You Have to Do What You Have to Do Until You Can Do What You Want to Do
A.D. Edwards launched Innovators Unveiled with me as his first guest, recording it from a closet because he didn't have a studio yet and decided not to wait. I told him that was the right call. My agency started in a closet too.
If someone tells me they started in a garage or a closet, I know they're serious, because it means they removed the excuse before they had the equipment.
You have to do what you have to do until you can do what you want to do
That's my mother's line, and I got it in the least comfortable circumstances available.
The short version: the economy collapsed while I was in California, I stuck it out for a couple of years, then packed up and moved back to Texas and landed at my grandmother's house. For a period in there I was homeless while still trying to hold onto the dream.
And the people around me said what people say. You need to get a job. If you're going to be in this house you need to put some numbers on the board.
Here's the part nobody wants to admit: that was fair. If what you're doing isn't producing, you have to do what you have to do until you can do what you want to do.
It was a blow to my ego and to my belief in the whole thing. I'd worked with Grammy-winning artists, been in real boardrooms, done deals with actual money attached. And I was back at my grandmother's needing support. I genuinely questioned whether I was cut out for it.
So I took odd jobs, and eventually landed at what was then the largest digital marketing company in the world. That's where I got formal training and certifications in the ad platforms.
The job I took because I had to became the foundation of the business I have now. One step back to take two forward. I couldn't see that at the time and I don't think anyone can.
Don't quit your day job
It's the thing I stress most with the entrepreneurs I work with, and it disappoints people.
Your business is a baby. It needs feeding, and at the start it almost certainly cannot feed you and the people depending on you. So keep the home covered. It is far easier to build something when you know there's a bed, working lights, a hot shower and food in the fridge.
Handling basic survival and the stress of building at the same time isn't heroic. It just makes both harder than they need to be.
Hobbies masquerading as businesses
A.D. asked what separates the mindsets, and the first thing I'd say is that a lot of people start hobbies and call them businesses. The distinction isn't how much you enjoy it. It's whether anyone actually wants to buy it.
Two shifts have to happen.
What you think doesn't matter unless the market proves it does. You can open a horse farm next to a Ford dealership if you like. The market won't buy it.
Your business needs more structure than your job had, not less. As an employee you have a start time, a lunch, a finish, defined inputs and outputs, and reports on your performance. People leave that and bring nothing with them.
When someone tells me they want to start a business so nobody tells them what to do and they can sleep in — go back to your boss's office and thank them for employing you. That thinking leads to bankruptcy, not freedom.
Where the coaching came from
It started with people we turned away.
We'd built smaller packages for a few businesses that couldn't meet our agency minimum, got them set up, and switched the ads on. Then eight or nine of them rang within a fortnight asking us to switch the ads off.
Not because it wasn't working. Because it was, and the volume was exposing everything unresolved underneath — no systems, no organisation, cracks in the foundation. They were collecting bad reviews because they couldn't deliver on the promise the marketing was making.
So we set a minimum, which solved our problem and excluded a lot of people who needed help.
I ran a boot camp instead. Charged a hundred or two, gave away an enormous amount, got elbow-deep into people's actual businesses. The response told me there was something there. I came out of a room on holiday and told a friend I was going to build it into a program.
Three days of work turned our internal frameworks into a gated web page. That became Launch Ignition — now nine steps across three phases, one-to-one sessions over ninety days, plus a weekly group call that functions as light peer pressure. I do a roll call. You said you'd get this done. What have you got?
Over a hundred entrepreneurs have been through it, entirely on referral. We've never marketed it.
The thing a student told me I'd got wrong
One of my best, Dr. Jon, checked me on it.
She said all the technical material was good, but not everyone is going to get up and fight through regardless of circumstances. Some people need help building that internal drive first.
It hadn't occurred to me, because my version of that happens in private at five in the morning and I'd never thought of it as teachable. She was right. It is, and it belonged in the program.
Which is a useful reminder that the things you find easiest are the ones you're most likely to leave out when you build something for other people.
Listen to the full episode
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The TRUTH About What It Really Takes to Succeed as an Entrepreneur. Innovators Unveiled with A.D. Edwards, January 2025 — the show's first episode.
Congratulations to A.D. on getting it done rather than getting it perfect.
The systems that stop growth from breaking a business are what Ignite Funnels exists to install.
