Music. Hey everybody, welcome to a very special bonus episode of The Virtual Couch. It is episode 368, I believe, but I'm gonna try to do something a little bit unique here. I want to start airing more bonus episodes and the reason I have some bonus episodes, I think there's a life principle here and that is when you find yourself a little bit overworked or overwhelmed and you keep saying that I'll get to things later, then it is absolutely okay to reach out and ask for
help. So I have for some reason edited all the podcasts myself and I've tried to book everything myself and I don't know if it was more of a wanting to being a cheapskate or if it was just not really wanting to almost like inconvenience or burden someone else by offering them a job in a sense. But once I asked for help and have a wonderful assistant Naomi who is helping book podcasts and then I have a couple of my daughters that are helping
edit podcasts. It is phenomenal when you can just reach out to somebody and say, hey, we'd love to have you on the show and Naomi can set that up. And then when I'm done recording, I can hand that over to one of my daughters to edit. And then you can keep doing all the other things, writing and creating and seeing clients and all those wonderful things.
And I've talked about this in the past too. I think this has to do with one of the principles of acceptance and commitment therapy that if you're doing something just because you think you have to, or you should, or you're going to. This is what you're supposed to do. It's called a socially compliant goal, and your motivation will be weak and ineffective because it goes against your own process of unfolding and
becoming. And so the things like the editing, while it's fun, it's okay, it can take me a long time. And the booking of guests, I will get to that later. And as we've talked about in previous episodes around the world of ADHD, there are two timeframes, now or later. So if I don't do it now, I'll do it later. And later doesn't happen until it becomes now. So I think. I think I've missed out on some really good interview opportunities in the past by scheduling
them later, which sometimes means not at all. So, then by asking for help and having people that are good at things like organization or people that really just find the editing process satisfying or people handing out things like accounting and bookkeeping that they're actually people that like numbers and math and those kind of things, that then in that world you free yourself up to do more of the things that you really enjoy or what matter
to you. So, that's a way to say that I have a lot, not a lot, I have more than I have had in the past of interviews that are starting to get backed up. And I am just not, sometimes I'll get asked to go on a podcast and they'll say, okay, this one's coming out in four months.
And I don't know, a lot can happen in four months and maybe that's just the world I live in because I want to talk about whatever the latest therapeutic principle is or things that I'm seeing in my office or I want to talk to people that I'm honestly thinking about in the realm of what's going on now. So I've been doing more interviews and I want to get them out. I want to do more bonus content. So today's episode is with a friend of mine
named Z, Zlotko, and he is just a fascinating individual. So we talk about a lot of things today. He's done a lot of things. He has some real, I think very, I want to say unique thoughts around doing, but it's funny if you really break them down, not to do a spoiler alert but he creates apps. He owns an ad agency. He does business coaching. He does a whole lot of things.
But some of the apps he's created are just because he just sees a problem. Actually, pretty much all the things he creates, he sees a problem and he says, I'd like to fix that. And he fixes it. He's not trying to see, okay, what can I do that will get the most, people engaged or that people will want to buy the most of so that I will make a lot of money?
He says, I want to do things that I want to do. And then I'm going to put them out there and I'm and I'm gonna put a lot of content out there and then I think that eventually people are gonna find things that they like that I do and maybe they'll like other things that I do. And so really just kind of creating, I know it can sound a bit cliched, but in essence, this brand around just who he is. and he talks about.
Becoming a different person throughout his life. We're going to talk about journaling, which I, as a therapist, I highly recommend, but I am a bit of a hypocrite and that I don't do. And then you have somebody like Z that's going to talk about his journey of journaling and why and writing and that's been pretty fascinating. And when he and I first really started talking together.
We were just both on this accountability train of where accountability doesn't have to be so scary just to say, oh, my bad. Yeah, I did that or I didn't mean to do that. But also just trying to be more consistent and say here are the things that I can do or that I can't do. But let's get to the interview. So here's a special bonus episode. So the only things I'll do to promote the things that I'm doing, maybe just go to the show notes and there's a link,
called linktree. or it's link.tree or something like that, slash virtual couch. And it will have all the links to the latest episodes and podcasts and courses and newsletters and all those things. So I would love it if you would just stop by there and take a look. Oh, and if you could take a look in the show notes as well, I'm going to have a link to something that Zee has put together since the time that we recorded this interview, just in the last couple of weeks.
And it is a 30-day writing challenge. In essence, it's a little mini course that he has prompts and examples, but I think it's a real kickstarter to really help you, Learn the power of writing daily writing journaling So check that out in the show notes and you'll see a link to his his course or his mini course about about the journaling. So, with that said, let's get to this interview with my friend Zee. Music.
Here we go. On your mark, get set. Let's podcast. Go. Okay. What a joy. This has been a long time in the making literally because we tried to do this a year or so ago and I feel like the behind the scenes of podcasting Z is I did not bring my A game to a particular interview and you were very gracious and kind. So, here we are. Well, I think the timing was just a little bit off and I think you and I both figured out like, hey, this is just not the right time at the moment.
