- Hey, my friend. Adam here.
Figured I'd take a few minutes break here at the beach,
get out of the sun for a little bit,
and share with you my story
of how I transitioned away from the corporate world,
away from the traditional nine to five,
and into the world of marketing,
becoming a marketing strategist,
a digital marketer starting marketing agencies,
and essentially taking advantage of all that this wild
and wonderful industry has to offer so that hopefully,
you can learn from the things that I did right,
and to those, avoid all of the things that I did wrong,
of which there were many,
so that you can come
out the other side and achieve your goals faster
and with a whole lot less headache and struggle.
(upbeat music)
So, let me take you back.
It was well over a decade now, a long time ago,
and essentially, I was working in the corporate world.
It wasn't your traditional corporate job.
I was working as a business jet pilot,
flying the world's rich and famous all around the world.
Really, when it comes to corporate jobs,
there's pretty much nothing better.
Like, it was the pinnacle job available.
We flew to amazing places.
All of my crew members and team members were amazing.
Our clients were amazing.
Like, it was just the best job ever, but it was also a job,
and there was always something there that was kind of eating
away at me, and I wanted to do my own thing,
but I had no idea how.
I didn't even know what that would be.
I tried a number of different businesses
in the past growing up, making skim boards,
which is kind of like,
I dunno what you'd call it,
shallow water surfing thing.
I tried different digital aspects back in the early days
of the digital industry.
I basically tried a whole bunch of things,
a little bit here,
a little bit there.
Nothing really worked out,
but I was always looking.
Anyway, while doing my corporate job, originally,
I thought that I was gonna do this
for just a couple years,
but it ended up turning into seven years
because they pay you a lot, they treat you really well,
and it becomes really hard to leave, until finally,
I'd just had enough.
There was just something about it
and I just couldn't do it anymore.
I had to get home.
I'm kind of a homebody at heart.
I like being at home.
I like having all
of my creature comforts and my routine and my schedule,
and when you are a business jet pilot,
you go when the client wants, you go where the client wants,
and essentially, you do whatever they need you to do
in order to fulfill the mission.
So one day, I just said, that's it. I've gotta go.
I called my chief pilot and said, "Look, I gotta go home,"
and he's like, "Yeah, we know.
Like, we kind of saw this coming for a while."
Everybody was great.
I went home, and I had nothing really, nowhere,
nowhere to go, nothing to do.
I had no ideas.
I didn't know what I was gonna do next.
I was really just at
this total low point of trying to figure out
where I was gonna take my life and my business,
so I sat down with my wife and I was like, "What do I do?"
And she's like, "You should do marketing,"
and I said, "What's marketing?"
Because honestly, I had no idea
what the industry was even about.
I didn't know what you did.
I didn't know how you would make money.
I didn't know if there was demand.
I knew that I didn't have any skills
or experience in that field.
The whole thing sounded crazy,
but she was a very smart lady, is a very smart lady,
knows what she's talking about, has a business degree,
has lots of good business experience,
so I was like, alright,
let's pull on this marketing thread
for a little bit and see where it goes.
So, I was like, alright, well,
let's see what it has to offer.
So, I started to learn about marketing with Google Search,
a book here, podcast there, an audiobook,
and very quickly, I was hooked.
There was just something incredibly interesting
about a couple things in particular,
the first of which is that marketing is really
the study of consumer psychology, of buyer behavior,
of human beings and why we do what we do, and essentially,
how we can use that to solve problems
for people using products and services that we sell.
So, that's my version of marketing.
I didn't know this quite at the time,
but there was something about it there.
It was just really interesting.
The other thing that I found incredibly fascinating was
that you could make money with words.
Like, you didn't have to operate a plane or drive a car
or dig a hole or build a house or wire something or do plum,
like, you could literally just write words,
and if they were the right words,
put together in the right order,
that triggered the right emotions
and response in your customers,
you could make money, not just money,
a lot of money, and sure, in those early days,
I might have been a little bit persuaded by the, like,
get a Lamborghini in your driveway
and get a mansion and all that,
but it was really just the aspect of, hey, wait a second.
If I learn how to do this
and I learn how to use these words
and apply them in the right order,
I can make money.
I can make money for other people.
I can make money for myself.
I can work from home, or from anywhere that I want,
and I'll have complete freedom
over my life and over my career.
Not to mention, I'm responsible.
So, rather than relying on a boss or someone
to essentially guide me,
it's up to me.
If I wanna work harder,
I'm gonna make more money.
I wanna slack off a little bit, I'm gonna make less money,
but these are decisions that I get to make.
So anyway, marketing sounded absolutely incredible.
