Show Notes:
Jae Park took over the family business, a local bakery, and said, “Let’s not be a regular business, let’s be the best in the world at something.” Now Inno Foods sells more coconut cluster snacks than anybody (tens of millions of dollars per year)!
Learn from Jae as he teaches us:
- How to “pick yourself” instead of waiting for others to do so
- How he “fails” 200-300 times before launching a successful new recipe
- The top 3 mistakes he sees entrepreneurs making
- How to properly value your time
- And much more!
This interview is so packed with helpful advice, please grab a notebook (as long as you are not driving or biking)!
Connect with Jae and Inno Foods:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/innofoods
- Website: https://workwithjaepark.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/workwithjaepark
Connect with Elaine:
- Website: https://elaineskitchentable.com
- Instagram: @elainetancomeau
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elainetancomeau/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ElainesKitchenTable
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/chatwithelaine
Get a free chapter from Elaine’s book, Sell Your Passion: https://elaineskitchentable.com/book/
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Elaine Tan Comeau 0:00
It's time to create better, create better family health,
Announcer 0:02
business and self Welcome to Elaine's Kitchen Table. This is where we share tips about business and parenting. Being a mom of three CEO of the award winning company Easy Daysies speaker and educator, you're going to learn the tips and secrets of successful and incredible people. Elaine wants you to be inspired, challenged and motivated, and that person you want your kids to grow up to be. This is real talk for real life.
Elaine Tan Comeau 0:27
I welcome to Elaine's Kitchen Table where we talk about how to create better and how to create better self, better business, better health, and better family. And my guest today is a gentleman that I had the honor of meeting at a high school at BC Christian Academy and we were both Dragon's Den pitch judges for a bunch of incredible high school students who had the most brilliant ideas. And I learned after that one of them was his son as well. But this man is a serial entrepreneur. He's the author of The Power of Today. When he isn't creating and developing new business ideas and working on a prototype or finding ways to give someone an opportunity which I love about this man so much. He can be found having fun with his beautiful wife and his four incredible kids. And this man, he is passionate about sharing strategies that have helped him so that others who are struggling like he did can live up to their full potential. He's an author, and oh yeah, did I mention he's also the CEO of you know foods. And and I know that you know, his products because if you've walked into a Costco, and I know some of you are listening, because it's a podcast, but some of you can see this right now and I'm holding up some bags of incredible yumminess my new favorite snacks. He got me at the word keto, but good. Oh my goodness. And like you're like, if you love coconut, or you gotta try his coconut clusters. They're just incredible. I want to say, welcome, Jae Park. Welcome. Welcome. Welcome.
Jae Park 2:08
Thank you so much. And thank you for having me. What a gracious introduction. Thank you so much.
Elaine Tan Comeau 2:14
You are You were awesome. And I gotta say it was so much fun being a pitch tech judge with you. Because I designated you after you first give your comment as the Kevin O'Leary.
Elaine Tan Comeau 2:33
I guess I don't know who cries on pitching. I must be known for being this softy emotional, and because all of a sudden, they stopped and they put a box of Kleenex on my table. And I'm like, Oh, dear, that's not good. But that's okay. But, Jae, I, I love that, you know, you have this incredible story of, of how you came about being coming as CEO of, of, you know, foods you like, I want you to start it. Tell us tell us a little bit about that?
Jae Park 3:08
Well, well, I think let's, let's start a little bit about me. So I'm from immigrant family, my, my parents left Korea with $350 to their name, because that was the legal limit limit that the country set on anybody going out of the country because it was a developing country, war torn Korea. And so they left when I was six months old. When I came to Canada, and I was born in a immigrant family, and we my parents did not speak English very well. And, you know, that's, that's how, that's how we began and the family business we stumbled across bakeries. And that's how, you know, we grew up in you know, I grew up making the rolls and bread and, and cleaning up from the age of
Elaine Tan Comeau 4:07
how old did you say
Jae Park 4:08
probably I started at the age of six. Wow, yeah, six and seven. So we would wake up early with my mum probably about 6:30 And we'd make it out to the stores and then we work for about an hour and a half and then we walk to school. And then after school we walk back to the store my mum would be still working, we'd do some odd tours and then we we go home together and so yeah, from it's it's called slave labor or child labor. But basically we had no choice because you know, we were immigrants we did what we had to do, you know, I mean, cuz there's, my parents didn't have any background, no foundation, they didn't know the language or culture very well. And you know, we had to do to to make ends meet here.
