Yesterday I quit my $xxx,xxx job so I can work on my business that has $xxx,xxx,xxx potential, full-time. Went smoothly, no hard feelings, learned a lot and provided a lot of value. It was actually not bad for a JOB, but not the environment for a guy like me to be able to really THRIVE.
Enjoyed a nice glass of bourbon and a Cohiba stick last night, just reflecting. It has been a long road to this point, 6 years in the making. 6 years since I read TMF , and 6 years since that fire was lit under my a$$ to make something of myself. 6 years since I completely turned my life around from being a poor kid from the trailer park with no formal education working manual labor jobs.
No one ever expected anything great of me, I can tell you that much. I watched my peers around me become consumed by drug addiction, crime, or in many cases, a premature death. Not exactly an environment geared towards success. Rather, one geared towards perpetual sidewalking.
From being a $10/hr laborer toting bricks and blocks and mud around through these hellish North Carolina summers (for 4 years, mind you) to having that FTE for that, and making the leap to running a successful, growing ad management business. I don't think I've ever put my whole story out there, but I think it's time. My hope is that through my painful journey out of the pit you can take something positive from it, even if just a laugh.
********* Warning: Long Post Ahead **********
The Sidewalk
Hit the Bricks. Move Them Over There, NOW!
Wanna talk about a tough, physically demanding job? Go be a brick mason's apprentice for a day. It's grueling work, particularly during the summers and winters. The only thing worse than carrying around heavy shit in 100+ degree weather all day, every day, is sitting in a warm truck, all bundled up and arriving to the job where it's below freezing and you have to move all of the heavy things from one side of the job site to the other. That feeling of pure dread. Every day was a FTE.
Yet, with that in mind, I guess I was just a masochist at the time. I just took it. For 4 years. 4 years of taking that pain and turning it into strength. Conditioning my body to be able to do things that I never thought I'd be able to do. To really pushing my own personal limits to see just how far I could go. I was young, I had no direction, and it was a good fit in retrospect. It helped me get my shit together mentally and get away from my peers at the time. Some people join the military to do it, for me it was just backbreaking work for a few years.
Now keep in mind that this was all post-Great Recession and residential brickwork at the time was slowww. Most weeks I would only bring in $300 or less. A really good week was $400. There towards the end, it got so slow, we were only working 3 days a week and I had rent to pay, and my car needed two front tires because they both blew out at the same time. Shit just got real, and I had to make a move fast.

So without hesitation, I had a few beers and made an ad to put on Craigslist. I put it in the wrong section on purpose to get more visibility, but it was basically something along the lines of "Experienced Laborer Looking For Work". The next morning I got a call from a guy a few towns over and he said to meet him at Lowes and go to work. I told my boss at the time I had to go, I had another job. So I moseyed down the road going 35mph for about 30 miles in my car which had two spares on the front. I couldn't go very fast, or take turns quickly, but I got there. It was a job doing gutter cleaning and roof repairs for homeowners, and I wasn't the biggest fan of heights. Great. But it was work, and I needed the money.
Gutters & Roofing: It's Lonely at the Top
I remember my first day on the job, climbing that ladder, getting onto this flat back porch roof. Legs trembling, profusely sweating, scared to death that I was going to fall off and end up being a vegetable. But it was that day, and the coming months that helped me really get comfortable with being uncomfortable. Next thing I knew I was running up and down steep roof tops like spiderman. New level unlocked.
Then I got the big pay raise up to a whopping $14/hr! I was stoked at the time, as this work was wayyy easier than doing brickwork. I mean you had to scale houses and do death-defying stuff all day, but it was in sprints. Get on a job, run around like a mad man for 30-45 minutes, then hop in the truck and drive to the next one. There was a lot of ride time and I looked at it as getting paid to sit in the shade.
Typical day in the life here. Shitty, old roof. 32ft ladder, fully extended, just barely reaching the roof for me to climb up. No safety harnesses were used during the taking of this photo.
The summer of 2011 was almost over and I was a bit worried about what were going to do about work when things started icing over and getting cold. Then I was told that we would be installing Christmas lights on residential homes starting in November. At first, this sounded great. I could rack up over 60 hours in a week!
Of course, I judged that book by the cover. It was an icy hellscape where my days blurred together and my life was nothing but work. I woke up at 7 am, started working at 8am on roofing and gutters, and worked most days until 11pm-1am. That wasn't even the worst of it all. The worst part was when you were dangling over the side of a roof hanging up lights, then when you go to get off of the roof, the temperature had dropped and frost covered your way down. For those unfamiliar, that equates to a death slide, allll the way down to the ground, which was typically comprised of concrete, steps, or rocks.
