111 – He’s made a long career out of talking: Tom interviews Jim Barber

Episode 111 – Jim Barber
[00:00:09] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody it's Tom here with episode 111 of Screw the Commute podcast. I'm glad you're here. And we got Jim Barber with us today. And I've known this guy for a lot of years. I don't really know how long, but he's got the barber shop and it doesn't have a thing to do with hair. He'll tell you about that when he comes on. And also. Oh, my God. He's been a toastmaster for 30 years. How could that be? We'll talk about that also when we get him on here. Episode 110. Jim might know this guy, Jeff Justice was on and he was a professional comedian. And you'll be amazed at the way he's been able to monetize. Just being funny. Yeah. I mean, one of the ways you just said how could that be? Those people aren't funny and he makes money from them. Plus, he's built a lifestyle business that's just too fun to quit. So that's what we all like. All right. Our podcast app is in the iTunes store. You can go to screwthecommute.com/app. And it does all kinds of cool stuff on your tablet or your mobile phone. We've got entire instructions on how to use it. So to use all the cool features, it's easy to put it in there and make it work. But you want to use all the kind of cool features. We've got instructions for it at screwthecommute.com/app now our OnDemand TV show is now going. It's on Roku TV. If you don't know what that is, that's the on demand TV service. And you can buy like a 40 dollar box and plug it into your smart TV and get thousands of channels. And people like me can develop channels and people like you can develop channels. But the first one, that's for sure, live by the time you're listening to this is called the public speaking channel. Now, some TVs is they're also called Roku TVs. You don't have to put a box in. So it's really cost effective a lot of people are getting rid of cable because of this. So you can watch and binge watch anything you want. I watched like 88 episodes of The Equalizer from the 80s. So check it out. My channel is the public speaking channel. We have other ones coming for protection dogs and brutal self-defense and Internet marketing and things like that. All right. Our youth program is in full swing. We're looking for young people that are entrepreneurial and young. When I say young, this up to early 20s. If they're older than that, maybe they'd be possible candidate for our regular show here. But we're really want to highlight young people and do that about once a month. So if you know anybody that's doing great things entrepreneurially, have them contact me and we'll show them how they can apply to be featured on an episode of Screw the commute.

[00:03:10] All right, our sponsor today is Screw the Commute private Facebook group, where you can interact with me, my staff and with other great entrepreneurs and like minded people, it is a place where my staff and I put in training and business tips several times a week and you can ask questions and get feedback on things that you are doing. And I'll tell you more about that later. But that's at screwthecommute.com/facebook. And anything we talked about today will be in the show notes.

[00:03:41] All right, let's get to the main event in 2019, Jim Barber is celebrating his fortieth year as an entrepreneur. In the past 40 years, Jim's done many things he'll tell us about him. But the common thread in everything he's done and I love this because it's the way I live is that he's always had a good time. Now, screwing the commute isn't for everybody, but it's definitely for Jim Barber. So, Jim, are you ready to screw? The commute.

[00:04:10] You better believe it, Tom. I am ready.

[00:04:14] You've been doing it for a long time, almost as long as me. That's a long time.

[00:04:19] Forty years I've been screwing the commute.

[00:04:21] Oh, man. So tell us what you're doing nowadays, though, and then we'll take you back to see how you got started screwing the commute.

[00:04:27] A number of years ago, I suggested to people it was kind of it was about the time that I attended one of your butt camps that the Internet was a way to make money. Nobody at that time was monetizing the Internet. But I said that could do it. And that's what I've been focusing on pretty much since then. That's what I'm doing now.

[00:04:49] What are you selling on there? What are you promoting on there?

[00:04:52] I've got a Web site finders speakers. So it's for it's for people who want to find speakers. But conversely, for the speakers who want to be found, it's a low cost, easy way to market and promote themselves. It's basically for beginning and aspiring speakers. So well-established speakers can afford big you know, they've got all kinds of opportunities. Beginning speakers don't have that kind of opportunity. Finders speakers is for them.

[00:05:29] So what kind of things are on there? They list themselves or can they put videos up? What can they do there?

