638 – Serve No Master: Tom interviews Jonathan Green

Episode 638 – Jonathan Green
[00:00:08] 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 638 of Screw the Commute podcast? I'm here with Jonathan Green from the Serve No Master podcast and the accompanying book. And this guy is really living the lifestyle business. He's in a tropical island and, you know, a couple of hundred feet from the beach and just love, love that. And it just so happens that the last episode, episode 637 you hope you didn't miss that is Jeff Herring on the content profit show and he is he got rid of his house and he's just living an Airbnb he's traveling all over the place. So it's beautiful beautiful lifestyle business. Now make sure you grab a copy of our automation e-book this. We updated the figures recently to about 8 million keystrokes. This is not exaggeration that just one tip in this book has saved me. You are crazy. You are literally crazy if you don't implement these free and cheap things that are in this book. This is what allows me to spend time with prospects and customers and developing new products and services instead of wasting time fighting with my computer. So grab your copy at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. While you're at it, pick up a copy of our podcast app at screwthecommute.com/app. Put us on your cell phone and tablet and take us with you on the road. And the upcoming very soon is Veterans Vet Preneur Month, we call it on the Commute podcast. All September will be highlighting veteran entrepreneurs, so you don't want to miss that. Let's get to the main event. Jonathan Green is here with us. And Jonathan, are you ready to screw the community?

[00:02:16] I'm ready. I'm ready to rock out. I'm here. Let's do it.

[00:02:20] Hey, Jonathan, listen, I heard that at 15 years old, you were told you were not good enough. And then eventually you were making more money than the lady that fired you. Tell us about that.

[00:02:37] Yeah. Everyone has their stories of adversity, right? We all like to root for the underdog. We've all had those moments where people said that, like, you're. I think it's that we think we're born with certain things. Like, I'm some people are born smart. Some people are born funny, some people are born beautiful. And we think that kind of like one of those role playing games where you fill out the card and you only get so many points and then once you've used your points, you can't get better anything. So I was told in a lot of areas that I didn't have any ability that I would never be popular, that I would never have my own business. A lot of things I think we've all heard those where people don't realize how powerful the words are, especially when we're young and adult speak it. So I had a lot of those moments where I was told I had no artistic ability. I was told just a lot of limiting things. And I thought, Oh, okay. I'm never going to be great, but maybe I'll be okay. My dream when I was young was to have a little house with a little fence, like a really small. I had a really small dream and it's and it was smaller than the house I grew up in and smaller than. And, you know, I don't know why my dream was that small, but I was like, I just want a tiny life. And more than that, I wanted the fence so that people would leave me alone. And I think that's kind of been a through line throughout my life and my career, is that I wanted to get to a position where people could not bully me anymore, where they could not say things I don't want to hear, where they could not have the ability to take away my lunch money or beat me up.

[00:04:04] Or that was an early day safe space you were looking for.

[00:04:09] Yeah. You know, it wasn't so much. And it was also like I went to a kind of high school where you get into a lot of fights. I got beat up a lot in high school, so getting punched in the mouth, getting thrown down a flight of stairs. Like for me it was like, I want to be in a place where, yeah, those things don't happen. Even in my mid twenties I had a job at a really big company and I had a bully at work who was like physically like choking me out and doing physical things to me. I was like, This is insane. I didn't know this happened at real companies, right? And then I, I realize now I should have just sued the company and then I could retire. But I told my manager, I was like, wait a minute. I was like, wait a minute. Adults aren't supposed to be. I don't I had a revelation. I go, adults aren't supposed to be allowed to do this. And I told my manager they didn't fire the guy. They just basically changed him. I never saw him again. They moved him to another apartment or another shift, but I was like, Oh, wait, adults aren't allowed to do that to each other. And I was 24 when I had that revelation. So.

[00:04:58] You know, we all have different ways or different things that people have discounted us or told us we're not capable of things. And yeah, a lot of it is. And maybe that's where my idea of a master comes from, is that the last time I got fired, when about 12 or 13 years ago, I was like, Wow, one boss has so much power, they take away your salary. It's going to be really hard to get your next job. Sometimes you get fired at a really inopportune time when nobody's hiring, right? It's like a bad time, like, right. No one's hiring right before Christmas. So if you lose your job like in December, there's nothing you can do for a month or two months. So there's certain times that are really bad and you can lose your ability to pay your rent, to pay for your kids, to go to school, to pay for your kids to eat. And it's really scary. So I just wanted to be in a situation where I'm in control of my destiny. And I think that's maybe what I think of as the American dream is like the ability to determine your fate, that the harder you work or the more effort you put in or leveraging your brilliance or skills that you can get rewards based on that.

