Stories, tips, and reflections on building a business, living life in the trades, and pursuing adrenaline-fueled projects.
*** Please Read ***
Please read our article on adding multiple passive income streams in today's modern tech era businesses. In it we have added a link to our online dropshipping store. There is also a Dropshipping link at the top of this page that goes to the same online storefront. It is NOT a store that sells products made by Forged Adrenaline. It is a way to add "passive income" to our business and to show readers that it's possible to augment their businesses and boost their incomes with an online store selling items that interest them and interest the people viewing the content of their websites.
*** PLEASE NOTE *** Forged Adrenaline has not tested any of the items that we sell in our online storefront. We can NOT give proper advice regarding the quality or durability of any items being sold. If you like any items feel free to purchase them and try them out, but please note that returns and refunds will be handled online only by the Forged Adrenaline Storefront Department and through the email addresses linked directly through the shopify.com storefront website only. Also refunds and returns will be handled according to the refunds and returns policies described by shopify.com and their affiliate partners. Forged Adrenaline does not necessarily endorce or reccomend any of the products being sold by our storefront but rather encourages customers to do their own research and due dilligaince when choosing products to buy and when choosing which companies to buy from. That being said, please come and check out our online store by clicking on this link https://shop.forgedadrenaline.com
Where it all began.... After highschool I had zero direction, zero prospects, and zero clue in life. College and university didn't really seem like the right options for me at the time, especially as my focus was not... focused. I found out about a couple of available streamlined courses to get me "work-ready", and the two best options were "Truck Driver" or "Welder". I literally flipped a coin, and it came up "Welder". Funny how life works though as my first job out of welding school was in a heavy truck shop fixing trucks, trailers, and scrap bins. Eventually I wanted to find a place with more structure. Somewhere that used blueprints, and would possibly have a mentor to teach me everything about this craft. So I moved on to building and maintaining Overhead Cranes, and diving into custom fabrication.
As time went on I learned the hard lessons associated with the term "economic fluctuations", or to put it another way "layoffs". I was forced to learn that in heavy industry the workload ebbs and flows frequently. More importantly I had to learn how to pivot. How to find work in bad economic times, or more accurately... where to look for the work during bad economic times, and how to get it when so many other people were also looking for it. It turns out that the magic words are... "adaptability". My desire to learn was key! Since I was a little kid I needed to know how everything worked. I needed to learn the best techniques when welding, fitting parts together, taking machines apart and rebuilding them. Every place I ever worked at I would find out who was the best at a particular task and ask them what they were doing differently than everyone else. It turns out this mentality paid off. When others were looking for jobs, I was finding them. Not just in welding, but in mechanics, carpentry, and design work. It didn't matter to me what topic or industry it was, I wanted to know how it worked, how it fit into society or into industry and how it was delivered.
After years of acquiring countless welding tickets, and numerous certifications I felt that it was time to take the leap and start my own business, and here we are now. My purpose in this world is to create, it's to fix things that are important to people, and most of all... it's to find the next project!
If it's working properply why can't you leave it alone? Only a true gear-head would understand why that's not possible. It's pre-built into our DNA. We just simply can't. We won't. Why would we not make it our own? How could we accept that the engineer's final version is in fact the "right" version, or better yet "our version"?
I guess the root of it all is that we're artists. We want every aspect of our lives to be custom. It doesn't matter how shiny and new something is, we look at it and immediately think about how we want different wheels, a different sounding exhaust, lights to add a fun visual effect at night time, and yes sometimes to make it faster and louder. A lot of people think it's because we want everyone to look at us and our cool toy, but the truth is we simply did it for our enjoyment. It's no different than moving into a new house and needing to make it a home. That need to paint the walls or buy new carpets. We just need to make it "our own". Although,... there is always the car shows, and the glory...
So many of us remember being a little kid and going to a car show and seeing these beautiful works of art. These truly flawless machines that someone has taken enough time and care to turn into something that belongs in a museum... and then they say "do you want to hear what it sounds like?". The answer is always YES!!! The way they look, the way they sound, it triggers something in us; maybe it's the freedom, maybe it's the power, for me however it's not just about someone's ability to dream.... but to make those dreams a reality!
I didn't own a computer until I was 25. I played instruments, like guitar, bass, and drums. The digital world was something I wasn't interested in. Then one day that all changed. Music software entered my world and I started thinking differently. I started approaching music differently. All while the world was evolving around us all.
In the last 20 years tech has evolved so quickly. It's sometimes hard to know where I stand on it. Part of me thinks about the "good old days" when kids played outside, we tuned cars by installing bigger needle jets into carburetors, and I played guitar in a band. The other part of me thinks about how much I love playing video games, making digital music, and now I modify the code in my car's ECU to gain incredible control over it. The options are limitless these days. So I choose to adapt while still holding on to some old traditions. I still build things out of steel, but I use my CNC Plasma Cutter to cut really fun designs. I still record my guitar tracks but I add other instruments digitally to make complete songs. I still modify vehicles by changing parts, but now I use software to maximize the performance that I get out of those parts. I write code to build websites about merging tech with the trades like this very one. Life is forever-changing... I guess I'll just have to go with the flow...
What are multiple passive income streams? I've spent years trying to learn whatever I could about anything that interests me. In that research I've found some things that a lot of successful people have in common. One of those key things is "Passive Income". What is passive income? Passive income streams are businesses that run smoothly enough that as a business owner you can take a step back and let things run mostly on auto-pilot. These are businesses like laundromats, car washes, vending machines, and in this case dropshipping websites. These all have a common aspect where you "actively" do a few key things like stock the shelves, make sure the machines are working properly, and then you "passively" sit back and collect the money while the customer does all of the work. These are all self-serve businesses. You provide the product or service and simply stand back and let the customer put the coins in and wash their items by themselves, or let them view your products and purchase them on their own without human interaction.
There are hundreds of passive income models. Paid parking lots, ATM routes, arcade machines, but in my case I've built a dropshipping website. Dropshipping is where you the customer go online to a website and view available products to buy. You find as many items as you'd like, add them to your cart, and then proceed to the checkout and pay for them. The best part is behind the scenes. When you own a dropshipping website you don't ever directly handle the products being sold from the affiliate vendors, you don't handle the money being sent from the customers, and you don't handle the refunds and returns. Websites like shopify.com handle all of that for you. You simply pick the products that you or your followers are interested in, list them in your store, and have Shopify handle the rest. The customer pays the vendor, the vendor pays Shopify, Shopify pays you whatever your profit margins are set at. There is a decent amount of work that needs to be done when setting up one of these storefronts, but once it's finished you "actively" update which product lines to carry and which ones to delete, and then "passively" sit back and collect the money.
If you have found this article interesting, or useful at all, or even if you're just curious about what one of these stores look like, please go to the ***Please Read*** section of this website and then click on this link https://shop.forgedadrenaline.com or click on the "Dropshipping" link at the top of this page. It will take you directly to the Forged Adrenaline storefront where you can view and purchase as many items as you'd like. I've done my best to list items that are connected with welding, motorsports, tools, musical instruments, and products that I think people like us would be interested in. I have not tested these products, and so I can't really give any opinion on them or their quality/durability, however there are some that I will be purchasing because the prices are just too good.