A 5-year Reflection on Fisheye: Lessons From a 31-Year-Old Business Owner
Bill Gates is famous for (among many things) this quote about accomplishment:
“Most people overestimate what they can do in one (1) year and underestimate what they can do in ten (10) years.”
Great. What am I supposed to do with that?
Fisheye is now five (and some change) years old.
I doubt anyone asked Bill how much one is supposed to accomplish in five years.
Probably what was “properly-estimated,” then?
Uh, Houston, we might have a problem.
The Back Story
Before we dive into our current reflection, I want to take you on a brief journey of the five-year history of Fisheye.
When I naively started Fisheye back in 2016, the goal was simple: apply what I learned and help people with their marketing.
I felt I’d learned a lot about marketing. I’d become a witness to the vast amount of opportunities being missed out on by business owners who don’t take modern marketing seriously.
After acquiring a few clients with whom I could apply my skill set, I didn’t want to take the journey alone.
My next step?
It was agency time, baby!
After all, my brother-in-law and I had tried our hands at the agency start-up game in the previous year. We (mostly he) launched what was called Seven Strands Marketing.
We worked on it for about a year before our paths were called apart — him into the world of private equity and me into the world of freelance marketing work.
As clients of my own began to stack up and it was time to launch my own agency, at least I now knew what a marketing agency even was thanks to Seven Strands.
I figured I’d take a shot.
What’s the worst that could happen?
It’s just lost time, lost money, and the embarrassment of public failure, right?
After a few filings with the state of South Dakota, some head-scratching for a name (that would later become Fisheye Marketing), and a search for an office and first team member, I had myself a business.
It was June 15, 2016, and the South Dakota Secretary of State now knew that some little “company” existed with the name Troy K-(bunch of random letters) stamped on it. They knew where to send the quarterly tax requests.
The birth of a business is not nearly as exhilarating as that of a little baby in a delivery room.
As it turns out, those first few steps were the simple parts.
Thomas Elness would become Fisheye’s first employee that summer. An Augustana graduate who worked for the South Dakota Golf Association, Thomas and I first met when I was late for a tee time at an event in Mitchell, SD, back in 2014.
He was an intern, and I was an unpunctual tournament participant.
Through our networks, we later connected over a few Arnold Palmers at a local coffee shop. That meeting ended with my offering him a job at Fisheye Marketing.
Did either of us know what we were doing? Well, we both had Twitter accounts, so of course we did. Besides, I had a few dozen social media marketing webinars under my belt.
To my surprise and delight, Thomas accepted, and we started working together on the accounts I had collected. These were all great opportunities, and we just dove in headfirst.
We spent our first few summer weeks in the Augustana library (even though I was never a student there). When we weren’t on Augie’s campus doing our best “we’re students here” impressions, we were at local coffee shops overstaying our welcome.
We soon got an office on Main Avenue in Sioux Falls, SD. More on that later.
Fisheye’s first day in our 250 sq. foot office, overlooking Main Ave. Summer 2016.
With a few early clients, we were doing really exciting work. We helped one client — with the help of a targeted social media campaign — sell 1,500 cheeseburgers in just a few days on a small ad budget.
For another client, we launched a unique giveaway that added close to 3,000 potential customers to their email list.
We were working with a diverse partner base: restaurants, golf repair shops, hair salons, golf courses, and others.
Good thing I liked peanuts, because that’s what the pay was in the early days.
But hey, that’s what you sign up for when you start a business. At least I was making something. And we had plenty of work to do. Head down, plow ahead!
A year into our work together at Fisheye, Thomas received a dream opportunity from his alma mater and, around the same time, referred another young Augie grad to my email inbox — Andrea Conover (now Van Essen).
We were in the middle of 2017 and transitioning one team member off (Thomas) and another one on (Andrea).
Fisheye was still a small little shop, but we were attracting smart people to the agency, doing meaningful work, and always seemed to have great opportunities just around the corner.
Ninety percent of the day was spent in execution of projects for our partners. It was work, work, work.
Since then, we continued to add more valued team members and more valued clients — all the while losing a few of both as well.
I’ve kept plugging away. So has the team.
At every turn, we’ve grown. Slowly, but we’ve grown.
Our office building — the Parker’s Block building on 6th Street and Main Avenue in downtown Sioux Falls — has seen us go from a 250-square-foot office on floor two, to a 550-square-foot office on floor three, to a now 1,150-square-foot dual office suite facing Main Avenue with a conference room that has a fridge and a plant that just continues to propagate.
Office #1 (est. 2016)
Office #2 (est. 2017)
Office #3 (est. 2020)
Fisheye Today
Life is good in the FishBowl.
