How I Started & Scaled HighKey Enterprises To An Eight Figures PR Firm

This is a very special Podcast! This is the first Podcast created for my new channel called Road To A Billion.

I vlogged back in 2016 and 2017 with my older brother on our YouTube channel when we started HighKey here: https://www.youtube.com/@HighKeyCo. 

Something I really missed over the past few years is being able to look back at the content from years ago and see the tasks I was working on, my mindset, and the documentation...

This is why I am starting up this series titled "Road To A Billion" on this Podcast and across my social media channels, documenting the entire process of building our company to a Billion dollar valuation.

On my social media channels, I will be documenting micro-content of weekly recaps, and on this Podcast, I will be documenting mainly monthly recaps.

These Podcasts will go through my failures, successes, plans, actions, goals, mindset, thoughts, and anything else I want to document during this process.

This will be the first-ever consistent vlog series of a 23-year-old Entrepreneur that will become a Billionaire.

This Podcast is being uploaded on June 3rd, 2023, but this episode was actually filmed on  December 12th, 2022. 

I run a Public Relations Firm in Puerto Rico called HighKey Enterprises LLC. We recorded just over $5.5 Million in revenue on our company's 2021 tax return and are scaling rapidly.

If you want to learn from my failures and watch the journey, feel free to subscribe to this channel. 