[00:05:57] Well, yeah. And you you talked about the boss having a lot of problems. You know what boss spells backwards? Double s, double s0b and and I guess you got you got to watch those ex-girlfriends, too, right? Because I noticed that you had the worst day of your life and the best day of your life. Tell me about that.

[00:06:21] Yeah. So one of my ex girlfriends called my job and got me fired my last job, and it was really.

[00:06:29] What they made it. What did she tell them?

[00:06:31] So I was a teacher at a university and I was teaching on a master's program. And at the last university I taught it after I left that after I stopped working there, I was dating a student, except she was one year younger than me. I was 28, she was 27. It wasn't like I was dating a college student. She was a master's student and they made it into this thing that that it wasn't. I was not dating someone while I was working there, while I was her teacher, none of those things. And she was not like a high school student or a college student. This was a master student who was the same age as me. Right, right. And had it worked out, it had been we dated for like and by the way, we dated like six months. Like a really long relationship only ended because my visa ran out. I had to leave countries, but the school spun it into something that it told me what my new employer was like, Oh, we can't have you dating students. I was like, I would never do that. It's not what happened, right? You know, like, yeah, you can spin into this one way, but it's like, No, this person was the same age as me. I wasn't her teacher anymore. It was after I'd stopped working there.

[00:07:29] But I don't know. Robbing the cradle. 27. You know.

[00:07:35] 17. I'm 20. I was 28. It was like, really?

[00:07:39] But this was an option. Was this when you were in London?

[00:07:42] Yeah, this was in London. And we had a really serious relationship. But my visa had to run out. We'd probably have gotten married like it was a really serious relationship and it just the timing ran out for us, but it just the school was already looking for a reason to get rid of me because I really. Struggle to fit into a corporate or an environment anywhere with a lot of like a really large staff. Because the larger and larger the bureaucracy, the more it's about perception, not reality. So they would give me projects that were supposed to last for six months and I couldn't do it. It would take me 30 minutes or an hour and I go, How did anyone spin this into work? I can't even imagine what's.

[00:08:23] That's why I hate the corporate stuff. You have to have a two week committee meeting to take a leak. You know, it's just I can't understand these people that they're just worthless slugs that just want to sit there and do nothing. I mean, I just. It's not in my DNA. It's obviously not in your DNA.

[00:08:41] Well, the way those systems are built is they're time based. So any job where you're basically they measure your output by time is probably that's one of the worst measurements of someone's work. Right. Because people like let's say you and me are in a brace, I'm very slow. So maybe you you we each run for 8 hours and you run ten miles and I run one. But they pay us the same because we both ran for the same amount of hours. Yeah. That's how, that's how most companies work because they don't have the ability to assess your output. And this especially happens once you start inserting middle managers into a company or multiple layers of middle management. You have people that don't have a vested interest in output. They switch into a mode like they're all about protecting their own job and like getting the next promotion more than anything else. So for example, let's say you're a manager and you have an employee who's really underperforming. If you report that employee, it makes you look bad. So maybe you don't get your next promotion. So they have these structures that actually reward misbehavior and misreporting.

[00:09:43] And I remember I had all of these every conversation I had at that job was so weird because I really I didn't come from an environment of like I hadn't been doing this type of culture for ten years of bureaucracy where I knew the games and where I knew like everything is like a trick and everyone is like trying to plot against each other. And I just couldn't understand why they would care about these things. I remember one time someone got really jealous that I had a new chair in my office and I was like, Well, when I started my job, there was no chair. So it's not that I got a new chair, it's that I got a chair and they got real like they were really they were jealous of, like, really weird things. I was like, no, no, no. When I started, there wasn't a desk, there wasn't a chair and there wasn't a computer. So they had to get those things because they didn't. It's not as though I got an upgrade, right? But people got really jealous of things like that.

[00:10:30] And imagine that the mentality of a worthless slug like that, that that's their biggest problem in life. You got a chair to sit on.

