I Spent $750,000 on Courses. Here’s What Actually Worked

0:00 Over the past 7 years, I've spent $750,000 on online courses, masterminds, and one-on-one mentorships. Some changed my life, and others barely scratched the surface. And so today, I'll save you hundreds of thousands of dollars by sharing everything I've learned. What worked, what didn't, and what actually made me rich. First, I paid Iman Godzi 50K to learn how to scale my brand. So, for Iman's mastermind, the biggest things I was trying to learn was how did he blow up so fast on social media? He basically put a CEO in his business and then he spent full-time on content to try and crack it, which he did. And two, he was spending like 200 grand a month on different Clipper accounts. Like he had 30 Clipper accounts posting shorts of him twice a day, every single day. And so when you do that, you have mass

0:46 brand exposure and awareness. And on top of that, he was making YouTube videos every single day as well. You have to take content full-time, not like a side hustle. And two, you have to invest a lot of money into this. Like it is not a cheap thing to blow up and build a huge brand. And so you need to have good business systems in order to monetize. If you don't, you're just be spending a lot of money on brand with no real ROI. He had a really good creative director on his team that was an A player who built all of these Tik Tok accounts and scaled it. And two, he also had a very elite marketer on his team who knew how to write copy and the ads and VSSLs extremely well. So all of the leads that they were generating, this person was able to convert them. And so when you have that combination, it's okay for you to go all in on it because even though

1:32 you're spending a lot of money on lead generation and organic content, you're able to monetize and make money from it as well. This made me realize that I need to be able to find an A player creative director on my team to really double down and scale and build all these things in order to build that big organic brand. That's number one. Number two is I have to now build these systems to monetize because as this brand scales and as I invest more money into the content if I don't have a way to make money and monetize, I'm just going to be bleeding money until eventually I run out of money. Next, I spent $108,000 on Sam Leven's mastermind and it was the best investment I've ever made. So, let me take you back to when I was 23 years old. I was living with my parents. I came across Sam's YouTube videos. I started learning from him. I was like, "Okay, this guy is credible. Everything he's talking about seems legit. Why don't I just go learn from this guy

2:18 directly? And I had $40,000 saved in my bank account. I decided to spend $36,000 of that $40,000 to invest because I was stuck and I needed to figure out a way to get my business to six figures a month and I had no idea how to do it. I told my parents about it at dinner actually and they literally wanted to disown me. They thought I was getting scammed. What was I looking to get from this? Well, I had no business skills and in the early days of business, you have no skills and you have no idea what you're doing. So any sort of direction is going to be significantly better than none. This was the first time I met other entrepreneurs, some my age, some a little older, some a lot older, and being in this environment taught me a few things that really changed the trajectory in my life. One was the other people I met in there, I realized that

3:03 they did not have some sort of special advantage over me. They weren't smarter. It's not like they worked harder. It's not like they had some secret business sauce. they just were doing it longer and they just had a different niche. I was no different. I could also get to six figures a month plus in my business and I that was a big wakeup call to me. In business, you are siloed on an island and that's what makes business so tough is because you are literally working on this alone day in and day out and it feels hopeless because there's no light at the end of the tunnel. And when you realize that you know other people who are going through the exact same journey as you and that there is a light at the end of the tunnel, that's what's going to allow you to make it through these the tough times in business. And on top of that too, it also built a competitive

3:49 nature because every 3 months when we go back to the mastermind, people are going to ask, "Did your business grow? How's business doing?" And I don't want to be the person that's like, "Yeah, my business is still stuck. I didn't do anything in the past 90 days." No. Like I want to get back and be like, "Yeah, I went from 30K a month to 100K a month." which was exactly what happened by the way. The other thing I also was able to learn was just how to become a better operator. How to about the business from a true CEO of I realized I had days where I only had meetings and I had days where I had no meetings and I said no to every meeting that people wanted to have and I just focused on working on the highest leverage things inside of the business on those days where I had deep work. After that, the Herozis event taught me how to build companies for the long term from growth to exit. So I learned a few things from the Herozi event in Vegas. One is how to build a

4:35 business that's actually sellable. And in order for you to do that, there are multiple check boxes you have to have, such as you need to have multiple lead sources, not just one. Ideally, two plus. You have to not be a founder face of the company, right? If the company relies on you to do marketing and ads in order for it to grow, then it's not really a sellable business cuz the moment you leave or something happens to you, the business is done. So, you have to be able to not be the brand face. On top of that as well, you have to be able to have recurring revenue. Cuz if you are generating one-time sales constantly and you don't have recurring revenue, well, every year your business is a a crapshoot. And the other thing as well is also a team independence. If you stepped away for 3 months, can your business still grow and run without you?

