My Million Dollar Grit Story Part II

Welcome to Million Dollar Grit, the podcast that dives deep into the world of entrepreneurship, where tenacity meets strategy and dreams meet reality. My name is Julie, and I explore the raw, often overlooked truths of what it takes to succeed in business and in life. It's not just about the glossy success stories. It's about the grit it takes to get there. Hey, this is Julie, and I am back with part 2 of the Million Dollar Grit origin story that I started, except this is probably not million-dollar grit. Now this is $10 million grit. What happened from 2018 to present day? So if you missed that first episode, I kind of walked through how I got where I got, how I made my first million, and what I did year by year by year. So 2018 was really when things got hairy. This was the year I almost, I almost went right over the edge. And that was largely because I didn't have good boundaries and I was hustling wrestling too hard. Maybe I had too much grit. I don't know. So I worked basically 12 hours a day in 2018 because I was doing two things. I was running my own private business, which was, um, some courses, and I had a mastermind. And then I also worked over at ClickFunnels full-time. I wrote curriculum, I oversaw the agency, I helped launch the 2CCX program. And so I was in meetings way like all the way up to 7:00 PM, sometimes even all the way up to 11:00 PM. I worked weekends. I traveled to Boise once a month. I was constantly juggling both ClickFunnels business and my business. Now, from a revenue perspective, everything was doing really, really well. So in 2017, I made, uh, $1.3 million. 2018, I had doubled it essentially to $2 million, and I was getting over $200,000 a year in affiliate revenue, um, affiliating for Coach, uh, for ClickFunnels. I was also doing ClickFunnels coaching. I was making, um, a salary from Russell, and then I was also selling my courses and my mastermind. So that was kind of the, the scope of 2018. Digital Insiders was an amazing sort of masterminded, mastermind from the beginning. Like I sat down and I planned that program out, really thinking strategically about how I would run coaching at scale. So I started out selling it at $12,000 a year and it quickly became in demand. So I, I upped it to $18,000 a year where it stayed for the bulk of 2018. I had visibility through ClickFunnels. I had my social media content. I had my insanely fast growing email list, and that's because I was running ads to my webinar funnel. I spoke on stages like FHL, LadyBoss. I was in Russell's Inner Circle, and by the end of 2018, I had gotten to 40 or 50 one-on-one clients inside my mastermind. And even though I was spending so much time working at ClickFunnels, I never let the foot off the gas pedal in my business. I knew that my business was my legacy. It was the thing that was gonna help me stay financially free. And so I was pushing hard on both fronts. Not very sustainable, I'm gonna be frank. I hired a PR person to get me on the news. I got in Forbes, Working Mother Magazine, Entrepreneur, and others. I got on big podcasts like, you know, EO Fire and things like that. And the beginning part of 2018 was really, you know, personally I was trying to find my footing because I had, you know, kind of slogged through, you know, less than 6 figures in revenue. Then I had this big year and now it was about to double. And I was carrying the load of two huge things. My marriage was not good. It was not good from day one, but it was really not good now, right? Things were really starting to fall apart. My kids were starting to become teenagers or tweeners. I was working a zillion hours a day. And this is also when Funnel Gorgeous launched. So there was like this amazing, cool seedling of an idea coming to light in the midst of just so much busyness, you know? We launched our first course. It was not a company, it was just a course. It was called Funnel Gorgeous. We launched it August 6th and we made $55,000 in sales. I traveled to Africa in the summer of 2018. I went to Kenya and that was with Stu McLaren's Village Impact. And while in Kenya, my ad account, my personal ad account went down and I would actually never get it back. To this day, I cannot advertise personally on Facebook. My income for TDG, which was my course my evergreen funnel came to a screeching halt. And I was halfway around the world and really nothing that I could do about it. So that was kind of a, a hard moment. I also, um, launched the One Funnel Away Challenge with Russell. I was a feature coach in it. I oversaw that funnel. It did $1 million in 7 days. I also participated in the book, that 30-day book. So there was a lot going on in 2018. I now had