Several years ago, I was running the rat race like so many other people out there. Although I didn’t really look at it like a rat race. I had a job that I really liked, did work that I really enjoyed, and worked around some great people.

But then I read a book - Rich Dad’s Retire Young, Retire Rich. It made me think about some stuff I had never thought of before - mainly the idea of creating passive income streams. I thought about doing it through investing and I thought about doing it through real estate but the best fit seemed to be creating my own business. (Side Note: While I still recommend the Rich Dad, Poor Dad books to people looking for inspiration and motivation, I have since come to realize that it really lacks some real hardcore content).

Next thing I know, I had partnered up with one of my co-workers, and we created an LLC. I should probably publish some of our first notes (I still have them) but I don’t want to go through that embarrassment just yet. We weren’t sure what exactly what we wanted to focus on but we did know that we should focus on our strength - web development.

It wasn’t that I wanted a entrepreneurial company just yet - it’s that I wanted to see what it was like. Make some money and get some experience. And like I said before, I liked the job that I was doing… at the time. You see, I worked for the top IT consulting firm at the time and anyone who knows how the major consulting firms function, knows that the jobs can change DRAMATICALLY.

In less than a year, I found myself in a bad job, doing work I didn’t like, with people that didn’t overly impress me. I realized that I was in the rat race and I was trapped.

But then something happened. That seed of a company that we created about 6 months before produced something great. I hate to attribute success to luck but that’s really what happened - we got lucky.

We met “The Surf Bum”.

The Surf Bum was exactly that - a surf bum. But not a surf bum who is the blonde haired character on T.V. whose sole job is to be unmotivated and worthless. He’s the surf bum who laughs in the face of financial instability, avoids work at all costs, surfs whenever there is a good set, and is very, very, very rich.

He was actually referred to us by one of our couple of clients at the time. It was for some small project work and we were just happy to have some more work.  He really liked the work that we did and was happy to have a couple of smart “tech” guys he could work with.

We started doing a few more projects and got more and more involved in his business.  One day on a call, he asked us out of the blue what we were planning on doing with our company - where we wanted to be.  At that point, we were just looking for more and more development projects but what he said then made us think twice.  He said “Managing people is full of headaches and you don’t want that.   You want to have a PRODUCT that you can sell, over and over and over again.  Turn it all into a system.”

Little did we know at the time, but that was the first, and most important lesson that we learned from the surf bum.  He told us on that call that by working with him, we would get the most invaluable lessons on how to be successful entrepreneurs.

It took a little while for some of the ideas to get through our thick skulls, but that was the start of the transformation of our company - a transformation that is still occurring.

We have picked up the lessons of the surf bum and are using them to turn our business into a successful enterprise so that we may eventually become the Lazy Business Owners.