The 24-year-old entrepreneur who was selected for the Forbes 30 Under 30 Greece in 2020 will talk about his interesting story on the 28th of February, at the University of Nicosia.

Let's start with a question that you probably get asked all the time. How did a 24-year-old from scratch get to be on the Forbes list of young millionaires in a very short period of time?

It has been a crazy few years! My grandfather left Kythera, Greece in 1938 and started some small businesses. He is my biggest idol. In 2011 at 13 years old I worked at McDonald's and at a factory in Australia, Frutex owned by a great and successful Kytherian businessman on weekends and holidays. I’d come home to play Skyrim after work, look at memes on 9gag and watch YouTube. One day a YouTube series called ‘Bloomberg Game Changers’ came on and it was about successful entrepreneurs. I kept watching videos on entrepreneurship on YouTube, movies about entrepreneurship and started reading books about it.

That’s when I thought about starting a Facebook group for students in Australia. I told my mum about the idea and she said “why would anyone pay you? You’re a nobody”. I decided not to listen in true George Moulos fashion and I added my friends to a group, and they added their friends. I shared memes every day on the group and some free educational materials I found on the internet and the group quickly grew to thousands of students. Then I told the students to go and follow a facebook page, sign up to a weekly newsletter, visit a website for the notes and I had built a community within a few months. Then I created more groups for other years. When I started having to use my €5 an hour that I was making at McDonalds to pay for these rich private school kids' websites and email lists, that’s when I knew it was time to monetize.

I started cold calling, at 13, tutoring companies, school holiday companies, party organizing companies and car companies so that I could get a deal where if I sell their products to my community, I’ll get a commission of 1 to 5%. It worked. I sold $130,000 AUD worth of holidays for the first client in the first 3 months for a company called Schoolies.com. After a few months I sold some of these businesses for a few thousand dollars and started a marketing agency that made a few thousand dollars doing ads and social media marketing for clients that I worked with from the facebook groups. Safe to say I quit from McDonalds and Frutex.



Working as a laborer at Frutex

Then in 2016 high school was coming to an end. But before I could graduate peacefully my family fell apart and I was forced to leave home at 17. During this time I was pretty depressed about the fact that my family had fallen apart and that what I thought was a bright future ahead of me now didn’t look so bright. On top of that I had the stress of my final exams. I quickly ran out of money and started living in my car. Just when I thought things couldn’t get worse. I lost my driving license. Just when I thought things couldn’t get worse. I crashed my car, and couldn’t open the driver's door from the inside, which led to some funny situations at gas stations where I had to climb out of the window.

I went back to the jobs I quit so confidently years ago and worked 12 hour days. After a very difficult period I climbed my way out of hell and I graduated high school. I sold my last facebook groups and my car and moved into the city.

That’s when my marketing business, Moulos Media started doing well and I started a digital product business called HSC Notes. Digital notes for high school students are only $10 each. That business allowed me to survive for years. Then I sold it.

At this point I had sold a handful of my own online businesses and a handful of my friends' online businesses so I figured I should probably sell businesses full time. That’s how www.Ecommerce-Brokers.com came about. At the same time I was coming out of my introverted shy shell, became less anxious and started to become who I am today. Two Australian entrepreneurs, Rowan Kunz and Jared Codling were great mentors and believed in me from the day I met them and are still my closest friends and allies to this day and I’m eternally grateful to them.

That was 5 years ago. Since then I left Australia, traveled to over 40 countries, moved to Greece then immigrated to Cyprus and I documented the entire journey including the good and bad times on my YouTube Channel George Moulos with over 200 videos and Instagram . My company has helped people buy and sell millions of dollars worth of businesses and I found a passion for storytelling, stand up comedy and talks. As you can imagine I’ve had many ups and downs and have many more crazy stories to tell which I tell at my university talks and stand up comedy shows.

Right now my business priority is on my online mergers and acquisitions business www.Ecommerce-Brokers.com but the focus of my life is to enjoy the journey more than I have as through these previous years I’ve been fighting a lot of anxiety. I’ve found peace and have learnt to take it easy, smell the roses and grin in the face of adversity. Entrepreneur gurus and hustle entrepreneurs forget that there are humans behind these businesses and that their physical and mental health is priority number one and for most people it’s not all about money but living a healthy and meaningful life.

2022 Talk Tour at Sofia University

Is there a secret or is there a lot that needs to be done at the same time for a young person to reach this high in his life?

I think it’s only fair to the audience that I say what I believe to be the truth here. Success in business in my estimation and definitely in my case is 49% what happens to you and how you deal with that, and 51% what you make happen.

