Why I Quit

I am so excited to introduce Gerson Martinez as this week’s guest on “Why I Quit.” Listen to Gerson discuss his experiences of being raised in rural Maryland by his parents who emigrated from El Salvador. Learn how he achieved his lifelong dreams of getting a job on Wall Street, but why he quit to find his purpose. Get inspired hearing about his journey to help create a more financially inclusive and equitable society.

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I am so excited to introduce Cole Barger as this week’s guest on "Why I Quit." Full disclosure Cole is a member of the Founders Approach team with Phil and I, but I couldn’t think of a better guest to share their story. Listen to Cole discuss rising the corporate ladder at Stanley Black and Decker. Learn how he quit his full-time job to focus more on his personal relationships and start a business where he felt he could make a more direct impact. Get inspired listening to how he pivoted from two startups ventures in the motorcycle space to now helping founders bring their own ideas to life.

Learn More About Cole:

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If you enjoyed this episode, please either:

Sign-up for the weekly newsletter on Substack

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Subscribe and review on Apple Podcasts

Follow and review on Google Podcasts

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If you have feedback or a new guest idea, please reach out here!

Guest Intro:

I am so excited to introduce Brian Taylor as this week’s guest on “Why I Quit.” Listen as he discusses how he never had a 9-5 and he dove straight into starting his own digital marketing agency, Goldiata Creative. Learn as he speaks about how he taught himself about different service offerings that he could sell to potential clients and how he was learning on the fly of how to run a business. Get inspired hearing how he has been able to scale his agency to 4 employees, exceed his own expectations, and begin to focus on his personal goals as well.

Learn More About Brian:

Linkedin

Website

If you enjoyed this episode, please either:

Sign-up for the weekly newsletter on Substack

Follow and rate on Spotify

Subscribe and review on Apple Podcasts

Follow and review on Google Podcasts

Subscribe on Youtube

If you have feedback or a new guest idea, please reach out here!

Today, we are joined by Joanna Winkler, who first got interested in farming when working for The Food Project in high school. They brought kids together from Boston to work on an urban farm and to build a more sustainable food system. While she fell in love with farming, she did not believe it could be a viable career opportunity.

While Joanna was studying government policy in college, she worked at Red Fire Farm in Western Massachusetts during the summer. She got her first experience with a CSA, which is community supported agriculture (a group of people purchase share’s of a farm’s harvest). After graduation, she moved to Baltimore, Maryland as part of the AmeriCorps VISTA program. She got her first office experience working with the Baltimore Food Policy Initiative.

Even though Joanna loved the work she was doing, she felt trapped working full-time in an office. She moved on to her next full-time role, but she was going out into the field hosting educational events at farms. This gave her the experience to see the inner working of smaller farms. For the first time, she started thinking that she could run her own farm.

Joanna started getting heavily involved in the urban farming movement in Baltimore. She worked at Cherry Hill Urban Garden, volunteered at the Farm Alliance of Baltimore, and completed a farmer training program (where you work one day a week at farm). Around this same, Joanna met her now husband, Brian Alexander. He was also heavily involved in the farming community and had similar goals to her.

Joanna, Brian, and one their friends start planning what it would look like to run their own farm and started looking at properties at the end of 2015. They found the spot in the county a half an hour north of Baltimore and moved into the property. They spent 18 months still working full-time jobs in addition to starting Good Dog Farm. Eventually they were able to feel comfortable enough with the proceeds from the farm to make the leap to quit their jobs and run the farm full-time.

Fast forward to today, Joanna and Brian now own 25 acres of land and are growing their operation. They have staff and grow crops all year round. The offer a modern take on a CSA, where every and every other week, people can mix and match what fruits and vegetables are available based on the season. They started in Baltimore and this year and expanding to Washington D.C. for the first time this coming year.

Full disclosure, I am a customer of their CSA and could not recommend it enough for anyone in the Baltimore or DC area. If interested, look into signing up here!

Check out the conversation as we dive into the following:

• How working on a farm in high school planted a seed that eventually led to her running her own farm
• Why she felt trapped in an office job
• How she was able to work a full-time job in addition to starting and running a farm
• Why it was so important to “quit gradually” 
• What the day in the life of a farmer looks like

Listen to Joanna share her story and get inspired with her amazing advice to people thinking about following a similar path.

