…, Norman Farrar introduces Kevin King, an Amazon Expert, and a highly-sought after speaker at Amazon Conferences Worldwide.
Kevin King is the King of Amazon. He is a serial entrepreneur and considered to be one of the most successful in the Amazon space. He invested in his travel and has been to 90 different countries.
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Hayden 0:00
Hey there guys and gals, this is your humble producer behind the scenes here at I Know This Guy. Just a quick reminder to please hit that subscribe button on whatever platform you’re using. Whether that’s Apple or Spotify, Stitcher, Himalaya, The Alps, Sierra 3000. I don’t know there’s a new one every day. Anyways, doing so we’ll keep you up to date with each new episode of I Know This Guy. Thanks so much and now back to the show.
Kevin 0:38
To me, life is about the experiences you have and the people you meet. Those can never be taken away from you. I mean, our time sitting there we talked at the beginning of this thing about smoking cigars, different things, whether there’s 15 of us out there and the other picture, that’s something that’s gonna stay with me and you until the day we die.
Norman 1:04
Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of I Know This Guy, the podcast where we dive deep into the lives of some of the most interesting people I noticed. Before we get started, please like and subscribe to I Know This Guy wherever you get your podcasts. By the way, like kids want me to say something about ringing a bell? What the hell’s a bell?
Hayden 1:40
So dad, who do we have on the podcast today?
Norman 1:43
We have a buddy of mine that’s coming on. We met at a conference a couple years ago and we’ve become great cigar buddies. Every time we meet, we go out for a stogie.
Hayden 1:55
That’s cute.
Norman 1:56
Yeah, well, happiness bugs. His name is Kevin King. He is a serial entrepreneur. He’s involved in Amazon. Some people may call him the King of Amazon. But wait till you hear his backstory. There’s a Tiger incident and you won’t believe it. We could talk a bit about Michael Jordan. His travels around the world and we’re talking a little bit about the mob.
Hayden 2:21
Wacky, a little wacky, not that type of wack. No, no. All right, well, uh, let’s dive right in. Can’t wait to get started.
Norman 2:29
We shall do that. Alright, I can’t wait to get started. Kevin, welcome to the podcast.
Kevin 2:36
Hey, Norm is great to be here, man. Thanks for inviting me on. Appreciate it.
Norman 2:41
Well, you know what, I really wish that I could be there because you’re my cigar, buddy.
Kevin 2:46
That’s right, man. I mean, what this Coronavirus has messed us all up, hadn’t it?
Norman 2:50
Well, this is why this guy is here. Yeah, his name’s even Kevin. Yeah. Yes. Yes.
Kevin 2:58
What? I hope that was he named in honor of me or was this Kevin?
Norman 3:03
No, no, no in honor of you that when I go out and have my cigar, he comes out and I talk to him, just about all sorts of crap. You’re the only person that listens.
Kevin 3:15
So you’re saying I’m like a dog. I’m like a loyal dog.
Norman 3:19
Well, I’m saying that you’re the only guy that ever listens to me.
Kevin 3:22
Like a loyal dog.
Norman 3:24
There you go.
Unknown Speaker 3:26
No, that’s cool. Yeah, normally.
Kevin 3:28
For those of you that are listening, Norm and I, we every time we’re at an event together. It’s quite a few events like this. The tradition started in Hawaii, I think actually at an event that you were doing your AMC and beyond or something and we went out on a beach and smoked some cigars and then every time since then, it’s been like who’s bringing the cigars it’s like, I got them. I got them, who’s going to the room to get theirs? If we both have them. It’s always a tradition to smoke. At least one sometimes two or three or a few more cigars and always has to be accompanied with a Coke Zero because the company with a Coke Zero because sometimes the guards can get you a little thirsty or dehydrated so that’s usually tradition and then we tell stories and shoot the bowl and and it’s good times man I miss those times.
Norman 4:18
Yeah and what’s funny it catches on because people come out and they see us having a cigar like you had a billion dollar seller summit. Do you remember the picture that we took, I think there was about 10, 15 people smoking cigars and most of them never smoked before?
Kevin 4:36
No, a lot of women that you hadn’t smoked before a lot of people were on a balcony at the hotel. Yeah, there’s like 15 of us out there. I remember it is like some other people were like, hey, I want to try it. I had a bunch of cigars like okay, these people have never smoked before. I’m not gonna give them the good ones over here. The gnomeo Juliet’s for the good ones. The 10 $15 cigars like I’m digging in there, like where’s the ones that are kind of dried up? They’re like $1 There you go. You can try. I’m joking. It wasn’t that bad, but
Kevin 5:02
because, sometimes someone smokes one and they’re like, this is not for me or they smoke a little bit and they put it down like, Ah, you just wasted a $15 cigar.
Norman 5:10
I know I’ve gone to parties, they’re handing out cigars and you see three quarters of them left because people can’t smoke them. Right and their high end cigars, and oh my gosh, so I do that trick, I hate to say it, but I’ll take the light label off and I’ll have certain cigars that hey, if you don’t enjoy a cigar, well, you get these if you do enjoy a cigar you get these. Yep.
Kevin 5:34
I think I always beat you. I think I’m always the guy. You’re putting yours out when there’s a little stuff. I’m putting mine out when it’s burning my fingers. I’m always like trying to get that last little puff off of there.
Norman 5:46
I don’t know how you do it.
Kevin 5:50
That’s always, always good. Always good times, usually, four in the morning. Like I know, we gotta get up. I got to do a lecture at 8am or something and we all do it.
Norman 6:00
But I really do miss those times. So, we’re the podcast that is happening during this coronavirus epidemic and anyways, yeah it is. It’s too bad because I do miss going to the events and I do miss hanging out with you.
Kevin 6:16
It’ll be back though it’ll be back. Maybe you’ll have to sit six feet away but it’ll be back.
Norman 6:22
Oh yeah. Or I’ll have one of those extenders, and your cigar. So hey, I got you on this podcast because it’s all about interesting people. And people I’ve had,
Kevin 6:36
You need to bring somebody in that’s interesting.
Norman 6:39
Yeah, sure. There we go.
Kevin 6:41
Hey, Johnny, come on.
Kevin 6:45
You said interesting people. What the hell he got me on here for?
Norman 6:50
Oh my god. Wait till you hear about Kevin in the stories. This is incredible. He’s been how many countries? 90 countries. I don’t know how many businesses you’re involved in with right now. But that’s crazy. So we’ll get into that. But first, I really like to get into the backstory and find out what makes Kevin, Kevin.
Kevin 7:14
What makes me me? Yeah.
Norman 7:17
What was it like growing up? Where did you grow up? I don’t know.
KevinUnknown Speaker 7:20
I grew up, I was born in Virginia. But I grew up in Texas. I grew up in a suburb north of Dallas, by the DFW Airport, a little town called Flower Mound. What used to be a little town now it’s pretty big town. But that’s where I grew up. Most of my life, I mean, a few little small towns in Texas before that. But pretty much from the third grade on I grew up in North Dallas. Now I live in Austin, since I graduated college.
Norman 7:45
So you’re Texan. I didn’t know that.
Kevin 7:47
Yeah, I’m pretty much pure. I wasn’t born here, but I’m pretty much most of my life. All but a couple years. I was born in the Navy hospital during the Vietnam War. My dad always likes to say I was a cheap baby. $7 it’s all it costs for me. I almost died when I was three weeks old, had a blockage in my stomach. There’s a medical term for it I can’t remember right now but it was a muscle or where your esophagus goes down right above the stomach. There’s a piece of muscle that can grow over the top of it’s like a valve and so everything I would eat will get thrown back up. This muscle would kick it back up so they had to go in and do surgery on me and so I got a little scar down there and they had to cut this out. It’s fairly common I guess in firstborn boys. So I had that and my dad always likes to joke that they fixed me. I’m good. I went from not being able to eat to now I can eat a lot.
Norman 8:38
Maybe I had that surgery too.
