From $50k Loss to $100M Win

0:00You're listening to The Vault Unlocked, where the real secrets of success are revealed. Every episode, one founder, one confession, one strategy that created income scale and unstoppable growth. Forget the hype. This is unlocking the code they swore they would never release. The playbook is revealed. The vault is unlocked. And we're back on another episode. And today we have the myth, the legend, the one Mr. Douglas James. So happy to have you here. I know that we've crossed paths a couple times to get to this show. You were telling me before the show you just came back from L.A. So I want to say, appreciate you early morning being here with us.

0:39How are we doing today, Doug? I'm excellent, Kayvon. Thank you so much for having me, brother. Yeah, I really, really appreciate it. Can't wait to get in because I know you have so much to share and give here. Just for those that are listening, tell us who is Douglas James? Yeah, man. So I just, you know, I'm married, two beautiful daughters. Got to start with that. a man of faith and served 10 years active duty in the Navy, United States Navy. I eventually found digital marketing, realized I didn't want to be in the Navy for 20, 30 years, and started to make a lot of money. I started to work with a lot of local businesses, helped them generate leads, got really good at running ads.

1:21After about six months, I was making my annual salary that the military was paying me on the monthly basis. So I, that got the attention of a lot of active duty, you know, guys that I was working with. So they were coming up to me, hey, how do you do this? How do you make money? And so I just got into coaching, you know, and I ended up helping over 10 ,000 active duty members transition into the online space. We scaled that company up to over a hundred million in revenue, helped a lot of people, did a lot of good. And now I, you know, building a company called LeadFi, which is a software that helps business owners identify real time buying power when somebody like opts into your funnel, your marketing, you basically know their exact credit score, their income, how much they can spend on the credit cards, all that stuff.

2:08So we're focused on that now. But I just love disruptive technology. So anything with, you know, AI, blockchain, even, you know, all this stuff that people are like scared of that don't know how to use. And, you know, that's, that's inevitable. That's going to be around for the next 50, a hundred years. That's going to really transform how we work and shop and eat and like everything, you know, find, you know, find spouses or whatever the case is. I love that stuff. So, um, you know, I consult equity for a number of companies doing, so I'm doing a lot of stuff, but, uh, at the end of the day, for me, it's just always been about, helping other people get to where they're trying to go.

2:45I remember early in my journey from when I got out the military, I was reading Zig Ziglar and Tony Robbins. I just had a quote, man. It's help other people get what they want and you'll have all you want in life. That always resonated with me because I was hyper successful in the military because I was focused on my sailors. I just transitioned that energy to people on the outside in the civilian world and entrepreneurial world. And I was able to find success. So I'm a big believer in giving. If only it was all that easy though. So I want to really deep dive in here. Yeah. And, uh, and you know, we, if we go back, you're, you're in the Navy again, obviously thank you for that service.

3:25Uh, let me ask you this. What was it? You said that you found digital marketing. How did you find digital marketing? Yeah. Good question. I, I mean, I legitimately was just, well, let me tell you this story. So it was 2014, 2015, somewhere around there. You know, the data, it's probably late 2014. I get back from a deployment. I was in Papua New Guinea, Fiji, and the Philippines. It was a humanitarian mission. We were literally building schools for kids out there, right? And it's still to this day, it's some of the best work that I've ever experienced or done as a human being, right? You know, you know, over there, it's very rural.

4:05Like you go there, people don't have clothes, shoes, or just the, you know, kind of like modern things that we're used to. So I remember the last day we were, I think it was Rojas city. We're in a super rural part of Philippines. And, uh, you know, I was, I'm a corpsman or was a corpsman and I work with the CBs, the CBs are the construction battalion. So if they, you know, anything that needs to be built, they build it. And I go to make sure they don't hurt themselves or take care of them if they hurt themselves. uh so i remember we're going up this hill this really high hill and we're carrying boxes of crayons coloring books uh you know stuff for the kids and we get up to the top and we didn't see a kid the whole like few weeks we were there and we get up there doing is literally hundreds of kids and he just ran up to us hugged our legs saying thank you thank you usa usa like it was i remember it like clear as day as yesterday and i just remember it just feeling this super euphoric feeling of like of what it feels like to do amazing for someone else.

