Step by step how i made $16.4M so you can just copy me

Hey guys, it's Will. And in this video I want to tell you step by step how I made $16.4 million through my online education company so that you can copy me and do the same or at least very similar to what I've done. I'm sure that you're not going to do exactly the same because that would probably be pretty impossible. But I'm just going to share the story with you. I'm going to share exactly how it happened step by step so that you can hopefully grab it, grab a pen, grab a piece of paper, make notes as I tell you this story and then hopefully if you are somewhere on the journey, I bet this. Well, I hope that there's something in here that you can pinpoint for yourself and help you either course correct if you need to or.

Just just learn something that's going to help you get further and get to the next level. Okay, so maybe a bit of a long video. I'm going to go pretty in depth. I'm really going to tell you everything in this video. So let's get into it.

So to begin with, for those of you who maybe don't know who I am, my name is William Brown. Again it's the name of the channel. I laughed about that in my last video. And over the last six, seven years I built an online education company. Grew it from not well, zero, I mean technically zero when I started it. I started it from my parents spare room back in the north of England and I honestly had about 7 or 8k to my name and I started it from just an idea and it actually started by accident. And I'll tell you how in just a second. This was all pretty much a. Well, not all a complete accident but it started by pretty much accident. And since then I've made $16.4 million. That was the total that I'd made when I sold that E Learning company to a private equity firm. And that deal closed about 10 weeks ago now in fact I made a video that's here on the channel literally about two hours after I got the wire from the private equity firm of the funds. So you can go and watch that maybe now or after this one. That's a very raw and real video. That is a very raw and real video for sure.

So yeah, so I recently sold the company to a PE firm and when I sold it I'd made 16.4 million. They've made a little bit more now since they took it over. I've also won this award, this 10 million award from from clickfunnels. And by the way, they don't just hand those out. Anybody can apply for them. But when you do apply, you get audited. You've got to send your PayPal, your Stripe, your bank statements, company history, blah, blah, blah. So they don't just kind of hand those out. You, you have to actually prove that you have made 10 million in cash to, to get one of those things. But I've won that as well, which is quite cool. And along the way, I moved to Dubai about two and a half years ago to optimize for, number one, the weather and number two, the tax side of things. So it's been a wild ride over the last six, seven years. But anyway, let's get into it. How exactly did all of this bloody happen? Right, so if we rewind back to the end of 2017.

The start of 2018 or, or thereabouts. I started trading financial markets. Now I was a professional. Well, I was, I was a professional musician at the time. I was DJing all over the world, making music full time, getting paid on average 2k a month, sometimes 3, 4, 5 if it had, if I did a tour, sometimes 0 if I didn't DJ for a month, 0. So average 2, 3k a month as a musician. I was about 25 years old. I started trading financial markets to make extra money and I thought to myself, if I can trade and I can do music, then I can probably make enough to like, you know, save up for a nice car and save up for a nice house and start to build a relatively normal life. So I started trading on the side and did pretty well. There was a lot of beginners looking that I think I've made a video in the past or if you go and watch one of the podcasts that I've done, I've told that story about the whole trading side of things. So I won't go into that here. Let's keep it focused on the online education business for this video. But I started trading after about a year or so. One of my, I had a Twitter account. So this is really actually pivotal to the story. So step one, I started trading. Step two, after about nine months, ten months or so. I started a Twitter account to share my trades, talk to other traders, build up a little online friend group of traders and that was more just for fun, to keep me occupied through the day and just give me something to keep me busy, talk to others, share ideas, see what other people are doing, blah, blah, blah. So it wasn't a marketing tool at all.

