A Journey Of A Thousand Miles Begins With... Hope

As anyone reading this may be well aware, this blog’s title is slightly different than the famous ancient Chinese proverb that ends with the word “step” instead of “hope.” Both are very true and for me personally ring true to the past couple years of my life. I’ve taken a a great deal of steps both literally and in my personal journey since this all started, but those steps wouldn’t have happened without being motivated by hope. It’s been just over two years since everything dramatically changed for me. I truly believe there’s a great deal we can all learn from this journey which is why I’m sharing it. Though, sometimes I’m not quite sure when I share it whether it’s for myself or or to motivate others. Either way, here’s how it went.

On August 11th of 2016, I took an extended stay trip to the ICU at Brookwood Hospital with viral meningitis accompanied by a nasty near 104 degree fever (none of which is good might I add). I don’t think people know too much about meningitis thinking it’s something like mono, but let me assure you it’s much more debilitating than one might imagine. Less than 200k people per year actually even contract meningitis (.061 PERCENT of the US population) so talk about bad odds. Those are like near lottery-type odds (actually, not quite as bad, but not too far off respectively).

It’s not even that meningitis itself is ‘that’ bad… I mean it sucks, don’t get me wrong, but the recovery process is where most people tend to struggle. There are entire support groups devoted to it and over a decade later you’ll read stories of individuals still in some type of recovery process. In all, I licked my wounds for about 4 months. I was ever so close to getting on anti-depressants. I was seeing a neurologist and after trying everything out there to repair the CNS damage that was the next logical step. I did something else instead, though. I (very reluctantly at the time) got a membership at Planet Fitness of all places and began to use the weighted machines just to start moving again.

Talk about humbling… Prior to going into the hospital, I might have been the strongest physically I had ever been in my adult life. I was back squatting well over 500lbs and bench pressing nearly 400lbs. Once back in the gym at Planet Fitness, 50lbs on a bench press machine was all that I could handle. It served its purpose though and just getting moving again became my anti-depressants. It worked and I reported back to my neurologist that I had found what I needed.

Though, the gym surely helped, my state of mind wasn’t great. I had turned back to drinking rather heavily once the doctors had taken me off pain medication. Quick story, only a week out of the ICU, I drove to the nearest gas station to grab a couple of tall boys. Due to my impaired depth perception from the infection, I wrecked my car into the garage coming back home. I hadn’t even opened my beers yet so that’s quite embarrassing to admit on many levels.

One of the reasons I turned to medicating through booze and drugs, was that I just felt like I was on an island - more than ever. I didn’t have anyone to talk to. No one I knew, other than one friend in Phoenix, had ever had meningitis. At some point, everyone gets tired of hearing you complain. I don’t blame them. It’s human nature to become frustrated overtime with someone who is stricken.

So, at some point, I just said to myself I was going to drink my problems away - which obviously only caused more problems in turn. My wife, Michelle, and I were not in a good place. She had about all that she could take. We had a 6 month old who hated sleeping. She had cared for me through my illness only to see me fall into deeper depression, more drastic mood swings and constant lying about my drinking problem. Things were coming to a head and all did on December 3rd of 2016.

Rarely do I remember my drunk episodes, but this one stands out. I drank myself into blackness at a party, we came home and mad at the world I lashed out with a vengeance. It was World War and all the while my 3 year old, Phoebe, sat bewildered at her mommy and daddy. That sticks out in mind as Michelle was ready to call the police and I said goodbye to Phoebe leaving not knowing when I’d see her again.

Eventually, Michelle and I started taking positive steps forward. It wasn’t easy and she did not trust me because time and again I had made empty promises. I knew inside things were different this time and the stakes had risen quite considerably. But, that didn’t matter so much. I had to actually live it making a life amends to her each day.

While I was genuine in my new path, I did not like it. I hated the way I was and many tears were shed alone yelling at God for making me ‘this way.’ Many questions came… Why could I just not be normal? Why did I have to be so extreme? Was I good for anything or anyone?

So many questions and I felt desperate for answers. It wasn’t long into the process that driving in home in tears processing everything that a Voice or something - to this day I can’t explain it - came through. The words were potent. Something to the tune of, “you don’t realize how talented I’ve made you.” It almost came through with a chuckle. Not intended at me, but at the situation as a whole. Like, “come on, guy, if you would just stop wallowing in your own self pity and realize that you were made for more.”

I now believe that it’s a fact that this is true for all of us - every human being on Earth - whether it’s ever realized or not specific talents reside in all of us. All having the choice to either share them with the world or keep them locked away inside of us.

At the time, this didn’t mean much to me. I couldn’t put my finger on anything specific, but it provided what started my journey - hope. Right then and there, I made a commitment to start taking risks and saying yes to opportunities and challenges. It’s like in an instant my brain rewired itself because these were all things I typically avoided. Basically, it boiled down to believing in myself.

