In this Business Blast Podcast episode, host Tyler Wagner interviews Jacob Baadsgaard, founder and CEO of Disruptive Advertising. Jacob opens with a harrowing personal story from his senior year of college, where he juggled 56 credits, a full‑time job, a newborn, and a scouting leadership role, ultimately suffering a broken leg, shingles, and pneumonia. The crisis sparked a profound realization about humility, the importance of letting others help, and the kind of person he wants to be. Shifting to his professional expertise, Jacob explains that Disruptive Advertising grew from a basement side‑project to a 120‑person agency that has audited over 5,000 Google and Facebook ad accounts. He highlights a key industry insight: roughly 76% of ad budgets are wasted due to poor allocation, with campaigns often spreading spend too thin and turning off top‑performing ads simultaneously. He argues that smarter budget reallocation can either maintain results with less spend or dramatically improve outcomes. Jacob then shares broader business wisdom, emphasizing the power of saying “no” to maintain focus and reduce anxiety, and advises his younger self to examine his motivations, noting past insecurity drove his pursuit of success. On happiness, he stresses learning to love the journey and viewing challenges as growth opportunities. He cites the book Essentialism by Greg McKeown as a transformative read that taught him to simplify and focus, and shares a favorite Jim Carrey quote about wealth and fame not being the answer. The episode concludes with a plug for Disruptive Advertising’s website.
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Welcome to the Business Blast Podcast. I'm your host, Tyler Wagner. This episode is brought to you by Authors Unite. Authors Unite provides you with the support you need to finish your book. Best part is, after you finish your book, they take care of the entire publishing and marketing process 100% for you. So if you want to become a successful author, make sure to check out authorsunite.com. Now let's jump into the episode.
All right everyone, welcome back to another episode of the Business Blast Podcast. I'm your host Tyler Wagner. Today I have Jacob Badsgaard with us. He's the founder and CEO of Disruptive Advertising. So welcome to the show, man.
Thanks for having me, Tyler Wagner.
Of course, pumped to have you here. So, Jacob, the first question we ask on this show is what is the best story from your life that has an underlying valuable message?
You know, I saw that question and it's one that has given me the opportunity to reflect and think about things quite a bit. I am— the story that comes to mind is the year of my life that was probably the most stressful and traumatic year of my life and an experience that kind of brought it all to a head and gave me vision and clarity for who I wanted to be. It was actually my senior year in college. I did 56 credits in one calendar year. I was working full-time. We had our first child. For those of you that are familiar with the scouting program, I was the scoutmaster. During this year, it was too much. I don't recommend this to anyone. Still have nightmares about it to this day. The first sign of failing health was I actually got shingles in my 20s, which is a resurgence of the chickenpox that you are only supposed to get when you're old and your immune system doesn't work anymore because I was too stressed. Then, I also had an experience where after a scouting activity, we were playing an impromptu game of Ultimate Frisbee. I landed on someone's foot awkwardly. I broke my leg into 10 pieces and was then taken to the— this was the week of finals. I went to the hospital. They operated that same day. I got pneumonia while I was in the hospital while they were operating on me. And it was just during an already busy and chaotic time of my life, just kind of brought everything to a head. And what was impressive is what followed and the amount of support and people coming out of the woodwork to make an impact in my life. And just a couple that I'll point out really quick. Is obviously my wife, my family members were there to support me. And, but my work called me and said, hey, don't worry, we're still gonna pay you. And we actually set you up with a laptop if you wanna work remotely, once you're in a position to do so. My landlord called me and said, hey, we heard what happened. Don't worry about rent for this month. Just get, just focus on getting better. And then I had a fellow, student of mine who I didn't even know that well at the time, who went out of his way to take notes and put together a study guide for my finals and help me get up to speed, that showed up at my house, picked me up a treat, gave me these notes, and I didn't even know the guy's last name. And as a guy that, you know, I'm a Type A personality, I like to be the one on the giving, not the receiving end. Of doing things in life. And it was just a great humbling moment for me where I just realized this is the kind of person I want to be. I want to be the person that shows up, that pays attention, that steps up in a time of need for people, whether I even was super close to them or not. And that just really gave me a lot of vision and direction for my life and the kind of person that I would like to be. And, you know, I still have, like I said, nightmares about that year, but it was just a great learning experience for me to see, to really have to humble myself and to let other people help me, even though that's hard for me to do. And it made a big impact.
Yeah.
And it shows you how important relationships are. Yeah, dude, that is wild. Well, thank you for sharing that with us. The next one I have for you, and I'm sure our audience is really excited to hear your answer to this one because I know a lot of them are interested in advertising. So what is the most valuable piece of information we should know that's within your expertise or industry?
You know, it's interesting. We, um, I started this, this business on the side in my basement. Uh, we've now got, uh, over 120 people in the organization. We work with a lot of— we work with a lot of clients now. Um, and we actually developed a cool software tool where we've been able to audit over, I think it's over 5 or 6,000 companies' advertising accounts on Google and Facebook at this point.
Wow.
