The Grit Factor Podcast w/ Karl Jacobi | Episode 039: Fired in Two Months. Built a Six Figure Agency with Benas Leonavicius

Episode 039: Fired in Two Months. Built a Six Figure Agency with Benas Leonavicius

June 19, 2026 / 01:01:59/E39

Episode Summary

Benas Leonavicius tried the safe path twice. Both times he hated it. He landed an SEO manager role straight out of university in Lithuania, hired into a marketing agency with no managerial experience, full of drive, full of ideas about how to make things better for clients. Two months later he was fired. He had not even passed probation. He felt the work he was delivering was the best he had ever done. The agency saw it differently.

Most people would have taken that as a signal to play it safer. Benas took it as confirmation. He had already been freelancing on the side since university, building small projects, picking up clients here and there, never quite believing it could become something real. The day he got fired, he made the decision to go all in on freelancing instead. By the end of that first year, he had made three times what the marketing agency would have paid him. He never looked back.

What followed was not a straight line to success. Years of working completely alone as an introvert who genuinely enjoyed solitude, until the loneliness eventually caught up with him. Three years of stagnation where he was earning enough to stay comfortable but had no clear next direction, caught in what he calls his own version of golden handcuffs. The breakthrough came in a room full of business owners at a mastermind, people earning six and seven figures a year, where something clicked that no book or video had ever been able to teach him. He describes it simply: he finally felt like he had permission to think bigger.

Today Benas runs a personal branding agency built on his own terms, eighty percent powered by referrals, documenting the entire build process publicly on LinkedIn and YouTube. He never went back to a traditional job. He never needed to.

This episode is for anyone who has been let go, passed over, or told no, and is still trying to figure out whether that was the end of something or the beginning of it.

In This Episode, You'll Discover:

How growing up with an entrepreneur father normalized business ownership for Benas long before he had any plan to build something of his own, and why he originally assumed he would not start anything until his thirties or forties
What happened when Benas landed an SEO manager role at a twenty-person marketing agency straight out of university with no managerial experience, why his drive to improve things created internal chaos with the delivery team, and how he was let go before finishing his probation period
Why getting fired became the best decision of his life, the exact math he ran comparing his first year of full-time freelancing against what he would have earned at the agency, and why he says it was not luck but preparation meeting opportunity
The years of working entirely alone as a self-described introvert, why the loneliness took five to six years to actually catch up with him, and the three years of stagnation that followed once he hit a ceiling he could not see past
What changed inside a single mastermind room full of business owners earning six and seven figures, why Benas describes the experience as finally getting permission to think bigger, and why hearing it from books was never the same as feeling it in a room
Why Benas believes school trains people in risk aversion rather than risk tolerance, the pattern recognition study method he used to pass exams without traditional memorization, and why he sees no correlation between academic performance and entrepreneurial success
The pivot from pure SEO and keyword rankings into personal branding, why he found the outcome of ranking someone on Google less meaningful than building their actual reputation, and why he believes personal branding becomes more critical, not less, as AI scales
Why Benas reframes every failed project as simply the end of a Google Drive folder rather than a personal failure, and how that mental model removed his fear of trying new things entirely

Key Takeaways:

