[LEXIE] 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] 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] Hey Lexie [LEXIE] So here we are with episode two. Yay. Last time on episode, so far so good, last time on episode one, we talked about how people say you shouldn’t work together. So I thought for episode two, we would start talking about how we came to be together. [RON] Okay. So what you all hear you saying is like how we met story? [LEXIE] Yes. Speaker 3: All right. [LEXIE] What a gift I was. [RON] You were a gift and you were a gift mainly because I met you on my birthday. [LEXIE] Yes. But to be honest, it was not love at first sight for both of us. [RON] No, not even close. Well, hang on. That sounds wrong. [LEXIE] It does sound crazy. [RON] I really like to find a way to retract that last statement as soon as possible. I do look at my wife and I say she was a birthday gift me, but we were not romantically charged at that point. It was one of those where we met at a church function. We were in a group called, what was that group called? [LEXIE] Snacks? I don’t know. It was a single’s group. Yes, it was a single’s group. [RON] So we met on a Friday with the singles group and Lex was kind of like one of their unofficial leaders. On this particular time, we were going to go to a place called WhirlyBall. Now, if you don’t know worldly ball is I’ll give you a quick, second description of worldly ball. WhirlyBall is lacrosse slash polo with bumper cars. So you have — [LEXIE] And basketball. [RON] Yes, and basketballs. So you have these huge open, like of, I don’t know, bumper car court, I guess, best size of a football field. The job is to kind of, you get this basketball and you got to pass it back and forth with each other and pick it up and move it while people are bumping into you and you have to show it to your team and they have to shove it into this magical hole and winner takes off. So that’s WhirlyBall. So we met on the night going to play WhirlyBall. I walked up to Lexie. She was in the group and I was just like, “Hey, my name is Ron.” She was like, “Not impressed.” [LEXIE] I remember — [RON] She said she was not impressed. [LEXIE] I even remember what you were wearing. So it’s like, maybe I wasn’t aware of how impressed I was. [RON] Maybe you weren’t impressed because of what I was wearing. I think that was the very end of grunge, grunge was coming to an end. I still, I really embraced the grunge thing because I was a bouncer at one time. So grunge was definitely my look but looking poor doesn’t necessarily play well when you’re actually trying to find women. [LEXIE] But we met in September and then our first date wasn’t until March. So we knew each other for a while before we started dating, we kind of came friends first, but even, really not even that. [RON] What were you doing when we dated or when we first met? [LEXIE] Oh, I was an area manager for a department store and I had been back and forth in going to school to be a counselor, but I’d go for a little while and I’d stop. I knew I was going to do that, but I wasn’t sticking with it and actively pursuing that. Then I was doing a lot of the volunteer work at the church. [RON] I was in probably my biggest company at the time, owning my biggest company at the time when we met, which was a dry cleaning company. I did a lot of stuff before I got into dry cleaning, but dry cleaning was the first real brick mortar, employees, making sure that everything operates right. So yes, I was doing that, which, I liked being a dry cleaner. Dry cleaning was good. [LEXIE] So tell this story about how you got your first location. [RON] Oh, wow. I was at ITT, which is a technical school and I was engaged to another woman and she ripped my heart out and moved to Mississippi, which she could have went on or stayed over and it would’ve been fine just further away. It would’ve been better. So when we were together, I was working, like I said, I went to ITT and I started working at dry cleaners. I really enjoyed it and I was good at it. I didn’t think I was going to be good at it, but I was good at it. From there, I just got to the point where I didn’t know what to do. So I was talking to the dry clean owner, the guy who owned that location, which was a guy named Brad. I was like, “What do you think about if we tried to find a pickup store for me to run?” Because he really, I graduated from with my ITT degree and he was like, “Well, are you going to go look for a job at like a Lockheed Martin or some kind of space engineer where you would use an engineering degree?” I was like, “I don’t want to do that.” I’ll be honest. I’m an honest guy, probably to a fault. I really liked a whole lot of stuff that I did on site and big operational corporate things probably would not allow some of the stuff I like to do, like going out, partying till in the morning and then dragging yourself in work. Didn’t play. So I was talking to this guy and he was like, “Well, come work for me. Be a manager for me.” I did that for a while. I did that work for a year and then I was like, this isn’t playing well. I mean, dry cleaning manager after a while, you’re like, you’re going to be a loser. Don’t take that wrong. I’m not trying to be tacky, but it isn’t a job with like great ceilings unless you own the place. So I look to my friends and I was like, can you help me become a dry clean owner? And he was in trade. He was like, “What’s in it for me?” My response to him was, “I will manage your store. We’ll buy the pickup store. I’ll hire someone to run my pickup store. I’ll pay you back for owning, I’ll pay you back for the clothes that you process from that pickup store and I’ll pay you back for the purchase of that pickup store, basically making me work for free.” At that point, I kind