Explore Sam Beiler's journey in the Digital Advertising Agencies Industry

I love this question. For me, it means ending up in a place that you never thought you’d be as you were growing up. That’s my story. Ten years ago, I never thought I’d be the CEO of a tech company. I didn’t have roots in technology and didn’t even have the desire to own a business. I grew up in an entrepreneurial family but I didn’t really go through high school looking to start up a lot of different companies. That was my mindset growing up. However, sometimes you can find yourself in a certain position or something may grab your attention and you feel like going after it even if it isn’t related to your education or your upbringing. – Sam Beiler

The journey of building my career is somewhat unconventional. When I was young, in my early 20s, I spent the summers working on roofs. My dad owned a roofing company at the time. I was taught a good work ethic. If something was put in front of me, I would try to fix it using everything that I had. I was a quick learner. That’s where everything started. I decided to not take the college route because when I was coming out of high school my dad had founded another company called Equipter. It was a startup and manufacturing company. He had invented this piece of equipment for the roofing industry, something completely unique. It was still in its early years but I saw it as a good opportunity to gain experience. I decided to jump on board with Equipter. At Equipter, I was quickly learning different aspects of running a business. That’s where I started cultivating the desire and passion for business. I don’t necessarily say I was born with it but it was something that grew on me as I experienced it. The company really started developing as I was offered my first sales position. I was 19 when I took my first sales position at that company. I started to understand how people buy things, how to sell thing, how to position a conversation to provide value to people so much that they’ll buy whatever you’re selling. I learned a lot and eventually found my real passion in marketing three years later. When there was a vacant position for the job of the marketing director, I took it. Long story short, I started Boostpoint several years later. – Sam Beiler

First of all, I want to mention that I took every job position really seriously. I always worked like it was almost my company. That really helped me develop entrepreneurship skills and the desire to run a company. That’s kind of how I acted inside of that company. It didn’t matter whether I was working in manufacturing, sales or marketing. I really took it on myself to act as if I would own this company and that’s how I related to customers. There’s always a need for customers at sales. If there is a trade show someone had to attend, I was there. If someone needed something at ten o’clock in the evening, I was there. Doing things like that gave me the mindset to eventually want to run my own company because I was already acting like it. The actual idea for Boostpoint came after I had spent about three years in a marketing director position at Equiptor. When I thought about Boostpoint, Equiptor was in an interesting position. I had stepped in as a marketing director and we had a good product, good customer feedback, good referrals but we hadn’t figured out the market components and advertisement. We knew we had a great product but people didn’t know about it. We went to trade shows in order to get in front of people. A lot of them were interested but hadn’t heard about it before. That’s when I started to become active in social media and saw it as an extension of my sales role. Instead of calling roofers one by one, I could schedule social media posts and get in front of thousand individuals. At that time, we were already working with several marketing agencies but we weren’t satisfied with what they were doing. So, my dad and brothers were discussing about starting our own marketing department and it definitely peaked my interest. Long story short, we started hiring graphic designers, copy writers and web designer. That’s how we started developing our own internal marketing agency. What we really doubled down on was social media advertising. Facebook ads was still fairly new back then. I had a fresh perspective on marketing as a whole because I wasn’t educated in marketing or advertising. I was thinking about how I could get in front of the most people with the least amount of dollars. We didn’t have a big advertising budget. We couldn’t be in the front page of a magazine every month. I started experimenting with Facebook ads and that seemed to be the solution, I could invest 100$ in an ad and get in front of thousands of contractors. If you would’ve told me 8 or 9 years ago that I would sell pieces of equipment to contactors in Facebook, I would’ve thought it was funny. However, we started to really invest into that and it just made sense even before we could prove the ROI. We could invest 150$ and get in front of lot people. We had done a lot of mail and magazine ads, trade shows and it worked to a certain extent but it wasn’t scalable and was really expensive. We had to double down on that. Equiptor’s story is actually funny. In a nutshell, my dad just had this idea, acted on it, invented this piece of equipment and it took 10 years for things to take off. That happened when we had the product figured it out had marketing and advertising behind it. In a three year span, we went from 10-15 employees to 40-50 employees and that growth was on the backs of just figuring out Facebook and YouTube ads, digital advertising. – Sam Beiler

