[LEXIE LEE] The Married Entrepreneurs Podcast is part of the Practice of the Practice network, a network of podcasts seeking to help you market and grow your business and yourself. To hear other podcasts like Bomb Mom and Grow A Group Practice, go to www.practiceofthepractice.com/network. [RON LEE] Welcome to the Married Entrepreneurs Podcast. This is Ron Lee [LEXIE] I am Lexie Lee. [RON] We are professional counselors and serial entrepreneurs who are married. [LEXIE] To each other. [RON] Thank you for joining us as we explore the business of life and the life of business. [LEXIE] Hi Ron. [RON] Good morning. [LEXIE] Or afternoon, whatever time of day you’re listening to this. [RON] That’s true. Depends on what part of the world and what part of religious, what part of the world you’re in. [LEXIE] Exactly. So what are we talking about today? [RON] Well, I think we should say who we are. My name is Ron Lee. [LEXIE] I am Lexie Lee. [RON] We are married to each other and this is our first podcast. [LEXIE] Episode one. So I think today, what we’re actually really going to talk about is about why we’re doing this podcast, who we are and what you’re going to get out of listening to us. [RON] So who do you feel we are? [LEXIE] Well by trade, we are marriage counselors. That’s the thing that makes us the most money. Not the only, it’s not the only company we run, but we — [RON] No, we have two other companies. [LEXIE] So we are licensed professional counselors in the state of Texas. We have a private practice where we both practice and then we have some therapists that work for us. So it’s a group practice. Then we also have a company where we do intensive retreats for people who are wanting to really delve in and get basically six months worth of counseling done in three days. That’s our favorite, or your favorite for sure. [RON] It’s one of my favorites for sure. [LEXIE] Yes. [RON] So let me ask you a question. Can I ask you a question real quick? What is your preferred client? [LEXIE] Well, a couple who are just disconnected and hopeless and feel like there is nothing but divorce in their future and we are able to come and help them to reconnect and see that there is hope and that there is a path where they can get back together. [RON] All right. I like that. My preferred client would be, and it’s weird because we see these a lot in the marriage counseling retreat side, where we’d work with entrepreneur couples. We had a couple in last weekend. They came in and they were in business together. He did a whole lot of stuff in the company. She did a whole lot of stuff in the company and we were able to help these guys form a new path to stay married, stay connected and stay in business. [LEXIE] Yes, yes. I like that tweak that you did right there because, yes, not just couples that are hopeless, but we love it when they’re trying to do what we do when we have something in common with them and spend 24/7 or pretty close to it together all the time. [RON] So one of the main reasons for this podcast is to help entrepreneur couples who may be struck either in their business or in their marriage with a multitude of different scenario problems. We’ve seen it all. We’ve seen everything from infidelity to money struggles to not knowing if we’re buying the right equipment to how many family members do I bring into my company before I want to pull all my hair out. We really would like to partner with these guys and really just try to help them understand the nuances, the ins and outs of entrepreneurship. [LEXIE] And being married to the person you’re in business with. [RON] Yes. [LEXIE] So let me ask you a question. [RON] Sure. [LEXIE] When you think about entrepreneurship, how did you get started as an entrepreneur? [RON] For me, I go way back. I’m going to have to go back to like seven or eight years old. [LEXIE] All right. So just for the audience, that means we’re in the 1970s. [RON] Yes, yes it is. So I’ve taken you back to the seventies and my father was military. That made me a military brat. So he would get requisitioned supplies that he would sign off for and he would bring some of those supplies home because he was a chief Sergeant. Well, one of those supplies that he would like to bring home were pencils, these electronic pencils that kids love to play with. I would take a case of them up to the elementary school. I was selling these things for like a quarter each. Well I’d gone through my dad’s inventory, then two weeks later he comes back, he walks into my bedroom and he’s like, “Where are my pencils?” I owned it. He was going to find out. I mean, that’s what he does. So I was like, “I took them to school and I sold them.” He was like, “What’d you sell them for?” “I got a quarter for the pencils and a dime or quarter for the electric pencils and a dime for the standard pencils.” He was like, all right. He turns around and walks out. Now my head’s going, I’m in trouble. He’s going to come back in with that big black leather strapping belt, start popping it when he is walking down the hallway, kush, kush, kush, letting me the fear is coming. That didn’t happen. I was expecting that and that did not happen. What I got on the other side was the door opened up and my dad walked in. He had two more cases of the pencils, set them down on my dresser and was like, “Let me see the money.” I poured out my piggy bank and the money was all there. He