I Run a $3,000,000+ a Year,
One-Man, Online Business

For me, I've found it's best to find people who have already done something I want to know how to do and learn it from them. This is a good way to rapidly put yourself ahead of everyone else trying to figure it out on their own. In other words, find a mentor and absorb their knowledge. If you're not self educating and learning from people who have succeeded before you, the road ahead will be a difficult and frustrating one, trust me.

I've spent $1,000s on self education. I've read over 2,000 books, traveled to over 60 countries and spent millions building my online businesses that gross me over $3-million-dollars per year. I live a very financially comfortable, no-stress, location free lifestyle meaning I can literally be anywhere in the world, whenever I want and I take advantage of this freedom often, travelling to dozens of countries every year for months at a time.

One thing that REALLY changed my life was learning how to invest properly. You see, when I started making some decent money with these businesses I thought the next thing I need to do is learn how to invest this money safely, in case something ever happened to these businesses, no matter how successful they got, it's always nice to have a nest egg to have just in case.

1. Learn how to make more than you need (learn how to stop living paycheck to paycheck)
2. Learn how to keep the extra you make, because most people, as soon as they have a few extra bucks they turn it into a new pair or jeans, trip down south or new car they can barely afford, putting them back to paycheck to paycheck. #2 is to learn how to stop doing this.
3. Learn how to invest the extra you have safely so it doesn't disappear. For me, I learned that this just meant putting the cash into safe, dividend paying large companies that are in healthy financial positions and are growing each year by a decent amount. If a company is growing by say 10% each year for the last 20 years, the stock price will probably go up by 10% each year going forward, the dividends will be raised by 10%, etc. I didn't invent this, this is Warren Buffett 101.

We will get into this investing stuff more in just a little bit...

Ever since my Forbes Article came out in 2018 a ton of people have asked me many questions about how I did it.

How did I build this business, totally online, no office, growing it to 50+ employees all over the world who work when/where they want and me running it from anywhere in the world when/where I want. How did I do it?

To me, it's easy. I just did it. But to most people it sounds impossible to go from average 9-5 guy to a global travelling entrepreneur (aka Digital Nomad) in a few years.

Before all of this, I was a regular 9-5 guy. I went to college for 2 years for a Mechanical Engineering Design program in London, Ontario, Canada. After college I had great jobs at some of the largest engineering firms in the world, including Hatch Ltd., SNC Lavalin Inc., & Siemens.

I learned a lot working at these places and I'm grateful that I had the opportunity to work at them for about 10 years combined. As good as they were I never really liked the trapped feeling I felt working a 9-5 job.

Working for someone else is not a way to freedom or wealth. How much money you make is decided and fixed by someone else, how many hours you need to work and how much free time you have to yourself is up to someone else, how many holidays you're allowed to take every year is fixed to 2 weeks and again, decided by someone else. This 9-5 world doesn't give you much choice in life and that didn't sit well with me. Another 30-40 years of that? No thanks!

I'm not saying these corporations were evil. That's just how the 9-5 world works and I didn't like it so I decided to do something about it. The thing that always bothered me the most was having to wake up before I wanted to, before I felt fully rested, commuting through morning rush hour traffic to spend 8 hours somewhere I don’t really want to be, with people I don’t really want to be around and do things how someone else wants them done. Then I'd spend more time commuting home in more traffic, get home and feel too exhausted to do anything else, day in, day out.

I was willing to do whatever it it took to escape it. There were other people that had done it, other people who built successful online businesses, travelling the world and enjoying the life I dreamed of but what was different about them? Why could they do it and I couldn't? Were they special super humans?

I started talking about what I wanted to do with my life and how I wanted to live it to some colleagues at work and they'd say "you can't start your own business, you don't even have an MBA! You can't travel the world and work anywhere you want, how can you make money while you travel?! You can't make more money than you're getting paid here!" And many other limiting beliefs they had about life that kept them from doing what I went ahead and did!

These comments were music to my ears! Like you perhaps, I love when someone tells me something can't be done. "Everything is impossible until someone goes and does it" - Steve Jobs

I started reading books about other people that have done what I wanted to do hoping maybe I'll figure out what the secret is. What that did was really open my mind up to the fact that if they can do it, why can't I? They're just humans and so am I, so why can't I copy them and do what they did? I just need to know what they know and apply it to my life so I started seeking out mentors who would help teach me what I can do to get out of this 9-5 situation.

