All you need is a dollar and a dream, and you can change your life.
These are words that Junior Anthony, founder, and CEO of LiveSotori, always held close to his heart. After years of hardship, Anthony found himself with nothing more in his pocket than a single dollar and no less in his heart than a dream. “I’m just a regular kid from Brooklyn,” he says. “I never grew up with anything crazy, but New York is a beast that I had to conquer. And if I didn’t conquer it, I’d be running from my problems for the rest of my life.”
Now, Anthony is dedicated to helping his students break free from the nine-to-five grind. He lays out the systems and processes of the ‘Laptop Lifestyle’’ giving students everything they need to build successful online businesses. Although, before Anthony built a thriving LiveSotori family, he first had to conquer his own demons.
Before Conquering The Beast
As Anthony recounts, he grew up without the parental guidance that many take for granted. “I didn’t have a father growing up and didn’t know who my mother was. In fact, I lived with my grandparents, and that’s the way it stayed until one day I heard a knock at the door. My youngest cousin answered it, and standing there was my mom. Without a second thought, she grabbed me and kidnapped me. I was young, and nothing made sense. But before I knew it, I was on a plane to Trinidad, which is where I spent the next five years. Even then, my life continued to change, as my father came out of jail and into my life.”
While Anthony’s upbringing was wrought with more turmoil than any child should ever endure, his journey was just beginning. Though Anthony has since built a lifestyle of abundance, he was yet to experience the transformative growth that would take him there. There’s beauty in the struggle, and for the founder and CEO of LiveSotori, there were no truer words.
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“I lived with my father from that point on,” Anthony recalls. “But at age 16, he kicked me out of the house and I was by myself. By the age of 22, I was homeless. I resorted to living in an abandoned house with my friends until the marshals came and kicked us out. Now, I had a choice: I could either stay on the street or find work and get back on my feet. I chose the latter and flew to Florida, awaiting the approval of my TLC license so I could drive for Uber in New York. When my license came, I had nothing to my name. I went back to New York without hesitation and told myself I’d figure it out.”
But as Anthony would soon discover, things rarely go as planned. Still homeless, he trawled the bus depot for hours every night and slept in the basement of LaGuardia Community College during the daytime. “I did this for four days. Then, I began to rent a car from Uber and lived in that same car for a year and a half. I had nowhere else to go until I encountered a landlady that was willing to take me in after her son’s sudden death. The only problem was that she was not in the country. I had to wait until she got back to move in, and I had to find my feet until then.”
An avid producer, performer, and songwriter, Anthony always had a passion for making music. “The whole time, despite my situation, I would be performing, doing shows, and writing music,” he recalls. “But to take things to the next level and to build a sustainable income, I needed my computer which was out of the country.” Still, without a home, Anthony received a call that would take him further down a long, arduous path. “A childhood friend from my old neighborhood in Brooklyn found out I was homeless. He was known as ‘Kay,’ and was the type of guy who people wouldn’t mess with. But he was more like a father to me, and I trusted him. He told me that he could get me the laptop that I needed, but I’d have to travel to Albany. Me being young and stupid, and thinking that people will give you something for nothing, I drove down. But instead of getting a laptop, I learned how to turn cocaine into crack.”
Despite having a roof over his head and a couch to sleep on temporarily, Anthony was involved with a bad crowd and saddled with bills he couldn’t afford. The fees from Uber were amounting to over $400 a week, and Anthony’s ‘father-figure’ was no less keen on exploiting him. After two months of asking and waiting, he realized that the promises of a laptop were all but a fantasy designed to take advantage of his good nature. He decided to return to New York, but his plans were cut short by yet another rough encounter. “I was inside my parked car with Kay, and as Kay was playing around with one of his “customers,” it resulted in my rearview mirror getting dismantled.
He lunged over and smashed through the windshield of my rented car. Nobody got hurt, but after diffusing the situation, I assessed the damage and realized that I now owed the rental company a lot of money. But my problem was that I hadn’t been working, and I was $2,000 in debt. I returned to New York, met my landlady and moved into the new place. But with absolutely no idea how I was going to pay my debt and repairs, I didn’t know how long that would last. I started working as soon as the sun went down. I figured that if nobody could see the windshield in the dark, then I could make enough money to pay everything back.”
