Founder 2 Founder

She looked me dead in the eye and she goes, "Princess lollipop." And I'm like, "Done." So, for one, my family still doesn't even know what I do for a living. They think I work for Google. SE agent doesn't have a didn't have a website until he had 5 million. What are you doing? Like, oh, I I got to go to school. I'm like, what is this? I was a student, then I became like C student in the second to fourth grade. I was kind of like a um speak easy.

Hello everyone. Today we have our guest Jason Jason Hennessy. Uh he's a founder and owner of one of the top marketing SEO agencies in the law firm industry. We're going to be talking about how he he built the the agency, how he was able to scale it so big, and how what it take him to build it. I'm honored to be here. I'm glad we both got the memo to wear black shirts today. Sordor and I kind of go way back. It's funny. We first met kind of in a executive uh coaching group called Vistage years and years ago and we kind of remained friends uh this whole way and so our stories have continued to evolve since then and uh just an honor to be here. Um I have an agency it's called Hennessy Digital Build It Up. We just celebrated 10 years last month and literally on the anniversary of uh of us kind of building that agency 10 years later we also exited. Um and so uh we're going to get into that story about you know um some of the failures, some of the setbacks, some of the lessons that I've learned and so I'm super excited to share the story with everyone. Thank you guys. Please keep watching it. We're going to be diving deep on every single step of how he have started the business and what lessons he have learned. What kind of wins he got and what actually help him to really scale this business right and please uh subscribe and continue watching it.

How do you manage your time? Like uh h how what time you wake up or like how many hours you work? Do you dedicate to the company? You know, I wake up bright and early. You know, I'm usually up by like 5:15. I make my coffee. Um you know, I usually kind of get my my day started. Um you know, usually from like 5:15 to about 7 is when I can actually get stuff done um without many disruptions. you know, once 7:00 comes, you know, I find myself like in the world of Zoom. You know, I'm on Zoom a lot, you know, more often than I would like. Um, and a lot of my meetings are not very long. Um, you know, a lot of them sometimes are just 15 minutes or 30 minutes. You know, I'm very, um, uh, I I try to make sure that I manage my time effectively. um if I feel like I shouldn't be in a meeting and I could be doing something more productive um you know I just make sure that there's somebody to actually take that meeting. Most of my meetings are really kind of like one-on- ones even though that I don't have a bunch of direct reports um you know I do like to get facetime you know with like my director of client services or you know my CFO that gives us a finance meeting. We have another meeting called our 1% meeting and we do that once a week um and it's an hour and a half long and that's where we actually look at um you know things that we can learn from uh in terms of our strategy or you know maybe like a client a case study like what can we do to kind of you know learn from this one case study that we can then apply to all of our clients. Why you call it 1% like it's the best 1%. No, we call it 1% is because we just want to be 1% better than yesterday. Okay, got it. Got it. How many hours a week you think you spend for the Hennessy Digital? 80 90, you know? Like I honestly I like I I don't look at it as work, you know, like it's one of those things like I love it, you know, like I'll wake up on a Saturday morning before the family gets up. Um, and you know, one of the things that I do, this is actually like one of the um I guess uh the skills that I've developed over the years is all week long like I I just write things on like little notepads and stuff like that. And then I try to read my own handwriting, which is a whole another, you know, skill, I guess. Um, and so, you know, at the end of the week, I've got all these like little notes and stuff, sticky notes, the back of like some envelope, you know what I mean? Like you're just right. And so, but at the end of the every week, I've got a two-page document that I basically go through and I I look at all this and it's basically it's like all the action items that I need to take from, you know, all of the notes that I I created. And every Sunday, I actually go through this and I document it, right? Um, and it might be as simple as check out this tool or make an introduction like introduce Sardor to one of my attorneys like because that was an action item that kind of came up via text message or something, right? And so I have the action items now, uh, next and later, right? And so that's basically it. So the now is like immediate, like I need to do this, you know, next would be like, okay, this could wait till next week and then later would be let's just check out this software. It can be anytime, right? So, that's basically how I kind of developed my action items. And you know, there's people that are a lot smarter than me and there's people that probably work harder than me. Um, but I could tell you this, like there's not too many people that's going to take more action than me. Like, I'm a big fan of action. I feel that when you take action, you're able to create a future that wasn't going to exist. Um, and then you just get results. So, can you share with audience one top life hack? What do you think makes you best? You are best performer, one of the best performers I I know. I think once you kind of master the art of delegation. Um I mean it seemed like a very simple answer. Um but a lot of people have trouble with that. