DON’T Start A Business If You Want To Get Rich In Your 20s

All right, everyone and their broke-ass uncle is telling you to start a business in your 20s. Get a Shopify store, start an agency, sell a course, build something, bro. Well, I'm here to tell you that that advice might be keeping you for it. And this is coming from somebody who has a portfolio of businesses worth eight figures. And as somebody who went the traditional route, went to university, got $300,000 in student loan debt and got a doctorate, right? So I have gone in both directions. I've gone the traditional route and I've also gone the alternative route where you start an online business. And I've also tried most of these business models as well and I failed at most of them. And I figured out something that the gurus selling you the $997 courses are conveniently leaving out. And the reason they're leaving it out is because it doesn't sell as well as the quit your job and grind dream. So I'm gonna tell you when you should not start a business, when you should and what you should do instead, as well as the skills that you need to know before starting a business. So if you appreciate me making this type of content, let me know by gently tapping that like button and let's jump into it right now. All right, so let me take you back to the beginning. I grew up wanting to make money, not because I was greedy, but because I had to. When I was about five years old, my dad and I were in a casino in Nevada. Don't ask. He was inside with his friend and I was in the gaming area playing video games. I ran out of money, but I had one quarter left. So what I did is I went over to one of those little quarter machines, the ones that have all the toy capsules inside and I bought a little plastic lizard. Then I walked out into the casino, I found a guy walking back to his hotel room and I sold him that lizard for five bucks. It's a present for your son, I told him. He loved it. I made a 1900% return on the quarter at five years old. I didn't know what entrepreneurship was. I just knew that I needed money so I could play more games. But things got harder pretty quickly after that. See, my dad had a bad accident, a wall collapsed on his legs, his legs were crushed and he nearly lost the ability to walk permanently. And just like that, we went from middle-class to broke. This is him by the way. So we were homeless at one point, then we lived in like trailer parks, we lived in section eight housing and for a period of time, we were literally homeless, like sleeping outside homeless. And then after that, I was staying at the Salvation Army and that experience did something to me. It lit a fire that never really went out. I told myself, I am never going to be broke again, whatever it takes. So I did what you're supposed to do. I studied hard, really hard. I got a scholarship to a private school, pushed through college, got accepted to pharmacy school, got my doctorate, actually graduated in less than six years so I did accelerated program when usually it takes eight years and I started working as a pharmacist making about $120,000 a year. That's $10,000 a month. And for a kid who grew up homeless, it felt like I made it for about three months because here's what nobody told me. Yes, I had money, but I had no life. I was working 12 hour shifts at least locked inside of a box. I literally could not legally leave the pharmacy. I couldn't even walk outside to take a fresh breath of air and beautiful green Washington State was right outside the window, but I was stuck behind the counter all day. And on top of all that, I graduated with $300,000 in student loan debt. And I remember checking my balance after consolidating everything and just staring at the screen. $300,000. I thought about all those years growing up without money and I realized that at least when I was broke, I had time, right? I could go outside, I could do what I wanted. I might not have had any money, but I had time. Now I had the money, but I was basically in a prison. And really I didn't have the money because I would be spending almost all my money just paying off my student loans. All right, quick break. This week, I'm doing a one-time only workshop where I talk about how to finally make money from youtube.com in 2026. And you can check it out down in the description and the pinned comment below. At this workshop, I'm gonna be giving away the Niche Validator Pro completely free. This is a GPT powered by a piece of software that I've been working on for a long time now. And it's been trained on thousands of hours of my teaching, coaching sessions and more. So you don't have to spend years to pick a profitable niche. You can do it in a matter of minutes. Heck, it's even possible to do it in seconds sometimes. And I'm gonna be giving this away at the workshop. So make sure you click the link in the description and then show up to the workshop. And the best way to do that is to make sure you add it to your calendar once you've signed up for it. So you basically just click add this to your calendar once you're on the thank you page after you've registered. And it'll show up as either Google, Apple or Outlook calendar, whatever calendar you have. So you can make sure you won't miss the chance to grab the Niche Validator Pro completely free. And you'll also be able to ask me questions live. So I look forward to meeting you. Can't wait to see you there. I'm gonna be showing you this new opportunity. It's completely free and it's amazing whether you basically want to use it to get a better job, use it to network, use it to make some passive income. Start a side hustle, make a full-time income or even start a full-on business. It works incredibly well with all of those and it's completely free. So make sure you click the link in the description and then show up to the workshop. And now back to your regularly scheduled content. And that's when I started looking for a way out. So I started buying courses, trying side hustles and doing what every person trying to escape the matrix does. Shopify, Amazon FBA, tried it, actually made a product and I'm not even joking. It was called the booty kit. It was like a resistance band thing that you strapped to your leg to work out your glutes at