5:02And I've had validation and feedback from people over the years, but to actually see it in the eyes of kids, I was like, holy crap. You know, so it made me, it really shifted my way of thinking at that point because I was in the Navy at that point for only five years and I had just made E6. So if for those that aren't familiar, E6 is like a high level supervisory position in the, in the U S military. Like I can be in charge of hundreds of people. And I made E6 in five years when it takes the average person 12 years. So that goes to show you like how much of a like go getter I was right. Yeah. We keep it short.

5:41Um, but you know, I felt like I did all I wanted to do in the militaries and then having this experience with the kids, I was like, man, how do I do more cool shit like this, but not just with my time, but monetarily so I can have a bigger impact. So those kinds of shifts were happening in my mind. And I wanted to have a family too. I wanted to have kids. Yeah. Right. So I get back from that deployment. My girlfriend, Sonia was waiting for me, which is my wife now. We solidified our relationship, eventually got married, had two beautiful daughters. But when I got back, I immediately started to Google and search things.

6:19I'm like, dude, how do I make money online? How do I fire my boss? How to kill my job? Dude, so I was searching things that a lot of people search that when they're lost and tired of their job and sick of the rat race. I was doing all of that. And that landed me on finding search engine optimization, SEO. You would go to Google, you see the ads at the top of the search. You're like, why are these businesses here? And why do I want to click them before anything else? Because they're at the top yeah so i found a guy on youtube talking about seo and how he's making all this money and so i started just to learn from him and this is back in this is back in 2014 yeah like just like that i call it the second wave like there was that first well there was like the three waves but like the first you know the first wave is like the early 2000s when you know it was what it was and then i find like the 2008 was a wave and then 2013 to about 16 was another wave So you got in like early and you saw what was going on.

7:21I want to just go, I think it's super important because what I'm hearing from the story, like something really changed on that trip. Like something really changed in you perspective. It was almost like you had like an internal, external transformation. Can we talk about that? Because I believe your business is a direct reflection of who you are on the inside. and if you're confused and scared and lost on the inside your business is going to be confused lost on the outside so for you it seems like something really clicked yeah man uh it's interesting point to point out there so um you know this kind of dates back probably a lot further than even that short story you know uh you know i'm not going to go too deep on this but you know, I, I came from a childhood that was pretty chaotic.

8:10You know, I kind of experienced things that really no children should ever experience. Uh, and I have two beautiful daughters. So, you know, if you're, you're a parent, you have kids, right? Yeah. I got two girls myself. I get it. Yeah, dude. So, you know, your kids, like you're, they're sponges, you know, their daddy's Superman, like anything he does or mommy does, it's like gold. They take it as truth, you know? And, you know, I saw things growing up that, you know, I should, I should never see. So I now have an example of what not to be of a parent. I want to pour the best I can into my kids.

8:45What I found through that experience of trauma, going to bed, not knowing if I'm going to eat, physical, verbal abuse, it was just all the things you can probably imagine, to be honest with you. I ran away from home at 16 years old because I was fed up with that lifestyle. That eventually got me into the military because it was either that go to college when I was like a 1.4 GPA high school student or, or yeah, yeah, actually. Yeah. You know, I, I got caught shoplifting that target at a young age too. So, you know, I, you know, and I did go to jail for, for a night, you know, and it was horrible.

9:22Um, it was either that jail or like homeless, you know, so go to the military, you know? So I found what I was doing though, is I was like burying my head in the ground like an ostrich and just focusing on success. Like that's all that mattered to me. Like be great, do good and everything else will figure itself out. And that worked for a good amount of time. And a lot of entrepreneurs do do that, you know, but what I found, at least from my experience and a lot of people that I talked to, they're usually running from something like, what is it you're running from? Right. And for me, I was like running from dealing with those memories and that trauma that I, that cooped up over all those years, you know?

