About

Hey there. My name is Josh, and I started Scale A Dollar in 2021. My goal is to help you learn how to make more money online.

It is as simple as that.

That said, if you want to learn more about my story and entrepreneurial journey, keep reading below.

I figured the best way to help you understand who I am, what I stand for, and why Scale A Dollar can help you is to use the timeline below 😎.

However, if you want to go directly to some of the best articles and skip this timeline/story/mission stuff, you should start here:

• Best Side Hustles to Start as A Newbie
• How to Start a Profitable Blog in 2024
• Business Ideas to Scale in 2024

Timeline of Scale A Dollar & 7 Lessons of a Business Owner

Below is a little about myself, but more importantly, seven lessons when it comes to starting an online company that you will want to really embody!

The 1980s-2009

The long story short is that I was born in the late 1980s, I am a millennial, I went to WVU and graduated with a teaching degree in 2009, and my passion has always been coaching kids.

The more extended version is I was hustling in elementary school, and I always seemed to have an entrepreneurial spirit. You could find me selling hotdogs on the street corner of Compton… Road!

Seriously, it was Compton Road. It just happens to be in Virginia.

Back to the story… I was always selling things in classes to friends and finding ways to work outside for the neighbors to make a few dollars.

From there, things escalated to my door-to-door coupon sales business.

By high school, I worked two jobs, not because I had to but because I wanted to. If there was an opportunity for overtime, I always took the OT. If someone had something valuable (to me) and they were tossing it, I would try and flip it.

During my college years, I was very much focused on typical college behavior and getting good grades, but I also had a knack for making things happen when it came to finding ways to make money…

No, I was not a drug dealer or anything like that, but I was always figuring out ways to hustle, from writing papers for others to selling used textbooks or refereeing sports. All this to say, I was very ambitious, very outward, and very much a lover of making extra money… which leads to this first lesson below:

2010-2016

After college was… well, an exciting time.

By all accords, I was doing everything I wanted to regard my career. I went to school, worked hard, got good grades, landed a job, and got a Master’s degree all by 2012.

However, 2012 was also one of my life’s BEST and WORST years…

I met my eventual wife in October of 2012, but it happened to be a month after my mom passed away at age 51 from cancer.

During this time, I was able to manage professionally, becoming the coach of the year for a high school as a wrestling coach and football assistant coach (I have always had a knack for helping/coaching others), but something was missing.

I thought moving from being a teacher/coach to an Athletic Director role would do the trick, but I quickly realized after two years in that role that working 60 hours a week for a salary – even if the job was COOL – was not what I wanted to do for 30+ years.

By 2016, we were married, but my wife happened to have her Doctorate in Physical Therapy… accompanied by $300,000 in student loans.

The loss of my mom in 2012, the overworking and burnout from 2014 to 2016, and the six-figure student loan problem meant we had to do something differently.

So, in 2015, I started a small landscaping side hustle business and an e-commerce business, which I had just played around with. It just so happened that in 2020, the e-commerce brand took off (keep reading). However, the seeds were planted…

2017

My why was established:

• We needed to get out of student loan debt ASAP
• We needed more time to start a family
• We didn’t want to experience another family loss and live with regret

Those were THREE reasons I started the first blog I alluded to earlier, Money Life Wax (as of 2023, it was merged with Wealth of Geeks).

I started, which is a big deal. Still, I made the classic mistake of thinking I would be an overnight success without any knowledge of building a website, blogging, SEO, marketing, graphics, keyword research, etc.

✅ How to Start a Blog & Scale it Here!

This is the newbie mistake ALL new online business owners make:

1. They have massive amounts of optimism
2. They hit a little negative or realize their idea won’t necessarily be easy
3. Doubt creeps in
4. If you push forward, you will probably learn and then earn. Or, in some cases, you might give up

Money Life Wax started off rough; I had no clue what to do. I did manage to make $20 with an affiliate in month two, but most importantly, I did not quit, which led to this enormous lesson:

Lesson Three: Whatever you set out to do will most likely suck… at first. You will make a lot of mistakes, you will become frustrated at times, and you will think you don’t have what it takes. This is where you HAVE to be really careful and AWARE of all of this – you have to push through the pain point.