Today, we are joined by Lauren Elsasser Smith, who started her entrepreneurial journey by starting a food truck business while taking classes in college. After graduating, she landed her first full-time role with Birchbox and managed to keep running her food truck business on nights weekends, and vacation days.

Lauren ended up quitting Birchbox to focus full-time on her business. Around the same time, her husband, Jared, was starting his residency in Lynchburg, Virginia. So Lauren moved, sold the business, and invested the proceeds and starting her next venture in wedding photography. She was able to scale that business and eventually got recruited by Burger King Corporate to take another full-time role. She worked her way up the ranks to become the marketing manager of Burger King Northeast US.

Lauren began traveling for work and was struggling to find work life balance. She became pregnant, which shifted her priorities. She and her husband sat down to put together a detailed 6 month plan on how long they could survive without her salary. Lauren eventually worked up the courage to tell her boss she was quitting without a plan of what was next.

They cut down on their expenses and gave Lauren the space to figure out what was next. Around 6 months later, Lauren was offered the opportunity to follow her passion of teaching and is currently the Visiting Assistant Professor of Management and Marketing at her alma mater, Susquehanna University. While Lauren’s resume speaks for itself, you can tell when speaking with her how her family, relationships, and work-life balance matter above all else.

Fast forward to today and Lauren has found an incredible balance of spending time with her family and having a career she is passionate about. As most of you would guess, she is already onto the next idea of rehabbing an A-frame cabin to eventually turn into a micro wedding/Airbnb venture.

Check out the conversation as we dive into the following:

• How she was able to run side businesses in addition to a full-time job
• Why it was so hard to leave your coworkers when quitting 
• How she mapped out a 6 month plan to be able to quit
• How she prioritized her family and relationships over her career
• How the extra time and space from quitting led to her buying an A-frame Cabin to start an Airbnb and wedding venue

Listen to Lauren share her story and get inspired with her amazing advice to people thinking about following a similar path.

Today, we are joined by Nic China, who comes from a family of entrepreneurs. His grandfather immigrated from Italy and started a company in Baltimore, which was passed down to Nic’s father. Nic always knew from a young age that he wanted to start his own business, but he wanted it to a different path from the family business.

After graduating from Wake Forest University with an art degree, Nic went on one interview where he quickly realized it was not for him. He went to work for the family business, which allowed him to learn the ropes of running a business. At the same time, he was constantly trying different side hustles on nights and weekends.

While at a best friend’s wedding in Chicago, Nic had hist first experience with an open air photo booth. He had never seen anything like it and was spit balling ideas with friends about starting their own. He gets introduced to his now business partner, Patrick Rife. Next thing you know, they are building a prototype with a DSLR camera inside a box with a stand and monitor. They take it to a bar for a friend’s birthday party and the demand is off the charts. They create a time lapse video after the event and it gets shared all over social media. At this moment, they knew they were onto something and began double down building the Pixilated.

At this point, Nic is still working a full-time job and running the photo booth company on nights and weekends. They hit $40k in sales in year one and increased to $250k in year 2. Nic and Patrick are now ready to quit their full-time jobs and going all in on Pixilated. 

Nic wanted to build Pixilated to reflect his personality. He wanted to build a culture that focused on consistency and hard work, but with a laid back atmosphere built on trust. Pixilated saw huge growth year after year as they continued to iterate on their product to focus on producing the highest quality of images for events.

Fast forward to COVID and everything changed. Their events business stopped overnight. They had to cut staff and had no idea what they were going to do. They were able to pivot to built a web offering to have online photo booths for virtual events by launching PixiWeb. Even when events came back, they now had offerings to service hybrid in-person and virtual events. Today, they continue to evolve to Pixilated 3.0, which shifted their business to e-commerce. They ship out photo booths to events was easy to use instructions. They no longer need events staff and have expanded their company footprint to across the United States.

Last month, Nic and Patrick celebrated their 10 year anniversary with Pixilated. They have consistently focused on building a company they want to work for and pivoted to adapt to whatever situation is thrown at them.

Check out the conversation as we dive into the following:

• How working for the family business when he was a teenager led to his entrepreneurial dreams 
• How he was forcing to different ideas to start a business, but a photo booth company fell into his lap at a wedding
• How he worked nights and weekends for 2 years before feeling stable enough to quit his full-time job
• How finding and retaining customers is the hardest part of any business
• How he and his co-founder were forced to pivot several times to stay in business

Listen to Nic share his story and get inspired with his amazing advice to people thinking about following a similar path. 