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like you know when you master that skill I mean boy does it open up a whole lot of more of your time, right? Because time is really you know that's the most valuable thing in this world, right? Um, and so 5 years ago, I wouldn't been able to kind of take a trip for 35 days and travel Asia with my family, you know what I mean? I would have been so crazy busy. Um, at the end of last year, I was in Asia. I was in Singapore. I was in Japan. We went to Bali, three areas of Thailand, right? And we had an amazing time. Um, and I might have checked email like maybe like for 30 minutes a day just to kind of get caught up, you know? That that's one of the important things what makes the company exitable, right? Like correct. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. Like Yeah. You know, and it also frees up time for me to do other things like build my personal brand, write a book, you know, promote the book, speak at conferences, right? Find out what your zone of genius is and then try to, you know, delegate everything else that you can focus on what you're best at and what gives you energy. There's things that take energy away from you and then there's things that give you energy, right? What do you think is your superpower? I think I'm very good at breaking down things that are complex and making it very easy to understand. Got it. What percentage of your time or hours a week do you think you spend with your team? I probably spend about a good 35% of my time with my team. Mhm. As far as like meeting with my um COO um we meet uh you know regularly um you know uh we we meet as needed. Um you know but we are on a lot of the same slacks and stuff. So like we both have transparency to things. Um usually when him and I are meeting you know like on an impromptu call it's because something happened. You know what I mean? you know, um so we certainly he's just the kind of guy that um takes full responsibility and he basically drives the company, right? Um and allows me to go off and do things like this, like you know, have these interviews or create video content that I'm going to post on LinkedIn or um you know, but don't get me wrong, like you know, him a lot of my senior leadership uh has helped me build the company that it is today. That makes it a sellable asset. I guess you got it. So, those are basically they work in the business. So, it allows you to work on the business. That's exactly right. Yeah, that's a good way to put it. Yeah.

Did your family understood and support you all the way or they were questioning because they don't know because mostly our families don't understand the valuation what you're building wells. Yeah. They think like you're working too much, you're not like taking money to the house or something like that, right? when you're building a valuation, like when you're doing a cash business is different. Yeah. So, for one, my family still doesn't even know what I do for a living. They think I work for Google, you know what I mean? Like, you know, so like, you know, so so there's that, right? Um so, like, you know, my people ask my wife, "So, what does your husband do?" She's like, "I don't know. Like, he does this SEO stuff, you know, and that's kind of it, you know, and she's right." Um, and so, you know, my kids think I'm like an entrepreneur, right? Um and so they just kind of see you know how hard I work right. Um now in terms of like mentorship yeah I wouldn't be where I was uh you know where I am today you know if it wasn't for things like Vistage where we met you know I spent 10 years in Vistage um then I joined YPO Young President's Organization um and that has been instrumental um you know going to college again like we talked about earlier um you know finding a business coach like when we were at 5 million in revenue I didn't I didn't know what it was going to take to go from 5 million to 10 million and 10 million to 20 million. I wanted to go and get a coach that has already done that, you know, and I think that was important. That was a big part of um of the growth as well because they give you all the the shortcuts, the cliff notes, the lessons that they've already learned so that you don't have to make those same mistakes. And so my business coach, he's great, his name's Cameron Herald, he's still my business coach even post exit, you know what I mean? Um, and so, uh, yeah, so like it's super important to surround yourself with mentors, um, and and and being so grateful for your failures, right? Because the failures, if you're not failing, you're not even trying. Yeah. You know what I mean? Um, and so it's not always going to be perfect. Some days you're going to wake up and you're going to be super pumped. You just signed a big account. Other days, you lost a big account, right? And you just kind of have to you just have to roll with the punches, you know, on accounts. You just said did you had an experience when your clients been purchased by another private equity company and they had marketing agency they would just shut out this one phone call or something like they Yeah. We had a we had actually we had a large law firm client um that we worked with for like