Todd is an entrepreneur who is currently involved in shopify and online business. However, the journey that got him there involved a long battle in court with the U.S. government where ultimately, Todd had no choice but to face time in prison.
Todd walks us through this rollercoaster step by step, how it feels to have everything you could ever want, to watch it slip away and the process of rebuilding a life.
Date: September 15, 2020
Episode: 20
Title: Norman Farrar Introduces Todd Snively, an EntrepreneurCurrently Involved in Amazon and Online Business.
Subtitle: “You gotta be hungry.”
Final Show Link: https://iknowthisguy.com/episodes/ep-20-todd-snively/
In this episode of I Know this Gal…, Norman Farrar introduces Todd Snively, an entrepreneur currently involved in Shopify and online business.
Todd Snively’s entrepreneurial journey was never easy. He walks us through this rollercoaster step by step, how it feels to have everything you could ever want, to watch it slip away and the process of rebuilding a life.
If you are a new listener to I Know this Guy…, we would love to hear from you. Please visit our Facebook Page and join in on episode discussion or simply let us know what you think of the episode!
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Todd 0:00
The cab pulls up where to? I’m like take me to this prison and he’s oh, who are you visiting? I go, oh a friend. So he pulls me up to the main gate. I’m getting out and he says to me, you want me to wait for you?
Todd 0:17
I couldn’t help but laugh, cuz I wanted to say you got five years.
Norman 0:31
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 know. 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?
Norman 1:00
Hayden, do you remember Elena Saris?
Hayden 1:03
Of course I do.
Norman 1:05
This is the person that she said was the most interesting guy that she knew.
Hayden 1:12
That’s a pretty big statement considering how awesome Elena was.
Norman 1:17
Yeah and she knows a lot of people. But yeah, you got to get to know Todd Snively and the backstory about how we met is crazy. So I’m sure we’re going to touch on that during the podcast, and it’s one of the weirdest introductions you can imagine.
Hayden 1:39
Weirder than my birth.
Norman 1:40
That was weird, too.
Norman 1:44
Alright, so let’s get to the podcast.
Hayden 1:46
Alright, let’s do it.
Norman 1:50
So welcome, Todd to the podcast.
Todd 1:52
Thanks, Norm. It’s a real pleasure to be here today.
Norman 1:56
This is the first time with the Big Showtime props, we invested into orange bulbs. So new studio just for you.
Todd 2:05
I was completely impressed when I saw the soundproofing on the wall. I said, Wow, this guy’s professional. He knows what he’s doing.
Todd 2:12
That’s just a green screen.
Norman 2:14
No. Uh, yeah, we spent $10 and got the foam up on the wall and spent another dollar 99 on the orange bulbs. So, hey, we’re high tech, Joe Rogan watch out.
Todd 2:27
The real question is, was it worth it? To get the value from that spender? No.
Norman 2:32
We’ll find out in a few more of these episodes.
Todd 2:36
I think it sounds pretty good to be honest with you. So I think I think you did. Alright.
Norman 2:40
Alright. So we have got one of the weirdest introduction stories. We met a few years ago, and it was through Elena Saris, and I want you to touch on that story because it still dries. I mean, I still laugh about it. How we met. You want to go there?
Todd 3:00
Yeah, sure, that’s actually a pretty good place to start. Because there, if people can read between the lines, there’s some lessons in what happens, right. So to your point, Elena is really, really good at putting people together that should meet each other for mutual benefit. Right and we, unbeknownst to me, right, you were down at this conference in Acapulco, I believe it was. I was there and Elena had been introducing me to a bunch of people and it got a little when I say a little late at night, like eight o’clock for an old guy like me. So I go back to my room and I’m just starting to relax, and Elena starts blowing up my phone and I’m ignoring her for the first five calls and then finally I answered, I’m like, What? She’s like, you got to come out here. I got somebody you have to meet. This guy’s amazing. He’s the nicest guy ever, you need to meet him. I’m like Elena, I just got in bed, I’m tired. No, and I hung up on her and I can do that, because we’re really good friends, Elaine and myself, right and so, and I thought to myself, well, I feel kind of bad. But I met like 50 people today and I’m tired. I’m just going to do me right now. So the next day was the last day of the conference and I actually didn’t see much of Elena that day. So we just piled into the vans to go to the airport and there were actually a few interesting people in the van and you were one of them. But I didn’t really know, you are the person that Elena was trying to hook me up with at the time. So we got to the airport, I got out of the van and it seemed like you were following me and I’m like why is that guy following me? Well, I’m going to go to the airline now. Maybe he’ll go to another line. You get right behind me in the check in line. I’m like, what is going on? Finally, I turned around and I talked to you and found out we were on the same flight to Detroit, you were connecting to Canada and I lived in Michigan at the time and then I found out, you were the guy that Elena was trying to introduce me to the night before and then I felt terrible, of course. But, I’m so glad that we were able to meet that way. Because the way these streams cross, I may have never had another opportunity to got to meet you personally. Right? Since then, we’ve shared meals together and we’ve been at other conferences and I can honestly tell you, I don’t do a lot of these interview type things, but you’re one of the nicest guys that I’ve met in this whole industry alone. So that was one reason why I’m more than happy to come on today and just in case anybody watching this doesn’t really know you. You should know Norms, one of the nicest guys I’ve ever met.
Norman 6:00
I’m gonna turn red.
Norman 6:03
But it was funny. It was absolutely hilarious. Like, and I saw you check in like looking back once in a while and there were two seats separating us on the plane. When we finally kind of talked and found out that Yeah, oh, you’re Todd and you’re Norm. But thank you Elena, because this has been a great relationship and that’s another reason why I’m such a firm believer in going to these conferences and meeting really interesting people. Even if you meet that one person, but that conference By the way, I met so many interesting people that I never would have had a chance to meet and I’m still friends with a lot of them and that was a few years ago.
Todd 6:45
Exactly. I remember another one I went to, I won’t say what it was, but don’t get me wrong. I’m sure the programming was good, but I spent 90% of my time out in the hallway just meeting people in the networking, it was to your point, then I don’t think people understand how important the networking is at an event, the people that go to an event and just sit in a chair and stare at the presenter and take notes are missing a big part of why they’re there, and why they paid the expense and took the time. It’s not always the programming.
Norman 7:20
You’ve got to, if you’re worried about going outside of your comfort zone, you gotta do it and I am an introvert. It takes a lot to just go up to a group and say, Hey, my name is Norm, how’s it going? But if you don’t do it, you’ll never be able to meet people and if you’re sitting back just thinking all people are gonna think bad of me, they’re gonna think I’m stupid. No way, there’re so many really great people and sometimes like you. I mean, you are a mover and a shaker in this business, and to be able to go up and say, hey,Todd in for you to turn around and start talking. I know that didn’t happen. But, it’s awesome because I’ve met so many people. Exchange cards, or you could tap your phones or whatever you do. But yeah, that’s how you grow and that’s how you grow your business, like, your network is where you can find all the answers, right. So how big did you grow your network? Or how influential is your network now, because of the networks?
Todd 8:29
That’s an interesting question, but I want to answer it maybe a little differently than you would expect. Because I’ve had a lot of different businesses over the years. The first one was in 1983, and people would ask me, what are you thinking? Why would you start a business? Why would you leave that business or sell that business or call that business dead and then go into another business? What’s the thought process there? A lot of it has to do with what you’re talking about, but I look at it this way. I think people need to be prepared to take advantage of opportunities when they present themselves. So when I call myself a serial entrepreneur, I tell people, what I’m actually doing is following the money. Alright? So if I’m involved in a venture, and for whatever reason, another opportunity presents itself that I think is a better opportunity, I will immediately begin investing that and if it means an exit plan out of the other opportunity, or at least putting it on autopilot, I make that decision. Because I’m always trying to be onward and upward, onward and upward. I don’t like taking steps backward, even though I have in the past. It’s supposed to be about forward momentum. Now one of the ways you can do that is by having a big network of people, because when you have a big network of people that you’re plugged into and engaged with, and you’re out there making things happen, you know what? Opportunities are going to present themselves and every time an opportunity presents itself, because of being involved with networks of people, usually. I would make the decision of whether to take advantage of it or not. But until you can open up your mind to that kind of mindset. You’re never going to take advantage of anything because you’re never going to see the opportunities right and to your point I’m, I don’t want to call myself anti social but I’m sure I am shy, okay and when I go into those big events that you’re talking about, there’s so many type A personalities buzzing around. I almost feel ill, it’s, I don’t know what it is, but it’s just overpowering because I am not a strong type A personality. I like to take advantage of opportunities and get things done and have forward progress. But you don’t need a type A personality to do that and I’m like proof positive of that. Because to your point for me to walk up to somebody and introduce myself, that’s a one out of 100 proposition. I need people like Elena to drag me erect.
Norman 11:20
Exactly. Yeah. She’s the conduit.
Norman 11;23
I gotta tell you about an event I went to, you just talked about type A. So get this, and I’m not exaggerating. So I walk into this room. It’s like a big hotel room in Toronto and people are mingling and this guy comes up to me, and he, hi, how are you? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. , and he doesn’t even say, what’s my name or anything like that? He sticks out his hand, and I shake his hand, and I feel something in his hand. What the hell and I open it up and it’s a paycheck, and it goes that’s right. That’s my last month’s pay and I’m sitting there going, who the hell does this?
Norman 12:09
I don’t care. What a jerk!
Todd 12:11
For a second, I thought you were gonna tell me it was his room key and that was like, I don’t like where the story is going.
Norman 12:18
I think I would’ve felt better.
Todd 12:24
People are interesting. I’ll tell you that’s another than another eye opening thing for me being in business this long, almost 40 years now. People are interesting, for sure..
Norman 12:36
Oh, yeah.
Norman 12:38
Hey, look, uh, during every podcast, we talk about interesting quotes. Can you share that quote with us?