This graphic shows it all – you will have uninformed optimism and the more action you take you will start to have informed pessimism – the honey moon phase will end. Ultimately, you will need to break through the valley of despair to reach SUCCESS!

2018

Ok, so I shared how I started my first blog, and I forgot to mention some of the mistakes:

1. My domain was Money, Life, & The Whole Ball of Wax
2. I used Wix instead of a self-hosted blog with WordPress
3. I spent 48 hours transferring blog posts and editing them in Elementor, only to learn that it was all wrong
4. I had to call someone to get help with setting up a web menu
5. I got attacked by a feminist group on Twitter about the title of an article (not kidding)

All this to say, somehow, I managed to make it to 2018, and the reason 2018 is noteworthy is that that is when I decided I had learned enough blogging to start a digital marketing company to not only house my blog but also offer “Blogging Marketing Services” to small business owners.

2019 

At the beginning of 2019, after slugging along with my blog (slogging), it quickly became a hobby, and I lost my solo digital marketing client. I wasn’t making ANY money with my efforts at this point.

I was becoming more than discouraged. I had worked two years on my blog, and I felt like I had accomplished very little, spun my wheels, and really didn’t know much.

I then took an SEO course that would revolutionize things.

In the SEO (search engine optimization) course, I learned how to write better, highly optimized articles that would rank higher on search engines (primarily Google).

That and marketing like crazy with HARO helped me win some huge PR wins. I wound up having article features and blurbs in the Huffington Post, Business Insider, Forbes, Yahoo Finance, Market Watch, Discover, and several others.

Personal Goal = Featured on Forbes, Fox Business, NY Times, and maybe others. 

I started focusing on taking more DELIBERATE action instead of blind, massive action. I started hearing to create results, 80% of your blog will be marketing and 20% everything else.

In addition to marketing my blog better, I helped a friend build his website and landed him as a marketing client.

All the hard work writing started to pay off because people suddenly asked for freelance writing help. Just an extra $500 was a big win. The more deliberate action I took, the better the results!

2020 

The COVID-19 pandemic was not friendly, and I wish it had never happened. However, I made the most of it and the flexibility to work remotely as a teacher.

First, I set my alarm for 7:00 AM every day. With work in flux, I was scared about the future and decided to double down on my marketing and blogging efforts.

My blog had grown quite a bit towards the end of 2019, and after joining a paid blogging group, things were heating up. I went from one digital marketing client to three before March 13th, 20220 (when the world shut down).

The MLW blog income tripled, and freelance writing gigs were taking off all at the right time. However, I realized most of this newfound success in digital marketing & blogging was not “Overnight.”

It’s the improving 1% daily theory if you’re unfamiliar with marginal gains.

When you are deliberate, consistent, and committed to something, you should expect an exponential-like result in 2-3 years. This is precisely what happened with my former blog and my marketing company.

After months of inconsistent growth and income, I finally hit a stride, and results poured in. This leads to lesson six in our story of entrepreneurship and business growth:

2021

If 2020 was a great year for online business ownership, 2021 was even better! The short and sweet highlights version of 2021 included:

• Birth of the first son in June 2021! 😎
• Surpassed career income with all part-time endeavors (hit the six-figure mark for the first time)
• Averaged $6,000 to $10,000 per month with online business income
• The largest month was over $30,000
• Sold Money Life Wax in December of 2021

You could care less about the highlights or the great things that happened for me in 2021, and I can relate. I remember reading “Blog Income Reports” from other bloggers and felt like throwing up.

I was not jealous, but I honestly wanted to know HOW to make it happen for me. Here is what I will say in lesson seven that helped me so much in 2021 – I learned how to scale.

2022 to Present Day

Here we are. Today, you are currently reading the About page on Scale A Dollar! I would love to help 100 people start their first company and have success!

But if you want to know what I am genuinely about, this picture says it all:

I want to create time and options for my family. It is really that simple. And I want others to experience the same! Join us on the journey!