The Story I Stopped Telling

It was worth it.

As I record this, my wife and I are preparing to drive our youngest son JJ a few states over to college.

Yeah.

Since he’s our youngest, it’s the end of an era of sorts, and this has me in a reflective mood.

This also happens to be just as I’m celebrating some 15-year anniversaries. August 18th was the 15-year anniversary of when I was laid off for the second time in two and a half years.

And August 29th will be the 15-year anniversary of when I started jonloomer.com.

So while I normally use these episodes to talk specifically about Meta advertising, I thought this could be a good opportunity to look back.

I’ve realized that during the initial years of my business, I told my story a lot. It was an origin story of sorts, and it’s something that I know a lot of people connected to.

Over time, it started feeling like something I didn’t need to keep repeating. I worried about it coming off as insincere after telling it so many times, so I just… stopped.

But I’m realizing that my story was part of what made my brand unique those years ago. While now my content is hyper focused and you know what to expect, there’s a danger of it becoming sterilized without a human story behind it.

It’s quite likely you don’t know my story, and what’s awesome is how the point I’m at now is so relevant to the story I was telling then.

So let’s jump into a time machine.

15 years ago, I was laid off from my second job in two and a half years.

If you were in the workforce back then, you may remember that the period from 2008 to 2011 was chaotic.

I was 36 when this second layoff happened, and I had already had some pretty amazing career opportunities. After starting in a career that gave me no satisfaction as an insurance underwriter for five years, I made a crazy leap into fantasy sports.

I wasn’t just writing for a website or starting my own, which I had already done. I was employed by the actual National Basketball Association (THE NBA) to manage their fantasy games division.

That meant content and game development, website and magazine. It meant some brushes with celebrities, and it was awesome.

It was also my first exposure to Facebook, since the NBA partnered with Facebook in 2007. That was when there were only 50 million people on the app, and it was expanding beyond high school and college kids.

I immediately fell in love with the platform, and that would become relevant later.

Understand that taking that job, as amazing as it was, was no easy decision.

Our oldest son Michael was diagnosed with cancer at the age of 2 1/2 in 2003. It was a rare form of cancer called neuroblastoma, which often doesn’t result in a good prognosis.

While Michael was lucky, it wasn’t easy. He needed a delicate surgery to remove a golf ball-sized tumor from his chest, lodged between his aorta and spine.

While the cancer hadn’t spread and he wouldn’t need chemo, we’d need to take him in for regular scans to make sure it didn’t reappear.

So these were challenging times, but we were at least out of the woods of the scariest of those times when I was offered this job with the NBA.

We lived in Colorado at the time, which was close to family, and the job would require we move across the country to New Jersey. I would work between the Entertainment office in Secaucus and business office in Manhattan.

It was a huge change in every way imaginable, but we did it.

Not only did we have a four-year-old in Michael at that point, but he also then had a little brother Ryan.

I give my wife Lisa so much credit for being willing to make this crazy move, something that could certainly be described as a selfish move for my career.

So we moved our little family across the country for this new job.

Everything about it was pretty amazing, not only for me but for our family generally. It wasn’t easy, of course, and it was a huge shift in terms of pace and lifestyle.

We were also away from family, which certainly made the adjustment tougher.

So after three seasons, we headed back to Colorado, and I took a job with a fantasy games development startup where I could work remotely.

After six months, I was laid off.

I did some contract work for a while before taking a job as VP of Strategic Marketing for the American Cancer Society. Given our family’s experience with cancer, this was a new opportunity that hit home, and one that gave me purpose.

And then, two years later, I was laid off again.

This was 2011, and our third son JJ was born just before we returned to Colorado.

So our boys at this point were 10, 7 and 3, and I was again without a job.

Needless to say, I was suffering from a feeling of failure at this point since after leaving a job I loved, I’d lose two jobs during a short period of time.

And we had lived in six different homes over a span of seven years, moving twice across the country.

So I was not going to put my family through this again, especially at the ages that our kids were at.

I needed a job, and because I was spoiled with some great ones, I didn’t want to settle.

So I bought the domain for jonloomer.com and published my first post on August 29th, 2011.

The goal was never to start a business because I had no idea how to start one. It was to showcase my skills and experiences to help me find a job.