And we just see a lot of the common thread. And yes, there's a lot of tips and tricks and best practices and new things and strategies that are working now that weren't even working 3 months ago. But through it all, what I see as the number one mistake is just poor budget allocation. Um, after the, the thousands of accounts that we've audited, over 76% of those budgets are completely wasted. And that does not assume that the other 24% is profitable. It just means it's producing at least something. Um, and one of the biggest things that I see from that is because businesses assign their, their budgets into their campaigns And they do so in a manner that they spread themselves way too thin and their campaigns turn off all at the same time because they're running out of budget. And when, and we're talking sometimes budgets of a couple thousand dollars a month, and sometimes a couple million dollars a month. This is, this is applicable at all scale. And what happens is they spread their budget too thin and guess what happens? Their top performers and their bottom performers all turn off at the same time. And rather than running their top performers all the time and having a testing budget to kind of figure out some other things to see what's working and what's not. But it's just that simple budget allocation that we see companies doing drastically wrong. And in our strategies, technology, and best practices, we can oftentimes just by reallocating budgets, in a more effective manner, companies can either spend drastically less and produce the same amount of results, or they can continue spending the same amount and produce dramatically better results than they've been seeing, just due to that one simple, uh, strategy.
Yeah. Um, and then what is your best piece of overall business advice? So maybe it's not necessarily industry specific.
Well, what I keep learning time and time again is the power of saying no. And I think whether as an entrepreneur, whether as holding a specific position as an employee in a company, regardless of the size of company, this is something that I think is just challenging in general for most people. Whether that's saying no to bad revenue, whether that's saying no when, hey, I realize that you want that one more thing to get done, but which thing on my list of priorities would you like me to not do to get that one done, right? It's the ability to understand our limitations, to prioritize what's most important, and to say no to the rest, I think is the cure for a lot of business anxiety. More balance in life and ultimately substantial better results by developing the ability to say no and prioritize our time.
Dude, I could not agree more. That was my biggest thing when I first started out. I would just say yes to everything. And I still, it's like a natural thing within me where it's like when people are like, "Hey, can you do this?" I'm like, it almost naturally comes out. I'm like, "Yes." But then, if you say yes to 1,000 things, then I mean there's no possible way to do them all. So, that was one of the biggest lessons that I had to teach myself as my companies have grown. So, I mean, that could be even applied to this next one. But the next one I have for you, Jacob, is if you could give your younger self one piece of advice, what would that be?
You know, I guess I'm thinking about my younger self in a lot of different stages. But, but I'll answer that in relation to the context of starting and running a business. And I would have just said, check yourself. And what is your motivation for doing this? And make sure that you've got that figured out first. Because I look back and, well, I wouldn't say I always had the wrong motivations. I did have the wrong motivations more often than not. And the biggest one that stands out to me was that I needed to be successful so that I could be comfortable with who I even was as a human being, as a person. And that a lot of my drive came from just insecurity and not feeling like I was enough. And that if you took away business growth or the success or whatever that was, that I wasn't comfortable with who I was seeing in the mirror. And I wish that I could help my younger self see that. And to kind of get that squared away first before really pushing for a lot of growth because, you know, just candidly, the first 3.5 years of business, I loved it. I learned a lot from it. It was great and it was really hard. It took a year of therapy and a business coach and marriage counseling to get myself back into the right frame of mind and realizing what was really important. And seeing myself the right way. And so, that's what I would go back and counsel my younger self with.
And then, kind of going, you know, slightly down a different path here, in your opinion, what is the key to happiness?
I think there's a lot of keys to happiness. The one that stands out to me the most, at least at this stage in my life, is learning to love the journey because the reality is there will always be good and bad things going on. There will always be easy and hard things going on. And that never really changes. What I'm realizing that makes life awesome is seeing the challenges as opportunities for growth and embracing those and enjoying that and choosing to enjoy that process rather than looking for the easy way out or, "Man, just when I get to this goal or when I have X amount of money or when the company gets to this point," or— and really just projecting the "I'll be happy when." syndrome really leads to a lot of unhappiness and lack of fulfillment versus the challenge that I am facing today is what is going to help me to learn, grow, and progress into the person that I want to be. And so, I choose this and I choose to enjoy it.
And what is the best book that you've read and what was the number one thing you learned from that?
There's a lot of books that have really made an impact on my life. The one that stands out the most for me personally would be Essentialism by Greg McKeown. I bring that up simply because every time I've read that book, I've actually made a meaningful and lasting change in my life through the process of simplifying and focusing on what matters most.
What is your favorite quote and why?
One of my favorite quotes is actually by Jim Carrey, where he says, "I wish that everyone could become rich and famous to realize that's not the answer." And I think that to— now, to some degree, I feel like I can relate with that where the business has done pretty well and I've had some success from that standpoint. And seeing that it didn't solve a lot of the problems that I thought it would.
Yeah, I love Jim Carrey. His— I can't remember what the name of that is, but he did some speech in that college. Yeah, 20 minutes. That was a really good speech. But so thank you so much for coming on, man. The last one I have for you before we let you go is where can our audience best find you online?
Yeah, the easiest way to find us online is at disruptiveadvertising.com. Simplistically, businesses come to us for help in advertising on Google and Facebook because typically they lack the bandwidth or the expertise to do so themselves. And we're good at it. So that's what companies use us for.
Perfect. Thanks again for coming on, man.
Thanks, Tyler.
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