a good chunk of savings. I was somewhat settled, even though my marriage was bad, we had bought a house, and I was like, all right, I need to figure out how the heck to keep the money I've made. And I'm telling you right now, keeping money is very different than making money, and growing the money that you've kept is very different than making money. And I knew nothing. Like, I grew up very, you know, very lower middle class. I was in debt for the majority of my whole first marriage. And so I didn't know what to do. So I started to look around for wealth advisors and teachers to kind of help me figure out what, what do I do? And so one of the things that I think I provide that's different than your average internet marketing coach is that I have made it a, uh, made a commitment to practice investing and practice managing and growing my money. And so I haven't, like squandered it all away. And so I'm able to provide some help and feedback in that area. So 2018, I invested in some cash value, whole life insurance. I dabbled in some crypto, things like that. So that was sort of my year on the financial side. On this business personal side in 2018, Russell came to me with sort of a, an offer to become partners in ClickFunnels. He wanted to know what it would take for me to basically shut my business down and, and go all in. And this was a very tough and difficult process for me to think through because I had spent so much time and energy and money building myself to this million-dollar business, like this sort of crown jewel moment that we all wait for when we hit a million dollars in sales. And now he was kind of asking, being like, all right, you're, you're amazing. Well, we want you on the team. Like, what would it take? Complicating that factor is that in the middle of all of that decision-making process, I was dealing with some mental health issues with my oldest daughter. And so I was trying to make these decisions in and out of the hospital and in and out of therapy and just trying to figure out what's best. And I didn't have a supportive marriage. And I was working a zillion hours. And so I, I did decide to become partners and I made that decision. I believe it was probably more a fear-based decision than I wanna admit, but I proceeded to feel uncomfortable about the decision for the months that followed. And, and I'll explain what happened. Meanwhile, Funnel Gorgeous was puttering along. We had launched the course and we started to make these funnel drops. And they were designs on ClickFunnels and we were selling them for $50. And the funny thing is, is they were making about $10,000 a month and they were a ton of work and we had to only sell to ClickFunnels users, right? So we kind of backed ourself into a little bit of a problem. We, me and Kathy, had no official operating agreement. We both were putting in the sweat equity. We relaunched the course a few times, but Basically, Funnel Gorgeous just puttered along until 2019. So by the end of 2018, I was exhausted. I had made more money. Like I said, I had made $2 million, but it had come at a very, very high cost. A lot of people ask, what was your net, like what was your net income after payroll and expenses? And I netted $1.1 million in profit in 2018, which means I'll do the math for you, over $580,000 in taxes and $580,000 left for me to work with. And so what did I do with that money? I'm just going to be really frank. I put at least $200,000 into a cash value life insurance policy. I started building a college fund, and I always left at least 3 months of operating expenses in the business. And my operating expenses were about $70K a month. So $250,000 was earmarked for just rainy day. If you didn't listen to the Float Season episode, I, because I am a 6 on the Enneagram, that's the worrywart basically, I tend to save for a rainy day. And so that's what I was doing. And I tried to get in that habit. Okay, so 2018, Julie is, you know, half dead on the side of the road making more money, but everything's kind of falling apart in her personal life. 2019, I split cut right down the middle. The first half was me trying to be everything to everyone, and the second half was sort of my awakening and my beginning of my restructuring of my life, which would take me 3 years. So in January to June, I was ready to be a partner at ClickFunnels. There were red flags everywhere, you guys, and I was like, crap, I don't know what to do. I was trying to shut down my business. I was trying to figure out what to do with FG. I was totally out of alignment, getting pulled in a million directions. Meanwhile, still making money. I mean, Funnel Gorgeous did great in 2019. We had a $100,000 launch, right? But this is what was