How I Went from Minimum Wage to Millionaire - and How You Can Too

Today we're gonna talk about how I went from minimum wage to millionaire and how you can too. My name is Eric Siu and I'm here to level up the world. And we have a holding company called Leveling Up that has a portfolio of different companies in there. All right, so let's talk about this. I am going to give you a timeline on how my, I guess my career went and how you can kind of repeat the same thing. And in groups like YPO or EO, these are kind of entrepreneurial organizations. There's a protocol known as Gestalt protocol, and that is basically when you share experiences. So what I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna share experiences with you and I'll give you kind of my thoughts and then you can take it for what it is. You can interpret it based on kind of, uh, you know, your own thoughts and your own experiences, right? Because sometimes giving direct advice, well, that's direct advice in the context of my world, right? So that's something you can look into as well. So I'm gonna take out my iPad of truth and justice over here. And so when I think about my first job, well, my first job was actually I was making, I think, $8.25. And you know what? I was actually not proud of this job, but I was— I went to this warehouse and my friend said, hey, they'll pay you like under the table cash, right? So I was making $8.25 putting stickers on top of expired dates. Okay. So I put new dates on top of expired dates. So not proud of this. I was 17 years old, so I just needed money, right? So First job was, was, let's just call it stickers. Okay, so stickers, and I was making $8.25 an hour. And after that, I mean, I went back to college and I got a job doing tech support. So I worked for this company called Mitchell International. And so let's just call it support. And they were paying me, I believe, $15 an hour or something like that. So good for a college kid, I guess. The only problem was I had to drive all the way like 30 minutes over there from my house. And then one day it was raining and I was just like, you know what, I don't feel like going to work. And then I got fired. So it wasn't exactly the best fit. So that's the first job where I got fired, by the way. Let's put this out here, fired. And then my next job after that, I was working at Circuit City. So this was the Best Buy competitor and Best Buy has Geek Squad, right? So Circuit City had Firedog. So I was— this was also support as well. Let's just call it support. tech support. So, you know, I enjoyed computers and all that, right? So makes sense for me to just do support. So support again, and I think I was making $22 an hour here. So I was, I was making more money, right? Then I had to go back to college. So I said, hey, you know, I'm gonna quit. And then when I came out of college, this was right after the financial crisis. This is in 2008 or so. And the only job I could get coming out of a good public college called UC San Diego And I was doing data entry. Okay, so data entry, if I do the math over here on data entry, I think it's $35,000 divided by 20, $1,870. So that's— I went down actually. So I had a salary, but I went down to $1,677. But, you know, it became like a— it was a $35K salary. And then what happened after? So this is the big level up here. Okay, so we kind of got to this age. So we went from age 17 to about age 22 or so. And then I started to learn digital marketing. And after I started learning digital marketing, I really never looked back. So my friend Christina, who now works at Airbnb, she told me about this, this digital marketing thing. And she was interning for this. I think she was working at this clothing company and she was interning on the side learning SEO. And I was like, okay, I'm going to start doing that. So I actually ended up getting an internship unpaid while I was working full-time at the data entry company. And from there, I was able to level up and get my first job. So 2, 3 months after the internship, I was eating this digital marketing thing up. So by the way, to me, digital marketing was like playing games. I have a book called Leveling Up, and it's about mastering the game of life, and it's about looking at life as a game. And digital marketing to me is a game. Business to me is a game. And so whatever you end up doing, if you can look at it as a game, it feels that way. It feels engaged. You feel like you have a sense of flow. My God, you're gonna be unstoppable, right? Because it's just fun to you. People that aren't having fun, they're just— they're not gonna be as engaged, but you're fully engaged. So after that, in the first— I would say if we go back to my iPad over here, after learning digital marketing, I got my first marketing job. So let's call it marketing manager. And then from there, I was making $45K. So now we're going salary. Okay, so $45K salary. And then what happened afterwards was I got offered a job at an e-commerce company. So e-com manager, I was an SEO manager actually. And then I was making, I think, $55K a year salary. And keep in mind, I want to say this too. I started learning digital marketing and I specialized in SEO first, and then I gradually started to learn the other, the other elements. So I became a T-shaped marketer. The problem I think is when you specialize too much, you leave yourself open to other risk, right? You want to diversify yourself so you can kind of speak the lingo, you can switch when you're speaking to other