Mind. So I think this is where we're at right now, man. It is exactly right. So all right, my good friend, and someone that I've been working with, I guess, in the role of mentor, slash, coach, kind of a vibe for a couple of years, right? That's it. You know that I've, I've just called you Z for so long that I don't know if I even know exactly how to pronounce your last name. You don't need to it's Z. Okay, I love it.
That's Z. That's the brand. Can you please do me the honor of telling my guests, my audience on the virtual couch, a little bit about you. And then we have so many things that we can talk about. You're a very impressive person and you have given me full reign to then kind of go in any direction I want. And oh my gosh, we've got a million directions we can go. So Z, who are you? This is gonna be very hard to not go down crazy rabbit holes.
So I'm really- I'm counting on us going on a couple of them. Yeah, so my name is Z, Zlatko. So I do a few different things. I run a couple of different agencies. One is a service agency. We help e-commerce clients, merchants set up their stores, sell products online, do, the kind of branding, design, development, all of those things. Anybody that's on Shopify, that's who we help, which is majority of the market at this point.
And I also over the past year and a half started another agency where we actually build products. So we build software products on a very small level, nothing enterprise, and we just solve, you know, one of a kind problems across different marketplaces. And along with that comes with comes, you know, a newsletter comes a podcast, I have my own podcast called What is my brain. And then I have also... What else do I have? Man, so many different things, but that's kind of the gist of it.
I write a lot on social media as well. That's pretty much the other part of it is that I write a lot on like Twitter and LinkedIn. Those are my two main outlets where I just kind of drop my thoughts about creating a personal brand, being a creator online, and entrepreneurship as a whole because I've been in this space for well over 12 years at this point. So that's kind of the summary of where I'm at, what I'm involved with, what am I doing every day and that kind of stuff.
Okay, so now I feel like I need to spin the wheel of where do we go next? Because I've got a few notes. And one of them is, so I've been doing the therapy coaching game for a long time. And I love that when I really learn how somebody ticks, you know, what makes somebody really get excited about waking up in the morning. And I feel like talking with you over the last two or three years, you really do have a gift, a couple of them.
One of them is being able to take anyone's business or thought or idea and then being able to almost synthesize it and then add to it. And I remember when you would first just kind of start talking about ideas, and I used to think, how does one just have ideas about some product or business or area that they don't really know about? And so at first I thought, oh, I must school Z on the fact that he must find his lane.
But then it's so interesting because I feel like This is one of those things where when somebody has that as a gift, it is their gift and I do not. So then I don't know what that's like. So talk about that. You have this ability to just make anything. I don't know. What is that? Yeah. So talk about being in the lane. I'm one of those people that you see swerving on the freeway when it comes to being in the
lane and I go left and right the entire time. But honestly, I think Tony, for me, it's just been in just in real life when I'm walking around, doesn't matter what it is. I'm very observant. I look over my shoulder. I kind of know what things are going on at all times. And that also applies to sort of the online game as well.
So whether it's me scrolling through Twitter or watching a YouTube video or watching a soccer game, whatever that might be, I'm constantly, I don't know if the right word is opportunistic or an opportunist, but it's one of these things where I automatically go into what is that? How did they do that? I started asking myself a lot of questions. And I think from those questions when curiosity kicks in, I immediately go into, well, how was that made? What was sort of the process to do that?
And I think from that point forward, I just started going, oh, there's got to be a business thing for here or somebody's built a solution or a service or, you know, whatever that might be. And I think that curiosity, once it kicks in, that's why a lot of my stuff that I, whether I write or I talk about on my podcast is people leaning into their curiosity or just asking questions.
I think for me, if I'm sitting at an airport and I see people walking around and somebody might be on their laptop, whatever, I immediately wonder, what is that guy up to? Or what is that girl up to? My mind is constantly running, but then for a while, I was like, man, it feels kind of weird just asking these questions.
It's almost like you're like a nosy Rosie, but at the same time, I'm like, no, that's That's just my curiosity going into a thousand different directions, just being curious about somebody's situation and then not in a way of like. Doing investigative work, but in a way of I'm just interested in your life and what you have going on because it looks interesting.
And that's literally where it comes from. So when people, you know, when I'm working with our clients, or I come up with an idea for a product, I immediately go into this gear where I'm like, Oh, well, I can build it and it's going to do this. And it's going to solve this problem. Or if I'm using an app or something, I immediately go into this. Why didn't they add this part? Like I'm missing like whether a feature or whatever.
So I think it's a curiosity honestly that kicks in and it just sort of takes its own little path into whatever is gonna come out of that. It's a business opportunity and sometimes it's a product, sometimes it's just a thought. I write it down and I sometimes sit on it for a year, three months, six months, whatever it might be and I come back to it and be like, Damn, I had that thought four months ago or a year ago. That's crazy, I'm still asking those same questions.
