Start Winning at Life with Ethan King’s S.I.M.P.L.E. Success Buckets Ep. 91

Mindset is very important. Things like mindset, visualization, the law of attraction, and I believe in all of that, but it's nothing if you don't put the action behind it, and it has to make sense. So I explain the science behind why things work, and here's what you do step by step to make it happen in your life.

Welcome to FASCINATING ENTREPRENEURS. How do people end up becoming an entrepreneur? How do they scale and grow their businesses? How do they plan for profit? Are they in it for life? Are they building to exit these? And a myriad of other topics will be discussed to pull back the veil on the wizardry of successful and FASCINATING ENTREPRENEURS. My book, RELENTLESS is now available everywhere. Books can be bought online, including Amazon and BarnesAndNoble.com. Try your local indie bookstore too, and if they don't have it, they can order it. Just ask them the review are streaming in, and I'm so thankful for the positive feedback as well as hearing from people that my memoir has impacted them positively. It is not enough to be resilient. You have to be RELENTLESS. You can go to TheRelentlessBook.com for more information. Thank you so much. Ethan King has businesses in apparel, fitness, eCommerce, and real estate. He is also a speaker and author who used to be a starving artist and is now a CEO of Seven Figure Brands. We talk about his core businesses, what inspired him to develop his personal brand and the books he's planning on writing in the future. Now, let's get right into it.

So this has been. 20 year journey now, and it started because I always wanted to be an artist. Growing up, I wanted to be a career artist, like drawing and painting. And my parents told me that artists only make money after they're did. They didn't work for me because I wanted to be rich. So the two weren't congruent, but I was a stubborn kid in long story short, I just set out to prove my parents wrong. So I majored in art in college. Well, in high school I actually took college level advanced placement art classes. Had my work in exhibitions. So in college I majored in studio art. Well, long story short, my parents were right. It's really hard. It's really hard to make a lot of money drawing and painting. So I had to learn that the hard way. But after lots of twist and turns and events where I worked at a Strip Club and couldn't find a good job, so I was taking out the trash at a strip club. I got robbed one night at gunpoint. It was just-

Let's be clear that you were not, Magic Mike?

No, no, no. I was not I was not stripping, and I was not even in the shape to be knowing that I was not in good shape growing up. I was taking out the trash as a barback, so it was a very humiliating job. Sometimes my friends would come in there and get drunk, and when people threw up in the club, I was the one who would have to cleaned up. I was taking out the garbage to the dumpster at night in the back, and it was in a really bad part of town. So sometimes there would be shootouts across the street and I could hear bullets ricocheting off of the dumpster behind me. So it was not a glorified job by any means, but it was what I had to do to make ends meet. While I went to school for graphic design in the daytime, and so what I ended up doing was marrying graphic design and I think you have a graphic design background too. Yeah. That's pretty cool.

Little bit. I mean, I had a passion for it and an interest for it, but not to the extent you did. I don't think.

Okay, so what I ended up doing was marrying graphic design with my zeal for my fraternity life that I did in college, got pledged to fraternity, and at the time I was just all into it. So I started designing like these flyers and posters, and I was learning web design in school. So I, I would advertise to the other Greeks on campus, like, "Hey, I'll design your flyers and your teachers" and things like that. And I just did it for fun. And even as a class project where we had to create this fictitious business for a branding class, I said, "Oh, well gonna create a company called Stuff for Greeks, because that's what I'm into right now." After a while of having this website out there in the real world, we started to get actual orders from people that we didn't know from across the country. Like, "Hey, can I order my sorority jacket?" And we're like, "Yeah." So we'll design it for. And here's the design. We were charging like $75. "Here's your design for your jacket. Based on what you told me about your ledge experience." Now you go get it made in your city. They're like, "I don't have anywhere to get it made. I want you to make it." I'm like, "I don't know how to make jackets. It's just, go find some old lady with a sewing machine in the basement, right? They can make it for you." That's what I thought it was. But after enough people asked and offered us money, we just said yes, and then we decided to figure out how to do it. That's kind of how I operate my life. I said, "Yes" first. Then figure the rest out later, because now once you've paid me money. I'm going to over deliver for you. I'm going to figure it out. So we figured out that it was called Embroidery. We found the company to outsource it to for a while, and we had like over a hundred orders in the first year. That company fired us because we were bringing them too much business that was interfering with their normal business. This is kind of the Mom and Pop mentality, not the scale up mentality, but they were nice enough to take me back in their shop and show me exactly how to do everything so that I could get out of their hair. And after that, we just brought our own embroidery machines and we moved it into our basement. Then we expanded. We had a small office in Tyler Perry's building. He was one of my early graphic design clients. And then we expanded. We were fortunate enough to, and this was all grassroots. We didn't have any investors or anything, but we just kept pouring profits back in. We were able to purchase a building in West Midtown Atlanta, where we moved our operations there. We didn't wanna just call it stuff for Greeks. And I mean, at this point we had probably, but like our thing that makes us really stand out in the Greek Market, is that we service over 500 different Greek letter organizations, and we are very specifically known for the very detailed advanced artistry that goes on the jacket backs of these fraternity and sorority jackets. So it's very, very niche market, very exclusive where the top player in that space, there are only a few companies that can do it and none of 'em can do it at our level. And you know the jackets retail anywhere from $400 to $2,000 for one jacket because they are so specialized.

