A millionaire who once flipped burgers at McDonald’s says it was ‘not that hard’ to build his mega £10 million empire.
Joe Davies spent years working ‘dead-end jobs' before he decided enough was enough. The lad from Birmingham was desperate to leave McDonald's alongside other roles he said he ‘hated’.
“I felt like I wasn’t doing anything important,” he said. “I wanted to create something but my motivation wasn’t very high in these jobs.”
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Not going to uni as planned because he ‘only wanted to make money’, Joe had ‘this burning desire to start something on my own and, at the very least, make a bit more of a difference’.
Looking up to his entrepreneur dad, the 36-year-old could ‘sense an opportunity’ in E-commerce. With an interest in internet business, he took on a £100-per-week job as an IT apprentice.
The 36-year-old used this role to learn the ropes – including understanding how to use SEO to make money. “This was the first time I had heard that word,” he explained.
“I couldn’t put my finger on it but it had elements of engineering, coupled with creativity and marketing, which really fed into my creative personality. I never got bored and at my next job in an SEO agency, I quickly learned the business side.”
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And luckily for him, it gave him an idea that would end up earning him and his best mate Joe Taylor millions.
Sitting opposite each other at their desks the pair decided to launch FATJOE.com back in 2012, doing something they say other agencies hadn’t done before: developing a system to score top clients SEO results.
And a year later, they quit their jobs and rented an office to make it ‘real’.
“Me and Joe would be working up to 13 hours a day just to get everything done,” the lad recalls. Eventually, they built a large team of specialists and grew their roster of clients.
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Within just two years, the two Joes had made their first million.
He added: “We accidentally created this great solution, a service platform for agencies to outsource SEO services, that even our old agency uses today.”
And now, the company employs 100 people globally, with 1,000 agencies on the client roster.
After working his way up from part-time jobs and burger flipping in McDonald’s, Joe wants to help others succeed with three traits to become an entrepreneur.
“Personal drive to become better is number one,” he said. “Curiosity to poke around and try out different ways of making things work is second. But most importantly, a drive to make money.
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“It’s cliche, but just start something – do and build.” Joe said procrastination was a major part of the problem with him and says there’s no such thing as having a ‘destiny’.
“It’s all about working hard and seeing where this takes you,” he concluded. “I don’t like to think too far ahead, because even with grand plans, they can change.”
Jess Battison