I was very determined to succeed.. After my parents split up I really had no choice.. My dad left to Cuba and my mom was getting remarried and living in Las Vegas. I had a shared house with two other friends, a $450 a month rent payment, food payments and I was out of school now. I struggled for hours on end at the office trying to just figure things out.. I had no idea what I was doing.. I had no mentors, I had no training, I had no degree.. I just spent hours and hours in the office forcing myself to figure it out.
I did the math one time and calculated I was earning about $2/hr working for myself. I was very tempted to quit and get a ‘real job’ like everyone was telling me to do. In fact I did leave my business for two weeks to earn money in a call center.. I was one of the best new trainees to sell enough to make $1,000 in my first week or two which was some serious money for me at the time. But I felt something was not right about the company I was working for.. And even more emotionally impactful.. I remember driving by my office with the lights off and realized.. That my dream could fade away if I didn’t get in there and focus no making it work. Nobody else was going to make it happen for me.
So I went back to work figuring things out.. Slowly going into more debt.. Convincing credit card companies to give me a little more and then a little more capital to work with. Telling friends that I’ll either go bankrupt or figure things out.
One day I got an email from yellowpages.com and it included a contact for strategic alliances at the bottom of the email. I knew I needed to start getting clients outside of little old St. George, Utah where I was growing up at the time. I decided that getting on a national yellow pages would be a way to get my name out there to a wider audience. The only problem is I didn’t have that much money. So I contacted their VP of Business Development with an idea: let me get listed on their top 20 metro city listings and see how it goes.. I can pay them a percentage of each sale and I will transparently record the sales activity that I’m having. They have 0 to risk because they already have the online inventory.. So it’s a way for them to create more revenue from otherwise digitally dormant space.. And it’s a way for me to earn more from an international clientele.
Thank god they accepted my offer.. It was a turning point in my business. Calls started pouring in from all over the country. I was started to sell web sites left, right and center.. I needed to hire an assistant, and then a project manager and then eventually a sales team to help handle all the leads.
And I went from just the top 20 metro cities to nationwide .. on the bet that if I was successful in the 20 metro cities I could do it all over the country with this now proven marketing channel. I took a big bet to do this.. I converted the advertising from a pay on performance basis with them to where I agreed on a $6,000 a month marketing budget which was enormous for me at the time.. Thankfully after 2 months of chasing my tail to try to make ends meet I got them to agree to lower it for a long term agreement of $2,200 a month.. Which was still considerable but I now had a nationwide footprint in the #1 position on the top yellow page service provider in the country. This was the leg up that I needed to start taking on bigger projects ,pay off my debts and establish myself as a successful web design firm.
Around this time I visited and revisited Encinitas, California and fell in love with surfing. I would soon leave little old St. George, UT to what felt like a huge change, moving to Encinitas California for a few months at the age of 20.
I was ready to expand, did a deal with Yellow Pages and started getting leads from all over the country.
Also as a naive and prospering young man I lost my first $4k to a guy that promised to be a marketing genius and turned out to be a real con artist. He was also an old gay man and tried hitting on me in our first business meeting. Very uncomfortable for me staying overnight while we discussed the possibility of creating hundreds of web sites that never materialized.
I started out quite naive and trusting and this would be the first of many situations where I was taken advantage of.