How John Summit Quit His Job and Turned $20K Into a DJ Empire

With all due respect to our accounting Avengers and the great work they do, it’s hard to believe that most CPAs dreamed of becoming CPAs. That certainly wasn’t the case for John Summit, who went from a monotonous role at Ernst & Young to arguably one of the most exciting careers imaginable: an internationally famous DJ.

Now, in the second year of his Experts Only Festival on Randall’s Island, Summit and his partners at Medium Rare are showcasing a new model for artist ownership, all while bringing the beats.

Experts Only is a global movement born from John Summit’s pursuit of total creative freedom. Founded on the ethos of music without limits, Experts Only is embracing genre-defying sound that spans house, melodic, and everything in between. Since its inception, the label has become a platform for talents like Mau P, Kaskade, Odd Mob, Layton Giordani, Cassian, Max Styler, and Summit himself.

Experts Only has built its live events around nontraditional venues, including cave shows in Tennessee, mountain events in Vail, Colorado and Lake Tahoe, Nevada, and events in Tulum. The brand has also expanded internationally to destinations such as Ibiza and Amsterdam and has hosted a curated stage at Bonnaroo.

Desk jockey to disk jockey 

Summit found his passion for DJing while studying at the University of Illinois, where he played local shows in his free time. After graduation, he moved to Chicago and took a full-time job at Ernst & Young.

“It was a very soulless job in the sense that I had no fulfillment from it whatsoever,” Summit admits to Entrepreneur, “But the hours are super intense, so I had to have that release of just DJing on the weekends.”

For a while, Summit was burning the candle at both ends, grinding through audits during the day while playing local clubs at night.

“None of my coworkers or anything knew,” Summit laughs. “It felt like I was living a double life.”

Pretty quickly, Summit’s music started building an online buzz, which was great for his confidence but not so great for his accounting career.

“I started doing worse at work, started showing up later and later and later. I’d come into work with, you know, bloodshot eyes and people would think I was just up all night partying,” he says. “In reality, I was just making the music. Well, I was doing my fair share of partying too for networking, but yeah.”

Eventually, Summit quit his job after saving $20,000 to live off while pursuing his DJ dreams, throwing himself into music full-time. Around 2019, things started to take off. Then, the world shut down.

Summit moved back in with his parents during COVID-19, but his commitment to music didn’t waver. He kept grinding, and it paid off. Before long, Summit was touring internationally, playing for millions of fans and reaching heights most DJs only dream of. Then, in 2025, he decided it was time to own the brand he had built. That’s where Medium Rare came in.

Medium Rare = Maximum Gain  

Medium Rare is a $75 million entertainment company built by Forbes 30 Under 30 alumni Joe Silberzweig and Adam Richman. What sets the company apart is its unique 50/50 business model.

“Our model is really simple,” Richman explains. “We’ll take all the financial risk, and we’ll split the profits 50/50.”

They used that same model to build Summit’s Experts Only Festival, a two-day music festival that Summit curated on Randall’s Island. Instead of simply paying an artist to headline someone else’s festival, Medium Rare builds an asset with the artist that both sides own.

“We’re going to risk $10 million plus on this event,” Richman shares. “So if it makes $2 million, we each get $1 million. If, God forbid, we lose $2 million, John doesn’t lose a penny.”

For Richman, the model works because both sides have a real stake in the event’s success.

“We’ll have people all the time be like, ‘Hey, we’ll work with you in this different model,’” he says. “We’re just like, not for us. We really found this partnership works best for everyone, and it really incentivizes [both sides]. Nothing is fairer than a 50-50, right?”

John and his team drive the creative vision and brand, while Medium Rare serves as a partner for the festival.

One of the biggest inspirations for Experts Only Festival was an old New York staple: Electric Zoo.

“Electric Zoo was a cultural mainstay of New York City. It grew organically for over a decade in the city, got up to, you know, over 75,000 fans or 100,000 fans across the weekend,” Silberzweig shares. “That property was sold, and the new operator didn’t really manage it correctly, and it went bankrupt. So we identified a huge void in the market, and there’s huge demand for these types of events.”

Experts Only was built to fill that void, launching the same month Electric Zoo had previously occupied. The inaugural festival brought more than 50,000 fans to Randall’s Island across two sold-out days, and the festival surpassed those numbers in its second year.

The numbers behind the noise 

While Summit may have left the spreadsheets behind, he still carries the business acumen honed from years behind a monitor.

“This is just as much of business as fun,” Summit proclaims. “I mean, if you ask anyone in the team I work with and stuff, like half my day is dedicated to business.” 

While some artists balk at the idea of due diligence, Summit finds it oddly comforting.

“I think maybe because I’m used to that from doing the accounting, then doing the music at night, where it’s not fun just doing art 100% of the time,” he shares. “It’s fun to work both sides of the brain.” 

He also points out the countless examples of artists getting screwed over because they don’t understand the terms of their deals, and end up going bankrupt. 

“How are you making X million dollars a year and then being bankrupt?” Summit wonders. “That’s why you have to have financial literacy. I think having that background makes this kind of stuff possible.”

As anyone both financially literate and music festival inclined knows, most of these events don’t turn a profit in their first year, or even the first few. But Summit and Medium Rare are comfortable betting on Experts Only Festival’s long-term success. 

“Look at all the best businesses in the world: Amazon, Meta, etc. No one made money in their first couple of years,” Summit says. “And where I’m lucky is that I do well as John Summit, so Experts Only is the true passion project of it all.”

Go all in 

Summit has gone through a career change so dramatic that it will almost certainly be the subject of a documentary one day. His advice for anyone considering a similar leap of faith? Have a backup plan, but don’t let it stop you from fully committing.

“If you’re gonna do something, you gotta go all in, he says. And so maybe that backup plan is what gave me the mental stability to know that I could go all in. But you can’t half-ass it, though. I think when you do it in your career, and when you hear about anyone who started a successful business or artist career, it’s because they went all in.”

With all due respect to our accounting Avengers and the great work they do, it’s hard to believe that most CPAs dreamed of becoming CPAs. That certainly wasn’t the case for John Summit, who went from a monotonous role at Ernst & Young to arguably one of the most exciting careers imaginable: an internationally famous DJ.

Now, in the second year of his Experts Only Festival on Randall’s Island, Summit and his partners at Medium Rare are showcasing a new model for artist ownership, all while bringing the beats.

Experts Only is a global movement born from John Summit’s pursuit of total creative freedom. Founded on the ethos of music without limits, Experts Only is embracing genre-defying sound that spans house, melodic, and everything in between. Since its inception, the label has become a platform for talents like Mau P, Kaskade, Odd Mob, Layton Giordani, Cassian, Max Styler, and Summit himself.