Written In Partnership with George Neilist
This past year was not easy to navigate, especially for entrepreneurs who dealt with the aftermath of a global pandemic. With supply chains still in shambles and many people still devastated by a lack of disposable income, it took only the best of the best to thrive in such a challenging year.
Here, we introduce you, and pay tribute to 2022’s Top 10 Tenacious Entrepreneurs who managed to come out on top despite all these incredible challenges.
Jordan, Luke, and Jackson Lintz
All still in their 20s and already managing a successful group of companies, the Lintz siblings are frequent subjects of envy and curiosity as to how they’re able to achieve it all.
While people unfamiliar with the Lintz’s might find it easy to dismiss the HighKey Enterprises’ founders’ success as a result of nepotism, the brothers know there’s nothing else behind their eight-figure empire than pure, hard work. That, and three entrepreneurial minds that manifested early on.
Jordan and Luke founded their first company, HighKey Technology, before the latter was even old enough to sign the incorporation papers. Today, the three brothers are more focused on their equally successful digital marketing companies, HighKey Agency and HighKey Clout.
Offering elite press and branding services through ingenious campaigns like their signature Instagram celebrity giveaways, the Lintz brothers have become social media superstars, frequently collaborating with big names like Nicki Minaj, Lil Baby, Cardi B, Kevin Hart, and Floyd Mayweather, among many others!
Chase Chappell
Chase Chappell wears many hats: a serial entrepreneur, tech visionary, a globally recognized expert on Facebook and TikTok advertising, and a marketer.
As a heavyweight in the marketing industry, Chase provides a masterclass in ad campaigns by helping clients hit—or even exceed—their sales and profit targets. To date, Chappell has advised for $200M+ in Ad Spend, and the mountain of golden reviews he’s gotten for his services is proof enough of Chase’s expertise.
Chappell is likewise the mastermind behind Chappell Digital and Sirge.io. The latter is an ad insights platform that tracks Facebook and TikTok ad campaigns and website visits, in order to accurately attribute results to their clients’ active campaigns. This removes the guesswork out of optimizing companies’ high-performing campaigns and helps them make better-informed decisions related to their paid marketing efforts.
Some of Chase’s most incredible accomplishments include helping a client earn $815K in 4 months from TikTok ads and helping another get 5M+ views and 38K emails after one day of getting advice from him. The best part, he’s nowhere near done.
Nick Wood
Known online as the “King of Digital Real Estate”, rank and rent expert Nick Wood went from being a struggling entrepreneur $60,000 in debt to creating a multi-7-figure business in less than a year. His massive swing from failed ventures to becoming an online millionaire is a much-needed inspirational story for many entrepreneurs and business owners who are still on their own journey in a post-pandemic economic climate.
So, how did he do it?
After learning about the potential in the digital real estate/rank and rent space, Nick began buying, building, and selling domains and websites and then renting them out to business owners all over the US for passive income. Fast forward to today and he credits his multi-million-dollar digital real estate empire to two simple attributes: hard work and a “never quit” attitude. In fact, Wood has quite literally spent his entire life developing an unbreakable work ethic, growing up working long hours on his family’s generational alfalfa farm. There his father raised him to live by the motto: “Make hay while the sun shines.”
Nick is now committed to helping other entrepreneurs escape the rat race and achieve financial freedom, which is why he founded Digital Landlords–an online course community that currently teaches 300+ students his tried-and-tested strategies on how to create passive income through digital real estate, rank and rent, lead generation, and sales. As founder and CEO of Digital Landlords, Wood teaches his students from all over the world, ranging in age from 18-65, to utilize his signature methods to earn passive income from $10K a month up to $45K a month–entirely from home. “I welcome anyone to show me a better business model on the internet,” says Wood with confidence. “The potential in digital real estate and rank and rent is limitless in our digital world and this is the best way I’ve found to create life-changing passive income not only for me but my students as well.” Based on his successes, it seems Nick Wood is helping build the next generation of digital nomads.
Chris Harder
Business strategist and successful business owner Chris Harder has helped countless clients reach six and seven-figure incomes. However, he is more famously known for his philanthropic efforts, which also plays into the manner in which he helps business owners be ‘unapologetically successful.’ His main goal is to highlight stories of successful and wealthy entrepreneurs, celebrities, and influencers who have maximized their earning potential to create a positive impact in the world.
Harder believes people can do greater things when they make good money. After all, he thinks money’s most important role in society is giving people the option to be more generous and touch more lives. For this reason, he has taken on the challenge of removing the stigma on business owners who are all about the bottom line.
As one of 2022’s top entrepreneurs, Chris Harder hopes to empower more people to write their own success stories, attract as much income as they can, and use as much of that income to leave the world a better place than they had found it.
Kamil Bennis
Kamil Bennis loves to surround himself with people who, like him, are crazy enough to think they can change the world. This is why he established Rebels With a Cause (RWC), a company that offers two programs that train both body and mind in preparation for the tall order of changing the world.
RWC’s first product is a fitness and nutrition program that seeks to reverse the impact of society’s modern-day evils like obesity, an obsession with fast food, and even casual hook-up culture. And then there’s the RWC private community, where the mindset training happens. Kamil believes world-changers must first and foremost be critical thinkers who can think for themselves instead of simply relying on what the news says.
