I'm 100 percent happier now than if I stayed with my
traditional nine to five job. In this episode, how I make seven figures every single year
running my businesses. Without our businesses, there would be no way that we could
live the lifestyle that we could live today. I don't actually even know how other parents do it. They have to hire help. And with our businesses, we can always be present in our
child's lives whenever they need us. The flexibility that is so important to me so that we can be
very, very active in our kids lives. That's tzong? Yeah, [in Mandarin] Tzong. Tzong ta to-shang fei guo. My name is Steve Chu, and I'm forty six And Jen Chou and I'm 45. And together we make over $1 million in the Silicon Valley. So, let me just text them really quick. I'm just going to text her. "Be quiet." Could you stop? We can hear it. He still has his Halloween candy, so it's probably eating a
lot of it. Which camera are we supposed to look at? Just this one? Oh, that one. Ok, thank you. I run and own Bumblebee Linens where we sell
handkerchiefs and linens for special occasions. I'm a blogger, podcaster, YouTuber, TikTok and I also teach
an online class on e -commerce. Combined, our businesses make over two million in
revenue, but our net income is around one million. A million dollars anywhere sounds like a lot of
money, and it's more than enough. We don't even spend a fraction of that amount. We don't budget per se, but we definitely spend less than we
make. And really, there's not that much that we really splurge
on. I would say I splurge on maybe travel, and Steve splurges
on game tickets. Besides those, we really don't spend a lot except for maybe
on our kids activities and their schooling. My wife and I, we are an extravagant people. So even if our businesses were to just completely dry up
overnight, we would still be able to live 20 plus years given our current expenses. I purposely looked for handkerchiefs and it's really hard to
find in the U.S. you can find men's ones, but you can't find ladies. And so I was able to find some handkerchiefs from a Chinese
vendor, but I had to order a lot. Our first order of handkerchiefs was around two hundred and
forty dollars, which amounted to about five hundred handkerchiefs in total. When we first use handkerchiefs for
our wedding and we sold off the excess, those sold like hotcakes because we listed them on eBay. When we first started the business, I was massively pregnant
and we were running the business out of our house. We started the business for six hundred and thirty dollars. By the end of the year, we made over one hundred thousand
dollars in profit. I think it was $102K. Fast forward, we've moved out of the house and into a
warehouse space. My goal was to make maybe five thousand dollars to just help
with the bills. Steve's goal was to replace my entire income. E-commerce was actually not our first choice, but we found
that starting those brick and mortar stores would cost us over five hundred thousand to start. Whereas with e-commerce, you can start with six hundred
bucks or less than that. And that's why we ultimately settle on e-commerce. So bumblebee linens did much better than we expected and
allowed my wife to quit. And then all of a sudden I had friends asking me how we did
it because they wanted to quit their jobs, and I got a little tired of answering the same questions over again, so
I decided to document that on a blog over at: Mywifequitherjob.com. That blog served as the diary or a
journal of our business, and we ended up happening is none of my friends actually read it. My mom didn't read it, but it attracted a bunch of random
strangers who are interested in what we were doing. And from there, the audience just grew and year to it
started making tens of thousands of dollars, and in year three it hit six figures. And today, fast forward is now a million dollar business,
and the way it makes money is a combination of advertising, affiliate revenue, core sales. The blog actually led to a podcast and sponsorships, which
led to a training class, which then led to an annual e-commerce event that I actually run over at the
Sellers Summit. Quick show of hands of how many of you are new to the
Sellers Summit this year? Wow. Ok, well, let me give you a quick overview. On an average day or average week besides holiday season, I
work probably about 20 to 30 hours a week. I rely heavily on my employees. I'm there just to help manage and to help basically support
them if things are falling behind. I start the workday at around eight and then I usually stop
at around 12:30 and then the rest of the afternoon. I'm actually a full time Uber driver slash chauffeur where
I just shuttle my kids, pick them up, take him to basketball, volleyball and all these other activities. I don't actually don't think it's a good idea to work with
your spouse. Things always come up. Steve had a lot of suggestions on how to improve our
business, and I must tell you they were horrible because he had an idea of picking certain
handkerchiefs that were butt-ugly just because they were cheaper. And I was like, Absolutely not. Let the professionals do this. And I actually make all the product decisions for our
business because he really has horrible taste. So the way we have it now is actually really good. She runs the day to day. I do the marketing and we do not step on each other's toes. We all have full control over our own domain. So early on, when we ran bumble bee linens, we actually had
the pedal down to the medal. And after a while of this rapid growth, my wife came to me
and she's like, This isn't fun anymore. It was definitely not fun. My goal initially for the business actually was, I think,
five thousand a month. And so at the time, I was like, if I can just help pay the
bills, that would be awesome. Steve definitely wanted to push it a little bit faster. And when we were pushing it faster and faster, I was like,
I just can't handle all this stress. And one time we hit the NBC Today show. Monogram is everything, and I love it on Bumblebee Linens
and this is $15.. Oh, that's nice. And all of a sudden our orders were 7x the normal sales
volume, and it was actually very stressful when you're running a physical products business. It's generally uncomfortable to grow fast. I really honestly thought that our goal was to just have a
little bit of income to help with the bills. There's no way I would have guessed like so many
years later that we would be as large as we are. We joke that we're going to move out of California as soon
as the kids go to college because it would be so much cheaper to live out of state employees would be cheaper. The location would be cheaper in terms of rent for our, our
office. I think he would be all in right now. Like he'd be like, Hey, let's move. I'd be all in because California taxes are really high. Let's just take Vegas, for example, there'd be no state
income tax. Really, we can run our businesses from anywhere. We're not tied to any location whatsoever. So financially, it probably makes sense to move somewhere
else once our kids are off to college. When I used to be a finance analyst prior to this role, I
worked crazy, crazy hours with this position at Bumblebee Linens. Having that creative freedom to do basically what I need to
do, I can work around my schedule. If it's slower, I can fully take that time off and not
worry about it and work at my kid's school, for example. In my past life, I was an electrical engineering director in
charge of microprocessor design. That's that's a lot to take in there, but basically, I just
stared at a monitor all day. It was a pretty demanding job. I used to work maybe 50-60 hours a week and it wasn't as
flexible because I actually had to physically be in the office. Having the flexibility is super rewarding for me, and I feel
like it's a win situation for me because I'm able to do something that I love and also be able to be a
really huge part of my kid's education. Growing up, I actually didn't see my parents as much as I
would have liked. They were first generation Chinese, they actually came to
the U.S. with no money at all. One of the reasons I'm really passionate about being really
present for my kids is because my parents really worked really hard growing up. But my mom also passed away when I was pretty young. So now I just want to take that time back and make sure
that I'm present for them. Yeah, it's delicious, right?
Ladies and gentlemen, this right here is why we need higher taxes on the rich and higher wages for workers. This entitled couple makes $1M in profit per year, work very minimal hours, but still complains about the โhigh costโ of their only two California employees (6:45 mark).
"We made it to NBC, sales went 7x and we were really stressed." - more sales clearly the problem here.
Let's give them a break. They are really struggling with all the millions coming in from selling hankerchiefs and get rich "courses".