Finding time wealth means having the ability to choose how you spend your time. On this episode, Laurie Barkman talks with Craig Clickner and Carrie Bohlig. They’re the married co-founders of Tandem Consulting and other companies. Their businesses, which initially started as side hustles, allowed them to step away from their corporate careers, and developed 8 income streams bringing in over $3 million annually. Taking an entrepreneurial path is a key topic on their podcast, Tandem Talks (where Laurie was recently a guest) and in their new book “So You Want to Start a Side Hustle.” Get inspired to focus more on what really matters to you in this episode with Carrie and Craig.
Listen in to learn more about:
- Thinking of entrepreneurship as an adventure
- Building your business without sacrificing your life
- How starting slow can help you accelerate faster
- Surrounding yourself with the right people
- Why time wealth and choosing how you spend your time is important
Find out more about Craig and Carrie in the links below:
https://www.tandemconsulting.co/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/carriebohlig
https://www.linkedin.com/in/craig-clickner
About Succession Stories:
Succession Stories is hosted by Laurie Barkman, the Business Transition Sherpa– guiding business owners through the process from “transition to transaction.”
Schedule a call with Laurie to discuss your goals for an exit that rewards your success.
Transcript
Laurie Barkman:
Welcome to Succession Stories! I’m Laurie Barkman. As an exit value planning and M&A advisor, I call myself The Business Transition Sherpa. This podcast guides entrepreneurs from transition to transaction- from building value in your business to letting go.
What do I do when I’m not hosting a podcast? I work with owners to maximize business value with my firm, SmallDotBig. And as a Certified Mergers and Acquisitions Advisor with Stony Hill, I guide you through the complex process of selling your company.
Tune-in to Succession Stories for weekly insights to reward your hard work and avoid succession regrets. Hit subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, and sign-up for our newsletter at successionstories.com. Here’s to your success!
Entrepreneurs don’t start and build their companies on their own, and neither should they plan their business transition or exit strategy without trusted experts in their corner. I love bringing these stories to you on this podcast, and have decided to put these insights into a book. I’ll be sure to share more details soon! Stay tuned on the book, events, and more by signing up for our newsletter at SuccessionStories.com. And be sure to follow the show in your favorite podcast player.
My guests today, Craig Clickner and Carrie Bohlig, are married co-founders of several companies, including Tandem Consulting, Simply Automate and their non-profit which helps older children in the adoption process. Their businesses, which initially started as side hustles, have allowed them to step away from their full-time corporate careers and instead, become full-time parents and entrepreneurs. Their 8 income streams bring in over $3 million per year in revenue. They have a thriving podcast called Tandem Talks and are newly published authors with their book “So You Want to Start a Side Hustle.” We talked about their best advice for anyone aspiring to have more time wealth—the ability to spend your time as you choose – so you can focus more on what really matters to you. Enjoy my conversation about finding time wealth with this dynamic duo, Craig Clickner and Carrie Bohlig.
Laurie Barkman:
Carrie and Craig, welcome to Succession Stories. It’s not often that I have more than one person on the show and I think you guys are probably the first married couple I’ve had on the show, so that’s a dubious honor, of course. This is exciting for me to talk to you both. I really am interested in your story of where you’ve been, and also where you’re going. Welcome to the show.
Craig Clickner:
Hey, thanks a lot for having us on, Laurie. We’re looking forward to the discussion for sure. Do you want us to give you a little bit of background, and we can take the content from there?
Laurie Barkman:
Absolutely. I’d love to hear your backstory. Carrie, why don’t we start with you? What’s your entrepreneurial story, and how did you meet Craig?
Carrie Bohlig:
Yeah, well, we actually met through our entrepreneurial journey, so it’s sort of “Love Story meets business.”
Craig Clickner:
Nice tryst, there.
Carrie Bohlig:
I was actually an undergrad when I started exploring business and I didn’t study Business formally. I have degrees in sociology and Women’s Studies, but it was when I was about to graduate a little bit before I had this precautionary pizza dinner with my dad where he was wining and dining me and just really put a plug for, “You have to do something extra,” like, “You did school, you got a degree, you did a good job, you’ll get a full time career, but also do something else,” and so at that point, I was just really seeking and trying to figure out what my options were.
