Day off
Mess up on using KKEA logo
Owning a business vs owning a job
4 years of business and different results
L&L Hawaiian Barbeque and supply and demand
Mom’s interruption
Gina Mangieri of The Cole Academy interview tomorrow
Dr. Hank Wuh of Cellular Bioengineering, Inc. interview coming up
Mike Hickey of Pearl’s Korean BBQ and Subway interview coming up
Transcript:
Today is August 9, 2005, it is Tuesday and this is Evan’s Journal broadcasting live from Honolulu, Hawaii, upstairs in my house in my home office.
We had some family in town and went out with my friends and spent the day out jet skiing, riding the surf jet, barbecuing and having fun. I bought this barbecue off of Amazon.com and it’s a barbecue, I think it’s called “fire and ice”, it’s a barbecue that you push on the peddle and there’s a cooler underneath and the barbecue will rise up and there’s a propane thing and it heats up.
I guess barbecue I guess worked out pretty good. It’s just that it took forever to heat up, it took like twenty minutes and that was kind of a pain in the butt. I didn’t even cook the food so, I don’t know. I was out there taking everybody on the jet ski and that was really quite a bit of fun. Kari’s cousins were in town with her uncle. So her uncle was on the surf jet and if you don’t know what surf jet is, it’s a motorized surfboard. There’s an engine on the back, 15 horsepower jet engine similar to a jet ski, but smaller. The surfboard itself is pretty thick, it’s about four, five inches, it’s thick. It’s wide, about thirty inches and about eight feet long. And you ride it. You pull the cord to get it started up, pull on the throttle and off you go.
So we were riding that. Her Uncle Grant and other people were trying to ride it, but it kind of takes a little bit of practice. So, they were having a little bit of a hard time. But I want to ride the surf jet because I’m going to sell it. I haven’t been riding it ever since we got the jet ski, we’ve been doing the old jet ski surfing. And if you have two people it’s really kind of boring because you have to keep switching off. It’s a pain in the butt. So, I’m going to sell it, which is kind of the last hurrah for Evan’s surf jet.
Nonetheless it was a really nice day. It’s always nice to get out in nature and play around. But back to reality, it’s work time. Tomorrow we’re just slammed. Interview in the morning, work throughout and things went on at night, so back to reality.
[00:03:30] Okay, now for the updates. I have to admit I made a mistake. I just printed out business cards and the front part shows the Greater Good Radio and back I put the KKEA logo. You know its good credibility to show that you’re on a radio station and then too it reminds people that it’s on KKEA, so they remember the name. The only problem is I forgot to ask KKEA in advance, which is totally stupid on my part, I admit it. So I sent an email to Randall, who is the General Manager. I said I made a mistake, I didn’t ask you in advance, can you cut me a break because I screwed up. You know that’s not a technique that I would recommend, which is to do it and then ask for permission later. But it just happened and he was cool about it, he said you know what just use it, but next time, don’t do that. So, thanks a lot Randall, I appreciate it if you’re listening to Evan’s Journal. Thank you. [00:04:34] One other thing I wanted to talk about as I was thinking on my drive home, was owning a business versus owning a job. It’s always quite different if you are working in a job, as an employee. You know I worked at a lot of jobs in my time and then running a business. There’s a big difference. When you’re an employee and you think about I’m going to run this business. You think well I can set my hours, have some freedom and I’m doing my own thing. I own it. I have equity in it and it’s great and dandy. The reality of that for a lot of people is that they don’t actually own a business. They own a job. Because yeah they own a business, they own the equity in the business. However, if they leave the business, the business would die. If they’re not there it doesn’t earn money and they’re doing almost everything and for Kari and myself I know we’ve had businesses like that in the beginning. What it really takes is a mental change in the way that you’re thinking. You want to be able to take a couple of weeks off, a month off or whatever it may be and still earn income. Still have money. Basically it’s earning money while you sleep. So a way to think about it is, different people start businesses at the same time, but at the end of four years regardless of what personal levels of success, their business levels of success is also different.I can give you an example. Let’s say that you’re a music producer and your business is producing music, writing, composing and selling music. If you happen to sell that piece of music to the movies, to a major motion picture or to television, you would continue to get revenues on that every single time that piece of music was played in the television or movie. Meaning that regardless of if you work or not, you’ll still get paid.
That’s a big difference in terms of billable hours where when you work you get paid and when you don’t you get paid. So you don’t have to necessarily have a job to have billable hours. Many businesses are based on billable hours. So it’s just, I guess my point is if you’re thinking about running a business or you currently do, you should mentally think about how you can earn money while you sleep. And that’s something you know we’re constantly thinking about over here. So, that’s just something I was thinking about in the car.
