Ethan King, stuff4GREEKS.com

[00:00:54] Sanjay Parekh: Today's guest is Ethan King, a serial entrepreneur, author, public speaker, and more. There's not much that this guy can't do, and we're excited for you to meet him. Ethan, welcome to the show. 

[00:01:05] Ethan King: Hey Sanjay, thanks for having me. 

[00:01:07] Sanjay Parekh: So, I'm excited to have you on. It's always nice to talk to another serial entrepreneur, but before we get into that and get into your background, tell us a little bit about your background and what got you to where you are today.

[00:01:18] Ethan King: Well, it's been a long road. I've been an entrepreneur full time for 20 years now and part time before that. But I guess the short of it is I started out as an artist. I wanted to be an artist when I grew up and my parents told me that artists only make money after they're dead. They had my best interests at heart, but that really made me reevaluate things.

So I ended up, majoring in graphic design. And I was a freelance graphic designer for a while. Then I ended up going into the apparel industry because of a school project that we did called stuff4GREEKS, where we designed fraternity and sorority gear. Well, that ended up becoming a real company.

And we leaned all the way into that. And that was 20 years ago. It's still one of the top players in the fraternity and sorority space online, stuff4GREEKS.com. And then as a spinoff of that, we opened a retail store called, Zeus' Closet, where we customize apparel. We transform your normal boring apparel into customized pieces of art.

And we work a lot with the film and TV industry, with small businesses, schools, and it's a lot of fun. And yeah, that's how I ended up here today. And I guess through that process, through building up different businesses over the past two decades, I've ended up in different entrepreneurial peer groups and helping other entrepreneurs grow, especially entrepreneurs who may have an art background and may have been maybe starving artists like I was and how you can actually introduce a few business tools and strategies and proven tactics to transform your art into a thriving, profitable business. Because at the end of the day, all business owners to me really are artists.

It's just what's your type of art, whether your dentistry is your art or you're an accountant. That's still your art, your craft, whatever it is. But you have to apply real fundamental business lessons to that to make it a real business. 

[00:03:30] Sanjay Parekh: Right. So was stuff4GREEKS your first entrepreneurial venture or did you do something when you were younger, when you were a kid that you view as entrepreneurial? 

[00:03:41] Ethan King: If we go, the farthest back I can remember doing my entrepreneurial venture, I was president of the computer club in high school, ninth grade, so that's how much of a nerd I was. 

[00:03:54] Sanjay Parekh: Hey, this is two nerds talking then. I'm down. 

[00:03:57] Ethan King: Yeah. After school, so I had this great idea to, I was really into video games, into DOOM. I don't, know if you remember. 

[00:04:08] Sanjay Parekh: I totally remember DOOM, yeah. 

[00:04:11] Ethan King: All right. First person shooter. So, at the time, we had a LAN network at our school, and that was the only place I had access to a LAN network. So, this was the first exposure I had to like a multiplayer game. And so I installed DOOM on all the computers and I convinced the computer teachers, hey, let's do an afterschool arcade where we just charge the kids like a dollar to come. Cause I just wanted to play DOOM with some people, right? So I was making a little money and getting to play DOOM after school until some of the parents caught wind that it was a violent video game. And then they shut that down. 

[00:04:49] Sanjay Parekh: It always happens. I was waiting for the shoe to drop in the story there.

So I got to ask you, since you were the president of the computer club, name your very first computer that you had. 

[00:05:01] Ethan King: Ooh, what was? Geez, I forgot the name of it. I used to do BASIC on it. 

[00:05:07] Sanjay Parekh: TI-99/4A by any chance? 

[00:05:13] Ethan King: Something like that. 

[00:05:13] Sanjay Parekh: Texas Instruments? 

[00:05:15] Ethan King: It was Texas Instruments, yeah. It was definitely a Texas Instruments.

And it had the green text on the black screen. And then you could do the code, the BASIC coding. And you get it to say hello after you type ten lines of code. And it spits out, Hello. 

[00:05:30] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah, exactly. That was actually my very first computer as well. The TI-99/4A. Early 80s. 

Yeah. So that was the first one for me. The Apple LLC was the second one right after that. Yeah, I go back in the days as well. Okay. So, let's focus in on your first venture then, stuff4GREEKS. How did you like, how did you come up with the idea? How did you start the business?

