The Millionaire Fastlane (4 page)

“I work for Motorola.”

“I got a job at Northwestern Insurance!”

“Hertz Rental Cars hired me as a training manager!”

While I was happy for them, my friends bought the lie that I later define as “The Slowlane.” Me? Thanks but no thanks. I sought to avoid the Slowlane like a medieval plague. My idea was to find the Fastlane, retire rich, and retire young.

Roadblocks, Detours, and Depression

Despite the confidence, the next few years fell horribly short of my expectations. I lived with my mother as I bounced from one business venture to another. Success was absent. Every month was a different business: vitamins, jewelry, some hot “turnkey” marketing program purchased from the back of a business magazine, or some goofy long-distance network marketing gig.

Despite the hard work, my record of failures grew, as did my mounting debts. Years passed and folly fermented as I was forced to take a series of Neanderthal jobs that crippled my ego: a busboy at a Chinese restaurant (yes, there are cockroaches in the back), a day laborer in the slums of Chicago, pizza-delivery boy, flower-delivery boy, dispatcher, limo driver, early morning newspaper delivery for the Chicago Tribune, Subway sandwich restaurant salesman (WTF?), Sears stock clerk (in the freaking drapery department), charity can collector, and house painter.

The only thing worse than these shitty jobs and their pay? The hours. Most required a predawn start … 3 a.m., 4 a.m… . if any ungodly hour was involved you could bet my job required it. Five years of college and I graduated to live like a dairy farmer. Hell, money was so tight that I prostituted myself to an older woman to pay for my best friend's wedding gift. Yes, cougars preyed in the 1990s.

Meanwhile, my friends progressed in their careers: They got their 4% yearly pay increases. They bought their Mustangs and Acuras and their 1,200-square-foot townhouses. They appeared to be content and lived the expectant life preordained by society. They were normal and I wasn't.

At 26 years old, I fell into depression; my businesses were not self-sufficient and neither was I. Seasonal depression gnawed at my fractured psyche. Chicago's rainy, dark, dreary weather made me crave the comfort of a warm bed and tasty pastries. Accomplishments were preceded by sunshine; so yes, I wasn't accomplishing much.

Tired of the high-school dropout jobs, I struggled to get out of bed, and doubt became the daily affirmation. Physically, emotionally, and financially exhausted from failure, I knew my results weren't indicative of my true self. I knew the Fastlane way to wealth but just couldn't get it executed. What was I doing wrong? What was holding me back? After all these years of research and education, complete with a closet full of books, magazines, and “quick start” videos, I was still no closer to wealth. I sat stalled on the sidewalk with the Fastlane nowhere in sight.

My deep depression sunk me into escapes, but instead of drugs, sex, or alcohol, I lost myself in books and kept studying fameless millionaires. If I couldn't be successful, I'd escape into the lives of those who were by absorbing books of the rich, autobiographies of the successful, and other rags-to-riches tales.

But it got worse. The people in my life gave up on me. My long-time girlfriend proclaimed, “You have no resolve.” She had a safe and secure job with a rental car agency, but we'd argue because she worked long hours for chump change, a whopping $28,000 a year. Of course, she rightly retorted with the facts: “You don't have a job, you make $27,000 less than me, and none of your businesses work.” She was a smart cat. Our relationship ended as she found courtship with a corporate radio ad executive.

And then there was my mother. For the first years after college, she cut me slack, but then came the failures and the goofy jobs. I begged patience and pleaded that wealth creation for a Fastlane entrepreneur operates under an exponential scale-those who hold jobs operate under a linear scale. Unfortunately, it didn't matter how great my charts and diagrams were; mom lost faith and I didn't blame her. Landing a man on Mars showed more promise.

Her directives dulled my drive. She'd shout, “Get a job, baby!” at least 20 times a week. Ugh, even today I shudder. That phrase, shouted in that voice, could exterminate cockroaches in a post-apocalyptic world. There were days I'd want to pound my head into a vise and crush my ears into deafness. “Get a job, baby!” bore into my soul; it was a motherly decree that put the trial to an end with the jury's unanimous verdict: “Failure, with a vote of no confidence.”