10:00And, um, you know, I, I hit the high rank in the military. I made a bunch of money, helped a lot of people, did a lot of good, married my beautiful wife, had two daughters, uh, created a non-figure company on my way to my second nine figure company, you know, doing all these things. But what I realized is success doesn't silence your soul, right? You have to address those internal things that are, that are haunting you. So I had to at one point turn around and look back and say, hey, I'm not going to allow this to live rent free in my brain anymore. I'm going to forgive and let it go and move on so I can have growth and sustainability for my own family, for my own kids.

10:39Because it was showing up on how I led, how I might have shortly reacted to my wife, all of these things, making bad decisions at times with money. Like I'm not perfect. I've made, you know, bad decisions in business life in general, you know, so I had to let a lot of that go, you know, so that transition was like paramount for me because I was whole, it was holding me back. Like, you know, like a ball chain wrapped around, uh, my ankle. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I hear, I, I see a lot of entrepreneurs and I mean, I think a lot of people go into entrepreneurship with that type of, uh, um, I would say past trauma, you know, it's to prove something that, you know, to prove them, to prove their story wrong and to prove everyone else, you know, right, or whatever it might be.

11:25But let's get in because you said, you know,$100 million company, that's, you know, that's not, that's not small business there that, you know, that takes a lot of work and takes, to me, it takes finding or cracking that code. Like, what was that? So you've said you found SEO, and then you started getting into SEO. How did you going from SEO turn into like a hundred million dollar business. Yeah. Um, I, so SEO allowed me in within about five months to replace my annual salary in the military on the monthly basis. I was making around 50 grand a month. Okay. About doing what? Cause I want to be very, you know, for people that are listening, like, what does that even mean?

12:03Like, so what I would do, I was helping local, uh, businesses get ranked high on, on Google, but specifically what I was doing. So that's like the overarching, but what I would do is I would create these micro websites in the small cities. I live in San Diego. In San Diego, there's these sub cities, Escondido, Chula Vista, Encinitas, and they all have maybe 100 ,000 to 300 ,000 people population. Instead of ranking for San Diego, I want to rank for Escondido. There's only 200 ,000 people there, so I can get a site ranked super quick for a carpet cleaning company or a dentist or something because nobody's Everyone wants San Diego, right?

12:43They're forgetting about the micro cities. So I would get a site ranked, my own site ranked within like 30 days, sometimes a week. Number one for dental, carpet cleaning, auto detail, limousine company. And then I would just basically get, I would find the, I would target a business owner. I would get their personal contact information. A lot of it lived online on Google. A lot of these mom and pop businesses, they'll put their personal contact on the website. Back in 2015, it was super easy. Or you can use a tool like Sales Genie and pay 50 cents and get their phone number anyway, their cell phone.

13:22So I would do that. And then boom, rank the site number one, all of a sudden, boom, it's blowing up with leads. People are calling the phone number, texting, emailing, and I would just redirect that traffic instantly over to that business's cell phone number. Now they're getting called like crazy, Like, what the fuck? Why I'm getting all these leads to my phone. This is amazing. But what the heck's going on? So I would let that run for a day or two and then I would call them up and I would say, Hey, the door here. Okay. This is wow. Wow. Not cutting you off, but wow. You're telling me, see, this is so gold.

13:56This is, this is what most people don't do. They don't. You were actually building the site, ranking the site, getting people to call. like let's call this this is a dry cleaner in in a small town in san diego all of a sudden his phone's going off the hook going i don't understand why but this is amazing and then a couple days let's call it let's call it what it is maybe a couple weeks a couple days maybe even a month later you call them and say oh by the way have you noticed that you've gotten some more calls and trash yeah that's me and ah what i love it i love it keep going i just wanted to make sure i was hearing this correctly okay you got it yeah i would call him and say hey uh and i would every single lead when they got a call they would hear a whisper message new lead from douglas james and then the person started talking right so they kept hearing douglas james when they picked up the phone.

