Know Yourself And Success Will Follow - Neil Patel Tells His Story

What this episode covers

This episode of The Jake Dunlap Show features Neil Patel, Co-Founder of Neil Patel Digital. Before Neil became the behemoth of marketing he is today, he had humble beginnings in La Palma, a small city in Orange County CA. From very early on, he realized that having your own business is what generates wealth. He was in his teens when his own entrepreneurial endeavors would kick in, starting with selling burnt CDs, getting licensed as an auto parts dealer, and mixing it up with other jobs like working in a theme park and selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door. At 15, he started his first company, Advice Monkey, and after getting burned with no results, decided to pursue college classes while still in high school. Neil embraced social media marketing early in its inception and he made a name for himself leveraging all the available sites as they were getting popular. Creating his blog was Neil's outlet to simply write and not worry about his other businesses like Quick Sprout. Incidentally, it would be his personal brand that would take off and grow exponentially even if it was not in Neil's intention to do so. Neil's golden nuggets of advice include spending a lot of money hiring rock stars who know exactly what they are doing and knowing your place in the company. For instance, Neil had always known that operations was his weak side so he never aspired to be the CEO of his own companies. Listen to the full podcast on Neil's uncommon entrepreneurial drive and unconventional priorities as a business owner to achieve success and what this truly means for him. QUOTES: 16:08 "My grades kept getting worse and worse as I started making more money, because I was like, screw this. I'm just going to go make money." 24:18 "My biggest takeaway is, in business, no matter how hard you work, if you don't ride the trends that people are looking for, you don't have some luck on your side, a lot of times things don't work out. Doesn't matter how hard you try." 25:19 "If you want to do really well, it's not about how talented you are. It's about how talented your team is. And you got to hire rock stars. That's the biggest lesson I probably learned in my career." 36:58 "I'm okay being a father. I'm okay not going to office. I'm okay not being as successful because I get to see my kids grow up. I figured out what makes me happy in life and that's what I do." 38:58 "What's changed my life is I avoid making the same mistakes over and over again. You learn from it. You still make mistakes but you're making new ones and you learn from it." More About Neil Neil was born into a middle class family and he quickly noticed how his entrepreneurial uncles seemed to have a better life than his own family. This would drive him to pursue financial success early on even as his peers were focused on their social lives rather than creating wealth. He explored many endeavors including selling burnt CDs, selling hacked satellite TV cards, and reselling car parts. Neil also performed many different jobs just to make ends meet including working as a custodian and door-to-door salesman. His first company would manifest by the early age of 15 and he learned from many, many mistakes in trying to grow Advice Monkey. The dismal results from his outsourced marketing taught him that he might as well learn this skill on his own. It is through marketing that he would meet his larger clients and he really started to enjoy income which already exceeded both his parents' monthly income. To satisfy his parent's desires and to learn even more skills, Neil decided to take early college lessons through night school at Cypress Community College. Neil would found Crazy Egg soon after which would garner the interest of Fortune 1,000 companies. He and his partner ultimately failed to sell it at their goal of $10 million and so they persevered to make their company profitable. By the time he was in the middle of his college life, he would be named one of the top influencers on the web by The Wall Street Journal. Also during this time he would start his first blog, ProNet Advertising. It would be named by Search Engine Journal as the Best Social Media Blog and ranked in Technorati’s Top 100 In 2007, Neil launched Quick Sprout blog and a year after that launched Kissmetrics. In 2011, they encountered one of their biggest hurdles which was a data privacy act violation lawsuit. The legal battles would continue for a year before Neil and his company would be cleared of charges. Neil would be recognized by even more organizations for his talents as a marketer as the years roll by. For instance, Forbes would name Neil as one of the top 10 marketing experts of the year in 2014 and President Obama would recognize him as one of the top 100 entrepreneurs under the age of 30 in 2015. Nowadays, Neil is focused on leading his company Neil Patel Digital but leaves the operations work to his rock star team. For Neil, he would rather focus on the areas he is good at and actually enjoys and leaves the expertise of operations to others. This strategy is what he recognizes as the key to the stellar growth that they have thus far achieved. Find out more about Neil and connect with him in the following links: LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/neilkpatel/ Website - https://neilpatel.com/ Learn more about Jake Dunlap and Skaled by visiting the links below: Jake Dunlap: Personal Site - http://jakedunlap.com/ LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakedunlap/ Twitter - https://twitter.com/JakeTDunlap Instagram - http://instagram.com/jake_dunlap_ Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/JakeTDunlap/ Skaled: Website - https://skaled.com/ LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/skaled YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsw_03rSlbGQkeLGMGiDf4Q