Elaine Tan Comeau 4:58
So you give And you mean to Playdoh?
Jae Park 5:01
Playdoh, yes.
Jae Park 5:02
I mean, literally, we would, we would like we would make some rolls, and then we deliberately throw some on the floor, so that we could play with it after. Because it, if we went to on the floor, it's not gonna make it to the, you know, the People's people's tables. So my brother and I would play, we would throw it at each other. At each other, we would hate each other sometimes and make them cry. And we have great stories. And in literally, like, the the flower bags that came in there were at that time, they were 50 pounds, I think, wow. And so they would, they'd be stacked on the floor, the waist high. And my brother and I would we take crayons or pens, and we just draw on all the flower bags. And that was our daycare, that was our, that was a playground, and we had an amazing time. And I was, and that's kind of where my entrepreneurial kind of spirit came from, like watching my parents, you know, struggle at times and succeed at times and, and solve problems and be resourceful. It's because, yeah, we didn't go to daycare because we didn't have money for daycare, you know, so we just stayed at the store. And we that we come up with when my parents came out, and we'd go home when they would go home. And so, you know, that was the case. And just watching that, and was such a great education. It's just
Elaine Tan Comeau 6:36
the best business course ever. Right there.
Jae Park 6:39
Exactly, exactly. And this is, and so that's, that's where I come from, you know, I come from, like, we we ran a retail bakery. And, and on Saturdays, we'd work there all day, because no school, I missed out on all Saturday morning cartoons, and I'm aging myself. Because, like, these days that you have cartoons on demand with Netflix, but we had, we had timed programming when when I was growing up. So yes, I recall that. You know, and so, Saturday morning cartoons as I was growing up, and I'd say like, the only thing I really wanted to do was when my friends would stay home, they wake up late on Saturdays. And they to watch cartoons, I didn't get to do that. I was at the store. But we had sampling. So I would set up my table, cut the breads or whatever I was sampling that day and give it out to customers. And, and and that's where I learned, you know, like presentation skills and sales skills and, and just greeting people feeling comfortable. Yeah, it was great. It was it was great. It was great education for me. So yeah, that's, that's where, you know, that's where it started. And I went to SFU standing former Simon Fraser University for for those that don't know, and I all I really wanted to do going in was to study business, that's, you know, I wanted I all I knew is I wanted to do in business. So. And, unfortunately, my CGPA was about 3.2 or 3.3 at the time. And I needed a three point like, seven, five or eight to apply for the business faculty. I could not make the grade and therefore they told me I was too stupid to study business. So like, what could I do, like, I mean, so I couldn't study business. So I treated my my last year of my fourth year of university as like elective year. So anything that interested me like communications, there's actually a a course in university that you can get credits for watching movies. So I took one I took that I took recording, like music recording composition, there was a class that you just play drums in. And so I took all these really, really cool courses, and I said, I'm out. And then I really told my dad at that time, like, you know, I have a few offers to go to a bank and, and do some banking, retail banking. But like a desk job really didn't interest me. And so what happens is, I said, What does a family business, you know, have for me, you know, like, I want to, you know, I want to I want to work in the family business full time. And that's when we kind of started when I was I was like 2021 22 and change. And so at that time, just you know full time in the family business. About 10 to 12 years is just really, I was just a kid, right? I was, you know, a kid in my 20s What do I No, I thought I knew everything. But really what did I know? So just the education process of development. And then, and then I came to the point where I told my dad, you know, we're like probably the eighth or 10th biggest bakery operation in NBC. Wow. But let's try to be number one in the world. That's something. So we literally discussed this over, you know, whatever, couple or several months and, and we decided to burn the bridges, this meaning close down our bakery operation in come a snack manufacturer. So organic snacks. And this first snack that we started with is the the coconut snack. So we were the original creators of the coconut cluster sound. So yeah, and so I mean, we, we really didn't know what we're doing. We took a coconut snack to Costco, we had a presentation date. And they basically told us, we don't want coconut chips. They, they are old news. They are passe. But if you ever could we really liked that you're you're adding other seed ingredients. That's to to make it more valuable. Like if you could ever make a cluster, wow. Then we would take a look at it. And so we get back.
