The Side Hustles that Made Me a Millionaire

Over the years, a lot of people have communicated in a lot of different ways asking me about network marketing, and to me it is the simplest thing in the world. So, I’m going to be doing a series of posts about it to try to make it simple for you, too.

Today I want to show you some of my side hustles that I’ve done over the last 49 years or so, because they have led me to really understand the value of network marketing. I hope you enjoy this. Here it is, my whole history with side hustles.

It started when I was about 13 years old, mowing yards. I had about 300 houses in my area that I could walk to, and it covered about seven miles. Out of those 300 houses, I got about 30 of them to allow me to mow their yard. That pretty much paid for the tennis shoes I wanted to wear.

When I was awarded a wrestling letter for a letterman jacket, they gave me the letter, but not the jacket. I needed to buy that jacket. There were a few other things I wanted that I got with that lawn-mowing money. 

I’m forever indebted to my mom and dad, because they told me, “We’ll give you what you need, but what you want, you’re going to have to earn.” That prompted me, and pushed me out the door to go out there and start hustling at a young age. 

Then I ended up working at a gas station, but the lesson that I learned there was that that was the owner’s dream, not mine. You cannot wash off the smell of gasoline for some reason.

Then, I went into the US Navy when I was about 17 years old, right out of high school. There were a lot of things that I learned there. One of them was that I was waiting on a pay raise. We had two years that we had to do “time in grade” before we were up for an advancement. Most of the time somebody had to move up, or out of the Navy in order for one of us to advance.

I hated that. I wanted to be able to earn money when I wanted to earn money. No matter how hard I worked, it wouldn’t help me advance any faster. If somebody was in the spot, I couldn’t get the pay rate increase because somebody had to move out or move up. 

“If You Want to Make a Lot of Money, You Have to Own It or Sell It”

I remember taking a college course in personal finance while I was in the Navy. What I learned in that course was not part of the curriculum. The guy was just kind of walking along in the ship classroom, and he just kind of looked over his shoulder and said, “But if you want to make a lot of money, you have to either own it or sell it.”

“Own it, or sell it,” became a church bell ringing in my ear. I will never forget it to this day.

Problem was, I did not see myself as ever being able to own something.

Then I remembered that out of 300 houses in my neighborhood, I only needed to get 30 to agree to let me serve them every single year, so I thought maybe I could sell something and just play the numbers.

I would literally knock on the door and I would say, “You wouldn’t want me to mow your yard, would you, now?”

(That’s probably the worst sales pitch you could ever make.)

The One Thing Everyone Needs Is Money

The other thing that I learned in the Navy is that everyone needs money. I would see guys who would spend their money on cameras, and guys who would spend their money on going out and drinking all night long. I saw them spend their money on motorcycles and things like that.

I remember thinking, “The one thing that everybody needs is money.” I learned that lesson in the Navy because I used to loan people money and I would see what they would buy with it.

I would think, “That’s interesting that everybody wants something different, but everybody needs money.” 

After that, I got shore duty, which means I wasn’t on a ship anymore. I took an entrepreneurial college course, and as part of that, they wanted me to go out and build a business plan. I wanted to start in the lawn business again, but when I crunched all the numbers, it ended up that the lawnmowers would depreciate at about the same time I broke profit. It would never become profitable. 

If it hadn’t been for that experience, then I wouldn’t probably have valued network marketing the way that I do because of the very low startup costs and running costs of network marketing. 

What About Real Estate Investment?

While on shore duty, I wanted to be a real estate investor. I bought one of those no-money-down courses by Ed Beckley. His idea was that you go out there and put out bids for 20% less than market value.

I put out about 20 of them and then one day my real estate agent, Sonny Higgins (I’ll never forget him) called me and said, “Hey, Tim, one caught. We’re on.” I ended up buying that piece of property. 

That was about when I realized what it took to do real estate investing on a $35,000 a year salary. Once I got my one property, I was leveraged as much as I could be in my income bracket, because that house was around $90,000.

When you think that through just a little bit, a $90,000 house on a $35,000 salary is a lot of risk. A lot of people don’t view that as risk. You can say, “Oh, well, it’ll appreciate,” but I was heavily leveraged in a way that doesn’t make the appreciation less risky.

I was making around $109 or so a month from rent. I thought that money was awesome. It was a lot of risk and it was a lot of effort to put out the bids and do all of that, but it was sweet. That was the first time I’d ever had any residual income. 

Then one day I got a call at around 11:00 at night, and the guy said, “Are you the owner of 231 Gardener Avenue?”

I said, “I am.” 

He said, “This is the US Marshall. We had to bust into it as the largest crack house in southern Maryland.” 

And I thought, “Oh, I guess that explains why they paid in cash.” 

That was the history of rental property for me at that time, because I just didn’t have enough capital to continue that process, to be able to hire somebody to manage it, and all of that. I didn’t have enough yet, and I didn’t see a way to get there. I know people say, “Oh, it’s all about owner financing. And you go out and you get creative and blah, blah, blah.”

