From Comic-Con to Commercial Lending: An Entrepreneur's Unlikely Pivot

For years, I lived in what most people would consider an entrepreneur's dream. My agency, Hadley Media, was producing experiential marketing events for entertainment giants—Netflix, Fox, Marvel, HBO. We'd be at SXSW one week, Comic-Con the next, Coachella after that. Our work won AdWeek's "Best In Show." We were building immersive experiences in Times Square, creating buzz at major festivals, and working with brands that defined popular culture.

It was creative, exciting, and successful. But I was drawn to something different—the leverage and scalability of tech. I wanted recurring revenue, not project-based work. I wanted to build something that could scale without my constant presence at events. So in 2018, I sold the agency to pursue that vision.

I sold Hadley Media in 2018 and immediately launched a new platform business serving the experiential marketing industry. It was gaining traction, building momentum—until COVID hit.

The pandemic didn't just pause the business—it eliminated the entire market overnight. Events disappeared. The industry I'd spent decades in essentially went dark. And in the aftermath, when I invested significant capital into development projects to pivot, those ventures never materialized. Projects built by others that went nowhere.

I found myself in my late 40s, reassessing everything.

Here's the truth: I didn't wake up one day and decide to become a fintech entrepreneur. The transition happened because I was tired of being dependent on others to build my vision.

I started learning to code by watching YouTube videos—grinding through tutorials, copying examples, making sense of error messages. Then AI tools like Cursor and ChatGPT emerged and completely accelerated everything. What would have taken years compressed into months. Every error message became a conversation. Every Stack Overflow search became unnecessary. I stopped outsourcing my technical problems and started solving them myself.

The transformation wasn't just technical. It was psychological. For the first time in my career, I wasn't limited by what I could convince someone else to build. If I could imagine it, I could now build it.

While learning to code, I started exploring different industries. Commercial lending wasn't on my radar initially, but as I dug deeper, I saw something fascinating: a massive, fragmented market with terrible technology.

Commercial lending brokers were using spreadsheets, outdated CRMs, and spending hours manually researching prospects. The lead generation was primitive. The sales intelligence was non-existent. Meanwhile, I was learning about AI agents, web scraping, and data enrichment—tools that could transform how brokers found and closed deals.

The disconnect was obvious. The opportunity was massive.

I started with simple tools—loan calculators that could help borrowers understand their options while generating referral commissions. SBACalculators.com, EquipmentCalculators.com, FranchiseLoanHelp.com. These sites served two purposes: they validated there was demand, and they generated revenue while I built something bigger.

That bigger thing became SalesLeadAgent.com—a comprehensive sales intelligence platform that uses AI agents to find prospects, enrich contact data, analyze company news, and provide personalized outreach strategies. It's everything I wished existed when I was trying to find and close high-value clients in my agency days, now built specifically for commercial lending brokers.

The platform does in minutes what used to take brokers hours or days. And it's priced at a fraction of what they'd pay for multiple point solutions.

1. 1

   Your "unrelated" experience is more valuable than you think

   Everything I learned building experiential campaigns—understanding customer psychology, creating memorable experiences, managing complex logistics—translates directly to building SaaS products. Marketing is still marketing. Sales is still sales. The medium changed, but the fundamentals didn't.

2. 2

   Starting over isn't starting from zero

   I brought decades of entrepreneurial pattern recognition. I knew how to validate ideas quickly, how to talk to customers, when to pivot, and how to manage cash flow. That knowledge compressed my learning curve dramatically.

3. 3

   Technical literacy is the new business literacy

   You don't need to become a senior developer, but understanding how modern systems work—APIs, databases, AI models, web scraping—is now as fundamental as understanding accounting or marketing. It's not optional anymore.

4. 4

   Age is irrelevant; adaptability is everything

   I learned to code in my late 40s using YouTube and then AI tools. I'm now ranked in the top 1% of Cursor AI users globally. The barrier wasn't my age—it was my willingness to embrace being a beginner again.

5. 5

   Setbacks create clarity

   Experiencing significant losses was difficult. But it also clarified what mattered and freed me from overthinking. When you've navigated real adversity, you stop making decisions from fear and start making them from curiosity and possibility.

Today, I'm running SalesLeadAgent with growing traction—conducting 20-30 demos weekly with strong conversion rates. My calculator sites are generating consistent referral revenue. I'm exploring UCC filing data integration and news intelligence features that could make the platform even more valuable.

The business model works. The product solves real problems. The market is enormous.

But more importantly, I wake up every day building something I control, using skills I own, in an industry with massive upside.

If you're reading this from a place of uncertainty—maybe your industry is contracting, maybe your business model is breaking, maybe you're just restless—here's what I'd tell you:

Looking back, I'm grateful for the circumstances that forced this transition. Not in a trite, motivational-poster way, but genuinely.

In the entertainment world, I was successful but constrained. I was executing other people's visions, managing increasingly complex logistics, competing in a crowded market where differentiation was hard.

In fintech, I'm building infrastructure that can scale. I'm solving problems that compound. I'm leveraging technology that makes my business more valuable over time, not less.

I'm building toward 1,500 subscribers in the next 2-3 years. That's the immediate milestone. But the broader vision is creating a comprehensive intelligence platform that changes how commercial lending brokers operate.

And unlike my first career, this time I'm not dependent on anyone else to make it happen.