happening in that first half. And in that second half, I made some really hard decisions. I resigned from ClickFunnels. I, you know, sat down with Cathy and we decided to really go all in on Funnel Gorgeous. I focused heavily on my Digital Insiders Mastermind. And you know, I also made some mistakes. I got sidelined by other business opportunities. So it was another pretty rocky year. And a lot of people ask me, you know, what was your partnership agreement with ClickFunnels? And I'm not gonna go into a lot of details, but it was basically becoming part owner of the company. And I was in charge of the agency. I was in charge of writing funnel projects, coaching the 2CCX program, and traveling and speaking on behalf of ClickFunnels. The problem is that the agreement morphed. It wasn't really well thought out. I have a lot of details that I'm not really comfortable sharing, but I started to shut down my business, closing down, you know, Digital Guidebook, closing down Create Your Laptop Life. I tried to say, can I at least save Digital Insiders and keep that? And that was an okay. But the big question was what was gonna happen to Funnel Gorgeous? 'Cause I was supposed to share to shut everything down. And the original response was, you have to shut it down, or you have to, you know, give it over to us to manage. And I was terrified that this thing that Kathy and I had started that had so many legs wouldn't be well cared for. And so even though this was kind of a handshake agreement that was going through this whole legal process, and it was taking months. I just knew something wasn't right. On the outside, I was running all of these events like the 10X event, the 2 Comma Club Cruise, speaking at FHL, you know, had a growing Digital Insiders community, teaching at 2CCX, going on early morning news shows, shooting ads with these other studios, running marketing retreats. But I was so burned out. And I was so afraid that I was gonna lose things that were important to me. And I remember thinking, all I wanna do is go to Disney World. Like, why can't I just go to Disney World? So the bad feeling that I had about my decision really never let up. I got financial advisors, I got legal counsel on my behalf, and eventually I decided, no, I'm not gonna shut down FG. I'm not gonna sell it. I gave back all my owner's distributions. I refused to sell my company. I resigned from my position and I, I basically said, I need to, I need to walk away. I was nervous since so much of my business was around ClickFunnels, my TDG and CYLL. None of those were making much money anymore. I'd lost my ad account and my only source of real income was Digital Insiders. Funnel Gorgeous wasn't making tons. It wasn't making any more than $10K a month. You know, and it was 2 of us. I was walking away from a huge salary and ownership. And even though I had made $1 million before I had been hired, I was terrified to walk away because it wasn't just the money. It was my entire identity. My entire closet was filled with ClickFunnels swag. Like I was all bought in. I had drank the Kool-Aid, joined the cult, and I had to walk away from all of this. And I was scared that I didn't have what it took. But, but for Funnel Gorgeous, right? That little company that had big potential. Uh, Webinar Gorgeous was our second course. We launched it in June. It was $197 and we made $120,000 in that launch. We did our first Funnel Gorgeous retreat in Disney World. We launched Offer Cure, which went viral, and we kept churning out design drops. So this was sort of a reawakening. I put my entire heart and soul into Digital Insiders. I grew it. What was happening was, as I was starting to kind of get my footing, I got myself in therapy. I was like, I need to address what's going on. I need to get back in alignment. There were sharks circling. As soon as I resigned from ClickFunnels, I had job offers, I had partnership offers. I made a lot of mistakes. And one thing that I would advise people is like making those decisions quickly when you're in the middle of a change is really, really tough. And so in 2018, 2019, sorry, I had made another $2 million and my net profit was again around a million. So I filled my college fund. I bought this crazy Club 33 membership for Disney World. I paid, half a million dollars into taxes, put money into life insurance. I did a lot of things and then I did save some for us, obviously. And we went to Disney World and all that kind of thing. And so at the end of 2019, there was some turmoil happening over on Twitter that started to eke out into the real world. And I, for those of you guys who know, I am on Twitter constantly and I noticed that there were a bunch of scientists talking about this