seven years and really helped build them up to the point where they were sellable, right? Um and so seven years of investing in content and links and SEO really made them the law firm that that they were. Um and then you know then they were bought by um another big law firm that I think was backed by some kind of a capital. Um and so they bought them and then we started to meet the new team and we kind of saw the writing on the wall that they were going to um replace us with an agency that they might have already had a relationship with or an agency that might be part of their portfolio, right? And so you know and it sucked at the time because it was around Christmas time and you know at the time they were probably they were a very large company so they were like I don't know 17% of our total revenue. you know what I mean? And so we learned a lesson there, you know, because then we, you know, that was the only time we ever had to like cut people, you know, and lay people off because of that, you know, and so that wasn't fun, you know, and you don't What was the year? Uh, I want to say it was like 20 21 maybe, something like that. 2020, something like that. How much they were paying? 17%. Uh, they were probably north of 100 grand a month, you know, something like that. Yeah. Yeah. I recently had a story also HVAC company agency supporting them they're charging like 220,000 with one phone call they shut them down. Oh my god. Put a business company out of business. After that we actually like are very strategic like we don't take clients that are that high anymore. You know what I mean? Like you know um too risky right? It is too risky you know.

Do you believe in calculated risk? Yeah, I think so. Um, you know, because you, um, based on previous experience, right? You know, if I do this, there's probably a greater probability that I'll be successful than I will at failing. Um, and then you also take in your own acumen as well. Um, my business coach likes to say, when you have doubt, you have no doubt, right? Um, and I'm a big believer in that. Um, and so sometimes, you know, you take all of that stuff into consideration, the cost or reward. Do you have any doubt? Um, you know what's so funny? I think I think most entrepreneurs are like C students, you know. I think most successful entrepreneurs are like good C students in high school. They're always like curious and distracted, you know, because when you have somebody that's really smart and they're like an A student, a lot of times they overanalyze, correct? and they talk themselves out of taking the next step, right? Because there's so many reasons not to do something, right? Whereas somebody that's a dumb C student, right, that doesn't spend a lot of time talking themselves out of it, they just go for it. You know what I mean? And there's a good chance there's a good probability when you actually go for it, like you might have success. Um there's a good chance that you might not, right? You know, and there's some of those stories, too. But you know I I consider myself a good C student. Yeah. I was also also in the school time and in the gymnas gymnasium and lysium I was a a student but when I got to university the first year was I was a student then I became like C student in the second to fourth grade. Is that right? Yeah because it was too much of a theory they start teaching and it was not applicable 100%. I was very bored. You know what I mean? like the subject matter that you're trying to learn, you're just not interested in, you know, and so but of course after I start my entrepreneurship journey, like I never stopped learning. No, of course not. Yeah. I probably like spent 10 hours a week like self-education in the evening and watching whatever the 100%. I remember you I remember when you were like you just stopped what you were doing because you were taking this course on mergers and acquisitions for a while. I'm like what are you doing? You're like oh I I got to go to school. I'm like what is this? And you started telling me all about it. We had lunch at John and Vinnie and you were kind of telling me all about that. Yeah. No, I admire that about you. Yeah. No. Yeah. I was able to learn a lot about private equities, about fundraising, launching a funds and everything else. I think I kind of got everything. Now I went I went back now. I want execution mode like like I want to execute whatever things I got now. Yeah. See, I'm the opposite. So I didn't take that course, right? I kind of I like to say that I got my MBA in mergers and acquisitions over the past six months living in it, right? You know, so like I was like um learning as I was going with this, right? But I think but I think you did it well still because like I know other examples when in home services. Yeah. Uh they sold it to private equity company. Mhm. And they sign up a lot of NASA they cannot compete not competes and they realize it was wrong now they cannot do the M&A and rollups. Sure. And actually they went back and bought it back the company. Oh there's those stories too. They bought it back. So actually now they they end up actually getting their own conference. Now they start doing rollups in the roofing industry. Ah interesting. Yeah there's a lot of consolidation happening in in in all of those verticals. Yeah, we're seeing it. I think it's a good times and bad times like on about multipliers and the about the cash on the market. So, y yeah, it's a lot of consolidations happening in most of the industry. It really is. Yeah.

