How to Make Your First Million Dollars: Brett's 4-Level Ladder

Brett Malinowski's first client paid him $200 to film a nightclub event in Kansas City.

Five years and 17 failed businesses later, he had his first million-dollar year.

If you're trying to figure out how to make your first million dollars, Brett's breakdown of that path is one of the clearest I've seen. Not because it's clever. Because he refuses to sell you a shortcut. His whole argument is that there are four levels to business, you have to climb them in order, and every guru you follow (Hormozi, Iman Gadzhi, Alex Becker, Sam Ovens) climbed the exact same ladder.

He recorded this back in 2023. I'm writing about it now because the ladder hasn't changed, and because most of the founders I talk to are stuck on a level they don't even know they're on.

Watch it, then I'll walk through the levels with his real numbers.

The 4 levels (and why you can't skip one)

Brett's framework in one glance:

• Level 1: get good at one skill, sell it yourself (first $10K/month)
• Level 2: agency, other people fulfill while you sell (first $100K... then a wall)
• Level 3: course + community, teach what you've actually done (first $1M)
• Level 4: software (the $10M+ game)

His claim is blunt: "You have to put the time in at each level before you can move up to the next step."

Everyone wants to start at level 3 or 4. They see Hormozi selling courses or Becker selling a SaaS and try to copy the end state without the decade of inputs behind it.

Brett's version of the receipts: Iman Gadzhi went video, then video agency, then the Grow Your Agency course, then Agency Flow software. Alex Becker went SEO, SEO agency, courses, then built Hyros and sold it (Brett puts the number at $110 million). Sam Ovens went consulting, consulting.com courses, then walked away to build Skool.

Same ladder, four different people. That's what sold me on taking the framework seriously.

Level 1: get paid for one skill

Brett's skill was video. One camera, hit record, edit at home.

That $200 nightclub gig turned into $500 gigs, then $1,000, then $2,000, as the work got better. It took him 2.5 years to pass $10K/month regularly, and his best solo month was $13,000. Just him and a camera, while finishing college and working a pizza job.

Two and a half years. For level one.

Most people quit a skill after two months because it "isn't working." It was never going to work in two months. Brett was dumping his video money straight back into lights, microphones and tripods so he could charge more the next quarter.

And the skill compounds in weird ways. The lighting and editing he learned filming nightclubs in Kansas City is the same production quality that now powers his YouTube channel. No skill you actually master gets wasted.

If you're at zero and overwhelmed by business models, this is the answer I'd give you too: pick one sellable skill (video, copy, SEO, dev, design) and ignore everything else. I wrote about how far a single skill can take you in the skill economy piece, and Brett's story is the long version of the same point.

Level 2: the agency jump

At some point Brett had more video clients than hours. That's the trigger for level two.

The mechanics are simple. A client pays $1,000 for a video. You find someone local who shoots it for $300. Your agency keeps $700, and your job shifts from fulfillment to sales.

His video agency became a marketing agency almost by accident: one client mentioned that Brett's product video was converting as an ad at a third of his previous cost per click. So Brett learned ads, stacked it on top of video, and charged more. Best month: $33,000.

Then the wall. Brett's math: an agency team of four people (shooter, sales, account manager, admin) makes you roughly $25K/month. Want $100K/month? Four teams. Want $1M/month? Around 60 people, and now your actual job is mediating arguments between employees. He had 30+ staff at one point and calls it one of his most expensive lessons.

Agencies cash flow fast and scale ugly. That's the trade.

Level 3: teach it

Instead of hiring his way to a bigger agency, Brett packaged what he knew: course plus community. Record it once, sell it to thousands of people who want to be where you are.

That's where his first million-dollar year came from.

The warning he attaches matters more than the model. People watch Hormozi and think "courses make millions, I'll sell a course." Then they sell courses on skills they've never used and businesses they've never run. Their audience sees through it, their channels never grow, and the course flops.

You can only monetize level 3 with credibility earned at levels 1 and 2. There is no workaround. (This is also, for what it's worth, why podcast guests with real numbers are so much more useful than thought leaders. You can hear the difference in one episode.)

Level 4: software

Brett's end goal, and the end goal of basically everyone who climbs this ladder, is software. Recurring revenue, high leverage, and a company you can sell for a multiple instead of a job that dies when you stop selling.

His own setup at the time of this video: three companies under the WGMI brand, each one feeding the software play.

