Wednesday, December 24, 2014

Year of the Hack

Many people do a year end review of the things they did and didn't do based on their new years resolutions.  As I was thinking about some of the things that I did and was involved in I realized that I could label my year the title of this blog post, or Year of the Hack.  Last year had some hacking involved, namely learning to type in colemak and trying to learn to speed read.

Some of this year's hacks were totally unexpected and some I had some interest in previously, but finally followed through on them and so I thought I'd document them and share them here.

Rental

The first major hack of the year was a collaboration between my family, mainly my wife, and my mom.  Ever since my dad introduced the family to Rich Dad Poor Dad and cash flowing assets the topic has been firmly planted in the minds of the family.  Previously my mom expressed a desire to own a rental or perhaps do a flip with some money she squirreled away for her part time job and businesses.  This came to a head when one day my wife was perusing the local mls for homes for sale in the area and found out that the condo she grew up in was up for sale.

With a little prodding she got me to go and look at it.  It was in fairly decent shape and when we were walking out the door they had a flier on what the payment would be with the current offer price and certain interest rates and down payments and we got excited because the numbers were close to what we could do and what we were paying.  I can't remember if it was that night or what, but we reached out to my mom to see if that would be something she'd be interested in or not.

She said she'd have to think about it as she wasn't too keen on having a condo as because often you are giving up money to pay the hoa that at times can be exorbitant and not warrant the cost for the "benefits" they espouse, which is a valid concern.  There was some extended dialogue on that point, but once done Ashlee and my mom dove right in to figuring out the lendors, down payment amount, terms, move-in/move-out dates, etc.

We didn't use a realtor and so this involved a lot of work on Ashlee's part, for which she is to be commended.

The hack portion came in the form of us getting to move into a bigger place, have part ownership in the investment, and then participate in the cash flows once we move out and the property is experiencing positive cash flows (and paid off!).

So far the place has been great for our family.  More space to host and for storage and to grow our family.  My wife updated the kitchen practically all on her own.  She is a boss!


WGU (and here too)

This one is the one that was a total surprise hack for the year.  A few years back when I first got married I had the desire to go and get MBA to help in opening up new opportunities for me.  The heading of this section is to a link of my experience there and how I hacked getting my MBA.  Long post short...I got my MBA in 87 days for a total tuition cost $3,395.00.  Check out the post if you want more deets.  Crazy awesome hack.  Traditional public school and university systems are broken in my opinion and WGU and MOOCs and coding bootcamps and technical schools are the needed change we need to see in education these days.  We need more people with real skills without saddling them with insane amounts of debt afterwards.  Not to mention the time wasted.

Excellent hack, WGU.


This was my first attempt at becoming a published author.  This idea was spawned from an earlier blog post I'd done.  I learned how to self-publish on Amazon and I've been paid twice real money by amazon for the work done.  The total payments are less than $5.00, but I thought it was a cool experiment and would recommend it to anyone interested in publishing a book to try it here before trying to go big with a publisher to see if they're up to the task and to see if the market actually likes what you have to offer.

Credit Card Hacking (here and here)

My parents are well acquainted with using the rewards system via the free flights they're able to bag, but I'm new to the scene.  A while back I was reading the blog by mr. money mustache and he mentioned how he'd done a little bit of credit card hacking.  For the uninitiated there are certain cards that offer certain rewards year round or that cycle through the generosity of their rewards based on when you sign up for them.  There are rewards for anything from vacation packages, free flights, and of course cash back and statement credits.  

My interest was in cash rewards.  I signed up for my first one earlier this year and through the course of regular spending on gas, groceries, and what not I got my first credit of $100.  I've since signed up for another card and will be taking advantage of $225.00 in cash credits to my account once I spend the needed $500 over the next three months.  

The last credit card hack I did this year was signing up for a Home Depot card, which gave me $25 off my purchase that day, which was a minor sum, but I only had to spend a few extra minutes for that win.

So on the year I'm looking at cashing in an additional $350.00 after tax dollars for less than an hours worth of work.  Not too bad.  Even if I spent two hours researching, waiting in line, setting up a new account and paying off my bills, which I didn't it still equates to earning $150.00/hour, or the equivalent of a $300,000.00 salaried job.  Not sure of how many people (Bill Gates and Warren Buffet aside) can scoff at that amount of free money, but I must say I'm sold on it and would recommend it to anyone who has an interest in it.  As info I only signed up for the no annual fee cards so that I don't have to worry about paying the fee or remembering to shut down the card before the next annual fee is due.


This one is another Mr. Money Mustache hack.  I was introduced to this idea via his blog and had a brother and a friend who also signed up for cell phone plans there.  I have to say I'm very pleased with it so far.  Instead of the typical $30-$50/month cell plan for smart phones mine is less than $15/month.  

What I like about it too is that if my kids need a cell phone in the future they have sensible plans for $5-$10/month that allow the kids to call/text/use data whether they're using wi-fi or not and with the phones being as low as $50 to purchase it is certainly an affordable luxury if the parental units decide to splurge on a communications line for their child.


This last one is hacking that I'll be doing starting in January that I've already started into with the pre work that is required.  About a year and half ago I developed a small interest in learning to program and progressed through codeacademy's code year and even signed up for a short time with teamtreehouse.com.  Then I put that on hold to prep for having my first kid, moving, enjoying the first kid, then buying the rental, then hacking my MBA and finally after that was done noticing that I still wanted to do coding and so I applied to a local coding bootcamp, Devmountain, to learn to become a front end web developer.  My hope is that I can enjoy some of the camp's placement rate success (98% placement for their students within 3-6 months of completing the program) and combine it with my experience and education to land something well paying.  Then I hope to be able get my skills up enough to do freelance work on the side so that I could eventually travel the world and just diversify my streams of income.

So there you have it, the year of the hack!  Merry hacking!  Do it!  Let me know how it goes for you!