What kind of advice you would give 10 young 10 years younger yourself? Um I would say um find a mentor early. I wish I would have found a like a mentor a lot earlier. Um, you know, I waited till I was at five million, right? You know, you go to, you go to school and you have a soccer coach and then you, you know, you're studying for the SAT and you bring in somebody that does like the SAT coaching or prep for you, you know, then you go to college and you're getting tutored, right? I mean, all throughout life you kind of have coaches, right? But then once you start a business, you think, "All right, I can do this." And you're just on your own, right? Why not get a coach, you know? Find somebody that could afford. It doesn't have to be like some $10,000 per month coach, you know what I mean? Like you can grow into that, you know, but just find somebody that, you know, has built what you're looking to build and just see if you could just pick their brain once every three months, you know what I mean? I think, you know, I think it's our duty as somebody that has some level of success to go reach down and try to pick the next generation up. Yeah. You know, I believe that% grow. Yeah. So that's my duty. I'm I'm doing that now. I'm coaching people. So I agree. Yeah. When you have a coach and mentor that blur uh things disappears, right? Like you get a clarity like because a lot of times we don't make that decision because we're unsure. That's right. But when you have a mentor and coach by actually asking you the right questions, it clarifies. It makes you like make that decision much faster. Absolutely. They're telling you not what to do, but also what not to do. Yeah. Right. And they're holding you accountable. And when you're the CEO of a company, right, there's nobody holding you accountable. And so, you need that level of accountability. I I completely agree with you. And how on on the coach and mentor coach, how often do you meet? We meet once a month. Once a month. Yep. We meet once a month. And it's usually a 90-minute call. Um, and we go through a lot of items on that 90minute call and we get so much value from that. Yeah. Do you keep kind of a format or it's just more No, it's it's it's loose. Um, you know, he'll say like, "All right, so tell me what's going on." Um, and Scott and myself, my COO and and myself are on the call and we kind of give him some things and then he's like taking notes and he's like, "Okay, we'll come back to that. Okay, we'll come back to that." And then we hit a lot of points. Um, and then usually at the end of every call, he's like, "Okay, great. I want you to send me uh an email with the top five uh actions that you guys are going to take from this call, you know, and then um I basically then have a long document that shows all the top five actions that we were supposed to take every month." And so when I go back like five years ago or whatever, you know, I mean, I can actually see like all the action that we took to get to where we are now. And so that's kind of cool to see. That That's That's cool. That's cool. Yeah. I have a similar way. Do you? Yeah. Yeah. I have a coach and mentor uh who's still the CEO of almost like a Walmart but overseas. Okay. Right here. Uh like I think he managed probably two 2,000 plus people. Wow. Okay. Yeah. And it's like on it on on demand marketplace as well. Okay. Right. Say similar to Door Dash. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And another one is more of a founder coach. Accountability coach like you said like we have a weekly calls. Cool. Weekly calls. Weekly calls but to towards the target. We have a 90 90day like I have a quarterly targets and she keeps me accountable. Wow. Like to to achieve those. That's amazing. Yeah. Yeah. It's they push us, right? Like it's the same thing without the coach. It's harder to go to gym and keep you accountable or diet coach. Totally. Anything. Yeah. I've got just one coach, but like I've got friends that have like five different coaches, right? They've got a a coach um that's their business coach, then they've got a public speaking coach, right? And then you might have a life coach, you know what I mean? Like, yeah. On anything you want to accelerate, I think you need a coach, meditation coach. Like seriously, you know, like there's so many different things that you can do if you really want to accelerate in life. There's nothing wrong with that. Yeah.