I didn’t have capital, I didn’t have, I hardly had a resume at that point, honestly, so it was just, “What would be something I could get my foot in the door doing and grow skills, grow my confidence, grow my business acumen?” It was at that point where I actually met some coaches out of the Chicagoland area and they had built their business to several million in revenue using more of an affiliate marketing direct sales model and so they were open to helping me. I was lucky I got my foot in the door with them, because now it’s been 16 years and they’ve still coached us really in a lot of areas of life, not just business, and I think that’s a tip also, is success usually isn’t built in a vacuum. If you want to be successful as an entrepreneur, having a good relationship, having a good health journey, all those things really do interface and so I focused a lot through my 20s on just building a good foundation.
It was around my mid 20s where my business incomes, my part time side hustles, they actually started creating me more income than my full time teaching career. I was a preschool teacher, so it was at that point where I said, “What the heck, I would rather be my own boss, be a full time entrepreneur, have more time for passion projects, but then also help more people through those mediums,” and that’s where Craig and I really started to get to know each other. He was technically, probably, more of a mentor, business coach, so, a lot of what I’ve learned from a business stance, from a finance stance has actually come from him directly, so it’s always fun to hear him share, because that financial literacy really changed my trajectory, not having any business background at such young age.
Laurie Barkman:
So you found a partner who really was a partner, somebody who could balance you out and you learn from each other. Craig, what’s your side of the story here?
Craig Clickner:
My side of the story is different but the same, obviously, in the rendezvous point. I always say I was actually a risk analyst with General Electric, when I met Carrie and actually started some of my entrepreneurial journey. Quite frankly, I was looking to do more, like I just sat in a corporate job, I was working for Deutsche Bank, and then GE Capital, had the good gigs, I studied finance and econ, and everything was going great.
I just, I didn’t want to work for someone else forever, but I didn’t have capital. I didn’t have any ideas. I didn’t come from an entrepreneurial background, so it’s like, “Okay, great. Real estate,” and I’m sure some of you out there are like, “Hey, I’m gonna do real estate.” I bought a piece of real estate at 23, now they call it house hacking, but I lived in the basement. I rented the top three floors, so I netted $0, but I didn’t have to pay rent. The question, though, wasn’t when I was gonna buy the first property. The question was, “When am I gonna buy the fifth?” And the answer was, “Not anytime in the near future,” because I ran out of capital. I was also investing in the stock market and MBA school and was just like frustrated, because it’s like I’m winning, but I can’t get to this goal of financial independence, and so that’s when we met.
Carrie and I met and really through people who had actually already created success, and a lot of people are really dialed in, “What should I do? What should I do?” We talked a little bit about taking a step back, thinking about, “How do you want to live, what kind of person you want to become and who’s already done it?” That might feel a little hokey to some people if you’re looking for real strategy, like tactical things to deploy, but it’s like there’s tons of people that have already accomplished a certain level of success. If you can go find them and seek them out, they can oftentimes, like point out things and save you decades of effort, or decades of pain or loss from their expertise and wisdom.
We got going, we built that direct sales, network marketing, like online revenue to about 3 million. During that time, Carrie stepped away, about halfway through my 30s then I stepped away from my commercial banking job, which was like, amazing, and so we rode off into the sunset to go pursue being full time business owners — part time business owners actually, and parents really, because that’s what we wanted to do. What that’s led us to now once we bought back that time, I say, once we divorced our time from our money, then that really allowed us to chase more of our passion projects. Since then, we’ve been able to write a book with McGraw Hill, we have a tech startup we’re helping co-found which is really fun and exciting in the automation space. We have a podcast, we do commercial real estate, we’ve gotten to do some other investing, I do some some gap financing and consulting for people, which is fun to use my banking skills, but we really just get to play more and like do things that we really want and pick up projects that sound exciting and fun versus just like, grind. I say life is more likely to be more of a playground versus like a manufacturing plant, but a lot of people and this is — then I’ll kick it back over to you, Laurie, but a lot of people end up becoming a slave to their business because they can’t figure out how to scale it. They can’t figure out how to automate it or they think that’s all they are and they attach themselves to their business and they can’t separate and so it kind of consumes them sometimes in not a healthy way, which I’ve seen as a former commercial banker many, many times
Laurie Barkman:
There’re so many things we could drill down into and your conversation. I love that. Thanks for the background there. One of the things that I do – I wear a lot of different hats – one of the one of the things I love doing is I’m an adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon, I’ve talked about that on the show, I talk to a lot of aspiring entrepreneurs, they’re coming out of that academic environment saying, “I want to do something for myself,” and one of the presentations that I’ve done is the different types of entrepreneur. You guys, I’m gonna put your faces in that presentation because ultimately you are talking about the side hustle, your book is based on side hustles.
