📈 How I Rebuilt In Two Years

Read time: 4 minutes

Two years ago felt like rock bottom for me.

I had just shut down a company I’d spent the prior 1.5 years working on. My co-founder had just told me: "I don't think this is going anywhere, I'm out" so I was working alone. 

And to make matters worse, I'd spent all my savings on business school and was worried I'd have to leave the country if my visa fell through.

That New Year, I went on a weekend trip with my wife's friends and someone asked me a pretty simple question… "So what do you do?"

I remember mumbling over my words and thinking “I honestly don’t know right now.”

I didn’t know what was next, but I knew I had to start over.

The Reality Of Starting Something New

When you're starting over, it's not just the lack of money that gets you. It's the embarrassment of being rubbish at something... in public.

In my case, I'd spent my adult life building an identity around being competent. Goldman, private equity, Stanford - environments where you're rewarded for having answers.

Starting over meant admitting - publicly - that I didn't know what I was doing anymore.

People tell you to "trust the process" but when you're actually in it, feeling the embarrassment in real time, those words don't help much.

What Two Years Can Actually Do

Fast forward to today. My bootstrapped businesses do over $1M/year in revenue across Saywhat, brand partnerships and my Exec branding agency.

But the revenue isn't the biggest thing. The point is I've built contingency. If I lost everything tomorrow, I could rebuild because I've built valuable skills - marketing and brand building - that travel can't ever be taken away from me.

Most people never get to that point because they expect progress to be linear.

And I understand why - most of life trains us to expect that. Study harder, get better grades. Put in the years, get the promotion. Effort in, results out.

Building something from scratch doesn't work like that. Early on, you're guessing.

You don't know what works. But every rep teaches you something, even the flops. Then one day you're not guessing anymore - you've failed so many times that you finally know what works.

And that's when things take off.

Starting Your Next Chapter

For me, the beginning of my next chapter came from posting on LinkedIn. For you, it might be something completely different.

But no matter what your path is, three things will always be the same:

Be ready to embarrass yourself - I started posting on LinkedIn when it was laughably uncool. This post got 9 likes. Behind my back, I was ridiculed for this and everything else I posted. Get ready for it.

Focus on speed of learning above all else - Every week, I was implementing something I'd learned the previous week. I paid experts for coaching. Lots of things didn’t work. But the things that did compounded quickly.

I analysed my top performers every week and doubled down on the topics and visual styles that worked.

• Things NOT To Say In A Job Interview - 72,157 reactions

• Job Interview Cheatsheet - 30,779 reactions

• People Who Worked Hard… - 3,306 reactions

• I Have To Vs. I Get To - 3,243 reactions

Separate effort from outcome - there was a period of 2.5 months in April - June 2024, when NOTHING was working for me. My views and growth were just going down, despite everything I tried. Then suddenly, everything clicked at once and my account exploded.

The effort was constant, even though the results felt “random”.

Your Two Years Start Now

If you're in that place right now - putting in work, seeing no results, embarrassed to explain yourself at dinner parties - here's what I want you to know:

Two years ago, that was me. Now I'm not scared of starting over anymore.

If I can do it, you can too.

See you next week,

Will

P.S. I studied more than >1,000 LinkedIn hooks and broke down the 8 hook patterns that consistently went viral. Here’s an 8-min video with examples.

Will McTighe

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