Kevin 8:42
So yeah, that’s where I grew up. As a young guy I was an entrepreneur and I think I sold my first something at three years old. I’d have my mom take me to the back then there wasn’t Walmart but the little dollar stores and buy some bubblegum. I buy these little pieces of bubblegum for like a penny bring them back, set up a store in the garage and open up the garage, that garage door where the cars are and my little table and put some on this bubble gum on the table and local kids would come by and buy it from me for two or three cents and I would take an old oatmeal bottles or cans that oatmeal came in and they were like top of it you can make a drum out of it. So if you flipped it over the bottom was like this cardboard kind of thing and if you took some sticks you could beat it and make a drum I’d sell those as drums do all kinds of stuff. When I was in grade school, I got bit when I started getting into music. I remember Queens’ Another One Bites the Dust was the very first song, you always remember your first girl or if you’re a girl you remember your first guy. I remember my first song I most people remember that. What got you into music, the very first thing is Another One Bites the Dust by Queen and started following the Billboard Top 100 at really big into that I listened to the radio show every Saturday and write down the stuff what the top 100 was and then I go to the have my mom drive me to the record store and I’d buy 10 albums, whatever, take it to make a little newsletter, take it to school and say, Hey, anybody want to this week’s top 10 I may want to buy Boston more than a feeling or whatever, whatever it was and they say, Yeah, I place an order for that. So I’d mark it up like a buck or two and then I’d have my mom every Thursday, we drive to the record store, which is like 20 minutes away, because the town is a little small back then and I buy whatever the orders were, and then bring them back on Friday and deliver them or anything I could do to make money. I was making so much money. When I turned 12, 13 my parents said you’re making two $300 a week. Just doing odd things. I paid the numbers on street curbs. I remember one time I was probably 13 years old with the boy scout camp. I was looking for the boy scout camp because it’s like a week long camp. I was like, what, there’s a new neighborhood that’s right through the woods on the other side of this boy scout Boy Scout camp. That’s a prime neighborhood, a prime target to go and paint numbers on their curb so here in the States I don’t know if they do this in Canada but in subdivisions you have the curb outside the house with a driveway goes up and a lot of people will paint their address on the curb so you have to address up on this on this house by the mailbox or by the front door but just to make it easier for delivery people, they like to put it on the curb and paint and so I went to the store and got these stencils kits like a number zero through nine and I would you just put the stencil down little spray paint spray, spray 1307 onto the onto the curb on the street. I charge like four bucks and so I have my bucket of paint and my stencil set and I go door to door knocking on doors, Hey, would you like me to paint in your address on your curb one side is four bucks both sides of six bucks or something like that. I get a pretty good hit rate, but a fresh neighborhood was a newly built house where no one’s done this before and no one has it on the curbs. I’m like this is like virgin territory. I can like clean house here. So at this boy scout camp, there is a fresh neighborhood, through the woods on the other side, I figured this out. This is the days before Google Maps or anything, I don’t know how I figured it out back then maybe in the newspaper. So I snuck my paint set in my stencils to Boy Scout camp and I snuck off one day in the middle of the day and went to this neighborhood like on a Saturday made like a killing just worked like eight hours I was gone from the boy scout camp they were looking for me they’re freaking out like we’re Kevin go? The adults are like, Oh my god, did you get abducted? Do we lose a kid? What are we gonna tell his parents, and then I show and they’re looking for me everywhere. I couldn’t find me and I came back to this little woods, tried to sneak back and there they all are waiting for me. So I got into a lot of trouble from that. I’ve only worked two jobs in my life for somebody else. I worked at McDonald’s, it was my first job andI I actually would create my own products at McDonald’s, we’re not supposed to do that. But I would be started out in the back working, flipping burgers, flipping stuff and we would have all kinds of code names back there. If a pretty girl from high school came into it, we’d say, we’d be back there flipping the burgers they meet, check on two, I mean, it’s a hot girl and register to whatever. So then I moved my way up to the front and I would create my own product mixes, I create my own bundles. I’m like, Hey, we should be selling, we have ice cream, and we have apple pie, but what about selling them together? So I would create my own bundle, put a little sign on the front, ice cream, an apple pie, imagine like, you can’t do that. You can’t do that. So what’s on the menu, I was supposed to only be working part time. My father was because I was in high school, 16 years old. He’s like you can have a part time job but you can’t have a full time job or anything. You got to do your studies, but I would sneak off to work. So they would schedule me for 16 hours, that’s what I tell my dad, but I was really scheduled for like 30 and so I would tell my dad, hey, I’m going out with my buddies, going out with my friends. We’re gonna go hang out at Nick’s house or something like that. But I go to work, and you’ll work and my dad caught wind of this, I think and I was suspicious. So I remember one time I said there in McDonald’s working the drive thru. Welcome to McDonald’s, man. Take your order, please. I hear a voice on the other end and the drive thru. It sounds like my dad. Yeah, like some fries and a hamburger. Yeah, sounds like my dad. All right, no problem, sir. $3 whatever coming through, he comes through and comes through the drive thru. There’s my dad. I’m not supposed to be working and he didn’t say a thing. He’s just like, pays me the three bucks. Thank you very much and then drove off that day when I got home. I was in a lot of trouble and he made me quit. He’s like, you can’t. So I guess the point of that whole story is I’ve been a workaholic and I’m willing to put in the hours to do what I need to do. I just recently I was telling my wife, that here in the states that ESPN ran a documentary on Michael Jordan big popular documentary that ESPN did, like a 10 part documentary and talking about 1998, the season for the Chicago Bulls and they showed his whole history when he retired the first time in 1993. In 1993, at that time I was the DJ slash manager slash roadie for a group of strippers and so we actually had a dance group that we actually had in 1992, called the USA calendar girls and we recruit these girls on strip clubs here in Austin and we hired a choreographer like a Las Vegas choreographer, a really good choreographer that would choreograph shows and it would have a little bit of topless nudity in it, but that was it, and then we were able to book into clubs all over the US. So these clubs would book as a headlining act from Florida to Arizona, to California to New Jersey to wherever and so we would go in and for a week, we’d be the headlining act. Iit puts up on the marquee and newspaper ads have now appeared in the USA calendar girls, and we do two shows a night we come out, we did this whole choreographed routine. I was the DJ. I was the manager. I was like, I was taking pictures with customers afterwards with the girls. I was the driver of the bus and we had a big band that took all the back seats out of the match back there and we drove from East Coast to West Coast for gigs, but we were in the Philadelphia area, and in October of 2003, I guess 1993, sorry.
Kevin 16:12
The girls like, hey, let’s go to Atlantic City do a little gambling is our way like Nashville. Let’s go. So we went over on our day off to do that and I’m sitting there gambling plants and blackjack, and the girls are doing their thing and these two guys come up to me and they’re like, Hey, you are you with those girls? I’m like, yeah, which ones? Those over there like? Yeah, like Michael wants to meet them. I’m like Michael, who’s Michael? Michael, right over there in the background, Michael Jordan. I’m like, are you serious? He’s like, Yeah, he wants to meet. I’m like, Sure, why not? I’m not starstruck. I’m not one of these starstruck people. Celebrities don’t do much for me. But still, it’s kind of cool and so I go to the girls, Hey, Michaels over there. He wants to meet you like, Oh, yes, of course. Of course. So we go over. He’s like a watch. I’ll come up. He had the whole top suite. I think it was a Trump Plaza Hotel. He had the whole top floor to themselves, private elevator everything. So we ended up going up there and I basically was the cockwalker. So I went up and Michael’s on his groupies and we went up, nothing happened. Michael said a few words to me to make sure that I never said he just said a few words to me and then we sat in this really nice suite as Michael picked his one girl that he was talking to and the groupies had their girls and here’s me the bouncer dude. Basically, bodyguard whatever, just messing everybody’s night up, sitting there and we ended up leaving and the next day he retired the first time or two days later or something like that. So that was kind of surreal. But there’s tons of stories like that, that we don’t have time on this podcast, but I could tell you, tons of stories. Tigers, modeling model on photoshoots and Mafia wanna blow up airplanes. Just I mean, the stories.
Norman 18:07
We’re gonna go to those two. So you got to tell the story about the Tigers. Okay? Oh, and by the way, I’m just kind of curious. The people that we’re working with the Tigers that we’re going to hear about anything to do with Tiger King?
Kevin 18:24
No, no, not at all. Maybe? I don’t know. I don’t think so and I don’t think so. No back and this is also in the 90s this is right around the time Photoshop was becoming popular, I think it is Photoshop version 1.0 or 2.0. There’s a software tool called a plugin called mystic backgrounds or something like that. I probably have that name wrong. But it would create these kinds of cool backers like blue screen backgrounds. So you could take a model or situation and put them into another scene and you could create these like surreal worlds in a software tool. So, Mark the photographer that I mean, you know Mark, from billion stars and he’s a photographer by trade. He and I had this idea, let’s do this fantasy line of cards at that time that our business was trading cards, baseball cards, little, two and a half by three and a half inch pieces of cardboard and most people know baseball cards or football cards or something. But at that time, the hot thing was hot girls on cards. So as every strip club in the US had a set of these baseball cards, every playboy, penthouse, all those guys, the bikini companies like Venus and Hawaiian Tropic and they all had these little bits, it became a hot thing for like three years. So we got into that, like let’s do a whole series of these cards and there’s this artist in Dallas, named Leroy Roper that painted body paint so his whole specialty was like he would take people, strip them down naked, and paint them from head to toe to look like an animal or to look like a fairy or to look like a Tiger, to look like a whatever you wanted. So Mark had the idea that’s like, hey, let’s use the software tool. This body painter and let’s create this fantasy set of trading cards where we have pretty girls in this fantasy, Dungeons and Dragons type of fantasy world and like and it sounds cool. So this was our first one we had a girl that we flew in. We made her sign all the releases and this is dangerous, whatever you’re going to be. So she stripped down naked, spends four hours getting body painted with an airbrush from head to toe to look like a Tiger, a really good job as artists are really good and marks like I want to do this scene where she is standing with a sword, but painted like a Tiger and she’s got a real Tiger next to her, kinda like a Goddess type of thing. So we needed a real Tiger so he calls an agency in Dallas that provides Tigers for movies and commercials and stuff and yeah, sure we got a Tiger, we’ll bring up this Tiger. So they bring out the Tiger, they bring the Tiger to the studio, and the Tiger would not go in the door of the studio. It just refused to go through the door. So I’m over there watching and all of a sudden I see a big piece of meat flap on the floor through the door and then comes the Tiger. I’m like, Oh, that’s not a good idea. I had to get him in the door with a piece of meat and then right behind him comes a little smaller Tiger and we’re talking to the people like why do you have the second Tiger wants to keep the first one in line, just to keep him kind of in check. I’m like, this is not so cool and Mark had built this whole set it was green screen behind a whole wall of green screen and he built a set, he brought in all this sand and had this like pit sand pit and that’s where the model was gonna stand the Tiger being there and he would take 10 out the background later and put this really cool futuristic scene in there. The Tiger refused to go on the sand, it’s like no, yeah, that looks like a I don’t need to go to the bathroom right now. It looks like a kiddie potty or whatever. It’s like, No, no, I’m not going in there. So it wouldn’t go in there. So Mark had to move the entire set, rebuild something on the concrete a little bit over. We finally get ready and this is the days before digital cameras. So you had what you had to do back then is when you take before you go to film, you would take Polaroids, so the back of the camera you change it out, it’d be Polaroid film and that way you could take a shot, test the lighting, you can look at the Polaroid come out in a minute or something, you flap it or whatever and it comes on and then you can look at the lighting make sure the lighting is right, the shadows are right. Everything before you actually start taking film. I mean now you don’t need all it’s just look on the back of your camera and adjust it digitally but so we’re at that point, get the model in the position, the Tiger. We’re like okay, bring the Tiger in. She’s got the sword, she’s standing there with a sword up. The Tiger comes in and the two trainers are just off camera holding a chain, Tigers on a chain just in case we’ll take that out digitally later. We’ll Photoshop that out and the Tiger gets next year it sits down and everything’s good. We start to take the first Polaroid to check the lighting, the video crew, they’re ready to do everything. I was up in a little balcony in the studio watching down as like a little second floor balcony watching and all of a sudden the Tiger, the model is standing and the Tiger just kind of ticks it’s paws and just kind of just taps her foot, just a little tablet. Hey, like a dog would do, like a paw of a dog or something. Nothing bad. But when it did that she lifted her foot just naturally she lifted her foot. When she lifted her foot, the Tiger was like, ooh, what the heck is a toy?
