This Founder Is Worth $35 Million at Age 23. Here’s How He Did It.

It took Emil Barr just 14 months of work to see his first $1 million hit his bank account. He was 19 years old at the time.

Today, at age 23, the founder and CEO, who created two companies while still in school, estimates that his personal net worth is around $35 million. He is unapologetically aiming to be a billionaire by age 30. 

Born in Russia, Barr moved to the U.S. when he was three years old and grew up in a small Ohio town. He stuck out at an early age.

“I was the weird Russian kid that didn’t speak any English,” he tells Entrepreneur. “I think I always felt out of place. And I think that as an entrepreneur, you have to be comfortable with discomfort and that feeling of cutting against the herd.”

In high school, he made his peace with being different and even leaned into it. 

“I’m convinced every high school has at least one weird kid that wears suits to school every day,” he says. “You probably had one. That was me.”

Money, not ambition, first pushed him into entrepreneurship. When it came time to choose a college, Barr enrolled at Miami University, the only college that he could afford. He was looking into transferring to an Ivy League school, but tuition was out of reach. 

“I was like, If money is the limiting factor, how hard can it be to make $100,000 [and] go pay for a year’s tuition?” he says.

How he made his first $1 million

Barr was on the lookout for money-making ideas when he met a classmate with 11 million TikTok followers who was barely earning anything from her social media presence. 

“She got one brand deal for $200,” Barr says. “This is crazy because on Instagram, even if you had a million followers, that would be your full-time career. This was a platform that everyone was using. There was no revenue there yet.”

Barr started his company, Step Up Social, in his freshman year dorm room. His plan was straightforward: Businesses had no idea what to do with TikTok, but Gen Z did. Step Up Social positioned itself as a social media marketing and advertising agency focused on creating short-form video content.

Starting the company required little more than an iPhone and an Internet connection. 

“We grew from $0 to $1 million in revenue in six months,” Barr says of Step Up Social. “As an 18-year-old, I had no idea what I was doing. I never had a corporate internship or anything like that.”

Instead of spending the money, he reinvested in the company’s growth.

“I think the first time I had truly a million dollars in my bank account was 14 months in,” Barr recalls. “It was the start of my sophomore year of college.”

Decisions that led to rapid growth

Growing Step Up Social meant embracing risk, especially debt. When the company adopted 90-day payment terms with large clients, there was a funding gap. Barr had to pay influencers upfront while waiting months for invoices to clear. 

“I was basically running around and taking out as many credit cards and bank loans as I could to keep the company afloat,” he says. “I took out about $1 million worth of personally guaranteed unsecured loans, and everyone thought I was crazy.”

His logic was simple: At 19, he had no assets, so the downside was limited. “If we failed, what were they going to do?” he says. “Were they going to take my shirt or my car? I didn’t have anything to take.”

The third key decision, in his view, was prioritizing people over lifestyle. The “absolute best thing” he spent money on was hiring people with “20 or 30 years of experience,” he says. 

How he grew Step Up Social

Early on, intent on gathering clients, Barr cold-emailed a few hundred companies. The first serious bite came from Kao, a Japanese consumer giant and Procter & Gamble competitor. Barr drove his old, beat-up car an hour and a half to downtown Cincinnati and walked into a 47th-floor boardroom wearing a university T-shirt and shorts. The executives gathered there asked him for his deck.

“I was like, ‘What’s a deck?’” he laughs.

Despite underpricing himself at “$2,000 a month,” he landed the account. That one contract gave Step Up Social credibility and opened doors.

“It was exponentially easier for us to get our next 10 to 15 brands, and it was just off to the races,” Barr says. 

From there, Step Up Social scaled into a full-service TikTok marketing agency, hiring influencers and managing online presences for brands and celebrities. By the time he sold it last year, the firm, by then acquired and rolled into a larger agency, was working with Procter & Gamble, Nike, Nordstrom, Kroger, Alo and Banana Republic.

“We were doing about $2 million a year in revenue, but it was extremely high margins,” Barr says.