Todd 12:46
Sure. One of my favorite quote is you gotta be hungry and that’s from Les Brown. I could probably quote Les Brown more than any other person because less drives around right to the heart of the matter as to why people usually fail to become successful. If you’re not hungry, forget about it. It’s over. It’s over. I see people all the time in dead end jobs, miserable, not earning what they’re worth and they’ll come to me and say, help me, I want to start a business, I want to sell on Amazon or whatever just help me and then I’ll talk to them and I’ll say, well, you’ll probably have to work into the evening a little bit or on a Saturday because you’ve got this job. I don’t know about that. Then I’m like, okay, we’re done. You’re not hungry. You are not hungry. So, if you don’t have that drive, it’s over before it starts because you can’t have somebody pull you through to success. It doesn’t work that way.
Norman 13:56
Yeah, absolutely agree. I love what you just said. Because it’s happened a few times where people first of all think that you’re lucky because you’re busy or because you’re successful. They don’t understand the work behind it. They don’t see the weekends, they don’t see the sleepless nights. Well, when I was young, sleepless nights, I’ve learned to handle stress better. But you talk to people, they’ll come up and you’ll say, yeah, you need to do this. Here’s some advice, and they look at you like a deer in the headlights and I’m not going to work a weekend. I’m doing this because I read a book that I can only work two hours a week or two hours a day and yes, the ideal situation is you can do that. But usually if I’m working like four hours a day, I’m probably thinking about another venture I could get working on which takes up the other four hours a day. But yeah, you got to be willing, you gotta have that. I love what you just said. You gotta be hungry.
Todd 14:50
Yeah, the people by the way, you just push the button of mine, one of my pet peeves, because I get this every now and then. That Oh, you’re lucky, you got lucky. You were just at the right place, right time. That was just all luck and you just want to punch him in the face. I haven’t been lucky one single time in my life. I worked my butt off and so that one drives me a little crazy to be honest.
Hayden 15:19
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, MLA, 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.
Norman 15:55
So look, we got to get into this backstory because you’ve told me a little bit of your back story and my mouth dropped. But let’s get into this. I want to know, what made Todd, Todd?
Todd 16:09
Sure. I’ll tell you what I think about this a lot, because
Todd 16:16
I really feel that over my lifetime since I, since I’ll say go all the way back to being 15 years old. There’s been a development, a process that I’ve gone through and when you’re in that process, a lot of times you don’t know that. Matter of fact, you can be in a terrible mindset and not even know it, because you just don’t know the difference sometimes and so I can look back now, you know that old Monday morning quarterbacking thing, and not even recognize who I was, even all the way back to age 17. But there’s been a few defining moments in my life, and probably too many to talk about today. But I want to start at one spot and just kind of move forward because the progression might help a lot of people, maybe it won’t, but it helps me talking about it because I joke about this every now and then. But this is a lot cheaper than therapy. I mean, we can knock out probably 10 years of counseling fees just in a good a good talk like this, and also have people hold me accountable to what I say about it, because not everybody will agree with some of my conclusions, but I’ll tell you where my life really, really took a change was 1989 and I was laying in bed, watching TV, and I think it was the Late Show or The Late Late Show and it was getting late. This commercial came on and it was one of those commercials you may or may not have ever seen, one where this real pretty girl promises to blow in your ear and say nice things. If you call this 900 number, and she’s gonna charge you 2,3,5 dollars a minute to talk to you in a certain way and I saw this commercial and the first thought that went through my head was who gets that $5 a minute, right? I didn’t care about the girl. I was like $5 a minute. Holy crap, that’s a lot of money. So, at the time, I was involved, I was investing in real estate, and doing pretty good and the story of how I got there is maybe for another time. But I spent about six months trying to figure out who gets at $5 a minute, right? Back then 1989, nobody really knew this whole 900 number, information business was brand new, and it was dominated by porn. 99% of the 900 numbers were porn, right? So it was very difficult to figure this out. Finally, I got to the right people, I got the right information and I was able to get my own 900 number setup, right? Now, the way that worked and this if I try to think about this in respect to how things work today selling information and trying to get the correlation. But basically the rule was, you could only sell information. You couldn’t say call this 900 number for $29 and you’re paying for a blue widget. You couldn’t do that. They want Jesus to sell information. Now how they thought these girls blowing in your ear was information was beyond me. But in any event, I came up with this program that took a mixture of income profit centers. The first one is affiliate marketing. I went to a large bank that had just started a brand new product called a secured credit card and for those of you that don’t know, if you get really bad credit, you can get a credit card, some banks will say, hey, put 500 bucks in a savings account, we’ll give you a credit card with a $500 limit. That was a brand new product back in 1989 and these banks were trying to figure out how to market it. So I made a deal with one of the banks to market their program and they would give me a percentage of the application fee people were paying. So what I did was I made this 900 number program, how to get a credit card, how to get a secured credit card, I showed the application, talked about the benefits. Call this 900 number, the cost of the call is 24.99 and we’re going to tell you all about how to get a secured credit card and absolutely free, we’re gonna send you this application. Think about that for a second, it was unique back then and I didn’t know if I was gonna make any money doing this. First, I had to figure out how to get the 900 number, right and oh, and just so you know, for that 24.99 call, I would net $17. Okay, so I got the 900 number setup and then I’m like, Okay, I need to get a TV commercial made because I’m very linear at this point, the girl blowing in my ear was on TV. Right? So I gotta go get a TV commercial night. So I went to a local TV place and I said, how do I get a TV commercial made? They said, well, does it require actors? No. You can use stock footage. Yeah, well, okay, sit down. Let’s make a commercial. I’m like, seriously? They go. Yeah, well, if you buy some airtime from us, we’ll just make the commercial for you. So literally in 45 minutes, they made me 30-second and 60-second TV commercials, broadcast quality and then I’m like, Okay, now we need to put it on and I wanted the exact, I wanted to do the same thing. The girl blowing in your ear was doing, two in the morning, three in the morning, four in the morning. So that TV station wanted $50 a spot for that overnight stuff and they wouldn’t guarantee the times they just said, Yep, it’ll air between 2am and 5am. You have to buy at least five. So it cost me $250 to buy these five commercials. So when are they going to air? Tonight. Oh, okay, so I’m up all night now waiting for my first TV commercial to air and it came on at 3am and I was so excited to watch it. Right. So the commercial ended and I had this phone number that I could call into to get what was called a call count. Right? This was very low tech back then a call count and basically, you’d hear this robotic voicing. You’ve received two calls, and I was like two calls. Oh, $35. I almost broke even on the ad, right? Or I did breakeven and so all night I’m up waiting for my ads to run, right. Get to the end, I ended up netting 1700 dollars. By the time those commercials were done running for that one little thing. So my next thought was I need more commercials. So long story short, I became kind of like really in the media and ended up going on WGN nationwide, they had I don’t know if you remember there’s this channel called the TV Guide, where or the preview channel, they would show you what’s on every single channel and it would scroll on the bottom part of the of the screen and then at the top, they showed commercials, right? So when I figured out how to get on that preview guide, my ad costs went down to 15 cents for every 30-second TV ad that I was running. Wow. Yeah, I ended up spending 1000 I don’t remember the exact number. But within a month, that first program had netted over $600,000 for me that one program, right? So the next thing in my mind is I need more programs. I need to keep rolling this one out and let’s do more and, eventually, this is kind of funny. Well , I don’t know how funny it is, but people were starting to ask me, What are you doing? How are you doing this? Teach me, teach me, teach me, that’s just kind of how it goes right? So I actually developed a training program way back then. How to become financially free with 900 telephone numbers and I eventually became something called a service sureau. So I invested in all of the equipment, all of the technology, all of the people necessary to host these programs and because I was paying my service bureau when I started 15 cents a minute that’s why you don’t get the whole 24.99 or whatever, because the phone company gets some and then the people with the equipment get some. So eventually, I got the equipment, and I made the course so that I could go out and get other people generating minutes on my equipment so that I could make five cents a minute off of all the traffic that they generate and I eventually had over 3000 customers on that service bureau generating over two and a half a million minutes a month, right. That business was pretty cool. We did no porn, no psychic hotlines or anything like that. It was all information. Matter of fact, we developed the very first it was one 1900 info law where you could talk to a lawyer for $5 a minute and ask them anything. They were out of Huntington Beach, California. We did ask a nurse. We did charitable programs. I worked with Clint Eastwood and the US Marshals Foundation to raise money for charity. We did a lot of stuff like that. It was a lot of fun. Now at the time MCI, I don’t know, I don’t know if anybody even remembers who MCI is. But back then there were certain long distance carriers. AT&T, Sprint, MCI, right. Okay. The long distance portion of the technology was taken care of by MCI and we paid them. I think it was 10% of the call as a billing fee and then so much a minute, just like you paid for long distance back then was so much a minute, I want to say it was 17 cents a minute to MCI and at this point, our business was in Colorado Springs and we were dealing with the MCI office in Colorado Springs. So I went there one day to meet the manager and the manager said, wow, you got a lot of 900 number traffic, he goes, is there any chance you can get us a bunch of 800 number traffic? I immediately, here’s one of the first mistakes that I made back then in that business was I just without even thinking said no and what I should have said is, well, why are you asking? Because it turned out this guy’s paycheck depended heavily on commissions and the commission’s on the 800 traffic were gigantic and then the 900 number traffic was almost nonexistent, yet the overhead to run his office didn’t matter, right. If he needed to hire more people to handle the review of my 900 number applications, remember I had over 3000 of them and all that, that overhead would come out of his P&L, but he wasn’t seeing any money from the traffic. I didn’t understand that at that time. Right. Well, they had a lot of rules, especially about sex programs. Back then people were using 900 numbers even to deal drugs, literally. People would hand out a 900 number and it would cost people 50 bucks to learn where to buy crack that afternoon. Yeah, it was crazy. It was crazy and so they were heavily monitoring the 900 numbers to make sure that if the application you sent in was for a daily inspirational prayer line, that you were, in fact, praying for these people and not telling them where to buy crack, which might be an extreme.
Norman 28:17
Or maybe praying for a crack.