Kevin 23:18
Put his mouth around her foot, or barefoot. Didn’t bite, just put her mouth around the bare foot. He thinks it’s like a toy or something. Well, when it did that, that freaked her out. So she screamed, the Tiger when she screamed it freaked out the Tiger, the Tiger clamped down on her foot, right in the middle of her foot. The trainers in the meantime, they’re up they have it on a chain. They’re pulling on a chain, they start to beat it to try to get it to release it, the Tiger’s like screw you. She falls to the floor. The Tiger drags her by her foot 25 feet across the studio or more into a corner with the trainer’s beating it the whole way her scream bloody murder. Mark dropped the camera. He’s running to try to help the video guys for video on the whole thing and when they finally get it out, get the Tiger to release. The guys take the Tiger and the other little baby Tiger. They get the heck out of there that they like, put it back in its cage outside and they leave, they actually left and we’re in the meantime trying to pacify her and Mark’s wife at the time got on the phone to call 911 and she was 30 years old, 35 years old something like that. But she’s in hysterics so she’s calling 911 emergency saying please please come help. We have a Tiger. The Tiger has bit the model girl in the police. The dispatchers thought she was joking. They thought like the dispatcher said, little girl 911 is for emergencies. It’s not for calling and making up stories and hung up on her so she had the callback and like you ephors get the freakin ambulance here right now. This is and so of course that goes over to dispatch so all the news media they are listening to police radios and stuff hear it. The ambulance comes and they walk in, here’s a girl painted from naked, painted from head to toe like a Tiger that just got bit by a Tiger. So they take her off to the hospital, she ends up going immediately into surgery. She turns out to be okay, at the end of it once later, but we did everything we could, we flew her parents in we did everything we could, we flew here parents in. It turns out the Tiger had done this somewhere else. That’s why they got the heck out of there really fast. The Tiger ended up we found out like two years later getting put to sleep because it hurt somebody else as well. She ended up suing us, suing the studio, suing everybody, we got out of it completely dismissed the case because there’s some weird Texas law precedent that some traveling circus went to a supermarket, set up a tent in a supermarket a parking lot, had Tiger it did something like this or some sort of similar situation. So our lawyers are actually able to get us completely off the hook. So all lawsuits got dismissed I mean it didn’t have any liability but I still have those pictures of right before it happened for Exxon. The gas company Exxon, their mascot’s a Tiger and so I would not go to an Exxon gas station for a long time because you pull off and you’re getting your gas and you’re staring at a Tiger. I’m like, No, no, no, no, no Exxon gas for me. I go to Texaco or whatever but yeah, it was. It was crazy.
Norman 26:31
I’m glad she’s okay. But one thing I was wondering though, you had that airbrush artist right? I think Mark told me that you were naked as well and you were apparent in the tree.
Kevin 26:50
No, not me. Nobody wants to see my ass naked, that’s for sure.
Kevin 26:54
I don’t think that would sell. I think that might
Hayden 26:59
Scare the Tiger.
Kevin 27:00
Yeah, exactly.
Norman 27:02
That’s what I was you were squawking up in the tree.
Norman 27:07
Oh, man, what a story.
Kevin 27:09
I mean, we’ve done a lot. We’ve been around the world shooting, shooting models and stuff and we’ve had some interesting things happen.
Norman 27:17
Well, when that happened, did you stop shooting? Or did you continue doing what you’re gonna do?
Kevin 27:22
Yeah, no, we continue. We did a whole line of it. Yeah, we just didn’t do animals. No animals. It became a rule. No wild animals in the shoots. So we did another shoot in Vegas outside of Vegas, shortly after that. What Mark’s said is like okay, no Tigers. But we can, there’s an Animal Park in Pahrump, which is, I don’t know, an hour or so outside of Vegas and this guy had wolves and he had owls and he had small animals, small little things not Tigers. But he said, I mean, we can try that, those are not as dangerous. So he went out there and did that and an owl sitting on a girl’s shoulder and the owl was crawling into her shoulder and left remarks and that but the worse one was a wolf. Tamed wolf, not a problem with a wolf. The wolf was completely tamed, and the trainer there and everything had a girl standing next to it, started taking the picture and the wolf started getting very, very interested in this girl’s crotch. How the dogs will sniff your crotch or your butt or whatever, it’s just sniffing that he just would not let it go and started getting a little bit aggressive and it turns out that this model was on her period and didn’t tell us so he was smelling blood and that turned into an almost nightmare too.
Norman 28:33
So, I would have stopped shooting this whole thing.
Kevin 28:37
At that point is, no more animals after that. We went from Tiger so like maybe smiles okay, then. Okay. No more animals.
Norman 28:44
Yeah, just airbrush them in.
Kevin 28:47
Yeah, exactly.
Norman 28:49
Oh, man. So you’ve done a lot of traveling and I mean, it’s amazing. We’ve talked about some of the countries but
Kevin 28:56
The traveling started. I mean, just people always say how did you do 90 countries. Well, we would travel doing these photo shoots. So we did a million dollar model search, we went to Prague and Mexico and the US and the Caribbean and we just made a huge big production and ended up on TV and the behind the scenes of it, and we did a, like an amazing race type of show with girls around and build rafts and do all kinds of crazy stuff. We did a lot of that kind of stuff. But when we were traveling, it was cool. We enjoyed it. I love going to these different places, but we’re always working, I’d be going to Prague and never really get to see Prague as we’re there. The work, but Mark and I would always go in advance, we would go to the cities or even shoot in Prague, we go like a week in advance or sometimes a month in advance, just for a week and then come back and go back to scout the place out scouting trips, like let’s go see what the locations are like, see what the logistics are like and those are always cool to me. We have a local guy taking us around showing us cool stuff and that was fun. But there’s a lot of places around the world that were not ideal to shoot in, just financially or just logistically or just didn’t make sense. But there’s a lot of places I wanted to go. So we were doing all this stuff for 15 years. But in 2007, I said, you know what, I have a list, I turned 40 years old, I was like, instead of buying a nice Corvette or some nice car, when you something like that, when you turn 40, I was like, I’m just gonna travel for a year, I’m gonna go to some of the places we can’t go on the photoshoots. So there’s, places just didn’t make sense. So I made a little list and I had organized the company to where we had 16 people working for us in an office at a time where I could leave for like two weeks and as long as I had an internet connection, I would be okay, I could communicate back with everybody doing their jobs and so my thing is, I’m going to leave for a week or two, every month, I’m going to go somewhere. Well, it started off with India and then Bali, and then went to other places in South America, Cuba, just Egypt. But on some of these trips, it would be just me and I’d hire a local guide if I didn’t speak the language and usually by the end of the trip, it’d be like 10 day trips. Like in Cambodia, by the end of that trip, my guide became a friend and he was like, hey, I want you to come to my house and come. So I go to his house and it’s a house the size of 10 by 10. There’s three people living in this 10 by 10 little shack, and his wife had scooted a bunch of stuff out of the way and borrowed some folding chairs from the neighbors and made a little dinner on the little tiny stove for us and it was cool, I get to meet his family, and you get to see how the real people live, the real culture and the real theme and so a lot of the times people go with me, maybe my brother, I’m interested in going to New Zealand, so I’ll take some time off work or I had a couple friends. One of the models that I traveled with was just purely platonic, no, just straight friends, nothing no romantic, and we would travel and do stuff and so but that one year turned into seven. So I did that for seven years and what. I’d be in Austin for a couple weeks and then gone for a couple weeks and I just made and the more places I went, the more I wanted to see and so it became into all seven continents and had some really amazing experiences, it changed me. I met my wife on one of those trips, my current wife met on one of those trips, it’s complete. So that’s how it evolved into that.