Well, every one of those people that I tried to do that financing for me said, “Well, why wouldn’t I just rent it out?” 

The guy I bought the course from, Ed Beckley, seemed to act like it was easy to just put out bids for 20% less than market value. But I just ran out of money, and ability to get money loaned. 

Network Marketing

After my real estate investment disappointment, I answered a newspaper ad for a consumer product. I didn’t know what it really was at the time. But within five years, I had built a $25 million business in sales, and I retired with a seven-figure income.

Interestingly, I haven’t heard earned less than six to seven figures every year since then. That obviously was a really, REALLY good deal, because I think I paid about $350 to join that company, worked it for 5 years and proceeded to make residual income for 18 years even after I retired. That’s unheard of.

Running a Business with Employees

While I was still receiving that money, I created a product called Brilliant Compensation. It was a DVD to begin with, then it was a CD, then it went online, but I needed to hire employees in order to take the orders and do that kind of stuff.

The internet was running back then, but people didn’t trust putting any credit card in the system or anything like that at that time. I had to have employees, and I remember thinking, “I don’t want employees because employees are real people who have needs and wants. They want to have a dental appointment when the dental office is open, and so they have to take time off. They need to get their car repaired and things like that.”

Who was manning the shop when they were getting their teeth done? Me.

That was tough, because over here where I built my network marketing team, I had a lot of reps building their own businesses and they didn’t care what Tim was doing anymore. That was a lot easier than managing employees.

Stock Trading

Then I got into stock trading, and I did make millions. But my biggest lesson was that I spent a million to earn a million, literally. That’s what it was: quick to earn quicker to lose. In other words, I would see the stocks advance and I would think, “Wow, I made $10,000 today. That’s amazing.” Then the next day, I would think, “Oh, I lost $40,000 today.” It was very fast. I still trade stocks today. It’s a good game, a fun game. But in terms of relying on it, depending on it as an income source, I would consider it to be challenging.

Consulting

Because of that video that I wrote, Brilliant Compensation, people started reaching out to me and saying, “We’d love for you to consult our company,” “Hey, could you come and speak about network marketing?” and, “Hey, could you come teach at the University of Illinois at Chicago?” I ended up charging for my advice to people, but what I figured out there is that I’m basically a hired slave and nobody’s happy. What I mean by that is that when you are a consultant, you can help them arrange something, or put in a sequence, or get an idea going, but you can’t really get in there “elbows to elbows,” the way I like to do. I like to be part of the entire marketing campaign, from the advertisement, to what is said on the telephone or website, all the way through the whole process and then see the conversion rate from the answering the ad to watching the presentation. I wasn’t that deep in it. 

I found that if they wanted me to do something like that, then I would have to get a percentage of sales, because otherwise why in the world would I go through all of that process? It’s the most difficult thing in any marketing department to figure all that stuff out. They didn’t want to give me a percentage of sales, so it was a tough situation. I found that I wasn’t happy, and I didn’t feel as though I could contribute and do the thing that would change the growth of the company and knock it out of the park. I finally said, “I’m coming back into the industry.”

Back in the Network Marketing Industry

I now have $300 million of sales in my organization, 57 millionaires, and 5,401 people who have earned $250,000. 

When you go back and you look at my whole history, I had quite a few side hustles. They didn’t call it that then. That seems to be a vogue name now, or a “gig economy,” things like that. Back then, they were just something to get by. 

Here’s the thing in this: if it weren’t for my earlier experiences, even in the Navy in special operations, I probably would not have turned out and been able to do all these things. These experiences taught me that I could learn anything. But when I look back at all of those side hustles I did, I realize that each one of them except for network marketing gave me a net zero gain. For example, I know people who drive for Uber part time, after their day job, who made $5,000, but then had to redo their engine. It’s difficult to look at it that way. Now, it is a business expense and he could write that off, but there is still very little total wealth increase.

Wealth Accumulation

And that’s the real point that I’m trying to make with you in this post: instead of looking at making a little extra spending cash, like I was in my early side hustles, take the long look. Network marketing not only gave me spending money I needed, but was an accumulation toward wealth. I’ve made many, many millions of dollars from both network marketing companies I’ve worked with. 

Summary

Network marketing is very low entry, and very low risk. You have the ability to make money when you want to make money, and you can get an increase. I was able to make a hundred dollars or so in residual income from my rental property, but I had about $90,000 of risk. But in network marketing, I could make that a hundred dollars in two days in selling the products. Why in the world would I put $90,000 out there when I can do that? 

I hope this post put all that into perspective. From now on, I’ll be doing different episodes each time, talking about what network marketing is. If you like this, let me know, and tell me what you’ve learned in your side hustles. I think that would be a really good conversation to put into the comments, because I love to come in and see what other people’s experiences are.