It was founded two years ago, in 2018. We started working on the idea in early 2018. I experienced that growth through experience, social media advertising and that’s what I contributed in Eqiuptor’s success. It was a well-oiled machine all the way round. When you think of a manufacturing company, there are a lot of moving parts and my contribution to that was in marketing and advertising. All the growth in Equiptor was driven by customer demand. We had do create that demand by implementing and understanding advertising, social media apps. Ever since I started working as a sales director at Equiptor, I had gone to all the major roofing shows for at least 8 years up to that point. As I continued to attend those as a marketing director, I just started creating more conversations around marketing and advertising in the roofing contracting space. I started hearing that conversation in social media advertising. Everybody was agreeing that this is where advertising is trending, digital ads, social media ads, that wasn’t really a question at that point. Eight years ago you’d talk about Facebook ads and people would chuckle. Three of four years ago, everyone understood that Facebook was this huge trend in advertising, it was like Google for digital ads. Contractors knew that as well but when I asked them whether they were doing it, they said ‘no’. They said the reason was because they didn’t really understand it themselves and didn’t have an agency they could trust or afford. Three years ago I heard that over and over again. In my mind, I thought this was a huge opportunity. In reality, this type of advertising wasn’t exclusive to an industry. As I really dug into the power of social media ads, I realized it didn’t matter what people weren’t advertising, it was just the most cost-effective way to capture someone’s attention. That’s you’re really looking for in digital advertising. – Sam Beiler

That’s where my personal journey really started developing. I started questioning myself “what do I want to do with my career, where do I want to put my energy in for the next decade?’. As I started seeing this problem, the solution started coming in my head to build a software that makes it easy for small businesses to run their digital ads even if they’re not a marketing expert. It will be more affordable than going to the marketing agency and also didn’t have to put the six months of learning the hard knocks that I had to put it, learning Facebook ads myself. That’s how it was for me, it didn’t happen overnight, I had to put in the work. It was six months doing Facebook ads every day before we started seeing results. So, I thought of developing a software to solve this problem. So, that was the idea of tech. at this point, I didn’t have any experience in this kind of industry. The thing that attracted me is the scalability of it. One thing I always encourage people is to position themselves to listen to the right things, people that you respect, whether it’s books or podcasts, or getting to know people through networking. That’s when you’ll be able to think bigger. Sometimes, the only limitation is our own thinking behaviors. Sometimes, you just need to position yourself under somebody else and listening to their thing and just be open to possibilities. That’s where I was at. My resource was podcast. At that time I travelled a lot at my position at Equipter to trade shows, was on the road a lot and would listen to podcasts for hours, listening to stories. I started listening to podcasts from the tech industry and really opened my mind to possibilities in this industry. Every business needs to start with an idea and the idea needs to be rooted in solving a problem for a group of people. So, I experienced, I saw the problem myself so I had a really clear idea of the problem that I wanted to solve for small businesses. Afterwards, I was thinking about the solution and how I could turn this into business. That’s where it started, that was the foundation and then just started building on the blocks of that foundation. – Sam Beiler

So, I am trying to think of which one. If you’re an entrepreneur, you’d be lying to yourself if you think you won’t make some mistakes along the way. One of the things I point out is being more open to seeking out advice from people who are a couple of steps ahead of you. In the tech world, maybe there are these huge giants that have built 1 million or 1 billion $ software companies but that’s not the type of people I’m talking about. Where we’re at right now, maybe they were here 10 years ago. These type of people aren’t going to have the time and energy to put a relationship with me. Seeking out people that are steps ahead, individuals that are also co-founders is something I highly recommend. The insight you can gain from those individuals talking about experiences they’ve had some time ago and are at the place you want to be is priceless. You can get a lot of great advice from those people. I have some connections right now but early on I was intimidated to try make those connections. We had the idea but hadn’t built a business yet so I didn’t feel confident enough to start approaching other people. That’s something I now think is very valuable and I wish I would’ve done before we launched our idea. – Sam Beiler