Jae Park 11:35
A team member who's still with us, is Powell. He's currently head of r&d. At enough foods, we spent probably three days without sleep. Wow. Created, created the coconut cluster by hand, I pitched it to Costco, and they said they love it. So good. So did we have we had a handmade formulation? Did we have any machinery? No. Did we know how to scale this? No. Did we have any food safety accreditation and sort of certificates? No. And so we just we just started backwards and literally, like food safety and certification loans that a professional say that it takes you about a year to two years to to to get in place? Oh my goodness, wait, I think three of us for three months, we didn't go home. Like we just stayed there until we were done. And and we failed the first one because, you know, we just didn't know what we're doing. But a month later we passed we aced it.
Elaine Tan Comeau 12:42
Sorry. What do you mean, you didn't go home? So where were you like in
Jae Park 12:45
we were at we like food safety and certification in compliance is is all about systems. It's all about making safe foods. It's about SOPs. And it's about proving that you have a logging system, dating system, like shipping, like sanitary is called GMP, good manufacturing processes pass up, which is a hazard analysis. And so you have all these systems. So it takes a company, a small army about a year or two to get this together, like three of us literally did not go home for three months. And we just we worked at it until because we had a we had a purchase order. But we didn't have I didn't
Elaine Tan Comeau 13:32
write that we didn't.
Jae Park 13:34
We didn't have a license this food safety license to sell it. And so we just we just did and then we sold our launch was about two months delayed because of that. May 16 We we hit the floors, and no one expected to do what it did. It became basically the best selling snack overnight.
Elaine Tan Comeau 13:57
Wow, what year was that? Jae?
Jae Park 14:00
Wow, I think it was 2016 I think so 2016 or 17. Okay, and and we hit the floors. And at this point you have to know we we we didn't have any business because we cut all ties to the bakery business. So we didn't have a backup plan.
Elaine Tan Comeau 14:25
So all your eggs are literally in one basket.
Jae Park 14:27
Exactly. And so we went into the consumer goods business, the packaged food business and and no one expected it to do what it did. We went from one region to to in Canada, to the US and then to the to the world like within within a year and a half and became the largest organic snack foods manufacturer and the largest coconut manufacturer in the world for organic.
Elaine Tan Comeau 14:56
Oh my goodness. Well congratulations and if you are listening All right now, you and your driving drivers off to Costco and go pick up some of these coconut clusters. Oh my goodness, they are so good. And I don't even know how many years I've been eating them. And you know, I didn't even click into me, who you were when I was sitting beside you until I had to think about after we met. And like, I love those clusters. I love it. It's like, Oh, my goodness, it's so good. i Your story is incredible. I know, that's just like the Reader's Digest version. Because I, because I want to respect your time. I mean, I wanted this dig in and learn so much from even like the side stories that you have. Because I'm sure in those three months that you lived at work, learning how to get it licensed and approved and pass all the safety protocols and tests. So many lessons. And right
Jae Park 16:01
there, there is a lesson here and for me, like who I am, is, is I like I feel that people have so much potential, you know, and, and I have a business life, and I'm an entrepreneur, and I and I love to compete. But another thing that I love to do is help people see their potential, and really, and really reach their potential. And so, in all these things I explain, and a lot of people don't know that it's only really hard the first time. Like, the second time it gets easier. Right? And so yeah, maybe you don't have maybe like, firstly, maybe you don't, you weren't perfect. You didn't have the grades, or you don't have the diploma or the certificate. Or maybe you feel that as an immigrant you're you have or disadvantage as as a person of a certain race or a gender. But it's it doesn't matter. It just it's only really hard. The first time. I love that. So in like the second time around, it gets easier. So
Elaine Tan Comeau 17:10
don't be afraid to try that first time. And it's okay. It's okay to fail. It's okay to fall.
Jae Park 17:15
Yeah, like don't wait for people to pick you pick yourself. And just and just this rocket. Yeah, I
Elaine Tan Comeau 17:22
love that. Pick yourself. Don't want to pick you. I love that. That should be on like a T shirt.
Jae Park 17:29
Let's do it. Let's do it. Yeah. Love it.