14:55So what? Yeah. So when I do that, it's through the call software that I was using, you can do a whisper message. Hey, new lead from Douglas James, press one to receive, right? So they would click one and then instantly be connected to the person that was calling my website or limousine party bus or whatever it might be. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, uh, and then I would say, Hey, this is Douglas James. Uh, how's those leads been working out the last couple of days and it'd be like dude this is amazing we got to sign up like well i don't know you but i love you like yeah let's get it done and then what are your packages going for i would just yeah i would just basically sell them like 20 bucks a lead you know okay so you're selling leads awesome okay you're selling leads yeah yeah i was i was selling leads so every time someone called every time they received a phone number in their crm i would just charge them 20 that's it because you could You control that because you knew how many calls were coming in because you were building it.

15:52That's it. That's it. Wow. So you controlled that whole kind of supply chain. You weren't relying on them to tell you how many leads they were giving you. Not at all. I own the website. I had the tracking. I knew how many leads and calls it was generating. I had all the calls recorded, literally everything. So if they didn't want to do business with me or they want to try to screw me over and say, hey, you want to pay you? I would just turn it off. And then I would immediately send it to another business owner. Okay. So I've tried myself. I've created a lot of businesses. I've seen a lot of people come up with ideas.

16:24It's just go nowhere. There must have been something before this, a greatness that, that, that, that you knew that clicked. Like, what was it that thing that everyone, because I, everyone can go try this and it's not going to work, but something changed for you. Something worked for you where you're like, I got this. What was that? Like what, if you can recall, what was the thing that just turned everything on for you? Yeah, I had super fast success with that. And I mean, really what clicked and solidified in my brain was the first dollar I ever received. You know, I remember getting a check for like seven grand because my first deal was actually, it was a big deal and they actually negotiated.

17:10I eventually settled in on like 20 or$30 a lead, but they wanted to do performance. And it was actually better for me because they gave me a third of their net margin. Right. And I remember my first check that they ever cut me was for like seven grand. And I was like, holy crap, this works. You know, and I took my wife or my girlfriend at the time, which is my wife now out to dinner. We celebrated and we did it up the wine, everything. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And yeah, man. And that's when I'm living with this. This is it. that because my i have a mentor um his name is dr jeff spencer he was uh he was an olympian and he trained like 40 gold olympians as well and he was with lance armstrong through like not all nine tour de frances and um yeah he's he's like a old g he's a yoda he's 78 years old but anyway he talks he talks about how there's a uh there's a roadmap to success and it starts with uh a daily grind period where you do work, but you don't necessarily expect a certain result in the short term.

18:14You just put your head down and do the work and you trust the process. That's it. You just trust the process and you do the thing until something happens. And that's what I did. And it's not until you get a result that belief is established because you're basically riding on hope the whole time. So until you get a result, that's when you're like, oh, this does work. I I have a result. I've proved it to myself. Now it's even easier just to keep going through that daily grind phase because you're always, you know, there's a belief at the end of that tunnel. So I just put my head down, dude, for two or three months learning this.

18:50And all that money really came in in the back half of that five or six months. So I almost made no money for about three months to four months, actually. And I just kept building and doing my process. So that that's really what like you know solidified it for me but here's here's the kicker with this dude um the way i was ranking sites and the way i was learning from to do this uh turned out to not be so great so what happened was one day and i had about 20 something clients paying me somewhere between a thousand to twenty five hundred bucks a month back then okay yeah they were all ranked number one on google for all their perspective carpet cleaning auto detail whatever And I wake up one day and all my sites disappeared from page one of Google for their perspective search.

19:37And I'm like, what the F? My clients are calling me. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, what's going on with the leads? You know, you know, I'm like, I don't know. And then I get an email from Google that says Google released a new algorithm update. It was called the penguin. And I'm like, what the is this? so basically it was it was flagging people that were using black hat processes to ranks websites i don't know what the i don't know what black hat was i was just following what the youtube guy was saying what the guy was learning from turns out the way i was doing it wasn't it wasn't like they didn't like that right yeah yeah it affected a lot of that because that's a it's very important what you just said there because some people don't know that i know that a little bit because i i've dabbled in the google space right there's like the this concept of black hat which is nowadays i could be wrong like not many people dabble in that because it's just like it's not a long-term play yeah how would you how do you explain black hat um it's probably i would probably just say it's ways of um loopholes or or gamifying systems and manipulating systems to get the the result in some ways, maybe not compliantly, what I would say.