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

How I got my MBA in 87 days at WGU

Update: Its now a couple years later and I've added an update at the end of this post for those that are interested to see what happened/what I did after my WGU experience in terms of jobs, pay increases, further education, business, etc.  I used to have google drive with all my screenshots and notes on here, but I needed to remove those for space for my painting business for which I'm now working full time.  Cheers!

- Brock - 1/30/18

I received notification today (10-27-14) at noon MST that my last assignment for my last class in my MBA program was graded and passed and with that notification I'm done with MBA program at WGU.  I couldn't be more pleased with that.  I want to share my experience and hope you enjoy.

I've always known education and knowledge was a good thing.  I went to traditional public schools growing up.  I had it pounded into my head that going to college and getting as much education as possible led to higher pay, but they didn't exactly explain anything about student loans and opportunity cost which in my mind is a huge thing that should be harped on.

For example, this past weekend I went to an information session for the worlds largest oil service provider and the recruiter said he'd stop the whole meeting if there was one person who was a diesel mechanic.  Why?  Huge demand for that skill set.  Pay level for year 1?  100k out the gate.  A quick perusal online and you'll find technical schools who'll certify you as a diesel mechanic for anywhere from 20-40k as far as I've been able to find.  What's funny is these types of programs aren't really hyped as much as perhaps they could be for the amount of tuition they cost.

I think traditional school is dying and breaking under the stress of its own largess and lack of offering real education for the prices it charges.

About two years ago however I still believed in large part that getting an education was worth it no matter the price.  Upon seeing that I wanted to advance in my career, but was getting passed up for opportunities I decided I wanted to pursue a MBA.  At that time I did a bit of research on ROI on grad school and found that though higher ivy league schools had higher entrance/exit levels of pay for their students/graduates, they had a higher than proportional cost of tuition, which resulted in a lower ROI compared to lower tiered students/pay scales.  I don't believe the studies I read factored in that should an ivy league student opt to not go to ivy league school, but instead prefer to go to a smaller, less reputable school, that they'd probably get a heavy discount on their tuition or perhaps even a full ride scholarship for their degree, which would then make the ROI infinite at that point aside from the opportunity cost of their time/working more at their job.

I signed up for a GMAT prep class at the University of Utah.  I took the course and took my first test and bombed out on it.  I wasn't even close to getting the minimum scores to get into the a low tier MBA program.  I plugged ahead and went another six weeks or so of studying.  After studying I decided to take the plunge again.  My score improved quite a bit, but still wasn't enough to get into the program.  At that point I decided that for the time being I'd put the MBA pursuit on hold even though I could have kept going to class for free for the next three years if I wanted.

Several months after putting studying on hold I did a few other things to improve my skill set and make more money.  One thing was to be a pizza delivery driver.  Another was to self-impose studying coding.  Around that time we had a kid and for the last year or so we've been focused on that as a family and trying small business ideas on the side.

One idea was to call small business owners and offer to list their business daily on the local classifieds so that their business would surface near the top of the search results.  This did produce some fruits, but didn't seem to be enough to warrant the amount of work that went into it.

Another idea was to help my wife in selling some maps that she designed and sold herself.  Really this was her doing, and I just helped her with some packing, shipping, setting up of displays and what not.  Nothing too crazy.  She has made more money doing that then I did delivering pizzas or posting classified ads though.

We then partnered with my mother to buy a condo in a small suburb in Utah as a joint venture/rental unit.  We'd live in the unit for the foreseeable future, which would allow us to move into a bigger place that could house our expanding family, but then once we'd outgrown it we'd manage it and ensure renters were in the unit.  Then we'd split the rental income and any appreciation according to the agreed upon split/investment amounts.

Then June 20th at 10 pm. happened.

After we bought and fixed up some things in the house things slowed down a little bit and we were enjoying the new place.  We played host to several family get togethers and game nights.  One of these nights when people were over everyone started talking about school.  My brother-in-law spouts off that he knocked out something like 27 or 28 credit hours last semester, which shocked me.

A typical college semester is 12-15 credit hours with 18 being crazy and also the max number of hours you can do without needing special permission to take that many credit hours.  Anything beyond 18 and you typically need special administrator approval to do so.  So when I heard he'd finished well over that amount I was naturally curious.  Turns out his semesters were six months long and so really he wasn't too far off from the average number of credit hours done in a semester.

He did proceed to explain though that he could do as many credit hours as he could get done in a semester and still pay the same flat rate of tuition.  I can't remember the exact transition to how we got talking about the MBA program, but I think it started with me saying that it'd be awesome if there was a MBA program like that.  He said that he believed his school, WGU, did.  I said that'd be cool, but that because it was an online school that it probably wasn't accredited to which he responded that he was almost positive that it was.  I had to find out if it was or not.

While I was looking online he proceeded to tell us that not only could he do as much school as he wanted, but that he could do so and still pay the same amount for the whole semester, regardless of how little or much you get done, which of course gives an incentive to get as much done as possible to lower their overall cost.

By this time I had confirmed that the school was indeed accredited even for its MBA program.  This part was crucial for me as I'd be told by the president of Questar gas back when I was studying the GMAT prep class that it didn't really matter which school that I went to as long as the school awarded an accredited degree once it was completed.

The next big selling point for me was the fact that I didn't have to take the GMAT to get into the program.  I obviously had had difficulty previously in preparing for that test and so having that last barrier to entry removed got me really excited.  At this time in the evening it was about 10:30 pm and my brother-in-law had to go home, but he said that if I was interested in applying that he could get me a code that night to submit the application for free instead of forking out the $65 application fee.  I told him that I was going to apply and he said he'd get it to me that night.

Another reason I was stoked to do the program is that they start a new program every month and so I wouldn't have to wait the nearly year+ to start the program.

On top of that my brother-in-law stated that many people have completed the MBA in less than 3 months, which was a great motivational carrot for me during the entire program.  This was/is possible because of the competency structure of the program, i.e. if you have years of knowledge or experience in the subject matter and can demonstrate as much then you're free to do so and once done you can move on the next subject matter.