[00:05:54] Ethan King: Well, it happened to be at a time in my life when I was in college, I did major in art, much to my parents’ chagrin. And I also pledged a fraternity. And at the time, I had just crossed into my fraternity, and I was all gung ho, it was all I could think about, just this fraternity life.

So married that with the art, I was drawing all the flyers and the t-shirts and the jackets for our fraternity because I was an art major. And then, like a couple of years later, I ended up with a branding project. So, by this time, I was designing stuff for all the Greeks on the campus.

Like they would come to Ethan, hey, design our t-shirts for this design, our flyers for that. And I was just loving it. It was the best of both worlds for me. And then I get this school project for our branding class where we had to design a real website, business cards, the whole nine, a full brand package.

And, so I said, oh, well, why not put out stuff for Greeks? I couldn't think of a better name. So, I just called it stuff4GREEKS.com and the domain was available. And it was just like, oh, whatever. And put the website out there, and then I just did it for the purposes of the school project. But then a couple of years later, we started getting real orders from people across the country.

It was like, Hey, I want you to make our jackets and I want you to do this. And I'm like, Uh, I don't really make jackets. I'll draw it for you, and you go get it made somewhere at your local place. And they were like, No, I want you to make the jacket! And I kept saying, I don't know how to make jackets. Go find somebody's grandmother with a sewing machine.

And enough people kept asking, I was like, you know what? Okay. Yeah, we'll do it. Pay me $200 and then they did it. They sent the money through like PayPal or something. I was like, oh, now I actually need to go figure out how to make these jackets. I went to an embroidery shop and learned how to do it. First we outsourced it for a while, and then we ended up overwhelming them with business and they fired us because we were keeping them from fulfilling, instead of growing to accommodate our business, they decided to fire us so they could keep focusing on their little league uniforms.

But the guy was, the guy was, I was fortunate that he let me go back in his shop and he showed me how to do everything and we ended up buying our own embroidery machines and going from there. 

[00:08:18] Sanjay Parekh: Oh, wow. So that's interesting the interaction with them and that they decided they didn't want to keep growing with you all. That it's a very different approach to what you would expect but, maybe comfortable with where they were. So that I imagine was a good shift then for you in the business because it forced you into that next level. What happened then, with the business?

It continued to grow? You insourced everything? What did you do with the business? 

[00:08:48] Ethan King: Yeah, exactly. So we were forced. It was scary at the time. I'll admit, we'd gotten comfortable with outsourcing our work to them and we had a good rhythm. But yeah, I find that in this industry, there are a lot of mom-and-pop businesses.

And, when I say mom and pop, I don't mean that in a derogatory way. It's a mindset thing. It literally was a husband and wife, and they didn't really want to hire anyone else to expand their company. They would rather have just been comfortable in that lifestyle. That's basically owning your own job.

But, so, yeah. When we were forced to go learn how to do it and buy our own machinery, we went to banks and got a loan, a small business loan, just to get the equipment. We were fortunate too. One of my graphic design clients happen to have some extra office space and at the time this graphic design client of mine, he was doing stage plays and I didn't really understand how popular he was going to become.

His name is Tyler Perry and so at the time you say, well, I have some extra office space here if if you guys want to use it for anything, you can use it. Just give me a discount on the graphic design stuff. I was like, Cool, let's do it! Yeah. The Tyler Perry. We were working out of his office at first.

It was a small, closet office space inside his first building, but we outgrew that and then we moved the business into our home basement. At this time, we had about three embroidery machines, about eight people on staff and we had all these cars in our parking lot. And some of the neighbors started complaining about UPS coming every day and all the cars and they were like, I think they're running a business out of there.

So we're like, Okay, guys, we can't, this can't be a permanent thing. We have to move out of the house. But we didn't have a bunch of money and we didn't want to pay a lease and get trapped into that. And one thing I learned from Tyler Perry is, own it. He was inspired by his mentor, Oprah, who taught him you want to own things.

So that's the frame of mind that we were in at the time. So, we said, Well, maybe we can find a place, an office that we can actually own. Which seemed crazy because we had no money. So, we went looking in the most obscure parts of town and we found this old, abandoned building that had been sitting there empty for years and had trees growing inside of it.

