From media brand to agency to $1.4M/yr holdco

Tim Stoddart built a media brand by accident. When traffic numbers rose, he didn't monetize it in the usual way; he started an agency and used his brand as the funnel. That made him millions before he sold the agency.

Now, he uses a unique model where his new agency called Quantum Leads ($1M/yr) funds his holding company ($400k/yr).

Here's Tim on how he got here. 👇

The entrepreneurial spark

I grew up in Philadelphia. I was a blue-collar kid. My mom was an ER nurse in North Philly at a hospital called MCP and my dad worked at the airport throwing the suitcases underneath the belly of the airplanes.

After 9/11, my father was laid off from work. He had worked at the airport for 20 years. He worked hard; he was always on time. I never saw him because he worked 80-hour weeks regularly. When he got laid off, it was a huge shock to my family. About the same time, my mother lost her job because the hospital she worked at was in North Philly, and they were tearing it down to build housing or some shit like that.

It was a difficult time for us as I was old enough to know what was happening, and I could see the stress my family was under.

When I got the call from my dad telling me that he was laid off, I remember exactly where I was, and I remember thinking right then and there that I would never be in a position where someone could just take my livelihood from me.

That's why I always made my own money and why I've been obsessed with business and financial security. I love being an entrepreneur. I have the best job in the world, but the truth is I am still driven by financial fear and insecurity. I'm grateful for it, though. It helps me stay focused and keeps me striving to stay out of my comfort zone.

Addiction

I was always entrepreneurial. I started a grass-cutting business in high school, where I would pack my lawnmower and weedwhacker into the back of my Bronco and cut lawns. I posted signs on telephone poles and actually made a lot of money. As I got older, I got into contracting and eventually started my own contracting business as well.

But growing up was difficult. I had many challenges, the biggest of which was a terrible drug addiction.

In 2009, when I was 23, I got sober. I flew to Florida because my cousin was sober, and he let me crash on his couch for a bit. It was terrible. I had withdrawals for months. But that experience was the birth of my life.

When I got sober, I started a blog called Sober Nation. It started out as just a way for me to write and express myself. I didn't promote it as a business, but eventually, people started commenting on my blogs, and that's when I discovered SEO and I learned that content writing was a real way to build a business.

At this time, I also discovered a website called Copyblogger, which taught people blogging and content marketing. I read it every day, and I applied all the lessons I learned to Sober Nation. Eventually, Sober Nation was the catalyst for me to become an expert marketer and professional in the behavioral healthcare space, and I've been working in the space and trying my best to help people ever since.

From media brand to SEO agency

I started with a service, and that's why I believe in boring service businesses so much.

Back in the day, I frequented a site called Moz. And on Moz, people could submit their own writing. This guy named Michael wrote a 30-page piece about how and why he started an agency all around local SEO. In it, he wrote about how his mentor told him, "There are like 15,000 media agencies in the country, what will you do that makes yours different?" And for Mike, that was the moment when he decided to focus on local. And eventually, he even niched down to local SEO for attorneys.

At the time, Sober Nation was getting pretty big. I was growing this huge following, but I still didn't quite know how to turn it into a business. I was getting a lot of inquiries from treatment centers who would ask me questions like, "How did you grow this following? Can I advertise on your site? Can I put my services in front of your audience?"

Somehow, even at the time, I knew that selling access to my audience was small-time thinking, but after I read that article from Mike, I knew right away that the move was for me to start an SEO agency that specializes in behavioral health.

I started my agency called Stodzy Internet Marketing. It was a huge success. I learned so much.

So Sober Nation was my first real brand. But Stodzy was my first real company. I would use Sober Nation as a way to collect leads, and we generated millions and millions of dollars in revenue.

Last year, I actually sold my stake in Stodzy.

From agency to holding company

I've invested in a few rehab centers, and I'm building a hotel and psychedelics retreat center in Costa Rica called atman.global. I also invested in ConvertKit. And I bought copyblogger.com for $740k, which brings in six figures yearly.

