The more I read about successful entrepreneurs, the more I realize a common theme; a fair amount of them regret never having documented their time while starting their business.
They don’t have any video diaries of their first years or even any posts or notes. I don’t want to live regretting I didn’t do that.
However, I am writing this kind of late. I started conceptualizing Evergrow in 2017 and it’s…December 22nd, 2020 at the time of this writing.
Fortunately, I do have some documents as well as a 10 minute video diary I just watched from December 2018 reflecting on the past year and a half. So I’d say I’m pretty well refreshed on my own history.
This will be the start of my posts I’ll write about my yearly journey in creating a business from scratch.
No seed investors.
No parent’s money.
No “life savings”.
Just a computer and dream (that was corny).
This one will be boring. I just always feel like we need a backstory to why a decision was made. I feel like it can provide some great context for the story later.
The Precursor: January, 2017
Mudd Advertising
It was January 2017 and I was gearing up to move to Kansas City from my home town of Cedar Falls. I needed to find a job.
I had been working at a marketing agency for about two years and had started as a Client Services Representative. It was an entry-level job making $28,000 ($14/hr) per year.
It’s here where I found my passion for marketing. I took a class in college on it… right before I dropped out, but it was Mudd Advertising that gets the credit for it.
I busted my ass here.
I worked long hours just to be the best Client Services Rep. I had eventually climbed the ranks and in less than the two years I was there to the Account Executive position for the agriculture division.
It was a fancy title for, “I get to keep all of my Client Services tasks while also managing and selling smaller accounts in the agriculture industry”. But it had effectively raised my salary to almost $40,000 after comission.
To me, $40,000 was a good amount. I think that’s what my dad was making in the early 2000s in his mid-30s.
However, I knew I was too driven to stop at $40,000 and Mudd wasn’t going to move me any higher. I had learned what I needed to know in marketing to take to Kansas City with me and make some moves.
Mudd overworked and underpaid us. It was probably one of the worst jobs I had. But it was the job that put me where I’m at now.
The Move / Hammel Scale
With my marketing background, I was able to create a compelling marketing resume despite not having any formal education in the area.
I landed a job in Kansas City, Kansas as the Inside Sales & Marketing person at Hammel Scale, a small, industrial scale distributor.
It was a small company but they gave me creative freedom with marketing at first. Plus they started me at $47,500, which was a heathy increase . I didn’t feel like I was taking a step back.
But something never felt right while working at Hammel Scale. I wasn’t educating people on digital marketing like I was at Mudd. That’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to educate and execute it.
The Catalyst: March, 2017
Around March of 2017, I was living at my new place in Prairie Village, Kansas with my then fiancée. The biggest issue with that place was the backyard was literally nothing but dirt and creeping charlies.
when it rained, our dogs would go out, get muddy, then we’d have to dry them off and wipe the mud off of their paws before they came in.
So I started looking for lawn care services to fix this problem. Maybe a full yard of grass will help.
As I was searching through Google, I noticed there were a lot…and I mean A LOT of lawn care businesses. And literally all of them except for maybe two had their Google My Business listing optimized let alone claimed.
Their websites were even worse… just God awful. It should have been a crime.
The Idea
I had never actually executed marketing for another business. I just knew about it. Sold it. Reported on it.
But how hard could it really be?
I knew there was an opportunity here. There was an opportunity to get these lawn care businesses to stand out over TrueGreen, BrightView, and the local Kansas City Metro gian, Ryan’s Lawn & Tree.
I just didn’t have a team I could turn the lead over to execute the plan.
I started where the most obvious answer was.
Optimizing their Google My Business listing.
The original idea was really simple.
A one-time, $250 fee for me to claim it and optimize it for them.
Clearly I wasn’t an entrepreur at this point. The biggest flaw in this being that this is a business model for “extra income” and not “recurring income”. And that’s probably what it was intended as when I first started it.
So I got to work on figuring out how to claim and optimize a Google business listing.
Yeah, I still didn’t know how at this point.
Needing a Guinea pig: April, 2017
I didn’t want to start doing this by calling up a random lawn care or landscaping business. I wanted to be a bit more discrete about it and make sure I was doing it right.
So I started looking at who would allow me to do this for them for free.
Churches.
Churches will take anything for free.
I reached out to a couple local churches to see if they’d be willing to let me claim and verify their Google listing. I had to meet with a couple of them to explain the benefits and the process.
