I'm in control of my whole
schedule. I never worry about
missing, you know, a graduation, the game or if
my wife was working. I would say that being a
sheep shearer is a minority in the United States, and
then being a woman is definitely its own
subcategory. And then to be a gay woman, I don't think
I know another gay woman, sheep shearer, besides my
wife. Eventually I realized that I
actually was much more happy doing doula work than
sitting at a desk doing nonprofit work. I remember thinking like,
this should be different. I have more freedom, more
options. I have more of a sense of
security for my family. As long as I'm bringing in
1200 dollars every other week, everything would be
good. All I need is 15 pools. My name is Mark Jones. I'm 32 years old. I live in New Orleans,
Louisiana. I'm the owner and Paul Tech at Blue Stream
Pools, and I'm on track to make between 89 and
$100,000 this year. Blue sea pools came from me
manifesting my business. Something just dawned on me
and it was like, Man, eventually you're going to
have a whole street of pools, and all these pools
are going to be crystal clear. Blue, blue street
pools, boom. And that's how I came. I grew up in Los Angeles,
California. My mom was a teacher. My dad worked for the IRS. Their dad worked for the
light company. So grew up with a real
loving family. That was my dream. I
thought I was going to the NBA like everybody else who
plays basketball, but. When I bought my house that
had a pool in it because my wife, she wanted a pool. So we bought a house with a
pool and I told myself, you know, hey, I'm young enough
to figure this thing out. I got the poor babe. Don't worry about it. I got
it, you know? But I didn't even know how
to turn the filter system on. But this is the pool where
it all started right here. And where the idea from the
business came is when my neighbor across the street
asked me who was cleaning my pool, and I told him I did. And he said, Look, I'll pay
you what I pay my other guy because I'm not impressed
with his work. You just come across the
street whenever you can. And that's where I was
like, okay, this is a business. But that's where
it really got tight when I got my first account
because now it's like, Okay, Mark, you live across the
street from him, so you can't come half step in
with this. Like you got to clean his
pool and they've got to be clean. He's giving you a
shot. Once I got fired from
Enterprise and I took it serious and I went to
Curley, I said, Man, I think I'm starting my own pool
business, man. He was like, If anybody can
do it, you can do it. Lo and behold, I zoomed out
pools all over the place and I'm just like, Yo, this is
crazy. Just in my subdivision
alone, there was 38 pools. They started passing out
fliers within one week. I was at five accounts
before while I was driving, you know, building,
building my business. I was like, Look, all I
need is 15 pools. I get 15 pools. I'm only working two days a
week. I'm bringing home that
$2,400 a month. Well, I started getting
serious about it in March 2020. In March. April is right before
swimming season starts, and that's where all these
people's pools are green. And that's where I make a
home run. I'm at your house two or
three days, make six 600 to 1000 for flipping your
pool. And then on top of that,
you might pick me up for service as well. The worst pool o man that I
ever done is above ground pool, full of man, full of
spiders walking on water leaves everywhere. Like, just like, look like
the pool hasn't been touched in months. It was so nasty. It stinks. It got to the point where
the algae was caked up and it just. Usually it takes
me two days to get a pool. Right. This one took me
five days because it was so bad. I charge them $700 for
that pool. I ended the year at, I
believe, 44,000. That's what I made from
March to December. I'm going to make six
figures, but six figures are what I want to be over
100,000. I'm on track to do that
because it's summertime right now, and my biggest
month so far this year was around 8500 in one month,
and that was in the wintertime. Ray You'll
never know the poor guy pulling up in this
incognito bra. So I'm doing poor
consultations and repairs on Mondays. Tuesday through
Friday is my route. Nothing gets in the way of
that. If you need a repair like really green poles are
when I really start them on Saturdays because it takes
a couple of days if I have to do my treatment to it,
it takes a couple of days for that to work. Don't
work on Sundays. And then when I come back
to work on Monday, I finish out the project for the
green pool and get you back rolling. This morning I hit
my first pool at 630. You know, everybody else is
asleep. I'm up cleaning pools. We're really seven at 2:00
is Tuesday to Friday is you know, that's that's kind of
my schedule. I got to be back in time if
my wife is working and get the kids. And if I don't
finish my route once my wife gets back home, then then
I'll go back out and just hit a couple more pools. I can. On my easy days. My oldest son. His name is
Dallas. He's about to turn seven. He's been working with me
