About
Hi! I’m Andrew.
This is my blog and my story.
To give you a bit of context, I want to take you back to what got me started on blogging in the first place because I think you’ll find a lot of similarities in our stories.
I grew up in a middle-class family in the UK — my dad worked three jobs, my mum worked too, and they did everything for their children.
From a very early age, and like many kids, I found a deep passion for Lego. I kept building and designing, and that child’s passion eventually led me down the engineering path. It was like I had found my true calling.
I followed the traditional education path, went to university, got a job, and thought I would work until I was old and grey. However, something very distinct happened to me along the way, and I suddenly couldn’t see myself being employed anymore — and that’s where the real story begins.
2011-2014: When I was at university, I was extremely fortunate to get the opportunity to work for the Red Bull F1 team. It was incredibly long hours, but it was also extremely fulfilling. Once the contract ended, I returned and finished my degree, which is where the problems began
2014-2015: My next job was working for Ford Motor Company, which sounds great on the surface but was far from it. I ended up becoming EXTREMELY unhappy, and I couldn’t see a way out — seriously!
After about 18 months at Ford, I knew I was about to break.
I hated my job, had few friends in this new place, and felt I was missing something. I felt like I had so much more to give to this world.
This brings me to the phone call that changed my life.
My sister’s boyfriend had a business out in New York. He had tried explaining what it was and how it worked to the entire family about 1000 times, only to see us scratch our heads with perplexion.
But here is the one thing I knew, and it was the only thing I needed to know: he made ‘a shit load’ of money. (actual unit of measurement)
One day I said, ‘fuck it, what have I got to lose?’ and messaged him saying, “Hey could we have a chat?” He immediately agreed (the first hurdle done!).
We jumped on the phone, and I remember saying these exact words to him like yesterday: “I know you make a shit load of money. If you teach me how to do it, I’ll work for you for free.” There was a pause, and he finally said, “yes, ok, get ready to work.”
And in a split second, my life had changed.
Over the next months, I worked every hour after my engineering job to educate myself on his business and improve my position. I was sleeping 6 hours a day to fit everything in, but I finally found some joy again in my life. I felt like I’d started taking back control.
After a few months of working part-time from home, I wanted to take the next step: go to New York and work in the office. The only problem was that I had a full-time job that paid me well and only about £1000 in total savings.
So I spoke with Chris (my sister’s boyfriend in New York) and asked if I could come out. He said yes, but getting entangled in the business and team would require me to stay a month or longer.
At this point, I’m aware that most would have said no, but that didn’t stop me because I didn’t care if I lost my job. After all, it was sucking the life out of me.
I spoke with my boss at Ford and said I need five weeks off for personal reasons, and if that wasn’t possible, I understand entirely, and I’d therefore be resigning. To my surprise, he said yes, and this is where the next chapter begins.
Flights booked (£880), bags packed (free), and I was ready with all the excitement in the world!
I landed in New York, went to my sister’s house and knew this was my home for the next five weeks. And when I say home, I mean the sofa/floor — I’m not joking!
I’d committed to come out to New York and work for free, but in trade, I needed food and a place to sleep, so my home was a small L sofa in a 1-bed apartment in the height of summer in New York.
But now, the actual game had started. Now I got to learn about this business from the front lines and what was the business of content arbitrage.
Essentially we ran ads to the news site (scribol.com), and the difference we made between the click costs and the number of ads a user saw was the business profit, simple once you understand but slightly more complex in practice.
The following month I spent learning as much as possible, living for free, and honing my craft.
As our time together wrapped up, I felt like the knowledge I had gained about business was invaluable, and I was ready to go back and do something for myself. And that is when something unexpected happened.
Chris and I chatted on my final day’s walk back to the subway. He asked, “how much do you make engineering?” I said, “about £36000” ($47000), and he followed up with, “I’ll pay you that, and you come and work out here with us and join the team.”
And that was it. My life’s direction had officially changed, and the bigger adventure had begun. (2015)
I moved out to New York as a part of the team, and my first role was uploading ads to Taboola, Outbrain, Yahoo and Facebook. My initial excitement had turned into boredom. I was doing everything they wanted, but it wasn’t challenging me at all, so I started to take an interest in the company’s data, specifically the media buying.
It soon became apparent that my love of lego and engineering was actually a passion for data and problem-solving. This media-buying stuff was just data and a problem; let me at it!
Within three months, I had gone from knowing nothing to being the head of media buying for Facebook, Outbrain and all the agency Clients we were servicing.
For the next 15 months (18 in total), the company grew from 18 million > 25 million > 40+ million per year, directly resulting from increased media buying. I felt pretty good.
But as the saying goes, all good things must come to an end, and after 18 months, I felt like I had learned everything I could. It was time to step out into this world alone. So I did just that.
There was only one slight problem. The original plan was to learn content arbitrage and then go out and do it for my own company.
However, in late 2016, the platforms that place ads on your sites (the good ones) changed their rules and set a minimum amount of traffic needed before they would work with you. That was a 6 figure investment and money I didn’t have.
So what now?
I arrived back in the UK, moved in with my girlfriend, and had no fucking clue what I would do. All I had known was content.
So I did what everyone else does and Google “how to make money online.”
The top search result is “affiliate marketing.”
So here’s a sneak peek inside my brain at this time:
I know how to buy media
I know I can sell products
I can use those skills to make millions
So I set out to make money with the skills I learned in New York.
However, it didn’t go as planned.
My main mistake? I signed up for eBay and amazon affiliate programs with tiny payouts (don’t do that!)
The result? Months of work where I spent $2500 on ads and made $250 in commissions.
Then came the era of drop shipping.
This time things went a little differently. Over the next year, I made around $200,000. My top product was a set of grooming gloves which I made a niche site around for horses called the ‘Hand Curry Combs.’
But as will become apparent, my constant desire for scale and growth became my downfall. I ended up hiring staff, testing more products, and launching more stores which did nothing but stress me out and make me no money.
However, amongst these latest hardships, I found something significant: I not only have a passion for media buying and lead generation, but I’m actually very good at it.
This realization led me to my next adventure of starting my agency, Alpha Empires. Starting and growing my agency was my ‘jam.’ I scaled to over $20k per month within 30 days of committing to this business, and it’s still a business I have today.
This leads me to my blog.
Over the last 7+ years, I’ve driven over 100 million in trackable revenue to clients and helped sell over $1 billion in real estate for teams across North America. I scaled two agencies personally, had over 26 people working for me remotely and much more.
With all that experience, I’ve learned a lot about scaling businesses, making money online, hiring people, excellent software, and best practices, which is what this blog is about.
Sharing all the best stuff and how to do things so you can shortcut the processes helps people find success much faster than I did.
I hope this blog can be a resource for you to scale your business.
Best,
Andrew Dunn
