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Why A Successful Exit Was A Complete Letdown With Corey Wert
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Corey Wert is the founder of Digital Blue Moon, a boutique digital agency in Toronto that is disrupting the outdated multi-vendor model. He has also started, grown and exited Free Flow Marketing back in 2014, a successful digital agency focused on providing services to only Fortune 500 companies.
Corey sits on multiple boards and is incredibly well respected within the entrepreneurship community.
In today’s episode we dive deep on why exiting his first company was the biggest let down of his life and how he was able to get out of a deep depression after selling that first business.
Corey explains his most important steps to set a solid foundation when building a company.
We’ll also discuss why he decided to outsource his first six employees from the Philippines when getting started.
Plus Corey shares how he completely got blindsided on his latest venture with an untrustworthy partner.
Key Points From This Episode:
- Corey tells us how he got into the world of entrepreneurship.
- Hear Corey’s story as he transitions from corporate to entrepreneur.
- Learn about Corey’s biggest struggles when he started Free Flow Marketing.
- Find out how Corey got Free Flow Marketing up and running.
- The most important steps to help you set a solid foundation when building a company.
- Understand the growth trajectory of Free Flow Marketing.
- Discover why Corey started outsourcing overseas.
- Hear Corey’s experience exiting the company and what he went through.
- Why Corey strongly believes that failing forward is a must in life and business.
- Find out how Corey worked through his depression and what turned it all around for him.
- Why it is so critical to structure your day and make time for yourself.
- Understand how Corey got involved with his new company, Digital Blue Moon.
- Discover Corey’s biggest takeaway and learning lesson from his experience.
- The importance of having a good support network.
- Learn how Corey forces himself to get out of his comfort zone.
- Find out why failure, to Corey, means learning.
- Discover who has had a profound impact on Corey’s life.
- Hear what’s next on the horizon for Corey.
- And much more!
Tweetables:
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Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
Corey Wert — http://bluemoon.digital/
Corey’s LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/coreywert/?ppe=1
Email Corey — corey@bluemoon.digital
Free Flow Marketing — http://freeflowmarketing.ca/
Timothy Ferriss’s book, Four Hour Work Week — https://www.amazon.com/4-Hour-Workweek-Escape-Live-Anywhere/dp/0307465357/
123 Employee — http://www.123employee.com/
UpWork — https://www.upwork.com/
Elance — https://www.elance.com/php/landing/main/login.php
Re Perez — https://brandingforthepeople.com/
Philip McKernan — http://philipmckernan.com/
Mastermind Talks — http://www.mastermindtalks.com/
Mark Zuckerberg — http://iammarkzuckerberg.com/
Richard Branson — https://www.virgin.com/richard-branson
Transcript Below
Read Full Transcript
EPISODE 019
“CW: I’ve traveled the world, I’ve seen things I never thought I’d be able to see, I’ve been able to carve out good time for myself instead of just trading my time for two to three weeks’ vacation a year, I’ve met some fantastic people and I’m grateful and all of that is sponsored by an entrepreneurial lifestyle.”
[INTRODUCTION]
[0:00:25.1] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Fail on Podcast where we explore the hardships and obstacles today’s industry leaders face on their journey to the top of their fields, through careful insight and thoughtful conversation. By embracing failure, we’ll show you how to build momentum without being consumed by the result.
Now please welcome your host, Rob Nunnery.
[INTRO]
[0:00:45.8] RN: Hey there and welcome to the show that believes you are destined for more and that failing your way to an inspired life is the only way to get there. Today, we are sitting down with Corey Wert, Corey is the founder of Digital Blue Moon, that’s a boutique digital agency in Toronto that is disrupting the outdated multi-vendor model.
Corey is a good friend, he’s a brilliant guy, super humble and has successfully started built, grown, exited another digital agency back in 2014. At that time, they were focusing on providing services to only fortune 500 companies. Corey’s incredibly well respected in this community and entrepreneurship community.
He sits on several boards and we go deep on why exiting that first company in 2014 was actually the biggest let down of his life. We’ll be discussing why he decided to outsource his first six employees from the Philippines when he first got started, how he was able to get out of a deep depression after selling that first business and how he completely got blindsided on his latest venture with an untrustworthy partner.
But first, if you’d like to stay up to date on all fail on podcast interviews and key takeaways from each guest, simply go to failon.com and sign up for our newsletter at the bottom of the page. That’s failon.com.
[INTERVIEW]
[0:02:03.1] RN: Corey, welcome to the fail on podcast my man.
[0:02:05.7] CW: Hey, thanks for having me Rob.
[0:02:07.6] RN: Sweet, just for a little context, we are in the beautiful city of Toronto right now, actually a mutual friend of ours, I guess he called it a game room, I don’t know if I’d call it a game room, there’s a little couch.
[0:02:20.1] CW: There is a foosball table.