About twenty or thirty minutes later he had the code sent to my email and I start compiling everything to apply.  I gathered all my tax documents, applied to FAFSA, set up a login, and submitted my application that night.  During that time we still had some people over and I was working late and they teased me saying, "Are you really doing this?"  I replied that I was.  I stayed up until I was all the way done applying, which was well past 1:30 am.

The next day was Saturday the 21st and I got a call from an enrollment counselor at noon.  He just called to see if I had any questions and talk about my past school experience and thoughts on school and how I'd feel I'd do with an online structure and what not.  It flowed very smoothly and didn't feel like a formal interview or anything though come to find out later that that was what it was.  He proceeded to tell me that he just needed a couple more things to get me going, which I think may have just been a resume or something like that.

We then talked about a week later.  In between that time I received a letter stating that I had been preliminary accepted into the program, which confused me and gave me doubts about whether I'd be accepted into the program or not.  This was cleared up on the next call and I was told that it was a done deal.  I believe that was June 27th.  I asked if I couldn't start the program starting July 1st as I felt I was ready, but he stated I needed to wait a month to start, which I reluctantly accepted.

From there I had to wait two weeks or so until the orientation program opened up for me, which was July 15th.  After that I was contacted by my assigned student mentor.  This mentor is someone who is assigned to you throughout your entire experience to handle any issues you have, be an accountability partner, and they also approve pre assessments, tests, and additional courses once you've got your currently scheduled courses completed.

The last week of July I noticed that some of my classes were open to be looked at, or at least what I thought were the classes and what I could look at.  With that info I decided to go ahead and start working on the course work for my first class.  On July 29th my student mentor said that I indeed was green lighted and was free to work on the classes if I wanted and so the clock started.

It took me several weeks to get the first paper written, but towards the tail end of it I discovered the courses online community and discovered additional material that made writing the remainder of the paper a breeze and allowed me to write the second paper over the course of 2 or 3 days.  From there it started getting crazy.

After getting those first papers graded I was able to focus on classes that had just a test to pass the class and then some of the classes had a paper and a test to pass the class.  What follows is the breakdown for how long each class took me.  Ethical leadership took me a while because I had family come into town for two weeks and so I really didn't study a lick and then I also started the last class, the Capstone, which was also part of the reason that class took longer to complete as I had to get up to speed on the Capstone to ensure I wasn't delaying other people in the group.  Then starting September 29th I started the last official class, the Capstone, which is done in a group and isn't quite able to be done at such a fast pace as it requires collaboration and working on a schedule that fits with everyone, but that didn't stop me from getting another four classes done while doing the capstone class.

Managing Organizations and Leading People - July 29th - August 18th. - 21 days.

Global Economics for Managers - August 18th - August 27th. - 10 days.

Managing Human Capital - August 27th - August 30th. - 4 days.

Accounting for Decision Makers - August 30th - September 5th. 6 days.

Management Communication - September 5th - September 6th. 2 days.

Marketing - September 6th - September 8th. 3 days.

Ethical Leadership - September 8th - October 3rd. 26 days.

Financial Management - October 3rd - October 9th. 7 days.

Data-Driven Decision Making - October 9th - October 17th. 9 days.

Operations Management - October 17th - October 18th. 2 days.

Capstone - September 29th - October 24th. 26 days.

So what are the things that I did to blow through a lot of these classes so quickly while working full time and having a wife and kid and church responsibilities, never really doing anything on Sundays and a lot of Saturdays off and not doing anything for two weeks while family was in town?  Well for starters I got my bachelors in business.  Truth be told there were only a few concepts that were new to me in each of the classes and so to get up to speed and show competency in each of them wasn't difficult.  If you didn't get your bachelors however in business beforehand it'd take a little bit longer to get through the material, but even then the structure is so great and the flow of the course material is so smooth if you were to follow the schedule they provide you for what you need to study it should go much quicker than what even the schedule indicates.

I focused on one class at a time where possible, which was all the time except for when I was juggling one class at a time while also doing the Capstone class.  Only once with Data-Driven Decision Making and Operations Management did I take the pre-assessments back to back.  Else I just took one preassessment at a time and focused solely on that class.

Preassessments

It goes against your intuition, but I took the first preassessment for each class before studying one word of the course.  This serves two purposes.  It shows you exactly where you need to study and which competencies you need help in via the coaching report that is generated after each pre assessment/test.  Secondly it gives you a confidence boost to know you're mostly there on the material in most cases.  I believe it was only two cases where I scored in the 40% range on my first preassessment.  After studying the answers for the preassessment I'd retake the second preassessment.  If it happens that you're not comfortable with your results and you still want to study you've still got one preassessment banked to see if the additional studying is needed.  I never took a third preassessment and passed ALL of my objective assessments on the first try.  I'll say that on average I'd see my score drop 10-15% between the second preassessment and the actual test results throughout my experience at WGU.

Screenshots!

You can take screenshots of the pre assessments and then study the questions you think you got wrong.  Don't get too excited though because none of the pre assessment questions were exactly the same in the assessments as far as I can remember.  They would have a handful or so of the questions though, but with slight variations on the answers and so studying the pre assessment questions was very helpful to me.

One thing I did during tests is I'd write down any questions I thought I'd probably get wrong to try and study those afterwards, but since I never missed on getting the right cut score I never ended up studying any of the questions I wrote down, but it is something you could try as I'm sure it'd help direct you to specific or general areas that you need to study.

The preassessments also tend to follow the book material in a linear path.  For example your first 5-10 questions on the preassessment will directly correlate to the first chapters/sections.  The next 5-10 will correlate to the next chapter and so on.  They intersperse some questions from other sections every once in a while, but generally I'd say 80-90% of the questions follow a linear path like this.  So if you can't find an answer just stick with it.

