Hi, welcome to the Be That Already podcast. I'm on today with Jacob Fadsbard, founder of Disruptive Advertising here in Salt Lake City. As usual, I'm going to let him introduce himself and kind of give him background where you come from and everything about yourself. So, welcome.
Hey, thanks for having me. I, like you mentioned, just operating out here in Utah and started Disruptive Advertising in 2013. And we've kind of gone from myself and a buddy from high school working out in my basement to got a pretty good operation right now. We've got about 160 people in the company.
We service about 600 companies worldwide. And companies hire us because they lack the bandwidth or expertise to drive growth from Google and Facebook, which is going to help them. And so, that's why they come to us. And, you know, I'm just really passionate about entrepreneurship, personal development, fishing, and the family.
You know, I've got three girls, and we found out we've got our first boy cooking in the oven. Congratulations. Yeah, so that's good. Awesome.
So, what type of fishing do you do? All kinds. I am not a purist. I do enjoy fly fishing, and I'm actually pretty good at it.
And I'm not afraid to put on a warmer power bait either if I'm with my kids and at the lake and just want to have a good time. And I've recently gotten into some more ocean fishing, both fly and live bait type things, and trying to check them off the bucket list. Yeah, awesome. Frank, because I asked, is being in Utah.
We're both in Utah. When I moved here, I moved here to work for a property developer, and my GM at the time, he's a big fly fisher. So, he'd tell me, I'm going to take you one day. I'm going to take you one day.
Never got around to it. So, I asked. Maybe it's a decop, you know, big fly fishing and stuff. The other thing is, I remember when I was younger, my dad took me on a boat out in the ocean.
I don't know, I'm actually like eight to ten years old or something like that. We went D.C. fishing. And a few hours ago, I was like, Dad, I'm sick.
It must be something I ate. And he just laughed at me. He goes, nah, it's not because some of you ate, you're seasick. So, that was a good experience.
So, yeah. For the last fishing trip, too, my wife was there, and she's a very big animal lover, and we caught two swordfish. Are they swordfish? Something.
Something down in Cabo. And you know how they have to, what they do before they get on a boat, and she was freaking out. So, it was a lot of fun. Well, cool.
Well, I'm pumped to talk to you about your company, because it's only been about six years, and you've grown that fast. Like, what do you attribute to that growth? Because some people never hit those types of numbers with employees and all that stuff. So, what do you do?
Like, what is it? Like, what does it contribute to your growth? I think there's a few things that have played into that. Number one is, Disruptive was my kind of second business that I was getting off the ground.
And the first one was pretty short-lived, but pretty lucrative. And so, it allowed me to fund the company without having to use debt or financing or raising money. And it allowed me to just move faster. I didn't have to take a salary.
I didn't need it to be successful immediately. And so, I could kind of take the time to be a little bit more selective on the employees that I brought on, a little more selective with our clients. And, you know, I didn't realize at the time, but that probably accelerated our growth through three years. Just having some, being in a good personal financial situation to go for it, right?
Yeah, that's interesting that you say that, because, you know, I do want to get into that, because a lot of people, they either take on debt, raise money, or they bootstrap it. And I think, you know, I want to know, like, did you, were you really, like, did you take a bootstrap mentality even though you had the funds, or were you, like, funding ahead of your growth? Do you understand what I mean? Like, you know, I mean, people, like, you know, they won't take on things that would help them increase the capacity in their business, because they're just starting out, and they have a very tight budget.
But if you have money going into it, like, do you feel like that, what did you do, like, differently versus that? Well, I think there's a couple of things that played out. And again, at the time, I didn't really even realize that it was a big deal, but in hindsight, I can see that it was pretty impactful. And just in terms of scale, like, when I started the business, my total monthly budget, I no longer had any debt.
We had a decent amount saved, and my total monthly expenditures that I had to pay for personally were, like, a couple of grand a month. Like, it was just, we were in a good spot. And what was great about that is it kind of took that pressure and stress off that can exist in a bootstrapping situation. I've still got to make the bills, still got to do all of those things.