20:51It's just going around their policy, finding loopholes. And black hat could be considered for a lot of... There's white hat ways to do things and black hat things. And then there's the gray area, right? Then people will say the gray area. Honestly, when I think back, a lot of it was gray zone because Google's policy has actually changed many, many, many times. Because of these things, yeah. Now you got things like AI. So now they're writing terms and conditions about all kinds of things that were even relevant 10 years ago. Right. So this is always a navigating, a transforming landscape that we're having to deal with.

21:29But it's basically saying like, there's the right, kind of the right way to do things and kind of the wrong way to do things. Right. Yeah. That, and I was doing it, I guess the wrong way, but you had no idea because you were just following this guy on YouTube and you're like, this is working. So going back to that story, cause we're leaving this on the cliffhanger. Like, so what happened? So now you're getting success. You're feeling good. You know, fast forward, you're taking the wife out on dinners and you're looking at this going, okay, I'm making more money than I ever made in my life in a month than I would make in a year.

21:59Uh, and it seems like you were, you know, well, obviously a hundred million, I call it wildly successful, but before it became a hundred million, you're, you know, doing X amount of a month and then boom, you wake up one day and it's like, it's over. It's like someone shut off the taps. What do you do? Yeah. Well, at that point, most of my clients were like, this is a scam. Like screw you. Basically like they had a very negative reaction, unfortunately, you know? And, uh, I, you know, I was like, what, what I'm, I'm sorry. Like, what do you want me to do? But I did have a small handful of clients that were like willing to hang out and like, yeah, they trusted you that knew that you were not doing this on purpose.

22:38Yeah. Yeah. And it wasn't, everyone was like, you know, but some people, you know, they're short tempered for the thing that goes wrong. They bail out, whatever. Um, I had like five or so clients that were like sticking around. So I was like, look, I'm going to learn Google ads and Facebook ads. Like, cause I would look, I would go on Facebook and I would see the little, you know, sponsored ad and I'm like, okay, that's something there. Okay. I'll go on Google. I see the, the, the sites rank the top. Let me figure out how to do that. So now, now I started looking at that. And, um, of course I sucked at it.

23:09I didn't know what I was doing in the beginning, lost like almost all those clients or after two weeks, 30 days, they were gone. I had one client that stuck around. It was my first client, the limousine party bus company. And they were like, dude, let's just figure this out. Let's go back to a performance model. I'm like, okay. So I really put my head down, learn Facebook ads, learn Google ads. And, uh, yeah. And after 30 days, they cut me another check for like almost eight grand, you know? Okay. So, right. There's so much. I wish we had so much time. There's so much things I love to talk about from the entrepreneur perspective of that kind of moment where you're at the high and then you lose it.

23:49And when you do, I believe when you have good relationships and you do good things, good people will stay around because you just said they're there. They can see the long distance versus just a short distance. Yeah. You as an entrepreneur, you're sitting there in that even that first 30 days, you went from making all this money to no money, learning something so uncomfortable back to the drawing board. What's going on with you in that moment? Like, how are you staying in the game? How are you keeping it above water and not losing your hair and freaking out? All I got to say is I had the belief.

24:25I knew this world was legit. it, the online marketing world in general. But I was smart enough to realize that SEO is not the play. I need a pivot. And that's when I noticed ads. And I would find people online talking about making$4 with$1 on paid ads because it's literally like an ATM machine that gives you instant returns. So at that moment, I was just extremely, extremely determined. And yes, I was very, very frustrated because I basically lost my$50 ,000 a month business overnight, instantly. It was devastating. It truly was. And I had to show up to work the next morning in uniform. right so this happened at like 6 a.m i gotta be at work at 7 a.m in uniform at attention checking in right so yeah dude oh you're talking but you're still in the military at this point i'm active duty yes oh i had no idea sorry i thought okay so i thought you're i i assumed see don't ever assume i assumed you were already done so you're in the middle i'm not laughing i'm I'm, I'm, I'm, I can't, if anybody who's an entrepreneur can understand this stress, you're, you're trying to sit there and active duty while this is going on behind the scenes.