home. And of course I lost money on it. Moving on, SMMA, Social Media Marketing Agency. Got a few clients here and there, but nothing stuck. Coaching, consulting, courses, digital products, some traction, but I kept hitting the same wall. Then there was real estate, white labeling, SEO, flipping websites and of course flipping physical products. The point is I tried them all. And here's the thing, I am not gonna sit here and tell you that those business models don't work because they absolutely do work. There are millions and millions of people that have had success with them, every single one of them, but they only work if you have one thing and that is traffic, views, eyeballs, people who actually know you exist. Think about it like this. Imagine you built the most amazing store in the world, best products, great prices, perfect branding, but you built it in the middle of the desert. Nobody drives by, nobody walks in and nobody buys anything. That's what it's like trying to run a business with no traffic. It doesn't matter how good the model is, if nobody's looking, nothing works. And I kept failing not because the business models were bad, but because I had no audience. I had no traffic and I had no views. And once I realized that, everything changed. Now I wanna give you a real example before I tell you what to do instead. One of my clients, his name is Josh, had a regular job in IT and cybersecurity. He didn't quit his job to start a business. He didn't raise capital. He didn't build a product. He just started making YouTube videos, documenting what he already knew and trying to be helpful to other people in his industry. So he was teaching other people in his industry which certifications were best, which skills were best, what languages they should learn and how to land high-paying cybersecurity jobs. That's it. He was just sharing his expertise. In many cases, he was literally just sharing what he had learned the previous week, almost like a video diary. And because of that content, he became an authority. Fame companies and Fortune 50 companies started reaching out to him with job offers. We're talking the big ones, Google, Amazon, Meta, because they saw his content and they thought, you know what? This person knows what they're talking about. And eventually, he quit his job entirely, not because he got a better offer, but because YouTube was making him more money than any employer ever could. He went from less than $1,000 a month when he first started working with me, all the way up to $186,000 in a single month, all from just documenting his expertise, no business plan, no startup capital, just content. And I like this story because he started all the way at the beginning. He was just giving value to people in his niche and he established himself as an authority. These companies literally reached out to him and offered him job offers from some of the hardest companies in the world to get into. He got his dream job because of his channel. And then he started it as a side hustle, making $5,000, $10,000 a month in a full-time business, making $10,000 to $30,000 a month. And then he scaled the business all the way up to over $180,000 in a single month. And that is the power of YouTube. So here's what I wish someone had told me when I was in my 20s. Every successful business on the planet needs exactly two things. Number one, a skill. Something you can actually deliver, something that you're good at. And number two, traffic, an audience, people who trust you and follow what you do. Most people try to start a business without either of those things. And then they wonder why it's not working. So instead of jumping straight into a business, here's what you should actually do. Step one, get a job that pays you to learn valuable skills. Or at the very least, it funds your ability to learn those skills on the side. So two of the most valuable skills you can learn are sales and marketing. So if you can get a sales or a marketing job, that is incredible. But if you just have a really good job and that can fund your ability to hire somebody to teach you sales and marketing faster, or at the very least gives you the time to learn it on your own, then that's just as good as well. So let's talk about sales first. Sales is one of the most important skills in business. Every transaction in the world is a sale. And every time someone gets a job, they sold themselves in an interview. And every time a business gets a client, someone had to close that deal. And every time you convinced your parents to let you do something as a kid, you were selling. Now I learned the basics of sales early. When I was around 10 years old, I used to work with this guy named Jeffrey who had an animal refuge in Kansas. He had lions, tigers, mountain lions, bears. It was wild. And one of the things he taught me how to sell was eyeglass cleaner at fairs and gun shows. So I'd walk up to someone, clean one side of their glasses, then I'd put the glasses over a steam machine and show them the difference. The clean side didn't fog up and the dirty side did. Simple visual demonstration. It was undeniable. And I had days when I made over $1,000 doing that as a kid because I learned how to demonstrate value and close a sale. And that skill is worth more than any degree. And the best part is you can get paid to learn it right now. Get a sales job, commission-based sales, SaaS sales, B2B. You'll earn income and build the skill that will run every business you'll ever start. Now let's talk about marketing. Marketing is how you make something sound as good as it actually is. And I'll be honest with you, I'm more of a product guy by nature. I'm obsessed with making products as good as possible. Kind of like Steve Jobs, right? There's a famous story where he wanted the iPod to be smaller and the engineers told him it wasn't possible. So what did he do? He threw a prototype iPod into a fish tank. And when air bubbles came out, he pointed at them and told the engineers, there's still space in there. Make it smaller, make it better. That is how I think. I want the product to be undeniably great, but I had to learn marketing too because even the best product in the world doesn't sell itself. You have to communicate its value. You