10 years ago I left my career in architecture and went from designing sky scrapers to building my own online businesses.

When I was 15 my dad had taken control of his addiction for almost an entire year.

He started attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings a couple times per week for ongoing support.

I would go with him quite often.

Late one night after one of those meetings, my dad’s friend named Mike came over to chat with us.

As we were getting ready to leave, we walked over to Mike’s new car, a shiny black Mazda RX-7.

When I saw this car it was love at first sight.

It was low, wide and completely black like some sort of mini batmobile.

Mike noticed my fascination with the car and offered to give me a ride back home.

My dad said “Go ahead, I’ll meet you back home”, and we were off.

To some this might sound silly but I mean it when I say that that 20 min ride home changed the course of my life forever.

We left the meeting and headed towards the highway.

Mike punched the throttle as we were entering the onramp.

We lost traction and the rear end kicked out a little sideways.

“Gotta be careful with that” he chuckled.

The intense power and acceleration was unlike anything I had ever experienced at the time.

The sound of the 1.3 liter twin turbocharged rotary engine echoing through the Portland Maine city streets was intoxicating.

We exited the highway, rolled into town and everyone within eye-ear distance turned their heads to take notice.

As a shy introverted kid with very little self esteem, I was never one of “the cool kids”.

I had very few friends and got picked on a lot.

However, being in that car made me feel powerful for the first time ever.

If you could imagine how Bruce Wayne feels when he puts on the Batsuit and transforms into Batman, I felt kinda like that.

I decided right then and there that I would do whatever it takes to one day own a car like this.

Mike dropped me off at home and I asked my dad the obvious question:

“So how does Mike afford a car like that?”

“He owns his own business”, my dad replied.

That’s all I needed to hear.

My path to success was becoming more clear.

I needed to have my own business.

But how?

And...what kind of business?

After 1 whole year of sobriety, my dad eventually fell off the wagon and disappeared on one final bender.

He was gone for off the map for nearly 5 months until we got a call at 6am one morning before school.

He had overdosed on drugs and passed away in his sleep while living in a homeless shelter in Portland, Maine.

I'm not gonna lie, that fucked me up pretty bad.

I stopped going to school and no longer cared about anything. 

I'll spare you the details but to sum it up, I almost didn't graduate high school because I spent most of my time smoking weed and getting drunk with my friends.

Thanks to a few good teachers who cared, I was able to pull things together in my senior year and recapture the burning desire I once had to be successful.

I buried myself in school work and graduated from Bonny Eagle High School in 2003.

Then I had bills to pay.

So my dreams got put on hold and I got a job as laborer for a local construction company.

I figured I’d work this job for a year or so while I figured out what I was going to do with my life.

Like most young adults, I thought my path to success was going to college, getting a cozy office job and making around $40k per year.

So the “starting a business” idea got put on the back burner and I started taking night classes at Southern Maine Community College.

I chose to pursue an Associates Degree in Architectural & Engineering Design because I thought it was the most “realistic” way to combine my creative skills with the experience I had acquired while working in the construction industry.

At this point I wanted out of the construction job so I worked hard and dedicated myself to becoming the best Cad Drafter I could be.

My efforts paid off when I landed a job as an entry level Cad Drafter at a local engineering firm while I was still in my first year of college.

I got my degree within 3 years and was happy with that cozy office job for a while.

I even considered transferring to University of Maine to pursue a Bachelor’s Degree and become a licensed architect.

I was 23 years old, making $17 per hour and thought I had made it.

And in the eyes of my family and friends, I was a massive success.

But eventually reality started to sink in.

Yea, I had my own apartment and was no longer living in my girlfriend’s mom’s trailer.

I had a decent running pickup truck that got me to work every day.

I had a motorcycle.

All my basic living expenses were covered.

We could even eat out once a week.

But that’s where it ended.

I often thought about the experience with Mike’s RX-7 and the promise I made to myself that night.

Eventually I realized the path I was on wasn’t going to get me the life I wanted.