Through RWC and its back-to-back fitness and development programs, Kamil hopes to help more people become better versions of themselves, a significant first step towards creating a better world. RWC will have merchandising drops every 2-3 months in the form of technical/training clothes as well. While 2022 was mostly a preparatory year for Rebels With a Cause, 2023 is game time for this earth-shaker, and everyone who believes in his cause.
Kendall Fontenot
Some people are just born with an entrepreneurial mind, and Kendall Fontenot is one of those people. He has been coming up with crazy good business ideas since the age of seven. Now 35, Kendall is credited for coming up with the largest “Buy Here, Pay Here” minority-owned auto dealership network in the state of Louisiana.
Kendall solved one of the most pressing problems for aspiring car owners in the United States: getting loan approval with a low credit score. He founded Ultimate Autoplex with the idea of letting people buy cars without a credit check — only a 50% deposit and a huge amount of trust that people will hand over their payments whenever they’re due.
Instead of aiming for a big profit margin on each car sold, Kendall also competes on volume — a strategy that has allowed him to offer affordable car deals to his customers. All these efforts in going the extra mile for his clients stems from Kendall’s main philosophy: that dreams come true when families can live in abundance, and not want.
Going into 2023, Kendall hopes to give more families a chance for freedom not just through Ultimate Autoplex, but also through his book: The Good Life & How to Get It.
Jake Swaney and Michael Kmetz
Jake Swaney and Michael Kmetz are true innovators who have a keen sense for business. Both their corporate lives were short-lived, as the pull of entrepreneurship proved too strong for both men to ignore.
As business partners, Jake and Mike found success as oil and gas analysts and land acquisition salesmen, which led them to start their own oil and gas acquisitions company. But they didn’t stop there.
Over the last three years, Jake and Mike successfully built two multi-million-dollar companies and now reside in commercial real estate. They work on funding deals in-house through capital raises and structured financing. But while real estate syndication remains their main bread and butter, they continue to invest in start-up companies and put their hard-earned money where it makes most sense.
Their philanthropic efforts are just as huge as their business successes. At the forefront of these efforts is the Texas Business Hall of Fame Foundation, which supports up-and-coming entrepreneurs. Recently, Jake and Mike also launched Real Property Mastery, a series of real estate seminar programs aimed at guiding other people who are interested in entering the real estate scene.
Justin Gilmore
Having been born well below the poverty line to a single mother who had to work double jobs to keep him and his siblings afloat, Justin Gilmore just didn’t have the makings of a successful businessman. It came as no surprise, therefore, that he collected failing grades in school, was written off by teachers and guidance counselors as a “problem child,” and was eventually expelled at the age of 15.
Even his own mother gave up on nurturing whatever sliver of potential Justin could have had at a young age. Only one person was more disappointed at Justin than his mother—himself. Determined to change his destiny and what the world thought of him, Justin buried himself in entrepreneurial and self-help books and courses.
All this determination soon paid off with Justin launching a full-fledged enterprise working with ATMs. Yes, those big, dull, grey machines that most people don’t even pay much attention to when they withdraw cash from their bank accounts. Justin saw potential for growth in those barely celebrated machines and thus was born AtmMachines.com. Through that company, and his younger startup BTMmachines.com (Bitcoin ATM Automation), Justin was able to redeem himself and achieve something even his family didn’t think he was capable of: creating a bright future ahead of him and the scores of other entrepreneurs he has helped create passive income through ATM and Bitcoin Automation.
Nathaniel Mack III
It’s not every year that you see personal injury lawyers make it to top entrepreneurs’ lists like this one. After all, lawyering is a profession that’s not very easy to scale. But Nathaniel Mack III has always been known for his game-changing ways.
He has so far managed to open five branches of his law firm in Texas — thriving in a state where lawmakers aren’t too friendly with personal injury lawyers. What’s even more impressive is that Nathaniel only started his practice five years ago, which means he’s been on a scaling spree, opening an average of one new office per year in the industry.
For his success, Nathaniel likes to credit his mentor for building a blueprint for running a successful injury law firm. But equally deserving of praise is his awareness that running a law firm is as much a business as it is a profession, a fact that many other lawyers fail to realize. That, and his incredible capacity for multitasking, has paved the way for Nathaniel’s continued success in building a successful and highly profitable law empire.
Corey Way
For Corey Way, nothing scales a business better than building a strong brand. That’s why he’s spent the last few years leveraging on his impeccable talent in design to help various companies establish a strong brand and hit their desired targets as a result.
Way has likewise built his own repertoire of companies that are dedicated to creating future-ready disruptions in the industries of advertising, production, cannabis, and publication. One of those companies is DayJob, which recently rebranded into “I’ve Got Dreams.” On Instagram, the company claims that its executives “quit their day jobs to focus on content creation and production”—a line so simple yet so effective in communicating what the company does, and for whom. As such, I’ve Got Dreams has managed to build a strong presence in Toronto, Vancouver, and Chicago.
This level of sophistication in content creation and design is precisely the reason why the Toronto-based Corey Way has won international awards at the One Show, D&AD, and Cannes for his work. With a couple more companies in Way’s launch pipeline, he is definitely one of the top entrepreneurs to watch for 2022.
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