Sober Nation brings in $200k a year through leadgen. People call the website looking for treatment resources and my media buyer pays me $50 per call.

Not all of my investments have cash flow, as some are more holdings, but Blue and Hazel Holdings does about $400k in passive revenue each year — excluding my Quantum Leads, which I'll talk more about later.

You get paid for what you own

My business model has changed over the years. I now follow a model that I find pretty unique.

It all starts with the agency. Currently, I still run quantumleads.com and I take on very high-ticket accounts. I make about $1M/yr and then I always reinvest the cash into other companies to build my personal holdings company. And then those assets generate significantly more revenue.

You don't get paid for what you do, you get paid for what you own.

At this point, I'm more of a portfolio manager than anything else, but it's a portfolio of my own assets and holdings rather than anyone else's. But the agency itself is what generates the cash and the leverage.

My investments play a role too. I've done many deals where I'll write a check to invest in a company, but then that company also has to pay my agency a retainer so that I can use my team to grow the company. So everyone wins. I earn equity. I de-risk my investment by turning the company into a client of Quantum Leads, and then the company does well because my marketing team is made up of geniuses, so then we grow the company, which increases the value of my investment.

I'm not sure exactly what to call this model, but it's how almost all my equity deals are made now.

A simple stack

I keep my stack simple:

• Slack

• Loom is insanely valuable for running a worldwide team.

• Google Drive

• close.com for a CRM

• kit.com

• Substack for my personal daily newsletter

• WPEngine for hosting

• WordPress for basically every site (except my daily newsletter)

• I have equity and ownership in treatment centers, so for those companies, we use Call Tracking Metrics and Salesforce a lot.

How to get paid

I grow my businesses mostly through content marketing. Just about every online company I've ever started is the same story:

1. Create content

2. Build an audience

3. Establish myself as an authority

4. Build products and services that the audience wants

5. Get paid

That said, different businesses require slightly different strategies. For example, in all my healthcare companies, running Google ads has been insanely profitable, and I don't think creating a media machine would be nearly as effective or fast.

Level up your thinking

The biggest hurdle for me was always leveling up my thinking.

It's funny that most entrepreneurs think that when they get started, they should start small and build their way up. Obviously, you need to get in some reps and that's great, but the real opportunity is always at the high-end market. Funny enough, that's also where the least amount of competition is, because everyone is scared to send 7-figure proposals and swim with the sharks.

As I've gotten more mature, I've definitely leveled up, but I often wonder how much stress I would have saved myself if I had learned how to live with 10X thinking right from the very beginning. Instead, I did what most people do, which is try and take whatever business I could get because my fear told me that it was better to get the revenue. If I had held out, and only worked with bigger accounts, I would have made 3X as much.

This is actually why I sold my stake in Stodzy. Because over the years, I was able to make some sizable investments that paid off and that 10X thinking put me in a position where I work much less and make much more.

It's not about how hard you work; it's about the leverage you generate and the choices you make.

Writers rule the world

Here's my advice: Write every day. Don't let AI steal your brain. If you can write, you can think. If you can write, you can communicate your ideas and present your arguments clearly.

Writers rule the world.

The reason I started Sober Nation in the first place was that when I was first getting sober, I heard an interview with Seth Godin. I didn't know who Seth Godin was, but in the interview, he said, "Start a blog, don't tell anyone about it, and write in it every day."

I was so desperate that I just took his word for it.

Sober Nation was essentially built because of my daily writing habit, and since then, I've written in timstodz.com almost every morning as well. I've missed some days, and I don't write on the weekends, but the habit of publishing my words daily is probably the most valuable thing I've ever done.

What's next?

My main goal is always to build my portfolio. I want to be generating $10M a year in passive (ish) revenue all through distributions of my assets.

You can follow along on X, LinkedIn, YouTube, and my personal website.