The Wealth Hacker Podcast w/ Jeff Rose, CFP®

What if you had a business that was making $100,000 in one month?

BUT, what if this business was failing miserably? 😱

You may have 100,000 in sales but your company is in the red, you are losing money. It is time to make a Pivot! You will have to make some changes to turn things around.

Thankfully this wasn’t my experience, but this was an experience of a close friend of mine.

I recently had breakfast with him to learn more about his story.

My friend is Antonio Centeno - you might know him from Real Men Real Style. He has almost 2 Million subscribers on his YouTube channel.

He was also an officer in the Marines. OORAH!

This dude is Legit! 🤵

He knows fashion, but you will know he was a Marine just by his demeanor.

I wanted to share his story because it is an important lesson.

[Antonio] I entered the Marines in 1997 through OCS after college. Most of the men in my family have served in the military. I actually didn’t know what I wanted to do with my philosophy degree - but I knew the Marines would be a good first step.

One thing we learn in the military is that you don’t fail -- you don’t give up.

A Tailored Suit was the first company I founded in 2007. Even through I was making 100,000 a month, my expenses were even higher. I was losing money.

Obstacles are there to stop other people. If you are healthy and relatively young- you may live until your 90s - you have plenty of time to change the world! 🙌

Remember the word Pivot?

You typically hear this word associated with entrepreneurs - but it’s true for all business owners. You may be on the right path in your business but if you face obstacles, you may need to pivot to reach that next level of success. 🤔 All of the sudden you realize you need to make a change.

With Antonio, he was on the right track, but he need to make a change in his business. He was talking about style for men because he felt like that was a great niche that needed to be served. But with his pivot instead of offering custom tailored suits, it was more about educating and offering tools and resources to help men dress for success.

He started with A Tailored Suit - it didn’t quit work out so he pivoted to Real Men Real Style - and has developed a major following.

I didn’t have any huge pivots but I did have a time where my following dropped from 100,000 overnight. This happened after Google made some changes. They did not notify me AT ALL. 😱

I didn’t know why I had a sudden drop or what to do to fix it. I had to make a small pivot and take a look at where I was going.

💡 I thought about why I had started the blog in the first place. That is what inspired me to start my YouTube Channel.

A lot of times people will just quit.

This is where you don’t give up and accept defeat. You analyze where you are and where you want to be and you make a pivot.

It doesn’t happen overnight.

But don’t give up!

Today we are talking with Todd Herman about his entrepreneurship journey.

Learn the importance of mentorship, apprenticeship, and getting out of your comfort zone.

You might believe that paying off a $200,000 mortgage is impossible.

Well, we Wealth Hackers believe in the impossible.

Today you are going to meet someone that did exactly that. Andy Hill is no ordinary guy, today we are going to hear his story and see how he paid off his mortgage in less than 5 years.

You can find Andy here:

💻 https://www.marriagekidsandmoney.com/

🎙️ https://www.marriagekidsandmoney.com/mkmpodcast/

Andy:

Back in 2013 my wife and I wanted to upgrade our house. 🏠 Our young family was growing and we wanted more space and a better school district. 👪

However, with a bigger house comes bigger bills. I didn’t want to be stuck in an uncomfortable spot in case one of us lost our jobs.

So we agreed if we bought the house we would work to pay it off in 5 years. This is how we did it:

➡️ 1. We started by getting a 15-year instead of 30-year mortgage (so that more of our money went towards principal).

➡️ 2. We lived on 50% of our income. We had monthly meetings to go over our budget for the month and make sure we were on track.

➡️ 3. We found more ways to make money. If we got bonuses or tax returns, that went straight to the principal on the house. We also sold things we didn’t need and I started a side hustle - again, all of this money - straight to the principal.

By doing this year after year we were able to completely pay off our mortgage in less than 5 years. 🏠 This was absolutely the best move for our family. What do you think? Pay off mortgage faster or invest in the stock market…which would you choose?

——

Hope you enjoyed hearing Andy’s story be sure to check him out here:

💻 https://www.marriagekidsandmoney.com/

🎙️ https://www.marriagekidsandmoney.com/mkmpodcast/

#wealthhackwednesday #andyhill

I got a chance to be interviewed by Phil Randazzo from American Dream U. 🎙️

If you don't know about them, you need to check them out. This is a great organization that helps veterans transition out of the military and into their career/civilian life.

He is currently doing an Airstream tour across the country and interviewing other veterans. 🚙

Hope you enjoy the interview.

✅ You can find out more about American Dream U here:

💻 http://americandreamu.org/

I have an amazing guest, Jeff Goins, with an amazing story today!

How amazing? We are all about wealth hacking and growing our wealth and growing our income. Imagine you are making $37k/year and you go from that to making $150,000 in the next 6 months.

Would that change your life?

It probably would. It did for my guest!

You can find Jeff here:

Blog: https://goinswriter.com Twitter: @jeffgoins Jeff's latest book, Real Artists Don't Starve: https://amzn.to/2tbH2M4

Jeff was making $37k/year at a nonprofit ad then after making some changes and making some connections he made $150,000 in the next 6 months.

After moving to Nashville I got to know Jeff better and I got a chance to hear all of his story. I know that Jeff is a published author with 5 books. His latest is “Real Artists Don’t Starve”. Jeff is also a blogger, he has online courses and a mastermind group.