Step Up Social earned revenue by connecting brands with creators. For example, a brand might pay the company $600 for a video. The company would then pay the creator $400 to make it and count the remaining $200 as revenue for arranging and managing the deal.

“Gross transaction revenue was closer to $8 to $9 million,” Barr says.

Convincing his university to pay him

Barr didn’t just build a business while attending college; he turned the school itself into a revenue source and marketing machine. He convinced his university to cover his tuition fees. The school also paid him $200,000 and gave him a faculty parking pass. 

Miami University had introduced its entrepreneurship program relatively recently. Barr saw leverage. “I was effectively the only student entrepreneur on campus,” he says. If he dropped out, “they would have no student entrepreneurs. It wouldn’t be a very compelling case study.”

He started with “small asks” like flexible attendance, arguing that it was more important for him to run his company than to participate in group projects. Then, he applied for every grant and pitch competition he could find at the school, winning “$40,000 in a couple of months.”

From there, he reframed himself as both a case study and a vendor. Miami University became a client. Barr’s agency turned the school into “the most-followed public university on TikTok in America,” a result he argues paid back any support many times over.

“For every $1 they spent, whether it was in contracts with us or grants for the business, I’m sure they made at least $10 back in tuition from students who heard of Miami and were drawn to the school,” he says. “So it was probably a good deal for everyone.”

Building Flashpass

Barr’s latest venture, Flashpass, looks very different from a TikTok agency. At its core, Flashpass is his answer to a looming question: What happens to workers if AI replaces 25% to 50% of jobs?

“If we could actually build a way for these 25% to 50% of people who might lose their jobs to be able to quickly get certified online and go find a new job in 30 days, that would be a very valuable service to government as well as to individual users,” Barr explains.

Flashpass is an online platform built around “micro credentials.” Users can learn a new skill in 30 days or less and then be matched with jobs in industries that need talent.

“We have things like natural energy, like oil and gas careers. We have things like medical billing and coding,” he says. “These are all industries where they have a lot of job openings, and they can’t find enough people, and the average pay is over $80,000 a year.”

How Flashpass makes money

The platform doesn’t charge individual users or employers. Instead, Flashpass sells its services to state governments. 

“Typically what we do is we’ll partner with a school, and the government will pay the school, and we will split the revenue with the school,” he says. 

The school helps build curriculum and recruit candidates; the government treats Flashpass as one more education and workforce tool.

“If we could take this Flashpass idea and actually give it to the government and make it free for everyone who loses their jobs as a result of AI, we could build a very valuable business,” Barr says. 

The bet appears to be paying off. Flashpass began with a $4 million, two-year pilot contract in Ohio, with roughly $2 million in annual revenue. Barr says he invested about $75,000 of his own money to build a demo, then used it to land that pilot. Since then, the company has added contracts in Louisiana (about $1 million a year) and Delaware ($2.3 million a year), and has proposals out in 17 states.

“This year, just based on the existing contract volume, we’re set to do at least $8 million, and that’s a four-fold increase over last year,” he says.

Work-life imbalance

Today, Barr estimates his net worth is around $35 million, up from $25 million when he spoke with Business Insider in December. He’s open about the personal cost of becoming a millionaire. In college, his schedule was packed to the minute. He took college classes from 8 a.m. to the early afternoon, then conducted back-to-back calls until 7 p.m. and went to networking dinners. He did his “true work” on the business until 4 a.m., finishing his day with three hours of sleep. 

“I gained 80 pounds,” he says. “I lived off of Red Bull…four or five cans of Red Bull each day.” He skipped holidays and ignored invitations to go out.

He’s since lost 30 pounds and hired a trainer who comes to his house twice a day. The hardest part, he says, is realizing “it’s three times harder to undo the damage than to do the damage initially.”

He also has a personal chef, a home assistant and a driver. Barr still works 19-hour days, but he says he’s calmer and more measured as a leader with the extra help.

One lesson he wishes he’d learned earlier: Don’t spend your 18- to 20-hour days chasing small goals.

“It takes the same amount of effort to do something big as it does to do something small,” he says.