The $800k 25 Year Old Tech Guy! (Cybersecurity)

#800k #Year #Tech #Guy #Cybersecurity

Tech is the best stepping stone for you to be able to start your business because you can get remote work you can get high income to qualify for loans and you get all the free times you need to build your entrepreneurial Journey or your business venture on the side you

Can be working an hour two three hours a day making six figures where you can take your work meetings you can go on you can go and meet clients you can go and tour buildings you can do everything you need to do remotely yeah and then you have that guaranteed income you have

Those health benefits you have that limited PTO you have everything you need to build your business welcome to another episode of tech is the New Black your source for discovering experts in a technology space that are here to give you exclusive information and secret tips all meant to help you break into

Tech scale in this industry and of course start your own billion dollar tech company y’all we have a very special guest today a guest that I’ve actually not got to interview this kind of guest before mainly one because they are in cyber security which is a very

Cool space in general that I get a lot of questions uh from y’all about but also there’s guess is incredibly successful both in Tech and cyber security as well as his Endeavors outside of tech so the guest today is Chris G’s making huge waves online educating people about the opportunities

That are in Tech and so of course got to go ahead and read off his bio so that way we all put some respect on his name and know who he talking to so Chris determined that Tech was the quickest way to earn a high income to qualify for real estate and business

Loans to jump start his entrepreneurial Journey he received his half a million dollar portfolio at the age of 24 by working only one hour a day now he travels the world builds his companies while having guaranteed six-figure W-2 income unlimited paid time off and health insurance he is the most interesting man

In the world I added that last part yo Chris bro first of all bro thank you for being on and how are you doing for sure bro I’m happy to be here and I’m doing good it’s been a hectic day so far it’s been a hectic week but that’s just

The life that we chose bro you seem busy productive you seem very productive productively busy selectively busy yes that’s the way that I’d like it to be I respect I wish you on that I’m with you on that it’s so crazy uh this isn’t even on the agenda to talk about this but

Just was saying that it’s so crazy how I I used to think and maybe you were this way too or maybe you weren’t like this but I used to think that oh once I got to a certain income or got to a certain place then it’s like I’m gonna have all

This freedom and it’s like I realize man that freedom is boring it’s like yo I want to do something more whether it’s giving back to people or it’s just like seeing how we could scale further like was it the same for you or like what is your motivation for like being so

Productively busy so when the pandemic started that’s when my job actually transitioned to remote and that’s when I had my first taste of remote I didn’t get into Tech before that because I didn’t really even think it existed at the time but by going remote my job was

Already simple but when I was in the office I was working you know maybe two to three hours a day with in-person means things like that when I went remote I could get everything done in about an hour’s time so I was sitting around for seven hours a day not doing

Anything for so long and that kind of showed me that I need to be doing something more but I want it to be fulfilling so obviously the solution to that isn’t to try to work more or put more hours into the same job or find something else that I didn’t enjoy so I

Was like let me you know pursue entrepreneurship or something else that could fulfill my time and kind of give me more of a um more of a structure and more of something that I could I would enjoy doing I guess yeah so so let’s let’s

Pull it back real quick like why did you what made you think like what went off in your head that was like yo tech tech is an industry Tech is a space that I should work in or I should get a nine to five job in and more specifically like why cyber

So when I was a kid I’d probably say about 10 years old after like watching YouTube videos and things like that I started gravitating towards technology and that was like back in the days where you could jailbreak your PS3 and you know get games and stuff like that and

By watching tutorials on how to do those things I just gravitated towards technology and computers and at the age of like 11 I built my first computer and that’s when I started watching like 11 you where I’ve not built a computer yet and you built a computer at 11 years old

Yeah man it was literally like putting Legos together like it’s really not no don’t say that you can’t just say that you can’t just say that because now you grab me looking at Legos different okay so you you built the computer wow at 11 years old

Um impressive and so my bad I took your thunder go ahead no I mean and this is by uh putting different pieces and different components together like I got like two like old computers in my school thrown away and I got one computer donated to me and I put all those parts

Together to make my own so I kind of had like a Jimmy grade computer at home and it turned on and everything like all the time that’s crazy man we didn’t even have internet in my house at the time so it’s like I used to have to I end up

Going to buy like a little Wi-Fi card and had to use my neighbor’s internet and things like that and sometimes the signal would be bad it will go out and have to like move computer to the left side of my room so I could like connect

To their house more it was a whole Jimmy rigged like setup that but by having to troubleshoot those things I had to learn more and more and that’s why I learned about like internet protocols and DNS and things like that and then going to that little farther like me as a kid I

Was so fascinated by things and like that’s when I got an Xbox and I started learning how to j-tag those things and I got more into learning about networking by using like game enable and using like IRC servers and botnets and just as a joke like I could like you know use a

DDOS attack to you know flood someone’s internet with extra packets and kind of like hit them offline in a way if someone’s like talking crap in like a person like that you can just kind of kick them out of the game so they would talk trash to you while you’re playing

The game and then you would basically like hack them or you would send something over to them that would like mess them up or kick them out of the game yeah so you could use a um a software called Kane enable and what it’ll do is it’ll show you the active

Connections or your network at the time because now uh most Call of Duty games online games are server based your connection everyone’s connected to a server but back in the day um some games might say this now but back in the day the strongest internet connection was the host so everyone was

Connect interconnected with each other yeah so I could I would have to guess sometimes if they were in a party with me it’d be a little bit easier the person talking the most they would have the most packets set back and forth that’s how I would know which IP address