But it was all we could afford, and it happened to be on the West side of Atlanta, which is now West Midtown. But West Midtown wasn't even a term back then. It was just very industrial. It was a part of Atlanta that no one ever knew about. It was just like railroads and factories and old people in old houses.

So we bought our office there and we built it out, inside out. And it was a great investment because now West Midtown is booming. So, we're very fortunate in that regard. 

[00:11:57] Sanjay Parekh: So, you still have the office space, the location? 

[00:12:00] Ethan King: Yeah, it's our headquarters now. And now the beltline comes right through it. Top Golf is right down the street. So yeah, it's amazing. 

[00:12:09] Sanjay Parekh: Oh, okay. I know where you are because I know where that Top Golf is. So yeah, exactly. So, you said you touched upon something, you said, It was a little scary. What made you nervous in doing all of this? There were probably multiple points, but what are some of the things that made you nervous about attempting this?

[00:12:30] Ethan King: Yeah, so many things. It's fear of the unknown, fear of the unpredictable. At the time my wife and I, we both had full time jobs and a reliable paycheck. We're humans, we're creatures that don't like change a lot. So it's anytime we do change, it's uncomfortable at first.

So stepping out there on our own, and investing in this equipment and are we going to have the steady stream of business? Is this going to continue to go the way it's been going? So, all of those unanswered questions at first proved to be a little bit scary. 

But once we started actually reading business books and going to seminars and joining groups, support groups for business and learning more about it, it gave us comfort in knowing that we're not alone and that there are proven things you can do to continually generate business and that you don't have to be just going on faith all the time.

[00:13:32] Adam Walker: Support for this podcast comes from Hiscox, committed to helping small businesses protect their dreams since 1901. Quotes and information on customized insurance for specific risks are available at Hiscox.com. Hiscox, the business insurance experts.

[00:13:55] Sanjay Parekh: Okay, let's switch gears a little bit. So you've been a serial entrepreneur as well. So multiple businesses, you're still running the business that you started from way back. and it's a full-time business and you've got other things as well. How do you manage the stress of running these things and getting downtime? How do you manage all of that for yourself? 

[00:14:22] Ethan King: So, I have a great team, first of all, which we've built up over time. I'll give my solution, but I want to put it in a context like this didn't happen overnight and we've slowly been building up processes and systems and having team members in place to get to the point to where we are now.

Where I can devote about 20 hours a week to each business and give it the attention it needs, but I have great people in place that can run the business and my wife is my business partner, and she definitely contributes her stuff as well. And she also has her other businesses on the side.

But what we found is, I have a system for freeing up my time. And what I do is I look at, whenever I feel myself getting overwhelmed, which in the beginning, we were doing it all, answering the phones, responding to emails, running the embroidery machines, all of it. Which is how most small businesses start at some point.

And, then I had to take an honest assessment of everything I was doing and say, Okay, well, what's the first thing I can offload? And the thing that you do that's a repetitive task that you can chop down into the step by step, 1-2-3-4-5, here's how to do this. That's the first thing that got off the plate.

So for me at the time it was answering the phones because that was interrupting my flow. And then why no, actually, first it was somebody to run the embroidery machines because I could easily train someone to do that. And then the second thing was answering the phones and then email. And then you slowly just build up your team by handling each one of these parts of the puzzle.

[00:16:08] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. I want to dive into something you said there. You said your wife is your business partner then. So how do you manage that? Because then, you've got all these businesses. You can talk about business all day long, 24/7, seven days a week, like all the time. You could talk about this stuff.

And so how do you build in those boundaries or do you build in those boundaries? Like these times we don't talk about it. These times we do talk about it, like weekends. Like, how do you think about that? The two of you? 

[00:16:39] Ethan King: Yeah, it's been, we have tried to set rules like, hey, we're not going to talk about business after 9pm. Or we're not going to talk about business in the bedroom and it might stick for a few days, maybe if we're lucky. At this point we've been married 21 years. We've been in business together longer than that. And it's just, we've just accepted the fact that we both live and breathe business.

And if we're not talking about business, we're talking about kids. It's like our life. what else are we going to be talking about? We're usually talking about one of the two things. So, we have to be very intentional about finding time to do things where it's just me and her and it doesn't have to do with business or kids.

So we would like to travel a lot together and have hobbies together that don't have to do with one of the two things. Just so we have some sense of separation, but we've leaned into the fact that this is just our lives. And we both are very passionate about entrepreneurship and business. And we talk about it all the time.

