I've been reflecting a lot lately, and perhaps this is an outgrowth of my station in life, where I find myself at this time and place in history. And if all goes as planned, this episode will release on my birthday on April 16th, 2024. So before we get too deep into this episode, Happy Birthday to me. Now, with that out of the way, I'd like to share what I would like to call my own pivot story.
I believe my story may ring relevant to you here on this rebranded and refocused podcast of Urelevant. I see not only my career at an inflection point, but likely yours as well, thanks to AI. We all are faced with figuring out how we can navigate an AI pivot. My hope is to make sense of where we are heading next, and hopefully my mistakes and journey to figuring things out as far as how to effectively pivot in changing times can help brighten your outlook and give you hope.
Now, I used to joke that my career had more pivots than Kobe Bryant. What I mean by that is that I have held many different jobs over the past roughly 40 years of an unusual career path. My first job was as a paper boy. I followed that by being a pizza maker.
I even sold vacuum cleaner for a week. And yes, you heard that right. I said vacuum cleaner or singular and not plural because I sold a grand total of one, which was to my grandparents. They quickly asked for a refund as soon as I quit. So I decided to look elsewhere for employment.
So I have toiled as a tool room foreman, failed as a package sorter for UPS and even worked as a salesman at a sheet music store.
I've worked in call centers selling landlines for AT&T and computers for Dell. I worked as a consultant during the birth of the internet and did work for large companies, which no longer exist. I've worked for translation companies on large projects into 20 plus languages, which required, at that time, swapping out hard drives for double byte and right to left languages.
I have written and distributed Y2K procedures via CD-ROMs, mailing them to outposts far and wide through snail mail. I've worked as a technical writer for 15 years, and I used to say that I wrote the manuals that no one reads, and for the most part, that held true.
Also, I noticed a strange thing with the arrival of the iPad. My two year old son was easily navigating its interface with his fingers and sometimes even his nose. At the time of its release. And now he's well into his teens. At those key moments in time when I observed things such as my two year old son navigating an iPad, I begin to recognize a pattern.
And what that pattern was, was that I found that on any of the four walls in any given room I found myself in at that time, I could see the writing "No manual required", growing more darkly etched as time went on. That writing on the wall was telling me that I needed to pivot in my career efforts. I also had the opportunity to witness the end of my father's career, and learned that no job is permanent, and that employers are only as loyal as their bottom lines allow.
So I began to develop my own thoughts on careers, a term I refer to as "EmployMentality", namely how to get and stay employed by increasing marketable skills, which brings relevance and ultimately leverage and options. I decided to abandon the corporate ladder, adopting my own methodology I call "Corporate Scaffolding". I did this recognizing that many of my jobs were placeholders or not the ultimate creation or edifice, but a temporary placement as something more significant was in the works for long-term success.
At times, not sure what exactly I was creating, but building just the same. Always building. I've talked and written before at length regarding the importance of becoming a creator in a consumption world, And that's exactly what I've set out to do. And that creator's path has been riddled with pivots along the way. I do see many benefits now to what seemed a chaotic existence at one time or another. I've grown comfortable with discomfort and am familiar with exploring my curiosity and trying new things at all times.
And working so many jobs, I've interviewed hundreds of times and interacted with a myriad of cultures and step by step, day by day. I began to note that my interest in an ability to pivot is a defining characteristic at my own core. If I had to choose a single word persona to define myself, it would be "Pivot".
Now, in the early days of the internet, it seemed not possible to make money online. It took years before search engines matured to the point of delivering on their promise and purpose, with Google birthing concepts such as PageRank and their groundbreaking search algorithm that for once actually worked. Much like AI now, the internet was then derided as a novelty or fad.
And I don't know about you, but I have come to recognize certain individuals in my life that have been consistently wrong with their hot takes and tech prognostications, to the point that I now believe the polar opposite will happen based on their insights.
