How I Went From $75K In Debt to Being A Multi-Millionaire

My. One of my best friends was. We were having dinner a few months ago and we were talking about how hard it is to. How hard it was to grow my business. And he asked me, was it harder to get my business to six figures or harder to get to a million. And I thought about it. I was like, well, it took me, I don't know, like around five years to get to $100,000 a year. And then it took another five years to get to about a million dollars a year. So I'm like, maybe it was about equal. And then I started thinking about it and I'm like, no, it was way harder to get to the $100,000 because I had so much self doubt and worries and fears and I was a mess. And overcoming all that was so hard. I believe that coaching is the most powerful force for change on earth. I believe that success is inevitable if you're willing to do the work in the world and do the work on yourself. When I first started as a coach, my goal was if I could make $35,000 a year, which is the most I ever made at a job. If I could do that as a coach, I'm like, that would be heaven. But I also had gotten myself $75,000 in debt from a previous business I started. So I had a bunch of. So I had all this debt. So $35,000 a year was actually not cutting it, but I did. In my first year, I made $35,000 plus. And at the same time, it was not a consistent income. So there were some months I would make a bunch of money, some months I wouldn' money at all. I kept falling behind on my mortgage and my car payments. I was worried that my. That my house, that I'd lose my house. Not because I didn't want to lose my house, but because I was afraid if people. If I lost my house, that people would think I was a failure or I wasn't successful and then no one would want to work with me. I had all this shame tied up in seeming like I was successful, you know, that I got it all figured out, even though. And mostly because when I grew up, I grew up poor. I grew up on food stamps and welfare, and I got teased a lot for my clothes and my broken glasses and all that stuff. And I thought I was getting teased because of being poor. And we think the reason we get teased is because of whatever we're getting teased for for. Right? Getting teased for whatever. I mean, we've all. Who here ever got teased as a kid yeah. Who here ever got bullied as a kid? Who here like me also got bullied as an adult? Yeah. So we think it's the thing that we're being bullied for. But it has, I don't think it has to do with that. They're just looking for some reason, people just, kids just. And others just look for things that are different or unusual or people who are insecure. I mean if we're insecure, we're going to oftentimes attract situations. I know for me, my last job I ever had, I worked there for a while and there was this guy who worked there who was a total jerk and he would harass people that worked there. But he totally left me alone. He never harassed me. But then as time went by because I had started my other business, it was called Giftastic. I had Giftastic, but I hadn't been taking action on it. I had been procrastinating. I thought when I took that job I would work there for four months and then I'd be off on my own in my own business. And a year later I was still there, but only not taking any action in my business anymore. And a part of me was dying every day at that job because it was a job I hated. And eventually I got so weak inside that he started harassing me. And that. Thank God for that. You know, we think that everything is all like good and bad, but there is no good and bad because the bad is good too. Thank God for Charles harassing me because he got me off my butt. And to say, look, I can't stay, you know, a job I hate is bad enough. Being harassed is even worse. I've got to friggin do something about this, about this. I can't just sit around here, you know, that's when I hired my first coach. And as soon as I hired my coach, I started taking action in my business. Like I am no longer willing to procrastinate. I have to do something about this. And within a few months I quit that job. I was working for myself full time in my business. I got out of a relationship that wasn't working. I got back in shape and that's when I knew the power of coaching. So when I started my business and I was falling behind in my mortgage and I was so worried that people would find out that I'm not rich, I'm not super successful, I don't know what the hell I'm doing because I'm only 25 years old when I let go of all that. And I Just started focusing on helping people and learning to speak the language of clients, which is the language of results, and learning how to do introductory coaching sessions and actually get people to sign up. And things just turned around when I started getting stronger on the inside in my business, when I had my job still before I quit. As I started getting stronger, Charles stopped harassing me. And then I got the hell out of there. My boss, this is a job. I was getting paid to do nothing. Every day. I got paid to go to work, sit in front of my computer, and pretend to be working. The little work I did have, I found a way to just automate so I could just go to work. I had to make these spreadsheets every day. I'd just go to work and press a button, and the spreadsheets would make themselves. And