Now after about a year and a half of trading and with the Twitter, I maybe had 300 followers. And the Twitter still exists to this day, by the way. So you can go and scroll right back to 2018, I think, or thereabouts and see the tweets. So it's still there, the proof is there, which is quite cool. But anyway, and one day one of my followers who was kind of a buddy of mine, an online buddy, reached out and he said, could you help me with my trading? And we live close to each other, basically. He was in the north, I was in the north. And he said, is there any way that I could come to your house for a couple of hours, sit with you whilst you trade, watch you and learn from you? So I said yes. He came over, he PayPal me £50. I've probably still got that transaction to this day actually. And over he comes and he spends two hours with me and he made notes, he made like a one page Word document of notes. You know, these markets, blah, blah, blah. This is what we do, this is how we do it. These are the timings or all of that stuff, right? And then he took that away with him. And it just occurred to me, if he would pay me for a little bit of help, maybe other followers would pay me for some kind of help. So I took it upon myself. I got that Word document back from, from him and I messaged a few of the followers that I was, I was already chatting with and I basically offered them the Word document and I said, look, you know, Wissam bought it for 50 pounds last week. He came to my house, if you would like it. I know that you said you were struggling with this, well, this might help you. And it's £50 if you want to buy it. And a few of them bought it, right? So I'd made maybe £200. £250. But.

That was, it was an amazing feeling, man. I can't, I can't describe. There's no feeling quite like, because it felt like free money because they would just send me £50. I would send them this Word document and then they would, you know.

Be happy and it would, it would actually help them. So that was kind of the accidental first stage of my elearning company right now. What happened next was those guys started to give me feedback. So, you know, one of them would say, oh, is there any chance that we can put some images in to show us instead of just the text? So I did that and then some of them said, oh, I've got this question, that question, this question, could you put a little Q and a bit in? So I did that.

They basically accidentally helped me find product market fit in a weird way because they just gave me product feedback and then I made the product better and they gave me product feedback, then I made the product better. And then after a few weeks and after their feedback, I thought, I wonder if I could charge a little bit more for this, like £90. And. And I did. I sold a couple more at £90. Then I thought, well, maybe I could charge £150 and make it into a bit more of like a thing. So I made it into almost like a. Like a PDF, you know, six or seven or eight pages of a PDF document with proper titles and images and stuff like that. And I started charging £150 and then £200 and then £250 and I kept making it longer, better, more detailed as I raised the price and it worked. And by the end of that year, which was 2018, because I've still got the financial tracker that I used to keep, I made about, I think it was 22,000, like 200 and odd pounds, so call it 22K. And this was from like maybe 2018 to the end of 2018. I made about 22,000 pounds from selling this. As I rose the price made it better and it turned from the Word document to the PDF, then it turned into a Dropbox folder of videos with the PDF. And then going into 2019, I had like a bronze tier and a gold tier. No, I had a bronze, a silver, a gold and a platinum tier to the, to the thing. And it was like 200 pounds for the bronze for like just the PDF, 400 pounds or something like that for the silver for like the PDF and the videos. Gold was like that plus coaching and platinum was that plus like six months of coaching and one to one and blah, blah, blah, just like as much as I could offer the customer. That was like 995. And in 2019.

As I built out those tiers, I also started a website, a proper website. And again, the website is still there to this day. And I also started a YouTube channel, which is still there to this day, because I thought to myself, this is working. Selling these files through Twitter is working. But my Twitter's tiny. I had like 300, 400 subscribers. Followers. Sorry. So I thought, how can I get more followers? And it just occurred to me, well, if I start a YouTube, I can have fun making videos and putting them on there. I can Send all of the traffic to Twitter, and then I can use Twitter as the conversion mechanism to speak to them and sell them on the product, basically. And that's what I did. So in 2019, I started the YouTube and again, it still exists. You can go to it, you can scroll right back and see my first ever video. They ain't great, they ain't great. But nonetheless, that grew the Twitter. As the Twitter grew, I made more sales. And as I made more sales, I made the product better. And as I made the product better, I raised the price. So can you see how that, how it worked? And then in 2019, I made, I think it was about 240k pounds or thereabouts to 230. 240. It was about a quarter of a million in 2019. And then I knew I was on to something, you know, that was like, that was the year that was probably, probably the most defining year of my life.

