Homeless man turns $27 into million dollar business helping ex-cons.
It can seem like everywhere you turn there's a get rich quick scheme just waiting for someone who's down on their luck and looking for an easy financial solution. But the truth is, unless you're born into money, becoming rich isn't easy.
An exception? Mario Kelly, a Detroit man who was able to break into the millionaire club when all odds were stacked against him. Kelly went through a divorce and found himself homeless living in his car with nowhere to go, but that didn't stop him from dreaming.
The man learned at an early age that if he wanted something then he would need to work for it. When he found himself unemployed and homeless, he knew it wouldn't be forever. Instead of sleeping in his car in the neighborhood in which he previously lived, Kelly drove his makeshift mobile home to an upscale neighborhood where they had mansions and nice cars. He knew he wanted to someday live in one of those expensive homes, so he decided to sleep near them in an effort to manifest his future.
Kelly could probably teach a class on manifesting because he was able to do so much more than buy a house on the nice side of town, and it all started with just $27. One day, he took a tour of the Shinola factory right there in Detroit and noticed the factory was pretty dirty. After asking around, he learned that the factory had no cleaning service. Seeing an opportunity to earn money, Kelly invented a cleaning company on the spot and offered his services.
"We walked into a room, it was filthy. It was dirty, and they were like, 'oh I'm sorry, our cleaning company is terrible.' I said, 'I have a cleaning company,'" Kelly tells Fox 2 Detroit. "They told me, 'give us a proposal.' I went home to try to figure out how much it would cost to do a building of this size."
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Photo by Oliver Hale on Unsplash
That was all it took. The once homeless man was now gainfully employed at his very own cleaning company that he'd christened, 313 Cleaning. During the pandemic, he also started "313 Staffing" after noticing companies were having a hard time because people were less inclined to work in-office. This led him to partner with recently released ex-prisoners, or as Kelly calls them, "returning citizens." His popularity with prisons due to his story was the catalyst for his book, The $27 Millionaire.
Truly, it seems that Kelly has somehow found the secret sauce to serendipitous moments that lead to the next big opportunity. His most recent venture is his company and academy is Believe in AI which provides users with an AI assistant that can have a 10-40 minute voice conversation. The artificial voice sounds eerily human and seems to respond to conversational language with full sentences that sound less like an automated system and more like you're speaking with a receptionist.
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While Kelly's manifestation brought him to where he is today, he started out by selling rubber bracelets with "B3L1EV3" on them to earn money. It was shortly after that venture that he took a chance by inquiring about a property that looked abandoned and was racking up tickets from the city. After contacting the owner, Kelly was able to purchase the house for just $6,500, which started his upward momentum and ultimately led him to millionaire status.
The entire process may seem impossible to repeat, but Kelly wrote all the steps down in his book and says anyone can duplicate it with some determination. For some reason, starting with just $27 seems more doable than hoping a parent, bank, or investor gives you a small loan to get on your feet.
You can watch the entire interview below: