The untold secret: How did Fernando Corona become a multi-six-figure entrepreneur

Fernando corona is an Entrepreneur, business consultant and an entrepreneur , he  was born in West Covina, CA, he did his studies in UC Santa Barbara .

Over the past few years, my life has changed immensely: I got married and we recently brought my daughter into the world. As a man, as a father and a husband, these changes in my life got me thinking about, not just about what I’m doing in my professional life, but also why and for whom. As men, we’re born providers. But providing doesn’t just mean meeting the financial needs of my wife and daughter. Yes we have a home, yes we have good food on the table, yes we want to live a life of financial independence where our passive cash flow exceeds our monthly expenses – yet the challenge becomes how do you build financial independence while maintaining the connection with my closest support system, my wife, my daughter, my brother, my parents, and those in my immediate circle.

The goal here was to be the man my family needs me to be, as both a husband and father, and also to grow and create actual wealth that would enable us to reach our dreams of traveling while working, choosing when to work, taking days off to go to the beach as a family at our own discretion, helping our parents with retirement so they can enjoy time with us or their grandkids and all while allowing our cash flowing investments to pay for our lifestyle.

Over the past 2.5 years, this has taken up front work, daily sacrifice, emotionally difficult conversations, and massive imperfect action to earn over $600k across a range of business efforts and investments…failing along the line, I stumbled upon the secret: how to provide, emotionally and financially, and achieve my family’s dreams, all at the same time. And I want to share that secret with you.

I’m the child of second-generation immigrants. Both sides of my grandparents came to LA from Jalisco, Mexico in the 1960s. My abuelo (“grandpa”) spent his life after 30 together with my grandma and their 9 kids and built a home, a life, and a future for his family in the United States without speaking any English. My father used those hard-won opportunities to capitalize on affirmative action and attended UCLA and even made their soccer team as a walk-on. I’ve been lucky enough to have both my parents still together in my 30 years of life and lucky enough to have had my mother be a stay at home mom to care for my brother and I – I attribute much of my self-confidence to my mom who believed in me simply for being…me.

Make no mistake, this country is a land of opportunities and I grew up in a family and community that wasn’t afraid to do that much more to provide, grow, and build for a future we wanted.

Conflict and Compromise: When Being “Good Enough” Wasn’t Enough

I put myself through college at UC Santa Barbara and after completing my Bachelor’s in Mechanical Engineering, I took a careful look at the job market and my skillset. With my qualifications and skills I first picked up a job as a sales engineer/key account manager for Tesla. After two strong years of learning here, I decided to explore the world for a year, working at a hostel in Barcelona, living in Thailand for a year to ultimately return home and pick up another job as a product marketing manager for an engineering company with a salary in the upper five-figure range.

That was good money for someone in their mid-twenties with paid travel to multiple countries and states. The sad realization I had was that working 8-10hrs per day, 5 days a week, with 2-3 weeks’ vacation was actually never going to give me the life that I wanted to live (no matter how much money they paid me).

There had to be another way. The question on my mind was simple: did I really have to wait so long to accumulate the skills and knowledge to create wealth? Or was there a more efficient way to get myself to that point? If I stayed on at the company I was at that moment, I would have had a steady job. My role was to help grow a new division to $20 million over 5 – 10 years and I’d see the benefits in my salary, too. But again, it was just too long a path and no guarantee I would actually fulfil my own dreams after helping this company fulfil theirs.

I was 27 and reasonably successful. Yet I realized I had to do something, take a leap of faith: I could live “good enough,” and provide for my own basic needs, and after ten or twenty years, I might even be able to turn my accumulated experience into solid business prospects. But what about right now? Time was of the essence. At that exact point, I had resources. I wasn’t married yet, no kids – it was all on me: I was perfectly positioned to do something big for myself. I took a leap, left my job, and became a solopreneur.

Growth: Learning and investing in yourself

The first six months of my self-employed life were difficult to say the least. I used much of that time banging my head on the table just trying to understand what does Fernando have to offer? What was the value of the skills I had in terms of 2yrs sales, 2yrs of marketing, and a mechanical engineer degree? How could I turn those skills into a product or service people needed? Who’d want to buy that?

During that time I learned a key lesson: very little to nothing in my life of education and work had actually prepared me for what I went through.

I made just shy of $312 in those first six months. I was easily working 30-40hrs per week, including some weekends. But what “work” was I really doing? So many days I would just be at my desk staring at my computer thinking “okay, Fernando. What the f*%^& can you do today for money?” It’s possible there were so many opportunities dangling right in front of me, but my current skills and experience didn’t allow me to see them. I went through extreme self-doubt and feelings of failure. Was $300 in six months all that my skills and experience were worth? The cold, hard truth was, ‘yes.’ But there was a remedy: I needed to invest in myself, to upskill myself and to learn. I needed to re-learn how to be of value to others who would actually give me their hard earned money and not just for a guaranteed wage.

I first invested $750 for a month with my very first business coach – I started learning but I didn’t feel that I was picking up actionable skills. I spent another $1000 on another coach for a second month, to learn about LinkedIn lead generation. I picked up the skill but I wasn’t able to turn that into action lead generation. I tried a third time. I dug into my 0% credit cards and invested $7500 into a premier business coach. I went into it with an open mind, trying my best to implement the skills and techniques he taught. At this point I am $20k in credit card debt and continued to believe in myself that I could do it if I had the right information and guidance.

Within a month of this new coaching, I landed my first client for a $2300 deal!! This was nearly 8 times more than what I’d made in the past half a year. From that point onwards, I continued a consistent pattern: I’d learn additional skills, utilize them to gain new business, then go back and do it again. One of my clients, Flying V Group (FVG) asked me to do for their clients what I was able to do for them and this created a 2yr long partnership that allowed me to live the life I had envisioned while simultaneously learning new skills of how to be of value to the marketplace. I was living in Puerto Vallarta, working from a laptop on the beach, enjoying time with my wife and living life according to my terms.

In those 2 yrs, COVID hit. Many businesses saw their revenue and growth devastated by this externality. At FVG, though, I leveraged the skills that I’d honed in the short period of time to hold the fort. Over 2021, FVG saw record growth, not decline. I even helped them hire new employees to learn the art of delegation to get their time back…and it helped all of us.

I saw the full value of the skills I had to offer, I decided to go a step further and explore side hustles. I got into everything from real estate rentals to real estate wholesaling, to ecommerce drop shipping to crypto and NFTs, and now in the private equity space. I actually became a partner in a private equity bridge loan financing firm and was able to secure our clients higher than average yields over a 6 month period. Over a period of 2 and half years, I managed to go from making a six figure income to making $300 in 6 months to bringing in over $600,000 in revenue across 2020/2021 – this was money with the potential to transform my future and that of my family’s: I learned how to break free and succeed by making progress.

The road I walked wasn’t simple. Failure and setbacks were the norm, not the exception, but so was learning. Everything that didn’t work taught me what I needed to focus on and improve. And by investing in myself, I realized greater returns than I could’ve imagined. In total coaching and mastermind events for networking and growing myself, I’ve invested well over $40k into that personal development. My firm belief is to invest into yourself in books, courses, coaching, etc. because the version of you that got you where you are is not the version of you that will get you to where you want to go. My goal here is simple: with this content, with my videos and other media, I want to highlight how it’s possible for anyone to take the right decisions, hone their skills, reach their goals, all while maintaining their relationship with their closest support system. Note: this doesn’t always mean your life is balance between work and relationships but it does mean that you understand how to meet the needs of your closest relationships while focusing on your own goals.

You can follow him on social media

Instagram : @itsfernandocorona