Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Deante Howard. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Deante, appreciate you joining us today. It’s always helpful to hear about times when someone’s had to take a risk – how did they think through the decision, why did they take the risk, and what ended up happening. We’d love to hear about a risk you’ve taken.

Life changing risk alert!!

I left the country. My family and I dropped pretty much everything we owned and left the country to explore the world as nomads and discover a new place we may want to settle down.

I am a husband and a father of 4 boys, ages; 2,4,7,9 (1,3,6,8 when we left) So that is 6 of us, with 2 suitcase, a duffle bag and 4 backpacks, we hopped on a plane from Kansas City to Mexico back in March 9th.

What?! How…why??

Let me paint the picture of why we decided to take this risk, how it came about and how it’s going.

Me and my wife loved to travel….or at least the idea of it lol…I mean who doesn’t, right?
I say the idea of it, because life happens and when life happens you tend to have to divert your funds to afford life happening. Prior to getting married, we have discussions about places we wanted to go together and how we could both work and live below our means and live our best life. We had a great set up, she was a recent college grad, my dad let us rent a house from him, not idea, place, but definitely ideal cost, I have always been a hustler. So we have 2 people bringing in an income and our cost of living was going to be way lower than average…perfect, right?

However, we did what married people do and from our honeymoon our first son was conceived. At the time, we were both like, if and when it may happen, it happens. We were not taking precautions to stop us from being pregnant…but at the same time, we did not think all the way through how our plans would change. Like we knew some idea…but not in depth. For example, the place we were staying…I said not ideal… we lived in the hood. Like gunshots and sirens on a weekly basis. For us 2, it was something we agreed to deal with until we can stack up… however, with a baby on the way, that compromise had to be dropped….so no more super low rent. Another example… 2 incomes. We know of mothers who worked while pregnant, had a baby got right back to work… however everyone is different, the way our pregnancy was set up, there was no way my wife would have had the energy or ability to work from the 2nd trimester on. Then, having a baby vs reading about being a parent…2 different worlds. Our boy gets here and as most parents may understand, she didn’t want to go right back to work, she wanted to breastfeed and spend that first year doing what we believed to be best for our son, being close to our boy. After some time we look at getting back on track, her back to work, 2 incomes… hopefully something that pays her for having a degree since now our expenses in all aspect are higher…but that brought a new expense…child care. The cost of child care is ridiculously high. Essential any money she would make would go towards child care, since, even with a degree the work place requires “experience “ to get the kind of income we need…even though the job says “entry level”

So time went on, our family grew ,but our hopes and dreams of traveling was still there. We made it a point, even with kids, be it road trips or flights (if affordable) to travel somewhere at least once a year. While we did leave our state, this was not the kind of travel we had dreamed of.

As I mentioned I am a hustler. As far as I can remember, I had an entrepreneur mindset. Most of my work career has been in sales. It started after my time at a certain retailer that I will leave nameless. It was nothing bad about the company, it was more of a revelation moment due to the workplace, my work ethic, and my mindset. When I started this job I would switch positions every 2 months. This happened a total of 4 times. I would switch because I learned that the new position paid me better for my time. Due to my work ethic, I would get employee of the month in that position in the second month, Due to my mindset, I would leverage that accolade and ask if it came with a raise…clearly as most people know from any retail job…the answer is No! However, each time I would do it, someone would tell me, “well this position pays more and they have an opening and Im Sure the team lead would love you” so I would go to the team lead and they would switch me over at the end of the current pay cycle. In my last position at the job, there came a point where my manager left because she had her baby. For the interim one of my coworkers was made temporary manager. He had been there for years and because of this, he was was first in line… Now I’m not one who cares for titles…I care for compensation. I had learned, also because of his time working there, how much he was getting paid and how now he will be on a better manager salary. Before becoming a manager, while doing the same job as me, he was getting paid $4 more per hour than me. My thing was, each day I come into work, I am finishing my task and then helping him with his task…here I am out working this guy to get paid less, only because he had been here longer. Then it dawned on me, he had been here for 6 years…6 years… to only be making $4 more…, do I want that… do I want any job that does not pay me based on my performance, when I was taught to always do my best, so I am typically out performing my coworkers (not always out performing everyone everyday …but I was young and cocky, and in most cases, most of my coworkers just… showed up ….so there was a clear difference in performance)