So, I did what you did basically 10, 15 years ago,
which is like, alright, well,
I guess I should sign
up for some marketing classes in college as well.
So, I signed up back at college,
started going through some of those.
The first year, bit of a spoiler here,
but you do not need a marketing degree to do marketing.
Hindsight being what it is, you could probably avoid it,
probably the safer plan to just self-study on your own,
but at the time,
it was sort of a necessary push
and at least gave me a little bit of structure.
That said, year one in a business degree is probably
the most valuable one that you'll do
'cause you're gonna learn accounting
and finance and business ethics, business writing,
all of these things that are gonna help you as a marketer,
and then years two, three, and four, I don't know.
You do some more marketing stuff.
Nothing that you can't learn right here
on this YouTube channel.
Perfect example of this.
I was at day one
of my services marketing class and the professor asked,
"Hey, what do you guys wanna learn in this class?"
And I wrote digital marketing,
and he read the answer and he is like, "Yeah, me too!"
And I was like, "Oh man, I'm in the wrong place."
So, I started to read the books.
I started to do all the things.
I went to the courses,
but it was learning in between classes and
after classes that I really started to get my education,
because this is where I was starting to learn
from the old pros,
the Dan Kennedys, the Ogilvys, the Eugene Schwartz,
the proven marketing geniuses, the Seth Godin, actually.
Can't believe I didn't mention him first.
Probably the single biggest influence
in my entire marketing career has been on Seth Godin.
I consumed everything that he wrote from those early days
and it really molded my philosophy and my principles.
Jay Abraham also, fiduciary responsibility,
being responsible to your clients.
I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's go back.
So, I'm starting there, I'm learning about marketing,
I figure, I've gotta make some money somehow.
I don't know anything about the industry yet,
but I sort of connected some dots.
I was like, well,
if we're doing digital marketing and everyone's online,
I should probably learn how to build websites.
So, I started to learn HTML and CSS,
which are basically coding languages.
I then learned PHP so I could code a WordPress website,
'cause I thought that would be incredibly valuable
and important, somewhat helpful,
'cause I was able to start building websites for clients.
I built them for basically anybody that would let me,
in the early days, for completely free,
'cause I wanted to build up my portfolio.
Slowly but surely though,
I started to get paying clients,
and they would pay me a few hundred here,
a few hundred there,
and I'd start to build these things up.
What I realized very quickly
after building these websites
and launching them into the world
is that no one could find them.
That led me to SEO.
So, now that I've got this website, essentially,
my entire career is an example
of what marketing is,
by finding and identifying problems
and then finding solutions for those,
which is exactly what you do
as a marketer for your clients or for your own business.
So I built the website, nobody could find them,
I had to learn SEO.
Bit of a slog there.
Very technical, especially back a decade
or so ago when it was a lot of different keyword things
and the algorithms were kind of a mess
and there was all kinds of different link farms and PBNs,
private blog networks, all kinds of nerdy technical things,
but I figured, hey, we gotta learn this thing.
It's incredibly valuable.
So, I learned SEO, I started ranking websites,
and that's when I really started
to make a little bit of money.
Man, this is incredible!
Like, again, I'm doing things with words.
I'm coding these websites. I'm doing SEO.
Again, heavily guided and influenced
with content marketing to build stuff up on the site.
We're ranking this site for search engine traffic,
getting free traffic to our site,
and I was hooked,
and I wanted more.
So, I figured the next step then,
if we're gonna get some good traffic with SEOs,
we've gotta start looking at social media obviously, right?
It's so funny to look back at the time
when you're first getting started and realize
all of the obvious things that you missed,
but obviously, it worked out.
So, we start doing social media.
At the time, Facebook was kind of the big player,
so we learned about Facebook organic marketing,
building up all of these pages,
everybody was going down that road,
and then all of a sudden, something switched.
Two things switched, the first of which is
that I wanted more traffic,
and there was only so much
that you're able to get organically,
so I knew that I was gonna have
to start looking at paid ads.
The second thing was that Facebook, overnight,
flipped a switch and they essentially removed a lot
of the organic traffic that you're able to get
on your page and basically just said, hey,
all of those business pages that you just spent a ton
of time and money and energy building up,
now you've gotta pay if you want to get traffic,
so you've gotta run Facebook ads.
A couple of cool things happen.
Number one, a lot of people got a lot of mad.
They said, "We're not paying you any money.
We built these up organically.
Keep giving us free traffic,"
and so they lost out.
Me, on the other hand,
and other people like me, were like, hey, wait a second.
We can pay a few bucks to Facebook and we can basically buy
up all of the space that all of these angry, spiteful,
bitter people have just left now
because they don't wanna give money
to the big corporation,
and so we bought Facebook ads for pennies on the dollar.