[00:10:42] Mean you're talking about a $50 chair. It wasn't like I got a sweet ear on like a thousand, like in that it was like a cool thousand chair. Like a massage chair may.

[00:10:49] Have been happier if you'd had like a milk crate or something, you know.

[00:10:54] They would have been like, Well, why you got a milk crate? Like, what did you do to earn the milk? And I don't because I hadn't come from that culture. I don't know how to respond to that type of question.

[00:11:01] I thought that I would have thought, that's a kidding, you know.

[00:11:05] Yeah, and that's the problem I did to at first I go, this can't be real because this is insane. And you know, you discover also like a lot of the things were super crazy. So this is a big university and they go, my department goes, Well, our software doesn't integrate with the university software. And I said, What? So there's a lot of that. A huge, huge amount of time is basically manually data entry where you look at one computer screen and copied it and another. And I was like, This is insane. And you discover that like when the way they make purchasing decisions, whether it's software, anything, you know, like education is like they basically take three years to buy software. So by the time they buy it, it's no longer good. Like it doesn't work. They're like, Hey, we just got Windows Millennium. I was like, What? That's from ten years ago. So you all of these things that are designed in a particular way are not the way I operate. I would rather get all my work done an hour and just go home. Right? But their culture is built around. You know, you've got to burn those hours. And I was doing things like taking two hour walks. And I remember when they hired me, my boss goes, you know, most people, once they start here, they work here for the rest of their careers.

[00:12:17] And so I got really depressed. I was actually really struggling with depression because I was within a week I was already thinking like, how long do I have to work this job to pay off all my student loans and then I can leave? And it was there's just no happiness. You're surrounded by people that are very competitive and very snarky, which is very common in anything that has heavy bureaucracy. It's the same thing with government, really large companies, and education is especially right. Education thing is they pretend that they're nonprofit and then they have like $54 Billion in the bank and that's it. But we're not here for like they have so much money, they always pretend they need more. And I just everyone I encountered in that environment was, like, unpleasant. They all were like we had. We would bring in teachers from other departments and they were like total like, I don't know anywhere I can say on the podcast to describe, but they were really unpleasant and they were they're getting paid $500 an hour to do trash and trash work. Right. And they were like, I was like, man, for $5 an hour. Most people would do just about anything, let alone, you know, let alone like read from a book for 30 minutes. You know, we're doing a.

[00:13:20] Small you can get a hit man for that.

[00:13:23] So so that's whole per hour. And you you just discover that there's these when people are in environments where it's very hard to get fired, that's the whole thing. It's built around and everything you see that everything is really, really inefficient and no one is. They're looking for inefficiency. Looking for efficiency. So. Not fit in the environment. So getting fired. Basically, I had the new job. I was so excited, like an idiot. I had the paper saying the job offer paper and was saying my salary and I went and signed a lease on a new apartment. I bought a new car Friday and Saturday, and then Monday I went in and they fired me. And as I was driving home in a blizzard, I was like, This is I never want to feel this way again. Most of the defining moments of my life are a moment I go, I never want to be able to do this again. And I just realized that like that career was over. I could have still gotten other jobs in that industry, but I didn't want to do it. I was like, That's the best job I could have gotten in my old career of education.

[00:14:20] I don't know that your dream job, right?

[00:14:23] It was I was at the peak of my career. I had done my postgraduate work. So while I was teaching on that one master's course, I was also finishing my own master's course. So I just finished my and got my master's degree like a couple of weeks earlier. And I had the best job of anyone from my graduating class. No one else was making the money. I was had a job of the level I was. Most of them were much lower jobs with much less prestige and less money. And yeah, you think it's your dream until you get there? That's kind of one of the big disappointments of the American dream is they tell you the things you want and then when you get them, you go, I don't want any of these things.

[00:14:58] I just play play off of that. And don't forget, you did get a chair, you know, so that's part of your compensation package, I guess.

[00:15:06] But yeah, you're taught.

[00:15:08] But these yeah, they were just here in the States. The President. I don't even want to call him that. The Biden just. It gave $10,000 forgiveness to student loans, which is now going to give the universities another excuse to raise to just charge more because people have more money to spend more administrators. Yeah, it's terrible. But all right. So let's get past all that doom and gloom. And so you were driving home in a blizzard. What happened then?

