266 - Best of 2025! How to Overcome Money Trauma with Clifton Sellers

0:00I was a VP of Development. I was making$95k a year. On paper, I was a very successful human, but I was so broke. I was so in debt. I was doom scrolling on Twitter one night. My wife's asleep in a rental. I got two babies upstairs asleep. I'm just staring at credit card statements. I was like, I don't want to look at this anymore. The reason I am sitting in front of you today running a multi-million dollar business is because I was obsessed not to make money, but to become the person that makes money and to find the answers that people had.

0:33All right, Clifton, you're one of my favorite people on social media. You've got hundreds of thousands of followers. You've started multiple businesses. You have a business this year. It's going to do two to three million dollars top line, healthy margins. you and I know each other really well. Here's my question for you though. Why was it so easy for you? Huh? Easy, huh? No, I say that. I say that tongue in cheek because you have a post that you post somewhat frequently that talks about your background. And dude, I just think your story is incredible. I think easy is the most relative term in the world.

1:09It's really easy for people to sit on the couch, look at a guy like me and say, man, it was just so easy, especially from somebody that I wasn't brought up. It's not like I have a background in content marketing or agency. I didn't come up in Silicon Valley or I'm in Birmingham, Alabama. I was raised in Level Plains, Alabama. My dad was 10th grade dropout. They worked a blue collar job. If you want to go down that rabbit hole of easy, I think easy comes on the back end of obsession. I think all the greats, the people that win in business and life, insert anything you want to win. I think it's on the other side of obsession, and obsession gets such a bad rap in our society.

1:51I've gotten told, I've lost friends over the last three years, man. The people that have stuck by me are my wife and children. They never wavered. A few close friends, my dad. My dad stuck by me. But a lot of people thought I was nuts. I mean, what are you going to do? I went to college. I Three degrees. You couldn't stop at one. I have a doctorate, for God's sakes. I mean, that's in the garage right now. What was your doctorate in? Organizational leadership. You went to school. You got three degrees, a doctorate, organizational leadership. And now you're messing around on Twitter. Obviously, I say that tongue in cheek, but to the outside world, that's what they're thinking, right?

2:30They're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a second. Your dad dropped out of high school, the 10th grade. You got a doctorate, and now you're posting on social media? What's going on here? Like talk about that. How did you even get into it? What was that transition like? There's a couple of reasons I got into it. Number one, I was broke. Yeah, I was so broke. I was so in debt and I was I was doomed scrolling on my couch on Twitter one night. My wife's asleep in a rental. I got two babies upstairs asleep. I'm just like staring at credit card statements. I was like, I don't want to look at this anymore.

3:04So I pull up Twitter. I'm scrolling. What was your job at the time? I was a VP of development. I was making 95k a year. I mean, it was, on paper, I was very successful human. I mean, but I was just, I had gotten myself into a hole like most people do in middle class. I had a couple car loans. I made some purchases I shouldn't have made from a consumer standpoint. And I was just, and then a big thing was I wanted my wife to be a stay-at-home mom. and we made that decision when two kids and life on a 95k a year salary no matter where you're at is hard you know when we made that decision we were only make i was only making 50k a year and so i was like i was just supplementing with credit cards at the time but by all standards objectively you're like we made this decision she's gonna stay at home i'm making 50 grand a year fast forward a few years later you're not making 95 grand a year and you're like i'm almost making double the income why am i still bro drowning bro i mean just drowning just feeling terrible i mean feeling like i'm playing catch up and what i tell people is like i looked at the people that were at the top of the field 10 20 years around me and i was like they're not making much more than me i mean they're making 120 140k it's not that big of a gap so i'm like am i earning potential over the next 10 20 years is low relative and then their lifestyle is like they're they're taking one vacation a year if they're lucky they're not in the greatest health i'm commuting two hours a day at this point i mean it's just insane right and so i'm doing scrolling i see this guy on twitter he's like i make a thousand dollars a week online and i'm like well what the what is this guy i'm like this is ridiculous you know i make four thousand a month after taxes or something like not even that much more right and i bought this 29 gumroad course man yeah the first thing i ever bought was a 29 gumroad course and it was a word document it was a word document it wasn't even a course it was just a word document it was a word document it was like set up profile pick profile picture write bio wait wait wait so he's like i make a thousand dollars a week online and this is my course to do that or like how did you get oh yeah man that's the underbelly of this is why people don't this is like the the dirty this is why people don't want to be online it's like a phase thing here right you start and you're like everybody's a scam it's a multi-level marketing scheme clifton's at the top now and he's got all these like people selling his crap this is what's kept me out of courses for so long i don't want to be associated with like money twitter or like this or that and i started in that world right i started when i first started people told me like oh you can make a thousand dollars a week by selling my stuff and I'm like heck yeah this is gonna be awesome man that stinks I was ripping like ripping guides and selling them I was making what were you selling I have to know what were you selling courses to sell stuff I mean I don't know like I was selling guides on gumroad you know and I still work with making money because like I was putting so much time in that the money I made didn't I I was still losing money on my time.

