Absolutely. In a lot of ways, running an Instagram or a blog and running a small business are very similar. I think one of the big differences obviously is that you are the product. You're not selling a product. It is you, which makes things a little bit different. Obviously different than running a business that has a physical product. That's quite different.

I think one of the ways that it's not the same is patience. I think that a lot of influences aren't playing the long game. They start their accounts and they think that they should be going on-- If for some reason you want to go on the revolve trips, you should be going on those trips, and you should have all this money, and you should be flying around the world, and making shitloads of money within the first year. If you've done that and you're able to do that, congratulations, but running a small business, having run one myself and continuing to do this, I'm seven years in and I've devoted that entire seven years to this thing.

When I started this company I thought three years, I'll sell it, I'll be onto the next thing. I love my job, I could do this for the next 20 years. It's not like I want to get out. I just don't think I appreciated how long it takes to build something meaningful and something valuable, because I've been inundated with all these stories of overnight successes. I thought that that would be me. I would just start this thing, it would be a fucking rocket ship, I'd be out, I'd be sitting on a beach in three and a half years, no problem.

I'm seven years in, I haven't seen the beach in a while. The closest I get is a St. Tropez spray tan every once in awhile, which St. Tropez is a client. I'll just do my FTC guideline compliance whatever, #client, but seriously, St. Tropez is- they invented self-tanner and they're the finest in the world. If you're not a St. Tropez customer, I really, really urge you to become one.

It's so much harder than I thought. I think that I now will like see a sign outside of small business that's in business for 40 years, and I want to go in and like shake that guy's hand because I realize just how hard this is. I think that what influencers are doing incredible and it's changing media and it's changing advertising, but you have to take the long view and you have to think about this as a decade or decades long project.

I remember when I was really struggling and I was feeling pretty down about what was happening at Fohr in the early years, I went to dinner with this guy and he was like, "Most businesses, it takes seven years. It took seven years to really hit your stride." He was seven years in and he felt like you know what, we're just figuring it out.

We're seven years in now and things feel so much different. I don't worry as much that I'm going to wake up and we're going to have no money and the thing's going to go out of business. I think that that seven-year rule is kind of true, and so if you're two years in, I'm not saying you shouldn't be ambitious, I'm not saying you shouldn't be driving for that overnight success, but if you're two years in and you feel like this is never going to happen, drop me a line, I'll tell you what my business looked like two years in because it was a complete and absolute nightmare.

I think that for the most part, being successful is just having stamina, it's just being tenacious, and you just say, "I'm going to fucking make this work, no matter what." Losing is just absolutely not an option. I think that's a mentality that a lot of small business owners have and I think one that to be successful in running your own thing, you have to take on.

The obvious ways in which it's a small business is I think that how many hats you have to wear. I don't think of Fohr as a small business anymore because I don't have 10 jobs anymore. I may have like three jobs, but when you're running a small business, especially you're an influencer, you're the photographer, you're the art director, you're the the PR, you're the assistant, you're the copywriter, you're everything. You're the retoucher, you're the agent, you're everything, right?

That's a reality of a small business. That's a reality of being an influencer and running this as a business is that you have to be able to wear those hats. You have to be able to do the work that really sucks. I think that's something running a business has taught me is that you have to be able to get through the shitty work to get to the good work, and every job sucks sometimes, every single one. I don't care who it is, I don't care how great their job is, there are parts of that job that they hate, that suck. That's true of being an influencer, it's a glamorous thing from the outside, but peel that back and there's a lot of stuff that that's pretty shitty.

I wouldn't want to answer 50 emails from brands that are never going to pay me and are going to disrespect me. Personally, I wouldn't want to have to respond to 50 DMs a day. Just for me, that would be very difficult, the parts of the job that are hard. I think I've said before that success is like that one thing that for the vast majority of the world, especially in those of us blessed enough to be born here, everyone's chasing it. If everyone's chasing same thing, it's going to be pretty hard to get it. I think that just how hard it is and how many things you have to do to make it work, is exactly like running a small business.