Is which and then um I would use an IRC service so you could look at stuff and tell whose IP is addressed was who’s based off of the rate of which how much someone was talking and you would look at the packets that were sent and was that’s crazy that’s smart that’s smart

But go ahead I got it wrong sometimes now hit the wrong person offline a couple times but I mean do you see no denial service attack you can realistically only do it for a little bit unless you’re using and then you’ll end up using your your Bots or your servers um capacity your

Capacity at that point but I could hit him offline for 10 to 15 minutes and they would think that the internet was gone I’ve had like a mom call me once or twice just mad and like our Internet’s messed up and things like that but just

As a joke you know it would turn off and turn back on but that’s how I kind of got into that space and by being in that space I met like people that you know do hack and do all these other things I never got into those but that’s what

Really like exposed me to Tech and I was never passionate about it to the point of working but it seemed like it would be the easiest job for me to or the lowest barrier of entry for me to get into that space yeah so so you saw the

Different roles in Tech and yeah for in your mind your low classes I see cyber security and I feel like yeah this is the lowest barrier of entry for me so I actually went into college for an I.T degree in my history so half my curriculum is business half of it was

Information Systems okay and my school introduced the cyber security degree my junior year and that’s when I declared a double degree I actually have two bachelor’s degrees oh yeah wow and there are separate prerequisites that separate everything so I had to redo everything to get the cyber security degree I ended

Up taking like four to five semesters of like 21 credit hours doing full summer workloads spring courses winter classes and everything I finished both degrees in four and a half years with like a 382 for cyber and a three seven for the Mis are you not playing but I didn’t study

At all I didn’t have to do much work it was second nature to me all the IT classes it was common sense to me like I could read through the questions I would know which answer was the right one like I never had to study do you think that

Was because of just you growing up like messing around with everything or do you think there was just something innate about you that you just caught on like you you connected with it I feel like I had enough experience just like with being computer literate and just being

Around those things I could kind of like look at the question and break down to which one made sense yeah so if I were to go to a different discipline in school or try to learn something outside of like my natural knowledge it wouldn’t have been as easy yeah it makes sense

But I was able to just kind of put things together the same thing with cyber security I mean it just were Common Sense things like what if what is a firewall like should you have this length of password like two-factor authentication is good because it’s this it gives people multiple um up multiple

Chances to um to secure their workloads it just seemed it was common sense to me it always has been so I got a chance to like kind of like flow through school and not really have to try very hard yeah bro that’s that’s super cool the

Fact that you got to flow through school not try really hard but you got dual degree funny in the same time frame it takes some people to struggle through to get one uh that’s that’s really cool so so you started working while in college so you didn’t wait until after college to

Then go out and get a job in Tech or like what was that timeline like for you so this is going to sound crazy and I’ll explain after but I did eight different internships in co-ops during college and when I tell people that the first thing

That comes to their mind is that there’s not even eight summers in college so I did yeah that’s true so you did two of Summer I so there was one job I was doing in concurrency with others but um some of those internships are co-ops as well so you do those during the

School year and I got my first internship after my freshman year my freshman summer at like VCU Medical Hospital doing I was doing um servicenow Administration and I was doing SharePoint and once you get for one like um internship is easy to get more just

Like in the world when you get one job it’s easy to get more on top of that so I was a freshman or going to sophomore year with an internship already and then I interview well I speak well I I’m very articulate especially when it

Comes to it things I was able to speak to it very well so I’ll go to job fairs and networking events things like that and it would be easy for me to pick up more internships so after that it was just a domino effect I just kept on

Getting more and more and then my like theology behind that is I’d rather work smarter than harder I was saying that I’m able to make you know 20 plus dollars an hour sitting behind a desk typing where all my friends have any serving jobs and still kids no one had a

Degree at my friends in college were doing lifeguard jobs and things like that I was sitting behind a desk in the AC just typing a computer making more money so I was like why not keep doing this you know yeah exactly yeah it makes perfect sense but but going back to what

You were saying um at the beginning of our conversation you like how did you figure out how to work one hour a day for like eight hours of work like what is there like a hack or or um so that’s going into this and share whatever you can or can’t share I ain’t

Trying to like you know I mean I get really good employee reviews I’m not like struggling at my job so it’s even if they were to see this I don’t think that they would it be the biggest deal in the world they may try to give me more work or something but

But like I went into the Consulting industry firsthand because at that point I hadn’t really considered sales but I knew that I had like a natural ability to articulate information I’m extrovert I’m a people person so it seemed like the Consulting industry would have been

Like a really good Niche for me and also like the way that I grew up I didn’t have my family didn’t have a lot of money so I didn’t get a chance to travel much so the idea of being able to travel for work and go to nice cities and you

Know have per diem and get my meals paid for while also being the bridge or like the liaison between Tech and the business side because at the Mis degree it’s a business degree and I T degree it seemed like it was perfect for me and you make more money like that because a

Lot of times in Tech space there’s a lot of introverted people people that kind of are better off working alone so when you find an intro I mean an extroverted person that can speak to Tech but also knows business yes that can be the liaison for that in between that’s when

You make the most money yeah that’s true those are facts so when I found that out I was like okay well I got to do this yeah but after doing research on YouTube videos things like that when I started applying for consulting jobs I saw that the traveling really wasn’t that

Glamorous you’re working most of the time you’re in the city you’re gone you know Sunday night through Thursday every week trying to pack up a suitcase and live out of a suitcase oh yeah so I was like I’m not doing that and after like after a couple of interviews for

