My Big Hairy Goals for 2026

0:00I am recording this on New Year's Day, I am a teensy bit hungover. You may be able to hear it in my voice, but I wrote down my 2026 goals and I want to share them with you and there's these are goals for my personal life and my business life. And I'm going to start with business since this is a business casual show and then I'll go into the more personal and like side project, you know, stuff. So to start and to be clear and to introduce myself just in case anyone's listening to this for the first time, I don't know why you would listen to this particular episode, but I've been feeling it's going to be fairly long. So my name is Matt Jibbenese. I run a site and a brand called Swim University. You can find it at swimeadiversity.com, you can search for it, that's my brand, that's my business. It is a company where I teach people how to take care of their pools and hot tubs, we sell

1:03books, courses and we have an app and it's an education company. We have four people on the team, it's me, my wife, my brother and Kayla who is our customer service person right now, but I think we'll expand into more roles in the future, same with my brother, my brother, Chris is just our video editor right now, but he's also, I'm trying to expand his role into doing more email stuff, staff, my wife is basically the contents are, she's in charge of all content and I kind of fill in the gaps everywhere, but mainly I'm the CEO manager of the whole thing, all right. So my goal with on this show that you'll hear for the rest of the year and hopefully, hopefully just the rest of the year, but if it goes longer, it goes longer. My goal with my business is to earn one million dollars annually, so this would just be not

2:04a million in total because we've surpassed that, the company's been around for 20 years, one million dollars annually without expanding the team too much. So we want to keep profit high and still earn that million. Now I have hit a million dollars annually in the past, but our profit was almost nothing because I just, I started making products that I had little control over and if you want to hear that story, I've talked about it many times and I'm sure I'm going to talk about it again in the future, I constantly learn this lesson. So it's not that I haven't done this goal before, but it is a goal that I think just has a very solid number, it's sort of arbitrary, it doesn't really mean anything, it doesn't really change anything, it's just a number, it's just something to hit and I think having that number and having the stipulation be, I can't really increase my hours, I can't

3:07really increase the size of the team, we're not going to build anything new. So we're not going to create new products, you know, like new stuff to sell and we're not going to expand in any other type of business. So everything just has to be pure company growth through optimization and after talking with Steph, who basically is my co CEO, she's like, she is the person I talk to the most, she believes this is possible. Now for context, we're currently at around $600,000 annually. So we don't really have that far to go, but it would be like a 25% increase if I'm doing that math right, which I'm probably not, but yeah, it's significant. So I'm going to explain how we're going to get there. So that's the goal, 2026 goal earned $1 million annually. So the goal would be to hit $1 million in 2026 revenue, it's not profit, it's revenue.

4:12So it means we're not taking that home, but if the team stays relatively the same and my hours don't really increase and our product line doesn't increase, our overhead expenses don't really increase, then that will equal more profit. So here's how we're going to do it. The first thing we're doing, starting like Monday, because I'm recording this on a Thursday and we're taking the weekend off Monday, we start work on updating our courses. We have two courses, we used to have four, but we've paired them down to two and we are going to be creating new videos from scratch multiple times per week until the courses are fully built out. The first one we're starting with is our pool care course. So that way we can start pitching that in the spring and then our hot tub course will come right after that, which we can start pitching in the fall. Now we already have these courses, we are already pitching these, we have these courses

5:13that are available for sale, people are buying them, but we are not actively pitching them. And when I say pitching, what does that actually mean? It means we are talking about them in our content on YouTube, on social media, we're talking about them and promoting them in our emails. Those are basically our pitch mechanisms, it's how we promote. Something that I probably, so the reason why we're not pitching it is because the courses are not outdated, they're just old and we want to refresh them, we want to take a look at them with fresh eyes after we've written two books and improve them. So once we do that, we will have these courses being pitched consistently and the reason that that's important is because they are our highest margin products because they're digital and it only costs us like 5% to actually deliver them, everything's sort of automatic.

6:16I pay a monthly subscription to right now a company called Podia, which is where I host the courses, but I'm probably going to switch that this year. I don't know where yet, it could be something like Thinkific, it's leaning towards Thinkific. It could be, there's ones that are built in the Shopify because that's what we use for e-commerce. It could be that, but that's probably going to be Thinkific. Anyway, we only, the margin is about 95%, which is huge, it's a digital product, that's great. Now, they're also our highest ticket offer. So it is where we're going to make a majority of this extra money, I believe, and there's really two places where this is going to happen, but that's one of them. Now the second thing we're going to do, and this is actually fairly easy, we've already started doing this, we sell two books. Now those books, the Pool Care Handbook and the Hotsup Handbook, the Hotsup Handbook we

7:21did this year, or in 2025, and that book is perfect. It needs no edits, it needs no changes, and we have that printed through a new company. We were using a company called Lulu to get our books digitally printed, which cost us about $15 a book, and then they're shipping on top of that. But we actually converted, we just got our shipment in from this new printer, which dropped it down to about $8 a book. So we've increased our margins on our book, and that's actually, because of this new printer, and the fact that we can order in bulk, we can actually go lower, but we just have to order more. So I'm hoping that the Pool Care Handbook we're going to redo as well with the course, we're just going to refresh it, we're not really changing the content, we're just going to update the cover, update some of the graphics, update some of the content, but nothing

8:27like earth shattering, like not worthy of a second edition, just a kind of general refresh, mainly to just get it printed at this new printer, which will bring down the cost of our pool book, which will then increase our margins there. So basically, we're going to increase our book printing margins, and that's not a ton of money, but every little bit counts. Third thing we're going to do is we've gotten, in the last like month or so, we have been aggressively pushing updates to our app, I've been, we're creating content for the app on a weekly basis, we are adding new features, we have a bunch of features planned in the pipeline, it's just, you know, development is a bit slow, but we've been trying to increase that, and one of the big things that we want to do, now the app is a paid app, so we make money on the app, there is no free version right now, I don't know if there ever will

