“Moving back to Florida was a risk, but I knew that I had to get out of my comfort zone. . . . I wasn’t getting any younger. But I was willing to start back at zero and put in the work. I wake up every day and I’m happy with what I’m doing. But then I’m hanging out with some friends and they’re just like, ‘God, I hate what I’m doing.’ Dude, there’s no reason why [you should be] doing something that you hate nowadays. But they’re afraid to fail, or they’re afraid about what their image will look like.”
He gets it. It’s hard to impress women when you tell them that you’re living with your parents. “I’m thirty-one years old, definitely feel like I want to settle down more. But if I meet a girl nowadays, there has to be an understanding. I’m trying to create something bigger here, and I need to make this sacrifice for the next year-and-a-half of my life so I can have a better life, and a potentially better life for us within the next five years. If you’re not cool with that, you’re not the girl I’m looking for.”
Rodrigo started out in the restaurant business, first with his family, later working for a large corporation. About seven years ago, he won a GoPro at a company holiday party raffle. He loved playing around with it and making videos but had no intention of doing anything else with it until he visited a friend of his living in Peru. The friend was a real estate agent, and one day, when his photographer didn’t show up, he asked if Rodrigo could take the pictures instead. He agreed but then offered to take some videos of the property, too. He spent the next seven months filming and renting real estate properties in Peru.
Upon his return to the United States, he moved to New York for a short-lived position at one of his previous employer’s new restaurants, then paid the bills by working at a tennis club, where he landed his next job as a personal chef for a family in the Hamptons, while also freelancing with a catering company. He discovered Crush It! when his company cooked for Techweek 2015 and he heard this Belarusian immigrant tell the story of how he made money as a New Jersey teenager buying Shaq dolls at the dollar store and returning them to Kmart across the street for a full refund. This kind of hustle was familiar to Rodrigo, whose family had moved to the States from Brazil when he was a small child. Money was tight, so when his parents would go to Costco to buy supplies for the restaurant, he’d buy a box of candy bars for six or seven bucks and sell them to his classmates at school for a dollar each.
He’d listen to Crush It! during his hour-long subway commute from his apartment in Crown Heights to cook for his clients’ family on the Upper East Side, and it convinced him to follow his passion and start filming. Film school was financially out of the question; he was going to have to learn on the job. He started with his roommates, who were models, and then offered to do a shoot for a clothing company where one of his friends worked. They put the shoot up on their Instagram, and it got so much attention that they invited him to shoot another event. He earned a little money for that gig, but it would be the only one that paid out of the next ten or so videos he’d create. And that was by design. While taking so many online Udemy classes that the company contacted him to find out why he was consuming so much content so fast, he was offering his services for free to anyone he could find. “I’d find someone who was having an event, and say, ‘Hey, is somebody shooting for you?’ And if they said no, I’d offer myself up. It was pretty much, what can I do to get my foot in the door? I didn’t have the technical skills, but I figured going out and learning and getting the field experience and the opportunity to work with clients was going to benefit me in the long run, so when I was ready to charge somebody, all those skills from the free stuff I was doing would come into play.”
He had the perfect day job to accommodate his training. The family he worked for in the Hamptons and the Upper East Side would have him work about forty hours over two or three days, which left the rest of the week open for him to work on his craft. “You have to start building those connections. That’s what drove me. At first it could be discouraging, but Rome wasn’t built in a day.”
After about three months, he finally got paid $200 to film a behind-the-scenes video for a large publication. Eager to get away from the New York winters, he started researching the Florida market for those types of videos and discovered that there was a void. No one was doing that kind of work down there. He decided he would be the one to create a market for it.
So Rodrigo moved back to Florida in March 2016. Things did not go well.
In New York, I would find a client and then do the whole project for them, the whole process, shooting a video, editing, and producing. I thought I was going to come back to Florida and be this hotshot from New York, and then I realized that no one cares that I was in New York. It’s one of those things; I needed to wake up and realize that the other thing I learned about from Crush It! is growing a personal brand. At first, I was like, “Hey, I’m Rodrigo Tasca from Rodrigo Tasca Productions.” And everyone is like, “Who?” And pretty much I got a lot of doors shut on me. But then I changed my brand to Tasca Studios, and then people were willing to set up an appointment to meet with me and hear what I had to say, and learn that there was a market for small-business videos versus behind-the-scenes for magazines. So changing that brand was like adjusting to the market, realizing that people didn’t want to hire just one guy who does it all, unlike New York, where if you’re not the one guy who does it all, they’re going to find someone else. There are still clients here who have only recently started a Facebook page.
Rodrigo is committed to helping his clients learn how to market online, teaching them the basics of Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube marketing, even when they resist at first. His persistence and commitment have paid off.
A year ago, when I started, we were calling businesses and offering free videos, and people were like, “No, we’re not interested,” or “No, we don’t need it.” Compare that to the fact that I now charge clients twelve hundred dollars for the day to shoot. I’m going to California. I just got back from Tennessee after shooting at a music festival. It’s just so crazy that within one year of hard work and hustle—where that has led me.
