We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Nick English a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Nick, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Being a business owner can be really hard sometimes. It’s rewarding, but most business owners we’ve spoken sometimes think about what it would have been like to have had a regular job instead. Have you ever wondered that yourself? Maybe you can talk to us about a time when you felt this way?

I’m much happier running my own business. I’ve had both corporate jobs and funkier startup jobs and while I’ve never had to wear a suit — jeans and collars were all that was required at the corporate one — I’m far happier when I can set my own hours. I haven’t woken up with an alarm in years, which I’m grateful for every day. I have a touch of OCD and I had difficulty with the way that working for someone else gave me little control of my day to day or my fate more broadly, plus I simply don’t love working and am ecstatic that I do less than 40 hours a week. It took a lot of work to get here, but my prior career was in health and fitness, and I couldn’t shake this idea that there’s no way to work the standard 50 hours a week, get 8+ hours of sleep, exercise regularly, walk 10,000 steps a day, meditate, read, eat well, and maintain friendships and relationships. Having to devote 50 hours a week for 50 years for 50 weeks a year is just inhuman to me.

Nick, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I was born and raised in Australia and spent my twenties traveling the world, working in education and NGOs in China, India, Kenya, and Chile. Eventually I returned to Australia to pursue a double master’s in International Relations and Journalism, which I only picked because that’s always what people pick when they don’t know what they want to do with their lives. I figured I’d wind up in PR or something, so I was delighted when I landed a job in New York City in health and fitness, writing articles for places like Men’s Health and Vice.

Eventually I got a job with a fitness startup, where I was the second employee and helped build it from the ground up. That taught me how to make a profitable website. I was in my early 30s at this point and wanting more control over my life and my finances so I decided to strike out on my own, after talking to a consultant who helped me work through a few different ideas until I landed on one that had the right balance of search volume, commission and conversion potential, etc.

The niche was boots! Growing up in tropical Australia, I never needed thick footwear that could handle snow and ice, and I had a lot of fun looking at different brands and trying to find that One Cool Boot. My site (and YouTube channel) were all about that, but I gave it a broad enough name — Stridewise — that I’d have room to move into other areas once I had my Google foothold secured. Today I have a ton of high ranking content on boots, waxed jackets, shirts, and more, and the goal is to get to the top of Google for leather jackets and jeans as well.

I always hated wearing shirts with logos, and always found myself craving clothes and boots that were timeless and simple, stuff that I wouldn’t be embarrassed to look at photos of myself wearing ten years from now. I found that in the “heritage fashion” niche and now I love being able to educate guys on how to find clothes that are durable and both cool and inconspicuous.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

YouTube! Writing an blog post about somebody doesn’t impress them much, but making a video about them gets them very excited. Having a YouTube channel is important for SEO for a lot of reasons, but I’ve found this cool strategy where if I visit a brand and make a video about them, they’ll a) love me for it and b) do a blog post about it on their company’s website. This gets me a very valuable, high authority link and helps with SEO, plus it’s more fun than just doing relentless SEO-style videos like “how to dry boots” etc.

At this stage, when I’m introducing myself to someone I can show them videos of me making boots in Guatemala, making leather in Mexico, and visiting factories all over the world. I can get even complex videos edited for $350, a good cameraman I can find for $500 a day, and this gets a link that’s worth over $1000.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

Maybe it’s just me, but when I had a job, my desire was only to do enough work that I don’t get in trouble. Now that I’m self employed, it took a bit of time to build the motivation and consistency to do enough work that I don’t fall behind my competitors. Once there was *enough* money coming in to pay my rent and groceries, I got pretty lax because hey, there’s no boss to yell at me. But over time, it made me lose some important rankings. Motivation comes in different forms when you’re a business owner, and it takes a lot more time for ‘not doing enough work’ to produce damaging results, but the results are more damaging than that angry e-mail from a boss. Anyway, learning to motivate myself every day is something I had to learn, and am still learning.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.stridewise.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/stridewise
• Facebook: facebook.com/thestridewise
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nick-english-502a3818/
• Twitter: twitter.com/thestridewise
• Youtube: youtube.com/stridewise

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