[0:02:21.8] RN: There’s a foosball table and some creepy looking camera equipment that I wouldn’t know if this is SEO company or –
[0:02:29.8] CW: You know what? He did call it a game room, not a games room so it’s very appropriate there’s only one game in here.
[0:02:35.2] RN: That’s a good point. I just want to dig into it man. You’ve had some highs and lows as an entrepreneur.
[0:02:42.4] CW: Absolutely.
[0:02:43.7] RN: Like all of us but just so we have some context, how did you first get into the world of entrepreneurship?
[0:02:49.6] CW: I’ve always kind of had like a hustle to me, you know, very young, I would do things like sell gumballs and everything like that to the kids in my class but my first step into entrepreneurship was really around 2008, I was working for a big consumer package goods company here in Canada, they did about six billion in sales.
I worked in the marketing department there and I just really saw that there was like a massive shifting trend that that was coming. IT really felt like a sweet spot for me in the sense where I knew I loved marketing but I’ve always had a fascination for technology in the digital space.
At that time, you know, people were considering digital to be experimental at best.
[0:03:36.8] RN: Yeah, it was still early.
[0:03:37.9] CW: It was still early for the bigger companies right? The innovators were grabbing on and making the most out of it and good for them. For me, there is just this disruption that was coming, I thought that I was in a good spot with a good knowledge on both sides of the fences and really was never…
I was very fortunate to have the job that I had, I did well but I was never really content working for someone else, you know, to steal a quote from you actually, you know, you’re either working on your dreams or you’re working on somebody else’s.
I realized that it was time to take the leap and get out there and take what I knew and try to bring that to the world.
[0:04:12.0] RN: Cool man, I want to actually dig in to kind of like the details there because you’re working at this company, I mean, did you get laid off or fired or were you just kind of proactive and like, “I want to make something happen.”
[0:04:22.3] CW: Yeah, funny story actually. I was doing well, I was on the fast track, I was moving up to management ranks, you know, good salary, everything was going really well but I always had a certain discontent on the speed with which things happen in a big company.
You’re always waiting for someone to bestow the honor and tap you on the shoulder before you can kind of get to the next level and while you have to learn to play that game patiently, it’s also something that was a constant and eternal struggle for me.
At that point, you know, I had done a digital campaign and it was extremely successful and kind of blew the lights out compared to all of the more traditional stuff that we were doing.
[0:05:04.4] RN: What were the metrics based on? Was it based on performance? How did you gauge that you blew it out of the water?
[0:05:10.7] CW: One, the level of insight that we were able to get from that campaign, you know, traditional media and traditional marketing like you sit there, you activate your campaign and then three months later you see the sales data start to roll in and then you try to retrospectively connect the dots and figure out what happened. We were able to see immediate traction, we were able to make immediate pivots.
It ended up garnering kind of like more social engagement, we ended up doing really well through a contesting promotion and again, we were able to actually identify a subset of our target base which we always assumed was X.
We saw that there was this whole other opportunity out there. For me it just like, the instant data was something that just immediately kind of like sparked with me.
[0:05:55.6] RN: Just so I understand better, is this like a Facebook ad campaign? What exactly was it?
[0:05:59.3] CW: I remember sitting down and doing a presentation on YouTube to my president and he was like, “that’s interesting but I don’t think that’s ever going to catch on.” This is before Google had even bought YouTube right? I remember sitting there and saying like, “this is going to be the future of kind of like video advertising” and the cost for which you could do it compared to a traditional media buy for TV was insane and so it was literally just kind of like foraying into that.
Facebook was still like university Facebook back then.
[0:06:29.3] RN: yeah, that’s true. 08, 09.
[0:06:30.4] CW: Yeah, it was really kind of before that but they were all sorts of platforms where you were really starting to see a two way conversation right? Like commenting was starting to become a thing and again, that instant connection with the consumer was something that you just never really had through traditional marketing.
It was always one-way messaging. You know, kind of you vomiting your message on everyone, the exact same way where digital really allowed you to connect and forge a relationship and build some loyalty with your customers.
[0:06:58.0] RN: And measure the results.
[0:06:58.3] CW: And measure the results and be able to take that and leverage it for insightful, meaningful campaigning down the road right? There was always discontinuous improvement that you could do in the moment with digital data.
[0:07:12.0] RN: You created this campaign at this company.
[0:07:13.7] CW: Created a campaign, it did really well and for me, it just kind of like a light bulb had turned on. You know, I really loved the marriage of marketing and technology and I remember sitting down and doing a presentation and showing the results and this was supposed to be like my moment right?
They were instantly going to make me president of the company and I just remember it being you know, that was a great experiment and we weren’t going to do that anymore For me, I couldn’t really understand what was happening so I literally sulked back to my office. I sat down and you know, I just looked out and it was a very...
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