From Slinging Burned Music CDs to Running a Multi-Million Dollar Marketing Firm

Sujan Patel is currently one of the industry’s leading experts on creating digital marketing strategies for companies that are looking to make an impact in their fields.

Sujan’s journey as an entrepreneur began while he was still in junior high school. Like many kids in Indian families, Sujan was raised to be efficient, scrappy and – most importantly – money-minded. When CD burners first became commercialized, he quickly realized their potential for making a few quick bucks. He started downloading music, burning it to CDs and selling them to his classmates. It wasn’t exactly a legal business – but it was a business, nonetheless.

Ultimately, Sujan ran into problems when demand for his products outpaced his ability to supply them. At the time, CD Rom drives burned CDs at 1x speed – meaning that a 60-minute music CD took 60 minutes to create. This limitation taught him the importance of building scalability into future business models.

Later on, while in college, Sujan was introduced to the world of web marketing while working with now-defunct auto parts supplier, Shonuffauto. There, he began to learn how to use SEO to build traffic to various web properties. Though he wasn’t that good at it initially, Sujan pushed himself to learn more and develop his skills, which he later translated into side consulting gigs found through Elance.com.

As his reputation grew, Sujan decided to follow his entrepreneurial spirit by dropping out of college to launch the Single Grain digital marketing agency. With two sets of parents hounding him to go back and finish his degree – and over $10,000 of debt to his name – Sujan committed himself to developing his SEO skills even further with the intention of multiplying his earnings five times over within two years.

Given the challenges of running a startup consultancy, Sujan eventually took a full-time management position with Oversee.net. And though he continued to take on side projects through Single Grain during this time, Sujan used this unexpected experience to learn more about employee training, management, delegation and motivation – skills he now brings to his full-time role as Single Grain’s President.

In 2009, Sujan left Oversee.net to focus on Single Grain again – giving himself a one-year window in which to gain as many clients as possible. With Oversee.net signing on as one of his first client, Sujan was able to move to San Francisco and finish out his first year with great revenue, high profit margins and his first official employee.

Despite some initial slowdowns in 2010 (which resulted in Sujan shifting Single Grain to the back-burner one final time), he was able to refocus his efforts and come back stronger than ever at the start of 2011. Sujan started the year with four employees and 20 clients before realizing that he needed to find a partner in order to support his own limitations as a business owner.

A mutual friend introduced him to AJ Kumar (though it turned out that the two had actually grown up together), who turned out to be an ideal partner for Sujan’s business goals. Sujan went “all in,” bringing AJ on as his co-founder and VP of Marketing.

Though the first year of their partnership was occasionally rocky (as the first year of any new marriage tends to be), AJ and Sujan eventually learned each other’s strengths and weaknesses. As a result, they’ve since doubled their revenues, taken on another ten employees and had the opportunity to work with top caliber clients, including several Fortune 500 companies.

Today, Sujan and his team manage millions of dollars in SEO campaigns and PPC budgets, handle large-scale social media promotions and help increase client conversions – putting more money in the pockets of the customers he works with. As a consequence of his success, Sujan is happier than ever – and this passion for effective digital marketing shines through in the results he’s able to achieve for his clients.