Many of us dream of becoming professional sports players. We watch sports when we are young and see incredible athletes who inspire us. Ivan Tapia is a businessman from Tijuana, Mexico, who from a very young age had the opportunity to study at Southwestern College in San Diego California, and begin to achieve his dream to become a professional baseball player
“At age 18 I received a temporary visa to begin studying at Southwestern College in San Diego California, which for me was an incredible opportunity to play baseball in the United States.” Ivan recounts.
Unfortunately, his career did not last long. Ivan suffered a shoulder injury and he knew that his dream of becoming a professional baseball player would be out of reach. Despite attempting to come back from his injury, he focused on finding a plan “B”.
“That summer I hurt my shoulder very badly, and I could never get my potential back from before I had the injury. Even so, I still was trying to make a push to come back. I knew I needed a plan B because my arm wasn’t getting ready.” Ivan explains.
Between the ages of 18 and 22 when he graduated college, Ivan bounced around from job to job. After a while, he moved to Los Angeles to study civil engineering at Cal State and from there returned to San Diego to finish his civil engineering degree. At the time of graduation, he had two job offers to start to work for a company called GLE Engineers.
“I finally graduated, and had a couple of job offers. I was focusing on two of them. 1 with GLE Engineers, a small engineering company in San Diego, and the other Turner Construction a larger Transportation Engineering company. I decided to sign with GLE Engineers because it was a small company with a lot of potential.” Ivan commented.
Much like with his shoulder industry, Ivan could not plan for what the future held for him. Right as he was graduating and entering the market, the economy entered a process of decline and many people were losing their jobs. Ivan, unfortunately, hit another bad stroke of luck and was one of the people unemployed.
“Unfortunately in 2008, I was naive enough not to know what was happening in the U.S. because the economy was in decline and I was not getting enough work, so in December 2008 my bosses decided to let me go. All the rest of December and January they started filling out applications for engineering jobs, but nobody called, and the callers were looking for people with 3+ years of experience but I had less than 2 years of experience, so the competition was very high.” Ivan states.
Ivan started to do MLM, which is a type of business that is formed by a network of independent sellers (also called distributors or representatives), who generate income from the direct sale of products that a company supplies to them. At first, Ivan started doing this more out of necessity than anything else.
“So I made the decision to start an MLM opportunity, which I personally never thought would go 100%. In fact, I was working at this MLM opportunity only part time because I did not think I would make it far with that gig. As I was doing MLM, and looking for a job. I lost my house because of 3 months of missed payments. I was behind on Car payments. I sold it and still was missing some payments, and for my Student Loans, I had to request to pay later, so my credit score started getting bad.” Ivan shares.
Finally, in 2011 things changed for the better. Ivan took off in his MLM venture, increasing his profits progressively and he was no longer doing this just to try and make ends meet, but rather doing it because it was lucrative and helping him succeed in life.
“In January 2011, after working for 6 months, I made the decision to continue doing MLM. I made a couple of changes, finally, in September 2011 I made my first $1,000 in MLM. 2 months later it was about $3,000, 2 months later it was $6,000 a month, and 3 months later it was about $20,000 a month. On July 13, 2012, I quit my job and have not worked for anyone else since. In October I earned my first $50,000 a month, and in 2013 I earned my first $100,000 a month. That year was the first year I earned over $1 million, making it well before 30, and became a millionaire before 30 as well.” exclaims Ivan.
In spite of his earnings, however, Ivan felt empty. He felt that something was missing from his life and he decided he wanted to do more.
“I felt empty because I didn’t have the feeling of contribution, and growth. I felt stuck representing that MLM opportunity, and I wasn’t expanding/investing my money in different diversifications. So in October 2016, we made the decision to change the MLM opportunities because we wanted to help many people, and we wanted to focus more on my purpose in life that I had found. Which was to impact the lives of 1 billion people.” Ivan says.
Today, Ivan is a professional network marketing entrepreneur, international speaker, author of Amazon’s best selling book “Antes Empleado Hoy Millonario” (Formerly Employed Today a Millionaire) and number one annual income earner in the Latino community in Network Marketing.
Ivan is also a consultant for companies that want to expand in marketing, and worldwide, co-owner of different businesses such as real estate, a restaurant chain, an insurance company, and service apps. He is also an investor in technology companies, real estate, start-up companies, the stock market, the crypto market and the forex market.
Find out more about Ivan here.