By a stroke of a luck, I made it through this arduous time virtually unscathed, though there was that one day when I almost lost two of my fingers when the bottom of a ladder slipped on a PVC deck and proceeded to go horizontal with my fingers mashed between the ladder and asphalt roof. I managed to pop the ladder up off the roof using my, at then, super human rowing skills and grabbed onto the gutter before the ladder fell to the ground. Ruined the gutter, but things could have been worse. This was the flesh wound that resulted.
The Big Change
Winter of 2011 was my next FTE. This led me to wanting out. Sure I was making more money, but at the potential cost of life and limb (literally). Something had to change. It was in January of 2012 when I was riding along to a job with a new helper who just got hired and he was telling me how he was getting items off of the free section of Craigslist and flipping them for a profit. Thought to myself, sounds easy enough. Get something for free or for a low price, sell it for higher. Simple.
So my research began and the first good resource I came across was this thread -> Great bootstrapping thread - how to create money.
Upon reading more and more, it made sense. Then I saw the link to the book on the forum. The Millionaire Fastlane . What is this? Checked on Amazon, started reading through the reviews. Ok, so maybe I should probably read this thing. So I did. Rather, I devoured the book. The concepts, the ideas, the system, CENTS, Lambos, freedom, passivity; the works. It all clicked. I remember, I spent very little time thinking things through, and just started hustling.
I got some software back then, Craigspal (now defunct), that scraped the location you wanted on Craigslist, the keywords you were looking for, and returned results as they were posted. Also had automatic email notifications, and great organization. It was a really powerful piece of software for the would be flipper. So next I started trying to figure out what to go for. Then I stumbled upon this Seagate's hard drive shortage from Thailand floods expected to continue throughout 2012 - There was a global shortage of hard drives. So, I started buying hard drives locally for cheap, and putting them on ebay to resell. Average ROI if I remember correctly was around 75-125%. It worked well for a while, then the software got shut down and I moved onto other things.
Internet Marketing: Getting Started
From early on in my journey, I wanted to have an online business. I had seen enough of the outdoors at that point and wanted something a little more cozy and out of the elements. Something where I could use my mind to do the heavy lifting versus my back. Something that I could eventually scale. So I started learning about SEO, web development, Wordpress, etc. I just immersed myself in it all until things started to click.
There was mention by my boss at the time that he wanted to optimize the website, so I readily volunteered. I also started running some Adwords ads at the time for the business, all for free just to get my feet wet. Around this same time I also met a PPC consultant when cleaning the guys gutters one day. Started talking and he ended up paying me $15/hr just to do some data entry-ish type work on one of his sites. Also started learning copy around this time and he gave me some pointers on ranking sites and the Adwords campaigns.
For about 6 months or so I took a break and was 100% focused on making money to bootstrap my own business, whatever it would end up being.
Sales: The Great Equalizer
The biggest difference now was that I was learning how to sell at this point. This is where the entire game changed for me. By learning how to sell, I started to make a lot more money and learned the power of dissociating my time from money. One week I even made $2,000 in commission! Going from $10/hr, to $2k in a week over this short period of time really started getting me thinking about what else can I sell.
So I continued to put money back for a few months while working the job, got about $10k saved up (more than I ever had in my life at that point), and QUIT MY JOB (The first time) to work on a Fastlane venture, or so I thought.
I Think I Know What I'm Doing..
So there I am. No income coming in, no real plan, just a fire in my belly and that burning desire to be financially free. This was in April of 2013. I join StackThatMoney.com and immersed myself in media buying and affiliate marketing. I bought a few relevant domains, I started running some traffic, I made some really terrible ads with really terrible angles, and failed my a$$ off. During this time I did pick up a number of quality skill sets that I would be able to use in a functional way in any business moving forward. I also made some money and had my first $500/day profit within a decently short amount of time. But it wasn't sustainable as competitors were ripping my ads and landing pages as fast as I could make them. This was a GRIND, not Fastlane at all. So I moved on.
I started working on local lead generation websites that would rank for various local services in every city across the US. I was selling the leads to the largest lead generation company in the US ( guess who?) via phone calls and forms. At one point I had a 7 man team of Filipino outsourcers working on different aspects of the sites, from content spinning, to web design, to creating new sites, to just VA work. I thought I was a big shot and I was going to be a millionaire in no time. I just KNEW it was going to work. Well, it didn't. It made a little money, but there were missing pieces to my system and I was running out of capital FAST.
