I Quit My Job & Built a $3M Agency | Here's How It Changed My Life...

I quit my corporate job 12 hours before my first day. That was 5 years ago. Since then, I've built an agency doing over $250K a month, made the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, invested in and advised a bunch of startups, and more. From the outside, it looks like a dream. But nobody talks about what's really going on underneath. This constant feeling that no matter what you build, it's not enough. The feeling of inadequacy. The guilt of not working every hour of every day. If you're a founder or an entrepreneur, you probably know exactly what I'm talking about. Most people think that's a problem. I think it's a blessing and a curse. Today I'm showing you what it looks like when you embrace it. A day in my life as a founder who stopped fighting that feeling and started surrounding myself with people who feel the exact same way. Today is busy. Welcome back. Adam rented a studio because he said we need more short-form content, so we're on the way there right now. I did a 5-mile run, a sauna, and an apple this morning. That was my routine. The thing that I want to talk about in today's vlog is the feeling of inadequacy that I think a lot of founders have that they don't talk about publicly. I'll be the guy to talk about it. I think oftentimes when people start businesses, there's this feeling of inadequacy, a feeling like you always want to prove to the world that you can do more. You feel like you haven't done enough, and it's kind of this perpetual feeling that snowballs. And that's partially where a lot of your drive comes from to to go above and beyond, sacrifice a lot of things and take risk because it's this endless pursuit of trying to basically quench your thirst in another sense. The inadequate feeling almost puts a chip on your shoulder to want to try to do more. And I think that when you meet other founders who feel the same way, it basically is the first time that you feel heard and understood. And then I think what you'll notice as you continue on your entrepreneurial journey is that a lot of the people that you'll start to spend time with as you get further along that journey are also entrepreneurs. Not to say it's 100% of the time, but I think naturally you gravitate towards people who do the same things, who feel the same things, because when you find a crew of people who can understand that feeling that you have, it just makes it a lot easier to relate. People who are brave enough to start their own company are typically doing it because it's a career or a calling, not because it's a job. You love what you do, you get passionate about it, and then you just don't want to stop talking about it. And I think when you start to question the people that you're spending time with, like if maybe you're hanging out with a group of people that you grew up with, but it doesn't feel the same, and it feels like there's tension because everyone's gone off on their own path, you have to realize that that's life. How we doing? Hey, what's up, man? So weird to see people that I see on Instagram. What? I'm like, I saw you yesterday. Oh, it went well. Congrats, man. Thank you. This— so this is the marker thing that I told you. See, I have the little So what I'll do is click this here. I got to move you out of the fucking way. I have to go home to jump on a call with an unhappy customer. It's like the nature of the service business. There's just— optics and communication is so important, and like level setting expectations. There are a lot of brands who will be upset about a situation, and then they'll reach out and sound frustrated and aggravated, and then when you get on the phone with them and explain to them exactly what happened, it's very easy to like talk them off the edge. I think the thing you have to recognize in the service business is oftentimes the person who's going to come to you with complaints is not necessarily the person who's deep in the weeds. They're just like the messenger. Someone on their team told them something. So you have to remember that people are not always coming into a complaint with full context. So you want to ensure that they have a full understanding of what happened and what occurred. And so you can be as objective as possible about the thing they're mad about. So, for example, this client that I'm jumping on within a few minutes who's frustrated, objectively what he's angry about is not valid based on what we've done for them, and we have documentation that actually shows it. But I don't expect him to have all the information because he's not the person on his team that's actually managing every detail. But part of the service business is client management. It just— it comes with the territory. Any sales calls today? Yeah, I have 2 sales calls at the end of the day. People don't even know. You're always selling even when you're not. Being that there is a— one of my customers just texted me cuz we just launched their new