When he was only 12, Ephren Taylor started his first business venture – video game design. He was crazy about games, like most of the kids his age. He started reading “How To Make A Video Game In 21 Days”, by Andre LaMothe, every day after school, and after a few months he had coded his first game – shoot the bad guys trying to outrage the president.
Some of his friends and schoolmates were the first market for his product, they bought the first copies at 10 dollars each. Motivated by his profits, Ephren continued to develop. A year later he started working in the field of web development and design, seeing better opportunities there. He marketed his services under the name Flame Software on different Internet forums. Nobody questioned his age, because of his deep phone voice J and that he had all the needed certifications. So he started selling sites to anyone he could, with the help of site brokers, who handled the contracts. He was charging a fixed price of 200 dollars per site. This was a really low price, his competitors received thousands of dollars for similar services. But this way Ephren managed to easily grasp a piece of the market, gain some popularity and build a portfolio of sites of satisfied customers. After gaining some momentum, he made the good business decision to raise the price of his services. Soon checks started flooding into his mailbox. His parents were a little worried about this. They even thought their son had become a narco boss when one day Taylor received a check for 3 800 US dollars.
Ephren made his first million dollars when he was just 16 years old when he and his friend Michael Stahl built a site for job offers for college and high school youngsters – GoFerretGo.com. The young entrepreneurs were in shortage of advertising money, so they started marketing their new venture publishing articles about their great business idea in local newspapers and media, a good lesson for anyone getting a business degree. People happened to enjoy the new idea and from mouth to mouth their business became popular. The site got thousands of visitors very soon. The price of posting a job offer was set to 38 dollars. Soon Taylor found himself selling his work cheap when he found out that big companies, like Citigroup, were willing to pay thousands to find a young and motivated workforce.
Soon, the young business managers rented an office because of the expanding venture. They even hired their school history teacher to help them with the work. Their company reached 3,5 million in market value but unfortunately broke apart after the burst of the tech bubble in 2001.
Ephren Taylor has started or acquired about one hundred businesses since the start of his career as an entrepreneur. He is the first African American CEO of a publicly traded company. He is also the author of several books, one of which is the bestseller “Creating Success from the Inside Out”. According to him, setbacks in business are something normal and a great opportunity to learn. He is a believer in the maxim “failing well” and that failures help the ultimate success to be achieved.
Some More Recent Info About Ephren Taylor
Ephren Taylor is one of today’s most influential African-American entrepreneurs. Taylor was born in 1981 and raised in Kansas City, Missouri. From an early age, he had a determination to succeed and the drive to bring his dreams into reality.
Taylor followed a path of self-education and after working his way through undergraduate school on an athletic scholarship, he made his way to Stanford University to complete his MBA by the tender age of 23. His knowledge of politics, banking, investments, and entrepreneurship was evident even before graduation and went on to become a well-respected businessman.
From there Taylor went on to launch several successful companies, but it wasn’t until 2007 that Taylor made headlines for a venture that is now considered infamously infamous. In 2007, Ephren Taylor created a business venture called City Capital Corporation that primarily dealt with investments and raising capital funds from religious organizations in urban communities. The venture would later become widely known as “Ephren Taylor’s Ponzi Scheme,” as most investors’ money seemed to have gone towards funding Taylor’s extravagant lifestyle instead of investing back into the company. Underinvestment left the company bankrupt in 2009, leaving thousands of unsuspecting investors with empty pockets and broken dreams.
Though the scandal certainly tarnished Taylor’s professional reputation, recent times have seen him attempting to rebuild his legacy. After spending years in prison for investor fraud, he was released from jail in 2013 with a mission focus on community development and economic empowerment within urban communities. Taylor currently travels around giving motivational speeches on financial literacy topics like budgeting and credit repair as well as initiating what he calls “Economic Empowerment Tours” which seek to bridge the gap between low-income earners and possible financial opportunities for them. He penned his first book “Urban Life is Not a Financial Plan” which dives deeper into these topics of financial literacy among other things.
Ephren Taylor has had an interesting journey that started out with humble beginnings yet spiraled down into controversy before finding its way back home to community building. Though his story may not have had a happy ending just yet, he still acts as an inspiring example of resiliency in today’s ever-changing landscape of finances.
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