At that point , I started looking into jobs that would pay me for doing well. The only 2 that I could find were, owning my own business and sales. I remember selling candy and Pokémon cards and Yugioh cards in middle and high school, but I had never thought about that as being a business owner. I had a lot of misconceptions about owning a business, from the cost it takes to own one, to how big a team I would need to run one. So I got in to sales and put owning a business in my pot of dreams on the back burner. Fast forward, I am married, we have 2 kids. I’m working in sales, my wife is a stay at home mom pregnant with our 3rd child and we still have dreams of seeing the world, with ever increasing reasons of why that would not happen, at least until I hit retirement age. However the hustler in me was determined. Between those years of me leaving that retailer and having my 3rd son, I was able to research, have some experiences, gain some 3rd party mentors and clear up those misconceptions and shortly after he was born, I started my own business.

My first business was my childhood dream. My own clothing line. Due to technology and social media, I was able to create and launch my clothing line to the world in a matter of a month with less than $50. This business was more like a side gig. I was still working my day job, which brought in most of my income and took up most of my time. The hours were pretty standard…roughly about 9 a day , 5 to 6 days a week…but there is a lot of other time that goes into a job. Getting ready for it, driving too and from it, wind down time to release the messes and stresses that may have come from the work place…so while my shift was 9 hours, my job cost me about 14 hours a day. I had to sleep, 3 kids, one was a baby, and a wife that needs some time and attention, so the business didn’t get much time. But, it was a start! It was a start that lead us to the risk and adventure we are own today.

Fast forward about 2 years and the pandemic happened. Even still, we had our dream of traveling, slow cooking on the back burner. My dream of being a business owner p, actually happening and bringing in some extra income. Things were ok, but not ideal. With having kids, 2 in school at this point, one a toddler and now we find out we have bun number 4 in the oven… our thoughts are ; how can we travel with this many kids, will this pandemic stop us from traveling or shape how we can in the future, what will we do about our kids, will we have to wait till they are all off to college…that’s at least another 18 years now sheesh, we want them to experience traveling too, what about school, can we only do it in the summer…flights for 6 OMg…can we afford that…road trips til they are grown…. Lol it goes on and on.

It turns out COVid was the catalyst. The kids had to do school from home. I had to move my work to home and that changed our perspectives and experiences on a lot of things. Start with school for the boys. My wife loved the idea of home schooling and thought we could maybe travel and even world school. Yet, she was nervous and scarred; can she handle it, does she know what she is doing, will she have the patience, be able to find necessary resources, etc. COVID forced her to answer those questions instead of being paralyzed by them and she quickly learned…yes, yes she can do it. The school from home became very inconvenient as it was a new, unplanned thing so it was very unstructured, so we pulled them out and she started home schooling. Then we move on to work and income. If we were to travel, how would we afford it, how could I work, could I work from home with this many kids around, would I be able to be productive, etc. Again COVID forced an answer, this time it gave me answers to those questions and provided opportunities that I had no idea about. It turns out, yes, yes I could work from home with 2 kids a toddler and a baby. Not only could I do it, but I could be more productive. Most of our team had seen better productivity working from home, while my kids sometimes got loud, my wife kept them under control most of the time. However, with the pandemic effecting everyone, any client that heard them was very understanding, a lot of times even empathetic and that lead to a better sales call, not a worse one. As far as unforeseen opportunities….I now get to remove majority of my get ready for work time, all of my commute time and some of my unwind time. This is like 5-6 hours a day I get back. Time that I invested in my business. Plus, with not having a manager potential looking over my shoulder….being honest, I used some on the clock time building my business as well. So during the pandemic, my clothing line grew, my skill set grew, my business knowledge grew and our hopes of traveling grew.

During the pandemic, I started a second clothing line and started offering other services like branding, logo design, social media graphics, album covers, and clothing designs for other brands and I started selling my art. Little did I know, my art would actually become pretty popular and , as of now is my primary source of income. During the pandemic, this extra time, extra income and lack of needing or being able to spend ( we couldn’t go out to eat as often or just out for fun in general, which lead to more home cooking and while the grocery bill went up the dining out bill went down way more) lead to a spark of, what most would consider insanity, but for us, life changing genius.

