Jacob Morgan went from poverty in South Wales to co-founding Yorkshire Canine Academy, a dog-training business now making close to £2 million annually. He turned down a £60,000-a-year sports career after a conversation about his dog's health. With former rugby player Ian Kirk, he started with nothing but a website and video, learning that money is oxygen, strangers' opinions don't matter, and imperfect action beats waiting.
Chapters
Once upon a time, there was a poor little Welsh kid from South Wales studying at university without a single penny to his name. A kid whose parents literally had to pawn their jewelry just to get enough fuel money to drop him off at his student accommodation. And that kid was me. And this is the story of how that kid went from being a broke student to a dog trainer, and then ultimately to an owner of a multi-seven-figure business. I was on a sports scholarship that paid for my university, and we were, to put it mildly, fucking impoverished. So you can imagine how my parents felt when I told them that I wasn't going to use my education and I was instead going to become a dog trainer. I was walking away from a substantial salary of like, I want to say like £60,000 a year at the time, which at that time felt like a significant amount of money. But I just knew I had to do it. So I actually sat down with my best friend Ian Kirk, a former Leeds Rhinos player. There he is. And we decided to set up something ourselves and we established the Yorkshire Canine Academy and we started from absolute zero. We had no reviews, no followers, no clients, just a website, a video, and a belief that we could make it work. And to give you a metric of our growth, last year we did just shy of £2 million in revenue, I believe. And in January this year, uh, we turned over just shy of £250,000. Okay, lesson number 1: money is oxygen. And then he asked me, what's your favourite thing in the world? And of course I said, my dog Ranger. And he then looked me square in the eye and said, if Ranger needed a £10,000 operation tomorrow to save his life? Is he going to live or is he going to die? And that question changed the trajectory of my life because I knew deep down what the answer was, and I knew I had to change it. So that same conversation with Will dismantled another false belief I had: the fear of being judged. And I would never let a stranger on the internet dictate the size of house my partner lives in or the size of garden my dog gets to run around in. And neither should you. This journey from a piss-broke student to where I am today was built on all these 3 lessons and understanding that your money is a tool for your mission, understanding that the opinion of strangers is completely irrelevant, and understanding that action, however imperfect, is always better than inaction.