9:30be, but there could be. Now what we're going to try to do, and I think, I don't know how we're going to accomplish this, but it's something that I have my, like my eye on, is we want to create tiered pricing in the app, so right now the app is geared basically for people who own a single swimming pool in their backyard, and they are the ones that take care of it, that's who this app is designed for, but what we're finding is that a lot of people have multiple pools, or they have a pool and a hot tub, or they run a company where they service pools, or they run a commercial pool, or they run like a, kind of like a hotel or a series of hotels where they have to manage like maybe six to seven pools, and so we want to create tiered pricing to accommodate teams and people who deal with multiple pools, so that means we're

10:34getting a little bit into the B2B side, which I don't know if we're going to be able to get to that in 2026, but it's definitely on my radar. Speaking of B2B, the other thing we're going to do is once we get the pool book being printed at the new printer, which means that we will be 100%, all of our products will be printed by this company, it means that we obviously have a higher margin because we can get it printed in large quantities, so right now we're ordering 1,000 books at a time and storing it in a warehouse and shipping it with a third part of the logistics company, but ideally we'd like to order five to 10,000 books, which is a lot, it's a big jump. Now if we go that high it, you know, it just keeps cutting the, it keeps cutting the price per book in half, so I'm sure there's a threshold at a certain point it's like okay it doesn't matter how many order like this is the price,

11:35but we're trying to get to that price. Now the problem though is that we don't sell 10,000 books in a month or we don't sell that many books, right? It's, we're small and that's because we do everything direct to consumer. We are doing all of our own marketing, all of it is organic right now and we are just trying to get like individual people, right, who own pools in their backyard to buy these books, that's who's mainly buying them, but we also recognize that there are some people, we get a lot of orders where they buy four books or five books or 10 books, and these, and these people again are the same people who are using our app and saying hey I either run multiple pools and I want to give these out to my employees as like a handbook, it's literally a handbook, or they own a pool company and they build pools and they want to be

12:35able to hand this office sort of a manual for the pool, which I think is a great idea and real estate agents who are giving them out as gifts to people they sell homes to that have pools in the backyard. So there's a couple of use cases for businesses wanting to buy these books in bulk at a discount or wholesale price, and we don't have any sort of pipeline to target that market. We don't have a product, we don't have infrastructure in place for that, and once we get these books printed in large quantities and we have a company that will ship large quantities, which they do now, but again, we don't have that sort of inventory, then it's probably the one or two higher that I do in the spring, or sorry, it'll be in the fall, or probably in like late summer, is to hire a commission-based salesperson to sell books and then set up some sort of

13:39infrastructure for that person to just create those orders on our website and have it all go through the shipping department and all that stuff. And then having a relationship built where we can charge or ask for re-ups, things like that. So going into B2B sales is something that we're planning on doing in about August of 2026. The reason we're waiting so long is one, we have to get the book printed, which is going to take, we can probably get the book printed by April, I think this year. So once that's good, then you know, we have to at least wait until then to start. But also, because we're going to start with the pool book mostly, pool companies are very active in the summer, and they really don't spend time buying products. All of the like trade shows and buying power comes in the off season, in the fall, in the winter. So really the best time

14:43to get sales really going, where we're going to have the best opportunity is going to be the fall. And honestly, it's probably a gig where in the summer, it's going to be a harder sale, because again, these companies are just not thinking about that. We'll probably switch to something like hot tubs or something. So anyway, and it's also trying to fit like the B2B sales for our books is one thing, we also want to do B2B sales for our courses and B2B sales for the app. So really just creating an entire B2B department where we can do that. And when I say that, I just mean like one person that's kind of in charge of that. Lastly, I've got a breath. Lastly is consistently putting a procedure in place for conversion rate optimization. So this is something that we don't do. I tried doing it last year. I didn't really have a system

15:50in place. I didn't have anything to constantly test. And it became sort of like, should we be doing this? Is this really moving the needle? You know, and we were kind of like, I don't know. So this is I kind of feel like this could go two ways. One is we could put this system in place. And it could help micro increase margins or not margins, but like conversion rate. Like in my go from like, if we're, let's just say for the sake of argument, our sales page for our pool book is sitting at about one percent. So, you know, one out of every 100 people who visit the sales page actually buy the book. Let's say we can increase that to two. That's kind of huge. That's kind of huge. So is it worth doing? Yes. Is it worth putting a ton of time into? No. And I

16:51just don't think it's one of those things that requires time. It requires time to set up a process and then be consistent with it, just like everything else we do in the business. So, I'm going to use a program called Crazy Egg, which is something I used in the past. We're basically going to use this to study the traffic we are getting, which is something we don't do. We don't really look at the data. We don't really study it. And so, I think this year, we're going to start doing that and see if we can make some incremental improvements in conversion rates across the board. So this would be all of our sales pages, our lead magnet pages, our social media pages, etc. Now, the only thing I didn't add to this list is running paid ads. And it is something that I am hesitant to do just because I know for a fact, I can absolutely reach

18:00the $1 million annual goal by running paid ads, but it doesn't mean we'll increase profits. And so, I think a few things have to be true in order for us to start slowly testing paid ads. The first thing that has to be true is we need to get the book margins down, or sorry, we need to increase the book margins. So that way, we have a little bit more room to play in our ad spend and our cost per acquisition. Right now, I know that we're making about $30, and that's rough right now, about $30 in margin for each book sold, which is pretty good for a book. And it's because it's a specialty book, and it's because we do everything ourselves. And we have full control over that. Now, if we were selling our books on Amazon, yes,

19:01we would sell a ton more books, but then we would not have that customer data. We wouldn't be able to upsell them anything, or at least we could, but it would have to be through the book, and it would be harder. And really, it's just a customer data part. That's the real winner for us. Now, if we can increase the margin, let's say we get it to $35, well, now we have, I can basically run an ad and convert at about $24 per sale, which means right now, we're making about roughly $5 a customer if we're running ads, which is pretty low. Now, if we can increase the margin by another $5, well, now we're making $10 per person, which I'm like, okay, that seems a little bit better, but there's another problem, which is we don't have, right now, besides the app, we don't have anything else to sell them. So it makes a lot of sense for people