[00:15:43] So I'd been doing side hustles. Like I'd had a little website, I'd done a little bit of coaching stuff using. I've done some tutoring through websites like built my own websites, and I was like, You know what? I'm going all in. And I really started working on building my own business and I said, I need to do something online where I make money fast. So it's very different. Like a lot of these online business models are very slow. Take six months or two years, right? You start building a blog and it takes two years or a YouTube channel. Five years or a podcast can take years to make money. So I can't do that. I need money fast. So what I wanted to do was sell services. So I started off selling search engine optimization services in Nashville where I was living at the time, and I said, I'll do this. I put up and I just I didn't realize it was a really good idea, but it turned out to be a great idea. I just started doing ads on Craigslist. I looked at everyone else's ads and I just made a better ad. So I used it and I just had a visual ad. So at the time, I know Craigslist has changed the rules now, but at the time you could have an image that was clickable. So my whole ad would just be an image that looked like a postcard and it was like and basically it was either a picture of a meteor, a picture of an iceberg or a picture of a volcano.

[00:16:54] And it would say cool stuff on it, like sweet SEO rank your website, and people would click on it. And I got a ton of business from that. From that one idea, that was a good idea. I said, I'll just make an ad that looks better than anyone else's, and that's all I did. And I got better and better and better at that over time. But I put it my first ad on a Saturday and got my first client on a Thursday. They only paid me $200. She was all she could afford. But it was so fast, right? It was like, Oh, this proves this idea can work. And I did really great work for her business until recently was ranking number one for all these keywords. Unfortunately, someone in the same industry as her became a criminal, and so their crime ranks for everything. But as far as ranking like 12 years later, still her website's number one and getting like really good results. So I did a good job for her. I learned a lot from there and I just began to get more and more clients. And then you go through the phase where you learn the difference between client acquisition, client management, because you'll make these big the big mistake you make when you're starting out is you make these really big promises and you're like, I'll do anything to right? And I would make these promises. I'm like, Look, I'll be your SEO ninja, I will be available 24 seven.

[00:18:04] You call me any time you have any question. I said, Look, you can hire big agency, but if anything happens at 500 1 p.m., your sol, they will not answer the phone. Which is true. They take the weekends off. I don't do that. You have my cell phone number. Da da da da. The problem is, then people start to do it. They start to call you all the time and not a lot. Just some of them. You basically get a mix of good and bad clients when you're close because you're saying anything too close and you have to learn to calibrate what you promise. And I just built and built on that. I started I built out a book of about ten clients. And I realize this is the most you can manage when you're doing the service and when you're doing the sales. So then I had to learn how to like outsource some of the services for a while, and I did that for about two years and really learned how to do that type of business. And there's it's still it can be a great business, but it's hard to travel with it. I wanted to move, so I wanted to move to Florida about two years later. So I dropped my local clients, only kept my national clients and began moving into building my own products and kind of that direction and doing affiliate marketing so that I could have a lot more locational freedom, which was the next level I wanted to get to.

[00:19:09] Are you sure? Have it. Now, tell him about where you live, the type of place you live in.

[00:19:14] Yeah. So I'd probably say this three or four times a day. Like, I can't believe I live in a house this nice. We, we just moved in a little over a month ago. No, actually, just less than a month ago. And. My landlord was like, What? And he did a massive amount of construction. After we moved in, I was like, Is this guy insane? We're not paying enough. That will cover what he's invested in, just in repairs. In the last month, even the a year's worth of us paying the rent won't cover that. So we have it's six bedrooms, which is insane. There were two. We actually had to tell them there were too many TVs. I was like, You've got to take some of the TVs out. We have a lot of kids. It's just too many TVs and they're all like 50 inches and everyone has a new it's really we have a pool. It's we live. Oh, and we live. I dunno if I told you this because this start happening after our last talk, we, we live in the jungle so this is like a preserve kind of. So there's only a few houses in this area and we have a lot of monkeys. We have a monkey situation where like I'll be swimming and I'll look up in 30 monkeys are watching me. They're not. And you have to I guess you have to create a detente when you live next to monkeys, which is I won't mess with you if you don't mess with me because I'm bigger, but there's a lot of you. So we have like this, I guess you could call it an uneasy alliance.

[00:20:30] And monkeys are strong, too. What kind of monkeys are these? Is a big, big ones.

