What is going on? Uploading today? I'm excited for this podcast interview. I'm excited to have you on Tommy McGill. So I want to give a little bit of background for context on Tommy. And so Tommy has been working with paid ads since 2016. He co founded a startup studio called the Gexa, focusing on launching and growing elearning brands profitably. And so the portfolio, I believe, held about eleven brands with just about 100 million in ARR pace. And then that was sold. I believe Tommy, this got acquired and now you are an operating partner at Arising Ventures, which is a holding company that buys, incubates and operates high margin technology businesses.

You also helped Scaleconsulting.com from eight to 30 million with paid ads in one year and nine months. And you've even worked with Jay Shetty with his certification school. So there's a lot of ground to cover here. You've been in the course space, paid ads studio world. So I'm really excited to dive into this conversation with you. But first I want to kick it off for you to say in your own words what your background has been throughout your career.

Totally. Yeah, appreciate it both. Blaine Ramon, this is super awesome. Yeah. Quick background about myself. Just started out as an affiliate marketer for everybody that doesn't know what that is. Essentially you find a brand that has an offer that works and you say, can I monetize that offer effectively? Will I make a little bit of money with every single? And you can choose any channel for me. Specifically, I worked at a larger agency called DMs, which ipoed, I believe two or three years ago, and we did a ton of affiliate marketing across many different industries.

Found my way into courses because affiliate marketing keeps you sharp on just whatever marketing channel you chose. And we chose paid and the course game sort of fell into my lap through connection worked@consulting.com for about two years, did PPC, then became the head of growth, which I'll talk about probably later and then found an interesting playbook in unit economics that makes sense for creator life business. And so we started as part performance marketing agency, part online publisher where we launched these elearning courses. We ended up selling the online performance marketing agency, grew it to a little bit over a million in a little over a year. Those eleven brands that will do probably north of 100 million, I just couldn't grab the numbers we'll do. I think the pace this year is something like 125. And what the big goal is is north of 175,000,000. So yeah, that's a little quick.

And then now I'm with Horizon Ventures. We buy cool software. Businesses that raised venture couldn't hit their goal and for some reason or another want to sell. So yeah, I'm here and I'm loving.

How do you, I want to take it all the way back to how you mentioned that you ended up working consulting.com through. However, you know, you and I have talked in the past, you also grew up in a really small town in Ba called Ceilings Grove. Not the most optimal for connections with people embedded in media. So how did you end up connected to such an opportunity? And the reason I asked you this question too is I want people to learn how to set themselves up to be able to connect with anyone, wherever they are. So I'm curious on that side of your story.