It starts with an idea to become independent, make more money, have more flexibility in life, maybe reinvent yourself.
When I was 21, I was released from my military services, and while studying for the SATs, I began working on a startup called Shark Answers, together with a friend and business partner who was studying with me.
Shark Answers was what Google Answers was in 2001, a marketplace of people asking questions and web-savvy people providing them with answers. We had no business model, but after answering 15,000 questions, we decided to get an investment. For what, we didn’t know, but we thought we had a good idea.
We met an investor that wanted to join as a partner. Being older and more entrenched in the business community, he pushed us to start doing secondary research using the internet. It might sound strange to you today, but back then, corporations paid a lot of money to get what we consider today “basic business information”.
The company evolved, and we became a secondary research company working mainly for marketing agencies and big brands. We started buying and selling information from the likes of Nielsen, TNS, Thomson and more. But we didn’t really make a lot of money.
By this time, I had left college after one semester to pursue my business ambitions.
Since we weren’t making hardly the money we wanted, we decided to evolve again, and start providing content-based marketing services, mainly huge amounts of content production for governmental sites, non-profits and brands.
By our sixth year in business the company grew into a full marketing agency. But it was still not very profitable.
Don’t get me wrong, I was doing okay, but I was working insanely hard and couldn’t see a clear path for meaningful growth.
Fast forward to today, I’m a high-tech entrepreneur with a MarTech exit on my belt, Facebook award winner, a sizeable business, very meaningful income, thousands of businesses I helped build (yes thousands), and the time to invest in projects I’m passionate about while being a full-time CEO.
What happened?
This is not my memoir, it’s a guide to helping you start and grow a very lucrative digital marketing agency, without breaking your back, using my very hard-earned experience. Experience not only building my personal agency (the long way), but helping, via Umbrella (umbrellaus.com), to build thousands of marketing agencies.
This book is a guide, a very practical one, that will cut your time to a mid-six-figure agency by 80%.
My goal is to educate as many entrepreneurs as possible about the unparalleled opportunities in the digital marketing industry, and empower them, using this guide, to reach their goals.