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

Hey guys, it's Will. And in this video I want to walk you through exactly how I made my first million dollars in cash. And I'm just going to tell you the full story, every step, everything that I did, all the way through the story, from start to actually getting my first $1 million cash in the bank. Okay, and by sharing this, my hope is that you can take inspiration from this. You can maybe take a nugget that helps you on your own journey. You could even just copy what I did essentially. And it is almost all replicatable. So as I share this, I would say make notes, think about how it applies to you, and again, you can follow the steps to achieve something very, very similar for yourself. Okay, now the story begins. If we rewind.

Roughly eight years backwards from where I am right now. And at that stage I was about 26 years old. I lived with my parents in the north of England in their spare room. And I was actually, in terms of making income at the time I was DJing. And I was also as embarrassed as I am to admit this, I don't think I've ever, ever shared this, but I was actually delivering leaflets door to door and making an extra about $40 a day, rain or shine. I had to drive 30 minutes this way, 45 minutes that way, one hour this way, park up in an area that I was told to get out, literally put leaflets in every single letterbox for the whole area. And it was not a very good time. So I had about three or four thousand dollars, give or take, to my name in the entire world. That's literally all the money that I had in the world. I had no assets, I had no, no wealth. I was making, I was averaging about two and a half thousand dollars, $3,000 a month or so. And for those that don't know this, I was actually a professional record producer and DJ at that time. So I've DJed in over 45 countries. I've played on Boiler Room. I've actually curated my own Boiler Room back in whatever year that was. And the weird thing was at the time people thought I was quite well off. People thought that I was famous. You know, people saw me DJing in India, DJing in Sweden, DJing in New York, DJing in Sydney. Sydney was actually my first ever sold out show of my entire career. And by sold out, I mean 200 people. So very, very small. And DJing was my career, but it made me almost no money. So I was making around about five to six hundred dollars per show. But sometimes I'd have to travel to another country to get that 600, then come home and then travel to another country to get that $450 and then come home. So that was not profit when I actually got that money home. Some months I would do a tour and I would do 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 shows and make 8k, 10k, 12k. But then I could not have a show for five weeks, then I might have one show and then nothing for three weeks. So this is why I was doing delivering leaflets on the side, just to make ends meet in the quiet times. And thankfully that job was quite fluid. So I could do it for one or two weeks, stop for a week, do it again for one week, stop for a week. If I was on tour for two or three weeks, I could stop and start again when I came home. But man, I hid that job. I didn't even tell my girlfriend that I had that job. I never even told my girlfriend. And then when we broke up, I would avoid her house in her area because I used to have to deliver leaflets in this place called Preston and the, the surrounding areas, which is a city in the, in the north of England. And I would wear like a cap and a hoodie and like try and park in weird places so that my girlfriend or my friends didn't see my car. And God forbid, like a music fan saw me. Like it was, it was embarrassing but like what could I do? I didn't have any qualifications, I studied music at college, music at university. I had no skills, no special talents apart from making music.

And around that age, 26, my friends started buying like nice cars. I'll never forget, I was at McDonald's one day and I saw one of my friends going through the drive thru in a brand new Audi A5 or A6. And I was like, how on earth can you afford that? Like what job do you do? How do you make money? And I didn't talk to the guy, I just saw him going through.