then I could just sit around and surf the Internet secretly. Hopefully nobody would see that, you know? And then when I went to quit, my boss was like, we need you. And many people who wanted to work there part time were denied new moms who were like, hey, I want to come back, but can I work part time? No, no, no, no, no. But for whatever reason, my boss went to bat for me and was like, can we keep them full time, keep them part time? What if you. You know. And then she came to me and said, you can work part time, and you can work as many or as little hours as you want. You can come in whenever you want and leave whenever you want. And because I was getting paid to do nothing, I could actually go there and work on my own business and get paid by them. And I did that for about two months. And I was like, you know what? It just. It sucks being there. I'm like, I'm not doing it. It's not worth it. That's one of the best things you can ever do, is realize when something's just not worth it sometimes. Maybe it's a client that is like a crazy client. I've had only one of those in my career, but it's like, it's just not worth the money. It's just not worth whatever. Being willing to just walk away, even from big money. Sometimes it can be so crazy. Seems so crazy, but it's one of the best things you can do. So the early days of my coaching business were tough. Eventually, I cracked the code. I started making good money as a coach. And then other coaches wanted to know, what the heck are you doing? Can you help me? Hey, I want to hire you to coach me. You coach me to help me grow my business. And four out of the first five coaches to hire me, one on one, I was able to help them grow from zero to six figures within 18 months. One of them did it in 72 days. And that's when I knew, wow. All the things I learned through trial and error, through the school of hard knocks that I could share with other coaches and they could have success much faster than I did. And even still, I didn't jump into helping other coaches right away. I had some stuff in my mind just because it seemed like as soon as anybody learned anything about how to get clients, as soon as any coach learned anything about how to get clients, they were also teaching other coaches how to get clients. And for some reason I didn't want to be somebody like that. I don't know why. But eventually, you know, people wanted to know this stuff and so I decided to share it with more and more people. I started creating group coaching programs, created my first online training program that I thought was a total failure. And I killed it right after I started it, and then didn't launch another program for another year or so, but eventually launched free sessions that sell the client sign up system. And that's my number one best selling program. And it's probably the number one best selling program for how to get clients around. And then of course I've gone on to create live events and 39 or 40 other online training programs. I have three number one best selling books. I wonder if I have them here. Let me see if they're in my secret box. They are not, but I will show them to you later. And I have a book deal with Hay House and I have my new book, personal growth book coming out in August called Abundance Unleashed. I was coaching one of my clients yesterday and she asked me something about like setting goals and like, do you set like what gives? What? Where do you come up with the ideas for your goals or dreams and stuff like that. It's like, is it just divine this? And because I do all this spiritual stuff too, which I'll tell you about in a minute, and I said, you know, mostly other people do something and I get jealous and I think I want that, I want to do that. You know, I heard of somebody having a million dollar business doing this kind of stuff that, you know, having a coaching business empire type of thing. And I was like, I want a million dollar business. I heard of people having. Leading personal growth or spiritual growth events. I mean, not interesting to hear about that. I went to many of them. You know, I did the work with Byron Katie up on stage with Byron Katie. I went to see Abraham Hicks. You guys know Abraham Hicks. I got to ask questions of Abraham. I went to the pyramids with Don Miguel Ruiz, who knows Don Miguel, the author of the Four Agreements. Yeah. And the Mastery of Love, which is my favorite. And I've done, you know, gone to training events with Dan Millman, Wayne Dyer, Deepak Chopra, Tony Robbins. Traveled the world with Tony Robbins and his a mastermind with some of my Platt brothers and sisters. And, you know, I've studied a ton, but I see other people have things and I'm like, I want that. Other people had masterminds. I was like, I want a mastermind. You know, so whatever inspires you, whether it's jealousy and envy or divine whatever, you know, whatever gets you in the game, right? Whether it's somebody kicking your butt and harassing you every day, like Charles. Sometimes pain is a bigger motivator than pleasure. Whatever gets you out of bed. Whatever gets you in the game. Thank you. Thank you. So it was harder to get by far to get my business to $100,000 a year than it was to get my business to a million a year and now multi millions a year. And over the last few years, I've earned a couple of these suckers. These are