Supplemental material wasn't really any use.  I'm sure there were some answers hidden away in some of them, but honestly I think I read maybe one or two supplemental things/case studies throughout the whole program (remember I didn't really read much of anything).

I would also very much recommend keeping everything online.  This way if you're at your family's place visiting, doing some school during work, on your break, or during your lunch, at the library, or at home you don't have to carry around a flash drive or keep your laptop with you wherever you go.  Once you're actually ready to submit a paper you'll of course want to import it into the word processing program of choice and edit it accordingly and then submit the polished copy.

What I wished I'd done, but didn't pick up until the very end of the program was just putting all my screenshots from preassessments mainly on a google doc and then adding comments to what I thought were the answers or if I thought an answer was right to each screenshot.  Prior to that I'd put all the screenshots on a word doc and because of the hastle of saving/uploading/downloading/editing/reuploading/etc I got lazy and just wouldn't work on the preassessments when I had the chance to do so at work and other places and trying to find the right answers because it was too much work to download it whereas once I started putting the preassessments on google (btw I still saved the preassessments on Onedrive from microsoft and on a separate word document on my local hard drive just in case google or some other thing crashed on me) I actually had motivation to do the work cause it was right there and it auto saves for you, which is excellent.

I used One note somewhat.  It is free from microsoft and is nice when you save a change on your work computer's one note it'd be there for you on your home computer or laptop.  I'd save some screen shot definitions, but didn't really use it as much as I thought I would because I'd just use the google docs.

For all of my classes that had a performance assessment except for data-driven decision making I did literally NO reading to prep for the assessment.  All my assessments passed either on the first submission or the second one.  The only one that didn't was the Data-Driven Decision Making one.  It did pass the third time around.  I'd just take the directions given in taskstream, add any text from the rubric and any supplemental documentation added in the communities, which for me was only the Managing Organizations and Leading People class and then space everything out.  Using the communities, tasks, and rubrics and their recommended length for each section within the paper is excellent and provides all the outlining you'd ever need to do for your paper.

APA formatting.

This is much more daunting then it needs to be.  I would highly recommend you use WGU's online library.  For the MBA program you'll want to access the EBSCO library.  If you're in there just use peer reviewed articles/books only for your papers.  When you bring up the resource it will have an option to the right side that asks if you'd like to copy the citation for your paper and in which format.  Just copy that!  Then just follow the APA format for citing the work correctly inside of your paper.

As for length needed for citation you don't need to include this long complex citation.  You can literally cite 2 words or a sentence or two and even meld it into your commentary and that is a sufficient amount of citing needing to be done.

I would recommend getting a second monitor as many before me have mentioned.  It makes it much easier to study the preassessments on one screen and then have the book you're studying on the other screen.

For most of the classes I didn't do any reading at all.  I'd just review the chapter summaries and the flashcards and if those didn't get me the answers to the preassessments then I'd do a little bit more digging, but otherwise I didn't read everything they recommend you read.

The webinars....eh.  Take em or leave em, but I left them.  I listened to the recorded one for the very first class, which was a waste of time since it just copied the slides put up for the course anyways.  I also went to the very last class webinar, which also wasn't anything too special, but is good to go to to show teamwork within your group and there were tidbits here and there that helped with the simulation.

I only reached out to the course mentors 4 times total.  Twice by phone and twice via email to answer some basic questions.  They were somewhat slow via email at times, but knew the answer and so I'd recommend only calling them if you're not afraid of doing that.

I didn't use the writing center once or any external grammar/spell checking site and my papers turned out fine.  They want the papers to be readable, but if you've received your bachelors and gone through traditional schooling simple proof reading ought to be enough for your papers.  Overkill would be to read your papers out loud as that often highlights weirdly structured sentences and lines of thought.

Honestly I wouldn't read any of the class/community questions or anything.  The complaints are distracting and the questions being asked are 99% likely not to be answering what you need an answer to and so instead just reach out directly to the course mentors instead of sifting through the excess that is in the forums.  I think generally we  just drift into social media mode and binge read forums because it soothes us even though generally they don't provide any real value/substance that helps you progress in the program (or in life in general on regular social media if I'm being honest).

So to recap here is how long 87 days is.

Date difference from Jul 29, 2014 to Oct 24, 2014

The total number of days between Tuesday, July 29th, 2014 and Friday, October 24th, 2014 is 87 days.
This is equal to 2 months and 25 days.
This does not include the end date, so it's accurate if you're measuring your age in days, or the total days between the start and end date. But if you want the duration of an event that includes both the starting date and the ending date, then it would actually be 88 days.
If you're counting workdays or weekends, there are 63 weekdays and 24 weekend days.
If you include the end date of Oct 24, 2014 which is a Friday, then there would be 64 weekdays and 24 weekend days including both the starting Tuesday and the ending Friday.
87 days is equal to 12 weeks and 3 days.
The total time span from 2014-07-29 to 2014-10-24 is 2,088 hours.
This is equivalent to 125,280 minutes.
You can also convert 87 days to 7,516,800 seconds.

87 days...shooo.  Now the easy part is done and now I just need to get a job in this crap economy.  I'm gonna need to be a nazi about my time like I was during my program as it pertains to applying to a new gig.  I figure that I'm missing out on anywhere from $50-$70 everyday that I don't have a better paying job.

As soon as I get one I'll have to do an update.

UPDATE 3/17/17

Happy St Patricks Day! (for anyone who is into that ;) And yes i did forget to wear green today.)

Soooo...I didn't do an update since I got the new job, but here is the update nonetheless.

After I finished the MBA I didn't go full bore into applying for jobs for a couple weeks.  When I did though I applied to just over a hundred that were mba/finance related.  My wife and I co-did it and we kept track of postings we applied to on a spreadsheet hence why I know it was over a 100.  The bad news...I only got a call or two just to verify I'd applied and if I was interested if they were interested.  Duh of course I am that's why I applied.  Needless to say blindly applying to jobs without networking or having more relevant experience got me nowhere.