since he's been five. All his job is to do is. Hey, when you. When you go
to the backyard with Daddy, you find those skimmer
baskets, and all your job is to do is to empty out the
skimmer baskets, and I'll pay you $5 a pool. He's an entrepreneur
himself. He's a he's a part owner of the company. I'm in control of my whole
schedule. I never worry about missing
the, you know, graduation, the game or if my wife is
working. He is true to his word. Blue street pools is where
it's at. I tell everyone, if you
want your pool clean, you get him. You get him. Absolutely. Yes. All I know is that I was a
frustrated customer at one point and I didn't know
what I was doing, and I wish that I can go somewhere and
see something where they simplified this process for
me. And I think that's why
people have gravitated to my page, not only the person
doing the poor maintenance, but also he's actually
teaching me how to take care of my pool. My wife has
been with me every single step of the
way, and when I got fired from Enterprise and I told
her, I'm not going to work for anybody else anymore,
ever in my life, she was like, Are you sure? I was like, Yes, I am
positive. She was like, okay, I trust
you. She was she was the one
bringing in the check. She was the one paying the
bills while I'm still figuring it out. And she
never made me feel like I was this small wee figuring
this thing out. We're in this thing
together. I really love her for that. And just being
the person who she is, because without that
support, I would not be where I am today is
definitely the foundation of where all of this success
is coming from. And I never thought that I
would be a sheep shearer when I was growing
up. My first shearing job was
when I was 14 years old. I made $5 a head, so it
came out to a grand total of $35 and it took us half the
day. My name is Katie Mikros. I'm 26 years old and I'm a
sheep llama and alpaca shear from Seguin, Texas. And this year we're
projected to bring in between 80 and 120,000. If we didn't share these
sheep, they would be extremely hot in the
summer. They've got to carry around
the weight. They've got to carry around
the heat. And in order to not make
them suffer like that, we share it off. Nowadays, if
I make less than 1000 in a day, it's a really slow
one. I grew up kind of all over
the place. My parents were in the army
when they got out of the military. We moved out to
the country. And that's where I first
started collecting animals. I can't imagine living this
life without my wife because she literally, like, holds
everything together. The only class that I
failed and had to retake in college was actually sheep
and goat production, which is super ironic. I did come out debt free,
which was really nice. I didn't ever have to ask
anybody to borrow any money or to help me out with
rent, which was nice. The most I maybe made in
college was around 30,000 working part time. Read it here. And we knew that we liked
sharing and that it allowed us to travel and we made
decent money at it. So we decided to give that
just a go at full time. You want me to grab this up
as a new. Okay. The first year we
did, like, 350 jobs. The year after that, we did
475, 575. And this year we're going
to knock that out of the park again. How pricing works for
shearing animals is by the head for one sheep. It's $20 for me to share it
and $20 for me to show up. We call that a setup fee. If you have two sheep, it's
still $20 apiece, but we have a $40 setup fee and
that $40 setup fee is across the board. And when we get
to 100 sheep, depending on the breed, you're looking
at $5 a head, one or two llamas, it's $45 a head
plus a setup fee. Same thing for alpacas, $30
a head for ten of them, plus the setup fee. So in four
months already this year, we've brought in over a
last year's amount of 80,000 that servicing about 480
farms. I have every intention of
reaching 600 or so farms this year, trying to break
that 100 to 120000 goal. Our season is from the end of February
till July, but that is the only time that we really
make money, except for about a month in the fall. So during training season
we work seven days a week and it's typically 14 to 18
hours a day, depending on how hard we run. We leave the hotel around
seven. At our first job, probably
about an hour away, get there around eight. And we could have anywhere
from one job, which would be a large job with like
hundreds of animals. Or we'll have multiple
small jobs, our average being 5 to 8 jobs a day,
but we do as many as 14 in a day, and that's traveling
from place to place. So shearing looks really
easy when you watch somebody do it, somebody that's
skilled, you look at it and you're like, Wow. I mean,
that stuff just falls off like butter. And it's
there's a lot of technical skill that goes into that. On an easy, normal sheep,
I'm shearing it between a minute and a half and 3
minutes, and then on the more difficult ones, it'll
take me about 5 to 7 minutes. Those shears are
incredibly sharp. It goes really fast with
high RPMs. It does not bog down, which
means that it could cut through meat, it can cut