Inc. 5000 awards for fastest privately held companies. And getting one is an awesome milestone. To get two is more than twice as awesome because to do significant growth year in, year out is not too many people have two and very few people have three, which I do not have my third one yet. So that's my first one from 2015. There's my one from 2016, and I'm pretty darn sure we're going to get one for 2017. They're going to announce it next month in August. So. Yes, thank you. And I saw people getting on the Inc. 5000 list and I was like, I want that. So whatever it is that you want, you can have it. I believe success is inevitable. All you have to do is set a goal, decide to have it. Don't hope to have it. Don't dream to have it. Don't wish to have it. Decide to have it. Take consistent action, work on yourself, and never give up. That's the tricky part, that never give up. It's always darkest before the dawn. And you know, in my mastermind, it's called Biggs Big Success VIP mastermind. Yeah. Go bigs. You know, we've had some people recently who've had like some dark moments, dark times, and One of our peeps did all this work to create a program, create the webinar for it, did all this stuff to get people to it, and she didn't get any sales. And she did this whole sequence, and she closed the cart and got no sales, and she was freaking out. And it's tough when your clients are failing or at least feel like they're failing, you know? And I told her a few things, you know, of encouragement. Number one, you know, this is your first swing at bat, right? Like, don't give up. When I did my first info product, I made three sales for $39. And I thought that was a complete failure. And I never promoted the program again. It was how to get clients from workshops and speeches. And I sent one email, I sent out an article about something else, and then at the very bottom, I had a little blurb for the program, and I had a tiny list of under 500 people, and three people bought it for $39. That's like a huge win. And I felt like a failure. And I quit that project. I didn't quit on my business, but I quit that. I was like, oh, that's. I don't know how to do this. I don't know how to make it work. You know, it's. We plant a seed, we water it, it starts to sprout, and then we're like, stamp that out. Die. Why aren't you an oak tree? I'll kill you. Never going to do that again. And it wasn't another year until I decided to try again, not realizing that I was actually successful. And if I thought, wow, what if I send more emails to promote this? What if I send a standalone email making an offer? What if I add in a special bonus? What if I. I mean, there's so many things I could have done to, like, amp that sucker up, put some more water and sunshine on it, put some fertilizer on it, get that thing to grow some more. But instead, I stomped it out, and I was afraid that's what my client would do. And other people in our group gave her a lot of support, emotional encouragement. And one of the things that I believe is that when we are neutral, when we're peaceful, when we're joyful, we are a magnet to what we want. When we're fearful, frustrated, angry, we repel. We push away the things we want. And so I could feel her devastation, and I was like, you know, you know, this is our whole philosophy. So whether I said it or not in that post, which I don't Recall. But it's like, work through your stuff, get to peace. And then like the next day she posted, omg, I just got a sale. And then she got, I don't know, three, five, a bunch of sales, you know, not making a million dollars or anything, but like bam. Now it went from a seed to a sapling. And one of the things that I believe is if you can make $1, you can make a million dollars. If you can make one sale, you can make more sales. People used to ask me all the time, like, when should I quit my job and go to coaching full time? And I used to say, well, you know, everybody's different. You should probably save up a bunch of money in your bank and get yourself into being very fiscally conservative and be careful and all that stuff. And I'm like, I didn't frickin do that. Like I went from, I got myself, I quit my job, got myself $75,000 in debt, quit my business and started my coaching business. And I started thinking about it, I'm like, you know what, if you can make one or two sales, if you can get one or two coaching clients, then you know, quit your job, go into coaching full time. One of my good friends is a musician and he was making more. Some months he would make more money with his music than he was at his job. And he was working 40 hours a week plus another 10 hours a week of drive time. So that's 50 hours a week making this amount of money. And then with his music business working maybe 10 hours a week, sometimes maybe 20 hours a week, he would make, sometimes make even more. But he was afraid to quit his job. And I'm like, quit, quit, quit, quit, quit, quit, quit. You know, logically it's like if you're making somewhere around the same amount of money, some months even more, and some months, maybe a lot less, maybe even some months none. But if you have this thing going from working 10 to 20 hours a week, imagine if you could also have that other 50 hours a week and just freeing up your energy from that whole thing and having your mind in focus 100% on something