[00:05:36] They can do all of that. It's basically a speakers directory. But unlike other speaker directories, which tend to be rather cookie cutter, everybody has exactly the same kind of format. Everybody can find your speakers. You have a complete web page that you can format pretty much any way you want. You can make it as long as you want. It's it's your page. It's kind of like having a web page of your own, but you're in there with where people are going to find find they're going to find speakers.

[00:06:06] Are they able to change stuff on the page themselves?

[00:06:09] Absolutely.

[00:06:10] Oh. And you have some type of tool that they can use, though, doesn't look stupid.

[00:06:15] It's very much like Microsoft Word. If you can put together a flyer with word, you can put together your page on finders speakers.

[00:06:22] Great. How long you've been doing this?

[00:06:25] Just a few weeks. It's brand new.

[00:06:28] Oh, brand new. What did we do before that? 40 years A lot of time to fill up here.

[00:06:36] Going back to the beginning, I've been a speaker. I've been a a trainer.

[00:06:41] On what topics?

[00:06:45] 18 books on mostly on computers.

[00:06:48] Oh, you are a techie guy.

[00:06:50] I'm a techie guy. I'm a nerd. Yes. And so I was I was I wrote 16 of the books on computers, two of the books on speaking, on professional speaking.

[00:07:02] All right. So take us way back to before you became an entrepreneur. What were you doing?

[00:07:07] I worked at a computer company. I was a programmer for a while. But then I decided that I enjoyed working with people more than I liked working with computers. And so I got into computer training.

[00:07:19] So in that company, are you. I mean, how did you transition from a worker bee programmer to having your own business? Or was it all at once that you plan on it that you had money in the bank or how do you make that move?

[00:07:33] For me, it was pretty easy because I was a technical trainer. I was a computer trainer. And I for a company, for a corporation. And I simply got tired of being told what I could and could not do without a good reason for it, other than we've always done it that way or this is the way management wants it or something like that. So I left. I had enough money. I didn't require a lot of capital because I was doing. I was just doing training. So I had enough money to keep me going. But I was making money within weeks after I left and I was basically just doing the same thing that I was doing before. I was just making all the decisions.

[00:08:14] So this was 40 years ago. Now that that's when they had wood burning computer little gerbils and squirrels, running around to keep it going. What kind of computers? Here's where I remember my first computer. You probably heard of this. A lot of people haven't. Was a CPM machine. And it cost six thousand dollars and it would barely do anything. I mean, I think I got something else one time and it had 40 megabyte hard drive.

[00:08:53] My my first computer was a Radio Shack TRS-80 model 2.

[00:08:57] Yeah. A lot of people started that way.

[00:09:00] It had 64 kb of ram.

[00:09:02] Didn't it have like a cassette in it or something.

[00:09:04] They didn't have any off. Well they did have offline storage. I had floppy drives, the 8 inch floppy drive, I remember big things. Yeah, I daisy chained three of those together. Each one of them had a quarter of a megabyte of storage. So by Daisy chaining three of them together, I was able to come up with three quarters of a meg of off line storage. I was in hog heaven.

[00:09:30] You couldn't even do one word of this podcast.

[00:09:37] But I could write my book, right? Or that I had tried writing on a typewriter and I can't do it. Oh yes. I write in sort of a circular fashion. But they had one thing, one thing, a backspace key. And that backspace key on the computer was the greatest thing that enabled me to to write 16, 18 books.

[00:09:58] Wow. So there was. Was there any copy and paste or any of that that they did?

[00:10:04] Yes. But it was it was rudimentary. Most of it was backspace and insert.

[00:10:11] Wow. And you wrote 16 books like that.

[00:10:13] I did, but it was not. I had upgraded to a to an IBM PC by the. I think around the 12th book or something like that.

[00:10:22] So we still have copies of the books. All the books actually.

[00:10:25] I have a copy of one.

[00:10:27] They're probably out there somewhere on a used book search, we should start a Jim Barber Museum.

[00:10:37] You can you can Google it. I think Amazon still carries it on their lists. They just don't have any copies.

