4 Of My Biggest Wins In My Business Journey | The Growth Booth #44

Welcome to episode number 44 of The Growth Booth, where I'm excited today to share with you a bunch of my biggest wins in business and investing. I'm especially excited because, as I said in the last episode, episode number 43, it was pretty painful to go back in the memory bank and pull out some of my biggest losses. So, if you haven't watched The Growth Booth episode number 43, you might want to watch that first so you can hear about some of my biggest blunders in business and then come back and watch this one. You can find that over at thegrowthbooth.com or wherever it is that you watch or listen to this podcast.

Today I thought I would share some of my biggest wins, and thinking back, just like with the biggest losses, the biggest wins were not necessarily the things that made me the most money. Sometimes they were the things that were most impactful or most memorable or meaningful, depending on where I was or where I am at any point in my business. And just like in the last episode, I'm hoping that you'll be able to take some good lessons away from each of these.

I'm going to start first of all, with buying and selling online businesses. It must have been about a decade ago now. I used to have a portfolio of over 1,000 different niche websites. In fact, it might be more than a decade ago, but I had over 1,000 niche websites and these 1,000 niche websites were built around the Halloween niche and also the Christmas niche. I had websites such as spidermancostume.com, toystorycostumes.com, buzzlightyearcostume.com, and so on and so forth. I had literally a thousand of these, and not just on Halloween, but in toys as well. So, toys were a massive seller for me. I was an affiliate of Amazon.com and made a lot of money from them.  The Halloween niche single-handedly allowed me to buy my first property and clear a lot of debt as well. I did this by building up a factory that sort of made me money every single day of the year, not just around Halloween. That was, I think, the big myth is that people buy costumes all year round, but obviously it spikes at Halloween. I had this portfolio of over a thousand websites and I was kind of changing course with my business.

That was part of it, but also Google was rolling out updates whereby it was harder for a certain style of websites to get ranked and get traffic. Unfortunately for me, the type of websites that I had were this certain type of website that Google wasn't as fond of anymore. They were called exact match domain names where the website was spidermancostume.com. I could get ranked very easily in the past on Google when someone typed for ‘spiderman costumes' , but then Google changed the algorithm and didn't quite work like that anymore. It was a good time for me to sell. I sold the entire portfolio for tens of thousands of dollars, and it wasn't in the hundreds of thousands, but it was like a significant payday for me, a very good five-figure payday, lump sum. That allowed me to clear a lot of debt, invest in some more property, and really just gave me a really good cash windfall that I wasn't really expecting. That's an example of selling websites.

Another example of buying websites that comes to mind is way back, and I think it was about 2006, we bought a website that was something that would ultimately go on to provide ongoing income for years and years to come. I can't remember the exact numbers here, but I feel like we bought it for $30,000 or $50,000. It went on to make us like 10X on complete autopilot without doing a single thing. We identified a website, I think it was on Flipper.com. I certainly sold my websites on Flipper.com, and I think that we purchased this one on Flipper.com as well. I'd have to check, but that's irrelevant. The point was we identified this website that was for sale, it was making good money on a regular basis, and we were able to get it making even more money and just ride this passive income day after day after day for many years to come. And there was a CPA marketing style website, so the cost per action, something that I spoke about recently on another episode on The Growth Booth where I was speaking about the fastest way to make $1,000 online, I believe, is with CPA marketing. Head back over and check that out if you haven't seen it already. I think it was episode number 41 and 42 where I spoke about that, but you'll be able to find it at thegrowthbooth.com or wherever you listen to this podcast.

So, buying and selling online businesses certainly had some really big wins there. And that's still something that you can do today, actually. Certainly something to consider. Anyway, now, the second one, the second big win that came to mind, was property. I spoke about how I had a disaster with one of my properties recently on the last episode of The Growth Booth with number 43, but today I want to talk about some wins in property. I bought my first property in Argentina back in 2006. First of all, it gave me a place to live because I was over here in Buenos Aires and I was able to live there without paying rent, which I thought was pretty cool. I bought my second property in Auckland in 2008, and then over the years, I've built up a pretty significant portfolio of properties all around the world and have definitely been doubling down on the property in the United States and specifically Manhattan, New York, over the past five years or so.

I think along the way I've had some really good wins there. It's almost been like a snowball effect where I got started buying property at the very cheap end of the spectrum because I had no money and I couldn't really afford anything. But little by little, some of those early properties that I purchased have turned into the most amazing passive income machines, really. The one that I bought in Auckland in 2008 was my second purchase. My second purchase was my first in New Zealand because my first one was in Argentina.

