Starting a business may very much look like a puzzle to most, and it may seem hard to know where to start, especially if you never have taken a shot at it previously. Dane Maxwell is a guy who has started many, and has not only scaled them to well over $500,000 in revenue quickly but has had his shares of $50,000+ months. His mission in life today is to teach you how to do the same thing with No Money and No Experience. The Secret Academy welcomes Dane Maxwell, the founder of the Foundation.
Secret Entourage Academy
Secret Academy Episode – Deric Tikotsky
Deric Tikotsky didn’t have much growing up and found himself alone in the US with no money and nowhere to go after growing up in France. Finding a 9-5 job was a survival move for Deric while he launched a computer repair business in NJ with a marketing strategy that you won’t believe. After launching several computer repair stores and business models, Deric experienced a business acquisition at a fairly young age. He followed his passion for exotic cars by starting a successful exotic car rental agency in Palm Beach, FL from his garage and ended up selling it to start producing exotic car parts in his latest venture while taking it easy. His diverse background and entertaining character makes him a great person to learn from.
Secret Academy Episode – Louis Spagnuolo
Louis Spagnuolo had a very humble upbringing, coming from an immigrant Italian family where entrepreneurship simply wasn’t in the cards for him early on. Believe it or not, he was actually a bouncer and even got beat up by Dwayne Johnson (The Rock) during his college days. Since then, Louis learned early on how to look for opportunities where others did not. From his early outsourcing of cell phone batteries to his web properties and lead generation software, he shares the wild ups and downs and the mistakes he recovered from that enabled him to become a real entrepreneur and launch 2 different 8 figure businesses. His story is bound to inspire you!
Secret Academy Episode – Joe Pulizzi
Joe Pulizzi is an Entrepreneur who started his company back in 2007 in the worst economic climate. After 6 years of being in business, he’s only spent $39,000 on advertising this year, yet his company will make almost $4 million in revenue. Joe’s got a great story about how he used content marketing as a business model to grow his company and provides great insight that can help other aspiring start-ups. He was also awarded: “Custom Media Innovator of the Year” by American Business Media, voted “Who’s Who in Media Business” by BtoB Magazine, named a Folio: 40, and recognized as the “Most Influential Content Strategist” by Lavacon.
Secret Academy Episode – Ian Ippolito
Ian Ippolito is a serial tech company founder and CEO. He is the creator of vWorker.com: a site which connected 150,000 employers and 350,000 remote workers around the world and made the process safe with money-back and payment guarantees. vWorker was named one of the “100 most innovative and brilliant companies” by Entrepreneur magazine, and was awarded the Inc. 5000 “Fastest growing private companies” award 4 years in a row. Ian started the company from an extra bedroom in his house and grew it to 15 employees and 11.1 million yearly revenue ($135 million total) before successfully selling and exiting in 2012 to Freelancer.com for an undisclosed price in the millions.
Secret Academy Episode – Alex Farrington
Alex Farrington was born in NYC and graduated from Beverly Hills HS and Cambridge University in England. He moved to Atlanta to continue his education at Morehouse with a dual degree in Corporate finance and Japanese. He then started Prestige Valet Services in 1997 and still operates that today. He started Prestige Auto Salon (detailing salons in office building) in 2001 and sold it in 2005 for $80k. He started Auto Storhaus (High Line car storage) in 2008 and sold it in 2011. He then purchased his first commercial building with that money and sub-divided it to rent it out to attorney firms. In 2010, he purchased a foreclosure for $300k and today it is worth close to a million. This is now his primary residence. It is 10k sq ft and has a 5 car garage that sits on 2 acres. He currently has 7 cars including a 2001 Honda NSX Turbo (600+hp) 1995 BMW M3 track car, 2001 M5 daily driver, 2013 BMW X3, 2003 Lifted Ford Excursion Diesel, 2004 Mercedes ML430, 1995 Jaguar XJS Convertible, Motorcycles, ATV and a boat.
Secret Academy Episode – Ricardo Poupada
As Co-Founder and VP of AskMen.com, the largest men’s lifestyle website in the world, he is responsible for managing the strategic direction and growth. In this leadership role, Poupada supports and guides a talented management team that includes editorial, sales development, business development, marketing, and engineering departments. Together with his team he seeks to increase AskMen.com’s content coverage and define its voice, work with advertisers on correctly targeting the male demographic, increase its readership, and generate new revenue streams. International expansion has been a key part of AskMen’s growing footprint and in the past years localized editions have been launched AskMen.com in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and Turkey.
Since co-founding AskMen.com in 1999, Poupada has led the site to become the largest lifestyle portal for men online, reaching worldwide audiences of over 20 million readers a month. He has been a frequent writer on the site, interviewing famous faces like David Beckham and Hugh Hefner. Additionally, Poupada saw through the sale of AskMen.com to IGN Entertainment (now part of Fox Interactive Media) in 2005 for $13 million, and was a key component in integrating the site within IGN’s network, which led to its impressive subsequent sales and monthly audience growth.