20:08to break even on a single product, or even lose money, selling a single product using something like Facebook ads, because they know later down the line in that customer's journey, only in that customer data, that customer will buy more stuff from them. And since they already have that customer ecosystem and they're not paying for it, that's going to be mostly profit. For us, the product that we're selling through the ad is where we make all the profit. So it's like, okay, how do you fix that? Well, again, increasing the margin certainly fixes that, but it's small potatoes. The big thing is having the courses as the upsell, which is, you know, we're not going to sell every single person who buys a book a course, but if we sold 25, 30%, that's pretty big. And so if that's true, and that's all in place, and we have that data, and we're constantly trying to optimize that to make that, you know,

21:1130, 31%, 32%, you know, all of those incremental improvements, then it's going to make more sense to run ads, because we are going to be making more money per customer, which will then justify our ad spend. And we'll still get us maybe past a million dollars annually, but then we can increase profits. So I am not, I don't think that we'll be able to do paid ads this year in 2026, but we'll have tested a ton of organic content, and we'll be able to maybe slowly ramp that up, and sort of start to build a paid ad reputation, testing different ads with a low ad spend, and then once the all the pieces are in place, we can start to increase it. And I think it's going to be one of those things that's going to take time to increase. It's not that we shouldn't do it. It's just that we should start really, really, really, really small, and just battle test to

22:17shit out of it, and then scale up very slowly. That's how I think we should do it. All right. That's the business. That's the old thing. All right. That's what this podcast is mainly going to be focused on, is that sort of thing. Now, speaking of the podcast, let's talk about my second goal, which doesn't have a number attached to it, but it's building my personal brand, which is why I mentioned at the beginning of the show, my name is Matt Chivenici. Very rarely do I like to say that because I don't like saying my own last name, but that's my name. It's government name. Okay. I have, if you're new to this show, I used to run a brand called MoneyLab, which effectively was my personal brand. I don't like the name MoneyLab. I don't think it really fit what I was doing. And so I basically erased the brand MoneyLab from existence.

23:22This show used to be called MoneyLab. It is now called Business Casual. My website, MoneyLab.co, is now givenici.com. So if you go to MoneyLab.co, it will automatically redirect you to givenici.com, has the same content as MoneyLab, but it is now branded with my name, my government name, instead of MoneyLab. I have nothing to sell right now. I'm not saying I won't in the future, but just because I want to give myself some out, I doubt it's going to be a product, because I kind of don't want to make products except for Sun University. I may offer services, I may have a community who knows, but it may be a retirement plan. I may do it early, but for right now, I have nothing to sell. The main purpose of this podcast, and this will continue to be the main purpose, is to get my steps in, because I'm recording this, walking back and forth in my garage,

24:24which I converted into a home brewery, which we'll get to in a second. And I get mental clarity from doing this podcast. So I'm talking on my business ideas out loud. I'm getting feedback from the audience, and it's the way that I process and think through information and strategy. And it has been incredibly helpful for the last two years. Now recently, I've switched to a daily format. It used to be three times a week, then I scaled it up to five times a week, and now it's seven days a week. I'm going to keep it going as daily. The sheer reason for that is because I have another goal of 10,000 steps average, which is not what I have right now, but I need to record more episodes. And I'm doing a few more things, which I think will give me fodder for more episodes, which will help me get more steps, and help me publish more episodes.

25:28So it's kind of just a downstream effect of wins. So this podcast will continue to be daily. It will continue to be the same format. It'll just be called Business Casual with Matt Javanesey as opposed to MoneyLab. All right. For the last three to four months, I've been posting daily on social media, specifically Twitter, Threads, and I almost said X, and LinkedIn. I am still planning on doing that. I'm not increasing it. I'm just trying to get better at writing and my tweets. And I doubt I'm going to switch to photos and video. I don't think I'm going to do Facebook or Instagram. I'm not trying to be an influencer. I just want to share the things that I'm doing around building a lifestyle business. Really, I mean, the first and foremost,

26:35for my own documentation in second, if I can help anybody come up with a better life through strategic decision-making, I want to be able to do that. And I want to be able to talk to like-minded people who think the way that I do about running a life in a business. And so that's the real goal here of my personal brand. But there's a few things I'm going to do in addition to posting daily on this podcast and on social media. And that is, I am starting or restarting an email list. I hesitate to call it a newsletter, but that's exactly what it is. It's a newsletter. How am I going to do this? Well, so I'm currently in the process of switching over my site MoneyLab to jivinesse.com. And I've

27:40I actually have all the contacts from my MoneyLab list, which I used to run two years ago. In 2023 is when I ended it, where I guess three years ago now. So I took that list and I uploaded it and I restarted it on kit, which used to be called convert kit. And I'm going to send plain text emails, no design, just simple emails from my own name, because everything is just my name now. What am I going to send? So I've been contemplating this for a while. The email list is kind of a no-brainer. The reason why I want an email list is because when I do this show, I kind of feel like I'm talking to nobody. I don't feel like anyone's listening. Obviously I get some emails from you, but I understand that it's very hard for me to

28:45say at the end of these podcasts, hey, shoot me an email, madatjivinesse.com. And you actually doing that, because you are not in the moment sitting at your computer, going to email, typing in madat, and then learning how to spell jivinesse, and then sending me an email off the top of your head. I don't expect you to do that. That's insane. I would never do that. Some people do that. And I appreciate you thinking about me, or even if you need help with something in your business, I'm glad you're reaching out to me. I want to talk to you. I like this. I like knowing you're listening, and I can't know that. Yeah, I can see the downloads, but that's not the same thing. So here's the thing. If I had made this show, a podcast on YouTube,

29:45I would see comments, and I'd be able to talk to you, and I like that. But I don't want to run a YouTube channel. I'm trying to get steps in. I don't want to film video. I don't want to edit video. I want to do this podcast in real time. It's what I like to do. And so I just need a way to talk to you. I do get some of that through social media, but it feels a little different. So I'm going to start sending emails. They're not going to be emails promoting this show, although I'm sure I'll mention it a few times. My goal is this. I love talking about business. I love talking about what I do for a living, how I think and make decisions in life. I love it. I'm obsessed with it. If there's any skill or if there's any passion that I have, which I recently learned about myself, is that I love getting better. I love getting better as a person. I love

