JeffreyLange

I worked closely with the marketing team on everything from company newsletters and promotional flyers to video editing and social media. It gave me the chance to work across a lot of different creative projects while helping keep the company’s branding consistent.

Through this role, I became proficient with Adobe Creative Cloud, specifically InDesign, Photoshop, and After Effects.

At 17, I left home and moved to Florida for eight weeks to work in door-to-door solar sales. I lived in company-provided housing with a bunch of college students. I had no car, and every morning I was dropped off in a random neighborhood with one job...get sales.

From around 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., I knocked doors. Some days were awesome, but the majority were brutal. Door-to-door sales is hard in about a million different ways, especially when you’re 17 and alone. But I wanted to be successful so bad.

Over those eight weeks, I was rejected 2,673 times. Ten people said yes. With the average commission being around $3,000 per sale, I ended up doing very well for someone my age.

By the end of the summer, I was one of only three interns still there. I went to Florida with almost no idea what I was getting myself into and came home with a life-changing experience that ultimately started my entrepreneurial journey.

When I got back from Florida, I knew I wanted to try building something of my own. I had just spent eight weeks learning how to knock doors and sell, so I figured...why not use that same skill for myself?

I started Freedom Washers, a window cleaning business, and put about $5,000 into equipment and getting everything off the ground.

Then I recruited four of my friends, taught them how to door knock, and we started going neighborhood to neighborhood selling window cleaning services. We would knock until we had enough jobs, then go back and clean the houses we booked.

That summer, we grew the business to over $15,000 a month in revenue. It was my first time taking what I had learned working for someone else and using it to build something that was completely mine.

But I also knew I didn’t want to knock doors forever. I had figured out how to make five figures. Now I wanted to figure out how people built businesses that made six, seven, or even eight.

Skip The Groomer was completely different from anything I had done before. I was brought into the company by a very successful entrepreneur who saw potential in me and wanted to mentor me. From the beginning, the point wasn’t just to give me a job...it was to teach me how to run a business.

And that’s exactly what happened.

I got involved in nearly every part of the company. I worked on marketing, paid advertising, content, Amazon, e-commerce, inventory, product development, fulfillment, accounting, margins, financials, and the day-to-day problems that come with growing a CPG brand.

Instead of only seeing one small piece of a company, I got to see how everything connected. I learned how a product goes from an idea to something sitting in a warehouse, how you actually get people to buy it, what it costs to acquire a customer, where the money goes, and what it really takes behind the scenes to keep a brand moving forward.

For the first time, I wasn’t just learning how to sell. I was learning how to build and operate a real company.

This was the experience that ultimately made me realize I was ready for something bigger.