June 2025: 7 Years of Flexibility & Freedom

On June 22, 2018, I walked away from a promising career in finance at Canada's largest pension plan to become an entrepreneur focused on building passive income businesses.

Since then, many things have changed, but many still remain the same.

So what's still the same?

• My continued passion and determination for creating durable digital businesses that generate passive income for me and my family.
• My voracious appetite for new knowledge, experiences, and connections.
• And my desire to live a life with no regrets with flexibility & freedom.

What's changed over the last 7 years?

• Digital publishing (a.k.a. blogging) has become a saturated market with traditional publishers like Forbes, New York Times, and cable TV networks like CNN and FOX squeezing out smaller, independent publishers from Google's search engine results pages (SERPs).
• This increased competition, along with Google's constant algorithm updates that generally favor larger publishers, made it difficult to scale income from my first content website (TheDermDetective.com).
• In 2021, I purchased a house in Hamilton, Ontario to protect the value of my savings from what I expected to be high and persistent inflation. Unfortunately, my timing could not be worse as my variable mortgage rate subsequently increased four-fold from a low of 1.55% to a high of 6.30% while general housing market valuations have weakened over the last 4 years.
• In 2021, I also worked in-house at a digital marketing agency based in Newmarket as an SEO Specialist and later SEO Lead. This opportunity greatly enhanced my understanding of client SEO, agency life, and eventually led me to start my own agency in 2024.
• In 2022, I travelled again for the first time since the COVID pandemic, going from 3 weeks in Croatia to 5 weeks in Greece, to over 3 months in Bangkok, Thailand. Since then, I've explored numerous cities and new countries like Vietnam, Cambodia, South Korea, and Japan. And with each experience, I gain a little more understanding and shed a little of my prior misconceptions.
• In 2023, I met the woman who means everything to me today. We met by chance during my travels and have forged a strong bond despite being oceans apart at times. I feel grateful to have someone as kind, creative, and intelligent as her by my side.
• In 2024, I started a conversion rate optimization (CRO) agency, Convert Better, to help digital businesses scale their revenue and profits with data-driven CRO methods like A/B testing. This began largely as a side business that grew out of my internal CRO work and eventually turned into my main business and income source today.
• In 2024, I also created my first online course, CRO for Beginners: More Profit, Same Traffic, that was published by IMG Courses and became the 5th most watched course in Q3.
• In 2024, I started my first joint venture partnership to create an online retailer focused on flooring products, Value Flooring Direct, which currently operates in Ontario.

This pretty much takes us to the present day. As of June 2025, my top priorities are:

• Convert Better: building brand awareness, presenting at conferences, creating case studies, and continuing to serve existing clients while paving the way for a scalable agency business
• Value Flooring Direct: scaling the paid ads traffic channel to a profitable ROAS, expansion to additional provinces (Quebec, Alberta), adding high margin products, establishing SEO foundations
• Derm Detective: diversifying into social media (IG, TikTok), experimenting with paid Google ads, migrating website to a new WordPress structure, focusing on high margin/commission products, reaching out to brands for sponsorship opportunities
• Property: final preparations for a second rental unit in my house which will help turn the property to cash flow neutral instead of cash flow negative
• Investments: exploring additional vehicles to grow my wealth long-term and preserve its value against what I expect to be continued inflationary pressures in next 10 years (government debt/spending, de-globalization, trade policy). I'm buying gold ETFs and gold miners on weakness but also big tech with earnings growth runway, as I believe both will hedge against the inevitable erosion of purchasing power in fiat currencies.

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