Elaine Tan Comeau 17:33
Jae. You're so incredible. You're very humble person. And, and I know people who are listening like, wow, he's the CEO of animal foods. But I know because you just said that, you know, mistakes have been made. And I would be I'd love it if you could share one of the biggest mistakes you've learned or had in your business journey. And what was it that you learned from that?
Jae Park 18:02
Well, there's, there's, there's too many mistakes, right? There's like, it's, you know, it's hard to pinpoint one. But I think I think, you know, I like that, if I'm going to choose right now. Is, is not starting, not starting fast enough. You know, like, like, waiting, like, waiting for what, you know, I the biggest regrets I have as a person, as an entrepreneur is like, no, why didn't I do this five years ago? You know, when I, you know, in my 20s What did I do my 20s I wasted my time, you know, what if I applied this the, you know, what? Didn't that go and meet that person? Why didn't that go in, you know, to that conference? And you know what, and I take that meeting at 5am. Like, it's all the things that are related to time. Because time is our the only true asset that we have. Right? It's, it's not starting sooner, like, like, literally and so I'm gonna give you a story of inner foods because, you know, we're talking about you know, foods, like when we, when we launch a food item, now. We make it two to 300 times the recipe. Wow. Like that means two to 300 failures. Wow. Right. So like, as an entrepreneur, give yourself permission to suck at it. Like 100 times before you're good at, you know,
Elaine Tan Comeau 19:42
oh my goodness, I love all your quotables give yourself permission to suck at it. Yeah, do it
Jae Park 19:47
in like, no one's good at it, you know from the beginning. Right? So like I'm just I don't know, I just the biggest regrets I have or that I didn't I gave up, you know, too soon. I didn't believe in myself or, you know, I should have started sooner. But a lot of entrepreneurs don't know how hard it is, you know, it's, it's always harder than you, you think. And so, but the thing is, if you're, if you're, if at the get go, if you say, you know, I'm not good at it, I don't have the experience, I don't have whatever, capital or whatever, but I'm gonna do it until. And so for those, like, for example, if I make a recipe, and if I launch a product and make it to 300 times, you can make those 200 or 300, mistakes, or iteration. Right? Or you can choose to make those mistakes in one month. Like, why don't you condense? It just set those expectations so low, that you're gonna be, you're gonna fail 200 times before you're good at once, right? And so just fail early, fail often. And just and just give you permission to be bad until you're good at it. And so, but really, it all has to do with time
Elaine Tan Comeau 21:16
as a non renewable resource right there. Right,
Jae Park 21:20
exactly. It's not transferable. It's not refundable. It's, you can't buy more of it. It's just bank it. Yeah, exactly. So like they gave you if you're really passionate about it, and you really want to succeed at it, just you know, just hustle, like, fail at it be bad at it, and good, long enough, or enough times to be to get good at it. Right and do that quickly.
Elaine Tan Comeau 21:46
And so, yeah, that is a great advice. And it leads me to my next question, which this is probably one of the answers to already is you are passionate about helping others and in their own entrepreneurial journey. And whether they're new entrepreneurs or, or people who are seasoned entrepreneurs, what would you say are the top three mistakes that you see these entrepreneurs do? And, and how do we avoid those mistakes?
Jae Park 22:16
So your question is top three mistakes that entrepreneurs do, okay.