Norman 32:11
So are you a photographer?
Kevin 32:13
I would not call myself a photographer. But on these trips, I took a lot of pictures and I didn’t have a blog back then if I would have had what I set out little. I was an editor of my newspaper in college and high school. So I have experience in that and so I would write little trip stories and this is not here’s Kevin eating some, some noodles in the market. It was more like National Geographic, this is what it’s like in this country and Peru. This is exciting. Here’s some pictures and I shot video, also a little small video camera and I shot tons of video everywhere and I shot it from a documentaries point of view, not here’s Kevin doing something and then because we had video editors that would do our other stuff for us with the model side. Sometimes they had downtime, and so I would just have them edit my videos and we did professional voice overs and I have a whole library of 30 some odd hours of National Geographic style videos about each of these places with history and everything makes them really nice videos and I just never did anything with them. I showed them, I did a party like 12 years ago and in the middle of this where I brought back Mica from Russia, and tea from China and some other unique foods from other countries and so I threw a little party at my house with like 230 people set up a huge screening room. I screened like, these videos are like 15 minutes long each, once a screen the Russia video while we watch the Russia video, we drink vodka that I personally brought back in my suitcases from vodka from Russia and then while we watch Cuba, we passed out cigars or whatever. So I did something like that. That was kind of cool, but that’s the only place I’ve really ever shown those.
Norman 33:57
Did you bring the Tiger back for the screening?
Kevin 34:00
I did not bring the Tiger back to the screening.
Norman 34:03
So other countries that you have visited, it might be hard. But what was your favorite country and why?
Kevin 34:12
People ask me that all the time, which, I mean, Japan probably is my favorite country, which because I love the high tech there. I love Kobe beef, Kobe steak, as you know. I don’t need sushi though. But the people, it’s so clean. Japan is, you could you drop something in the middle of the street and a busy street in Japan, you can pick it back up and feel comfortable eating it. It’s so clean. So Japan’s a really cool place. But some of my favorites are more the adventure stuff like Antarctica. I would love to go back to Antarctica, African Safaris, the Ice Hotel and the North of Sweden was really really cool. There’s something different about every country I like. Probably the most enlightening trip that I did was Israel. So I went to Israel. I’m not religious. I was raised in the Episcopal church which is similar to Catholic but I’m not really religious and more spiritual, but to go to Israel and I had a private guy who was an ex college professor that took me around for 10 days all over Israel and I ended up going into Jordan to and saw Petra and all that but in Israel to see, you hear all this stuff on the news of what it’s like over there, isn’t it? That’s where travel changes you see for yourself, what places are like not what the movies, what you think, or politicians or newspapers want you to think you see for yourself. So this guy, he was totally unbiased, but I got to see how three religions are living on top of each other and everybody always wants this world peace and they’re always striving for this. It’s never going to happen there. It’s just that it’s not going to happen. But to see all the history in these three religions and how they interact and are coexisting on this sacred land that they all claim as one of the most sacred in their, in their tradition was fascinating and very enlightening. So that would probably be one of my more favorite trips that just really opened my eyes to a lot of stuff.
Norman 35:59
So talking about travel. Kevin, I hear you have an interesting story about was it Italy or Italians?
Kevin 36:09
I know about people from Michigan.
Norman 36:11
Michigan, okay, right?
Kevin 36:13
Yeah, I have my run in with the Mafia in the US Mafia too and back in the early 90s when I think that was telling the story earlier, we were doing that USA calendar girls bit. When I was traveling around with these models, and doing that, my background, like I said is I was an editor, the school paper and stuff in high school and college and whatnot and so I had always wanted to start a magazine and so I really what I decided after doing this, I started doing some research in Texas, and Texas liquor sales or public information. I don’t know about every state but and I was doing I saw an article at these clubs, these strip clubs back in the 90s or early 90s were doing crazy numbers and liquor said I’m like, that looks interesting and then at that time, strip clubs, it always been us the CD joints, these places on the other side of town where, you really don’t want to be seen and there’s still a bunch of those out there. But there’s also some that were like crystal chandeliers and marble floors and just like Philemon, you own lunches and just incredible, like palaces, especially in Dallas, Houston, Atlanta and I got to see some of that from the other channels. Like, you know what I would like to start one of those. I was 23 years old. I had no experience in it. Like how can I raise the mind’s eye? So I made a, like, 100 page business plan. I worked like two months researching, like a proper business plan, like market research, like flooring, like everything, like a huge thick business plan to open this club. But I had no it’s gonna take like 3 million bucks. I picked out a location and had all the plots for the land and everything as like, how am I gonna get this money? So I put an ad in the newspaper saying new. I forgot what I called it. Kevin’s clubs opening soon. Now hiring dancers, barbacks, managers, whatever and I had no club, there’s no club going, Sam but I put a help wanted ad in the newspaper, I get all these people. It was for market research all these people submitting their resumes and stuff to me and I would call them back and ask questions just to learn about the business and then one of these turned out to be the manager of a local club and he and I hooked, hit it off and so he’s like, oh, I’ll help you open this thing. So we tried to raise the money, and we just couldn’t raise the money and so what I did is I pivoted, because my mom at the time worked for American Airlines. So I could fly anywhere in the US for free. We have these little vouchers you just show up at the airport as long as there’s a seat on the plane you write in Where do you want to go? So I literally flew to every big city in the US, 30 40 cities, and I would go spend the weekend and go to strip clubs, not to see dancers but to do research like how are they charging? How is their entrance? How is their lighting? How is their this? I would then go into the library. This is before the internet and pull a microfilm and pull all the stories about what had been written about the owners and everything for the last 10 years and make notes and they had this huge library of stuff and ideas and I was going to use that for the club. But it turned out that I couldn’t raise the money. So I pivoted into a magazine and so I started a little magazine called Gentlemen’s club, no nudity, no, nothing is a business, a glossy business magazine for that industry as like, I need to get some publicity for this. So what do I do? It’s not like press releases, you know press releases Norm, like a bit press releases, maybe I can do a press release. This is days before the internet. So I took all this information I had, I was like, Okay, which are the top 10 cities in the United States for strippers? Roughly what kind of dollars are they doing in the cities? So I looked through all my stuff, came up with a list of here’s the top 10 so, Dallas has got 37 clubs and they do whatever, 3 million a month in sales and Atlanta is number two in the US and 2.9 million in sales and 16 clubs or whatever the number was, I made a top 10 list. I typed that up on a piece of paper. Got my old fax machine for those of you who don’t know what fax machines are, they look kind of like a big computer and then you put a paper in and it’s like a scanner and scans on and sends it over the phone lines. Before you could send PDFs by email and I fax that to Entertainment Tonight to a couple other things. I think maybe PR Newswire at the time I think they might have existed I can’t remember. Two days later, Entertainment Tonight sends a crew to my little apartment in Austin to film me, talking about the industry. A week later, I met CNN in Dallas, they asked me to come up to Dallas and come on CNN and a little office in Dallas. Shortly after that, Robin Leach reaches out, their team. I’m flying to LA to be on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous and they’re doing this whole story about how the strip clubs are no longer these little seedy places. They’re now these like palaces with marble floors and tuition reimbursement programs and all this kind of stuff that some of these other trends at the time, I became the de facto expert for that industry. I was quoted on the front page of USA Today, New York Times. Redbook, Vogue, you name it, every little newspaper, I was the de facto guy and that led to some subscriptions for the magazine and some other stuff. But out of that there’s a guy in Detroit, this is where we get into this. This is I set up the story into, there’s a guy in Detroit that sees me on one of these TV shows, he finds me, he reaches out to me and says, Hey, I would like to fly you up to Detroit. I want to hire you as a consultant. I’m thinking about opening a club and at that point in time, I was robbing Peter to pay Paul, I was like, I need this guy to pay his thousand dollar ad bill so I can freakin pay my rent. Or I was eating ramen noodles and drinking water out of the faucet. I just had no money and so I was like, I need to do anything. So I flew up to Detroit. I drove around with him, made some suggestions and came back, I told him at the time, I’m looking for investors. He’s like, well, how much do you need? I said, $10,000 and I was 23, 24 years old and that was a lot of money and I was like, he’s like, No, I’ll do it. No problem. Wires me $10,000, I think my life is solid, I can breathe. I can’t figure out how I’m going to survive, I can focus on things. Well, he decided for his $10,000 investment, we had nothing in writing. He decides that there needs to be perks involved. The girl wants to be on the cover. They gotta come see him and things like that and then he decides to move from Detroit to Phoenix to really help blow this thing up. He needs to be on the ground. He puts a little bit more money and like another 10 grand or something and we started working together, but we don’t really see eye to eye and every weekend or not every weekend, but a lot of weekends, this guy would just completely disappear off out the face of the earth. Like where are you going? He’s like, Don’t worry. I’ll be back on Monday and he would go and rent like the Phoenician resort and in Phoenix and rent the top floor and the CEO of all these big companies would fly in and they would have this big huge cocaine party on the top floor of these nice hotels and they bring in strippers and all this kind of stuff and I was not invited. He told me one day maybe I’ll get an on the right to be invited. But right now I’m not invited, but he just disappeared. Well, he had a big cocaine problem and so we didn’t see eye to eye. I didn’t like the fact that he wanted special privileges for someone to be on the cover. I’m like, this is a business pure business and I end up saying, I’m leaving. I’m moving from Arizona, back to Texas and he’s like, No, you’re not and then he accused me of a bunch of stuff that I didn’t do and said, sent guys to beat me up when I was moving and I had to call the police to move on my place low my u haul. Police had to stand there because he sent to Guido’s to actually break my legs. So I couldn’t move. I get back to Texas, times in Austin, there’ll be people come to visit him and you see in the movie sometimes where they’re walking in our restaurant, they have a little clicker to do remote start their car. This is more common now people have remote starters. But 30 years ago, it was kind of a new technology and they would remote start their car just to make sure when someone didn’t put a bomb underneath it. We get back to Texas and I hook up with Mark the photographer to do some stuff and I’m trying to recover and in the meantime this guy is coming after us. He’s sitting with the people that come after us. He’s doing all kinds of threatening to blow up airplanes that we’re on all kinds of crazy shit. So yeah, I went through a phase there where we had to watch, watch our back and be very, very careful..