basically scooped up half of it and says, “Cost of inventory.” He turns around and says, “I’ll have two more pencils before you next week. Keep up the good work.” He turns around, spins on his heels and walks out. I was hooked on being self-employed at that point. I was hooked on being an entrepreneur. I thought this is the greatest thing in the world. I got to keep my profit and spending on what I wanted to. Then after that, I went into smashing, collecting aluminum cans, collecting bottles, anything I could do as a kid to hustle up ice cream. Money was my main goal. What about you? [LEXIE] Well, I didn’t start quite so young or at least if I did, I mean, I think there was a lemonade stand that was in there. But really when I think about I getting into business and understanding and finding some joy in it, I was a teenager and I was in an organization called Junior Achievement. It’s still around, great thing. It’s where business professionals in the community go and work with students to teach them about how business works. So it was myself and a handful of other teenagers that would meet one night a week. We had this great guy who came and helped us to figure out a product to develop and how to market it. So our product was first aid kits that you could store in your car. So we designed them, we produced them and then we developed a marketing plan and we sold them and we got to keep the money to use how we want. I learned so much about accounting and marketing and all the basics of business. So like you, I found that fascinating. That’s part of why I ended up as a business major when I started in college, because I was always interested in psychology, but what do you do with the four year psychology degree was the thing that people kept saying. So I started out with business because that was practical and my dad had always said, “Whatever you do with your college suite, just make sure it’s practical. Don’t spend all this money and not use it.” So I started out as a business major and really still, I would sit in class and I just loved it, but my heart was also for psychology. So God worked on me some, and I ended up graduating with a dual major of business and psych, but that was my first delve into business. As it turned out, having the dual major really helped me when eventually starting private practice, because most counselors don’t get that. It has worked out really well for me to understand more of how the business world works. So we both started young. [RON] Right. [LEXIE] I guess the other thing that we need to let our audience know is a little bit more about who we are besides counselors. So, we are married to each other, is how we like to say it. Do you know how long we’ve been married? It’s a test. [RON] It’s 2021. It’s going to, I say 21 years. [LEXIE] That’s when this is being recorded. So it may not be when you’re listening, but yes, that’s the beauty of getting married in 2000, is that you can always figure out how many years. [RON] The sad part is, is when you forget what year you’re in, you’re like, is this 20 or 21? Where are we on the calendar? [LEXIE] That happens as you get older. But also we were older when we got married. We were not young whippers snappers when we first got married and part of how we have never walked a traditional path. I guess the only thing that’s really traditional about us is that we are married, but we started later. We had kids later. We have two kids, two teenagers. [RON] A boy and a girl. We got a matching set. Then we quit. [LEXIE] But teenagers people. Pray for us because we have two teenagers in the house. [RON] You make our teenagers sound like they’re bad kids. We got reasonable teenagers, most expensive teenager. They like to do stuff. Not always cost money, but they are good kids. [LEXIE] We have great kids, but teenagers, or anyone who deals with teenagers, it takes extra patience. [RON] When it comes to my teenagers, I have two rules I want to teach them before they move out of my house. There’s going to be a whole lot more, but two rules I really want them to grab hold of. One, you have to separate yourself from the trash. Please throw things away that you don’t need or want, or that are just trashed. The second one is you have to learn how to hygiene. Please shower, brush your teeth and use deodorant. Those are my main two goals while my children are going through their teenage years. If I’m going, they can just master, throwing away trash and hygiene. I may feel like I have an accomplishment on my hands [LEXIE] Some days that go well, other days it’s more of a challenge. [RON] It’s crazy when that’s a struggle, right? [LEXIE] Right. So we are married 20 something years. We have two teenage kids. We also have a little micro farm. I have chickens. [RON] We do, we have about five acres. We’re in Texas. We have about five acres in Texas that we like to play on. So we do have chickens, we’re growing peach trees and some apple trees. We just like a smaller life. We’re just trying to, now I wouldn’t say we’re trying to move off the grid. I don’t think that would be a proper terminology for it, but we’re just trying to be less reliant on the grid. Maybe that’s the better way of putting it. [LEXIE] Well, and so in our entrepreneurship, we’re also trying to figure out how we can work less so that we can play on the land and with our chickens and on your tractor and all that