I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Cody Neer, world leader in ecommerce and CEO of 727 Digital Advertising, to hear about his inspiring story of how he left a professional baseball career to pursue entrepreneurship and create a life beyond “average”. Here’s what Cody had to say.
In your own words, what’s your story Cody? How did you get to where you are today?
In 2010, I walked away from a professional baseball career to start my journey as an entrepreneur. With 9 other individuals and the leadership of a mentor of mine, we started an electronic checks processing business that processed over $30million in gross sales in its first 2 years in business. After its 3rd year, the company was acquired and sent me on another entrepreneurial path that led me to building a hunting apparel brand called Bucks of Nebraska in late 2013.
Then in 2014, I was hired at Target Corporation on a team that would be the very first use cases of Facebook Power Editor, Twitter Cards, and other social platform beta ads managers. Managing over $50m+ in Facebook ads with over a 5x ROI. This was the point I realized direct response marketing was the key to my financial freedom and I went all in with it on my own brand, Bucks of America. It’s success turned it into a national brand called Bucks of America that’s done multi 7-figures since.
Wow. That’s incredible. Surely you could’ve stopped there and been “satisfied”… But I know you didn’t. Care to share what you did next?
In 2016, I joined a young team of entrepreneurs who partnered with Kevin Harrington, the original shark from shark tank, to create a multi million dollar advertising agency. From 2016-2017, we did over $10m in sales online for our own brands we built and managing several large client brands. In 2017, I started my first eCommerce advertising agency called 727 Digital Advertising where we managed both client stores and grew a dozen of our own. Those dozen stores did a combined $12m+ in gross sales in 2018 before we sold them for a seven figure payday.
Well that must’ve been a day worth popping some champagne. Congrats, man! Now what’s next?
Now, managing 727 Digital Advertising, we’ve partnered with Today’s Growth Consultants, a Fortune 5000 company, on a journey to build as many successful eCommerce businesses as we can in 2019. We’ve purchased over 100 eCommerce Stores in the last quarter of 2018, while building 100 brand new ones from scratch!
Our goals in 2019 are to do $60m in sales for every 100 ecommerce stores we manage and continue to grow our portfolio of successful online businesses by building hundreds at a time to find niches that we can compete and win at scaling through direct response marketing strategies. That’s incredible. So what would you say has been one of the biggest life lessons that’s helped you reach success and build true financial freedom?
Instead of looking for someone to help me, I found others that I could help through my skill sets. I learned the value of time. I realized people would be willing to pay for things if they could get their time back. I never sold my skills or false promises, I simply found a way to create value for others who needed their time back in their business to focus on more important things.
Right on. That is so true. Congratulations again, man, and all the best to you and the team at 727. Thanks for taking the time to share your story. Any last words of inspiration you’d like to leave our readers with?
There is no finish line to success, so as long as I set small goals and constantly achieve those on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis – I’ve been successful.