WHO IS TOM AND WHY ARE YOU HERE?
EARLY YEARS
Born in Communist Poland…. We escaped to the US when I was 11 in the early 90’s.
Here are some adventures from those days that shaped me:
When I was 7.. I was laying on the back seat of a car that was smuggling liquor back into the country (was supposed to cry and scream if the immigration wanted to check).
At 9 I was helping pops push product at soccer stadiums in Eastern Europe… was hustled a few times by Russians in the other stands and learned my lessons.
I learned how to sell and how not to be hustled.
The only games I played around the house had to do with money changing hands (don’t ask as I’d have a hard time explaining this one).
The medical field was terrible and all my teeth back then were fixed without any numbing.
My first computer was a Commodore 64. It took over 10 minutes to load a game from a tape deck. If it did not… I had to use a screwdriver to adjust the magnets in the tape deck and try again.
We were still a generation that ran around for hours without any supervision.
FIRST BUSINESS VENTURES
While in high school I wanted some money. My parents never got into a habit of giving me an allowance.
I ran a record store with two older friends of mine.
Became a DJ and played at colleges, bars, radio stations, clubs, and raves in the local area. My biggest crowd was 4,000+ as I opened for DJ Scribble (he used to be famous on MTV).
FORMAL EDUCATION
Three degrees. Two associates and one bachelor.
Marketing – Business to business & Sound engineer.
MUSIC STUDIO
Straight out of college I moved to New York and got an internship at Unique Recording Studios. Eventually I moved on to Assistant Engineer and then Engineer before all the studios started shutting down. Getting a paycheck was like ripping teeth out from that crowd.
Some of the artists I was able to work with:
REAL WORLD EXPERIENCE
I did not want to leave the music industry as I had some bigger dreams but also did not want to be a broke musician so I came up with a plan.
Get sales jobs at various corporations and let them train me. That I did. I learned, sold and once I started hitting my goals or got close to I quit and moved on to the next one.
Here are the ones I still remember:
MUSIC SUCCESS
Since New York had a huge polish population I made it my goal to dominate it and I did.
I created a group, rapped and engineered the music.
We had two albums.
Played concerts..
Had 3 hits in the top 10 on the local polish radio… one was #1 for almost a year.
Major TV station from Poland came to do a documentary on us.
FEELING LOST
I accomplished what I wanted in music and the offers I had on the table from the labels were not something I wanted to pursue.
After working in sales for all of these corporations I realized that they were the ones making residual income from my hard work and I always started from zero each month.
Read the 4 Hour Workweek and couldn’t get the idea of being location independent out of my head.
BACK TO BUSINESS
Moved to Atlanta and bought a coffee shop in the suburbs. Ran that for almost a year but since I do not drink coffee realized it wasn’t for me.
Back to square one again.
FIRST INTERNET VENTURE
I was browsing the web and heard about Adsense Niche sites. Created a couple… made a few dollars and started pumping out around 50 every month. Six months later I made my first $1,000 and after that had months where I hit close to $10,000..
Used my SEO skills to talk to local business and landed my initial clients. Before I knew I had an agency with workers and made more than I ever did in my corporate jobs.
PUBLISHING
One of the blog networks that I used for SEO became to popular and Google shut it down. That left me with 1,500+ blog posts and a team of writers with nothing to do.
I told them to start writing books and left them alone. That became profitable and we went on to writing 5,000+ books and making $250,000+
Lesson learned for my SEO biz… DO NOT USE PRIVATE BLOG NETWORKS FOR MYSELF OR CLIENTS.
DIGITAL NOMAD YEARS
I started to slow travel the world and see how my biz would handle it.
I had to create better systems and tighter constraints for what I would pursue but it turned out ok.
Some of the countries I lived in: Japan, Thailand, Germany, Portugal, Poland, Vietnam, Spain, Taiwan, Czech Republic and more
FILMED A MOVIE
My businesses were running well and I became bored. Got a great team together and we made a documentary about the realities of building/running businesses when on the road.
More info at yourownwayout.com
PODCASTING
Over the last few years I got into podcasting.
Smart Brand Marketing
We Create Online Courses
Crypto Moon Radio
I also helped out some friends to get their podcasts off the ground:
You might recognize this one:
Peter Shankman – creator of HARO (Help a Reporter Out)
FIRST ONLINE COURSE
One of my SEO clients is a Muay Thai Champion and we went on to create an online course and market it.
Read the case study here
NEW VENTURES
In 2017 I combined my experience of online courses and marketing skills to test out two new offerings.
The first one to help experts monetize their expertise.
Service #1: We can create an online course for you in 14 hours of your time.
I quickly realized that the bigger pain point was getting students to enroll.
Service #2: We help you market your online course.
We have a solid marketing strategy that turned $1,400 into $30,000 for our clients (this is an average figure).
As you can see the road to success is not a straight one and I’m not even halfway done yet.
If you’re feeling stuck or think I could help you reach out to me.