6:37Right. And so I tried affiliate marketing, e-commerce, eBay drop shipping, all these different ways that like when you get online, this is why people burn out. This is why people burn out. And I didn't have any money. I couldn't buy inventory for eBay drop shipping business. You're describing the, it's a double-edged sword, right? Yeah. On the one hand, there are people out, like you're a hustler. You're more like my, my best friend, Chris Kerner. he's a natural born hustler. He's just like everyday scheming. It's like, okay, what can I do to make a buck? And I think that many entrepreneurs are like that.

7:12But then there's me on sort of the other end of the spectrum, which is more like, yeah, I'm not going to be a hustler, like find something for$2 and sell it for three. I'm going to take my time and I'm going to plan it out and I'm going to figure it out. And like, there's pros and cons to both sides, but there's a lot of people who are like you that are just, they're trying to figure it out. I want to make more money. I want to have control of my time. How do I make this work? And like you said, But on social media, there's lots of people who are like, I can show you how to do that. You can make$100 ,000 on a weekend if you just put$4 in.

7:38I promise you, it's a guarantee. And then they pay$30 that they don't have and get scammed. But many times, that's the price of tuition, in my opinion, for those people who are hustlers. They have to pay that price in order to make it to the next level. Did you look at it like that at the time? Or were you like, man, I got all these bills and I just freaking wasted money on this course? Yeah. Yeah. Ignorance tax. Ignorance tax, my friend. I think people ask me why I kept going. Because I spent eight months down that rabbit hole. And my wife's looking at me. And she's an angel descended from heaven.

8:17I mean, she's looking at me. It's awesome. She's watching me like she's like, what are you doing? I was like, I don't know. I don't know. But I see people winning like there's people out there winning. And I say this, I say this at that time. I say this now to my team. I mean, I'm managing almost 20 people now. Right. And when people come to me with a problem, they're like, this is this is a problem. Like we can't figure it out. I'm like, there are people that have figured out this problem. You just don't have the answer. It's not an unsolvable problem. It's just that you don't have the knowledge, the resources.

8:55You just haven't figured it out. So take that out of your mind. It's not an unsolvable problem. It's just we need to find A, the person to solve it, or B, the information in which we need to solve it. That's where I was. I literally put everything on the table, and I said, I will not stop. And I tell like the reason I am sitting in front of you today running a multimillion dollar business is because I was obsessed not to make money, but to become the person that makes money and to find the answers that people had. And I'm dumb, man. I'm dumb. Hey, I don't know if you remember this, but when we started this podcast, we entered into a social contract.

9:37I would spend time, energy, and money producing this podcast, interviewing these individuals and giving you insights into how to build, buy, start, grow your business. And you would like, subscribe, and leave me five-star review. Now, out of that, we both get to talk to really cool people and hear really cool insights. We both get a ton of value. But I just want to help you keep your word. So would you do me a favor? Will you go leave a five-star review for me on Apple or Spotify? It would really help. and if you want even share this with a friend your PhD in organizational leadership would say otherwise but PhDs are education is a test of endurance that's all it is well which is interesting actually because you showed you had endurance there and you showed you had endurance now right like this hasn't been an easy road for you to make the transition there's one thing though that I want to hit on where in social media it's very obvious that there are these like schemes they can prey on people who are just looking and trying to better themselves, but it's not unique to social media, right?