Yeah, and okay, and I like where you're going there too. I don't know if it's just your overall vibe or mannerism, but I think it doesn't sound like you are trying to tell somebody what they've done is wrong or bad. You have a particular version of curiosity that I feel like almost lends people to then say, yeah, yeah, I don't know, I hadn't thought about that versus the, well, what you don't understand is. Because even when we're talking and I'm supposedly coaching you,
you know, you'll kind of turn things around and say, well, tell me about that. And how long have you been thinking that? Or, you know, and all of a sudden I find that's where I'll say, well, hang on, I'm supposed to be doing this for you. And. So I feel like it just seems very natural. How long has that happened for you? I mean, is there a Genesis story of where that goes back to.
I don't know if there's an actual like a beginning to it, I think is just when I realized that when I actually started building my own path with like building my first business or whatever. That might be, I just always looked at things. I always say like I never care about peeking over the fence and looking what the next person is doing. Yes. Rolling with my own thought process or my own ideas.
And I think from that, once you start looking over the fence too much and you start looking of what the next person you're constantly peeking over, you lose sight of whatever you're thinking about. And so for me, I was in sports all my life. You see somebody playing soccer a certain way, like how did they get that much better than this person or how they, you know, it's all these different things.
And I think for me is when I started my first official business, which was a IT business back in, shit, man, I think it was probably in the 2009, 2010. And I was just at my parent's house, I was still basically a teen, but I enjoyed playing around with computers. And actually at age like 12, I think it was, I built my own computer.
And to the point where somebody came and helped me to do the initial piece and I took the whole thing apart and I rebuilt it myself, not having like pictures of it or anything else and just, you know, let's tear this thing apart again and let's put it together and see if I can do it myself. I think at that point is when I take that story back because I think at that point I I realized I'm actually really interested in this.
I'm not just, you know, somebody that's just, Oh, I want to do this for the hell of it, I actually just went with my curiosity. And I think once I started my first business and then I, you know, went ahead of the job and all these other things, I would just ask a million questions all the time. And then in like 2015, I started another business, which was a sock subscription service. And I always wondered, I was like, why is nobody making sock purchasing easier?
Like the way that Apple makes it easier to buy a laptop or a phone or whatever. They give you one, two or three choices. They don't give you a thousand different choices. And I literally went and started a sock business based off of that idea. Hey, wait, talk about that. Because why socks? I'm curious. So I was working at AT&T as a retail sales consultant. And we have to wear basically uniforms. So you had a white shirt, blue shirt, whatever. There was only certain colors.
You have to wear khakis. Everybody looked the same. And two things that I did, because it was customers are coming in because they're having problems with their phone. And every time somebody comes in, it's just like the whole spiel. Hey, how you doing this and that. And I figured out, I was like, man, I really enjoy wearing like colorful socks. Like I have a, my personal, like if anybody goes on my website right now, you see all these different colors. It's like very retro.
I always had that as part of my personality, I'm very extroverted. And so when that happened, I was like, oh man, this is really, really cool. I get to show my personality in a very discreet way. I'm not wearing a big, bright pink shirt, but people will come by and my pants would be just a little bit higher off of my dress shoes. And they would be like, oh, cool socks. And it would break the ice immediately. And so in my mind, I was like, oh man, this is kind of cool.
It's like a fashion statement, but it's not so loud. It's not a, like I said, pink shirt or pink pants or whatever else it is. It's more discreet. But when somebody sees it, they're almost like. Already know that they can be like friends with you. It's like a psychological trick that everybody, no matter who it was, no matter what culture they were from or anything like that, they would just see that and go, I want to, I want to talk to you about like, they felt like you were immediately
friends with them. And I think it was just a, almost like an open door policy for somebody to talk to me about something other than their phone being broken. Well, and what I think is so fascinating about that is, I mean, I have a very strong sock game. I've had sock subscriptions that I then forgot about for months and months and then have a tremendous amount of socks. But I never thought about starting a sock subscription company. So there you are as an AT&T and you start wearing socks.
I mean, I think that's the part where I feel like I don't even know if you know how cool that is. And so people that are listening that are entrepreneurs, oftentimes I feel like they think, oh, well, Z's incredibly wealthy parents must have handed him a dump truck full of money and he started a sock subscription, right?
Farthest thing from it. You know how people say you're the first there's a first generation of like somebody graduating from college i'm the first generation in my family to actually start anything on my own like nobody in my family has ever started a business has never done anything everyone's already already kind of like worked for somebody else or worked at a company or whatever that might be in fact when i was working
at&t my dad was working at&t as well in a different store so it was like that was always sort of his name was tom at&t like you were the son of right no hey real quick and i'm gonna get you back to to the stocks. Talk about your backstory. I mean, talk about your parents. I mean, that's, a pretty good story. So yeah, backstory. Originally, I was born in Bosnia at a very young age. I moved to Croatia because of the war in Bosnia. So I was born in 88 and...
By the way, that's when I graduated high school. Z, did you know that? That's when I graduated high school. Yeah, that's, I don't know if that's in New York City or something. Oh, wow. That's amazing. you. I love it. Well, I wouldn't have thought that because your mindset is completely different than people that, you know, Oh, stop. There we go. Okay. Don't stop. No, no, don't stop. Okay. So, but in 88, yeah. Okay.
