ADD Hero Nick Eubanks

Nick: Hey, this is Nick Eubanks.

Welcome to another episode of the ADD Entrepreneur. Today, we are joined by the founder of Juris Digital, Casey Meraz.

He is based out of Greenwood Village, Colorado. And Juris Digital specializes in doing digital support services and marketing for law firms.

How are you doing, Casey?

Casey: Pretty good, Nick.

Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Nick: No, I appreciate you coming on, man. I usually butcher this sort of the bio’s of the folks that I’ve talked to, thus far. So, if you wanna give a better introduction of you and what your firm does, what your agency does, I’d say feel free to go ahead.

Casey: Sure, okay. Well, you did a pretty good job.

We, basically, do a whole service digital marketing services for law firms. So, everything from website design to SEO, SEM, anything we can do increase our visibility online.

Nick: How long has the company been around?

Casey: So, we originally started under the brand Ethical SEO Consulting, and we’ve been around for six years now.

Nick: Oh, nice. Congratulations, man.

Casey: Thank you.

Nick: Was this sort of the start of your entrepreneurial journey? Or did you have other ventures before you’ve gotten to this one?

Casey: Oh, no, no.

Yeah, I’ve had a lot of other ventures along the way, so as a kid, I was interested in paintballs, started a paintball store locally. And then, that kind of morphed into my next venture which was computer repair, completely…

Nick: Nice.

Casey: …in a different direction and I did that for a few years, and started a wireless internet company. And then currently, I am pretty much only doing this, but I am an active partner in Airsoft store, as well, now.

Nick: Nice. I am a very avid Airsoft enthusiast, and I actually played paintball on a team when I was in high school.

Casey: Oh, nice. Yeah, me, too. So that’s a lot of fun.

Nick: Yeah, super funny, man. And the theme is definitely from, you know, all the entrepreneurs I’ve talked to that have, you know, ADHD, or some flavor of ADD –  that nobody is on their first venture or nobody’s doing just one thing.

That segues actually really nicely into sort of where I’d like to start, which is, you know,

How old were you when you started displaying science of…what they then called ADD, and now I think it’s just more formally encapsulated by ADHD?

Casey: Sure. So, I definitely had the symptoms all of my life as far as identification goes.

You know, I struggle with the school actually quite a bit in high school, middle school, and that type of thing, and it wasn’t until I found something I was kind of interested in in college that I was able to really focus.

So, it started probably around 15, I guess, but just recently diagnosed actually.

Nick: No kidding. So, who would you say was the first person that noticed sort of the symptoms or was it you?

Casey: Well, it was definitely probably me but also my teachers.

I feel like they always had feedback and just certain things didn’t come easy to me, so especially like Math, for example, is something that I had struggled with until I had to learn a very specific way to teach myself.

Nick: Interesting.

So what drove you to finally get, you know, professionally tested?

Casey: Really, that I just felt like I could do so much more if I knew I could maintain my focus a little bit more, and could just understand myself better. So, I just felt like I could get more done.

Nick: So were you looking for a more of a medical solution just to sort of help support, obviously,

Hey everybody, welcome to episode number two of The A.D.D. Entrepreneur.

Today I am thrilled to be joined by Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg, the Founder of Zivtech, a Philly-based digital strategy company specializing in application and product development, who also obviously happens to have ADD.

Thanks for hopping on here, Alex.

Alex: Absolutely, happy to join.

Nick: That said, again, I wanna make sure…I don’t know if you wanna add anything on to what it is you do because what we were just talking about, I feel like I definitely did not even scratch the surface on all of the cool stuff that you guys were doing at this point.

Alex: No, it’s cool, yeah.

Zivtech is a nine-year-old web development, design, training, strategy company focused on products and web applications for everything from startups to Fortune, whatever, 50 companies, and we work with all sorts of open source tools as well as software as a service, and occasionally even proprietary software to help our customers innovate in a digital sort of space.

Nick: Thank you for that, that’s obviously way more holistic way, I would say, to deliver. Yeah man, just thank you so much for coming on here. I truly appreciate you guys…it’s amazing how busy everybody is, especially founders, and just…I’m very, very honored that people are willing to take their time out, especially, you know, when we’re easily as distracted as we are.

Alex: Yeah, well, I think that that’s also the way that you’re gonna get plenty of distracted people to sign up because they’re like, ooh, that sounds distracting, I like. And it’s definitely interesting from what I’m used to doing at four o’clock on a Monday, so yeah, that sounds great.

