Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Caleb Kruse. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Caleb, appreciate you joining us today. Risking taking is a huge part of most people’s story but too often society overlooks those risks and only focuses on where you are today. Can you talk to us about a risk you’ve taken – it could be a big risk or a small one – but walk us through the backstory.

In September 2023 I decided to leave the company I had been working at for 6 years. I worked my way up from a senior media buyer to the director of paid social, managing a team of 8 media buyers. We took paid social from $0 spend in 2018 to multiple eight figures in 2023.

The decision did not come lightly. It was something I had known I needed to do for a few years but the opportunities I was given made it hard to walk away. My wife also closed her private therapy practice the same year. It was extremely scary to walk away with neither of us having employment.

Ultimately in 2023 I decided it was time. I wanted to build a life for myself where I controlled my own work/life balance. I wanted to build a life that fit into my values.

When I decided to walk away, I had no actual plan. I made the decision two months before I left so I could craft an exit plan. This involved me connecting with people in my network and putting out feelers. I was so amazed by the support I felt from my colleagues and friends. Every person I connected with said they would have work for me in some capacity. The scope or work ranged from one off consulting all the way to full time employment.

Thankfully, when I decided to leave my wife and I had saved up enough income for me to take my time and not rush into the next thing. I did not jump into any of the opportunities I was presented with because deep down, I knew I wanted to build something that was fully mine.

I started making Tiktoks the week that I left my job in September. I decided that this would be my fun “project” to crack in my time between gigs. I had no idea what was coming.

Fast forward to now and I have over 85 thousand followers on my TikTok channel “Mr.PaidSocial”. I’ve had hundreds of opportunities come my way. Brand sponsorships, consulting clients, agency work, automation work, selling my own digital products and so much more.

I discovered that I could stand on my own, without the need to jump right into a full time job.

I’m still working on the work/life balance piece. Soloprenuership is one of the hardest things i’ve every done but also the most rewarding.

5 months in and I replaced my salary from my full time role. I’ve proven to myself that there’s something here and i’m so excited to see what lies ahead.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

My first ad campaign I ever built was on Facebook while I was still in college. I was the activities coordinator at my University and was responsible for booking talent and promoting events on campus. For a few of our concerts I leveraged Facebook ads to sell tickets and spread the world. Some of my events were extremely successful.

Post college I worked for two start ups in the Seattle area. I was doing all things marketing for both and learned a ton. I taught myself how to use photoshop, video editing, website design, seo, run ads, email campaigns, etc.

My wife and I had just started dating and she was getting her masters degree in southern California. I knew I wanted to move down so I changed my location on LinkedIn to California and began connecting with as many people in marketing as I could in the region. I struck luck and had someone reach out about running Facebook ads. 24 hours later I was flown down to interview in person and was offered a job on the spot. This was my first “real” corporate job outside of college and it lay the foundation for all my experience in digital advertising.

I learned how to build massive bulk ad creation systems and processes for scale. I was exposed to high volume media buying and learned a ton very quickly.

I was at that company for 4 years until I was hired by Fluent in 2018. I worked there for 6 years. I was hired on as the first senior media buyer dedicated to paid social and quickly scaled these channels to 7 figures my first year. I hired on a team and built robust systems, automations and processes to allow for tremendous scale.

In 2022 I partnered with Kitchn.io to build a large scale bulk ad creation system as well as automations for managing media. In 2022 my team built over 10k ads using the systems and processes I built.

Today I offer a range of services for clients ranging from creative strategy, automation building, ad account set up, ad account audits, Ai consulting and infrastructure, reporting, pixel set up and tracking.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

The very first thing I did when I started building my presence on social media was follow creators who were talking about similar topics. I consumed their content to learn how they connect with their audience and what topics seems to resonate well. Then I followed creators who share best practices on content creation at large.

Then I began to test my own content. One of the best pieces of advice I got early on was to consistently post. I made a goal of posting at least once a day for a few months. The key piece to understand with this is that it’s not the act of posting a lot that gets your account to scale, it’s learning quickly by creating so much content. When you are cranking out videos, you’re testing so many new hooks, strategies, content pillars, etc to understand what will work. Once you “crack the code” for your audience you no longer have to pump out content as aggressively. The focus shifts to quality over quantity.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

I’m sure anyone who has worked in paid social digital advertising will agree that to work in this space requires a lot of resilience. There have been seasons in my career where nothing seemed to work. Period that made me question if i’m even good at what I do. There is an emotional roller coaster that takes place when your livelihood is connected to how your ads are performing.

Learning how to disconnect your emotional state by how well your campaigns are performing is something i’ve had to work on a lot throughout my career. Ultimately, understanding that there will always be an end to the poor performance and staying the course is what i’ve found to help the most.

I’ve compared cycles like this to a rip current. If you swim against the current to get back to shore, you’ll likely drown. Instead you should not panic, conserve your energy and swim parallel to the shore. Focus on what you know works and live to make ads another day.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.mrpaidsocial.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mr.paidsocial
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61554676047193
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/calebkrusemedia/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/mrpaidsocial
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeo5m2r5sj_w6RM3cEfXY2Q
• Other: Tiktok https://www.tiktok.com/@mr.paidsocial?lang=en