So, it was my second purchase, I bought it in 2008, and that thing is just a cash machine. It just pays us money every single week, week after week after week, hundreds of dollars without doing a single thing. And it's rented for about 51 weeks a year. It's in a really good spot in Central Auckland and it just rents like mad. There's a huge demand to be in there and it's done incredibly well for us. The first purchase I bought in Argentina, I ended up renting that out as well, and I sold it maybe ten years after I purchased it and got a really good return on that. But again, these were things that allowed me to get on the property ladder and get moving up and ultimately get to a point where I'm investing in other much more luxurious properties that are completely another end of the spectrum.

And I think, looking back at this, it's amazing how fast five years can go by. Five years can go by in the blink of an eye. With property, over a period of five years, my first five years of investing in property, I was able to accumulate a few properties, not a whole heap. But then the next five years, I was able to accumulate more and more and more because I was reaching that tipping point where I had a lot of passive income coming in, my properties were appreciating in value and I was getting more experience. I think this is a case of where money does like speed. It likes you to move fast and there's no time like the present to start investing pretty much in anything, I think.

Some interesting stories. Actually, with buying that first property in Argentina, I really was thrown in the deep end and it was an interesting experience, to say the least. I was buying a property in Argentina when I was only semi-fluent in - a beginner - and speaking Spanish at the time, and just a completely different way of buying property over here, as I found out. So first I had to transfer the money into Argentina. At the time, you couldn't just do a bank transfer, you couldn't do a wire transfer. I had to go through this funny route to get to Argentina. I then went into the back office and collected the cash. I was told not to take a taxi to the bank where I had to take the money because taxis might know that this was a place where people came to pick up their money. So instead of taking a taxi, I bundled the money into my clothing and went on the subway, eventually making it to the bank. And then I was paying in cash across the table in $100 bills because property transactions here are done in US dollars, not Argentine pesos. And then the seller would say to me, “I don't like this $100 bill.” There's nothing wrong with it. It might have just had a little pen or pencil mark on it, or it might have been a little bit ripped, but completely fine as a $100 bill.

So anyway, I've got a few more stories that I could tell about that experience, but I want to get on some of the other wins here that I've had in my business and investments. And the next one that comes to mind is a merger that we did with a couple of our students. We had people come into our Blueprint Academy program, and they started building an e-commerce business. And very quickly, their e-commerce business was an e-commerce business that had brands that were selling on Amazon. And it was exactly what we were teaching as part of our Blueprint Academy hand-holding mastermind. They started doing very well from the outset. And they built up a brand which, in a short space of time, was doing similar numbers to a couple of brands that Steve and I had built up.

It got to a point where we were working so closely with these guys that we said, “Hey, we should just partner here.” It was a win-win all around from every angle. And these people have been the most amazing partners that we've got to hope for. And this was a case where we really knew them before we were partnering with them because we had worked with them for one or two years as part of our academy coaching program. We got to know them, we knew their business, we knew their metrics. We knew that they were good at it. And those people today, now, the CEO and CEO of our e-commerce brands business, and that's the business that sells products. Millions of dollars’ worth of products are online every year, but also offline where our products are in over 200 stores. In fact, I did an episode with Kelly, who is the CEO of that business and my business partner in that business, back in The Growth Booth episode number 10, where we spoke about navigating the turmoil of running an e-commerce business in a pandemic. So Kelly and Patrick, our other partner there, are absolutely amazing and certainly one of the biggest wins that I can think of from a partnership standpoint.

I should also say, though, that on a personal level, when I merged my business and partnered with Steve, which I don't even know how many years ago this was now, but it must have been 12, 13 years ago, I think that was also a game-changing point for me. We came together. I got to know Steve because I had been through some of his different training programs on how to build different types of businesses online, and I've done very well with them, so I got to know Steve, and then I started doing a little bit of work with Steve. I was helping them with some of their marketing and we got to know how each other works and so on and so forth. And again, we got to a point where we were to say, “Look, your business is crushing it, my business is crushing it. We could go into this together and absolutely smash it out of the park.” And that's what we did. I think the beauty of that relationship is that Steve has a lot of different experiences from me. He had a very successful corporate life prior to becoming an entrepreneur, where he had different roles, like at the very top of Fortune 500 companies. He brought a lot of that kind of mindset and organization to my business, which I simply didn't have because prior to merging my business with Steve, I was a one-man band with a bunch of outsourcing teams sort of behind me and fast forward today, we've got over 140 people on staff and we've built truly amazing suites of businesses, I mean, portfolio of businesses. There's no way that I could have imagined doing that on my own, but I think there's a special magic when you do find partners that you know you can really gel with and work well with that you just can't get on your own.