Todd 28:21
So here we are doing two and a half million minutes a month, I am traveling the country doing live presentations to introduce people to this opportunity. We have over 3000 people who have done this, and I get a letter one day, just a letter, right in the first class mail, from MCI, from the guy that was running that office, and it said pursuant to this section of your contract, we’re terminating all services in the next 30 days. That was it, Sincerely yours, blah, blah, blah. I had to read it twice to really absorb the gravity of what was happening and so I called the guy up, Hey, I just got this letter, what’s the what’s going on? You know what he said to me? You should have given me more 800 number traffic, colic. I was like, oh, my goodness, I couldn’t believe what not only couldn’t I believe that, that he could do that as like a regional manager. I couldn’t believe that I put myself in a situation where a multi million dollar business could be put out by a bureaucrat, basically a manager, right. So I got on the phone, and I called AT&T and though there were two guys, two sales guys from AT&T, that were probably in my office once a month, trying to get me to either switch from MCI or at least give them some traffic, put some programs up with us and I was really cocky back then and I didn’t listen to people and I just felt I was kind of in a whole different level, if you will, it’s even terrible for me to look back now and even think like that, but I was an asshole. I was and I got what I deserved, I think. But in any event, I called these guys up and I didn’t tell him about what had happened with MCI. But I said, Hey, I mean, I’m giving it some thought. Would you guys like some business? Like, we’ll be right down. So they drove down from Denver, about an hour to my Colorado Springs office. It gave me a little more of a pitch, right? I said, Okay, I’ll give you 100% of my traffic, two and a half million minutes a month, if you will contractually agree that the transition will happen before 30 days. They didn’t know my back was up against the wall, but they agreed. They completely agreed. They said we’ll have everybody switched over. Now there was some friction. Yet, everybody had to change numbers back then. MCI owns their numbers, AT&T own their numbers. So I had to go to all of my clients and say, we’re going to make this switch to AT&T. Here are the pros. There’s many of them. Here are the cons. There’s a couple and one of the cons was you got to change your numbers, right. 97% of my clientele said, Okay, sounds good. Well change our TV ads, we’ll change our radio commercials, we’ll change the number in all the marketing. That was a lot to ask. But they said okay, 97% of them. 30 days go by, we’re ready for the switchover. Everybody’s got their numbers out in the advertising and everything and not a single number was worth it. Not one. What? Not one. So I get on the phone to AT&T, and I’m like, Hey, guys, did you forget to hit the button, flip a switch or what’s going on? Yeah, we’re having technical problems. I said, well, when did this happen? Nobody said anything to me. He said, we need two more weeks.
Norman 32:11
Oh,
Todd 32:13
So now I have to go back to everybody and say, I need two more weeks. Alright. Long story short, two weeks, turned into six weeks and over that six week period of time, I lost every customer. Every single one of them jumped ship, they had no choice. They had to go to another service bureau, get a working number because they were losing money. I mean, they’re generating two and a half million minutes a month and nobody’s going to lose money for me, nor would I ever ask them to. Alright, so I’m sitting at my desk. Very expensive office, right. But all these employees and all this overhead, I’m like, what am I gonna do? The phone rings and there’s a business broker and he said, and this business broker had been calling me for the last year trying to get me to sell my business, the service bureau and he says, Are you still interested in selling? I said, Well, I got a small problem. I don’t have a service bureau anymore. They go, do you still have the equipment? I’m like, Yeah. Do you still have the patent that you had developed on that call forwarding, redirect PC board? I’m like, yeah, still got that. That’s all they really want, the interested party. I have an interested party that wants to buy your company, do an asset sale, because of that patent, like, okay, so I got pretty much my full asking price for a company that I was about to walk away from. I had no idea what it was really worth without the business itself. Now coincidentally, my first daughter was born right when this happened, so it was a pretty easy decision to take the money and just take some time off and we were able to give all of the employees a real nice severance and I’m still friends to this day with most of them. So that part of it went better, better than it could have. So here I am now with no business. I’m at home all the time enjoying my first daughter. Matter of fact looking back in my life, that was probably one of the happiest times of my entire life was the summer I spent with my firstborn as a baby in the beautiful summers of colorado springs are just amazing memories that I have and then one day like we every evening like my wife and I always did. We were watching a movie we had rented from blockbuster and actually it was my wife who had made the comment. We rent so many movies, we could probably afford to buy a video store. How you make off handed comments like that and I kind of chuckled, and then thought for a second, and I said, yeah, you might be right. So the next day, so I had actually been without a business for all of three months, I had no idea what I was gonna do and I went out and I bought a video store. Now, this video store was in the middle of a rundown neighborhood, probably six blocks off the main street, had been there 12 years and you could tell it was not loved by its owner. It was not cared for or nurtured. It was awful. It was a terrible store. So I was able to get a great deal. A great deal and my wife said to me, well, how are you going to get traffic to that store? I said, I’m not, I’m going to move the store and I moved it right next door to a blockbuster and everybody thought I was crazy. They’re like, why would you move right next to your largest competition? Everybody’s gonna go into the blockbuster. I said, why do they go into the blockbuster? Well, because they have all the new releases and all of that. I said, okay, what if I had a guarantee that if you come into my store for that new release, that’s out this week, and if I don’t have it, you get any movie in the stores free? Because I made a deal with a company to lease as many copies of the new release as I need and I was paying them on a pay per copy paper rental basis. Alright. Now, I’m kind of going really fast on this story. But I think there’s some things to be learned from that. So I’m right next to my largest competitor, making an offer they can’t even make, right and then, even if somebody went into the blockbuster and they didn’t have it, they came right back right into my store and say you do have this hot movie that blockbuster doesn’t have? I go Oh, you mean this one right here? Yeah, sure and, and we were able to do lots of things that they couldn’t do on a dime. I mean, we could pivot, pivot, pivot whenever we had to, and that business, that video store was was probably the most fun and now, it didn’t make me millions, like the 900 number and I actually call that business accurate. When people ask me about it, say, Yeah, I had a marketing company, because I don’t want to explain to them how I wasn’t a purveyor of sex numbers. But that was a lot of work. The video store, now that was fun. I really liked that. What I really liked about it was taking it from basically failure and elevating it to a six figure net profit business. I would say on average, that business made about 110,000 in my pocket every year. Well then the fun stopped. Alright. My wife came to me and said, my dad’s sick, really sick and he’s back in Michigan where we both grew up in Michigan and she’s like, can we move back to Michigan? So I can be with my dad for however much time he has left and then when he passes, if you want to come back to Colorado, we’ll come back, we’ll do whatever. I’m like, Yeah, sure. I mean, she had never really asked for anything major like that before,so I’m like sure. So it was like an instant thing, three weeks later. I’ll never forget that day. We sold the house in Colorado, closed on that and then closed on the house in Michigan. She was in Michigan. I was in Colorado with a double closing and then I had to drive, finished packing up the trucks, with the movers and then I had to drive from Colorado Springs to Michigan. So it was right around the time of the birth of my second daughter 1994 that we moved back to Michigan and I didn’t have a job. I had some ideas. I thought the video store was going to be fine in Colorado, that’s why I left it there. It was doing great. I didn’t want to move it, I couldn’t even find a good spot in Michigan. But, it was an all cash business that I left in the hands of a 19 year old manager. So yeah, you can imagine that that did not end well. He would send me the profit reports every week, and they were looking looking like I was going over a waterfall in a barrel was
Norman 39:35
So much for your $110,000.
Todd 39:37
Gone. Yeah, I mean, I was counting on that money, right. But I ended up going back to Colorado walking in, firing him on the spot. I worked at the cash register for a couple of days until Sunday night, then closed the business for good, liquidated it and headed back to Michigan. So when I got there, maybe a couple of months and I was trying to figure out what to do. Kinda looking at a few smaller projects. But I was contacted by one of my former clients, with the marketing, with the 900 number business and he said, Hey, I want to hire you to do some consulting, we’re going to do this or that or the other thing. I’m like nah, I’m just not interested in doing that right now I’m looking for, like the next thing. Now this guy was a world class, very successful commodity trader, he traded futures contracts and he had won contests like millions of dollars, he’d win in these con trading contests. He was that good. So his information was valuable. So he started a 900 number, where he would charge per minute to tell people what they should do, what kind of futures contracts they should trade things like if gold hits $600 an ounce in the June contract, buy it at the market, that kind of thing. He would just talk and talk and talk and people were paying per minute to listen, and then maybe implement his advice and he was doing really, really well with it. He was one of the guys that ended up having to take his program somewhere else because of what happened with AT&T. When I told him no, he said, well tell you what, I just wrote a training program on how to trade futures. I want to send it to you as a thank you and I’m thinking, What am I going to do with this? Right? But I’m like, Okay, thank you and when it showed up, I started to go through it and was amazed, not only because I understand what he was talking about. But I had this epiphany, I felt it was an epiphany, where I had just found something I had been looking for my entire life, right? This was numbers driven, it was analytical, I could do it on a computer. You could make a lot of money. I said, wow, this whole thing just really, really spoke to me for some reason and so I immediately set up my trading office, right and just got consumed with day trading. So I’m thinking, okay, I need to figure out how to do this the right way. So I saw this ad in the newspaper from one of these brokerage firms that said, we will show you how to trade pretend wise, they call it paper trading and then when you’re ready, when you’re making money doing this paper trading, then we’ll help you with the live trades. But in order to take advantage of this free training, you had to transfer like $5,000 into a real brokerage account so when you were ready, right? So I was assigned a broker and when I wanted to, I could call him and ask questions. So I’m watching my, I’m watching the data and like, Oh, looks like I should buy the S&P 500 here, so I called him up and I said my signals are telling me I should buy the S&P 500 right now, what do you think? You know what he said to me?
Norman 43:06
What’s that?
Todd 43:07
Do you want to do it as a live trade? Because he doesn’t get paid. If I pay per trade, no commissions on paper trading and I’m sitting there and I said, what do you think I should? He said, looks good to me, like buy one at the market and so he took my very first futures trade with knowing absolutely pretty much nothing, right? How you get just enough information to be dangerous, right? While the worst possible thing could have happened. In the next three minutes, I made 1200 dollars and you’re like, well, why was that the worst possible thing because I thought it was easy, all of a sudden at all. There’s nothing to this right and you generally don’t want to approach anything that has to do with large amounts of money, but that kind of an attitude. But I don’t know what happened over the next six months, seven, eight months, I just kept making money. There were losers, but we were managing the downside and trying to maximize the upside.