And it was nice that, you know, I felt blessed and lucky to be in a situation where we didn't have to worry about that too much. We basically didn't need to make any money off the business for two years, and we'd be okay. In addition to that, I only wrote one check that I put in the company's bank account, that was $50,000, that I just stuck into the operating account. And then I contributed a book of business that I had that was about $35,000 a month in contracts.
So that was kind of like my contribution to the company. And then rather than trying to get money out, just use that money, hey, let's hire people. Let's actually start just growing and building and making that happen. And so I took more of the sales responsibility to get clients in the door, get them aligned with strategy and direction, and allow the team to execute on that.
That's like stage one for every entrepreneur, right, is I'm going to, how far can I amplify myself? And that's usually where most agencies get to is anyone at five to ten people range, where the owner or the founder or potential partners or co-founders, you know, we've really gone as far as much as we can sell from our networks and hustling. We've gone as far as we can and still having touch and pulse with all the clients. And that's where most gets stuck, right?
And so one of the biggest challenges that we had to kind of like figure out to overcome that together in the business, because at that point I didn't have any partners, right, it was me. I had one early on, but it was the wrong fit, so we ended up pretty quickly. But what I realized is, hey, I've got to start replacing myself. And I made the rookie mistake that a lot of, I think a lot of people do, which is I'll just hire someone that's going to be so great at it.
I don't even need to help them. They'll just come and take it off the plate, right? Yeah. Because, you know, that's definitely setting someone up for success.
Yeah. How'd that go? I didn't go. You know, went and hired a couple of more experienced salespeople and said, hey, you're just going to take sales off my plate now, right?
Yep. Great. It didn't work. Yeah.
And so a lot of some momentum there and kind of had to come back and revisit. And what's happened with the success that we've had in the organization is just taking my time to find the right person and then taking even more time to invest personally in their growth and development experience. And the investment that it took to get my first salesperson to a point where they were independently closing, setting good expectations, aligning the strategy of what we could do with the business's actual goals. And that's like 12 to 18 months of a lot of coaching and closing their goals for them and letting them experience it.
And that's, you know, that's a scary investment because what happens if it doesn't work out when you're 14 months down that path? Yeah, absolutely. And so that's kind of what it took both on the execution and fulfillment of our contracts on the sales side and kind of just one thing at a time, you know, of taking the time to invest in that. And I've always invested in coaches that were able to help me think through and strategically kind of work through those situations, find the right people, invest, and just get them up to speed.
And then they do that. So that gets you from five to 15 people to, you know, 30, 40 people because now you've got a couple of key leaders in the company, right? Kind of just expanded. Well, eventually, then those leaders do the same thing.
As I'm developing some leaders, they're now doing the same as well. And that's where we can only grow as fast as our leadership allows us to. And so that's really where we've had to invest a lot is in developing that. And, you know, it's just a completely different game and going from five to 10 people.
And this year we're going from about 120 at the start of the year and we'll be close to about 180 at the end of the year. We're about 160 now. And it's, you know, it just feels like it's accelerating. And it's hard to stay on top of and keep all the leaders trained and developed and aligned with the vision and the culture and the core values.
And it's fun, but it's hard. Yeah, I totally get it. You know, you said something that is a little bit against the cultural norm, right? Because I saw some comment in a group saying, hire fast and fast.
Sorry. Oh, yeah, it's hire slow. You did that. But, you know, I'm completely wrong.
They were saying that. But, you know, that development was, you found that it's, you know, you try to go out and hire talent, right? And generally I've heard with a lot of business owners that it's hard unless you're not having the resources and, you know, this massive company you can hire. It works a little bit better.
But with a smaller business, technically in that category, right, you're not too small anymore, but, you know, developing that person from within, taking, let's say, your salesperson that's maybe just, you know, the bottom of, you know, a BDR, you know, business development reference, other than just developing them over time. Have you found that to be a better strategy? I have had. So I think that both are necessary.
And the challenge is for small businesses to go get a legitimate A player to the table with proven experience. You're going to likely give up a lot. You're going to give up a lot of money or you're going to give up equity to get that person. And that's a really high cost early on in an organization.
And I've actually had more success in developing less experience but high potential individuals. I've had more success doing it that way than going and hiring the big guns. Now, I think it depends on stage, role. And there are some roles.