Today, we are joined by Scott Skrivan, who followed an incredible journey from the Navy to full-time systems engineer at Lockheed Martin to quitting in order to become a tattoo artist. 

As he was in his final year at school, Scott was trying to figure out next steps. He ended up enlisting in the Navy for a 4 year tour. He followed a path into the intelligence sector as a cryptologic technician that focused on collections. 

Towards the end of his tour, Scott was ready for a change. He was struggling with his work schedule where sometimes he was working nights and others he was working weekends. He felt the role was affecting his quality of life, his personal health, and his relationships. As his enlistment ended, he had the opportunity to interview for the same exact role with Lockheed Martin, but he would only need to work 9-5 style Monday through Friday. Also, he was able to start traveling for work and ended up heading to places like Japan and Thailand.

During these travels, Scott became fascinated by the meaning and history behind tattoos. He started getting more tattoos on each trip. The more he spoke with tattoo artists, the more he learned about the industry as a whole. Throughout Scott’s life, he had always found peace in drawing. He would spend hours on end with pencil and paper. Eventually this translated into Scott designing his own tattoos. Then he started putting together his own drawing portfolio to hopefully receive a tattoo apprenticeship. 

When the opportunity arose, he would work his full-time job from 6am-2pm and would head to the tattoo shop from 3-7pm. He was learning as much as he could. He even completed his first tattoo on himself as training. He started recruiting buddies by offering free tattoos to help him practice. 

Scott had serious discussions with his wife about what this meant and how feasible this was for their lifestyle. They sat down with their financial planner to come up with a plan. They set benchmarks to make sure they could achieve their short term, medium term, and long term goals. He spent 8 months until he got to the point he would enough clients to make the leap to becoming a full-time tattoo artist. 

If you are interested in getting a tattoo or want to see his amazing work, check out his Instagram. Stop by and visit him at Spell Craft Tattoos in Baltimore!

Check out the conversation as we dive into the following:

• How drawing was always his safe space throughout his life
• How he learned the ins and outs of the tattoo industry by talking to the artists while getting his own tattoos
• How quality of life became a higher priority when considering next career opportunities
• How he learned to tattoo by first tattooing himself
• How he came up with a feasible plan to make sure tattooing was a long term viable career

Listen to Scott share his story and get inspired with his amazing advice to people thinking about following a similar path. Check out the full conversation on YouTube or Spotify by clicking the links below.

Today, we are joined by Connor Lewis, who quickly realized during an internship that his career path to be an accountant was not for him. He fell in love with film making while producing content on social issues with Northeastern University Television. He was able to secure his first job with this skill set getting hired by the Predictive Index to make marketing videos. He proved the value of content to his company and was able to work his way up to lead the department.

During COVID, his role changed. They were no longer going into the office and he spent his days working from home and editing zoom videos. He no longer felt passionate about his work and was looking for a change. He began considering different options of quitting, going into social work, or going back to grad school. Connor worked up the courage to speak honestly with his manager about how he was feeling and his manager listened. They offered him the opportunity to shift his role into making documentaries. He started with a 3 minute documentary on “being understood at work” and hit the ground running from there.

Fast forward to present day and Connor became fascinated hearing about more and more colleagues trying quitting their jobs. He began reading articles about the data behind more people transitioning jobs than ever before. He pitched his company on getting on the forefront of this issue. Over the course of a month, Connor traveled to 10 different states and interviewed industry experts, people changing careers, and companies changing their company culture in the current environment. 

These conversations led to the documentary “Work on Trial” where Connor focuses on rethinking not only where, but also why and how people work. With the relationship changing between work and life, it becomes increasingly difficult to separate the two. Connor is on a mission to give people a language to talk about what they want from work. It truly is an amazing documentary and everything should check it out here!

Check out the conversation as we dive into the following:

• How his search for purpose in the workplace led him to film making
• How his friends and colleagues quitting their jobs inspired him to make a documentary
• How jobs are like a relationship with a friend, it is not going to work if it is not beneficial for both sides
• How during his interviews the concept of “being listened to” was the number one factor that would lead to a person staying at their job
• Why it is up to both the individual and the corporation to build community in the workplace

Listen to Connor share his story and get inspired with his amazing advice to people thinking about following a similar path.