else. I mean, if you have no reserves and no ability to use credit cards for a couple months, so you have a little bit of Runway, you know, then maybe don't quit. After you get your first or second client, maybe you need a third or fourth or whatever the number is. Obviously do what's right for you. My number one advice that trumps everything I will ever teach is always trust your intuition and act on it. Follow that. So either do the things I recommend or do the things that your intuition recommends. But always trust your intuition. Finally, eventually he thought, well, I'm going to save up Once I get this amount of money in my bank, then I'll quit. Finally. He did quit before he got that far. And he just took off. And then now he's created an empire, A coaching business empire. Teaching other musicians how to make money full time with their music or even make full time money working part time with their music. One of his programs is called part time musician full time income. Yeah. And he's built a big business. He does events that generate a quarter of a million dollars per live event. He's crushing it. And most people would think you can't make money coaching starving artists. I have another client who actually did coach painters and artists and had a lot of success with that. We have. One of my clients now is a survivalist. And he coaches survivalists. And he just crushed it. He just offered his first mastermind. I'll let him tell you about it. He's going to be up on stage probably on a couple days from now. So you'll get to hear about it straight from the horse's mouth. Not that he's a horse. Success is inevitable if you're willing to do the work. If you work on yourself and you never give up. The only mystery is time. How long is it going to take? I don't know. But I will tell you. There is gold in your gold mine. There's gold in your gold mine. And sometimes you make get a little bit of gold and you're like, oh, awesome. That's your first client. You make some money, maybe launch your first program and you make some money. But there's so much more gold in that gold mine. And you never know how many times you're going to have to swing that hammer, swing that ax, swing that pick to get there. We don't know. Certainly there's things that help speed it up. You can learn the best mining techniques, get the best equipment. And that's what this event is about. Giving you the best techniques and the best tools to help you dig your gold mine, to help you build your empire. It gets easier. But what happens when things start getting easier is you take on bigger challenges. So then the challenge gets bigger and you start over and you're a beginner again. And you have to grow and get stronger. You have to get new capabilities, new capacities. And then there's going to be some people who just come right in and have super fast explosives. Success. That seems easy. And you might be jealous as I am of my friend who's a rock climber, new rock climber, and is already as good as I was after climbing a year, That's going to happen. Some people are going to have success faster than you. Let that inspire you. Don't let that discourage you. Everyone is on their own path. It took me four or five years to get my business to six figures. And then four out of the first five coaches who hired me to help them grow their business did it within 18 months. One of them did it in 72 days. Now I helped people do it even faster than that. One of our clients in Biggs did it in 30, 34 days. So there's going to be people who go faster, some people go slower. You never know. We are all on our path. And also consider the story of the tortoise and the hare. The hare gets way out ahead, but the hare eventually catches up and wins. So you don't know, somebody has some more success. They're, they're farther ahead, they're more advanced, but you keep plugging along. Who knows, five years from now, three years from now, a year from now, maybe 10 years from now, you might be way more successful than they are. And of course, comparing ourselves is not the best game to play. You want to compare yourself to yourself, compare yourself to your own progress. That's one of the things that you want to get in the habits of doing. It's one of the things that is. One of the gifts my wife brings to our relationship is she's always celebrating everything. We're always, you know, cheers to this, cheers to that, like all the time. And so looking back, you know, if you're walking towards the horizon, you'll never reach it, but you'll make a lot of progress along the way. And if you keep looking at the. And that's what happens. We keep setting bigger and bigger goals. We need to stop and celebrate as we reach those. Some of those goals and even milestones towards those goals. This is the success arrow. One of my good friends for so many years. His dream is to be a millionaire, make millions of dollars. But he never had smaller goals. He only had the big goal, and he hasn't reached it yet. So people often wonder, like, well, how big of a goal should I set? Well, I think you should set a really big goal. A goal that just juices you, that gets you really excited, maybe even scares you. Right? Let's say, just for financial purposes, let's say it's $10 million. That's even. I haven't even done $10 million in a year. Oh, that's $10. How do you get to a