Foreword

By David Frey

Tanner has always had a dream of playing Division I football and going on to play in the pros. In high school he was a team captain, all district, and took his team to the Texas state semi-finals. But injuries plagued him, and after short playing stints at BYU and Arizona Western, he came back home to Friendswood, Texas, deflated but determined. You see, Tanner isn’t only an exceptional athlete; he was a 4.0 student and smart as a whip. He was accepted into the prestigious petroleum engineering program at Texas A&M, which is no small feat.

I’ve known Tanner since he was a young kid. I was his church youth leader. I’ve been a full-time internet entrepreneur for twenty years, and when Tanner came back into town, I invited him to join me for lunch. I wanted to catch up with him and talk about his future. I knew that Tanner had the smarts and drive to create his own business online and work for himself. He had the looks and the body, so I believed he could make a great living as an online personal trainer.

At lunch that day, I urged him to drop out of college and become an online entrepreneur. He didn’t know the first thing about internet marketing, but I knew he was smart (but I never realized just how smart he was till later on). I offered him a desk in my office and personal mentoring.

I’ll never forget the day that Texas A&M’s admissions office called him to finalize his acceptance to their petroleum engineering program. He put them on hold, looked at me and asked, “Should I do it?” I looked right back at him and said, “Yes. Do it.” So he got back on the phone and told them he wouldn’t be coming to school that year. After he hung up the phone, I think he was a little stunned at what he had just done. I told him, “I’m proud of you. You just burned the ship. You’ll remember this day for the rest of your life.” So for the next year, Tanner would show up in my office every day, ready to learn and work.

There was one problem: Tanner was broke. He drove an old, butt-ugly Mazda Protege that had been handed down to him. He had no source of income and didn’t have a dime in his pocket. So he decided to do male modeling on the side to make some money. He quickly discovered that male physique modeling was full of seedy people. Some of the pro photographers wanted him to pose totally nude because there was big money in selling his nude images to gay websites and magazines. He turned them down. But the photos they did take left little to the imagination.

Tanner was so broke and desperate to make a few bucks, he took on some of the weirdest jobs, most of which I cannot write about. But I’ll give you a taste by just saying one dude paid Tanner $300 a month to receive three pairs of Tanner’s dirty underwear. Ewww. Like I said, it was a seedy business, but Tanner was desperate. He didn’t want to get a full-time job because that wouldn’t leave him enough time to work on his business.

To keep his chiseled physique for modeling, he would eat next to nothing. I remember he would bring one can of tuna to eat every day and a gallon of water. That was about it. He was always falling asleep in his chair from exhaustion. Sometimes, I would snap photos and videos of him sleeping and post them on Facebook just to have some fun. He became known as my “sleepy intern.” Tanner was working out so hard and eating so little that there were days he would literally come into the office, lie down on the floor, and go to sleep. One time he decided to have a cheat meal so I took him to an all-you-can-eat salad buffet. He was so hungry that I swear he ate half of the salad bar!

If I had to label Tanner with one word, I would use the word “determined.” Tanner had more drive to succeed than anyone I’d ever met. He would get up at 4:30 a.m. and go to bed at 11:00 p.m. and work all in between (except for the naps). He was too broke to date and was embarrassed to pick up a girl in his run-down Mazda Protege. So he put all his energy into his business.

After a year of working in my office, he still wasn’t making any money to speak of. He built out a great product but didn’t have any money to promote it. So he decided to move to Utah to get a part-time job as a server. It wasn’t glorious, but it allowed him to survive and still work on his business. He moved to L.A. for a little while and worked as a food delivery boy. He spent more money paying parking fines than he made from delivering food. He got a few paid modeling gigs here and there, but nothing to speak of. I remember a couple of times he called me up so depressed, he talked about maybe quitting. But I knew he could make it if he just kept trying. I believed in him and his ability to find success. I urged him to keep working side jobs and continue learning and studying how to get fitness training clients.

He then got a commission-only job selling alarm systems in Alabama. It was there that he discovered his talent for selling. Tanner could sell. He was bold, didn’t take “no” for an answer, and hustled all day street selling, all the while never giving up his dream to have his own online training business. He instantly became one of the company’s top salespeople.

One day he came across a “guru” online who was selling a $5,000 coaching program promising to show you how to make a six-figure income as an online trainer. Tanner figured he could skip all the painful and time-taking “learn on your own” effort and just pay someone to learn how to get where he wanted to go. So Tanner scraped together every cent he had and invested in the program. He discovered he could take his street selling skills to the telephone and get people to agree to pay him a lot of money for fitness training. Finally he started making decent money. So he decided to quit his street selling job, move back to Texas, and go all in on his fitness training business.

In very short order, I saw Tanner turn his telephone and Instagram account into an ATM. He was so successful selling online fitness training that he started teaching others how to do it. Within one year, he had a million-dollar business doing fitness training and teaching trainers how to start their online training business.

By the way, he was running a million-dollar-a-year business out of his tiny bedroom in his parents’ home. One thing about Tanner: He loves his family. He has six brothers and sisters, and he loves them all. In fact, his two younger brothers work with him in the business. Benson is his chief business and fitness coach, and Gentry was one of his fitness coaches and is his primary salesperson. Tanner’s dad is a teacher, and his mom is a stay-at-home parent. They grew up on a teacher’s income, and so Tanner and his brothers learned how to work for everything they wanted. There were no shortcuts in Tanner’s home.

With the rise of Tanner’s success, he started hiring expensive business coaches and joining high-ticket masterminds to learn how to scale his business to the next level. He learned some from most, and none from some. I remember recommending one of my friends who was promising people that he could teach them how to make six figures in thirty days with a Facebook group. The cost of the coaching program was $5,000. I trusted this person. He was successful, so I recommended him. In the end, he did zero for Tanner, and I was ashamed that I had referred Tanner to him. And my friend refused to give Tanner a refund of any kind. It was shameful. But Tanner took his financial licking and moved on. Little did Tanner know, he was in for a breakthrough in his business.

There were two things that changed everything for Tanner. The first was running online ads, which is super scary when you first start. He was barely making any money running ads and was nervous about continuing it. So out of necessity, he started following up with people who didn’t sign up with him. He couldn’t afford not to. And almost overnight, he started closing people right and left and literally 12X’ed his ad spend. It was a eureka moment for Tanner. I remember him coming into the gym that morning freaking out about his results from just following up with people. So Tanner worked hard to perfect the follow-up process that had brought him so much success. And he started building out a team of people to help him do it.

Fast-forward one year, and Tanner “tentupled” his business. He went from doing one million a year to generating revenues of over ten million dollars a year! That’s almost unheard of in the coaching industry. He then replicated his marketing process and started offering it to other types of coaches and consultants. Today, he is the King Kong of his market. He is one of the top business coaches in the world because he never gave up. He’s built out a team of forty people, and now he can go anywhere he wants, buy anything he wants, financially help anyone he wants, and do just about anything he wants. He’s gone from sleeping on my office floor to living in a...