When it comes to marketing sales and fulfillment for my business, I know how to do all of that. And I can do it better than anyone in the company, right? So my ability to grow and develop them, I have that ability. When it comes to a finance person or an IT person or the developers that we've needed, that's where I've had to go and just, you know what, I'm just going to have to pony up and pay for these people and get the right ones.
And I've always taken more of a, I'll take the risk and I'll bet on myself and I'll pay with cash, you know. And so, you know, now I'm glad I did because then I haven't valued myself too much in the organization. And, you know, the risk hasn't worked out every time. But for the most part, those are the roles that I've had to do that with.
And then the ones where I'm strong and I've been able to go more of the development route. Awesome. You know, you said something about you've hired coaches. You know, can we just, let's talk about that a little bit.
You know, if you want to, if you don't mind sharing who you've worked with and, you know, what benefits you've got out of that, you know, and what's been the most impactful. So I've worked with a number of coaches. I've had a kind of like an outsourced CFO of sorts basically since day one that helped me have clean and easy and interpretable profit and loss statements to come up with compensation plans that aligned costs with revenue so that it was scalable and actually worked for the business. So I invested a lot in having financial support.
I had a sales coach to kind of help me understand how I sold and how I could turn that into a process and teach someone else how to do it. I've had a couple of general business coaches that were probably as much therapy as it was coaching, you know, because I'm more crazy and emotional than I'd like to admit. And, you know, but I would even say some of the impactful ones is I've had coaches work with me on specific habits I'd like to change or implement, done marriage counseling a lot during the process of getting a business off the ground and going. It's been, you know, really impactful and a big reason why I'm happily married today still, needed to invest there.
And then more recently I found a lot of success and I found a coach that had grown, built, and sold an agency and so had just kind of been there, done that, and has been able to provide a lot of support, you know, and understand at a level that most coaches wouldn't, you know, what I'm going through and have to support me through that. So that's kind of, I've spent a lot of money on it. I actually totaled it up last year, but I'm probably over 400 grand in just coaching at this point in the business. You know, it's not uncommon, you know, I mean, I know some entrepreneurs I know have shared their numbers and it's big numbers.
Some of them are in the billions. And, you know, it's the main thing, it's getting access to what you don't see, right? I mean, you know, I commend you for doing marriage counseling because I think that's like, it comes to standard package when someone's starting a business and married. I mean, it's, I follow Wake Up Warrior and Get White.
And I don't know if you've experienced them, but you said the trifecta of insanity is being married, having kids, and running a business. So you said that the bonus is if you work with your spouse. So, yeah. And it is tough.
There's a lot of uncertainty at times. And, yeah. Well, what are some tips you can give some business owners to really kind of embody that being battle ready and building that battle ready business? You know what I mean?
You've done really well. You've built this amazing business. And, yeah. Like, what are some things that you would recommend if you were, you know, someone was where you started, you know, in 2013, and you were mentoring somebody like that?
Like, the guy's mentoring you. And they're like, I want to get to you. Like, what would that be? You know, it is interesting.
If I walked myself in to our office and operation now five years ago, I don't even know if I'd have believed. Like, no way. Right? Like, that's – I think we all like to believe it's going to go crazy well, but in our heart of hearts, we kind of don't know if it's really going to.
And if I were to go back and mentor myself and or someone in a similar situation, it would almost have nothing to do with the business because the experience of building and growing a business is like a beautiful, hard, ugly thing. It's just like everything. And I think the experience is very fulfilling. And I wouldn't even want to take away a lot of the roadblocks that I had to work through because if I didn't experience that in a real way, I wouldn't be the leader that I am today if I wasn't the crappy leader that I was a few years ago and figuring that out.
But what I would have spent the time – what I would have counseled my younger self was there's never enough money. There's never enough cool cars. There's never a big enough house that will ultimately fill your cup, right? Like, that's because it doesn't fill the cup.
And for myself as a religious person, I would say the only person that can fill my cup is myself and God, right? Because if I expect my wife to do that or people at work to do that, it actually becomes a pretty twisted relationship if I can only be happy if other people allow me to be happy, right? Like, that's pretty interesting. And so I would just say, look, you're the only one that can do that for yourself.
