Where I am today is purely a result of luck and being in the right place at the right time. So when I have an opportunity to talk to people about my career, the one thing I would say you have to put in a lot of hard work and then you have to be in the right place to be lucky. I went to school, I wanted to learn finance, and I'm in marketing. I went to school and I wanted to be an entrepreneur and I spent 12 years working in corporations so none of what I intended to do really worked out. Where I got lucky is that I met the right people along the way. I stuck with things, I had a kind of long term goal of where I wanted to be and I didn't quit before I got there. So, I moved to Silicon Valley from Eastcoast, I wasn't originally from here. I took the first job I could get. Luckily enough, it was in marketing and taught me important skills around marketing, showed me different roles I wanted to get to the next job I got was actually because the founder of a company thought that people that worked at the company I had been working at were really good at marketing, and that wasn't necessarily true. But he insisted on hiring me from the company I was at and I worked at a start-up and gained a tremendous amount of experience, and I was fortunate to work at Surveymonkey at the time where they were going through explosive growth and able to have a massive impact and being there just opened up so many doors and again complete luck is just seasonal opportunities that were in front of me. To where I am now is I'm a consultant. I worked with some amazing companies and I'm always interested in learning and always looking to meet new people and then add new experiences, and again that just puts me in the right place to have luck happen to me.

I mean, being a consultant is potentially one of the scariest things anybody can do. I actually have four children and a mortgage and cars and all things that need to be paid for, a fridge that needs to be full. So if I would have done this when I was younger, I would have far less risk. Maybe I would have been living at my parent's house, maybe I would have no expenses, but I also would have no experience. So, yes I did something incredibly risky with a lot more at stake but I also had a career behind me and I'd say one of the most important things in being a consultant is that I spent a long enough time building a network of connections that I can count on, people that will vouch for me, people that will make introductions, people that I can introduce other people to and really build a network of expertise. So, yes, it's risky but I also have sort of that cushion. So the first few weeks as a consultant were pretty scary because I went from running an income on a W-2 and getting paid every other week to not getting paid every other week to need to eat what I kill and to meet clients and to convince clients to work with me then even if I work with them to convince them to pay me on the schedule that we agreed upon. So I have contracts, of course, but contracts are only as good as the paper they're written on, and I'm not exactly going to be able to sue a company if they don't pay me on time. I'm not even going to chase a client, a brand new client if they don't pay me on time because if they're a few days late I don't want to ruin a relationship with a new client by being the guy that's like, Hey, pay me right now. I have to give them leeway, and sometimes that will end up with them never paying, sometimes that will end up with them paying late or sometimes end up with them being a client for two years so you don't know. So, being a consultant could be incredibly scary but also incredibly rewarding, and anybody that is considering weighing going into consulting, I would say like the best way to learn if this is the right thing for you is to do it while you have a full-time job, because when you have a full-time job, even if you're overworked, you're not working more than 60 hours per week and even if you are working 60 hours per week, you're not working all 60 hours of those or every hour of the 60 hours at your office. You have brakes, you have lunch breaks there are opportunities to learn. If you don't think anybody will pay you for your expertise, you can volunteer your expertise and see if your expertise is valued. I had all those opportunities while I had a full-time job and was able to earn enough money on the side to convince myself that I could do it. Then the last thing I did to really sort of risk myself as I spent a long time probably a year and a half building up a nest egg so I would have a cushion if things didn't go my way and I would have to get another job, which I think would be terrible but at least like I have an option.

So in my specific field, I am a marketing consultant and product consultant and I help companies increase their visibility on Google by building products that will generate more visibility. So the tools I use are provided by Google so Google Search Console, Google Analytics and then there are a number of SEO tools, and I use all of them, so each one has a different advantage over another and having more data rather than fewer data and that's where sort of my experience comes in where I can filter through the data, I get to make my own decisions about what the data is telling me and not just completely trusted. As a consultant, it's not my job to deliver data to clients, it's my job to deliver interpretations to the clients as they can also use those tools. They only cost $50 a month, $100 a month, I need to uncover what it is. It's sort of like being an attorney and somebody asked the question, and you point them to the law like that. I need to go give them answers they're looking for. So I use the same tools the client can use, but I use them differently than they do. Then I use another number of like management tools to help me with my day. So I use that counter.com that plan out my day, my schedule, I mean Gmail all the time. Then my favorite tool is TaskApp just the Google tasks where I'm constantly writing down the things I need to do and just pushing my way through all those to-do lists items.