people. Because I understood paid media, I understood CRO, I understood copywriting, all these kind of marketing disciplines, email marketing as well. For my first marketing job, I was more of a generalist. I, whenever I spoke to specialists in other areas, when I went to this ecommerce company, I could talk the lingo with them. By doing that, they respected me more and we were able to kind of build a better relationship that way. You're able to earn more trust when you're able to do that. So when you're able to switch like that into different conversations on different topics, or maybe a conversation is much more professional versus kind of more casual, you have a skill that many other people don't. So keep that in mind too. So I want to tell you too, in my first year after learning marketing, I think I switched 4 or 5 jobs. And so the next job, A month later, I was like, this e-com thing, I think this company, it's too slow for me. I just don't want to do this anymore. So then what I did was I went to this agency. So I became an SEO link builder. All right. So I started going deeper into SEO. Here, I actually took a pay cut. When you're leveling up in your career, it's not always necessarily about the pay. Some people tie too much of their self-worth to the pay. I was more interested in the growth opportunity, right? And if you're able to look at things from that lens, then you're going to be leveling up past other people. You see what I did there? So I think I bumped down to $47K or so, but I really enjoyed what I was doing. I actually ended up staying there 3 or 4 months, which was my longest tenure job this early in my career before I got offered $75,000 to become an SEO strategist. Okay. So $75K. So I went to, so I became an SEO strategist. And then what happened was I got bored at this job too. So you see the trend here, I keep getting bored, right? If you find that you're not growing anymore, it's worth asking yourself, should I still be here? Because the logic that my parents gave me growing up was that you should stay at a job long-term, you know, you should stay for 4 or 5 years or so and you should get pension. And that's fine, they give you that advice, but keep in mind, this is why I mentioned earlier, if people are giving you advice, it's based on what they know, it's based on their experiences, and you have to ask yourself, are their experiences up to date? Your parents love you, your friends, family, they love you, but you gotta make good decisions for yourself based on information that you collected for yourself. Okay, so not relying on kind of your heroes growing up, but really again thinking for yourself. Okay, so here I actually got fired because I got bored. So I started to start my own consultancy here and I started actually getting some clients on the side too. And I was doing so well for one client. In fact, I was using a company, using a platform called Elance, which is now known as Upwork. So I worked for a company, a t-shirt company on the side, and they're paying me, started at $25 an hour, then it went up to $50 an hour. And eventually, they liked the work that I was doing so much that they offered me $250 grand to move to Philadelphia and with like 5% profit sharing or something like that. And you know, obviously my mom didn't want me to go, and I was like, Philly? I don't know about Philly. I don't know about the cold, right? I'm from LA, and then right now I live in Miami. So I was like, I don't know about that, right? But anyway, I continued to work with them, so I just wanted to let you know too that doing stuff on the side, you build up more experiences, which is great. And when I think about the leveling up organization as a whole, we actively encourage side hustles because you learn so much on the side. And if the side hustle takes off, great, great for you. And then maybe you can go off and do your own thing. My other entrepreneur friends actually tell me that it's actually not a good thing to tell my people that, but I don't want to hide these things, right? If you want to go for it, by all means go for it. And if my mission is to level up the world, then I have to say this stuff. Um, so that's a side note. So anyway, I got fired from this one. So you can see I got fired. I got fired from this one for being motivated. The other one I got fired for being lazy. Okay. And then what happened afterwards was I, as I was posting more, I was posting, working on the side on Elance. And I was also, I posted on what, something to Quora. So I was answering questions on question and answer sites and that platform was growing. And I answered a question and then someone offered me a $30,000 a month retainer for SEO, which is powerful. And I got a couple of clients that way. But then I got offered a job to basically become the VP of marketing for a startup. It was an online education startup. So I became a VP of marketing and I had never done this before. I didn't know how to manage people, didn't know really how to manage a marketing team. And all of a sudden I had 10 people under me. This, I was basically making $100K and then I got equity. So plus equity. And keep in mind, I'm like 26 years old here. And then like up here, I'm like 17 years old. Let's just do it like that. And so at this time, okay, I ended up working at this company for about 8 months or so. I love the company, love the product, love the mission. A lot of the people on the team, these are world-class people. They could easily have gotten a job at Twitter