Scotts Valley High graduate Austyn Crispell is the founder of Santa Cruz-based Makhai Media, a company that helps other companies do their social media marketing.
He spoke at a recent local business forum, where Growing Up was amazed at his successes, as was everyone in the room.
Growing Up: Your bio says you make $100,000 per month…really? You might be the top earning teen business person in the county or the whole country.
My business revenue at the moment is $100,000 per month but that will increase within the next few months. I don’t live a lavish lifestyle so I just reinvest all of the money back into the business.
Growing Up: How did you pick the name for your company and what does it mean?
In high school I started a fitness apparel brand called “Makhai Strength.” In Greek mythology, “Makhai” is the spirit of war, so I thought it was a fitting name for a fitness brand. I used to make my own shorts, sweatpants, and tank tops in high school with the “Makhai Strength” brand, then when I graduated and started this social media business, I just decided to go by the name “Makhai Media.”
Growing Up: At what age did you decide to become an entrepreneur? From where did you get that spirit? Your peers were serving coffee or working menial jobs. What separated you from them?
I’ve been an entrepreneur my whole life, people have even joked and said that I was “born in an entrepreneurial lab.” The earliest entrepreneurial thing I remember doing is drawing comics in third grade and selling them during recess.
Then in middle school I started doing people’s homework and selling Bass Pro Shops hats during lunch. Into high school I tried drop shipping, day trading, started a vending machine business, and did pretty much every side hustle you could think of.
A lot of the side hustles I did didn’t make me a lot of money, that was until I decided to start reselling on eBay. At age 16 I started driving to garage sales and thrift stores in Santa Cruz and would buy things that nobody wanted for a few dollars and sell them on eBay for way more. There were times were people would give away things like books for free, and I could sell those same books on eBay for $300!
In my first year of reselling on eBay and Amazon I did $200,000 in sales, and during this same time I would film a lot of TikToks that would go viral and eventually lead me to start the business that I run today.
Growing Up: What kind of grades did you get in high school? What were your favorite subjects? Did you consider college?
My freshman and sophomore year of high school I was a really good student. I had a 4.3 GPA and wanted to go to college just to play football so I wouldn’t have to work a normal job. I didn’t have a favorite subject, but I did have favorite classes.
In some of my classes my teachers would let me go on my phone or laptop since I finished work early, so I would be in class trying to script out new YouTube and TikTok videos or trying out new side hustles.
I also really liked lunch period because that’s when I could go around school and sell my clothing brand inventory to other kids. When my junior year of high school hit, I started making money reselling on eBay or Amazon, so I didn’t have to worry about working a normal job anymore.
As a result of this, I started doing really bad in school because I would ditch class to drive to thrift stores or Walmarts to source product for my reselling business. Since I would go on to make $300,000 in my last two years of high school, I didn’t think it was worth it for me to go to college because everything I was interested in I could learn on the internet.
Growing Up: What did your parents think of the unconventional directions you’ve taken?
My parents didn’t support it at first because they wanted me to go the college route. I can see where they’re coming from, because in their eyes I was a kid who had a 4.3 GPA who all of the sudden started getting D’s and F’s.
They knew I had my own side hustles but I never told them how much I made. So of course they would be upset because they thought I was throwing away my opportunity to get into a good college. Once I showed them how much I was making they became a little more supportive.
It’s hard being an teenage entrepreneur because our parents just want the best for us, and the truth is most businesses fail. Our parents are just trying to protect us, but sometimes you have to let their dreams of you die for your own to live.
I told my parents I wasn’t going to college. That did upset them for a bit. I had to stay true to what I wanted. Otherwise I would have resented them my whole life for not following what I truly wanted to do, which was be an entrepreneur.
My dad actually passed away when I was 17, a few days before I was supposed to graduate high school, so he never truly got to see how everything unfolded… but at his funeral, his co-workers told me how much he would brag about me and the things I was doing. If you’re taking the unconventional route, you have to understand your parents love you, but you have to build the strength to go against what they want if they don’t fully support what you want.
