Welcome to invest in yourself, the digital entrepreneur podcast. Join the podcast market Phil Better as he interviews successful entrepreneurs that make their living in the digital world. Now let's join your host Phil Better as his special guest today on Invest in Yourself, the digital entrepreneur podcast.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Invest in Yourself, the digital entrepreneur podcast. I am, of course, your podcast mogul, your host, Phil Better. Today, I am excited to have the guy who went down to nothing. He blew up his business. The tech department is the name of his company. It's Dan Kirby. He also has an amazing podcast called Honey, I Blew Up the Business or Blew Up My Business. Right?

Blew Up the Business.

Blew Up

the Business. Yes. Honey, I Blew Up the Business. An amazing podcast. Your first guest was Dan Sullivan, a huge person. But before anything, Dan, please thank you for being on the show, and please introduce yourself.

Well, thank you for having me. Yeah. It's great great to be here. I'm I'm I'm Dan. You you did a great job explaining who I was there, but I'm I'm a well, I'm an entrepreneur, and I have been an entrepreneur for, over twenty one years. And, so I've kind of been around the block a little bit, and, I kinda started my career with a brand design business, which I sold in 02/2009 to the guy I founded the business with. But the business I run now is called the tech department, was founded in 02/2004, so I had these two businesses going together. So I sold one business to go to focus on on the other, and it was going really great.

And it's, going really great now, but we had this kind of detour back in 2017 where it it all went horribly wrong. And, so hence the name of the podcast, Honey, I blew up the business because, honey, I blew up the business.

Yes. You get into it in the the pretty much the trailer of your podcast. You talk about everything that went wrong. Not Not necessarily what went wrong, but everything that compiled to, to to pretty much make you blow up the business, and then you came back and you made it even stronger than ever, I bet. But I wanna know, Dan, why did you start podcast? Why did you start going into entrepreneurship? What was it about entrepreneurship that was like, yep. This is what I wanna do?

Well, it wasn't quite as as strategic as that. Basically, I was a a young well, I was 27 years old, and I was, working in a in a job in a technology company because it was the kind of .com era. So it was like websites were a thing. And I was the young dude at this company I was working at in a kind of marketing PR PR company. And so they said, you're young. You must know all about technology. You do it. And I, I went to art school.

I was a kind of I'm a humanities graduate. I did not know about technology. I had no knowledge of of IT or or web programming or nothing. So I sort of pretended that I did and then blagged it like everybody did then and, like, I think people do now through, you know, various new technologies. And that's how I created a career building web platforms, websites, digital stuff, and and now we build digital products for startups. So I'm not a techie. I'm a creative. And I so so I was working in this business doing this stuff, and I kind of with the guy I I've cofounded my first company, we were just we're pissed off.

We we didn't like our bosses too much. They were messing us around. We didn't think they were doing a very good service. We felt we could do something better. And it was kinda like, if now, when? If not now, when? So there was no grand plan, and we just thought we could do a better job, and we wanted to create something that we felt we could be proud of. And so that's how I set up we set up a company. And back in those days, being an entrepreneur wasn't a career choice.

No. No. It's only recently they became a a career choice.

Yeah. It was no infrastructure. So it was bay it was called in The UK, which is where I am, it was called, setting up a small business. Yeah. So

you set up this small business. What happened?