During this time, I also began dieting and rebuilding myself physically. My body wasn’t the same since falling ill so I took a different approach to things. I stopped worrying about being the strongest guy in the gym and started to focus on a more disciplined approach. This entailed weighing and measuring my food daily being very specific about how I was fueling my body. I must say as the results came, it didn’t hurt my confidence. More than that, though, the discipline of the routine was much needed at a time my life felt out of a control. It also assisted in giving me another reason to avoid consuming alcohol.

I’ll admit, I probably took my diet too far. I’m happy to report these days things are far more balanced.

Shortly there after, I dove into Facebook’s Business Manager which is where advertisements are bought and placed through targeting certain audiences via specific goals. I had no idea what I was doing, I just knew that I liked it… a lot. My first night into it, I stayed up until 2am tinkering. During that same time period, I also began to welcome the challenge of learning Infusionsoft, a robust CRM (customer relationship management) platform built for small business owners).

That alone speaks volumes because before this, throughout the prior two years as VP of Marketing at Iron Tribe Fitness, I had avoided it like the plague.

All of this came together a couple months later when Brad Bearden was hired as a Digital Marketing Consultant for Iron Tribe. I was instantly attracted to him like a magnet to its counter part. He taught me digital marketing, but it was so much more than that. His attitude and energy rubbed off on me and he helped me begin to believe in myself even more. He also revealed to me what I had never known - that I was an Entrepreneur.

That was a weird idea to me. For over 15 years, I had worked for established companies where I had job security, benefits… and a boss telling me what to do. So, I did what any rational person would do in that situation, I leaned into it. Just kidding… I’m not sure if this was rational or if I was on the brink of insanity, but it’s what I did.

I was already working an insane amount of hours running the digital marketing for 8 Iron Tribe corporate gyms… And, when I say running, what I mean by that is pressing the actual buttons which included 30 - 40 ad sets (audiences we were targeting) with 2 - 3 different types of ads (the actual creative) in each. If you do the math on those numbers on the conservative side it meant I was managing and optimizing 480 different ads at any given time (heads up if this digital marketing stuff means nothing to you - that’s a SHITLOAD).

So, I turned my attention to consulting while still in my full-time role. I targeted two different companies and reached out to them to schedule meetings with the hope they might hear me out. Both said, “yes” so I the next step was to build a presentation from scratch to show them what I could do. I presented to both of these organizations and miraculously they agreed to sign 3-month agreements with me. I was kind of shocked and amazed, but ultimately excited. Next came drafting agreements which I had to figure out how to do.

During this same time, I had a buddy who was starting a supplement company reach out to me and I mentioned what I was doing and next thing I know we sign a contract! In a matter of a couple of weeks, my monthly income had doubled. That was pretty weird.

I must say being a solo-preneur with no support I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I was already working a pretty insane amount of hours and I had just signed 3 new clients at basically the same time who I had to build custom campaigns out for from soup to nuts. That tested my metal for sure. Add to that, each of them had unique challenges as well as technologies that I had never worked with before. I had to learn on the run and figure out how to integrate these different complex pieces of the puzzle together to make these campaigns seamless. So, not only was I operating on all cylinders and I was having to learn new things in the process.

Not long after of that, one of these clients referred another company to me and helped me get a meeting with them. I presented and to my surprise, they signed on as well. The difference was this was a national organization compared to the small businesses I was working with and I had tripled my fee when I pitched them. This client alone was the value of my other three and along with it came a much higher output expectation.

This also meant that my monthly income in only a matter of months had just about tripled - something my wife very much appreciated. :-) This also was accompanied by even more significant challenges and learning curves to sync up their robust platforms to the marketing I was building for them. I’ll admit, I was in way over my head, but as they say, you have to fake it till you make it. So, I dove in and I did it with a smile. You’d be surprised how much you can accomplish just by smiling and remaining steady when front facing. The building can be burning down behind you, but if you stay cool under pressure no one will even notice what’s in the background.

So, that happened a great deal throughout the early days and as soon as the client turned away, I was putting out fires, fixing the damage and figuring out how to make it work. And, not only work, but be even better overdelivering on expectations and results. I learned more about the digital world and myself than I ever could have imagined.

Fast forward a bit more and I decided to step down as VP of Marketing at Iron Tribe Fitness rolling them over as a client and founded Apex Current, LLC, in September of 2017. That whole process was a trip and pretty damn scary - still is if I’m honest. I had to learn to trust the rollercoaster that I was on and trust that I had what it took to run my own company.