I think for the focus of today, it can be about that. Because ultimately what you are saying to an aspiring entrepreneur is, “Find an area of interest and put your toe in the water in some way,” and the ‘big why’ that I was reading about you guys, which I think is really smart, is many of us when we get a job, if we’re working for someone else, we’re not diversifying our income stream and there is a degree of risk if you lose that income stream. What else do you have at your disposal? Some folks have a nest egg, some folks have investments. Craig, you started buying real estate at a pretty young age, which was a great exploration and as an example, but this ‘big why’, why should someone start a side hustle if they’re thinking about entrepreneurship? One of your interviews, you talked about intrapreneurship and I like that word too, because it doesn’t mean you have to go all in take all the risks, you can you can start to figure out what your strengths are, what your interests are, and Carrie, you talked about that a bit. You were a teacher, but yet you were learning from these advisors about affiliate marketing and digital ecommerce. What would you say about that, if someone’s considering going and taking the leap? How do you coach people today about that?
Carrie Bohlig:
I think you can look at it from a few different angles, but number one, just taking a little bit of a deep dive on how we identify as a person. Because I think especially if someone doesn’t have a formal business background, it is so easy to write ourselves off as not a business person. I mean, I had never considered business prior to starting a business. It wasn’t even on my radar, so being more flexible and open minded and Carol Dweck talks about growth mindset. It’s such a simple concept, but I do think people who succeed in business have a growth mindset. Often if people don’t, they lack that malleability and open mindedness to really see themselves in a different light and see the potential that they have if they put themselves in the right environment, have the right type of help, and are willing to do the work for long enough, so having a little bit of that bigger vision around what we want to create, but then also who we are, and then more more tactical, like in terms of what could I do or what would be a viable business option?
What’s really helpful is figuring out what are you willing to do and what are you willing not to do? Because business ownership isn’t for everybody. A side hustle by nature is usually built on evenings and weekends because someone by default tends to have a full time career if you’re calling it a side hustle. Outside of the nine to five, when do we have hours to invest? It’s evenings and weekends, so just being really honest and candid about… are you willing to travel? Are you willing to operate outside of your current industry? Some people aren’t, they want to maybe do more consulting with their current expertise, but there are plenty of people who are open to operating in a different industry altogether, and learning a whole new suite of skills.
When you think about diversifying your income, the power of that, think about the power of diversifying your suite of skills, and your network, the people that you’re networking with. Those are things that I was energized around, and I think if you sort of feel that deeper energy, it’s a good sign that you are more growth minded, and that you’ll be able to make changes and everything’s a skill set, ultimately.
Laurie Barkman:
Craig, for you, talk about surrounding yourself with people. I saw an article that you wrote, I think it was on CNBC, about being the smartest versus finding people who are smarter than you, and maybe it’s not smarts, maybe it’s skill set, but what did you mean by that?
Craig Clickner:
In the corporate world, you usually want to be the smartest person in the room, so that you can look good, smell good, and like get the promotion. In the entrepreneurial world, especially when I think about the tech startup that we’re helping with, I want to be the dumbest person on the team. Because I know I have a certain level of competence in an area, but there’s a lot of areas that I don’t know anything about; software development, I don’t know anything about some of these other things, and so it actually takes a really healthy ego. Because what happens for a lot of people, if they’ve had a lot of academic success, let’s say, then sometimes this ego gets really high, like “I’m smart, I’m intelligent,” which I’m sure you are, but that doesn’t mean you know how to build a business if you never have, and if you build a business in one sector, that doesn’t mean you can just switch sectors.