You see, successful people are no different than anyone else, they just have more knowledge than average people. They make better decisions in money, relationships, business, health, investing, psychology, etc. because they have more knowledge than average people in those areas so they make different, better choices during their life, which compound into a great life over time. Decision after decision, where to put money, what to do with money, how to make money, how to pay less tax, who to date, who to marry, who to be friends with, how to be happy, all of those decisions add up and slowly, and over time, turn into a great life.

Based on what I was reading and learning I decided to start a side business while working my full time job and boom! J – CAD Inc. was born. All it was, was offering my engineering skills to local machine shops, manufacturing facilities and welders in Toronto making blueprints for them. I did this for years while working a full time job so it definitely wasn’t an overnight success, I did this from 2006 – 2013 in fact.

Then it finally started to pick up, or more specifically my business skills and knowledge started to pick up. I'd learn something and apply it to my business and make more money on the side. Rinse & repeat, rinse & repeat until I was making enough money on the side to quit my job.

Sound easy enough? Is there something you can do that's similar, offer your skill on the side, water it and wait for it to grow into a full time business? I'm sure there's something!

When I started in online business most days were $0. Then I started having $100 days. Now $5,000 - $10,000+ is pretty normal. So what do I do with all of this money? Invest it! How? Let's get into that next....

1. Learn how to make more than you need (learn how to stop living paycheck to paycheck)
2. Learn how to keep the extra you make, because most people, as soon as they have a few extra bucks they turn it into a new pair or jeans, trip down south or new car they can barely afford, putting them back to paycheck to paycheck. #2 is to learn how to stop doing this.
3. Learn how to invest the extra you have safely so it doesn't disappear. For me, I learned that this just means putting the cash into safe, dividend paying large companies that are in healthy financial positions and are growing each year by a decent amount. For example, if a company is growing by say 10% each year for the last 20 years, the stock price will probably go up by 10% each year going forward, the dividends will be raised by 10%, etc. I didn't invent this, this is Warren Buffett investing philosophy 101.

1. Lower your expenses and invest the difference. What's the fastest way to give yourself a 10% raise? Simple, lower your expenses by 10%.
2. Lower your taxes and invest the difference.
3. Make yourself more valuable and invest the difference.

Let's now get into each of these 3 rules of investing and buildling wealth in more detail.

In my experience, and I can offer this advice because this is something I've gone and done myself over the last 15 years, making a lot of mistakes along the way, losing over $100K figuring out what not to do, and then finally getting successful at it, and now making millions doing it, I can honestly say that none of it is that hard.

The hardest part of investing is ignoring all of the noise out there saying 'Buy crypto! Buy NFT's! Buy this stock, my neighbour said it's going to 100x in 1 month!' and so much other nonsense. This is realated to Step #2 of building wealth, which is learn how to keep the extra money you have in your pocket, and then Step #3, learn how to invest it safely.

So many people I talk to put money into foolish things and lose it all, and then go back to Step 1, learning how to stop living paycheck to paycheck because they lost everything in a risky investment. How many times do you want to keep doing this before you say 'maybe I'm doing something wrong?' Yes, what you're doing wrong here is putting all of your eggs into one basket. Divisificaion is key and we will touch on this later...

This was me about 15 years ago, day trading, buying risky things with no knowledge on how investing actually works or how to value something and know what a good price is to pay for it, just throwing one pile of money into something and hoping it works. Hope is not a strategy with investing. You think Warren Buffett buys all the right companies at the right prices and hope he's right?! No. He's doing calculations and figuring out which company is a good company to buy and what price to pay for it. There is zero hope in his calculations.

Basically, using the law of inversion, you need to learn what not to do, like I had to, stop relying on hope, stop making huge bets on things when you have no idea if they will work, stop doing that and then all that's left over is doing only what works and just do that, then just ignore everything else.

This is honestly all that works. It's the most boring way to invest but it's also ironically the way to make the most money and I'll explain how this works in a bit. Why learn what not to do from your mistakes when you can just learn from my mistakes and save tons of money? Warren Buffett said 'It’s good to learn from your mistakes. It’s better to learn from other people’s mistakes'.