But, yeah, that year changed the game. So when that year ended, it was just me. I think I had one team member. I'd hired one of my best customers, Paul, who still works in that company to this day, by the way, which is pretty cool. So, Paul, if you watch this video, you're absolutely awesome. Thank you so much for the years of help and hard work and support and love. So super appreciate you, buddy. So I think Paul was my first ever hire. Came in to help with support. I think I'd hired a coach by then. I'd hired one of my best coaching clients, this guy Tom. Tom still works in the company to this, to this day as well. All these years on. Same to you, Tom, if you watch this, buddy. Big love, big respect, big appreciation, man.

So I think I had about two team members, Paul and Tom. Tom was doing some of the coaching calls. Paul was helping with the email support side of things. And we'd just done about a quarter of a million pounds. And it was all profit, aside from a little bit of expense for the team members. It was all profit because we were not running ads. We had a very, very, very small, lean team. We had a few software expenses, you know, like.

I think I had someone editing my YouTube videos. We had an email, software, web hosting, but you're talking not a lot. Not a lot. So it was the. The profit margin was like 85%. Really was. It was insane, man. I made so much money that year. That was by far the most money I'd ever made in a year personally, which feeds into something else that I'll cover in a minute, which is moving to Dubai because I got a scary tax bill, a scary tax bill off 2019. But anyway.

So end of 2019, things are going really well. And I stopped doing music in 2019 because I wasn't enjoying it. I didn't enjoy the travel. It was so sporadic. You know, I could have tried to keep going, but I just thought, let me go all in on this. This is working so well. I'm making so much money. It's fun, it's easy. You know, I'm loving it. So let me just stop doing music for now. And I stopped. And then I never djed again. I never made music again. And that was the end of the music side of things. Now one really pivotal thing happened. December 2019 was one of my last ever DJ shows. I was DJing a club in London called Fabric. And I was. I was in the hotel before the show, and I saw a YouTube ad from a guy called Alex Becker. And basically what he was saying is he had a program that would teach you to run YouTube ads. And if you're already selling online education, this would massively grow your company. So it came at the. I mean, good God, like, if there is a God, if God is real, then he gave me that advert that night because that changed my fucking life. That advert changed my life, man. So I saw the ad, clicked it, booked in a call, took the call a few days later, and bought Alex's iron programs, about $8,000. And I learned to run YouTube ads. I learned how to build sales funnels. I learned how to write sales scripts and all this really crucial stuff that stupidly, I just didn't know. I just didn't know. I didn't know what a sales funnel was, man. I didn't know what I was doing. Cold outreach. I didn't even know what cold outreach was. I honestly didn't know. I just used common sense. I just thought if I speak to people and they have a problem I can solve, maybe they'll buy from me. And they did. I just used common sense this whole time until then. And then, then I learned all this stuff. But anyway, so I bought that and I quickly made a webinar funnel, an automated webinar funnel, and I made YouTube ads. I turned them on January 2020, and I swear to the Lord above, we were doing like 15x cash. So I would spend, like, you know, I'd spend like £500 and we'd make thousands. Honestly, like, I would spend, let's say a thousand pounds and I'd make like 15 grand back from those ads. It was insane, man. So anyway, and I'm actually, I'm writing a book at the moment and I put a screenshot from the ad tracker in the book. So if any of you buy that book when it comes out in a few months, I run you through all these early numbers and I show you screenshots from the 2020 Ad Tracker. So you can see my. You can literally see exactly what I spent on ads, what the ROI was, all of this stuff. So I've put that in the book, which is quite cool. So I'm excited to share that with you guys when that comes out in a few months. And that book is just going to show you exactly everything that I've ever learned so that you can build one of these businesses and make this money for yourself. But anyway, back on track. When I turn those ads on, it was like printing money. It was like owning a money printer. It was, it was actually scary. Like I just thought, how on earth is this possible? But anyway, so I slowly scaled those ads and you know, I'd spend like 500 month one, then I'd spend two grand month two, then I spent like five grand, month three, 10 grand, 25 grand. And I just kept spending a bit more, bit more, bit more, a bit more. And then by, in, in that year 2020, we did £1.3 million in sales. So we more than 4x the company. It's just insane. It's just insane. But yeah, so that was an amazing year. And again, the team was so lean. I mean, I think I hired another coach that year, but it was still, it was me, Paul, Tom, I think Asri came on board that year who was our second coach. And when I got the tax bill from 2019, it was in 2020.