I began to look around at my co-workers who had been working in the same field for 20,30, or even 40+ years.

None of them seemed happy with their lives and I surely didn’t want to end up like them.

So I turned to the internet for answers.

I opened up Google and typed in: “How to start a business”.

I fell into the rabbit hole and learned all I could about the different businesses I could start.

I discovered internet marketing, and learned that the success of a business comes down to solving a real problem in the world.

Then you gotta be able to attract the right customers and convert them into a sale while still making a profit in the end.

One day I met my grandfather for lunch and told him about my desire to start a business and leave my safe office job I had worked so hard to get.

A few weeks later we met for lunch again and he gave me a book called “The Secret” which introduced me to the concept of “The Law of Attraction”.

That book showed me that focusing on positive thoughts would help bring the positive change in my life that I wanted.

I had a lot of negative beliefs and mental programming from my childhood that needed to be fixed if I ever wanted to be successful in business.

The Secret inspired me to take action and learn HOW to actually start a business.

Before this, it was just an idea that I never gave much thought.

My first side business was doing freelance Cad Design (what I was doing at my day job) in my spare time after work.

I posted a classifieds ad and got a client within a few days!

I made around $1,000 doing small projects for this client over the next few months until he didn’t need my services anymore.

I posted another ad but was unable to get anymore clients after the first one left.

The lesson I learned here is that having a valuable product/service doesn’t mean that you’ll automatically make sales.

First, you need to get specific on who your target customer is.

Second, you need to identify a specific problem they have.

Third, you need to figure out how your product/service solves that problem for them.

Then you can successfully enter the conversation already happening in their mind and position your product/service as the perfect solution to their problem.

These are “The 3 Pillars” and you MUST nail these down before taking any business past the “idea phase”.

Most businesses that fail are missing at least 1 of these things.

I was one of them.

I had no idea who my target customer was.

I didn’t identify a specific problem either.

I was just trying to sell my “Cad Drafting Services”.

But nobody wanted Cad Drafting Services.

They wanted a solution to a problem they were experiencing.

Maybe they were a self employed architect or engineer and needed someone to turn their sketches into blueprints...

Maybe they were a small drafting firm that just took on a big project and needed help to take on the additional workload...

Whatever the problem, my Cad Drafting Services were just HOW I could provide them with the solution.

There was a massive disconnect between my target customer and my marketing message.

I wasn’t speaking their language, so they never even noticed me.

But I didn’t understand this back then.

I just thought nobody needed my services.

So I gave up and moved onto the next big idea…

Like I said above, I had a motorcycle at the time, a Yamaha R1.

I was also a member of a motorcycle forum for enthusiasts of that particular motorcycle.

It was a pretty tight niche of around 65k people.

I noticed another member who was making unique custom exhausts and selling them to other members on the forum.

I also noticed that he didn’t want to make the exhausts anymore, but lots of members were still demanding them!

So there was all this demand and soon there would be no one supplying it.

I did some quick research and figured out how he was making the exhausts.

Turns out I could create something similar with a few parts purchased from Home Depot and a local auto parts store for around $25.

He was selling the exhausts for around $150 if I remember correctly.

For every $25 spent I’d get $150 back.

A 6x ROI on every exhaust I sold.

I made my first batch of exhausts by hand in my aunt’s garage.

Then I posted them for sale on the forum.

Before I knew it the orders were coming in and I had turned my aunt’s garage into a little exhaust factory.

This time around I did all “The 3 Pillars” correctly:

I knew who my target customer was: They were owners of the Yamaha R1 motorcycle.

I identified their problem: They wanted a unique exhaust system that would set them apart among all their riding buddies upset their neighbors.

With this, I was able to successfully position my exhaust system as the solution to get them what they wanted.

I even executed on the idea rather quickly instead of spending too much time over analyzing.

Because of this I got fast results.

I was even able to duplicate this business model in another small niche making custom truck grill inserts for Dodge Dakota pickup trucks - the truck I drove at the time.

I made some decent side income with this but I always treated it as a “side hustle”.

