Tai Lopez is a well-known investor, partner, and advisor to more than 20 multi-million dollar businesses, with millions of people viewing his self-help videos and completing his programs for a happy life.
He’s a wildly successful entrepreneur who’s all over social media, so the question is: How did he get to this point?
The Tai Lopez brand story
According to Lopez himself, every successful entrepreneur needs a brand story, and he is one of the rags to riches through sheer hard work. Lopez was raised in poverty by his mother, with his father in prison.
He describes himself as having gone from sleeping on the couch in his mother’s trailer with just $47 in his pocket to living in a dream home in Beverly Hills. It’s no wonder that we ask how he achieved that, and what lies behind the brand story.
Early entrepreneurship
Lopez seems to have been born an entrepreneur. He started his first ever business at the age of six, selling cherry tomatoes for his mother by the side of the road. Lopez noticed that nobody wanted to buy tomatoes, so he decided to open a lemonade stand instead.
“In the time I had sold one bag of tomatoes for 25 cents, I was able to sell ten times more with my lemonade stand,” he said.
It’s an early sign of the business instinct that identifies what people want to buy and moves to deliver it.
He describes another entrepreneurial trait when talking about his stint running a farm in Virginia when he was 19. As Lopez tells it, he made $12,000 that summer after striking a deal with the farm owner. “If you put the money up to buy the cows, I’ll do all the work, then you get paid back first, and if there’s any money left over, we’ll split it.”
Dedicated to learning
Although Lopez is a college dropout, he is self-taught and values learning. As a teen, Lopez didn’t have many friends because of the gang culture around his home, so instead, he buried himself in books.
At around that time, he wrote to his grandfather, who was a scientist, asking for some life advice. In reply, his grandfather told him: “Tai, the modern world is too complicated. You’ll never find all the answers from just one person. If you’re lucky, you’ll find a handful of people throughout your life who will point the way.”
Lopez took that guidance to heart. After leaving college, he continued to devour books sent by his grandfather, who became one of the handfuls of people pointing Lopez through life. His reading took him to Aristotle’s teachings on Nicomachean ethics, particularly how to live a happy and satisfying life.
This philosophy, together with his reading habit, forms the basis of the self-help enterprise that supports his rich lifestyle.
After a while, Lopez decided to travel the world. He worked odd jobs to earn enough to travel to 51 countries, accumulating interesting learning experiences before returning to the US and spending two and a half formative years with the Amish, years he often refers to in his videos and books.
But after leaving the Amish, finding himself with just $47, he wanted to make money and went about it in a characteristic fashion. He looked for the wealth manager with the biggest ad in the phone book and asked to work for free in exchange for learning all he knows about how to make money.
It’s another decision that reveals Lopez’s entrepreneurial instinct. Rather than looking for a job, Lopez set out to learn how to build his own business and earn more than a salary.
Building a self-help empire
Lopez’s first wealth came from owning Elite Global Dating and other dating sites, which he bought in 2007, but his lifestyle now rests on his entrepreneurial ability to run a self-help empire across social media.
Amongst other things, Lopez sells his “67 step program” to achieving “the good life”; the “Social Media Marketing Agency 2.0” course to train people to start their own agency; runs a Youtube channel with more than 1 million subscribers; and has given a successful Ted Talk “Why i read a book a day (and you should too).”
Lopez was an early adopter of social media for organic and paid marketing, back in 2008, which helped put him ahead of the rest of the pack. His “Here in my garage” ad was one of the first ads to go viral and spawned a rash of spinoffs that helped cement his fame. Although Lopez claims he didn’t expect it to go viral, it didn’t happen on its own. He shot multiple versions and split-tested them before running the final ad because as he says, you need to put in the work to get results.
When discussing what makes his social media content successful, Lopez emphasizes “VRIN material: content that has Value, is Rare, Inimitable, and Non-substitutable.” He prefers long-form content and says that he tracks engagement by minutes viewed, rather than the number of views.
Another pillar of Lopez’s success as a social media influencer is his authenticity. In Lopez’ words, “I built a personal brand around who I already am, instead of who I wanted people to see me as, and I think that’s where a lot of people go wrong. It has to be authentic, otherwise, no one is going to get on board.”
The brand story never falters
It works because Lopez sells self-improvement, which meshes perfectly with his personal branding of self-made rags to riches. It makes him believable when he tells his audience “If you aren’t prioritizing and setting aside time for your own development, you’re going to fall stagnant. You have to make the time, and invest that time wisely, no differently than if you were to invest any amount of money in yourself.”
It’s clear that Lopez still takes his own advice. Although he’s made his fortune, he continues to learn and share what he learns by connecting with experts and celebrities, maintaining his brand story, upholding his integrity, and meeting his entrepreneurial hunger to keep growing.