Companies one of the companies that sent me a job offer they actually had two different departments they had like an apartment that was more of the post installation side so I was just maintaining what the services based our service side already did so I wouldn’t actually have to travel to the client I

Don’t have to travel like 10 per the year and I was just managing different projects at that time all from the office so I wouldn’t get the chance to travel like I wanted to experience the world that way but I could not be living out

Of a suitcase so I feel like that was the best like in between for me yeah okay that makes sense so you found something that was like a just a real good uh perfect uh merger for you at the end of the day and let me explain the

Hour part kind of skipping with that question but so the job for me was reactive so I only had to work when something broke ah so if I was given a client and there were opportunities for automation or let’s say something broke and I figured

Out how to fix it so it wouldn’t break again I wouldn’t have to be re I wouldn’t have to be in a reactive position as often oh yeah so you would yeah so not just fix it but you would fix it in a way that would like limit

The amount of times that it would like be the the possibility of it breaking again exactly so I was like if I could do if I could just put you know a lot of effort up front to make this more of a passive job for me why not that’s

That’s smart like it’s it’s it seems so common sense like in in hindsight or in retrospect or just hearing it but it’s like Mania most people don’t think that way most people just think okay yeah let me do this job let me just kind of fix

It just to where it’s fixed for now but don’t realize how they’re gonna just continue to have to do more work yeah and even though I seem very articulate with tech and things like that I still don’t program I’m still not you know fluent in a programming language oh

That’s cool to automate things I outsourced work on upwork for someone to make scripts for me and um make some of the functions that I needed to actually like fix the process workflow or to automate some of the tasks I needed done all right whoa whoa whoa all right hold

Up hold up let’s rewind let’s rewind all right so some of the work that you would get because because when you just said that you don’t because I assumed that you were a programmer that you you also could code wait wait okay that’s crazy all right my

Hair is getting all types of messed up now I don’t know y’all might be getting messed up too my head is getting messed up so cause not just being in cyber with all the other things you’ve done it’s like oh you have to have you have to know programming languages so you’re saying

That you found a way to basically like off offhand some of your work to other people so that way you would still be the job would still be getting done but instead of you doing something instead of you having to take time to learn a program language where that takes takes

Up a lot of time instead you treated your time in a way where you said hey instead I’m going to trade this off I’m going to pass this off to someone else who’s looking for work and have them do this particular task instead where the job is still getting handled right but

They weren’t doing the actual job for me so this this is can’t be applicable to every situation but I was finding that I was getting called or instance were happening for very repetitive tasks I’ll get a call and I’d have to go in remote into their software and check the same

Thing over and over again yeah it was there the fix the fixed procedures were very similar and repetitive similar repetitive means that it can be automated be scripted that’s true that’s good and even though I’m not fluent code myself I know how to plug and play so if

I see different things I can rename the functions to make it connect within the software because obviously I can’t let someone remote into proprietary software that’s when you start getting if you want things like that that’s true yeah so I had I kind of like typed up what I

Needed to be done the remote address for the computers things like that so that I could Outsource the work or Outsource the script to you know the personal upwork without them actually needing to use the proprietary software then when they delivered the script to me and I

Verified that it worked in my own environment I would take it to work and then um tailored the script to actually fit my work environment that way whenever it happens someone will call me I’ll just double click a batch script and would run it for me and would take care of it

Man that is brilliant dude that’s incredible like it’s so weird obviously we don’t do the the same kind of work at all nevertheless the the overarching like theme the overarching message of everything you’re saying I’m like I feel like it’s applicable to almost every area of work you know just even the

Message of you saying like hey if it’s if it’s something that’s repetitive it’s something that can be automated you know so that’s that’s a huge I hope I hope y’all are getting some even if you’re like even if you’re doing something as I hope you’re that nugget alone is

Powerful if something is is repetitive it can be automated to some degree that’s really cool I’ve always had to work harder I mean work smarter not harder mindset and it’s crazy because I mean I definitely see the theme like even from just when you know you were

You were younger like all the way up to now I see like that consistent theme and I think that’s super dope so you were kind of touching on something and it kind of just made me think just go off like on a slight tangent where I have I

Have friends uh one of them one of them is a close friend of mine uh y’all actually remind me of each other it’s really freaking crazy uh he’s the reason I he’s the reason I got in Tech he was the reason I was like yo this is

Something I should consider and he does something he actually can’t be be a guest um on the show uh because he’s he’s a VP at a tech company and he does something that’s called Tech stacking where he uh essentially is working at about five or six tech companies at the

Same time but he does something it’s similar to what you mentioned but I think it’s something else do you I guess know of any people who like do Tech stackings a lot of my followers of people ask about it and I don’t I don’t do that I’m somewhat familiar with it

But I’m I’m not well versed enough in it to be like a good resource on that so like is that something that you’re knowledgeable about like what does that look like if someone wants to do that how would they go about doing it so I have some close friends that actually

Um do Tech stacking now and my best advice for that is you have to find a really in demand skill and you have to master it yourself because it’s hard to get one job let alone multiple so you have to be within like the top 20 top 10

Percent within that job field or that job you know to actually be able to apply and that’s my homeboy the guy was selling he’s like top 10 ranked in Georgia in terms of like what he does so yeah go ahead and then the advice she gave people the other day you have to

Keep on replying you have to keep on applying to jobs and you’re going to get a lot of rejection but you keep on replying or applying to get those but for job stacking specifically the best approach that I feel like that I’ve heard about from my friends is to