ten million dollar a year business? You have to set smaller goals. Your first goal might be get your first client. One client. You know, they say the journey of a thousand steps begins thousand miles begins with a single step. Something like that. Yeah. So it's that first client might be the first one. Right. Then maybe it's to. It's a $5,000 month. Might be your next go. Maybe Then the next one is a $10,000 month. Then maybe the next one is 100k year, 250, 500, One million, five million. And you certainly can do 1 million, 2 million, 3. It doesn't have to go exactly like this, but this is just an example. You want to have milestone goals towards your big goal. If all you're doing is thinking about the big goal and you're never thinking about these intermediate steps, I think you're going to run into some trouble. So you want to think long term and short term. If all you do is dream about $10,000,000, $10,000,000, 10,000,000, but you're not actually doing anything to get yourself that first client, probably not going to happen. But you get that first client, then you work towards maybe having a 5k month or you're getting your second client. Right. Whatever it is, ten clients, then a ten thousand month, hundred thousand dollars in a year. Who here has at least one paying client so far? All right. Wow. That was like 75, 80% of the audience. Let's give it up to all of our coaches with clients. That's exciting. Congratulations. Yeah. And everybody is somewhere along that continuum, everyone in this room maybe hasn't gotten the first client, but everybody who's gotten your first client, you're somewhere, you're on the path. And even if you're not, just by being in this room, you're on the path. Everything that is hard will get easy. Climbs that used to be way above my capacity are so easy. Now when I rock climb, you know, a 59 or 510 a 59 or 5, 10 a, like those used to be really challenging and now those are mostly pretty easy. Now I'm climbing 5, 10Ds, 5, 11As. And now that my wife did a 511B, I had to go start climb some five 11B's, at least try them, give them a shot. So you are going to build a big empire. Right? That's why you're here. You are going to build a big empire, right. How about the people in the back? You are going to build a big empire, right? Are you sure? How big? Huge. Nice. 10 million. Nice. Yeah. Plus. Plus. Good. Yeah. So a friend of mine started her business like three years ago or so, three or four years ago and her business is already bigger than mine. It's like my friend, the climber who's already better than where I was and probably will pass me in the next six months. I mean, you never know, but yeah, probably that's okay. Things start hard, then they get easy. Some people things are easy right out of the gate. That's okay. God bless them. And maybe you're going to be one of those people. Right. But don't count on it. Hope for it, but don't count on it. Right. Don't depend on it. Yeah. What will a coaching business empire look like for you? So for me, I have online training programs. We do a big product launch once a year that does over a million dollars in a week. Has done over $2 million in a week, twice. I have three number one best selling books and a book coming out from Hay House with the book deal. And Hay House is going to be promoting it for me as well. I host incredible live events. Not only live events for coaches on how to build your coaching business, but I also host spiritual events, spiritual growth, personal growth events. One's called Instant Miracle Experience. Who here has ever been to imx? Nice. Yeah, I love that. Who here has been to imm? Nice. What? No cheers for that one. That one I think I love imm. I love imx but IMM to me is even better. And then I have another one called Instant Miracle mystic and that one I think is our best event. Yeah. So what else have I got going on in my empire? I have a team. I have high end masterminds. So we've got, I think about 35, 37 people in our high end mastermind bigs. Let's give it up for our bigs. We just got done spending three incredible days here right before you guys got here. And we rolled up our sleeves and we got deep. In fact, the theme of our last mastermind was go deep. To go big. And we went deep deep inside ourselves and deep inside the hearts and minds of our prospects. We're going to be sharing some of the stuff that we did with the bigs with you guys over these four days together because I want you guys to go deep, to go big as well. I also have a coaching team. We have. Do you know how many? 20, 22 coaches on our coaching team. I want you to create so much demand for your coaching that you can't possibly do it all yourself. Who wants that? And I have a team besides my coaching team. We have, we have 50 something, 50 plus people on our team. And I get to show up and do the fun stuff. Who here wants to be able to show up and do the fun stuff? Who here has some things on your plate that you need to do or that need to get done that you don't really love and don't really want to do? Who's got some of that? Yeah, so I don't know if you'll ever be able to completely get rid of it all and only do the fun stuff, but maybe, and definitely you can get more and more, you can orient your business more and more that way. But in order for you to be able to show up and do the fun stuff, you need other people