10:40There's multi-level marketing schemes in the real world. There's all kinds of schemes that you get sold on. You get locked into a car that you didn't want to get to because the salesman at the car dealership, you know, sweet talk to you to a certain point, you get locked into a phone or a, or a health plan or whatever. You get insurance on that device that you bought a Best Buy that you didn't really want, but they sold you on it. You know what I obvious on social media. But the flip side is there are actual people who are looking for that, that will still better themselves from it. Like there still is a value that comes from taking the course or learning some education, which is you.

11:17And I think the differentiator is what you just said. It's the endurance game. Can you hold endurance? So how did you, I mean, eight months, my wife would have been like, uh, we're done eight months. Like, what are we doing here? Clifton? how did you navigate eight months of just like figuring it out? There was a stopping point at January of 22. I said, this isn't working. And I looked at my wife, I was like, I'm, I'm no, I have a lot of knowledge. I'm further ahead than when I started, but I still, I'm not making money. How far in was this? This was almost eight months in because I started in August.

11:51So January, this, I still use this framework, I started reaching out to people that were ahead of me. And I said, Hey man, can I jump on a call with you? They're like, yeah. So I reached out to a couple of people that had larger audiences than me that had larger, that were making more money than me. And I said, tell me what you're doing. And they said, you should just, just focus on growing your account. Just focus on writing. And I was like, okay. So I did that. And I started writing a thread every day. Now this is when threads weren't popular. Like now everybody writes threads, right? So I was very early into, right.

12:28I had people tell me I was crazy. I had people tell me that I was going to burn out my audience because I wrote threads every day. I had people tell me that I was botting my account because my account was growing so fast. In March of 2022, I grew 40 ,000 followers in a month on Twitter. I had a 10 ,000 follower a day. that's insane at that point nick i realized that i loved writing and positioning branding all this stuff so then this is when what i tell people you can if you don't learn a skill you will sell for others for the rest of your life it will work for others for the rest of your life or anything right and i'm a salesman by trade like i love sales it's my favorite thing in the entire world i love sales.

13:14It gives me energy when most people hate it. I want to be on sales calls. It's all I want to do every day. So I had the skill. I'm like, okay, I can write, I can grow Twitter accounts. Boom. I don't, nobody knows who I am. So I started reaching out to other ghostwriting agencies. This is when those started, were kind of coming up, personal brand management, all this stuff. And I said, Hey, I want to work for you. Hire me, hire me, hire me. And I was like, I just got to make some money. And this guy took a chance on me, hired me. And I started writing hundreds of longhorn pieces of content per month for this other agency.

13:52And I finally started making money. Hundreds, hundreds. And this is why you're working your full-time job, right? Oh yeah. I didn't quit my full-time job until April 23. I'm going to back up just a little bit. So in January, you're like, honey, I don't think this is working. And at that point you said, I'm going to actually reach out to some people who are ahead of me that can give me some advice. I think that's an amazing framework. Have you always been like that? Every time I couldn't make money, I reached people. When I started writing for that guy, he couldn't keep up with how much money I wanted to make.

14:24He told me to start my own agency. He was ahead of me. He taught me how to start my own agency. When I started my own agency, I struggled with sales. I paid a guy 10K to teach me sales. When I hit sales, I started signing a bunch of people and then I struggled with operations. I reached out to a guy, got help with operations, eventually brought on my CEO, Brett, who's been heading up operations for us for over two years. And then was my graduation for money Twitter. And this is what I tell people. It's like, if you want to be a real business, you have to be a real business. If you go to my website right now, there's nothing about it that says I'm on money Twitter.