Yeah. And so, yeah, my parents, you know, the war broke out. We ended up moving to Croatia because my grandparents had a house there. Stayed there for a couple of years. And then after that, we ended up moving to Germany because that was the only place that, you know, my parents can potentially get a job, make some money, all this. All this, but long story short, we're there for four years. They couldn't get permanent citizenship or residency there because there was.
Just like laws were changing in Germany at the time. And then we had a, some sort of cousin family members, some underground way of getting to the U S which I have no idea. I still don't believe any of the stories that my parents tell me, but I'm just, I just roll with the punches. Uh, and so we came here and my parents came here to literally with one suitcase, Maybe two and a thousand dollars in cash with two kids. And so four of us total and literally started rebuilt their life from ground up.
We had nothing when we got here. And so that's one point of where now, when anything happens to me or whatever I'm doing, I always use that as the humbling experience. And your problems are not bigger than what your parents had to go through. And all these other things, like you're very fortunate, whatever happens, there's going to be good.
There's going to be bad, but that story always pulls me back a little bit and kind of like to think about it. So yeah, I'm sure that my parents, yeah, my parents got, you know, got good jobs and didn't know English and they were doing sales with no English, which is like, what the hell? And yeah, it's been crazy. It's been a crazy ride. We've been here since 97. So Wow. So then okay, so now back to AT&T, and then you like your
socks. And then what causes you to say I will start a sock subscription business. Well, yeah, after a few years, when I left AT&T, I was like, all right, I need to do something. I left my job, all of that. I moved down to Orange County with my sister. And after that, I just wanted to start something. I moved to LA to be by myself and just literally was like, I really want to do this. I want to build everything from the ground up. I want to,
create the boxes. I want to understand how fulfillment works. I want to understand how, everything, like literally out of a 600 square foot apartment, that's basically where the the business was born out of. And so at that point we had a few hundred subscribers that came on board and I had to actually shut the business down because I ended up starting, you know, more like project management work and stuff that was actually paying the bills because that wasn't paying the bills at the time.
And then after that I started my agency and all this and then kind of just went from there. But yeah, the business never ended up, you know, becoming the thing, but it was one of the best experiences I've had because I just got to learn about every aspect of business. Yeah, and if you don't mind, and this is the part where I love that you said free reign, but we can edit out anything if you ever want to.
But when you went down to LA, I really love this concept too, because I'll talk to people that will feel like they don't even, you know, they don't have their people, they don't know what to do, they don't have, you know, necessarily have friendships in an area. And I remember you telling me a story about what you would do every day and how that played out for you as far as like, do you know where I'm going with this?
At the coffee shop? Yeah, and just going out and starting to just be around people and starting to be that guy, and hey, let's go out and let's, and you just started developing a community. And I just felt like that, when I work with a lot of people that are struggling with anxiety or depression, or they don't feel like they, you know, anybody cares or they don't have friends. And so, yeah, how did you remedy that?
Well, yeah, for me, I actually, so when I was living with my dad for a little bit, and then, so my mom had gotten a job out here in like Rockland area. My dad was still in the Bay Area and I was staying with him because that's where my job was. And shortly after, I kind of felt like I was getting stuck in this sort of three-prong-like system. I was going to work, I was going home, and I was hanging out with the same people
I basically grew up with. And I just didn't, my mindset didn't align with them. It was just always, I was always wanting to do more. I wanted to start a business, or I wanted to do something different. I didn't want to be stuck at a nine to five anymore. And one day I just told my manager, I was like, I'm leaving after six months, I'm out of here. And he was like, yeah, whatever. That's what everybody says.
You know, two weeks came around, I put in my two week notice and he's like, oh, you're really leaving. I said, yeah, I'm out of here in like literally two weeks. Like I'm moving down to LA with one bed, one, you know, suitcase and like a thousand bucks in my pocket. Like I don't need anything else at this point. And so...
Stayed with my sister for a little bit. I was fortunate enough that she was down there. She had an open room and then after I got my dog Buddy, I couldn't be there anymore. And so I got a place in LA because that's where I originally wanted to be. I was always very drawn to sort of the energy of those people. Anytime I made a trip down to LA, I felt like a different vibe, a different energy. Like everyone was doing multiple things.
You talk to one person on the street at a coffee shop and they're like, I have a clothing line and I run this business and I do this and I have a side job and all these things and that always kind of was like, man, I need to be here. Like I need to be in this sort of space. And when I got down there, I again started from nothing and didn't have any friends, didn't have anybody that I knew that I was, you know, that I can connect with and be like, oh, that's my buddy from school or whatever.
And so I kind of just went about it in a whole different way. I had my dog and myself and my little apartment and every day I would just walk to a coffee shop and I would just hang out with random people there. And in LA where I was at, I would see all sorts of famous people. Like I'm talking people from the show Breaking Bad or in crazy commercials or whatever else it is.
