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Throughout his high school and college years, Lucas Lee-Tyson didn’t exhibit what many call traditional “predictors of success.” He wasn’t your typical ‘A’-grade student. He wasn’t interested in schoolwork or his courses. Lucas Lee-Tyson was one of those kids who had trouble applying at school – he’s the first to say he was lazy.
That same young man became a self-made millionaire in ten years, proving that success comes in different shapes and forms. Through his company Growth Cave, Lucas Lee-Tyson and his business partner Ozzie Blessed help countless businesses and individuals achieve greater success.
There’s no trick to that change – Lucas Lee-Tyson learned and invested hours of hard work and strategizing into his growth. The one thing that set him apart was that he wasn’t chasing good grades in school or money in the business world. He simply did what he was good at.
“When I was 14 or 15, I started my first small gig, designing little YouTube banners for $5 a piece,” Lucas Lee-Tyson recalls. “I wasn’t concerned with money, and I wasn’t an entrepreneur. I was just so excited to be doing something I was good at because I wasn’t good at school. I learned this on my own, watching Photoshop tutorials online.”
Lucas Lee-Tyson credits the validation he got from those early successes for kindling his entrepreneurial spirit. The praise he received for his work and the idea that he could improve his skills were all it took to set him on a new path.
It didn’t help him become a good student in college, though. Even though he enrolled in a college where they studied entrepreneurship, he still felt he wasted a lot of his time. But, again, the metrics of success in that environment – grades – weren’t interesting to him. By his sophomore year, he decided to start a business – and the first iteration of Growth Cave was born.
“The first money I ever made with Growth Cave was on Upwork,” he says. “I signed up out of boredom. Then, after a month of unsuccessfully applying for jobs as a newbie, I took on a low-paying job, did well with it, and started building my profile and reputation from there.”
Lucas Lee-Tyson would eventually leave that freelancing, one-man-show business model behind when it proved too unsteady in revenue. With a story that caught people’s attention – a self-made freelancer who started his digital ad agency – a new opportunity opened up for himself.
Instead of selling his services, he would use another method to capitalize on what he was best at – by teaching others how to do it.
“Around 2020, I decided I would pivot from doing 1-on-1 work with clients and their Facebook ads and move towards coaching and training them to do it on their own,” he says. “And with people reaching out asking how to do what I do, I put together a very unpolished product of some screen shares and recordings and offered it to people. They took me up on it and came back with stories of finding work with those skills.”
That’s how the current iteration of Growth Cave was born. A couple of years later, the one-person operation became a company of around thirty people, with Lucas Lee-Tyson and Ozzie Blessed at the helm. Once again, Lucas is chasing what he’s good at and working on the marketing side of the business, leaving sales to Ozzie.
“Ozzie and I are two very different people. He loves things like Lamborghinis, and he owns a beautiful house. I didn’t even own a car for years; I would scooter around. But we both get to focus on what we’re good at and get the rewards we want, and so do the people we work with. That makes for a successful company.”
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This content is brought to you by Andrea Mario
Photo provided with written permission from owner Mateo Evans.