Sharing My 5-Step Professional Life Plan

Looking at life from a multi-year standpoint is the only way I’ve been able to accomplish the things I have so far, and I’ll continue to do so. When I was 6 years old, I realized that no one in my family had the kind of lifestyle, educational attainment, access or social impact that the people I looked up to as idols had (a la MLK, Ben Franklin, etc.). The main factors were clearly socio-economic and educational.

Pretty much from that point forward, I’ve made 5 life goals:

1. Earn college scholarships.

Thankfully, I won over two dozen and more than $100k in academic scholarships. Today, I have both high school and college classmates who are investors in Localeur.

2. Secure post-college, career options.

I’ve been working since I was 11 years old; filing taxes since at least 1997. I cut grass and raked leaves for my neighbors and sold bubble gum to my classmates in middle school to afford school clothes and a Beta Club trip to D.C., where I’d later move post-college to become the speechwriter for a near-Cabinet-level official and then as a communications consultant for multi-billion-dollar corporate clients; I worked 30 hours a week at Pizza Hut through high school and ended up winning a scholarship from Papa John’s (oh, the irony); I worked near full-time during college between the Texas Longhorns Media Relations Office and the UT Office of Public Affairs, and held internships at Motorola/Freescale, Southwest Airlines and half a dozen other renowned companies in college to pay for whatever the scholarships didn’t cover.

All this set me up to become eminently employable only to then realize being employable wasn’t what my slave ancestors, my mom and my journey was all about.

Today, many of my former bosses during this time are investors in Localeur.

3. Build a strong professional skillset and reputation.

When I moved back to Austin after 3.5 years in D.C., it was for a specific reason. I was going to pursue entrepreneurship. But first, as I often encourage many mentees who want to be their own bosses someday, I took a job. First, with a former college lecturer who was launching a social media and communications agency. As the first employee in the Austin office, I helped the company service some of its initial clients, worth hundreds of thousands in annual contracts each, but eventually grew disenfranchised with the idea of making something like $40 an hour with no stock when the client was being billed at over triple that. After multiple prospective and existing clients subtly offered me jobs, I jumped at the opportunity to launch my own consulting firm with my first client being FedEx whose head of communications told me to my face that she wanted to hire me (not the agency I worked for).

Today, that former FedEx executive is one of my earliest investors in Localeur, along with many of my previous clients such as Clayton Christopher (Deep Eddy Vodka) and Bridget Dunlap (Lustre Pearl, Clive, etc.).

4. Establish a strong professional network and pursue entrepreneurship.

Along with the consulting business (which I named Joah’s Ark), Sneak Attack was my first real foray into entrepreneurship since I took in money from outside investors, and I failed. Style X was next, and there I had what I’d now consider a moderate success in getting SXSW (and then ESPN X Games) invested in style.

Those businesses did not succeed at the magnitude I wanted to operate at, and I’ll work hard to repay those investors (and some) from the earnings I make from Localeur someday, but what they did was teach me a lot of valuable lessons and give me the kind of professional access, network, lessons and battle scars that people who get MBAs, even from the best of the Ivies, simply do not get. That's how I ended up being recruited by then-COO Heather Brunner and then-CEO / founder Brett Hurt to join Bazaarvoice back in early 2011 a year out from their I.P.O. And that’s where I found an industry I was passionate about (travel) along with a co-founder (Chase).

Today, Heather is an investor and on my board, Brett is an investor and adviser, and several other executives in Austin’s tech industry are invested in part because of the combination I’d built of being an emerging serial entrepreneur and having worked at a fast-growing tech startup during one of its most critical phases as a company.

5. Use entrepreneurship as a catalyst to pursue passions and serve others.

I’m currently on step 5 of my entire professional life plan. I’m 34 years old and I have, hopefully, many years to focus on this last big endeavor, which is good because when I see what people like my friend Doug Ulman are doing with both passion and purpose, I know I’m in for the long haul.

What I’ve learned is that any goal of mine shorter than a year is not worth pursuing. I’ve mentored over a dozen young people and spoken in over 100 classrooms from Blackshear Elementary here in Austin to the Wharton School of Business in Philly and one of the things I always say is that people only get measured on 2 to 3 things in life so there’s no point in wasting time on things that take less than a year to do. You wanna run a marathon? Cool, don’t plan on making a career of it unless you’re focusing on marathons alone for years. You want to lose 10 pounds? Cool, but you better plan on it being a lifetime decision or you’ll be back at square one in no time.

It took me 13 years to make #1 happen, from ages 6-18. It’s taken me the next 11 years to get through #2, #3 and #4.

For #5, I know there are a million and one major obstacles between now and being able to say I’ve gotten anywhere close to making a dent in achieving this goal. Localeur could become a whale of an outcome for my investors and myself financially or it could land somewhere that requires me to think about getting a well-paying job soon thereafter. Either way, I know this is my life’s work. Not just Localeur, not just serving on boards like AIDS Services of Austin and KLRU, and definitely not writing these long Facebook posts; no, I’m talking about legacy. I’ve got to spend my life on #5.

It’s not a destination so much as it's a journey, but sharing my goals publicly has never been about self-aggrandizement as much as its been about setting and striving to hit a bar of experience, impact and legacy that matters to me long term. In just 5 easy steps...