of became an indention servant. I couldn’t even afford my own apartment at that point. I moved into my first dry cleaners. I lived in it for two years while I paid this guy back. And from there I bought — [LEXIE] I see the impressive part. When I think about your story, that’s the impressive part that you were willing to sacrifice and to actually live in your store in order to make it happen? [RON] Yes, I was, I paid that pickup store off and I went out and I was trying to find my main plant and I found one. It was an okay location, older equipment going out of business. It was owned by someone who was not, I would say a native American. I was talking to him and he was like, I asked him if he could finance it because I was broke. He was like, “Well, let’s go talk to my brother.” So we went to like three different brothers. We go to his brother’s house, but before we went to his brother’s house, I had said, “Lt’s go buy my pickup store,” because he wanted to see it. So I said, okay. So he went there and he was looking around and he looks at me and goes, “You live here? I was like, “Yes.” He was like, “You’re not like any American I’ve ever met. Most Americans are not willing to sacrifice their comfort, their own preferred comfort. They are not willing to sacrifice their comfort for their business.” That impressed him. So we go to his brother’s house and we’re sitting there with his brother and I’m trying to talk him into giving this main plant. It was like out of an Indiana Jones movie, the very first one where they’re at the bar and they’re doing this drinking contest where they’re taking these shots and they’re turning him upside down. They’re slamming him down on this table. I go to this guy’s house. His accent was not great. He said, these people, were not native Americans. They were foreigners. So he was like, you drink with me. I was like, you got it buddy. We started drinking. I don’t even know what we were drinking, man. We killed one bottle and we started the next bottle and I’m getting sauced because I don’t drink. That was not my gig. He is just acting sober. So at the very end, he leans in on me real tight and he says, “I am going to agree to let you have this location, but I will never ever have to worry about collecting my money from you ever again.” I felt like I was dealing with some kind [crosstalk]. I was very mob like, and I was like, heck to high water, this man’s getting his money. That was my goal from that point on. I continued to live in my store. Now I had a pickup store and a main plant and I was still living in my store. I eventually got to move into an apartment with a handful of buddies. We were trucking along these two locations that I met Lexie and it opened up to a whole new avenue. But yes, that’s how I got into dry cleaning, was this guy, great guy, his name’s Brad. I still give him all kinds of kudos. He gave me the best opportunity of my life because he allowed me to open up a business and grow and it was awesome. [LEXIE] Well, and then you were able to take that and when I came into the picture, I was going back and forth on, okay, am I going to finish this degree or not? In the middle of that, we got married. I was working outside of the company but I decided, okay, I’m going to be serious about finishing my degree. You said, “Hey, you can go to school and work a pickup location at the same time. It’s great job for a student and you can study and there’s a lot of downtime.” I said, okay. So I left that job and I went to work for you. Then suddenly you got rid of the first pickup store and just had the plant and then you bought another pickup store and that’s where I worked. I finished my counseling degree and we had a baby in there. So I was working in that store and was able to bring the baby to work and was finishing up my master’s degree. Then I left the company you purchased, you ended up with seven stores, just to make a lot of stores — [RON] I did. We ended up with seven stores, mainly because 9/11 happened. Now that’s the, it’s a sad part on some occasions. [LEXIE] Yes, it was. [RON] Because what happened was there were a lot of Muslims in the dry cleaning industry and when 9/11 happened, America got a little testy with Muslims. They didn’t want to work with them in any way, shape or form. [LEXIE] They were struggling. [RON] They were. All these locations were struggling. So they all started calling me because within the dry clean industry, probably like most industries in America, you end up knowing other people within the same industry that you’re in. So all the dry cleaners kind of know each other in your neighborhood. They will share boxes of hangers with each other or poly bags. Those are those plastic bags. Yes, so we just started buying locations. We started buying them up left and they were cheap. Some of them we managed to get almost free because the building owners would call us up going, “Will you just take over the lease?” “Yes, sure.” That’s how we ended up with seven locations and it was quite a challenge. We ran into a whole lot of challenges that I wasn’t expecting. We were going from two locations being manned by a husband and wife, no one stealing from you to going into seven locations, deliveries, — [LEXIE] I learned a lot about people. It was a challenge. It was a big challenge during that timeframe. [RON] I enjoyed it, but didn’t enjoy it. It was a challenge. [LEXIE] So 9/11, the first tragedy that helped us to like grow, well then the economy, tank time, no longer working for the dry cleaners. I’m now working for an agency as a counselor, most counselors started out working for agencies. It became obvious that because the economy in 2007, 2008 was crashing that it was hard to make money as a dry cleaner. So we got out of dry cleaning. So then you’re