And so I just started, I was just me, like always, never dressed a certain way, never of just literally what you see is what you get. And it started sort of building, you know, friendships and, you know, going out by myself. And I was always, I think the other thing what you touched on is that people get anxiety or they don't want to go out. I was always okay with being alone. Like I never. I was always happy to just be, you know, by myself, go out, sit at a bar, not worried about,
you know, is somebody going to talk to me or not? Like, I can be there. I can start conversations with anybody. Again, very extroverted. I don't think a lot of people maybe have that. But I was just always okay because I didn't really care what people thought. I was a good, I would say a pretty good human from that perspective. I wasn't trying to hurt anybody. I wasn't trying to be creepy with anybody. So at that point, I just, you know, kind of was just me. And so I just
stepped out of my shell. And I think that was the, that was, I think the point in my life where I ended up really, really maturing in all sorts of different ways from taking care of myself to starting a business to being, you know, when I was broke and didn't have money for rent and all these other things, like just had to kind of work through all
of those problems. And I think that was probably any point in my life. I think that was the the biggest growth point of like maturity and everything else. Do you remember, you taught me what, is it a Irish goodbye is, or what was that? You were telling me? Yeah, the Irish goodbye, when you just leave and you don't say bye to anybody, and you just, people look around like, oh, he's coming back, and you never come back. And for context, because I think, you know, you are a good human being.
I just really appreciated that story, because if I remember it correctly, you can tell me, but the more you would just hang out around these places, and you would get to know people, but then people would naturally start to invite you to go places, and so now you're starting to pick your friends and friendships, and so sometimes, if I write, you would get out and you'd be with somebody and all of a sudden, oh, this is not somebody that I think I wanna hang out with.
And that, yeah. I always had some sort of moral compass, I think, I would, does this person feed my energy or are they sucking my energy? And I always kind of weighted up against those two things. And if they suck my energy, then I would just, that's not for me. I wouldn't talk to that person or whatever that might be.
And if it's somebody that really like gives me energy and somebody that I'm like, enjoy being around, can have a good conversation, then that's the person I'd be like, Oh, we should like hang out again, or we should go do this, or we should go do that. Or, Hey, you know, what do you think about this? And, and I think from conversation alone, even just being at a bar or whatever, like you can kind of understand the people that you can connect with and the people that you can.
Well, I think there's so much that I want to say that, you know, this sounds silly Zee, but I want to say you don't even know what you don't know about yourself, which sounds very egotistical on my end, but the part where the confidence that you exude is what I like to call coming from a healthy ego, where it's based off of real life experience and you're. Not trying to be somebody that I don't know, you think you have to be to get people to like you.
And so even if somebody just heard, you know, cause I'm laughing about the Irish goodbye concept, but it's really, it's, it's trusting your gut and it's realizing, I think that, You know, you don't, man, that does sound funny to say it to somebody that maybe isn't as emotionally mature or in a healthy ego.
If I was gonna say, at some point, if you realize that someone isn't who they say that they are and you're out with them, then you don't owe them anything as far as spending that extra time because you don't want to make them feel uncomfortable. It's your trust in your gut and following that. And I think that, yeah. Exactly.
And that's something I always, whether it was in sports, whether it was in business, whether it was just like personal life, That's always one thing that I always go by my gut feeling. It's never treated me the wrong way, I would say. I think it's always been a great sort of like compass of which way to go about with this. So do I go left, do I go right, do I just, you know, whatever that would be.
Yeah, and so then take us to, you start your agency, and then that ends up having just tremendous growth. What was that experience like? That's when we started working together. So I take all credit for the good part. Absolutely, you definitely do. You definitely helped me with a lot of the process of changing things. And so, yeah, I started my agency in 2018. A couple people, just myself as the project manager, had a designer and developer to just build stuff out. And that was the
other thing, going back to the sort of the confidence thing. The day after I registered my business, I registered my business, I think January 18, 2018, I think it was, or January 16th, one of those days, literally the next day, I landed a $30,000 contract, which was crazy because we had a designer on staff, but the developer just wasn't going to be available. And so, you know, I take this job basically knowing that we can knock it out of the park.
But we didn't really have all the resources to do it. So while we were doing the design work, I went out and hunted for a developer to try to kind of bring it to life when that was all ready. So I just knew what we can do and what I can, you know, what I can do. And so I just was like, yeah, we got it all figured out. And little do you know, it was just like, everything's kind of half half assed at that point. But we got the project done. Everything was good.
And so everything was going well, we kept getting new projects, we kept growing the business, I was basically wearing all the hats. And so at one point when 2020 came around, and the pandemic and all this stuff, everybody kind of shut down all their retail. it was there was like a three-month period where. Pretty much didn't get any new leads, didn't get any new projects, didn't get anything. And I just remember being curled up on my couch and kind of thinking like, oh,
my business is going to be doomed. And so basically at that point, I kind of had to make a decision. I ended up starting, thanks to you, starting a podcast because you told me, I remember seeing your microphone in there and I said, oh, I've been always wanting to start a podcast. And you're like, dude, here's the mic, here's this. I literally went home that day. I ordered everything and I started a podcast within a week of that time frame.
Okay, pause right there, Z. Pause right there. Like that is the part again where I don't think... Do you recognize how... That is impressive because I cannot tell you how many people have said, man, I should do a podcast. And I say, yeah, you should. I mean, it'd be great. And you literally did. And within a week or two, you were rolling, right?