30:51getting better at skills. I just love getting better. And the thing is, is I talk about that a lot, but I only talk about it with Steph. I have my friends, and sometimes I mention it, but not everyone's on the same page as me. I have friends that are kind of from all walks of life. All of my friends are not like business people. I have a few, but they're not all like that. And so even when I hang out with my business friends, we like talking about regular ass shit. You know what I mean? Movies, music, things like that. Drinking beer, whatever. But I want to talk more about this thing. And so I have things that I want to share, but I want to share unpolished things. I want to share Saul Dust, which is I am making something at some university, or I'm making something at Brookhaven, these brands that I put out publicly. And I want to show

31:55you how I did it. Or I want to be able to ask you, I'm working on this thing. I'm trying to choose something. Or hey, how would you look at, here's the data. How would you, how do you interpret this? I want to just have a dialogue. I also want to make videos, but I don't want to edit them. I don't want to play the YouTube algorithm game and trying to build an audience there. What I'd rather do, and I think this is I'm becoming clearer on this, is I love talking about business in this format. I can do it every day. I can take what I talk about here, and I can convert it into tweets. That's very easy to do, and that's with the help of AI. That's a perfect use case for it. Take what I say, take all of these words, and help me edit them. Help me find the nugs. And then I'll turn them into tweets, and I'll be able to take little chunks from the show,

32:59and push it out as really good insightful thoughts. Great. That feels like a good use of time. It's even helping me to still down my own core belief system. Now, there are some things on this show that I can't show. I can't show you my SOPs. I built this fucking email SOP that I love, and if I showed it to you, or if I described it, it's like, what are you talking about? It's so abstract on an audio format. If I were to just email it to you with no explanation, you'd be like, what the fuck does this mean? So the best way to convey that, and to get ideas back, and to improve it over time, is to film a video showing you it, how it works, how I walk through

34:01the whole thing, how I make all of this content really easily, et cetera. So I thought, well, if you're going to spend the time making a video, you might as well put some pizzazz on it and edits, and then put it up on YouTube, and get a good thumbnail in the title. But you know how much work that is? That's a ton of work. And it's also only a moment in time. So that video is not evergreen on YouTube. And I don't like putting up videos on YouTube that are not evergreen. I know that people do all the time, but I don't like doing it. I don't think of YouTube as a social media platform. I think of it as like, a channel. You know, it's like, I want to go back and binge old episodes without going like, oh, he's talking about the sale that he ran with a coupon code, and I don't have access to that anymore. Like, it's like, you know, it's not a day in the life. It's like, he's updated it since this. So this is like, not worth seeing,

35:05because there's a newer version. Point is, I can do that through email. So my thought with email is, I'm not going to bore you to death with a bunch of words. In fact, I don't even like writing words. I'm going to write an email that's that I would write to anybody or any of my friends, but I'm going to include videos, links to Loom videos, where I'm going to show you what the fuck I'm doing to give you more context for what I talk about in the show and to also help, you know, communicate and even figure out my own issues with what I'm doing. And I think the best way to do this is like, hey, I'm working on this SOP. Check out this SOP. Here's the video of me walking through the whole thing. Now, it's a Loom video. What's great about Loom is that you can comment on the video in the place where you're watching it. And I can respond to that. And it's all private. It's

36:08not on YouTube. So what I'm trying to do, or where I think would be more valuable, especially for me is I can just keep pumping out these videos. They're easy for me to make. I have a studio. I can just sit at my computer, throw on, I have a button I hit, the lights come on, the camera comes on, and I can just hit record on Loom and go. I don't have to worry about intros or editing or the way I look or anything. I'm talking privately to you through email. It's just a video that I would send to my brother, a video I would send to staff, a video I would send to Kayla, or John, my developer. Like, I would just, you know, and I think about the team thing. I forgot to mention John. John's more of a developer partner on the app, but yeah, that's the team. So anyway, that's that. Yeah, but so I send these people looms all day. I'm on Loom all day. And I'm like, what's another Loom video? You know, in fact,

37:10sometimes, and this is why this is where this idea really came from. Sometimes I record Loom videos and delete them because like I said, in fact, the way this podcast started was I needed an outlet to think through business problems. A friend of mine said that she believes I'm a better out loud thinker than I am an internal thinker because we would have a mastermind together. And I would spend 40 minutes basically talking to myself and working out my problems. So I took that idea and I said, okay, I'm going to go out into my garage brewery. I'm going to talk to myself. But that seems ridiculous because I'm going to go crazy if I just end up talking to myself. So I'll record of voice memo to myself. And so I was recording these voice memos on the like writing on a whiteboard and thinking through these problems. And then I would just delete the memo

38:13because I'm like, well, I don't need. I'm never going to go back and listen to it. So I just needed it as like some sort of like mental mechanism of not walking around talking to myself like a crazy person. So one day I decided, well, wait a minute. Instead of deleting the voice memos, what if I just packaged it like what if I just did a little bit more, you know, polish on the way that I speak, you know, learn how to speak a little bit better and just publish them as podcast episodes. And so that's what I started doing and I've been doing that for two years. So and it's crazy when I say to people, oh, whatever happened in your money that podcast, I'm like, I've literally been publishing almost daily for two years. And they're like, what? How? I'm like, well, if you listen to the show, you'll understand how I'm doing it. It's pretty easy. So with that said, I do this with

39:17loom. So I will go into my office on my computer. And I'm, and I name, I may need to like, like most of the time what I'm doing is I'm trying to improve an SOP or improve a process. So what I do is I hit record on loom and I literally do the work and talk through it to myself. But because I'm recording it, it feels like, oh, well, if this turns out good, I can send this to my team. Or most of the time, I just delete the loom because I maybe got stuck somewhere or whatever. So I was like, oh, I'm basically doing the same thing that this, the way this podcast started. So why not share that? So I thought, okay, well, let's just put it on YouTube. I'm like, yeah, but you know, similarly to anything on like this podcast, if I were to put this podcast on YouTube,

40:21the amount of like work that I would have to put into the packaging of it for it to even make any sense, that's what I'm trying to avoid. Which is like, you know, I don't have to make a thumbnail, I don't have to come up with a crazy, hype title, I don't have to come up with a crazy, hype description. I don't have to make sure that these episodes are like perfectly edited and polished so that it retains your attention, things like that. So I don't want to do that kind of work. I want to do this kind of work, which is like, I am doing that kind of work at some university, at Brew Cabin. And I want to share the behind the scenes of that, of the business side of it to you. And I want to do that through email, podcasting audio, and through Loom videos. And I want to start building an audience. So I want to start collecting email addresses from social, this podcast and, you know, from Loom videos, I guess, if people share them.

