Financial Freedom 101

When we first started this blog, I was at my absolute infancy in business and life. Just learning the stock market and learning how money grows in this capitalistic country. Started this blog to document my path on the journey of financial freedom. Haven’t posted in over a year because I’ve been knee-deep into business. But a lot has happened, and you could say I am very close to achieving what I came out and started this blog for, which is financial freedom.

My business, Stryker Digital, officially reached a $10M run rate and collected over $10M in cash since starting this journey in under three years. It has taken a lot of work and sacrifice in time to get to this place. You would think something like this would make you feel fulfilled, but it’s actually the complete opposite. Being able to grow at this rate in such a short amount of time makes you want to see how big you could actually grow this type of business with our own bootstrapped money. I will dive into what it took for us to get here and where we plan to take this thing.

A majority of my business comes from Twitter, which is really awesome because up until 2025, we never paid a single dollar to acquire a client. Which, in business, it’s really tough to have all of your growth come from organic. My Twitter account alone generated us $5M in revenue this year, which is absolutely insane. But for 2025, we made ourselves a goal to start doing paid advertising and selling to cold traffic on platforms like Instagram and Facebook. This was a whole different challenge. But in order for us to double our business in 2025, this is what we had to do. And it was well worth it. Instead of relying on my personal brand, we were now able to mathematically calculate how we can acquire customers. A pretty cool statistic is we spent $300,000 on the dot and returned $1M in under 12 months.

The thing about this milestone is not that we collected a million dollars in cash from cold traffic. It’s what we learned along the way. Running paid advertising is a whole different ball game between marketing and sales.It’s not as easy as blasting a tweet out to your organic following, and people booking calls and closing them with you’ve been nurturing for a long time. The biggest struggle with selling to cold traffic is these people have no idea who you are or what you do. But they were willing to hop on a Zoom call with you, and you have to try to sell them a $2,000/month service. The skills this takes has improved our business dramatically. Between the types of clients we got through cold traffic and how to sell to these people who have no idea who you are, has just been a major game changer to our company and business.But the coolest part of all this is we know if we spend X amount of money, we are able to return Y when it comes to digital advertising. And that skill alone can be translated to any type of business, whether it’s B2B SaaS, marketing, or even e-commerce. These skills are stuff that we can transfer to any type of business.

Scaling A Sales Team

Something that’s been really helpful this year, and that we’re planning to do for the future, is just getting a bigger sales team.I have taken over 500 sales calls in the last three years and closed over $10M in business. The biggest takeaway at this point of our business is it’s pretty low leverage for me to be on every sales call. What’s pretty awesome is that we have two full-time closers now that are also doing sales on top of me still doing sales for higher end businesses. This has easily been the biggest move forward for my role at Striker Digital this year. It’s just like compound interest. Instead of one person (myself) taking 6 sales calls a day, I have myself and two other people taking 6 calls a day. So 18 sales calls per day really helps our business grow rapidly.

Something I plan to work on, and I’m actively working on, is going from a sales guy to more of a sales managerial role. The toughest part for me with doing that is I’m honestly just a pure closer, but at this point, it’s pretty low leverage for me. To be in these calls with the amount of clients and content I have to make to also grow our business on the marketing side. Going from player to coach is definitely one of the most important things for my whole entire business to grow. The fulfillment team and the account executive team is pretty built out, but now it’s up to me to really get this sales team running properly, without depending on me taking almost every single call.

I know it’s the middle of November right now, but we’re already thinking about our goals for 2026 and plans for 2026. Q4 for marketing agencies is a pretty slow time of year, so at this point, I’m just gearing up and getting ready for next year. In 2025, we did more in revenue and grew as business owners more than I could have ever imagined the biggest takeaways are:

We went from having a small business to actually running a proper company. When I say that, I mean we have multiple different teams within the company and different managerial roles around our company.

Looking Towards 2026

As I said earlier, we’re already looking and planning for 2026. The goal for 2026 is to do about $15M in revenue, which is a 50% growth rate from 2025. It’s a whole different ball game now in this type of business. Going from $10M to $15M isn’t going to be as easy as going from $2.5M to $10M. The logistical intensities at this level are way different than they were back in the day. At this point, we’re playing the game of acquiring the best talent possible instead of being the best talent in the business. What I need to do is dial in on my personal brand and keep making our sales team bigger. I am fortunate enough to have great team members who keep our onboarding in place.

I plan to grow my personal brand in 2026 onto other platforms outside of Twitter.I hired a content team that works for and works with a lot of different big personal brands in this space. What my business partner Andy and I are going to do is double down on our personal brand and double down on Facebook ads. If we can spend $600,000 on Facebook ads in 2026 and return $2.5 million, that would be a big win for us. It would also help us steer away from depending on my personal brand for all business growth.

The biggest takeaways of growing a company to $10M in under three years are the following:

Hire fast and fire fast. Some of the biggest mistakes we made in the beginning of this business is we kept talent on that we shouldn’t have. That cost us a lot more money in the long run than just firing them in the first place.

You need to be willing to work 6-7 days a week if you want to grow at a rapid pace and not listen to any external factors telling you you’re wrong for doing this. Otherwise, because most of the time, these types of individuals have never grown a company to this level.

Lean on mentors as much as you possibly can. People who have already experienced what you’re experiencing will help you grow so much quicker and make less mistakes, which will lead to more money in the long run.

Your employees will try to burn you, and that’s okay; that’s just a part of running a business. Just make sure you track everything numerically with the proper KPIs in place. If you do have an employee slacking and you have no proof behind it, they’re the ones that hold the leverage, and you cannot allow that.

Leverage your network and connect with as many people as you possibly can. The connections I have made over the years have allowed me to realize I can pretty much make money in any venture I go into, because I know the right people in the right places that will help me grow any type of business in any case scenario.

Money is meaningless.If you work hard, you will make a shit ton of money. It’s gotten to the point where I have almost achieved my goals of financial freedom, which is pretty cool. I started this blog to document that journey. But overall, at the end of the day, when you hit these specific milestones, all you think about is the next goal you’re looking to achieve. I think the most important part of life and business is to enjoy the days you’re in right now and not keep looking forward to the future because the good days are the ones that you’re currently experiencing. The days that you’re sitting in your desk working with your boys, traveling with your business partners, meeting new people across the country and the world that do the same thing as you is actually what the true meaning of building a business is, and the money just comes along the way as a reward.

Running an online business has a ton of ups and downs, but it has definitely changed my life and set me up for long-term success. If you made it this far and enjoyed this blog, and have any questions, comments, or anything at all, and you know me personally, shoot me a text message or email me here: bodhi@stryker-digital.com