Episode #617 - Try To View Life As A Game with Eric Siu, CEO of Single Grain

Welcome to this edition of the million dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on winning. I'm your host, Larry Wydell.

Hello, everybody. Fun to talk to you today with Eric Sue, CEO of Single Grain, a digital marketing agency out of Los Angeles. Hello, Eric.

Thanks for having me, Larry. Very excited to be here.

Yes. And congratulations on your begrudging move from Miami to West Hollywood recently in Beverly Hills.

Close enough, though.

Beverly Hills. Beverly Hills. And so I'm sure you're going to make it a better place. We're going to be hearing better things about L. A. Now that you're. You have arrived. But I'm excited to hear your story because, Eric, you've done so many things and I wanted. I was asking you earlier, you know, like, what are you mainly doing now and all? And I thought, well, let's, let's get you to explain that to everybody, and then that'll be kind of our starting point. But you've come a long way and you've come out of nowhere and you've made a big name for yourself. You've accomplished a lot of things. You developed a lot of incredibly valuable skills for major companies, and you have a lot of cachet out there in the world. But we all come naked into the world, and naked we're going to leave. And somehow you put things together. You navigated your way into a position, a huge position of influence and accomplishment. And that's not accidental, you know, that's by design. And so we want to hear about that. But where are you today? What do you spend your time doing? What's your focus?

Yeah, thanks for the kind words, Larry. Very humbling. I certainly feel like I'm, you know, just trying to make it every day. Right. You know, just. That's taking it day by day. But main thing I focus on right now is I have my ad agency, Single Grain, which I bought for $2 out of pocket when I was about 26, 27 years old. I'm happy to talk about that. And, you know, two years ago, we bought two other agencies. So, you know, working on mainly operating a business and looking at potential acquisition opportunities, especially with this upcoming. Whatever you want to call it.

Right.

And then I do my podcast, and those are kind of the primary things. And other than that, you know, occasionally I'll d Babel in angel investing here and there. So.

Okay, so let's go and let's talk about how did you get to that Point. I mean, how did you. When you're coming up, we. It's amazing how many of the thought patterns, the, the skill sets, the, the way we go about looking at life and you know, dig into what's in front of us. Starts at a very early age. When did you start thinking about doing something big, doing something special, doing something you could get excited about and you know, doing something big.

So when I was about nine years old, I got my first computer. And that was when the whole world opened up. Because I remember I stole my mom's credit card to sign up for the Internet. And when I would wait for my parents to leave during the day because they leave me home alone, I would then move my computer because I didn't buy an extension cord. I'd move it next to the phone line, plug it in, I'd be on the Internet all day. And at nine years old, I had actually built my first website, which is an MP3 website. That's when MP3 started to become a thing. You could listen to music and all that, started to learn the web. But along the way I kind of got caught up in the world of gaming. And so I got my start in the Internet, but then started playing online games and I got really good at games and that was the moment when I got really good at games. That was my confidence builder. That's where I learned teamwork, camaraderie, everything that you learned in sports. I thought to myself, dude, if I can just become really good at games, if I can find this feeling in real life, I would become unstoppable. And it wasn't until way later in my life where I learned that that thing was actually business. But I would say my very first start was actually gaming. And that's what it is because I look at life as a game and I literally released a book on this called Leveling up two years ago. So.

Yeah, well, and hopefully we're going to get into that. But it is a side note, it is absolutely amazing how esports has, you know, this team gaming and competition has. It's a worldwide phenomena beyond belief to those who of us who weren't watching.

Totally. Yeah. And you know, I think people tend to look at things and they dismiss things when they first come out. Oh my God, this is gaming. This is a waste of time. You know, kids are just as bad for their mental health and all that. It's like there's downsides to everything and there's always upsides. Everything too. There's trade offs, there's no solutions and there's.

But, but kids are learning. They're not just becoming psychopaths in their dark rooms playing games, you know, they are learning, it is drawing them out, you know, building relationships, learning to get along with other people, you know, competing. And then you have dealing with devastating defeats and things like that, you know, but they actually travel and do things like that. But so it helps as you're growing up, it gives you an insane advantage to learn to compete early on. And you can learn that from gaming for sure. And it's kind of a surprise to all of us who grew up doing sports actually realizing you can do that. Not in athletics.

Totally. Yeah. And so I think the world has kind of turned around and gaming is a multi billion dollar industry and it's going to continue to grow. And you can talk about crypto or blockchain, but one of the biggest on ramps into crypto or blockchain is going to be gaming. It's already kind of started in that space. So I'm, you know, I just, look, I can't play any more games nowadays. I'm in my mid-30s now. But I do look at this conversation that we're having is a game to me. Business is a game to me. Investing is a game to me. Everything is a game. And when I look at it in that lens, then it just makes everything more fun.

Well, the thing is, you know, now, now that I think about it, I hadn't really looked at it this, this way before, but you know, kids who are into games, you know, they, in this game they're looking for the new game comes out, they quickly master that, you know, they, they, it's not just one game their whole life. Well, that's the way I was in sports. You know, whatever the season was, I'm playing that sport. You know, it's basketball, it's track, it's baseball and tennis. And so for that our generation, there was no gaming. But that kind of was a gaming substitute back then. Now that I, you know, there's one way you can look at it, I.

Guess multiple ways to look at anything.