What I’ve found is when I go into something with a sense of humility, but that doesn’t mean I’m bad, or I’m weak, or I’m not good. It just means I don’t know this topic or this subject or this arena, and so like when we wrote our book, we got just… McGraw Hill just ripped us apart, like in a good way. Like we didn’t know what we were doing. We’d never written a book, but it was like that willingness to put ourselves out there and just be around people who are editors for 20-30 years and really smart, it’s like, awesome, because then you learn a ton.
Like, I’m sure some of the things that you know, and some of your deep expertise, Laurie, I don’t really know about so it’d be fun to maybe have you on our show someday or whatnot. But then, like really dive into that, because then it’s not about you being smarter or better than me, it’s about how can I learn from you and that I get better as a function of that? It sounds easy. It sounds like, “Oh, yeah, of course, we should all do that,” but many of us don’t, and I’ve caught myself not wanting to be the smartest or wanting to be the smartest at times when it’s not the best play. It’s really not if you want to grow long term.
Laurie Barkman:
A lot of folks on the show, we talk about this idea of building a business, scaling it, creating enterprise value, and then having some sort of transition, maybe selling, maybe passing along to family. You’re building a scalable business, you’re creating, I think, an enterprise. You have several businesses under one roof. How do you think about where your businesses are going for the future? Carrie, do you think about building these businesses so that you can one day transfer them to management or to your kids? I know we’re pretty young right now, but do you? How do you think about the future of the companies that you’re building?
Carrie Bohlig:
Yeah, I think it’s a good question, and I think, at 22, when I launched my businesses, I had a very small version of the launch. Mine, it was more just, I want to build something and I want to take ownership and have that autonomy, but absolutely. As we’ve scaled in everything we’ve touched, I think there is an element of just thinking a lot longer term than I ever did in my 20s and just thinking about, how do we create more legacy and generational income? The other aspect is just, how do we create more time wealth for ourselves and for our children? As Craig talked about, really divorcing the time from the income, and that that takes time. That’s not a quick process, but that was why we were willing to do a fair amount of work for long enough, because from the beginning, that felt like the most important thing was the time element.
Craig Clickner:
Yeah, and I think now when we enter a business venture not so much when we were in our 20s, but now we have a very clear goal to exactly to your point, which we didn’t early on and so like with a tech company, the goal is to get it to 50 million in five years and flip it. That’s very different than some of the companies we operate now, which will kind of always be involved with, we love, we enjoy, but we’ll be able to sort of… there’s enough passive or passive progressive income where we can kind of fade in and out.
Some of the investing we love, but there’s always a target of what you want to do, and I tell people, it’s really hard to get to a set destination if you don’t have a specific address. Because you punch in south in the GPS, you end up in Arizona, your kids want to be in Disneyworld, you’re gonna have a very upset minivan, so if you have a destination, when you get into your car, why would you not for your life and for sure for your business? If you can start with that end in mind, everything now becomes a strategy to get there and you can surround yourself with the people who have already done it. Probability of actually succeeding is much higher when you know what succeeding looks like.
Laurie Barkman:
Yeah, that’s what I like to say, you need a roadmap to be able to get to where you’re going, but you have to know where you’re headed for sure. Some people listening are business owners, and they are working 70-hour work weeks, they’re living that lifestyle that you were saying that maybe they haven’t been going to the baseball games, and maybe their health is deteriorating and they have all this weight on their shoulders. Perhaps they’ve been thinking about starting something on the side, maybe it’s in real estate, maybe it’s a new venture to make a change and a transition, and I know, it’s not an easy thing to do. Do you have a sense of time? To say, if you get started now, realistically, this is something that you could grow into over three years, five years, 10 years? How do you talk to your clients and coach them about making that leap, and when is it the right time?
Craig Clickner:
Also an important question, especially for someone who’s considering it, so a few things. You want to make sure to catch yourself and you don’t fall into the serial movie called ‘side hustler’, but serial entrepreneur, where you’re always hopping, because there’s some people hopping so then you never build something substantial, then you can never reap the actual autonomy from it and the real benefits. It’s really important to figure out a way, if you have a business, that you start to develop an exit strategy ASAP, if you want to move out, or you develop some strategy to automate it, and outsource.