But it was around that time, you know, I saw my high school friend Dan in that brand new Audi. One of my other friends, Josh, bought his first ever house, was getting married at the time. Another friend of mine was getting married and going on these really nice holidays and I just honestly felt like a broke loser. I was delivering leaflets ashamedly and hiding. So I didn't get seen doing it. I think I looked fairly successful when I was DJing, when I was on tour, probably online, when I was DJing on Boiler Room. But the truth of the matter was I was making like on average two, two and a half thousand dollars a month if you evened all the income out across, across a year. So sometimes way more, sometimes zero, sometimes I could not earn anything for three, four weeks. And I was feeling lost, I was feeling stressed, I was feeling stuck. And I was thinking like, how do you make money, how do you get rich, how do you build wealth? And there's only one way that I knew in the world and that was real estate. Because I'd been to a couple of real estate seminars and you know, I, I, it made sense, common sense. You buy a house, you rent it out, you get the rent, it goes up in value. But obviously I could not afford a house. I had like 3,4k to my name, so I was not getting a house anytime soon. But my plan at that stage was right, I'm going to stay at home with my parents, I am going to live like a pauper, I'm not going to go on holiday, I am not going to waste money, I am not going to buy anything fancy and I'm just going to save, save, save, save for as long as it takes. Buy a little house, rent it out and buy a little house. The first house I ever bought, I didn't buy this till later, but the first house I ever bought was £51,000, so about $60,000. I bought it with a mortgage back then. That was my first ever real estate investment. And that came about a year and a half later. We'll get to that later in the story. But that was my plan. I thought, right, I'm going to dj, work as hard as I can, deliver leaflets in my spare time, save money voraciously, and maybe in one or two or three years I can buy a house and then in one or two or three or four more years I can buy another house. And I will slowly, maybe when I'm 50 years old I'll have a few houses and I'll be okay, right? Because remember I didn't have a pension. You don't get a pension when you're a dj, right? You don't get a pension when you deliver leaflets door to door for $40 a day.

So that was my plan. Now one massive shift occurred for me when I came home from it, DJ booking one afternoon and I remember I was DJing in London, I got the train at home, I drove home to my parents house and I was having dinner and there was a trading documentary on TV all about currency trading. And again I was about 26 years old at this time and I had Never, ever heard of making money online, ever. I did not know until that moment. I did not know that you could make money online. So a lot's changed these days. Everybody knows now that you can make money online, whether it's trading, whether it's econ, whether it's drop shipping, whether it's reselling things, whether it's whatever. That day, that evening when I saw that documentary and I saw some young guy younger than me, apparently making like $500 a day, $1,000 a day, one and a half thousand dollars a day from his bedroom at home, that blew my goddamn mind. I couldn't believe that that was true, that that was actually real. So straight away, straight on Google typed in trading broker, opened a trading account, put £500 in, and through nothing but beginner's luck. I had no strategy, I had no edge, I had no plan, I had no education, I did not know a single trader in real life. I grew that £500 up to about 7,000, 8,000 over the coming three or four or five months. And I thought, I am going to be a millionaire. This is easy, I can do it from home. I'll never Forget I was DJing in New Delhi, in India on my second India tour. And from the airport in Manchester I took a trade and by the time I got to India and got to my hotel, I'd the, the trade had closed itself out, it had hit my profit target and I'd made about £700 and it was more than I was getting paid for the DJ gig. And I'll never forget that. So I thought, this is it, this is the way out, I'm going to get rich, I can dj. Just for fun, I can stop delivering leaflets. This is going to change my life. And up to that point, for that three, four, five months, it was beginning to change my life because I was making money from the Internet, I was making money as a trader. And then one day, as happens to all traders again, I can remember the market, I can remember the trade, I was long the German stock index. And again, I wasn't managing risk, didn't have a strategy, didn't have an edge. And I wiped about 70% of my account on one trade. And I went from something like seven or eight K right back down to like one and a half, two. And I would honestly say that was one of the most heartbreaking, gut wrenching, scary, weird, confusing.