[00:20:34] Or not really great. They're probably 20 to £30, I would say.

[00:20:39] Yeah, but boy, they're strong.

[00:20:41] Yeah, they're stronger than my kids. I haven't wrestled one, so we kind of like the coconut, right? We haven't had that. We haven't had we haven't had any incidents. Like they aren't violent, they haven't done anything confrontational. They just sometimes not buy the house all the time. Actually today they came by. It hadn't been buying two days. I was like, Where's the monkeys? So they come by. Sometimes that's because we have a bunch of fruit trees that we don't eat, like there's a ton of coconut trees near us and there's some other fruit trees that are kinds that we don't have in America. And it's like it's a banana tree because I would eat those. But they, you know, and I'm like, Well, they're just eating stuff out of the tree. It doesn't bother me. They don't like eat our food or trying to sneak into house or anything, but it's, it's cool. It's like, nice to have, like, this amazing adventure. We have this view over the ocean because we're on the little cliff, so we're right next. If I jump off my balcony, I'm in the water, but it's quite high.

[00:21:29] So we have this like but it's just your dreams can come true. And part of it was just, I want it to travel. I wanted to be able to live anywhere. And that was kind of part of it. A lot of people that started out when I did. They did. They built offices and started wearing suits and stuff. And I don't want to do that. Yeah, I don't. So you're everyone's definition of freedom is different. Some people it's a lot of money and a lot of houses and a lot of cars. Like you see movie stars have like six castles. You can't live in that many houses. Right. And then some people, it's just living in a mountain or having a house that's solar powered, or some people it's being able to travel full time. My freedom is really being able to live somewhere where no one bothers us. We live in a really remote area, so we have a lot of privacy, which is what I want to be able to do what I want.

[00:22:20] I like your internet connection is pretty good. This interview is going well.

[00:22:24] Yeah, we have gigabit internet, which is insane. So the first internet company came by and they were like, Oh, it was a huge amount of money for 25 megabits. I go, That seems really expensive considering our last house was much was 100 megabits for less. And then this other someone on the road. This is how things are here. My wife is walking in the street and I'm like, Hey, you guys want internet? Just randomly shots of my wife in there. And she goes, Yeah, what do you got? He goes, I got gigabit. My wife has these amazing conversations just walking down the street and it always sounds like a scam. Yeah. And then they share.

[00:22:57] Like, a parking lot. You're like a drug deal, but here's a gigabit connection.

[00:23:02] Yeah, I was. I was like, what do you mean? Because it's basically it was like a cat call. Hey, lady, you want fast Internet and she, you know, they didn't know that she had just had someone else come by, so they came in and stalled it. It's so fast. We actually have an issue that most of our devices don't go that fast. So like, you know, our smartphones, phones only use the 2.5, not the five gigahertz. That's a new challenge. Is that like which I never thought I would have I didn't think we'd ever have gigabit Internet. So that's like really, really cool. You know, my last house where I was living until last year, I'd never during the day I used to only have Internet from midnight to 6 a.m.. So I built my entire I go, This is my paradise tax. My kids live an amazing life. We live on the beach. They go surfing every day. They're swimming every day. Okay, I'll only work at night. That's the trade off. But here I can work. I still mostly work at night because that's the only time it's quiet when you have four kids. Yeah, but I can check emails and do stuff during the day. At my old house. The speed during the day was 0.01 megabytes, which means basically you can't you can't load an email. There's Internet speed at which you can't open email. And that's what we had.

[00:24:06] Oh, man. But gigabit, geez, we're not going to reveal exactly where you are. But it sounds like a very interesting place in of the monkeys.

[00:24:16] Yeah. We've we bounce around a lot. We we've moved we moved to different islands. But I just realized in my when I was around 30 ago, I always live on islands. I lived in Japan for a long time. I lived in Wales and then I lived near London. England is basically an island and I just love being near the beach. I love seeing sunsets, I love swimming. So I kind of built a life around my dreams. Like the last place I was before here. I was in the Ukraine about ten years ago, 11, 12 years ago or something. My last girlfriend, before my wife was Ukrainian and I was like, And you're walking down the street and the street just has two inches of ice on it at Christmas. And I go, I don't ever want to be this cold again. Yeah. So I did this. It's so cold where the ground is literally ice. I said, this is too much for me. Let me just where I'm always hot. And you know, my kids and my wife have never been in snow. So they're like they're watching movies where people are skiing. They go, I just want to swim in the snow. I know it's cold, but they've never actually been cold. The one time we're on vacation and there was a playground that had like snow in it and the snow machine was broken. So my kids have never been that cold, but the coldest they've been is like a 60 degrees Fahrenheit. Oh, my God. Which is like it's freezing. I might have to put on socks with my shoes.