Excuse me, back it up. Who is buying $400 to $2000 jackets? I'll look up on your website and see what this is all about. That's amazing.

Yeah. Yeah. Pull it up. If you go to stuff4GREEKS.com, you'll see the jacket backs right there. It'll kind of give you an idea, but if you want your photo Natasha embroidered on the back of your motorcycle vest, whatever you are passionate about.

Yeah. My daughter would love that if I just rolled around town with my photo on the back of my jacket. Yeah, let's do it.

Right. Well, some people are like that, and whether its your photo or your business logo or your skate club. We get the wildest stories. It's what really makes me smile about this business is because people are so passionate about so many different things, and we started in the Greek market, but once we bought the building in West Midtown, we said, "Okay, let's expand." Let's see what other markets we can tap into. So we opened a retail. We called it Zeus's Closet. So it still kind of has that connotation to the Greek world where we got our roots. But hey, Zeus is King of the Gods. What would Zeus wear? Whatever he wants to wear, right? So we will make whatever you want. Whatever you are passionate about, put it on your jacket back and then of course do stuff for your polos for your company and things like that. We do tons of that. We've expanded into schools. We even do a lot of stuff for Marvel Studios. So many things are filmed here in Atlanta now that that's been huge for our business. These wardrobe departments will come to us and we can do things that most other Embroidery Companies can't and help them bring these visions to life.

What is your upside to other embroidery companies? Can you say your secret sauce? What's the secret?

Yeah, I can describe it. I mean, I can't replicate it just by me describing it, but most embroidery companies are very old school where the digitizing the file, set up the artistry, they go get that done somewhere else or they're like, "You give us the file and we'll just punch it in the embroidery machine." It so out. Whatever you give us. Most embroidery companies, if you come to them with a vision of a sketch or whatever that you want to have happen, they don't know how to execute everything. They aren't vertically integrated to execute everything from start to finish. And we do it all in the same building from concept design, consultation, all the way to production. So not only can we handle the advanced stuff, but we can also do it really, really fast, like same day, which is unheard of in the industry. You know, Hollywood, they are always last minute and they have big budgets. So we just fell kinda right in that niche where last minute and we can handle the heavy stuff. So that's been a lot of fun. So that's how stuff for Greeks led into Zeus's Closet. And now they're both going strong.

They're two separate companies.

Yeah, they're two separate companies, but they are related and they're just for brand purposes, they're-

Gotcha. So when did you decide on developing and focusing on your personal brand?