Jason, you went from selling gum to building a agency with substantial exit. Okay. Uh, how did you not lose yourself during this race? Like how did you keep yourself up? Like what helped you? Ah, um, I would say just kind of staying true to who I was and and finding a passion. Yeah. Um, because like the that race is like being 17,000 out of 28 million companies. H Yeah. I never thought of it like that, you know, in hindsight, like looking back, sure, like pat myself on the back, pat my team members on the back. It was collective effort, uh, for sure. Um but it was all a matter of like um you know just having having the right drive in life um and and just like working really hard but find building a life where you don't even feel like you're working like you and I are talking right now right I'm in a studio that I invested in right it's this beautiful space here in in Hollywood um and uh you know this is work yeah right? You know what I mean? But it's not it's not really work. I I love this, you know? And so when you can kind of build a dream life where you love waking up in the morning and it's not like never was there a day where I regretted waking up on a Monday morning, like I'm excited. You know what I mean? Sometimes some weekends like I can't wait for Monday because we can get the momentum back, you know? Um and so that's kind of Do you work on Saturday, Sundays, or not? Oh, I non-stop, man. You know, I mean, don't get me wrong, like, um, you know, I turn it off. Um, like I can't just sit and watch a movie. Like, I'm not like that at all. Like, I don't watch movies. I don't watch TV shows. I don't Netflix and chill. I might do it once a month for distraction purposes. Do you? I just can't. You know what I mean? I feel like distracted. I don't know why. Like, that's just always things. I feel like I could be more productive with my time. Um, and so, but I'm not normal. You know what I mean? And and that's actually a curse. I think I don't think that's a blessing. You know what I mean? The fact that I just can't stop um and just enjoy things. It takes a lot for me to stop. You know, the one thing that I do find passion with is like traveling and seeing new places and experiencing new things with my family or people. Like I love that. That's kind of my way of kind of entertaining myself. But just sitting and looking. Yeah. I always see you traveling on Facebook like in different places. Like love that. Yeah. Like I mean, you know, at some point in my life, I'll probably like travel the world with my family and just kind of like see different things and experience different things. What gives you the energy and what drains you? I can tell you uh what drains me. Um you know, what drains me is when um people uh talk about problems and they don't have solutions. You know what I mean? It's very easy to like just complain complain about things. um you know show up with a solution right you know like that that I that I have a lot of respect for um so all the drama and stuff like that like I definitely don't do well with drama what gives me energy is you know just innovation um education uh learning new things learning how to solve problems like the world that I live in in terms of SEO the fact that there's no like there's no book that you can really read to understand the Google algorithm you kind of have to reverse engineer it and do a lot of experimentation and then see what works and then you know holy [ __ ] you know I'm now ranking number one for this keyword that's so competitive like that's the stuff that kind of gives me energy because then I could kind of take that and scale it and then build systems and processes to kind of do that. So that's the kind of stuff that really kind of gives me energy and it's really like the backbone of like how I built my personal you know reputation in a very competitive field like legal. Um, and so, uh, that that's the stuff that like drives me.