I really like partnerships. When I talk with aspiring entrepreneurs, I always say the key to starting a business is teaming up with somebody that you can build a company with. You’re not going to own 100% of the business. The reality is that you may be good at something but there are other things you’re not good at. If you’re building a tech company, you’re going to have the entrepreneur, the business person, the marketer, the salesperson but you also need to compliment that with a technical person. A technical co-founder is almost a must if you’re going to build a tech company. If not, you’re selling something that isn’t stable. As I was developing this idea, I knew I couldn’t write a line of code if my life depended on it. Also, I just didn’t feel it was worth working two years in learning that. I wasn’t really interested, that wasn’t something I was passionate about. I just enjoyed the idea of building a company with a team and a co-founder. I was really fortunate. Thing just wound up almost by chance. My co-founder AND cto, Jared Neff and I didn’t even know each other three or four years ago. However our core values aligned, we were similar character wise and we really got along with each other. There was just that perfect skillset fit as well. I am really good at sales, marketing, the business component things and he is super well-versed in technology and software development. It’s especially in a technology company to find a solid co-founder you have the same core values. I would recommend to entrepreneurs in other industries too. There’s so much you can benefit from having someone that compliments your skillset instead of trying to do everything yourself. It can be a co-founder or someone you just pay really well to take on that role. You won’t be able to do it all by yourself. You can get to a certain level but if you’re looking for growth and taking it beyond, you’ve got to be able to build team and have people beside you. That’s where a lot of companies fail. – Sam Beiler

The idea sparked while I was still working as a marketing director and I met Jared soon after. So, we really started developing the idea together. I had this first blub of inspiration, we wrote it down and we developed the idea together. I think it took us almost nine months to could actually put out an alpha version of our software, our product. He was the only developer at that point so we were in a shoe string but he was putting all his energy towards this. We have generally tried to push things fairly early. In the software and technology industry you really need to get your product in the hands of users as early as possible. Jared and I have different opinions about that. It’s Jared’s product and he wants it to be perfect before it gets in somebody’s hands. I am different. If it was up to me, we’d deliver things way too fast and wouldn’t have any customers because they’d be frustrated because it wouldn’t work. At the same time, we balance each other. In the beginning I could hardly wait to launch it, to get hands of actual contractors. It was about finding the balance. Eventually, the software performed well and we had a good customer experience. There were still a lot of things to be fixed in the back end, not everything was automated. However, it was a decent experience for the user and was enough for us to start proving the idea’s value and actually getting real time feedback from users. – Sam Beiler

I was creating as many conversations as possible. For about six months, we were building our company underneath the Equiptor marketing team. Boostpoint as it exists today is a partnership with the Equiper’s partners. So, there’s other partners at Boostpoint because we are still raising capital. During this six months period, I still had some responsibilities at the marketing team there but was also creating as many conversations with potential customers and users as possible. The idea in my head made sense to me. I didn’t think there was a way it would fail but that happens only if someone else believes in the solution as well. That’s when you know you’re going to have a viable business. You can have a great idea but if other people don’t believe in it by not seeing its value, you’ll never have a business. So, that was my role during that time, creating a list with people that would be interested when we finally did launches. However, there was nothing to show them at this point. So, we would put people in the waiting list for when we’d do release tests to become potential user. – Sam Beiler