41:23So that's, you know, I don't know how much it's going to grow, but it's something and that's the plan. Okay. Two more things. This is a long episode I know. I'll go into Brew Cabin because it's fairly quick. Brew Cabin. Brew Cabin is my, what I've come to realize is my, we'll call it a passion project for lack of a better phrase. At first, when I started Brew Cabin, it was a website with affiliate links and blog posts and I was doing social media and I was trying to, you know, I ended up building a course and selling it and I had a lead magnet and a newsletter and all these things, right? It was basically a clone of Swimming University, but for homebrewers. And then in 2020, during the pandemic, I built this brewery that I'm walking in and I, a friend of mine

42:30had said to me, you should document what you're doing because what you're doing is a pretty cool project. Like just document it for yourself. He's like, you know, pull out your camera and just document the whole thing. And I was like, okay, he goes, look, you can put it on YouTube if you want, but like, it wouldn't be cool to be able to see the growth of this thing. And I'm like, yeah, kind of, okay, sure. So I took his advice and I actually did it. I took my camera out every single day while I was, while I and a team of contractors that I hired built this brewery. It took me 40 days to build it. Now, it was already a structure. It was already a garage, but it was just a garage with studs. You can go and watch the video on YouTube. If you search brew cabin, home brewery, you'll find it. And that video took off. And it was like, I put so much effort. I actually did edit it together and put it up on YouTube. It took off and I went, oh,

43:35that was really fun. And the reason it was so fun is because, one, my brewery is like, I guess like woodworking. It's the same kind of thing. It's like a true hobby. It's like a real, real hobby, right? And I also happened to really love making videos, making music, making graphics. Like I love the work that I do at SUNY University, but the topic at SUNY University and the products that I make are very much, they're very, they're much more business-y. I'm not passionate about pool care or taking care of hot tubs. I'm not, I used to, I mean, like, I'm not that I even used to be. It's just been my job for as long as I can remember. I've always been in the pool and hot tub industry because I was 13. But my true passion, again, besides just

44:35getting better, is brewing and making will just say content. I love making content. I love writing songs. I love editing videos. I love filming videos. I love making graphics and animations. Like, I just love all that shit. But the problem is, is I don't love doing it for, like, a business purpose. I kind of just like doing it for the pure art of it. And I realized that after building brew cabin and trying to make it an actual business that earned money, I couldn't do it anymore, because I'm like, well, I have to focus that energy to swim university. Swimming university is my business. It's what makes my income. It's what allows me to build this facility that I'm in. That is my job. Now, I don't need two of those. I just want one.

45:42And so brew cabin is my way of doing all of my skills, but for something that I love for no money. And this brand, my personal brand, is the same exact thing, except I don't even have to publish anything. I am just talking about the thing that I love. And so I feel like this is completely rounded me out as a human being. I get to do my art, I get to do my business, and then I get to just connect with the world about all of those things, which is what the personal brand really is. And like I said, with the personal brand, money will probably come from the other two things, but I don't want it to come from me running a business, meaning having customers and selling products. What I'm fine with is like, hey, if you know, I put out a video on YouTube

46:42and I start and YouTube wants to be monetized, then okay, if I make a little bit of extra scratch from posting a video, I'll take it. If a company wants to send me gadgets and home brewing ingredients, I'll take it. You know what I mean? It saves me money in my personal life and it's fun. I love, I love trying new stuff. And I would say the same for my personal brand. If a company that I love wants to sponsor this show, I'll take it. If I, as long as I don't have to do anything crazy or sell anything, it's like, hey, you know, I'm trying to think of a company that like, I love whisper flow right now. It's like one of my favorite apps. I basically don't type anymore. I talk everything out because it's what I'm better at. And then if they came to me and were like, hey, we love to sponsor your podcast. Now I'm not going to reach out to them. I'm not going to have a frigging package or anything. That would be me selling a product to a customer. But if they come to me and say, hey, we let the sponsored six episodes will give you X amount of dollars. I'd be like, all right,

47:45cool. I love you guys. So I would happily do that. So that, but anyway, the point of my personal brand right now in Blue Cabin is it doesn't make money. It is for me to talk about my business and share my art. Now, Blue Cabin videos, what's my goal? My goal in 2026 is to make one short per month, one short form video per month, and one long form video every quarter. It's not that much. If you see, if you saw my most recent short on Blue Cabin, you may be able to figure out why monthly is about all I can do because they're highly edited. They require literally a month to make a beer. So all my shorts are grain to glass videos, which in my world means you brew the beer,

48:47ferment the beer, package the beer, serve the beer, taste the beer. So you are doing a full brew session to drinking the beer. And that takes about a month to make literally. Takes one day to brew it, two weeks to ferment, two weeks to carbonate and condition. And you're drinking it. So literally takes four weeks to make any pretty much any beer. Obviously, there are some exceptions like some beers take months and years, other beers, you can do it in two weeks. So once a month, I think it's doable, right? And then quarterly long form videos, I would like to do more than a quarter. So I'd like to do more than four videos in 2026. But that's just the general goal. If I can get one every few months, then that's great. Now, the first video in 2026, I will probably be that I'll probably come out in

49:53probably February, because I still have to make the beer. But the rest of the video is kind of already thought through and done. So I also have other videos that I could do while that's being made. So yeah, there are, it is possible I could do more than, I mean, it's definitely possible I could do more than four a year. I'm just shooting for four. And finally, which I know this is a long episode. But again, my big, you know, beginning of the year episode, the last thing on my list is a personal goal. In 2024, I lost about about 40 pounds, I think. Now, right now, I am, I've been at this weight, the same weight for a year. And

50:55it's, I feel the best I've ever felt physically. I am not somebody who's felt unhealthy in their life, but I can tell that I am much more fit than I used to be. So in 2024, I lost 40 pounds. 2025, I enjoyed that weight loss, to be honest, meaning I did, you know, I maintained, and I, and I just enjoyed being this new weight for a year. In 2026, I would like to lose 40 more pounds. You might be going, holy shit, that's a lot. It's like, yeah, Bra, I'm big. So I would like to lose 40 more pounds. Now, I don't intend to stay at that new low weight. I just want a 10 pound buffer. So I'm going to go really lean and then maintain from there, which will probably

