How To Go from $0 to $1 Million in 2 Years

I get what are you are saying, that's why I deleted my first novel of a response and rewrote it. But I will never be able to word it perfectly so everyone will see exactly what I mean. That's the downside of emails and forums... the exact intended message never comes across precisely how people mean it. That's why I say in the top and bottom of my post that I totally respect what this guy has done.

All I'm saying is there is way more to the story. He did not start out in retail before doing this as though he was the average guy... Sears was a very short term in between job for him. He had already done quite a lot before. He did not make a million bucks knocking on doors. He did that BEFORE he worked at sears. Since he was not making $15k a month in residuals from his first credit card processing job still while he was at Sears, he must have been making high upfront commissions or sold the residual. We don't know, because that part is left out. There are basically 4 different ways people get paid in that industry:

1. They get a huge upfront check and nothing else. This can be the present value of what they could have earned in residuals, or from selling overpriced leases. When I say overpriced, I mean charging a small business $30-50 a month for 4 years for a piece of equipment that costs $150 new. The commissions on those leases are around $1k. I suspect he didn't do the leases, because that would be counter to the "unscrupulous practices" that he preached against.

2. You can get nothing upfront and a large residual. This residual may be sold to a third party depending on whom you sell for.

3. You can have a mix of the above 2.

4. You can be an employee, collect a salary and commission and have no ownership of the account.

When you read the other article, you will see that he had a string of successes before Braintree because of all those good things we should admire about him that he already did. He had a VOIP company with 500k in angel funds that apparently failed because they needed $2m more around 9/11 and couldn't get it. Early on, before any of this, he came up with a creative way to make money selling phones. He also did a big real estate thing. I consider his failures to be successes because he learned something from all of them. But he was also successful in some of them. The one common thing about everything he did though was MASSIVE ACTION.

If you read the above paragraph and take that as a negative comment, you are missing the intent again. What I am saying is that while this guy is very talented and hardworking, much of the success he had at Braintree was due to all of his prior hard work he did before. That is a good thing.

Bigbee said "Here's a job who worked in retail, left retail to become a door knocker, and ultimately made himself a millionaire.

Read this story multiple times. Notice the things that he did which were different, from the thousands of others who were doing the same thing."

Had I had come from a different background, I would have totally agreed with the original post. However, it's unintentionally very misleading. It's still a motivational story. It's still true that the guy combined creativity with lots of hard work and ACTION. Not once did I say any of that was contrary. What I'm saying is read the other story and any others you can find. You'll get a much better idea of the whole story and have more actionable pieces to pull from it to benefit yourself.

Guess what? ... Just read now Braintree was sold to Ebay for 800 Million in cash!

So he went from $0 to $800 million in 2 years it seems ... that's crazy!!!!!

EBay to Buy Braintree for $800 Million - WSJ.com


How Bryan Johnson has Taken Braintree to Explosive Growth in Three Years @Technori