So and so the flexibility, it causes you to be flexible and to look at opportunities. What caused you, what opportunities stood out to you the most when you said, did you get a degree, did you study, did you get right into the work, the job market? How did you break out of the house and off of your parents computer and Internet line?

So the first job I got out of school was actually right on the heels of the Great Recession. That was in 2008 or so. And the first job I could get coming out of a top 10 public school. So I went to school in San Diego and the first job I could get was a data entry job making $32,000 a year. So I wasn't quite out yet. But then that's at that point, that's when I discovered this whole digital marketing thing. And I picked up an intern and from that point on, I never really felt like I looked back basically within two years. To answer your question directly now. So I was 23 at the time, 22. And by the time I was 25, I had already moved out and was living on my own. Not saying that's an amazing accomplishment, I was just answering your question. And by 26, I was leading marketing at a startup. And by 27, I had taken over this ad agency, which I was originally hired for, to help save. So that was the timeline. Basically in a span of like 3, 4 years, I went from knowing nothing to leading a company, which I also knew nothing about.

And to unpack that for a minute, what was the first event of that three years, the triggering the set, the dominoes going was, was that you moving out? Are you getting the internship? Are you getting that kind of job or what? What caused you to, you know, the push?

So I'll, I'll give you, there's two major pushes there. So when I was doing the data entry job, I was early 20s and we saw a guy also doing the same job, he graduated from Harvard and he was 30 years old. And at that moment I was, oh crap. All of the co workers around my age were like, we cannot be like that. And it's such a sad thing to say, but it's like, what an example. It's like that's the anti example. And so at that point we're like, okay, what do we need to do? What do we need to do? And then my friend who was working at American Apparel at the time, her name is Christina, she said, hey, you should look into this digital marketing thing. I was like, what do you mean? And she's like, yeah, I'm learning this SEO thing. And so I started looking into it and I got an unpaid internship while I held my full time job. That's another lesson, hang onto your income. And from that point on, I never looked back because this whole digital marketing thing felt like an entire game to me. And this was also validated a couple of years later when one of my friends that grew up with me playing games, he worked in private equity, but he saw everything that I was doing. He's like, man, what you're doing is exactly like playing a game.

Really. All the business is playing. It's all competition, it's all trying to get an edge on what the other guy's doing. Take over markets, hang on to markets and you know, develop your people and develop your people, develop territories, develop your product line. You know, it's all, it's all in there, isn't it? Elements of growth and competition and compounding. And so when you got into what prompted that instinct to hang on to your, your full time, your, your regular, your paying job while you're doing that internship.

I wish I had a good answer for you, but it seemed like pretty common sense to me to hang onto your main source of income. And then, you know. But basically I'll tell you what I did just to just how I positioned this because I was an hourly worker and so I would. Basically I was coming in at 9 like a usual worker, 9 to 5. But I was actually allowed to change my hours from 6:00am to, to 2:00pm and so I changed my hours, I moved it up. And so I would show up to work. Don't copy me. But this is what I did. I showed up at work at 6am Nobody was there besides someone else. And I'd go to sleep for two hours on my desk and then start again. And then by the time 2pm came around, I would start to internship and I would study until 11 or 12 in the evening.

Yeah, and they have, I don't know if they. The boot camps were around at that time, but now they have these boot camps to where you can learn a lot of those skills. And I don't know how effective they are, but I know that they're out there. They kind of compress timeframes. Rather than go to college, you go to a boot camp and you learn specific skills. But how did you leave the internship? Did the internship give you particular credibility? What you learned there? Or how did that, how did you turn that over into a stronger position? Yeah, at the end of that.

So this was in 2010 and so there weren't. A lot of this whole digital marketing thing was really compounding at the time. There wasn't. You don't see kids now. Nowadays you have kids that are like five, six years old starting E commerce stores or last week I taught in a class at USC. And one kid, 20 years old, he has a $2 million construction business. The other kid's 20 years old, he has a one million dollars a year software business. And we're just seeing the cost of knowledge compound a lot faster. But I digress. So your question. Sorry, I just want to make sure I answer correctly. What was your question again? Just to rephrase.

Well, what were you meaning, you know, you saw the cost of knowledge compounding more today. What are you referring to off there?

Yep. So let me combine two things right now. So what I think about wealth now, and this is something that's rewired my thinking recently. Wealth, people would usually say, oh, it's time, it's money or whatever, it's assets and wealth is actually knowledge. And so because knowledge outgrows any, it grows outgrows you and me, it outgrows any Bitcoin or gold or the concept of, you know, money. Knowledge just continues to, you know, it lives on forever. Right. And so for me, the what I mean by the cost of knowledge or the rate of knowledge increasing is, is it's moving a lot faster the way we're able to intake information. The kids are learning how to build businesses from YouTube and then they're learning from other entrepreneurs around their age. And I truly believe we're going to see a lot more five or six years old building seven figure businesses without the help of their parents. And so that's kind of the benefit of this knowledge compounding faster, if that makes sense.

Thanks for listening to the Million Dollar Mastermind. If you felt there were any valuable takeaways from this episode, please take a minute and leave us a five star review. Your feedback is important and really helps us get the word out to a wider audience. Remember, we have a valuable webinar. This is absolutely free. Register for it right now@whiteallonwinning.com thanks for listening.