Now, this is back in the good old days,
but we were getting clicks for literal pennies,
25 cents, 50 cents, leads for 50 cents or a dollar.
It was a bit of the wild west. Anything flew.
The terms of service were a bit sketchy.
You could basically put in anything you wanted,
but we were able to make a lot
of really cool money with Facebook ads, and essentially,
that's where I started to build my name
in the digital marketing industry.
Had some great mentors, some great friends in the space.
They provided referrals.
I ended up doing a lot of fitness advertising Facebook ads
and that kind of introduced me to a whole new world,
which led to more referrals, and so on and so forth,
and then things really started to pick up
and I realized that I could put in the same amount
of work for a client,
and if they were a six-figure business doing $100,000 a year
and I made them an extra 10%,
well, I could make them 10 grand,
but if they were a seven-figure business
and I did that same amount of work,
I could make them 100 grand,
or if they were a bigger business,
I could make them an extra million, or 10,000,000,
and very quickly, I started to realize that
by going after bigger clients with the skills that I had,
I was able to make them, and therefore me,
a lot more money as well,
and then I realized the importance of branding
and of content and of authority and of trust.
So, I really doubled down
on my own internal content marketing game.
I started blogging more,
I started a podcast, I started making videos,
not really knowing where it was gonna go,
and in fact, on YouTube, probably the perfect example,
I remember those first few videos that I made.
Not only were they terrible and very awkward, very sweaty,
and the audio was only coming out of, like,
one side 'cause I couldn't figure out the microphone,
but I remember my friends
and family thinking that I was crazy.
Why was I wasting time and energy
and money putting together these videos
that no one was watching?
It's actually kind of a valid, it's a valid question,
especially from those on the outside,
but I knew that this was the answer,
that not only was the future
of marketing going to be heavily video-based,
but even then, many, many years ago,
I think we started making them seriously
around six years ago,
I knew that this was where that my target market was,
I was able to provide the most value.
It sort of leveraged the skills that I had
and also the skills that I wanted to acquire,
so video became a major player,
and then from there,
it obviously snowballed and the YouTube channel
has become one of the biggest drivers for the brand
and for the business.
It's led to speaking opportunities,
working with some of the biggest names in the business,
from Facebook to Google to Adobe
to HubSpot to Salesforce and all kinds of different things,
but that's essentially the journey,
starting at the very beginning
with no idea what marketing was, no idea how to do it,
no idea who the major players were,
no idea where I was going,
and then slowly but surely pulling on the thread,
picking away at interesting elements that I was curious in
or that I heard about or that I thought would be valuable,
working far too hard for far too long,
so why don't we talk about that next,
because hustle culture, kind of a bit of a buzzword.
People are moving away from that,
and I think they're moving too far away from that.
Yes, balance is important.
Obviously, I'm recording this right now
from the beaches of Hawaii here on a bit of a "workation."
We tend to come here a lot,
and then I still do some work 'cause I like working,
but the point is, in those early days,
you've gotta sacrifice and you do kind of have to grind.
So for me, what that meant was 12, 14, 16 hours a day,
seven days a week,
and it was a good couple years of doing that,
often with very little return to show for all
of the effort that I was putting in,
but it compounds and it builds up, and now, looking back,
not only was all of that sacrifice
and all of that time completely worth it,
but the level that it has enabled me to achieve now
is beyond what I could have ever imagined.
He never could have possibly imagined
that I would be even a fraction of where I am now,
and I can credit that,
not to any intelligence
or any smart thing that I saw and capitalized
on that nobody else saw, possibly a bit of luck,
but by far, the biggest factor
was simply working a little bit harder
for a little bit longer than other people.
It's a bit of a war of attrition,
meaning that other people are going to come in,
they're going to think it's easy,
they're going to try some things for a while,
they're going to realize it's not as easy,
and they're going to quit,
and if you can just keep working
and just keep putting the pieces together, they add up,
and the more that you show your face
and you make yourself available
and you stand behind what you do, you never,
ever sacrifice or risk your integrity or your reputation,
these things, again, they compound,
and they'll take you places
that you could have only ever dreamed of.
So, my friend, thank you for being here.
Thank you for all you do.
Thank you for watching this and showing the commitment
to yourself and to your goals and to your dreams.
Let me know in the comments whereabouts you're
at in your journey,
as well as physical.
Where are you? Where are you located?
Where are you living these days?
Let me know what your challenges are.
Let me know what you're most looking to learn.
That's what this channel is really all about.
on your journey and on your adventure.
So, with that said, my friend,
I'll talk to you soon and I'll see you in the next video.