But what I didn’t know at the time was that this website would ultimately help fulfill one of my biggest dreams.

I desperately wanted to control my hours, spend more time with our sons, and participate in their lives as they grew up.

That was one negative of working for the NBA because the commute meant I was away from home a lot.

If possible, I wanted to work from home or at least work close to home. I didn’t want a commute and I didn’t want a job that would send me on the road for hours and days on end.

So, with that domain, I started writing about social media and marketing, but I didn’t have a focus on Facebook ads yet.

While I wrote some things that generated good traffic, my website wasn’t helping me get a job. I don’t even think I had an interview.

So I had a lot of time on my hands, and I just kept writing.

It wasn’t easy either, because I was the primary source of income for my family and we were burning through savings. I had no long-term plans for this website, but little things would happen here and there that made me realize I might have something.

I was getting lots of traffic for posts about personal use of Facebook, usually on topics about privacy settings or scams.

And while they didn’t lead to business of any kind, it was that traffic that made me realize that I might be able to make money from content.

Facebook announced Timeline for Pages in the spring of 2012, and I believe that this was the pivotal moment when my website became more than just a way to find a job.

I began focusing on helping businesses leverage Facebook, and more and more people were reading.

I would finally start monetizing the website with AdSense and affiliate partnerships and I’d even sell ad space. But it still wasn’t replacing the income I was losing.

Finally, 10 months after I launched jonloomer.com, I created my first product.

For $97, I’d review your Facebook page.

It was severely underpriced and it wouldn’t scale, but people bought it. That experience helped me understand that I may actually be able to start my own business.

And once I launched my first training course on Power Editor a few months later, it was official: I no longer needed to find a job.

And that’s when what started as such a terrifying experience of losing my job suddenly started developing into my dream scenario.

I controlled my own hours, and I worked from home. I walked my kids to school in the morning and back home at the end of the day.

And, best of all, I shared a love of baseball with my three boys.

I coached their baseball teams, which meant we could spend even more valuable time together.

And as they grew, it evolved from rec baseball to Little League to travel ball, and it became a nearly full-time commitment as a coach.

In 2015, I used skills I learned as a marketer to start a new team. I created a website and started writing articles to help attract players and families.

After coaching our oldest son Michael for a few years, I moved on to our middle son Ryan for this new team and coached him until he went to high school.

And once he moved on, that meant I could coach our youngest son JJ, which is what I did until he went to high school.

So many hours coaching, so much valuable time, and so many memories shared with each of my boys.

And while my business would explode in those early years, I started hitting some rougher patches beginning in 2020.

By the time JJ moved on to high school in 2022, I was ready to focus more of my attention on my business again, and it would come at a critical time.

Four years later, the business is still going strong.

And those boys?

Michael is now entering his final year of med school. A survivor of childhood cancer, Michael is going into pediatric medicine.

Ryan graduated from college with a major in sports journalism, and is in the early stages of his career.

And we’re taking JJ to college, where he’s looking to be the first of the three boys to keep playing ball.

We’re all entering new phases, but this will be an especially new phase for my wife Lisa and me, and the business.

Years ago, I wanted a business where I could control my hours, spend more time participating in my kids’ lives, and coach their baseball teams.

I got exactly what I wanted.

It wasn’t always easy.

Coaching had its own challenges, stresses of dealing with difficult parents, exhausting summer weekend schedules, and a pandemic that made things even tougher.

Those countless hours spent at practices and tournaments and stressing over lineups and pitching matchups also surely impacted the bottom line of my business.

But you know what?

It was worth it.

It was so, so worth it, and I can’t ignore how fortunate I’ve been to have this business which has allowed me to share these amazing experiences with my boys.

So here’s the bottom of the glass.

The first 15 years of my website and business have been an absolute whirlwind, and I’m so grateful for it.

I’m so grateful for the experiences I’ve had, but it’s time for a new phase.

While I’m still sorting out what that next phase is going to look like, I know I’ll have some amazing memories from these first 15 years.

Thanks for letting me share my story.

It’s an incomplete story, but it’s one that warms my heart and makes me proud.

I’m looking forward to that next chapter, and whatever it will bring.