From Bankruptcy to Nine Figures: How We Built a Business With No Investors

How the Heck Did We Get Here?

How did I become a nine-figure-a-year brand owner? I built a company, with a lot of great help and a lot of great people around me, that produces upwards of $100 million a year. What were the steps we took? And how the heck did we get here without any outside funds, no investors, none of that along the way?

This is the journey to nine figures. And I want to walk you through it exactly, year by year, because the timeline matters. When you see where this started and how long it actually took, the lesson lands differently.

It Started With My Father's Dream in 1997

1997. My father had a dream. He had an obsession with the body, the metabolism, the energy. He wanted to help himself so he could help other people. So he formed a company called NaturalSlim, born on the island of Puerto Rico. He started doing seminars and got that brand off the ground all on his own. I did not have anything to do with that.

Fast forward to 2006. My father wrote a book called The Power of Your Metabolism. That was a crucial moment in the journey. We would not be here today if my father had not become an author and written books, because his information was so valuable.

Then in 2007, something very special happened. This was the start of the opportunity for me and my wife. We flew my father into the USA and pitched him: Dad, you built a great brand in Puerto Rico. Give us an opportunity. Let us bring this brand to the USA. Let's create a partnership. And what did my dad do? He said yes, let's do it. That was the birth of this company.

The Real Game of Business Is Not a Straight Line

Look at that journey. From 2007 all the way to 2023, a full 17 years until we became what we are today. It has been growing every single year, but of course it is not something that happens overnight. I wish I could tell you the game of business looks like a smooth line going up. It does not.

The real game of business goes up, then down, then up, then you crash. Then there's a meltdown. Then there's this thing called COVID, and you crash again. And then you go, and you go. If you keep on working hard, applying yourself with intelligence, and studying people that know what they're talking about, you will eventually persevere and win. That is the real game of business.

Here's how not-overnight it was for us. In 2007, our first year, we sold $290 in products. Two hundred and ninety dollars. From 2007 to 2012, those five years, we were really just trying to figure things out. And somewhere around 2010, I actually declared personal bankruptcy. I lost it all.

2012: The Single Most Important Thing We Ever Did

2012. Something very special happened. My father launched a content channel called MetabolismoTV. And that, my friends, is the single most important thing we have done for our entire nine-figure-a-year company: launching our content channel.

It still took about a year of uploading content before we started getting some traction. We were doing four videos a week. Nobody handed us an audience. We earned it, one video at a time.

2014 is when I developed a marketing obsession. That's when I said: I love this game of capturing attention. This is it. It became something I would eat, sleep, and breathe, day in and day out. And I started understanding that attention equals income. Attention equals growth. So at that point we started launching social media channels for my father's content and making them take off. Facebook became a big deal for us. That was the beginning of the social media omnipresence strategy that we still run every single day.

Testing the Skill, Then Turning It Into a Company

Along that journey, in 2015, I built an e-commerce brand just for fun. I wanted to develop a marketing ability in the e-commerce world. I did it, and I succeeded at a big scale. That brand was called Koi House Collection. In 2017 I sold that brand, got out of it, and then I launched Attention Grabbing Media, the marketing company that was born with my dad's inspiration.

Somewhere in 2023, we got our third Inc 5000 award. Three times in a row, the first three times we qualified for it. And now people come to us every single day asking our team to help them execute a similar strategy: grow their social media, grow their presence, expand their brand. That is what the journey looks like.

The Biggest Takeaway: You Cannot Do This Alone

One of the biggest takeaways I can give you in this lesson is this: without a team of people around you, dedicated to a purpose, on a mission to make themselves better, make the team better, make the organization better, and accomplish the goals of the organization, you are going to have a tough time accomplishing something massive like what we are accomplishing ourselves.

So build a team of people around you. Build an organization. Travel your own journey. Set your own goals. And walk the line until you accomplish those goals yourself.