The start of my adulthood was tumultuous and at times traumatic but I didn’t let that stop me from doing what I wanted to do. I then applied my own skills to actually starting something and making things happen. There’s a lot of successful entrepreneurs out there that say business success is just “hard work and hustle” but if you read into their story they usually had a leg up in the sense that they perhaps had a smooth start to their entrepreneurial career. For self made entrepreneurs who don’t have the luxury of having smooth and stable start to their adulthood, career or business, especially those of us who don’t get capital injections from family, there’s a lot more finesse that goes into starting a business and reaching success young or older.

So to answer your question I don’t think there is a secret to reaching success for a young person in their 20’s. I think everyone knows what they need to do to achieve success in business or innovation. For me it has always been to these 3 things:

1. Learn the simple rules and methods of entrepreneurship that you can read in any basic entrepreneur book that you can borrow from a library for free, or online
2. Take action on what you have learnt
3. Learn from your mistakes.

You don’t need to work yourself into burnout or “hustle like a dog” like hustle entrepreneurs say you do. That’s just not the reality of business. You can learn and work at your own productive pace and achieve success as long as you’re following those 3 tenets of success. I unfortunately burnt out and went too hard too fast, but I did it so young entrepreneurs don’t have to! So anyone starting a business or innovating within their career can now know that they don’t need to feel anxiety about starting a business or missing out and they can take their time with it.

We want you to share with us your feelings about your first professional success. On the first major sale you made…

Great question! The first real success for me was selling my first 6-figure business. I had sold my other businesses to focus on my www.Ecommerce-Brokers.com business full time, which meant my month to month cash flow was slowly drying up as I had to keep up business expenses, and I also decided to stop selling small $10,000-$50,000 businesses, so I stopped bringing in small cash flow. I wanted to focus on bigger deals.

This meant that I quickly ran out of money as my business expenses stayed the same while my revenue dropped to almost $0. I was living in a Soviet Era Khrushchevka apartment block (one of those ugly communist era buildings) in my first real European winter and I was broke by the end of the year. Freezing because I only had linen shirts for summer and no winter clothing. It was a huge risk to try and focus on bigger deals. I was now paying the price for that risk. I had to make a tactical retreat to my favorite cousin's house in Victoria, Athens. My cousin Thanasi Stratigo always had my back and made me feel at home. He let me stay at his place while I was getting my life together. While living in Victoria I thought I had really messed my life up and gone backwards in life.

Then a client who wanted to sell his $440,000 hearing aid business came to me for help. I thought this would be the opportunity that would save me! For those next 2 months I worked to close that deal tirelessly with a lot of ups and downs and although I had more than 3 panic attacks throughout the process I got it closed. I was down to -$5,000 on my credit card and when I would go to the MyMarket for groceries sometimes my credit card declined and sometimes it didn’t. I called it grocery roulette.

But the day we closed the deal and the buyer and seller were all very satisfied with my company and teams service I was over the moon. The next day $40,000 USD in commissions landed and I didn’t know whether to cry or laugh. I went for a 20km run just to get my energy out. I finished my run in front of the Temple of Athena Nike, goddess of victory right at the top of the Acropolis and looked over the city. That was my first business success.


Lately you spoke to young people in Cyprus. What do you think about the youth of Cyprus? Do they have dreams, ambitions, qualifications and a drive to succeed?

I spoke in Paphos, Limassol, Larnaca and Nicosia and everywhere I’ve spoken in Cyprus there is an outpouring of interest and enthusiasm. I’m the first person in a long time that is saying to them“You can do something special if you want to”. Cypriot and Greek Generation Z don’t hear this from parents, teachers, friends and the general culture. We’re told to take the safe road and never take risks, even if those risks are an expression of our ambitions, interests and self.

We all have dreams and ambitions and the remarkable thing is that if you want to start a business full time like I did, or start a side business in your spare time after school or university or after your job, or if you want to be an innovator within your job and career, or if you want to be a professional musician, content creator, social impact entrepreneur or ecommerce entrepreneur there is absolutely no excuse anymore for you to not do this. On top of this, the job market in 2023 is looking for people who have a degree AND have experience in their own ventures and creativity. Having a degree now is no guarantee of a stable job. You need to do something extra to even compete. Not to mention that with the start of remote work jobs young people aren’t competing with others in their city or country, they’re competing with the most highly educated people in the world.

Technology is so good now that high school students start their first year of high school with a smartphone that has high speed internet. I’m 24 and when I started high school I had a SamSung flip phone with no internet connection. When I finished I ran a small business from my phone. The internet has liberated anyone who wants to do their own thing and felt like they couldn’t because of their circumstance or culture.