Yeah, that's always... That's one thing that I actually... A lot of whether it's like through my newsletter or like social media, it's one thing I exude a lot through my writing is just for people to start taking action because I think you can sit here, you can write the plan, the perfect plan, the this, the that, all of that honestly goes out the window the minute that you start because you just don't know what's going to happen.
And so to me, it was always one of these things where I got on a podcast with my friend, I asked, I was like, Hey, would you be interested in jumping on as like my first guest? And he's like, absolutely. And so I did and he ran an agency as well. And then he said one thing to me, he was like, you can't scale an agency if you don't have retainers in place with your clients. that light bulb just immediately went off. And I said, okay, I need to change everything that we're doing.
So the next day, I went to each one of our clients that we had and I said, our pricing is changing. Here's the cost. Here's what's required every single month. Take it or leave it. We're willing to... You guys are already not paying us anything because the pandemic is hurting your business and all these other things. And then when people started coming back, they're just like, this is the only option, basically. much and we do this kind of work or we just can't work with you.
And that ended up being one of the best things I've ever done because it just, I think we ended up being around between anywhere between like 80, at one point we were like 100,000 in reoccurring revenue every single month for like a long period of time. And so by the end of 2021, the business had grown from like, I don't know, like six, $700,000 a year in revenue to in 2020, end of 2021, we broke like 1.4 million, which was like absolutely insane.
But then we also grew our team and we had 22 people and we definitely got bloated. And so now that we're in this place where things have kind of already, like things are still a little bit shaky. We ended up having to like bring that, bring that down to about seven people now because I had a bad burnout and all these other things, but I just didn't care about managing that many people anymore because it was just way too much. It was sucking my creative
energy to be honest with you. It was completely sucking my creative energy. And I think kind of keep into your strengths and that I hope that people that are listening even from a mental health standpoint is you went out there and you grew this agency and then you got to a point where there was just acceptance that okay this is no longer what is sustainable or viable and then happen to deal with that discomfort and then and downsizing and I feel like you
you've done a nice job of everything that you have been doing. Go in big and and then you learn, and then you tailor it to fit. I mean, you don't just say, okay, well, I guess that didn't work, period, I'm done. Right, right, and the other thing is it took a really big toll on my mental health because it was just a lot going on. I had been running 100 miles an hour for like three years straight. I mean, it was just a lot of stuff going on.
And it was great, money was great, everything was great. We were growing the team, paying people really well. But at some point I was just like, this is just not, it doesn't feel sustainable, maybe it is, but I'm not the right person to keep this ship moving. Like I'm just, I just understood that about myself that I did not want to be steering this ship one way or another. And so then I...
You know, had some changes happen, whatever. And then I ended up just simply saying, you know what, we just have to dial all this back. I just don't want to be every time I pull it, turn on my slack. I just have like a hundred messages waiting for me. People, this, people that we need to, we have a problem here. I was basically the fireman at the, at that point. And I just didn't want to be that anymore because I just had no creative
space. And so then I just ended up dialing it down and really now starting to to focus on building more of a one-person type business or a smaller business. So Taco Agency is basically kind of the hub for all the service work and that sort of feeds all the other stuff that I'm working on, whether it's my podcast, my personal brand stuff, my newsletter, anything, building products and all that other stuff. So that's kind of the little engine that sort of runs everything.
I think that's where we were kind of vibing as well of the if somebody just has the nine to five, which is great if that works for them.
And then I think we were talking about how, okay, if I'm going to see clients and podcast and write and go speak and, you know, and you're talking about, okay, if I'm gonna have the agency and I'm going to develop products, I'm going to write, I'm going to podcast and that what if it is, it's okay to do a lot of different things, because that keeps that excitement going or that creative energy going.
Absolutely, and I just didn't know what I didn't know at that time and I think what I didn't know was how much I needed to and you and I talked about this a lot is. The power of writing to me over the past year. I mean in April It's literally about to be 12 months since I started, you know that drop that guard, The imposter syndrome wasn't there anymore and I just said, you know what?
I'm gonna just start writing online and whatever happens happens But I know that I want to start a podcast as well. I want to do all these other things and, You know You don't have to give up one to do the other all of these things as long as you can manage it or you have a couple of people to help you out. And so for me, that was one big unlock because I can actually.
It was like self-therapy. I can, like, distill my thoughts, my ideas, my emotions, be vulnerable. And, I, you know, sometimes you think, like, I really wish that I had started writing a lot earlier in my journey. But again, you don't know what you don't know. I think school ruined it for me. I think school ruined a lot of writing for me and different things because it just was very.
You know, five-sentence paragraphs. You need this. You need, you know, like, there was too many parameters where I feel like online it's more like lean, fast, moving, you know, stuff and you can just kind of write short form, you can write long form, you can create videos, you can create a podcast out of it, you can transcribe that podcast and use some of that content online.
