The real, unfiltered journey of building a million-dollar agency while figuring out pretty much everything.
Book in progress.
Story not finished.
Both are the point.
Your Messy Million documents the actual climb toward building a million-dollar agency — including the decisions, experiments, wins, mistakes, money, sales, systems, people, mindset, marriage, and chaos involved.
This is not a retrospective written after everything worked out. There's no comfortable distance. No cleaned-up narrative. No selective memory.
It's happening now. You're watching it happen. And that's exactly what makes it different from every other business book you've already read and half-remembered.
Author Brenton David Nickles is actively building, actively failing forward, and actively writing it all down.
Every other book about building a business was written by someone who already knew how the story ends. They wrote it backwards. This one's written forward — which means some chapters haven't happened yet.
That's not a bug. That's the whole product.
Real numbers. Real milestones. Real messy.
We're not there yet. That's why you should be watching.
I was looking for a credit card I couldn't find.
That turned into laying out the ridiculous number of personal and business cards Jenn and I had accumulated while building the company.
Some were active. Some were old. Some I barely remembered. One had expired years ago.
Staring at all those cards became a strangely perfect picture of what building this business actually looked like. Not the version I'd tell at a conference. The real version.
That's when I realized this was the story worth telling.
If you're building something real and occasionally wondering whether everybody else secretly knows what they're doing... you're in the right place.
Nobody has it figured out. The ones who look like they do are just further ahead on the same messy road.
I'm documenting the climb before I know how the story ends. Get the lessons, mistakes, experiments, stories, numbers, and breakthroughs I'm collecting along the way — sent directly to your inbox.
Not a newsletter. Not a funnel. Just Brenton's notebook, shared.
Real stories.
Real numbers.
Real life.
No spam. No polished corporate newsletter. Just the real stuff.
I've read dozens of business books. This is the first one that made me feel like someone was actually talking about what it's really like — not the cleaned-up retrospective version.
Most business content is performance. Brenton's work feels like a confession — in the best possible way. It's the stuff you only usually hear over drinks, not in a book.
I kept nodding reading the early chapters. "Yes. That's it. That's exactly what nobody tells you." This is the book I wish existed when I started.
Questions about the book? Media inquiries? Want to share your own messy middle story? Brenton reads every message. (And occasionally responds at weird hours.)