In an effort to get more capital, I sold my car. I lived downtown at the time and could ride my bike where I needed, so good riddance.
Now this is where the story takes a bit of a turn for the worse. This is the point in time where I just started spreading myself way, way too thin and it led to my inevitable downfall.
I fired all of my outsourcers and just let the sites float, letting them collect any revenue from lead sales that they could in their state at the time.
Importing: Everyone Is Doing It!
This was around Fall 2013, I got a whiff of the market for e-cigs. It was getting red hot and vaporizers were getting better and better. So I decided, why not make my own brand? Notice the common theme here? All decisions up to this point are "me too" based. No focus on providing people real value, but rather money chasing.
So I came up with a brand name, made a logo, made my packaging design, made my site, got my high risk merchant processor and gateway setup, and ordered 200 units of the highest quality product I could find in the flavors I noticed competitors were promoting the most often.

I managed the get the site ranked very well for some key terms using some high quality backlinks. But I made one crucial mistake here. I used the same keyword in the anchor text from the external backlinks too many times and ended up getting a linking penalty and my rankings for my top high volume, high converting keywords disappeared. Went from $700/day in revenue to $150-$200/day revenue, literally overnight. And it continued to fall from that point.
As the legendary Billy Mays would say, BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!
Mobile Mechanic Partnership: WTF?
Around this time a friend of mine approached me with a business idea. A mobile mechanic service for the local area. I had experience ranking local sites. I knew how we could target the primary demographic. I knew how we could sell the service. I didn't, however, know anything about the mechanic business or the pitfalls associated with doing it in peoples driveways.
So I put together the site, found out how much we would need to charge and upsell parts, and started putting the pieces together. In short time I had the backend stuff all working and the phone was ringing and revenue was flowing. Everything is working, right?
Then we came across one of these bad boys.
That's right, the Ford Exploder. My partner had quoted the owner of the vehicle WAY under what it should have been to do a specific engine repair to replace the timing chains and the guides for it, when it should have been a complete engine replacement. Long story short, we ate shit on this deal. This is where things went from shit, to worse. At this point my partner had used the Amex that I setup for the business to cover costs for the business such as parts, fuel, and so on, to the tune of roughly $4k or so. In addition to this, he drained the business banking account dry and bought an Xbox with the money and proceeded to disappear.
The Bottom: It's Lonelier Here Than At The Top
It's around February-March 2014 at this point. My cash reserves are 100% depleted. My credit lines are all maxed out. I have virtually no income at this point. Bankruptcy crossed my mind once the creditors started calling. There really is no worse feeling than that which I experienced during this time. Depression kicked in. I think I watched the first couple of seasons of Game of Thrones for like a month straight and drank like a fish. I had a girlfriend at the time, and she had a job, but I was THAT BUM now. I had to get a job, like ASAP.
I started applying for several sales positions, some marketing gigs at agencies, something that would help me progress while also helping me pay down this debt I had accumulated. I went for an interview at a Toyota dealership for a car salesman position. Show up, and this old bastard gives me this look up and down in disgust "You should wear a tie next time". Definitely not the place for me. Obviously didn't get the job (thank god).
Next I had a few return calls, one for a roofing company hiring outside sales reps which I had experience in. The other inside sales for an online agency. The roofing sales gig obviously had more potential for more money and faster based on my experience, but that wasn't that path I wanted to take. I wanted to go somewhere where I could learn more about online marketing and continue to hone my skills. So I started working at the agency.
Phone Sales: The Reason I Am Calling Today..
I started cold calling businesses to sell them SEO services. Like pushing a rock uphill. I got a few sales, but selling SEO in general is typically just a lot of bullshit. It might work, it might not, depends on a lot of different things. But the silver lining here was I learned how to prospect and build effective pipelines and get good at talking to people on the phone. This skill will serve me well no matter what I do or where I go, it is one that I continue to refine and perfect.
Still wasn't making a lot of money, still had a lot of debt, things were on the rocks in my relationship due to the financial hardship. Getting out of the pit is never much fun, but sometimes it is just what you need when you need it. For me, it was a reality check. It got me back grounded in the real world and I kept on kicking.