Elaine Tan Comeau 22:25
Now, not starting soon enough, I'm gonna say maybe, like,
Jae Park 22:28
yeah, I just like if you're, if you're identifying yourself as an entrepreneur, and, you know, I just, I think this is this, this because there's just so many, it's really, you know, there's just so many mistakes, but I think really taking the time really taking the time for personal development. Wow. You know, why? Because I see so many people, okay, I see so many people. And they said, All I failed because of the economy, I failed because of my competition. I failed because of COVID. You know, but you know what? I look to the root in, in, in many times, the majority of the times because they didn't have the goods. They weren't good enough. They didn't have, they didn't have preparation done. They didn't have all the other skills done. So I quit. I've written in my blog. It's called a blog post called the juggler. So, in the juggler, as an entrepreneur, we all like to identify like, this is my core competency. This is my service, this is my product that I'm going to launch. And we treat that product like an orange ball. And we we like to keep it afloat. Because even if it falls on the ground, we die in our dream dice. But the thing is, there's other other balls that you need to juggle, and they might not be your core ball like an orange ball. They can they're they're a white ball like accounting, like sales and marketing, like yet like getting the right team manufacturing, like all these things. And every everything behind that, that runs that that manages that leads, that is personal development. It's like Jhansi Maxwell, in his leadership book says the law of the lid, and the law of the lid exists in not just leadership in everything, right? And so as entrepreneurs we're juggling. And the rule is if any ball whether it's an orange ball or white ball falls to the ground, you lose as an entrepreneur. Doesn't matter why you failed, what doesn't mean is you failed, right? But as entrepreneurs, we give a lot of attention to our main core and we think that if only we We care about the core of our business, we will succeed, which isn't the case in real life. If you run out, if you run out of money for any reason, you've lost your runway, you've lost the time, right? So not investing in personal development or under, not under estimating, undervaluing personal development. Also, I think another another downfall is they fall in love with the idea. To the point, they're not real, like, like, they're just, there's just like, what do you call it, I'm just trying to explain it. Like, they fall in love with the idea of this romance of like, what they're going to be doing, and they don't end up doing anything. And they're not real, in terms of real world expectations.
Elaine Tan Comeau 26:08
Yes, because there's no action taken to take a chunk at a time to achieve it. And like what you were saying earlier, like, you can make mistakes, quickly in a month and do those 200 Mistakes until you get it right. Or you can dream about it, and try here and there and wait for that perfect time when there is no perfect time to start. And yeah, don't waste time just dreaming.
Jae Park 26:37
Yeah, they've spent too much time in this in this no man's land cons why intrapreneur? You know, it is like, they love and they love the title. And they like working on their dream, but they never ship anything. You know, they never enter into the marketplace. And whether whether they've shipped it and they fail, they get instant feedback from the marketplace. And you have an ability to pivot or you have to iterate. Right? But what that cycle of not shipping it up just like it's like, it's like somebody in their day. Being busy. But not productive. Yes. You know, as an entrepreneur, you have to be insanely productive. But they they equate busyness to activity, instead of their metric should be productivity.
Elaine Tan Comeau 27:31
I love that. I love that. And like, Do you have a strategy for eliminating the bat busy and focusing on that productivity?
Jae Park 27:42
Yeah, you have to say no.
Elaine Tan Comeau 27:45
That is powerful word No,
Jae Park 27:47
exactly. No, no, no.
Elaine Tan Comeau 27:52
I'm totally feeding on this. I'm like, Okay, I remember that. Because it is very easy to get caught up in busyness of doing a bunch of things that do nothing to bring in profit. And I'd love to ask you that question. If you have any advice to our listeners, right now and say, okay, stop being busy and start making profit. Right? And what, what would you say is that top two things, and I'm guessing, like I and I talk to a lot of women entrepreneurs is they don't know how to price their service or their product. And women in particular, have a hard time taking money for something they offer crates, and you know, I've been doing for 10 years, and I still am so humbled. And anytime anybody wants to buy something, and I haven't, you know, I stopped packaging, because I throw in a bunch of free stuff, too. And, you know, and my family will say, oh, did they pay for them? Like no, but they need it. So would you say is the correct way to price?