site. Nate, that's him actually. It's the same guy who texted me, is also like, yo, I'm on your block right now. Yo, and Nick, he's the guy that built our website. He lives half a block away and we just ran into him. Ben, give you a hug. What's up, brother? Good to meet you. Good to meet you too, man. Thank you for that. Oh, hi. For what? No, he's with me. He's with me. Sorry, he's with me. Oh, okay. Sorry, fucking website. Oh yes, you're welcome. I said to him, I was like, no, I'm not, I'm not the guy who did it. I'm just the guy who finds the people that are good at what they do. By the way, you can turn it off. This brand, the Absorption Co brand. So like, we're standing there talking and then I came over, I said hi, then this guy like gives me a hug and I say hi, and then we're standing there talking and that girl's like 'You know this guy? Like, why is he filming?' We're getting all weird. Dude, I didn't realize that guy's famous A-list celebrity. Do you know who Ian Somerhalder is from Vampire Diaries? Apparently he's like mega famous, and that was his wife. And apparently a bunch of people are like— they can't walk on the streets without people stopping them. So when I went over to say hi, because he's also a co-founder of Absorption Co., so I went over and he's like, 'Dude, I love the website. Thank you so much.' And I was like, 'Yeah, dude, no problem.' I had no idea who he is. And Adam's standing with me filming, and like this girl's just like keeps giving us a weird look. I was like, Adam, stop, because she was getting annoyed. And I realized it because an employee from Ruby's walks outside and goes up to her, says, hey man, can you just say anything to the camera? And I was like, oh my God, completely unintentional. One of my favorite compliments I've gotten so far from one of the brands that we've worked with, he goes, unreal work on the website. I'm illiterate on that stuff, but the team is saying it's like a Ferrari versus a bike, which is where we were before. You should see the group chat, they love it. It's like a happy customer and sees like the fruits of the labor from months of work going into it. So it's just like another, another good win for the team. Just to give you reference, this is the website that the founder is talking about that he absolutely loves. And to be clear, I also love this website. And I think one thing that's important to note is one of the things that makes a website go from nice to like amazing is if they have really good assets and product photography, which these guys do. It's just like the cherry on top. You can see here, it's just so beautiful. It's so easy to use. The elegance of like right here, it's just allowing you to like sort by different products, the ability to add the product directly to your cart from the home page. We also put this bundle on the home page, the Essentials Stack. So this is like a great way to increase average order value by allowing them to add a bunch of products to their cart with one button. So if I click this, it's going to add like the full stack, which is 4 products. With the slide-out cart, and you can see like the shipping thresholds unlocked. I actually noticed something that I'm gonna send to the team because there's something that they should make better. There's always ways to improve. I'm sitting here showing you how great it is, which I still think it's great, but I have an idea. What? Wow, 500 subscribers! You never take those moments for granted. How do you see YouTube playing out? And how do you think it's going to help you? The fact that it's really hard to use AI to emulate people who are basically just sharing a behind the scenes into their actual life. I think AI content is going to dominate, but I think that there's still going to be a corner of the internet that want to follow like real humans doing human things. And so I think the long-form vlog, despite the fact that I know it started, you know, 10, 15 years ago, so there are a lot of people doing it, like I am definitely putting my eggs in that basket over the short-form content because I think there's more depth. More value in the relationship that you can build with an audience on YouTube versus any other platform. This is one of the most time-consuming yet most effective ways to build relationships. Remember, you have to do things that don't scale sometimes to build relationships and to stay memorable. I am writing handwritten letters to a lot of people. It's taking me a long time to get through them all, but I made a long list of people that I'm writing letters for from last year who had a profound impact on my life because because I feel like taking 5 minutes to thank someone is something that will stick with you for a long time to come. Going to meet with my friend Amar, who is an investor at Adapt, which is him and his brother's venture fund. He lives in Dubai, but every time he's in New York, he promises that he'll text me to hang out. So gonna go catch up with him. He probably has a couple