I use an example in the book; I had a client who had a lawn care business, but he was always working super hard so he could make more money and buy more equipment and have more lawns and like, “Why don’t you just hire somebody? Instead of net profiting 300, why don’t you net profit half at $150, hire somebody for $150,000 or two people to run it and you don’t have to do anything,” and the guy’s like, “Yeah,” I’m like, “Then you can have your life back for like 150 grand a year, you just don’t make an extra 150, which happens, it goes to tax so like, who cares,” and so it’s really thinking about what’s important, and what’s valuable. When you make the pivot the side hustle to the main business, go for it, but what I recommend is making sure, A you’re fairly stable, and then B, again, be humble, and then get around other people who are successful. Don’t think because you’ve had business success in one industry, now it’s just going to transfer right away. Some things will transfer but not everything.
In terms of timing in your life, we’re big fans of what we call life set, so there’s mindset and then life set. Mindset is our choices, life set is like how we live, or mindset is how we think, life set is like our choices and how we live, and so if your life set’s really screwed up, it’s hard to start a lot of businesses so you might want to double back to the marriage, you might want to double back to the health a little bit, get some of those foundationally things good. Get your business good, then absolutely, the timing is awesome to diversify, and there’s so much opportunity right now, so that’s a general answer. It’s a better question more specifically to people’s very, like niche situations.
Laurie Barkman:
Understood, yeah.
Carrie Bohlig:
I would just add that a lot of times the entrepreneur is type A, go getter willing to work really hard, and so this idea of like, “Wait, slow down, and like fix my spiritual walk, or at least invest into my health,” it feels counterintuitive, but the bottom line is, when you’re willing to build a strong foundation, you can actually grow much more quickly and be a much more happy, healthy person, so it sounds like a slower process, and maybe initially it is, but it can actually help you grow a lot more quickly in the long run.
Laurie Barkman:
I love it. All right, we’re gonna switch gears to what I call the fast four. And sometimes you might get the same question and sometimes you might not, so here we go. Carrie, you’re first. What’s the most difficult part about working with your spouse?
Carrie Bohlig:
Being non-judgmental of strengths and weaknesses.
Laurie Barkman:
All right.
Carrie Bohlig:
Do you want short answers? [Laughs]
Laurie Barkman:
[Laughs] Short answers, yes, whatever comes to your mind. Craig, same question. What’s the most difficult part about working with your spouse?
Craig Clickner:
I think compartmentalizing at times the personal relationship with business because they can bleed into each other. Most of us, our businesses are kind of like our baby, so now I have three children or four children every time I start a new business and my biological ones and then then a wife, so kind of compartmentalizing all that, do you want the quick answer again? Expansion will give you a lot more interesting detail.
Laurie Barkman:
[Laughs] No, we go for the quick. Your kids are four and eight, so they’re little right now. Carrie, favorite places are things for inspiration?
Carrie Bohlig:
I think Ted Talks are really powerful. I also think just like hardcopy books, a lot of old school timeless books, like Seven Habits.
Craig Clickner:
Seven Habits, so amazing.
Carrie Bohlig:
We love that one.
Laurie Barkman:
Gotta sharpen your saw. Craig, what energizes you the most about your work?
Craig Clickner:
Oh, gosh, I love being challenged, and I love being forced to develop new thinking and new skills. I think that entrepreneurship is like the vehicle to get better in life or get better at something or challenge myself, so I love the challenge of it.
Laurie Barkman:
All right, well, I lied. Not fast four, it’s going to be deep six, because I like asking you guys these questions. Two more. Carrie, what’s your strangest daily habit?
Carrie Bohlig:
This shouldn’t be strange, but I floss every single day, sometimes multiple times a day.
Laurie Barkman:
Your dentists love you/hate you because then you don’t need them as much.
Craig Clickner:
Got the most beautiful teeth.
Laurie Barkman:
Absolutely. Craig, last one here for you. If you could have dinner with anyone, who would it be?
Craig Clickner:
Alive or dead?
Laurie Barkman:
Up to you.
Craig Clickner:
Up to me. I mean, I would probably go to the top and pick the highest level of spiritual gurus that have existed on the planet, so I mean, you’ve got Jesus, Buddha, and Muhammad, probably would be my top three to have a nice little chat with. I’m sure it would be a good evening.
Laurie Barkman:
That’s amazing. Thanks for indulging me, guys, on those questions, so the last, and each of you, if you have one to share, is a favorite quote. Do you have a favorite quote about entrepreneurship or leadership that you could share with us?