Like there's so many ways of doing things and so I think for anybody that was listening to this, if you're in any kind of space where you're, you know, whether you have a lot going on or whatever, set aside at least like 30 minutes to an hour every single day and just write. Just dump your thoughts. Just put them on paper. It's going to look like crap. It's going to maybe feel weird.
It's going to be all of these things. But it is the best self-therapy that I believe anybody, especially anybody in the entrepreneurial space can do for themselves because it just really unlocks a lot of ideas. And I always use a phrase that my, I felt like my brain was congested and writing decongested my brain.
I like that. And I really like that phrase. And I think we were even talking recently about when I'm talking about it as a therapeutic intervention of sorts, that when things are in our brain, they're just flying around a million miles an hour. And when you lay it out linearly, does it seem to just then, I don't know if it's make more sense, but just seem more tangible or what's that like? I mean, when you, yeah. It's like, it's just basically putting pieces to the puzzle together.
There's this big puzzle that will never get completed, but you're just sort of piecing things together as they come. And I also think that, you know, I know a lot of for me, it's a lot, I'll be walking, I'll be driving or whatever I'm doing. And when I'm not behind my computer or behind, you know, whatever that might be work related. That's when a lot of my things start flying through my head. So I started doing a lot of like voice, like voice memos on my phone and just like,
walking and just talking literally. And it just something to listen back to. It was like, what is this? But that's just what was going on at the moment. And so I think for writing, it's just kind of the same thing. It's just taking those thoughts and putting it on paper. Kind of like what I said earlier is that you might have an idea five months ago and you might look at it and say, oh, that's nothing right now, but maybe five months later, you look at it again.
You say, oh, there's actually something there. It keeps this this repeating thing going on. And we just have so many things, so many dopamine hits every single day. Social media, tick tock, like all these other things. I think if you don't control, try to give your thoughts a little bit of structure, I think a lot of ideas and a lot of great things just kind of get lost in the minutia. I love that. And just to be clear for anybody listening, you were not a writer before a year ago.
Is that right? No, I didn't do any writing. I at all. And we had talked about that ever. I started with a like a writing cohort called ship 30 for 30 and it was it's all about starting to write online. a very, Publish 30 essays in 30 days. That's literally all you do and it doesn't matter what it is. It could be off subject
It could be an entrepreneur like whatever you want to write about there's people writing about fitness. There's people writing about food there's people writing about business and yoga, whatever that might be and it's just a matter of getting that that.
Consistency going and I think that That part of it when I started being consistent with writing that ended up trickling down into so many other parts of my life life, whether it was, you know, consistently recording a podcast every week, consistently, like, you know, whatever that might be consistently exercising. Cause I just realized the results of doing something consistently ends up just compounding over time and you don't see it in that moment.
But I feel like when you start to look at it, like now 12 months, I've, I don't know how many pieces of content I've put out there. I don't like, it's just, it's crazy numbers. And to me, that's just been the, I mean, it's one of the things where I always think back, man, what if you had just started, you know, 12 months even before that, or 12 months before that, but you know, you can always go back and think, why didn't I do that?
But now the process is really continuing that forward and just never stop writing. Yeah. So I want to do, we got just a few minutes left. I want to tell one quick, funny story that I think always made me laugh. And then I want you to talk, if you don't mind talk about your, I mean, you, you offer things like business coaching and I want people to be able to find you and
listen to your podcast and that sort of thing. So the story and maybe it's not even that funny. I thought it was I thought it was funny, but you, you were you did some work for some and we won't even mention but some giant YouTube person that had a store and then I remember you set up their store and then you left some like alert on your phone and you forgot to turn it off. And then you had like, Oh, yeah, thousands of alerts to the
point where your phone got so hot that it turned off. I didn't know that that was they worked that way? What was that? Oh, my God, that was crazy. So yeah, we built a store for a very famous YouTube influencer person. And, you know, they just came to us and there was something, I mean, we built a store pretty quickly because they had like a really tight launch date, whatever. We built it and they were like, you know, and you hear most clients say, oh, we're just going to get so many sales
on the first day. And I'm just like, yeah, whatever. It's not going to, it never happens. It's like you get a few and you're just get excited. And I just remember, and at this point, And I wasn't really in control of like doing a lot of the day-to-day work at my agency Somebody else was handling that and I think at like three o'clock in the afternoon They had set the website live and that person had started making a live YouTube video.
Like a live stream on YouTube telling people to go to the website and I think from what I remember, I think they did, $270,000 in sales and And I really thought that the app was broken because I, for some reason, I was still connected to the Shopify app and the notifications came in so quickly that it was literally like, it felt like my phone was stuttering.
It was like, like it just kept going and it just shut down and it overheated because there were so many notifications coming in and it was absolutely insane. And I just like looked at it and I was like, oh my God, this is crazy. And I went on my email and I just had like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of emails where I had to basically go into the store and take it off because I wouldn't have been able to like do any work at that point.
It was crazy. It was absolutely insane. Like I still cannot believe how crazy that was. And that was the only time that actually clients said like, oh, we're going to get a lot of sales in the first day. And they actually, I mean, they broke my phone. I think that would be the funnest thing in the world. I think that that's, and I remember even the person was kind of secret. I don't think you got to talk to the person.