15:02it looks like a reputable fortune 500 like partnered agency what's the what's the website legacybuilder.co you go to that website right now you're like oh man this is a legit content agency like this is somebody i want to work with right and i did that and so i started reaching out to real business owners right i started saying like hey what does that look like well like how how are you differentiating and it actually is a really boring thing man it's like well i mean because in money twitter or when you're first starting out in business especially these young guys you get taught to sell these egregious offers right it's like i'm gonna grow your business in 30 days or you get your money back or i'm gonna come to your house and clean it for the rest of my life and it's like it's just insane right and and that's how you start because nobody knows.

15:58So you need a risk reversal. You need something to like get people in. But one day I woke up and I said, whoa, wait, wait a second. I'm really good at this. I have nothing to prove to anybody. I should start acting like that. And so I went through an exercise with Scott, Scott Bear at Lunar Studios. He built this website that she had pulled up right here. And we went through like, what's our unique value prop? What makes us a business? Why would 5 million, 10 million, a hundred million dollar businesses want to work with us? And we mapped that out another situation where I didn't know how to position myself.

16:36So I reached out to somebody who knew how to do that. And the day I launched this website, Nick, we went from within a quarter, we were making a hundred K plus a month just from repositioning ourselves into this i mean look at this sexy beast here yeah i love this is a good looking website man yeah 300 clients served 100 000 post published 50 million impressions here's our value prop value it's perfect now you got actual results there's the ceo of mighty networks dang um ben bill she's legit then you got kind of the what are you going to get when you work with us here you get a full content right when you work with us simple process because so that's framing for the sales call right there it's also like more testimonials from people that's me and brett a little letter from us look at these look at these freaking is any of this ai do you think that picture of me is ai it's not but brett brett i'm like it is oh okay it is i worked with this guy i think it's called headshot pro or something another twitter story so one night it was like 11 30 at night and i wanted this like super clean ai picture of me so i downloaded and i messaged the founder i'm like your product is not working like i do this does not look like me and he said i will work with you for hours until this looks like you and he literally went through like seven iterations with me until this thing spit out the perfect ai picture of me because he was i mean obviously you have distribution and he's like yeah he's like i'm gonna win for this guy this is a whale i want to get a win for clifton yeah dude i would say yours looks good yours looks really good it's not they both look good the green color is like my i have so many things in that green color man and then even the logo so the logo is really cool because my old logo stunk it like this guy poor guy.

18:41He made me like a free logo and it was like an L and a B. It kind of looked like a Luigi hat. And they went through this and like this logo has like this amazing story of like it's like a sequoia tree and it's like growing and growing your content. The L's kind of fit in their catty corner at the far left. And yeah, it's a great story. Even that logo, man, like the enterprise value of our business went up just from the logo. Right. And people say that stuff doesn't matter, but it really does matter. Of course it matters. It all matters. It all matters. Yeah. Like I love this idea that you talk about those, like reaching out to people who are a couple of steps ahead of you.

19:23I think sometimes people are insecure or nervous or like, well, I don't really know what to say. How do you do it? I think it's a superpower. I'm, I'm similar to you where I'm like, I'll reach out to anybody and ask them a question. But lots of people are that way. How do you think about when you reach out to people positioning your ask? I think it's twofold. First, you have to be a person that people want to help. I'm a kind person by nature. I'm a connector by nature, right? Like, if you call me and you're like, I'm having this problem, I probably have like three people to connect you with. When I reach out to people, I'm very vulnerable, man.

20:01I'm like, hey, I'm mad right now or I'm frustrated because I'm stuck at a 1.5 million run rate and I know you're at a 10 million run rate and you were probably just as frustrated as me when you were at a 1.5 million run rate and I offer to pay him I'm like can I pay you for 30 minutes to an hour of your time just to tell you what I'm doing and see if I can get any level of unstuck from where I'm at right now and most of the time they're like bro you don't have to pay me or like yeah most people are cool yeah and then sometimes they say like yeah here's my meetup link or whatever right and i pay people i pay coaches i i have a professionalization budget i spend like 10 of our income on on people to help me scale faster that's super interesting when did you start doing that day one what does that mean day one like when you're making money it was actually higher when I first started.