And that was a scary tax bill. And I just joined. Towards the end of 2020, I joined this guy, Sam Oven's Mastermind. I remember it clearly, it was $36,000 for the year. And I met someone in that mastermind, my buddy James, who just moved to Dubai from England to optimize for tax. And I posted in the Mastermind and I said, you know, hey guys, I've just got this massive tax bill. Have any of you learned any ways to get this down? James commented on the post and he said, yeah, I've just moved to Dubai from Newcastle.

And then he explained that it was pretty easy. It was not very expensive. It's like 15 grand to fully move everything over here. And that's what I did. So I started that Process carried on scaling the webinar. And in 2021, we were doing about 300k a month.

I'm almost certain that's correct because I remember when, when I moved to Dubai.

It is at least a quarter of a million a month. At least a quarter of a million. Between 250 and 350amonth we were doing with the webinar. But we'd scaled so far that profitability was coming down and down and down and down and down. And when I moved to Dubai, we were doing.

About 1.8x. So if we spent a hundred thousand on ads, we'd make 1.8 back. We met like 180k back, so 80 profit. So we were doing about 1.8 on ads. And this was April, May, when I just moved to Dubai, 2021. And I just learned I knew about sales call funnels already because I learned that in Alex Becker's program. But I just thought, I don't need this. I don't want to build a sales team. But at that stage, I revisited sales call funnels and I also found out about this guy called Cole Gordon, who was a, is a big sales guy. He just spoke at my mastermind a few months ago. Awesome guy, doing immensely well, multiple millions a month across his handful of businesses. And I bought Cole Gordon's mastermind as well. I think that was like $64,000 for the year. And we moved from a webinar to a sales call funnel with a, you know, a value video and a so on and so forth. And that was May, June 2021. And that was, that's what got us to the, to the next level. Because when we made that move, we came right back down in revenue. So we went back to like 60k a month, 70k a month. So a big step down, but we were hyper profitable again. We were doing like 4 or 5x again. So we went down, but the profit went massively up. Right. So there was a bit of, there was a rebalancing phase for a few months. But anyway, so I took all the sales calls myself. I was doing like 10 calls a day, six days a week. It was actually, it was actually a great time. I look back on that time with good memories. It was hard, but good memories. I just moved to Dubai, was feeling awesome, was feeling focused. I was just on my own. No girlfriend, just a few friends all doing the same thing. It was a good time. It's a really good time. And then across that year, I hired two or three sales reps So I did calls myself for about two, three months. Then I brought on a rep. And then two, three months later, we brought on another rep. We just did the same as the webinar. We just slowly scaled up over the months. And one thing that I regret actually was not scaling faster. We should have scaled faster. And if you're one of my coaching clients, if you're one of the people I coach one to one to build your education business or grow your education business, you've probably heard me say this. If you've got an edge and if you're very profitable on ads, just scale. Don't be stupid. Don't go from spending a thousand to ten thousand, but scale fast and capitalize on the edge whilst you've got it. That's one thing that I wish I did. Cause I could have made more money, but I made a lot, so I'm not unhappy. So we made the transition to a sales call Funnel that year, 2021. And over the next few years, that's all we really did. We just very slowly scaled further and further and further, hired another rep, another rep, another rep, and just pushed it. And then we started working on the back end. And then we started.

We worked with a developer to introduce a software that we would sell to customers for $350 a month. We created like an online mastermind where people would. Oh, and here's another thing that I've missed, actually. Sorry, here's another thing that I've missed. So how the price has evolved. So just to take a step back.

When I started out, I had, well, nothing first. Then I had the Word document, then I had the PDF ebook thing. Then I had the files in a Dropbox folder. Then I, for some strange reason thought that it was a good idea to do the bronze, silver, gold, platinum thing, which worked well.

