There’s an American Dream of a 9-5 workday that comes with a house, free time, and an annual vacation day or two, and that dream has tricked many people into a hard and fruitless grind. It can take a long time to realize that nose-to-the-grindstone labor isn’t the only thing you need to achieve the kind of fulfilling life you have in mind, especially in today’s more complicated world. Increasingly, people are looking up to realize they’ve fallen behind on investments and multi-stream passive incomes that make today’s world turn.
This was Mark Hemsley’s experience. Just out of school, Hemsley went to work on his dream career and gave it everything he had. He turned his love of cooking into a career in fine dining, achieving what—to many people—looked like a dream job.
Unfortunately, for Hemsley, it became a fruitless grind. “I used to work 14 plus hours a day as a chef in fine dining,” Hemsley says. “Michelin-starred restaurants for some of the best, well-known chefs in the UK.” But the work left him stressed and robbed him of free time, and he could tell he wasn’t earning what he deserved. “I knew I had to break out of what seemed ‘normal’ to start living a life of freedom and not wasting my life making somebody else rich.”
“Saving money will never make you rich,” says Hemsley, who made a risky move out of his culinary career and into e-commerce investments. “I don’t have many regrets, as I believe everything happens for a reason, but I wish I had been introduced to the world of working online and e-commerce sooner.”
His new achievements look a little different. He isn’t the chef for a famous fine dining restaurant anymore, but he’s built multiple six-figure businesses and closed deals with some of the UK’s biggest retailers. His network includes well-known influencers and celebrities like James English and Wayne Lineker. He’s recently turned to mentoring others in e-commerce and has helped hundreds to make the same leap he did.
Mentorship is an essential part of the business, Hemsley explains. “Knowing that there would be a level of risk, I knew for me to succeed, I had to learn from a master,” he says. “Having a mentor to help me through the journey and teach me the skills… was the best investment I made, as I had zero experience of working online before.” More important than the experience was the humility to learn a new industry, the will to take risks, and the belief that he could succeed.
Today, Hemsley is more ambitious than he’s ever been before. “Over the next few years, I have some huge plans to further scale my own businesses to the next level, start some new ventures with building new e-com brands, and also help hundreds more new people.” He wants to do what he can to keep people from falling into the same dream-crushing career grind that almost caught him. “My dream is to show people that creating a life beyond a 9-5 is much easier and manageable than you think.”
Mark Hemsley is happy he learned how essential it is to have multiple income streams, and he believes that e-commerce is the best way to achieve that. “Trading time for money is no way to get rich,” he’s learned. Now he has much more time, much more money, and a powerful desire to help others achieve the same.