virus. And so 2020 hit and it was a strange AF year, right? Funnily enough, it was my highest income to date. I ended up making $2.2 million in my business, which was my Digital Insiders and half of the Funnel Gorgeous. And then Funnel Gorgeous as a company did $2 million on its own. So it was like a crazy pandemic and yet a lot of profitability. I ended up, um, hiking my price in my mastermind up to $20, uh, $25K. I, um, felt the pinch when COVID hit. A lot of my members were, um, immediately without clients because all these like local businesses closed up. I ended up opening up a scholarship program for members for people who couldn't make their payments. I filed for an EIDL loan. I did the, the PPP opportunity. Um, everything went online. And so I was able to sustain, um, not just myself, but other people, other customers through that year, which I'm really grateful for. In Funnel Gorgeous, we launched a whole bunch of things. We launched an event. We launched FG Society, which was our certification program. We launched Launch Gorgeous, and we finally decided to get fully off the ClickFunnels train. The last piece that was missing was that our templates were on ClickFunnels and we needed to move over. So 2020 was an amazing year financially. Personally, I was trying to recover from burnout. COVID spiked my anxiety. It did force me back into nature. I got into, you know, gardening and birdwatching. And, you know, I had, a really like calm year personally, even though there were still some significant problems, um, under the surface. We did need to start finding new networks to swim in. We got involved with Pete Vargas. We started to get traffic from there. We, you know, ranked really high in his affiliate offer. I remember in 2020, the Digital Insiders were so, you know, cabin fevered from not getting together. We ended up hiking and camping in the desert. And basically I decided I need to get into real estate. I need to start putting my money into real estate because money was continuing to come in and I didn't know how to grow it. So I found some deals through a friend, Arie, who started to show me kind of how to do this. I continued to pay my life insurance, bulking out my college fund, saving money for a bigger home in Guilford, which was a secret desire. So 2020 was a recovery year, even though it was a weird year because of COVID It was scary to burn the boats with ClickFunnels fully. And but this is when we decided to take the plunge with HighLevel and we launched FG Funnels. So that was 20— 20. And it wasn't really until 2021 that I made a huge lifestyle jump. So I, even though I had, you know, earned my first million by 2017, it wasn't until 2021 that I felt like, okay, this money is stable enough that I'm gonna go and buy a home. So I actually bought my dream house in Guilford, Connecticut, a mile from the beach, 15 acres farmhouse. It was a very expensive purchase. I had to put over $500,000 down on the house cash. And this was sort of my shining moment personally. But I'm gonna tell you privately, I cried a lot that day because even though I had reached sort of the pinnacle of what I thought was success, my marriage, my relationship was falling apart and it had never been good. It got really bad. It sort of had a little rejuvenation in 2020 for a couple months, I think just because I slowed down, but then all of those problems came raging back. And so 2021 was really the year that I started to get honest with myself in, in therapy about what I, you know, what I didn't wanna face. In Funnel Gorgeous, we were churning stuff out. We were doing Launch Gorgeous rounds, we were doing, uh, Course Chemist, we did Future Fund. We had amazing courses. We were growing faster, faster, faster. We hit 1,000 units— sorry, not 1,000 units, 1,000 accounts in FG Funnels. And then we started growing. Digital Insiders was growing. 2021, I pulled off the biggest mastermind I had ever done. I took all of my clients to Disney. We did a VIP day. I basically rented out Animal Kingdom. After dark. It was just insane. I did VIP tours for everybody. It was just after a year of quarantine, I was like, you know what? I'm going to spend my money and I'm going to do this amazing thing. And I will never forget it as long as I live. It was just, it was so fun. Personally, we dealt with COVID My daughter Ellie got COVID, landed in the hospital. I got my puppy Nala. Moving, we moved to Guilford and my marriage resumed falling apart. And so basically, top line, I did $3.1 million in revenue with a net income of over $2 million. That means I was paying a lot of money in taxes, over a million in taxes, and I was putting it in real estate, putting it in savings. And little did I know, I mean, not little, but it was all about to be obliterated. And so 2022 kicked off with a big event in Disney World with Funnel Gorgeous. The event itself cost us over $300,000. We sold about $700,000 from stage. It was really hard to remember much after that because the day after I returned, I asked, for divorce and I went back into survival mode. It felt a lot like I was going back to 2014 again, except this time there was a lot at stake, right? We, I now had a $4 million company and another $2 million mastermind. I had a hard time getting outta bed. I remember thinking, I just have to do 3 things, keep the kids alive, help my one-on-one clients, and make content for Funnel Gorgeous. 