But was a bit complex. Then I moved to the webinar and it was just one thing, one product, just the Platinum program, the big platinum program for $2,000, right. So $2,000.

And we kept it at 2,000. We tested it a bit. We tested two and a half. That didn't work. We tested one and a half, wasn't profitable enough. 2,000 was the sweet spot. And then when we moved to a sales call funnel, we moved it to three and a half thousand dollars. And then after three or four months, we moved it to, I think it's four and a half thousand dollars or $5,000. And then we held it there for a few months. Then we moved to like six and a half thousand Dollars and we just slowly price tested and what we actually found. And this is really interesting, this is a very valuable lesson to share with you guys. When we raised the price, we still made the same sales, so it didn't impact sales at all, which is quite interesting. But support tickets went down and client quality went up. And what I mean by that is more people would finish the program, more people would do the hard work and get great results. We'd get more good testimonials, good reviews, and again, it was easier to service them because they were almost like a higher quality of buyer, which is quite, quite interesting. But that's definitely one thing that we found. So that usually what I've learned is the higher the price, the higher quality the buyer, they're just a better quality of buyer. You know, they care more, they're more invested, they want to do the work. They're not a refund risk. Like when you sell very cheap things, you get a lot more refunds. When you sell expensive things, you get barely any refunds because they're just higher quality buyers. I don't want to say people, because that's quite crude, but, but it is true. It is true. The higher the price, the higher quality the, the buyer. So that's definitely one thing that we found and we raised the price right up to where it was when I sold the company. So when I sold the company, it was eight and a half thousand dollars for the program. It was a much bigger, better program because across the years we'd made it better. Iterated, added in a new section, added in a mini course, added in more coaching, done this, done that. So we kept making the product better across the years as we raised the price. So we didn't just raise the price, we didn't just take a two grand program and charge eight and a fucking half. Like you can't do that, for God's sakes. So that's not what we did. I just want to make that very clear. It was a great program, man. That program is, it is, it's. You can still buy it today. The company's still going to this day. You know, seven years on, which I guess says a lot. You know, not many companies last for seven years, whatever the, whatever the industry, but there you go.

So, yeah, and then that's it. We grew it very far. We built a big team. We scaled to the biggest month that we ever had was $824,000, which funnily enough was the month that I signed the LOI to instigate the sale of the company. And loi is basically a confirmation letter between you and the buyer to say, we are going to buy this. Now let's start the buying process. So I signed that back at the that biggest month that we'd ever had in May last year, and then that was it. Six months later, I sold the company to Highview US private equity firm for multi seven figures, which was exactly what I wanted. That was one of my dreams. To be able to. To be able to build a company so good that you can sell it especially for a very high price was one of my dreams. So it's really nice to, to achieve that. And that's basically the story. I don't know how long this video has been. It's been 20, 28 minutes.

And it's been a wild ride, but it's just been.

One. Probably the biggest thing I've learned is if you don't know what to do, if you don't know what you don't know, you're gonna get stuck and you're gonna stay stuck. Because I've seen this happen a lot. One thing that's made me successful is every time I've got a problem or I'm stuck on something, I find a mentor or a coach who's done it, and I just pay them. If they have a program, I just buy it. If they have a mastermind, I join it. I've spent way over, way over $250,000 now on Alex Becker's mastermind, Sam women's mastermind, Cole Gordon's mastermind, Dan Bradley's mastermind, Alan Sultanich's mastermind. On and on all the courses I've bought, all the books that I've read, which you can actually see on the shelf behind me, I read a lot of books. So I've put in the money. And it's always the people that think that they can do it themselves that don't make it. They never make it because they just stupidly think that they can do it themselves. How on earth if you could do something, you would have done it. It's like Alex Hormozy says, if you were capable of making a million a month, you would be making a million a month. You're not capable. If you're watching this video and you want to make, let's say, 10k a month, 50k a month, 100k a month, and you are not.