Just, it was just such a horrible feeling to lose that much money because that 8k might as well have been 30, 40k to me. Because I'd never seen that much money. That was the most money I'd ever seen in my entire life. And granted, it wasn't in my bank account, it was in my trading account. So really it wasn't, you know, I hadn't actually taken it out. But nonetheless, I took a massive loss. I stopped trading for a couple of weeks and then I made this pivotal, life changing decision. And even to this day, like, I just thank God that I did this, because I made probably one of the best decisions maybe, maybe of my entire life. Because it's the reason I'm sat here today, this decision that I'm about to tell you about. I took out the rest of the money and I took myself back to, let's say I had 2,000 left. Well, I took about one and a half out. I left my initial original 500 in. And I bought my first ever online course. It was £300 from this trader called Chris, whose YouTube channel I watched. And I also spent some money on a mentor who used to work at a trading firm in London, a guy called Tom. And long story short, thanks to Chris, thanks to Tom, thanks to buying that education over the next seven, eight, nine months, I was finally able to actually gain consistency, learn what an edge was, build and develop my own strategies, gain consistency. And around that time, I started a Twitter account. Now just really pay attention to this because this is one of the most important things that I did. I didn't know it at the time, but this led to the creation of a business that made me $16.4 million. This one decision, starting a Twitter account. So I started a Twitter account and I would share my trades, I would talk about the markets, I would chat with other traders. And this is all still online, by the way. The Twitter is still there, all the tweets are still there, right Back to like 2018, which is quite cool. So you can go and literally see that. You can see my whole journey documented tweet by tweet for years, which is a great thing to still have. And after about nine months or so, maybe 12 months, I had like 300 followers. And somebody messaged me and they said, hey, Will, I've been following your Twitter, I've been following your trades. This person said to me that you're doing really well. It looks like you're doing really well. I am not doing very well. Is there any way that you could help me? Could I pay you to help me.

Now? I had never even thought about teaching. I'd never even thought about education or the Possibility that I could even have an education business. It never even crossed my mind, ever. So I said to this guy, and he was a local guy, he was from like about 25 minutes away from me. So I said, look, come to my house.

We'Ll do $50. And he, I've still got the receipt. To this day, he PayPal me $50. He came to my house for about three hours. We traded together. I showed him what I was doing, he asked me questions and he made a Word document. And I'm talking like a two page Word document, just text, just notes. And he took that copy away with him and I kept a copy for myself. And it just occurred to me, just through common sense, I just thought.

If he was a follower and he bought that, then maybe my other followers will buy it as well. The thought just crossed my mind and I thought, right, let me just neaten the Word document up a bit so it's a bit more presentable. And then I was already in conversation with a few of my followers, so I just said to them, hey, look, Wissam came to my house and we made this Word document together. And he said that he really loved it and it's really helped him. If you like, you can have it too. And it's just $50, the same thing that Wissam paid. And two or three people said yes.

Now that felt like a significant breakthrough at the time because I just remember thinking like, these people have given me money, but I haven't really done anything for it. I've just given them a Word document, they've given me $50. And at the time that $50 felt significant to me because again, I was not very financially, you know, I was far from rich, I was far from wealthy, and again I was DJing, I was trading. And this money that they were giving me, it just honestly it felt like free money because I just was not doing any work for it. I didn't have to travel to another country for it. I didn't have to drive for an hour and deliver leaflets for it. I didn't have to take risk to get it. As I was doing with my trades, I just sent them a Word document and they PayPal me $50.

Now from there, those few people, and I'm talking three or four or five people, they started giving me feedback. So one of them, I remember said like, well, can we, can you please put images in there? And another one said, is there any way that you can add this thing in? And then Wisam said to me, what could you share this and put that in there and maybe put some questions and answers in there. And those initial customers actually built my product for me.

They helped me find what's called product market fit. And as they kept giving me feedback, I made it bigger, I made it better, I made it longer, I put images in, then it transformed into like a 8 page ebook. Then it transformed into a few videos in a Dropbox folder and the ebook. And then I slowly raised the price from $50 to $100 to $150 to $250 for all of this stuff. And as the year went on and I made that first sale, I think it was April 2018 or, or, or thereabouts. And by the end of that first year I'd made in US dollars, about $32,000 selling the word document, selling the ebook, selling the Dropbox folder of videos and the ebook, selling some one to one consulting as well. Then I made a website. And then again through common sense, I thought, right, I'm getting traffic from Twitter. They look at what I'm doing, they like what I'm doing, they can see that I'm good at what I do. And then people ask for my help and they give me money and I give them the help. So I just thought, well, how can I get more people? So I started a YouTube channel. And I think I started this in 2019 if I remember correctly.