Norman 44:37
Wow. So just tell me if I have to pixelate your face.
Kevin 44:41
I didn’t name any names, but that I could name names, but I’m not person. He’s dead now. I could write a whole book about that chapter of my life and my dad at the time was like, Kevin, you get out of this business. You come back to the house, live with us, go work at the local McDonald’s or something as I was like, No, I’m into entrepreneurial. On my way back, after moving out I had my haul that I had packed away with the police standing there to keep the Guido’s away and escorted me actually out of town. They follow me until I passed out of town to make sure that Guido’s didn’t follow me on the interstate to come back to Texas. When I get back into West Texas, I’m cruising along at 60 miles an hour on my u haul. The speed limit is 55, the cops pull me over the middle of nowhere in Texas for speeding. Just gonna give me a warning. It looks at my license like oh, you have an unpaid ticket, an unpaid traffic ticket from like three years ago when you’re in college. You’re coming to me to the jail. So I ended up going to jail in a little Podunk Texas town. It was a Friday and so in the Monday was a holiday so I’d stay in the jail till Tuesday till the judge could see me and I remember calling and thousand dollar bail is something minor and I got the whole thing got dismissed. But I’d spend the night in this little Podunk Texas jail. Me and one other guy. It’s like you see in the movie, they’ll share us, a thing in a Western or something from the 1800s and I remember telling my dad saying, Hey, I’m stuck here. He’s like, good, you can rot in there and you need to get out of this business. I’m not giving you the thousand bucks to bail out. No. Only if you agree to come home, change, get out of this business, go to work for somebody because my dad always had this dream that I would go to work for somebody, some accounting firm or something. I’m like, I’m not doing it. I’ll sit here. I don’t need your money. I’m not gonna agree to that. I’ll find some other way to get out of here. So I found that my uncle ended up giving me the money and I got out and continued my entrepreneurial ways.
Hayden 46:39
That concludes part one of our episode with Kevin King. Make sure to tune in next time to listen to the rest of the interview. Kevin lets us know how he turned his life around after dealing with the mob and gets more into his own personal values, and how he’s established himself in the Amazon space. Make sure to tune in, check it out. Just a reminder to subscribe on whatever platform you’re using.
Hayden 47:05
Thanks so much. I’ll see you next time.
Hayden 0:01
Hey guys and gals, this is part two of our interview with Kevin King. Make sure to go back and listen to part one. If you haven’t checked that one out yet, just a quick reminder to subscribe on whatever platform you’re using. Thanks so much and enjoy the rest of the show.
Norman 0:19
So I got to ask you the question. Did you stick with the strippers?
Kevin 0:25
No, no.
Norman 0:27
You did get out of the business. Yeah.
Kevin 0:27
Well, we did it for a while. We got out of the stripper business and we still deal with models. For a while and still to this day we published calendars that have models on. It is one of my I have eight businesses right now that I’m involved in running and one of them is a seasonal calendar business that we print. That’s why the Amazon stuff came natural for me because I’ve been creating products overseas for a long time and dealing with all that. We used to do really high end collectibles in the collectible space. We would do gold signatures, we get the model signature and actually put in one car with a gold ink on gold like a foil all over it and put it in this nice plastic case that you would put like a bar of gold in or something. We did a lot of really high end collectible product creation stuff. But that whole market, the trading cars, the internet stuff, the TV stuff, we did really well for that for a while. It’s all kind of evolved, businesses change and things change but the one thing that’s remained constant is calendars. We have a base of five 6000 customers that every year buy calendars from us and then with the advent of Amazon and calendar club and some of these others we wholesale out of them and it does really really well. It’s not a big business. It’s on autopilot kind of now, but we’ve built it over 20 years to where we have a built-in audiences recurring revenue. We print in South Korea, and our landed cost is I think this year is $1.43 landed DDP costs and we sell for 19.95 and we sell quite a few. So it’s now with Amazon blowing sales on Amazon are crazy and then we have our own direct to consumer list and we actually mail out a little catalog. We print a catalog and mail it out and sell directly to our consumers and then we started with, we have our five or 10 calendars that we make, but there’s hundreds of these out there and so we actually became a distributor for everybody else. So to actually maximize revenue rather than just selling ours to people, we would put ours and put them bigger and put them on the front cover and prime positions and then we’d say on this catalogs Oh, by the way, we have these other hundred ones here and we would just buy as a as a distributor, buy wholesale from people in Australia, California, Canada, UK, whatever have pretty girls the whole catalog, I’m sorry, is a pretty girl so it could be girls in bikinis fishing, girls dress like firefighters, 1940s pin up art that you would see on airplanes and World War Two to playboy playmates to whatever. Anything to do with pretty girls. We tested where we added guys and they just didn’t sell to the women and we tested where we added like firemen and scenic stuff, and it just didn’t sell. But our little niche that we’ve found was pretty girls and it still works to this day. I mean, because calendars are something that a lot of guys like to hang in the garage or put up or whatever, and it’s a recurring revenue every year, you got to have another one. But selling calendars is like selling milk. Because they go bad. It’s unlike it’s not like a lot of products. While they don’t sell them this holiday season, it’s okay, I’ll sell them in the spring or next year, calendars are dated. So come Christmas, if you got a lot of inventory left, you’re screwed. You gotta start figuring out how to get rid of that stuff really fast. So it’s a balancing act on inventory and the picture you put on the cover can determine your sales big time. So from year to year, sometimes we run out and early December, other years where we got stuff we’re liquidating at the end of January. It just depends. But it’s a really good business and you would think well guys buy a calendar hang up on the garage. Our average is over $100 from consumers. We have a guy in Canada, in Calgary that buys $3,000 from us every year on calendars, and these are not nine quantity and one calendar. He buys one calendar of this one, one of this one, one of this and so we have 100 different calendars or so I’ll buy one of each. Sometimes he buys two of his favorites, one to open, one to keep an eye on the shrink wrap as a collector not to ever open and we have a lot of people like that. So our average is over $100 from individual consumers not buying wholesale just collecting for themselves. So we really understand that market psychology and how to market to them and everything. So, it’s a good little business.
Norman 4:46
That’s a lesson learned because you’re sticking to a niche and you’re killing it.
Kevin 4:52
No, we stick to that niche. It’s not a seven figure, huge business, but we’ve got now to where there’s two people running it, and it throws off six figures. So, if I want to, the average person could live off of earning the profits off of that. I have a nice living, probably, but I would be bored, if that’s all I did. So that’s why I have all these other companies too.
Norman 5:18
We were talking to Andrea Lake earlier today and one of the things that she came across and said, she sells T-shirts. Well, she’s with her partner who sells a billion dollars with T-shirts. She teaches people how to sell T-shirts and she said, Look, you don’t have to sell a billion dollars. All you have to do is sell 20 $500 and you’re changing somebody’s life and that’s very similar, like you’re talking about calendars and not having to do a million. Well, if you can go in and find a product and sell it and make a few extra thousand dollars a month. That’s life changing, especially in times like we’re in today. I mean, you’re lucky that you’re involved, well not lucky, you’re successful, because the way that you do your research, the things that you get involved with, but with a lot of people, they think that they have to make a million dollars in sales to be successful and that’s completely untrue.
