Fired for the last time

Not everyone knows this yet, but I got laid off in May.

It wasn’t completely unexpected—I was working at a pretty early stage startup (which is always risky), and with 20m people suddenly out of work, some of the core assumptions about that business changed.

There were no hard feelings, the founders were super apologetic and respectful, and I still do some consulting work for them on the side, so we’re all good there. This isn’t a tell-all or takedown piece (sorry to disappoint).

However it did mark the 3rd time I had been fired out of 7 jobs (and anyone who worked with me knows there should have been a 4th and maybe a 5th). So it got me thinking—maybe I just shouldn’t get another job? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

No unfortunately I’m not super rich, I can’t just relax on a beach somewhere—I still have to earn money to exchange for goods and services. I’ve got a daughter celebrating her 1st birthday next week, and though my wife works, she’d definitely want me to continue to pull my own weight.

So what am I talking about?

Well I got to thinking that maybe I’m just not a very good employee. Perhaps it’s time to drop out of the rat race, stop looking for new jobs and just accept that I’m only employable by myself—as an entrepreneur.

If you look at my employment history the data backs up my hypothesis. I lasted 9 months in my first job, then 16 months, then 20, then 9 again, then 10, and finally just 4 in the last real job I had. Guess how long I worked on business #1? Over 5 and a 1/2 years!

Ok ok, I did quit that business and come back again, but in my defense we had some cofounder drama at the time, and in my moment of weakness I got lured away to work with one of my marketing heroes. If I start another business as a solo founder this time, I’ll have no excuses left — I’ll have to just work on my business indefinitely.

I do love being an entrepreneur. It still amazes me that out of thin air we somehow built a marketing agency that employed 50 people in 3 countries.

It’s addictive like nothing else — at times it had me working 80 hours a week… yet I was happier than anyone I knew doing the 9 to 5.

I’d wake up at 6am, immediately log on Slack (still in my sweatpants) and sync up with my cofounder (who was in London while I was in New York). I’d take maybe an hour for lunch and a shower, and finish at 8pm.

That was me 6 days a week—I always made sure I took Sunday morning off to do a boozy brunch with my now wife. That’s not the kind of schedule you can pull off for long, unless you deeply enjoy what you’re doing.

Yet I found when we got past 30–40 people, a lot of the joy came out of it. At that scale you’re managing managers who manage other managers, and I felt further and further away from the action.

I love to do marketing, analysis and coding, (it’s why I got into this in the first place!) and I wasn’t doing enough of either. Though I can do strategy and sales (and earn good money doing it), my secret weapon, and point of pride, is actually being able to do what I’m promising to deliver.

So I peacefully transitioned out of my own company after talking it through with my business partner, and took the early-stage startup role because it offered another chance to get my hands dirty. But that didn’t work out.

So here I am, doing it again. I’m starting business #2.

Well actually, if you count the Pokemon cards I sold in school, this is business #3. I would buy the packs, sell the best cards in the pack for a profit, reinvest by buying more packs… my poor mother thought I was selling drugs (would have been less profitable).

Anyway, what am I going to do for business #2?

Well if I think I might never be an employee again, I need a business I can work on forever. Given my interests, it needs to be at the intersection of marketing, analysis and coding. I still consult for my old business Ladder on key projects, and I earn passive income from the online courses I did for LinkedIn, so it has to fit with that too. Broad enough to keep me perpetually interested, but niche enough that I focus enough to make a real impact.

I settled on the idea of a “Growth Studio” — I imagine it working like this:

1. Do free mentoring sessions with growth marketers to identify patterns in the type of problems they’re running into
2. Charge $$$ for consulting where I identify a valuable problem in the field of growth marketing, that I’m personally interested in solving
3. Leverage my insights to automate and productize the solutions, then release as online courses, SaaS products, or open source code / content

I’ll be doing this solo at first (maybe forever), so I can understand end-to-end the best way to move from discovering opportunities to experimenting with solutions and releasing them as products. This gives me maximum control over what I focus on, which I know is essential for maintaining my motivation.

I kind of see this as my personal laboratory— the scientific method applied to growth marketing. I’ve always fancied myself some kind of mad scientist, and this is my chance to live that. This is the vision I always had for Ladder, but realistically when you have staff to support, you do what clients want you to do, and don’t have complete freedom to experiment.

Because it’s only going to be me (at least for a while) I plan to only take on a small percentage of projects, and say no to almost everything else. I don’t spend much, and I have a decent network, so I’ll use this supply/demand imbalance to my advantage—only taking on the most interesting projects.

Last month I registered the company Saxifrage, LLC, and the domain name www.saxifrage.xyz. I’ve already had a few people comment that they don’t like the name, or can’t pronounce it… but that’s kind of the point!

I don’t want to build this into a huge mainstream business. I’m keeping it boutique. Low volume, high quality. I want only the best growth marketers to have heard of it. I hope it makes enough money for me to do something, but not enough for me to do nothing.

Saxifrage means “stone breaker” in Latin— that’s what I want to do: break stones i.e. solve problems. I took the name from a 500 page trilogy about the colonization of Mars. One of the main characters is an archetypal mad scientist called Saxifrage Russell, who spearheads the terraforming of Mars.

Though I don’t plan to do anything nearly that ambitious with this business, it’s that spirit of problem solving, following the data, science’ing the shit out of things, that I want to emulate. With a name this geeky, I don’t have to take myself too seriously, and can just have fun, doing what I do best. Helping companies grow.

On that note, I can see this business being a great vehicle for launching a more ambitious one. In fact, I’m already working on something in the virality space that I’m getting increasingly excited about. Even if it takes off, I plan to keep Saxifrage going separately, and build it to the point where I’m covering 100% of my expenses passively —true ‘fuck you’ money.

If you’re in the growth space, or are looking for help, check out my work at https://www.saxifrage.xyz/, and the best way to reach me is: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mjt145/

Thanks to my wife for putting up my my long hours and crazy ideas — I promise you this business will be different (sorry in advance if this turns out to be wishful thinking!). Thanks to my daughter for reminding me there’s more to life. Thanks to my family, who remain supportive and supremely confident in my ability to conjure money from the internet.

Thank you to Alex Emberey for forcing me out of my comfort zone—I’d still be a wantrepreneur without you. Jon Brody, thanks man for keeping the legacy alive at Ladder, and growing it into something bigger and better than I ever could. Shout out to the leadership team at Ladder—Yiannis Papadopoulos, Adam Wesolowski, Tomek Duda, Liv Christie, Mike Rozelle, you’re the reason the company is thriving since I left. Thanks to everyone else who has ever worked at Ladder—we have a phenomenal reputation in the growth world thanks to you, which makes starting my next thing a whole lot easier!

Ryan Kulp and Nat Eliason, the way you guys run your businesses as a lifestyle (and your lifestyles as a business) continues to be an inspiration. Thanks Foti Panagiotakopoulos and the rest of the team at Growth Mentor, for building an amazing community in which I’ve done over 50 mentoring sessions (gunning for 100 by the end of the year). Thanks to Conrad Wadowski, Will Bancroft, Kosta Kolev, Johannes Radig, Matt Eisner, Rhys Fisher, Julian Shapiro and all the others I forgot to name, for having multiple talks with me since I left Candor, helping me sound out different ideas I had. Onwards and upwards.