How to Make Your First $1,000,000 (Learn From My Story)

This is the story of how I turned zero dollars into millions of dollars and what it taught me about success. When I was 20 years old, I was cruising around in a Buick Century. I was so embarrassed by the car that I drove and my parents, after I decided to drop out of college, completely cut me off. So my insurance was mine to pay, my phone bill was mine to pay. I felt like Hannah Montana with two different worlds. One world, my business life, was traveling, doing events, staying at nice hotels, but it was all in a company time. And then I would go home and I would be in my $500 a month apartment and I would have my Buick Century. And it was very jarring for me to go back and forth between these two worlds because I had access to what it could be like to live in a life of abundance, but that wasn't actually mine yet. I will never forget the first sushi restaurant I went to. We were in Las Vegas for a work conference and the guy who was hosting the dinner at the table ordered $1,000 worth of appetizers. There was 12 of us there and he was just ordering everything. He knew how to talk to the waiter and he was hosting and I just thought, man, I would love to have that skillset. I would love to just know how to do that. I had no idea how to do that. I recognized in that moment that I didn't have the financial background, I didn't have the educational background, I didn't have the experience to become who I wanted to be, but this proximity and seeing that this lifestyle was available changed how I approached everything and it allowed me to say, what's holding me back, what are the gaps and what do I need to do to fill the gap? And the fastest way to fill the gap is by falling in love with books. Yes, I said it, no one's gonna like this part, but this is how you become successful. Successful people use other people's experience to learn from so that they don't also have to have that experience that's painful, that has losses, that has tribulation themselves. Why make mistakes that you could learn from somebody else just so that it takes you longer to get to where you're trying to go and potentially never even make it? Once I was surrounded by money, I realized I couldn't settle for not becoming a millionaire. You see, I had the mindset, but I didn't have the skills. One of the most difficult decisions that I made was deciding to marry somebody who was older than me and who made so much more money than me and had so many more skills than I did because I'm not like one of those girls that always wanted to marry some rich guy. That was actually something I frowned down upon. I judged people who married rich guys. And when I actually fell in love with somebody who happened to be older than me and happened to make so much more money than me, it was crippling for my confidence because I assumed that everybody was going to treat me the way that I treated people who made that decision. They were gonna write me off, they were never gonna take me seriously, and I became a shadow of myself. But in that time when I had nothing to contribute, I was just somebody's arm candy and I would just sit there for hours and hours and not say a word, I finally just got sick of my own bullshit. And I realized that I could choose to live like this in somebody's shadow for the rest of my life, or I could make a different choice. I could get over my fear of what everybody thinks and I could start investing in myself to become the person that I wanted to be regardless of what somebody thinks about me. I don't really care that that's what people think because I know who I am trying to become. I know that I'm capable of something so much greater than what I'm allowing myself to live like right now. And that drove me to read countless books, but the book that changed everything for me was Celery Sold by Grant Cardone. This book sold me on me. That is the most important sell that anyone can ever make in their entire lives. If you are not sold on you, if you do not feel confident in yourself, if you do not believe in yourself, it is going to be impossible for other people to take you seriously. Great people wanna be around great people, and if you're not sold on why you're a great person, it's gonna be a problem. And I realized that I wasn't a great person, that I was just kind of coasting. I was dating a wealthy guy, and everything that people assumed about me in that moment actually was true. If I was ever gonna create something big, if I was ever gonna start a business, have a foundation, be able to be an inspiration to somebody, I had to inspire myself first. I had to get skills for myself first. I had to believe in myself first, and I always knew I wanted to start a business. I always knew I wanted to create an impact where I could have thousands of team members and tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of customers, because at that time I realized that if you want to create wealth, you have to create a business, which led me to identifying what skills I need to create today in order for me to start a business. I set a goal to hit $100 million net worth by the time I turned 30. Now, I didn't hit it on time, but I did make it happen, and here's how. I was 24 years old with a $100 million dream and maybe $36,000 in my bank account, and so I took a step back and I said, in order to get moving, in order to get to this goal that I have as quickly as possible, what would be the fastest way to do this? Instead of going a traditional route where you start a business from scratch and it's very difficult, you're a nobody, you have to create your own brand, I started looking across the space of social media influencers who were talking about business, who were talking about real estate, and who my husband and I could be additive to. So instead of starting something from complete scratch where there's no brand name and you have to do everything all on your own, one of the fastest ways that you can become successful is to collaborate. You see, I believe that collaboration is the new currency. So I looked across the space at all of these social media personalities and I literally had a list of 30 people that I was looking through and saying, okay, could we be partners with these people? Could we be partners with these people? And I was checking these people off this list and I came across Grant Cardone, this video of him with a jet behind him, there was a money gun, his hat was sideways with the big 10X, and I watched this video and then crossed his name off the list because that is not what I thought our future business partners were going to be doing. I was thinking somebody a little bit more traditional who was like education-based. And by the grace of God, the YouTube algorithm retarget me with Elena Cardone's content. And I started watching Elena Cardone and her talking about what it's like to be alongside a strong man, how difficult it is in this day and age to actually support your husband because you're supposed to be this strong, independent woman. And I watched this video of her and I was in bed and I literally started bawling because she brought to life this exact fear that I had, which is I'm gonna support my husband. I'm gonna do this great work with my husband. And instead of celebrating me or even giving me any sort of credit, people are just gonna assume that it was easy. I finally found somebody who truly understood. And so I pitched to my husband that we were going to start listening to Grant Cardone's content. And he rolled his eyes at first and was not interested whatsoever. He wanted to do traditional private equity. I was like, no, no, no, I think that I'm onto something here. So I forced him by sheer will to listen to one of Grant's books. And it was game over from