I haven’t made less than $100,000 a month in over 5 years.
19 years ago, I wasn’t planning any of this. I just loved cars.
I built a website for car enthusiasts called EliteRides. It had a small but loyal member base of a few hundred.
Then an unknown movie just dropped, and the site exploded into thousands of members. The movie was “The Fast and the Furious.”
As the community grew I wanted to learn how to make it better, so I learned design. Then marketing, and that’s when I started learning SEO.
Ever heard of SEMA Show?
At over 1,000,000 square feet, it’s one of the world’s largest car conventions, and is by invite or for industry members only.
After going the first year I wanted more. But their site had no photo gallery, and the best I could find was scattered pics across half-ass sites. So I decided to solve that problem, and the next year I went I took hundreds of pictures and stared a site called SEMA Gallery.
The SEO I had started to learn worked. Too well.
I outranked SEMA’s own official site, and got a cease-and-desist letter for it. After I Googled the attorney’s name his LinkedIn profile showed up. He was a former FTC attorney. That was enough of a warning for me to shut it down, but I also got proof that SEO worked.
The next trick? I outranked a billion dollar mega-media company.
After hanging out with my wife in 2006, she was watching the Bachelor season finale. When they went to commercial break, instead of saying “we’ll tell you who the next Bachelor is in a few weeks” they were going to announce it that night.
I wasn’t a savvy entrepreneur yet, but knew that had to be on purpose. But why?
Sure enough, after the commercial break they announced the guy, I got online, and couldn’t find hardly ANYTHING about him. If I knew how to navigate search engines and wasn’t a die hard fan, imagine the frustration of the die hards that didn’t now search engines?
💡 Just like SEMA, “I’ll solve that problem” popped in my head.
Spent an hour or two building a site, scraping what pics of this guy I could, and adding whatever bio info and was printing money with Adsense a week later.
Then, life happened.
The company I worked for remotely got raided and shut down by the ATF and the FTC.
Overnight, I had three choices I was forced to decide from:
- See if the company survived
- Find another job
- Bet on myself
I did the math.
My day job paid ~$28,000. My side SEO clients brought in $20,000.
Without replacing my day job I’d be losing more than half my income. But the combined income with my wife, we could cover the essentials.
I realized, newly married and the idea of kids in the future, I would never have more free time to make this leap than I did right then. So I made the jump into entrepreneurship.
And by freeing up that time I recovered recouped the lost income in just a few months.
A year or two later I was at six figures.
And since then, for 19 years, I’ve stayed in one lane… SEO.
No shiny object syndrome, no chasing every new trend. Just three SEO pillars, over and over
- Improving a website’s structure
- Improving their content strategy
- Improving their reputation.
Even with AI reshaping search, those three pillars haven’t changed.
I built a multi-million dollar agency this way, without paid ads. I did it by becoming known as “THE SEO guy.” The person who helped first and pitched never.
That’s how I ended up working with people like Russell Brunson and Tony Robbins.
I answered their team’s questions… for free, more than once, before anyone hired me for anything.
Tony Robbins’ team found me because their marketing manager saw me tagged in a post dozens of times by people recommending me when someone asked for an SEO expert.
That kind of social proof does more selling than any pitch ever could.
For years, people started asking me to teach this. So I built a course, launched it, and sold ~$100,000 in a day… then paused it.
I didn’t want to sell more and take people’s money when I knew I wouldn’t be available to support them. So I fulfilled for those that bought, changed lives, and then traveled Europe and Dubai with my wife and kids for nearly a month.
And while on that trip, team running the ship, closed a $400,000/year client.
Optimize Live is my 3 day training on SEO, AI optimization, and how to run an agency.
It starts tomorrow.
It covers not only the fundamentals, but also how to systemize what you’re building, and how to do it all without sacrificing your sanity along the way.
Tonight is the last night to register. I’m closing the cart in just a few hours.
So if you’ve been on the fence, this is the moment to decide if you want to join dozens of other agency owners and hungry entrepreneurs that will be there (in-person and virtual).
The next three days could change your life, starting in less than 24 hours.
See you at Optimize Live.