[00:17:46] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. it sounds like from your answer, you guys were business partners before you got married. Was this, you were just business partners first and then dating and then married or what was the order of things here? 

[00:17:58] Ethan King: No. So, we met in college and we were just friends. And then, so at the time when stuff4GREEKS started to take off as a real business and not just a school project, she was in a sorority. She was a business major. I was in a fraternity. I was an art major with no business knowledge. We said, hey, well, you want to go half on this business? And we each put in $350 to seed the company with $700. And that's how we started it. We went half on a business, and we were business partners while we were also dating. And yeah, then we got married and here we are.

[00:18:40] Sanjay Parekh: There you go. Great path. I love that. Okay. I think you had touched on this previously, but I want to specifically ask the question. Do you have a daily routine? Exercise routine? Like, how do you think about your days? And is it different weekdays from the weekends or is everything the same?

[00:19:01] Ethan King: Yeah, definitely have a routine and I'll break it down for you, but I don't want to come off as one of those guys that I don't do this every single day religiously. But I treat it almost like a 30-day prescription at a time. 

And I believe that having some type of routine to the start and end of your day is fundamental because I look at it like the foundation of building a skyscraper. If your day is a skyscraper and you don't start with the foundation, then any wind that comes and blows will just knock your building over, right? And those winds are emails and notifications and text messages as other people pulling on your time and fires that you have to put out.

So, to create that foundation, I start off with gratitude journaling. So, I write down just three things I'm thankful for, start the day off with that. And then sometimes I'll do written affirmations or watch what I call a vision movie. So, it's the next step beyond just doing a vision board. I actually create like a moving slideshow of things that I want to manifest in my life.

And then, I do transcendental meditation, which you can learn how to do that at TM.org. But that helps me reset things and if you think of your brain like an attic and things are just a mess all over the place, it helps me organize and declutter. And then I do exercise. So at least 35 minutes of vigorous exercise every day.

And that forms the acronym GAME. Gratitude, Affirmations, Meditation, Exercise. And then I also create. I also am intentional about reading something. I'm usually listening to audiobooks while I exercise or podcasts. I'm constantly feeding my brain with stuff. But I also try to devote to reading an actual physical book, about 10 pages a day because it stimulates a different part of the brain.

So that's the R part. So that forms the acronym, GAMER.

[00:21:05] Sanjay Parekh: So, this is a call back to the DOOM days and playing video games. I love it. I love it. Okay, well let's talk about now you've reset your brain and everything, but let's take a retrospective of everything that you've done.

Like looking back at the things that you've done in your 20 year span now. And now the things that you've learned, what would you go back and do differently knowing what you know now?

[00:21:36] Ethan King: Man, so many things. 

[00:21:39] Sanjay Parekh: What's the biggest one thing? 

[00:21:42] Ethan King: Hmm. The biggest one thing.

Well, so there was one point in our business where we didn't quite realize that our business was seasonal. So, I remember we hit the first slow point in our business and things had been rolling, rolling, and then it didn't. Sales just really got slow.

There were like no orders coming in the door. We had all these people on staff and we're like, okay, well, it's going to get better. It'll be fine. So we kept people on payroll and we ended up actually taking out loans and drawing on credit lines to keep people on payroll. Well, it didn't get better, and we had to, we eventually had to let people go or people would quit, but the debt didn't go away.

We still had the debt. We still had the interest and it started snowballing and snowballing. And I wish in hindsight that I had just made the decision to cut earlier. As uncomfortable as it is, it's always uncomfortable to let people go, to lay off people. But it's also very uncomfortable to be drowning in debt and to not know if your business is going to survive.

And you got to save the ship. And sometimes you got to get people off the ship in order to save the ship so that the ship can continue sailing. And there was a lot of pride and ego involved in it. Like I remember thinking to myself, Well, I don't ever want to have to lay off people. I'm never going to have to do that. 

And it was a ridiculous thing to think that in business, I'm going to be exempt from that. But that thinking led me down that path of accumulating all that debt and I wish I would have made the decision earlier to cut and make changes, fast. 

[00:23:30] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. Yeah. How long did it take you to deal with all that debt and get rid of it?

