People Process Interviews: Jacob Baddsgaard

What this episode covers

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the people processes podcast. I'm your host, Rhamy Alejeal and I am excited today to welcome Jake Baddsgaard. He is an amazing entrepreneur. After growing one of his first pay-per-click clients from 25 to 250 employees, Jake realized that he had a gift for using Pay-per-Click marketing to drive dramatic business results. To help more companies succeed online. Jake found a disrupted IV advertising, PPC and CRO management agency that has helped hundreds of companies realize unprecedented growth and profitability from online advertising. Of course, as an HR channel, though we're more interested in that. In the last six years since its founding, disruptive advertising has grown from two employees working in Jake's basement to a flourishing agency with more than 160 employees and a run rate of over 20 million, puts it at number 145 on the 2017 inc 500 list and is listed as one of USA today's best places to work in Salt Lake City in 2019. So we're ecstatic to have you here, Jake. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me, Rhamy. Well Jake, on a lot of kids don't necessarily dress up as marketing guys and business owners when they're eight years old, you got to tell me, how did you wind up getting into this industry? You know, you're right. I never did dress up as a marketing agent, right? Well, and how many of our businesses were even around when we were kids, right? Like, this is a whole new world. It's interesting that you asked that question because there's probably a trillion things that happened that ultimately led to where I'm at today. And I look back from the first job I had when I was eight years old. The first business idea I tried to execute on at a young age. Ultimately I would probably almost pin it down to the moment that I experienced in my corporate career. Before going down this entrepreneurial path, which I kind of just had realized, that moment in an annual performance review where I realized I will no longer have the growth as a person. Professionally or financially that I'm looking for from here. It was my moment of either choosing to settle or choosing to move on and, and to create that environment for myself. I would say, that was probably more of the real moment that kind of catapulted me down the path that I'm on. Was realizing that I wasn't gonna find the fulfillment I was looking for in life if I didn't take that chance. Unfortunately, my wife was supportive in that decision. Yup. A good partner is everything, isn't it? Yeah. Well, you've been in business a while and of course you've grown to a very successful company with a great revenue and good employees. But a lot of our listeners are in an earlier phase of their company. They're still about maybe bridging out on their own or they're part of a larger organization. I think a lot of them kind of get caught up in thinking about what the success looks like. But it's the failures along the way that teach us the most. So I always ask my guests to share with us their largest entrepreneurial mistake, failure, really, really, really bad day. And tell us that actual story, like what happened and how'd you feel and how did it come about? And then we'll talk a little bit about what our listeners can learn from it. Yeah. Well. You know, when you asked that question, I imagined myself holding a scroll with all of the failures that I've had as an entrepreneur and like opening that up, letting it drop to the floor, and it just keeps rolling. Right? It's the hardest thing for every entrepreneur I ask. Yeah. It's hard. It's a journey of ups and downs, but, I want you to think of your worst one. Well. Let's just go ahead and get personal on this one. A lot of this becomes more in focus with a little bit of hindsight in perspective. And what I realized at what probably the biggest failure that I had, and I'll relate this to a specific experience that I went through. The illusion that finding success as an...