Why Should You Be An Entrepreneur? My Journey To Becoming a Millionaire #entrepreneur #business

Foreign. I wanted to start the hero's journey today, of course, with my companion, Senor Ruperto. You can see he's also in the photo behind me. But he's been with me for eight years of this journey. He was also with us through the pandemic where we went from the office with 25 people and then we had to come home. And you really hated that, didn't you? Welcome back, everyone. I wanted to introduce you to Rupert because he's a very important part of my life and the entire purpose of this video is for you to know, like and trust me. I'm an open book and I want to be as authentic as possible. I believe so much content's being consumed online nowadays, but people aren't really authentic. They show you the really great parts of their lives, but no one really ever talks about the really bad parts of your lives. And in my experience, the most engagement that I've gotten from people who follow me on the Internet is when I'm really vulnerable about the shitty things that are going on. And so I hope that my journey and sharing with you a quick, you know, five to 10 minute version of my entire story from being a child to where I am today. Feeling pretty darn successful, fun employed. My net worth finally is over eight figures and I feel like I have a lot of financial freedom. So let's dive right into this. I'm not going to take up too much of your time. I really want you to get into the courses. So I was actually kicked out of my house when I was 13 years old. I was a pretty good athlete, but if you gave me rules, I, I would try and fight them, bend them, break them, jump over them. And I was just a rebel. And I was really curious as well. And I had a little bit of adhd. I was moving really quickly and so I ended up moving with my aunt and uncle when I was 13 years old. I got into boxing when I was 16 years old. I've had 34amateur boxing fights. I released a lot of my anger by doing that. It was one of the most valuable things I ever did in my life. I graduated high school in 2007. I was a C and D student. The only thing I was really good at was math and that's really helped me out in my life that I'm living now. And so right after high school ended, I was working at a car dealership. My boss came down and said, josh, we can send you to school for this. It's a 10 month program. You'll get Your automotive mechanics certificate and then you'll start making $30 an hour. I was only making like 12 or $14 at the time. Sounded amazing. So I was like, yeah, I'm ready to start tomorrow. I went to school for 10 months. I graduated when I was a little bit young, when I was 17, but I did that. And within three months, finishing that program and working at the car dealership and seeing the, the 40 year olds that worked there and their quality of life, I knew that it wasn't for me. On a Thursday night, I went out to the bar with my friends and a guy pulls up in a Lamborghini. I remember this clear as day. Like, who is that guy? How's he got that car? He's only a few. He might be my age. He's maybe a few years older than me. I end up chatting with him. He's having a party. After I went to his party and I was like, dude, like Jonah Hill style and Wolf of Wall street, how can I get a job with you? He said, you can start on Monday. You'll be answering customer service tickets. They, they were doing affiliate marketing on the Internet. We sold all kinds of products. If you bought green acai berry or teeth whitening between the years of 2007 and 2012, those products probably were somewhere in our wheelhouse or came from us. In 2011, I had worked my way up. Basically I started at a customer service. Within a couple months I really fell in love with Google adwords. I completely self taught myself online. It's all Google gives the entire playbook away. And I started watching what they were doing. I loved the data analysis that they were doing and they were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a day on ads. I saw $1 million spent on ads in one day once when I was in my early 20s and when I was 21 and I'd worked there for a few years, the FTC broke in. Complete Wolf of Wall street moment. No joke. Windbreakers, guns pointed at us. Cell phones, wallets on the desk, don't touch your keyboard. We all thought they were joking. They weren't. They were fully serious. There was a lawsuit against us for $467 million for negative option marketing. You can go and Google this stuff. I had no ownership in the company. I was just an advertiser. That day we had 50 some employees. The next day we had four. I was one of those people that stuck around for a couple more years and I started to see that we were veering back into the place that had gotten us in trouble in the first place. And I really didn't want to be involved in any more depositions. Those things are terrifying. But, you know, this guy had become one of my really good friends. I was living with him at the time, and I lived with him for most of that five years as well. And we were really good friends. And I still friends with him to this day. But it was a huge learning for me. And I realized that I was like, I don't want to be involved in this anymore. And he said, josh, you have the skills to go out on your own and do this, but you can come back and work here at any time within the six months. And this guy probably still makes eight to nine figures a year. I swear to God, it's crazy. But he said, you have the skills to do this. You have six months, and you can come back and work for me, but after six months, I'll never hire you again. And that was the best thing that ever happened to me. And so I packed my Mazda 3 up, I moved to a new city to get away from my friends and focus on becoming an entrepreneur. I. I knew that I was going to start a Google Adwords agency. I already had multiple clients in the pipeline of who I could work with and run their Google AdWords for them. And the money was really good, too. For every dollar that I spent on Google Adwords and managed for someone else, I charged them 25% of that. And so very quickly, I went 50, 50 with a partner in this business. After 18 months, we had about half a million dollars in our bank account, and him and I decided to go our separate ways. So I'm 24 years old. I get a $250,000 check. I'd been making about 70 grand a year before that. And I bought a house, bought a Mercedes. Buying the house really opened my eyes to how much wealth is in real estate and how much value there is in the data in it. And that's what's led me on my journey to today. And the first kind of light bulb moment that I had when I went out on my own was I had studied Carfax. We'd