Seven years ago I moved to Arizona knowing exactly one person.
About a month later, the business I had spent more than six years building fell apart. Six years of work, and it took roughly two weeks for it to come undone.
New state. No network. No company. That was not the plan.
I don't tell this story because it's dramatic. Plenty of founders have lost more. I tell it because almost everything I believe about business now came out of that stretch, and because most of the advice I see online skips the part where you're sitting in a new city with nothing and have to decide what to do next.
What actually disappears when a business fails
When people hear "the business failed," they picture the money. That part hurts, but it isn't the hardest part.
The hard part is that your identity goes with it. For six years, when someone asked what I did, I had an answer. Then one day I didn't. I was in a place where nobody knew my track record, my name meant nothing, and I couldn't point to anything and say "that's mine."
That stretch is when I started paying close attention to how people decide to trust someone they've never met.
Starting over with no network
I had always thought of a network as something you build slowly over a career. In Arizona I didn't have that luxury. I had to build one from zero, fast, and the only way to do it was to show up.
So I focused on people. Meeting them, staying in touch, being useful where I could.
What surprised me was how much the people here gave back. Arizona has a way of rewarding people who show up and keep showing up. So much of what I've built since came from relationships that started in that first rough year, from people who had no reason to help a guy who'd just lost his company and helped anyway.
If you're starting over somewhere new, my honest advice is to stop waiting until you have something impressive to say before you meet people. The meeting is what makes the something.
The lesson that turned into a company
Here's what that period taught me, and it's the idea Subscribe PR is built on.
Being good at what you do doesn't matter if nobody can see it.
When I landed in Arizona, I had real experience. But to a stranger, I was just a name. There was nothing to look up, nothing that vouched for me, no proof sitting somewhere a person could find it in thirty seconds. I had to rebuild trust one conversation at a time.
Most business owners live a quieter version of that every day. A lawyer with twenty years of wins. A clinic owner whose patients love her. A founder who has built something genuinely good. And when a potential client looks them up, there's almost nothing there. Or worse, there's something thin and outdated.
Today that lookup doesn't just happen on Google. People ask ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity who to trust, and those tools answer based on what's been written about you and where. If the proof isn't out there, you don't get recommended, no matter how good you are.
That's the problem I decided to work on. Get good people into the publications their clients actually read, and make sure the AI tools those clients ask first know who they are.
What I'd tell myself back then
I'd tell myself that the failure wasn't the end of the story. It was the beginning of a better one, I just couldn't see it yet.
I'd also say: build your proof before you need it. The worst time to realize nobody can find you is the moment you need them to.
If you've had a business fall apart, don't assume that's the final chapter. Sometimes it's the thing that points you at the work you were supposed to be doing.
What would someone find today if they looked you up for the first time?
