How I Became a Professional Website Designer For Private Practice

This is my story.

Might be a little long, but worth the read.

a family photo
a photo of young Jesse

From Distracted Youth

to Self-Discovery

When I was young, I was a very energetic, outgoing, young boy. I loved to learn, though my grades through elementary and high school would show otherwise. I had many friends and couldn’t, for the life of me, figure out why some people didn’t like me. Oh well, maybe they were just having a bad day. I just wanted to have fun. This may have been to mask a hard family life happening in the background. I often found myself wandering off in my head and thinking about anything and everything, other than what I should be focusing on.


When high school was over, I was filled with ambition and dabbled in many ventures, but never stuck with any of them. I was and still am today, highly creative, and resourceful. Moving from job to job and life event to life event, I knew I was struggling mentally and found a counselor who helped me see that there were a lot of traumatic issues I have had bubbling under the surface.


Because of my lack of organization and responsibility with money, my time there was cut short, and I was left with only that... I was dealing with some significant stuff. I was committed to working on myself and spent a lot of time on my own, reading, listening to some amazing podcasts and changing a lot of habits which started to turn me into the person I wanted to become, which led to meeting my wife.

I immediately started looking for answers. I binge-watched an incredible amount of her videos and was more validated that maybe I wasn’t a failure in life and that I wasn’t doomed to a life of intense struggle. I reached out to a place to ask if they diagnose for ADHD. Am I a child? “Nope.” “Then it’s really hard to diagnose when you are an adult.” I reached out to another place. “Are you just looking for medication?”  "No". "Then it is a 1-year waiting list". And another, with another 1-year waiting list. I reached out to an actual ADHD clinic and got the same answer. Wow, I couldn’t believe how hard it was.

I reached out to my friend with his glass company and told him, I can make something so much better for him. I have been studying website design and SEO like my life depended on it. For a heavily reduced rate, I created him a website that ended up ranking him #2 and #3 on Google for some big keywords. I was hooked on figuring out how I can manipulate google and master the art of scaling businesses online.


Because of this, I was now being referred to people who are asking me if I could build their website. By this time, I was to report back to my job full time. I was now freelancing and working full time with a growing baby girl and another on the way, while trying to keep my wife home to be able to take care of our little ones. I spent almost 2 years doing this. I knew that something had to give. I either give up working in the evenings and be content with a job I didn’t like, or pursue the entrepreneurial journey which I feel has been calling me for years.


I joined a mentorship group that teaches people like me how to grow a value based digital agency. One that is not spamming your inbox every second day, but one that truly is able to provide people with tangible value. In order to work with them, you had to niche down, and I learned how important that was. They urged me to find something I was passionate about, and I had to figure that out. It came down to working with real estate agents (only because I knew so many of them) or mental health, because I was actually passionate about it.

 When I met my wife, it was a rollercoaster of amazingness. All my priorities were out of wack and I didn’t really care because the woman of my dreams had all my attention. In 6 months after our first date, we were engaged, and 11 months after, we somehow pulled together the wedding of both of our dreams. Since I moved out of my town, I quit the sales job I was working in to find another closer to home.


I found a new job in sales at a more upscale marble and granite company, selling very luxurious countertops and feature walls to elite clientele and renowned interior designers. The elegance of it all was way beyond my own personal style. The sales style I was being taught was very specific and leaning towards hard closing. The pressure put on me to perform was huge. This was of top of the fact I just could not get myself to focus. Staring at five different Excel spreadsheets was becoming a blur, and missing one incredibly small detail could cost thousands. I needed to get out.


I came home and speaking to my wife who has been aware of this struggle for a while, I realized… this struggle has been evident in the bulk of my (embarrassingly) many jobs. I saw a video from a gal on YouTube, explaining what ADHD was. I had a lightbulb moment. The woman in this video was explaining my ENTIRE life.

I had given up.

Fast-forward about 3 years later, when the pandemic hit, I got laid off from the job I was working at. My wife and I had our first baby girl 6 months before everything got shut down. I got worried and went straight to work on figuring out what I can do to provide for my family.


I remembered that a couple of years prior, as a favor for a friend, I helped him build a website for his new glass company he started. It wasn’t that great, but it wasn’t bad. I created it for him because he is an incredible person and deserves to do well, but I also got the chance to figure out the process of constructing a website from scratch. I also built one for another friend to start their HVAC company.


I got in touch with an old friend who owned a digital marketing agency and asked him how he started his business and what he used to do it. I am so grateful to him. He spent the next 4 weeks sitting down with me once a week and taught me what to do.

I reached out to friends in both industries to ask about what they would be looking for and value in working with someone to help them with their online stuff. I connected with an awesome woman from my church, who I didn’t even know was a therapist, and she agreed to answer my questions. In that meeting, I found out that she specialized in working with people who have ADHD. I had so many other questions for her like “why is it so hard to find someone to help me figure this out?”. She connected me with a specialist who was able to take me through a test and an interview. I was to take those results to a doctor for a final diagnosis, but she concluded, “People who do the Brown who don't have ADHD...all their domains are in the normative range. Nothing even touches the gray. And most people with diagnosed ADHD have one or two dots in the white. Yours are allllll gray.”
 
I finally felt like I had some sort of answer. I finally felt like I wasn’t as dumb as I have grown into my 30’s believing. This is still something I am working on and working through.
 
All of my passions have led me to this point. I feel like I am now able to take my creative personality, the skill set that I have acquired over the last handful of years and a passion for mental health and turn it into something amazing. I feel like I am now able to help people like me, by helping you craft your message so that it genuinely connects with your ideal client, optimizing your website to be found on Google and create a website design that helps move the needle for someone to make an incredible decision to invest in their life.

 My story doesn’t end here. This is where it begins. I am incredibly grateful and honored to have found where I am meant to be. 

There is work to be done * There is work to be done * There is work to be done * There is work to be done *
There is work to be done * There is work to be done * There is work to be done * There is work to be done *