Standing on the shoulders of Andy Elliott. Two years as the first employee.

For the two years before I met Andy Elliott, I’d been watching Tony Robbins. The line that locked in for me was Robbins quoting Newton. If you want to go further faster, stand on the shoulders of giants. Find someone who has already been where you want to go. Don’t reinvent the path. Learn at velocity from someone who paid the tuition for you.

When I found Andy on YouTube at 2,000 subscribers, the line stopped being abstract. He was a working car salesman making $700,000 a year. He had the word tracks. He had the strategies. He had the persona of someone who was going to make it big, and the discipline of someone who would grow that persona either way. So I called him. Two months into my own car dealership job, I was already implementing his playbook at the desk every day. Eight months later, I was on a plane to Oklahoma.

This is the story of the two years that came after.

How I found Andy

Senior year of high school, I was deliberately isolated. The plan was real estate first, then sales for the income (a regret I’m writing about separately, because the marketing-versus-sales decision is the foundational why behind Dynamite Growth and it deserves its own article).

My dad got me an interview at a car dealership. The first month I was clearing $5,000 to $6,000 in commission, top of the board. Hunger plus Tony Robbins tapes for fuel. About two months in, I went deep on YouTube looking for the people one or two levels above where I already was. That’s how I found Andy. He had 2,000 subscribers and was posting word-track tutorials that nobody else was teaching. The receipts were undeniable. He had been in car sales long enough to make $700,000 a year doing it.

Most people would have left a comment or sent a DM. I called. I started implementing what he taught at the dealership the same week. The income moved.

The decision (one week)

About six or seven months into the dealership, I was done with the toxic environment. The money was real but the room wasn’t. I called Andy back and asked what was next.

He gave me two options. A Texas Lexus dealership had a slot open, but only as an internet rep. I declined. The other option was Oklahoma. He was training the staff at a dealership there. He suggested I move out and work directly with him.

A week later I was on a plane. I was 18.5 years old.

What I built

Here is the piece of the Andy Elliott story that doesn’t get told. When I got to Oklahoma, the branding was zero. Andy is many things, but he is not a brander and he is not a marketer. He could close. He could train salespeople. He could film. The infrastructure that turns all of that into a scaling business, that wasn’t there yet.

So I built it.

I built the brand. The logos, the visual identity, the look that became The Elliott Group’s recognizable surface. I created the offers, because there were none when I started. You can’t scale a sales education company without offers to sell. I created the process for scheduling a call. I brought in the CRM and built the automations on top of it. I helped seed the early company culture. I helped launch the podcast. I created The One Percenters Club, the brand identity for the community side of the business. I launched a Facebook group that grew to 100,000 members.

And I helped run the day to day. I lived with Andy. I helped with chores. They fed me. Two years of full-immersion access to a man building a sales education business from nothing. (The lessons from living in the same house as your mentor deserve their own article. I’m writing that one separately too.)

What I watched up close

Andy let me in close. Not just on the work, on the operating posture. I got to see how a man with a track record translated that track record into a public persona, and then into a business.

When I started, the company was doing about $7,000 a month in revenue.

By the time I left, we were doing roughly $800,000 a month.

That is the kind of compression you only see if you are in the room. Most operators I know have read about scaling a business. I got to watch it happen, in two years, from inside the house where it was happening. From $7K a month to nearly a $10M-a-year run rate.

The receipts of that experience never washed out. Every operating decision I make today has a piece of what I saw there in it somewhere, even the pieces I had to walk away from.

When I left

Robert Greene’s Mastery names the moment I had been getting closer to. Cuchillo Mastero. The phase when the apprentice notices more wrongs than rights, and the right move is to leave. Fast.

I won’t go into the specific triggers here. The lessons stay. The rest stays private. What matters is that the principle locked in for me. When something clicks as wrong, the exit is fast.

That speed-of-decision pattern is now operating procedure. The same week-of-decision tempo that got me to Oklahoma at 18.5 got me out when it was time. A week to commit. A week to leave.

What I carry today

The visible legacy is the brand-craft instinct. I now run a marketing agency, Dynamite Growth, where the same design discipline I used to build Andy’s brand shows up in every client’s surface. The funnels look like they cost something to design. The emails read like a person wrote them. The offers are built before the ads ever run. Brand is the conversion mechanism on a high-ticket offer, and the brand-craft I learned at Andy’s company is what makes that work today.

The deeper legacy is harder to see. Two years of close-range observation of what scaling actually looks like, including the parts the highlight reel never shows. You learn what good and bad scaling look like in your bones. You learn what you’d do differently. You learn what is worth standing on someone else’s shoulders for, and when to step down.

After I left, I took what I learned and ran my own play in Iowa. That story is here. The brand-craft instincts and the speed-of-decision instinct both came from Oklahoma.

For now, the principle is simple. Find someone further faster. Call them directly, don’t just consume the content. Implement what they teach. Build something that wouldn’t exist without you. Leave when it’s time to leave.

The receipts go with you.