Mom suggested, “The grocery store is hiring a deli manager, why don't you go down there and check it out?” As if my college education and struggles for the last five years were to eclipse at the deli counter, cutting blocks of bologna and ladling potato salad to the neighborhood soccer moms. Thanks for the job tip, but I'll pass.

My Blizzard of Awakening

It took the pain of a cold Chicago blizzard to throw me into the crossroads of life. It was a dark, frigid night, and I was dead tired working as a limo driver. My shoes were drenched from wet snow while I fought a migraine headache. The four aspirins I chased two hours earlier had no effect. I wanted to get home but couldn't. I was stuck in a blizzard and my usual routes were snowed in.

I pulled to the shoulder of a faintly lit road and felt the cold chill of melted snow crawl up my legs from my toes. I put the limo in park and faced myself in dead silence with nothing but the fall of snowflakes to remind me how much I hated winter. I dazed at the cigarette-burned ceiling of the limousine and thought, “What the hell am I doing? Is this what my life has become?”

Sitting on an empty road in a blizzard in the dark of the night out in the middle of nowhere, I'd had it. Sometimes clarity washes over you like a peaceful breeze and other times it hits you over the head like a falling Steinway piano. For me, it was the latter. A sharp declaration overpowered my brain: “You cannot live another day like this!” If I was going to survive, I needed to change.

The Decision to Change

The harsh winter shot me into swift action. I decided to change. I decided to take control over something I thought was uncontrollable: my environment. I decided to relocate-to where, I didn't know, and at that moment, I didn't care.

In an instant, I felt powerful. The velocity of that choice infused my miserable existence with hope and a small drip of happiness. My failures evaporated and I felt reborn. Suddenly a dead-end road converged with a dream. It just wasn't about the decision to move; it was about taking control and knowing that I had a choice.

With this new power, I considered options that never had dawned on me. I asked a simple question: “If I could live anywhere in the country without restraint, where would I live?” I thought about the things important to me, and circled five cities on a map. The next month I moved, or I should say, escaped.

The Merge from Slowlane to Fastlane

I arrived in Phoenix with 900 bucks, no job, no friends, and no family-just 330 days of sun and a burning desire to hit the Fastlane. My possessions included an old mattress, a 10-year-old rusty Buick Skylark with no third gear, a few side businesses that made little cash, and several hundred books. Ground zero for my new life was a small studio apartment in central Phoenix that rented for $475 per month. I transformed my studio apartment into an office. No bedroom set, no furniture, just a mattress that invaded the kitchen. I slept with Pop Tart crumbs, a side effect of laying a mattress next to the kitchen counter.

I lived poor and without security, but I felt rich. I was in control of my life. One of the many businesses I created was a Web site. While driving that limo in Chicago, sometimes I'd sit idle for hours and had plenty of downtime to read books. I didn't waste that time. While I waited for clients at the airport or while they got obliterated at the local watering hole, I sat in the limo and read. And read. I studied everything from finance to Internet programming to more autobiographies of the rich.

The limo job did something special: it put me at the forefront of an unsolved need that needed a solution. One of my limo clients asked if I knew of any good limo companies in New York. I dropped the passenger off at the airport, but he left me with a seed of invention. If I lived in Chicago and needed a limo in New York, where would I go to find it? I didn't have a New York Yellow Pages handy, and surely no one else outside of New York did either. Faced with this question, I concluded that other travelers would have the same challenge. So I built a Website that would solve this problem.

Naturally, the Internet has no geographical limits, so this venture traveled to Phoenix well. But, like my prior businesses, it didn't make a lot of money. However, now it was different. I was naked in a strange town with no money, job, or safety net. I had to focus.

I aggressively marketed my Web site. I sent out emails. Cold-called. Mailed letters. I learned search engine optimization (SEO). Because I couldn't afford books, I visited the Phoenix library daily and studied Internet programming languages. I improved my Web site and learned about graphics and copywriting. Anything that could help me, I consumed.