[00:23:35] Ethan King: Oh, man. Years and years because I didn't realize it was creeping up like it was. And you see it's snowballing and then we were paying all this money in interest. You're talking about a few thousand dollars a month just in interest payments and that's not going to help you get ahead. So honestly, we ended up having to, once we were able to consolidate the debt into one loan and pay it all off on a lower interest loan that had longer terms, that gave us some breathing room and helped us get ahead.

And on top of that, we also had to realize some opportunities we had in our business to make our business more profitable, to create more margin where, you know, things we could do, value added services to give our customers, like rush fees. Okay, if you need your order faster, you can pay more to get it faster.

It's very common in everything we do in life, but we didn't have that in our business at the time. And that allowed us, by offering that, that allowed us to create more margin and offer some more profitable things in our business, offering guarantees and things like that. So, by creating more margin, more profit and reducing the waste of the interest and debt, we were finally able to get out of that hole.

[00:24:56] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah, were you all looking at your financial reports on a monthly basis? Did you understand everything that was going in there? Or was this, you said you were an art major, and so you didn't have maybe those business classes behind you. Was there some of that and that you had to figure it out or? Why was it that this kind of surprised you, really?

[00:25:18] Ethan King: Yeah, it was very much that. I wasn't a numbers person and a lot of time you think, well, I'm getting orders, like how come there's no money in the bank account? When I look at a profit and loss statement, it says we're profitable, but my bank account doesn't say that I have that in there.

So having to figure out that gap and honestly, it was just a lot of going to classes and doing stuff like, EO, Entrepreneurs Organization, and studying finance books, things that were very painful for me as a creative person. I guess like I'm bored to tears, but we have to exercise those muscles in business because money is the lifeblood of business.

So I was like, I have to understand this. And by doing this, I was able to uncover things and see some of those problems under the hood that had just been flying under the radar for me. 

[00:26:15] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. No, absolutely. No business has ever failed that had a lot of money in the bank. It's only when they don't have money in the bank is the problem.

Okay, last question for you. If you were talking to somebody who's thinking about taking the leap like you did and launching a side hustle or starting a small business, what would your advice to them be? 

[00:26:34] Ethan King: Start slow. A lot of times we can glamorize entrepreneurship, especially in the social media, TikTok, Instagram world.

And we get the impression that, Oh, just take the leap and then go all in on your new business and it'll all work out. Well, I didn't do that. I actually had a full-time job and I did my side business when I wasn't at work. So, I devoted all my off time to that, but outside of work hours. And I did that for about a year and a half until my business got to the point where I realized, well, if I devote more energy to it now, I actually have some consistency of sales coming in.

So now I know that I can take the leap. And if I apply those 8 to 10 hours every day that I was that I'm giving to my job, if I apply that to my business, I see a path now where I could make it grow. But it wasn't just a cold leap into the new business where I think a lot of people are misled and thinking that it should happen that way.

But you could set yourself up for failure that way. And then a year later, my wife left her business. So, it was a very gradual thing. She kept her benefits, and we were able to really leverage the time there before we both went full time into entrepreneurship. 

[00:27:54] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah, it's the old classic, right? All these overnight successes that actually take 8, 10 years to get there because nobody wants to talk about the pain before the overnight success, right?

It's all about the glamor at the overnight success. Ethan, this has been fantastic. How can our listeners find and connect with you online? 

[00:28:14] Ethan King: The easiest way is just to go to my website, which is my name, EthanKing.com. That way you can find links to connect with me on your favorite social media platform.

I'm on all of them, but that'll have links to connect with me and to connect with the different businesses. Zeus' Closet, stuff4GREEKS, however you want to reach out. I'm very accessible. Just shoot me an email, shoot me a message and we'll go from there. 

[00:28:38] Sanjay Parekh: Awesome. Thanks so much for being on today.

[00:28:40] Ethan King: All right, Sanjay, thanks a lot.

[00:28:44] Sanjay Parekh: Thanks for listening to this week's episode of the Side Hustle to Small Business Podcast, powered by Hiscox. To learn more about how Hiscox can help protect your small business through intelligent insurance solutions, visit Hiscox.com. 

And to hear more side hustle to small business stories, or to share your own story, visit Hiscox.com/Side-Hustle-To-Small-Business. I'm your host, Sanjay Parekh. You can find out more about me at my website, SanjayParekh.com.