And so it begins…
TL, DR. After 12 years as an auditor, I’m beyond excited to announce that I am leaving my job and along, with Nate Heintz, going full-time here at our digital ad agency, Ad Astra Media. It feels like all of my life experiences have been leading to this one moment, and it’s finally here. I’ve never known less about what my future will hold, yet been so extremely confident in what’s to come.
Here are the 5 lessons I learned in moving from a corporate employee to a business owner:
Believe in yourself. Regardless of the path you’re on, you can get to where you want to be. And if you don’t know “where” that is, believe that you can figure it out, eventually.
You are not stuck, you are making a choice to stay. This one was hard to swallow but it gave me accountability and helped me realize that there were reasons why the choice to stay > the choice to leave (for me: it was mostly financial).
Follow your interests and start with “low-stakes” activities. The two are related but start with your interests, it’s not as serious. I took Digital Marketing master’s courses that didn’t lead to anything while I worked. Then, I wanted to write and it turned into a business opportunity but if I thought that I was starting a business right away I never would have taken the first step.
If you’re not the person, find the person. Once you know what you’re interested in, find people/groups and reach out to them to see if you can get your foot in the door or help out. Not everyone is a “fail your way to success,” type of person but if you can find one that needs your help, you can learn a lot.
When you’re ready, you’ll know. Fear and excitement are the two main feelings I’ve been tracking as I’ve thought about making this change. Originally, I planned to wait longer to make the change but when I felt my excitement outweigh my fears, I knew it was time!
Nate Dogg, my guy. I am so thankful for you and excited for the journey we’ve already begun together. You’re by far the most driven individual I’ve ever met. Without you, I never would have been able to make this leap.
Thank you. LFG!
Now, below is my journey to get here, for those who celebrate (Wins, that is ;p)...
Life is crazy. The idea that 18 and 19-year-old kids should know what they want to do for the rest of their lives makes no sense to me. College was more about having fun and getting away from home to me than it was about finding myself, let alone a career.
“Home” is a word most people take for granted. I’ve struggled to admit that I come from a broken home. Because I thought, “people don’t want to hear excuses from a kid who grew up in Greenwich.” And, there is truth to that.
But you can still come from a broken home even if it’s in an affluent neighborhood. You can still pay your own way through college. You can still have the impacts of addiction run rampant through your life. You can still be crying, screaming on the inside, and act like life is all rainbows and gumdrops, even when it’s not.
I graduated from UCONN (Go Huskies!) amidst the turmoil, thanks to an amazing support system of close family and friends who helped me through those tough times, including people at the Boys & Girls Club of Greenwich, an organization I hold near and dear to my heart. The rest of you know who you are.
Rough start
While a global pandemic was a brutal way to launch into the workforce, the financial crisis job market wasn’t much better. It was before Zoom, and there were no direct checks from the government. Still, one must get a job because those student loan bills don’t pay themselves, amirite?!
I am forever grateful to Kevin McGovern and Tom Mullen for helping me start my career at Deloitte & Touche in 2010. I learned invaluable skills there that have helped me throughout my career. I loved interacting with the people there and was so fortunate to have had the experience of working with a prestigious Big 4 audit firm, and after the recent news, am so glad it wasn’t Ernst & Young!
My mentors Jonathan Osypian and Shane Hurley helped me grow and develop within the company and helped me answer time and time again the age-old question of “what I want to do”. I knew I was more interested in digital marketing and media but got caught in the corporate rigamarole of public accounting where they saw me as a resource, for the sole purpose of billable hours, denying multiple requests to work on projects that I actually enjoyed. I knew it was time to leave.
After 4+ years at Deloitte, I found another great job with the internal audit dept at G-III Apparel group, where the work-life balance from public accounting was like night and day. It was still auditing but at an apparel company that represented some huge brands! Surely, I could find a way into the marketing department!
There were more roadblocks though, as I explored digital marketing and sales positions within the company only to find that they were few and far between, plus the salaries made you wonder how someone could actually afford to live. Around this time, I read Scott Adam’s How to fail at almost everything and still win big, and while I didn’t have cartooning skills, or the desire to wake up at 4 am, the idea of a “side hustle” was born.
The turning point
After a chance encounter at a Happy Hour with a high school friend, I met Tyler Morin who was writing a blog called Entry Level about young employees who could relate to the inner workings of Corporate America. The tone was great and I reached out to write for him. We instantly hit it off and he brought me on board to help him with a newsletter project along with two other guys (AJ and Nick). The team launched The Water Coolest to 300 family members and friends in September 2017.
It became clear early on that TWC was a legitimate business opportunity. Every new connection and every new subscriber gave us confidence that what we were doing was substantial. I wasn’t the primary business owner but I was learning so much just the same about the growth techniques, operational execution, financial requirements, and advertising opportunities in the newsletter space. All of our hard work finally paid off in November 2021, when TWC was acquired by Barstool. Thank you, Tyler, for taking me on that ride.
And that brings us to today. After determining that jobs at Barstool (thanks Stu Hollenshead for the time and consideration) wouldn’t be a fit, Nate and I decided to launch Ad Astra Media to help newsletters grow, optimize, and monetize. In six months we’ve booked over HALF A MILLION dollars in sales for our publishing partners and it almost seems surreal.
We are experts in the newsletter industry and have grown so much over the last 5 years in this space thanks to the guidance of industry OG’s like Pierre Lipton, Tyler Denk, Daniel Barry, Boye Fajinmi, and countless others who are educating the digital media industry on the value of newsletters!
If you are a creator looking to start a newsletter, grow it, and/or turn it into a legitimate source of revenue, or an advertiser looking to get in front of millions of engaged, targeted audiences, give us a call!
*Cue the obligatory new business slogan*: We are just getting started!
And I can’t wait to see what’s to come.