Find like agile based like development jobs so you’re dealing with work in Sprints and in the best case scenario you’ll be handed you know work and you’ll be you’ll have two weeks to get that work done or a week get that work done so you’re not having to deal with

Multiple meetings at one time you’re not having to deal with multiple like Hands-On things throughout the day because most of the time in development jobs you will have to actually put in a lot of money like a lot of upfront time to finish whatever it’s been giving you

For that project but a lot of times also you can get it done early and if you’re given something that’s a development job or development piece of work you can Outsource that so what they’re doing is they’re getting um programming jobs and they’re being given work in this this

Agile based environment where they have a week or two to actually submit it and they have people that they found through various sources of upwork or maybe they’re Outsourcing overseas on like remote jobs that pH was like a Philippines Outsourcing website and they’re handing the instructions for the

Project and the deliverables that need to be done and they’re getting the work back and they’re submitting it you know um on on their behalf and this is a gray area right now with companies because as long as the company doesn’t have an NDA and it doesn’t say specifically in you

Know your employee paperwork a lot of times they don’t nowadays it really isn’t illegal to work multiple tech jobs the Outsourcing part about it is where it can be iffy yeah because if your company works with sensitive information or sensitive data you’re allowing someone else to see that data and work

On it yeah that’s true so it depends on what company in what industry and the terms within the employment contract on whether or not you can do this or not and even if you were to try to be transparent and tell a job hey I want to work more than one that probably

Wouldn’t be the best idea yeah but I do know people that are honest about it and say they have one other job but they’d already been at the first job for multiple years and they have that you know establishment ability that you know they are comfortable allowing them to

Work multiple jobs but just imagine this that’s for a simple numbers sake say that you have one programming job that makes 100 knowledge here let’s say within a week period you probably work let’s say a day period let’s say you work two hours a day imagine adding

Another six-figure job on top of that now you’re at 200 000 a year not even considering that Outsourcing at this point let’s say you add a third on top of that now you’re making three hundred thousand dollars a year six hours a day working six hours a day yeah and now for

One job to get to three hundred thousand dollars you have to be like a principal engineer as talk to your tech company that’s true whereas if you’re just a mid-level programmer at just a regular tech company you’re able to get to a 300 000 Mark almost instantaneously once you

Acquire those jobs yeah that’s true and from my friends and people that I’ve known in that space is actually called over employment their own um uh Reddit and things like that there’s whole communities of people that do it they’re able to pay off their mortgages early buy cars go on vacations because you’re

Tripling your income yeah that’s crazy so if you want to do that for a few years in your 20s and work really hard and actually work eight hours a day you can make three to four times as much money and then use that money for Investments and never have to work again

Is that something did you do something similar because going back to to your bio and even when I first um found out about you uh a close friend of mine or a good friend of mine I shared shared your page with me and I was like oh this

Guy’s is killing it and I was like he’s doing some really dope things he’s doing some stuff that I plan on doing at some point and all of the friends that I have that are that are in Tech and that are doing the things you’re doing they’re

All even older than I am so yo this guy’s like way ahead of the game on this so how did you build out your portfolio so the real estate portfolio one cool thing about not getting two in the weeds and like real estate terminology and

Things like that but if you get a job within your degree field you can actually qualify for a mortgage six months after graduating you don’t need to wait two years for your proof of income so one of the biggest reasons why I chose Tech is because I wouldn’t have

To work my way up multiple years to get to the 80 plus you know six figure plus salary yeah and really all you need is the salary at W2 income is gold within the real estate loan space yeah I just realized recently that it was certain loans they respect it more with you

Having a nine to five like it even if you have a business that’s making a lot of money they feel more comfortable with you having a W-2 income even if it’s a little bit less that’s crazy because it’s seen as secure guaranteed income yeah but there’s ways around that you

Just make your LLC and put yourself on a W-2 and pay yourself from your loc okay you can just dividend yourself if you need more money so there’s ways around that I appreciate it given different angles different ways of skin a cat I appreciate that but I ended up reading

Rich that poor dad like my junior year of college going into my junior year and that’s when the first time I had like the idea of not working for money not exchanging your time for money and Entrepreneurship kind of shoved down my throat from that book and that’s when I

Had like that’s when I changed my perspective on money and what I should be doing with it and that’s when I was I was living off of my um what’s it called my uh my student loans it was paying for my classes and all that stuff so every bit of income that I

Made it was just extra at that point I could spend it so I started saving all my money and by the time I graduated I ended up watching like five or six YouTube videos in real estate and how to buy you know 10 minute YouTube videos

And then that’s when I found about the FHA loan product where you put three and a half percent down and I ended up looking or going to like tour buildings and things like that to see which ones I could buy because I only wanted a

Triplex or a quad Plex so I could get the most amount of doors for one time on a loan and for the second quad Plex and going to tour I fell in love with him when to buy it so I went through the process of just using my income to

Qualify for the loan so this is your in your income intake to your your nine to five uh does your income intake from you working the job the one hour a day right yeah and then you took that and right but actually my income wasn’t enough to

Qualify first oh okay and this is when I found out it’s actually easier to qualify for multi-family this for a single family because you’re able to use the projected income from the leases of the extra units oh okay to offset your DTI because they say it’s more of an

Investment property exactly okay so you can use the extra doors projected income to qualify for the property and that’s how I did that man do it’s it’s so cool talking to you because there are a lot of things that I like I mentioned earlier there are