Then one day I had a breakthrough; I received a call from a company in Kansas that raved about my Web site service and wanted me to design its Web site. While my focus wasn't web design, I obliged for a price of $400. They thought the price was a steal, and within 24 hours, I had built the company its Web site. I was ecstatic. In 24 hours, I had most of my rent payment. Then, coincidentally, not 24 hours later, I received another call from a company in New York asking for the same thing, a new Web site. I designed it for $600 and it took me two days to complete. I had another rent payment!

Now, I know this isn't a lot of money, but from poverty to $1,000 in three days felt like winning the 50-million-dollar Powerball. My first few months in Phoenix I gained traction and survived on my own for the first time in my life. No flower boy. No busboy. No pizza delivery. No sponging off Mom. I was purely self-employed! I was momentous acceleration, a wind at my back that foreshadowed a directional change into a new universe of wealth generation.

But something still wasn't right. Something was missing and I knew it. Most of my income was attached to my Web site designs and not my Web site advertising business. My income was tied to my time, the construction of Web sites. More Web sites jobs meant more time spent, and if I didn't work, my income would stop. My time was being sold off for money.

A New Wealth Equation Yields Wealth Acceleration

In the winter, a friend visited from Chicago. I showed him my web directory and he was amazed at all the traffic my service received. I'd get limo price inquiries from around the world, every minute of the day. How much for a limo from Boston to Worcester? How much from JFK to Manhattan? We'd scan my email inbox and it had 450 emails. Ten minutes passed, click refresh, and then there would be another 30 emails. Emails were pouring in several per minute. He suggested “Dude! Turn those emails into money somehow.”

He was right, but how? And how can it solve a legitimate need? He left me with this challenge and I was intent to solve it. Days later, I created a risky, unproven solution and I gave it a shot. What did I do? Instead of selling ad space I decided to sell leads. There was a problem though. This “revenue model” was new and groundbreaking. Additionally, I had to convince my customers that this method of business was beneficial to them, and I had no data to predict whether it could succeed. Remember, this was the late nineties, when “lead generation” in Web space was unfounded, at least until I went out and did it.

Nonetheless, I took the risk and implemented it. In the short term, I expected the change to kill my income and it did. I predicted its success would take months, if it worked at all. The first month the new system generated $473. Yikes. I built more Web sites to fill my income gap. The second month's revenues were $694. Third month, $970. Then $1,832. $2,314. $3,733. And it continued and continued. It worked.

My revenue, my income, and my assets grew exponentially but not without issue. As traffic grew, so did the complaints, the feedback, and the challenges. Improvements came directly from customer suggestions. Within days, sometimes hours, I'd implement customer ideas. I was known to answer my clients' emails within minutes, if not an hour. I learned to be receptive to the consumer, and business exploded.

The workdays became long and challenging. Forty hours was a vacation; typical workweeks were 60 hours long. Days and weekends blurred together. While my new friends were out drinking and partying, I was hunkered down in my tiny apartment, regurgitating code. I didn't know if it was Thursday or Saturday, and it didn't matter. The glory of the hard work was this: It didn't feel like work; in fact, I enjoyed it. I didn't have a job; I had a passion to make a difference. Thousands of people benefited from something I created, which addicted me to the process.

I made a difference!

I started to compile testimonials from clients.

“
Because of you, my business grew ten fold.”

“
Your Web site led me to my biggest corporate client.”

“
Your company has been instrumental in growing my business.”

This feedback was wealth currency. I wasn't awash in riches quite yet, but I felt rich.

My “Faked” Shortcut to Wealth

In 2000, my telephone rang with a different type of inquiry. Technology startups called; they wanted to know if I would sell my business. In that year, the dot-com frenzy was in full force. Not a day went by without a tall tale about some dot-com millionaire who struck it rich by selling a tech property. Remember the fameless millionaires? This subset of the rich grew at a staggering rate, and the wave swelled my way.

So, did I want to sell my company? Hell yes! I had three offers to sell.