And if you're not prioritizing and filling your cup each day, you won't end up with the business that you want. You won't end up with the marriage that you want. You won't end up with the relationship that you want with your kids because at the end of the day, the only thing that I can do is bring my best self to each of those. And then the outcomes become what the outcomes become.
But my influence is best when I bring my best self to the table. And so the last 18 months or so, I've really, I tried quite a few times, but really figured out a good morning and daily routines that I do. And like, I don't come to work until I do those now. And if you've ever read The Miracle Morning, like I follow a lot of the principles in that, which is I wake up, I have some time with silence, affirmation, visualization, I do some good exercise.
And then like, just go through that process. I listen to a good book on the way in. I write in my journal at night about what was hard and what was great and all those things. And when I do those things, I am a better husband.
I am a better business owner. I am a better father. And that's the only thing I would have said, look, you're going to be a lot more successful at all the things you want to be successful at if you prioritize your own personal well-being. Okay.
mentally physically emotionally spiritually you take care of those things on a daily basis the rest will take care of itself awesome yeah i was gonna ask you more about your routines and that and so you know you mentioned seriously how you you know on a daily basis how do you do that how do you feel your cup you know i am i love to read the scriptures every day actually um and so i read the book mormon every day and and then i do my visualization and prayer and meditation and for me spirituality is i think religion and spirituality sometimes get missed i think incorrectly categorized as the same thing because i know people that are very religious that i don't consider spiritual and i know people that are very spiritual but i don't see as very religious right and i think when done correctly there's a lot of overlap but they're not the exact same things and so for me it's just uplifting literature or content that gets my mind and my heart and my spirit right visualizing how i want my day to go and who i am and who i want to be um that's what kind of gets me spiritually right and then believing that there's a higher power and i've got backup when i go into when i'm bad already you know like i've got backup you got the best backup right yeah cool so uh you know what do you what do you see let's talk about your clients like who's your like typical client ideal client or does do you have is it all over the place yeah you know if i described it in like a bell curve we've got our enterprise clients um that are the large national brands huge budgets require lots of team members working on those and then we've got small um niches that we like to work in like in home services or health care like you know think of like roofers dentists um those kind of things but our torso like the 80 of the clients that we work with are typically spending between about 10 to 50 000 a month on google or facebook advertising they've got a business while it's working um they just don't know how to grow it and they've started spending on digital marketing it's just not driving a lot of value they're either doing it in-house wearing too many hats or working with an agency not getting great results or measuring and even knowing if it's making a difference like that's the that's the clientele that comprises the majority of those that we work with okay awesome so where do you uh where you see you know what's your future vision of your company where are you going so i mean our vision statement is we'll do 100 million in revenue in 2025 okay and uh driving measurable growth for 2 000 customers and for me the number is less meaningful than what that represents because you know we've got we've got our mission statement we've got our core values and at the end of the day if we get to some revenue number but we're not proud of who we are the impact that we're having i don't care what number we get to right but when living to our living true to our values and like improving lives through results that we drive for our customers and for the people that work here um well then 100 million just represents a big-ass impact in the world right yeah and um and so like for us the things that i personally do and find a lot of satisfaction i have no desire to sell this business i'm not going to sell it which is weird because as an entrepreneur everyone asks you what's your exit strategy and i'm like my exit strategy is to build a company that i'm proud to be a part of forever yeah it's profitable yeah like you don't hear that very often right i mean because really what are you gonna do you sell them then what you know and so now i've like converted that into i teach this personal leadership development course in the mornings it's optional with a high degree of accountability and help people develop those habits i teach a finance class so that people understand how to make more money and what to do with it when they've got it so they can be set up for success financially and like we're here to win at life together with each other and with our clients and when we're winning at life like that's what it's all about and the rest of it like you know we'll figure that out awesome awesome cool well i appreciate your uh your time and uh tell us how to get a hold of you yeah personally i'd love to connect i'm the most active on linkedin it's just jake basgard there's four a's in my name so you should be able to track that down pretty easy and then as a business you know if you're if you find yourself in that stage where you're lacking some bandwidth or expertise to kind of grow to the next level uh that's what that's what people use us for um and you can just reach out to us on disruptiveadvertising.com awesome well i appreciate your time and be honored to talk to you okay great thanks you