Onward - Step 1 - Lower your expenses and invest the difference. When I was just starting my businesses, I had to get my expenses way down as much as I could so if I had a bad month or months, I could still pay my rent and eat. I sold my car which even thought it was paid for, was still costing me $800/month when I foctored in gasoline, insurance, maintenance, etc., I downsized and lived in an $1100/month studio apartment and adjusted my life so I only had to make about $2500/month to live. Anything extra in business profit got invested. Even when the businesses started doing better and I could afford a car and nicer place, I kept doign that for many years. I didn't have a car for 14 years and invested all of that money I saved. I lived in tiny cheap apartments and invested the extra money my businesses made. I rented my parking spot for extra $150/month. I rented the storage locker for $100/month. Anywhere I could save money and make money I took advantage of it and invested the difference, strictly adhering to Step #1.

Step 2 - Lower your taxes and invest the difference. Once I started making some decent money in business it became important to structure the businesses properly to avoid paying as much tax as possible, legally, so I could keep more business profit in the business's pocket, personal tax in my pocket, and invest all of it.

Different countries and states/provinces have different tax laws. It's important speak to a good, reputable, professional accountant that knows the rules and tax laws where you live, so they can help you set up your business and personal finances and lower the tax you pay as much as legally possible.

For example, J - CAD Inc. pays a decent fair amount of tax each year. All of the profit gets put into a Holdings Company, which then gets invested by me into dividend paying stocks. Any dividends this holdings company makes through the investments it holds, is taxed rather high BUT if those dividends are paid out to a shareholder (me) there is 0% tax on those dividends. Then I pay the personal dividend tax rate on those dividends which is much lower than the corporate tax rate on dividends, and this also gives me some cash to spend personally. It's things like this a good accountant can tell you about and setup for you, keeping more money in your pocket, paying less tax than you were before, and investing the difference.

Step 3 - Make yourself more valuable and invest the difference. This one is rather vague. What does 'make yourself more valuable' mean? It means get more knowledge. Smart people are paid more. People who have more sales skills sell more. People who have more business skills make more money. People who are better than the average person at anything will naturally, over time, attract better opportunities. If you like your 9-5 job and improve your skills related to it, you will do a better job, get paid more to do it, and get the promotion over your other colleagues who did nothing to improve themselves.

If you want to start a business doing something, if you get really good at it, people will refer your business to their friends over another business doing the same thing, but not as good. Your business will grow. You will make more money over time. If you open a French restaurant for example, if you get really good at cooking French cuisine, get good at making the decor in the restaurant warm and inviting, get good at the welcoming process to the restaurant, get good at every single detail of owning and running a restaurant, when someone in your city wants some really good French food, they will think of your restaurant. They will bring their friends there. Their friends will bring their friends there. Your business will grow way more than another French restaurant in the same city becasue you did all of the work to improve yourself and make yourself more valuable to your restaurant.

Now, how do you make yourself more valuable? Read books, watch podcasts that teach you things you want to get better at, buy university lectures from universities online, find mentors and people doing what you want to do and ask them for advice. There are so many things you can do to acquire knowledge, especially now with online technology, you can learn anything anywhere pretty much any time. There's no excuse anymore like the library is closed so I can't get that book until next week. Make yourself more valuable and invest the extra money you now have that you didn't have before.

And that's it, those are the 3 Steps to Wealth and 3 Rules to Investing. If you follow those you will inevitable be very well off one day. I know this because that's exactly what I did and now, objectively, one would say 'Jason is pretty well off!'

Not to brag, but after 15+ years of following those rules I have millions of dollars working for me, paying me more dividends each month than I can spend and the capital has turned into a nice pile of money. What is a dividend? We're getting to that soon! Note that I just said it took 15+ years for this to happen to me. None of this happens overnight and many people don't like hearing that or reading those rules to follow because it means they have to make sacrifices now to enjoy later. 'Everyone wants to get rich quick, no one wants to get rich slow' - Warren Buffett.

The time is going to pass anyway, why not be invested while the time is passing, get paid dividends and have a pile of money one day? For 15+ years now that's been a beautiful way to pass the time for me and remember, you can make a lot of excuses or you can make a lot of money, but you can't make both!