Todd 44:15
Because of my mindset in there, I almost felt I was infallible, to an extent it was like, wow, this is easy? Remember, asshole, I was an asshole. So, other people, it was very natural would say, hey, you just bought a brand new BMW. I’m like, yep. Well, How’d you do that? I trade futures. Oh, well, will you trade some of my money? Huh? Sure and there was an exemption under the law that allowed me to trade for 15 people without having any kind of license or anything. Well, I hit those 15 people really quick. So I had to make a decision, right, what am I going to do? We were doing really well with everybody and so I went and I got licensed what’s called a series three and so now I’m licensed, I went and got another license called commodity trading advisor, which allowed me to solicit funds from more than 15 people and trade on their behalf with their authorization and all that. Well, a couple of years have gone by, and I think the first year, our returns were 138%, in the second year it was 187%. Now institutional money is starting to come to me, and they would have big large pension funds that would have 100 million dollars to put out into the market somewhere. We’re dropping a million or 2 million, into my hands just because of the returns right in the record. Well, then one day, I’ll never forget this day. This was another one of those worst days of my life and I didn’t even know what was going on. I just woke up one morning and the position that we were in, had gone against us and that just a little bit. I mean, in the market, they have this thing called limit up or limit down, where the market moves so violently, so fast and in such an amount that they will stop trading, they call that limit down or limit up and I was in a situation where I needed the market just kind of stay mellow. But instead it made a limit move and my phone started to blow up with a brokerage firm and they’re like, what are you gonna do? I’m like, well, what do you guys think? Yeah, no, we’re out of this it’s up to you and so I ended up wiring in pretty much everything I had of my personal money, just to keep the position open one more day because they basically said if you don’t wire in X, millions, we’re just going to close it and take the loss because we don’t know if you’re good for it right? You got it. These are serious people and so I wired the money in and hoped right, just hoped. The next day the market opened limit down again another limit down. Oh, yeah. So they’re on the phone again to me. What are you gonna do? You want to wire in your life savings again, I gone nah, I did that once I don’t have anything left, right and so we literally stayed on the phone for four hours watching the market, see what it was going to do and it pulled back just enough right before the close to where I was able to say just close everything out. I was able to get out of everything. But I had lost everything. Absolutely. Not only all my money, right because I put up all of this other money that technically, other people should have put up because I wanted to keep the trade on. So not only did I lose all my money, I lost all everybody’s money right? I didn’t know what I was gonna do. I mean, I literally it was a feeling I never wanted to have and I made a lot of decisions right then and one of them was I’m never ever, ever going to be responsible for somebody else’s money. I’m never gonna, if I ever come out of this thing alive, I’m never gonna trade another nickel for anybody because the feeling was, oh my gosh, it’s just your entire spine being ripped out of your body. It’s just the worst thing. But at the same time,
Todd 48:32
I was at a crossroads. I was looking at what well, what are my options here? What am I going to do? I can shut everything down. Right? I can lay off all the employees, sell off all the equipment and just kind of wind things down, break my lease, take my chances and I would walk away after this liquidation with I figured out at the time I believe it was 300,000. Now, that wasn’t gonna come close to paying anybody back. Right? But one of my goals was to eventually pay everybody back. So I’m thinking, okay, I have this last 300,000. I can either shut everything down and just figure it out or I can figure out how to keep going in the commodity business and one of my brokers said to me, well, why don’t we do a discount brokerage firm? We can let people trade their own money, let them call their own shots, because there’s plenty of people that want to do that, not everybody wants their money managed. They want to go in there and make their own trades and so I went and got another license called an FCM, a Futures Commission merchant license, and invested some of the money that I had left into getting some different kinds of equipment. I had to have some software written and when I’m just about to figure out how to take this business live. The regulators told me I needed something called a clearing agreement with an exchange. I’m like, okay, so I went to talk, there wasn’t a lot of people that could give you this kind of an agreement and if you can imagine for a minute, the kind of oldboy network, that people that own the seats on these exchanges have, it’s a very, very small, close knit group and while they’re all competitors, per se, right, they don’t hurt each other. They operate their business in such a way that everybody gets some, everybody gets theres, and there’s a lot of dirty underbelly to that industry and I’m not the only person I think everybody that’s ever been in that industry will agree with that. A lot of times you just have to go home, take a shower, just because of what you see happening at that level. So anyway, when they found out I was opening a discount firm, they all got together and said, we’re not going to give this guy, nobody give this guy a clearing agreement, because he’s going to take customers from us that are paying us $50 a trade or $150 a trade and he’s going to charge $5 because that was a great idea, right? But it was going to hurt them. So they all said no. So I had to figure out, now what am I gonna do? I got almost everything invested in this new charting software I had developed and whatnot and I promised all of these people, I was going to pay them back from the commission’s I was going to earn from the discount firm, and so they were all being patient and then all of a sudden, I couldn’t get a clearing agreement. So I went to a lawyer, and I said, what can I do? He said, well against those guys, nothing. He said, but let me do some research and he came back to me, he says, Hey, I think under this obscure little law that hasn’t really been used before. Maybe you’ll be able to clear these trades on your own. If you put some money in an account to back against the trades. I said, was that a green light? Nice. Now I still got to really look at this was running out of time and remember, again back then, I would just make what I look back now and call irrational decisions. It was a lot of irrational thinking, a lot of just a justification of bad decisions and it had been a lifelong thing. So for me, it was nothing to say, I’m gonna do it anyway. Because in my mind, it was going to solve a lot of problems that could make the industry better for the customers. I make some money, I wouldn’t have to lay people off, I can pay these people back. So I said, I justified it completely irrational, but that’s what happened. So we started operating this way and just like I thought, we picked up
Todd 52:54
thousands of customers. Now when you’re taking the other side of the trade like I was. If they lose money, you make money. If they make money, it comes out of my pocket, right and the reason I was willing to do this was because what I had learned from the years in the business is 87% of everybody that trades their own money loses and futures trading is what’s called a zero sum game. If somebody makes $1. It came out of someone else’s account. If someone loses $1, it went into somebody else’s account, the money just moves around these different accounts. So I wanted to test this theory. If 87% of the people are going to lose their money, they might as well lose it to me, I’m willing to take that risk. Because I had no choice. I had no other way that I could see to make millions of dollars in a short order to pay back these other people whose money I’d lost while trading for them. So we implemented it. We had charting software that was better than anything out there. We had data direct from the exchanges, plugged into the software, was faster than anybody could buy from another service and word spread like wildfire and we picked up thousands and thousands of customers. The very first month that we were in business, I made $800,000 because the other people were making bad trades. I wasn’t telling them how to trade. I was giving no trading advice whatsoever. It was completely up to them. They did the research, they made their decisions. I couldn’t believe it, $800,000. The second month, little over 2 million and then it stayed at right around $2 million for the next five months. So after about six months, the government regulators came into the office for their audit, and they sat down and they asked for records and I gave them records and I went through everything and whatnot and at the end of the day they called me in and they go, we’re not 100% sure that what you’re doing here is according to all of the rules, and I was like, what? Really? I’m like, what do you mean? They go, Yeah, we got to go back and talk to the bosses and just review all of this and we’ll be in touch. So they left and I didn’t like the vibe, right? So I called a lawyer, a different lawyer, explained the whole thing to him and he goes, you got a problem? I said, I do. He goes, Yeah, he goes, I don’t know if that was 100% green light, what you’re doing, it might have been okay for currencies but not for wheat and things like that. Oh, he goes, I go, what should I do? He goes, Well, if I was you, I would just close down. Send everybody their money back and wait until they come back and tell you what they want you to change and then change it because what if you close down right now because that’ll go a long way just to show you trying to cooperate. Wow, that turned out to be terrible advice. By the way, here’s the other thing I’ve learned over the years. Not all of the advice that professionals give, should be taken carte blanche, right. I think professionals are good for input, but you should take that input and make your own decision. I feel the same way with doctors too. But back then, that was bad advice and I took it and I shut the business down, started to send the money back and then the big boys, the big government showed up, walked into the office and wanted to know why I shut down. I guess, even though I had communicated with the thousands and thousands of customers we had, a lot of them still panicked. They didn’t know if they were gonna get their money back or not. So they were ringing the phone off the hook with the enforcement people and that’s why the enforcement people walked into my office after the auditors..
Todd 57:00
I don’t believe these guys smiled once the entire time. Yeah and so they wanted to take complete control of the money and before I gave them all of the money, my only question was, how long is it going to take you to get this back to the customers? Right? They said not long. Well, not long and government talk is approximately two years. Right? I didn’t realize that. So things got real bad. The customers were thinking they’d lost their money. The government was saying that we’ve seized this money, the only way for you to get the money back is to fill out this complaint saying that you were defrauded. Think about that for a second. So what are these people going to do? I mean, what choice did you just give these people if they want their money back they got to file the complaint. So pretty much everybody filed a complaint except the people that it had made money and I had been, I had paid off and they got to keep those profits. They put me about, by the way, they put me about $2.2 million in debt. Because the government eventually came back and said, well, what we’re going to do is just pretend no trades ever happened. We’re gonna hit the reset button. So if Jimmy John put in 10 grand, you got to send him 10 grand. If this guy put in 25, you gotta send him 25. We’re just gonna call it like it never happened. I’m like, well, I already paid off the 50 to the guy that started with 25. I don’t have enough to pay everybody off and they go, Ah, yeah, you’re screwed, then. We’re gonna come after you. So, here I am 2.2 million in debt now, thinking wow, if I’d have just not done this, I could have had $300,000 and a chance to build something different. But no, I wasn’t. I wasn’t a man enough, I think is what it really came down to. I couldn’t make that hard of a decision. Because I was too used to the trappings of success. I had an airplane. I had a triple A office space, lots of employees, all cars, everything and I wasn’t man enough to give all of that up and figure something out, the shame, the disgrace, the public humiliation would have been too much and so I made this horrific decision to go this other route and now here I am 2.2 million in debt. The government saying yeah, we’re probably going to want to put you in prison. We gave them the house to bring the debt down to 1.9 million, right and did everything we could. We had to borrow money from my father in law, who by the way, was still alive. He was so healthy. At that he kind of kicked back from the cancer. He could have kicked but he was doing so good. So we never got back to Colorado we’re talking about now it’s 2002. Right. So all this started in 94 and thank I mean, thank goodness, he was still around, right? But unfortunately, he was around to see all of this and the day I had to go ask him for that money to buy a mobile home, here I am, I married your daughter. I said, I’d take care of her. I need your help and he wasn’t happy. But he helped and so we moved in, we gave our home over to the government, moved into a mobile home and by this point, I’d say we’re at 2004, right and I had started in February when all this was coming down. I was kind of shell shocked. I mean, literally, post traumatic stress. I couldn’t think straight, I couldn’t think past the next minute, to be honest with you, I was dealing with so much on a minute to minute basis I couldn’t think about tomorrow. Well, one of my friends who happened to be the chief of police of the town, right next two ours, invited me out to lunch and he was a good friend. But he also had to explain to me how he couldn’t have anything to do with me anymore because of all of the investigations and things like that and I understood. But he asked me the question, he said, what are you going to do now? This was February 2002 and I honestly said, I don’t know. I don’t have a clue. I’ll never forget this moment. He took a bite of his tuna salad sandwich and said, why don’t you sell stuff on eBay?