About the same time as applying though I was considering moving into tech via doing a coding bootcamp as coding was something I'd dabbled in a couple years earlier just doing free coding stuff around the web on teamtreehouse.com and codeacademy.com.  Before doing a coding bootcamp though (they're more expensive then even my mba was at 4.5k vs 2.5k after receiving the tax credit for higher education) I called a friend/mentor who is/was a venture capitalist to get his opinion.  I didn't know at the time, but he and his comrades invest in tech companies and he thought it'd be a really good idea for me to do a coding bootcamp and then to couple my MBA with it to get into a product manager role.  So with that nudge I interviewed several bootcamps and ended up going with devmountain, which is locally based here in salt lake city.

Between finishing the mba and the coding bootcamp I came across a much better way to get jobs through networking with...linkedin.  I can be shy and this way of networking is much better for me.  It is very simple.  Sign up for all the job alerts you want on monster, careerbuilder, resumerabbit, indeed, glassdoor, linkedin, your local classifieds, etc, but before you just go guns a blazing and apply please do yourself and the world a favor and FIRST go on linkedin (this is all predicated on you smartly having one and two maintaining/growing your connections) and see who in your connections one either works there or two knows someone who works there.  Now of course not everybody who is a connection really knows everybody that is a connection (just look at your own IG, Twitter, FB, etc friends list), BUT...this is WAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYYYY better than just blind applying.  And what I mean by way better is you simply send the person a simple message, "Hey I saw you work at XYZ company or you know (fill in the hr person/hiring managers name with whom this person is a connection with) and I was thinking about applying to XYZ position.  I thought I'd do the smart thing though before just blindly applying and first see if I knew anyone who worked there or knew anyone that knew anyone that worked and saw that you do or you know XYZ person who does and was wondering how you'd recommend I proceed or who I should talk to or if you could just introduce them to me?"  Something to that effect will yield you waaaaaaaaaay better results.  After doing it this way I got way more calls, interviews, and jobs.  Please don't blind apply unless there is simply no connection at all on linkedin and even then that is questionable because you can always ask to be a contact with someone who works where you want to and then you can apply after you're connections.  So with that rant now done we can move on...

So where did I land after England Logistics?  Insidesales.com as a web developer.  I started there I think May of 2015.  And guess what?  My sister worked there and that was my main foot in the door plus there was already someone who was in that department that had done devmountain as well (NETWORKING....please don't ignore it...linkedin is your friend...you are getting very sleepy...it is almost the weekend........unless you're reading this mid week then...you're screwed).

So at EL I was making about 45k/year.  I landed at IS.com making 50k/year.  I didn't know till being at IS.com for a while that A LOT of weight was put on my having my MBA getting into the company.  They very much valued the higher education within the company.  They had a bunch of phd dudes doing big data and AI stuff and the founder has his masters in philosophy etc etc.  So within 6-ish months of finishing my MBA it paid for itself via a new job with an ROI of 200%.

I actually didn't stay very long at IS.com because the workload was so low that it drove me crazy.  A girl I sat next too would just sit at her computer almost all day everyday with a minimized screen of youtube playing videos of video games.  She's since moved on as well to another department and I imagine is not watching so much youtube these days, but I could be wrong.

I was only at is.com for about 5 months when I landed another job through, gasp, networking.  I'd told my mom that I wasn't really engaged in my job, but I wanted to keep learning and growing and she'd mentioned that to a friend who worked in another tech company and I landed there at 60k/year starting in October of 2015.

So now at this point we're up from 45k/yr to 60k/yr in less than a year, or based on my 2.5k MBA investment a 600% return on investment.

Through my own lack of experience and not a great fit I moved on from that last job to the one where I am now in January 2017 at 64k/yr plus full health insurance paid for and i get to work from home twice a week, or now up to about 700% roi on my wgu tuition investment.

What's more important I think to tell people who are more interested in the business/entrepreneurial side of their mba...in my opinion...it is only mildly preparatory to working on a real business.

As I'd mentioned that my previous job wasn't a great fit I was feeling super restless and under valued and wanted to capture more of the value I knew I could bring to a venture.  This is in part due to my nature, but also blasting myself with content from sites/podcasts like eventualmillionaire.com, foreverjobless.com, and affordanything.com.  One podcast in particular was about a painter who almost shut down his business after getting punched in the face and funds drying up due to not being online in an online age and losing his market share to those that were online and just using better practices in general and I thought to myself that ya I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed, but certainly i'm not so clueless as to get punched in the face running a business and if that guy turned it around in a few short years and was now a millionaire, then surely I could do it.

So since last summer I've partnered up with my father in law running his painting business and we've grown it over 60% last year in the 4 months we were involved and this year we should easily double last year's growth.  Bottom line for my portion after expenses I'm up another $420/month there, which is great and I think at least in part is due to my experience/education I got from my MBA experience at WGU with building teams, improving processes, better/more marketing, ethical leadership and on and on.

So I guess if the projection from regular income and side hustle is annualized i'm closer to 70k/year vs 45k when I just finished my mba 2.5 years ago.  Now I know that I'm still under performing in my opinion and where I want to be, at the same time I do acknowledge that Utah has a highly educated work force, driving down the cost of hiring an mba, but on the flip side it also has a lower cost of living compared to other parts of the country so my money goes further (I'm the only income provider in my house and my wife stays at home with our two kids), i.e. last year we bought a house, and currently don't have any debt aside from interest free payments on furniture we could pay off, and a little bit on a car we owe, which we could also pay off.  We did finish some electrical that we're going to use a line of credit to pay on, but again we could also pay that off if we wanted, but would prefer to keep more cash in case we need it.

So morale of the story...education is guuud.  Real knowledge AND SKILLS are what will result in you getting the job or business you want.  A MBA is a good foundation, but continuing to improve and get more knowledge and skills will ultimately lead you (and me) to earning more via the additional value/capabilities we bring to the workforce/business place.  And if you've read this far you're likely the "get more skills/knowledge" type so good on you.  You're heading in the right direction even if you aren't doing wgu or a coding bootcamp or even any traditional school.

