Leaping from a stable full-time job to starting your marketing agency sounds like the ultimate dream: being your boss, setting your schedule, choosing your clients.
But here’s what most people don’t talk about. The transition is brutal, and agency life is nothing like having a job. The sleepless nights wondering if you’ll make payroll, the feast-or-famine cycle that becomes your new normal, the crushing weight of being responsible for everything from client delivery to keeping the lights on. One day, you’re celebrating landing a dream client, the next you’re dealing with scope creep that’s eating your profit margins alive. The mental shift from employee to entrepreneur isn’t just challenging–it’s a complete rewiring of how you think about work, money, and success.
Today’s guest knows this reality all too well. Jeff Tormey is the founder of SEO Guru Atlanta, LLC and Bariatric Audience, where he’s built a thriving digital marketing agency specializing in SEO and lead generation for the bariatric surgery industry. But his journey to agency ownership wasn’t the smooth success story you might expect. Jeff made the bold decision to leave his secure full-time position to strike out on his own, and he’s here to share the unfiltered truth about what that transition is like – the good, the bad, and everything they don’t tell you in the entrepreneurship books.
In this episode, Social Pulse Podcast host Mike Allton and Jeff Tormey talk about:
- Financial reality check: Understanding the true financial implications of leaving steady employment, including the feast-or-famine cycle and how to prepare for income uncertainty.
- The mental game of agency ownership: Strategies for managing the psychological shift from employee to entrepreneur and dealing with the isolation and pressure that comes with being responsible for everything.
- Building systems vs. creating a job: Practical approaches to structuring your agency from day one to ensure you’re building a scalable business rather than just an expensive position for yourself.
Resources & Brands mentioned in this episode
Full Transcript
(lightly edited)
Take us back to that moment when you first considered leaving your full-time job to start your agency. What was the catalyst for that moment?
Jeff Tormey: I was always interested in SEO for some reason. I used to do a lot of programming in college, and then I was just at a real estate seminar, and somebody was doing a lunchtime seminar on search engine optimization in 2001. So I thought it was really interesting. I’ll stick around and listen to it, and I learned about that and started working on it way back in 2001, and then really kept it in my back pocket, and was making money with it, but it wasn’t anything really serious.
And then, I noticed that the guys who I knew were what I consider to be pretty successful, almost all of ’em had started their own companies or owned their own companies. So I thought maybe I should do that; that was the impetus for me to start seriously thinking about starting my own company. It’s really scary because if you’ve got a really good, secure job, you’ve got that paycheck coming in every two weeks and insurance and everything, and then to think about walking away from all of that and trying to start something on your own, it’s pretty scary, pretty intimidating, I thought.
Mike Allton: For sure. So you’re seeing some of the guys in the industry and you’re already telling yourself a story about them, that these guys not only look successful, but that means they must be successful.
What else were you telling yourself about agency life versus the reality that you discovered?
Jeff Tormey: I didn’t have too many expectations about what it was going to be like, other than I wouldn’t have to travel so much.
So, my previous job was a great job! I was flying all over the country. I was on an airplane at least every other week, and then especially after nine eleven happened and the security got tighter and the lines got longer, that was tough. Then I started thinking, could I use my time in a better way? Because just flying around the country and all that, you feel like you’re wasting a lot of time, ’cause there is a lot of downtime.
So that’s when I started thinking about it, if I found and started doing this full-time, I bet I could make it because, hey, other people have, and it’s a big country, so why don’t I give it a shot and see how it goes? So that’s what happened.
How did you prepare for the income uncertainty?
Jeff Tormey: Okay. Yeah, so it was a big leap of faith, but I did have several concerns.
So I had gone to some networking meetings and built up some clients and then gotten a couple pretty nice-sized ones to the point where I was pretty much at my current income, at my old income, and at that point, I didn’t have a huge amount of money in the bank to finance this thing. I basically was going to bootstrap it, so I needed to make sure that, okay, I think I can cover my bills every month, feed the kids, all that kind of stuff, and pay the mortgage.
I just had to finally, one day, step away and then devote myself totally to it so that I could stay financially solvent, and one of the things that scared me the most is being a new agency owner was, like around the holidays or the summer are people just going to stop paying over the holidays because they can’t afford it over the holidays? That never happened at all.