Jae Park 29:01
Well, I don't know the exact I don't really have, like, for me, what the market will bear and as an entrepreneur, like you want, you know, making more profit is equated to winning, you know, but, you know, I don't want to I don't want to start there. I want to start at first, really, sometimes, like, if you're if you're if you're selling something, whether it's a service or product, and you feel that you just like you can't price it, you can't like there's not that much margin that because you know, like in in Google we live in. We live in instant search, whether it's on YouTube, Amazon or Google, we know the price, we know the market price. But then if if you are having problems with your profit margin, you're Probably in, in a commodity game. Meaning, like, if you won't sell it, someone else will sell it. Right? Like, you don't really have that much differentiation. So I really like to start at, because, again, time is our only reason we can we we choose to spend our time on things that satisfy us or as an entrepreneur that will give us the greatest return on investment of our time, and our capital and etc, etc. But if you have to start with your, your, your your product or offering, and if you have troubles, you're probably the commodities game, meaning you haven't innovated, you haven't built in extra value for your customer. Because you really have to think about it, your customer is no different from yourself, look at your behavior, you're not going to pay more for a good or service than You Think You Can you mean that it's worth, right, it's common sense. If you go to, if you go to this Walmart, and you buy this toothpaste, this brand of toothpaste and it's $3 you're not going to go to another super like superstore and pay $5 for it for the same good. Where I really like to start is, is like Stephen Covey's book is one of his seven laws is start with the end in mind. Really design your product and your service and create unique features and built in a built in extra whatever services or a different features in your product or packaging, packaging it differently. So that there is built in immense value. So that you you can differentiate yourself in the marketplace, is if you don't have any differentiation, you don't deserve any additional profit, you're just going to be playing in the commodity this game of me too. So I think the best way to protect your profit margin or built in profit margin is to, to design correctly, to iterate your product correctly. Until Until you'd have a unique offering unique offering, right? service offering or product offering. Right, brilliant,
Elaine Tan Comeau 32:35
brilliant advice. And that is so smart, right? Making sure that you are in your own category that that is why you are allowed to offer a certain pricing because you are uniquely different. Not not the Me too. I love it. Love it. And I know that our time is running out. And I want to talk about your book that the power of today that you launched in 2018. I want to say now, in this book, you are talking about rules and tips of getting the best edit today. And I believe that today is an acronym. And I cannot wait to read this book. Jae, I cannot wait. So do you want to touch a little bit and give us a little teaser on what you mean by getting the best out of today means?
Jae Park 33:28
Well, you know, a lot of people and I'm a realist, right? I know that. Rome wasn't built in a day, you know, nothing, you know, really significant be built to the day. But in one day, there in one day in 124 hours, lies the potential to really change your life. Like like, you know, the direction of your life, the projection of your life, you know, the outlook of your life in one day has that potential. And it really starts today is a framework of thinking it's either it's a tremor foundation, foundation attitudes that we have that I live in, I breathe every single day and today stands for time, opportunity, development, assessment and yield. So that's that's what I go through and, and time is is really you have the right attitude towards time. Right and, and I think time is sacred. I really do. And I really love living. But I'm not I'm I've lived long enough to know that there are people that I've known or that I know that their life has been cut short Maybe because of tragedy, maybe because of an accident maybe because of critical illness, whatever. This is story, her name was MJ. It was at the very, very beginning of the no food story, when we only had a handful of team members. And we needed production workers and, and she she was Korean. And she was, she needed a working visa. So a company to sponsor her. And she was she was delightful, but she was a pitbull, and she worked so hard. And her attitude was so great that every team member appreciated her. So what we had is we sat down and we had a meeting together. And she said, I need I need a company to sponsor me for working visa, and love to sponsor you. Because you're just such a great team member. And after you after somebody gets sponsored, for working visa, they're able to apply for the permanent residents over, you know, maybe maybe two or three years later. And her dream was to be able to become a permanent resident of Canada. So we had this discussion, and three days later, she didn't show up to work. Oh, and she missed. She carpooled with another team member. And then we, the other team member called Mrs. Kim would would, would text her and she wouldn't reply, oh, dear, we found out that on the way to work, she was walking, she got hit by a semi truck, and passed away.
Elaine Tan Comeau 36:32
Oh, my goodness, I'm so sorry. This was
Jae Park 36:35
this is tragic. And like, obviously, that day, nobody in our company could work. You know, it's just, we were just so upset. Because just the day before, she was beside us, shoulder to shoulder, you know, making coconut clusters. And so, like, for me, time is so precious. And so, really starting today, you know, knowing that, like our time is finite, and really treating it with the right respect. And I love living but I know that I'm not immortal. You know, that something could happen to me whether driving or, you know, I don't know, you know, stuff happens, right? And so to really make most of the date, but really in front of in front of the imminent potential of death. Like, what are you afraid of? Wow, you for failure? Are you afraid of like acceptance? Are you afraid of like what other people think? You know, really, it really just get after it. Write Love and know if you have a dream, live your dream? You know, if you have to work at McDonald's minimum wage, eight hours. Yeah, work at McDonald's said that after live your dream? Love it. You know, just like get after it. It's so important. And then I'll go quickly. The O stands for opportunity. It's all around you. You know, if you're open to it, like for example, there's so many people that say, Jae, can I have some some of your time? And like, you know, I say sure. You know, like, Okay, how about this Saturday? Can you meet me at 530 for breakfast? You wouldn't believe how many people say, Oh, that's too early. You know, I'm like, Okay. Or, you know, I say, okay, you know, I really don't have time until, you know, I'm at home after dinner. I want to spend some family time and after the kids go to bed and and how about 10:10pm? Like, could you meet me for 30 minutes, you know, somewhere, there's all that's a little too late. I could get up early to her. And you you wouldn't believe you wouldn't believe how many people just opportunities all around us. Wow. And, and, and you know, like, the fair to take advantage. The feet that take advantage. Opportunity is preparation. That's what you have to do. And that's personal development. You have to do that. But just opportunities right there. And you say no. Wow, you wouldn't believe how many people say no,
Elaine Tan Comeau 39:12
I am so shocked by that. I would meet you at 530 because I respect your time and I know that you have to go to a meeting next. I'm so sad to have to end our chat but because I respect your time. I am going to say Jae I'd be honored and grateful to have you on again at a time that works for you. But Jae, you are incredible. I am inspired. I know that my listeners are so inspired by you. And I we all have to run out and get your book. And if you ever said do you want to meet and talk at 530 in the morning, I will be there I will bring you breakfast. And yes and no.
