Welcome all and kudos to you for showing interest in becoming the owner of your own agency! My purpose in creating this course is for others to experience how fun it is to be a business owner, creative director, make lifelong relationships and of course… drum roll…. MAKE MONEY! The most fundamental part of this entire course is to be the owner of your own digital marketing agency. If you have experience, great! If you don’t, even better! You’re going to find my material interesting regardless of how involved you’ve been in the marketing world. Just to give you a little background about myself, I am a college dropout. Believe it or not, I was told by a professor to just got out and work. This happened when he asked what I was doing on my laptop on a lunch break. I told him I was learning how to code websites. This was back in 2010. When he told me to go out and work and make money… it really hit me. He was someone I respected because he was the director of the theatre department at Fullerton College in Southern California. I really admired his knowledge of theatre, his passion for teaching students how to become the best of the best. I was directed by him in a few plays that I performed in. To get back on track, I did as he said. I went and began to learn more and more and MORE. I went and asked my girlfriends dad (at that time) if he needed a website. He had a construction company in the Riverside area. He was my first client and I did a very poor job on WordPress back then. It was old school WordPress where you had to write most of the HTML and CSS. Well it wasn’t a poor job, but looking back… I guess I’m being too hard on myself. Shortly after, I began to ask people at my church if they needed websites for their businesses and I just started to make connections and make money. At that time, I had found a web developer on Craigslist who lived in Tampa, FL and he mentored me and taught me a few different things. Number 1, always charge friends and family through the roof. Why you ask? Because they’ll always want the best deal and the most changes. Turned out to be true. He also showed me how to do the payment structure when billing and slew of other things that I still use to this day.
Two years after doing freelance, I saw myself making $45,000 a year. For a college kid who was living with my parents and living off government grants… I was doing better than most of my friends who were still in college. Two years later I created an LLC for my business “Zeal Creative Group, LLC” because I was so ambitious and to learn and help others. Shortly after that, I started finding other clients around the US and eventually started making more money every year.
Since then I have literally been having so much fun working. Let me back track a little. I graduated high school at the age of 18 in 2004. During my high school years, I learned how to use Photoshop and I was doing small graphic design jobs for the school clubs. My girlfriends dad at the time had a HUGE screen printing shop in Orange County and he said, “Why don’t you sell them some shirts, you can make some cash.” I did just that. I began designing shirts, hats, banners and selling them right back to the school and making a couple hundred dollars here and there. Not bad for a kid in high school. My first year of college was at The Art Institute of Orange County where I was lured into attending, living and didn’t realize until the end of the year that I was nearly $80,000 in debt for ONE YEAR OF SCHOOL! I learned basic art design for business, color theory and a couple other classes that didn’t really teach me anything at all. So after that year I just dropped out… with an 80k loan attached to my name.
After that, I was just wondering how I was going to pay all that back. I then moved to LA where I started working as an extra in movies, shows and commercials making a little more than minimum wage. I landed a couple good commercial spots where I was invited to join SAGAFTRA (actors union) and started making much more money for other extra jobs. Then… the 2008 recession happened. The work was slow and almost non existent. So I had to move back home and decided to go to college to get a degree. I really didn’t know what I wanted to do. I loved graphic designing and I really loved to act, so I just became a theatre major.
Point being, after I dropped out of college and started teaching myself how to run an agency, I’ve never enjoyed life more than I did after I made that decision. I’ve seen my family, closest friends work jobs and complain about how much they hate it. To this day, I really don’t even know what a weekend is because I can literally take days off, work a little here and there, and still make over 100k a year. The overhead is so minimal and the freedom is the most beautiful part about my job.
I got married in 2016, moved to Hawaii with my wife and kids, and I’ve never been happier. I still have clients throughout the US and I literally work on the beach while my kids run around in the sand. I am always expanding, investing in my business, retirement, real estate and the best part is that I work from home, homeschool my kids so I literally get to see them all throughout the day.
My life as a creative director and agency owner has kept me youthful, stress-free and all around happy. I want you to experience the same feeling I get when I help clients solve problems, hire contractors that are awesome and make a very generous income with leverage to make partnerships with clients and their businesses. Well I can’t spill too many beans here… Take my course and you’ll find out more about me, how I do it and how my business is always growing exponentially.
