OUR JOURNEY

I graduated from high school (yes, high school) in the Spring of 2022. The following Fall, I did not find myself at University.

2 days before the deadline closed, I told my college that I would be taking a gap year, and that I was excited to meet them in 2023. Then, without anything more than a backpack of clothes & the money I had saved working as a lifeguard, I flew to Salamanca, Spain.

Two weeks later, I had a conversation with an older man in the lobby of my hostel. He brought up his daughter, about my age, and spoke on how differently my generation and his saw social media. He described it as “a skill he had to learn for his career” and said that, if I agreed, my generation saw it as just an extension of our lives.

He was right. Social media, and the internet, are both just things that have been around since the day I got a phone in sixth grade.

As luck would have it, the man I continued conversing with was the owner of the hostel I was staying at. I, looking for work, offered to run the hostel’s instagram page for the week I had left in Salamanca. I could make a little bit of needed cash, and he had one thing of many taken off his hands for the week.

We had a deal.

At the end of the week, my new friend came up to me and told me that he liked the work I had been doing. Little more than designing graphics & scheduling posts, he said that if I wanted, he’d keep paying me to do the work I was doing.

I agreed, and immediately on getting to the next hostel I stayed at that year, I told the owner I run hostel instagrams, and I could send him a reference. He agreed to let me run the page for a trial week.

The trial week was extended.

Before I the year ended, and I returned to the United States, I was running 14 hostel pages across Spain, Germany, Italy, Turkey, Australia, and South Korea. On the fly, I had learned design & simple backend coding to give my partners’ websites a makeover.

Now, Oblivion Agencies is a full-fledged company, working with 31 clients continuously, including all of the original 14, and doing work on a one-time basis as well. Without knowing, I stumbled into something I was good at, and with just a little self-teaching and some (more than some, a lot) of help from my University, we are proud to say we drive impressive, industry-leading results tangible in numerical data.

So, if you’re ever alone in a foreign country, have a conversation.

You never know what might happen.

- Nick W. Patterson.