through flesh, it can cut through bone tendons
without skipping a beat. So it is very dangerous. And then I am holding an
animal that has a mind of its own. Just this year, I
cut my pinkie in half. I broke my toe. I've been electrocuted over
an extended amount of time. I hooked my leg and put 22
stitches in it. A lot of people want to
know how I can just run like the Energizer Bunny. And the thing is, is the
Energizer bunny does stop beating the drum
eventually. You know, when you go that hard, it's
really hard on your body. Physical exhaustion is one
thing. I can pretty much power
through that, but the mental part is really hard. Sheep shearing is mostly a
mental game. Doesn't really matter about
how strong you are. It's about can you hack it
for that many hours? I love sharing. I love
sharing sheep. I love sharing alpacas, I
love sharing llamas. I hate sharing goats. But
that's besides the point. When you take a passion and
you turn it into work, it is that it is work. I love what I do and I
honestly don't want to do anything else. It's just
honestly, being a business owner is not what it's all
chalked up to be. It's hard because nobody
else takes that responsibility if you don't
show up. I would say that being a
sheep shearer is a minority in the United States and
then being a woman is definitely its own
subcategory. And then to be a gay woman, I don't think
I know another gay woman, sheep shearer, besides my
wife. I didn't want people to
judge me before I ever got out there. Like I didn't
want being lesbian to be a defining part of me. As I've matured, I've
realized that it doesn't have to be a defining part
of me, but it is an excellent quality that I
have. I was worried that it would
affect my business, and it hasn't because it turns out
people don't care if I'm gay. What they care about
is if I come in and do a good job on their sheep. Everybody's always going to
want and need air conditioning depending on
the climate, whether it's air conditioning or
heating. I mean, that job is pretty stable. With all
this experience I have now, I do consider myself an
experienced tech. I take pride in having an
excellent reputation online. My job reviews are through
the roof. I actually get a lot of
referrals through customers. My name is Roger Quadra. I live in Corona,
California. I'm an HVAC technician at Next-Gen
Heating and Air Conditioning. I make
anywhere from 80 to $120000 a year. Roger installs and repairs
air conditioning, heating and air purification
systems in homes. From diagnosing unusual
problems to fixing older systems that need repairs
to long hours in 110 degree attics, the job can be
tough. The majority of the time I
work six days a week. On a typical day, Roger
makes about $336 in commission. The most difficult day
customer had no power to their unit. They're pretty
frustrated they couldn't turn it on. You check the
whole system and you just can't find the problem. And so you start
questioning, you know, like, oh my gosh, start
questioning your life. It's like, what am I doing
here? Oh, my gosh, I'm on our number four at this
point. Had to go through all the
low voltage wiring that connect to the outside unit
and found some rodents there alive nesting. They chewed through all the
wiring and it wasn't until my seventh hour till I
found it. I couldn't get it off my
mind for like the following week. That was my mistake
that day for not starting there in the first place,
because it is a fairly common problem where
rodents chew away at those wires and ruined systems. That's one of the biggest
things customers do not understand. And this
industry, it's skilled labor. Skilled labor is not
cheap. You're not necessarily
paying for the part. You're paying for my
knowledge and my service, plain and simple. Roger has been working in
the heating, ventilation and air conditioning or HVAC
industry for about 12 years. Today, he's one of the top
requested technicians for his company, next gen Air
and Heat in Anaheim, California. But for Roger,
getting to this point wasn't easy. I grew up in Whittier,
California. I was actually born in Nicaragua, was
brought over to southeast L.A. County area Santa Fe
Springs, Whittier. One of my first jobs out of
a high school was at a food for less. I was a bag boy
and making about $7.25 an hour. High school was an
adventure. I didn't take it serious,
to be completely honest, even though I was trying to
stay on the right track. You know, my family did
sacrifice a lot to bring us out to the United States. Being the oldest, my dad
would sometimes take me to his job, and he encouraged
me to get into mechanics. You know, he was a
mechanic. Our life to this day, he's a mechanic. I think about him a lot
sometimes when I'm actually working. Just those moments
that we shared when he would take me to his job. I joined the workforce
after high school and, you know, started doing little
construction jobs and really dead end jobs, to be
completely honest. Things turned around for
Roger in 2009 when he found an HVAC distribution center
looking for a driver. I went in there, talked to
