Meet Rayson Esquejo

We were lucky to catch up with Rayson Esquejo recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Rayson, thank you for being such a positive, uplifting person. We’ve noticed that so many of the successful folks we’ve had the good fortune of connecting with have high levels of optimism and so we’d love to hear about your optimism and where you think it comes from.
There are 7.888 billion people in the world. The future is still unwritten. You are one decision away from a completely different life. Keeping a wide perspective gives me optimism. There are hundreds of opportunities, billions of interactions, and millions of experiences out there that are within reach, we just have to be open to them. This mindset has impacted my life and has opened up so many doors that have helped shape my life and career. I’ve been told that having the personality or character to be open for this is difficult and really honing this skill is being comfortable with being uncomfortable. You can accomplish this by doing things that are out of normal routine, learning a new skill that is completely out of what you know how to do, talk to people you don’t know…are a few exercises I do that foster this quality.

Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?
My name is Rayson Esquejo. I’m from Los Angeles and I am a digital brand maker. I started my career when social media and all of web 2 was in its infancy. I loved interacting with people and really wanted to get into marketing. However, the thought of traditional (billboards, TV, print) was never that appealing to me. I grew up with AOL chatrooms, downloading music, and MySpace so I knew that there had to be something there I could work on. I worked on a couple of internships and when I transferred to / graduated from UCLA during an employment downturn, I took what I learned and went basically door-to-door offering online marketing services. Because the demand was so low, I needed to pick up skills like website design and Adobe skills that I learned via random blogs, YouTube videos, and one-off community college classes. After doing this for about 3 years on a number of different projects, small businesses, and brands, I got headhunted to run social at a movie studio called Open Road Films. There I combined all my creative problem-solving from working with all the brands to create industry-leading marketing campaigns that included the first-ever HD uploaded a trailer on Instagram (if you love uploading videos to Instagram, you’re welcome, I hacked the platform forcing them to introduce the feature), The Best Picture Oscar-winning campaign for Spotlight, and the delicious experiential campaign for the movie, Chef. As the impact of social media grew, I realized that there were more opportunities out there in this growing field, and so many opportunities to do something and really put my name on it. So I took all the amazing experiences and contacts that I made over 4 1/2 years and jumped ship from the company to travel and freelance. The world is so big, with so many amazing interactions to be had and with the rise of Web2, everything became so much more accessible. When I came back to LA, I really looked at the blank canvas of life and decided to try doing something that I wasn’t too familiar with, but always thought was interesting. Throwing a large-scale event. In 2017, one of my friends I had dinner with wanted to give back to the cultural community (as we’re Filipino-American), so that year we put together LA’s largest Filipino-food event (called Eat-Play-Move) drawing out more than 25,000 people combining my skills in online awareness and picking up a whole lot of skills surrounding large-scale events. This opened so many doors to do more freelance work for that community, so we put together a non-profit organization( called USAPAN which translates to, “To Speak of” in Tagalog (Filipino)) that focuses on amplifying Filipino-American small businesses through these types of events. When the pandemic happened in 2020, we pivoted the large-scale events to smaller, more frequent drive-thru and pick-up events, called the Filled Market. This type of effort gained noticeable coverage from outlets such as NBC news to PBS. Alongside the growth of the market, one of the brands I was marketing had a sudden burst of exponential growth and was offered an opportunity to build a company and a team from the ground up at Harvey Industries International, INC. I applied the online marketing skills and techniques I gained over the years, to this verticle (woodworking) and was able to 10x the revenue being brought in and in the short time I was there I was able to double that number year over year. Currently, the Harvey Woodworking Saw brand is the fastest-growing brand in the segment supported by a 5-star rated team of 14 that I personally hand-picked and hired. If you’re looking into getting into woodworking, Harvey’s saws are literally the Lamborghini of woodworking tools.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
Learn from as many places as you can, get comfortable with being uncomfortable, and always keep a wide optimistic view on situations. Collect as many hobbies as possible and interact with the people who are also into those hobbies.

What was the most impactful thing your parents did for you?
They gave me opportunities to choose happiness for myself. As a kid, they instilled in me that being happy was above success. To find what made me happy, was they would involve me/expose me to as many things as possible. I would start businesses, join boy bands, learn magic, ventriloquism, pick up DJing, and they even encouraged me to pursue digital marketing when everyone told me not to including my college counselors who were convinced it was a fad and do something else like be a lawyer.

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