Today I have a guest post from Sal Greco from Surfer Lifestyle Design. Sal lives a few blocks away, right on Cocoa Beach and is spending his first years out of college building an incredible niche business. Below are his ideas for post graduation.
This post is directed and dedicated to those who are about to graduate, have recently graduated, or anyone looking for a career change. What I am telling you is, “do not waste your time in this current job market, instead input yourself into your desired industry and conjure up your own education!”
Almost exactly one year to this date I was sitting in a Central Florida University classroom, studying traditional marketing, with my head in a textbook saying to myself, “WHAT THE FU*K AM I GOING TO DO WITH THIS”! (this was the semester before graduation…)
The University had me on the conventional marketing track, taking classes from marketing research, marketing strategies, to marketing management. To graduate you had to take those three courses in a row, consecutively. Now I can assure you, that when I was in the very last course, I still had no clue how to really conduct market research, strategize a marketing campaign, or manage my own self for that matter…
Real cynical thoughts popped in my head like, “maybe business school, is just a business, and they purposely do not teach you enough, so you pay to stay longer (via a traditional MBA).” Until one day, when something happened, and the future started to look brighter, and clearer…
To make more out of a project in an Entertainment Marketing class, I formed a hip-hop/funky music group, the “Pharmaceutical Funk“. The timing was perfect, because Greg had just released his course, The New Music Economy, and since I had interned under him before, he slipped me a copy to check it out.
WHAM… BAM… THANK YOU MA’AM… I had finally learned what marketing was all about. In his simple to follow eCourse, I learned more about marketing than the previous 3 years at a major university. Even though the course was geared toward musicians in context, everything was there. From researching your market (I knew mall surveys where obsolete), to obtaining leads, to what to do with those leads, and how to repeat the process in automation.
Now graduation came sneaking up on me, what was I to do? Test the job market? Continue schooling?
Although not 100% on what exactly I wanted to do with myself after college, I knew 112% of how I wanted to live life after college. I wanted to live like the “New Rich“. To make a passive income online, so I can focus my time and energy into my real passions like surfing, making music, and inspiring others. To do this I fully indulged myself into the internet marketing community, and created my own “MBA 2.0 educational program“.
Since I did not know exactly the way I wanted to earn an income online, I went about testing everything [I highly do not recommend this method, I am just A.D.H.D. (Ambitiously Desired and Hyperly-Dedicated :-)]. I decided to immerse myself within the industry, work virtually for free, and contacted all of the people who I already knew worked online to say, “is there any way I can help your business while learning something for myself?”.
Lucky enough, the company I interned with let me start testing PPC ads on Facebook, and Google. Simultaneously I started blogging for myself, and engaging in the community; Spending some time on twitter, learning from other peoples blogs, but most importantly building lasting relationships.
One of the best ways I found to simultaneously learn while networking within the industry was to attend conferences immediately. Within five months after receiving my degree I had attended five major conferences including Affiliate Summits and Murray Newlands, Social Media Marketing conferences. Besides learning a ton, at these events, I busted out my personality and met anyone I could get my hands on (for a hand shake that is). I made sure to make an impression on important people, even in the after parties, I danced like a jack-ass, just really being myself, letting my “freak-flag fly”. I believe it was this lasting impression that helped me win an Affiliate Summit West platinum scholarship from the two awesome individuals who run the show, Shawn Collins, and Missy Ward (I still cannot thank you two enough).
[note from Greg: this also included jumping on stage doing a Bill Cosby impression with 3-6 Mafia]
Without a traditional post-college program to follow, I had to be very committed, disciplined, and dedicated to learning these new crafts. Even before graduating I started reading marketing books like Purple Cow, from Seth Godin. Also, with the plethora of knowledge available online (mostly for free), learning on my own became quite overwhelming to say the least. With so many free eBooks, eCourses, webinars, podcasts and “how to” videos to choose from, it is easy to fall into a “planning paralysis” where your business is not really moving anywhere, because you are stuck in a phase of “I must know more in order to continue on”.
The biggest jump in my learning curve came when I realized, information unused is information wasted.
What is the point of learning something, if when you do not immediately put it into action, you have to re-learn it when the time comes to use it? Now that I have narrowed my field of interest, I am actually working on my own projects, as well as partnering on projects, and utilizing the “learn as you go” technique. It is the surefire way to continuously take action toward you goals, while learning and growing on your way there.
I do understand that not all things can be learned on a “need to know” basis. There are some theories, and ideas that are good to implement in your every-day way of doing things. So now to continue my “Radically Ambitious MBA 2.0,” I choose wisely the voices I learn from, and make sure that every week I spend some amount of time learning a new perspective in marketing.
You already know that the days of graduating, going right into a career job, working up the latter, retiring “happy”, and dying fulfilled are OVER. So do not waste your precious time after college cleaning up your resume (or as Tim Ferris would call it, “creative nonfiction”) or even worse, paying for more schooling when you will graduate years later with more debt in the same situation.
Instead, I super-highly encourage you to get out there, start learning for yourself, and start mixing it up with the people in your industry of choice. Go on linkedin and look for local meet ups. Go to amazon.com and look at the highly recommended readings in your field. Start a contact list of all the people you know, or want to know in your industry and ask them, “is there anything I can do (for free) to bring value to your business?”.
Whether you want to own your own business, or work for a specific company, any client or employer in this market will always go with the candidate they see taking real action in their field. I hope these words hit you strong, and do not be surprised that in the time it could take you to receive an MBA, you could be hiring someone with one, or perhaps even replacing someone with one…
Surfs up,
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