The thing about the birth of the internet and the world's adjustment to it can be characterized as a slow pivot. The internet did not take the world by storm in a month or even a year. It took multiple years for things to shake out and be figured out with the internet. So the slow pivot with the internet is fascinating for me to look back on, and I'm thankful to have come into my own professional career during that time, and having the opportunity to experience it firsthand.
And I think that reflecting on that slow pivot of the internet can help us to make sense of the much more rapid pivot we are seeing now with AI.
For my own internet pivot, what this look like for me was that from roughly 1992 to 1994, I started using what were known as bulletin boards. These were dedicated interest areas that were listed in a physical phonebook, which you could reach via a dial up modem on a landline. I didn't start hearing about the actual internet until roughly 1994, and didn't experience it for myself until I landed my first consulting job in late 1995. This was on a green screen Unix terminal or Sparc workstation.
We had to keep our internet connection by running a Unix command to keep pinging our connection, and this required a dedicated landline to be reserved for our internet access. During this time, I learned how to write HTML by hand with what was known as a command line editor called VI. You were able to write code using shortcut keys on your keyboard, where you could author your code without even needing a mouse.
These are all skills that I had acquired at that time, which I no longer have a need for and have let atrophy over time and that's okay. You will acquire skills and those skills will come and go. They have a shelf life for sure.
And that's the thing with these various technical skills or what would be referred to as hard skills, is that they can be obtained fairly readily, but are also made obsolete very readily as well, because technology does not stand still.
I really learned a lot about the internet from 1995 through the remainder of that millennium. And yes, I did spend countless hours helping companies prepare for the Y2K catastrophe that wasn't.
Once we got into the 2000s, I started becoming consumed with how to make money online. This started to become a potential reality. I was beyond intrigued and was constantly rolling that question around in my mind.
How can I make money online? How could anyone make money online? I started to see some articles about that, but it seemed impossible. But that question kept persisting, and this eventually led me down the path of registering my first domain name and creating my first business, which was called DocuMentality.
I registered DocuMentality.com on October 8th of 2003 and started my own freelance technical writing business, and my tagline was "Any document. Any size. Any language. Any questions?"
Now, by 2005, my goal was to rank number one on Google for the term Nashville Technical Writer.
This pivot for me was a decade in the making, from my initiation into the internet in 1995 to my 2005 focus on search rankings.
As a serial entrepreneur, this newfound search focus for a service based business led me down the path of starting yet another business. That's what entrepreneurs do - they start businesses, apparently, and I followed suit. This one was called SEO Page 1. I branched into creating websites and optimizing them for search for various clients. And so that SEO Page 1 stood for Search Engine Optimization, with a goal of landing people on page 1.
So the punchline here is that it took me roughly a decade, from 1995 to 2005, to pivot into some semblance of an online business. And another curious thing happened as I amassed a respectable stable of clients on the technical writing and search engine optimization fronts. I started to see the writing on the wall for some of my clients businesses.
One vivid example that stands out in my mind was that of a photographer that I had helped attain. Page one search rankings for the terms "Nashville Photographer" and "Nashville Family Portraits". This was at the beginning stages of the stock photography industry.
I recall him complaining about stock photography and how it was a scourge that simply didn't deserve to exist. I discussed ideas of him taking his photographic talents to get in early and amass a large library of stock photos that he could enjoy residual revenue from. He countered that he simply couldn't bring himself to sell his photos for $1 to $3 each, when he'd charge hundreds of dollars for them in the recent past. I think the last discussion we had about that was that he refused to do it out of principle.
But here's a hard and fast truth. The market doesn't care about or respect your principles, nor your boycotts. So now that photographer finds himself in a new career. He had to make a pivot eventually. And now he's a truck driver. He did not survive as a photographer because he didn't adapt. Now back to my own pivot story. I spent the next roughly five years doing freelance technical writing and search engine optimization work for clients.
And then I discovered the blanket with sleeves, the Snuggie. I seen the Snuggie commercials on late night TV constantly during the late hours of the winter of 2008 to 2009. I knew that people would wear the Snuggie in public, and I had to know what website I would want to post photos to of any inevitable Snuggie Sightings.