ran AdWords accounts for Carfax. I realized that Carfax was acquired for billions of dollars. I was like, why don't we do a Carfax for houses? You could go on Zillow and Redfin and ReMax at the. You could only see properties that were for sale. You couldn't see there's only about 4 or 5 million properties on the market at any Given time in the United states and there's 155 million properties and I'm like, I can buy this data for one or two pennies maybe. How, how much can I get a sale for? How much do I need to charge for this if I make it a recurring subscription, what's my average order value or lifetime value of a customer if I only have to pay 20 to $30 for a conversion? Fast forward to today. I still own that business. There's 20,000 people paying $20 a month looking up properties on those websites. And how this has evolved was that business started to scale. I had employees. I realized that I wasn't really that passionate about it. In 2016, we were making money, not a ton of money. We were profiting a couple hundred grand a year. I'd maybe started paying myself 90 grand a year. I had five or six employees and we had a few users come out to us and we're like, hey Josh, we want to look up 500 properties a month, 1,000 properties a month instead of 20. And I was like, oh yeah, I'm sure I could build you something like that. But I don't really know how to build a B2B enterprise software company. And so I started talking to mentors. I joined Accelerate Okanagan here in Kelowna, British Columbia. And then they introduced me to techstars, which was the best decision I ever made. I went to Techstars. It's a 14 week all intensive startup program similar to Y Combinator. They let you pitch a hundred plus investors on the final day. And then at 9 or 10pm, I'll put the link below. You can see me pitch in front of 1300 people in Boulder Theater. And that was where stated came to be. So we now have this B2C business, the Carfax for homes. And now we have estated, which is a B2B business. And I go all in on the B2B business, 100%, everything. I really tried to automate the B2C business. I hired a CEO for it. I'm like, take it over. And we go through some serious challenges with Estated. You know, we end up raising $3 million from Foundry Group in January of 2018 to build the product because I couldn't fly fund to build it. I didn't raise at the end of tech stars. I waited another eight months because I thought I could fund it myself and keep 100 ownership. And that is a smart idea. As an entrepreneur, depending on where you're at, please ask me questions if you're starting out, But I will 100% give you my advice and thoughts on what it's like to have partners in a business, how you should split equity, if you should give equity to your employers, how much you should sell in your first round, whether it's a seed, Series A, Series B, whatever it might be. I'd love to help you with that. Essentially we raise 3 million bucks at a $12 million valuation. 15 post money and it's 20% of the company and we sold in 2022 for $15 million. Pretty much a wash. Gave our investors their money back with a little bit of interest, paid out all my employees and I own 68% of the company so you guys can do the math on that of where I am today. But I went through a lot of challenges in a stated we had to run a company through Covid and I got so lucky that some voice out there in the world in 2022 when I woke up, it wasn't a New Year's resolution for me. Someone something in my body said, josh, it's time to stop being a CEO and it's time to move on with your life and start something fresh. I sold one of my rental houses in Kelowna at the peak of the market in April. In June I sold the Carfax for homes business to a friend of mine and I still have quite a bit of involvement but I'm more of a consultant now and and that business still will make me almost seven figures a year in profit. And then we sold estated in August 4th of 2022. At the time I had about 25 employees. I have no employees now. I have a couple friends that I still work with and I'll probably work with for the rest of my life. But everything changed for me that day. I had an 18 month earnout which was one of the worst decisions of my life. My earnout was based on the calendar year of 2023, January 1st of 2024. I think it's February 2nd of 2024 right now. I was fired and so I've been fun employed I call it for nearly a month now. And my therapist I've been going to therapy for 8 years bi weekly and I also talk about that within this course. I'm an open book about it if you want to know. I think every entrepreneur should go to therapy with the highs and lows that we live and have to handle and manage and the stress that comes with it. But she said, josh, some people take years to unwind unthaw because as an entrepreneur, you're typically in the fast lane and you can get wound up pretty tight. And to let all of that go. That's why people need to take sabbaticals. I feel like my sabbatical was my, you know, 14 to 16 months that I had at Adam Data. After they acquired my company. They basically told me, we're shutting the stated down, roll your clients over and then don't talk to anyone in the company. Just upsell your clients. And then we're going to fire you as soon as your earnout's over. Because if they fired me one day before my earn out, they would have had to pay me in full instantly. Whereas then earn out, they can cut it down to 50%. I think we're going to get 75%. I've done the math, so not the greatest, but that money still ends up coming to me. I've paid everyone out now and I've paid all the taxes on 15 million. Another huge learning. But now that I'm employed, I am 100% focused on just giving value to more entrepreneurs. I don't have any incentives in this. I just don't want to see you go through all the same shit that I went through. And so that's my story. Leave a comment, let me know what you think. Let me know if there's any questions. If you want me to deep dive into anything a little bit more, I really didn't have the skills to get to where I am today. I've built them over the last 15 years of my life. You see all the books behind me and they're really my best friends. I swear to God, I do have a handful of good friends that are people. But these things have taught me so much. And every single one of the courses that you go through in this, we're gonna have a full book recommendation for it. Because I've really found that when books hit me at the right time in my life, they can add so much value when I go and implement them. And so, like I'm always going to say, this isn't my first rodeo. I'm so glad that you're here. Let's start diving into the actual lessons. Here we go.