there. We went to a conference that they hosted with 35,000 people in a stadium on Super Bowl Sunday. And at the stadium, we found our future business partners and we brought our operational skillset. We brought our business consulting and we decided that we wanted to partner with them. And we were gonna bring our skillset to the table to create a business together where we would service small business owners and help them understand what's possible. I saw Grant, I saw Elena, and they created this life that I wanted to have. They were incredible spouses to each other and so supportive of each other's goals and dreams. They have these two incredible children that they spend quality time with who they were raising and homeschooling on top of building this massive empire with real estate and with sales education and marketing education. And I found these people who in real life were what I wanted to create. Everybody around me had the stats. Elena had a book, Grant had multiple books, all of this real estate. My husband had built and sold a business for 77 times EBITDA for over $155 million. And then there's Natalie who looks like the trophy wife. So needless to say, I had a chip on my shoulder and I made the decision at 25 years old when we partnered with Grant and Elena that I was going to become the person that I am today, which is somebody who actually knows what they're talking about in business, somebody who has read books and is literate in the language of business. And my greatest advice for somebody who is trying to create success is it's okay to feel like you do not belong. Even though I had this leg up where I was around successful people, I didn't have the success yet. And I could have just chosen to sit back and be in the shadows and not have to go through this really uncomfortable process to evolve. And I just had to keep telling myself over and over and over again, I'm going to get there. I am not good yet. It's okay that I'm not good yet. I'm just going to be bad for as short of a timeframe as possible in order for me to get good really quickly. So this started with me with public speaking. I was a terrible public speaker. I would get nervous. The lump in my throat would just be so enormous that you could hear my voice shake. I was terrified to look like I didn't know what I was talking about. Instead of having one speech every month, I decided I was going to become a great public speaker and I was going to speak every single day. So at dinner, I would make a toast and it would be a mini speech. In the morning when we would kick off a meeting with our whole team, I would treat it as an opportunity to have those nerves build up so that I could get over the fact that I was freaking nervous. This was the same with every skillset. First set of financials, didn't know what to ask for, didn't know what to look for, didn't know which pieces were good and which pieces were bad. So I would read books and I would get the reps in so I was looking at the financials every single week to ask better questions, to really understand what was happening from a financial standpoint inside our business. Because the game of business is understanding your financials. If you do not have that skillset, you will never create a big business. So if I was starting over again, I would publicize to everybody that I knew that I wanted to be successful and that this is my target because it forces you to raise the stakes on yourself. So you don't have to marry somebody who is wealthy. You don't have to be around really successful people in order for you to change your mindset so that you take the actions that are required for you to get to where you're trying to go. You just have to make the stakes really big and ask yourself what you need to do or study to become the person that you want to be. I one time flew all the way across the world to Australia so that I could watch my husband and his business partner and a bunch of people that we had flown with speak. And all of a sudden it dawned on me that here I am in the audience. I flew the same amount of time that they did. I was physically there. Little Natalie was just sitting in the audience terrified to speak publicly. So as I looked at this group of people, I just thought to myself, what's missing that I can contribute to? And that was the moment that I decided I was going to become a people expert. I was going to learn everything there was to learn about how to attract great talent, how to interview them, how to onboard them, how to develop them, how to retain them, how to make it so that they make so much money through working inside our business and then teaching other people exactly how to do the same. At first, they thought it was a ridiculous idea. There was nobody who was like, oh yeah, this is what we're missing, Natalie. You should go learn this. If you can't see it and you can't create that opportunity, no one is going to just pick it out of the sky for you and tell you this is what you're going to be really good at. There was a group of existing things. And I said, okay, what can I do that can contribute to this group of people? So from that point forward, I became an expert in every recruitment platform. I figured out how to truly create success in my business. There's a theme here. You learn and you learn and then you implement and then you implement and then you learn more and then you implement. And it is just a cycle of going back and forth. So ask yourself what doesn't exist in the market so that you can learn exactly how to do that. The quote that changed my life when I was 19 years old was real money does not follow people with degrees. Real money does not follow people with great ideas. Real money follows people who solve problems. It's simple and it's that easy. If you want to make more money, then provide more value through solving people's problems. The hardest part of my millionaire journey has been getting over the fact that people will always think that I didn't earn it. And I've just come to terms with the fact that people will always assume that my success belongs to a man. But what I came to understand is if that's the worst case scenario, if that's what I'm so fearful of, who cares? So what? Somebody can think that all of my success is because of somebody else. I know who I've had to become. I know the work that I have put in to create the life that I have today. And I can't sit here and say that I would have done all of this without my husband because I actually don't know. Maybe what I would have built is bigger than what I've built or it could be smaller. The crazy thing is I will literally never know. So the fear or the anxiety or the worry about what somebody would think because I made this or that decision doesn't matter because the life that I have is the life that I'm proud of and I know what I've done to create it. I could lose everything tomorrow. The houses, the cars, jewelry, all the nice things wouldn't matter because what I know I would take with me is all of these things that I've created within myself. And that is what true success really is. I've earned a reputation from myself of my ability to gain people's buy-in, to get people to trust me. And that only happens because I trust myself and I do what I say that I'm going to do and I don't let myself down. And I'm my own best friend because I like myself. And the only way you will ever end up liking yourself is when your work ethic and your discipline and your core values are actually in alignment with the person that you're striving to become because it's your core values that actually create your reputation. So say you want it, claim it, and then learn the skills to get there. If you want to make the leap and start taking steps towards building your dream life, check out this video here.