There was an opportunity that came up in this company to be an SEO consultant, and I jumped on it. I already had skills in ranking my own sites effectively, so why not hone that craft even further? Even though I was more interested in doing paid ads, this was an in.
Enjoyed a nice glass of bourbon and a Cohiba stick last night, just reflecting. It has been a long road to this point, 6 years in the making. 6 years since I read TMF , and 6 years since that fire was lit under my a$$ to make something of myself. 6 years since I completely turned my life around from being a poor kid from the trailer park with no formal education working manual labor jobs.
No one ever expected anything great of me, I can tell you that much. I watched my peers around me become consumed by drug addiction, crime, or in many cases, a premature death. Not exactly an environment geared towards success. Rather, one geared towards perpetual sidewalking.
From being a $10/hr laborer toting bricks and blocks and mud around through these hellish North Carolina summers (for 4 years, mind you) to having that FTE for that, and making the leap to running a successful, growing ad management business. I don't think I've ever put my whole story out there, but I think it's time. My hope is that through my painful journey out of the pit you can take something positive from it, even if just a laugh.
********* Warning: Long Post Ahead **********
The Sidewalk
Hit the Bricks. Move Them Over There, NOW!
Wanna talk about a tough, physically demanding job? Go be a brick mason's apprentice for a day. It's grueling work, particularly during the summers and winters. The only thing worse than carrying around heavy shit in 100+ degree weather all day, every day, is sitting in a warm truck, all bundled up and arriving to the job where it's below freezing and you have to move all of the heavy things from one side of the job site to the other. That feeling of pure dread. Every day was a FTE.
Yet, with that in mind, I guess I was just a masochist at the time. I just took it. For 4 years. 4 years of taking that pain and turning it into strength. Conditioning my body to be able to do things that I never thought I'd be able to do. To really pushing my own personal limits to see just how far I could go. I was young, I had no direction, and it was a good fit in retrospect. It helped me get my shit together mentally and get away from my peers at the time. Some people join the military to do it, for me it was just backbreaking work for a few years.
Now keep in mind that this was all post-Great Recession and residential brickwork at the time was slowww. Most weeks I would only bring in $300 or less. A really good week was $400. There towards the end, it got so slow, we were only working 3 days a week and I had rent to pay, and my car needed two front tires because they both blew out at the same time. Shit just got real, and I had to make a move fast.

So without hesitation, I had a few beers and made an ad to put on Craigslist. I put it in the wrong section on purpose to get more visibility, but it was basically something along the lines of "Experienced Laborer Looking For Work". The next morning I got a call from a guy a few towns over and he said to meet him at Lowes and go to work. I told my boss at the time I had to go, I had another job. So I moseyed down the road going 35mph for about 30 miles in my car which had two spares on the front. I couldn't go very fast, or take turns quickly, but I got there. It was a job doing gutter cleaning and roof repairs for homeowners, and I wasn't the biggest fan of heights. Great. But it was work, and I needed the money.
Gutters & Roofing: It's Lonely at the Top
I remember my first day on the job, climbing that ladder, getting onto this flat back porch roof. Legs trembling, profusely sweating, scared to death that I was going to fall off and end up being a vegetable. But it was that day, and the coming months that helped me really get comfortable with being uncomfortable. Next thing I knew I was running up and down steep roof tops like spiderman. New level unlocked.
Then I got the big pay raise up to a whopping $14/hr! I was stoked at the time, as this work was wayyy easier than doing brickwork. I mean you had to scale houses and do death-defying stuff all day, but it was in sprints. Get on a job, run around like a mad man for 30-45 minutes, then hop in the truck and drive to the next one. There was a lot of ride time and I looked at it as getting paid to sit in the shade.
Typical day in the life here. Shitty, old roof. 32ft ladder, fully extended, just barely reaching the roof for me to climb up. No safety harnesses were used during the taking of this photo.

The summer of 2011 was almost over and I was a bit worried about what were going to do about work when things started icing over and getting cold. Then I was told that we would be installing Christmas lights on residential homes starting in November. At first, this sounded great. I could rack up over 60 hours in a week!
Of course, I judged that book by the cover. It was an icy hellscape where my days blurred together and my life was nothing but work. I woke up at 7 am, started working at 8am on roofing and gutters, and worked most days until 11pm-1am. That wasn't even the worst of it all. The worst part was when you were dangling over the side of a roof hanging up lights, then when you go to get off of the roof, the temperature had dropped and frost covered your way down. For those unfamiliar, that equates to a death slide, allll the way down to the ground, which was typically comprised of concrete, steps, or rocks.
