What’s happened in the past 6-10 months since building this page.
It’s difficult to start at any one particular point because it’s all a bit of a blur in all honesty, but here’s the basic gist of what’s been going on with me since I first began building this page and a bit of an explanation as to why it took me so long to get started again. If you want to know one thing about me, I’m a perfectionist. I want to get things right before I execute them, but as I’ve discovered through a lot of reflection and analysis over the past few months, being perfect gets you nowhere, and if you want to get somewhere, taking massive, consistent, imperfect action will carry you further on your journey than any amount of procrastination in the hope of doing things just right.
I was employed at a car rental company called East Coast Car Rentals. Initially, the job was great, but more and more things happened that made me burn out and lose my way. I found myself hating the job and looking for ways to escape, which was where this whole idea of a personal brand was dreamed up and then it promptly rotted away with no activity and no traction whatsoever because I found myself unable to do any work after finishing my 9 to 5 and instead choosing familiar escapism tactics such as smoking weed, watching adult content or playing video games. First of all, smoking weed for me is a bad idea because I’m bipolar and it is, without a shadow of a doubt, one of the worst lifestyle choices I could make because it can lead me back into mania and psychotic relapse due to my bipolar. My best friend has no problem with weed, but I know personally that it keeps me slow, stupid, unmotivated and at risk of a major health breakdown that can lead me back into hospitalisation and state-enforced medication treatment. Secondly, playing video games always served as an escape that would keep me distracted from achieving anything major, and the combination of adult content, video games and weed kept me pacified for just long enough to tolerate going and suffering at my job for what seemed like an eternity of “Groundhog Day-esque” suffering, where each week blended into the next with no real progress made towards my goals of starting a business, escaping the 9 to 5 and losing the extra weight that I’ve gained.
That all changed very recently. I’m going to tell you a story, and it’s going to require a little context, but I promise it will make sense.
I work very hard at my job, I pride myself in efficiency and execution. It’s almost guaranteed that I’ll be on top of the statistical leaderboards in terms of calls handled and emails completed, though these weren’t Key Performance Indicators at the job, nevertheless I worked the hardest, the stats don’t lie. I don’t have a copy to show you, but you’ll just have to take my word for it. Over the 2.5+ years that I was at ECCR I worked tirelessly and didn’t complain, but all of the people I started with either moved up or sideways in the company to other roles, or simply moved on and quit for one reason or another. Now, I loved the job because when I first started, the previous job I had was underpaying me at $21 an hour, and ECCR offered me $31/hr on a casual rate. I soon moved to full time, although I had full time hours already, I wanted to earn leave entitlements and wanted the job security. What came next was 2 years of absolute slavery, taking anywhere from 90-150+ calls a day every day I worked. That wasn’t even including all the emails I had to answer. I was close to burnout over 12 months ago. I was offered a leg up into a promotion. A role utilising some of the skills I had developed when I was younger including SEO marketing and content management. For reasons that I’m not going to elaborate too far on, that promotion fell through, but the gist of it is there was no direction, no support, no one really to report to or police what I was doing and no idea of what I was meant to achieve. So I just took that loss and returned to the frontline call centre, taking call after call but stewing over in my head that this was a waste of time and that I’m going nowhere.
You can only take so much abuse from customers that don’t like it when you tell them no, and there are only so many days you can take a call every 3 minutes on average and still function like a normal human being. As I said earlier, I found myself diving into distractions and bad habits to keep myself placated after work, because the sense that I was going nowhere dominated my subconscious mind and kept me feeling anxious, on edge, and tired. The day came where I crossed my limit. It was Sunday April 27th, 2025. I had been passed up on a promotion to call centre manager because I was on my last warning – earlier in the year I had been somewhat rude to a couple of customers within the space of a week and the HR team made it very apparent that any more fuckups and I was out. It’s not that I was terrible at my job, but I was terrible at hiding how much the job took out of me at times, and how little I could handle the customer’s bullshit any longer. This particular Sunday, I arrived for my shift, the last slot of the day between 0900 and 1700. Arrived before me were two agents of lesser skills and experience, and one of the recently appointed managers who was also a newer agent who started over 2 years after I did. Please note, I wasn’t jealous of his success, I just didn’t understand why his promotion allowed him to not work at all, taking no calls, answering no emails, just sitting there on his phone collecting his paycheck with very little effort at all. Meanwhile, I did 54% of the call volume, 170+ calls in a single day, between a team of 4. If you’re able to picture that, it means I did the work of 2.5 people and outstripped the other agents that were working by a ratio of 2:1.
