Free Agent

What up friends and random followers? It’s been a while since I published anything here. I guess it’s because I never really devote time to growing my “personal brand”. It’s probably a mistake, but I just get shit done. Sometimes the work seems interesting enough to share, but most of the time it’s just business as usual.

Over the last three years most of that business has been grinding hard for WP Site Care. Looking back on it, we accomplished a lot during that time. We grew the company into a real, honest to God business with employees and insurance and all kinds of things I never thought I’d be involved in.

While I was at Site Care, I learned a ton about running a business, managing employees, and working as a team. Although I’m not sure I ever really wanted to learn any of that… I know it will serve me well in the future. I also released some cool open source projects, built the best recipe plugin ever made for WordPress, and helped Ryan and the rest of the team in every way that I could.

It’s been a fun ride, but for about the last year or so I’ve been feeling the itch to do something else. Lucky for me, fate dropped a new opportunity in my lap and last month I decided to jump on it.

So what the hell am I doing now?

If I asked you to guess I don’t think you’d be able to. Go ahead. Give it a shot. Did you guess selling stencils via Shopify, Amazon, Ebay, Etsy, and as many other marketplaces as we can find? Yeah I didn’t think so. But that’s what I’m doing.

A few months back my old running mate Jacob King hit me up with a business plan to start selling stencils on a domain he’s owned for a while, Stencil Revolution. He needed some extra funds to purchase a filter for the crazy laser cutting machine he was buying and I was happy to be able to help out. A month later he had paid me back using stencil profits and things have been ramping up ever since then.

So… stencils? That’s It?

Hell no. Jacob and I are going to turn Stencil Revolution into the best damn stencil company on the planet, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only thing I’m going to be doing. I’ve got a few ideas for products that I’d like to explore and I’m always up for an interesting project if it fits my skill set and schedule.

I think the most important thing that I’ve learned over the last few years is that when it comes to business, I’m a free agent. I like helping people, solving problems, and growing things but I don’t like to be tied down to any one thing and I for sure don’t like being told what to do. In order to really thrive and feel like I’m doing my best work, I need to be in control of my own destiny.

A steady paycheck is nice but for me it’s also a bit like a shackle. Does that mean I’ll never work for a company again? Hell if I know. Only time will tell. What I do know is that as long as I’m able, I’ll always be in full control of my work life. It’s better for everyone that way.

I’m sure I could go on and on about this forever, but I’m just gonna let Big K.R.I.T. explain it for me. ✌️

Talk at you again soon. ?

2 responses to “Free Agent”

  1. Hi Rob, sorry if this is the wrong way to contact you, well, where do I start, really like your work, I stumbled across your profile while looking to fix some structured data problem on my website, ended up looking at some awesome stencil website, bookmarked! Then I had to go Google ‘Potato Salad’ to find out what that is all about, getting distracted but I thought I’d comment and let you know I’m very impressed.
    Also wondering if you could maybe help point me in the right direction with a few things or perhaps you offer some kind of coaching service? Or one on one help with websites? I’ve been struggling along for 14 years with my online business and I’m still not very good. I’ve wasted money on help in the past but have benefited more from learning it all myself (very slowly) long story. Please check out my website if you’re interested and let me know what you think, I know it’s a bit of a mess but you should get the idea of what I do, I do ok, but I think I need help from someone like you with all the tech stuff, just advice I guess.
    Thanks for your time.
    Regards
    Andrew

    I will look more in to your stuff later when I have time. Badass!