brands to send my way and just see how life's going. Good to see you. This is Adam. Adam, nice to meet you. He just got married. Do what? Your weddings are like 3 months long? I don't know, I was burnt out, man. What is it, a week? Yeah, about like 10 days. 10? Yeah. Wait, so how many events actually are there over the course of the time? About 9 in total. Dude, that's exhausting. I was trying to like be productive during that period. Of course you were. I closed 4 deals and did 2 investments and blah blah while I was getting married for What are you spending most of your time on right now? Probably 20% of my time on the BPO business. We scaled now, we have about 950 employees. We have 2 business divisions, we're looking at making an acquisition right now. Still spend a lot of my time on incubating businesses. This is our best performing video. See, we hit 17,000 views. I've never seen the backend of the analytics of I've always wanted to see this. Are you monetizing here, or do you need to have like a certain number of— No, you need to hit, uh, 1,000 subscribers, a certain number of watch hours. Yeah, we're not even close to monetizing it. But you— I think you would actually enjoy— you would genuinely enjoy the video though. It was— we, we consolidated the 6-month journey into 19 minutes. But look, it's like, uh, I'm gonna check— all my videos get like 400, 500 views, and then we got 17,000. Wow. If I continue doing this for the next 5 years and it doesn't do anything for me, if nothing else it's a timeless thing that I'll have for myself. Yeah, that's true. Like that, a lot of you— that boxing video. Yeah, that's like something to sit on my couch with my kids and be like, watch me knock this guy out. Yeah, yeah. All right, going the other way. Dude, so good to see you, man. I'll see you. So good. Glad to hear everything's going well. Nice meeting you. See you soon. Later, dude. It's cool to see people like that where like you don't catch up for— yeah, I haven't seen him in like 2 years, but yeah, but like it's like when you meet, you feel like you pick up right where you left off. Exactly. Hi. Yeah, how are you? Good, how are you? I'm doing well. It's good to meet you. Look, I appreciate you guys jumping on, you know, happy to be as helpful as possible and kind of steer you guys in whatever direction is most helpful and can obviously give you more context about our business as well. But I'll let you kind of dictate what would be most productive for you. Basically, we are a med spa that started 3 years ago, and we did Squarespace based on the recommendation of like the design team. Like a well-oiled machine because it's really just like rinse and repeat with the the same process and just making improvements every single time we do it, like 1% better for the next brand that we work with. Okay, amazing. Was there any— there were brick and mortar and I was like, I'm not really selling much online, but now I wish I probably had listened to him. So I just want to do it right this time. Like I said, you get what you pay for. My opinion, when we started this business, every time a brand would come to us with their timeline, we would like say yes and then try and figure it out. And then we're like, why are we creating this sense of urgency that just stresses everyone out? If I told you that you're going to wait an extra 30 days, but the end product is going to be exponentially better, like 12 months from now, you're going to be happy with that decision. Right. Of course, everyone, everyone wants everything done yesterday. We understand that. It's so numb to get on the phone with a brand like, yeah, we need the new site in 3 weeks. I'm like, okay, we're not the right partner for you. And they're like, okay, but how long can you do it in? I say 120 days and all of a sudden they're like, okay, that's fine. Yeah, it actually is better to say the days and months too. Yeah. And then from there you guys can make a decision. Great meeting you guys. Be in touch soon. Okay, bye. Honestly, I got on that call not expecting them to be a buyer just because of the nature of their business and at the beginning of the call, I was like, I'm happy to help you guys. I don't think this is going to be the right fit for you. And she pushed back on me. She's like, no, no, like, I want to pay for it and do it the right way. But I think that honesty and just calling it what it is out of the gate gets respect versus you just looking like you're trying to sell something even if you don't think it's a good fit. So I don't know, we'll see what happens. Like with anything else, filming these videos just gets easier with reps. I feel like when we first started filming vlogs, it was like so much overthinking, and now we are just churning these out, and I'm excited to keep doing so. As I've said before, I appreciate you guys following along in the journey. If you're still listening, please subscribe, hit the button down below. Many more to come. We'll see you guys next week. Peace.