20:59I reinvested most of my first two years of income back into people to tell me how to make more income. Dude, this is fascinating because I used to think that like coaches, consultants, less consultants, but coaches in particular were like, eh, scam. What do I need a coach for? I don't feel that way anymore. That's good. I don't feel that way anymore, but it was hard for me to kind of get over. Honestly, it's still hard for my wife. she'll be like wait why'd we pay this guy 10 grand i'm like oh you have no idea he he helped me unlock and she's like uh i was isn't that obvious anyways how did you have you always been that way where you're like yeah i'll spend money on paying someone to help me get to where i need to be or is that a shift in your mind that you had to make it was a shift because i was scared to spend money for most of my life you know when you grow up the way i did and like everybody's scam everybody's trying to rip you off watch you back save your money but there was an unlock i had to go through some mental coaching which is funny right like i paid coaching to get over my money problem i mean i did i mean like i i had past trauma around money and i noticed that was either that was either the best salesman of all time or you were incredibly self-aware that's hilarious Well, we all have a rock bottom with every problem we have.

22:17It just takes some people. Some people are more stubborn than others, right? And so I think it was the first time I handed somebody money, and it was like$2 ,000, which to me is like$200 ,000 now, right? Like at that point, it's like, here's$2 ,000, and a month later I was making$10 ,000. And I was like, okay, here's$10 ,000. Oh, a month later I'm making$30 ,000. Okay. And this is the problem with coaches and all this stuff, right, and the framing around it. First of all, they're not going to save you. Your best bet with coaches is you are going to win anyway. They're just going to help you win faster.

22:57Everybody I hand money, I tell them, I'm like, I was going to do this anyway. I'm handing you this money because I want to do it faster. That's it. And so that's why a lot of the coaching industry has such a bad rap because if you weren't going to win anyway, nine times out of 10, a coach probably isn't going to fix that. You have to have that innate ability in you. I really agree with you. I don't know what it is, but there comes a certain point where you realize that, oh, coaching is the unlock. And then you start seeing it everywhere. Is it Tom Brady, the TB12 method that like there's a duty ad that was his coach that figured out that method.

23:33Tiger Woods has always had a mental coach. Michael Jordan, LeBron James, any of these like Kobe Bryant dude any of these top tier athletes have had not just coaches on the x's and o's like here's how to play basketball but like mental coaches strength and conditioning coaches specific coach like I can't remember who the athlete was you might know this was a basketball story where this guy was having a hard time figuring out how to shoot and so he went and got not somebody who knows how to shoot he went and got some like a psychotherapist to help him get over whatever the hump was that he was working on.

24:06And he did. And he exploded the next season. I can't remember who it was. Well, that's it, man. Most of your problems, you know what to do. There's probably something inside of you keeping you from doing it. I mean, my past trauma around money was keeping me under a million dollars in revenue because I was scared to hire people. And I was scared to hire people because I was scared to waste money. Say more about that. I'm curious. So you were stuck under a million dollars because what does that mean you were scared to hire people? I was doing everything myself, right? So I was writing the tweets.

24:40I was publishing the content. I was doing all this stuff. I had never run a business before. And everybody's like - For your clients, your ghost writing, you were doing all that stuff. All that stuff. Yeah. I've held every position in our company. So you got to a point where you were doing it. Why were you holding onto it? What was it that - I was scared of, is it going to work? Is this a flash in the pan business? In a couple of years, am I going to get replaced? There was all these unknown unknowns, right? And I paid coaches to basically, first of all, I just had PTSD around money and trauma.

25:17And I had to get over that. Then I had to get over the fact that I can't control any of this. I can't control. I mean, AI could kill us all tomorrow. I mean, I don't know. You know, like I can't control that. Sam, Sam's over there. Sam Altman's over there, like planning world destruction. And AGI is going to like take our homes by December 2025. Like I don't like there's all these unknown unknowns. But eventually I woke up and I said, there's people out there. Everybody's running a business. There's people. My background's in fundraising. I met with people every day that made millions of dollars running a business and exited or we're still running a business.

