How did I become a multi-millionaire by the age of 30, without real estate? That's what I'm going to cover in today's video. If you like videos like this, be sure to subscribe, I release them every week.
All right. So I see a lot of people on YouTube talking about how they became a millionaire. There's never been an easier time in the world in history to become a millionaire. And so we're seeing a lot of people put out content about how they grew their wealth. I see a lot of people talking about things like cryptocurrency, stock trading, or real estate. And that seems to be a common path, but I'm going to show you a different path, my path. One that most people don't take, but it was far accelerated than, say, real estate. I've dabbled in real estate. And yes, I've made some money off real estate, but nowhere near the kind of money and profits that I've made from what I do now and what actually made me a millionaire in the first place. So there're really two ways to become a millionaire outside of winning the lottery.
And that's either being an investor or an entrepreneur. Being an investor takes a long time. You have to have some startup capital, and it's a very slow drip process. Being an entrepreneur, it can come extraordinarily fast. Look how fast Elon Musk has grown his companies and become a billionaire. So for me, it all started back when I was going to college. I was going to school for audio engineering in Tampa, Florida, and right across the street was a Guitar Center. Now because I'm a musician and I was going to school for music, I used to hang out at the guitar center all the time, cause it was right near the college. And I would play with guitars that I couldn't afford.
Well, one day, a guy came in, and he was looking for a microphone, and he couldn't figure out what microphone to buy. And so I offered him some words of advice. I said, Hey man if you're recording a kick drum or this or that, you should probably use this microphone. And he was very impressed with my advice that I'd given him, even though I wasn't an expert per se, or at least what I considered an expert, you know, I knew more than him. I wasn't a professional recording engineer. I wasn't Bob Rock. I wasn't like this huge music producer, but I didn't know what microphone to use on a kick drum. And he didn't. And so he was impressed by this. It helped him. And so he offered me a hundred bucks to come to his house and teach him how to use his home recording software. And so I did, and I made a hundred dollars, and that was the first time anyone ever paid me for my advice.
So I actually ran with that idea and paid my way through college by starting a small company where I would go online and screen share with people that had home recording setups and home recording software and teach them how to use it. And I paid my way all through college. Now, when I got out of college, I kind of forgot about it. I never really thought it would make me a millionaire, and I was just doing it to pay my bills going to school. So over the next decade, I really tried everything to become a millionaire. I tried trading Forex. I tried, you know, starting my own vending business. I had a cotton candy cart. I had an Italian ice cart. I had almost everything. And I learned a little bit about internet marketing and I made a little bit of money there, but not a lot, not anything that would make me a millionaire until one day I scrounge enough money together to open a bar and this bar was in terrible shape.
So I remodeled it. I learned how to use Facebook ads to promote it. And I grew it into a very profitable and fun spot in town. I then sold that bar for a six-figure profit and lost all of that money by making a terrible investment. But what I did have was a skill. That was the ability to run Facebook ads and market a local business. So I started doing that as a service for people. And that's where I really began to learn how to sell my services online. So I ran ads for some local businesses, did that for about six months, made some really good money, 10, 15, 20, $25,000 a month, really starting to get there. And so people started asking me, Hey, how do you do this? Until one day, I got a letter in the mail from the IRS that said you owe $250,000 in back taxes because you basically didn't file taxes when you owned your bar and you screwed everything up, and you got to give us a quarter of a million dollars.
I was devastated. Just when I started to get back on my feet, I got hit with that. So I started researching on Google for what's the fastest way to make a lot of money. And I kept coming back to the same set of things. People were going online, and they're either selling some sort of coaching program, online course, mastermind. They were selling information. And I thought this was interesting because at the end of the day if you do e-commerce or you do, you know, a food company or something like that, you have to pay every time you sell. In other words, there's a cost for the products. There's a cost for the food. There's a cost for, you know, whatever it is that you're selling.
When you sell information, there is no cost of goods. If you record videos, then you basically just can resell them as many times as you want. If you show up at an event and you speak, or if you coach someone, it doesn't cost you anything to talk other than you're time. And I read an article where a guy made $220,000 in a month from selling an online course. And so I was like, all right, this is my only shot. This is what I got to do. Plus, people were constantly asking me how I ran my marketing agency. So I was like, okay, I'll create a course on how to do a marketing agency. Well, my very first month selling that course, I made a hundred thousand dollars. And that was the moment that I knew I absolutely had to learn how to become the best in the world at selling my product, services, and advice online. Over the next five months, I made a million dollars. Over the next few years, I scaled to $20 million. Even at a million-dollar day, once where I sold 34 people into a $30,000 mastermind in one day.
And so this just took off so rapidly that the amount of money that was coming in from selling my advice, my coaching programs, my courses was just nuts. And I constantly reinvested that money in masterminds. Other coaches, learning more about my craft. I read books, I just became, or at least tried to become, the best in the world at it. And after about $8 million, I decided to stop selling my course on local business marketing 'cause I was kinda sick of talking about that. I wanted to talk about something else. And everybody was saying like Dan, you're growing so fast with your advice business, and you know, how are you doing this? And so I created and founded the company, getclients.com, where I teach people how to sell their products, services, advice, coaching professional services, what have you, for a premium price to the market and scale that business to the moon.
And when I did that, that's when the company really took off, and we hit 20 million. And so not only was I able to become a millionaire by teaching, but I was able to help other entrepreneurs and small business owners become six, seven, and even a few eight-figure earners along the way. And it granted, well, I can't take sole credit for everybody's success. Ultimately they were coachable. They did the work, they learned from me. They did what I said, and I'm sure they learned from other people as well, but just being a part of helping other people become millionaires, honestly, felt a lot better than becoming a millionaire myself.
Now, from there, I took a lot of this money, and I put it into stocks, real estate, and other things, and I was able to turn that money into more money, but I'm going to be honest with you.
All the investment strategies that I use rely on having a lot of money. I don't do anything where it's no money down or borrow somebody's money or any of that. I use all my own money for my investments, for my real estate, because I have a lot of it from my company, my getclients.com company, which has grown and is extraordinarily profitable, a lot more profitable than most types of businesses. And that's also what I teach other people to do is not just grow their online business, but do it, so it's a very high-profit margin without a huge team. I only have a team of 10, the company's still pretty small, but we do very well. Now I will do another video on my investment strategy and my investment strategy moving forward for 2021 and beyond. So you can see how I take money and turn it into more money.
But as far as how I became a millionaire before 30, without real estate, I started my own company. I sold the highest profit thing you could think of, my advice. And that is how I did it. If you'd like a very, very detailed, broken down. Step one, step two, beginning to end, look at how I did that. You can buy my book, Digital Millionaire Secrets, which is a USA Today and Wall Street Journal bestseller. I "ll leave the link below in the description.
And if you want to learn more about my company, getclients.com. You can visit getclients.com. There's a ton of free information on there, podcasts, videos, and a free training.
If you enjoyed this video, let me know, tell me in the comments and also ask me what other videos you would like me to do. And I will film them and finally make sure you subscribe to my channel. It would really mean a lot to me. I'm trying to build up my subscribers and, you know, really get my name out there and my message out there so I can help more people. So don't forget to subscribe to the channel.
And by the way, if you have a big YouTube channel and you'd like to do a collab, I would be happy to talk to you about that because I can definitely show you how to make more money from your YouTube channel by selling your advice. And if we could do a collab and share, that would be really, really cool. All right, guys, I'll see you in the next video.