Today, we are joined by Ian Sharman, who has literally ran around the world. He started his career as an economist for Deloitte in London. While living in the city, Ian was getting tired of the nightlife scene and looking for a healthier lifestyle. After seeing a commercial for a marathon in the Sahara desert, he started training. Soon after, he completed his first half marathon and never stopped running.

Fast forward a few years and Ian became the youngest person to complete 100 marathons. Most weekends he would travel to new cities around the world, complete a marathon, and head back to work on Monday morning. He combined his love of travel and desire to keep getting better at running. 

Around this time, Ian moved to the United States while still working for Deloitte. He switched roles and was not enjoying his new position. He had just won a big race and received his first sponsorship. He decided now was the time to quit his full-time job to build a career in the Ultra Marathon industry. He focused on building a business that allowed him to run and travel around the world, while having a stable long term viable career.

Ian was able to develop multiple revenue streams, such as sponsorship, coaching, podcasting and race directing. He built a team of world class runners underneath him and has a full fledged coaching business to help train clients to achieve their goals in the Ultra Marathon space. If you are looking for a coach or looking to get into Ultra Marathoning, feel free to reach out to Ian here.

It’s hard to keep up with all of Ian’s accolades, but here is a snapshot of what he has accomplished so far. He has run over 200 ultras and marathons (PR: 2:21) in every type of weather and on all terrains. He's won over 50 multi-day races/road marathons/trail ultras or adventure races with experience of running in many mountain ranges, including the Himalayas, Andes, Rockies and European Alps. He also holds the fastest time in a trail 100-mile race by a Brit (12h44m), the record for the Grand Slam of Ultrarunning (69h49m), has won the USATF 100-mile trail championship twice and is a four-time Leadville Trail 100 Champion. Ultra Running Magazine has voted him as high as 2nd in its annual Ultra Runner of the Year rankings and 4th in Ultra Runner of the Decade.

Check out the conversation as we dive into the following:

• How he taught himself how to train for ultra marathons using trial and error
• How he is most proud of setting the record for the “Grand Slam of Ultra Running” which is four 100 miles races in one summer
• How he set his business up to be able to run and travel
• How he focused on making sure his business was a long term viable option even after his running prime is over
• Why artificial intelligence is not as good as human experience when it comes to coach

Today, we are joined by Kathleen Porter Kristiansen, who has a unique story that has taken her all across the world. She is an 8th generation “Mainer,” who grew up in Portland. While loving her hometown, Kathleen was always itching to travel aboard. When looking into law school, she found an education hack with the opportunity to go to law school for free in London. This allowed her to avoid over $200k of debt while gaining experience in the international law field.

Kathleen spent three years working for a law firm in London before switching to a new role that was stationed in Switzerland. While living full-time in a Marriott in Zurich, she got her first taste of travel points hacking. Even though she enjoyed her position, she was working over 100 hour weeks and knew that this life style was not sustainable.

Kathleen found a new role back in the UK in the field of legal technology, which she was extremely excited about. Over the next few years, she had two children and was able to take two years off for maternity leave. During this time, Kathleen kept thinking about what was next and started dabbling in different ventures. She purchased an apartment in Portland Maine to manage as an Airbnb and have a place to stay when visiting her hometown. With the first one being a success, she continued to purchase new properties to grow her Airbnb business.

Around the time, The Points Guy was looking to start a UK branch for his business. Kathleen sent multiple cold messages to the founder and was able to lock in a meeting as he was visiting the UK. This led to Kathleen being offered the opportunity to write content and she took the leap to quit her full-time job.

Fast forward, Kathleen manage three Airbnbs and has created an online brand called “Triple Passport” that focuses on travel, investing, and family content. She has been featured in several media outlets, such as CNN, CondeNaste, Vogue, etc. Also, Kathleen is a regular contributor to The Points Guy and The Points Guy UK.

If you are interested in learning more from Kathleen, feel free to follow her here.

Check out the conversation as we dive into the following:

• How she used education hacking to go to law school for free
• How she built an Airbnb business while still working a full-time job
• How social media opened the opportunity to cold connect with others and how this changed her life
• How content creation can be a roller coaster 
• How she utilizes time blocking to manage time between her businesses and her family

Listen to Kathleen share her story and get inspired with her amazing advice to people thinking about following a similar path.