I could move out, but I’m considering staying at my parents’ house for another year and then getting an office space. My family is super supportive about what my sister and I are doing (she left her job and works with me full-time now). They’re like, “Whatever we can do to help. We wanna see this work out for you guys.” I really wouldn’t have made it this far without the support of my friends and family.
Fear of Wasting Time
If you’re under the age of thirty-five, this isn’t even an issue. You can always go back to the practical world in twenty-four months if you stink or hate what you’re doing. School and the nine-to-five grind are not going anywhere.
It bears mentioning that a fear of wasting time has also caused many more-established entrepreneurs to miss important opportunities. There are a lot of people who ceded ground on Instagram because they were putting all their energy into Twitter and Facebook. The people who laughed at Snapchat should feel pretty foolish now. Every platform is worth some investment. Of course not every one will feel like a good fit, and not every platform will pay off, but you can’t know until you spend some time there. For every Snapchat and Insta where I won, there was a Socialcam where I lost. I can assure you that whatever I learned on Socialcam made me a hell of a better player everywhere else.
People are so scared they’ll be wasting time if they try to build a business, even when their time isn’t valuable. If you’re sacrificing time you could have spent with loved ones or doing something that brings value to your life—or hell, $50K—then I can see how that might cause you some regrets. But if you’re giving up only your downtime—time you would have otherwise spent with Game of Thrones or some video games—how can you say it was wasted? You’re literally giving up empty hours in favor of doing something that could fill your life with joy, and you’re worried about wasting time? That’s bullshit. If you’re not 100 perc
ent happy with your life today, it is never a waste of time to try something that could get you there.
How I’m Crushing It
Sean O’Shea, The Good Dog
IG: @thegooddogtraining
When you’re young and your biggest dream is to become a professional musician, you accept that you’ll be working low-prestige, highly flexible jobs, like bartending and waiting tables, to keep you financially afloat until you make it. It goes with the territory. Everyone’s got to pay their dues. At twenty-five, even at thirty, you’re cool with it.
At forty, not so much.
For eleven years, Sean O’Shea worked as a valet, parking cars at a restaurant as well as for a company that handled private events for Beverly Hills celebrities. A drummer since the age of three, he’d played on hit records with artists like Alicia Keys, CeeLo Green, Jennifer Hudson, and Ghostface Killah. Despite being a part of some hit tracks, it was the valet work that was paying the bills, not the music. The future was not looking bright, and he was in “a bad space.”
His break came in the form of two demented dogs. Both pound puppies, at six months the Chow mix, Junior, and pit-Rhodesian, Oakley, were sweet and cute and everything you want in a puppy. But like a lot of dog owners, Sean didn’t really know what he was getting into. Puppies require a lot of consistent training and discipline, and Sean admits he did everything wrong. At first the dogs were just obnoxious and ill-mannered, but by the time they turned two-and-a-half, they were dangerously aggressive and reactive toward other dogs. “We were a menace to the neighborhood. They were huge, and if we were at the park and the grass was wet and they saw another dog, they would literally take off and pull me on my ass, like I was waterskiing, except on my rear across the park. I even ended up on Judge Judy because my dog had gone after another person’s dog.”
He didn’t blame the dogs; he knew the failure was his. And he knew that if he was going to keep these animals and protect them, he was going to have to figure out a way to turn things around. He started watching Dog Whisperer with Cesar Millan and studying dog-training techniques. He also started doing some deep personal development work.
“To be honest, I was a pretty good mess. I studied my ass off. Not traditional books, but a lot of personal work to change my belief system, change my values, work on character, work on everything that I had never really received as a kid or as a young adult.”
It took a few years, but eventually his methods—known as “balanced training” technique—turned his dogs into models of good behavior, much to the surprise and relief of the neighbors. The transformation was so remarkable that around 2006 he was able to start a neighborhood dog-walking business, supplementing his income as a valet and part-time musician. He became the guy who could take a giant pack of fourteen dogs out at one time and make it look easy. Naturally, people started asking him if he could train their dogs, too. As a valet and musician, he’d brought in about $20K. In his first year of training and walking, he brought in $65K. That figure doubled the second year.
Sean started to feel a new dream coalesce, one that didn’t include going on tour with a band. Yet while he had discovered a natural ability to communicate with dogs, he was not a natural businessperson. “I didn’t know anything about business. Zero. Like the word brand, the word marketing—I didn’t know anything about any of that stuff.” He read obsessively to educate himself, however, which is how he came upon Crush It! He followed every word.
“I dove in pretty naïvely, started creating a ton of videos, starting doing a ton of Facebook. I remember simple conversations with myself: If I was the consumer out there, what would cause me to come back to a Facebook page or a YouTube channel over and over again? And the only answer I could come up with was if it helped improve my life, if it had value in that sense. And that was my guiding light.”