• WGMI Media for attention: a newsletter at 70,000 subscribers after four or five months (on track for $8,000 in its first month of sponsorships), an Instagram near 200K, and a blog pulling 500K visitors a month from SEO
• WGMI Labs for cash flow: an agency building internal dashboards and business automations for clients, at $50K to $100K per project, with one client close to seven figures
• WGMI Academy for trust and feedback: course and community, which doubles as a direct line to the problems his future software should solve

Media buys attention, the agency pays the developers, the community tells him what to build. Every dollar funnels toward the software.

If that progression sounds abstract, I've got a real one on the blog: how Youssef turned an $800K agency into Scalelist, a B2B SaaS. Same ladder, levels 2 to 4, with the invoices to prove it.

17 businesses and the 10 skills nobody lists

Here's the part of the video I'd make every first-time founder watch.

Before the million, Brett counted roughly 17 attempted businesses. Dropshipping puppy products at 20 (one $20 Instagram ad, one visitor, quit in three days). Amazon FBA arbitraging video lights from China ($1,000 in, $200 profit, three months of waiting on inventory). A Call of Duty trickshot channel. Concert promotion. Managing a rap artist. A hemp business. A "Disney FastPass for bars" app.

Each one died, and each time he blamed the model. "Dropshipping is a scam." It wasn't. His own diagnosis, looking back: "I wasn't good at dropshipping because I wasn't good as a person. I had zero skills."

His list of universal business skills has ten entries: product, copywriting, lead generation, funnels, email, ads, sales, community, outreach, and content. A million-dollar version of any business needs most of them covered. At 20, Brett had exactly one (content), so every business he touched collapsed at the nine he didn't have.

The counterexample he gives is a friend who made $1M dropshipping trendy products, then stopped product-hopping and committed to one physical brand. Year 2.5 looked like failure. Year 4: Walmart, CVS, and a company worth over $100 million by Brett's telling.

Same person. The only variable that changed was how long he stayed on one business.

The use clock

One more idea worth stealing. Brett borrows it from Alex Becker and Bezos-era Amazon (which ran roughly a decade before serious profits): how long you can wait before making money sets how much money you can make.

His estimates, assuming you have the skills already:

• Freelancing: $10K/month within 3 months, then you hit your own time ceiling
• Agency: $100K/month within 6 to 12 months, then the headcount ceiling
• Course: $1M in about 1.5 years, then the market-size ceiling
• Software: $10M+ in 3 to 5 years, if you're great and the idea is right

Fast money caps low. Slow money caps high. Pick your lane consciously instead of defaulting to whatever pays this week.

And his disclaimer deserves repeating: you don't have to climb the whole thing. A $10K/month freelance lifestyle with vacations and zero employees is a genuinely good life. The ladder is for people who want the top, not a moral obligation.

What I'd steal from this

I didn't follow Brett's exact ladder (affiliate SEO was my level 1, infoproducts my level 3, and I sold Les Makers along the way), but the shape of it matches every bootstrapped founder I've interviewed.

The pattern that repeats: the ones who break through stopped switching models and started stacking skills on one business.

Funny detail, Brett's best solo month was $13,000. That's the exact amount I once paid for a mastermind while making $15K to $20K a month. (Stupid decision, right? Six months later I was at $75K a month.) Different ladders, same lesson: proximity to people one level up compresses years into months.

So find your level, then find people living at the next one. Watch the video for Brett's full version. The whiteboard alone is worth it.

FAQ

Who is Brett Malinowski?

Brett Malinowski is an entrepreneur and YouTuber behind the WGMI brand: WGMI Media (newsletter, blog and podcast), WGMI Labs (an agency building internal tools for clients) and WGMI Academy (course and community). He started as a freelance videographer at $200 a gig and crossed his first million-dollar year about five years in.

How long does it realistically take to make your first million dollars?

Brett's path took 5 years, and he argues he could have done it in 3 by sticking to one business instead of trying 17. His rough timeline for each level, if you already have the skills: $10K/month freelancing in 3 months, $100K/month with an agency in 6 to 12 months, and $1M with a course and community in about 1.5 years.

What are the 4 levels of business in Brett's framework?

Level 1 is selling one skill as a freelancer. Level 2 is an agency, where other people fulfill the work and you take a margin. Level 3 is info products and community, teaching the thing you've proven you can do. Level 4 is software, which Brett calls the best business model because of recurring revenue and sellable equity. He says you can't skip levels, because each one funds and de-risks the next.

Should you start with a SaaS as your first business?

Usually no. Software needs around 100 customers to make the revenue one agency client pays upfront, and it demands most of the ten business skills at once. Brett's advice (and mine) is to cash flow with a skill or agency first, then build software with the money and the audience you've earned. If you can already code, you get to shortcut parts of that, but distribution still has to be learned.