The thing I found that was really nice was that if you’re doing a good job and you have a relationship with these people, they like you and they want to have their business grow, and they’re going to depend on you. So that was a real thing that, you know, I felt like I wasn’t going to just suddenly lose all my clients, so that was good.
And then the other thing is, I used to be in real estate, Mike, and the thing about real estate is a cash monster. I invested in real estate, it’s a great business, you can make a lot of money. You can also go through huge amounts of cash. One of the things I noticed about this was that I didn’t have to have so much overhead, which I think, what causes a low barrier to entry, so many people want to try to get into it.
And then once you get into it, you realize it’s harder than it looks to make sure that you keep all those clients happy to deliver, to do the reporting, and then to grow your business.
Mike Allton: There are some fantastic points that you just read.
If those of you listening are thinking about starting an agency, you’d have to make sure that, if possible, you’re already starting to do some agency work while you still have that comfort zone of a full-time job, right? You’re starting to bring in clients, you’re starting to lay the groundwork. Ideally, you get to the point where, like Jeff just said, he was making enough from his part-time clients to equal what he was making from his full-time job, which is realistic.
It’s also one of the sexy, appealing parts about agencies that there’s less of a ceiling or there’s a greater ceiling, I should say, in terms of income, and then you can go full-time and start to bring on staff and really scale and expand. So I love that you had that approach. That’s fantastic.
I want to go back to what we talked about in the introduction. I just mentioned by the way, you’re in this bariatric surgery field, which is fascinating to me, I know a lot of agencies’ niche, but this seems to me particularly narrow.
Did you just fall into a niche in this particular industry?
Jeff Tormey: I was going to these BNI networking meetings that just try to scare up some business, which, generally, you don’t get a lot from, but I did get some really good ones. And one of the guys who was in there talked to me afterwards, and he said, “Hey, let’s get together and chat,” and he was telling me about how he had built some specialty products for managing the patient journey once they’re in a doctor’s office, and he was focused on bariatric surgery.
I didn’t even know what bariatric surgery was, and he is like, “Oh, yeah, it’s a niche, but there’s a lot of it going on out there.” And at the time I was starting to learn about using big data and buying data and then using that data for Ads, essentially, and so I said this sounds like a great niche to try using big data to reach that market ’cause it’s not that easy to reach, if you’re trying to reach people that are morbidly obese, it’s not in their Facebook profile.
It’s just data that’s not generally available. So we ended up buying big data and using those in those campaigns, and it worked out real. Basically, I was introduced to that whole market by somebody else, and then they were just basically bringing me into a whole bunch of accounts that needed marketing help.
Mike Allton: I love that so much. First of all, it’s a variation on a fairly common theme, which is that almost everybody starts off doing marketing, freelance marketing, even agency work on a general basis, and then they discover or land, or maybe they tend to focus on a particular niche. That’s what you need to do, folks: you need to specialize in very specific niches.
One of my great friends, Andrew Davis, who’s a speaker, talks about this from a speaking perspective, but it’s true for everybody else. Pick a niche that you’re familiar with, and then you can speak the language to those business owners and those employees. You’re just so much more familiar with them.
Now, you know so much more about the bariatric surgery industry than I do, and if you were talking to a prospect, you know what their pain points are. So Andrew talks about finding a niche like this, and then if you want to, you could expand into what he calls fractals, which are like complementary niches. Maybe there are other areas of surgery, maybe they’re businesses that are in that same niche, but they’re serving that niche. It’s just a fantastic way to go.
Folks, if you’re struggling to get business, go to networking events, go to other kinds of events, network with people, create a mastermind group, and be open to the opportunities that other folks can give you.
But I’m wondering, ’cause that’s very different from what you were doing as a full-time employee. That sounds like a mental shift. Was it the biggest mental shift?
What were the mental shifts that you had to make going from employee to agency owner in a real historical transition?
Jeff Tormey: Yeah, it’s just a little bit stressful. The thing about it, when you decide to do this on your own, is if you’re successful, you get all the credit, and if you fail, you get all the blame because nothing is stopping you. There are a lot of successful people, there are a lot of people who are failures, and it just depends on what they did and the actions that they took.
So I think one of the mental things that I had to focus on was just making sure that I was in the right mental state. I was a junkie and took all kinds of courses from countless different people and listened to videos and everything in the world to educate myself, so that was fulfilling.