Things that I plan on doing and things that I know a lot of my audience uh a lot of my audience they hit me up about this and they’re like man okay I’m I’m you know most of them are completely oblivious as to what tech is and in my

Head oh my God I thought everyone knew what tech was in general uh but as I’m seeing many of my audience are like hey I’m I’m interested in in being a an investor or I’m interested in starting a business and they’re so they’re hesitant about jumping into Tech because they’re

Like oh I think that’s gonna Slow Me Down working in Tech and usually what I tell people is hey no I don’t think it’ll slow you down I think you’re able to leverage this income and pour it into either your business or pour it into uh into real

Estate or whatever it is you want to pour it into and but I’m thinking I’m always thinking from the Vance’s point of working like okay six or eight hours a day uh not realizing especially because I’m in customer facing roles I’m a sales engineer so it’s different from

The roles that that you’re speaking about where it’s more more deadline based uh and I know it’s sprinting there’s certain tech tech terminology that we understand in this space but for people that that aren’t in Tech they are like what’s what’s a Sprint what’s this what’s that and so it’s like yes

Basically deadline based where if you can if you can knock it out sooner then you can save time on the back end exactly and to all of my entrepreneurs watching to all the people that aspire to be business owners Tech is the best stepping stone for you

To be able to start your business because you can get remote work you can get high income to qualify for loans and you get all the free times you need to build your entrepreneurial Journey or your business venture on the side you can be working an hour two three hours a

Day making six figures where you can take your work meetings you can go on you can go and meet clients you can go and tour buildings you can do everything you need to do remotely yeah and then you have that guaranteed income you have those health benefits you have the

Unlimited PTO you have everything you need to build your business yeah man all of those factors I know um there’s a list of a young artists uh that I know and they’re they’re doing really well but of course they’re not making any real kind of money and many of them you

Know it’s not just them it’s something in the culture today where people are so afraid of a nine to five where it’s like nine to fives to talk down on and I understand like obviously no one should should sell their soul to a job that’s only paying them forty fifty thousand

Dollars a year you know especially as you start to get a little bit older and okay now your your time and now your goals should start to become coming bigger and growing and so like what would you say to someone and you kind of touched on somebody just a moment ago

What would you say to someone that’s like they’re kind of stuck in between they’re like man well I’m trying to not work a job I’m trying to grow this business but this business isn’t making any money yet for me to truly live off of or I’m

Trying to live off of it but now I’m eating off the business so I’m not able to reinvest money back into the business so I’m in this weird stagnant place like what suggestions would you have for someone like that so there’s two suggestions I would have the first one

Is to take you up on your offer and go do the tech boot camp within I don’t know how long is the boot camp well it depends on which one it is but but most of them that I generally talk about are that I partner with are somewhere

Between a month to three months so in a month or three months you could finish the tech boot camp find a job reasonably so three to four months investment your time could guarantee you the income that you need to support yourself while trying to build your business and like

Cyrus said like I said you don’t need to be a very like computer literate person necessarily to be in Tech if you’re not that person but you’re extrovert and you can speak you just need to know a high level of what technologies are and you

Can speak to them and you can that could kind of be your job that could be your passport to help build your business give you the free time and give you that income so you’re not stressed about your business not making money yet you’ll get a remote job where you can work from

Home you can continue to build your business and you know you’re going to be living off of the tech income it’ll kind of give you that peace of mind and the second thing that I’d want to mention for advice for people is if you’re a person that’s already in

Entrepreneurial space I feel like you’ll succeed the most in sales whether it’s pre-sales engineering that’s more of a higher barrier of Entry or you could go straight into Tech sales you’ll have a lower um base salary in a lower OTR which is on target um OTE yeah On Target earnings but if you

Put in more effort and you know you master cold calling you can dictate how much money you make you can make more for yourself so it’s going to give you the entrepreneurial feel but still with the security of a job and you’ll still be working remotely yo what’s good

Family if you’re tuning in to this and you’re wondering yo how do I get a job like that in Tech we’ve got good news for you because we’ve just partnered with a tech boot camp called General Assembly that’ll help you get a job like this or a variety of others no matter

Where you live at in the world we’re talking product management ux UI design programming or development data science data analytics and a variety of others use the link in our description and not only will you be able to do your first class for free but for those who decide

To sign up with the program you’ll get a two hundred dollar discount off make sure that you let us know which course you chose and keep us posted on your journey in Tech yeah man it’s it’s crazy it’s it’s wild the opportunity is like it’s such a beautiful time to be alive where

I mean one it is a beautiful time for entrepreneurs beautiful time in terms of what we can do what you know from whether we’re talking social media or uh just just the the the freedom of of exposure that you can have now but it also is a wonderful time in terms of

Still working a nine to five in Tech and I love the the aspect of the component of pairing both together of being like hey let me leverage this this High income job poured into a business or poured into pour it into real estate or pour it into

You know the stock market or whatever it is they want to pour it into until okay now now it doesn’t make sense for me to work a nine to five anymore because now now my businesses are other things that I’m doing are now like bringing in so

Much money that now not only am I able to live off of it now I’m able to reinvest back into the business and I’m able to reinvest into other things so with that being said like where are you currently at and what’s like next for you

Um right now I just I just got my PMP two days ago so the area that I want to go into I’m not PMP is that a pro is that a project product management thing it’s a project management professional certificate oh the PMP is really hard to

Get because you need 35 hours of specific credit training and you need three years or 36 months of uh direct project management experience to even get the PMP but the PMP is it’s not specific to once like industry like you can be in construction and use the project management you’re managing

