My Million Dollar Grit Story Part I

Hi everyone, this is Julie and I want to retrace my steps today. 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. The name of this podcast is called Million Dollar Grit, and it's sort of encapsulating my story that getting to $1 million or $2, $5, $10, $15 million was filled with a lot of failure, windy roads, uncertainty, and it required a lot of grit. And I think that many people don't retrace their steps when they're teaching. And so you come along and you meet someone and they say, oh, I've done $17 million in sales and Here's my life, and you don't see the windy road to get there. And I find that when I actually hear the stories of those people, like if I can get one-on-one with them and I can kind of go behind the scenes, I learn so much. And then I don't feel so alone because most of us are really just trying to figure this out as we go. So I'm gonna retrace my steps and I'm going to go all the way back in time. And so maybe this is not million-dollar grit right now. This is like $10,000 grit. How did I go from a stay-at-home mom of 3 kids to consistently making $10,000 a month? So we're going to travel back in time to 2012. I was 31 years old. I had 3 children. Evan was age 9, Eliana was age 7, and Eden was 6. And I had been a stay-at-home mom, and this was the first year 2012, where they all were in school full-time. So up until this point, I was teaching piano lessons in the evening to try to, you know, add a little cash to the family bank account. I think I was making about $1,200 a month. My husband was making about $60,000 a year at the time. We were in debt. We were living paycheck to paycheck, and I was sort of in a grief cycle with a very toxic relationship with my biological father that had ended. So I was sort of in a transition period of my life. So the way that I started making money in 2012 was first with SEO. So I went to a site called HubPages and I was making pennies, you guys, pennies with Google AdSense ads on these articles. I also signed up at Textbroker and I would write 700 words for $5. And so I would be writing sometimes 5, 6, 7 articles a day. Mind-numbing articles using particular keywords and getting $5 an article. I was over on Upwork at the time, I think it was called oDesk, and I was writing content and blog articles and I was charging $100 for a 5,000-word blog post. And what you might be thinking is, well, okay, that was, yes, that was 11 years ago, so maybe it would be more now. But it's also just revealing the fact that when you aren't in this world, you produce and you charge based on your own financial lens. Like, I had no idea people were making $1,000, $2,000, $5,000 for a piece of content. I think MrBeast charges or pays somewhere around $10,000 per YouTube thumbnail or something ridiculous like that. But I was coming into this online marketing world with my own financial lens. Which was broke, in debt. And so for me, I was like, you're gonna pay me $100 to write 5,000 words? These guys got a steal. I actually wrote some of these articles and went viral. They were really good, and I got $100 for them. I also started my own WordPress blog. It was called Fabulous Blogging, and I started doing blog designs for about $100 to $300 each. And I was helping people migrate from Blogspot over to WordPress, and I was charging $100 $1,069. So you can see in 2012, I was doing a lot of odds and ends things to earn maybe about $2,000 a month. So my revenue for that year, for 2012, was around $25,000. So it wasn't million-dollar grit, it was $2,000 grit, um, or $25,000 grit, if you will. And I didn't even have a business, like I didn't have an LLC. I was just working under my social as as a sole proprietor. So in 2013, a couple things changed. I grew older, number one. Number two, I stopped teaching piano lessons. I found that I was exhausted in the evenings and I wanted to, you know, be with my kids, and now that I was making a little bit of money on the computer and remotely, I was like, I think I can give this up. I started to double down on my blogging my tech design migrations, and I started to build, really focus on building an audience. I was still writing those SEO, SEO articles, but I remember I had this realization about Facebook groups because I joined an SEO Facebook group and I was like, wow, you can meet people. And then when people get to know you, then they hire you. And this was the first moment where I sort of internalized that your network is everything. And so I was like, well, huh, maybe I should start my own Facebook group. I started, it was called the Bloppy Bloggers. I can't remember what the story was, there was a story, terrible name, not a searchable name, but people were asking me about my blog, they were asking me about WordPress, and I was getting more and more blog customers, so I was like, well, let me build a