Subscribe to My YouTube Channel
https://www.youtube.com/@lukelintz_/videos

Follow Me on Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/lukelintz/

Transcript

Luke Lintz: 0:00

Alright, so this is my first vlog on my personal YouTube channel. This is very special. Because I've been wanting to do this for a very long time, I thought of this idea that's never been done before. And the name of this channel is going to be road to a billion. I don't think that it has ever been done before document the entire process on a week to week basis, going through the goal setting involved going through the mindset, going through the major decisions being made on an ongoing basis of what looks like to get to where we are now where myself is right now, personally, where myself is right now in the business. And getting to that billion dollar level. I want to make this because I've had such an enjoyable time going back and looking at videos from the past that I filmed back when we first started seven, eight years ago with our business, Heike, and I found so much enjoyment, going back and seeing what I was like in certain dynamics, what my mindset was how I talked how I interacted, noticing if I was stressed in certain areas, I could only imagine what myself is going to be like in 10 years from now 20 years from now 30 years where I'm at looking back on videos, this specific video, and then the videos that I'm making the future and seeing that. So this channel is really just for documentation for me, I'm not expecting really any viewers from it, maybe once I get to that billion dollar level, people might go back and see what the process is like. And what's really cool is I've been doing this to a certain extent where I have these journals where their 90 Day journals I know every single successful person has some way of documenting information document goes. But I have this blue journal where it documents 90 Day goals. It gives you three major 90 Day goals to review. And then it breaks it down into weekly goals. And that also breaks it down into daily goals. And I filled this out practically every single day really religiously for the past three years, I have a ton of information, these these journals and I'll probably make a video down the line going through all three years of journals because there'll be a video itself of basically going back in time through my goal setting journey of what my goals were like I even wrote down what my mindset was like at certain points during major stress points, I wrote down notes about how I got through major decisions. And that's why I think that this vlog in this entire channel will do for me just by myself in terms of, I think it'd be cool to have something every single week where it's not only in the journal, but things that are inside of my journal that I'm writing goals that I'm setting, and who knows it might be valuable to certain people that are on the same path in the same industry dealing with the same problems. Hopefully it helps with that. But again, this channel definitely mainly for me in terms of just documenting the entire journey and having that for myself, I'm going to be doing this every single week. So plan is right now. It's right now it's Monday, November 28 28th, I'll probably be doing this on Sundays, because I have the most time then again, I'm going to be mainly going through the blue journal, I will be making a video going through the past three years of blue journals, I think that would be very valuable. And it'd be fun to go through those past three years. Like probably cram that into one video. And the main thing with this is I'm just doing it now because I can constantly keep pushing this off. But the main thing is, is I blind to do this for so long. And I wish I did it before because we are at a level with the business. And I'll get into it and talk about about the level that we're currently at just being completely authentic. And just being completely honest, I'll show screenshots to if I decide to add this or I'll just keep it raw, but I wish I did sooner because we are at a place of a decent amount of success in terms of the monetary sense, whatever you quantify success as but if I'm looking at from the monetary sense, we are decently successful. And so we aren't dealing with problems that I was dealing with two years ago, three years ago, four years five years ago. And so the reason I'm just starting this now is because I just went started and I have that goal set up for a billion but it's not even really a goal. It's just the name of the channel. I think it's catchy and accurately cool just to document the path and having a sticker point being the monetary sense in these videos, you're not going to see me putting on a character I'm not going to be like I am in most of the Heike videos or in some of our ads where I'm extremely over the top energetic trying to get in the face. Like it'd be these videos I'm gonna be myself you know, smiling, being enthusiastic, but you know, not not too over the top and before I get into things in terms of the past week and doing a recap of basically what I do every single week, it would be fitting to do a background of high key start off our business in August 2016 first business myself my old a brother and a really good friend at the time, Aaron Badescu. And we started an E commerce company, just sporadically in terms of we saw a need for wireless earbuds completely wireless ear buds, no core ear buds. And so all we had to do was go on to the internet, found a site called Alibaba, which was a wholesale site for making large purchase orders of Chinese products bulk ordering them, and you can do what's called OEM or ODM design to make changes to the product, aka white labeling to put your logo on the product and make it as if you've created the product. And so we found this one pair of wireless earbuds it was the only pair of wireless earbuds there at the time, we ordered initial samples, and we thought that they were all right, not the best, but we thought that they were good enough considering there was no other alternatives on the marketplace. So we made a bulk purchase created a logo. And originally our name was low key, just because Loki was a huge search term in 2016. And it was one of the top three most popular search terms in Google in 2016. And so we decided to have the hazard name. When we went to the registration office to make that into a company. They said that it's not valid, and we thought about things you're gonna like, right? We're high key, we're, we're not low key. And so we switched it, create a logo, which is designed to have like a key with an arrow up, showcasing like high key and put that on the earbuds. We just started selling via Instagram marketing, we had no idea what we were doing in terms of marketing, like my older brother Jordan was in business, Aaron didn't really have any past business experience. And myself i i was in high school, we kind of just started posting random meme page content on Instagram really just anything that we liked to get viewers and we grew that up. And it was crazy. What just happened is that we were posting stuff going viral on Instagram, we were able to find ways to creatively market on Instagram by posting on what was called me influencers. So meme pages and posting our content there with just captions talking about our wireless earbuds. And when it really was