Projects yeah but that knowledge of that is applicable to almost anything to have that behind my name and you know it’ll help me a lot out with the job specifically but um I want to go more to a a role that is commission basis wealth that has a

Higher base salary so that I can kind of start there but I’m also kind of in between because I have my entrepreneurial entrepreneurial Ventures as well but the fact that I’ve gone so far in Tech it’s easier for me to get higher salaries so it’s like if I’m able

To make a really high salary and also get commission based and I’m able to automate my businesses in a way that I’m only you know having to delegate certain hours to them or things like that on top of me being remote um I feel like what I want to do with

Myself is I want to have a 200 000 plus base salary job with commission and then I want to start building up my companies the trucking company I do a little bit of e-commerce I do wholesaling but the wholesaling so far has really just been as deals get

Sent to me I’ll kind of flip them over to a hedge fund or different buyers from Facebook groups like that but I actually want to build an infrastructure around the wholesaling so I have like a cold calling facility that I’m partnering with and the training up my VA so

They’ll start you know dealing with the cold calling and the um pulling the list for me and I got to talk to you about va’s I’m going to hire a VA or two this week and I should have done it a couple months ago I should have done it a few

Months ago but my hesitation is in my head I’m like well how are they really gonna fully know how to do things but more and more I’ve been talking to people they’re like no va’s are pretty fire and stuff so I’m definitely going to talk to you like offline about like

Okay how does that relationship like go or work um my bad go ahead um and people have like a different connotation of va’s because they may think that someone in the space in India that doesn’t know English but there’s va’s in the US there’s va’s in South America that’s probably the best place

For me to find a VA because they they’re more likely to speak better English be more fluent things like that and also the time zone isn’t too much of a difference either because in india-based VA their time zone is almost opposite of ours yeah not as true yeah yeah I was

Recommending the Philippines um some va’s in the Philippines but I don’t even know how their time zone correlates to um to us here in Georgia yeah that could be a barrier I’m not exactly sure what their time zone is either um where was I on the oh the wholesaling

Um but I described myself as a serial entrepreneur so I think I’d already described everything I was doing with the wholesale but I’m trying to turn that into a full business model but all the business models that I choose the trucking the wholesaling uh the e-commerce and the real estate they’re

Because they’re considered semi-active meaning that they don’t require me to actually be in the role full time so that I can work them you know on demand when they’re when it’s needed and I can easily delegate the tasks out to run you know at the end of the day if I’m going

To be doing anything in the entrepreneurial space I’m not going to be giving myself another job there are only going to be delegatable business models that can run without me being there I’d rather take less money than to be fully in the business I want it to

Run by itself yeah that’s good and then when the businesses succeed I’d say like one to two million net per year that’s when I’ll kind of transition out of the tech world because I actually enjoy my work I like doing it okay so you enjoy

Your work in Tech yeah the hour day is bad yeah I guess that’s not that bad that’s funny man that’s hilarious some people are uh happy to happen to have an hour a day break you’re talking about working hour a day in Tech that’s uh that’s really cool so

With that insert so you’re are you 24 now I just turned 25. okay you just turned 25. yeah are you saying in July okay cool I wasn’t happy birthday but that’s too far away but no um so you just turned 25 so in terms of your half

A million dollar portfolio that you have built up in in 24 how is that that split income wise like what part of that was Tech what part of that is what is like other other endeavors and obviously the other endeavors you and you poured your Tech money into those other endeavors

But in terms of like okay those other endeavors whether grossing or net like how what was the split so the apartment building that I bought was four hundred thousand dollars and I bought that I bought it at 22 but the closing date was three days after my birthday so I

Just turned 23 but I was 22 and I put the offer in the next 21 qualify for all that yeah so um the building was 400 000 at the time but now it’s worth almost double that so it’s actually above half a million in just the real estate aspect man I caught

The beginning of the appreciation boom so I made a lot of money off of Just appreciation that I was making cash flow then you have principal pay down then you also have the tax benefits of real estate but the tech salary first my first job out of college I made about 75

000 but we got like a nine percent quarterly bonus and I got a sign on bonus so with all those combined I was like 2 000 or 3 000 below the six figure mark my first job out of college and then um the job I work at now I’m more

Wild right out of college going Consulting like the the bottom men Consulting it goes by industry average it’s probably one up now but at the time two years ago or three years ago now when that happened it was about seventy thousand dollars for Georgia and so for

My like listeners that are in DC that are in California in more expensive places like Georgia’s minimum wage is seven seven twenty five it’s still 7.25 man I think it is that’s wild oh my gosh I think it’s still 7 25. that’s crazy Eric Nadia was like yeah that’s crazy so

70 000 base I mean sorry 75 000 base when you have 725 um you know minimum wage like that’s a lot whereas DC the minimum wage is like 14 or 15 California is about the same so someone in California would need to make double that to be able to even their

Cost of living is still higher than their minimum oh yeah definitely so like the cost of living in Georgia is still really cheap so that salary here like I was living like yeah that sounds good really nice you know yeah um but my job now

Um let me not go too far so I ended up leaving that job 11 months into it and went to another job I ended up jumping forty thousand dollars by going to another job base yeah that’s nice but I got lucky in a way that my first job didn’t require much

Time to meet my second job didn’t either I kind of went at it from a strategic um perspective in choosing the job to make sure I found like a reactive role yeah so that I wouldn’t have to you know work and be Hands-On but I could still make a