to show up and do the fun stuff to them that they love that you don't love. We call it cake and cringe. The things we love are our cake. No wonder all my analogies are food. Got the cake and cringe. We got the chocolate covered strawberries and the medicine and the meat. Anyway, so we call it the cake and cringe. Things you love every day. You'd eat it up for breakfast, eat it all day long. That's your cake. And the stuff you don't love is your cringe. Right? But your cringe is someone else's cake. And you want your team doing the stuff they love and not doing the stuff that's their cringe as best as possible. And it's not, you know, my company's not a utopia. My position isn't, you know, absolutely perfect with where I'd never have to do anything that I don't want to do. But we orient it as much as possible that way. I want at least for my team, I want everybody to be at least 80% cake and only 20% cringe. And for myself, I want to be at least 90% cake. At least 90% cake. And I want that for you. I work part time. Typical week looks like this. I work on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday from 9 to 12:30. Wednesdays and Fridays I will sometimes work at 9, 9 to 10 or 9 to 11, maybe 9 to 12 sometimes. And that's it. Every now and again I have a tele class or group coaching call in the afternoon. So I might do a call or something like that. And then I do these, I lead these live Events I lead masterminds, I lead in person team meetings. So we fly our leadership team out to the Miracle Mansion, which is my second house on my street. That's my office. Fly them out and they come out and they work. Or we meet for three days. We go over what's going on, they give me updates, we do our future planning and then they go back and they carry most of that stuff out and we get back again every three months or so. And mostly what I do is those in person meetings and then coaching and training. Most of what I do. Sometimes I have to shoot videos. That's my cringe. Sometimes I have to watch and give feedback on videos. Also my cringe. Sometimes I write some copy which is actually cake. Sometimes I have to review other people's copy which is my cringe. But my life is pretty freaking amazing. My work life is amazing. My home life is incredible. I've got three amazing daughters. I have two homes on the same street. One is our house and the other one is the Miracle Mansion. And that's where I go to work. I work by myself most days. I have a personal assistant who does come in on Mondays and Tuesdays and works in the office as well. But everybody else works virtually. And I just bought a sexy new sports car. Got my Lexus LC500. It's a brand new car that just came out with it. I just got it a few weeks ago. Go on vacations. Earlier this year we went to Puerto Rico for a couple weeks. Go to Hawaii usually three or four times a week a month. Sorry, not a month, a year. Three to four times a day. We'll just fly back and forth. I love being on airplanes. Yeah, I have great friends. I'm surrounded by yea sayers. It's one of the keys to success. Surround yourself with yea sayers, not naysayers. When I was planning to quit my job, quit my job to start my business, everybody was so worried what are you going to do for insurance? Like I have big dreams. Like I'm not going to let my fear of not having insurance or having to pay for insurance make me not quit my job and start my own business. But it was really hard. Like all that energy. I felt like when I quit my job it's like I got out of the matrix because I was no longer like everyone else. I was no longer part of that group. Think of regular people who have jobs. And what was really hard for me when I first started my giftastic business because most of what I was doing every day was cold Calling companies to see if they would partner with me and let me sell their gift cards on my website. This was actually when gift cards were just starting to be new and it was mostly gift certificates. And the idea was to sell gift cards and gift certificates online or over the phone@gifttastic.com and so I had to call all these companies to try to win them over to say yes. And it was also lonely being by myself at my house, all by myself, by myself, alone. I'm an introvert, so I get energy by being by myself. But I'm also social and I really do love people. So I like being around people, especially people I know and people that are friends. But it was tough being by myself, making cold calls. But it was also great being free. There was something amazing about that. Who here works for themselves full time? Yeah. Awesome. Let's give it up to the full time, self employed, full time business owners. Congratulations. That is huge. That is huge. You guys know what I'm talking about. Can you relate to that? What do you want your life to be like? What do you want your business to look like? Let's take a moment, pull out your journal and your pen and let's take a moment and dream as big as you can dream. What do you want your business to be like? What do you want your life to be like? I'm now friends with many people that were once my mentors, people I so looked up to. Now call me for advice and coaching. Or just to hang out. That is awesome. What do you want? What's on your wish list? Let's take a few minutes and write down, Just let it all go. What do you want to create?