So I searched for the term "Snuggie Sightings", which brought back zero results. I decided then to register the domain name SnuggieSightings.com, and on January 10th, 2009, I got to work making that website a reality. Since I've been working for the past five years in the space of content creation and also creating websites on WordPress, I had the ability to execute on my idea.
Let me pit stop for a moment to mention that is so stunningly important for you to acquire skills that empower you to execute on ideas; either your own or those of others. And that ability comes in time, measured in months and years of hard work and not an overnight endeavor.
Now back to my executing on an idea and making that Snuggie Sightings website a reality. Within three weeks of its creation, Snuggie Sightings was featured in USA today at the top of Google Trends and was featured across almost all major media outlets in print, radio, and TV. What I originally intended as simply a humorous, diversionary website grew into a business unto itself. Once I discovered that I could earn between $12 to $15 for each resulting Snuggie sale from traffic I was referring from my website to the Snuggie parent company of All Star Marketing.
For the first tangible time in my career, I had uncoupled my time from my earnings and started making residual income. It was up there with oxygen on my favorites list.
There were several eye opening experiences as I started bringing these websites into fruition related to the Snuggie. One was that I originally wrote a satirical story about what I called Snuggie drinking games, which was reported as fact by various major news outlets. The idea was every time a Snuggie commercial would air, people in bars would take a drink, or in college dorm rooms or whatever. That was picked up by major media outlets and spread from there.
Now, that idea of a Snuggie drinking game led to a social phenomenon known as Snuggie Pub Crawls that swept the globe, frankly, with cities taking part in hosting their own Snuggie Pub Crawls, often for charities. And so I did what any self-respecting affiliate marketer would do and built a website around that as well, called SnuggiePubCrawls.com.
Now, there was another satirical article that I wrote on my Snuggie Sightings website, mentioning that there were Snuggie Sightings at Obama's inauguration, and at that time that was reported as fact across the globe by every trustworthy news media outlet out there. This led to President Obama following my Snuggie Sightings Twitter account. So those were strange days indeed, for sure.
This was also around the time that Facebook was overtaking MySpace. And so I launched the social network with sleeves called Snuggie Book. Over the coming months, I created a lot of content about the Snuggie, to say the least. And since these websites and this content were linked from a lot of various news outlets, this helped with its rankings as well for search.
And this extensive linking, plus my SEO or search engine optimization experience soon led to my various websites ranking not only number one, but also number two on Google for the search terms "Snuggie". As an affiliate marketer, I was making money all hours of the day and night, even while I slept.
You may be wondering what this has to do with the onslaught of AI in this emerging new era that we are entering into. So please bear with me, because this time was pivotal in many ways for my own journey, and also to establish the difference between a fad like the Snuggie and something that may be ushering in the next industrial revolution, namely Artificial Intelligence.
So up until that moment in time and break through with my Snuggie online successes, I'd only made money online as a service provider. And my income was capped at my ability to book clients, as well as the number of hours I could simply physically work. There is a hard cap to the 24 hours in a day. You need sleep, etc. so there's only so much that you can work in a service based business.
So this online affiliate marketing endeavor was different, and I found that my income was indeed scalable as a product promoter.
Being on the ground level and operating in the space of a very popular product helped me to learn the potential sales cadence of something big. I became well connected and established with direct response and the as seen on TV industry - meeting original sharks from Shark Tank to discussing marketing ideas and being approached by aspiring entrepreneurs, complete with their NDAs in tow for me to sign, so they could share their own product ideas for me to hopefully make go viral.
So I found myself also being interviewed as a case study in various marketing books, one of which was "Attention" by Jim Kukral. It's an interesting title because over a decade later, as I started listening to Gary Vaynerchuk or Gary Vee and learning his focus of day trading attention, I came to recognize a pattern of importance as an entrepreneur, or someone trying to sell a product or service. Figuring out where the attention is today and where it is heading is of paramount importance.
