I didn’t even know who Mark Zuckerberg was back in October 2015.
18 months later, I’m keynoting at conferences and serving clients in London, Sydney, Singapore, Los Angeles, Lisbon, Vancouver, and 50 other cities.
The 250,000 miles in the last year also took me to glaciers in Iceland, bungy jumping in New Zealand, safaris in South Africa, deserts in Dubai, and even food poisoning in Bangkok.
I got a brand new truck, two jet-skis, a three story house, and various toys to enjoy with my awesome family and my girlfriend.
But back to October 2015, I was a poor college kid at Brigham Young University.
Perhaps like you, I struggled at retail and call center jobs to pay bills. I applied for internships and interviews, hoping to land something before graduation-- maybe at one of the big New York ad agencies.
I reached out on Twitter to make connections and my friend, AJ Wilcox, connected me to Dennis Yu.
Dennis had been doing Facebook ads for years at the highest levels. And for those of us that know him, also know he’s hard to understand and a lousy manager, by his own admission.
He wanted my help in revamping the training materials-- converting 300 page manuals into bite-sized lessons that normal people could understand.
I made video tutorials from these lessons, while going through a crash course in Facebook marketing-- from my apartment, from the airport, and from hotel rooms.
Because we believe in teaching from example, I was running ad campaigns and analytics for the Golden State Warriors, MGM, Ashley Furniture, Social Media Examiner, and other big companies-- then documenting the process, step-by-step.
I remember one 3 week stretch where we did 5 continents and 15 cities.
It was a non-stop blur of flights and time zones-- getting straight off flights to speaking on stage, then to client meetings, then to the hotel room to work.
Then repeat, often without sleep, since we’d do red-eye flights and work on the flights.
From your point of view, you may have seen the glamorous pictures of food and activities.
But who is going to take pictures of them working on a laptop, taking a conference call from the back of an Uber, printing documents before meetings, and trying to sleep in a middle seat in coach on a 14 hour flight?
Dennis and I re-started BlitzMetrics, with him personally training me. Our agreement was that I’d then create the training for everyone else, focusing that knowledge and software into repeatable processes.
And that’s how mentorship works, since what’s the value of having a world-class expert be your personal tutor for 3 years, fly you around the globe, and open his entire network to you?
Our mission to create jobs for young adults has been blossoming because of the training systems, project management, and support from our partners-- folks from Facebook, Infusionsoft, Social Media Examiner, Digital Marketer, and so forth.
And we’ve been able to create jobs for the hard-working, loyal, and happy folks we have in the Philippines. too.
Working with our partner universities has been a blast, too.
We’ve been fortunate to be able to teach with Jon Bradshaw of BYU, Karen Freberg of University of Louisville, Hua Jiang of Syracuse University, Bo Liang of St. Vincent University, Sabrina Kizzie of Baruch University, and a few others-- educators that believe in equipping social media students with real work experience in our program.
We spend a lot of time teaching digital marketing in Utah, too.
A lot of the folks in our program are return missionaries. But we are happy to accept people of all faiths and walk of life.
My story has just begun and I’m happy to be able to share it with you.
We’ve spent over a billion dollars on Facebook and Google, so there are a lot of mistakes we’ve made that we hope you can learn from.
Dennis and I would be honored to hear your feedback on how we can further our cause to bring together students, businesses, and partners-- in your role as one of these three legs of the program.
