As I said in the introduction, I have a circle of friends I look to for insight and inspiration—and, in those times when I need it, for guidance. They are all super-successful. I call them my “Spec Ops friends of the business world.” No one better exemplifies the principle of front sight focus than Joe Apfelbaum, CEO of the Brooklyn-based digital marketing company Ajax Union.
As successful as Joe is, it took some bitter failure and heartbreak to get him there.
Joe grew up in an Orthodox Jewish community where, when you get married, it’s very important to have kids right away. In 2003, all of Joe’s married friends were having kids, but not Joe and his new bride. People who knew them started talking: Why weren’t the Apfelbaums having kids? After a year of this, Joe and his wife started seeing doctors, going through tests, and doing all kinds of research. It became a huge source of stress in Joe’s life.
Finally, they got pregnant. They were so excited they had a celebration at his mother’s house and another at his wife’s mother’s house. Everybody they knew was happy for them. They told the whole world.
A few weeks before their due date, Joe was at his office when he got a call from his wife, who was crying so hard he could barely understand her. She was at the hospital for a routine test. The doctors said they couldn’t find a heartbeat.
“They don’t know what they’re talking about,” said Joe. “I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
One of Joe’s strengths is that he has an amazing ability to become an expert at pretty much anything he turns his mind to. (His mother used to call him Touchy-Touch when he was little, because he would go around touching and messing with everything until he became an expert at it.) By this time, he was running a few different businesses and had already acquired a reputation as a master troubleshooter. As far as he was concerned, there wasn’t a problem that couldn’t be fixed.
He would just go over to that hospital and fix this one.
He walked in, full of confidence, and when the attendant said, “Mr. Apfelbaum, I’m so sorry for your loss,” Joe replied, “What loss? There’s no loss here. Let me speak to the doctor. Bring me the head cardiologist.”
For two days, Joe battled to make it not true. Finally, he had to accept that he and his wife had lost their baby.
A deep sadness settled over Joe, like a black cloud. “This was my purpose for being here,” he says. “This was the reason I came to this world. And now I’d failed. It felt like my life was over.” He sent his employees home and closed his businesses—maybe permanently. He wasn’t really sure. He wasn’t sure of anything.
After a few weeks, someone called to offer him a job. Joe didn’t want to take it—like most entrepreneurs, he considered himself unemployable—but the guy pressed. He’d just sold a $100,000 piece of software to somebody in Minnesota who was having trouble with it, and Joe was the only person he knew who could figure things like this out on the fly. He needed Joe to get out to Minnesota and figure the damn thing out.
Joe asked his wife what she thought.
“Look,” she said. “For the past two weeks you’ve been sitting around the house, moping and crying, driving me crazy. I can’t take it. You need to go do this, or we’re getting divorced.”
Joe agreed to take the job if his new employer would let him run his other businesses on the side, and the guy said yes. He spent a little phone time with the software company’s staff, read a few books on the subject, flew out to Minnesota, and within three or four hours of messing with it, he had the problem solved.
Okay. So he hadn’t fathered a child. But he could do this.
Joe poured himself into his work again. At his new job, he became an expert at IT. Every time Google changed its algorithm, Joe would reverse-engineer it and figure out what he needed to do to get his clients to the top. It was like a game for Joe—a game that paid very well. He started an IT consulting business on the side. He became an expert at selling things on the Internet. He became an expert at Web site construction, graphic design, marketing. He read entire shelves of books, about everything and anything. He worked until three in the morning every day.
During the next few years, he went through a series of four full-time jobs, all while running seven businesses on the side, in an office with eight full-time employees. He had a construction company building sukkahs (ceremonial huts used for Sukkot) with three crews building units each year for four hundred customers. He ran a real estate Web site. An SEO (search engine optimization) company. A graphic design business. An eBay business. He was doing a million things and executing flawlessly. But deep down, he knew it was crazy.
“I said yes to everything,” says Joe. “But I knew I was doing something wrong. It’s just not humanly possible for someone to do all that and be successful at all of it.”
Joe had grown up working after school and on weekends in his mother’s clothing shop on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. He had seen her go from selling sweaters to flying all over the world to buy the best fabrics and selling high-end couture under her own label at half the department stores’ prices. She was successful, to a point—but she could never break the million-dollar mark. Joe had watched her business struggle for more than a decade before finally going under.
Now something weirdly similar was happening to him. He wasn’t failing . . . but something was keeping him from being as successful as he should be. The truth was, he was a mile wide and an inch deep.
In 2008, a business partner, Zevi Friedman, approached Joe about starting an online marketing company. Joe said yes (of course), and the two started a digital marketing company they named Ajax Union. Joe now had yet one more part-time horse to ride in his jam-packed stable.
At the time, Joe had a full-time position as chief marketing officer for TheWatchery.com, a luxury watch business, where he managed about a hundred people in its sales and marketing division. Even as the Great Recession was killing a lot of other luxury businesses, Joe helped it grow from $3 million to $40 million in a very short time.
In April 2009, after Ajax Union had been going for a while and was showing some serious growth, Joe walked into the office of Watchery’s CEO, Joseph Levy, and said, “Joseph, you know I have seven side gigs that I do, right?”
“Yeah, of course,” said Levy. “How’s that going?”
“It’s going well,” said Joe. “Actually, this one business in particular is really taking off. We have thirty clients, we’re growing, and my partner wants me to come work full-time. But I love you, I love this company, and I love working here. What should I do?”
“Listen,” said Levy. “First of all, I want to thank you. Because of you, I’ve grown my company from $3 million to $40 million, and we’ll be selling it soon. You should go build that business. What’s more, I want to be your biggest customer.”