Yeah, so that was a kind of a gradual thing, but 2014 was probably the most pivotal moment when I knew that I wanted to expand my personal brand. And what happened was in EO, so this is when I first joined EO. In fact, I was still in the accelerator program. For the benefit of your listeners, Accelerator helps your business grow to a million dollars in revenue. Once you do that, then you can join EO Entrepreneurs Organization, in which the minimum requirement is $1 million a year in revenue. So in 2014, I was right at that point where I was graduating from Accelerator coming into EO, and we had this program. It was like a TED Talk style event. That we called EO X instead of TEDx. We called it EO X. So they allowed members to do like an eight minute speech on whatever topic. I decided to do the speech on my own personal answer to life balances, my framework for life, and at the time I called the speech the simple Path to Prosperity, and it's based on the way that I calibrate life into six different bucket. Spirituality, which is your focus on the self, your stillness, your subconscious restructuring. So that's the S. The I is for your intellect. Constantly developing your intellect every single day, doing something to stimulate and boost your learning. M is for money mastery, always focusing on your finances and making sure those are in shape. P is for your physical presence, less inside and out. Not just your fitness, but the way you carry yourself, the way you dress, the way you groom. L is for love in leadership, and that's your relationships, whether it's romantic relationships, family relationships, and relationships with your employees and your staff. And E is for entertaining experiences, and my personal belief is that. Instead of focusing on the concept of life balance, where it's just like up or down in order for one to be up, the other has to be now. Well, I believe that instead, you focus on those six areas which are in constant flux from day to day and just focus on constantly calibrating them, and you can truly have it all across those six area. I gave this eight minute speech, and it was very, very well received. I thought that I sucked as a public speaker, but people came up to me months afterward and they could recite back the whole speech to me, and I was blown away by that. And I said, Well, maybe I'm onto something here. Maybe instead of just keeping this to myself, I should start to share more of it with the world. And that led me doing more speaking gigs, and especially as I became president of the Atlanta chapter, I was doing a lot more, was behind the microphone a lot more, and then it just kind of snowballed and snowballed into becoming another side business That gave me more satisfaction, honestly, that, or at least a different type of satisfaction in the business. I had been running for 15 years. I was at a dinner the other night and the question was asked, Well, how do you measure success in your life? And my measurement used to just be only money, but now I measure it when I get unsolicited thank you notes. And you know when you get those in the mail, like one I can remember, I gave a speech at a banquet and a few weeks later I got this unsolicited thank you note in the mail. From one of the waiters who was working that night. He said, Your speech wasn't meant for me, but I just happened to be working and I just want you to know it changed my life. That kind of stuff is just so much worth, so much more than money, and that's what led me to focusing on my personal brand and getting to where we are today.

Have you ever thought that you should write a book, that you should write the story of your life to help other people learn from your experience? Please go to MemoirSherpa.com and learn how I can help you write, figure out your publishing path and market your story, your memoir, to a best seller status. It sounds like you developed this personal brand out of like an intuitive need, and it was fulfilling some maybe gaps in your life, and that's beautiful, but I imagine since you are the entrepreneur that you are, that eventually it became a source of income and you're monetizing your thought leadership and such. Is that the goal, now?

Yeah. Yes, it is. So in my dream world, cuz I'm a big believer in designing your life, designing your future, and I'm currently living the dream that I had 20 years ago. But it's okay for dreams to evolve and for them to change. And I believe that in fact they should. So the dream that I'm designing now, I love the travel, I love to speak and impact people like I just explained with the thank you notes. And I really like money. So marrying those three things, I would love to just get paid to go speak in different countries across the world. And that's how I'm designing my life. And I know that, that's, at least for the next chapter in my life, the life that I want to lead is just impacting people in different countries, different parts of the world. And I'm already doing it on a, on a much smaller level than where I want to be. But that's how we start by being intentional. About our wants and our desires and visualizing them and starting to put them into practice.

Right? And you probably appreciate the journey and don't need to arrive at the goal as soon as possible. I think that you seem to be on this mature side of your thought process, and I know for myself that I have these big, lofty goals, but because of everything that I've experienced, I'm really looking forward to getting there and sometimes I hold myself back so that I can enjoy the moment and put off the achievement. I don't know if you're there yet, but it just sounded somewhat similar. So let's talk about your book, Wealth Beyond Money. I'm assuming it probably comes from that simple process and and the framework, but I'd love to have you tell the listeners about it in your own words.

So the full title of the book is Wealth Beyond Money; Unlocking the Six Dimensions of Success for Richness in Every Area of Your Life. And those six dimensions of success are the simple framework that I explained earlier. What I realized, you know, from that point, from that speech in 2014 to where we are now in 2022, it's been a rollercoaster ride. We've had ups and downs in our business. We faced challenges. Challenges that we thought were ins, insurmountable. I've been stressed out to the point where I've been on anxiety medications to the point where we've just been happier than ever and I realized. Those moments when I was unhappy is, is when I was only focused on money or ego. Now that's important. This isn't one of those books that's just all about, "Oh, be happy." It's not a hippie book. I call myself a hippie capitalist because the money part is very important and there's a money chapter when, when you get to the money chapter in the book, it could be a business book in itself. And it gives you step by step actionable tips on how to double your business revenue, on how to become more profitable so that you can explore these other areas of life. It gives you a lot of life hacks across those six buckets of the spirituality, intellect, money, your physical presence, your love, relationships, and entertainment. So that's how it came to be, because I have been at my lowest in every single one of those buckets. And I tell the stories of how I overcame the challenges in each one of them. And then I also give step by step like action steps. Like "do this", "this", "this", "Use this app. "Use this app." "Use this app." If you go look at the reviews in my book, you'll see the word actionable. I don't know how many times, but that's because I was very intentional about not just writing another fluffy self-help book mindset is very important. Things like mindset, visualization, the law of attraction, and I believe in all of that, but it's nothing if you don't put the action behind it, and it has to make sense. So I explain the science behind why things work, and here's what you do step by step to make it happen in your life. That's wonderful. I would love to know when you set to publish the book.