Kevin 6:17
No, you need to make enough money to support the lifestyle you want to live. If your dream is to be on a yacht and fly first class everywhere, you need to make more money. But a lot of those people are miserable. If you’re happy living on 50 60,000 a year and that covers your bills and allows you to do what you want. Then don’t try to make a million I mean, my motto in life, that derives from this because so many people think money is the Almighty God and everybody is I got to make more money, I can make more money becomes a competition. When the president the United states is a prime example. Everything is about money, and you need money. You need to make money. Don’t get me wrong, life is not about money and so what happens is a lot of people end up all they do is working. I go through phases like I’m going through one right now where it’s three months, four months of just solid work, and I’ll bust my ass first and this may turn into six months or a year. I bust my ass around the clock working harder than anybody would ever work. It’s like the McDonald’s story. But then for the next seven years, like I did with the travel, I’ll coast. So, there’s a payoff on the other side where people my dad used to joke while I was doing all that trouble, you’re semi retired when you’re gonna go back to work? So when the money runs out/
Kevin 7:34
But that’s would that’s what enables me to do some of these things. A lot of people are trying to quit their job to have this freedom. I’ve already had the freedom. I’ve already done what most people would want to do. A lot of people say, Kevin, you’re crazy. You wanted to do all that travel. You spent half a million bucks or maybe a million bucks traveling over seven years and I probably did. If you add it all up. I bought a lot of stuff for my house and furniture and different things, artwork, nice artworks and stuff. My house is like a little museum. I’m with the whole world and people like you’re crazy, you should just invest that somewhere and I’m like no, never I would never. You could have $2 million right now, I’m like no but so what? I could make it somewhere else, doing something else but $2 million cannot even touch and replace the experience of that. To me, life is about the experiences you have and the people you meet. Those can never be taken away from you. I mean our time sitting there we talked at the beginning of this thing about smoking cigars, different things, whether the thing the billion dollar sale or something where there’s 15 of us out there and the other picture that’s something that’s gonna stay with me and you until the day we die, versus money doesn’t. Money is fleeting money comes and goes and the things you buy with money and whether it’s a car or furniture that stuff always ends up breaking or falling apart or you get tired of it, and you move on to something else. But the people, the experiences you have, me going in Antarctica and sitting down amongst a million penguins on this glacier and they come in all around you, they’re just curious about you as you are about them. You can’t take that away or going into Israel and seeing how these people live, it changes it, all the racial stuff that’s going on in the US right now. I used to be a little bit more racial, went on some things before I started traveling, it opened my eyes to we’re all the same. You opened your eyes to see how people are different and the people that I have met, whether it’s in this business people like you, or the people I met when I’m traveling, and everybody I met my wife traveling, it’s those experiences can never be taken away and I’ll always remember those. I’ll always have those and so that’s what people need to focus on more is enjoyment. You’re only here once, enjoy it, and people say Kevin, if you were saved all that money, or does traveling, look what you could have I’m like, Yeah, but who knows what I’ll be if I did the traditional way wait till I’m 70 years, 67 years old, retire and start traveling then. Who knows if I could walk up the Great Wall of China? Could I’ve gotten a little rubber boats in Antarctica and gone acoss I might not have done that. I might have gotten hit by a bus and not been able to do any of that. Now I’m gonna live for now, I live for now, with an eye towards the future, I don’t live in the future and work it backwards and so I think that’s important. Too many people get caught up with money and and you see it in our business people started throwing off big figures. I’m selling this much and this much and I can tell you that there’s people that are doing $300,000 a year selling on Amazon, they’re a lot happier than people doing $10 million a year and a lot more comfortable and a lot more financially stable. So don’t get caught up in that. I mean, it’s cool, to make a lot of money, but at the end of the day, it’s what you take home that matters. Make enough to live the life that you want to live and then live your life. If you’re passionate about what you do, and you do what you like, and you help others, then it’ll come, it’ll happen. Giving back and helping everybody needs a helping hand. Everybody needs a little break. Everybody needs someone gone before them, they can give them a little guidance and that’s one of the best things you can do if you are successful is to give back and to help others. I mean, one of my goals is, once I sell one of my companies where a lot of money and I have some extra centers, I’m going to endow people kids to travel. So I think it’s super important and they do this in Europe, they don’t do it really in the US or Canada. It’s much between their high school and college they take a year and kind of travel a little bit. I think more people need to do that. Get out of their comfort zone, not go where, going from Canada, the United States is not traveling, it’s to somewhere. You need to go from Canada to Myanmar, where you don’t speak the language and you don’t understand the culture. You don’t know what the food is, that’s traveling and so I want to enable people that might not have those means to do that, to be able to do that and to truly change their outlook on the world and on life.
Norman 11:51
That’s awesome. I know Hayden and my other sons as well, but Hayden went to France in high school. Right Hayd?
Hayden 11:59
Yeah, on exchange for that one and I mean, that affected me back then. But then just from being a musician to I mean, I taught in India for a summer and I think that experience really opened my mind to the world. I mean, even just seeing the disparity and poverty there and it’s right in your face and just realizing how people can live in different means which they live in. There’s different ways of seeing happiness too, in whatever situation you’re in.
Kevin 12:29
I always remember one time when I was in Fiji and we did this. We had some we’re shooting some models in Fiji and we brought in these fire dancers and stuff. This old man that lives in a shack on the beach, and I remember one night I’m sitting out our little hotel resort with small little 20 room resort or where it was on the beach, sitting out there one night, didn’t smoke cigars or anything back then so I didn’t miss anything nor but I was sitting out there one night. This old man comes up to me and we started talking. He’s like, we’re talking about how his life is simple, but he’s happy. He’s right here on the beach, he catches his fish. He doesn’t have all the problems that we have back here in the US and we got into a big discussion about it and you’re right. It’s how you choose to live your life or you don’t need physical, material things or money to be happy and some of the richest people in the world are the most unhappy people.
Kevin 13:21
It just invites more problems.
Norman 13:24
So there are a lot of people that are listening and probably don’t know you. Well, Amazon people, e-commerce people know you as pretty much the king of Amazon, you know a lot of stuff, Kevin, and you do share, by the way, you’re probably one of the most giving people that I know when it comes to sharing and helping people. If somebody asks you questions or to get on a podcast or that you just open your knowledge base, which is really cool. But one of the things that I want to bring out is the Amazon site, you started out, and I know that you met many coats and you guys got together and with ghee and started Illuminati and that was very successful and I’m not sure. How did you guys meet?
Kevin 14:16
I met Manny. He had a podcast, he started at the end of 2015 and I started selling on Amazon as an FBA seller in 2015. I was selling on Amazon before that back to 2001, but not as this model that we all know now as of FBA, so I was trying to learn everything I could at the time, I was listening to Scott Volker, and I think Kevin Riser had a podcast and there’s a few others and not too many not like there are now and many it started one. I started listening to his and he was kind of laying out his whole path and his whole thing I was like, this guy sounds pretty cool and down to earth, and Tony kind of like it is and so he had a little Facebook group. I think they call it the high rollers or something at the time or maybe had a different name. I can’t remember. I remember posting in that group, and I think it’s like a March or so of 2016 and I was waiting in an airport, I was meeting as before I got married, it was me and my wife for meeting her and her plane was delayed. So I was just checking Facebook and someone had posted something that was getting tired of people posting wrong information about, this is how things work and one person says, and this got paired with everybody else, it became true when it’s totally untrue. But I posted something and they’re like, here’s 10 things that you should do to build your listing or including, put some Spanish keywords or something like that. I forget exactly. But that post got pretty popular. Many saw it and he was looking for guests for the podcast. So he reached out to me through Facebook, and at the time I had I used Facebook for groups, but I had no friends up until about a year and a half ago. Actually Athena’s to Verizon one Kevin, why don’t you have any friends, not even your wife is your friend? I’m like, I don’t really care about sharing what I ate today or anything on Facebook. I just use it for the groups and then when it became a business, I opened it up now I think I’m maxed at 5000. But, so I didn’t, I’m surprised I even saw the message from Manny and he’s like, Hey, would you come on the podcast? I’m like, no, I’m just keeping my head down. I’m launching five brands here and I’m busy. Just come on, man. I’d like to come on. So I went on his podcast in early spring of 2016. It’s a pretty bad audio connection. I think I was on my cell phone in the garage sound like I was in a tin can. That podcast became one of his top one or two of all time, I think still is on the am pm podcast. It’s way up there and so other people heard that and then that started me going on some other podcasts and then many, he came to me that summer and said, Hey, would you be interested in we’re gonna start this thing called Illuminati mastermind? That is, I think Ben Cummings at the time had his training and there’s a couple other little more advanced trainings where people who are reselling and they want to start that and I’m like, they want me to come on for free and just be like a guest or host. I’m like nah, I’m like, I’m not gonna do it for free and so we ended up working a little test webinars and well, they were building Helium 10 at the time, and I think it was just scribbles and Frankenstein, maybe one other tool and wasn’t what it is today. We decided to do Illuminati mastermind as a monthly training. I think it started in February of 2017. Two or 300 bucks a month, 400 bucks a month, something like that and we did a revenue share where I got a piece, they got a piece and then the company got a piece and then from that, we ended up doing an event. That’s where I met you in Cancun, in May of 2017 and then we did another event and now the Illuminati mastermind is they rolled it into Helium 10. It’s called Helium 10 Elite now, so it’s kind of an advanced package with the software and it’s basically the same, what’s modified it’s changed a little bit used to be a little bit more edgy, I guess you could say and we can’t be quite as edgy now because Helium 10 is public, big, big profile company. But that’s how it evolved and so that’s how, how I met Manny and then we ended up doing it’s 2018 the freedom ticket started, which is a course for new people and that evolved out of I was getting frustrated with all the scammers out there and all the people charging a lot of money that or people doing YouTube videos that don’t know what they’re doing, and teaching other people and people teaching a formula. Find it fits in a shoe box, weigh into this match and blah, blah blah and like no. So that’s why we did the freedom ticket and I went into real detail on building brands and stuff in there. It’s very detailed and now that’s rolled into Helium 10 so if you have a Helium 10 membership, you get that for free and you don’t need to pay for it and so that’s my relationship with those guys. They are really good guys. They still have a piece of the company but they did a really good job building it and got a nice payday.