Let me know if you have any other questions and I'll have to do another update once the painting business has become my full time gig!

Cheers (st patty's day)

Update:

As of a week ago I started full time into the painting business.  There is still so much to get done and I may even go on my own and start another one so I can capture more of the profit for jobs I bring into the company and also make it more profitable.

I also removed the google drive content and link since I needed the space on my drive for the business so that isn't available anymore.  Keep up the good work and just be persistent and you'll do well in the program and it'll happen fast for you!

Brock - 1/30/18

UPDATE 3/11/19

So I actually did do the painting business full time for about 6 months.  I also did end up starting my own, Enterprise Painters, and it is still chugging along.  I got it up and running, but until we scale it up it won't be able to support the financial commitments we currently have.  My mom is working in the business and we've got a handful of painters.  Last year we did over $300,000 in revenue and we backed out of a big contract valued at $414,000 cause the numbers in the ended up being too tight. 

As I dived back into looking for a job last summer we started flipping houses and we'll be continuing doing that going forward since we're now having contractors do all the work and we can still make a profit on them.

I did land a job after further certifications earned in becoming a scrum master and product owner.  Base pay is pretty good at $87,500 with the potential for a 7% bonus split paid out twice a year for a current max of around $93,000.  Add in benefits and HSA matching and I'm well over $100,000/year in 'pay' so that is fun, but really flipping houses and the painting business income comfortably put us over $100,000/year.  With those funds we're paying off all of our debt and we're starting to learn about investing in multifamily real estate, i.e. apartment investing, which should really change how things go for us going forward financially.  I'm excited about it and will possibly update here if we get into it.

UPDATE 1/2/24

I just shared this post with a friend and thought I might as well do an update.

Since landing that previous job/update I have since been laid off from that job along with three others for a total of four layoffs since march 3rd of 2020.  My pay went from that base of 87.5k in 2018 (layoff) to 75k in 2020 (left for career growth/compensation bump) to 95k in 2020 (layoff) to 110k in 2021-2022 then with a cost of living increase to 114k (layoff), then 150k in 2022-2023 (layoff).  I'm currently working as a senior product owner for a startup making $130,000/year with full health insurance benefits paid for by the company along with unlimited pto.  It'll be a hybrid position after I finish working the first couple months.

We did end up flipping 5 houses all profitably thankfully.  We did stop once the fed started raising interest rates as I wasn't sure what would happen to housing prices because of that.  

I would say in conjunction with my mba, continuing to get certifications relevant to my field along with paying for professional resume writing and what not has enabled to survive the layoffs and find work relatively quickly and so I hope this encourages you and ya that is about it.  Till the next update!

























Wednesday, June 18, 2014

Baby hard at work



You've heard of the standing desk I'm sure.  Well they just came out with the laying down desk.

Tuesday, May 13, 2014

Rachmaninov just gave me chills

Rachmaninov is a boss I just found out.  


I'm listening to some of his music while I'm working and there was a part I was just listening to that was incredible and it gave me chills, which doesn't really happen when I listen to music.  I can only think of one other time distinctly where that happened.

I had to write about it is all.

Friday, February 28, 2014

One thing I’ve learned in my 5 hour business journey

I’ve learned that my body and mind give off very definite cues as to whether or not I’m in the drama as it pertains to poor business thought.  Mainly it is this nagging depression and lack of energy and doubt.  I will be keeping watch of these and update accordingly for any insights.

Customers and how to catch them

Net (building systems) vs hook (not building systems)

Thursday, February 13, 2014

Biggest bet ever!

Hello World.

I made the biggest bet I’ve ever done with my brother this week.  Its on like donkey kong.  The bet is that I will work on business for 5 hours per week and if I don’t have it done by Saturday at midnight then I owe that sucka…..$500.  Yup.  In one week if I don’t follow through this chump will get my hard earned dough.  This post is to do an update.  The other day I was looking into doing this bet on stick.com that my other brother showed me, which I really liked because on it they have a space where the individual can do a journal update.  Hence why I’m doing this post.  I’ll just do my journaling here.

$500 is going well.  I'm at 2 hours and 59 minutes and 56 seconds out of 5 hours.  I haven't made any money yet, but I think I've saved myself some time.  I can't quite discern how great asking w/o selling will be for me, but so far it is working out great.  Example.  I was thinking maybe instead of buying an eBay business I'd just contact realtors and ask them to ask their clients to list stuff to sell with me.  Turns out realtors can't accept commissions/kickbacks for stuff like that.  Plus I was thinking that isn't a home based business and would be a drag to have to go to someone's house and take pictures and then list and then coordinate shipping and and and...too much!  So I nixed that idea. 

Two days ago I read through the Utah state fair guidebook to see what is up with being a vendor there.  Then I looked up costs for buying stuff to do that.

I'm also onto to seeing if making eBooks could be a thing I could do or not.  I figured I could list my barter skills/items that I posted to udemy.com as an eBook to get the feel for it.  Turns out I deleted the text of it once I posted the video and I can't find it anywhere.  Only way I think I could get it, w/o having to transcribe the videos that is, is to ask my friend Tyler Warnick if he perhaps has that one copy I sent him that one time.  That'd be a bit of work and would have to search his emails for attachments I've sent him and then resend it back to me.  If not no worries.  I think the eBook thing though could be a good idea.  Ashlee bought some children’s temple book for like $9 and I’m just thinking that is dumb cause it is a big book and it'd be much better to have that and a billion other books on a tablet or something to save on weight and preserve colors and what not.  So I think I'll try and make that happen.  It'd be something I could do from home and ideally something I could outsource and automate 4-hour workweek style.

Another idea I think I may try and loop back around to as well would be selling people/companies on making apps for them like restaurants and small businesses.  So we'll see.  I figure I'll just keep going on this process of working on business 5 hours per week and eventually I'll land somewhere that makes sense. 

