Meet Mike Black. He’s a successful guy. He’s also a wealthy guy. One of those self-made business types that you sort of admire. You know the type – fresh-faced and eager. Not exactly lacking in confidence.
He runs Told Media, a software development agency that ‘helps companies recruit leaders across engineering, product development, marketing and sales’. It does well, pulling in seven figures in revenue every year. Good for Mike, eh?
Ever ready to challenge himself, Mike decided back in 2023 that he would ditch it all to become poor.
Not because he’s gone off the idea of being wealthy, but because he wanted to prove that it was possible to earn $1m (£808,000) from nothing, in just a year. He wanted to practice what he preaches in his online business mentoring programs.
Black called it the ‘Million Dollar Comeback Challenge’. The idea was that he would prove to others that you don’t need money to make money. You just need dedication, hard work and some business savvy.
‘I knew a lot of people who lost everything during the pandemic and they got really depressed,’ he tells viewers in one YouTube video. ‘I even had a friend that lost a $10 million business overnight.’
Over the course of a series of special vlogs, you can see Mike embark on the mission as he steps away from work, gives up his house and car and has all assets frozen and possessions put into storage.
He makes himself intentionally homeless, that’s how extreme the challenge is. It’s an overwhelming start to proceedings and a huge shock for the wealthy entrepreneur.
To begin with, not only did Mike struggle to find anywhere to sleep, he was even being refused water when he asked for it.
Soon, though, someone let him stay in their RV. Within a few days, he had made his first $300 (£242) by selling some furniture he’d picked up for free.
‘One of the best things to sell are tables. I started taking ads on Craigslist in the free section, putting it on Facebook Marketplace and selling it for a profit. I acted as the middleman, handling all the logistics between the buyer and the seller.’
According to Mike, in just under a week of middle-manning these furniture transactions, using a borrowed computer, he’d earned enough to buy one for himself.
In a fortnight he was making enough to lease some dirt cheap office space. Soon after, he could afford to rent somewhere modest to live.
Three months in, so around a quarter of the way, Mike set himself up as a freelance social media manager and took on some clients. Not long after that, he came up with his own coffee brand.
‘Look at where we’re at right now. We’re not making millions of dollars but I’m getting on calls with big tech companies pitching them on running their social media. I’m starting a coffee brand. I have a coffee dude in Austin now,’ Black said. ‘I mean everything’s going in the right direction. Three months ago I was homeless!’
Four months in, Black had proven somewhat that it was possible to make (some) money from nowhere (albeit with plenty of disclaimers chucked in there that he rarely dwelled upon in his vlogs).
But as month four came around, that million dollars was looking very elusive indeed. Then Mike struck upon some bad luck.
Mike found out that his father had been diagnosed with stage four cancer of the colon and had begun chemotherapy. Despite this crushing personal news, he pursued the project anyway.
He carried on for a few more months, even when his own health began to suffer. ‘I’ve been dealing with a lot of things personally, and recently something’s happened that has really pushed me over the edge,’ he admitted in one rather heartfelt video.
‘My personal health has declined to the point where I really need to start taking care of it. Throughout the entire project, we haven’t shared it with you, but I’ve been in and out of the doctor’s office.’
Black talked candidly about how he suffers from autoimmune diseases which cause extreme joint pain and ‘chronic fatigue’.
As his and his father’s health declined, Mike decided to quit the challenge. He had two months remaining.
‘I have officially decided to end the project early. Now as much as it hurts me to do this, especially with just two months left, I feel like it’s the right thing to do,’ he announced on YouTube.
‘Health and family were much more important than the challenge so I decided to stop the whole project.’
Mike ended the project after ten months. He had made just $64,000 (£51,700). Which, of course, isn’t bad going from the starting point of zero and the other conditions of the challenge. But it’s rather unlikely that he’d have turned that $64,000 into a million bucks in just eight weeks.
The businessman had his own, valid reasons to quit. But his challenge proved that you can’t make a million dollars in a year when you’re broke and homeless. The rest of us already knew that, didn’t we…?
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