I never took it seriously so it just fizzled out over time.

I could have easily figured out how to scale it up by reinvesting some of the profits back into improving my product and hiring a small team to make the exhausts.

Then I could focus on the marketing and running the business.

But I didn’t.

Looking back it just didn’t dawn on me that this was even possible.

I lacked the vision and abundance mindset needed to even think that big.

Eventually I got tired of making the exhausts and just stopped.

But I still get emails from people looking to buy one even to this day!

Next I decided to pursue my love for cars by starting a mobile auto detailing business.

I can’t remember why I thought this was a good idea.

Especially after getting burned out on the motorcycle exhaust and truck grill making experience.

This time around I would again do all “The 3 Pillars” correctly, but I would make a whole new set of mistakes.

However, these mistakes would set in motion the next big shift in my life.

Over the next 6 months I spent hundreds of hours doing research on forums, taking courses, planning and learning all I could about the auto detailing industry.

I even saved up enough money to buy some basic equipment and supplies.

Since this would be a business serving local customers, I realized I would need a website.

I didn’t have thousands of dollars to pay someone to do it for me, so I watched YouTube videos and learned how to build my own.

Then I learned about Search Engine Optimization and how it was important for my website to be on the first page of Google when my ideal clients were searching for a local detailer.

After 6 months of constant “setup work”, I launched the business with my website on the first page of Google.

I got my first client pretty quickly - a local used car dealer.

After my first day on the job I realized how much it actually sucked to clean melted M&Ms and coffee stains out of a stranger’s stinky minivan lol

So….6 months + hundreds of hours planning + $3,000 investment = $50 in return

I was having so much fun researching, planning and developing the marketing plan for the business that I never actually thought to ask myself the obvious question:

“Is detailing dirty cars something I’ll actually enjoy doing?”.

Turns out that was a big NO.

I went back home that night, listed all of my equipment for sale and moved on to the next thing.

At this point I was pretty upset at myself because I had invested so much into getting the auto detailing business off the ground with practically nothing to show for it in the end.

Not to mention, all of my “failed” side businesses before this.

But then I looked back on all the new skills I had learned from these “failures”.

I learned how to identify problems across different markets.

I could instantly see how to solve those problems with new product/services.

I could see how those product/services needed to be marketed to get people to buy them.

I learned how to do basic graphic design.

I learned how to build my own websites.

I learned how to rank on the first page of Google.

I learned how to analyze my competition and figure out ways to beat them.

I learned the basics of copywriting and marketing.

And not only did I enjoy these things but I was pretty darn good at them too!

Suddenly I had an epiphany.

What if I could help other businesses with their marketing?

What if I could help them get more customers?

So I decided to start a marketing agency.

Only thing holding me back from going “all in” was the safety net of my job.

But that would soon change.

Summer 2009.

I bought a small house with my girlfriend at the time and moved out of the convenience store apartment.

Within 3 months we were fighting non stop and ready to kill each other.

She left for work one morning and never returned.

We had been together for 9 years which meant she saw everything we just talked about go down in real time.

Plus there were a lot more “failed” business attempts that aren’t worth mentioning here.

Point is, she thought I was just wasting my time with this stuff.

While I was building vision boards and picking out the car I’d be driving in a few years, she was telling me to stop dreaming and “come back down to reality”.

But that just made me want to continue even more.

There was no way I was throwing in the towel and accepting a life of mediocrity.

This caused lots of fights which ultimately caused her to leave me for another dude.

I was crushed so I used up about a week’s worth of paid vacation time to stay at home and cry.

A week later I show back up to work and find a voicemail from my boss saying he wants to meet with me.

He tells me our company is losing work due to the economy.

A bunch of people were laid off while I was gone but I was one of the “lucky ones” who would get to keep their job.

Only catch is my hours were getting cut down from 40 to 32 per week.

I was still paid hourly so that was a 20% cut in pay.

With my girlfriend’s second income gone and a 20% cut in pay, I started to get pretty freaked out.