Hayden 1:01:53
Hey there guys and gals. That concludes part one of our interview with Todd Snively. Make sure to check in next time for part two, you thought that was enough bad luck for one guy. Just wait. I’m sorry to say there’s more coming. But he does let us know how we got through all that and how he pieced together his life and his business. That’s enough for me and I’ll see you next time.
Hayden 0:01
Hey there guys and gals. This is part two of our interview with Todd Snively. If you haven’t heard part one yet, make sure to go back and check that out first. As always, remember to subscribe to I Know This Guy, wherever you get your podcasts, it really helps us out. Now, for the rest of the show.
Todd 0:21
I’ll never forget this moment, he took a bite of his tuna salad sandwich and said, why don’t you sell stuff on eBay? I was like, What? eBay? He goes, Yeah, I think I’ve read about people making money on eBay. They just list’s stuff for sale. It sells, you make money. Alright, I’ll look into that, thinking I’m never gonna look into that right. But I drove home and I started to look around at some of the extra stuff we had laying around that now meant nothing to me and stuff that assholes buy. I had a framed $500 bill. Yeah. $500 bill? No, I’m sorry. It was a $1,000 bill, Woodrow Wilson on it. Stupid shit like that, right? Who buys a frame with a $1,000 bill, I think I paid $2500. Anyway, that was the very first thing I listed on eBay. I listed it for a penny and let it just go on auction for seven days and I think it’s sold for I want to say $1250, which happened to be exactly what it was worth. I paid way too much for it. I guess the frame was nice. I don’t know. Anyway, that and some other stuff that I just had laying around and I was shocked. Everything sold, and it sold for more money than I was expecting. So I said oh, there’s something to this. I can take it, I can figure out some processes and I think I can turn this into something that might make a decent income. So I got on the computer and I started to look for it was I think I googled wholesale used products, or something. I don’t know what I was doing. But I found this guy. I know this guy now and had never met him, right? Wonder where I heard that. I never met him. Just found him on Google. We got on a phone call with him. I told him my exact situation and he said, Okay, I’m gonna help you out. I have a truckload, 26 pallets of returned goods from Sam’s Club. So good load, it’s good load and so how much is it? I’m trying to think back. I think it was $6,000 and I’d actually asked my wife, I said, Hey, do you still have that last credit card? She goes, Yeah, I go, how much is on there credit wise? I think there was around 11, it was the last very last card, right? To this day, by the way, I still cannot get an American Express card. Those guys have a memory like an elephant. Anyway, so I put the 6000 on her credit card and he said, okay, the 26 pallets are on their way, they’re headed to your home. It should be there in three days or before. So I get off the phone. So the wife, okay, I did it, she goes, would you just do it? So I bought these 26 pallets and she goes where are you gonna put them? I said, well, we’re getting rid of all of our cars. I said, I’ll use the three car garage and she goes, Well, how big is a pallet? I said, I have no clue. She goes, well, you better figure it out. So I get online again, find out a pallet four by four, maybe 568 foot tall, right? But four by four, I go out and I measure my garage. I could fit 12 of the 26 in there. I go back in and she goes well, How’d that go? I said not good. She was gonna get it. What are you gonna do? I said long stuff. I can find more space. Now back at that time, it was a bit of a recession and there was lots of warehouse space available and I found one really close by. It was just a box, no offices or anything like that and it was an older guy who still did business with a handshake. So literally, after seeing the place for 20 minutes, he gave me the key and I don’t even remember I gave him any money. I’m pretty sure he said, I told him my situation also, he says, I’ll take 30 days, okay, fine. So then I go home, told my wife I got this space and she goes, great, how are you gonna unload the truck?
Todd 4:19
Well, man, stop with the problems!
Todd 4:24
So I call a place to rent a forklift and like, No, no, you don’t want to run a forklift because it’s really expensive. You got to pay us to bring it out, unload it, then it’s by the hour and then we got to come pick it up? Just Just buy a used one. So how much is a good used one? Sold me a good used forklift for 2000 and he took my wife’s last credit card, right? So they delivered the forklift and the truck is scheduled to show up three hours later. So I took those three hours to figure out how to drive this forklift. I’ve never driven one before. It’s not as easy as it looks. I don’t think. So I’m messing around. I’m thinking I’m gonna hurt myself or hurt somebody, all of a sudden it hit me. I’m sitting in this empty warehouse with this forklift, waiting for 26 pallets of gosh knows what to show up. Hoping that what I’m about to do is gonna work. I had no idea. I had literally sold nine items out of my house on eBay and now I just ordered 26 pallets. So anyway, the truck shows up, and the driver opens the doors and he sees me coming at him and he does one of these. So I stop, says, Is this your first time running a forklift? I’m like, Yeah, he’s like, get off, get off that thing. I want to be home before midnight. So he was kind enough to unload these 26 pallets and he did it like in no time. I totally understood where he was coming from and there I was alone again, and it was late. I started ripping open the palettes and after I opened the first couple, I kind of looked at what was there and I said, you know what? This might be okay. This might work. So I immediately just started going through and listing stuff on eBay and after a couple of weeks of seeing how fast and how much things were selling for versus what I what I had paid, I knew how many listings I had to make every single day in order just to break even on life, paying attorneys paying other people, our living expenses, and I did not leave that warehouse. If I got there at 5:30 in the morning and I had to stay till midnight, I did not leave until I hit that goal of the number of listings that I knew I had to make. Finally, after a few months, we got some breathing room and I was able to hire some employees to do the packing, and the listing and things like that, and that was a huge, huge relief. So long story short, mostly because of a deal that I was able to make with QVC. To buy, all of their customers returned Birkenstocks. There were some other brands too, but basically women’s shoes and I don’t know if you’ve ever seen how a woman buys shoes online, but she ordered 10 pairs. Maybe try them all on once and send eight pairs back like okay, I like these two, right and QVC had this policy that if somebody returned shoes, they wouldn’t even try to resell them or even open the box. They went right on a liquidation pallet and I was buying those things for 15 cents on the dollar, sometimes better, selling them for 80 to 90 cents on the dollar because they were in essence brand new shoes, right? That was the description, 90% of the time on eBay is a QVC customer return item that looks like the woman never even opened the box. Right? So Birkenstocks were, I thought very ugly. I came to call them my little gold bricks because I made so much money and learned so much about women’s shoes. It was crazy, more than I ever thought I would. But in any event, it took about 11 months of doing this, and we hit a million dollars in sales. I couldn’t believe it. I could not believe it and I was still to a certain extent in this post traumatic stress state because it was always something. Every time the phone rang and that God, is that going to be the lawyer? What is it? It’s not going to be American Express again, wanting their 50 grand. It was just, that’s the way it was. I was determined at that point. Once I saw that, okay, I’ve got maybe a viable way to come out of this not to go bankrupt. Right? Never filed bankruptcy, not ever. I just wanted to pay everybody back and work it out. Well, right around the end of 2004. My lawyer made it clear to me that the government was going to want me to have some sort of punishment. We didn’t know what but it was coming and I needed to prepare and at that time, I just started to dabble with Google AdSense and without turning this into a clinic on AdSense, if you have websites, and you put advertising from Google onto it, Google will pay you when people click on those ads. Turned out to be an amazing business back then. But I again had no idea how short term it would be. So we ended up selling off the distribution business, the eBay business and going full time into the AdSense business. Remember what I said before I tried to follow the money, right? To me, that was a dream business. No customers, no products, nothing. I could sit at the computer all day long. Make money during business. So I went all in on that. Well, in January 2005, I found out that they wanted me to go plead guilty to one count of mail fraud and the prosecutor, short story. There was no plea deal or anything he just said, if you agree to go in and plead straight up guilty without a plea deal and leave your punishment up to the judge. Well, we won’t go after any of your other employees. Nothing like that. Okay, that’s good because one of my employees was a relative and couldn’t stand the thought of what might happen. So I said, Okay, I’ll do that. I finally was understanding. You need to take responsibility sometimes. So yeah, in January, I didn’t even have my lawyer with me. My lawyer said it’s no big deal. Just go in and plead guilty, you’ll five minutes. So I went in, I plead guilty and as I was walking out, the FBI was standing there and it turns out that one of my former clients that I’d lost money with, had a friend that was an FBI agent, and he was there for some payback.
Norman 11:37
Oh no.