Carrie Bohlig:
I don’t know that this is business related, but maybe more leadership related is the world owes us nothing, we owe each other the world and I think it’s a good life mantra, to take ownership, to give, and to take responsibility.
Laurie Barkman:
Anyone watching on YouTube is gonna see a poster. Yeah, here, bring it back. Okay, yeah, bring it into the camera there.
Craig Clickner:
Can you read it there? I’ll read it in a second. It says, ‘life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke thoroughly used up totally worn out and loudly proclaiming, “Wow, what a ride.”‘
Laurie Barkman:
What a ride, and you guys have an adventure arm to your spirit, to what you do as a family, which maybe we hit on that really quick, and also if you can touch on the nonprofit that you’ve created.
Craig Clicknerg:
Yeah, well, if you think about the word adventure, if you break it down, it’s actually the word add and then venture, so let’s actually add a side hustle, I mean, theoretically, or add a hustle to your game out of business. It’s very much a part of business and entrepreneurship and I think that if people are looking to start a business, and they want it to be predictable, and paved and smooth, then you’re in for a lot of disappointment and heartache. But if you think of it as an adventure, like, “I’m going on a hike,” or, “I’m going on like a wilderness expedition or something,” then all of a sudden, like the business itself becomes its own adventure, in its own joy as you’re going through it. Not always easy. Not every day is beautiful. But like, that’s an adventure. That’s not a walk in the park, and so I think that’s one of the best ways we’ve incorporated venture into our life, is to just be able to say, “Hey, what the heck, let’s start a podcast. Hey, what the heck, like let’s write a book. Let’s start a nonprofit.”
Carrie Bohlig:
Yeah, so the nonprofit, we’re looking to have three arms, but the current arm that we are focused on growing is actually helping an existing nonprofit called Before 16, who’s helping older children in the adoption process find families, just because there’s such a small percentage, once you get to a certain age, the percentage of adoption goes way down and then children usually sit in the orphanage system, especially in other countries, like Colombia, one of the main international markets that we’re focused on helping, they age out at a certain age and just the reality is very dire for teenagers at that point, so working on getting grant money for adoptive families who want to adopt, but maybe just don’t have that initial fund to be able to do that, and we’re just warming up, we’re excited to add other arms to it, and the nonprofit is called Tandem Giving. It was just always a vision of ours on how do we actually create something that creates a really genuine impact for people who need it, so finding families felt like a really good start for that.
Laurie Barkman:
That’s it, you guys, you’re so mission driven, and what you’re doing and so extending it into how you spend your time, talent and treasure. It’s all part of your ecosystem, and not just the business enterprise, but also this social enterprise. Sorry, Craig, I cut you off there.
Craig Clickner:
Oh, yeah, I was just gonna say if we really think about the thought, our children or our family we’re with them during the holidays, to have the thought of a child without like a family to be with on the holidays just feels really heart wrenching and really moving to us, and so I’d say whatever area you’re giving in, find something that really is moving. If there’s any way people want to support, they can give $5 or 5000. We’ve had bigger and smaller, so whatever works, they can go to Tandem Giving on our website.
Laurie Barkman:
Well, that’s probably a great spot to end. I was gonna ask if there’s a best way to get in touch with you, to give in to your charity, so you mentioned that link already. Any other ways that folks want to get in touch with you guys?
Craig Clickner:
People can actually just go to tandemconsulting.co and we actually didn’t do any social media, we didn’t have any presence online at all until really the last couple years, and now Carrie’s done a great job on LinkedIn. I’m also active there, so again, you can go to the website, tandemconsulting.co, click on Tandem Giving, it’s there or you can reach out to us direct on LinkedIn, we’re happy to help people in any way that we can, or at least point them in the right direction to smart people like you, Laurie, if your services are better than ours, for sure.
Laurie Barkman:
It’s so great to have you both on the show today. Thanks for sharing your story. Thanks for all your insights, and I wish you much success.
Craig Clickner and Carrie Bohlig:
Thank you so much, Laurie.
Who is your most important customer? The person who buys your business. Stony Hill Advisors works with owners to maximize the value when you’re ready to sell. Get started today with a business valuation by visiting stonyhilladvisors.com/podcast.