There just wasn’t enough income coming in to pay all the bills.

But, the universe works in mysterious ways.

Remember how I just told you we bought a house?

Well, a big motivator for us buying that house was The Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008 which gave first time home buyers a tax credit worth up to $7,500.

That tax credit was my way out of this mess.

The timing worked out almost perfectly to the point where it seemed like it was supposed to happen this way.

I decided that when that check arrived I would quit my job and go full time with my marketing agency.

I also sold my truck, motorcycle and anything else I could find around the house to cash in on.

I bought a cheap car for $1,100.

When it was all said and done I had about $10k saved up.

Enough to cover living expenses for 4-5 months.

Then I went into work late at night, sent a resignation email to my boss and left my day job for the last time.

I burned the bridges on the job I had worked so hard to get knowing it would force me to go ALL IN.

There was no other choice but to be successful with my marketing agency.

But it wouldn’t be that easy.

The next 9 months would be among the most difficult times in my life.

Within 5 months I was almost entirely out of money.

Again I did all “The 3 Pillars” correctly.

And I was getting clients here and there from friend and family referrals and Craigslist ads.

But I had no way of getting new clients consistently.

This meant I had to hustle every day and I had no time to breathe or even think!

Not to mention, I was still trading my time for money.

Whenever I got a new client, I would need to invest 40-60+ hrs of my own time into creating their website.

Because I undervalued my services and still had a “broke mindset”, I was underpricing myself.

My margins on a website were low so I eventually stopped outsourcing the building of the websites to contactors to put more in my pockets.

I went back to doing everything on my own and as a result I created a trap for myself.

My marketing of “cheap websites” was attracting what I now call PITA (Pain In The Ass) clients.

These clients were more trouble than they were worth.

They were always trying to haggle me on my already low prices.

They were always trying to get extra services for free.

They called me all the time with annoying questions and unreasonable demands.

They almost never paid their bills on time.

And they always seemed to complain about everything.

Then I got a new idea…

What if I built the websites to my own specs first, then sold them to people?

This idea of “Pre Built Websites” would allow me to “Productize” my web design services and remove 90% of the complexity from my business.

It would strip away the need for building custom websites.

No more back and forth with clients and trying to meet their demands.

I would just build the website, sell it and walk away.

After the Local Flip Formula experience I fired all of my local agency clients with exception to a handful of my favorite ones who didn’t require much maintenance.

Over the next 6 years I went on a digital product launch rampage and as a result built a name for myself as an expert in the internet marketing niche.

I reinvested some of the profits from digital products back into creating better products.

I diversified my income by promoting other people’s products as an affiliate and added another 6 figures per year in revenue into my business.

Eventually my competitors started to take notice and asked if I wanted to help with the launch of their digital products as a “Product Launch Consultant”.

I would just help them with the marketing strategy and sales copy, put my name on the product and get a percentage of all sales.

This is what’s known as a JV (Joint Venture) and would prove to be a very profitable thing for me for the next couple years.

One of these JV deals netted me over $70k and only required a few days of actual work on my part.

However, not all of these JV deals were sunshine and rainbows.

Because it was so easy to make money w/ JV deals, my judgement got clouded and I became more focused on how much money I could make instead of the actual quality of the product the customers were getting.

2 out of my last 6 JV deals got shut down due to DMCA complaints.

The vendors - one knowingly and the other unknowingly - used source code from another product that they didn’t have the rights to.

Part of my job was to evaluate the product being sold in full detail and do my own due diligence to ensure product quality and originality.

I blindly trusted my partners and breezed through this process and paid the price in the form of hundreds of thousands in lost revenue and lots of angry customers.

This was a big lesson learned.

Never put profits before the customer.

EVER.

Always and in everything you do, ask yourself: “Is this what’s best for the customer?”

If the answer is no, change your approach because it will bite you in the ass eventually.

Regardless of these 2 failures, everything else I touched seemed to turn to gold.

I was good at creating these digital products and I was even better at marketing them.

The explosion in income meant I could build the 3,000 square ft house and garage I always wanted.