Facebook group of bloggers and then maybe I'll get some customers. I also got hooked up in the BlogHer community, which is, you know, they do an annual event. And I was running two blogs at the time. I was running my mom blog, which was just kind of nonsense, and then I was running my Fabulous Blogging blog, which was gaining traction. And I actually won a BlogHer Voices of the Year award. So 2013 was really, the year that I understood that community and networking made a huge difference in your ability to find new clients. Okay. So I also noticed that starting in blogging, because I started as a writer, I noticed that the platform and traffic were really the key to visibility, and I was still stuck in a very a low income bracket. I mean, I, I didn't have enough to make a full-time living, but I was gaining these really critical skills, um, that were helping me understand online business. But the biggest reason I believe now looking back that I didn't really make much progress in those first 2 years was I had no mentors. I had no idea my prices were too low. I was looking at my business from my income lens instead of what the market would bear. I had no urgency to make more. I was, uh, you know, just earning extra money for vacations. My husband at the time was providing all the, you know, all the breadwinner, breadwinning money. And I had no model to really show me a different way. I had social media gurus that I followed cuz they were sort of the bright shiny objects, but nobody was actually laying out a path for how to get from here to there. So in 2013, my revenue stayed largely stagnant. It was still about $25,000 for the year. So the difference mainly was that the work I was doing, it was more tech and WordPress work and a little bit less writing content work. So what changed in 2014? So now we are in year 3 of my windy, gritty journey. So financially, I was starting to see the end of the debt tunnel, right? My husband was still supporting the family. Savings were starting to kind of creep in. And in the beginning of 2014, I had saved enough money in my little baby business to take our first family Disney trip. This would be shadow of things to come. I was focused on my mom blog, the audience. I was focused on fabulous blogging and trying to get the views up and I had an email list that was about 1,000 people. I had my Facebook group, the Bloppy Bloggers. I was doing a ton of migrations for $169, and that was a lot of work for $169. I was expanding into web design, and 2014 was the first year where I got the nerve to charge $1,000 to design a website. Which is crazy. I'm actually right now finishing up a web rebrand that's, you know, triple, 300% that, you know. I did actually grow financially in 2014, so I attribute it to the following 6 things. Number 1, I understood that the higher value offers would make more. So I could tell that I was immediately making more just saying website design versus blog design, right? This is where I started to recognize the offer packaging and like the way you frame your words makes a difference. A divorce and a pregnancy sent me into crisis mode. And sometimes when we are under pressure, we produce more than when we're not. Uh, number 3, the divorce made it so that I wasn't actually able to support my kids, and I knew that I had to do something different than what I had been doing. Number 4, I actually stopped writing for pennies on Upwork and Textbroker. So I had to let go of money that was previously money I was kind of holding onto. Number 5, I started to take my process more seriously. So my proposals, the way I handled clients, you know, just thinking of myself as more an expert and a business owner versus just this stay-at-home mom that was like doing something on the side. And number 6, I had planted my flag as an, in a niche. I was a WordPress and blogging expert. So it was this combination of letting go and planting my flag at the same time. And 2014 was also the year I started testing courses for the first time. So I started like $15 courses on, you know, how to do social media or how to write a MailChimp newsletter, things that I was really good at, and I started to sell. It wasn't making tons of money, but it was still dipping my toe in. However, in 2014, I was still a sole proprietor. I was still using spreadsheets to track my income. I had not hired one single person. I did actually take a job at a college for income stability 'cause I was pregnant and divorcing and I really needed health insurance. I moved into an apartment in the diviest town in Connecticut. After living on the shoreline. And I was still just building my business part-time because I had a full-time job. So you can see from 2012 to 2014, I did have a little growth in 2014, but for 3 years my growth was pretty much stagnant or small. I had zero mentors, no one to lift my chin, no one to give me