[00:25:28] Oh, boy. What a great lifestyle. So. So tell tell him about the book. Let me read the title Serve No Master How to Escape the 9 to 5. Start up an online business. Fire your boss and become a lifestyle entrepreneur or digital nomad. So tell them about the book.

[00:25:45] Sure it's a mix of my story about losing my job and other people having power of me having good and bad bosses, and also realizing that there's so many opportunities online. Whatever you do, you can do it online and you can find what you're really great at. It could be voice overs. I've had people read my book and then they become audiobook, narrators, full time or accrued a tape business or all these amazing things. And there's this moment. This is the really key moment that you hopefully people gain from the book is that it's possible. So my the couple that points in my life where things really change were just when I learned it was possible. So when I was 17, I learned it was possible to get better at being friends. I had no friends at 17 and I, I said, what if it's possible to get better? And I studied this guy. Nathan Elwes was my friend's older brother. He was the first person I met who was popular and nice. I didn't know that existed till I was 17, and I though I always want to be around him and he was so nice to me and we were friends like five or six years after I go this and he was the most popular person I knew. I go, This guy is popular, he's in a band and he's nice. So I just studied him and learned how to be popular. It changed my life and then when I was 27, I learned you could get better at dating. The time that my wife, I go, Oh, you can become better at dating, better at talking to people, better at making people feel nice.

[00:27:07] And this possibility of improvement is then I realized, Oh, it's possible to become an entrepreneur. I always thought, Oh, I'm not an entrepreneur. So my book really teaches you that it's possible and then shows different types of business models. Because what I do is not what you do. You and me are slightly different. We have different business models because we have different skill sets and that's okay. There are so many amazing opportunities and and even if you don't want to leave your job, some people have like really high job security. They think they're at a company that's too big to fail. And maybe you are, maybe some people are. But we've all seen really big companies do really bad things, right where they just go, oh, we got to fire 10% of our employees. Right? Right. So it's my belief is that you should have a backup plan and you should start working on it now. It's the same thing for people. You never notice that someone only updates their LinkedIn profile right after they lose their job. They should have done. You should have done it early. You update your resume before it happens, but we wait until the disaster happens before we prepare things. But I want people to have a secondary revenue stream, even if it's just making 100 or $200 a month that you go. If you lose your job or something happens, you get it extra money, you have an emergency. You have this resource you can tap into or you can put more time into it to grow it.

[00:28:17] It's really hard that first 0 to $100 a month, that first year is the one that's the hardest challenge because once you do that, then you go, Oh, I could just do double the work and make double the money, and you can start building on it. But having that foundation, the earlier you do that, then when you need it, it's there. It's a resource that's there. And maybe you never have a family emergency, you never have a medical emergency. So you just have this vacation fund that's okay. So that's really like my core belief and it's that you just can't trust other people to take care of you. There are so many people who follow me. I got an email today from a lady who's 78 and she's starting another career. Why? Well, because it turns out the government doesn't give you enough to take care of you because some people live to be 120 now. Right. There's these expectations and this reliance on other people and you just have to be self reliant and it's just a form of that. So that's what I really like to teach people, is that it's possible. I talk a lot about how you can be generous in building your business. Like my business mostly focuses on generosity rather than sales, because when you're really generous, you put a lot of good calm into the world. The rest of the things kind of fall into place, and that mindset shift has really helped my business grow over the last five years.