that was a winning product. There was no other alternatives on the marketplace. And so it was bound to win. We just needed to get some exposure out there. And we found a way to get millions of views for fairly cheap with these mean influencer pages. We launched in August 2016. Going through our first Black Friday, Cyber Monday and holiday season, we ended up selling it was about$40,000 Canadian in our first business in that first four months of launching. So it was wild for us. It felt crazy. We knew we had something there, we started thinking of what the next steps were in terms of developing the new product. We create a second version of wireless earbuds which was literally just our wholesale providers in China created a second version of wireless earbuds we tested out they were better. We put our logo on it made a few customizations like we wanted certain colors. We wanted customized ear tips, certain things like that they got it done, bought purchased it did more marketing, crushed it the second year, Black Friday, Cyber Monday crushed it in 2017 made I think it was a couple few$100,000. And then in 2018, we started getting into different products because we wanted to constantly keep expanding and so we developed charging backpack and then also had a speaker literally went into so many different areas and diverted away from our winning product, which was the wireless earbuds we ended up taking a huge out because there were so many other competitors in the marketplace for these other products. We ended up bulk purchasing stuff that we couldn't sell this storage were hosting fees that we couldn't keep up with shipping costs crazy had to get a loan. Basically, when in debt, I remember going to our Shopify store and we generated over a million dollars of revenue. And we literally went to the analytics report million dollars of revenue, we had nothing to show for it in terms of profit and money in the bank. And so there was a huge realization in terms of it's really just about the profit has nothing to do about the revenue. And so you'll see me throughout these channels, mainly talking about the profit ongoing and not talking about the revenue because in reality, the revenue doesn't really matter if there's no profit there. It wasn't a huge slap in the face because I was just graduating high school at the time, he still had plenty of time to go and what my mindset was back then I remember it it was such a sick mindset. I hope anybody who watches this in the future employs this mindset who's young is that I thought of it. I was like, Oh, my friends are going to college and they're going to be in college for for some two, eight years now just thinking that I could miserably fail. For the next four to eight years I could miserably fail from all the way up until I 2628 As long as I retain some extremely good in life and work experience that I was better off going into the real world and trying it out and miserably failing than going through university and that that relieves a lot of stress from me because when I was going through business and trying out new things, taking new risks going into new businesses just on the basis of learning it Parenting as much as possible work as hard as possible. And that feeling wasn't a bad thing and that it was inevitable in certain areas. But what happened is after Heike hacky tech is what we called it for the wireless ear buds is that we switched into a marketing agency called Heike agency because when we realized what you're really good at was Instagram marketing, we were able to generate a million dollars in revenue we just weren't able to retain a profit we switched into highkey agency and met our first client just sporadically inside Winnipeg, our hometown who was a real estate investor had no idea if we could do the same type of Instagram marketing for a real estate investor we ended up working with him close them on it was a $4,000 per month marketing package I believe, close them on it and literally perform super sick guys Instagram following up on a ton of viewership made a ton of content for him. We were so hands on you're literally the ones filming it. I was the one going back and you can literally see if you go onto Heike code on YouTube and scroll down to like six years ago or five years ago you can see I'm the one actually editing the content on Adobe Premiere Adobe Photoshop so I taught all myself that super easy you just go onto YouTube and search up like how to edit videos on Adobe Premiere and sell teach yourself so I was doing a in all the videos filming the content for this guy named Stephan Arnie. And then we ended up partnering up with him on Heike agency he had 10 years experience in real estate investing. He referred some clients over to us. And then we just start building up high key agency as a social media marketing agency. As we were building it up, we realized that all of our clients wanted to other things besides just social media management, they wanted social media growth, and they wanted to grow on their Instagram profile and other profiles. And then they also wanted press and publications which was kind of full circle, growing their brand not only on social media, but also growing their brand on Google as we started chugging along with Heike agency getting some monthly retainers, some people falling off, because we didn't have like a consistent product. And then some people being extremely happy with us and referring over clients. We started implementing new products, which was how we transitioned into doing press and start implementing press and really start growing out that team but then also doing the high key cloak giveaways, which is probably what we're most notable for, in terms of the Instagram community and a lot of our content on YouTube. And that's basically where we partnered up with celebrities. So our first campaign we partnered up with celebrity, and we were giving away I think it was $10,000 at the time for people to follow a list of accounts on at Heike floats, Instagram, a list of accounts on Heike Klout would pay us to sponsor the campaign. So they pay us we would set up the entire campaign. And then the celebrity would be like all you have to do to enter this campaign. To all my followers, all you have to do is go to add Heike quote and fault everybody that they're following had ended up turning to be a hit model. And we scaled that up for the for the next three years. Up until now, it ended up being extremely successful. I think the total amount generated was about 15 million in sales throughout the course of the three years with Heike clout. Now the giveaways have definitely slowed down just because Instagrams engagement overall has slowed down. So we've pushed way more into press. We have a team of foreign hosts publicist. Now for press managers, we have a team of I believe it's five editorial press writers. And then yeah, some other people along that team. But definitely the press side of things is our core focus and what's likely going to be what's getting us to that billion dollar mark with over the next 10 years. And so I think that's a wrap for this video. Just want to give that full background of where we are to come from and then in a week from now, I'll probably be filming the next week recap of basically the goals, what the mindset was, what the plan is for the following week and all that but until next week, peace