There was a point when I realized something was deeply off. Not just with my job, but with the way the industry I worked in defined success.
I was living in the western mountains of Colorado, working for a digital agency that was slowly dying at a time when the industry itself was booming. On paper, things looked good. I had just gotten married. My wife and I were buying a house in the mountains. Our first child was on the way. This was supposed to be the season where things finally began to feel stable. Instead, it was the season where everything quietly started to fracture.
I could already see the cracks in how digital marketing agencies operated. The thing was, I was not seeing it from the client side. I was seeing it from inside the machine itself. The work wasn’t the problem. The people weren’t the problem. The model was.
Clients were assigned an “hourly allotment” per month. Specialists and managers were expected to do meaningful, high-impact, billable work inside rigid time boxes that had little to do with reality. Real problems don’t politely stay within scope. Real businesses don’t pause growth because a stopwatch ran out.
But the rules were clear: Do not go over time.
So I didn’t. At least not on paper.
What actually happened was that I started donating my nights. My early mornings. My weekends. My mental bandwidth. I fixed issues that needed fixing because the clients mattered. Their businesses mattered. The work mattered.
My supervisors were happy. The agency was profitable. The clients were seeing results.
And slowly, my family was paying the price.
That was the moment I couldn’t ignore anymore. One night during the holidays, I found myself sitting at the kitchen table (my office back then) late at night, laptop open, solving problems that technically “weren’t mine to solve,” while the people I loved most slept in the next room. I wasn’t being heroic. I was being depleted. I was sacrificing myself for people outside of my family. My wife kept asking me, “What are you doing?”
What I was doing should have worked.
It worked for the agency.
It worked for the clients.
It just didn’t work for my life.
When work started taking more than it gave
The first thing to crack wasn’t the business. It was the balance. Stress has a way of disguising itself as productivity until it starts taking things from you. My marriage felt it. My sense of presence felt it. My identity felt it.
The question that wouldn’t leave me alone was simple and uncomfortable:
Why am I making money for other people when I’m the one actually helping businesses grow?
I understood there was a sales process. I understood there were systems and hierarchies and structures. But I also knew something else. There was something quieter, but impossible to ignore.
If I was going to sacrifice this much, it had to be for something that aligned with who I was becoming, not just what I was producing.
So I made a decision I wasn’t fully qualified to make.
I started STU Enterprises.
Not because I had a grand vision.
Not because I knew how to run a business.
Not because I was particularly brave.
I did it because something had to change.
My background wasn’t business. I was an English major. Creative writing, linguistics, Spanish. I understood stories and language far better than balance sheets. The idea of being a “digital marketing business owner” was laughable on paper.
And yet, I stepped into it anyway.
There is an important caveat. Within five years, that decision nearly destroyed everything I had built.
The stress didn’t disappear, rather it multiplied. I became a stay-at-home dad while running a small business, trying to hold onto the idea of being “the man of the house” while quietly unraveling under the weight of it all. I had bitten off more than I could chew, and then kept chewing out of sheer stubbornness.
But something important happened in the process.
I learned that I could face hard things and survive them.
I learned that business is not about tactics nearly as much as people think.
And I learned this truth the hard way:
Business is about 25 percent work and one hundred percent relationships.
People run businesses. Not systems. Not funnels. Not dashboards.
When you help people believe in themselves, their goals, and their vision, and when you genuinely keep their interests at the center, they tend to believe in you right back. Solve real problems. Help businesses grow in ways that make sense for their reality. Relationships compound faster than any growth hack ever will.
That belief reshaped everything.
Why STU Enterprises was never meant to grow fast
STU Enterprises stopped being about “running an agency” and became about building a process around a mission. I was not forcing a mission to fit a process. We didn’t chase venture capital. We didn’t launch massive marketing campaigns promising 10–15 new leads a month. Growth came slowly, organically, and with intention.
Most of our partners have been with us for five to six years on average. That’s not an accident. That’s trust, earned over time. That’s work, showing results. That’s the connection between people.
We even call them partners instead of clients because growth, when done right, is shared.
Ironically, our own website lagged behind the work we did for others (and honestly still does, but we are getting better). We were busy building their platforms, their reach, their visibility. Only now, more than a decade later, are we finally building out case studies that reflect the impact of that work.
It took us about 13 years to get around to telling our own story.
And that’s okay.
Because STU Enterprises exists for one reason that has never changed:
A work/life balance shouldn’t destroy the people creating something that matters.
Not business owners.
Not partners.
Not families.
This company was never meant to grow fast.
It was meant to grow right.
Finally, this is the story behind it.
And it is the foundation for everything we build next.