High salary so I worked within the Consulting industry but I was on a long-standing project so the project I was working on was the project I would stay with it was a long-term customer it was a long-term project or product that I was um managing and monitoring so I

Knew that my job wasn’t going to change much because you go to the Consulting industry you’re constantly going through product turnover or project turnover and going to more projects so you don’t know if the one you’re going to be on is going to require a lot of work or a

Little work it’s unpredictive and I didn’t like that especially for like entrepreneurial Ventures I couldn’t I couldn’t have it like that man so what are some soft skills uh because I know we we touched on like you have a bunch of different hard skills things that you learned

Um whether from whether from studying or just from like life experiences um things that you found interesting and there are the overall majority of people listening and watching are might be thinking like oh man all that sounds great and I’m willing to learn a lot of

Those different things but man I wish I had when I was younger I wish I had done X Y and Z I wish I had a you know look care more about computers or care more about technology and had that experience that you have on the had like earlier on

But like in terms of soft skills of people that are looking to either get into this industry or scale or do just some of the things you’re doing like what are some soft skills you can speak to do you think are um valuable for people to consider

If you’re the type of person that’s not in Tech now and don’t think that you’re passionate about it I feel like the most valuable soft skills you can have is just your ability to articulate information your ability to speak well and speak at a high level which is

Teachable you really don’t need to know the ins and outs of Technology you just need need to know the acronyms how they’re applicable to different things and how to speak to them yeah and then you have to tailor those soft skills or those terminologies or words for the

Interview the job you’re applying for they just want to be to hear that you can speak to it and they’ll kind of train you from there so just to go back to reiterate the most important soft skills to have is just your ability to articulate and speak to the information

And understand it at a high level to the point that you can sell the product or work within the space and take the information from the engineers from the developers and translate it to the the business the business uh c-suite Executives and kind of just translate that information back and forth and

That’s where you’ll make the most money man that’s good I think um that’s definitely gonna help a lot of people because I’ve seen questions like that come up a lot um and you touched on some things that I’d even ask about but I’m definitely appreciate you touching on because one

Of the things that people oftentimes uh come to me about is like well I’m not techy or I don’t think that you know they’re hesitant or you know imposter syndrome things like that that people oftentimes bring up and people are like well Cyrus how do you do it and I just

Tell them like I just put my head down I just work like I just it’s like I don’t feel techy at all I still don’t think I’m techy nevertheless I’m doing I’m doing well in this industry in this space they want you to be personable that’s like the people that you’re

Meeting with especially when you’re like business to business or even business uh b2c business to um consumer uh you’re speaking with people that a lot of times aren’t techy so they want you that’s true they don’t they don’t like I obviously I’ve been in the industry for

A long time so I’ve kind of like learned the mannerism so like even now I’m speaking it probably sound like I’m techy because I’m so used to it but they chose you your jobs you work now chose you because you’re personable you can walk to a room with a business

Person and they feel comfortable if a person comes in that room and speaks too techie they’ll they’ll feel like you’re speaking information they don’t understand yeah and they won’t they won’t necessarily want to buy a product if they feel like it’s too too understandable it’s too complicated yeah

Because one of the things people don’t get is that when you work in Tech particularly somebody’s customer facing roles or consultative roles is that when you’re talking to whether it’s the CEO of a company or c-suite exec uh unless you’re talking to the CTO or whoever’s over the technology of that company

Whoever it is you’re speaking to they just want stuff in layman’s terms and they want to feel like they’re talking to a human and not a robot they want to feel like they’re talking to someone that okay you’re a genuine a personable person so so I love everything you’re

Saying because it’s like it’s so crazy because people ask me this question and the way that you just communicated it I’m like man I think it’s just incredibly like just very perfect and I love you touching on the aspect of yeah you’ve been in this space for a while so

Yeah you know the slang you know the lingo like you you you you you’re using some of the acronyms that are familiar within uh within the software industry but people don’t need to be afraid of that when they hear you talking like that it’s like well no it just comes

With the territory if you’re in this space long enough you’re gonna pick up on the lingo you’re gonna pick up on the slang you’re gonna pick up on the jargon and stuff and this is honestly it’s an advantage if you haven’t picked up on it

Yet for the people that want to get into it it’s an advantage if you haven’t picked up on it yet because you’re still more personable that’s real yeah that’s right yeah you don’t sound like a you don’t sound like a puppy you don’t sound like okay you’re just another cookie

Cutter you know person in the space Oh you’re a real person who is communicating this information to me in a way that doesn’t sound like you’re just regurgitating you know acronyms and regurgitating terms but you’re just speaking to me breaking stuff down in like a simple way exactly it’s it’s all

It’s it’s very simple especially when you really think about it and also your your proof like your proof that you can go in the boot camp not have a tech background and Excel and then your um your story of excelling is far above you know median Tech incomes and things like

That so even if a person feels like they may not have the capacity that you did to excel at your level even if they were to find a job 60 70 000 less you’re still above six figures you’re still you’re still eighty thousand dollars entry level then six months in working

And being immersed in the environment you’ll pick it up then you’ll be good but to sit there and say that I don’t think I can do this because I’m not techy you’re selling yourself short like they would the job is gonna have to tell me no I would have to get so many

Rejections that I ran on jobs to apply for before I would take no foreign I’m gonna apply until in every day all day you have to have that type of mentality like the job is going to tell me you know I’m not gonna tell myself no yeah now that that’s very real it’s

Funny because uh some people I know a guy he hit me up recently he was saying it was after two months he finished the boot camp and two months later he hit me up and this was just three weeks ago he hit me up and he was like man I’m not