[00:29:20] Beautiful. Beautiful. Yeah. And I kind of call it like an insurance policy for you. You know, I got in a hunting accident, and money kept coming in because I was laid up in intensive care. And you build this what we call very virtual real estate online as low risk, high returns. So it's just a beautiful thing, but we call it an insurance policy here. So we've got to take a brief sponsor break. When we come back, we're going to ask Jonathan about what's his typical day look like. And also, he's got a great freebie for you, so hang in there. So, folks, I don't know. About 25 years ago or so, I started my mentor program, which is the longest running, continuously running, most successful, most unique ever in Internet and digital marketing. You get an immersion trip to the retreat center here in Virginia Beach, where you actually live in this big mansion. With me for an immersion weekend. We have a TV studio here where we shoot marketing videos for you, teach you how to do it, and you have it's all one on one. There's no group stuff other than the couple of days you spend here at the retreat center.

[00:30:30] But and I never had any luck with group stuff because if I'm talking to the advanced people, the beginners are lost. And if I'm talking to the beginners, the advanced people were wondering why they gave me money. So I said, Forget it. So you get one on one attention. The tutoring with myself and my entire staff and the financial model is my success is tied to your success or nobody at my level will do that for me to make big money, you have to make big money. Check it out at greatinternetmarketingtraining.com. 1700 plus students have enjoyed this with no lawsuits and no people ragging on me because I'm a crazy fanatic. All right. Check it out. GreatInternetmarketingtraining.com.

[00:31:18] Now let's get back to the main event. Jonathan Green is here. He's living the lifestyle business and a tropical island with monkeys as his audience. When he does a practice, as his speeches, I guess. I don't know. But Jonathan, what's a typical day look like for you?

[00:31:32] I get up every day at 545. My trainer comes over at six and I work out him, me and my wife for 20 to 40 minutes. I try to keep it tight, 20, because I just won't go to the gym unless I have someone come over. So that's one of the things I've invested in because I'm in my as you age, you have to be more and more fastidious about your health. Then I have my morning shake, like breakfast shake again trying to watch that weight, just being real with you. And then I go swimming to cool off from the workout. Then my kids start waking up. Now they just restarted school this last couple of days, so we're getting used to that rhythm here. There's all sorts of really different rules, so the kids aren't allowed to start school at the same time, so it's like a lot more work. So two kids go to school at eight and another one. My next son goes to school at ten, so we kind of have to rhythm and then they finish at different times and make it really tough. So that's, you know, my wife and the nannies handle that. So while they're doing that and then I do my morning work stuff, a lot of my morning is taking up, working with these this team that I'm entering.

[00:32:34] So I'm working with two brothers and one of their wives who are just blowing up on Tock. So I'll do an hour phone call with them to kind of assess what they worked on the day before, what the projects are to help them grow, and what we're going to do for the next week. And kind of what I need to help them with for the day. I help with a lot of the tech stuff because they're just really good at one thing and I do some of the other stuff with them, so that's mostly what I do in the morning. I'll answer some emails, kind of check if there's anything major going on, but usually in the morning I only work an hour or 2 hours. Then during the day I'll spend time with my daughter, who's almost two years old. So she's not in school yet, so I'll go swimming with her, play games with her, maybe I'll play a video game with her, or just different stuff like that. To spend a little time, do some work on Tik Tok myself because that I can do for my phone so I can kind of be chilling out and do that work.

[00:33:24] Then in the afternoons I take my nap. When my kids come home from school, I spend time with them. Maybe we watch a movie and then around seven I usually start working at night and just depending upon the day I'll either work for 5 hours, sometimes I work for 10 hours, maybe once or twice a week. I do a longer shift where I'm just in the zone and I'll work on my blog, work on my podcast. There's a lot of outreach back and forth with managing guests and managing, as you know, like getting the podcast out on time, all that stuff that's all organized and scheduled on the calendars. Same thing for blog. I'm doing a lot of outreach and a lot of guest posts just to try and just drive more traffic to my blog. That's kind of one of the big pushes I'm on right now, so I spend some time on that and then. Look. And then I work on. Then the other big thing for me is my emails. Most of my revenue comes from email.

[00:34:14] Yeah, me too.

