Justin Gilmore founded ATMMachines.com out of Atlanta, Georgia in 2006 when he was 21. Now, his company provides and services ATMs around the nation, and he teaches other hopeful entrepreneurs how to enter the market and launch their own successful ATM businesses. According to Gilmore, it’s a lucrative industry because so few people actually know how it works.
Most think that ATMs are owned and operated by the banks, when in fact, they are installed and serviced by third-party companies, as Justin found out over 14 years ago. He realized that it wasn’t too hard to enter the market (with the right skills and approach) and decided to apply the lessons he learned as someone who had to start fending for himself at 15 after being expelled from school, to grow his own ATM business.
Growing up, Justin faced a lot of setbacks early in life. He and his siblings had to practically raise themselves, as their single-parent mother needed to work two jobs to keep the roof over their heads. There wasn’t any money for luxuries, and even some necessities like dental care had to be skipped because they had no money for it. Justin, for his part, didn’t help things along with his poor academic performance and bad attitude. After he got expelled from school in the first semester of ninth grade, Justin’s family pretty much gave up on him and deemed him a failure in life.
However, adversity breeds strength, as they say, and the letdown he saw in his mother’s eyes greatly motivated him to turn his life around. At 16, this meant that he had to work menial jobs to make an income. Still, he knew he needed to find a way to start earning a passive income if he was ever going to realize his dream of taking care of his family and showing them that he wasn’t the failure they all thought him to be.
It certainly wasn’t easy, but Gilmore never gave up. “When times get tough is when I get my best work done. I’ve always been told that I would be a failure, and this is what has always motivated me to move forward,” Gilmore says. So he started doing anything he could think of to build his experience and earn extra money. Justin even started selling old newspapers on eBay and “hucking pizzas,” as he calls it, which involved selling hundreds of pizzas he got on the cheap from a local pizzeria to businesses all around Atlanta by pretending he had canceled orders.
All of the skills he learned by cold-calling companies and hitting the streets trying to sell prepared him well for when he eventually saw an opportunity to open his own ATM business. Even though it was hard work, he started doing well and knew that he could succeed if he kept at it. In the ensuing years, Gilmore has managed to complete and even surpass many of his life goals. These include being able to take care of his family, getting healthy and taking better care of himself, and even getting proper dental care so he could walk away with that million-dollar smile.
Interested in learning more about Justin and what he does? Follow him on Instagram at @atmmachines_com to get a glimpse into his life and see the way he runs his ATM business, which now also boasts online courses to help others get into the industry.