When we initially started Boostpoint, I didn’t have a Pitch Deck. We weren’t exactly sure which direction we wanted to go. We had a great idea, we wanted to put it in hands of customers but didn’t know what the second step would be as far as what growth would look like. We had some initial capital to work with. For the first six months, it wasn’t what Jared and I were working on 100% of the time. We were still working at Equiptor so it didn’t take a whole lot of capital to get the idea built out. That’s what I usually recommend. If you’re looking to build a software company, there’s a lot you can do after 5 o’clock. It’s better to put in the work before you start the company or quit your job. That’s what the first couple of months looked like for us. In late 2018, we decided to do this full time. As things developed, we believed in the solution we were providing to small businesses so the idea about how to grow the business developed later on. I think there is no right answer to this. Some people may have it all mapped out, know what the next 5 years even before they ever deliver the product. We took the approach of building the product first and develop the plan later. Several months after taking the leap, we decided we would try to raise capital for the startup. We had two different choices. We could take the lifestyle route in building the company, it would be only Jared and I in the first year and we could slowly grow this business. The other alternative was to raise capital, approach investors and have them invest in our company early on and just see growth a little quicker. Sometimes, the quickest growth isn’t the best answer for the founders. You have to ask yourself: “What do you have the stomach for? What aligns more with you as founders and individuals?” One thing that drove the decision for us was the timing. To develop an idea, you really need to put timing in perspective. When we were launching our idea, we knew there was nothing like Boostpoint in the market yet so we knew this was newish idea. Some people can launch products too early and really try to sell them too early because the market just isn’t there yet. However, I had spent a decade in the contracting industry. I knew people were buying into the idea to moving things to digital app advertising, pulling advertising money out of traditional and wanting to invest in digital. So, the market was there and I knew it was the perfect time to launch and grow this thing. We wanted to do it as quickly as possible because we don’t want another person with our idea. This sense of urgency helped guide us throw. We could either find investors or decide to build this on a shoe string budget. We decided to start raising capital. That was something completely foreign to me. I didn’t really know anyone that was raising capital for a tech company. I didn’t know any founders in tech at that point. I was just jumping in this unknown world. So, we started raising money by just jumping into it and finding our way through it. – Sam Beiler

For us, we knew we had to expand beyond our current network. If we did nothing, we would never raise capital outside of the people I currently had relationships with. That’s something a lot of key founders find hard to do and freak out. They may think they can build it just from their savings account, maybe have some relatives put money into it. Maybe you can raise enough to put the idea off the ground but it comes to the point where the current network has no more capacity there so what’s the next step? It’s an overwhelming feeling. You know you need to raise capital but you don’t know how because you’ve never done it before. I didn’t know anybody who would write us 100,000$ check for the idea that I had. It can be a polarizing feeling but you have to get past that and start looking. For me that usually happens in the evening, I do a lot of researching. Most areas have communities around technology that you can plug into and where you can start building some of those relationships. An important partner of ours at Boostpoint is an organization called “Benjamin Franklin Technology Partners” and they run a TechCelerator. We’re based in Leicester, Pennsylvania. It is a city with 50,000 people but even cities of our size normally have a sort of tech community. Our partner ran an annual TechCelerator and they would bring speakers in. It was a small group of a dozen people and you could pitch your idea. You could build a Pitch Deck and start presenting to each other. Hopefully, you start raising capital afterwards. The biggest benefit for us is connecting with people that could be potential investors.  The organization has an investor program as well and invests in first-stage companies if it’s the right fit. They partnered with us and was the first firm that actually invested in our business outside of just friends and family. I had no idea that something like that even existed in Pennsylvania until I started talking to the right people, looking things up in the internet. Right now, we’ve been in business for about two years and for the past six months or so, we’ve been advertising a seed round for our business of 500,000$. That’s the type of capital that we’ll need to achieve what we want to in the next twelve months. We are building a Pitch Deck around that by looking at our business model. What gave us a lot of momentum was our systematic work. We were constantly doing, building. We’ve been trying to actually attract customers and users to our platform so we’re not just sitting here, working only on our product. We’re actually out there trying to generate revenue. In my perspective, until you actually have people paying for your product/service, you don’t really have a business. There are a lot of startups trying to raise a million dollars on an idea. If you haven’t built a successful startup before, you won’t raise any money. If you’re new in technology, you have to start building some traction and proof to support your idea and that’s what can give you the momentum in attracting investors and be successful in raising capital. – Sam Beiler

