Josh Elledge wanted to reduce some of his monthly bills and started to find some loopholes in the system to cut his expenses by sometimes more than half. Taking it to the next level, Josh started to look for ways to save when he spends as well with the use of coupons, often not known to the general public. With these loopholes in hand, Josh created Savings Angel, an exclusive site catered to saving consumers thousands of dollars of month through a unique and custom tool that works based on where the consumer is and what they’re looking for. As word started to get out, Josh saw his customers were not coming in the form of traditional ads, but rather free press he received when being featured on major local and major publications. Josh saw this as an opportunity to teach others the same methods of getting free press and now coaches students through his course at Millions in Free Media. Today, Josh has built a multi-million dollar empire while saving consumers more than $10 million.
Secret Entourage Academy
Secret Academy Episode – Matt Paulson
When it comes to online businesses, you hear of many entrepreneurs who become dependent on one source of traffic which usually is organic from Google in most cases. The problem with that is that Google runs major algorithmic updates periodically throughout the year so your site may drop off or even disappear off the results at any given time. One of the most solid sources of traffic has and always will be through your own personal list of subscribers in the form of an email list. Your email list usually holds its weight in gold as the people who opt-in not only have a vested interest in your offering, but also are more likely to engage and purchase. Matt Paulson has several diverse online businesses in different verticals but the common success factor is his email list which is now over 150,000 in subscribers but also worth over $1 million in sales. As they always say, the money is in the list!
Secret Academy Episode – John Maddox
After getting a taste of entrepreneurship in college when he learned how to leverage people to scale his lead generation business, John Maddox started to second guess his desire to continue his college education. Around this same time was when businesses were leaning towards new media for advertising such as radio ad placements. The problem was that most businesses did not either have a website or a website optimized to capitalize on radio referral traffic. This gave birth to a Ten Fast Feet, a consulting and marketing agency that grew over 1200% in 3 years, all without a single sales person on staff. Today John is the founder of Serious Startups, a new startup incubator from Tennessee that aims to redefine how startups are created. The twist is that Serious Startups takes an equity in the company it helps develop, market, and brand, with hopes for a larger VC acquisition or funding.
Secret Academy Episode – Simon Bai
After a successful career as a engineer of product development, Simon Bai left his day job and ventured into a totally new career as a restaurateur. His first restaurant was quick to capitalize on the frozen yogurt fad and soon after that, Simon launched a wine bar and a fusion Asian cuisine restaurant, all in the South Florida area. With most restaurants expected to fail within its first year of business but Simon Bai has perhaps found the recipe for opening a successful restaurant with three under his belt.
Secret Academy Episode – Morgan Carey
As a young stay-at-home dad in his teens, Morgan Carey had little options for employment unless it was for himself. During this time was around the dot com boom when businesses were creating websites left and right. Obviously without traffic a website has very little impact on any business so Morgan began to learn the fundamentals for search engine optimization (SEO) and was soon coined the “SEO Guy” for being one of the first to truly know how to increase website visibility. As business grew, Morgan realized it was hard to scale the business with himself being the bottleneck. Seeing the demand and rise in real estate, Morgan created Real Estate Webmasters (REW), a website solutions and software company for realtors and brokers nationwide. Since 2004, REW has continued to grow and as of recently, Morgan made an appearance on Dragon’s Den and was able to secure $2 million for 5% ($40 mil) valuation that he astonishingly turned down. Today, Morgan is worth over $70 million in addition to his other investments in real estate and hospitality businesses.
Secret Academy Episode – Neil Patel
In 2013, we had the honor of featuring Neil Patel as a success story on Secret Entourage where he talked about his humble beginnings to becoming one of the most well known and respected online marketers and start-up entrepreneurs. Neil made quite some noise in 2014 when he took the Instagram world by storm with several very uniquely placed social media campaigns. For 2015, we decided to bring back Neil Patel, but instead of resharing his story, we decided to have Neil talk about what he has been up to including the results of his Instagram case study as well as other marketing tips entrepreneurs can use this year.
Secret Academy Episode – Chris Ducker
As business becomes more globally connected, new services have allowed entrepreneurs to find quality employees overseas for far less the cost they’d find domestically. Chris Ducker was a native Brit living in the Philippines when he noticed the surging demand for contractors, specifically virtual assistants, to help entrepreneurs with their daily tasks. The problem was, anyone in search of a virtual assistant would not know where to begin but also who to trust. Chris launched Virtual Staff Finder, a premium virtual assistant locator that helps entrepreneurs focus on more important responsibilities and even work less in some cases. Chris is living proof of the effectiveness of having a virtual assistant from previously working 16 hour days to working a few days a week at no more than 4-5 hours per day.