Step-by-step (literally) how I went from a lower-middle class broke college student to building a 7-figure marketing agency working with billion dollar companies, Shark Tank-featured businesses, and NBA teams.
Before working with the Jazz as a client, I talked about them on radio as an on-air DJ.
This (cringey) audio clip is me in 2001 as a twenty year old, first-year radio talent that some friends just found and tagged me about.
- Before being a DJ for 7 years across half a dozen stations, I started in radio as an intern.
- I started as an intern because the community college I was attending offered an elective credit for interning with a media company.
- Media was an elective because I was taking communications classes.
- I was taking communications classes at a community college because I just spent a year at a University and didn’t know what I wanted to pursue and didn’t want to keep paying “full price.”
- Communications was broad, and I was comfortable NOT forcing myself to choose a path.
- Learning communications, I picked up radio AND I started a car enthusiast website as a class project.
- I’d work on the car website between radio breaks.
- I learned search engine marketing because, as the site grew in traffic, I asked myself “how do I monetize this?” and learned internet marketing.
- I started the website as a class project because I was learning more HTML.
- “Learning more HTML” because I started designing basic websites for the first time before that, in 1999.
- Picked up design in 99 after learning HTML basics in 1998 in the high school’s first EVEEEER html class. (This was 20 years ago, kids.)
- I had an interest in websites after learning about the text-only search engine “Gopher” in 1996.
- I was gifted the opportunity to learn about Gopher in another school first “internet” class years prior.
- That gift came after my passionate participation in typing classes. Lol. Yes, typing class. I was typing 100+ words per minute when I was 16.
- Got a head start on typing because in school I absorbed as much about computers as I could. A computer was a luxury I didn’t have at home as a kid.
Now running an international SEO agency with three dozen team members across the globe… Every. Single. One of those moments were pivotal in contributing to where I’m at now.
Moral of the story…
Continue pursuing what path you feel is right, no matter how insignificant it may seem at that brief moment in your life. With time, what’s wrong for you will weed itself out and what’s right will reveal itself.
Give yourself the freedom to explore. Give yourself grace to change direction.