Being home more, me and my wife could have more conversations. With the extra ways to bring in income without a job and the more companies being open to remote workers due to the pandemic, we jumped back to the idea of world schooling. My wife really dove into the research with the thought, “if people are world schooling, that means they have kids…they are traveling with kids…we just need to know how they are doing it!” She quickly learned that most of them are not wealth people, which encouraged her to go deeper. We had come to learn that a lot of people were able to travel the world with their family and do it for roughly about the same amount as their normal monthly cost of living… some were able to do it for considerably less. The common string was, they all had ways of continuing to bring in income, from staying with their employer as a remote worker, to being a business own, to living off investments. This not only gave us hope, but gave us figures which gave us a goal.

We had already had several reasons we wanted to go; fro. Our love of travel, to wanting to expose our boys to other cultures. From cost of living vs quality of life to the fears, worries, anxieties of raising black men in America. So, we took those reasons and we created a list of places around the world that would absolve those negative reasons and appease the positive ones and we made a plan to stop letting life just happen and start living life intentionally with purpose and goals.
Part of that plan was to either A) try to keep my job or B try to find a job that would let me work from anywhere in the world. We set a date, we bought plane tickets and made made plans.
However…life said ..I’m still going to happen lol.

In January of this year (2022) I got laid off from my job. BANG!! Down does plan A…no keeping this job…so I had to really shuffle to try to get plan B in place. We leave in 2 months, I need to hear back from someone…I need to go into overdrive on submitting applications , right? Nope! Instead, I decided to go into overdrive on my businesses. I treat my businesses like my new job. Set a time to clock in, set daily targets and got to work. I created new designs, I created new low cost or cost free marketing campaigns, I went out to places and offered my product and services, I made virtual and real life pop up shops. I got busy with my businesses! Then in February, I took a leap with my art and I made a bunch of canvases, like 12 ( I previously only made 1 or 2, try to sell those only and then the rest were made to order.) I took them out to sell, and I sold all 12 that afternoon. That day, I made more money than I ever made in one day…it was like getting my commissions check. That is the day we decided to risk it.

When first being laid off, we were thinking, keep a few things, go to Mexico for 3-6 months, see what it’s like, see if I could land a remote job, and if so we continue and we have our parents sell our furniture and cars. However, with the ramp up of business starting from January to that wonderful day in February our perspectives changed. I thought “I can do this! I don’t have to get a job working for someone else… I can support us from my business!” My wife agreed. With time dwindling down, we gave away or sold everything we had thought we would put in storage and we tossed out any plan B. I stopped filling out applications and deleted any job profiles that said that I’m open to work.

How is it going?

Fantastic! We spent 6 months exploring Mexico. We started in Quintana Roo, landing and spending a couple days in Cancun and about a week in Playa Del Carmen. From there we went to our first place on our list, Puerto Morelos , and we loved it. We had planned to stay for 1 month but ended up staying for 2. We stayed in the magical town of San Cristobal de las Casas for a month and Aguascalientes city for 2 months. In between those longer stays we visited places like Guadalajara and Mexico City for a few days to a week. We are currently right on the outskirts of Medellin in Colombia! Our boys are experiencing a whole new continent, it’s amazing!
We are getting to experience the culture, new foods, see amazing sites like pyramids and Mayan ruins, large canyons and waterfalls Have new life experiences like snorkeling and horse back riding, having a professional house cleaner and affording a personal chef. All of this, within the same budget that we were paying back home. Thank God, I was laid off and was give the vision to press hard into my gifts and craft. My clothing lines, branding services and my art, mainly my art are covering me more than my previous job and our current cost of living fluxes between where we were in Kansas City to 20% less, but with a much higher quality of life, way leases stressor and much more time together.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

My name is Deante Howard. I am 33 years old, at least until December. I am the father of 4 boys and I have a wife of 10 years now. I’m the middle of 7 kids from Kansas City, Missouri. I grew up mostly raised by father with the 3 of my siblings that were his. It was tough for my dad, being a single parent with 4 kids, but he did an amazing job if I do say so. My dad was the hardest working person I knew and he instilled that work ethic into me. He taught me that if there is something I won’t in life, it is likely not going to come to me, I will have to go get it and no matter what anyone tells me….if I wanted the only thing that can stop me is me! I graduated from Lincoln College Prep in 2007 and I went to UMKC for a few years. I spent a semester pursuing a degree in Architecture, then switched to Graphic Design… that switch had some ill advised information from my student councilor, and led to a couple classes being withdrawn with fails, plummeting my gpa and causing me to lose most of my financial aid. I mention that because, I have been able to accomplish what I have and make it where I am with no degree.