It’s a good mixture. It’s different for certain people as well. What we’ve done, Jared and I we’re really intentional. Even before we started our business and build our product, we took the time to draw out our core values. We’ve done our best to stay true to those, whether it’s been in front of clients or investors. One of these core values is transparency. We just want to be genuine with whoever we’re communication with, whether it is an investor or customer. It has created credibility for us because that’s truly who we are. People see our honesty and it helps build that credibility. Early on, when we were raising money, we were basically pre-revenue. We couldn’t just say we had 100 customers that trusted in us. I couldn’t say that I have an MBA from a certain university. So, it was just about proving that we believed in our product, our solution and that we were genuine in what we were communicating. Basically, you just need to be a good person. What I’ve seen, especially in the investor world is that they almost get numb to flashy sales pitches. I’ve talked to investors they consider it a red flag when something seems too good to be true. It is essential to go back to analyzing who you are as people, what are your core values as a company, present the reality of that and build that into a good story. To build credibility you need a really good story. This is important. You need to be a good storyteller. You need to have the experience behind that. Both Jared and I have interesting stories but sometimes that is not enough. You have to be able to communicate the story as well, build that to your Pitch Deck. Don’t try to come across as to salesy or too glamorous but try to build a good story and have proof to back it up. – Sam Beiler

I’ve been thinking this past week. For me, it’s the growth mindset. For some reason it seems to come naturally to me but I think I need to be intentional with it as well. Digging a little bit deeper, I see it as a comparison of people that are trying to create opportunity versus just catching opportunity. There’s a huge difference there. You have to be subtle, you may want growth, success and think if you just position yourself, and something will just fall on your lap. You need to have the mindset of thinking what you’re going to proactively do to create opportunity. You’ll end up doing more than the average person and more opportunities will fall on your lap. I’ve seen that happen. It started developing ten years ago when I was working in sales at Equiptor. I had no experience in sales and I was an extreme introvert as well. Naturally, if I get into a big group of people, I’m still introverted. I struggle with just joining conversations. Ten years ago, my personality was extremely introverted and there I was, needing to randomly call roofers and that was so intimidating for me. At that point we hardly had one or two inbound leads coming in a day, maybe we would get a phone call or a web lead. I realized that if I just waited for opportunity to fall in my lap, I wouldn’t go anywhere. I thought: “where can I go to create opportunity? Which other events can I go to? How many calls can I make?” I knew investors weren’t just going to come to us. You need to build your product and go show it to people. That’s what happened with Boostpoint too. We needed to go after customers and investors. As I look back at ten years of my life, that kind of mindset really helped me. It is all about continuing to stay in that growth mindset on how to create opportunities continuously. – Sam Beiler

I try to think about it this way, it’s all about dividing the energy. It’s not like I slice and dice this exact percentage of timing but when it comes to energy, you need to focus 80% on the present. Then, you can spend the remaining 20% to prepare for what’s coming down the road. There’s a balance there. I see founders and entrepreneurs always thinking about the next thing but they’re not working on what can provide value right now. For me, it’s more important to figure out what people need at this very moment. Also, it is important to stay aware of what’s happening in the next six months, the next twelve months. That’s how I think about that. We put most of our energy into the present because we need to provide value today for our clients. We also need to be providing value tomorrow. We need to be aware of where our thing is shifting. For us, it’s almost magnified because we’re in tech and marketing too. Both those industries move very quickly. So, the number one thing to consider is to be aware of the type of industry you’re in and think accordingly. – Sam Beiler

I love this question because as entrepreneurs, we need to be dreaming. To me, it’s so important to have that idea that seems to be bigger than your current shoes. For me, that was Boostpoint from day one. When I had this idea, I wanted to build a 100 million dollar Software Company. Having that aspiration is what has given us the drive to dream big, take bigger steps. If I had had the mindset of messing around, building a software and seeing where it would go, I wouldn’t have achieved anything. If we never had a goal and dream in mind, we wouldn’t be currently taking macro steps to really dream big. One of the things that drives that dream for me is that I love to surround myself with people and be rising with a team. That was one of the things that I enjoyed so much at the chance that I had Equitor to build a marketing team of six people. It was small scale but I was also involved in building a company, sales, recruiting and all of that. It expanded from 12 to 50 employees in just a few years. I was able to experience that not as the owner or president but was able to ride along with that journey. So, that was a big drive for me in Boostpoint too. I am loving the journey of building a team and rallying around an idea and a dream and bringing more people along, investing in people, developing people. It’s definitely a core mission of mine, a lot of what I want to do with my own life. So that’s kind of the other element. I’m not one of those people who want to build a large company just because. I want to have an impact in a lot of people’s lives and I’m going to need a platform to do that. – Sam Beiler