By a stroke of a luck, I made it through this arduous time virtually unscathed, though there was that one day when I almost lost two of my fingers when the bottom of a ladder slipped on a PVC deck and proceeded to go horizontal with my fingers mashed between the ladder and asphalt roof. I managed to pop the ladder up off the roof using my, at then, super human rowing skills and grabbed onto the gutter before the ladder fell to the ground. Ruined the gutter, but things could have been worse. This was the flesh wound that resulted.

The Big Change
Winter of 2011 was my next FTE. This led me to wanting out. Sure I was making more money, but at the potential cost of life and limb (literally). Something had to change. It was in January of 2012 when I was riding along to a job with a new helper who just got hired and he was telling me how he was getting items off of the free section of Craigslist and flipping them for a profit. Thought to myself, sounds easy enough. Get something for free or for a low price, sell it for higher. Simple.
So my research began and the first good resource I came across was this thread -> Great bootstrapping thread - how to create money.
Upon reading more and more, it made sense. Then I saw the link to the book on the forum. The Millionaire Fastlane . What is this? Checked on Amazon, started reading through the reviews. Ok, so maybe I should probably read this thing. So I did. Rather, I devoured the book. The concepts, the ideas, the system, CENTS, Lambos, freedom, passivity; the works. It all clicked. I remember, I spent very little time thinking things through, and just started hustling.
I got some software back then, Craigspal (now defunct), that scraped the location you wanted on Craigslist, the keywords you were looking for, and returned results as they were posted. Also had automatic email notifications, and great organization. It was a really powerful piece of software for the would be flipper. So next I started trying to figure out what to go for. Then I stumbled upon this Seagate's hard drive shortage from Thailand floods expected to continue throughout 2012 - There was a global shortage of hard drives. So, I started buying hard drives locally for cheap, and putting them on ebay to resell. Average ROI if I remember correctly was around 75-125%. It worked well for a while, then the software got shut down and I moved onto other things.
Internet Marketing: Getting Started
From early on in my journey, I wanted to have an online business. I had seen enough of the outdoors at that point and wanted something a little more cozy and out of the elements. Something where I could use my mind to do the heavy lifting versus my back. Something that I could eventually scale. So I started learning about SEO, web development, Wordpress, etc. I just immersed myself in it all until things started to click.
There was mention by my boss at the time that he wanted to optimize the website, so I readily volunteered. I also started running some Adwords ads at the time for the business, all for free just to get my feet wet. Around this same time I also met a PPC consultant when cleaning the guys gutters one day. Started talking and he ended up paying me $15/hr just to do some data entry-ish type work on one of his sites. Also started learning copy around this time and he gave me some pointers on ranking sites and the Adwords campaigns.
For about 6 months or so I took a break and was 100% focused on making money to bootstrap my own business, whatever it would end up being.
Sales: The Great Equalizer
The biggest difference now was that I was learning how to sell at this point. This is where the entire game changed for me. By learning how to sell, I started to make a lot more money and learned the power of dissociating my time from money. One week I even made $2,000 in commission! Going from $10/hr, to $2k in a week over this short period of time really started getting me thinking about what else can I sell.
So I continued to put money back for a few months while working the job, got about $10k saved up (more than I ever had in my life at that point), and QUIT MY JOB (The first time) to work on a Fastlane venture, or so I thought.
I Think I Know What I'm Doing..
So there I am. No income coming in, no real plan, just a fire in my belly and that burning desire to be financially free. This was in April of 2013. I join StackThatMoney.com and immersed myself in media buying and affiliate marketing. I bought a few relevant domains, I started running some traffic, I made some really terrible ads with really terrible angles, and failed my a$$ off. During this time I did pick up a number of quality skill sets that I would be able to use in a functional way in any business moving forward. I also made some money and had my first $500/day profit within a decently short amount of time. But it wasn't sustainable as competitors were ripping my ads and landing pages as fast as I could make them. This was a GRIND, not Fastlane at all. So I moved on.
I started working on local lead generation websites that would rank for various local services in every city across the US. I was selling the leads to the largest lead generation company in the US ( guess who?) via phone calls and forms. At one point I had a 7 man team of Filipino outsourcers working on different aspects of the sites, from content spinning, to web design, to creating new sites, to just VA work. I thought I was a big shot and I was going to be a millionaire in no time. I just KNEW it was going to work. Well, it didn't. It made a little money, but there were missing pieces to my system and I was running out of capital FAST.