shortcuts. I was the epitome of doing it myself, and grinding. Okay, in terms of like what tools I was using, I really was just using this thing called DPD at the time. It was digital product download, and, and that's how I was selling inexpensive courses. Otherwise, I was just sending out PayPal invoices for all my done-for-you work, and the majority of my content was still free because I was coming from that blogging world where you just give away the farm. My revenue in 2014, wait for it, it's not million-dollar grit, it's $40,000 grit. So it was around $40,000-ish. 2015 rolls around and I had my baby, I was divorced, I got remarried all in one year. It was absolute madness. Madness, I tell you. In fact, I look back and I'm like, what The hell, Julie Chenell. So a couple of fun personal facts for you guys to know. Number 1, the baby belonged to this man that I had met on a dating app in 2014. You guys, Tinder was brand new and all the rage, and I was at the, you know, blogging conference, and they told me to download it, and I did, and I swiped right, and next thing I know, I'm knocked up, right? I had been with one man my entire life. I had grown up as a, as a conservative Christian. I, I did everything right. I got married a virgin. And the first moment on the dating scene, I fall for this Romanian soccer coach who's here just on a, a short-term visa. A wild night, I get pregnant. And so now I am like, well, what do I do now? So I ended up marrying him, um, at the advice of a lawyer who said you need to get married or he's going to have to go back to his home country and he won't be here. And I was super scared, right? I was terrified of, you know, I was— I wasn't really making enough to even support my 3 kids, never mind this new baby. You know, it's just all kinds of craziness. I was living in this very, very tiny apartment. Alex was there with me in Meriden. We did finally decide to move to a bigger rental home in Cheshire. Uh, I answered emails the day I gave birth. I was in total survival mode the entire year. Okay. So what happened in 2015 that sort of changed my outlook and had me reaching for more revenue aside from, oh, you know, shoot, I'm pregnant and I have kids and I need to do it. Uh, number one, I discovered Freedom Hackers. It was a Facebook group and Kimmer Luna who was giving, uh, a lot of tremendous value for free in her webinars. She was one of the first people I watched webinars with. It was the first time I realized people were making so much money with courses and education. She had launched that Be True, Brand You, and I think she had had a million-dollar launch. I discovered Marie Forleo. I discovered Russell Brunson. I discovered funnels. I started to get my chin lifted by going deeper and deeper into this world. We ended up having enough money. We could get that bigger rental in Cheshire. My job plus my business plus Alex's part-time coaching income was starting to make a dent in our finances. I had a significant amount of traffic coming to my fabulous blogging website after years of that consistent content. And I quit my, uh, my full-time job after I had hit $7,000 in one month in my business. I could not believe it. And this was 2015. And what, where was this money coming from? Well, income was coming through my tech services, my blog migrations, my blog designs, my web designs. I started to do these things called funnels. I was doing them on Leadpages at the time. That was the landing page builder of the day in 2015. I was selling those courses on like MailChimp and social media. I was making affiliate revenue by selling hosting packages, like with Bluehost and sites like that. I had some Google AdSense and I also launched my first, what I'm calling big course. It was $497 and it was called The Blueprint: Reimagine Your Digital Landscape. I think there are a few people still following me who bought that, which is crazy. That was 2015. So my revenue jumped. It didn't quite double, um, but I hit about $75,000 in revenue. So it was $75,000 GRIT in 2015. And if you're doing the math, yes, we are 3 years in, still working as a sole prop with my Social Security number. I was still using a traditional tax person. I did not have enough credit to build, to buy a house. I did have some savings. I hit my first $10,000 month, most of it service work, and my email list was around 2,000 and they were still following me mainly for blogging content. 