I brought my grievances up with my head manager that Monday (the next day), who shut me down in the most rude and disrespectful way. So I sat there for the next three hours fuming, and finally decided enough was enough. I took my building pass off my lanyard/keychain, picked up my phone charger and left the building. I went to the shops to get some food for the week, got home and sent a resignation letter. The resignation was accepted within two hours and my employment was finalised. That brings me to the present past week and what’s been happening.
One of my old coworkers, Kai, reached out to me and asked me how I was feeling, because he heard that I quit, and we had a quick chat, and then I asked him what he was doing with himself since he left the position at ECCR. He started a Lawn Mowing and Garden Maintenance business and was self managing and self directing, finding clients on his own. I had a brainwave. I asked him if he would let me try and generate some leads for him, because I had always wanted to create myself a business in the digital marketing space. He graciously accepted the offer, and I have spent the past 3 days building a funnel, creating digital ads and troubleshooting the whole process. You’re welcome to view my post on my social media page for the agency – @risen.agency.au about the process that I went through, and if you have an interest in building a digital agency I’d encourage you to follow along as I document the process. It’s fairly new at the moment, given that Kai is my first client, but I’ll be working hard to get it off the ground and build more clients and generate more interest. I’ll be documenting the choices that I make, the processes that I’ve followed, how I’m monetising and managing my clients and business and more.
So here I am, and I’m faced with difficulties, I’ve got to find myself more clients and I’ve also got to find myself another 9 to 5, which I’m dreading doing, but I need something to pay my bills because unfortunately, the plan that I had while stewing on that Sunday was to doordash for extra cash and that’s just not economically viable for me unfortunately. I’m at the complete rock bottom that I could be but I’m actively building and attempting new things and I’m really proud of what I’ve achieved so far in the past couple of days for Kai. We’ll see over the next week what happens to the ad and if I can get any conversions through the lead form that I built. I’m also considering signing up to Gohighlevel for better lead management and funnel pages + domain control, but I’m hesitant to pull the trigger because the price point is higher than I can afford without a guaranteed income. Over the next couple of weeks I’m hoping to find a new 9 to 5 to pay my basic bills and then I want to spend nearly all of my spare time developing this business and getting it off the ground. Starting with reaching out to friend of mine who might need my help and then moving onto cold reach while also developing a separate website for my agency and developing a client acquisition process.
So, to wrap it all up—I quit the job that was burning me out, without a plan. And then, the very next day, I made one. I’m looking for another 9-to-5 to cover my living costs while I build out my business and brand—this blog, my agency, and all the supporting content that comes with it.
I’ve thrown out the weed and everything that came with it: the pipe, the grinder, the ashtray, all of it. I’ve been meditating daily for eight days straight—aiming for 30 to 60 minutes a session—and I’m treating that as a non-negotiable going forward. I’ve also started counting my calories again, determined to shed the weight I’ve put on over the last few years.
There’s a lot more to say, especially about meditation and weight loss, but I’ll dive deeper into those in future posts. For now, just know this: I’m not escaping anymore. I’m rebuilding.
I welcome any questions that you have via my social media channels which you can find on my about me page or via email risen at protonmail dot com. Finally, you can text me on whatsapp or telegram at +61 473 053 017 .
Follow me on this journey if you find value or resonate with what I’ve shared and let’s grow together.