The Contrarian Bet on a Digital Agency

I, I had this sort of takeaway that the, the number of problems you face in business is not at all correlated to the size of the business. And in fact I, my, I would take my theory further to say that all businesses have the exact same problems and the exact same number of problems coming at them. Maybe not the exact same number of problems, but the, the same order of magnitude of problems coming…

And so it, it is silly to, to swing small because you're going to be working just as hard and dealing with just as many issues and getting much less reward for it than to take the bigger swing that the 10x swing as I had envisioned and ultimately turned out to be much larger than a 10x swing.

Okay.

Okay.

I was, I was gonna guess what about just the conventional wisdom that a larger business is a sturdier, less risky, more, more, more robust, more mature, you can work on it rather than in it. All that good stuff. You know, the main reason to go there.

No, so for sure was, was maybe not as important as those first two factors, but was a, was a factor in my mind of I, I wanted to, I had, I had been everything in the E commerce company that I had been spending all my time into, you know, so answering the phones, making the sales, fixing the website when it goes down, building the new SEO pages.

It was an SEO driven company and, and so I was not, I was ready to not do that and, and to step back from that. So was certainly looking for one with an established team that I could, you know, I could help grow and help lead rather than having to do all of the day to day myself.

Would you be comfortable sharing how much income you wanted to be able to take home from whatever you bought?

Yeah, well, to an extent. But the, you know, my, I met my wife at McKinsey. She then had joined a different consulting firm after that she was making a very comfortable, you know we've, we've been living in a very privileged income space consulting salary for the last decade plus.

And then my e commerce companies, you know we're doing well and I as you know enough that I could sell one for a lot more than I bought it for. So I was trying to replace that and we were, you know, replace a comfortable lifestyle we'd built.

Yeah. So the sometimes standard $150,000 a year salary that a self funded, self funded search will pro forma paying themselves is below what we're talking about here in your case.