2016 was the year I put my big girl pants on, and this is the first year that I actually had an official profit and loss statement. Now, I want to tell you, from 2015 to 2016 was a massive jump. So I had gone from $25,000 a year, $25,000 a year, $40,000 a year, $75,000 a year. In 2016, I did $280,000 in sales with $125,000 of that net. Okay. This was the year that I made myself an LLC. I got myself a bookkeeper. I got myself an accountant. I launched Create Your Laptop Life, uh, which is a brand. It was a brand with Madeline, who was my partner, and I made my first hire. So a lot of people have asked me like that, that was a big jump. Like, what did you do with all that net profit? Right? And so I thankfully, I'm so grateful that I had the wherewithal to, to get a tax person, to to get financial help because I didn't know what to do with all of this money. I mean, I had made, you know, $40,000 in revenue or $70,000 in revenue, but like I didn't keep all of that. But now I had $125,000 in net profit. So what I did was I basically slashed it in half. I took, you know, 40, 50% and I put it aside for taxes, even though, you know, maybe I'd get some of that back. And then I took the remaining $75,000 or whatever it is. It, well, it wasn't quite $75,000, somewhere around there. I split it in half. I kept half of it in the business for business expenses, and then I distributed the rest to my family. And so I began a habit of living on less than what I was earning, which I'm gonna be frank with you guys, I'm not doing as good of a job of that now as I was then. I think I was more scared back then and I was more, unsure that the money would last or that maybe I had just like gotten lucky. So I was very cautious. I've gotten more brave, which means I spend more, way more now than I ever did then. I did try to buy a house in 2016, but the bank wouldn't give it to me. So it would be a whole nother year before I was able to do it. And so we were piled into 1,100-square-foot ranch 1 bathroom, 4 kids. And Alex and I were married. We threw a wedding. Um, it was a very, very small wedding. I think I spent maybe $5,000 on that wedding and it was just for family. But I had some really big business wins in 2016. I sold Create Your Laptop Life as a $500 course in the spring and I got 30 students. And then I did it again in September. I doubled the price and got another 30 students. And I finally launched a funnel on ClickFunnels and used Facebook ads to an evergreen webinar. What we did is instead of selling our Create Your Laptop Life course for $1,000, we upped the price to $1,500 and I took sales calls. So I think Madeline and I did over 100 sales calls in the next 90 days after turning that ad on. And we had our first $80,000 month because of that funnel. I remember thinking, dear Lord, I am building a business on a toothpick. It was like one Facebook ad was driving all the money. We built the funnel ourselves. We did the webinar recording. I did the Facebook ads myself. We did the sales calls, we did the training, we did the content, all of it. It was gritty and grindy and bootstrappy, but this is how we hit an $80,000 month. Like, that was like a huge— I mean, it was just like 10x what I had done before. A couple mistakes I made in this era, if you say. Number 1, I pushed a last time lifetime offer that I saw other gurus do. That I didn't think through very well, and then it came back to bite me in 2017. I also decided to give Madeline equity in my agency, and we really should have kept the company separate. Like, I was just all excited and I wanted to like blend us together, and so I was like, come on, you can do the agency. We're selling the courses together, come do the agency. And that was not a good idea. And I did what most of my clients do. I thought something was wrong with our funnel when we would get a refund request or we would get, you know, abandoned carts or we would only get, you know, a 5% conversion. I thought something was wrong. And this was because I did not understand funnels. This is because I did not understand scaling growth, standard benchmarks. Again, flying blind, didn't really have a mentor. So 2016, you know, I made basically $300,000 in revenue. It was a big year. but it was only the start of my next few big years because 2017 would be the year that changed everything. My agency was growing fast. I was still doing, um, you know, web designs, but now I was doing more funnel designs and I started to get clients, um, like Proofread Anywhere, Healthy Habits, Happy Moms, I Heart Planners, and they were all having success with the funnels that I built. I was nearing burnout. I had contractors, I had a designer, I had a copywriter, I had a tech person. Um, and Madeline was like, I don't wanna be on this train. Uh, in about February of 2017, she was like, this is too much for me. We had our Create Your Laptop Life course. We pivoted to a membership. Huge mistake. To this day, I see people do this. They want continuity, so they take their course and turn it into a membership, and then everything tanks. Been there, done that, have the t-shirt. I ended up having to close it down and then reopen it later as two separate entities. It was like a whole big thing. Um, but I realized, man, courses are where it's at. And so I launched the digital guidebook, which was How