have to make people feel something. You have to make them want it. And once I learned marketing, everything changed. My conversions went up, my revenue went up, my ability to help people went up. And again, you can get paid to learn this. Get a job in copywriting, media buying, content. There's lots of marketing agencies out there. Learn this on someone else's dime while you build your skills. You're definitely not wasting your time working a job. You are building the engine that your future business will run on. Now you might be thinking, well Shane, you know, either I don't wanna get a marketing or sales job or I can't get a marketing or sales job. What should I do instead? Well, another thing you can do is get a job in an industry where you're getting paid to learn the skills that you want to start your business in. So for instance, let's just say you want to eventually start a cybersecurity business. Get a job in the cybersecurity industry and get paid to learn all about the industry and basically get paid to do market research on the industry that you know you're eventually gonna start a business in, right? So that's another option. Yet another option is the one I talked about at the beginning where you just get the highest paying job you can get that has the most free time possible. That's kind of what I did with my pharmacy situation. I got a high paying job where I had a good amount of time on the side to start my business. And then the fourth option is get a job where you can actually work on your business while you're at the job. So I like to call this like a warm body job where you're kind of just getting paid to almost be like a security guard. You don't actually have to do anything. You just have to be there in case something happens and you can just work on your business while you're there. If I'm being completely honest, my pharmacy job at times was like that as well. And I would actually bring an iPad into the pharmacy. And when we had slow times, I would go into the back and I would actually just work on my iPad on my business and my YouTube channel. Okay, so now you got a job and you're getting paid to learn valuable skills. Now, while you're doing that, you start building your traffic on the side, specifically YouTube. And I wanna explain to you why YouTube specifically. Because there's a reason I chose this platform over everything else. Because every other social media platform is renting you attention. You post on Instagram today, it's gone tomorrow. You go viral on TikTok, great, but the algorithm moves on in 48 hours. You stop posting and you basically stop existing. YouTube is different. I made a video five years that we just a few months ago got a $10,000 a month agency client from. So right now, as you're watching this, thousands of people are watching videos that I made over five years ago. And some of them are buying from me because of it. So every video you make is like hiring an employee who works 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for free, forever. And it compounds, it builds, and it grows even when you're asleep. And once you have that traffic, every business model that I mentioned before, they all start working. Because now you have an audience. Now you have eyeballs. Now you have trust. So you wanna sell coaching? You've got an audience. You wanna do affiliate marketing? You got an audience. You wanna launch a course, a product, a service? You got an audience that knows, likes, and trusts you. You wanna promote your business? You got an audience. And here's something even better. If you're not a business-minded person, you don't even have to run a business. You can just rent your traffic to other people. Sponsorships, brand deals, affiliates. Other people will pay you to access your audience. And this is exactly what I did at first. I didn't quit pharmacy. I kept working, I kept learning, and on the side, I built my YouTube channel. And when the YouTube income was big enough to replace my pharmacy salary, and I felt comfortable, I left. And I have never looked back. That's the sequence. Job, where you earn income and build skills. YouTube, where you build traffic on the side, you document your journey, and you help other people in your industry, and you build your brand and your authority. And then business, which you launch when the audience is there to support it. That's it. That's the whole thing. So let me say this one more time clearly. Don't start a business if you have no skills and no traffic. That is not a business. That's just hope with a PayPal account. Here's the actual roadmap. Step one, get a job that pays you to learn valuable skills. Step two, while you work, start your YouTube channel. Document your expertise. Build your traffic, build your authority, build your audience. Help other people in your industry. And step three, once the traffic is there, launch whatever business model fits you and your audience the best. Or just monetize the traffic directly and skip building a business altogether. This is the path that I wish someone had given me when I was in my 20s drowning in student debt and working 12-hour shifts wondering what I was doing with my life. And it's the path that took my client Josh from $1,000 to $186,000 in a single month. So if you want help with step two, building the YouTube traffic engine, come to my free live workshop where I'll walk you through the whole system step-by-step, exactly how to build it, and how students are building it right now. Links in the description and pinned comment below. Go sign up. And I know that 99% of you are just gonna watch my free content, get a lot of value from it, even go to my live workshops and get a lot of value from it, and that's completely fine. We're never gonna end up working together and it's totally okay. But for the 1% of you out there that does want one-on-one coaching, that do actually want to work with me and I can actually help them to build their YouTube channel, click the second link in the description below or the link in the about section on the channel to apply for our one-on-one coaching program. And also check out this video right here of one of our clients who had a ton of success with us and exactly how we helped them grow on YouTube.