Todd 11:38
Yeah, he says, you’re not free to go. I said, the judge said that I was free to go. They said no, we’re taking you in and we’re processing you. Because I guess the way it would have worked is a couple of days later, the court would have called and say, Hey, run down to the FBI, get your picture taken. They’re going to take your prints and all that they call that processing, because they didn’t take me into custody when I pled guilty, they set a sentencing date, right? Because nobody knew what was going to happen to me yet. So anyway, this guy, I’m not gonna go too deep into this story, but this guy basically treated me like the street thug. Anyway, so after that, now here it is January 2005. They set my sentencing for October. So now I have from January to October, to kind of one, get my affairs in order and two, try to minimize the sentence. Can I get people to write me letters, can I write a letter to the judge? What can we do to kind of show the judge it was irrational thinking, I made bad decisions, but I wasn’t trying to hurt anybody. So we did everything we could, and the AdSense business continued to grow. So I felt Okay, that’ll be alright. So October 15th, no, I’m sorry, this would have been August. Right around August. 15th I went in, and for my sentencing, the judge comes in, right you stand up, he says sit down. He tells me to stand up. He goes, Yeah, this won’t take long I read the file. I don’t see any reason not to give you the maximum sentence, which was 60 months, 60 months in federal prison and he asked me a weird thing. The only other thing he said to me was, how old are you? I think I just turned 40 I’d have to do the math, but I think I just turned 40 and he said to me off, you’ll be fine. You’ll do your time, you get out, you’ll still be young. You’ll be fine. It was like he had just justified a 60 months sentence in his mind and then he left.
Norman 13:45
Just like that, you just walked in and gave you 60 months?
Todd 13:48
Like it was handing out candy, right? Everybody was setting expectations for me, for the sentence. They go, Oh, it’s your first time. You’ll get probation. If you get any time, it’ll be six months and they’ll give you home confinement. Don’t worry about it and I listened to these people. So my mind was, okay, six months, I need to be punished, I did something wrong. I’ll accept my punishment. When he said 16 months, I was right back into post traumatic stress and my brain just locked down and I couldn’t think and then he asked me that question and after he said, Yeah, you’ll be fine. I remember the one thing I said to him was, yeah, you’re right. It’ll be okay and then my lawyer hopped up and said, can he turn himself in? Because the police were like, headed towards me. Can he please just turn himself in? The judge said, Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you’ll get a letter. It’ll tell you when to report to prison. So go home and wait for your letter. My God, oh good times, good times. So yeah, so basically, it was August I got my quote unquote my affairs in order, right, I wanted to make sure my family was going to be taken care of and I thought we had enough money for 60 months and I think it was October 15th 2005, I took myself to prison. It was the weirdest day of my life. I mean, just totally strange and I hope anybody listening to this never has to go through.
Norman 15:25
What was it like knowing that your life was going to change a 100% in moments?
Todd 15:31
I was trying, I tried to prepare, do the research, find people that would have been in and been out especially have that specific facility tried to learn what I could, so that there wouldn’t be this huge culture shock, right. So I felt I was as prepared as I could be. But at the same time, I got to tell you, it was nice to know just about every responsibility I had was about to be removed from me. I could literally go in there and work on myself in every way that was important physically, mentally, every way, every way and so on one hand, I remember the morning of right, I got up and for half a second. I thought maybe I should go visit Norm in Canada. But then I said, No, no, no, no, that’s irrational thinking again, you gotta smack that down, you gotta stop that and so I called the cab and the cab pulls up where to? I’m like,take me to this prison and he asks, who are you visiting? A friend, so he pulls me up to the main gate, right? The lobby, if you will. I’m getting out and he says to me, you want me to wait for you?
Todd 16:57
I couldn’t help but laugh cuz I wanted to say you got five years to wait around for me?
Todd 17:05
I said, No, it’s okay. I’m gonna be a while. Here’s what I said and I walked in, I walked into prison and they processed you in, the surrealism began, it was one of the most dysfunctional experiences, long term experiences I’ve ever had. Imagine a small city full of nothing, but people with huge personality issues and you’re living with them and you can get away from them. Okay. That’s what it was like and if I had to put another word on it, it was boring. I mean, just a lot of boring. If you couldn’t figure out how to be productive with all this downtime, you are going to have problems. But a lot of, I’m going to call it pretend help, they could do so much of a better job. But long story short, they had a program, it was called the Residential Drug Assistance Program and the whole idea behind this program was if you were a drug addict or alcoholic, they wanted to put you through this rehab, in residential rehab, and counseling and if you’ve successfully completed the program, they would take a year, up to a year off of your sentence and I’m thinking I wish I was a drug addict, but I’d never touched any drug in my entire life. But they interview everybody, so they call me in for the interview. He’s like, so what kind of drugs do you do? I said, I’ve never touched a drug in my life and he kind of looked at me and gave me a weird look like, later I came to find out. The weird look was like, dude, I’m trying to get you into this program. You shouldn’t be trying to get yourself out. Right? Then he asked me, well, alcohol you drink, right? Yeah. And he’s nodding his head you drink, right? Like, yeah, I didn’t know when to drink as well. How often would you say you drink? It’s a lot, right? I said, can you define a lot? He goes well, according to the Residential Drug Abuse Assistance Program, a lot would be one to two drinks a week. I said, Oh, yeah, I drink a metric crap ton then. He goes, you’re in, you’re in Mr. Snively, congratulations. Not only are you a felon, but you’re officially an alcoholic now. I’m like, okay. I think I can probably live with that one. Then you sit around waiting for your turn to go into this program and it’s interesting because it’s boring as I said. It was still interesting enough that I think you could have written a TV show about, matter of fact they did Orange is the New Black but they kind of, they made it much more extreme than it really is, but the people that I’ve met and that politicians, judges, lots of lawyers, movie stars,
Norman 20:11
In prison?
Todd 20:12
Oh, yeah. Athletes. I’m not gonna say names, but there was huge football teams. I mean, you would know, right? You would know who these people were, I will name one because it was very, very public. Wesley Snipes was in that facility. So anyway, he came in right after I left, he could have got my bed for all I know, one more was very public was this. He was, I believe the President of a company called Exide battery and his whole thing was a bribery case involving Sears. Yeah, so Sears and Exide battery did some sort of nasty, and the CEO ended up in prison. So there were all kinds of different people. It wasn’t all drug dealers or whatnot and that one guy, once who got he had 17 years for poaching alligators in Florida. I mean, just, I didn’t know you could, the stuff you couldn’t go to prison for. It’s just unreal. I’m not saying that you should kill alligators. But in any event, all I wanted to do was get out. I made sure that I didn’t do anything that would keep me there one one day longer. So I ended up spending between the good time and the Residential Drug Treatment Program time off. I spent a total of three years and four days in actual confinement and I got to transfer to a halfway house in Michigan, where another friend of mine had agreed to hire me into his company so that I could have employment. Okay, because if you have employment, you can get out of the halfway house and be put on home confinement to where you’re allowed to go to work, and then come home and you can’t leave at night and that was six months. So I did that for six months now. This guy while he had his own kind of side business that he hired me into, had a full time job, full time job and so basically, I would go with him to work and I was sitting at a little card table, next to his desk in his office with a computer. As he said to me, when I got out, he goes, let me go show you where I work and the little card table you’ll be sitting at for the next six months. I’m like, Okay, cool. So he walks me through this company, it turns out that it’s a warehouse business. I guess they sold things to golf courses like grass seed and chemicals and fungicides and weed killer, everything at the golf course with me. So he’s showing me around, and in one part of the warehouse, there was this empty room, I’d say maybe three thousand square foot, completely empty and totally enclosed from the rest of the warehouse and I’m like, well, what’s this room for? Because I’m not sure it used to be a parts room, the company before ran, I think it was a lawnmower, so people would come in and buy parts for their lawn mowers and don’t know what we’re gonna do with it. So he walks me into the last part of the tour to meet the owner of the company, whose name was also Todd and he knew my story because he had to approve me being there in his building. The little card table sitting next to his employees desk, right? So this is a good guy, right? He’s helping me out, my friend’s helping me out. We talked for a couple of minutes and then I asked them, I say let me ask you this. So what do you gonna do with that empty space there in your next to your warehouse? Because I don’t know because it might make it a break room or a training room but no, no real idea and no short term plans. He goes, why? I said would you consider leasing it to me? He goes, leasing it to you? He was just thinking that this guy just got out of prison was asking me about leasing the space, right? He says, what are you gonna do with it? I said, I’m going to start a distribution company and he kind of laughed because No, you’re not. I said, Yeah, yeah, an online distribution company. He said you can’t do that. I said yes, I can. I said, I’ve done it before. So he said to me, this was all I’m telling you, literally, this is the conversation on the spot and he says to me, I’ll tell you what, I will give you that space rent free. I will let my employees use my forklifts to unload the trucks of the stuff that you’re saying is going to come here. They’ll bring it to you. Because I want to see what you’re going to do. I hope you succeed. I can’t believe you’re going to succeed. Nobody just says they’re going to start up a distribution business and have it happen. This was a Friday afternoon. He says, when you want to start? I said Monday, I got to show up here Monday. All right, this will start Monday. So my friend, as he’s driving me back to actually my house, my home confinement place. He said to me he goes, how are you going to do that? I said I don’t know yet I got to find somebody that’s got some money that’s willing to work with me. He goes, I’ll do it. Here’s our credit cards, it’s good enough because I got lots of available credit. I said, you do that? He goes, Yeah, for 50%, right. So he kind of made his deal, right? They’re not, we’re not gonna go down that road too far. But so I made the deal. What am I gonna do right? What am I, I was kind of back against the wall kind of a thing. So we started out that Monday, I had a laptop on the little card table in his office and I started to look for customer returned goods to buy and just started to run up his credit cards and the goods showed up three to four days later and it was just like 2002 all over, the big space, pallets and pallets and pallets, and I’m the one cutting into them, going through everything, but I really knew what I was doing. So it was much, much faster. In the 11 months of this time, we get $2 million, right? It was a lot easier to bring employees in, and whatnot, it grew, it grew really fast and it got actually got to the point where I think when we hit a little over 3 million run rate a year, it literally became unmanageable, because you had all of these people inspecting these customer return goods, and one guy might think, oh, that’s used like new, the other this other guy might say, Oh, no, that’s used acceptable and when you didn’t have enough standardization, enough processes in place, you’d have nothing but problems. So I got so frustrated, at one point. I said, I’m shutting it down. I said this is crazy. We’re having a lot of revenue, but a lot of the margins shrinking because customer return and when you get a customer return on a customer returned, good, that’s telling you something. There’s some problems in your processes, right? So I literally shut everything down, shipped everything that was still there to eBay. That stuff would still continue to sell and then both Todd and my friend came to me and said, Well, what are you going to do? I said, we have to start selling brand new items, I’m going to immediately start looking for brand new name brand products to purchase and sell and Todd looked at me and said, why don’t you sell my products? I looked at him and said, what do you sell again?