I bought my childhood dream car.

Not the RX7 but a yellow Lamborghini Gallardo.

Driving my Lamborghini around Southern Maine attracted lots of unexpected attention so I mounted a GoPro to the car and start making Youtube videos about my experiences.

One of those videos went viral and before I knew it, I had a YouTube channel with over 30,000 subscribers.

Then people started asking me the same question I asked my dad about Mike’s RX7…

“How do you afford this car?”.

The idea of being able to provide others with my own answer to a question that changed the course of my life forever was something that gave me a deeper sense of purpose.

Up until this point everything I had been doing was to fulfill my own wants & desires.

I grew up poor and I just wanted to make lots of money and buy cool shit I wanted as kid.

And there’s nothing wrong with that.

(Setting onto my soapbox real quick…)

Yes.

It’s OK and totally normall if the reason you want to start a business is to make lots of money and buy cool shit.

You not only deserve to make lots of money, but it’s your OBLIGATION to.

Most people have a belief that making lots of money is a bad thing.

But it’s actually a good thing.

Not only for you and your family, but for the entire world and our economy as a whole.

You see, when you start making lots of money, you’ll want to buy things with that money.

You might buy a new house.

A car.

Maybe you’ll travel the world with just a laptop and a backpack and stay in a new place every few months.

But if you’re smart, you’ll also reinvest some of that money back into your business.

You’ll spend money on advertising, hire a team, invest in better tools & equipment.

All of these things are good because every dollar you spend is another dollar someone else earns.

Did you get that?

As an entrepreneur, you help power the economy in this way.

Even if you just save the money and let it stack up in your bank account, you are contributing.

Imagine you have $100k and you deposit it into your bank account.

Now that bank can lend that $100k to someone else.

Maybe that someone needs that $100k loan to start a business of their own.

The bank obviously doesn't take your money and give it to the other person.

They just create another $100k out of thin air.

And the cycle continues.

Sound crazy?

It’s how the banking system works.

That’s why I can only laugh when I hear people talk about how wealthy people are evil.

Most people aren’t educated enough to know that it’s actually the opposite.

Being broke is not only bad for you and your family, it’s bad for the entire world.

Being broke is not noble.

It’s downright stupid and irresponsible.

The only way making lots of money would be a bad thing is if you just buried it underground and never did anything with it.

(Stepping off my soapbox…)

When I started coaching startup entrepreneurs it was originally something I was doing in my spare time in between running my original business.

But eventually I had to make a decision.

Do I continue running my original business or do I go all in on the coaching business?

Splitting my energy up between both meant I could only be 50% as good as I could be.

I had to pick one.

I chose to go all in with the coaching business.

This might sound a bit crazy but I literally walked away from a business that was producing 7 figures in annual gross revenue.

I kept between $200k-$300k of that after all affiliates and expenses were paid.

But it was time to get to that next level and make a bigger impact.

Transitioning from the original business to the coaching business forced me to step back and take a look at the business I had built up to this point.

I discovered there were some things I needed to improve on if I wanted to transition from selling $47 digital products to a coaching program that could command a 4 figure price tag.

The first thing up was my traffic source.

Once an online business has successfully dialed in “The 3 Pillar”, making sales just comes down to 2 things:

Traffic and Conversions.

Traffic just means you need a consistent way to get your offer in front the right target audience.

You can reach these people by running ads on Facebook, YouTube, doesn’t matter.

Conversions just means you need a system that can predictably convert some of those people into paying customers once they’ve clicked your ad.

I had always relied on affiliates for all my traffic in the original business.

This meant that while we were making good money, it was coming in an unpredictable manner.

One month we could get 20 great affiliates to send traffic and generate $200k in revenue.

The next month we might only get a few affiliates and make $15k.

It was like an up and down roller coaster and I always worried about what would happen if we couldn’t get any affiliates one month.

It was clear, I needed to learn how to generate my own traffic so I could generate consistent sales of my new coaching program.

The next thing on the list was my conversion system.