He is doing lots of things. But I wanted you guys to hear about where he came from and where he is today.

➡️Before you were an author or had an online business, what were you doing? 

➡️When you first started blog, what was the name of that blog and does it still exist today? 

➡️In your nonprofit, you were fundraising your salary right? 

➡️What was the next step for you? Growing your blog and monetizing or writing your book? 

➡️So after you started building a network, what was your next step? Is that when you wrote your book? 

➡️ Was this person that inspired you to try an eBook in the network that you were building? 

➡️What were the next steps that you took? 

➡️How long did the process of creating this eBook take you? 

➡️Do you remember how much your friend that made $40k charged for her eBook? 

➡️So once you starting writing and putting stuff out there, this all happened really fast? 

➡️So tell us, how does the rest of that journey look? 

What an amazing story!

Get out of your comfort zone and make connections, put yourself out there.

Find out what people want, what they need then create it and put it out there!

Interview with Bob Lotich from http://christianpf.com/. Bob was let go from his job and was able to replace his income from blogging full-time in less than a year. Quite an amazing story! Here's Bob's story and other great tips from starting a blog: http://christianpf.com/how-to-make-money-with-a-blog/

Today's episode is an interview with Dave Chesson. Dave is the founder of Kindlepreneur and has an amazing story of how he started and how he continues to build and grow his online presence.

💻Check out Dave's Blog Here: https://kindlepreneur.com/

🎧Listen to his podcast, The Book Marketing Show here: https://kindlepreneur.com/podcast/

📹Watch his YouTube Channel here: https://www.youtube.com/kindlepreneur

One of the amazing things about moving to this area is that I get to connect with a lot of amazing people. A lot of these people I knew before I moved here and others I have met since moving here. One of those amazing people that I got to connect with was Dave Chesson.

Dave and I have military backgrounds, we were both a part of a mastermind group and we have a few other things in common. I know Dave’s story but today I want you to learn about Dave.

Dave: The military was constantly sending me around the world, away from my family, and I wasn’t happy with that. I didn’t have a goal and was just showing up everyday and doing the job they asked me to do. I decided I needed to develop a business that would allow me to leave the military and still provide for my family.

Of course being on the other side of the world there is no way to open a brick and mortar business. I also didn’t want to leave one 9 to 5 job for another, that didn’t feel like success.

We started looking at online marketing and the ability to be able to make money from anywhere in the world (as long as you had internet access). That is what kicked off my interest into search engine optimization (SEO) and other online tactics.

Jeff: What was the first thing you did online that generated money?

Dave: My wife went to a conference - A Danny Johnson conference and there was a guy, Jeff Usner, who had a free book called something like ‘How to make Money Online”. I got the book and decided to follow everything it said. I did, I read every page and applied everything it said. It took a couple of months to implement everything and I made…….$1.00.

Most people would have laughed and thought that was the biggest waste of time. I didn’t.

I was able to make something from nothing, something that didn’t affect my regular job, and I saw that $1 as a success. That was proof that I could succeed. I just needed to do it again, and again, and build on that.

That first project was a site called FreeGameNinjas.com, which has nothing to do with what I do now.

I realized the concept could work, I just needed to tweak my process and learn from the mistakes I made with the first project. The second project was a little better I maden $17. I saw that I could build on my idea and make improvements. But it wasn’t something that I felt that mattered. I needed to find something that I felt would bring real value to the internet.

So I started another project and then another. I just kept building onto those projects. I wrote books for Kindle, I created products to sell to people. I continuously learned from my mistakes.

My business now is Kindlepreneur which is designed to help authors get their books in front of the public. Through this process I realized that some of the software on the market geared towards authors was lacking in a lot of areas. So I created KDP Rocket a software designed to help authors create and sell their books.

One big thing that has been prevalent throughout this process, is you constantly take a step up. You continue to learn and grow from your past mistakes.

If you are looking to start doing your own thing you have to keep in mind that everyone has failures. You just have to learn from that and keep moving forward.

It’s been fun to get to know Dave and learn more about him and his story. I am amazed at his ability to take an idea, build a team and get it done.

I hope you enjoyed learning more about him, I look forward to bringing you more stories about people like this.

Welcome to the first Wealth Hacker Podcast.

Wealth Hacker has been a passion project of mine for several years.  I am excited to bring it to the podcast world.

For those of you that may not follow me on YouTube or other channels, I would like to share a little about what a Wealth Hacker is and what the vision is.

The vision:  To help a younger version of myself with a faster way to achieve the financial success that I have.

If you want to live differently, you have to do something different.

What does a Wealth Hacker do?  If you visit WealthHackerlabs.com you can see all the details of the Wealth Hacker Code. The code is:

1. There’s A Faster Way To Grow Wealth
2. Being Wealthy Is Not All About Your Bank Account
3. Disrespect the Impossible
4. Our Future is Bigger Than Our Past
5. Opportunities Are Abundant
6. There’s No Such Thing As Failure
7. We Are Our Greatest Investment
8. Leverage Is A Good Thing
9. We Always Trust, But Verify
10. We Always Give Back

That is what Wealth Hacker is all about.  I am excited about the journey. You can find me on YouTube at youtube.com/wealthhacker and also check wealthhackerlabs.com