I think the same can be said for your own career and aspirations. Nurturing your ability to assess where the cultural attention is and shifting to will serve you well in gaining and increasing relevance in the marketplace of ideas. Relevance is leverage, and the more leverage you can acquire, the more persuasive you can become. Leverage works like magic in any setting, whether in a job interview, a sales presentation, or podcasts like this.
All of us are in the business of persuading and overcoming objections and whatever method of communication we attempt to command. And that shift of attention is the very definition of what it is to pivot in our professional pursuits. I began to quickly identify just how volatile my own position as a product promoter of someone else's product made me.
I not only served at the good graces of Allstar Marketing, the Snuggie parent company, but also at the whims of Google's search algorithm. When the fortunes of search engine optimization shifted virtually overnight on April 24th, 2012, with Google's infamous Penguin Search update, I found myself in need of a sudden and quick pivot. Although I knew the Snuggie was a fad and was also seasonal, peaking during the winter months in my hemisphere, I was determined to enjoy the ride for as long as it lasted.
But I was on the lookout for my next pivot always.
Enter Salesforce.
in less than three months after the Google search update that decimated my rankings, I had pivoted to gaining my first certification on the Salesforce platform and parlayed that into a six-figure job as a Salesforce developer. And this came about in August of 2012, just a few short months after that Google update.
I worked professionally for a few years as a Salesforce developer, administrator and consultant and grew in my experience with the Salesforce platform.
Then in late 2015, I discovered the Udemy platform. With a background in technical writing and training and also having sons that excelled with video production, I decided to pivot towards online training.
We released our first paid Salesforce course on March 30th of 2016, and sold 28 enrollments that first day. Every day since that day of March 30th of 2016, I've not gone a single day without at least one sell of my courses. And coming out of the gate with 28 enrollments in day one caught the attention of Udemy.
I found myself in meetings with Udemy executives on the second day of my time there on their platform. They wanted to know more about myself, about my sons, who we were, and what we had planned next. Now, I mentioned that I have not gone a day without enrollments in my courses. Over the years, I've not only taught on the Udemy platform, but have also expanded on to many other platforms such as LinkedIn Learning, Stack Skills, and many more.
In total, I've had the honor of teaching well over 300,000 students across 185 countries. I became well established in the Salesforce space as a trainer, and also attained bestselling status for all of my Salesforce courses. In fact, if you go to Udemy and search for the term "Salesforce", you'll find my name as one of the related searches. I'm also currently authoring a Salesforce book for O'Reilly media as well.
I've also launched various versions of my own learning platforms. I have a big update about what we have coming next here soon, so before we pivot into my new learning platform, I need to next pivot into the release of ChatGPT. And that was a massive pivot in my own career and a sudden pivot, And this has probably been a rapid pivot for yourself as well as you've watched AI enter into the mainstream very quickly.
It was back on November 30th of 2022. OpenAI released ChatGPT publicly. It was the fastest growing platform to 100 million users in history, reaching that milestone in less than a month. And for me, ChatGPT was love at first prompt. I instantly understood just how significant this new technological breakthrough was, and realized that the world had indeed changed.
I released my first ChatGPT course on Udemy in December of 2022. I was also selected by edX to be their first instructor to teach ChatGPT on their learning platform. Mind you, edX is a very academic powerhouse with prestigious universities that pay millions of dollars to be featured on their website.
And here I was with just some college, no college degree being selected to teach this brand new technological breakthrough with AI to their audience. I believe the reason I was selected by edX over those imminently, more qualified, was because of my ability to anticipate where tech is heading and being able to pivot quickly, and also to articulate those things in a approachable way.
This would be the ability to communicate, and that is a key soft skill, or what is more commonly being referred to now as durable skills. These communication skills, they're found on virtually every job description. And as an author, podcast host, online trainer, etc. I have studied communication skills very much so, and other soft skills as well.
With this pivot into AI, I found myself maintaining and growing my Salesforce course offerings and also doubling down on Salesforce to the point of securing that book deal with O'Reilly to teach Salesforce even further in these new mediums, such as writing books. And I also added into the mix courses on artificial intelligence and prompt engineering, and ChatGPT.