51:59bring me up to about 10 more pounds. So I'm fine with that. Now, how am I going to do that? So I'm going to do the same thing I did in 2024, which was very easy for me. And I got, I built a lot of great habits around this that I still do today. And all I'm going to do is slightly tweak them. So let me explain each one. What I already do is this shows a test, a test to that, which is I walk roughly, I try to hit 10,000 steps per day. I don't always do that. So if you look at my Apple health app, my average daily steps throughout the entire year, hovers at around 8,000 steps, which is, which is great. There is, I'm not hating that. I would like to actually increase that

53:01to 10. How do you do that? So again, I don't get 10,000 steps every single day. In the year 2026, I would like to try to at least get 10,000 steps every single day. And the only way to do that is to make it a absolute priority. So today is New Year's Day. And as I mentioned earlier, little hungover, Steph says, what's your plan today? I go, I have one. Get 10,000 steps. So it is my default. Meaning, if I do nothing, I must do that. That is my, you know, rain, sleet, snow, sick, healthy, doesn't matter. 10,000 steps. And I have multiple ways to do it. And the more ways that I have at my disposal, the easier it is. So one is obviously doing this podcast. This is where I would get the most steps.

54:06Because I've been recording for 54 minutes. And I've been pacing back and forth. I am getting probably five to six thousand steps just in this episode. So if I do an episode every day, which I don't, but I absolutely could, I don't like when I'm traveling, it's really hard. But that's the, that's one way I do it. Another way I do it is talking on the phone. So I will call friends. I will call my family. And I can talk, as you know, I can talk for hours. So I'm just pacing around my brewery. I'll pace around my basement or my offices. Anytime I pick up the phone to call anybody could be, you know, insurance companies being on hold for whatever I'm walking. That's one way that I get my steps. The second way is whenever I go to a store, and I've been doing this for two years, whenever I go to any establishment. So I get my car and I drive to it.

55:07I just park the furthest away possible without looking like a weirdo. Every time I go to the farmer's market on the weekends, I park pretty much like in the next town. And then I walk to the farmer's market. If I go to the grocery store, I park at the very back and walk all the way through the grocery store. If I, where else did I go? Like, God, even if I go to a brewery and there's not that much parking, I will just park the furthest possible place you can park away from the brewery just to walk to it. That's the third way. The fourth way is connects with something else. The fourth thing or the fourth way I get steps is using my high end elliptical machine. I say high end because I actually bought this elliptical machine at a like home gym store. And it's the same elliptical machine they have at Planet Fitness. And I, I've had this machine for 10 years. I bought

56:07it when I first moved to Colorado. So it is right now in a, it's in our laundry room in the basement. And I built a little gym. So we had this section of our laundry room that the previous owners just used as like storage. And we were just basically using it as storage as well. And so I took all of that shit out through most of the storage crap away because I hate having, I hate storing stuff, honestly, especially if I'm not using it. And I, there was like this really shitty carpet in there like this like dust real carpet. I ripped that out. The walls are just cylinder block. The ceiling is exposed, you know, wires and, and gas lines and, and water lines and HVAC systems. So like it's just a, you know, it's a utility room. And I laid down rubber flooring.

57:09And I installed these like really ugly lights, really ugly like industrial lights. And yeah, I, I built it a little gym that I put my electrical machine in there. I put some dumbbells in there. I put a bench in there. And that's really that's all it's in there. I built that the beginning of 2025. And to be truthful, I didn't really use it at all this, this past year. And so one of my habits that I'm going to build is literally just stepping foot in that room because it has a door. You have to open the door. You have to flip on the light switch. Okay. In that room, I said, has the electrical machine. I also have a pair of shoes in there like gym shoes. So my goal is to simply step foot in that room every day or every day that I'm home. Now, obviously, that's kind of silly to step foot in the room and just stand there and

58:13go, okay, cool. I did it. But that's my bare minimum. The least you can do is just put on the shoes or not. And just walk on the electrical machine for like a couple of minutes, five minutes. I have a like a radio in there that I can just like talk to it. It's a home pod. And I just say, hey, you know, put on this song or put on something for me. It plays music. I have an iPad in there where I could watch YouTube videos and shit. So if I'm on the, I go on the lift to go. I want to watch a YouTube video. I want to go through shorts who cares. And so my goal is to just do that. Now, what ends up happening, I've been doing it for the last two weeks. So I started early because I was like, oh, I think that's a good idea, right? And this is all based on this, um, the saying that I have called, I say to myself, use what you have. So I don't really buy a lot of things anymore.

59:16And I'm trying to use the things that I have in my house. And so that's the thing that I built didn't really use. Now I'm going to use it. All right. So I usually go in there. I'll get in the elliptical. It's not five minutes. I'm usually on that thing, 15 minimum. Sometimes I get to 30. You start watching a YouTube video or a podcast or whatever or listen to music. Like you just start going. You just start moving. I don't even put the resistance up. I just do it like, you know, just to move. And then I'm like, well, I'm here. Let me lift the weight, you know, so I start like just doing like, you know, dumbbell exercises. You know, I have a little bench. I do some chest press. I do some overhead press. I do some bicep curls. I do some squats. It's like fairly easy shit. So that's the fourth way I get steps. And that's sort of like the, the, the habit of like, just go to the gym every day. And the gym for me is not somewhere I have to drive. It's right in my own house.

