Meet Bill Sebald

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Bill Sebald a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Bill, thrilled to have you on the platform as I think our readers can really benefit from your insights and experiences. In particular, we’d love to hear about how you think about burnout, avoiding or overcoming burnout, etc.

I came up in hustle culture. I worked in marketing agencies that ingrained the “work hard, play hard” mentality. My days were spent working 8–10 hours for someone else, and my nights were filled with side projects until midnight or later. I juggled multiple tasks at once, convinced that high productivity meant constant motion.

I was determined to succeed on my own terms, but this relentless pace took a serious toll on my mental health. Burnout hit me over and over—manifesting as anger, depression, and anxiety. I pushed through each time, convinced that was just part of the grind.

When I started Greenlane, my digital marketing agency, over a decade ago, I was already burned out—I just didn’t realize it. The excitement of chasing my biggest professional goal masked the stress. I assumed hustle culture had prepared me for entrepreneurship.

Then one day, it hit me: the exhaustion, the sleepless nights, the mental fog—it was all burnout. My mind and body were worn down, but I couldn’t afford to stop working.

Hustle culture breeds self-reliance, often to a fault. I tried to do everything myself, becoming a jack of all trades. Every leadership book told me to delegate, but I resisted. Eventually, I wised up. My business partner and I divided responsibilities, allowing us both to focus. I started trusting my employees to manage key areas, even though it was hard to let go. Now, I don’t oversee every single decision in my company, and yet, it continues to grow.

One of the biggest shifts I made was prioritizing my mental health. With fewer tasks weighing me down, I finally had space to think about myself. As an artist, I find peace in creating. Where I once believed everything I made needed to be monetized, I discovered the joy of non-commercial art. Music, photography, and podcasting became outlets for self-care, and I continue to make time for them.

As I approach 50, I can honestly say I’ve found a healthy balance between work and life. I wish I had figured it out sooner—it would have saved me a lot of stress. If nothing else, I hope my story inspires you to slow down and put yourself first.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

I grew up in the suburbs outside of Philadelphia, always fueled by curiosity. As a kid, I was full of questions, and as an adult, that curiosity never faded. I always dreamed of running my own business—and eventually, I made it happen.

My journey started in music. After graduating from Penn State, I worked briefly in the music industry. While music remains at my core, my pursuit of rock stardom didn’t pan out. But that failure opened the door to something else—marketing, the field I had studied in school. I fell in love with digital marketing while working at a store that sold used CDs. It was 1996, the early days of the internet, when the store owner had the idea to sell CDs online. He asked me to figure out how to drive traffic to the site.

To generate interest, I launched a digital music magazine, interviewing famous musicians to attract visitors. At the same time, I discovered search engines as a powerful traffic source—years before Google even existed.

Before long, I found a small community of people trying to reverse-engineer search engine algorithms. We started calling it SEO (search engine optimization), though back then, we simply thought of it as hacking search engines. I was lucky to get in on the ground floor of an industry that would later become a fundamental part of digital marketing.

Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to work with some of the biggest brands in the world—from NFL teams to major retailers and fashion brands. Today, I run Greenlane Search Marketing, an agency dedicated to helping brands drive high ROI through digital marketing. It’s been a long road from my early days in music, but that same passion and curiosity still drive everything I do.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

I believe three key traits are essential for growth in any field: passion, curiosity, and helpfulness.

Passion is what keeps you moving forward. You have to love what you do—so much so that you wake up every day eager to do more of it. Curiosity is what makes you better. Without questioning why things work the way they do, you can’t take the necessary steps to become a true expert. And then there’s helpfulness—the genuine desire to support others. It builds relationships, opens doors, and fosters opportunities you might never have expected.

I call it building serendipity—the idea that by being helpful, you create chances for unexpected opportunities to come back to you. It’s about fostering luck through intentional actions—putting yourself in situations where positive, unforeseen outcomes are more likely to happen. Not every act of generosity leads to something, but over time, a few have turned into major opportunities that shaped my future.

How can folks who want to work with you connect?

I’m always looking to meet new people and collaborate on new projects, both commercially and artistically. I’m easy to find online, but if you’ve read this and would like to talk, I’m happy to provide my email – [email protected]

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.greenlanemarketing.com
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/billsebald/
• Twitter: https://x.com/billsebald