[00:10:43] Wow. Yeah. I mean, a lot of is probably a big demand for a 28 year old computer book, right?

[00:10:52] Absolutely. The. That's why I got out of computers. Basically, it was changing so fast that it was just hard to keep up on it. And I had to republish the books every year. I just said, no this is getting tiresome. It's not fun anymore.

[00:11:06] Yeah. Now I get it. I mean, I'm kind of in that same boat with the Internet stuff. I mean, some of my public speaking stuff's been selling for 24 25 years or more. But the Internet stuff, you know, it changes all the time. We really it does stay on top of that. Tell us about this toastmaster thing, because I think, you know, I have kind of a love hate relationship with Toastmasters you put in 30 years. 30 years. Mm hmm. How did that get started?

[00:11:32] Well, I just when I decided that I wanted to be a speaker as I got out of computers, I thought and wanted to become a professional speaker. I figured I need to learn how to speak. I had been a trainer before. But that's different from keynoting.

[00:11:49] Was NSA around at that time?

[00:11:55] This was the late 80s by that point. Yes, they were around and I joined them about the same time that I joined Toastmasters.

[00:12:02] So I got to tell you, my Toastmasters story is my favorite Toastmasters story, because I think because there's a couple of I actually won like the Northeast Region Non Toastmaster Award for something I'm in. And that was quite an ordeal because they asked me to watch their. I don't know. It's some kind of contest. They were doing and these are the best of the best people. And I'm sitting there looking and I'm thinking to myself, oh, my God, these people would get laughed off the stage in any real profession. I mean, they were like it looked to me like a Shakespearean play. Their timing and their gesture was all matched perfectly and all that. And I thought, oh, my goodness. And then I was in. This has to be in excess of maybe almost twenty four or five years ago. I'm in Dallas, Texas. I get five thousand bucks for the hour. I get a standing ovation, probably two to three minutes, which is enormous. Okay. That's a pretty long standing ovation. People were lined up from the front of the auditorium. It's one of those raised auditoriums all the way out in the parking lot. Wait to get their book signed by me. Toastmaster guy stood in line for a half an hour to come up and tell me he didn't think I was very professional because my coat was unbuttoned and I said um and ah six times.

[00:13:27] Toastmasters definitely has this place because if you need a supportive environment and you're scared to death, that you need a place to to everybody around you is gonna pat on the back. Great. But when they cross the line into thinking they have anything to do with professional level speaking, that's where I kind of set my foot down, because the bottom line is impact in our field not looking like an automaton. And so that's my problem with them. They kind of cross the line a little bit because like I said, I'm all for him. On one hand, if they know their place and what they're good for and how they help people and I know they've helped tens of. Probably millions of people over the years, but that's different than becoming a professional speaker, and I do know that there's some professional toastmaster groups. I don't know not too many of them. Right.

[00:14:20] I agree with you completely, Tom. And it's it's it's this I. Well, what can I say? I agree completely.

[00:14:28] I mean, why aren't there some professional a very small percentage of professional toastmaster groups. Right.

[00:14:34] Where there are. And I I haven't been a member of any of those, so I'm not quite sure how they conduct their clubs.

[00:14:41] So why do you stay in after all these years when you've been a working professional for years and years and years?

[00:14:47] Well, for one thing, I think I'm getting a little better. I think I can always improve. Right. I I take Toastmasters with a huge grain of salt for the reasons that you just described.

[00:15:00] Before I started NSA I joined the group and the president was so pitiful, he was ready to fall over and shaking in his speech. And I'm thinking, how can this be is worth so I'd be here. That's why I'm just wondering, do you want to be critiqued by people that aren't generally very good speaking?

[00:15:19] Not especially. But what I would like to do is critique the people that are scared silly. We get people joining our club that are they don't think they can possibly. Speak That are scared silly About getting in front of people and with support and with encouragement, they can become a decent speaker. Are they a great speaker? No. Probably never will be.

[00:15:42] I mean, some of them coming in go up to the world championships and all that stuff, you know, I get that but that's a tiny tiny percentage. So do you get clients out of this, is that one of the reasons you keep going?