2022, everything declined. Economy started to get shaky. The post-COVID fallout was real. Both Funnel Gorgeous and DI lost revenue in 2022, and I lost half my assets because I had to go through a divorce. I got COVID twice. I learned a lot about divorce when you have a lot of money, and I learned that no-fault states don't care whose fault it is. That child support is going to be paid to the lower-earning parent. Men do receive alimony, and it was about 6 to 7 months, and I had to pay for my lawyer fees, his lawyer fees. I had to pay for all his living expenses during the divorce. I had to keep him on payroll even though he wasn't working for me, and I lost so much— real estate deals, hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, 6 figures in alimony and child support. And I just thought, this is nuts. I worked so hard only to watch so much of it go away. And the mindset work I had to do in coming back around to that financial security, thankfully, I, you know, I had done a lot of things right, so I didn't cause a financial crippling to the point where I had to sell my house and downsize. I was able to manage all of that. And the biggest thing I can say is that surrounding yourself with the right people is more important than you can possibly imagine. And even though I lost a lot of money, I had so much wisdom and skill and experience, I knew that I would be okay. My divorce was finalized in August of 2022, and I decided to change my name back to Chanel. Julie Chenell. I love that last name. I'm never changing it again, just because it just means so much to me. And I have been in a process of coming back to life. I mean, I'm recording this episode and it's almost August 2023. So nearly a year after my divorce, a year and a half after going through that. And I am trying to figure out how to find my voice again. And obviously this is a lot. You can see that the road to success is never what we think it's gonna be. We idolize and we admire people from a distance, and we don't understand what's happening beneath the surface. I'm gonna leave you with a quote, which is, the further the arrow is going to be shot, the further it must be pulled back. And I use this quote to remind myself that every single thing, every tough decision, every failure, every wrong move has taught me so, so, so much. Because we do, we learn a lot more in failure than we do in success. And I'm learning how to appreciate each day. I'm learning how to share what I've learned with other people who are on a similar journey. And so this is my story, and I don't know what the next 10 years will hold. I don't know what kind of grit I'm gonna have to muster or if I'm going to start counting my business success in revenue numbers, or if I'm going to start to think about other things. But you know what? It's okay either way. Some of us on the journey, we need to set revenue goals. And I just told you my whole story year by year, revenue by revenue. And that was really how I sort of monitored my progress. Now it's shifting, but I'm not going to tell you that it's, it's not okay to do what I did because you should absolutely. And that's one of the dangers of following gurus who are so far ahead. Is they forget where they came from. They forget how they did it. They don't rehash the journey. And so hopefully this was helpful so that you can see how the journey went for me, so that you don't feel like, oh, I have to do what she's doing today. No, you don't. You can do what I did 5 years ago, and that's okay. So if you like this podcast, please leave a review. Thanks so much for hanging out with me, and I'll talk to you soon. And there you have it, folks, another dose of Million Dollar Grit. I hope today's episode has left you feeling inspired, equipped, and ready to to face your own entrepreneurial journey with resolve. Remember, until next time, embrace the struggle, harness your grit, and keep pushing forward. You're stronger than any challenge you face. I'm Julie Chenell, and this has been Million Dollar Grit.