25:59And it kind of went into that. Why not? If they can do it, I can do it. Why not me? What am I doing? Like you're competent, you're driven. And I kind of just had to get out of my own way and saying, like, if you allow yourself to sit in the these are all the ways that society can kill what I'm building, you are not going to build anything of significance. Let me ask you a question. I've had the same exact issue. So I mean, I'm one of nine kids. I grew up exceptionally poor. I've gotten over it in some businesses, but like even today, I have a hard time making the investment because it is an investment, right?

26:36Like it's not a one-to-one ratio. If I put the $10 in, I'm going to get the$20 back because I'm always worried. Well, is the demand really there? Is the demand really there for, you know, whatever that you're selling? How did you get over that? Did you know the demand was there or was it truly like, no, I was just afraid to spend money, period, and I had to get over it? I think it was both. The money thing is the money thing. Early on in my career, I was told to niche down. I was told to only be a content agency for SaaS companies. And intuitively, I thought that was the dumbest thing ever. I was like, if your process is good enough from a content standpoint, you should be able to write for anybody.

27:20That fits certain criteria from a money standpoint, from a time standpoint, and from a can they get benefit from it. So I didn't niche down. Now, it's funny. Now I'm like, oh, we need to niche down a little bit. Now we're at a point where we're safe. But when you're scaling, you need the biggest total addressable market as possible. You just need revenue. And you just need revenue. And you just need a runway. and you don't need to act like you're a$10 million business when you got$5 ,000 in your business bank account and an Amex card and a prayer. So I just kept it wide. I knew there was demand.

28:05I knew that because I had benefited from it. And I still say that today. I get on sales call. They're like, how do you know this works? And I raise my hand. I built a multimillion dollar business on the back of personal branding and organic content flowing into for lead generation. I mean, I know it works. So for you, it was like, I know it works. You didn't necessarily have a pipeline of people that you couldn't get to. It was the unlock of like, if I bring somebody on to do the execution, it'll free me up to do what I'm best at, which is sales. Go out. You're a genius. You're a genius. that Brett Eric looked at me a year ago and he said, my goal in three months is for you to not be in clients accounts anymore.

28:48And I said, oh man, that would stress me out. He was like, I don't think it will. He's like, well, let me try. And he did it. And our clients are better for it. They're better for it. They get a way better experience when our team is pouring over their content and their strategy. And then I come in for like higher level strategy or execution, or I can actually like work with the clients on some mental blockers that content's creating for them. And I can sell and I can do podcasts like this. And Brett is a way better operator than I am. Like he was put on this planet to be an operator. I was put on this planet to vision cast, sell, all this stuff.

29:34So like the greatest reason that we've scaled to our point is we got people that were very competent and put them and incentivize them in a way to where they would have massive upside and they actually enjoyed coming to work every day. You know, many things in life are a flywheel, both positive and negative. Like if I make a bad hire and it doesn't work out, that reinforces the, Oh, I shouldn't have made that hire. That was stupid. And if I make a good hire and I did all the things necessary for it to be successful, then success begets success. And I hire more people and I'm more confident, right?

30:07Like both of those kind of compound on themselves. What did you do right in order to free yourself up from all of the delivery and hire that person? Well, I'm just saying there's a lot of entrepreneurs who are listening right now. I'm like, they're not running content agencies, but they're in that same spot, right? They're like, well, I'm doing all the fulfillment. I'm the pressure washing guy for my pressure washing company or I'm the digital agency guy for my digital agency, whatever. They need to know how do they make that first hire and make sure that it's successful, not unsuccessful. And then they're always stuck at the ceiling.

30:39Sales was always the last thing I was ever going to delegate. I'm about a year out from that. I think people try to delegate what they're good at too soon. So you almost have to sit down and take inventory and you're saying, okay what what are things that i'm doing just because they have to be done and what are things that i do that i'm enjoying it and it's helping me grow my business and i kind of went through that inventory and i realized like i'm i'm i'm not an operations guy when i have when i'm in spreadsheets or in notion or like tracking things like i get really bored really easily and i so How did you realize that?