the front desk guy, which Ishmail Valdez, and asked
for an application. I actually came in every
single day for the next five days. His persistence paid off. Roger got the job as the
driver there. He met HVAC techs who
helped him reach the next level of his career. I started getting a lot of
guys like, Hey, man, why don't you come over here
and help us out on Saturday? Start learning the ropes
and whatnot. So eventually I got the
opportunity to join a crew and be the third the
helper. When he started as a helper. Roger was making about
$55,000 a year. He worked hard and rose
from third helper to second helper to lead installer to
technician in a matter of years. He's hoping to break
the 100,000 mark this year, even while working full
time as a tech. Roger continued to improve
his skills. So I dedicated myself. I would go home, watch
YouTube videos. I actually enrolled myself
into some classes that the City of Downey provides at
the gas company for Nate certifications having to do
with air distribution, heat pump units, different types
of systems that we use in the industry. Along the way, Roger stayed
connected to Ishmael Valdez, who eventually branched off
and started NexGen, where Roger is currently employed
as a technician. Since then, Roger's
experience has helped him increase his income. As far as the pay structure,
it is fully commissioned. When you become a tech,
sometimes there is those options to have an hourly
wage and partial commission. So by the way, I missed two
months of last year. I feel confident I would
have broke that 100 K mark last year. But, you know, I
went on maternity leave. Another benefit, actually,
that I think a lot of us take for granted is company
vans. You know, we got the gas
card, company trucks, so, you know, less wear and
tear on our own personal vehicles. And we want to
talk with you guys. All right. All right, guys. However, I usually wake up
at 530 in the morning. I sometimes try to get a
little jog in. I like to keep myself fit. I feel with that. It helps me have the energy
to last all day and to deal with these 110 degree
addicts that we're in sometimes. I drive out to
our main shop in Anaheim. I usually arrive
around 637 before a lot of our guys. I go through my
bins, restock my my van with any parts necessary that I
use the day prior. I usually have my first
call around 9 a.m. in the morning. I usually
call my customer, give them an ETA. I usually have
about 3 to 4 calls a day. I average about 12 to 14
hours a day. I usually get home around
830, 930 at night. Summer is Roger's busiest
season, so he can't take time off to spend with
family until December. So my girls know summertime
no vacations. Summertime is all about
work for me. It's my money making time. That's when I make a
majority of my yearly income. With that money
means for me and my family is like, I have more
freedom, more options, I have more of a sense of
security for my family, my family's future, my bills. Of course, you know, I get
to spoil my girls. One of the things I love is
being able to provide the majority of the time. I
work six days a week. I do have an option to work
on Sunday, which I take sometimes. But, you know,
having the seniority that I have now and having a lot
of new guys, I kind of hold back on Sundays now and let
the new guys take care of it. One of the most
rewarding things about this is not only the money, of
course, but, you know, just the satisfaction I get when
I help these people out. We have, like little
friendly competitions here at the company where we set
goals for the week, for the month, for the year. Amongst the technicians
have friendly competitions to kind of reach those
goals and improve. At the beginning of his
career. Roger started off making 55,000 a year. This year, he's closer to
breaking the 100,000 mark, a goal he says contributes to
his family's happiness. I obviously want to provide
my daughters a way different life than than I had. So, you know, not not only
is it a motivation, but it's very rewarding knowing that
I am able to do that for my girls. My advice to anybody
that's looking to get into this industry would be stop
thinking about it and just do it. Take that chance. Whatever you got going on
in your life, I'm pretty certain it's going to be
more beneficial to your longevity, your future,
your your financials. So do it immediately. Don't be afraid to take
chances. I've now been a Dula for
almost nine years. I sometimes compare us to
wedding planners. Obviously the couple that's
at the center of it gets to make the decisions. Birth is something that, in
my opinion at least, you should really be in charge
of. My name is Samantha
Griffin. I am 34 years old and I live in Maryland,
near Washington, D.C. I'm a doula and the owner
of D.C. Metro Maternity, and I make
about $85,000 a year. A doula is a person who
supports birthing persons during pregnancy, birth and
postpartum. We're there to answer any
questions, make sure that our dual clients understand
what's happening with their bodies and with their
emotions, and during labor itself, where they're