Todd 27:37
What was in his warehouse? Let me show you. So, he took me on a tour and showed me everything he had and he had a lot of stuff that would appeal to consumers and I said, Okay, I said, can you give me a good price? We need to be profitable. He says if I can cover my costs, he goes I’ll sell to you add, I think it was 5% over cost. Awesome. Fantastic. So all I had to do, the very next minute was take his price list and every item that he had, and start listing it on eBay, at the prevailing rates, whatever sold that day, like when I would come in the next morning, I would run a sales report and see what sold, I would hand it to one of his employees who would go into the warehouse side, pick all those products, wheel them over to me and then later in the day accounting would give me an invoice with 60 day terms. All right now did I get a little preferential treatment because of knowing the owner of the distribution company? Yeah, for sure. Okay, but I still could have done this right and Matter of fact, I did do this with other distribution companies and people are doing it today. Oh, you don’t need to have a sweet deal, but it really helped me getting going. So literally, I had to buy no inventory ahead of time, right? We were just shipping what he would bring us. So I started doing this with outside distributors. Now we’re storing a little bit and whatnot. One day, now here’s every now and then there’s a day that changes your entire life and this was the day. I went looking for products. This was actually right before we had switched over to all the brand new stuff, and I found a place called liquidation.com and it’s where you go on and you bid on pallets. You can get used goods, you can get surplus and some new stuff. So I bought some pallets. This was still customer returned goods at the time, and they came in and every single box on those pallets were an Amazon box and I was looking at this, it didn’t quite understand what I was looking at because I was like, what, doesn’t Amazon just sell books or electronics or why is this blender here? Why is all this beauty stuff on this pallet, all in Amazon boxes? So I went back on Amazon and this is what also helped me make that decision, to make that switch is that everything that I had just bought, used, I could resell on Amazon as used and the stuff that I bought as new, I could resell on Amazon as new and that became the new model. So we immediately ended 2009, immediately set up on Amazon and started looking for the new products to sell while we did sell some of the customer returned goods there also, but that was when life changed. Life absolutely changed. Todd came to me. I think it was maybe a year later 2010. He said I’ve the opportunity to merge with another company. It’s a whole different line of products. I’m going to give you an inventory file with your cost. Now I want you to tell me, how much money can we make selling this stuff online? Because the company he was merging with was all brick and mortar type stuff. They did nothing online. Nothing. I ran that file, using some software I had to develop to be able to run these files fast to see what would be profitable and I couldn’t believe what my eyes, what I was saying. I said, Todd, this is some of the most profitable stuff I’ve ever seen. Go merge with that company. Right. So he went and he did the deal and that was when my Amazon business hit eight figures. Right. Once I got this other line of products in there. It was crazy, absolutely crazy. So long, long, long story short, the company he merged with wanted to buy me. When they saw the number, the amount of the orders that I was placing, they didn’t know it was me at first. They said, who’s this guy? Oh, yeah, that’s Todd.
Todd 32:17
I’d met him one time. He had walked through one time, shook my hand like it was the street sweeper right, turned around. I never saw him again. Until he found out that I was the one, buying millions of dollars, millions and millions of dollars of product. Then he came in, met me for real and wanted to buy my company. I said, why do you want to buy my company? He said, my accountant, looked at my books and because of everything, we sell a seasonal, we basically lose hundreds of thousands of dollars every month, in November, December, January, February, I said, Oh, that’s funny. Those are my best months. He goes, I know. So long story short, they tried to steal my company from me. Both of them tried to steal my company from me. The documents they put together were not reflective of our discussions of what the deal would be. When I wanted to take the documents to my own lawyer to look at, they both got outraged and said, after all we’ve done for you. Just sign it now.
Norman 33:27
You gotta be kidding.
Todd 33:29
I’m not joking. I’m not joking. So I found a lawyer, a lawyer that was referred to me to be like the best business contract lawyer and he said to me, he goes, do you want me just to tell you what these papers say? Or do you want me to tell you if it’s a good deal or not? I can give you that consulting too. I say, yeah, give me a both. Three days later, he calls me up and those were his words. They’re trying to steal your company. He didn’t pussyfoot around it at all and he pointed out the opposite furcation and everything in the documents. When I called them out on it, when I said this is what my lawyer said, what do you guys have to say about it? They said, get your business out of our warehouse. We’re done. What? Really? We can talk about this. Nope. Nope. So that was in 2015. So I ended up, the one guy, I ended up buying out, I gave him a lot of money and he was out. So I had 100% now, for the first time, in a long time, I had 100% of my business. I moved it to a different warehouse. I then called those guys. I called their biggest competitor. I called him up and I said, I want to open an account and let me tell you why. Because at first they said, No, I said, well, meet me for 10 minutes. I got a story. So I went over to like their senior vice president and that’s this, by the way is an $11 billion a year company that I’m talking to now. The other business was maybe 500 million, 600 million a year, right. Todd’s business. So I go to the other business, 11 billion a year. So let me tell you what just happened to me with your competitor and like, I sat there and he listened and he said, Yeah, I’ll help you.
Todd 35:30
Then he said, what were they charging you? I said, 5% over cost. He goes, I’ll sell to you at cost. I said, why? He said, because our business is rebates. He goes, all of the manufacturers that we deal with, it’s all a rebate play. We need volume. Now think about this for a second. I just went from two clowns trying to steal my business, to getting my business back and ending up with a deal that has automatically baked in profit and not only that, but I learned about this thing called rebates. So, one day, I’m in my new warehouse, things are never better, right? One of these manufacturers, not going to say who the manufacturer is, but you would, I guarantee you, everybody would know who this manufacturer is. They’re so huge. The rep walks into my warehouse and it happened to be one of the brands that had a clause in the contract that says you’re not allowed to sell our brand online. Okay? I’m thinking, Hey, I think I’m about to lose this deal. But he comes in, and he says, I want to thank you for the amazing job you’ve done representing our brand and the volume that you’ve been selling and I would like to offer you a rebate program.
Todd 37:04
I’m like what?
Todd 37:08
So all of a sudden now I’m in the rebate game with these major brands and it’s an amazing game. People ask me all the time, how can these people sell at breakeven on Amazon? That’s what my suppliers are selling to me for and I’m like rebates, rebates, nine times out of 10, the answer is going to be rebates. It’s an amazing underground profit that many people don’t know about. So in any event, I got to the point where I started looking into other profit centers within Amazon and I’m not going to tell the story right now. All I’m going to say is I accidentally created a private label brand. It was a pure accident. Okay, but once I got it created, and the thing started to make $135,000 a month, my one private label brand, I started to look at private label training. Because I wanted to figure out what is it that I maybe don’t know that I should know and the program that I ended up buying into, to answer that question for me, what I discovered was, no, I’m doing everything okay. But a lot of people aren’t and they were really struggling and so to the ones that were like, I’m about to give up, I lost the money testing this brand of mine, and oh my gosh, I don’t know what to do. I go, you should try name brand wholesale. It’s a lot more straightforward and I started to talk about it. Eventually, one of the people in this group started a separate Facebook group and it was embarrassingly called, Todd is the Amazon boss of us and she invited these three to 400 people into the group that had been like I’ve been interacting with over time. I said to her, the first thing we need to do is change the name of this group. I appreciate that, but no, right and it was another pivotal point. So at that point, I started working, three to 400 people, showing them what I was doing with name brand wholesale, finding these products that were already selling, analyzing them, and making a deal with a wholesale distributor to purchase them and people that were failing at private label for whatever reason, right? We’re being successful with the wholesale model. So I started to spend more and more time and ended up hooking up with my business partner Chris Keefe. I call him the amazing Chris Keefe and together we have the same mindset. We’re kind of doing the same thing on a parallel and we figured, we believe in synergy to do the work of more than two, one plus one is like four. So, I was a little leery of getting another business partner man, if I was one of those things when what had happened to me before I was like, I’m never gonna have another business partner in my life and here I am, meeting the amazing Chris Keefe, hearing all of the right things, right and saying, yeah, okay, let’s let’s work together, right? I can honestly say now five years now, I’ve been working with him, and I have never had a finer business partner. He is one of the nicest guys you would ever want to meet who has a true heart for helping people. I love Star Trek, right? People have compared us and said, if we were Star Trek characters, he’d be Deanna Troi, Counselor Deanna Troi and I would be Spock. Wow. So I’m okay with that place. It’s like, at least I got a guy character, right.
Todd 40:51
Chris gets to be the chick, anyway. So we sat down and we said, this is taking up so much time and to do this right, we’re going to have to create a paid training program. So we made our first paid training program and said to the people in the group, here it is. I mean, it’s if you like it, fine. If you don’t, that’s okay too. But this is what we have to do moving forward because we’re capitalists, our time is important, blah, blah, blah and I also had a feeling that it had the potential to affect my core Amazon business and I thought about this for a long time and I said, Well, even if it does, as long as I’m getting compensated for the consulting, I’ll call it a wash and be okay with it. Because at that point, I had 100%, outsourced and insourced my core Amazon business. To this day, I do nothing. I literally wake up and during breakfast, I look at my financials, I look at a balance sheet, and a P&L. I read them like the newspaper. I don’t see any red flags. That’s it. That’s it for my business, it then becomes all about helping our paid members and of those 400 people that were in that group. Those were the first 300 that became paid members, three out of four, went with Chris and I and most of those people are still with us on this journey five years later, and just been more and more and more, we develop more and more software. We figure out different profit centers and ways to help people. We’ve developed our software to like a 10th generation wholesale product analyzing tool that blows my mind because I think about what I had to use when I first started, and we’re in just such a good spot right now and I’ve seen reasons why people are successful, and why they’re not and it blows my mind now, because it’s like being able to read the newspaper. Now, I can’t prejudge anybody. I would never do that. Because if I would, I know I’d be wrong. Almost all the time, you cannot do that. Anybody has the same, I think opportunity, the same starting point. It’s the things along the way, Les Brown, you gotta be hungry. If you sit on an idea, or fail to act on a goal, it’s not really goal setting is it? It’s just wishful thinking. So we see a lot of that, right. So, the first thing I had to do was to get out of my mind that everybody was going to be successful. Well, I cannot stop working with this person until they’re successful. You know what, a lot of time, you can’t take somebody that’s not ready. Right and pull them across that finish line. Life isn’t like that. It just isn’t. So we just concentrate on doing the best job that we can, helping as many people become successful as we can and we’ve been doing that, like I said, for over five years now and I’ll tell you one other thing and one other huge failure that I do want to mention is my wife.