Even though he wasn’t comfortable on camera, he started filming videos with a cheap flip cam. “Do-it-yourself videos, a ton of teaching videos, a ton of before-and-after videos, a ton of showing what we could do, but also teaching people how they could do their own thing.” Other trainers were doing the same, but his intense efforts and the fact that he was early to the platforms, served to differentiate him and elevate his profile.
A lot of trainers at the time, whether in social media or otherwise, were in a kind of chest-beating space, like, “I’ve come out of the womb and I instantly was gifted with this thing.” My journey was more like, “I fucked everything up, and I was a wreck, and my dogs were a wreck. Here’s my journey of how I got out of there. Let me share that with you guys.” I was really transparent and doing my very best to try to share the information, the tools, the approach, the techniques, and my own blueprint for how I got out, including personal-development stuff and recommended books.
I worked obsessively. I studied, studied, studied, studied, trying to understand how to do this right and how to build this, because I was so obsessed with doing something special. I finally felt like I found my break. My biggest goal was to do something that had an impact. It sounds cheesy, but that was really where I was at. I think I struggled for so long not feeling that way that when I found the opportunity, I just went kit and caboodle all the way in. I was determined to find my answer, determined to develop, cultivate the skills so I could move forward. And I knew I had a shit ton of catching up to do. I was so far behind.
His following grew quickly. He waited until he was “overflowing” with clients before quitting the valet gig. “I’d been there eleven years, and everyone was like, ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ And I was like, ‘We got plans.’”
Within a few years, he had built an international profile (he called in from Scotland for an interview for this book, after speaking in front of the Scottish Parliament about balanced training and his ideas for regulating the industry). In 2012, he opened a second location in New Orleans. He hired a partner, Laura, who had worked with some big names in Hollywood and could provide the administrative and organizational support he needed, and more trainers to handle the increased demand for his services.
Now forty-nine, Sean does very little training himself, except when especially dangerous animals come in, which he takes on until they’re safe for his team to work with. People fly their dogs in from all over the country. And trainers travel from all over the world to study with Sean and his team, learning not just training techniques but how to leverage social media for their businesses. He spends about six hours a day creating content and responding to his community. He’s also written a book and created DVDs, and he runs a Q&A podcast. “There are so many people around the world who can’t get to us and can’t get to other trainers for help with serious stuff. We’re trying to empower people. We get feedback from people in different countries, and they’re sending pictures of their dogs off leash, fully trained, just by using our free videos. It’s really awesome.”
One thing he hasn’t done is product placements. “I don’t want to cheapen the blog. Not that [I wouldn’t do it] if something amazing came along. And I don’t mean monetarily, necessarily. Money would be great, but there are so many cheesy products from people who don’t even build relationships. They just send you an e-mail and they’re like, ‘Hey, would you put this in your blog?’ No!” He has built the entire business through social media and his personal brand. In 2016, he grossed more than $600k.
Not a moment goes by when he’s not thinking about the business.
I have a little bit of downtime, but with Instagram Stories and Instagram and Facebook and YouTube and responding and training and running the business, there’s not a whole lot of extra time, but that’s cool for right now. It’s what’s needed in order to get things to the right space. I’m totally down for it. To be honest, being forty years old [when I started], I don’t feel I have time to waste. It’s not a desperate thing. It’s not a freaked-out or panicky thing. It’s just, “You don’t have time, buddy. You wasted a lot of time doing a lot of stuff that didn’t serve you. Let’s go
hard and see what you can make happen in the time you’ve got.”
Fear of Seeming Vain
When I wrote Crush It! in 2009, I got a good amount of grief from critics who accused me of glorifying narcissism. I don’t hear much from them anymore, because I’ve been proven right by the consumer, aka the market: developing a strong personal brand leads to business success. Don’t worry about seeming vain. Embrace it. Everybody else who is crushing it did. Remember, smart entrepreneurs don’t care what other people think. You’ll look like an ass for a while if you walk around with a camera constantly pointed at your face, but everyone looks like an ass when trying something new. Reality TV was once a joke, remember? Now you can’t turn around without seeing a reality star on a magazine cover, a makeup counter, some exercise equipment, or a frozen-food package. Everyone’s an ass until they’re a pioneer.
Set Your Mind to Success
The most exciting part about being an entrepreneur today is that we’re still living in the early years. The pool is crowded, but there is still plenty of room for you. Get in while you can! Look, I’m sympathetic. I didn’t learn how to swim until I was nine years old because I was too scared to put my face in the water. The only reason I finally learned was that one day I was playing air hockey at the community pool when I heard my mom clapping and cheering. My younger sister had just figured out how to do the crawl stroke and was making her way across the pool. I ripped off my shirt, threw myself into the pool, and started swimming before my mom’s applause stopped echoing. There was no way my sister was going to learn to swim before me.