like, what am I going to do? About this time I am having baby number two and we decided that you were going to stay home for a little while with — [RON] We did decide that because who makes the least things at home? That’s the way couples look at who has the baby? Whoever’s making the least is changing diapers. [LEXIE] So that’s where we were but I was like you need to go back to school. We need to up our game, up some skills. We had big conversations about how you had these natural counseling skills. You want to take over for the story from there? [RON] I have natural counseling skills. I’ll give you that, but I do not have natural academic skills. I do have dyslexia. I do have some things. So I was told when I was quite young, you’re not a college material. I bought that line hook, line and sinker. So the idea of — Yes, I just didn’t want to do it. So Lexie was like, well, you really should go back to school. I was like, well, okay. I’ll take English 1301. I’ll fail miserably and I’ll get this out of her system and she will leave me alone and I’ll open a pawn shop or some other kind of donut shop or some kind of little small business on the side where I can continue to do what I do. She was like, no, you’re going back to school. So I said, fine. So I took a first semester English 1301. The teacher’s first assignment was tell me about yourself. I wrote an eight-page paper. I was in my late thirties at that time. Lexie was my proofreader. I would show her stuff and she would run through the program. She wouldn’t write things for me. She would just run it through Microsoft Word and point out all the errors and go, “I don’t even know what this sentence is. Learn what punctuation is.” So I had this eight-page paper, and like I said, you got to condense this down to four, something smaller. I was like, why? This is my life. Her response was, she’s used to dealing with 18-year-olds and an 18-year-old’s live story is I woke up, I had a bullet story, I learned to control my bladder, and now I’m here. That’s the story of an 18-year-old. By the time you get to college, you ain’t done much. Lexie was like, “You got to condense it.” I condensed it, I turned it in and six weeks later, at the end of the semester, I had an A in English 1301. Can I tell you on some levels I was pissed because it kind of told me I’m going to have to do this all the way through. I’m not going to be able to, just not finish college at this point. So college became a career. I doubled up. I did summer semesters. I did many semesters. I did anything I could to wrap this up as fast as possible. I did six years of school. [LEXIE] Well, sorry for interrupting you, but I was just going to say that you are one who thinks outside the box. So you figured out ways to make it happen. You got programs that you could just speak your papers instead of having to type. That made it easier with your dyslexia. You figured out how to take algebra in a mini course and make an A. I mean, you just blew it out of the water because you were willing to say, okay, this is it. I am committed to this. I’m going to figure out a way. It may not be as a traditional student. I’m non-traditional and I’m going to make it and you did. [RON] So basically six years worth of college, I knocked out in four. Then after that I finished my internship. Lexie was already in private practice because she wrapped her degree up first and I went to work for my wife. How did that happen? [LEXIE] Yes. That’s a whole story in how we ended up in private practice. It started with dry cleaning and learning this lesson of you can’t put all your eggs in one basket. Dry cleaning was the only way we were really trying to make money and then when it wasn’t doing well, we had to get out and scramble. In that timeframe of when you were wrapping up your degree, I started a company doing parenting classes for child protective services and had hired employees and was serving like a seven county area. But again, all my eggs were just in that basket. We were rocking along until the state had budget cuts and they cut the contract statewide for everybody. So then I had to make that leap from, okay, I’m running, have 17 employees to, I don’t have any work for them. So take some steps back. I became in private practice as a counselor, still starting out, working with child protective services as my main client, but just shifting to doing counseling instead of parenting classes. And off to the races on starting practice, then you came in and you worked for me and then we hired some more therapists and now we have a group practice. But we had some hard nogs in learning that diversifying how we make our income is extremely important. So really that’s the other thing that we want to help people know is that you can’t put all your eggs in one basket [RON] Diversifying your income is mandatory. You can call it a side hustle if you want to. I like to look at it like, what is it that you already are doing that compliments? So if you’re a construction guy, would it be worth your time to buy another piece of equipment and start doing dirt work? So you have to start looking at it like that. That’s kind of what we’ve developed, is the capabilities of looking at what we do for a living and go, what’s a compliment to what we’re already doing that doesn’t take us into a totally different field, but yes, it allows us to make more money and to diversify? [LEXIE] Yes, yes. That has been the key for wealth building and long term longevity for us. But we again learn that from the school of hard knocks. I think there’s going to be more about that as we talk about it in future episodes, but this may be a good place for us to wrap today. [RON] I am Ron Lee. [LEXIE] I am Lexie Lee. Thank you 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.