My Childhood
Throughout my childhood, I was surrounded by “career workers”, people who had one job and they would be with that company for their entire working career. My parents were both college graduates, both had successful careers, my father graduated with one of the first computer science degrees in the country, and took a job starting at $75K in the 1960′s working for a large company who did work for the government. He made great money, but worked 80+ hours a week, he was never home, and was very tired when he was home. While we lived a nice lifestyle, I wanted more, I saw how hard my dad worked, and saved only to live a life that deprived him of his “life”. This was not what I wanted my life to be; this was not a welcomed idea, especially among my parents.

Early Entrepreneurship
Growing up, I only thought about change my lifestyle, I did not want to end up like my father, while I love and respect him, I did not want to live him life. In High School, my cousin, who is a year older than me, was selling T-shirts to students at the time. I saw how he was making a few bucks so I started doing the same thing, but was selling tie-dyed t-shirts. I quickly realized that I could make about double per T-Shirt than he was, so I branched out to a service, tie-dying other peoples’ stuff, their hats, pants, jackets, shoes, really anything someone wanted, and I could tie-dye it!

Within weeks, I was known as the kid who would tie-dye or sell anything tie-dyed. I then decided to capitalize on this by purchasing-shirts in bulk and selling them to other high schools. Business was booming and I made a few grand in profit.

Reality: There is not a long-term career in selling or tie-dying stuff, so I decided to get into a legitimate business.

Stupid Corporate Life
Income from my businesses was never stable; so I decide to get a “real” job. After 3 months of working at “blank” company, I’d realize it wasn’t for me, or that my manager was an idiot, so I’d quit and get another job. Over and over, I’d work for 3-9 months and then get bored and leave. This cycle happened for a long period of time.

Being a Partner
I decided that since I wasn’t making much money, I needed to start making some money, So I started working with a local furniture company, LoveSac, and was one of the original founding partners. I put in a bunch of time, think 90+ hrs a week and money, a lot of money, at one point I maxed out an American Express card with a $50K limit. Simply because I was a partner, with the hope/dream that we would eventually start making money. We did start to make some money, we grew the company from 1 company owned store to 30+ stores through franchising. It was awesome, we grew to over $50M in gross sales, problem was, and we were only making peanuts, compared to what we were selling. Our costs were too high, our overhead was too high, I saw the writing on the wall, we were slowly dying, I decided to leave and get out while I could. Good thing 3 years later they filed bankruptcy.

Internet Marketing Consulting
Instead of finding another job I decided learned more about the consulting business model and how some consultants were making huge amounts of money and others were making close to nothing or worse.

I found out that as a consultant, I could easily bill companies $125 to $250 dollars an hour or more. I couldn’t believe how much money I could make, which started the entrepreneurial juices again. I tried earnestly to figure out how I could also make that much, so I started looking for consulting jobs. The problem was, I had no clue what “consulting” really was.

I thought that if I could even make a small % of what successful consultants were, I would start to become rich and start making the money I thought I deserved. This led me to start my own company. After spending 5 grand to build the website and have the logo designed, it launched, and then came the thud! No one knew my super-fantastic-awesome website existed. Then I learned the hard way that if you don’t market a site, while it might be super-fantastic and awesome, it won’t make or bring any money in, because NO one knows about it.

Logic would tell you to go and hire a marketing company to bring in the people, but sometimes logic sucks. I did exactly what logically I thought I should do. I went out and hired an Internet marketing company to do it all for me. Within a few months, my allotted budget was gone and they were asking for more money, problem was, they didn’t increase my traffic, I was not making any more money, I had no choice but to fire them and find someone else. I then went looking for others, and hired another firm, whose results ended the same, wasting my money, and not bringing in any more traffic than before.

Because I had spent all my money for a service I never received, I had no choice but to learn how to do it myself. I decided to begin learning about Internet marketing and eventually I started to get better at it. But really had no idea what to do with it, I didn’t make any money with it.

A Little Success
I wanted to find something I’d enjoy, here is where marketing came back into play. I started another company and it started taking off and I thought I was “rolling in dough”. With the money I was making, I started to invest in a few start-ups. Most of them took all the money and died, only a small few ever returned my initial investment and only 1 out of 20+ ever made me any money. Realizing investing was not working out for me, one of my business partners took the rest of the money I had made and started investing it into Real Estate, that was really smart, it was working out greatly.

I then started playing around with the internet and started to see results with affiliate marketing, and with blogging. The traffic started to come in, and I sold my first blog for a low 5 figures, Yeah, that was awesome, to finally have some success, and achieve something more than spending money. I purchased I’mBloggingThat as a way to duplicate the effects of the success of my first blog.

Yonder!
I have no idea what the future holds, but have a positive attitude and know that I can overcome any challenges put in front of me, I believe the same for everyone out there. I luckily have made a little more money than I have lost, spent or blown and I have been able to leverage that money into investments like real estate and offline and online companies.

If I play my cards right, these investments will pay off, and I will beable to retire at the ripe old age of 39, I’m 33 currently. Over the next few years I’d like to share with you how I am going about achieving this goal, so hopefully you can to. I’d love to share and interact with you, so please comment and do not be shy, fire your questions away, I would love to help in any way I can.

I hope that you will enjoy my posts, comment, come back around and always feel free to contact me.