I've now also attained bestselling status in those AI related courses and areas as well. And that was one of my goals when I started creating that first ChatGPT course back in December of 2022.
Now I would like to introduce you to what I call the AI Pivot Method.
This is what I've been developing for months, and what I will be speaking at length about here on this new, improved and rebranded podcast called Urelevent. The idea behind the AI Pivot Method is to leverage the power of AI to your advantage to help you make your own pivot. Much like the rapid pivot into the AI era that we have experienced, I plan to help you navigate your own rapid AI pivot.
And to do so, I'll be launching my own learning platform called Rapid Reskill. You can go to RapidReskill.com to learn more. And at this time of this recording, we have a coming soon page where you can enter your email address to subscribe to the Rapid Reskill newsletter.
We'll be opening the doors on the Rapid Reskill website soon, and there you will find three primary focal points of training. For those of you that are listening to this after the launch. I do encourage you to try out RapidReskill.com. And so those three primary focal points would be artificial intelligence and then as well Salesforce or Business Essentials. And then third would be soft skills, also known as durable skills.
To be clear, I'm not vacating the Salesforce space. I've been asked that by many students wondering if I've given up on Salesforce or if I'm distracted by AI. The answer is no. I'm writing a book about Salesforce. I'm going to talk about Salesforce a lot, but in the context of business essentials as well, in addition to those certification trainings.
I'm not vacating the Salesforce space in any way, shape or form.
What I am doing is adding to my Salesforce training best-in-class training to help you become an expert level AI practitioner. Also, I'm going to show you how to use AI to help you rapidly reskill not only with AI and various AI tools such as ChatGPT, Claude and others, but also learning more about effective prompt engineering techniques.
And these techniques would be for things such as text, audio prompting video, prompting, visuals, and more. And not only that, but also soft skills training. I think it's very essential that you become strong with soft skills or what are now being called durable skills, because I do have a longer and more durable shelf life, and they persist through time and don't become obsolete like software so quickly.
The stronger you are with your soft skills, the better the inputs you can enter into AIs, for example, and this will assist you with getting better outputs from those AIs. And also the better you are with collaboration, not only with people, but with various AI systems, you can begin to see how important soft skills are in the age of AI.
That is where we can keep the human in the loop, and you can remain relevant because there may be some fears of being made obsolete by the advances of AI. So the soft skills are the path to success in this age of AI and the rising in importance. That's where the attention is heading, and that's one of the primary focal points of rapid reskill as well.
So think of this as the trifecta of the AI era and what Rapid Reskill's training focus is. Those three would be artificial Intelligence, Business Essentials such as Salesforce and CRM in general, and then Durable Skills / Soft Skills.
I also want to briefly mention the formation of our new company.
And this is very much a family, business and endeavor, and I'm very excited to share this news with you. I mentioned previously that this podcast Urelevant and also our online training platform of RapidReskill.com. So both Urelevant and Rapid Reskill are properties of a newly formed parent company called Velza LLC.
So Velza is admittedly an unusual word, but it has a very special meaning for me personally. And just to be clear, Velza is spelled VELZA. That was my father's name and my father was simply an exceptional man. He was kind and all he wanted to do was to help others. So my father passed away in 2019 and I've owned the domain name Velza.com for many years.
I always hoped to make his name a household name, and now is the time for me to pivot my focus to trying to make that happen. I have formed Velza LLC with a team of family members, namely my wife Christy and my sons. If all goes swimmingly, my dream is to see my daughter Emma also join in the fun once she reaches adulthood.
And Emma is a true visionary and creative. But for now, it's my wife and I and our talented sons working together to build Velza as a parent company for courses, podcasts, and books to help others navigate their own AI Pivot.
I do ask that you stay tuned to this podcast and subscribe for updates. I plan to release new episodes on Tuesdays as we continue the conversation related to topics such as Durable Skills and the Skills Graph, Business Essentials, Customer Relationship Management, Constituent Relationship Management, and also how you can use the power of AI to increase your own relevance and leverage so that you can navigate your own AI Pivot from Now to Next.
