by MJ DeMarco
He was right, but how? And how can it solve a legitimate need while providing value? He left me with this challenge and I was intent to solve it.
Days later, I invented a risky, unproven solution and started working on it.
What was I going to do?
Instead of selling ad space, I was going to sell targeted, detailed leads and reservation inquiries.
There was a big problem though. Like, huge.
I had to convince my customers that this method of business was beneficial to them. At that time, this revenue model was new and ground-breaking. Because I had no predictive data (in any industry, much less the limo industry) I had to nail execution. As far as I know, I was one of the early pioneers of the lead generation model (if not the first) to adapt and succeed at it. Remember, this was the late nineties when databases and animated GIFs were considered technological marvels.
Despite having no roadmap or preemptive practices, I launched it.
In the short term, I expected the change to kill my income and it did. I predicted its success would take months, if it worked at all. The first month the new system generated $473. Yikes. I built more websites to fill my income gap. The second month’s revenues were $694. Third month, $970. Then $1,832. $2,314. $3,733. And it continued and continued.
It worked.
My revenue, my income, and my assets grew exponentially but not without issue. As traffic grew, so did the complaints, the feedback, and the challenges. Improvements came directly from customer suggestions. Within days, sometimes hours, I’d implement customer ideas. My employees and I were known to answer clients’ emails within minutes, if not an hour. I learned to be receptive to the consumer, and business exploded.
The workdays became long and challenging. Forty hours was a vacation; typical workweeks were 60 hours long. Days and weekends blurred together. While my new friends were out drinking and partying, I was hunkered down in my tiny apartment, regurgitating code. I didn’t know if it was Thursday or Saturday, and it didn’t matter. The glory of the hard work was this: It didn’t feel like work; in fact, I enjoyed it. I didn’t have a job; I had a passion to make a difference. Thousands of people benefited from something I created, which addicted me to the process. Although I had zero passion for the limo business, the passion came from making a profound difference!
I started to compile testimonials from clients.
Because of you, my business grew tenfold.
Your website led me to my biggest corporate client.
Your company has been instrumental in growing my business.
This feedback was a different form of currency called happiness. I wasn’t awash in riches quite yet, but I felt rich.
My “Faked” Shortcut to Wealth
In 2000, my telephone rang with a different type of inquiry. Technology startups called; they wanted to know if I would sell my business. In that year, the dot-com frenzy was in full force. Not a day went by without a tall tale about some dot-com millionaire who struck it rich by selling a tech property. Remember the fameless millionaires? This subset of the rich grew at a staggering rate, and the wave swelled my way.
So, did I want to sell my company? Hell yes! I had three offers to sell. Offer 1: $250,000. Offer 2: $550,000. Offer 3: $1,200,000. I accepted offer three and became a millionaire . . . instantly . . . well, almost.
It didn’t last, as didn’t the tech boom.
At the time, I thought $1.2 million dollars was a lot of money. It wasn’t. Taxes. Worthless stock options. I made mistakes and invested poorly. I bought a Corvette, hoping it would make me look rich. I thought I was rich, but I really wasn’t. By the time it was over, I had less than $300,000 left.
The tech implosion arrived with unforgiving consequences, at least for buyers of my company. Against my recommendations and domain knowledge, they made poor decisions; decisions that were good for short term revenue but horrific for long-term growth. They flushed money down the toilet as if there were an endless supply. Do we really need custom-branded water bottles? And logo T-shirts? Are these revenue-generating actions?
Decisions were made slowly and by committee. Customers were ignored. Incredulously, most of the company’s executive management had Ivy League MBAs, proof that the business logic doesn’t come with expensive initials after your name. Despite having $12 million in venture capital to buoy the storm, my website slowly started to die.
A few months later, near the cliff of bankruptcy, it was voted that my website would be dissolved, even though it was still profitable. Tech buyers dried up and stocks tanked. Everyone was on life support, including them.
Unwilling to watch my creation fade into oblivion, I offered to repurchase my company at a fire-sale price—a mere $250,000, financed by its own profit. The offer was accepted and I regained control of the same company I had just sold 18 months earlier. Essentially, I’d operate the business, take the profit and pay down the carry-back loan. What was left over I reinvested into the business.
With my company back in my control, a new motivation surfaced—to not only survive the dot-com crash, but to thrive.
The Birth of the Money Tree
The next few years I was revitalized to take my service to the next level. In hindsight, I wanted to prove to myself that I wasn’t just some lucky chap who got caught up in the dot-com boom. I continued to improve my website. I integrated new technologies and listened to customers. My new passion was automation and process.
As I streamlined my processes and systems, a slow and steady transformation took place. I worked less and less. Suddenly, I worked an hour a day instead of ten. Yet, the money rolled in. I’d go to Vegas on a gambling spree; the money rolled in. I’d be sick for four days; the money rolled in. I’d day trade for a month; the money rolled in. I’d take a month off; the money rolled in.