Jason, what projects inspires you more than money right now? I like building, uh, new tools. Um, like truthfully, you know, I think the world of AI, um, you know, somebody told me this, I was at a like a mastermind group, uh, and this AI speaker came in. And he's like, "Let's be real." You know, I mean, AI is going to change the world. You know, uh, somebody is uh, going to develop a product that puts you out of business, right? So, why don't you be the person to develop that product, right? And so, I've been given that a lot of thought. And so, I've been working with my engineering team to figure out like everything that we do like how could we like automate it? Um, how can we use AI? How can we build automations? Um, and so that's been a project that we've been working on for about 6 months. Uh, and so, uh, that's the kind of stuff that kind of excites me and gets me out of bed these days. I normally ask this question with a lot of people. Where do you see yourself in three, five years? But I'm going to ask you different one. Okay. Where do you like to see yourself in 10 20 years? 10 to 20 years. Um, yeah. you know, like I I hope at that point um you know, I'm I'm really hopefully I'm mentoring others that are looking um at growing their respective businesses. Um you know, finding, you know, young Stanford grads that are on to something that's going to be the next billiondoll company. um where I could basically invest in their company and advise them um on growing the right business. So, I could see myself doing a lot of that. Um I could also see myself supporting my own children in whatever it is that they're advancing in their lives. Um my daughter will be 18 at the time. So, uh, you know, keeping the boys away, um, from the house probably will be a big job. Company she named. Oh, yeah. So, my daughter Yeah. So, this is really funny. This is a funny story. Um, so, you know, three years ago, uh, my attorney said, "Hey, by the way, you know, since you've got this executive team, you know, and you're building other companies, you might want to lease out like your team's time to work on these companies. so you should probably create a holding company so that you can kind of do that. And so it made a lot of sense and I'm like, "Okay, let's do that." And so he's like, "Okay, great." And then he text me that night. He's like, "One quick question I forgot to ask. What do you want to name the company?" Holding company. This is the holding company, right? And so thinking nothing of it, I'm like, "I'll never ever use this name anyway." So it could just be anything. And so I look at my daughter who's like, you know, three years old at the time and she's got like macaroni and cheese on her face and she's sitting there and I go, "Bro." I'm like, "If you were going to name a company, what would you name your company?" And she looked me dead in the eye and she goes, "Princess Lollipop." And I'm like, "Done." I texted him back. I'm like, "It's going to be called the Princess Lollipop Group, right?" And he's like, "Question mark question mark question mark." I'm like, "I'll tell you later. It's just going to be called Princess Lollipop Group." He goes, "Okay." Right? And so, sure enough, Princess Lollipop Group was available in California, right? And so, he ended up registering it. We created the entity. Thought nothing of it. Um, you know, I ended up getting a credit card, uh, you know, an MX card just to kind of open it up and that was it. Like, I didn't think that would ever come up again. I can't tell you the amount of times that that name has come up in diligence when I was kind of going to They're like, "So, let me get this straight. So, if the Princess Lollipop Group is going to do this, and then who's going to do that? And who's the equity owner of this Princess Lollipop?" And it was just like, "Oh my god." Like, you know, and the amount of like legal documents it showed up in. And so, anyway, it was just hilarious. So, my daughter named that. Mhm. And now we're actually talking about the Princess The Princess Lollipop Girl. Thank you, Brooklyn. One other thing too, like I could see myself like, you know, owning a small little restaurant, like, you know, and not so much because I'm doing it to make money, you know? I mean, I think I would just like to kind of have community that shows up to the restaurant and I'm kind of like the matraee and, you know, and we serve good food and we got a really good chef. Like, I could probably see myself maybe opening a restaurant like 15 years and that's just like what I do to get out of the house. So, if my wife says, "You're home too much. You need to go somewhere." I'm like, "All right, I'm going to the restaurant." You know, like that might be in my future. Who knows? Definitely. That's all also on my checklist. Like, is it? Yeah. Not to for the not for the money, just for the enjoy. Exactly. The people bring people together, have coffee, you know, dinners, like I think that would be really cool.

