Most entrepreneurs can identify with Marcus Barney’s struggle. Barney, AKA Him500, has a multi-million dollar business and aims to help the next generation of entrepreneurs succeed. However, his climb to the top wasn’t easy by any metric. His “recession-proof” plan came from an early lifetime of struggle.
Starting With Nothing to Build an Empire
Barney’s life of business began as a necessity. Before he was old enough to even rent an apartment, he was homeless. He quickly realized how important money was for what it could buy and the freedom it could bring.
When Barney turned 18, he got his real estate license, realizing he needed a way to make money. Unfortunately, the market wasn’t in his favor, and the 2008 crash saw him moving from real estate into owning a small mobile phone kiosk.
More Setbacks Plague The Business
A few years later, when Barney was 23, the kiosk “ran dry,” according to him. He shut up shop without even a credit note to his name and started looking for other opportunities. However, this downside laid the foundation for Barney’s future business model.
Without anything to his name, he figured out how to create credit and leverage it for his own needs. He realized how much he could earn and save by doing this, and the recession-proof business model was born.
An Idea Spawned At the Breakfast Table
Naturally, an idea like this doesn’t automatically appear to someone without a little prompting. Barney’s “Aha Moment” came to him at the breakfast table. He was reading the business news, and the stories he was seeing discouraged him.
He thought there must be a better way for things to get done. The closer he looked at these businesses, the more he realized that they lacked the fundamentals of financial literacy. Realizing this planted the seed that would bloom into Recession-Proof.
A Combination of Community and Entrepreneurial Spirit
One of the things that makes Barney’s idea different from other methodologies for financial learning is that it doesn’t focus on pure numbers. It instead looks at the bigger picture. It combines networking with the knowledge that Barney has collected over hours of delving into what makes businesses tick.
In one of his most recent meetups, which he scheduled for over three hundred people, he attempted to get a plane from Delta Airlines to carry them all. Unfortunately, the airline couldn’t accommodate him because they didn’t have enough advance notice.
Solving Problems As They Arise
Barney has always had a positive mindset, which has helped him overcome the issues he’s likely to encounter as an entrepreneur. In this case, his courageous spirit led him to find a solution to the problem of getting 300 people to where they had to be.
Barney solved his problem by renting a few planes from a private provider to get his group to where they had to be. Barney said it felt like being on a Soul Plane with all the laughing and content creation going on.
The Importance of Financial Literacy
Barney contends that a lot of people’s problems can be avoided by basic financial literacy. For him, it’s about more than just the bare numbers and theories. It’s about having agency and knowing you’re in charge of your destiny.
From budgeting to creating and leveraging credit, each of these has its place in learning how to make and manage money. Investing and building cash flow, which goes into building businesses, is at the core of the Recession-Proof business plan.
Monetizing the Back End

Barney is fond of referencing one of his mentors, who highlights that new businesspeople try to make money off the front end. Experienced businesspeople know that the back end is where money happens effortlessly.
For Barney, the back end is where all the change happens. Recession-Proof aims to make a permanent change for all his mentees on the back end, and he has many of them. At last count, the program has over 2,500 people involved in it.
Building a Business to Help Other Businesspeople
When Barney started building his business, it was never about becoming a millionaire. In fact, he tells his mentees that thinking about money first and foremost is a way to fail at business. It should be about putting things in place to live a happy life.
Barney’s goal in developing his business was to gain financial freedom. And when he got it, he realized that many people just like him wanted that freedom but had no road map to get there. He decided he was going to give them that road map and the details they needed.
Keeping The Debt At Bay
Barney knows that the average American is almost $100,000 in debt, and with those numbers, it’s easy for a person to get frustrated. Recession-Proof was designed as a way to bridge the gap between the people without the financial knowledge and the people with it,
Barney is trying to build a family of entrepreneurs who are linked by their network and forged into a collective of people who support each other’s goals. In essence, he’s creating a family of wealth, with each member knowing the others in a vast network that transcends social and economic boundaries.
Knowing The Struggle To Combat The Struggle
It’s not possible for someone to advise others on the struggle without being there. Barney thinks that he’s the right person to talk to anyone from any background about the struggle. He also likes giving back to the community and has a solid philanthropic drive.
Barney understands the need to create generational wealth in his community and give them the opportunity to help their own families. Recession-Proof gives his community the tools they need to make that generational wealth and pass it on to the next generation.
Looking Towards the Future
Barney thinks that wealth starts with understanding how money works, and that’s what he tries to teach in his business. Those who attend his lectures and sign up for his life-changing seminars know what they want from life. Barney is happy to give them a way to make their dreams a reality.