Entrepreneurship takes a lot of time. You need to be committed to it. At the same time, I have a life outside of Boostpoint as well and I think there’s an importance to that. I don’t want to wake up ten years from now realizing all I did was business and not having a family life or knowing my kids. I’m fairly young but I have three girls and we’re expecting a baby boy in two months.  I invest a lot of time into my family as well. I’m very dedicated to what I am. It does take a lot more time than if I just had a 9 to 5 job. I am a morning person, I love getting up early. You need to be willing to put in those extra hours because it’s going to take that. I could’ve stayed at my last position. I worked decent hours, nothing to extreme. In the early stages of building a company you need to take a lot less of family time. I think there is another big misconception for people getting into entrepreneurship and running a business. They think they will be making all that money. If that’s your only motivation, you’re going to lose gas after a year or two because it takes more time than that. You’re investing in equity, you’re investing a lot of sweat equity. Back to the original question, you need to be willing to put in the hours. I don’t even know how many hours put into it but there are a lot of evening when the kids go to bed and I’m working in my laptop. This morning I was behind on emails so I got up at 5 o’clock and started working on emails right away. It’s about being willing to put the work and time into it. I’m not the type of person that has everything figured out from a routine perspective. Thinking that every successful person has this routine they stick to 100% of the time is a total fantasy. Simply, you need accept that’s going to take a lot of energy and it’s going to feel like you’re giving 110% a lot of the time. That’s how I often feel. I need to exert more than 110%. It takes a lot of energy but at the same time, this is what I’m passionate about and is also how I generate energy. I feel spent at the end of every day but at the beginning of every day I feel like I have more energy because I have spent it. It’s like building a muscle. The more you work, the more you have the capacity to work. – Sam Beiler

Yeah, there’s definitely a few of those. I think one that I would disagree with is that the business or industry that you go after needs to be your dream industry. If I would’ve chosen the industry I’m most personally passionate about, it would’ve probably been around music. If I was told over and over again to follow my passion, I probably would’ve taken a route that is completely different and probably wouldn’t have taken me very far. What I have realized is that passion is more inherent and built inside of you. You can find it in whatever you do. For us, right now that industry is software and marketing and I enjoy this industry but I have worked to develop that feeling. Ten years ago, it wasn’t something I had a passion for or didn’t even think about spending my time learning about those industries. – Sam Beiler

You need thick skin as an entrepreneur because you’re going to get rejected pretty often. A lot of people give up when they get discouraged by that rejection, whether it comes from investors or potential customers. Every business goes through that, every entrepreneur goes through that. We see headlines and articles and it seems like they made it in a few years and they were always successful but behind all that, is a lot of rejection. I experienced it myself and I have seen there is a lot of it. I’ve been rejected by a lot of investors, by groups and private investors. Sometimes, they’re open to the idea but don’t think the market is right or there is too much competition. That’ve also said that I’m fairly young and inexperienced or that I don’t have a lot of education. There are so many reasons why people say ’no’ and they always find something. As an entrepreneur and founder, you need to believe in your idea 100% and in the mission that you’re trying to build. That’s what will sustain you. If you don’t truly and honestly believe in your solution, that criticism is going to tear you down and break you. I’m not saying I don’t go through times I get discouraged and wonder if things won’t pin out. Every entrepreneur has those moments but the belief in your own idea and what you’re building should be in your core. When I reset at the end of the day, even after these moments of rejection, I analyze what we’re doing and what I’ve done up to this point. I have this core belief of knowing it’s going to work. To me, that’s different from motivation. I’m not motivated 100% every single day. I am energetic, most days I bring 110%. If you have motivation, you have that flow but you need to have that core belief and to me that’s what’s more important. That’s what will truly inspire those around you, your internal team and get investors to believe in you as well. At the pre-revenue stage, investors that are going to write you a check (at least for the first 500,000$ that you raise) are putting all their money in just believing in you as an individual. You don’t have the track record of revenue or a glamorous P&L Statement. So, they’re really investing in you and you need to be a leader and believe in yourself, your team and your idea even in the face of people saying ‘no’. – Sam Beiler