making sure that people are hydrated, that they're fed,
and that they're comfortable. I was in my
mid twenties when I first became a doula. When I first started out I
had a lot of what I would now call imposter syndrome. Some of it was definitely
that I hadn't had kids of my own. I also think some of
it was just that this was such a departure from
anything that my parents had done. My mom worked for the
Department of Defense and my dad is retired from the
Army. My dad always told me
specifically not to go into the military. It was always
the expectation that I would go to college and do a good
job academically and then get a good job. In 2009, my very first job
after college was at a small nonprofit that focused on
helping mostly young women in the foster care system. A third of young women left
the child welfare system in D.C., either pregnant or
parenting. All of their birth stories
just sounded sad and lonely. And I remember thinking
like, this should be different. As a community, we have
higher rates of infant mortality and maternal
mortality than everyone in the US other than Native
American women. When I was Googling what
the solutions were to maternal mortality, I
learned about midwives and doulas. In order to become a dula,
you take a training. It's usually a two day
training, but my very first Dula training took 2 to 3
months to get through each side of the pelvis. You can create like 15
degrees more room. One of the challenges of
being a Dula is that the hours are strange and long,
so babies often come in the middle of the night and it
was really hard to juggle multiple things as well as
go to people's births. Eventually I realized that
I actually was much more happy doing Dula work than
sitting at a desk doing nonprofit work. So I quit everything my day
job at non-profits and quit grad school. Hi, Stephanie, it's
Samantha. I hope you and everyone are doing well. There was a time where I
felt a little bit sheepish about asking for money for
something that feels really personal and also something
that I do love doing. But this is hard work. It can be hard on your
body. It can be hard on our own
personal relationships. And I also think that
charging has benefited my clients. They're in charge. I'm not doing anyone a
favor, and instead I'm just helping someone have a
really empowered experience where they feel safe and
peaceful. I run D.C. Metro Maternity,
and there are ten of us right now that are labor
and partum doulas at the moment. All of the dual is
on the team are black women, which is awesome because
that's mostly who we serve. We get a decent number of
doctors, lawyers, dentists, lots of people who are used
to being experts in other areas of their lives. And so they're really
hiring a dula to be an expert in pregnancy. This is where the milk
would be stored and then that's how it travels. We know the different
options. We know different
hospitals, different providers. We're also one
of the continuous faces that you see through things in
the medical system. They would call it
continuity of care. We can be with our clients
all the way from pregnancy to as their baby gets older
in a similar way that your wedding planner might take
you through. Hey, we just got engaged
all the way to the big day. If we're working with Labor
clients, then we do a couple of meetings with them ahead
of time. We call these prenatal
meetings, we'll talk through birth plans. Also, we'll talk through
what we call comfort measures in labor. That's anything that helps
someone cope with all of the sensations that come with
having a baby. Does that feel good then? Yeah, for you that works. There's different
positions. There are massage techniques. So breathing
techniques. Sometimes the person that
we're most supporting is not the person who's giving
birth when we're working with the non birthing
parent, dad, mom, whoever, we're helping them stay
calm, helping them figure out where they fit into
birth and how they can become a parent. I worked a lot with clients
last year. There were times where I
would have a daytime client and then go home, take a
nap, and then do a ten or 12 hour overnight shift. And so I think the most
that I worked was 75 hours a week. If I can fulfill
something for a client that we've promised them, then I
want to. For people who are trying
to conceive right now are currently pregnant or in
the early postpartum phase, the first thing that I
would recommend is pre drop your shoulders, take a
really big breath all the way from your belly and
then just let it out. Most of us are carrying a
lot of tension and being stressed out is a really
hard way to give birth or figure out what it's like
to be a mother or a parent. I really hope that I get to
be a doula until I am old and gray. The issues that
led to maternal mortality rates in the US, which
frankly aren't great for white women or other women
in the US besides black women, they have existed
for a really long time. So it's going to take more
than the not quite a decade that I've been working for
that change to happen, but I'm hopeful that we're at
least headed in the right direction.