5:22 Cuz if not, and it's relying on you holding everything together like most businesses, well, guess what? You also don't have a sellable business. If you're starting a business right now, you want to start with the endgame in mind. Then I spent $120,000 learning sales and leadership from Cole Gordon. And this is how I was able to build an 8 figureure a year sales team. I've realized I had a gap which was in sales. So I had to figure out who was doing sales at a high level that I wanted to basically learn from to shorten the gap. And so the only person that was kind of doing it back then was Cole Gordon. So I was like, great, let me go learn how he's running his sales team. Back then in the early days, it was just me as the closer. But if I wanted to scale this business to more than six figures a month and get to 200, 300K a month to a mill a month, I need

6:09 other people to be able to close for me. And so I was like, okay, well, one, how do I even hire and recruit a closer? And that was when I learned, hey, you have to actually put up job postings on LinkedIn and you have to join these different Facebook groups to find where closers hung out. and basically make posts in there. And that was basically how I learned how to recruit my first closer. On top of that, I had to learn how to write a sales script because how do you teach someone who doesn't know anything about your product and your sales structure to get good at business? I had to learn how to train this person on a daily basis and I was like, "Oh, you know, I can just train them once and then they'll they'll get it." No, you have to train closers every single day. It is a very high touch point type of

6:54 department. As you build your team, you have to run what's called a daily team meeting. And in these team meetings, you got to be motivational. You got to do call coaching. You got to hold them accountable in terms of their numbers. If they say, "Hey, I'm going to close five deals this week. Every single day, we're tracking to see if you're on pace to make sure you're going to be on pace to hit your numbers. And if not, cool. What's going on? What bottlenecks do you have?" And then boom, you solve it. You do call coaching. You do one-on ones with them. You help them push deals across the line and you're really drilling. Like I think of it as almost even like an army surgeon. You are there in the trenches and you are pushing the team on a daily basis. And really in sales it comes down to a few things. There's what I call the trifecta of sales, right? You have to get good at call coaching. You have to be able to run great team meetings on a daily basis. You have to be able to do one-on-

7:40 ones with your closers on a weekly basis, right? You're checking in on them. You're seeing what bottlenecks they have. Sometimes it could be a mindset reshift. Sometimes you're helping them with life advice and sometimes you are more technical and focusing with them on how to improve their sales calls. If you do do those three things right and you also get good at recruiting a player closers, that's how you can constantly scale your team and get to a million dollars a month in your business. Next, Tai Lopez, the infamous internet marketer, taught me things I didn't know, I didn't know. So, Tai Lopez, I know he's a controversial figure, but he basically had this one-on-one coaching program that somebody I knew joined. And I was like, "Let me talk to him, see if it's for me, and if it is, I'll join." And so, I end up joining. Some of the things I learned from him was how do you remove yourself

8:27 from the day-to-day? Because for me, as long as I'm in my day-to-day, I can actually grow the business to a 9 figure a year plus trajectory. And what I learned was he hired key operators in every single part of his business. operators that can actually solve problems and drive the business forward. And then he just had to be the face of the brand. I learned how he built these systems. I learned how he did partnerships with people. How you don't need to own 100% of your business. You can own a part of your business and let other people own the other part and have them run the business. Next, I learned about social media. Tai Lopez is constantly talking about how his personal brand and whether or not he has a big controversial brand, he does have a big brand. people both love him and hate him. And he's like, if you want to build a big personal brand, you're going

9:12 to be loved and hated by a lot of people. That's the only way to get to that level of brand. The other thing, too, is just understand the importance of social media. Because I thought, oh, social media, if you just film YouTube videos like this on a weekly basis, I'm going to eventually blow up. It's not the case. He was telling me that at his peak, he was spending like $200,000 a month on his social media brand between team, between putting out content, you name it. You don't just post out one piece of content and get a bunch of views. You need to post out different pieces of content on every single platform. And even the same piece of content gets repurposed onto five different pages and five different people who manage his pages. And they're now expanding your reach. Then I spent about $25,000 on Patrick Pet sales leadership program. And this taught me not just how to manage, but how to lead.

9:59 I realized to get to the next level in business, to get to that nine figure a year, you can't just be a manager. You have to become a leader. When you're a manager, you are, you know, coaching on people's day-to-day. But when you're a leader, you're inspiring. You're somebody that people are able to go to and you can drive the vision. They can trust in you to get the company to where it needs to get to. Leaders are able to attract a player talent. And I didn't know what an A player was for the longest I thought the people I had in my company were A players until I actually brought in people who were A players and I was like no wonder the business was not able to get to the current points it wanted to get to. It's because you don't have an idea of what an A player is yet. When I met people on his team, I was like, "Wow, this person, if they wanted

10:47 to, can just go and start a business on their own." But they chose to work for Patrick because they'd rather build their business inside of Patrick's business because of his bigger vision and leadership. And I'll be honest, the moment I learned what an A player team was, unfortunately, like over time, I had to let go of different people on my team because they didn't meet the new standard and bar that I set. By bringing in the right eight people, it actually allowed my business to grow significantly. And so, learning how to be an inspiring leader, a leader that people want to work for is just as important as a skill of just some of these technical tactics. Next, Alex Becker's mastermind taught me YouTube ads, SAS, and marketing psychology for a little under 40K, and it paid off. So, when I was growing my business, the big thing back then was Facebook ads. And