1:00:24And I'm hoping that by developing that habit, one, I'm going to get stronger, two, I'm going to get more steps. And three, I may end up liking the workouts because right now I really don't like resistance training. I feel like shit every time I do it. But I know it's working, but I still hate doing it. So I'm hoping that with the consistency and the habit of it, I will start to enjoy it. And then maybe I might invest in some machines that I really like that I can add to that. It's not a huge room. So I can't do like a full on like gym, but I could probably put like one of those like multi gym cable machines in there. And maybe like one, I might have room for like one big leg machine, but that's probably about it. And then obviously dumbbells. I love the elliptical. And I probably need a stir to your bench because it is a cheap piece of shit that is wobbly. So probably not great, but anyway, use what you have. So that's the plan there. So go to that gym

1:01:29every day, get 10,000 steps every day. I'm not going to hit every day. I know that. But a hack daily is so much easier for me to think about. I thought about, oh, we'll just do the gym three days a week. And it's like, no, do it every day. Just do it every day. And then if you get like into the habit, where you're like, actually, I kind of like going to this little I like built, like I made this room a place that I enjoy going to. Then yeah, then maybe I'll do it three days a week and be much more specific with my workouts and like bodybuilding plan. Not that I want to build a bodybuilder or anything, but I don't know. I'm just trying to keep a very simple health regimen. Now, a couple of other things. On top of that, I want to lose weight. So just going to a gym and just getting steps does not do that. It does help get me into a calorie deficit, but I need to focus on being in a calorie deficit. Now, for me to maintain my weight,

1:02:35it's about I need to consume 25 to 2700 calories. Now, that depends on how active I am. I actually don't know. I don't know how to put that into the calculator. It's like, am I am I a little active because I get 10,000 steps a day? Am I really active because I work out every day, but I'm not going hard every day. I'm not doing cardio. So I don't really know what it means. But if I basically don't exercise, I think I need to consume about 25 to 2800 calories a day to maintain my weight. So my goal is to eat around 2,000 calories a day. Now, that might be low. In fact, I actually try to hit 1,800 calories a day, which I know is low. And I know that's aggressive, but I also know that if I strive for 1,800 and know that I have some wiggle room,

1:03:42then I don't have to count every goddamn calorie. And it's like from striving for 1,800, but I'm probably getting more like 2 to 2,200. And I'm like, all right, well, at least I know for a fact without having to like check my phone every hour that I'm in a deficit. I have been able to do this. It's very easy for me. It took me years to figure out the meals. I'm still always tweaking like my preferred meals, but I basically have like a breakfast lunch and dinner. I have about 2 to 3 options for each meal that I can rotate between. That I know that if I ate those 3 meals, I'm hovering at around 2,000 calories. And so if I want a fucking cookie, I'm not a dessert person, but if I want like a cookie with my coffee or a donut with my coffee or if I want like, if I want a couple of beers, like I know that I can

1:04:44still have those things and be in a deficit. So, and not be starving. So I know that. And I can go into more detail about that, but I'm not a health person. So like, I'm still figuring out and I don't feel comfortable like describing every specific thing that I do, because I don't know if it's right or wrong. And I don't think anybody fucking knows, to be honest. But it works for me. And if you're interested, I'll happily share it with you. Now, the last thing is, and this is the hardest one, this is the hardest goal. I don't know how I'm going to do it. I'm being honest. I don't know how I'm going to do this. But this is so specific. And this is going to sound completely antithetical to what I just said. I am trying to limit myself to two beers a day. Now, that sounds insane. Wait a minute.

1:05:45You drink two beers a day? No, I do not drink two beers a day. I usually don't drink. Today, it's New Year's Day, everyone's off. I literally in a brewery, I have nine beers on tap. I won't touch it. I won't touch it. I'm not a, I'm not a person who needs beer. I enjoy it, the way that I enjoy coffee. So it's like, I enjoy, like when I drink coffee, it is not blindly and for the caffeine. I fucking hate that it has caffeine. Actually, I love the ritual of coffee and the, and the, just the feeling of drinking coffee is magical to me. I don't want to sit there and drink coffee all damn day. That, that, that sounds miserable to me. And the same is true for beer. But no, I don't drink two beers a day. The problem though is that if I get invited out to a brewery,

1:06:50which is one of my favorite third spaces in the world, I like spending a lot of time there. And I don't like spending a lot of time there empty handed. And that's where my problem is. It's not in the I like getting drunk or I need to have beer every night to calm my nerves. It's I like the hangout. So that's been a huge struggle for me. In fact, like it's hard for me to go out to a brewery and have two beers. I've done it, but I'm like, if we're hanging for more than like an hour, bro, I'm, I'm, I'm at least getting a four. And that's, I don't know how I'm going to do this. Now, again, I don't drink every day. I probably drink one day a week. I'll like some, there's some weeks I don't drink at all, but on average, I drink once a week, but it's usually like

1:07:54it's usually a lot to be honest. And I know that's not good for me. But I do love it. And so I want to be able to still love it, but I don't want to go overboard. And I have not really, I have a couple of tricks up my sleeve on how I can do it. It's all habit building. One of the, one of the habits that I have, I have adopted, which again, this all sounds silly because it's so like, you know, it's going to sound unhealthy, which it is. And I recognize that. But one of the habits that I got into was when I go out, I only drink low ABV, low ABV beers. I kind of just don't like high alcohol beers. I never really did. But, you know, there was a time where like IPAs are really popular, and IPAs are 7% at minimum, 6%. That's too high for me. When I see a beer on the menu that's like

1:09:002.5%, I'm like, fucking give me that. Especially if it's got flavor, holy crap, 3%, 4%, I basically max out at 5. But even 5, I'm like, all right, probably only having one of these. So that is something I did in 2025 and 2024. Truthfully, I didn't have a hangover last year, at all. Now I felt the effects of being hungover, but there were days where I would get hungover and like, I'm not moving today. Like I'm just going to sit on the couch, order take out, like I'm just going to nurse myself back to health. I haven't had that. So that's a good habit that I've adopted, but I still tend to over consume the light beers. Because again, I just like it. Not even the, I just like the ritual of it. So the other tricks I have up my sleeve and have worked,

1:10:07but like, their tougher is I said I had nine beers on tap. That's not true. Currently, I only have three beers on tap. I just have nine taps. I have six that are in a kegerator that I built, and or a keys or I built, and three in a kegerator I bought. Now, I have decided that the kegerator, which only holds three beers, they're only going to be hot water, which is a bit, which is basically salt or water on tap, with a little bit of hops in the water. So zero calorie still gives you like the hot bite. I can still drink out of a pint glass, and I can sit in my brewery and enjoy the act of drinking without the calorie intake. That works extremely well. And I learned this from smoking. So it's not, I used to smoke cigarettes, and I quit when I was 25, I'm 42 now.