I've been listening to this podcast.  http://automatemysmallbusiness.com/   It's been interesting to listen to the different things they've got going and how they're doing it.  Listening to them makes me think I need to keep going with pursuing business ideas that I can automate for sure.  Its just the way to go and is way cheaper/efficient.  I definitely envy how they're able to work the 4-hour workweek life.  

One thing I really like about their podcast is the ease with which they're able to start new businesses because they have experience in automating their own existing businesses.  I also really like product based businesses.  I think I really want to transition eventually to digital products and ideally subscription based digital products.

One thing they recommend doing is hiring a VA (virtual assistant) to do some task for you.  It doesn't even have to be for business.  It can be for anything.  One thing I'm thinking I'd have a VA do for me is research the most reliable and cheapest solar panel unit to power small things like a laptop, ipod, phone, etc.  Tyler wrote me telling me where he's living that they had an ice storm that knocked out power for a whole day and it was cold.  Fortunate for them they had food and were able to stay at the in-laws who had a wood burning stove and so they were a toasty 75 degrees.  They didn't have anything as far as batteries and flashlights though.  So I think that may be something I work on business wise this week is hire a VA to do that for me so I get experience hiring someone and interviewing them and I can do it for cheap.  Exciting!

I figure I've just got to continue to surround myself with business ideas/success and then take out the option of not doing something and work on business each week.  On my way home from work I’m listening to the biography of Warren Buffet that my dad highly recommended.  Guy just kept trying to figure it out and was a little schemer since he was a kid.  He even wrote off his bike and helmet I think for his paper route to lower his taxable income on his newspaper delivery business ha ha....sigh.  That’ll be me.  I actually liked one thing a lot from the super bowl, specifically Russell Wilson.  His dad would tell him when he was growing up, "Russell, why not you?"  For whatever reason that really resonated with me.  Why not me?  I deserve it just like anybody else.


Thursday, January 30, 2014

Paradigm shifting things I’ve learned fairly recently part 3

I watched the film Ghandi with Sir Ben Kingsley.  It portrays Ghandi amazing.

If you’ve ever had your paradigm shifted you know that before it shifted you were ignorant.  Once shifted you may be angry that you were ignorant, then you may try and share what you learned with others, and unfortunately many people may not give a rats behind as to what you have to say, and when that happens you may get depressed.  What one would hope to happen if that happens is that someone in that situation would make the final step and realize they’re the only they can change/worry about and it isn’t their duty to force a shift in another’s paradigm.  Certainly one would help with the shift if there were curiosity or a desire to do so from another individual.  Hence why missionaries go out, schools exist, and life/business coaches exist. 

So I feel like things in the world are crazy.  News flash I know lol.  In the midst of the craziness and becoming aware of certain parts of the crazy I eventually came to the above realization, i.e. that I can only change myself.  Some advocate for that, but also think that retaliation/violence is a way to accomplish that.  My conclusion is that may only exacerbate the problem and extend the current paradigm’s way of doing things.  This led me to Ghandi and doing things a different way in the face of craziness/oppression. 

So I gobbled up the movie Ghandi.  Reason being is that I had been taught/told/portrayed to that he was a very strong proponent of civil disobedience, non-violence, and equality for all.  Then I listened to a show that discussed some of the not so known history of Ghandi. 

For starters the government of India actually funded a large portion of the production of Ghandi and of course the string that was attached to that was that he only be painted in a very positive light.  Turns out dude was crazy racist towards blacks and the very low class of Indians.  He was married at a very young age.  At that time he was caring for his father.  One time when being intimate with his wife he came back to find his father had died and apparently blamed himself for that for years and years and his intimacy with the wife either almost died off completely or was gone.  What wasn’t shown/portrayed at all about the guy is that he thought he needed to prove his strength for resisting sex after this incident by sleeping naked with people, family and very young girls included when he was really old, and he’d ask them to massage him and his goal was to not get aroused.  Turns out this so disgusted some of his inner circle that they left him.

Shortly after learning about this I also learned about Nelson Mandela and some of his craziness.  As disclosure I didn’t really look up to Nelson.  What I will say though for Nelson and Ghandi is that they’re both figures that are pedaled out to us as these great guys that we should look up to and admire and follow.  When I learned the other side of these guy’s lives, including the life of MLK, I realized that anything popular these days probably isn’t what it is all cracked up to be.  Which is kinda crazy to think about considering I’ve spent the past two or three years learning about things that aren’t really what they seemed and yet I seemed to gobble up Ghandi.  Well unfortunately I’m not really gonna let that happen.  I will continue to listen to all and follow none and try and take the good from the bad.


Thank goodness for the perfect example.

Paradigm shifting things I’ve learned fairly recently Part 2

One thing I've learned about recently is the minimum wage and how destructive that is.  I myself was grateful for it at one time during my middle/high school days because I knew that if I got a job I'd at least be able to make $6.50 per hour, which I think was my first paying job wage.  What is unfortunate about the minimum wage is that it puts a floor on who you can hire.  If you wanted to hire people to say um pump your gas for you or bag your groceries or help you do you laundry you wouldn’t dare pay $6.50 per hour, but maybe you’d pay that person $3.00 per hour.

One thing I learned about the minimum wage is that it was instituted to keep blacks out of the work force.  People/employers/politicians know that you’re paid, typically, what you are worth.  Well if you have no skills then you won’t get hired.  If entry-level jobs and pay are always above your skill level then you can never get started and land that first job.  That is pretty disgusting that that is why they instituted the minimum wage. 

This becomes more apparent of a concept if you raise the minimum wage to say $50 or $100 per hour.  All things the same, i.e. $50 or $100 still buys the same amount right now as it does once the minimum wage gets raised, anything/job below those amounts will disappear and move elsewhere to get accomplished as they still need to get done.  When you consider that $50/hr is a 100k/year job and $100/hr is a 200k/year job that’d pretty well wipe out all lower/middle class jobs, which of course make up most of our economy here in the US.