Getting Fired Can Be Confirmation, Not Condemnation. Benas was angry after losing his SEO manager job, but the anger was not really directed at the company. It was directed at the entire premise that a steady job was supposed to be the safe, smart choice. Sometimes the system rejecting you is not proof you failed. It is proof the system was never built for what you actually are.
Opportunity Meeting Preparation Looks Like Luck From the Outside. Benas calls his transition into full-time freelancing lucky. Karl pushes back on that framing directly. The years of freelancing on the side, the projects, the client experience, all of it was preparation. When the agency let him go, the opportunity simply met the work he had already put in. Luck is rarely luck. It is readiness colliding with a moment.
Solitude Works Until It Does Not. Benas thrived working alone for five to six years as a self-identified introvert. Then the loneliness arrived anyway. Even people genuinely built for independent work eventually hit the wall where isolation starts costing them clarity and direction. Know that the wall exists even if you do not feel it yet.
A Room Full of Bigger Thinkers Gives You Permission You Did Not Know You Needed. Benas had read business books. He understood conceptually that networking and masterminds had value. None of that compared to sitting in a room with people earning a hundred thousand dollars a month and realizing the model in his head for what a business could look like was simply too small. You cannot read your way into permission. You have to be in the room.
School Teaches You to Avoid Risk. Business Requires You to Take It. Benas is blunt about this. The education system rewards memorization and risk aversion. Entrepreneurship requires experimentation, failure, and trying again. The skills that make someone successful in school and the skills that make someone successful in business overlap far less than most people assume. Do not measure your business potential by your academic record.
Move Faster. Fail Faster. This is the single piece of advice Benas would give his younger self. Not because speed alone wins, but because the years he spent comfortable and stagnant cost him more than any failed experiment ever could have. The fear of moving too fast is almost always more expensive than the cost of actually failing.
Failure Is Just the End of a Project Folder. Benas reframed every failed experiment as the natural close of a Google Drive folder rather than a personal verdict on his worth or capability. When a project ends, you do not grieve it as a failure. You open a new folder and start the next one. That single mental shift removed his fear of trying things.
Grit Is Trusting Your Own Gut Over the Noise Around You. People who are not in business, not taking risks, and not building anything will often try to talk you out of doing the same. Benas's definition of grit is the discipline to filter that noise and trust your own read on the situation, even when the people closest to you cannot see what you see.

Timestamps:

[00:00] Karl introduces Benas Leonavicius: tried the safe path twice, fired within two months of a manager role, built a six-figure agency on his own terms
[03:00] Growing up with an entrepreneur father, why business felt normalized rather than unusual, and the original plan to wait until his thirties to start something
[07:00] University, the whiteboard in the dorm room, three months of pure ideation with nothing to show, and the eventual first freelance project
[11:00] Landing the SEO manager role at a twenty-person marketing agency straight out of university, the chaos his drive to improve things caused, and being let go before finishing probation
[16:00] The decision to go all in on freelancing, the math comparing year one freelance income to what the agency would have paid, and why Benas calls it luck and Karl pushes back
[20:00] Karl's ad break: The Grit Code Exposed at https://gritcodeexposed.com
[21:00] The corporate environments before that final agency job, why none of them ever quite fit, and the efficiency mismatch between working solo and working inside a company
[25:00] School versus business: the risk aversion built into the education system, the pattern recognition study method Benas used to pass exams, and why academic performance has no correlation with entrepreneurial success
[30:00] The loneliness that finally caught up after five to six years of solo work, and the three years of stagnation that followed once he hit a ceiling
[34:00] What changed: AI's growing impact on SEO, the fear of becoming obsolete, and the mastermind room that finally broke the stagnation
[38:00] The permission moment: what it felt like to sit in a room with people earning six and seven figures and realize his model of what was possible was too small
[42:00] Karl's ad break: The Grit Code Exposed at https://gritcodeexposed.com
[43:00] Why you cannot understand the value of networking and masterminds until you actually experience it, and the eighty percent referral business that followed
[47:00] What Benas is most fired up about now: the pivot from pure SEO into personal branding and why he believes it matters more, not less, in the AI era
[51:00] The sixty-second message to himself from ten years ago: move faster, fail faster, do not look back
[54:00] Grit defined: trusting your own gut and filtering out people who are not in the business game from your decision-making
[56:00] The directive: failure as the end of a Google Drive project folder, not a verdict on your worth, and why that reframe removed his fear of trying
[58:00] Kanika Vasudeva's question from Episode 37: what is the thing that scares you in your life right now and why aren't you doing it?
[01:00:00] Benas's honest answer: scaling faster than he can manage, and the irony that it is the same lesson he is still trying to fully apply
[01:02:00] Benas's question for the next guest: what experiment have you run that failed but left a big mark on you?
[01:04:00] Where to find Benas and Karl's close