I just moved out of my fancy downtown office & I couldn't feel more free

I just moved out of my fancy downtown office.

And I couldn’t feel more free.

I know that sounds weird to say, because I loved my office & it served me well for the last 4 years.

But over time, things that you love & own can begin to own you.

Let me take you back to 2021 when we signed our office lease. My company, AdOutreach, had just crossed over 8 figures in annual revenue & landed #87 on the INC 5000 list of the fastest growing companies in America.

I had just moved my company from its old home in Boston, MA to Austin, TX.

Our team was rapidly growing & would soon cross 50+ team members. And at that time we started aggressively hiring in Austin.

Soon we had over 20 team members in Austin & we were ready to get a fancy office we could grow into with our scaling plans.

I remember touring dozens of offices & the feeling when I saw what became our office for the last four years, it felt perfect!

And the first year was amazing!

Team members moved from across the country to join us in our offices, we hosted client events that soon grew too big to host in our office so we began hosting them at the event space in the hotel that was a part of our building. And hosted full team on-sites where we flew our full team out to Austin to work together.

This continued through 2022, but shifted in 2023. For the first time in my business career our growth had stalled & market conditions shifted.

It took us a bit of time to adapt but as AI started to take off going into 2024 & we shifted our focus from “Revenue growth at all costs” to “Profit Growth & Recurring Revenue”

What I didn’t realize is I had accidentally treated my bootstrapped marketing company like a Silicon Valley tech company.

The truth is we weren’t funded by venture capital, I bootstrapped everything myself - starting from my college dorm room 9 years ago. I was reinvesting profits into our growth.

But I had started to buy things for the company I thought I should, but really I was just influenced by the rosy picture of Silicon Valley companies.

Companies that weren’t like mine.

Those companies are venture backed & they focus on “scale at all costs” and the unfortunate reality is that makes a few billion dollar companies while the rest ultimately fail…

That’s not how I wanted to run my company. I just got swept up in it all.

Hire more. Get the fancy office. Host company retreats. Fly the team out for lavish onsites. Focus on revenue not profit.

^ these are the Silicon Valley mantras. Run on OPM “Other People’s Money”

I thought because I didn’t have a Lamborghini & tried my best to be humble in conversation, I had avoided the ego disease that affects many entrepreneurs.

But that wasn’t true…

I had developed an invisible ego & the very things I thought I owned like the big office was starting to own me.

So taking us back to 2023-2024 I went through a process and worked with a couple of mentors who had both gone through similar previous challenges to transition the business back to a focus on maximizing profits & building stable recurring revenue.

This is a topic for another post but I realized that I had never actually let go of a team member. Sure I had fired people for cause / bad performance & I had people leave my team. But I had never let go of someone we outgrew as a company.

I realized I had people that were holding AdOutreach back & we were holding them back in their careers too. So we let them go.

And our company got more efficient, more profitable, ever better results for clients, built more recurring revenue & got more innovative & fun again!

But there was now an issue.

I now had a team of 25 A Players

And most of them weren’t in Austin.

And I had a 6,500 sq ft office!

Oops.

The next few months were brutal.

The very office I had loved turned into a prison.

Walking into the office that had all those memories of the team, now mostly empty, ate at me.

Even though my business was more profitable & healthier than it had been when we were in “growth at all costs mode” the sight of the mostly empty office & the memories was getting to me.

So I made the decision to let go.

I still had a couple of years left on the lease & I even had to take a haircut on the sublease.

But a lesson I’ve learned is to not succumb to sunk cost fallacy & to make decisions quickly when you know they’re the right one.

I just moved out of the office.

And I’ll be honest my eyes teared up a bit when I left. It was a bittersweet moment.

But now, a few days later as I type this, I couldn’t feel more liberated & free.

I’ve got an amazing team at AdOutreach of A Players, I’ve learned valuable lessons over the last few years, we’re maximizing our profits & recurring revenue and are focused on profitable growth.

And I’m innovating again!

That’s something I’ve felt since I made the decision to move out of the office, but it’s also something that I feel accelerating now.

Even this post = 0 AI, haha!

This is just me, sitting at a coffee shop, sharing my thoughts with all of you like I used to do all the time.

The entrepreneurs mindset is to Win or Learn - it’s something I’ve shared in the past and a mantra I live by.

And I’ve had a lot of learning lessons along the way, that’s how we grow as entrepreneurs.

I am grateful for the chapter in my business journey where I did the thing - I had the fancy office, the big in person team, the lavish parties & dinners & “Silicon Valley” lifestyle.

But that’s not why I’m in business. That’s not what I care the most about.

I’m here to create an impact on the businesses we serve with our marketing strategies & I’m excited to get back to my roots:

Innovating the latest & best marketing strategies that help businesses grow!

Stay tuned - big things are ahead! 😁

-Aleric

P.S. If you liked this email & found it valuable, please let me know using the feedback form below. I’m thinking of pulling back the curtain more & sharing my learning lessons. Let me know if you’d like more posts like this.