Todd 44:22
Everything was just too much.
Norman 44:25
I could just imagine, I was gonna ask you about that, how did she take it so?
Todd 44:31
Well, it was hard. It was really, really hard and there was a lot of baggage even before this event, and it’s one of those things where it was a bit of an epiphany for me also, I kind of think what happened is just two people that never should have gotten married, ended up getting married. I wasn’t the man I needed to be, to see that earlier and instead, not only did we stay married 34 years, and I won’t tell too many people this, but we actually divorced four times and we reconciled three times.
Norman 45:14
What? Hold it. You divorced four times and reconciled?
Unknown Speaker 45:22
Yeah and it was the same lawyers and the same judge each time and the third time, the judge was like, come on, guys. It was like, make up your minds what’s going on here. But we kept getting back together for the wrong reasons and I could do a whole another series with you and just what I went through during those separations, it was actually quite interesting. But finally, something happened when we had gotten back together the third time, something flipped in my brain and I said, you know what? This is gonna sound silly to people listening, they’re gonna be like, after three times you didn’t figure this out. But something in my brain said this, this just won’t work. This is never gonna work and so I filed the fourth time and I told my lawyer, I said, I don’t care what it takes, just set her up, set her up for the rest of her life, so she doesn’t have to worry and go figure it out for myself. So just like I said, I would never have another business partner. I said, I’m never going to get married again. So three months later, I’m in Manhattan. For a business meeting, one of the biggest business meetings of my life, it turned out and I was alone, and I wanted the fish. So I’m walking down Fifth Avenue, headed towards a restaurant, I stopped at a light and next to me was this woman and then I said to her, I said, I know you probably get this a lot. But you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. She looked up at me, and she was like many beautiful women in Manhattan. I felt kind of silly. I said, No, no, really. There’s something about you. We stood there on that corner talking for 40 minutes, didn’t cross the street. Finally, I said to her, I said, you know what? I was headed to dinner. You want to go have some dinner? She says, what kind of food? I said seafood. Sure. So we went and we had dinner that night. We had dinner the next night, and then I had to fly back to Michigan to run my business. Some of my friends had been setting me up with blind dates. So I went out with a few women. I’ll never forget, I was at dinner with this one, perfectly nice woman and I could think about was this woman I had met in New York and so I politely excused myself and I went home, and I called her up. We had like a video call and I said to her, I said, it was Wednesday. I said, Do you want to go out to dinner again? Friday? She was, you coming back to New York? It says if you say, Yeah, I will. So I flew back and I was with her, actually have been with her now for over three years, almost every single day and we got married last year.
Norman 48:26
Wow and I remember I had the pleasure of meeting her briefly as your girlfriend in Las Vegas and then last year, under some weird circumstances, if you remember that. I met her at your house and wow, that’s incredible. I didn’t know the backstory to that.
Todd 48:48
She hates it when I tell that story. She’s never gonna be able to listen to this podcast because if she knows I told this story, she’s gonna kill me. She makes you make it sound like you picked me up on the street. I said, I didn’t pick you up. I’m not like that. Shucks, I’m gonna tell people we met at a restaurant. I said, Tom, whatever you want, I don’t care. I said to her, I said, we can live anywhere you want, where do you want to live? We visited a lot of towns and she picked Las Vegas and that’s why we bought the house in Las Vegas. About a year later, my accountant said to me, here’s your tax bill for the year for federal taxes. I said, Whoa. So what can we do to fix that? He goes, well, you’d you’d have to move to Puerto Rico, where they don’t have the federal taxes like that. Nice. Three weeks later. I kid you not. Three weeks later, we moved to Puerto Rico, and we’ve been here ever since. So that would have been April of last year. We moved here. So what is this July? Yeah and love it here. I love it here. So we’re very happy.
Norman 49:51
I got to get out here to see you.
Todd 49:54
Oh, yeah, come on down. I mean, we live right on the beach. It’s always at 85 and sunny or partly cloudy. Every day we were either swimming in the ocean or in the swimming pool and I pinched myself all the time.
Todd 50:11
Because I just don’t forget what it took to finally get here.
Norman 50:19
So, when somebody says, you got there because you’re lucky, I can see why you want to punch them in the head.
Tod 50:28
That’s also why I have very little patience with people, like, they don’t want to put in the work. Or they just want you to give it to them. Or they complain about every little obstacle. You know what, as an entrepreneur, it’s our job to go around over or through obstacles, right? What’s an obstacle? It’s an opportunity to reach a goal that people that don’t get that, drives me crazy. Right now, the big thing right now, as you probably know is Amazon just reset the standard for storage limits based on your inventory score. If your inventory scores below a certain amount, they’re not gonna let you store as much and people are really upset about this and you know what? People are really upset about that. The one that are running lousy businesses that can’t control their inventory, and they don’t buy stuff that sells. Amazon’s telling you, you need to fix your business. So instead of like, thinking it’s a conspiracy theory, why don’t you work on fixing your business? So that’s the way I am if somebody wants like a hug, and be told everything’s okay. They go talk to Chris. Because Chris is really good that way. They don’t talk to me because I’ll just punch him in the face like, here’s, hey, here’s the cold hard truth. You’re ready? You’re ready, snowflake?
Todd 51:58
I think we probably just lost our viewers their Norm. I’m sorry.
Norman 52:02
Yeah, maybe one.
Norman 52:05
But that’s okay.
Norman 52:08
Yeah, I always say when somebody talks to me about what does it take to be an entrepreneur? I mean, it sounds so simple, but I said, if you can get kicked between the legs the first time and get up, get kicked again and get kicked again, it gets easier to get kicked between the legs, but you got to keep getting up.
Todd 52:28
Wanting something is not enough. You must hunger for it. Your motivation must absolutely be compelling in order to overcome the obstacles that will inevitably come your way, Les Brown.
Norman 52:43
You nailed it.
Todd 52:44
So, I’m an no excuse kind of guy, if I can do this several times. I think people that are properly motivated will have a lot less trouble than I did. Nobody’s going to have the kind of journey that I had. I would never wish it on anybody. I hope everybody starts in a successful immediately with no issues whatsoever. That’s just not realistic.
Norman 53:07
I know that we’ve been talking for quite some time. But if you were to give any advice to somebody that’s listening to this, what are the character traits? I know we started out with that motivational quote, what are the character traits that you think it takes to be a good entrepreneur?
Todd 53:29
I’m not sure if this is necessarily a character trait, but I believe one of the gifts somebody should have is the gift of resiliency for exactly what we’ve been talking about. Right? As far as character goes, it’s the same thing, a good work ethic, right? You have to be honest to yourself, really, am I putting in the effort? Am I doing what needs to be done? Am I also creating the balance in my life? That needs to be there. This was probably one of my biggest problems. Well, especially the first 20 years of my marriage was a lack of balance. You know how entrepreneurs can be there like, honey, I know I’m gonna be working weekends again. But it’s just until I make it and eventually she would say to me, I think you’ve made it like nine times when’s enough enough? Right and for me, I wasn’t balanced enough. So people need that be able to understand that it’s about taking care of your body, taking care of your family, and then business, right, the priorities need to be straight.
Norman 54:45
Right. Okay, Todd? Well, we’re winding down the podcast. At the end of every podcast, I always like to ask our guests if they know a guy.
Todd 54:59
I think I do. This guy, his name. I know this guy, Jonathan Kronstadt. He’s the president of a company called Kajabi and never have I seen a guy be so successful with a company like that and be an overall great guy also, and he’s got stories. So I know this guy, Jonathan Kronstadt. I call him J-cron.
Norman 55:23
You call him what?
Todd 55:24
J cron.
Norman 55:27
J cron. Okay, well, we’ll have to reach out to J cron and see if we can get him on the show.
Todd 55:33
I’ll get my little prod too. I’ll tell him I was completely painless. He won’t want to talk about anything difficult at all.
Norman 55:41
Yeah, not at all.
Norman 55:45
Alright, my friend. So how do people get a hold of you? If you have that course available? How did they get that?
Todd 55:52
People that are interested on the way that we sell on Amazon, with the wholesale model, we have a website It’s webinar.expertuniversity.com and they can watch informational presentations that we have and if you have some links to like our public Facebook group that you can put out maybe later that would be cool too and that way we can interact and answer questions and get people headed in the right direction if they’re interested.
Norman 56:27
We will definitely post those links. A lot of the times at the end of the episode, I’ll say hey, awesome, and we have awesome guests on but this is different. You opening up and being so transparent, it hit a nerve and I just have to say, I thank you for being on the show. I thank you for being so open. I know it’s tough. Anyways, thank you so much.
Todd 56:56
Like I said, Norm, you’re a great guy. I wouldn’t have done it for anybody else and I want to thank you for the opportunity to come on here and be able to be transparent. So thanks Norm.
Norman 57:09
You’re very welcome, my friend.
Hayden 57:12
That’s it for our interview with Todd Snively. Make sure to tune in next week for an interview with Barry Cates. Barry’s an expert in the field of experiential marketing. This includes immersive experiences created for the Superbowl, for concerts, and even for some reality TV stars. We might talk about a certain famous chef whose name rhymes with Jordan, Sam z. Anyway, make sure to tune in next time you won’t want to miss it.