Three business books that really changed your thinking. The first one was uh really what inspired me to write my book. Um it's called Rework. Um have you ever read that? Yes. I love the book. Yeah. I thought that one was amazing. The reason why I really liked it is because very short chapters. They're like two, three pages, right? You don't have to read 20 pages. Um and uh and I love that there's visual kind of like, you know, like illustrations in there, so you kind of stop and think. And that was how I got inspiration to write my book. that way. Um, so I think that's the first one. I'm reading a book right now. It's called uh Die with Nothing. It's really great. It talks about, you know, everybody kind of saves up for rainy days and save save, but they forget to live life. Um, and life is really about creating, you know, moments and stories. Um, like my grandfather and my grandmother saved a lot of money and they didn't make a lot of money. And so when they died, they never really truly lived life, right? And they had just money in the bank that the kids ultimately ended up fighting over. You know what I mean? At the end anyway. It actually separated their family, right? The two brother and sister because of my uncle got greedy. Now he doesn't even talk to my aunt, my mom. And so it ended up like separating their kids because they didn't live life right, you know? Um so that's a good book. It talks about just kind of like living life. And the third I'd say is a book called Vivid Vision uh which was written by my coach camera. Yep. Have you read that one? Yeah, that's a good one too because I think you know if you don't really have a vision of what you're trying to build, you know, good luck trying to build it. It's like just getting in the car and driving or where are you going to end up? Am I going to be in San Diego or I'm going to be in Mexico? Right? I don't know. Right? I'm just getting in the car and driving. Right? So this allows you to kind of create that three-year vision. Imagine you have unlimited budget today. I believe you already do. Okay. And where you would invest right now or would you say in marketing or you would go other niches? Yeah. Um so uh so I'm I definitely want to follow the trend. Um, you know, I'm certainly uh looking at like, you know, AI, um, you know, looking at, you know, companies that are kind of in the AI space where I can maybe become an investor. Um, whether it's like angel investing or, you know, maybe VC. Um, so I'll definitely be kind of open up to those type of ideas. Um uh and uh you know and just finding you know solutions that I feel could really disrupt y um business um and probably not going to win all of them. Um but uh I will certainly be on the lookout for you know stuff that's kind of in that space I'd say. Yeah. Guys if anyone have a great idea about AI reach out to Jason or comment below. We're going to reach out to you. So if you need any investment,

how long it took you from the first dollar to hit the first million and what was the toughest time when you were even thinking like should you actually it might not be for you like did you had any thought of that or not? Yeah. Um so my story is kind of interesting. Um, you know, uh, my first agency, it's interesting how I got into this whole world of legal. Um, it was 2008. I got asked to speak at a group of lawyers as like a mastermind group. I didn't go in there thinking I was You almost became the lawyer, right? Yeah, I did. I was studying for the LSAT. I was living in Las Vegas. I was going to go to the William Boyd School of Law, which is like UNLV's like law program. And then I shadowed a district attorney and realized that that wasn't for I was too entrepreneurial. Um, and so in 2008, I was like you. I was doing, you know, SEO and and I had affiliate stuff going all kinds of different things. And then I got asked to speak to a group of lawyers. There's 50 lawyers that had this mastermind. They were all DUI lawyers. And so they asked me to come out and speak, talk about SEO. And so I got up there for 45 minutes. I said, I don't know nothing about legal marketing, but this is what I did to rank for this keyword. And I gave them the exact strategy that I used. And at the end of that, I had eight lawyers that came up and said, "That was awesome. Like, I'm paying my SEO guy like $6,000 a month, and he's not doing any of that." And so I'm like, "Internesting." You know, do you do this from consulting level? I'm like, "Sure, give me your card." And so I ended up leaving there with like five new clients and about $35,000 per month, right, in revenue just from like one 45minute presentation. And so that was kind of like the genesis of how I got into this world of legal. And then you build them some case studies and then you just kind of grow. That business we got to about 3.5 million in revenue. It wasn't very profitable. Um, you know, I had a business partner. We were kind of going in kind of two directions in terms of the vision of the company. And so he ended up buying me out. Great guy. Love my old partner. We're still friends today, right? And so he ended up selling that to another friend of ours uh that has that agency. And so then I moved to California and I remember just starting this agency which is Hennessy Digital from a coffee shop in Tuca Lake. When did you start it? 2015. 2015. So 10 years. Um and it was just me and one client. Um and that client is still a client of ours today. 