It dawned on me that I did it: This was the Fastlane.
I built myself a real, living, fruit-bearing money tree. It was a flourishing printing press that made money 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and it didn’t require my life for the trade. It required a few hours a month of water and sunshine, which I happily provided. Outside of routine attention, this money tree grew, produced fruit, and gave me the freedom to do whatever I wanted.
For the next few years I lived a life of laziness and gluttony. Sure, I worked a few hours a month, but mostly, I worked out, traveled, played video games, bought and raced fast cars, entertained myself with dating websites, gambled—I was free because I planted and cultivated a money tree that surrogated for my time. Its harvest, bountiful and monthly.
Since reclaiming my business, it grew meteorically. Some months I’d PROFIT more than $200,000. Yes, profit! A bad month was $100,000. I earned in two weeks what most people earned in an entire year. Wealth poured in and I was flying low on the radar . . . no fame. If you earned $200,000 every month, how would your life change?
➡What would you drive?
➡Where would you live and take vacations?
➡What passions—art, writing, charity—would you pursue?
➡What schools would your children attend?
➡Would debt be a noose around your neck?
➡How fast would you become a millionaire? Four months or forty years?
➡Would you be cursing Sunday night and rejoicing Friday afternoon?
➡Would grabbing a $6 coffee at Starbucks be an issue?
You see, when you generate this kind of income, millionaire status happens quickly. By age 33 I became a multimillionaire. If I didn’t initially sell my business, I would have probably arrived faster, but when you’re eating cardboard noodles and someone slaps $1.2 million dollars in your face, not many would say, “Nah, I’ll pass.”
I purchased my first Lamborghini and completed the prophecy dreamt in my teens. After owning a variety of exotic cars for years, I learned that the same question I asked years ago wasn’t unusual. It was asked almost weekly. And now I had an answer that I can give, and an answer I would have loved to
have read.
In 2007, I decided to sell my company again. It was time to retire and think about my wildest dreams, things like this book, writing fiction, and who knows, maybe screenwriting. However, this time I entertained a variety of offers, ranging from $3.3 million to $7.9 million. After making millions over and over in a few short years, I accepted one of the full-cash offers and repeated the Fastlane process . . . in a matter of minutes. That’s how long it took to cash the six checks that amounted to millions.
Chapter Summary: Fastlane Distinctions
➡Fame or physical talent is not a prerequisite to wealth.
➡Fast wealth is created exponentially, not linearly.
➡Change can happen in an instant.
➡Don’t fear taking roads that have not been paved by others.
➡I wrote this book because it is something I wished I could have read when I was 20 years old.
PART 2
WEALTH IS NOT A ROAD,
BUT A ROAD TRIP

PART 2- WEALTH IS NOT A ROAD, BUT A ROAD TRIP.
[3] - The Road Trip to Wealth
The journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.
~ Lao Tzu
Wealth Is a Road Trip, Not Just a Road!
While in college, my friends and I embarked on a spring break road trip from Chicago to South Florida. As young men, we were drooling with anticipation. Captivated by the destination, a sun drenched beach crowded with scantily clad boozed-up college coeds, we failed to focus on the most important thing: the vehicle we depended on getting there.
Eight hours into the trip, our old Dodge Duster started billowing smoke and clanked to a stop. With a ruptured gasket and no oil, our trip stalled on some country road in the middle of southern Illinois. Cows, manure stink, and cornfields, light years away from the sandy beaches of South Florida.
Sadly, for most, the journey to wealth often ends like my spring break road trip: stalled on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere, left to ask, “How the hell did I get here?”
Like my spring break trip, to know and drive “the road to wealth” is not enough because the road itself is deficient in delivering wealth.
Your pursuit of wealth stalls when your focus is the road and its destination, and not the road trip. Sure, the Fastlane might open a rapid road to wealth, but a successful road trip will demand your respect for all of the trip’s vital tools. My spring break stalled because we neglected the road trip and focused on the road. Oil? Roadmap? Engine tune-up? Screw it, just head south! When you disregard critical road trip components, your engine redlines, oil burns hot, gas is squandered, and decade-long detours are encountered. When your focus is only the road, your journey is likely to stall and dreamy destinations never arrive.
Wealth’s Illusionary Road
If wealth has escaped you, it’s probably because you are “road-focused” and not using the whole formula. Sure, you might have bits and pieces: an ingredient captured from a book or two, another seeded by some “get rich” seminar or a hot stock tip from your broke college buddy. Unfortunately, these isolated ingredients can’t create wealth and are likened to a dead car on the interstate with an empty gas tank and a dead battery. You can’t crack wealth’s code with one variable in a multi-variable equation.
Wealth’s road trip formula is like a recipe.
Imagine if I threw you into the kitchen with sugar and flour and ordered you to bake cookies. The feat is impossible because two ingredients alone don’t make the entire formula. Forget the baking soda and the cookies won’t rise. Remove the butter and the cookies taste awful. One forgotten or flawed ingredient and the process fails. Therein lies the fault with most wealth books: They are “road-focused.” They specialize on the most titillating part of the formula—the sugar! They tell you:
Import goods from China and sell them on Amazon!