And it worked really, really, really well. Some of the first videos I made got like 10,000 views, 25,000 views right out of the gate. Again, you could call it beginners luck. I wouldn't really call it skill. And then I was sending all that YouTube traffic to Twitter. I would nurture the traffic on Twitter. Eventually people would ask for help and I would do a bit of outreach as well. I didn't know that it was outreach at the time, but I would just chat with people and then I'd say, look, if you need any help, I can help you. And I've got this Dropbox folder of videos, I've got this ebook, I do coaching as well. And whatever the price was, I think I was charging like £495 at that stage for everything that I put together.

And things really started to compound on themselves. So the Twitter was growing, the YouTube was growing, the product was getting better, the price was getting higher and it really began to become something. And by the end of that second year, again in US dollars, I did about $280,000 cash in that second year.

Now that was 2019 and suffice to say, everything Went out the window. I stopped doing music, right? I was like, this is my chance, this is the thing that might actually make me rich. And it all happened very quickly and very fluidly as well. Like it was all just common sense and things falling into place. And I think just those first few people that said yes gave me a lot of confidence. I thought, wow, it works. People will give me money for my knowledge.

And I just slowly made the product better, slowly made a website, made more YouTube videos, did more tweets, nurtured the customers, spoke to the customers, sold them the programs. And that second year I made.

What I think anyone would consider a life changing amount of money, or almost $300,000 in cash from selling the education and suffice to say, stopped doing music, certainly stopped delivering leaflets. And then in December 19th, I'll never forget this, I moved out of my parents house. I got a one bedroom apartment in Manchester city centre. It was one and a half thousand pounds a month in rent.

I bought a second hand silver BMW 4 Series. That was a great car, I love that. I'll never forget.

I got it from a garage in Huddersfield and I remember driving it home and I was like, this is the dream. I'm printing money, it's so easy. I've got this awesome car, I've got this really nice apartment in Manchester. Obviously I had pretty good cash reserves by that stage and I think it was around that time that I bought my first investment property as well. It might have been the end of 2018. I honestly can't remember when I bought it but like I say, I bought my first ever investment property in the north of England. It was 51000 pounds. I bought it on a mortgage. 25, I think 25 mortgage, rented it out and December 2019 I was making like 15, 20k a month, 25k a month area very consistently, very predictably and things were getting bigger and better. I was learning how to do everything like because I was just bootstrapping this whole thing. I didn't know what customer support was. I just had an email inbox and I would answer their questions. I didn't know what product development was, I didn't know how to handle refunds, I didn't know even what cold outreach was, but I was doing it and it was just all, I just made it up as I went along and just used common sense really. So it was a wild ride. And then something happened. In December of 2019 I saw a YouTube ad from a guy called Alex Becker and in the ad Alex was saying, look, if you sell courses and you're not running YouTube ads, you're missing out on a lot of money. And I'd been watching some of his YouTube videos. I liked him, I trusted him, I believed him. I could see that he was pretty good at what he was doing. And I booked a call and I bought his Mastermind and it was $8,000. And that was the most money I'd ever spent in my entire life in one hit. I'd never spent eight grand. And I remember I literally, I was in my, my parents kitchen, right, just before I'd moved out to Manchester, I was in my parents kitchen and I had, I remember paying that money like so vividly in my head. And I think it's just because it was so impactful. That moment never left me. And you're probably starting to see a pattern here because buying the first course and hiring the first mentor had a massive life changing impact. Buying Alex Becker's Mastermind had a life changing impact. And this is why to this day, I love online education so much, because it has genuinely changed my life. It's genuinely made me millions and millions of dollars. This is why I so confidently say to people, buy courses, hire coaches, hire mentors, invest in masterminds. Because I would not be here today on a six week vacation, staying in this luxury villa in Bali if I didn't make these investments. Anyway, back to the story. So I bought Alex's Mastermind and over the following two, four, six weeks, I learned what YouTube ads were. I learned to write them, I learned to run them. I learned to write a long form auto webinar and my first ever webinar. I just did what Alex told me. Alex told me how to make ads. I did what I was told. He showed me how to write a webinar and run the ads. I did what I was told. He even told me what to charge. He said, look, just charge $2,000, put everything into one. And by that stage it was a online course. It wasn't the Dropbox folder of videos anymore. It wasn't the ebook anymore. It was like I'd made what I believed was a great online course, which had group coaching and one to one coaching as well. I charged $2,000 and I turned my ads on December. No, sorry, not December, January 2020.