As I mentioned before, I had a lot of misconceptions about owning a business, one being I would need some kind of degree., when a degree is only meant to show that you can fit into the work place…not create your own. In my personal development I had come to learn that a ton of successful business owners didn’t graduate college. They may have honorary degrees, or have attended after success for some social or publicity reasons. On top of that quite a bit of the ones that graduated didn’t go into business utilizing their degree. I learned they took risk, they learned how to Make something they loved to do into something they were paid to do and took every inch of opportunity they saw. Nothing was below them, there was no pride in their pursuit to excellence, but much pride in their effort, with good reason, as it was always exemplary.

For me, my love was to create. It could be music, art, designs, videos, poetry… just creating. The idea that something unique from my mind could be transmuted into reality in any format and be so engaging to someone else’s mind that they would give me money that they sacrificed time and energy for, that they compromised to stressors and ego for, is one of the highest honors I could ever think of.

As a child raised by a single parent, new clothes was not something that was on the priority list, except when absolutely necessary. That typically meant, who ever was the biggest gets new…everyone else, mostly gets “new to you”. And it was typically Payless and k mart, so no name brands. That type of clothing can easily get you picked on at school. Personally, I didn’t care about brands as much as I cared about styles that appealed to my personal vision of expression. Since I was not the biggest, I would typically get hand me downs and since I wasn’t the one to pick it out, it was hardly ever my style. From that young age I developed a dream, one day, I will create my own clothing brand and I will rock a style that expresses “Me” all the time and it will be great and my brand will be that brand that the trendy kids would want. Often I would take “my new to you” clothing and I would create my own designs using whatever I could. It was a learning process. First I used marker, but it bleed when washed, the. Sharpie, bleed a little, but at the time the only color was black so my options were limited. At some point late in high school, I learned about fabric paint and fabric markers and it was on. A far cry from my own clothing brand, but an encouraging step towards my dreams because a few of my peers would ask me if I could make something for them…some even offering to pay me (I only had a fledgling business mind at the time….I would typically only charge them for the material, which allowed me to make more without having to buy materials myself…but if I could go back…BANK lol)

As I mentioned, life happened. Senior year of high school , I glanced into what it would take to own a clothing line and started counting the cost, then I counted myself out. Not knowing this was not the only way to do things…but it was the only way I kept seeing at first..,I thought, I would need to first find someone who can do samples, them once that is done, pay someone to make the designs digital (which is why I eventually changed to graphic design, I figured I could learn to do it myself) then I’d have to buy my inventory at bulk, 1 so I can have inventory, 2 so it would be less per unit, 3 because I thought I would need that to prove my line was legit. Samples coming in at a grand….designer coming in at a grand or more, then inventory at 2 to 3 grand. Five thousand to get this thing started??? Well…off to college… I can be an architect and I can create that way and then I can earn good money and I can start my own brand!

Fast forward about 12 years…no Masters in architecture, no 5k start up fund, no credit history so no credit to get a loan and no contacts to help make things happen. But the world has been changing. Business models transforming. Access to information expanding. As I mentioned I had a 3rd child on the way and I had started some personal development and decided to re pursue my dream… looks take another look, because now I know how to properly make plans and set a goal. I know to set up steps, to write it down, to give myself dates. I know how to work backwards from what I want to learn how to get there. So I start some new research and thanks to blogs and digital magazines and chat boards, I learned quite a bit of new info….primarily this growing industry called Print on Demand. I then learned of a number of free creative software like GIMP. I then learned of a industry called e commerce with platforms like Shopify and Etsy. It all came together. No longer do I need $5000 and somewhere to wear house inventory as I try to sell merch out my closet or trunk until I can get a store to say “yes we love it, we would be honored to carry your brand” like I imaged….I can order 1-2 samples to make sure I like the quality…spending $23 and then I can set up a virtual store for $30 a month and/or another store for $0.20 per item listed and I can sell products that are made when they order! My net profit per month only has to be $30 and I would never be in the red…this is a game changer. I can make a brand that expresses me and present it to the world for the same cost of taking my family out to dinner! Time to get to work. I think that is one of the things I am most proud of. I never gave up on my dream…even when I had to make detour after detour, I always felt my dream was possible. It was never an “if”, but always a “when”…and that “when” became an “is”. That is large in part due to my mindset, instilled from my dad’s work ethic and teachings, to what I have come to learn through my faith in The Bible and that is my motto and tagline “The Hustle will make the Dream the Reality”