Norman 18:48
You think of it, it’s 2020 and we’ve only known each other since 2017 and like what you’ve done with the Illuminati, now Helium 10 Elite and seeing what those guys did many engi and you, what they did in a couple of years is incredible and these are the most humble guy, you too. You don’t sit there and you don’t hear them talking about oh, I made this much as my, here’s my Lamborghini, here’s that here’s, you’d sit next to you and you would just here’s a Coke Zero.
Kevin 19:22
I try to treat people like I’d want to be treated. You never know, you just take as someone like Steve Simon said, for example, he came and spoke at Illuminati mastermind we did in Hawaii as really like the first time I met him and see him on stage and then now he and I are doing stuff together and I was a member of being an event and he’s a big Diet Coke drinker. So every time I went to get a Coke Zero, I’d bring him a Diet Coke, just out of courtesy, but those little things when you take care of other people they take care of you. There are some backstabbers that don’t give a shit. Yeah, but the vast majority and if they don’t, if they come back and backstab you, at least you know you were good to them and it’s just you just move on. Right? I’m not a big in front of the scenes guy. I don’t need all the credit. It’s nice to get a pat on the back or an acknowledgement but I like being more the guy. I like watching American Idol or Shark Tank or what’s it Sharks den or no what’s in Canada?
Norman 20:22
Oh dragons,
Kevin 20:24
Dragons dragons,yes. Shark Tank in the US or American Idol. I like seeing somebody that was nothing getting that chance and getting that coaching opportunity that can be exploited. There’s a diamond stuck in all of us and you just have to peel back the layers and find out what that diamond is and then let people do that. Whether that’s, it’s not always go to school, get your degree, go to college, get your degree, go work for a company. No, I mean, maybe I don’t know Hayden, he’s a musician. Maybe his thing is music, music and he’s talented at music. Let him go freakin do music. As long as he is happy and he can survive. He’s not having to live off of you or something, let him do it. He doesn’t need to go work in a corporate job. But too many people in society, they say this is the rule. When you do this, you do this, you do this and when you’re this age, you do this, when you’re this age, you do this. Screw all that man. Enjoy it, man.
Norman 21:15
Absolutely and it’s interesting. We were just going back to what you’re talking about with Amazon and learning and going out there and trying to maybe find a new job and you see all that crap that’s on YouTube. Oh, my gosh, I really feel bad for people that are let’s say, it’s a COVID thing right now and people are trying to find new things. They go out to and they’re trying to do it inexpensively and they go out to YouTube and they find all these YouTube videos about Yeah, it could have been two years ago. It could have been three years ago, could have been last week. But all the crap that’s out there, and people come to me I work with Amazon’s sellers, and I see crap, absolutely crap listings, they think they’re doing it great and where did you learn this? My point is, if you invest in crap, these free youtube videos, which some are probably pretty good, you’re going to get crap, but you really do have to invest in yourself and right now is the perfect timing for people to take a look at freedom ticket and get good quality. Yeah, I guess I’m plugging you, there you go. It is a free plug for you. But it’s a good quality product that people don’t have to worry about. They pay a little bit, but it’s quality and they can learn and if this is what they want to do in e-commerce, hey it’s a great life. Look at us. We get to work from home. We get to take off when we’re not working. But, it is a great life but don’t settle on just finding free crap and thinking that you’re getting a great education, there is good stuff out there. But you really do have to make sure that you do the research like you always do. You always preach, get data, get research? I think that we have to bring that across.
Kevin 23:14
There’s a lot of good people out there that know what they’re doing and you can find it out there. My way is not the only way. It’s a way that works for me and I think it’s I try to give people the knowledge so that they can pave their own way, versus saying these are the 10 steps, a lot of people want the easy way. Right, the 10 steps to riches, or whatever, there’s no such thing. Those were the 10 steps for one person, but your 10 steps may be totally different. So you need the foundation and the knowledge and then you can find your own 10 steps.
Norman 23:43
Alright, with everything that’s going on right now, with COVID and everything else in the world. Any advice you have?
Kevin 23:49
Well, I think people need to take COVID seriously. There’s people that think it’s a conspiracy theory. There’s people that are really scared about it. I think somewhere in the middle was the truth. I think you need to proceed with caution, but you can’t let it rule your life, you can’t go cubbyhole up in your house and never come out until Groundhog Day. You need to actually find a balance to where you can be safe and reasonable and it’s not just about you being safe, you may be one of these people, like, I’m not gonna wear a mask, I don’t really care. But you said to keep in mind, you’re affecting other people that you come in contact to. So you may be innocently murdering somebody else not really knowing it, and not intending to. That’s in today’s world, it’s completely changed. I think there’s gonna be a lot of change, at least here in the US. We have a political year with a presidential thing. You have the racial inequality thing going on. 2020 is a big year of change and it’s going to be interesting to see how this comes out. But one of those changes relates to the business side is I think you’re seeing a shift to where more and more people are going to be working from home and more businesses are going to be set up to be doing what we’ve been doing, they realizing Hey, this actually works. We don’t need everybody to come to an office and pay the overhead. I think you’re gonna see a lot of retail companies, some are already going out of business, but some we’re gonna have to adapt and change, restaurants are going to change. But from our perspective, from e-commerce, there’s never a better time. Amazon’s blowing up. I mean, they had a huge bump with the COVID. They’re only continuing to grow and it’s not just Amazon and stuff that’s happening with Shopify, these partnerships with Facebook and Walmart. It’s just e-commerce is going to continue to explode. So if you’re able to take advantage of that, then this is a great time. Some people say is it too late? A domestic golden opportunity? No, it’s not too late. Is it as easy as it was? Five years ago? Absolutely not. Five years ago, you could find something off Alibaba, throw it on Amazon or Shopify, drive some traffic to it and make a lot of money. You can’t do that anymore. You need to create a brand. I just started a company with a million over a million dollars invested. Not everybody can do that. A lot of people have five or 10,000, that’s okay. You just got to lower your expectations that you’re not gonna become a millionaire for a while when you start a company with five or 10,000 but you may make enough money that you’re happy, that you either can support your family or if not, you get some extra cash to pay off some bills or go on a nice vacation or whatever your goal is. But it’s a great opportunity right now out there especially for e-commerce and when society has a big change, like it does now and there’s the guy, Wizard of ads. I don’t know if there’s, he’s got three books on Amazon, the Wizard of ads series, and then he’s got a big castle here in Austin, where I live. He brings people in and trains but he’s got one book, I forget the exact name of it, but you could probably look it up on Amazon, but the premise, his name is Roy Williams, you look up Roy Williams’ books on Amazon, you’ll find it. But the premise is that I think it’s every 20 years as a pendulum shift and every 40 years, there’s a bigger shift, and every 80 years, there’s a major shift. We’re in the middle of those right now. So things are changing, and the way people believe and the way society believes, we go from me to, to we to or, it’s different. So right now you’re on the cusp of one of those and so there’s great opportunity, if you’re going to define what that is for, from a personal point of view and from a business point of view, nothing is going to stay the same and you got to be willing to adapt and roll with it.
Norman 27:09
For Kevin King, what does the future hold?
Kevin 27:12
Well, the future right now for me is I’m launching a couple of new companies. My goal in one of these companies is to actually be able to sell it for a significant money. So that’s my target goal is I want to be able to have $10 million that I can just set aside, invest in a very modest way so that I know that no matter what happens in the world, I’m totally okay and right now, I don’t have that $10 million sitting just on the side. We’ll get there. We’re on the way. But so, one of the quickest ways to do that is to build an Amazon based e-commerce company and sell it in two or three years. So that’s one of the goals right now and then I can do what the heck I want to do. I’m still doing what the heck I want to do but then I can do it knowing that if I got hit by a bus, everything would still be okay. My wife would be okay, my dogs would be okay. Everything would be okay. I’d be okay. So that’s my goal and then I want to be able to give back and get back to traveling more, once everything opens back up. There’s still some place in this world I want to go someplace I want to revisit. It’s a place that I want to experience with my wife that I experienced by myself, but now bring her and have a whole new experience with someone else you love.
Norman 28:23
Let’s talk about your wife for a second. So you mentioned earlier on very briefly, that you met your wife traveling. Can you get into that? It’s an interesting story. You told me about this before?