Jae Park 39:57
We'll enjoy. We'll enjoy coffee and breakfast you I do. I do. I do have I do have five minutes. So if you have any last questions, I'd love to invest five minutes with you.
Elaine Tan Comeau 40:07
So I love the teaser, that we have the T and the O, and people are gonna have to read your book for the da y. And I'm gonna say, Jae, if you have one more word of advice, for I know that many of my listeners just saying, you know, I don't have money to do marketing. Jae, what would you do? Like if there's one tip that you have for? For, you know, people on a shoestring budget, I'd say, you know, I have a product or service that I would love to let people know about, but I don't know how, what would you say? And then we'll end it there.
Jae Park 40:42
Well, on on. Like to tell your listeners and, and your subscribers and yourself like, like, I really believe in people. And I'm saddened that, you know, they only like people, I think only really tap into like three to five per 10% of their full potential. Wow. Like, what if he can operate at 10 like that, I think that's world class, that'd be considered world class, if you could operate at 10%. So like, like you like, anybody who's listening, your potential is far greater than what you give yourself credit for. And, and so just, you know, really believe in yourself. And for for products. Don't settle. Like, a lot of people. They make the excuse of, you know, this is the best though. No, just don't settle until like you're at the very, very beginning of when you're when you're bringing life to your product or your service. Make it world class, make it the best, absolute best. Because if you have a great product or offering, you don't need marketing, wow. Because it will sell it would sell itself. And people if you have a crappy product, if you have a crappy product, the more money you pour onto marketing people, you're going to your sales are going to like die. Why there are going to be no repeat buyers of your product or service.
Elaine Tan Comeau 42:22
Brilliant. Right? Make it the best and it will sell itself. Exactly. Yeah. Brilliant. I love it. Jae, you are incredible and inspiring. And just so sincere. And I'm grateful for you. And thank you, thank you so much for being a guest on my podcast. And thank you with all my heart.
Jae Park 42:45
Thank you so much. I'm humbled by your invitation. And that your friendship and let's do it again soon.
Elaine Tan Comeau 42:52
I love it. And our listeners. Thank you. Thank you for joining us today. And I know that you probably had to pull over to take notes. I hope you did. If not, I have everything in our show notes that you can find at Elaine's kitchen table.com. And, Jae, if people wanted to find you or reach out to you, is there a place that they should go? Yeah,
Jae Park 43:15
I'm on LinkedIn under Jae Park. Facebook, you can follow me on my business page Jeep Park. Also on my website work with Jae park.com. Jae spelled J A E. And yeah, I love to listen, you know what I would love to? This is what I love to do. I'd like to donate 10 of my books for you to give away to your top fans, your top subscribers. So I'll get that to you as well.
Elaine Tan Comeau 43:45
I love it. You're just incredible. And thank you that is so generous. And I cannot wait to crack open one of those books and I'm I'm one of those people who write in the margins and like circle thing, come back for the corners and reread relearn. I love it. Jae Thank you and have a fabulous day and God bless you and God bless your beautiful family and listeners. Thank you and God bless you and we will talk to you soon. Bye for now. Bye
Unknown Speaker 44:12
bye
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