Growing Up: You said you did people’s homework to earn money and also snuck vending machines into school. Did you get in trouble? Were those things legal and ethical?
None of the teachers or principals knew I was doing other people’s homework. If they did I would probably have been expelled but I didn’t mind. I was a really smart kid so I actually enjoyed writing essays and doing math.
As for the vending machines, I put up a bunch around town and then would put them in classrooms at my high school. I would donate 10% of all the money I made to a charity of the teacher’s choice, and everyone loved those machines.
Growing Up: How did you go from small business to founding an internet company?
I started Makhai Media as a local company. We would run social media accounts for businesses in Santa Cruz County. Then one day I decided to take the same system I created and apply it to businesses in San Jose and San Francisco. Once I figured out it could work in other cities, I went all in and built out teams all across America. This was only about four months ago… Now we’re just on a massive scaling journey.
Growing Up: How many people work for you and how big is the area you cover?
I have about four full time employees and around 20 part time employees/contractors. We have a local division, an ecommerce division, and an influencer division but we operate all across America
Growing Up: Can social media marketing really help small businesses? Is old world marketing, such as print and television ads, dead?
Social Media Marketing is the best form of marketing for small businesses today for a number of reasons, but here are some of my favorites.
- Customers can see your brand’s messages FOR FREE through the organic algorithm! You don’t need to pay to get the word out to your customers.
- It attracts MUCH BETTER talent and gets them bought into your vision way easier. My best employees all followed me on social media. I didn’t have to do much convincing on why they should work for me,. They saw what I was doing and were eager to work because of the vision, not just the money.
- You build an audience on multiple platforms (TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube) that you can retarget in ad campaigns. If you buy a billboard or TV ad, people might see it, but they have no direct contact to you… They cant directly message you from the billboard or TV, they can’t click a button and be updated on all the new things your business is doing. If someone sees your ad on social media, however, they can directly click to your website or follow you to stay up to date with everything your business is doing.
Growing Up: What have been your most successful promotions and your biggest failures?
The thing that brought me the most success was bringing on a partner who had an opposing skill set as me. I’m really good at marketing and product but I suck at sales. So the moment I brought on someone who was good at sales, my business went from making $24,000 a month to $100,000 a month.
My failures have been plentiful. Like I said, I’ve tried a bunch of side hustles and failed most of them. I haven’t had any huge failures because I cut my losses short and weigh the risk of every situation. I don’t look at a lot of my “failures” and failures, I just see them as lessons and I learn from them.
Growing Up: It’s graduation season: What advice can you offer high school grads?
If you’re unsure about college or what you want to do in life, don’t take on a huge amount of debt to go to college just because society tells you it’s the right thing to do. Give it some time to think your decision through, or attend a cheaper community college so you can maybe transfer in the future.
Growing Up: How did you feel when you graduated high school? What were your biggest concerns?
I didn’t necessarily know what I wanted to do, but I knew I didn’t want to go the traditional route. I’m just glad that I kept doing my entrepreneurial ventures and never quit.
Growing Up: What makes Makhai better than its competitors across the country?
We honestly don’t have any competitors. No other company in America is scripting, filming, editing, and managing social media for more than a handful of businesses if any. What makes us different from most marketing agencies is my creativity.
I’ve amassed over 450,000 followers for my own social media accounts on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube due to my creativity, and that’s definitely a rare trait.
On top of that I’ve spent hundreds of hours perfecting systems to ensure that we’re able to make more than 1500+ TikToks every single month… nobody else in the world can handle that amount of volume at the production level we’re at.
I’m good at marketing because I’m young and grew up with social media my whole life. While most people who run marketing agencies only do it for the money, I do it because I genuinely love making videos and marketing.
Online
makhai.us
Twitter: @autsyn
Facebook: facebook.com/autsyn
By Brad Kava