Young Greeks and Cypriots are seeing this. They’re starting to break out into their own identity and start writing their own story. They, and I as a young Greek look at the country and business culture we are inheriting from our parents and grandparents of a nepotistic, corrupt and highly indebted culture of gatekeepers in business and we say “NO!”. We are not continuing that culture anymore and we’re going to go the hard way and make something of ourselves on our own terms with the freedom that the internet gives us to generate our own income, express ourselves and learn from others.

I feel we are at the start of a tidal wave of entrepreneurship in Greece and Cyprus.

'21st Century Hustle' the title of your speech at the University of Nicosia. What to expect? What do we have to gain by following you?

I call my talk 21st Century Hustle because hustling, or starting a business or innovation of your own is not done the same way in the 21st century as it was done last century.

Young people starting from scratch can’t get into property, shipping, liquor stores, agriculture or any of the fully established and consolidated markets like generations before did. We need to and are building businesses in different ways this century and that’s what my talk is about.
My talk illustrates how the method to become a successful entrepreneur and employee has changed in the 21st century and outlines my step by step journey in how I tested and proved this hypothesis and then gives the steps for the audience to do the same.

In addition to your businesses and the various speeches you give in many countries, you also offer consulting services. Are you learning about the path of people you advise? Could you tell us a recent success of someone who stuck by you, followed your advice and achieved their goals?

At www.Ecommerce-Brokers.com we consult for people looking to acquire businesses. We don’t consult directly for people looking to start a business from scratch at the moment as we don’t have the time in my team. However, we have consistently been putting videos on my YouTube channel about how people can start. Here is one video we made that illustrates how to start an online business in 2023: 

To answer your question here are a few testimonials from clients of www.Ecommerce-Brokers.com about our services and their successes:

1. Will Holtz: https://youtu.be/ZGV6TafWHXI
2. Mark Patchett: Ecommerce Brokers and the Elite Acquirers service is a rare find. George has a no BS approach with a rare level of transparency. You know if they are giving something the green light that it’s well worth looking into. Highly recommended.
3. Gwen Sylvester: Elite Acquirers provides a quick and easy view into the deals currently available in the industry
4. James Van Elswyk: George was always reliable and transparent through the process. Even to the buyer George talked about both the good things and the bad things about the business, and was in the process of really making a good deal, which is what a broker should do.
5. Jaryd Krause: It was a very very simple listing and sale process… I would definitely recommend Ecommerce Brokers to other buyers and sellers, and already have!
6. Sam Baldwin: The transaction and exchange of funds and assets was a very easy process. I had questions but the support that Ecommerce Brokers provided was fantastic. I would definitely recommend Ecommerce Brokers in the future.
7. Ben Yule: Ecommerce Brokers were very professional and helped to sell one of my businesses within 2 weeks. I would use them again in the future.
8. Matt Orlic: Day and night George was finding buyers and providing lines of communication and keeping us always in the loop. That for me was the most impressive part of the whole service.

Why did you decide to move your company headquarters to Cyprus? What are your impressions of our island?

I left Australia in 2018 and traveled the world for many years and never felt I found a cultural fit for myself and my business, nor did I feel the need to relocate my business until 2021. In 2021 I spent some time in Monaco and when I was speaking to Greeks and Cypriots who moved to Monaco I thought about moving there for their great business environment. However I didn’t feel a good cultural fit. Then I checked out Malta and Cyprus and when I learnt about the business environment in Cyprus and spent a month here I was blown away. I was scared the bureaucracy of Cyprus would be similar to Greeces’ but it was a very smooth process to immigrate here and set up my company. The island has greeted me with open arms and a day doesn’t go by when I’m not grateful for this country. The weather, culture, language, people, food, healthcare and of course the taxes are great here for this stage in my life. As the younger brother of Greece I think Cyprus does a far better job of attracting entrepreneurs than Greece and it will forever have a place in my heart, even though Cypriots say Aphrodite was born here, even though she was born in Kythera.

What are your future plans?

Business, talks, content creation, standup and triathlons. These are the focuses for 2023. www.Ecommerce-Brokers.com is of course my priority in business and achieving sales targets there and exceptional customer feedback is the goal always in my business. My talks at universities and events about entrepreneurship have been getting great feedback from students and teachers so I will continue my tour around Cyprus, Greece and have expanded to France, Czechia and Spain in March of this year and hopefully will be able to tour the UK and USA later in the year. In my free time I love to do standup comedy and complete marathons, ocean swims and triathlons so I’ll be continuing those crazy adventures too.

Anyone who wants to follow my journey can follow my Instagram and YouTube channels here: https://www.instagram.com/georgemoulosofficial/ and here https://www.youtube.com/c/georgemoulos