more. So that’s a big part of who we are is that we want to work hard, play hard. I guess the other thing that we need to talk about is the whole house flipping thing. [RON] Yes. We mentioned that we have a handful of businesses. So we have, we do some farming stuff. We make a little bit of money off that more. That’s more of a hobby than anything. We have the practice where we talk to couples and all that. We have intensive retreats. We do that. Then we flip houses. [LEXIE] Yes. [RON] That’s the crazy part, because most of the time when we flip houses, it’s a hoarder home. So we buy these houses, they’re reasonably priced, we gut them. I mean, most of the time we take it right down to the studs and way too many dumpsters have I filled, just full of junk because people just leave junk and you’re like, why are you leaving your junk? So sometimes there’s buried treasure. Sometimes part of flipping is looking for Barry treasure in people’s junk. Most of the time junk is junk and you just toss it into the big dumpster and just roll up. But yes, I love finding deals and flipping houses. It is like rescuing people sometimes, but that’s a whole different industry. [LEXIE] Yes. But as we think about the things that we have done together that people say married people shouldn’t do, we work together. We’re together all the time. We’re in business together. Not only do we work together, but we are in business together, but also we do lots of remodeling together. Those are some of the big things that people say, ah, if you do that, you’re headed for divorce. Yet here we are, 20 plus years. [RON] Well, we have a system that’s just based on a system. So we have a system for that, which basically means the system is here, you go, folks, ready guys, here you go. I’m going to tell you how it works. She’s in charge. Once you wrap your head around that little system, your goal is to try to make your wife dreams and ambitions come true. We do that because it makes us happy and it gives us joy. Then if their goal, which is, I know this is my wife’s goal. It may not be every wife’s goal, but I know this is my wife’s goal. Her goal is to make my dreams and wishes and ambitions come true as well. [LEXIE] Yes. You said that I’m in charge, but I don’t view it that way. I view it that you’re in charge and that we work as a team. So isn’t that interesting? We have to work it out. [RON] That may be one of the greatest secrets of why we’ve been able to do this for 21 years and not be divorced yet. [LEXIE] I think, well, and I look forward to, as we’re doing this podcast, exploring more things on how you make it work when you’re working together and sharing more of what we do. And our plan is to interview some people and glean, because we’re always learning. I don’t know it all. I confess I don’t have all the answers, but I am so willing to seek them out. That I think is a really important skill for an entrepreneur to have is to be able to say, “Hey, there’s something else I need to know and I’m going to find out.” [RON] I think that’s another great reason for the podcast right there, is to, eventually, and we have a reasonable Rolodex now, but we know as we go in this adventure and we interview people and we get to know more people that that Rolodex is going to grow. So that we know that there are people out there that are struggling within their own industry, their own business, trying to understand things, trying to move up to another level and you may not know how to do it. You just may not know. So one of the reasons we’re doing the podcast is so we can actually start introducing ourselves to more people, learning more people about different industries and then being maybe a conduit to hook people up. You’re trying to make this happen and this guy over here makes that happen. You don’t know who they are, but you know who we are, you get ahold of us. When we help you, make the contact and make your dream come true. I think that’s a huge part of what we’re trying to do here is just being a does everyone know what a Rolodex is? [LEXIE] Depends on how old the listener is. [RON] So maybe I clean that up, say a contact. So you need contacts to make your dream come true. You’re needing a contact to take yourself to the next level. That is what this podcast is going to be as well. It’s going to be a way for you to work on your marriage, work on your business, work on your life, work on your relationships. We just want to be to help you. [LEXIE] Partner with you. Yes, absolutely. I think that’s a good place to stop. [RON] I think so too. [LEXIE] That we’ll come back again next episode, and we’ll share a little bit more about ourselves. [RON] I am Ron Lee [LEXIE] I am Lexi Lee. [RON] You all have a great week. [LEXIE] Thanks for listening. Thank you for listening. Time is our most valuable resource and we appreciate that you shared your time listening to us. If you enjoyed our show, please rate us or give us a review. You can share this episode with someone that you think may benefit. You can find more from us at marriedentrepreneurspodcast.com. [RON] This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regards to the subject matter covered. It is given with the understanding that neither the host, the publisher or the guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical, or any other professional information. If you want a professional, you should find one.