Buy a franchise and be your own boss!
Learn the mystical secret law and think positive!
Follow your passion and start a business!
Invest in real estate for passive income!
Trade your way to riches with cryptocurrencies!
These strategies highlight various roads to wealth: the real estate road, the trading road, and the business road. They address nothing else. The failure is within the “else” because the else is the rest of the formula.
Millionaires Are Forged by Process, Not by Events
All self-made multimillionaires create their wealth by a carefully orchestrated process. They have and use the entire formula. Despite what you may have read or heard, wealth is not an event. Wealth doesn’t drop from the sky or come from a game show. It doesn’t ring the doorbell and stand on the front porch with balloons and a check the size of a refrigerator. Wealth does not chime from a machine with spinning bars, lemons, and cherries.
Wealth is a process, not an event. Ask any chef and they will confirm that the perfect dish is a series of ingredients and a well-engineered process of execution: a little this, a little that, done at the right time at the right place, and wham, you have a tasty meal. Wealth creation has the same method of execution—a mixed collection of many disassociated ingredients into an consolidated whole that has value and is worth millions.
Wealth eludes most people because they are preoccupied with events while disregarding process. Without process, there is no event. Take a moment and reread that. Process makes millionaires, and the events you see and hear are the results of that process. For our chef, the cooking is the process, while the meal is the event.
For example, an athlete who scores a $100-million-dollar contract to play pro basketball is an event from process. You see and hear about the big contract, the spectacular “get-rich” event, but you typically ignore the process that preceded it. The process was the long, arduous road you didn’t witness: The daily four-hour practices, the midnight pickup basketball games, the torn ligaments, the surgery and rehabilitation, the rejection of being cut from the junior varsity team, and the resistance to the neighborhood gangs, all frame the journey that forms process.
When a 20-year-old sells his Internet company for $50 million dollars, you read about it on a tech blog. The event is lauded and showcased for all to admire. Sidelined is the process—you didn’t hear about the long hours of coding the founder had to endure. You don’t hear about the cold dark days working in the garage. You don’t hear about how the company was founded on credit cards at 21.99% interest. You don’t hear about the founder and his rusty P.O.S. Toyota with 174,000 miles.
When Kevin Plank founded Under Armour in 1996 and takes the company public in less than 10 years, the accomplishment makes headlines around the world. What doesn’t? Subtle facts of process. Like Plank went broke one year after founding the company. To carry the business forward, he blew through $20,000 in his personal savings and later $40,000 in credit card debt. The billion dollar “get rich” outcome is the event—the process is the struggle and the backstory.
The sale of my company (twice) climaxed in an event, but its progress was carved by process. Outsiders see the nice house and the expensive cars and might think, “Wow, if I only could be so lucky.” Such a belief is a mirage of event over process.
All events of wealth are preceded by process, a backstory of trial, risk, hard work, and sacrifice. If you try to skip process, you’ll never experience events.
Unfortunately, as a media-driven, “I want it now” society, we spotlight and glorify the event, but usher the process behind the woodshed, carefully drying its sweat from the public cognition. However, if you search long and hard, you can always find the process, buried in another story or in the trailing paragraphs that glorify the event.
When you make your first million, it will be because of process and not some clandestine happenstance that just happened to waltz across your path. Process is the road trip to wealth: The destination shines as an event, but it’s found by process. Yes, the elevator to success is out-of-order—y
ou will need to climb the stairs.
Wealth’s Road Trip Formula
The formula for wealth is like a cross-country road trip. Success demands your focused discipline into the journey and the journey’s tools (process) as opposed to the destination (event). There are four ingredients that make up the winning formula. They are:
Your Roadmap (Parts 3, 4, and 5)
The compass for the trip—your roadmap—is the guiding force behind your actions. Your roadmap pens your financial belief system and your preconceived convictions about wealth and money. There are three roadmaps that will chart your course to wealth:
➡The Sidewalk
➡The Slowlane
➡The Fastlane
Much like a recipe, your roadmap will outline why, where, how, and what.
Your Vehicle (Part 6)
Your vehicle is you. No one can drive the journey but you. Your vehicle is a complicated system composed of oil, gas, an engine, a steering wheel, a windshield, horsepower, and an accelerator—all needing frequent tuning and maintenance to ensure peak efficiency during the road trip.
Your Roads (Part 7)
Your roads are the career pathways you travel. For example, you can travel the job road, and within that road you have unlimited choices: You can be an engineer, a project manager, a physician, a plumber, a truck driver. Then there are entrepreneurial roads: You can be a real estate investor, a retail store owner, a franchiser, a freelancer, or an inventor. Just like a cross-country road trip, roads are plentiful with millions of permutations. Each carries with it a mathematical equation.
