I’ve spoken quite a bit about sleeping on the floor of my office for 2 years at the start of my DJ career, but it wasn’t all clear sailing from then on.
One of the biggest struggles of life came AFTER my DJ career had ended. In the year 2000 I got myself banned from the United States for DJing without a work visa. Getting the right paperwork proved difficult, and eventually I just gave up, which obviously put a big dent in my income.
By 2005, I had conceded that the peak of the 1990s rave scene was behind us, and never seemed like it would be coming back. Attendance continued to slide, and I felt it important to end what we started with Hullabaloo, my promotion company, in a way that it deserved. So, inspired by how a TV series will promote it’s final season, we did the same thing. It accomplished my goal, of ending with a bang, but that also meant that the livelihood I earned from Hullabaloo also ended.
I got into stage hypnosis during that time as a new pursuit, and had some good early successes, but with no regular steady income it was feast to famine. Sometimes for months at a time. Unlike my DJ career, where I had the combined income streams of DJ bookings, promoter income, and CD sales, which would all compliment each other, I only had one income source – gigs. This time was way harder then when I was starting out as a DJ, however, as now I had a family to support.
The feast/famine cycle continued for a good few years. I would increase my business steadily, but in the end I started from literally zero. I can recall coming back from what would have been a successful 6 week tour, but after road expenses and overhead, I wrapped up the tour with basically no money, and no gigs booked for a few months!
I was dead broke. Again. With a family. I can recall watching Will Smith in Pursuit of Happiness and having to turn it off. It was too painful to watch him evicted from a motel with his son, when I had late notices for my own rent. It was stressful and scary.
My phone got cut off, and I switched to Skype. Obviously home life with this sort of piano hanging over your head is never good.
I was committed to success, and I believed in it and myself, but it took longer than I hoped.
I went back to my mentor, Geoff, and asked for some additional help getting me on track. A combination of his time with me, combined with a business that was continuing to establish itself, things started to come together in a real way.
I remember celebrating one day when my bank account started to look healthy again. There was money to cover my nut, instead of “taking from Peter to pay Paul”.
This time with Geoff also spawned some great conversations about business automation. I applied new technologies to my business that I knew no one else was doing. It started to come together, where more money was coming in and I was doing less work to get it.
These conversations lead to the development of Stealth Seminar. Because I worked from home, I had the spare time to develop the embryonic tests of what that software would become. Finally, by 2010, my hypnosis business was firing on all cylinders, and Stealth Seminar launched creating a new income stream.
By summer of 2011, because of Stealth Seminar’s runaway success, I would have performed my last hypnosis show. My last DJ gig was 2008. I set a goal of “Freedom 35” – sometime during my 35th year, my monthly nut would be covered by recurring income. I believe I hit that 1 month before my 36th birthday.
This is all long behind me now, but that road was tough. I’m sharing this story because success if visible, but failure is usually not. Every story of success have these tough elements to them and it’s part of my mission to help others by being real about this. It can be done, but no one gets it done easy.
