#i contribute literally nothing to the worls

[dailyduh]

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[topicprinter]

It was without a doubt one of the most difficult decisions I’ve made in my entire life, and to be completely honest, I wasn’t too sure of what I was doing yet. All I knew at the time was that college wasn’t going to help me leave my mark on the world, and that somehow I needed to go out and build a reputation of creativity and excellence for myself.I thought of all the ways an oblivious teenage business student could make some sort of impact, and after reading (and re-reading) Confessions of an Advertising Man by one of my idols, David Ogilvy, the idea came to me:I needed to start my own modern day marketing agency.And not only that — I needed to make it the most successful agency that’s ever existed. I needed to prove to myself that I was worth something, and that I wasn’t just another idiot teenager who talked trash about school, but didn’t have the chops to make it on his own.After finishing up my third semester of college, I filed for an LLC and transferred all the freelance clients I had at the time under its management. A few days later, I left school and never looked back. I was terrified, but I knew in my gut that I was making the right decision for my future.I’ve been working in digital strategy and social media marketing since I was 17 years old. I knew the world was slowly migrating online, and I was lucky enough to consciously realize it at an earlier age than most. While the majority of my friends were knee deep in book reports and homework, I was planning the best ways to tell captivating stories to the world using the latest and most advanced social platforms on the market.By the time that I started college, I still wasn’t too sure on where I wanted to take my career. I was studying business and hating every minute of it. It was the standard curriculum taught at most schools: management tactics, corporate hierarchies, SWOT, etcetera. It was material that hasn’t changed since the 1950’s era of Peter Drucker, but was still being heralded as the most effective and “modern” way to run a business in the 21st century.Sitting through these generic lectures, I always wondered what exactly I was learning here that I couldn’t learn on the internet for a fraction of both the cost and time. At the end of a few of my classes, just for the hell of it, I looked up the material on Google, and found very quickly that the curriculum to my entire intro to business administration class was basically the Wikipedia entry on management — just stretched out over a couple of months.I compared my education (if you could even call it that) to what my freelance clients were doing with their own marketing and business development efforts out in the real world. It was a similarly grim picture.In a time where customers had literally tens of thousands of companies fighting for their attention at all hours of the day via mobile advertising, the traditional approach to marketing that’s taught in college is a fantastic way to go out of business very quickly. But that was all that I saw. Ads being taken out in boring newspapers that no one was reading; display space being bought on sections of websites that neurological studies have proven to be invisible to the human mind; and ineffective discounting strategies that did nothing to bring new customers through the door, but did a lot to make the brand look cheap and undesirable.It becomes a race to the bottom: Make an ad that’s a little better and is shown a few more times during the day. Put up a few more thoughtless social media posts. Make the product a tiny bit cheaper or faster, and shout that from the rooftops to your customers in the hopes that they’ll care.Surprise surprise, they don’t, and they never will. I knew I could do a whole lot better than these garbage strategies that were so prevalent in the world of marketing, and finally having an agency as a professional platform to do so, I got to work.During the early stages of my agency, I was buried in work and paid very little.I was new, I was unheard of, and I didn’t have more than half a dozen clients to my name — most of them being small businesses who could barely afford marketing of any kind. They desperately needed work, and I desperately needed a track record to show that I was good at what I did. I only took on companies that I knew I would be able to turn into wild successes, that way I could take those examples and use them to pitch bigger business.This strategy worked wonders for me.I slaved away day and night to overdeliver to every single client I had. I built out a process to inexpensively create marketing material that people would genuinely enjoy and remember, and I figured out the best ways to deliver it to my clients’ target audiences. I analyzed my clients’ customers’ microeconomic and behavioral habits to the point where I actually knew the times of day where a customer would walk their dog. And no, that is not a joke. That’s how committed I was to research and data that could help me reach my goal.In many instances I took on work for either no upfront cost at all, or for a small amount of equity. I learned very early on that while cash flow is most definitely the heart of an agency, the reputation it holds is its brain. One cannot exist without the other, but I had to focus first and foremost on the reputation and track record that I had. Without having success stories, I couldn’t go after new business, and I couldn’t convince anyone why it would be worth their time and money to work with me.A few of the companies I took on for next to nothing turned into multimillion dollar successes because of my marketing strategy and its execution. I won’t lie, it fucking hurts when you know for a fact you’re not being paid what you’re worth and can’t fight back because you agreed not to in your original contract.This was a powerful wake up call that told me now is the time to start charging the proper amount for the work I do. Even though I wasn’t paid fully in the cash that I deserved, I now had a success story in which I simultaneously took three small-time fashion brands from nothing, to multimillion dollar valuations and eventually one buyout by an international retailer.I told my story every time I was pitching my agency to a new client, and promised to deliver the same success to them as I had done in the past for others. All of a sudden, companies of all sizes were much more eager to work with me than ever before. Never forget that your reputation is the key to your success — find ways to leverage it in every possible situation.Something that I’m asked very often is how I got clients when I was still a baby. Why wouldn’t they just go to someone who’s been around longer, had more experience, a bigger team, and more resources? That’s a very good point — my clients had every reason to not work with me.I contribute all of my success to being able to turn these so-called problems into benefits that my clients could very clearly see. All it takes is looking at the situation from a different angle.My pitch was that since I was young and grew up on social media, I knew it very well from the side of the customer. I knew exactly why they used it, how they used it, and what they were expecting to get from it. Because of this, I knew what it took to manipulate these platforms to get your audience actually paying attention to you, caring about you, and doing business with you.I sold the small size of my agency as another positive:Because I wasn’t a corporate powerhouse with a ton of accounts, I was able to give lots of attention to each individual client. I promised everyone that came through my door that they would never be put last working with my agency, and that I will treat their business with the same care I treat my own. I have yet to break that promise.When you keep yourself focused on producing great work and making your clients happy, great things start to happen. Business owners tend to be friends with other business owners, and because I got great results, I became the topic of many conversations. Those conversations turned into referrals, which turned into more business for me.I learned very quickly that the best marketing combination in the whole universe is a great product combined with word of mouth.My advice to anyone who’s currently in school for business, marketing, public relations, or communications of any kind:For the love of god, do not allow yourself to ever believe that your school (no matter how expensive it is) will fully prepare you for working in the real world.It’s an enormous shame that the majority of a college education in business tends to be theoretical. The work you are assigned is given with the primary intention to keep you busy for a little while, not to prepare you to solve real world problems. A good education cannot be given in a sterile vacuum — it must be done under real world conditions, with a lot of failure involved. If universities worked to teach business development in a simulated free market economy, our graduates would not be clueless upon entering the workforce. An entry level job in marketing will no longer be a minimum wage assistant role — it will be a position of real responsibility in which people can do amazing work and build businesses to great heights.To anyone who has big goals in mind, I implore you to do several things:Go out into the world and DO.Create something valuable.Tell your story.Get people interested.These things will pay you back exponentially for the rest of your life.You don’t have to drop out of school altogether like I did, but make sure that you find the time to do things that are grounded in reality and not just in a textbook. A track record of results and a solid reputation are the only things that are required.Develop them, and the entirety of the world’s opportunities will open themselves up to you.