Jason Berkowitz reflects on starting his agency and shares two pieces of advice for his 2010 self: find a mentor earlier, and delegate sooner instead of trying to do everything alone. He emphasizes balancing technical SEO skills with leadership and business acumen.
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What advice would you give yourself if you were back in 2010 and kind of just starting to figure stuff out, going out on your own for consulting? What would you tell yourself that's maybe different than what, what you actually did tell yourself back then?
There's a few things I would tell myself. I wouldn't necessarily change the trajectory because I think there's some hard lessons you got to learn, and that's usually through failure, which sets you up for success. I would say get some mentorship early, earlier. I spent a lot of time also just trying to debug everything myself, and I became, becoming an SEO person, and that's really technical. And strategic. And then at the same time, okay, I'm going to start building a business, but I don't know jack about running a business or how to be a good leader. So there's all these things that you can acquire easily. It's like a growth hack in a way, just by having a really good mentor. I personally have an SEO mentor and I have an agency life mentor, and they both absolutely keep me on track. And then I think the second thing is I would say delegate earlier. We have this belief, especially entrepreneurs, that, oh, no one can do this as good as I can. But what they don't realize is they're half-assing it because you're not giving it your full attention because you're wearing many hats. So if someone was only focused on that area, and if you have the, the revenue and budget to delegate, delegate sooner.