I think the final big one that I'll share with you here today is just about business synergies. You probably know me from the online education space where we've got different products, where we teach people about e-commerce, we teach people about how to build affiliate marketing businesses, and so on and so forth. Now, what you might not know is that we've also got a hosting company, you've heard of that, Float Hosting, and a shopping cart called Cartzy. I'm in the process of adding to that suite with another tool, which you're going to find out very soon, which will also cater to the needs of these people.

The people that are building online businesses need different tools and services and education, and we've been able to offer these to people. We don't just give training, but we also give these other bits and pieces as well. I feel like this is very much a win-win situation because as a product creator, it allows me to go out there and build something that is different, that I know is going to solve the needs or the problems that many of my coaching clients or customers of my courses and education business courses have got.

So, I can do that. I can do it in a unique way and I can do it in a way that provides a lot of value. And obviously, for me, the upside is that then I get another customer in my hosting business. Float Hosting is a great example of this. Floathosting.com is something that we never really went out of our way to market, to the public. We almost had it as sort of like an in-house opportunity, an in-house solution to hosting. And we sort of just recommended it little by little, “Hey, you want hosting?” We would mention it in our education programs. “Do you want to host? Head over to Floathosting.com to set it up.” But we never really put much emphasis on that and sort of woke up one morning like, “Holy crap, we've got a really big and stable business here.” And by adding people to it, little by little, we were able to mature the business, make it very, very stable, and slowly sort of upgrade the technology and team over the years.

I think there's just a lot of synergy there and we've been able to provide a lot of value and help our customer base, but in multiple ways, not just in one way. I think the lesson here is to think about all the products that your customer might need and see if there are ways that you can offer solutions to them. It doesn't even have to be your own product, it could be another product that you are affiliated with, or of course, you could just recommend a really good product as well. But I think there's a lot of opportunity there.

So, a couple of closing thoughts for this episode. I think when you put enough out there, you are going to have wins and you are going to have losses. And I think it's the nature of the beast of being an entrepreneur, owning your own business, being involved in any kind of investing. There are going to be wins and losses and many times, some of these losses are going to be things that you can't even control. I gave a couple of examples of these in the last episode here. I think having someone to brainstorm with, being a business partner, a coach, a mentor, or an accountability partner, can be absolutely invaluable. And not just because you might be able to get expert advice from someone, but you can just talk about something out loud and sort of navigate your way to making better decisions. There are some mistakes that we've made that have come from inexperienced and bad decisions, but there have been many, many more that we have avoided by seeking expert advice.

And more than anything else, Steve and I sitting down and talking about things over dinner, getting together in person and actually talking about things and really sort of fleshing it out, that's also allowed us to form balanced, I think, opinions or assessments about different opportunities. Because if I had spoken to Steve a lot about crypto, maybe we would have decided, or I would have decided I wasn't going to go in as quickly as I went. I spoke about that experience of losing a lot of money with crypto in the last episode, but that was just something I did on my own. I didn't talk to anyone about that.

I think getting someone who you can work closely with and talk to about different parts of the business can be absolutely invaluable and then always just knowing that if you're building a business as an entrepreneur, there are going to be speed bumps along the way, but as long as you don't give up, the magic will eventually happen. I think the wins start to compound on themselves and the losses just continue to be bumps in the road. I don't feel like the losses compound on themselves all that much, but the wins definitely compound on them, definitely do compound on themselves. And you can see that by my example of just buying that first property that gave me passive income. It wasn't all that much, but when you've got 20 or 30 or 50 properties like that, then it really does start to add up. I think getting to that level though, you need to have those small ones along the way.

So, look, I'm going to wrap this up here. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Growth Booth. As always, you can head over to thegrowthbooth.com, navigate to episode number 44, see show notes of transcription, links to the different things I've discussed here and so much more. And remember, you can see the video version of this either on thegrowthbooth.com or over at YouTube, and feel free to subscribe to that to make sure you get updates. And as always, I appreciate the reviews that you leave. So, leave us a review, a good review if you like this show on the favorite platform where you listen. That's it from me for this episode. I will see you back again here next week. Bye for now.