What is interesting, totally disgusting, and another notch for why I want to home school my kids when it comes to minimum wage is that after 12 YEARS……120 months…TWEEEELVE YEARS of public schooling, i.e. high school graduate, how much are you worth in the economy?  Honestly you’re worth whatever the minimum wage is when you graduate.  You know that.  I know that/lived that.  The public system teaches you NOTHING economically pertinent that increases your abilities.  I was listening to a Warren Buffet thing the other day and he invested with this lady who was running a furniture store and she didn’t even know how to read or write lol.  He invested millions with her and she ran the thing.

12 years…sheesh…..you can go from not knowing where your hippocampus is to a brain surgeon in 12 years.  I crap you not.  You can go from knowing NOTHING about biology to commanding 6 figure plus income as a medical specialist.  If that isn’t a slap in the face for how colossal of a waste of time, energy, human spirit, growth, creativity, then I don’t know what is.  And yet currently we settle for 12 years of that shit and accept minimum wage as just something that makes sense and people do for their first job, even if it is just a short stepping stone to another opportunity where they’re making more than minimum wage.

One last point on minimum wage I learned the other day as it pertains to sound money.  Back in the day they paid workers minimum wage, but because of the silver metal content in the money, i.e. dimes and quarters, a minimum wage worker of today would have to make at LEAST $20/hour to equal what somebody was paid in the 1960’s.  How stupid is that?  

Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Paradigm shifting things I’ve learned fairly recently

MLK, Martin Luther King was the leading proponent for blacks having equal rights.  Yesterday I learned that this figurehead, that is the only person to have his own national holiday in the United States, and is known for fighting for the moral rights of others, wasn’t quite all he measured up to be.  Turns out he slept around with tons of women.  He was being followed by the FBI and tracked to the point that they video recorded him cheating on his wife, and then sent the video to his wife. 

Also turns out he plagiarized the crap out of his works/speeches, including a portion of his “I have a dream” speech.  Apparently something like 60% of his master’s thesis was plagiarized from one source and the remaining percentage from another source.

Last but not least he was surrounded by and believed in communism himself, minus the atheism portion, which in spite of his rampant cheating went against his preacher beliefs.  The point was made, and I’ll share it here, that it would be like having a mother Teresa or some other figurehead surrounded by hyper Al Qaida informants.  Communism has killed hundreds of millions of people.  Way more than Nazism, not that either are acceptable, but it is just to illustrate how crazy it’d be to believe in and listen to those kinds of advisers.

Another thing that I hadn’t really thought about until listening to this philosopher is spanking and taxes.

As a society we don’t like evil.  We can bear it however when it is dressed up and made to appear ok. 

One example is the millions of photos taken during the Iraq war.  There aren’t laws forbidding them being shown, but our mainstream media doesn’t show them.  Nobody shows/talks about the depleted uranium rounds that were shot at tanks that have now radiated into the air and caused leukemia levels to skyrocket in Iraq.  We as Americans are happy we won the war, but we don’t want to see…at all, at what cost.

Another example may be voting for socialist ideals/candidates, but when shifted slightly we see how ridiculous it is.  For example lets say we put into practice socialist ideals when it comes to body parts.  How do you figure you ask?  Say someone is born blind or with two bad kidneys.  A socialist would say that all should be equal and what would be fair is to take one of my/your eyes/kidneys and give it to the unfortunate person.  Why this clashes so much with reality is that as beings and owning our own body we inherently understand self-ownership and “human rights”.   Yet when we impose taxes, by force of imprisonment at the barrel of a gun, taxes by the way represent US and OUR time and effort, we’re stealing from people what inherently belongs to them.  We’ve made it ok though because we’re ok with taking from those who can’t protect themselves from the very beginning.  Thus back to spanking.

When a child is spanked we are taking away from them.  We’re enforcing our will on them and they are helpless to prevent it.  We green light this form of punishment as a society and so it should come as no surprise that we also roll over/accept later on in life as adults that it is ok for our government to take away from us without us being able to do anything about it.

The good news is that spanking is slowly going away.  In the LDS church we often talk about and are taught that the family is the nucleus of the home and society in general.  What we allow or don’t allow in our homes will inevitably trickle down to our local, state, and federal governments.  If we want to stop being exorbitantly taxed then we must stop the rampant inequitable punishment that is occurring within our own four walls.

As info on tax revenue and fiscal health on a state basis see the following for a paradigm shifting experience.  The following 7 states don’t have a state income tax (HUGE amounts of extra income):

·                       Alaska
·                       Florida
·                       Nevada
·                       South Dakota
·                       Texas
·                       Washington
·                       Wyoming

The 5 states in the best fiscal condition from 1st to 5th are as follows:

Alaska (no state income tax), South Dakota (no state income tax), North Dakota (shale oil boom currently), Nebraska, and Wyoming (no state income tax).

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/01/17/state-in-the-worst-fiscal-condition-is/

You would think that the states that didn’t have all this extra revenue in the form of state income tax would be at the bottom of the list, but indeed they flush out the top three out of five spots.  To me it just shows that these states are showing restraint and are much more careful with their funds then those that have much more abundantly.

The last paradigm-shifting thing I’ve come across is marijuana and the war on drugs.  For years I’ve been told it is the worst thing ever and makes potheads and kills your brain cells.  While this may be the case I also know that alcohol alone kills 4 times as many people as all the users of drugs each year.  I know that the number of deaths from marijuana are almost 0 in the United States whereas I know the number of deaths from cigarettes and the cancer they cause is astronomical.  Were you to ask someone though which one is safer they’d tell you that a cigarette definitely is over a marijuana cigarette.  They’d be wrong. 


I wonder what other things I’ll come across that I think are ok and good and normal or are bad and evil are quite the reverse.

Share with me what paradigm shifting things you've learned about recently.