What was your, and I'm sure you had many goals, but if you could sum up, what was the goal for you for this book? I'm gonna just jump in and say, it's not to make money on book sales. Right. Let's get that outta the way. But what were your goals and are you realizing them?

Yeah, well, lots of goals to go back to what? Everything that was flying through my mind at the time. So I started writing this book at the end of 2021. But before that, it was sitting in my Google Drive in an outline format as a, "Oh, one day I'll write this book." You know, I had no timeline attached to it. And then I'm doing speaking gigs and things like that. But I start to get this sense like, you know, some of these people don't take me quite seriously. They're like, Who is this guy? And it started to play with my emotions and my thoughts like, "Well, who am I really?" You know, that imposter syndrome starts to settle in, but then you're like, you know, Really have a really cool story and other people are like, You should really tell your story more. And one of my business mentors, one of my business coaches said something that really impacted me. In fact, she was saying it to someone else, but I saw it and it just made this spark in my brain go off. And she said, If you haven't published a book, no one's gonna take you seriously in the world of like speaking. I said, "You know, Let me do this. Let me get this out of the way." Get this out into the world, and not just for the purposes of having more credibility of being a speaker, but it also makes it easier to spread your message instead of having to repeat a bunch of one-on-one conversations or speeches. Well, I now have this tangible form that I can just spread around the world that someone can read, and then have a baseline for what my message is about. And my plan is to, I have like six more books already lined up where we go in deep on each of the six dimensions of success. So this-

Okay, I love that. Just hold on everybody, take a moment because I think that's really important and brilliant. You have this overview book. Right? That hooks people. Gets them interested. You have actionable steps in the book and now you have a built in next six books. Did you consider that before you published it? Did you know that you were going to do that?

I did because I knew I wanted to write a book, but, and I had a bunch of outlines on my Google Drive, so when I sat down like, "Okay, I'm going to publish a book." It's like, well, which one do I publish? So I have a fitness program that's a whole course, Six Pack Dad. So you know, I could have written a book called Six Pack Mindset, but I was like, "No. I wanted to get out the whole foundation first because this book, Wealth Beyond Money is what I would tell my younger self or even a version of me in an alternate reality who made different decisions and was unhappy and not where I wanted to. And be like, look, this is what you gotta do, man." Like, so that's who I wrote this book for. I was like, "No, this has to be first. And I'm not quite sure which order I'm gonna release the next six books, but I think-

I mean, I think they need to be in the order of the acronym. Things are putting it out there right now. I mean, it would drive me a little nuts if the P came out before the S, but you do you.

Ok. We'll see. You know, I have to go where, you know, I also look at what the world needs at the time and obviously the past couple of years have been crazy with the pandemic and all the ripple effects of that. So this book was released in the spring of 2022. and I feel like it came at a time when a lot of people needed to hear it because the preceding 18 months had been extremely confusing and a lot of people hit the reset button or they wanna hit the reset button. They're like, "What is life really?"

I hit it, I hit the reset button, I stopped that reset button. Okay, so I have a question for you, which is actually masquerading as advice. So you have six books. I think that it would be beneficial to you and your readers so equally beneficial to both of you if you, and this is gonna be so much work, but if you wrote all six books, you had them all ready to launch and that you them in a three to six month apart so that you're not losing any of your audience. And this is what some murder mystery books do in romance novels. They hook you, and as soon as you're done reading that, they go straight onto the next. And those kind of books have an incredible trajectory because they have this momentum. And if you listen to me, we'll see if I can take my own advice one day. But if you set everything up in advance, have the books all written, edited, proofread, designed, ready to go, then there's not gonna be a stop gap. You know, life gets in the way, business gets in the way, and a year or two could go between the M. Let me see if I can spell in the P. And you may lose some people.

Right.

So, I don't know, you can tell me later. And thank me. In your thank you notes, if you go that version, did you have help with an editor with your book? And how did you source and qualify that person?

EO again, you know, so you and I are in the my EO authors and speakers group, and I had put it out there one day on a call that I'm writing a book and someone else, Mac Rendos, I'll give him a shout out. He gave me a reference to the publisher that he used and I gave her a call and we just hit it off. Rebecca is amazing and she rolled out a whole package. Share the concept of your book, and she'll read a draft manuscript, decide if she wants to take it on, where there's a whole procedure that she goes with from start to finish. Once you decide on the launch date, it's like, "Okay, well here's what we're gonna do every day to get to that." And it included the editing, like multiple rounds of editing the cover design, getting the early reviewers and testimonials, what you're saying on social media and really grooming this to become a bestseller. Cuz as you know, it's all about building up to that launch event and really crushing it on that launch event. But it's really the background work that a lot of times people don't see in the background leading up to it. I knew that I needed help. I do not do very well doing things on my own. I need coaching, I need accountability. I like tough love. I need deadlines, So I definitely got help in that arena.

