MJ DeMarco is a self-made millionaire and entrepreneur, author of the acclaimed books “The Millionaire Fastlane” and “Unscripted”

Straight out of college, he decided not to scale the corporate ladder like his friends. He wanted more. And despite the initial roadblocks which turned him into depression, he persisted and built his startup Limos.com into a flourishing “money tree” business.

He has an incredible and inspiring story, and his no-bullshit attitude and walking the talk made his book a bestseller mostly because of the buzz and worth of mouth from its readers.

As of 2020, MJ DeMarco has an estimated net worth of $10 million.

Early Life

MJ DeMarco was born and raised in Chicago, and he defined his childhood years as lazy.

All this until an event changed the course of his life. He was getting ice cream at the parlor next to his house when a Lamborghini parked next-by.

Once he asked the owner of the car what was he doing for a living, the response surprised young MJ DeMarco and opened a new world for him.

The driver of the luxury Italian car was an inventor, not a celebrity or rich by inheritance.

It was a paradigm shift. MJ realized that even if he couldn’t act, sing, or be good at sport, he could have lived life like the 1%.

This brought him into a journey of learning from biographies of self-made millionaires and dabbling into get-rich-quick schemes that, of course, didn’t bring him the results expected.

Career as an Entrepreneur

He attended college and graduated in business. At 22 years old, however, while all of his friends got inviting jobs at big corporations and started their career, MJ DeMarco had different plans for his life.

He wanted more and realized that what his friends were buying into was what he later defined as the slow lane.

When you trade your time for an income, and you give up control over the next moves of the company you work in, you become simply a “hitchhiker” without control over not only your income but your personal and professional growth as well.

Also, the more you’re stuck into trading time with money, the less scalability there is in your system. Means, for example, online business work and produce income 24/7. Customers come in and come out, and you can hire someone to take of most of the administration related tasks such as customer support.

With a regular job, you’re tied to working your 9-5 amounts of hours and cannot multiply more quickly your income. Sure, you can get a promotion and increase your salary by 10%. Still, a business can scale a multiply it’s revenues not only by tenfold in a year, but it has a market value for its asset (usually around 3X multiples for online businesses.)

Hitting Walls and Roadblocks

However, getting to the Fastlane and living like the 1% wasn’t easy for MJ DeMarco.

While his college peers were getting promoted at their jobs, he was working gigs by gigs at blue-collar jobs while trying to make his businesses work out.

“I delivered newspapers at 3am in bad neighbourhoods. I delivered pizza, flowers and was a day labourer for a commercial plumbing firm in the slums of Chicago. I was a bus-boy at a cockroach infested Chinese restaurant, limo driver, charity can collector and house painter. Hell, money was so tight that I prostituted myself to an older woman to pay for my best friend’s wedding gift.” MJ DeMarco

Until one day, while he was waiting inside a Limousine, he was driving as a job, he had a realization.

That was enough. He couldn’t bear one single more day living life like this, living with his mom doing some of the worst jobs imaginable.

He thought about what was the ideal city he would have like to live (source) and opted for sunny Phoenix, Arizona.

He moved in the new city with $900 bucks to his name and rented a studio which served him as an office.

Changing his environment was crucial. People around him in Chicago were doubting his dreams, and the harsh weather conditions had a toll on his optimism.

He decided to focus on the one idea that had the most potential for him: Limos.com, a website that allowed people to find limousine rental all across the United States in different cities.

The website wasn’t making much initially, but it made progress quickly. While it took time, MJ paid his bills, offering web design services for other companies.

He was still trading time for money and kept looking for solutions that could have helped him monetize furtherly Limos.com.

Until the realization, selling leads was more remunerative for him than monetizing through advertisement.

That’s when everything changed for him. He started making hundreds, then thousands of dollars per day.

Selling Limos.com for the First Time

It was 2000, and the dot-com bubble was getting bigger and bigger. Different companies started to reach out to MJ DeMarco, interested in buying his creation Limos.com.

MJ accepted an offer for $1.2 million. He was now a millionaire.

But it didn’t last long, bad investment decisions and buying stuff he didn’t really need, such as fancy cars, quickly burned most of his resources, and MJ was back at having about 300k in his bank account.

However, the dot-com bubble started to crash. Limos.com turned mismanaged by the new owners, which made poor decisions not aligned with the customer. That’s when MJ DeMarco proposed to buy back the business for $250,000.

Once back at Limos.com, MJ worked hard on creating processes and innovations inside businesses.

The results of these improvements didn’t wait to appear. The businesses quickly grew and started making about $200,000, on its worst months it was making $100k.

Funny enough, the more the business was growing, the least amount of work was required for MJ. He started working a few hours at most a day and spent most of his time working out, traveling, dating, or even playing video games.

MJ eventually sold the business again, this time for a way higher sum estimated by Astrogrowth in about 7.2 million dollars.

MJ decided to retire since then and now spend most of his time writing, taking care of his investments, managing his online forum for entrepreneurs, and of course, having fun!

MJ DeMarco Books

MJ DeMarco is the author of two best-selling books.

In this inspiring and practical book, MJ DeMarco explains in detail what are the principles that brought him from poverty to riches. It was an incredibly inspiring book for me, and one of the books I recommend the most. Despite the get-rich-quick title, which made me skeptical at first, this book it’s a comprehensive business and critical thinking compendium that will challenge your assumptions and increase your chance of success dramatically.

“Unscripted: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Entrepreneurship” is the second book that MJ DeMarco wrote, it’s all about taking the red pill and escaping the rat race that it’s bringing us down. Unscripted it’s THE book to recommend or gift to people who are stuck in their job and simply are ambitious enough to challenge society’s assumptions and have more freedom and fulfillment in their lives.

MJ DeMarco Wife

Despite declaring of being single by choice to one of the readers of his book in 2011, MJ DeMarco later decided to enter in a long-term relationship. His wife is a nurse.