10 years later. And uh very grateful for the loyalty over the years. Um and um and so I started it in May and by the end of the year I think I brought in like $750,000, right? So call it whatever 6 monthsish. Um you know I was able to get that then next year I broke 1 million and then you know and then got to like 2.5 by like year three. Basically it was the second time of your entrepreneurial journey, right? Yeah. Correct. Yeah. for the agency side and we met I think in 2019 right in probably 18 or 19 like right before co I think one year before and I think at that time you were doing what five already yeah we were probably right about there like five yeah and you didn't even had a website do you remember that I remember I was so surprised like how are you doing $5 million without a website it was just a onepage landing page like I was surprised like like because I gave a presentation and you're like how you were generating clients. It didn't make any sense. I like I didn't have to I was kind of like a um speak easy, right? You know, people knew that I was really good. I didn't have to like go out and like do sales. People just came to me. But it was really interesting when I'm trying to recruit people like, you know, somebody that's going to come and work for me and they're like, "Is this legit?" Like, "Is this real?" I had the same doubts. Yeah. Like, you know, I'm looking at your website. I understand how the website ranks and everything else like I'm looking at one page like hold on this what is this how is this guy this guy legit? Uhhuh. That's that's so true that you remember that story because it is it's it's part of my my my story. Yeah. So it took like one year basically to break. Yeah. Because you know why I only had a onepage website is because I was a perfectionist, right? And I didn't want to build like I wanted my website to be perfect, right? and you want something to be perfect, you don't get any momentum, right? And so, and plus we were like the cobbler's kids that didn't have shoes and we were working on clients that we'd get in. And because I wanted my website perfect and we're busy, we never got around to it. The whole reason why we even had a website was because there was uh the Wall Street making our shoes. Exactly. The Wall Street Journal was like running a story and they were going to link to us and they're like, "Where do we link to?" I'm like, ah, quickly put up a website so that they could at least I don't want to miss out on that link from the Wall Street Journal, right? So, we quickly built a website, otherwise we wouldn't have had a website. SEO agency doesn't have a didn't have a website until he had 5 million. So true.

Why you launch Hennessy Studios, Hennessy Ventures in your podcast when you can actually like relax and So, Hennessy Studios. Yeah. So, here we are. We're sitting in Hennessy Studios and we got a great team that's behind the scenes kind of, you know, making us look good. Um, this was truly uh like I I created this uh truthfully because I used to see my son go into auditions um and he would spend like three days memorizing scripts and he's only in like sixth grade, you know what I mean? and he put everything into it and he would show up, the casting director would watch him deliver his lines and then he would never get a call back or anything, right? And so kind of seeing your kid kind of go through that, you know, I'm just like screw this. I'm like I'm sick of I'm I'm sick of like trying to get a seat at somebody else's table. I'm just going to make my own table. And so I'm like, I'm going to build my own studio and I'm going to, you know, start building, you know, my own stuff here so that we can audition people to possibly show. This is built for mostly for yourself or this is built as a business. Mhm. This was built, you know, definitely I wanted to use it to to create some of my own video content, but the goal was obviously to lease it out to other people so that they can come in, rent the studio to do a podcast like this or to film a music video or is the studio business uh profitable or not? like it it can be you know I think wherever you put your time and attention um you know I was so focused on building Hennessy digital that this was more of um a side hustle I guess if you will um and so I certainly use it for a lot of my own stuff. We do some cool stuff here. What are you going to do after exit? Are you going to like get into another enterprise like Ellen Musk did? Yes. Yes. Ah um so so for one I'm actually bought into the vision of what we're building with the private equity. I am still the CEO of the company. I'm a large shareholder. Um I am on the board and so I think I'll probably play a more active role in the mergers and acquisitions trying to find uh new agencies to acquire looking at ways to become more efficient getting rid of certain redundancies. So if we've got a great solution that tracks the way in which we do our strategy, let's apply that to the dental marketing agency that we just bought. So I think I'll probably be playing a bigger role, you know, probably in the next year. Um but for now, like uh you know, I'm very excited to continue to grow Hennessy Digital.

If you like the uh the video or you don't, comment below. Uh, whoever is going to be putting your best comment, we're going to be sending a free copy of this book. Jason, thanks for the honest conversation. Uh, I believe uh, whoever watch this video till the end, they learn a lot of uh, valuable information what they can implement to their businesses. And I wish I would watch these kind of videos like 10 years ago, right? Like someone is starting a business, I'm sure they they kind of have a kind of a road map of building multi-million dollar business. Like it's really scalable business. Like I'm sure like if you would watch and have this kind of mental, it's really valuable. I think guys if you like this video, please subscribe, share it, and leave your comments. It will be really valuable for us. Thank you. Thank you so much.