5:42PM December 3, 2012
Location: Boquete, Panama
So today marks the 25th year on Earth for me.
It’s crazy. 25 years. A quarter century.
A few years back I was wondering what I was going to do with my life when I graduated college. I never would have thought that I’d be sitting here overlooking this beautiful view…
The past couple days I’ve had quite a few successful marketing promo’s on Facebook and have some great feelings about the future. I’ve been surrounding myself with some people who I admire so much. People who have taken a dream, started a business and created a life that they absolutely love.
One of my friends that I’ve really been hanging out with here made over $100,000 last month. A cool thing about this is that he just turned 27 today. Yep, we’ve got the same birthday! He’s an awesome dude and a great marketer. I’ve been learning a TON from him the past few days.
Other people who live in this community are retired and have built massive businesses and know just what it takes to grow a business. Sitting around the dinner table with people like this and listening to the conversations they have has had a major impact on the way I look at business. Instead of worrying about “I need to make $5,000 this month” there are questions like “how much profit will that specific project yield after 6 months” and other topics that are more long term thinking.
Ideas are being discussed that are dealing with investing hundreds of thousands of dollars, even millions of dollars that will have a global impact on the world. Instead of only worrying about my immediate bottom line, it got me thinking about what I was going to do that had an impact on this world.
One of the after-hours conversations that took place (many of us had some wine or liquor), we were discussing our personal missions.
One of the guys asked me what my goal or mission was and I responded with what I have adopted as my personal mission at this point…
my response was: “to positively impact the lives of over a million people in my lifetime”
People smiled when they heard that and said that I was well on my way to doing that and that they appreciated that I always was trying to add value to conversations and trying to make everyone feel better and do better.
**pats self on back**
Today I spent about an hour on the par 3 golf course in the community with one of these guys. While we were cracking jokes and hacking away at the ball, we were discussing how I could grow my business and scale it properly. We were discussing everything from creating a tribe of raving fans geared towards a specific market, paying for experts to create products for these people and hiring a team to sell the products while we worry about whether to hit a 9 iron or a pitching wedge.
Right now I’ve been building a fan page on Facebook that has over 250,000 likes on it. I decided to test an offer to that page the other day and it converted pretty well (this was when there was 110,000 fans) and it netted me over $600 from one single post.
While this may not seem like a lot of money to many people, that pays my rent.
The next step is to simply re-create this and duplicate it with other pages, while simultaneously adding a percentage of these people to my email list.
I’ve been working on having capture pages created that will entice people to give me their email address, which means I’ll be able to sell them things in the future even if Facebook deletes my pages.
I would not have been thinking about that prior to being down here and having someone say something to me that I had heard before in one of the Empower Network training videos I had gone through in the $15K Formula video course.
It’s funny how it takes an external source sometime to say just one or two words that CLICKS with something you had learned before. That single nugget has added 500 people to my email list in the past week, adding over $1,000 in commissions to my bank account and will yield a lot more profit long-term as I apply this more.
I can honestly say that I was 100% terrified to come down here to Panama and leave a bartending job I had in the states. I even remember telling my buddy Tollie Schmidt that I was terrified to come down here, but I knew that because I was terrified I had to do it.
Life sure has a strange way of kicking the shit out of us one month and then opening up infinite possibilites the next month. Sometimes it really does take an extremely low time in your life to put you in a proper position to have a massive break through. My break through is happening right now as you are reading this and I couldn’t be happier.
I’ve gotta thank Brendan Wenzel for introducing me to Empower Network and exposing me to a community that has altered the way I think about growing a business and my buddies Chase, Cole and Max for believing in me when I was going through a difficult time in the business while being down here and really questioning what I was doing with my life. Without all of you guys, I may have given up on this.
To all my other friends out there who always have believed in me, I love you all.
You know who you are and I don’t want to spend the next hour writing out every single persons name. I hope that I’m helping you create positive experiences and memories in your life and that you continue to chase your dreams.