to Become a Digital Marketer. It was my first $100,000 launch, and I realized, okay, I'm gonna need to shut down the agency. Things are getting busier and busier. And so I transitioned from done-for-you work into coaching. I paid out Madeline and she left the business, and I was left with selling Create Your Laptop Life, TDG, which was my digital guidebook, and high-end coaching. And I was wrapping up my agency work. 2017 was the year that I discovered the crazy world of internet marketing affiliate launches. And. I started to promote ClickFunnels and I got involved with the Expert Secrets book contest. And in 2017, I made just shy of $100,000 just in affiliate sales. And that was a really like cool moment for me when I was like, oh my gosh, okay, I can sell other people's products and make money as long as I have that audience, which I had been consistently building. I hired my first legit Facebook ads agency and I started running ads hardcore to my TDG and I started having $15,000 days, $26,000 days, $10,000 days. The TDG funnel, it was an evergreen webinar funnel and the course was $997. I was doing one-on-one coaching. I was charging about $7,000 for 2 to 3 months of private coaching. And 2017 was also the year that my dearest partner and best friend, Kathy Olson, became my client. And that's how I found her. So I was running all kinds of things. I had, you know, free Facebook ads masterclasses. I had bootcamps. I was running, um, group programs. In fact, the program that Kathy joined was a program about running, um, a self-liquidating offer funnel. She was the only one who signed up and I decided to run it anyway. How many of you have launched a group pro, uh, coaching program and then only one person signs up, right? That was Kathy. She signed up and I like fell in love with all the stuff that she was doing and she really liked me. And so that relationship, um, got started. 2017 was also the year that Russell Brunson finally paid attention to me. It was because of the Expert Secrets contest. I went to go see him and I joined his inner circle. And in that mastermind meeting, he invited me to lunch and he offered me a job as the director of writing content. And, um, I wrote the book Marketing Secrets for him in 90 days. I basically, at that moment in time, and this was towards the end of 2017, I realized I was gonna hit $1 million in sales. And so this is where 2017 is aptly named Million Dollar Grit. I had hustled my way to $1 million, and yet I was still afraid that I wasn't good enough. I was still afraid that it was all gonna go away, and But I was really, you know, I respected and admired Russell. And I thought, you know what, he's going to offer me a job. As long as I can keep this business and work for him, it's a win-win. So he offered me a healthy 6-figure salary. And he did ask me to move to Boise. And I said no, it was a kind of a battle, but I finally put my foot down. And I told him that I would work for him if I could keep my business. And so that meant that I was gonna keep TDG, my course, CYLL, my course, and I was gonna have to figure out what to do with all my one-on-one coaching clients. And so I transitioned out of one-on-one coaching into the mastermind model, and I launched Digital Insiders. And I also began working full-time hours, 11:00 AM to 7:00 PM, Monday through Friday for Russell Brunson. I was scared. And so I just piled on the work, right? Grit and grind and hustle to the max. I did start to take my content and branding more seriously in 2017, and I finally bought a house. So after getting divorced in 2014, it took me 3 years to really, or 4 years to build up enough to, um, buy a house. My revenue in 2017 was $1. $1.3 million. I paid myself $100,000 in a salary, and I think I had about a 50% profit margin. So if you do the math, $100K salary, $1.3 million, I had like $700,000 left over at the end of the year. Now, a good $370,000 of that went to taxes. $90,000 of it went to the down payment on the new house. And another $50,000 in moving costs and furniture. And that was sort of my year, my big investments. I was trying to save as much as I could, and I still had a good chunk of savings at the end of 2017. So that is the story up to the million-dollar grit moment. And I, I give you that because I wanted to kind of just show you how windy it was, how many different things I tried, some of the mistakes that I made. Now, there is a second part to this, and that is sort of what happened from 2017 to where we are now, 2022, 2023. And I'm happy to share that story if it's of interest. I would love to know. I will record that for you if you found this compelling and you want to hear what happened next. As always, if you like this podcast, please leave a review, uh, tag me on social, 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 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.