HOW IT ALL STARTED
Meet Your STR Wealth Academy Instructors
Michael & Katrina Stead
The Founders of STR Wealth Academy and your go-to guides for the short term rental industry.
Before we discovered this life changing opportunity, both of us had successful careers in sales and by all conventional standards were doing what everyone else in society tells you to do to become successful - go to school, get a job, work hard, buy a house... you get the idea.
While everything seemed to appear fine on the surface, the truth is both of us knew we wanted something more than the traditional 9 to 5 career, trading hours for dollars, spending hours a day commuting back and forth to work, and not being in control of our own income and financial destiny.
Despite having no prior experience in the short term rental space, in our first 19 months we had made over
$500,000
and grown our business to the point now where we make over
$50,000/month
and now coach others through STR Wealth Academy how to achieve financial freedom and take control of their lives.
And while it may sound like it was easy for us to get to where we are now, the truth is we struggled like crazy for years before we saw an ounce of success in creating our own business and income stream outside of traditional jobs…
Our Story Of Struggle...
Our entrepreneurial journey started off in a similar fashion like many other people looking to get into the game - a strong desire to obtain financial independence, but not the foggiest idea of how to actually get there.
So we tried many different types of businesses and investment strategies including the following:
• Network Marketing • Affiliate Marketing • Writing a Book • Stock and Option Trading • Trading FOREX • Buying and selling tax liens • Real Estate Investing • Amazon FBA •
After failing at nearly all of these, we finally began to have some success with the FBA business and grew that company to multiple six figures per year.
And just when it finally felt like we were about to hit our stride and really make it big, we woke up one morning and our entire world changed overnight...
Setback After Setback
We were selling internationally and had discovered our accountant had ill-advised us on how to properly handle the tax treatment on our income from foreign sales.
Long story short, the government came knocking on our door and hit us up with a 5 figure back tax bill that sent our company into bankruptcy and were forced to permanently close our doors.
From this painful experience, we learned a lot of lessons and tried to figure out where things went wrong and how we could avoid this horrific mistake again in the future.
Despite the setback, we still had a strong desire to create a lifestyle where we could travel anytime we wanted and be able to run our business from anywhere in the world with just a WIFI connection and laptop.
While driving home from work one day, Michael was listening to a podcast that discussed short term rentals, but doing it in a way where you didn't have to own any properties.
This is when a light bulb went off and sent us in an entirely new direction.
Turning the Corner
Armed with this knowledge, we picked ourselves up from our failure and bootstrapped our way to starting anew with a fresh opportunity.
Although the journey to where we are now was certainly not an "easy" one or a straight line as there were many challenges and obstacles along the way, we successfully reached our initial goal of launching 12 properties in our first 12 months, but also automated nearly all of the daily operations so we had complete control of our time while our business was running on near autopilot.
This allowed us to create the lifestyle freedom we had always dreamed of as both of us are avid travelers and have an insatiable appetite for exploring new places and cultures around the world.
STR Wealth Academy is Born