[00:15:56] Actually, no. I've gotten a few clients here and there, but I just do it because I think part of it is I'm giving back to the community. I am I am helping people. We get we as I say, we get people in that can't speak. And if they stick with the program for a couple of years, they leave being more confident. It's it's all about confidence. The we use speaking as a tool. But frankly, I don't think it's about that. It's about being more confident. If you're confident, you're going to be a better speaker. Right there. So we just teach people confidence. We teach them that it's okay to get in front of people. If you can get in front of somebody and not worry about being an idiot, making an idiot of yourself, then you can tackle other things.

[00:16:50] Zis. I just don't care about that. But you're not afraid of it? No, I'm happy to look like you're manager. The whole thing about everything that we talked to Jeff, just as you know, Jeff. No. Oh, he's an NSA guy, a Georgia Brit. Yeah. He's made a fortune making a fool of, you know, the name. I've got a lot of respect for him that I've never met. Yeah, he's funny.

[00:17:14] If you speak now, what do you speak on? Whew. Dream fulfillment, potential fulfillment. So for what types of groups?

[00:17:25] Frankly, I'm concentrating more on my web work right now. I'm not doing much in the way of speaking.

[00:17:33] Okay. And then what kind of things do you sell besides the one speaker thing?

[00:17:39] That's my primary focus. I'm not a good multitasker like you are. You've got a dozen things, a dozen brands in the fire at any one time. Yeah, right.

[00:17:50] There's there's a lot of good things happen when you concentrate. I'll tell you that.

[00:17:54] That's just my approach. I can't say that it's the right way to do it, but it's it's my way. And I just prefer to focus on one thing and everything else kind of gets put aside for a little while. What I'll be doing in six months, I have no idea.

[00:18:08] Well, right now, if you make a line, making a living for 40 years doing this without necessarily a specific focus. How long did you do the computer training?

[00:18:22] Oh, for myself. About about 10 years.

[00:18:25] 10 years. Okay. So there's 30 left. We've got to fill up.

[00:18:30] Well, I started that. That's when I got into speaking. And I but actually I did some speaking. But actually I wrote two more of my books. These were on speaking for professional speakers. And I also published them because I hate rejection. So I wrote them, publish them. And I frankly made more money that way than I did through speaking.

[00:18:53] Yeah. No, I get that. You know, that's the thing I tell people. Speaking is only one product of many products. You know, sell your knowledge, not just sell your mouth on stage because.

[00:19:05] Exactly. And for me, it hasn't been the most profitable one. Yet it may change what the speaking part.

[00:19:12] Yeah, well, I mean, it doesn't have to be because the thing is, is I have a transcript out of a program I did called How to Sell Your Knowledge in 19 Different Ways. And speak is only one of them and say that the number of people that can pull out a big check and pay you to speak is miniscule compared to the number of people around the world that can buy your knowledge if you put it in a saleable format. That means e-book kindle e-book, PDF e-book printed book. Teleseminar, webinar, C.D., DVD, all these different formats that people can buy your stuff. So anything crazy or bizarre happened to you along the way?

[00:20:01] Probably the barbershop was the craziest thing I that back in the. I think it was in the early 90s when domain names. Before that you had to be a corporation or something. And they made them available to the general public. And I read about it, I said, oh wow, I gotta do that. So it was on the weekend I checked. And again, the Internet was rather rudimentary at the time, of course. I checked. And JimBarber.com was available. I said, all right, I'm gonna have to do this. Come first thing Monday morning. First thing Monday morning, I logged in, checked on it, and somebody had taken it. JimBarbara.com a couple of hours earlier. So I thought, well, darn. I still want my own domain, but what am I gonna do? What am I going to do? And after thinking about it, why, I came up with thebarbershop.com and it was great because if I had used JimBarber.com, that's fine. But it's kind of ordinary. But I've had more people when I give them my email address or my Web site address to go, oh, the barber shop. That's great. Oh, I love that. Anyway, yep, making lemonade out of lemons.