In an effort to get more capital, I sold my car. I lived downtown at the time and could ride my bike where I needed, so good riddance.

Now this is where the story takes a bit of a turn for the worse. This is the point in time where I just started spreading myself way, way too thin and it led to my inevitable downfall.
I fired all of my outsourcers and just let the sites float, letting them collect any revenue from lead sales that they could in their state at the time.
Importing: Everyone Is Doing It!
This was around Fall 2013, I got a whiff of the market for e-cigs. It was getting red hot and vaporizers were getting better and better. So I decided, why not make my own brand? Notice the common theme here? All decisions up to this point are "me too" based. No focus on providing people real value, but rather money chasing.
So I came up with a brand name, made a logo, made my packaging design, made my site, got my high risk merchant processor and gateway setup, and ordered 200 units of the highest quality product I could find in the flavors I noticed competitors were promoting the most often.

I managed the get the site ranked very well for some key terms using some high quality backlinks. But I made one crucial mistake here. I used the same keyword in the anchor text from the external backlinks too many times and ended up getting a linking penalty and my rankings for my top high volume, high converting keywords disappeared. Went from $700/day in revenue to $150-$200/day revenue, literally overnight. And it continued to fall from that point.
As the legendary Billy Mays would say, BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!
Mobile Mechanic Partnership: WTF?
Around this time a friend of mine approached me with a business idea. A mobile mechanic service for the local area. I had experience ranking local sites. I knew how we could target the primary demographic. I knew how we could sell the service. I didn't, however, know anything about the mechanic business or the pitfalls associated with doing it in peoples driveways.
So I put together the site, found out how much we would need to charge and upsell parts, and started putting the pieces together. In short time I had the backend stuff all working and the phone was ringing and revenue was flowing. Everything is working, right?
Then we came across one of these bad boys.

That's right, the Ford Exploder. My partner had quoted the owner of the vehicle WAY under what it should have been to do a specific engine repair to replace the timing chains and the guides for it, when it should have been a complete engine replacement. Long story short, we ate shit on this deal. This is where things went from shit, to worse. At this point my partner had used the Amex that I setup for the business to cover costs for the business such as parts, fuel, and so on, to the tune of roughly $4k or so. In addition to this, he drained the business banking account dry and bought an Xbox with the money and proceeded to disappear.
The Bottom: It's Lonelier Here Than At The Top
It's around February-March 2014 at this point. My cash reserves are 100% depleted. My credit lines are all maxed out. I have virtually no income at this point. Bankruptcy crossed my mind once the creditors started calling. There really is no worse feeling than that which I experienced during this time. Depression kicked in. I think I watched the first couple of seasons of Game of Thrones for like a month straight and drank like a fish. I had a girlfriend at the time, and she had a job, but I was THAT BUM now. I had to get a job, like ASAP.
I started applying for several sales positions, some marketing gigs at agencies, something that would help me progress while also helping me pay down this debt I had accumulated. I went for an interview at a Toyota dealership for a car salesman position. Show up, and this old bastard gives me this look up and down in disgust "You should wear a tie next time". Definitely not the place for me. Obviously didn't get the job (thank god).
Next I had a few return calls, one for a roofing company hiring outside sales reps which I had experience in. The other inside sales for an online agency. The roofing sales gig obviously had more potential for more money and faster based on my experience, but that wasn't that path I wanted to take. I wanted to go somewhere where I could learn more about online marketing and continue to hone my skills. So I started working at the agency.
Phone Sales: The Reason I Am Calling Today..
I started cold calling businesses to sell them SEO services. Like pushing a rock uphill. I got a few sales, but selling SEO in general is typically just a lot of bullshit. It might work, it might not, depends on a lot of different things. But the silver lining here was I learned how to prospect and build effective pipelines and get good at talking to people on the phone. This skill will serve me well no matter what I do or where I go, it is one that I continue to refine and perfect.
Still wasn't making a lot of money, still had a lot of debt, things were on the rocks in my relationship due to the financial hardship. Getting out of the pit is never much fun, but sometimes it is just what you need when you need it. For me, it was a reality check. It got me back grounded in the real world and I kept on kicking.
There was an opportunity that came up in this company to be an SEO consultant, and I jumped on it. I already had skills in ranking my own sites effectively, so why not hone that craft even further? Even though I was more interested in doing paid ads, this was an in.
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