“And then he said, ‘I’m not giving the site back until you wire me $10,000!’”
Way back in 2019, I sat on our usual weekly call at my old marketing agency.
The owner, Matt, just dropped some Gulf of America-sized bad news.
“Yeah, Joe went off on some crusade about ‘saving the dogs’ and locked us out of the site,” he continued.
Joe was the guy we’d hired to manage a major internal project—let’s call it Midtown Mutts.
Basically, we connected customers with online puppy brokers and collected a percentage of sales.
Not exactly the SEXIEST business in the whole world, but…
Midtown had grown steadily since 2016 and just started to hit what looked like “the bonanza zone.”
Website visits skyrocketed, and we had to get serious about managing the business separately from our agency.
So, Matt found Joe…
Somewhere.
I have no idea where.
Honestly, this guy could have been an interstate drifter for all I know…
Point is, Joe was the new “CEO” of Midtown.
For like, a month.
Then he locked us out of our site and demanded $10,000 in hush money.
(Oh yeah, I almost forgot the part where Joe used company money to onboard two sales guys he found hanging out in a Coldstone Creamery parking lot. And bought them laptops.)
Anyway…so it was more like $14,000.
And at the time, we didn’t really have any cash on hand to pay terrorists.
That one psychopath? Almost tanked our entire business (both Midtown Puppies AND the marketing agency).
Lots of lessons here…but the interesting thing is that once we got Midtown back…
The “bonanza zone” kept on comin’.
Without skipping a beat.
And if you ask me, the only reason Midtown rose higher is because our near-death experience lit a white-hot fire under our behinds that made us work even harder.
Speaking of which…
The whole sich reminded me of an incredible book called The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel.
Specifically this (and I’m paraphrasing):
“Successful investing doesn’t mean hitting it big on a single bet. Successful investing means making tiny, incremental gains over and over again so you can weather any crashes that come your way.”
The reason Midtown thrived is because we’d built a strong foundation that stuck around even after Typhoon Joe came ashore.
We had a system to grow the business.
Which, not-so-coincidentally…
Is one of the reasons business owners flock to me like seagulls assaulting a fallen boardwalk French fry:
The system.
Because we don’t “guess” here.
If you’re tired of marketing that feels like guessing, plunge into my waitlist here:
I Ran (So Far Away),
Nick