Kevin 28:34
Sure, yeah. One of the places when I was doing all the traveling for those seven years, I went to a trade show in LA for movie locations and so all these different houses mansions, back lots countries, would come and have booths and saying come shoot in our country, we’ll give you incentives or whatever and one of them was Columbia. This is 2009 and I was like Colombia? I always thought Colombia is much of a drug dealers and the cartel and Pablo Escobar and all that stuff. Hell no, I’m not going to Colombia. But these people, this booth, I was there looking for locations for our calendars, businesses and I was like, this actually looks pretty cool. I’m gonna go to Colombia, just go for like four or five days, go to Bogota and Cartagena to the main cities and just see how it is and people thought I was crazy like, you’re crazy man. It’s not safe, I’m like, that should be alright, so I went to Columbia and I found a guy on the internet to be my guide and he was supposed to be my guide and something happened where he had to leave Cartagena and go to Bogota, says my office girl is going to pick you up at the airport. So I get to the airport expecting this office girl and it’s just some dude in a taxi is there to get me. The next day and take me around showing me the sights and the main guide, he is still out of town. He was supposed to have taken care of me and he calls up his office girl and says Hey, would you mind, see if this guy wants to do anything, take care of him. So this girl calls me and says, Hey, is anything you want to do? It’s like, No, no, I’m not gonna inconvenience you or whatever, I’ll be fine. The next day she comes to the hotel, organized on a day trip. I was supposed to go out on a boat to go snorkeling and see these dolphins and stuff off the coast of Colombia in Cartagena and she came to the hotel to help organize that and took me to the dock to make sure I get found my way and when we’re at the dock, I have a fun time. Everything said here’s your tickets. I’m like, No, you come with me, right? She’s like, No, no, I gotta go back to the office. She dressed in a dress and wrong shoes for a boat and everything. This is a speedboat with like 30 people on it that takes you out to this place and I convince her to go and she calls her boss and he’s like, well if he’s paying for it, go ahead and so she comes with me and we had a nice day and in that night, we decided I want to go eat and actually I want to go get a I collect things from different countries in Colombia is known for emeralds, so I want to go get some emeralds. So she took me to this Emerald store and I said, I was negotiating for this little rock and I had a little ring over there. I said, well, if I buy this rock, well you give her that ring? They’re like, no, no, not that one. It’s like, what can she pick something else out that she likes? Okay, okay, so I buy this little Emerald rock and she gets to pick out a little ring, and I just gave it to her and then we went to dinner, had a nice dinner, and then I told her that I’m learning Spanish, and I’ll come back in a year, and we’ll speak, I’ll speak to you for 15 minutes in Spanish. She’s like, okay, I’m gonna hold you to that. Or I didn’t think anything of it. I was just whatever, nothing happened. This was just a she was just the office girl. I leave from Colombia and we kept briefly in touch by email here and there. I sent an email and said thanks. That’s nice, Man. Yes. She sent me a few emails, sent me one of my birthday. I was like how did she remember my birthday? Then comes close to the year 2010, when I was supposed to go back and speak in Spanish. She messaged me, I’m on a plane to go to Israel actually sitting on the runway and she’s like, you told me you’re coming back to Israel to speak Spanish. I expect you to come back. Like, I don’t know. Alright, I’ll come back. I don’t know Spanish good enough yet to speak 15 minutes of conversation all in Spanish. So I ended up going back. The rest is now we’re married.
Norman 32:15
Yes, you are.
Kevin 32:18
So yeah, there’s more, there’s a little more and that story to that when I’m taking a trip to Rio de Janeiro for carnival and she’s a lawyer, so we did long distance for seven years. She stayed in Colombia, I stayed in the States and she couldn’t get a visa to come here for a couple years. Because visas for a lot of countries, you can just hop on a plane like we can as Canadians or Americans and just go wherever we want, kind of when there’s a few countries like India, some that require visas, but for them, it’s here’s your 10 countries in the world. You can go to the rest of them, you got to tell us in advance, get a visa. So it was difficult to get a visa, but we would meet in Panama or we meet in Colombia, we’d meet in Peru or somewhere during our breaks. I go down there for a weekend, I’d fly down on Friday, sere for seven hours on Saturday, fly back on Sunday, once a month or whatever and we did that for seven years and now she lives here. Now we got married in 2017 and Columbia.
Norman 33:14
I thought you only did that for me.
Kevin 33:18
Well, if you had some Kobe beef and you say, Kevin, come tomorrow night. Can we be flying to Toronto and drive up? Be like, alright, man. Let me call the plane.
Norman 33:32
You’ve done that a few times.
Kevin 33:34
I’ve actually taken a trip just to Japan, to eat Kobe beef. I remember the first time, Norm and I, I’ve been talking about Kobe beef. For those of you that don’t know, Kobe beef you may have heard of it. But the authentic is from Japan, and you can only get it in Japan and you’ll see it on the menus in the US and places say they have Kobe beef, but it’s probably Wagyu, it’s really not Kobe. It’s kind of like saying Dr. Pepper is Coke or something and they’re both sodas, but they’re not the same and so to the real Kobe beef, these are calories from the Kobe region of Japan, where they do all kinds of special feed for them and special treatments and the beef is just so tender and so it’s like, out of this world good. It’s expensive, it’s $30 an ounce or something like that. It’s not cheap and so we were in Vegas a few years ago, and I’m like, No, let’s go get some Kobe beef. He’s like, what’s that man? No one likes to eat, like I like to eat. So I’m like, just come on and we’ll try it so we get there and he’s just kind of like, it’s like monkey see, monkey do is like, order eight ounces of this. He’s like, Oh, is that what I should order? It’s like, well, keep in mind this is gonna be like 300 bucks for these little steaks. Are you okay? He’s like, just don’t tell my wife and I’ll be okay. So we were munching and I can just see the eyes rolling back and Norm, his eyes were just like Holy cow. This is like almost better than sex. This is oh, wow, this is amazing. So now every time we’re in Vegas and Vegas is one of the only cities in the US where you can get it’s actually Wagyu there, but it’s a five Wagyu and I told Norm like, look, you got to make sure this is real because a lot of places say they have it. It’s bullshit. It’s not really from Japan. It’s like, well, how do i know? I said ask for the birth certificates like what? I said yeah, if it’s real, they have to bring out the birth certificate of the cow in the restaurant. They’ll have it, one for each little carton that they get. So the guy brings out the birth certificates, gives it as the nose print of the cow on it, it has a date when he was born, the date he was slaughtered, and all that kind of stuff. He’s like, alright. So now every time we’re in Vegas, it’s Kobe beef time.
Norman 35:46
We’ve done it every time we get together.
Kevin 35:50
I’ve actually flown to Japan just to eat it and I was on the way back from Australia one time. I could have flown from Australia directly to the US. I was like nope, I’m going to take a side trip, go to Tokyo. I got to Tokyo, nine o’clock at night, something like that, dropped my bags in the hotel, ran to the restaurant that had 10 o’clock reservations at or whatever it was. That’s like on the 52nd floor of a building in downtown Tokyo and had a really nice Kobe beef meal where they cook it at your table for you and it’s just amazing and flew back out the next morning.
Kevin 36:22
That’s how much I like Kobe beef.
Norman 36:24
Well, buddy, at the end of every episode, I have one question that I like to ask our guests and that’s if they know a guy?
Kevin 36:35
I know a lot of guys, but I also know a lot of gals and I think something that would be very, very interesting is instead of getting another guy that I know that maybe is successful in business or has an interesting story. That’s all cool, but there’s a lot of those. Why don’t you get in the case of a guy, the girl that’s behind the guy, because a lot of times us guys can’t do what we do unless we have a strong, supportive, loving girl behind us. A lot of times they have a different perspective on how things are going and can tell you some very interesting stories that will actually, we all can learn from and they take for example, we talked earlier about Manny coats and Helium 10 is his girlfriend, Mariana it’s been with him for a long time. She sold a little bit on Amazon. She has been there the whole time, I think she would have some very interesting perspective and can tell some really cool fascinating stories about what it took and what she saw in him and what they went through from her eyes, not from Manny’s eyes to actually build what they were able to build in such a short amount of time.
Norman 37:44
That is really cool, Kevin. I like it. So yeah, that would be fantastic. I’d love to have Mariana on.
Kevin 37:53
I will do, you know what I’ll do is I’ll reach out to her and see if I can make that happen for you.
Norman 37:58
Fantastic. Thank you Sir. So, Mr. King, thank you for being on the podcast.
Kevin 38:07
Are we done? We’ve only been here for six hours.
Norman 38;09
I know. I know. You know what? We could go another six
Kevin 38:12
Hayden’s like, damn man, I’m hungry man.
Norman 38:14
I know.
Kevin 38:17
He’s like, ah shit, I got to edit this. I got it. This is like, this is like four podcasts and more I gotta edit. Damn.
Kevin 38:26
He’s like, Oh man.
Norman 38:29
But you know what? This is what I love about meeting great people, forming a great friendship. You could just talk forever. So I can’t wait to bump into you at some events, somewhere around the world.
Kevin 38:42
Yeah, cigars are ready. So I see Kevin there. So are you going to go smoke a cigar with Kevin Norm?
Norman 38:51
Absolutely. Matter of fact, Kevin and I are going to go out right after this and enjoy a cigar. What kind of cigar would you like Kevin?
Kevin 39:02
I don’t know, like a Romeo and Juliet, please.
Norman 39:05
Okay, we’ll do that.
Kevin 39:08
Awesome. It’s been great being on here, Norm. I appreciate it, man.
Norman 39:11
Hey, thanks for coming on, Kev.
Kevin 39:13
Well, see you soon man.
Hayden 39:16
That concludes part two of our interview with Kevin King. Make sure to tune in next time where we have Todd Snively on the show. Todd is another one of those serial entrepreneur types. However, we spend most of the episode going over how his life totally fell apart at one point and his long arduous journey of putting it back together, all the way up to being one of the top sellers on Shopify. Make sure to tune in and check that one out. That’s enough for me, and I’ll see you next time.