11:34 the only person who was teaching YouTube ads was Becker. So, I was like, "Okay, this is interesting. thing. Let me go learn about this even though it's not as popular yet. And what ended up happening was I basically paid for the knowledge of how you don't want to be the person that is relying on just one channel of attribution. If you have a business, you want to be able to have leads coming in from at least two different channels because if something ever happens to one, your business just won't stop running out of leads the next day. And the other thing I learned was about SAS because in the game of info, everyone's focused on profits and cash flow, right? If you, let's say, make a million dollars in your business and you net, I don't know, let's say 40%. So you make 400 grand from your business. However,

12:19 with taxes and everything, you might only end up taking home in your bank account 250 grand. So in order for you to generate and get to $10 million in your bank account, you would have to work 40 years. However, in SAS, let's say you grow a business to a million dollars. If you're at the right timing and you get a 10x multiple on a million dollar a year business and you sell it for 5 to 10 mil, you are liquid 5 to 10 mil in 5 years or even less compared to having to work 20 to 40 years to get the same amount in your bank account. You have to constantly be able to pivot and jump into higher leverage vehicles. And so that's exactly what he did. He was in info, but then he jumped into SAS. And SAS is the reason why he was able to build such a high net worth. It's

13:04 because he went from a lower leverage vehicle to a higher leverage vehicle. That's one. Two is when he actually first jumped to SAS, he spent a few years failing and spending a lot of money. When you make these jumps, you actually have to cut your lifestyle cost down a good chunk. Cuz if you don't, you don't have money and funds to fund this next thing. And you're not going to make money from this thing. This thing is going to be a cash losing machine for a few years until you crack the code. And if your lifestyle creep and costs are just constantly high, you are forever stuck in this vehicle because you have to be working full-time to even meet your minimum baseline of living. On top of all this, I've spent over $100,000 just learning how to get attention. I've invested in different social media consultants, whether it comes to YouTube, LinkedIn and next shorts, you

13:51 name it. And so for me, there was so much stuff I didn't know about content in terms of shooting, filming, how I come off on camera, how we edit videos, how we write hooks and script out videos, thumbnails, titles, ideation, packaging, the list goes on. I feel like we're we're closer than ever in terms of learning how to crack the code. When we started first started making YouTube videos, we didn't know that the packaging was the most important thing. Packaging means your title and thumbnail. We started finding titles and inspiration of YouTube videos that were already proven to blow up and scale, right? So, taking inspiration from proven concepts is what a lot of YouTube consultants do cuz if you do that, your likelihood of the video doing well is significantly higher because it's proven

14:37 that people want to consume this content. When it comes to thumbnails, right, we've tried a different things. Eventually, when we first started, we were kind of just copying people and I was like, this is not differentiating us at all. we look like every other person on YouTube in this niche. And so something we're working on currently is how do we create thumbnails that are more unique and differentiated. Now, on top of that, there are also things like the the video itself. I didn't write a script or hook or intro. And because of that, the videos had no engagement. And I realized that the first 30 seconds of YouTube video is extremely important because here people are going to decide if they're going to stay and watch your video or they're going to click off and go to the next. So you really want a scripted intro for your YouTube videos

15:23 because that's going to keep people in. And then after that, you kind of just want a bullet point outline so that you don't go on tangents and you can focus on what to talk about in terms of being streamlined and making it as simple as possible to for the viewer to understand. The more simple and easy to understand your concept is, the more people are going to watch your YouTube video. Hopefully, as we constantly tweak these things and improve, eventually we'll be able to crack the social media system. But it's something I've invested a lot of money on in terms of one-on-one social media consultants, courses, you name it. And finally, I've spent over $150,000 on different online courses. And to be honest, only a few were worth it. Even talking about these big numbers, sometimes I forget how much I've invested into learning. And I sound like I'm some final boss when it comes to

16:09 courses and learning essentially. But here's the thing. Even though a lot didn't work, again, how am I supposed to know, right? Sometimes you you have to spend money on courses that you don't learn anything from because when you do find something that you learn a lot on, that one program or educational or piece that you learn ends up making up for a few of your mistakes. And that's what people don't understand is they're trying to overthink and and find the perfect course. But sometimes you have to make mistakes in order to learn. And so I have bought courses on basically everything you can think about. I bought courses on trading. I bought courses on business, on marketing, on sales, on dating even. And the biggest takeaways that I can talk about here when it comes to just overall education and learning is wherever you are in life, obviously

16:55 do your due diligence. Don't just go see an ad and buy a course off the bat. Do your diligence. Watch this person's content. Are you even getting value from their free content? Cuz if not, that's probably a red flag. But if you're like, man, I'm learning this much from their free content already and they resonate with you in terms of what they're teaching, you'll probably be able to get more value from their paid content. Whatever it is, the fundamental principle I want to give with this video is you need to invest in your learning. The fact I was able to learn how to build an 8 figure year business in my 20s, most people don't even learn that in their entire lifetime. And I credit a lot of that to just mentorship programs, masterminds, you name it, to learn from people who have just done the thing already. So, if this video was helpful for you, please like, subscribe, leave a comment on any questions. I'm happy to answer. And overall, go click on the

17:42 video I made that talks about the businesses and systems that I built in my business to work just 4 hours a day in all of my businesses.