25:51My God, like, again, the strength, the resilience, the determination to stay in the game. There's no joke there. And I'm going to assume back then you didn't deal with your shit either. At that point, you hadn't dealt with the stuff we were talking about earlier. So you got all that trauma coming up in so many which ways. Man, you must have been a wrecking ball inside. I was. But here's the thing. The success and drive to figure out business buried the trauma. So that was a good thing. It capped it. So that was good. But I was very much like, dude, yeah, I was a wreck. I was a wreck. I was at lunch.

26:32I was taking two-hour lunches. I was going to meet clients during lunch, changing out of uniform, getting into street clothes. Yeah, yeah. You know, sometimes showing up late to work and leaving early, you know, like I was doing, I, you know, I, my superiors in the military didn't make my life transition easy either. Right. And I did not give them a good reason to take it easy on me either. So, but, um, I, yeah, I was still active duty for four years doing this before I actually got out, you know, so I was making like, by the time I got out, I was making already a couple hundred grand a month when I got out the military.

27:08Wow. Wow. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's not going to make those superiors happy either, right? There's got to be a little jealousy there. And then you're not also doing the rule, you know, going against the rules. That must have been very challenging. So, so what happened going back? This is wild. I love it. What a great story. So going back, everything falls apart. You then figure out, you looked at, again, being forward sight, seeing the future. You see ads, you see the Google ads, you start learning it, you start growing it. And you're telling me it was only 30 days. Literally, it was only 30 days later.

27:39You're right back at your first$8 ,000 check again. Yep, 30 days. And then only about two, two and a half months, I was back at 50K pretty quick. So once I figured it out for them, dude, I just took that same case study. And I took that money and I did my same strategy. But instead of waiting two to four weeks to rank a website, I could turn on a Facebook ad or Google ad and immediately get leads that day. so i just took the same websites that i made which were just basically one page funnels right yeah and yeah i would just run traffic to them and start getting calls again instantly i would the same pages that you had to the same pages that were already on google they were just on page 20 exactly so instead of relying on google to send you the traffic you're just paying the traffic to go there anyways that's it you know and phone numbers started bringing again and then all the clients came back.

28:36Some didn't, but most of them came back and then I got even more clients back. So I got the 50K within two months and then that grew to six figures pretty quickly after that. And then how did that company, because that's kind of an agency service company, how does that company grow to$100 million? So that company didn't. It's the coaching, consulting that got me up to those numbers. Right. So, so basically, you know, I was not quiet about making money when I was in the military. Uh, I was telling my colleagues and friends that I was, you know, serving with, I bought like a$200 ,000 Mercedes. How can you not really, you know, you know, I got, I got to say it like even me, like, how do you not, when you're surrounded with that type of mindset and I'm not saying it in a rude way but there is a certain type of mindset of someone who's making 80 100 120k versus someone who's making million dollars a year and you know that there's there there comes a different mindset there how do you not want every and a person like you who wants to help people and you're seeing them struggle and you're seeing them in this mindset that doesn't serve them how do you not flaunt it in a way and tell them that you can help them and show them i mean that's what i do with my agency too i try to help all my friends that are stuck in that six figures and like hey like come over here and you'll make a couple six figures from working from home what are you doing what are you doing struggling and working for the man right so I get that uh so I love it all right so you're you're you're I just I'm just picturing it right now you're the captain in the military uh driving in a$200 ,000 Mercedes and everyone's going what is going on I mean if you wanted to if you wanted a target on your back i don't think there was any more bigger one than money any military base you drive on you got to stop at the check station and show your id yeah every time i would roll up the guys that were on duty to check the id they thought i was they were getting like oh like i got a tent this is about to be an officer we have to salute yeah yeah yeah yeah and i'm and i'm like an e6 active duty guy which is a good high position and but i'm not an officer yeah not an officer my id and they look at the double take like what's going on here because e6 in san diego with housing is probably about six thousand a month yeah well there you go okay so yeah yeah your car payment was six thousand or at least a third that right yeah yeah yeah so that's that's awesome okay so then you you said then you turn into a coaching business So because you were so loud and because people eventually people like, what do you do?