My Story

Wondering how in the heck this blog got started, who I am, and how I got here?  (ya me too some days! 😉 )

Let me take you back to early February 2015… I was a web developer, earned a good living, but slowly started to realize I wasn’t going to be happy later in life, if I kept perusing the same road I was on. Sure, I’d make more money by continuing to take on bigger and bigger clients each year, but I quickly found myself between a rock and a hard place every new corporate client I worked with.

it was like, yeah the money is great, but it also feels like I added a new boos each time I took a new account too. Know the feeling?  (pay is good, but the guy is an asshole to work with?)

Anyhow, the whole idea of being “self employed” started to go out the window, as these corporate cogs in a wheel had me jumping through more hoops than I care to count each month, and I was starting to resent the whole damn thing.

One day I realized I was going to have to shift gears if I wanted a different life. I was 33 at the time, and I knew I wouldn’t be happy by 40 or 50 if I kept trading my sanity for dollars like that. I began researching ways to start something else on the side, but not completely start over. I knew there had to be a way to do something that would allow me to satisfy my desire to connect and help people, make a lot of money, yet still be flexible enough to interject some of my passions every now and then.

What I was really after, was my ideal lifestyle even though I didn’t know it at the time. I didn’t even know what a lifestyle business was at the time, but later I would find out it’s one of the most lucrative tax advantaged businesses on the planet… it’s just no is talking about them, because everyone wants “life balance” and never wants to bring “work” home from the office. Well, when you do what you love, it isn’t work; and you stop caring if it’s in the other room or not. Plus, old Uncle Sam rewards you to the moon and back, by letting you keep a whole shitload more or your money! And who doesn’t like free money right?!

So over the next few months, I would get frustrated, started drinking more, would rack my brain 24/7 on how I was going to get out of this mess, and finally one day in the shower everything changed.

I’ll never forget it… it was like the light bulb moment of the century for me. I was standing there under the water, pondering how in the hell I was going to create this mystery business that would give me the life I wanted, and it was like a flash of lightning illuminated the entire thing before my eyes.

You see, for the weeks prior, I had been telling myself if I wanted to have more freedom AND double income, I was going to have to get real clever, and use lots of leverage. At the time I though that meant financial leverage, but really the most powerful and valuable form of leverage I had available was not money. It was my brain and creativity.

I had figured out a way, in what seemed like almost overnight, to leverage everything I knew serving those corporate clients I learned to hate, and branch out on my own in a whole new way. It was the same way that I’m going to teach anyone how to take what they already know, and use it to get where they want to go…. just in a new way, that creates an asset for you, instead of for someone else.

And thus, Clever Leverage was born!  However, the original idea is NOTHING like what you see here today. My original idea was to help small businesses get going online, and show them how to stop losing customers to their competitors down the street, who were legally stealing their customers using online marketing techniques I had been hired to deploy for years.

Now fast forward to December 2016, my 12th month since starting Clever Leverage. I was making a full time income from blogging in less than 10 months, and it was growing every single month. I lived the entire year of 2016 off of savings, so I could continue to have plenty of funds in the web dev business to carry out any prior obligations… all while not taking on any new clients.

This was a scary fucking time for me, and it felt very strange to know I didn’t have any income coming in, and consciously turned down new clients. But I knew if I took on another one just for the money, I would forever be a slave to that cycle. I had to break it, but it almost broke me…

I was stressed, I wasn’t taking good care of myself, and something I never anticipated was about to happen. In early 2017, I was now making more money from my blog, than I was the previous year from my web dev job. Things seemed like they were going great, but somehow through all of this, I let my health go and I began to decline.

I had this mindset for a year, that money, success, my freedom lifestyle to make $100k/yr from anywhere in the world, was all that mattered. And boy did I get a swift kick in the nuts after some time of forgetting about true wealth!

Now don’t get me wrong, I would do this whole thing all over again exactly the same way and suffer the same consequences if I had to… totally worth it!  I mean, how many people are living a semi – retired lifestyle at 35, with more passive income than most penta-millionaires?  Not many, so I’m very very fortunate and grateful to be in the position I’m in. However, I have learned so much, and if I were to do it all over again, there are so many things I would have done differently, and I believe they would have dramatically lowered my stress levels. As part of my mission, I want to create some blogging courses and other resources for people who want to leave the corporate world like I did, and ditch the 9 to 5 forever. I can make it easier on them, than it was on me, especially for anyone who wants to create a profitable lifestyle blog that they can live off, while still helping people and maintaining their purpose and fulfillment in life.

Why am I telling you all of this?

Well because if you look at my blog image today, it is nothing like my original vision. You see what happened was, when my health took a nose dove, and I began suffering from fatigue, anxiety, and brain fog pretty much every day, it stopped me in my tracks and forever changed the course of my life.

No longer am I just money focused anymore, and I consider many things outside of money that provide true wealth. Without your health, you’ll never have wealth. It became abundantly clear to me during that whole experience, that part of my path includes me sharing and helping people with similar problems that I’ve had on my own journey.It is one of the core principles in my blogging and business philosophy, even though I’ve never taken a single blogging course in my entire life.

And THAT is why you see me blogging about infrared saunas, detox methods, doing juicer reviews, and testing out supplements…. because I hit a 20′ tall speed bump in the road, and it forever changed the scope of what is possible.

In the end it was a blessing in disguise, but I would have never said that one those crazy nights I laid on the couch researching Web MD, thinking I was going to die after months of researching my symptoms when nothing was working.

To be continued…