Today we’d like to introduce you to Ahmed Al-Sayeed.
I had just recently quit my job as a waiter in 2015. I was a college dropout and had little to no direction in life. While looking for a new opportunity, a friend I played basketball with told me he found some success selling T-shirts online and asked if I would be interested in joining him. With nothing left to lose, I decided why not join him on a journey that just might change my life forever?
I convinced my best friend Adeeb at the time to join me and he did without hesitation. The next 8 months were spent learning about e-commerce. We did everything ourselves, building the websites, product photography, editing, sourcing, and fulfillment, marketing, customer service, graphic design, etc. 12 hour days at coffee shops, libraries, you name it!
It took us about 8 months to finally turn a profit! Luckily and gratefully we lived with our parents at the time and had no real need for money or a liveable wage during that time. Everything we worked towards in 8 months finally felt worth it. We realized that we could rinse/repeat the process over and over until something truly worked and that’s exactly what we did. After 18 websites and semi-successful stores, we finally managed to build our first successful company; queue Canvas Freaks which launched in October 2016.
In 2 months of launch, we had done over $500k in sales and realized the immediate need to bring our production in-house. This started a 3-year long process of learning how to build a manufacturing facility even though we all had zero experience in operations. Over the course of these 3 years from 2016 to 2019, we built up Canvas Freaks and its sister production company Home Decor Fulfillment to over 100 individuals employed within the ecosystem.
We now manufacture all kinds of canvas products, as well as neon, LED signs, and other amazing and custom products. During this time is when I realized my deficiencies as a leader and decided to go back to school to graduate from UCF and then to complete my MBA at Rollins which truly helped me in so many ways in regards to building our companies. 2020 and 2021 were when my co-founders and I shifted our focus back into e-commerce to build out Ag3ncy X which would function as our own in-house full-scale e-commerce digital marketing company. This allowed us to build other incredible brands such as www.Animefyme.com and www.pokepetshop.com along with a few others.
We grew to $10M revenues in 2020 and to $15M revenues in 2022 with a projected outlook this year in 2023 to surpass 50% growth yet again hopefully! Our team is absolutely incredible and almost every single person in management positions and leadership positions started from the ground up within the company and worked their way up to where they deserve to be.
All this growth would still be a dream if it wasn’t for them and their buy-in with building everything we want to build and achieve.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall, and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
The journey has definitely been anything but smooth. We’ve made many mistakes along the way and have learned so many valuable lessons. One really important lesson that comes to mind is that you should absolutely never prioritize profits over people.
In the early days of building Animefy Me, which is one of our portfolio brands that animates you and your loved ones into custom anime art, we highly overestimated our capabilities. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem because you can always update customers about the issues and slow down sales to be able to catch up, but this was right before Christmas of 2020.
We saw how much demand there was for the art and we ambitiously tried to keep up with hundreds of daily orders which ended up resulting in thousands of unsatisfied customers over time who didn’t get their orders in time for the holidays. Our artists were beyond tired and we tarnished the reputation of our brand. It took us over 6 months to build back trust and the respect of our team.
The short-term profits ended up losing us an incredible amount of money and respect and taught us to never ever put ourselves or our team in that position again. Needless to say, the pandemic caused a challenge for most businesses. We were lucky enough to be in e-commerce which benefited from the pandemic in regards to growth. This had its own challenges however since our production team had to manage to figure out how to produce 400% volumes with global supply chain issues while also protecting each and every team member with proper covid protocols.
We somehow made it through this very turbulent period and our team grew stronger because of it! Lastly, Facebook ads challenges that began in Q3 last year lead to massive industry shocks with paid advertising which was responsible for 90% of our sales. We had to pivot to survive. There was a moment when we genuinely thought we could lose everything we’ve built but thanks to TikTok advertising we survived.
We found massive success in TikTok for all our brands. Making content on TikTok became our specialty and now we thrive because of it!
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
Ag3ncy X is a full-service e-commerce agency that incubates and scales direct-to-consumer eCom brands.
We take a concept and turn it into a fully functioning business within just 30-60 days. We build the operational funnels. We conceptualize the products and source them. We build the websites and design them. We create the content and manage the social media. Lastly, we run all the ads up to hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, profitably.
As of now, we have 4 house brands that are doing a total of $15M a year in revenues. We also have 4-5 brands in the pipeline to be launched this year that all have incredible potential. We never wanted to take on clients until we realized just how much VALUE we have available to give to direct-to-consumer eCommerce companies.
We do it with our awesome 3 departments: XBrands | XMedia | XPerformance.
2022 is a very exciting year for us because we will now finally begin accepting clients for both XMedia and XPerformance and will help many other eCommerce businesses grow their own brands to 7-8 figures and beyond! XMedia creates content packages on TikTok that sell! XPerformance does omnichannel paid ads extremely profitably.
We are not just an agency, we’re eCommerce business owners first, which means we know exactly what’s important to our clients and we ourselves have experienced everything they’ve experienced and know how to address concerns accordingly.
What makes us incredibly special, is our team. Every team member is an intrapreneur (entrepreneurs within our business) and helps ideate brands and different parts of our business from scratch. We have a very collaborative environment and provide as much creative freedom as necessary.
Our entire team works 80% of the week from home and on a flexible schedule that doesn’t follow the standard 9-5 system. This means team members exclusively work when they know they’ll be the most productive.
Do you have recommendations for books, apps, blogs, etc?
The apps that our team absolutely cannot live without are:
– Clickup: a project management software that allows our whole team to work in unison on projects with massive depth and even something as simple as a daily to-do list.
– Slack: the perfect communication tool for our team so we can keep all of our conversations organized while working on so many different projects and brands at once.
The podcasts that bring massive value to my life:
– The Game w/ Alex Hormozi – An incredible podcast hosted by an entrepreneur that has built a portfolio of companies that are doing $85M a year in revenues before he turned 30. Actionable advice on how to improve your mindset and results.
– How I Built This – An awesome NPR show which hosts guests who have built world-class brands and stories about how they exactly did it.
Articles and Newsletters:
– The Information is a great place where I receive daily/weekly/monthly updates about the happenings around the creator economy and all things business & tech without any of the fluff.
Contact Info:
- Email: ahmed@ag3ncyx.com
- Website: https://linktr.ee/ahmedalsayeed
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ahmed_al_sayeed
