How Derral Eves founded Creatus and VidSummit, then built the #1 crowdfunded TV series in history: All by being a disruptive entrepreneur.

• Author: Eves, Derral

MY SPOUSE AND I were young and broke when we graduated from college. How many success stories start like this? Well, mine is no exception. After I graduated, I got a "good" job to put my degree to use, but I wasn't happy. I knew I was destined for something other than a 30-year desk job where I had to answer to someone else. So I talked with my wife, Carolyn, about it, and I quit.

This was around the turn of the century, and Carolyn and I bootstrapped our own advertising and marketing agency. We did a lot of website hosting and design as well. Carolyn kept the books while I was the designer and salesman. We only had one child at the time, our daughter Ellie, but we knew we needed to figure out something because our tight financial situation wasn't sustainable--and we planned on having more mouths to feed at our kitchen table.

As the internet became more and more of a "thing," I started to adapt my game plan around it. I thought for sure our agency was going to be successful in ranking websites for different businesses. The algorithm couldn't outsmart me! Well, it turned out that I had a lot to learn.

MY FIRST LESSONS IN FOCUS AND FINANCIAL DIVERSITY

The long version of this story includes highs and lows with clients, algorithms, business lessons and babies, but I'll highlight some of the most important pitfalls we overcame and things I learned--things I'd guess entrepreneurs of all career paths could benefit from.

As I said, I had a lot to learn as I built my advertising and marketing company. I was grinding every day only to be set back every time I had to solve problems with clients, or worse, lose clients.

Then, I had a series of conversations with my dad, and he taught me concepts that became game-changers for my career and for my life. The gist was that I needed to follow the old cliche to "work smarter, not harder" if I was going to break free of earning dollars one dime at a time. This is so much harder to achieve than it sounds! Working smarter requires a lot of mental and physical work.

One of the best things I did to work smarter was to hone my focus in the right direction. My dad taught me to focus on the problem rather than the solution. People are solutions- and results-based, but that's usually the wrong approach in my experience.

My dad taught me that if I really focused on the problems I was trying to solve, the solutions would present themselves. Rather than asking, "How do I fix this?" I shifted to asking, "What is the real issue here? What is it exactly that needs to be fixed?" I was truly surprised at how this shift in focus helped me problem solve.

It's a good skill to learn as you try to figure out how to diversify your income. For me, I was offering a product or service that was a one-and-done design and host a client's website, check. But now I started contemplating what else I could offer these same clients so I didn't have to go find new ones every lime I needed to pay the bills. What could I offer on repeat or in a sequence to keep them coming back?

You might be wondering what any of this has to do with...