[00:34:15] So maybe 90 at least 90% of my revenue just comes from email. So I have four or five email accounts now for different parts of my business. So I have to write those emails up and I queue them up. I try to have like a week or two weeks in advance done. So I'm always trying to get as far ahead as I can with those. And then that's just autopilot income, right? Because it's all done. That's the broadcast emails. That's the most important thing I do the rest of the day. Doesn't matter except for the emails. So the rest of the day is almost make work to make it feel like I'm still working and like be like still feel productive because it's the only thing that matters. Just looking at my little list of what I had to work on today. Yeah. And the mostly it's about basically managing the calendar, saying what I'm going to be mailing or promoting or cross grading or who's mailing my offer over the next few months. I try to be as far as scheduled, as far as I can in like three or four months ahead right now. So I know what's going to happen every week. So that lets me just prepare emails weeks in advance. And that means, like you said, when something happens, you know, my family was in a natural disaster eight months ago where we all lost Internet power. We were all starving. We all mean all for my kids. We're in the hospital, basically. We're all within 1 to 3 days of dying. We got to the hospital.

[00:35:28] Yeah, right.

[00:35:28] And with no power, no Internet. And I get a message from a friend of mine, he goes, Hey, great job with your emails this week. Where do you want me to send the money? And he sent enough money to cover all the hospital bills, like just in a cash payment. I was like, This is amazing, right? Even when you're not working, the revenue comes in. That's why you've got to be a little bit ahead if anything can happen. So those are most of the things I work on. A lot of it is. Really. It's about being organized and building process for whatever you want to do and then just focusing on a small, narrow thing that you're really good at. Right. So the big danger for me and for a lot of people is that you get distracted by a lot of ideas like, Oh, I should do Pinterest or I should do YouTube or I should do this or I should do that. Maybe I should do a print on demand, maybe I should do FBA. And there's all these things you can do online. And the problem is if you get really distracted and you do ten things instead of one thing, great, you just it takes ten times as long, you really delay. So everything I do is all built around driving people to my website and growing my email list. So everything I do is always driven that one goal. And that's how I stay focused. Like even my the purpose of my podcast is to do meet more people, do collaborations, and to get more awareness of who I am and what I do and to get links to my website because that increases how much you appear in search results. So all of everything I do is tied together. It's always that purpose. So having that throughline of my day helps me to stay organized because it's very, very easy to get distracted and I'm guilty of this. Like I'll have a really good day and then it won't work for weeks unless I have organization. So that's why I've just become more of a process driven person.

[00:37:09] Well, yeah, same. Same thing here. I mean, I don't even look like very substantial on social media because everything I do is to get him the hell off of there onto my email list. So that's where I make all the money. I won't say all because if I do a speaking engagement, I get a big burst of income. But but the email is the one that can always count on. So. So you got a freebie for him, right?

[00:37:33] Yes. I'm always giving away one of my books. You're more than welcome to go to Amazon and look up my name and buy one of my books, which I always appreciate, but I always give away a different book in a rotation at Gift to Get Free. And it's either my book, Fire Your Boss or my book Serve Your Master, my book Give to Get. Each of those books is really built around helping you, and you can just wait a few weeks and check the link and it'll be linking to another one of the books. I kind of rotate it, but it's really about giving value first so that you can see what I'm all about. You don't have to buy my book, you don't have to spend money and buy one of my courses or anything. You can go through the book and see, okay, I like what Jonathan's all about or I don't. I really want you to get a feel for who I am, what I stand for, and if I'm the kind of person you want to spend time with or not.

[00:38:20] Givetogetfree.com. And also if you have a real interest in monkeys, Jonathan can tell you what it's like to live next to him, I guess. But wow, it's a great, great lifestyle business, great family interaction, love it that you're able to spend so much time with your kids and just just beautiful and and I'll just assure you, they'll make it full circle. You are good enough, man. I don't give a shit what those people said when you were 15. You're good enough. So thanks so much for coming on, man.

[00:38:56] No, thanks for having me. I've had a good time. You ask a really good questions. I talk about stuff I don't normally talk about, so. Good, good.

[00:39:02] That's 600 and what is it? 638 episodes. I get I guess if you pay attention, you can get a little better at this.

[00:39:11] So you kind of figured it out. Now I know 600 episodes and I get good. Yeah.

[00:39:17] All right, man. Well, thanks so much for coming on. And folks, check out Give to Get Free XCOM. And is that also lead if they wanted to contact you directly?

[00:39:28] Yeah. You you can reply to any email from me. It all comes from my personal email address or you can just go to serve. No master and I have a contact form there and that's my blog with all my other information. If you just Google serve no master. Every result is me. Got it. So it's all me.

[00:39:46] All right, it's all you. All right, man. So thanks so much and everybody, we will catch you on the next episode. See you later.