Getting a job man these companies are racist and I was like why do you think they’re racist oh because they’re not hiring me it’s like yeah they’re not hiring me and you know yeah I’m not getting a job said dude it’s been two months bro calm down like most people

Don’t get a job after two months of finishing a boot camp like chill out and I just told him like dude put your head down and put the work in and people ask me people people tell me about how often they get rejected and I’m like I got

Rejected so many times I just didn’t care I was like I’m gonna get in this space one way or another and um I don’t know if you saw maybe maybe you were just kind of referencing this but someone mentioned people ask me this all the time they’re like well I’m looking

At the roles and I don’t qualify and I’m like I didn’t look to see if I qualified I just applied and the company I actually got hired at I didn’t qualify I literally didn’t look at the qualifications for the role until they emailed me and confirmed an interview

Then I was okay let me actually look at the the description make sure I’m prepared for the interview and when I looked over the description it said they needed someone who who was who was a well-versed in a couple different programming languages and that they had you know had two or three years

Experience I had no experience I had a boot camp I don’t I still see this they don’t know any program languages and in my first my first interview with them I told them I said hey I’m gonna tell you straight up I don’t know how to code a

Program and the guy who ended up becoming my manager he said cool I don’t either and we both bust out laughing we never talked about like programming and I never had to when I was at that company so it’s like people can’t allow like they just like put your head down

Put in the work it’s like let them tell you no and don’t allow your own doubts and fears until you know let HR do their job and filter through your resume you know still send it anyway yeah like HR do their job exactly and then um for

Like repetitive or like replying you can um LinkedIn once you like fill out your LinkedIn you can download a LinkedIn template that makes your resume for you and it’s specifically designed so that when you do the autofill engine it autofills correctly because when I did my resume myself there have been I

Always had to go in and fill in the dates because it would mess everything up out of order I literally just had a Microsoft recruiter um on and she was sharing how more often than not people when they upload their resume it puts things out of order but you’re saying

Man that’s crazy say that again and explain that so that I make sure everybody hears that if you go on your LinkedIn profile um you can either hit the uh there’s like the three dots for the menu and it’ll either be download this PDF which you’ll download your

Profile but then there’s a create a resume part right there you click on that and Linkedin will curate and create a resume based off of your profile and it’ll have like if you worked at like let’s say Target it’ll have the Target logo beside Target it’ll have it all

Organized and very neat but the way that their template is specifically designed is designed so that the autofill engine autofills and finds everything you need correctly so you’ll no longer have to go into mainly fill in data so you can like apply to jobs a lot easier bro that’s

A hack not even a hack that’s just information that I didn’t know about and I know it craps on other people didn’t know about that’s going to be extremely extremely helpful and I got one other hack I’m gonna give people about LinkedIn too I probably got 80 rejections maybe more for finding my

First job and this is how I did it I went on LinkedIn and typed in recruiter Atlanta and when you send a request to a recruiter you can have 300 characters in a message so I typed up a 300 299 character elevator speech selling myself

About what I’ve done what I want to do what I’ve accomplished so far um you know things about myself within the 300 characters and I copied and pasted it you know Sim request copy paste copy paste and requests for every person and I said I would literally go

Down the list till LinkedIn tell me I sent to me request for the day and as soon as they accept the request I sent my resume you can send an attachment in the messages once they accept your request so I sent my resume automatically yes then I sent the

Calendar uh the calendar link so that they could schedule a time to speak with me even if they had internal tools they would obviously send me something back but I initiated a conversation with the recruiter where they would break down my resume and I had a lot of like

Conversations even if they didn’t have roles just by making that relationship with them they reached out to me later on hey I have a job because they remember me I made an impression on them because of that bro that’s good man you you were on like you you made it your

Job to get get a job right applying for a job is a job like I sent like I said LinkedIn stopped me from like applying every day it’s like I ain’t gonna stop you gotta stop me literally I’m with it man dang bro bro this is so good dude um

Man I definitely we’re gonna do a lot of other cool things in the future uh the the goal is hopefully to to you know have like different events and stuff and um and bring on other people and maybe do like panels and things like that one of the things I’ve been wrestling with

Is okay like what are good people to bring back on as a panel of course we’re gonna allow like the guests to tell us in the comment section and um and then like our emails like what guests they want us to bring on but dude I definitely want to like have you back

For some other endeavors uh in the future bro uh that being said man you please let everybody know who’s listening who’s watching where they can find you and also anything that we didn’t get to talk about that you want to share and leave everybody with

Um you can find me on Instagram at it’s chris.g I think that I covered most of the things I want to speak about spoke about the you know the job stacking you know how to find jobs with LinkedIn I try to speak about my experience and how

I got to where I’m going and my future visions and the companies and things like that so I can’t think of anything you know around the spot of what else I want to mention but hopefully like with the panels and the future interviews if you guys end up following me I’ll end up

Like talking about different things and yeah but y’all need to follow him he’s got some got some cool stuff cool stuff dude thank you so much man uh for for being on dude let us know in the future any any way we can like support or like mention or shout out something that

You’re doing again in the future if you want to spend a block and have you back on like as you’re as you start building out and doing other things where I would love to talk about that for sure I appreciate you bro yeah definitely man so look y’all thank you all for tuning

In to this episode of tech is the New Black I hope you all enjoyed this episode at least half as much as I did it’s really great conversation uh listen y’all it’s always if you enjoyed this episode please let us know let us know

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