[00:07:20] I think about our other business which is novelty supplies four years old and we’ve had success with that business. Business is running fine, it runs really relatively smooth. However, Hoco Scientific is a four year old business, also and Hoco Scientific just went public. So, why is it that, ____ now is worth $20 something million dollars and I’m not? I think one of the main reasons in that is that the plan that he set out to accomplish, if accomplished, it would achieve that and the plan that we set out to accomplish. When we accomplished that we achieved that, but it’s a whole different set of what we set out to accomplish. So, I think when you’re doing a business plan or you’re planning out your current business or whatever it may be you really want to think about what it is that you’re trying to accomplish. [00:08:17] Okay. L&L Barbecue. I was reading the article, actually I’ve been reading a number of articles about L&L Barbecue and I think it’s an extremely good example of supply and demand. When you think about opening up a plate lunch place on the mainland, first thing a lot of people think is well the mainland people wouldn’t necessarily eat that type of food or they’re not accustomed to that type of food. But the thing about it is that if you talk about supply and demand, there is a ton of ex-patriots and also there are a ton of local people that are visiting the mainland. So, damn this is super irritating that the phone keeps ringing, who is this calling me. My mom. Hold on. Got to reset the router. That’s so irritating.Anyway, L&L Barbecue, supply and demand.
[00:09:34] Okay, now you guys are probably wondering, your mom is calling you. What’s the deal? The house that I live in is right behind the house that my parents live in. It’s my grandparent’s old house. So, when my grandparents passed away, occasionally we’d be here. When Kari and I moved back from the mainland we ended up living over here because, hey, why not, got a sweet deal and it’s really nice accommodations. So, anyway. [00:10:01] L&L Hawaiian Barbecue. If any of you folks are from Hawaii and have gone to the mainland for school, you know, besides the beach, your friends and stuff, the thing you miss the most is food. So, we bug our parents to send us these care packages and bug our friends to send gifts and so on. But it’s the food that you miss. So, I remember that there were times when I went to school in Oregon that we’d drive, I think we’d even go to Vegas just to eat local food or find somewhere in California.So, now with L&L Hawaiian Barbecue opening up in various areas such as Las Vegas, California, Arizona, where there are a ton of Hawaiian people, it only makes sense that they’re going to do well. If you can think about how to apply that to your own business, I think that would be good. And that’s something we’re constantly thinking about as well. So, I don’t know, I’m giving this advice out but take it or leave it, I’m not the guru, whatever. Things come in my mind, so I figure I’ll share them with you guys.
[00:11:09] Okay. Tomorrow’s interview we’re doing with Gina Mangieri, owner of The Cole Academy and that will be tomorrow at 10:30 and we will pre-record it as normal, produce the show and let you guys know when it’s coming up. I think it’s an interesting story because Gina was not an entrepreneur. She was the Editor of Pacific Business Magazine or Pacific Business News, sorry. And she wanted child care, couldn’t find what she wanted, so she started her own. I think it’s one year old for the downtown location and now they’re opening up a Oahu location in September and I think they’re opening up something else too, but I’m not really sure. [00:11:51] Okay, good news on another interview. Dr. Hank Wu of Cellular Bio-Engineering, Inc. has finally agreed to do this. Hank Wu and I are acquaintances, friends, not the best of friends but you know I consider him a friend. He was introduced to me by another mutual friend and he’s one of the smartest guys I’ve met. He has a Johns Hopkins Medical School, Stanford Surgery School, Harvard Masters, I mean he has invented orthopaedic devices while he was going through school. He’s just a super, smart guy and his company, Cellular – Gosh man. What the hell. Hello.Man, I am just totally losing my train of thought here. All right.
Okay, so Hank Wu has this company called Cellular Bio-Engineering and an article we recently read, I don’t know if it was in BPN or Hawaii Business Magazine, said that the market for it is something like a billion or two dollars or something pretty large. And what they do is regenerate corneas for your eyes. So they’ll take one cornea and they can regenerate a thousand corneas. And these corneas are used for transplants. I guess the demand for transplants world-wide is super high but the supply for it is really low.
So, they have a huge market, doing some really interesting research and development and now they’re doing something with plasma, I guess you would call it and then that way you don’t even have to have the cornea, you can just produce these corneas from that. So, I don’t know, Hank can talk about the scientific stuff. He went through some things when I was going through a tour and I have no idea what he was talking about. So that will be an interesting interview because his business aspect is extremely advanced as well.
[00:14:24] And then another interview we have coming up will be Mike Hickey of Pearl’s Korean Barbecue and also Subway. Mike is actually one of our customers for Bubble-Tee Supply and we sell him Bubble-Tee Supply products. Mike is a former Minor League baseball player. He played professional baseball for a number of years and now runs restaurants. So, you’ll be able to hear from Mike about his pro career in baseball and then his restaurant career and how he has maybe used some of athletic abilities or what he learned from sports to help his business.So, anyway that’s about it for tonight and I need to fix this router, this computer, so my mom can get online, because I guess she has to email her friends. And she’s going to keep calling me every five minutes, so.
Thank you for your time and we will talk tomorrow.
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