On December 31st of 2017, I moved into my first office at The Tower Building which sits atop Red Mountain in Birmingham, Alabama. My wife and I had driven to Ikea in Atlanta and came straight to the office to put all of the furniture together and set up the office. That month was pretty epic working solo in my first-ever office space. While it certainly wasn’t easy, it was extremely profitable. With little overhead, to date, January of 2017, has been Apex Current’s most profitable month with $48k in actual profit.

With that in mind, I had taken things about as far as I could go on my own and was feeling stretched as thin as humanly possible so I began hiring. As I began looking for support staff, I migrated from my sole office space to a larger space in the executive suites we were in that could fit multiple people. This entailed another trip to Ikea for my wife and I along with more furniture assembling when we returned. Those were long days, but ones that I’ll never forget.

As the office grew, I moved back into my lone space I had started in keeping my team in the bigger office we had graduated into. We had also began to thankfully find scale in specific verticals and began marketing heavily to those industries directly spinning those up as product companies. All of the sudden there was Apex Current and Apex Current owned two additional LLCs one named, CoolStream, and the other, WaveFlow.

I walked into the team’s space one day and with contractors present there were like 6 people all huddled in this space that was really meant for 3 or 4 so it was time to upgrade things yet again. It just so happened that the Tower Building had an open space on the 5th floor that they were looking to lease so I decided to secure it and the building began renovating it to fit our needs. This was a bigger commitment level and longer lease, but one I felt necessary given the trajectory we were on.

We moved in towards the end of July and it’s been an interesting journey since then. Ultimately, over the next few months we would hit our highest revenue months of over six figures. To caveat things a bit, though, revenue’s revenue and certainly not profit because as with more work the expenses increase. There’s a leveling out that happens with expenses as you scale up, but we haven’t hit that yet and it’s not without it’s costs (figuratively and literally).

There’s always been a juxtaposition between acquisition and fulfillment. Since I am still a major piece of both puzzles, I can only acquire so much new business before I get myself in trouble on the fulfillment end of the spectrum. Unfortunately, this has happened, and there have been casualties because of it. None of this is anyone’s fault, but my own and something I’m trying to learn to balance so that we can grow steadily and not quickly. I have a hunger for where I see things going, but I’m learning that all things worth doing take time and that I need to stop more to smell the roses.

There have been many costs in this journey of our first year as well as many triumphs. As my own worst critic it can be hard not to solely focus on the former. We’ve had turnover because I’ve hired way too quickly. That said, I’ve tried to rectify the situation in multiple ways. First off, by always making sure I communicated clearly to the individual who wasn’t going to last, but also making sure to provide severance so they weren’t out on their butts. Given everyone’s technically contractors at this point, I feel that this has been something to help rectify the mistakes I’ve made in these processes. I’ve also hired much more experienced individuals like Ethan Voce and Josh Taylor, but with that comes higher payroll as well as greater expectations for me to lead well.

In all, over the past 18 months, my business and consulting work as taken in well over $1 million dollars in revenue. Not bad for our first full fiscal year. That said, with all of my missteps along the way, I definitely have no doubt that we’re upside as far as profits go. I have leveraged everything that I possibly could to pursue this dream of mine. I’ve forgone paying myself to make sure my staff gets paid. I have labored the long hours that I wouldn’t want for anyone else to keep the ship afloat. Ultimately, we pride ourselves on running our own marketing to acquire new business just like we do for our clients so while the return has been positive that has been an investment in and of itself.

There has been no greater loss, as I round out this two year journey and approach 2019, than that of the time I have sacrificed away from my family. My wife, Michelle, has been my greatest supporter always encouraging me and pushing me to do what I need to do. She’s operated as virtually a single mother while I was away trying my best to go all out for this passion that was born two years ago. I desperately miss my kids and I know the feeling is mutual. Not only that, I am tired.

“The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” So, as Christmas approaches, I’m looking forward to time with them more than anything else and hopefully sleeping… Lots and lots of sleeping. As I mentioned at the start of this, maybe recapping my journey has been more of an exercise for myself than anyone who reads this and I might have just found it in realizing how much I need my family and how much in turn they need me.

So, my renewed commitment is to find a balance between my love for Apex and love for my family in the new year. This journey has been worth it and I know I am better for it, but if I’m truly the man that I aim to be, I must be that man to and for my family first and Apex Current will follow right behind.

Thanks for reading. Thanks for those who have joined me, encouraged me and supported me this journey. Especially, to anyone who has been a part of the Apex Current team. No one more than Ethan Voce, my steady hand, more than equipped and accustomed to the craziness of startup life. You all mean so much to me. I couldn’t do it without you and I wouldn’t want to.

It all began fueled by hope mixed in with a little grit, sprinkled with a dash of stubbornness and it continues ahead into 2019 the same way, just with more perspective to light the way.