Nick: Okay. With that said, I guess we will just dive right in. So the first question I have for you is,

How old were you when you started displaying signs of ADD?

Alex: I think as soon as I started school.

I went to a sort of alternative school here in Philadelphia called Project Learn.

So they didn’t really have report cards, but I did see what they would do, is they would give you sort of feedback, and the feedback I always got from kindergarten on to sixth grade when I stopped going there was always some flavor of, Alex is very enthusiastic, he always seems very excited and eager to talk about what we’re gonna talk about, but he never lets anyone else have a turn and he never waits his turn, and he’s always a little loud and interrupting.

So you know, looking back on it, I don’t think people were diagnosed that early or as often with it back then. But for sure, it’s been a personality trait since day one, and it starts to…started immediately to show itself as soon as I came in contact with the world outside of my parents’ and grandparents’ houses.

Nick: So that perfectly segues into the next question which was,

Who would you say was the person who noticed, if it wasn’t your parents?

Alex: Again, I don’t think like back then in the, I guess, ’70s, ’80s, I guess mostly…no, it would have been the ’80s, I don’t think it was as well…or I don’t think it was diagnosed as often as it is today.

So, you know, I think they just thought I was eager and excited, and I was lucky enough to find myself in a school that really was supportive of people that needed to have a little more, or maybe that had a little more energy and excitement towards what they were doing, and were a little bit more all over the place.

So I think I just ended up in the right situation early on in life so that it didn’t need to be…it wasn’t an issue.

To kick off The ADD Entrepreneur Podcast, I interview Ross Fruin, Co-Founder of Portland, OR based direct-response marketing agency, SearchLogic.

My favorite quote from this episode is:

We live in a world where our education system has not evolved much from 100 years ago.

If you’re unable to listen, the full podcast transcript can be read below:

Nick: Hey. Welcome to the ADD Entrepreneur.

This is our flagship podcast and I’m really excited to kick this off with an entrepreneur with ADD, who happens to be a good friend of mine.

So today we are joined by Ross Fruin, one of the co-founders and the CEO of Portland, Oregon-based paid media marketing firm SearchLogic.

How you doing, Ross?

Ross: Good, how are you doing? Thanks for having me.

Nick: My pleasure, man.

Ross: Glad to be the first.

Nick: Yeah, me, too.

Do me a favor.

Before we jump into my list of questions, tell me a little bit about SearchLogic.

Ross: Yeah, so SearchLogic is a direct response marketing agency, like you said, located in Portland, Oregon.

And we started about five years ago, this is our sixth year as of January. And we are primarily with mid-market brands, companies that, you know are kind of in the, I guess, $100,000 to a half million dollar a month in digital advertising spend range.

And one of our more primary focuses recently is really B2C and B2B allegiant companies that have to integrate sales cycles and sales teams into the process of just helping brands understand how to connect all those pieces of the puzzle together and how to optimize them individually based off of data they have on each part of that process.

And so we’re a small team. About 20 of us here. And, yes.

Nick: It’s not small at all.

Ross: Yeah, well, I guess it depends on what you’re comparing it to, right.

But, it’s certainly not been an easy experience but it’s definitely been fun and excited to talk about some of the hurdles, I guess you could say that I’ve had to overcome personally with my ADD and all those types of things.

Nick: No, totally.

It’s funny because it’s more and more socially acceptable, I think, not only to have it but to talk about it.

But it’s still never…at least for me it’s not become something that is, like, easy to talk about just yet, because it’s still…it’s still, you know, it’s that second D.

Like, it’s still called a disorder.

Ross: A disorder, yeah, well and I think that’s a good point, you know, I can’t imagine in 20 years…I think that compared to 20 years ago, so if you look at a gap of 40 years, I mean, the amount of people that are gonna struggle with some type of this is just gonna be outrageous because people are growing up with everything instantly, you know, at the tips of their fingers.

And I think it’s partially a…it’s obviously, I believe at least personally that it’s partially genetic, right?

Some people have it worse than others but I think as a byproduct of how we engage now with media, I think that everybody is gonna have it to some extent compared to what people have now.

Nick: I could not agree more.

With that said, let’s dive right in here.

A couple things. Some of these are gonna be more like transactional, just so, you know, me and everybody listening can get a sense of sort of what your life cycle of dealing with this has been like and then some of these are gonna be, you know, give you the chance to expound a little bit more and have some personality come out.

Ross: Absolutely.

The first one is how old were you when you started displaying signs of ADD?

Ross: Yeah, so I think, unfortunately, I really wanted to potentially sit down with one of my p...