Selling a $47 product is relatively simple.

You need a well written a sales page and a video.

Then you send traffic to it and some people buy.

But when you’re selling a coaching program with a 4 figure price tag, it ain't that simple.

I needed to get good at webinars.

I needed to learn high ticket sales.

I needed to learn how to serve all my clients in the most efficient way possible without burning myself out or trading my time for money.

At first I thought I could learn it all myself.

So over the next 6 months I did 5 different webinars but struggled to make sales of my coaching program at the high ticket price point.

I was banging my head against the wall trying to figure out why…

I had years of experience under my belt and had sold millions of dollars online with the stuff I was teaching in my program.

My program was actually helping people and I even had some success stories to prove it!

I went from thinking I was big shot marketing genius to feeling like a failure all over again.

But giving up and returning to the old business model with my tail between my legs wasn’t an option.

So, I did what I should have done 6 months prior and invested over $20,000 in business mentors to teach me the skills I needed to get my high ticket coaching business off the ground and making consistent sales.

Before I knew it I was bringing in new coaching clients at the high ticket 4 figure price point.

In case you can’t tell, if I find a problem in my business I can’t move on without fixing it the “right way”.

This is not always the quickest or easiest way to do things.

But it’s how to win the “long game”.

And when it came to learning how to do Facebook ads, I had to take the long game approach.

You see, my plan was once I learned Facebook ads, I would pass that knowledge down to my students by adding it into my coaching program.

But I didn’t want to learn Facebook ads by selling my coaching program.

I didn’t want to be one of those people teaching Facebook ads by showing you how they are selling their course where they teach you about how to do Facebook ads.

Does that make sense?

There’s no real value in that.

I decided the best way to learn Facebook ads was by throwing myself into the trenches and doing it for other businesses.

Yep.

You read that right.

I returned to my local marketing agency roots and started a small Facebook advertising agency.

First, I found some small local businesses who wanted more customers.

Then, with the help of my mentors I created a Facebook ad campaign that generated customers for them.

One of my first clients was a small auto detail shop in Pennsylvania.

I was able to generate over 24 new customers and $7,000 in new auto detailing jobs within 3 days.

This experience was a win/win for me.

I was learning a new valuable skill that I absolutely needed to get to the next level.

And, I was making money in the process because businesses were paying me to do these ad campaigns for them!

And that brings us to today where I’m dedicated to helping my students in my 2 signature coaching programs:

As you just learned, I got my start by doing “done for you” digital marketing services for other businesses.

Right now every business wants to be on Facebook.

Facebook just so happens to be the most powerful ad platform in the world and still the most cost effective for generating customers for local businesses.

If you are a newbie just getting started and don’t have any specialized skills or knowledge, I recommend starting here.

I talk to a lot of people who think they need to have experience w/ Facebook ads to do them for local businesses.

The truth is clients don’t care about that stuff.

They only care if you can generate results for them in the form of new customers.

You can learn that part in a few days following a proven process.

And since you won’t be underpricing your services like I did, getting to $10k /mo can be achieved with a handful of clients or less.

Oh, and no PITA clients.

Click here to learn more about my Agency CoPilot program.

If you are someone who has valuable skill to offer the world, I recommend starting a high ticket coaching program.

I see so many smart people who are extremely knowledgeable and passionate on a subject pumping out content on social media yet they are scraping by every month.

Most coaches and experts are broke because they don’t know how to properly monetize the value they provide their clients.

Like YouTubers and content creators who are scraping by on peanuts from ad revenue…

Or begging their audience for a few bucks a month by opening a Patreon account...

The ones who are smart enough to offer coaching are still trying to do it on a 1 on 1 basis and are massively limiting their growth potential…

Then there’s the experts who are trying to get by selling low ticket products or books…

Or speakers who spend too much time on the road away from family to speak at events…

There’s a smarter way to turn your knowledge into a consistent 6 or even 7 figure income, and it starts with creating highly scalable group coaching program.

Click here to learn more about my Scientific Influence program.