[00:21:16] And then what did you put on it Back in those early days?

[00:21:20] Actually I have I'm celebrating, I think my 30th. Might I don't have to check on that some 25th, the 30th year of having the Web site and I have on my Web site now the page I searched out through the Internet. That was from the first year that I had the Web site up. Oh, it was very rudimentary. I mean, you know, just hi, I'm Jim Barber and this is what I'm about. And I had animated gifs and using weird fonts and it really was ugly, but it was mine.

[00:22:03] So do you ever get screwed over in business?

[00:22:10] Actually, no. I I've had misunderstandings where things didn't work out the way that I thought that they would. But I don't think anybody wanted to maliciously screw me over. It was, as I say, it was just a misunderstanding. A regrettable misunderstanding. But these things happen.

[00:22:33] Well, that's so they saw the barbershop and they thought you have all these straight razors.

[00:22:37] And I think that's the downside of the barbershop, is I get more email probably for hair care products and or promoting that sort of thing than I do the real business.

[00:22:50] Why don't you just say looking for hair products, click here and then put a bunch of affiliate links.

[00:22:58] That's a good idea. Why or why throw the traffic away? I mean, they're coming anyway. I'd never thought about that. But that's a good idea. I make more than anything on that. I got to do that.

[00:23:09] So what do you like best about working for yourself? What's the worst part?

[00:23:14] The best part is being able to do what I want to do without getting approval from somebody else. That doesn't mean it's going to work. You know, basically, I have to get approval from my customers ultimately. But I can still do what I want to do. And I don't have to get approval from somebody else. I don't have to listen to somebody else's reasons as to why I can't do it. I've been told many times that I couldn't do something since I became an entrepreneur and I just went ahead and did it anyway. Yeah, that's the best thing.

[00:23:48] What's the worst part? The worst part is the loneliness. It's when you're working for yourself. There's just you you miss having fellow employees. You can actually, as strange as it is, you can miss having a boss, because if some if you don't know what to do on something, you're screwed. You basically have to figure out how to how to proceed. There's nobody that you can go to if you have a failure. There's really nobody that you can go to that will commiserate you if you have a success. You're not really don't have really have anybody that you can celebrate with. That's where associations come in so powerfully NSA or for me, Toastmasters and that sort of thing, or building personal relationships, personal associations.

[00:24:39] Well, I tell people that I feel lonely, that I get a water cooler and go stand by it and gossip to yourself that I like that.

[00:24:48] I like that. I find a lot of time talking to myself.

[00:24:51] So tell us more about this, this Web site where you're putting up for the speakers.

[00:24:57] Finders speakers. Yes, I'm excited about that because it's I as a beginning speaker, one thing that always frustrated me was once you bought business cards, everything else was just so expensive. I'd go to NSA conventions and they would say, oh, you need to be doing this. You need to be doing that. And they were talking thousands of dollars to do these different things, which is great if you're making thousands of dollars. But if you're just starting out, it presents a real problem. Now, I fortunately, I know a little bit about computers. And so I was able to be my own web master. But I knew people that spent thousands of dollars to get their first Web site put up. And I I simply couldn't have afforded to have done that at the time. So finders speakers is for people that don't have the resources, but they still need to market themselves and promote themselves.

[00:25:53] Great. And so will it'll be a full blast running by the time they hear this. Absolutely. We'll have a link to it in the show notes for you. So we're going to take a quick message from our sponsor. When we come back. We'll ask Jim what's a typical day look like for him and how he stays motivated?

[00:26:12] Yeah, screw the commute. Private Facebook group where you can interact with me, my staff and the other great entrepreneurs is in full swing and the like minded people are there. It's the place where my staff and I put in training and business tips several times a week and you can ask questions to get feedback on things you're doing. And I give you a quick tips that have made and saved me a ton of money over more than 40 years in business. And myself and my staff also give you more in-depth postings on all kinds of business topics. So check it out in the show notes at screwthecommute.com/facebook. We always have some kind of deal. Sometimes we got a one dollar trial that leads to a monthly payment or you can save a whole boatload by paying for a year. All right. Check it out. Screwthecommute.com/facebook.