And then when I decided to start going to this full-time, I had to just keep remembering what I had learned and apply what I learned, so that’s one of the most important things. Apply what you’ve learned, because it’s one thing to pay money and take classes and listen to podcasts and stuff like that, but if you’re not going to take action and implement some of those things and stay focused on those, it can be a little bit of a waste of time.
And like in my case, I was realizing I had all the knowledge, I had all the information, I had to just pull it outta my brain and start implementing it. So that was a huge mental shift for me . Instead of taking so much information, I had to now start outputting all of the work, and it’s not bad work, you do; t get blisters on your fingers, but it’s a lot of mental work. It can be a mentally draining job.
Tell us about a time in those early days when you questioned if you’d made the right decision and how you pushed through that moment.
Jeff Tormey: Yeah, so I don’t think I ever really doubted myself too much, ’cause I had thought about doing a lot of different things.
Like I said, I was doing investment real estate and then started doing this, and then I guess I figured that I didn’t have any doubts because I thought that if I just paid attention to what I was doing and had a plan, and got good advice and got help, that I would be able to push through.
So when I would get stuck, and I did get stuck, definitely, I got stuck where I wasn’t closing enough deals. My close rate got low. That was a scary moment, and then I think most agency owners wonder, Am I charging too much? Am I charging enough? What’s going wrong?
So, I hired a business coach, paid him a lot of money, and he helped me tremendously. One of the very first things he did was help me get the pricing squared away, just to make it a lot easier, a lot simpler. People don’t like complex; they want easy, so just give ’em three choices.
So just doing things like that, and when I feel like I’m stuck. Getting some coaching. I’ve taken a lot of different courses; there are a lot of great guys online who have got different products to train you on how to do things, and I bought a lot of ’em. You can get a lot of free information, but I found that the good stuff is usually in the paid courses.
Plus, once you have a little skin in the game, I think you’re going to go through the whole course and then try to apply it, as opposed to if they just give it to you for free. That’s just my opinion, but that’s how I pushed through it was reaching out to people who were not necessarily just for SEO, but they were in the business of helping digital agencies, which helped me tremendously. And even though I paid ’em quite a bit of money, I made back probably 10 times that amount in the first 12 months.
Mike Allton: I could not agree more. There are all kinds of ways we can invest in ourselves through the things that we choose to read or consume, or actually reaching out to friends, colleagues, mastermind groups, or actual paid consultants.
They’re all good avenues and, frankly, necessary avenues. And when we’re hiring somebody, for instance, just as an easy example, and we ask ’em a question like what? What books have you read lately? And they’re like We don’t read books.
That’s a huge red flag to me. You’re not reading, or at least consuming new information, new ideas, regularly. You’re standing still, and you’re not going to be able to evolve, and you’re certainly not going to be able to help yourself the way that you did.
Now, earlier, another point that you made that I thought was relevant, you talked about how important the relationships were with the clients that you were building. I think that’s critical.
I think it’s an often overlooked fact of life for successful agencies. You have to do good work, and you have to foster those relationships with clients. If you’re not interested in talking to people and building relationships, frankly, this is probably the wrong industry for you, but I also think that they’re completely different.
As an employee, what do you think was the steepest learning curve for you, now that all of a sudden you’re the one responsible for building these very close, intimate relationships with clients?
Jeff Tormey: Yeah. I think maybe my background just happened to fit right or something, but I was an accounts manager for an international company, so I had some of the Fortune 500 who were my clients.
And it was technical selling, so I have an engineering degree and had always had different technical jobs, and got into sales. So there was a lot of technical selling, which could either be a plus or a minus, depending on, you don’t want to make it so technical that people’s eyes glaze over.
The fortunate thing is that in my sales job, especially with one company, I have a lot of sales training. They rested among the people, which was realistic. So when I started doing this, building rapport, relationships, how to talk to people, how to understand their business, and things like that, was super helpful.
So if you’re an agency owner and you don’t have any sales training, I would say that there is some really good sales training online. That’s going to be money well spent in my opinion, because it’s so important to be able to connect with people and to talk to them in a way that resonates with them, not just in a way that resonates with you, right? So you have to adjust how you’re going to present your material, and then when you’re an employee, you’re just going out on behalf of another company and talking to somebody, when it’s your own company, I think you feel a lot more personable or personally responsible for it.