You'Re not capable. Or else you would be doing it, you'd have it. If you were capable of building your dream life alone, you'd have your dream life now, but you don't because you're not capable. And I've learned that because before Alex Becker's Mastermind, I was sat on a 1.3 million a year business, not making it because I didn't know when I joined Cole Gordon's Mastermind, I was capable of doing 800k in a month. But I wasn't because I didn't know how.

So that's one massive thing that I've learned. And still to this day, I'm still. I'm in a Mastermind right now. I've made almost. Well, actually I've made over $20 million selling online education. And I'm in a mastermind right now. Still learning, getting better at copywriting, getting better at writing value videos. I'm learning about YouTube. I'm growing my YouTube channel so even the learning never ends. And the only people that aren't going to make it are the ones that don't have the knowledge and are so stupid that they don't just invest in getting the knowledge from someone that's been there and done it. You have to be an idiot. I understand that some people can't afford it. And if you genuinely cannot afford it, then you've got to find the money, you've got to save the money. And if you can't afford it and you don't do it, you're simply wasting your own time and just missing out on the money. That's all you're doing. You're just slowing yourself down and costing yourself money. So that is probably the biggest thing, the biggest lesson I've learned. If I don't know how to do something, I just find someone who's done it and I just pay them. Just, just show me how to do it, man, so I can unlock the money that's waiting to be unlocked.

So there we go, guys. That's the journey of building the online education company, scaling it to 16.4 million in total sales, selling it to a private equity firm. And.

Right now, question you guys are probably asking is, what are you doing right now? So I'm writing a book, which is another one of my dreams. I've always wanted to do that.

And the book is everything I've ever learned. Nothing held back. I've given away everything, scripts, templates, just everything is in there. That's going to be coming out in April, May, so I can't wait to share that with you. And I'm also just founding a company called Build, Grow and Exit.com. and what I'm going to do, believe it or not, is help people to either build an online education business, grow an online education business, or exit an online education business. So I'm already doing that right now. And the reason that came about was because a year and a half ago, one of my now friends was in a mastermind that I used to be in. And the owner of the mastermind was telling a story of my success and he reached out and he messaged me on Instagram and he said, hey, Will, Dan was telling this story about you. I'm struggling with some stuff that you seem to have solved. If I pay you 3000amonth, can I please have one hour with you a week and just help me? And I helped that guy. His name is Oliver Denier. His testimonial is actually on my testimonials channel, William Brown testimonials YouTube channel. You can go and watch that after this video. And I made him like over a hundred grand in about six, eight weeks.

So that was the first ever business consulting that I ever did with anyone, ever. And then I took on another client and then another, and then another. And I realized that was my true calling and my true passion was helping people to build these businesses. So that's what I do now. I've got about 13, 14 clients right now, and I help them. It's a mix of the two. I help about half of them. I'm helping to build an online education business, about half of them. They've got one already and I'm helping them to grow it. And it's just so good, so fun, so fulfilling, so enjoyable. It's just awesome, man. The dream, the absolute dream. So that's what I'm doing now. So I guess if any of you guys do need any help with either building one of these businesses or if you have one growing it, or even if you want to exit, I'm working with a couple of people to help them exit as well, which is quite exciting. I'll put a link in the description and come on board. Let me, let me coach you one to one. Let me help you build or grow or exit we of these companies. It's not free, it's quite expensive because number one, I don't need to do it. So I don't really care. I mean, the money's not the goal, so I don't care at all whether people come on board or not. But for the ones that do, I love it. And I'm going to help you. I'm going to help you do some awesome stuff and make a lot of money, that's for sure. So if you do, if you're one of these people that's realized through this video that you don't know what you don't know, and you understand that you're missing out on a lot of money by not doing this, I'd love to work with you. I'd love to help you. Come on board and let's make it happen. So I hope that you enjoyed this video, guys. Bit of a long one. I've really gone deep there and I've shared it all. I've shared the whole journey. I hope this inspires you and I'll see you back here soon.