The process was literally just me saying,
“I honestly don’t know how this is going to go. I used to sell these services and my team handeled it. I’m starting my own business and want to learn how to do this on my own. That’s why I’m offering this to you for free.
This is where I was able to learn how to perform simple tasks and I could actually get my business off the ground.
But I waited still. I waited until I was a bit more comfortable.
Learning & Getting Certified: May, 2017
I wasn’t yet comfortable with the idea of taking people’s money to perform a task I wasn’t an expert in. I didn’t have any confidence in this yet.
So I decided to get Google Analytics and Google Ads certified. This was something I could have done at Mudd. But it didn’t come with a pay raise, so I never did.
These classes are free on Google. They’re also extremely valuable. Especially if you ever expect to call yourself a digital marketer.
Google Analytics Certification
Google Ads Certification
Taking these wasn’t fun. But I knew it was a step in the right direction.
Long story short, I got certified.
But in the meantime, I used my new marketing knowledge and kept applying it to my day job at Hammel Scale. This, of course, was because what I had with my business idea wasn’t really anything other than an idea at this point.
I was preparing.
That Tai Lopez Training Course
Look, we all make mistakes.
Some of us forget our anniversaries while others join MLMs, peddling products that are overpriced and poor quality. Messaging people from highschool they haven’t talked to in years with “Hey Girl!”
Mine was watching an entire Tai Lopez video ad on Facebook.
It was a video ad on starting your own 6-figure per month social media marketing agency.
It was a good-ass ad.
it was so good, I loaded my credit card up with a $1,200 charge to pay for this damn class.
Don’t make my mistake! Yes, I learned a couple things, but those things you can learn for free! The topics I learned about are below. So just take that advice and save yourself the money.
I thought it would have a lot of useful information in starting by own marketing agency.
I’m not going to lie. There were actually some good things in the video they covered. They talked about LLC vs S Corp, having confidence, and creating tiers.
It was when they started talking granularly about stuff that was just a bunch of horse shit.
Their SEO and Google Ads practices were way out of date and they were teaching things that would get you banned from search engines.
I never finished the course and received my “certification”.
At the end of the day, I’m happy I took the course, though. It did teach me some things about owning a digital marketing agency and getting set up. Beyond that. Nothing.
Niching Down
The BIGGEST takeaway from the shitty Tai Lopez course I took was a simple concept:
Find your niche.
In otherwords, if you’re going to be a marketer, don’t market for every type of business. There’s no value in a jack-of-all-trades.
But there is a ton of value in a specialist.
I thought back to my original business idea of the Google listings for small businesses. I thought niching down was going to be dumb. It was going to severely limit my target market.
But I did it anyways and I stuck with it.
After heavy consideration, I picked lawn care.
It Felt Like the Perfect Fit
There were three reasons why lawn care and landscaping niche felt like the perfect fit.
- The industry was very behind on digital marketing. The opportunity was definitely there.
- I’d always wanted to start a lawn care business with my dad. We’d talked about it for years, but never did.
- I was already familiar with the green industry from working with agriculture clients.
Everything just seemed to kind of fall in place. I felt at peace.
Deciding on a Business Name: June, 2017
At the end of the day, I was a digital marketer. Whether I had just learned how to perform simple digital marketing tasks or not, I knew what I was talking about when it came to digital marketing practices and theories.
Your business name is great, but the domain for the website is better. I knew that going into this and that’s how I decided on my name.
I didn’t want to have my first or last name in it. I wanted the option to sell the business with its own brand identity in the future if I ever decided to entertain that idea.
I also wanted to have some meaning that related to the green industry. Additionally, a simple .com had to be available. I wasn’t going to settle with a .org, .net, .biz, or whatever.
The problem was, almost all of my domains were taken.
blueprintmarketing.com
evergreenmarketing.com
redoakdigital.com
redoakmarketing.com
etc…
I went through so many of these, that I started helping other people find domains for their business when their first choices were taken in the years to come. So much so, I ended up writing a blog post about it on the Evergrow website.
My business partner even wrote a post on his site about 5 months later called, “What to Do When All of the Good Domain Names Are Taken”. I’m not saying he stole my idea… but I mean…
Anyways, it went through a bunch of iterations before I landed on evergrowmarketing.com. The domain wasn’t taken and no one else had registered that name.
I took it. And EverGrow Marketing was born.