Pushing Past The Breaking Point
As Anthony recalls, the gravity of his situation crept in with each and every passing day. “After all that, I didn’t even have a computer. I had nothing,” he says. Desperate to make a living by any means necessary, he tried gimmick after gimmick. But despite his best efforts, the ‘get rich quick’ schemes proved unsuccessful. “I was on my phone trying to figure out ways to make money online. I downloaded apps, looked into bitcoin, and got into all this foolishness. None of it worked.”
To make matters worse, Anthony fell off of his skateboard while traveling to the grocery store. In doing so, he completely fractured his ankle. “After three days of searing pain, I went to the hospital and received a cast. Needless to say, I couldn’t drive. I had nothing and had nobody. One of my friends would pay me 20 dollars every two weeks to sell drugs, and I could barely afford to eat. I was near my breaking point. I knew there had to be a better way to live my life.”
After months of recovery, Anthony was able to find honest work in construction as part of a union with his father. This gave him the funds he needed to order his laptop, and Anthony wasted no time in taking his research to the next level. “I watched webinars constantly. I’d read up on everything that could help me grow an online business. But I still felt like bad actors in my life were bringing me down, taking me to dark places, and holding me back. I had to get my mind right with some deep spiritual cleansing.” In the hopes of eliminating the negativity, regression, and struggle from his life, he took a complete reset and re-imagined the new direction he wanted to take.
Anthony journeyed back to where it all began, to Trinidad. “I bathed in a river for six months straight. I used soap from a bush. All the foods that I ate came from a tree. This reset was powerful for me, and it gave me the mental equilibrium I needed to learn a host of useful skills in social media marketing and online advertising,” Anthony recalls. These would later prove crucial in cultivating the business success he enjoys today. After his six-month stay in Trinidad, Anthony felt ready to return to America and finish what he’d started.
A Fresh Start And New Mindset
After consuming no end of content from guides, courses, and videos, Anthony was critical of the advice that came up time and time again. “I was told I needed to be a digital marketer,” Anthony began. “That I needed to run ads for my clients and make $5,000 from them every time. That’s not how it works.” Despite every effort, going into advertising posed a considerable challenge for Anthony. Finding clients without building a rapport or earning trust can be difficult, but unwilling to be dissuaded, he had one final ace up his sleeve. When he left Trinidad, he decided to go to Miami in search of clientele.
“By the end of the trip, I had just 30 dollars in my pocket. My phone bill was set to expire in the next two days. If I let that happen, I wouldn’t have been able to do anything. That could have ended my career before it even started. For a month, I lived off $20 in my pocket. Once I was down to my last dollar, I walked down the boulevard for two hours. Everybody has a business there, and I called or visited every single one. I didn’t even know the first thing about running an ad, but I knew that if I had a client, I’d figure it out. I went to gyms, pet clinics, doctor’s offices, and jiu-jitsu academies; it’s more appropriate to ask where I didn’t go.
I walked so far along the boulevard that I stopped seeing businesses and started seeing residential communities. Then, finally, one person decided to give me a shot. He listened to me and told me he needed my services. But after months of talking, it looked like things weren’t going anywhere. He was difficult to get a hold of and never picked up the phone. One day, I sat down and realized that I had just one dollar left. I was down to my last option.
I picked up the phone and dialed his number, and miraculously, he picked up straight away. I told him, ‘We should start now. You can pay me 500 dollars — half now and half later.’ After the longest minute of silence in my life, he agreed. I got the client. From there, I figured things out along the way. I was capturing leads properly, building his business, and gaining confidence in myself. I started to believe that I could do it. Before long, one client led to the next. One moment nobody was working with me, and in the next moment, everybody was. And when I got my first $1,500 client, it was a massive breakthrough. It was one of the most defining moments of my life.
From then on, I set my intentions on living a better life and getting into more meaningful friendships and relationships. As I began to take better care of myself, my business scaled even further, and I started working with high-end clients with much greater resources. Now, I’m fortunate to be able to help hundreds of people break free from their nine-to-fives and win big online. My journey through life taught me that there’s nothing more important than sharing my guidance and influencing the world.”
Anthony shares his wisdom in his two-day live workshop, taking his audience through every step in starting a successful business with interactive coaching, landing page optimization, and the coveted secrets of the ‘Client Attraction Formula.’ Members of the LiveSotori family regularly make over five figures a month using his methods and processes. As one person recounts of the experience, “Two days for a life-time of information? I’m so shocked with how real and informative the workshop was, seriously. The whole workshop itself reprogrammed my thinking and allowed me to live my dream online.”
Through it all, one thing is clear: If you have a dream to start an online business, Junior Anthony and the LiveSotori family will help you make it a reality.