He Made $3M a Year and Decided He Had Enough

**Daniel Berk** (0:00)
In 2009, Jonathan Goodman was a broke personal trainer living in Toronto, making only $41 an hour. He started the blog, self-published the book by 24, and by 2013, he had his first seven-figure year.
Today, he's done over $35 million in revenue, built a $14 million net worth, never raised a dollar, never sold a company, and takes his family abroad for six months out of the year, all while paying 50% on his income to his Canadian taxes by choice.
This is the story of a guy who found his number and stopped chasing. Moneywise is a Hampton podcast. Hampton's a private community for founders doing 2 million or more in revenue. There's real conversations that happen in the Hampton community behind closed doors that you really just can't get anywhere else, especially if you're a wealthy founder. If you're looking for a community like this, go to joinhampton.com. Now, Jon Goodman on Moneywise. Welcome back to another episode of Moneywise. Today, we have Jonathan Goodman on the show. Thanks so much for joining us today, Jon. Yeah.

**Jonathan Goodman** (0:59)
What a joy, man. I'm looking forward to this.

**Daniel Berk** (1:01)
Me too. I wanted to just start off with your family growing up. You grew up youngest of four in a Jewish professional family. Sounds like there were doctors and lawyers and accountants.
What was money like in your house growing up?

**Jonathan Goodman** (1:15)
I mean, money, we were like middle to upper class. So we'd go out for dinner once a month at the pickle barrel. We had our time share in Orlando.
But beyond that, yeah, if something was on sale, we like stocked up. There were four hungry kids. My parents never made a lot of money, but they made enough and they were very smart with it. And although I was never really taught like explicitly about money growing up, through osmosis, I could see what they were doing. And I think that that kind of watered down and helped me a lot now.

**Daniel Berk** (1:49)
That's great. And when you started this personal training program in your 20s, you've vocalized even on X and elsewhere on the internet, you were a broke personal trainer. What did broke personal trainer look like? What did that actually mean?

**Jonathan Goodman** (2:05)
All personal trainers.
It's interesting, cause I was about as successful as a personal trainer as you'd get in Toronto at that time. I had 30 client hours a week. I was the senior trainer at my club. I was referring my overload of clients to other trainers. But I mean, I was making $41.80 an hour. That was what I was taking home. That wasn't what I was charging out at.

**Daniel Berk** (2:27)
That was Canadian dollars or USD?

**Jonathan Goodman** (2:29)
It's Canadian dollars. I was getting a monthly salary for being a senior trainer. I was making about $70,000 a year, which is actually a pretty good salary as a personal trainer. The problem is, I was at the cap. In that industry, there's only so much you can grow, unless you want to own a gym or become a business owner or whatever. And so, I reached this point, I call it my red couch moment, because I was living in my parents' basement, and I was sitting on the red couch. And I looked up and I was working like 12 hour days, and I had just pulled a hamstring playing hockey at night. Oh, geez. And so I was off my feet for two weeks, which means I couldn't work for two weeks. And all that I could think about was, is this what my life is going to be like?
I know that I want to have kids at one point. I know that I'm probably going to get sick at one point. Like, if I can't be in this career where I'm not going to be able to work, even if the money is good enough for now. And then of course, there's the cap of the growth, which was an even bigger issue.

**Daniel Berk** (3:27)
Okay, and the cap of the growth, is that what started you down this journey of realizing you could actually make more?

**Jonathan Goodman** (3:34)
Oh God, I don't know what started me down this journey, to be honest. Every adult that I ever knew growing up was a lawyer, doctor, dentist, teacher and accountant. Like, my dad's an engineer, my mom's a teacher, my sister's a lawyer, my brother's a small business banker, my other brother is a high school math teacher.

**Daniel Berk** (3:53)
So you were around a lot of ambitious people?

**Jonathan Goodman** (3:55)
I was around a lot of very smart, very intelligent people who had their lives more or less set in front of them. Like they knew and how I grew up was, adults knew that they were making X amount of dollars this year. In five years, if they do a good job, they're going to make Y amount of dollars. In 10 years, they're going to be at Z amount of dollars. And so they could very much plan for that. And if they save for that and if they assume a percentage of growth, I mean, this is kind of what I understood through osmosis growing up. Entrepreneurship wasn't a thing. So I never even considered it to answer your question. I didn't even know that it existed, really, growing up, if I think back. It was just, I call it optimistic ignorance. I just kind of, I was personal training on the floor. I wrote down what I was doing on the back of my clipboard or if I struggled with something or if I was asked a question by a client or if I had a crush on a secretary or if I saw another trainer instructing an exercise wrong. I wrote it on the back of my clipboard and I went home at night. I thought about how I might be able to deal with that better. Call a friend, I'd say, how would you deal with this? And I wrote that down. It was personal development.