Now when I turned ads on, I was spending like.

I was spending like.

$25 a day or something like that.

And that.

Money.

Man, like, it was just insane. I would spend like a thousand on ads and I would honestly make like 12k back. It was like having a legal money printing machine. I couldn't even believe it, man. At the time, I could not believe it. Then I would spend a little bit more the next month and make, you know, I'd spend 3k and make like 25 grand back then I would spend like 7, 8k and I'd be like 50 grand back. And it was just insane. And by the end of that third year, we were doing over a hundred thousand a month. By December 2020, going into 2021, we were doing six figures a month cash. And it was just so easy, so fun. I honestly remember thinking, is this allowed? Like, are you allowed to even do this? Because I was making more money than I even thought possible. I didn't even. It was a bit scary. I really mean this. It was a bit scary. Like, I remember saying to one of my friends that I met in the apartment complex that I lived in in Manchester, I remember telling him, and he was a, like a lawyer or something, so he had a pretty good job. But I remember showing him our payment processor and be like, yeah, we made £112,000 last month.

And I remember his face. And he was like, is this like real? Like, what? How do you make that much money in a single month? And I was like, well, it's easy. I just run these YouTube ads and then people click the ad and they watch this webinar. And then in the webinar I tell them how I can help them with their trading. And then at the end of the webinar, I share my two thousand, I think it was dollars, two thousand dollar program. And then they just buy it if they want to buy it. And it was just insane. It was probably the most insane time of my entire life. Like, and by this time I had a bit of a team. So I had like a coach who was one of my customers that I hired. I had a support rep who was also one of my customers that I'd hired. I had a copywriter who was helping me with the webinar and the ads and stuff like that. And it was just mental. We were just printing money like never before. And then tax became a problem. So by the end of 2020, even my accountant was like, how on earth are you doing this? Because I have the same accountant from my music days. So my accountant, Mandy, she's been with me since like 2014 or something, when I started making decent money from music. And she was still my accountant. So she'd watched me go from like two and a half thousand A month to two and a half thousand a day more. Three, four, five thousand a day more. And even she was like, what are you doing? Like, how are you doing this? How are you making so much money? And I actually still speak to Mandy to this day, and my old bookkeeper Tom, we still speak to this day, which is quite cool. And it was just mental. It was absolutely mental. So tax became a problem. And I was in a guy called Sam Oven's Mastermind. So I bought Sam Oven's Mastermind. It was $36,000 for the year. I think I bought that towards the end of 2020. And there was a guy in there called James who just moved to Dubai from Newcastle. And James was saying to me, oh, I've just moved there. There's no tax here. You can just set up your company here. It costs like 15 grand. It takes three, four weeks. And it's the best place to be anyway because it's hot, it's sunny, it's clean, it's safe. And I thought about that for about two or three months. So I didn't have the balls to just go and do it straight away. But in the end, I moved to Dubai. And I moved to Dubai in April 2021.

And around that time.

I distinctly remember, I went out for dinner with two of the guys from Sam Oven's Mastermind that had moved to Dubai. We went out for dinner, the three of us, we went to Massimo's Italian Restaurant in the Marina. This is how vividly I remember this. And between sitting down for dinner and the end of the dinner, I'd made three sales from the webinar at 2k each. And again, I remember showing my buddies, I was like, look, I run this webinar and they knew what it was. They know what a webinar is, they know what ads is, they know what a program is, of course, because we're all in Sam Oven's Mastermind. But even they were mind blown because they had a sales team and I didn't. I was just running ads to a webinar and just printing money on pretty much autopilot back then. Crazy time. Crazy, crazy, crazy time. So anyway, I moved to Dubai and by the time it got to like May, June, July of 2021, we'd scale to like 250k a month, 300k a month. And by that stage, the profit margin was not massive because we were spending a hell of a lot on ads. I had a team by this stage, and so on and so forth, but I was personally making like A hundred and twenty thousand a month net profit. And it was around, it was actually a bit before then. It was like the end of.

