Russ Perry

And that was my aha moment afterwards.

It was like, look, I could just do really, I'll even say it, kind of boring design, production design, straight level stuff.

And if I could get it really dial in and optimized, I think I could have a different kind of business than trying to do everything under the sun.

We did around 3 million at our best year, but we were doing high ticket items.

I'm talking half a million dollar branding projects, quarter million dollar trade show events.

So one and done huge monster projects.

I never had more than eight clients at a time.

And it was unscalable and there was no sales system.

I made about every mistake in the book possible with that agency, which I actually think is like 85% of why Design Vehicle has done well is because I got all my mistakes out of the way.

We had a team size of about six people here in Scottsdale.

And then this is when I kind of fortuitously...

tested the outsourced model.

I had a partner in Buenos Aires in Argentina, and we had 12 designers and creatives down there.

And the whole model was to try to use international teams to have a lower cost of goods.

It worked on that part.

But what I misestimated was just not having a system for the projects.

And so we spent so much time redoing work, managing clients.

We lost all our profits in the client management side of it.

Interesting.

He was a 50-50 partner.