We’re now a team of five (hello, team!), and in the duration of our five years we have worked with more than 30 different partners, executing on well-crafted marketing strategies.
We have a healthy partnership base (hello, partners!), a strong institutional knowledge base of marketing instilled into our culture, and a respected reputation in our community.
Like I said, life is good at Fisheye Marketing.
But how far along am I (or are we) supposed to be?
Reflection
As I reflect on five years, that’s the question that continues to haunt me.
Maybe haunt is my word of choice, because I feel as though I’m not as far along as I’d conjured in my mind as a 26-year-old first-time business owner.
Instagram built a company that sold to Facebook for $1 billion back in 2012 after just 18 months. They are unicorns. We all know it’s unhealthy to compare ourselves to the unicorns.
But what about us normal donkeys — you know, the non-unicorns? How should we fill out our scorecards for success?
I sat down today and created a list of the things I’m proud of about Fisheye in the past five years (and change).
I want to share them with you.
Here are a few things Fisheye has accomplished:
We’re healthy enough to turn a small profit every month, and every year of our existence has been profitable.
We have a strong roster of enthusiastic partnerships and clients.
We do really great work. As we grow, that great work will continue to grow.
We’ve never missed payroll (except for our founder’s a few times).
We’ve gained a ton of institutional knowledge about the marketing world in this tiny office space.
We’ve never taken on debt.
We’ve had a total of nine members of our team.
We’ve never missed a bill or payment.
We’ve established core values that all of us strive to live, and work, by.
We have a solid reputation in the community, as new opportunities sprout up on a weekly basis.
We’ve been able to build up a small reserve of cash in the bank.
We’ve got a bright future on the horizon, with new aspects to the business that we haven’t even unearthed yet.
… and more that I could probably write about for hours.
A wild success? Probably not. We’re no tech start-up in Silicon Valley. Don’t expect a Fisheye IPO.
But a success that our entire team (and everyone involved) should be extremely proud of?
Absolutely. Abso-freakin’-lutely.
You know, 26-year-old Troy didn’t set proper expectations for what “success” should look like.
So now, I take a second to look around our office.
I see a team of incredibly good people who all come to work to make a difference for our partners every single day.
I see stacks of binders of past work we’ve done over the years, filled with successful projects.
I see a project management software full of fun projects and activities taking place on a daily basis to grow our partners’ businesses.
I see smiles.
I see a branded office with a painted blue wall that boasts a Fisheye seal.
And I see a future for a company that seeks to solve real-world business problems.
Remember, it’s marketing, but with a business mind.
It’s really fun, and it puts a smile on my face.
Lessons from a 31-year-old business owner
The pay has gone from peanuts to cashews.
(Yes, cashews are better than peanuts — but they’re still nuts.)
The most rewarding parts of this work have been the relationships, the countless opportunities, the deep knowledge acquired, and the future prospects of unbelievable growth.
After five years, I’d like to thank every team member at Fisheye that has poured themselves into what we have here today:
Ashley
Hannah
Matthew
Ian
Meranda
Andrea
Kyle
Thomas
I’d also like to thank my wife, who has taken long walks with me, only to hear me ramble about my business as we step over the cracks in the sidewalk.
And thank you to every partner who has — and has yet (!) — to develop a powerful partnership with our team.
With that, I have some advice I’d like to pass along to others. Take it or leave it.
Get comfortable with gut punches — you know — those emails, phone calls, texts, or conversations that leave you feeling like your diaphragm caught a hard blow from a hardened fist. With every gut punch, you’re building a business.
Embrace the work. Late nights, early mornings, stressful weekends, endless webinars/trainings, and a full email inbox are all part of the game. Hard work is part of the game.
Turnover is normal —with both customers and employees. But do whatever you can to reduce it. While we do what we can to reduce it, Fisheye takes immense pride whenever we can launch someone into their next amazing venture.
Celebrate every single win. Our team literally has a Slack category called “BIG WINS” that we share every week together. Even small wins are logged in as BIG WINS. We review these on Monday mornings. Business is hard enough. Celebrate all of your successes along the way.
Systems are critical. We’re still learning that.
Laugh in the office. Tell jokes. Bring pizza. Grab beers at a local brewery. It’s important to smile as you work to climb the mountain.
It’s a blessing to be in business for five years.
We have some incredible momentum at the agency right now. I sincerely feel that we’re making the turn toward building something with a long-term impact.
I started an agency to have freedom in my life. I started an agency to work hard, to control my own destiny, to work with great people, to help many more people.
I started an agency to build something independent of myself that I, and others, could be proud of.
You see, Mr. Gates, we’re five years in and I suppose it’s exactly as I estimated.
