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.