at the time, Facebook, which are super hot companies, which are still pretty good companies right now. And I was just super humbled to be a part of this mission. You know, a month into the job, actually, the CEO said he'd have to fire me if I didn't hit numbers. And, you know, you also learn a lot there too, because you can either crumble and cry about it, or you can do something about it and use it as a moment of growth. And thankfully, I picked the latter and we're able to hit numbers there. But, you know, keep in mind, like, people are gonna have different expectations for you too. Now we come all the way up, and I'm gonna kind of fast forward this, but at 27 years old, I came in to help save a failing agency. Called Single Grain, so I became the chief operating officer, the number two. And so here, I was basically getting paid, I think, like 120k or something like that. But I also had equity in the company. And then what happened afterwards was six months into it, all the other partners wanted out. And then this is logic. My brain told me that I should get out too. And then even the partners, Neil, my podcast co-host, actually said I should get out too. So Like there's no brand equity, there's nothing here. And so what I want to tell you here is, look, if there's an opportunity, if there's an opportunity for you to place an asymmetric bet, meaning that your upside is really big and your downside is kind of capped and it's really not that low at all, you take that bet. Okay? And then you also want to use the Jeff Bezos regret minimization framework, meaning that if you're 80 years old and you look back on your past, are you going to regret not having done this? When you look at it from that lens, then it's much easier to make decisions and it's much— you think clearer. So 6 months into it, I become the CEO of the company and I take over the company. And so I own 100% of it. And from there, my bet was if the company would work, I could take the cash flows and reinvest it into more durable sources of income or more exponential sources of income like software, education products, whatever. And if it didn't work out, I'd invest my time and it would be an MBA. That's how I look at it. Right? And that's how I structured a deal. I had bought some other companies before, but I bought basically some websites. But this was the first like company I bought, which had employees, people, and all that. That's a whole nother story. But from there, thankfully the bet worked out. And then now the way I look at things is I'm the founder/chairman, and we have a whole host of different things going on, right? So we have the agency, we have software, And we've bought other agencies as well. And we have events. We also have education. And we're also looking at buying other companies too. Okay? And I want to tell you too, when I became CEO of Single Grain, so Single Grain, we'll put it over here. I mean, it was years of eating poo poo, right? Stuff didn't work out, and our outside accounting firm even told me that it might be time to shut the company down. And, you know, I kept going, kept going, kept going. And thankfully, you know, people believed in me. And more so, the people that chose to work at Single Grain believed in me, and they were the ones that made things happen. So I'm very grateful for that. And we were able to slowly turn things around, took the company from, you know, went all the way down and then 6 figures to 7 figures and to 8 figures, right? And now combined with our— all the things that we have going on, it's a healthy 8 figures a year, right? And so You know, what I want to really stress here is when you think about the times where I wasn't making salary and I decided to kind of reinvest in the company and continue to, you know, eat poo poo, right? I continued to grow enterprise value. Okay, so I wasn't focused on profit. I wasn't trying to realize the gains and take it and profit because there was really no reason. I didn't have any obligations. There's no children, no family, right? Everything else is fine. No tuition, like college debt or anything like that, which I'm really grateful for my parents for. You know, you just continue to reinvest, you continue to invest in yourself, and eventually it just keeps compounding to a state where you become unstoppable. And so, you know, healthy 8 figures right now. And then we, you know, I have another video where we talk about how we're bootstrapping to $100 million in annual revenue. It's very possible if you work out the numbers that way. If you build a great culture, you build a great vision, you build something that's inspiring for people and you give people variety, then you're able to continue to compound over time. And you just have to be, be very patient. It's, it's really, having a sense of short-term urgency. So moving very quickly on things short-term, but understanding that great results take decades to realize. And again, I'm in my mid-30s right now. And so I'm super excited about what I'm doing, but this is how, this is how I did it, right? This is the path. And so if you enjoyed videos like this, please hit the subscribe and the bell button. I'm going to continue to pump out videos on wealth building, on careers, on growing an agency, on the NFTs that we're building out, a lot of cool stuff that we have going on. So That is it for this video. Leave in the comment what else you'd like to see me talk about and feel free to upvote those as well. And we'll catch you in the next video.