A "Musk-read" chronicle of our 2018 year PART 1: the first 3 months.

Planes, Trains and electric automobiles.

So we began the year @V3 Digital as a 2-man business. But like a plane departing for a new adventure, things lifted off quite fiercely.

The beauty of entrepreneurship and the gathering of the year.

We started off the year with Expo Entrepreneurs'18, the first edition of it's kind (and not the last! Hello EE'19!).

Not only we decided to collaborate by sharing their vision on social media, but it was easy because helping startups is in our DNA. In the end, we were rewarded 10x on taking the challenge of putting the event on the LinkedIn map.

The EE team were kind enough to put our Logo on the giant banner on the floor, literally giving me and LV goosebumps and being so grateful that they recognized our hard work.

I also had the chance to take part in a panel in front of thousands of participants, and talk about my passion for B2B digital strategies. Meanwhile, LV was busy handing out solutions to aspiring and active entrepreneurs.

Like I said before, the show was a risk given the time allocated to build up momentum, but the reward repaid so much more. We walked out of the event with more than 150K in new business deals.

Lesson from January: - Sometimes, you have to take risks to reap the biggest rewards.

Scaling up is not so easy. What was up with February?:

Most of February was spent hiring and scaling up... we needed to onboard people yesterday! It's funny how we focus so much on starting a business, but disregard the challenges of efficiently scaling once you made it past the launch period.

Thankfully, my EO Accelerator mentor, Hugo Boutet and Verne Harnish's book helped me make sense of it all.

After much discussion, we added 3 new members to the team, of which, is Sarah, our current Account Manager / superwoman of the team.

I hired 2 other people, both of which panned out to be bad fits.

One because the roles and responsibilities required higher business accumen and strategy than I gave Social Selling, or myself, credit for.

The other, well let's say we gambled on someone and got burned... (more on that later)

But needless to say, we riding a rocket. 2x month-on-month, busy as can be. I focussed on growth, while LV handled and steered the Operations.

It went well for the next 3 months.

Lesson from February: Always be prepared for hiring, build a candidate pipeline like you build your sales pipeline.

Thank you March... and BLVD!:

BLVD is a group of creative innovators in Montreal. They are behind most of the amazing audio-visual, immersive, 3D projects and experiences that are responsible for placing our city in the forefront of the creative world.

They also happen to be clients, and I couldn't be more blessed to get to elevate their projects on social media like we did this year.

So, in a casual conversion while planning a content calendar, Andres told me they were heading to Austin for SxSW, as they made it an annual "have-to-go" event for the last few years. I told them I was jealous, that it was a dream for me to get to attend.

Andres told me: " You want to go with us?"

I was trying to get my emotions in check, but I was celebrating like it's 1999 inside. I told him, casually: " My heart wants my legs to go home right now and pack my bags; but since I have 3 kids, I need to check with the wife first. "

She told me to go and realize my dream. The rest is history.

Met Marc Cuban's IT investor, the VP of MasterCard, lots of great entrepreneurs from Canada and Quebec.

My personal highlight was the private event (a.k.a.: don't ask me how I got invited, I am very serendipitously blessed) with the Mayor of London.

Sadiq Khan is the most impressive man active in politics in the world at the moment... he is an true inspiration.

I could probably write a book about the whole thing, but please join me in viewing this brief, non-representative snippet of the trip of a lifetime:

Lesson from March: 4 years after leaving Apple, and after long nights of hustle and a lot of near-business-death experiences, it was all worth it.

But it's still just a start(up).

Looking forward to sharing the next part! Stay tuned!

-Alex @ V3 Digital inc.