Probably quarter for 2020 or thereabouts that I had my first million dollars or actually pounds, it was British pounds, million pounds in the bank. And I officially became a millionaire around.

August, September, October of 2020. And the reason that I know that, because I've got this vision board thing called an alchemy of self. And I track all my goals one by one as I achieve them. And that is on there, basically. So I know I could go and look at that right now and see the exact month that I officially became a millionaire. Officially had like a million pounds liquid after tax in the bank. And it was around that time. So it all happened what felt like very, very quickly. And looking back on that timeline. So April, I think 2018 was when I made my first ever $50 sale. And again, I can go back and find the receipts because I've still got that PayPal, I think, but I'm pretty sure I've still got that PayPal.

And that set me on the trajectory to becoming a millionaire, building a business that in the end, for those that don't know this, I actually sold that E Learning company last year. We'd made 16.4 million in total across that five years, or just touching on six years when I sold it last, last September.

And then I sold it to a private equity firm for multi seven figures.

And that pretty much brings me up to where I am today and just to backtrack a little bit.

So eventually that webinar that I was running, it burned out. So people were realizing what webinars were. They were cottoning on to the sales process and whenever that happens, you've got to switch model. So it was towards the end of 2021 that we turned off the webinar because we were doing like, in the end we were doing like 1.6 cash. So we'd spend 100 grand, we'd make 160, 60 in profit after paying off the ads. Right. Which was quite low. Then we transitioned to having a sales team and we raised the price from 2k to, I think it was 3.8 when we moved to the sales team model. And then again we went from like 1.6 cash to literally like 5x overnight month one. I'll never forget that. I, I distinctly remember writing the VSL for the sales call funnel from an Airbnb in, in Dubai because I didn't have my own apartment until like the end of the year I just bounced from Airbnb to Airbnb.

And yeah, then we have the sales team and then we scaled up to, you know, 250k a month, half a million a month, 750k a month, just above that was our largest month that we ever had as, as the years went on. So 2022, 2023, and then I sold the company last year. So September 30th was the day that we closed that I got the wire and now that company is still operating to this day. It's being ran by a Colorado based private equity firm called Highview.

And that's pretty much it. So that's the story of how my E Learning company began.

How it grew and evolved, how I made my first £1 million.

In cash and actually liquid in the bank, which took me about April 2018, 2019, 2020. So it probably took me about just above two years to go from having 3K in the bank to having a million in the bank.

Wild. Absolutely wild. And that's the end of the story. So I hope that this has inspired you. I hope that it's added some value. If you have any questions, just ask me in the comments, whatever you like. I'll try my hardest to get back to you all and hopefully you can take some elements of my journey, my path, and use them towards your own success. And you may even want to model exactly what I did because looking back, I can see it a lot more clearer. I can see that I got traffic, nurtured the traffic, presented an offer to the traffic, converted it into sales, worked on the product, found greater product market fit, and then really I just got more traffic from Twitter, from YouTube, from paid ads. I built a better, more hands off sales process, which was the webinar and then the VSL and the sales team. And I just played the game of numbers unit economics essentially and made sure that it was costing me this to get a customer, but I was making that back in profit. That's what allowed us to scale as far as we scaled. And there are other avenues of the story, like what led me to exit the business, which I could maybe make another video all about if you'd like me to, or how we scaled or the exact numbers behind the business. And again, if you want me to make a video on that, I'm more than happy to make it. I also recently made a video that you can go and watch here on the channel, breaking down the sales call funnel as well. So you can go and watch that maybe after this video.

That'S the journey, that's the story. So hope it helps. And I'll see you back here soon.