[00:27:06] All right. Let's get to the owner of thebarbershop, Jim. What's a typical day look like for you?

[00:27:15] I don't have a typical day, and that's not going to be the answer that a lot of entrepreneurs are going to give you. But I don't I don't have one.

[00:27:26] You're going to go every day, right? So you got your early riser, early riser generally kind of in the middle.

[00:27:33] All right. In the middle. Not not especially early. But on the other hand, once I wake up, I'm ready to get started. But what I'm going to do, I will be on my computer within probably 30, 45 minutes after I get up. I need to get focused, have my coffee and that sort of thing. but then I'm on the computer. But what I'm gonna be doing on the computer for the rest of the day, that's really hard to say.

[00:27:56] Yeah, me too. I mean, there's so many like you said, I've got a million tasks. Go on. We go to TV station, we've got the podcast. We've got everything we got. Yep. E-books, you know, so. So, yeah, it can go a lot of different directions and it can change on a flash. Like I think you you said you're celebrating disaster week this week.

[00:28:15] Yes. I've had better weeks as. So. Yeah. So then what. How long's that go on for.

[00:28:23] It's again it's it's flexible. I may work a 16 hour day if I feel like it and if I need to. On the other hand, if I get in the middle of the afternoon and I feel like I want a nap, I deserve a nap. I'm going to take a nap. So I don't know.

[00:28:39] That's exactly in line with what we're talking about. You build a lifestyle business where you can take a nap. If you feel like it's. You can. That's it. You can do nothing. Or you can do, you know, go like crazy all day long. If you feel like.

[00:28:52] I wouldn't say it's necessarily appropriate for everybody. No, but for me, that's the way to. That's the way I want to live.

[00:28:59] I have to have a certain amount of self self motivation, and that's there. Next question for is, how do you stay motivated to keep getting up and doing it all day?

[00:29:08] Two things motivate me fun and poverty. If my bank account is healthy, then I'm motivated purely by fun. I don't have to. Make myself sit down to the computer and do things I want to sit down to the computer and do things right. Or go out and speak to people or do whatever. It's because it's fun. If my bank account is not healthy, then poverty is a great motivator. I'm going to do whatever I need to do to make some money. Hopefully that would be fun as well. But making the money is my primary motivator that time then.

[00:29:47] Yeah. So it switches from fun to poverty. Exactly. Yep. Yeah. And then back then back to fun again. There you go. Oh. And so it's so, so much fun catching up with your man. Yeah. For everybody out there, this guy you can see he didn't have like an absolute focus. And one thing, for 40 years, he's just been doing stuff that's fun and he likes and enjoys it. Made a living for 40 plus years doing it. So that should be motivation for anybody listening to this. If you don't have to to sell your life all in one direction and you know, you could just do things. But again, you gotta do what it takes to make the bring the money in.

[00:30:32] I wouldn't even say that somebody should be too focused because after all, when I started, the world wide web hadn't been invented yet. So how could I have possibly forecast e-commerce and that sort of thing?

[00:30:45] Exactly. And I tell people, your customers will tell you who you are. Like everybody wants the brand themselves and spent a fortune doing it. Yep. But your customer will tell you who you are. That's it. That's it. Yeah. So. So, anyway, thanks for coming on with us. We really appreciate it. We'll have your that great Web site that you're developing for for beginning speakers in the show notes. And everybody should check out our podcast app. Please leave us a review and rating over at iTunes if you can. And check out all Jim's stuff there and get a kick out of going to his Web site and see what it looked like 25 years ago. You know, there's a thing called the Wayback Machine. You can go and see what your site looked like. Mine was mine. My site was actually up before the Wayback Machine started. Antion.com. But I think it was in the top 1000 Web sites or something ever. I talked to somebody yesterday was the top 150 Web sites. That maybe was day before yesterday, but they were the top one hundred fifty Web sites. Yeah. So anyway, thanks so much for coming on, Jim. And we'll get everybody else on the next episode.

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