And yeah, they also have a higher expectation of you personally, because if you’re an employee, they’re like, okay, the delivery on that’s going to be late. I can beat upon my poor sales guy, but there’s only so much you can do. When you’re talking to a real-life client and you’re the owner and you’re the guy who told ’em you could do certain things, and you need to be able to deliver on those certain things.
I thought it was a very liberating one in one way, in that, hey, I’m the guy who gets to call the shots now. I can tell the client what we can and can’t do, and I don’t have to depend on somebody else all the time to try to make the sale or to deliver the product or service.
So that was a wonderful thing. And I still enjoy that tremendously. It is a lot of responsibility, and you are dealing with people’s livelihoods. When you’re working with your clients, they’re not doing this for fun. It’s their business, and they’ve got a mortgage and spouse, and kids, and all that stuff too.
So you have to make sure that you’re going to take good care of ’em, but having that perspective of being the agency owner and getting the opportunity to be the responsible one and actually on those. I think it’s just a great feeling, and that’s one of the things I enjoy tremendously about doing this.
Mike Allton: That is such tremendous advice. Folks, go back again and listen to that segment, particularly if you’re thinking about starting your agency, you’re just starting, maybe you’re SEO or website building, or social media, or some other aspect of digital marketing, you’re fantastic at that.
If you’ve never done client relationships, if you’ve never done sales, then you need to recognize that you don’t have that experience. You lack that knowledge and take a few hours outta your day, out of your week, and get that extra training. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was blessed in a former life to have worked for a pool and spa company, a sales company, right? So I was a sales rep for a couple of years, and they gave us really solid sales training on Wednesday mornings, when nobody was coming into the stores.
They talked to us about talking to the customer, building rapport, and trying to understand what they want to accomplish. They don’t care about the width of a pool wall; they care about building an outdoor living space outside of their home where their family can enjoy themselves. And you have to go into that conversation with that mindset. That’s priceless training, folks, so make sure you invest in that.
How did you avoid the trap of just creating another expensive job for yourself instead of acting on a scalable business?
Jeff Tormey: That’s something I think most agency owners started to work on every day, that you don’t just have an expensive job for yourself where you’re just buried, but honestly, it was really being the face of the business for a very long time, and then, to scale. And I always said, geez, do I want to have employees because
I’ve managed people before, and not necessarily crazy about that, but finally got to the point where, hey, if you’re going to grow, you have to hire more, what we call project managers or client-facing people.
My SEO team was not so difficult to grow, but what I looked for were people that I thought were going to be a good fit for our culture, and our culture is, I think, we just try to be very respectful of people’s businesses. We try to bring energy to what we’re doing, and you have to have very good ethics and good communication skills. Those kinds of things.
So once I started hiring, I was so pleasantly surprised at the quality of people that I was able to hire. And that’s just been amazing, because at that point, then it’s not me just doing everything. And then once I get ’em trained and a lot of the training is just throughout the day. Some days, not everything’s a formal training session, but just being able to get some real-quality people has made a really big difference. And I did have some people who were virtual who were around the country, but now that team is mostly in Atlanta, even though we have clients all over the country.
But just being able to get really good quality people was not easy. I had to go through so many resumes and interview so many people, but when I found the right people, that made all the difference in the world. And then, as far as not just giving yourself another job, you have to be able to manage the work.
So, you have to get some systems in place so the work’s not managing you. So you’ve got to be able to control that. So you can use any kind of project management thing that you want, Monday, or there are a bunch of mouths there. It doesn’t matter which one you use as long as you use it.
And then once you can start to delegate tasks to different people through a platform, so that your work can be tracked, and just going to be a whole lot more. I guess it’s manageable, right? So there’s going to be certain deliverables, you can see what people are working on, and then the work can start to flow, and it doesn’t all have to flow through me. That’s the biggest thing.
If folks have questions for you or they want to reach out for more information, where should they go?
Jeff Tormey: You can reach me at SEO Guru Atlanta, and I’d be happy to chat. We can either set up a Zoom call or just have a phone call.
Mike Allton: Terrific. Thank you, Jeff. Thank you all for listening. We will, of course, have all of Jeff’s links in the show notes below, but that’s all the time we’ve got for today, friends.
Don’t forget to find the Social Pulse Podcast Agency edition on Apple and drop us a review. Let me know what you thought. Until next time.