Joe went back to Zevi and said he was ready to work full-time in their business—and much to his astonishment Zevi said, “No. That’s not going to work for me.”
“What? What are you talking about?” said Joe.
Zevi said, “Joe, you need to focus.”
“What do you mean, I need to focus? I’m incredibly focused!”
Zevi shook his head. “No, you need to get rid of everything you’re doing on the side. Everything. Let go of all of it. You need this to be the only thing you’re doing.”
Joe was shocked. “I can’t do that! I’m making so much money from my sukkah business, and my eBay business, and my advertising platform, and . . .”
Zevi looked at him and said, “Joe. We can build a multimillion-dollar company here. But we’re not going to do that if you’re doing all this other stuff. I need you to focus.”
Joe was stunned.
He went and talked to his wife. She said, “Do it. If it means we take a financial hit, that’s okay, you’ll make up for it with Ajax Union. You’ll figure it out.”
Joe took a deep breath and made the plunge. He sold the sukkah business; closed down his eBay business; shuttered his IT company, handing its client list off to a few other IT companies he knew; pulled the plug on a bunch of Web sites; and folded the resources of his Web design and online marketing businesses into Ajax Union. He got rid of everything. It was like reaching into his pockets, turning them inside out, and giving everything away—like jumping off the highest high dive without knowing for sure how much water was in the pool.
In the process, Joe says, Zevi helped him realize something. He’d never really been excited about all those different businesses; what he’d been excited about was promoting them. Joe had a passion for promoting things—ideas, concepts, values, businesses. Focusing all his energies into a single digital marketing business allowed him to tap into that passion.
Ajax Union took off. Eighteen months after Joe went full-time, the company hit No. 178 on the Inc. 500, an annual list of the fastest-growing private companies in America. In 2010, it doubled its revenue, from $500,000 to $1 million, and then doubled it again the following year to over $2 million. By 2015, the revenue was $4 million, and as of this writing the company’s on track for $6 million in 2016.
Joe has also become an expert in a whole new topic: focus.
“Most people don’t really know what they want,” he says. “If you don’t know where you want to go, you might end up getting somewhere else. Where? I don’t know. But it’s probably not somewhere you’ll be happy with.”
Like me, Joe is big on the word “purpose.”
“If you know what you want to do and focus intensely on that purpose, you’ll move forward—but you have to put all your chips into one basket and go all in. If you don’t do that, you’ll die.”
Joe says focus is a skill, and as with any skill, to become good at it you need to practice it. Not just the kind of hyper-focusing you do when it’s suddenly crunch time, but focusing each and every day on whatever is the most important thing, on that particular day, toward reaching your goal.
He has also brought that dedication to focus to how he works with his clients. He doesn’t just help them market their business; he also coaches them to help them get clear on exactly what that business is at its core.
“Most businesses fail in the first year,” he tells them, “and most of those still standing fail within the first three. Very few get past five. Almost none get past ten. And you know what most of those failures have to do with? Lack of focus.”
Today Joe is one of the most focused guys I know. He’s also one of the happiest.
And by the way, he and his wife now have five beautiful children.
• • •
You’re probably wondering what happened after that lunch with Todd Dakarmen, when he called me on my lack of focus.
A week later I got another phone call. “Hi, Brandon? Todd Dakarmen. Look, I want to set up our next shooting date.” He was a man who knew what he wanted, all right.
But now so was I. “Sorry, man,” I told him. “I can’t do it. I’ve taken your advice. I’m focusing.”
He laughed. “Son of a bitch!” he said. “Good for you.”
I made that call staring off the La Jolla coast and let go of Wind Zero. Unlike Todd’s crashed Porsches, the thing was not salvageable, not even for parts. Four million dollars’ worth of investor money and my life savings, gone. Chalk that up to one expensive postgraduate course in business. I took a position with a large defense firm in San Diego, just to have something to pay the bills and consolidate my finances while I figured out what the hell to do next. Over the rest of that year, I let go of a bunch of other projects I was working on and gave a pass to a lot of strong opportunities I’d been considering. I got laser focused. I needed to find that single target.
Within a few months, I did.
I scraped together about $10,000 and in February 2012 launched a Web site, SOFREP.com, which stood for “Special Operations Forces Situation Report” (like the military term “SITREP,” for “situation report”). That became my front sight focus.
By the end of the year, we had more than a million people hitting the site each month. Our weekly SOFREP Radio broadcast became the No. 1 broadcast in its category on iTunes. We had a publishing division going that would generate several New York Times bestsellers. Over the next few years, we launched or acquired more than half a dozen related Web sites, including SpecialOperations.com and the gear site Loadout Room, and I formed an umbrella entity, Hurricane Group, Inc., to bring all these properties together into one unified digital media empire. In 2014, a media company offered to buy it all from me for $15 million, and you already know where that went. A year later, Hurricane was worth triple that, and today it’s worth a good deal more. There have been other offers. I’m still not selling.
It’s amazing what can happen in a few short years. All the success that had failed to materialize with Wind Zero happened with SOFREP and Hurricane. And I trace it all back to that conversation with Todd.
Over these last few years, I’ve said no to a lot of strong opportunities, some of them truly amazing situations. It still happens today. On average, I say no to a solid business offer about once a week. “Will you consult for my company? Will you join this board of directors? Are you interested in being my partner investor?” Sorry—no can do. I’m focused on my target.
You’re also probably wondering how that B-52 bomb drop worked out.
I called the numbers, and seconds later the bomb fell—about a hundred yards behind the fighters who were shooting at us. I made a quick recalculation and called up new numbers. The second drop was right on target. We’re still here. The other guys aren’t.
Sometimes that’s the only outcome that counts.