If You Want To Be Successful, You Have To Do Your Own Thing

“My dad always said that if you really want to be successful, then you’ve got to do your own thing.” Ben Pratt

SOV Media was not my first business. It’s my first official business. But when I did independent contract work in the past, I would just operate under my own name or a DBA. But SOV Media was the first time that I decided to go that next level and make it into a corporation. So I have to keep the books, I have to pay my taxes quarterly. I have to file with the State of California. I have to file with the Federal Government.

The creation of an S Corp is quite an interesting process. But I basically call it playing for real. As opposed to just doing a gig, here and there, sporadically. There’s actually a structure to it. There is billing, there is invoicing, there is a reporting of taxes, there’s potentially the hiring of employees. So I think that after dabbling in business, I like the concept. My dad always said that if you want to be successful, you’ve got to do your own thing. So I would dabble in it and I was taking the skills that I was getting paid for already as part of a W-2 job, and then taking those skills and making money doing other jobs on the side in my off-time. That was always my hobby. My hobbies were taking whatever I did and doing more of it on the side so I could make money. I was just never into fishing, I guess?

But this time around with SOV Media, I basically take the relationships that I have and I help my current clients expand into other places above and beyond where I can sell in the immediate and help them grow their business, thus helping them grow their budgets.

The other benefit is that there’s a trust that’s been built up. So the way I look at it is this: I am taking an existing relationship, and think of it like a rag filled with water. And so I’m wringing it out in one direction and that’s how I help them as an employee. But the creation of my ad agency was taking that same rag and wringing it in the other direction because there are other things they can be doing. You can only spend so much in maybe one place in the advertising world and you scale that audience but when they want to go and scale other places, they can then go to those individual venues without any assistance and work with individuals who they don’t have a relationship with and potentially be at risk for being ripped off or paying too much or they can use someone like me that they’ve worked with for awhile and you’ve built up that trust and then so “Okay, you helped us here. Can you help us here, as well?” And that’s how you build a relationship.

Now I view that as a nice expansion of the current relationship. And so that’s basically what I’m doing with SOV Media. As far as the name SOV. That’s an acronym and it stands for Share a Voice. Which is vernacular in the advertising business.

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http://www.mysov.com