Since then, I have done some major collaborations with my clothing brand, from ReallyReps4Lyfe to Shein from Ororo to OnlyFans. Fashion and music work with AY Young, the only U.N Youth Ambassador from the U.S. Branding work with a couple brands that I can not disclose at the moment and art work for some Stars and celebrities, including 3 NBA players and a childhood hero, Mr. Walter Jones, the original Black Power Ranger.

Any resources you can share with us that might be helpful to other creatives?

For sure. A couple things. Bitcoin! Lol No, but really, the print on demand industry as a whole. I didn’t learn about it until about late 2018 early 2019, but Printful has been around since 2013 and Printify since 2015. Also I wish I knew about online platforms like shopify and etsy which started in 2006 and 2005 respectively. I thought a website would be very expensive and I thought you needed an actual store to have a website, so people would have a place to go to and see things and to have a place to make returns. i wish I knew about mock ups , I thought I needed items to take pictures for the website or just to share in general.

Knowing about those services, I could have been exposed to the industry and able to start making mistakes to learn from at least a whole 5 years earlier… I can only image where I could possibly be if I was in year 9 instead of year 4.

Do you have any stories of times when you almost missed payroll or any other near death experiences for your business?

I actually do not have one. The great thing about my business model is I’m always in the black. The only constant cost I have is time, and not to say that time isn’t valuable, as it is the most valuable thing we have. What I am saying is, I love what I do… I create. If I had unlimited money, this is what I would be filling my time with. Maybe in more lavish places, with a higher caliber skill set and toolset, but creating nonetheless. So that is not a high cost, versus if I was doing something I am just ok with or even worse, something I hated but it makes ends meet. I love this question because I think this can be encouraging or inspire to some who may see this and that is their concern….what is I start and I just can’t afford to operate any more. I think it’s important to know that you can have a business model that can’t leave you in a pile of debt.

To be clear I can have some debt…but, for a business, it’s trivial like under $100.
Just in case you may have missed it, as I only briefly mentioned it before. I operate on an on demand basis for all of my products and services, I am presently the only employee, although I have hired a virtual assistant before, also on demand. We live in an age of the gig economy. There are so many people who will do a job as a one off or short term, so as a new business owner, it allows some operation unlike any time before. I can hire a driver for my company, via Uber, allowing me to be transported on demand without me having to focus in the driving or the traffic….I can spend that transit time being an asset for my business, and I can do it on a very limited income…I don’t need to be some 6-7 figure business owner. So for my services and product, my expenses or covered in my price to my client. No expenses need to be covered unless and until I have a client. I already have expectations of returns. Exchanges and refunds set up prior to any transaction. My only expense that is not covered before a payment is made to me is my Shopify premium and my Etsy listing cost. If I go 3 months with no sales on my Shopify store, I would say it is failing. 3 months at $30 a month is $90.
Etsy is $0.20 per listing. I can list 50 items for $10.and it can sit for 4 months before it expires.

So $100 will get me a personal website for 3 months and 50 items listed in one of the highest traffic receiving marketplaces for at least 4 months. I can get no business for a year and spend less than $500. If I’m getting no business for any 2 months consecutively , then I need to reevaluate my efforts…so it should never make it to a year….but I would hardly say a $500 loss is a death blow, even if it did make it that far.

Contact Info:

• Website: Www.deecor.design
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/howard.d.artist
• Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/Imajinayshun/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/deante-howard
• Twitter: https://mobile.twitter.com/deante_howard
• Other: Www.Equrisclothing.com Www.Etsy.com/shop/Stacsondeck www.behance.net/deantehoward