Would you say that she helped you with the development of the book and the content? Did she do ghost writing or was she really there to help structure and coach you along?

It was more, feedback in coaching. And editing. I decided not to do any ghost writing this round. I wanted to, but for this, my first book, I wanted to like feel the whole thing. So I sat down and typed.

Feel the pain.

Yeah, so I typed every single word, but she did gimme feedback, like maybe move this here instead of there, you know, so that it makes more sense, it flows better. And some of the feedback I took and implemented some I didn't. But I needed that, and not just from her, but also from some of my early reviewers and people that I respect and admire. I took into consideration their feedback as well. I believe that it needs to be a tribe that, I mean, even if you, there are rumors that. Shakespeare wasn't one person, but it was a group of people, right?

But he had a writer's room.

Yeah, people were writer's room. So it's on the outside. It can look like it's one person, but it's really a team behind a lot of these big names. Even with these shows like Grey's Anatomy, things like that, it's not just writer.

It'll take a village

It's a village. Why should I as a budding author, try to go it alone? Yes. Follow the model of the greats.

Smart. Smart. So back to your core businesses, what is your involvement in each with everything that you've got going on plus your family and trips to like Africa for safari?

So we have a great team. My role now, my role, it fluctuates, so I don't wanna act. I'm just hands off the wheel. I've definitely been there. I've had moments where I took my hands off the wheel for too long and things were going great. But then if you do that for a while, you know, your car might end up in a ditch and you have to over correct. But right now I primarily, I do, we, we do sales appointments, like in person sales appointments. I'll do some of those. As I've developed my personal brand more and more, it's had a cool effect on my day to day business that I didn't anticipate where people who follow me online when they come in and meet with us, they're surprised to see me there and I kind of get this fan effect, which is kind of neat. Unexpected but neat. So it's actually helped that business grow, even though my personal brand and the book, Wealth Beyond Money don't specifically have to do with custom embroidery and like personalized apparel. But yeah, so the sales and marketing are primarily what I do. And you know, of course hiring, being the team cheerleader, keeping the team spirit up.

How many employees do you have across both companies?

We we're small. We only have 12 now. And we've had more employees. Less revenue in the past. So we

Thanks to COVID me and honestly I learned to kick off profit with your people. So there's silver linings So the last things I want to ask about is for your two core business is your biggest strategy for growth.

Yeah. Interesting question. So pre COVID, we were on the road to franchising Jesus' closet. In the traditional route and popping up multiple locations like all of the country. That was the vision. And of course, COVID happened and made us reevaluate a lot of things. And it's like, do we really wanna be dealing with a bunch of physical brick and mortar locations and staffing them, or even dealing with franchisees? So we're questioning that now, even though we have all the franchise docs, we have our prototype stores, so we have two locations right now, but we are starting to take more of the angle of expanding our online presence and implementing a platform to help other clothing brands, startup businesses like that are focused on or having apparel element to them help them grow and expand. So this is a kind of a marrying of my personal brand where I teach a lot about business growth, mindset, things like that, that can help any business growth, but it'll be tailored. Like our clothing brands, and we already have some clients enrolled in this, by the way, but we're giving them the coaching, but we're also giving them the support system where we'll build your website for you. We'll do your fulfillment for you. We'll be like you're a silent partner on the back end where we'll fulfill the clothing for you and ship it out to your customers. Hand of the customer service, and we'll give you the coaching so you can go out and be the face of your brand at promote your brand, but you don't have to worry about all of the headache. And when a machine goes down and when an employee doesn't show up. Let us handle that for you because we have 20 years experience and we have the framework and the infrastructure in place to help you. So now our focus is expanding that part of our business through what we call the Clothing Line Success program. And then we have another one called the Greek Per Program, so that we can become a platform in a vessel to help other people live the American.

For more information, go to the show notes where you're listening to this podcast. Wanna know more about me, go to my website OfficialNatashaMiller.com. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you loved the show. If you did, please subscribe. Also, if you haven't done so yet, please leave a review where you're listening to this podcast now. I'm Natasha Miller and you've been listening to FASCINATING ENTREPRENEURS.