1:11:17One of the things I heard about that was, oh, smokers have this addiction to the oral fixation, not necessarily like the nicotine or tobacco or anything. And so what that meant to me was, oh, it's just the act of putting something in your mouth, okay? That's what it is. So I switched from cigarettes to like, I guess at the time, it was like early vaping. Now, with early vaping, that worked. I didn't want cigarettes anymore, because I'm like, oh, this new thing tastes like mojito, which tastes way better than cigarettes. And I'm still getting the same thing. I'm still able to get everything I got out of cigarettes, which wasn't nicotine. It was the social aspect. It was the activity, the oral fixation, the ritual. And then eventually, because, you know,

1:12:19smoking vape is terrible for you. And I called it a douche flute, and I went, oh, I've got to quit that. I'm not doing douche flute stuff. So I stopped. And now I don't smoke cigarettes. I don't vape. I don't smoke weed. I don't smoke at all. And I don't miss it at all. Okay. So I thought, well, is it just the oral fixation of drinking? Do I just like drinking liquid, which is why I love light beer? Because it's like, oh, I get to just enjoy liquid that getting shit faced. So I thought, well, use hot water as your replacement. Now, somebody will say, well, why don't you do non-alcoholic beer? Again, it's not the alcohol. It's the calories. Non-alcoholic beer is pointless to me, because I'm like, well, I might as well enjoy it. Like, I don't like, I love the taste of beer. And like, I will drink a non-alcoholic beer, but I'm like, well, that's just soda to me then.

1:13:21So now I'm just drinking something that tastes like the thing I love and is a shittier version of the thing I love. And I'm still, and I'm, and it's like loaded with calories because it's, it's still mostly sugar. So I'm like, well, this fucking defeats the purpose. So I don't like non-alcoholic beers, but I do love me some hot water. So what I've been trying to do is obviously, when I'm in my brewery, I drink mostly hot water. That's true. I don't really drink beer. I definitely don't drink beer by myself. I don't like doing that. Drinking is more about the social part of it for me. And, but for hot water, I'll sit here and drink hot water all day. Now, I'm going to drink hot water in a second. This is what I'm done in this podcast. The problem though is that most breweries don't offer hot water. And that's tough because it's like, well, I mean,

1:14:24would I go to a brewery and order a water between every beer? And it's like, I could, I could, but not every brewery serves that. And water, I just chugged. So it's like, it's going to take two seconds. And I'm like, all right, next beer. I did stop drinking, I mean, I don't drink cocktails and I don't drink wine because I don't, it's like, I will drink a cocktail and I will drink a wine, but like, I don't seek it out. And usually when we go to a bar, I'm like, well, I always want beer. And if it's not a beer bar, and I'm probably not drinking. And so that's another like kind of habit where I'm just like, oh, I just said, okay, no, I am a beer drinker. I prefer beer. Even though I love cocktails and I love wine, I just prefer beer always more. So I'm like, well, then if they don't have good beer, I'm not drinking. Anyway, this is a long way of saying that I am trying different techniques to limit drinking, not that I

1:15:32specifically beer. Not that I have a problem, but it's mostly a calorie thing. And I don't want to completely give it up because I would hate life. Beer is one of my favorite things in the world. I want to be able to enjoy it. And I want to have, and I believe I have a healthy relationship with it, but when it comes to weight loss, it kind of gets in the way. And so yes, I know that I could quit drinking, I mean, I've quit drinking several times for, you know, just months. And I just like fucking hate it. I love beers so much. So yeah, technically if I wanted to lose 40 pounds, I could get really locked in for like the next six months, lose the 40 pounds, not drink, not go, not travel, not go out, eat super healthy. Like, yeah, I could do it that way, not sustainable. Not that I wanted to be sustainable. I'm not trying to lose weight my whole life, but I just don't

1:16:35also don't want to hate the next six months of my life. You know, so I don't know if you actually have an idea. I'm open to hearing it. I've pretty much given you all mine. There's not other ones like if I get invited out to a brewery with more than one person, I show up late and leave early. That's hard to do because again, I kind of love the social part of it. Not the necessarily the drinking part of it. Oh no, I do love the drinking part of it, but I'm there for the social part. So that one's tougher. It's really, I think the hot water is the best, the best hack that I found is like just replace the thing you're drinking in your hand with something that doesn't have any calories, which has been how I kind of get to the 2000 calorie mark without feeling like I'm dieting because I still eat all of my favorite foods. I just have, they're just lower, they're just

1:17:36like lower calorie tweaks. So it's like, you know, for lunch every day, I eat a sandwich. I used to eat salads and I'm like, salads are great. Salads actually is super high calorie because of the dressing. So I'm like, well, how can I eat it? How can I make a sandwich healthy? And you figure it out. I'm like, oh, all right, took me, took me a couple tries, but I'm like, oh, I know I can make two sandwiches, which I fucking love and I can make turkey sandwiches, which I also love. I just make low calorie versions of it and it's, you can't tell the difference. You know, breakfast has always been low calorie for me. I was just, I just like, eggs and vegetables basically. And then dinner is I'm like, yeah, I'm kind of a, I'm kind of like a, I don't like processed stuff. I think it kind of sucks. So I'm like, I like whole proteins and whole foods and chicken and vegetables. I love vegetables. And I'm not a dessert person. So it's kind of easy for me to be honest. Like dessert. Oh, I don't, like I fucking, I don't eat ice cream. Like I'd never really

1:18:36ate ice cream. So that's not a thing for me. I don't eat cookies. I don't like sugar. So I was weird. And it's like, well, if I'm going to get sugar, hey, put it in beer. I'll drink that. But yeah, liquid calories is where it gets me. So anyway, that's it. Those are my four goals. Lose 40 pounds earn a million dollars annually. Start and build my personal brand and publish videos for brew cabin, brew more beer and have fun. So I know this was a long episode. If you are still with me this far in, that's awesome. Thank you so much. Shoot me an email matatjivinesy.com. Check out the website jivinesy.com. I'm going to be updating it slowly. And look forward to the newsletter. I'm sure by the time this episode comes out, you'll have already gotten a newsletter. So that's happening. All right, that's it. Talk to you next time.