And then I remember looking them up and they had 30 million followers or something. And that was crazy. Yeah, yeah, it was insane. It was absolutely insane. And so it was it was one of the craziest stories. And I just didn't realize it. And I went back to the guy and I was like, Hey, so you guys want to set up some sort of like, like revenue share partnership thing, because this seems like way more money than what you guys paid us and we'll help you with absolutely
anything. And they obviously didn't do that because they're just like, No, we know what we can make because we're just there through the roof through the roof. Crazy. Okay, so last couple minutes here, where do people find you? And then that concept of you can literally look at any person's project or product? I mean, we didn't even take the time today, but you've made apps just because you wanted to make an app. I remember one time you said, Hey, Tony, have you ever?
Have you ever just wanted to know when all your favorite teams played and have that on a calendar? And I thought, yeah, that's kind of cool. And you said, I made an app, you know, and you just made you make apps. And again, I think you alluded to that at the beginning of the show. But if you want something, you make an app for it, and then maybe it will, maybe other people will like it too. Which I love that concept. Exactly.
Yeah. I'm a big proponent. So yeah, so I'm a big proponent of solving, solving my own problems first. I'm a, I'm like the best user of my own apps. And so whenever I have a problem, I go out and I see if there's anything out there to solve that problem.
And if there isn't, then I just find the very smallest, most lean version of that to build it myself because I just need that problem solved and software can solve so many problems without having to hire a virtual assistant or whatever that might be. So that was an app called SportsCal.io. And basically you just go on, you sign up and you pick your favorite team across any sport, football, basketball, soccer, whatever you want.
And you just select your team. You pay, I think we've charged five bucks a year or something, or 15 bucks a year or something like that. And you can literally just sync up with their calendar and you never miss a game. So if you're a Kings fan, whatever that might be, you just go on and you just do that. But yeah, so my whole what I've been focusing over the past like 12 months is. Just do after all this experience with like starting businesses, running businesses, working with people,
project management, just have so many components to my overall kind of being. I really, really love helping people in any way that I can. I'm just kind of like what you do with mentorship and therapy and all these other things. For me, it's business coaching and there's no better feeling than somebody coming to you asking for help and then after even one session or two sessions, They just say, Oh man, you unlocked that thing.
I just needed somebody to tell me this or, or, or some, most of the time they just solve their own problems. You're just there to listen to them. And then they just, they're already solving their own problems and you just have to like point and be like, you know, that thing you just said, that thing you need to lean into or need to push more or cause you seem excited about that. And so for me, people can find me, I'm on Twitter.
It's just at ZBajelic, spelled Z-B-I-J-E-L-I-C, or on LinkedIn, same thing, LinkedIn.com slash in slash ZBajelic. My website also, I don't know, maybe you'll have it in the show notes. I will, I'll put them all in the notes, yeah. Perfect, so it'll be in the show notes, but it's ZlatkoBajelic.com, spelled Z-L-A-T-K-O-B-I-J-E-L-I-C. Dot com. I have a newsletter that I publish weekly. I highly recommend. I mean, I really, I've commented a few times on your newsletter.
I really like that. It's pretty concise and to the point and it's got some humor and then you you throw a, here's like the things you're enjoying. And I like that quite a bit. Yeah, yeah, I make it it's mostly around creating a personal brand and entrepreneurship and just like mindset things and all this, but it's usually like a four or five minute read. It's very quick. It's you know, I don't do like a lot of, you know, big blocks of text and make it very
consumable. It's actionable, basically actionable stuff that you can take with you and just kind of, marinate on it and actually put it to use at some point. But yeah, that's pretty much the biggest thing. My newsletter is probably one of my favorite things to do every single week. I get to just write to, you know, my, I call it my tribe, my email subscribers and people who actually are interested in it and get a little bit more personal with them.
And then, yeah, I read on Twitter every single day. I run on LinkedIn every single day. Yeah. Your podcast, a lot of business coach and I have a podcast that I publish every single week, at least one episode. I'm getting into my 30th episode. So yay to that. But yeah, that's kind of where you can find me happy to help anybody that needs help with anything. And yeah, it's been, it's been really awesome. chatting. Thanks for. Yeah, no, it's a time.
Tony, I think it's it's kind of nice to get to really understand your entire I know it sounds so cliched, but your entire journey because I think you again, I don't even think you recognize how impressive that is that when you think of something, you build it. If you want to try something new, you do it. And, then you just learn from there.
And I feel like I work with so many people that say, if only I could work for myself or if only I could start something and I know hearing you over and over again, then you just say, okay, well, then let's do it. And so sometimes I think people just need the permission to know, or even where to start. And I feel like that's something that you can offer. So I think it would be really nice. I'm here to give permission to anybody to do everything that they want to do.
There you go. And if they haven't happened, they sell things and it blows up your phone, then you just want to wet your beak a little bit, right? Absolutely, man. Thank you so much. All right, I can't wait to hear from you. Music. Distance don't explode allow the understanding through to heal the legs and hearts. Music.