It may seem silly, but I fell in love with marketing through one of my favorite TV Shows, Mad Men. What drew me in was the focus on human nature and the beautifully damaged characters. At the time I was watching the show, I was firmly planted in the tech world, holding a position as a project manager for a large entertainment company. I never thought that spark of curiosity would one day become my means of earning a living. I had a good job working for a good company which was more than I could say for most people with similar backgrounds to my own.

Years later, a woman came into my life that changed everything. That woman is my wife and the mother of my son. Something changed in me when we started dating. I viewed her as a high-caliber person that deserved to be with a man who was on equal footing. I knew I needed to change to become the person I felt she deserved. More importantly, I had to become someone I could love, and in turn, accepts her love.

I decided that the first step on that journey would be going back to school to finish my degree. The next semester I enrolled at USF as an economics major. The timeline was short, and I couldn’t work a full-time job, so I put in my letter of resignation for the best job I ever had. To my surprise, my boss came back to me asking me to stay with them part-time. The gesture was unexpected given there were no other part-time employees in the department. This was a stroke of luck, to be sure. The way people responded to my longing for self-improvement took me off guard. I still had a victim mentality and usually defaulted to thinking the world was against me. From that point, my perspective began to shift.

While I was in school, my employer assigned me to several marketing projects and where I got to see firsthand how their processes worked. Part of my job as a project manager was to document existing business processes and bring them into the new software that we were implementing, focusing on improving efficiency where ever we could. What interested me the most was how much the marketing department relied on technology and how essential it was for all marketers to understand how it worked. In many cases, a lack of technical knowledge was holding back the department.

The new experience with marketing projects and my economics classes gave me an idea about the changing landscape of marketing and its march toward the digital realm. I knew that tech adoption was more prevalent in large companies focused on gaining efficiency with the time and money to stomach the undertaking. On the other hand, small businesses tend to lag, especially those who have been around for a while. I thought this was a fascinating insight and could be an inefficiency in the market.

The thought didn’t get much attention for a while after that. I focused on graduating from USF and planning the wedding that would take place the same year. I ended up graduating in eighteen months and then getting married a couple of months later. It was the best year of my life, and I didn’t think it could get any better. When it came time to go back to work full time, I was offered the same job with a twenty percent raise; I couldn’t believe it. I would have been a fool to turn it down. So I took it and settled back into the corporate world.

That all changed when 2020 came around. I was laid off a week after touring operations shut down along with 95% of the workforce. It couldn’t have come at a worse time for my family; we were supposed to close our first home in two weeks. If I didn’t have a job, we would have lost the house. Luckily I got a job a week later because I was going through the interview process the month prior. This new job saved our new home, and I was extremely grateful. However, I felt I needed to verify my skillset and income stream to have more flexibility if something like this ever happened again.

I developed a relationship with a local business owner while I was working the new job. He liked my thoughts on marketing, and he decided to take a chance on me. This became my side hustle alongside my new job.

Six months later, I was laid off again, and believe me; it was a punch in the gut. The same week I got let go, I met with my one client and told him I had lost my job. He asked me to work for him, but I offered up a different proposal. I asked him to sign a retained contract for a year, and he accepted. That was the beginning of our company. It wasn’t clean or easy. It was a string of setbacks and good luck that led to the founding of WD Morgan Solutions.

A year later, we are still at it with many more clients and a lot more work. We are far from a finished product, and we strive to become better every day. We will always be thankful for the opportunities that come our way and strive to overcome any adversity.