Karen:
Today's guest is a fellow entrepreneur, storyteller, and
award-winning business owner. He is the creative force behind FXV Digital
Design, which recently took top honors right alongside American Crane at the
2025 Greater Reading Chamber Business Excellence Awards. He knows what it means
to lift a brand, a business, and a vision from the ground up. His journey is
all heart, hustle, and honesty. Freddy Vasquez, welcome to Always Lifting.

Freddy:
Thanks for having me, Karen. That was a great intro. I need you to
write all of my intros and my bios.

Karen:
Can you have your own podcast, right? So thanks for taking the time
to switch sides of the mic and join me.

I love on your website how your title is Founder and Big Cheese. I
can tell the entrepreneurial spirit just from being here in the building with
your people. Can you tell us about the journey of lifting your business
literally into existence?

Freddy:
Holy cow, man — how much time do we got? It honestly came out of
necessity. I did the college thing, and I first started working in the music
business in New York City, Manhattan. Then Napster came out, and a lot of the
new kids got let go, myself included. I went back to retail, working at a music
store called Sam Goody. My fiancée at the time, Jill, and I realized New York
was too expensive, so we got set up with jobs in Florida. I left in October of
'08, and two weeks after we got down there, the place closed.

We had our daughter to think
about, a one-year lease, and I didn't know what to do. Jill said, maybe you
should try doing this graphic design stuff for real — I'd always just done it
as a favor for friends, or made cassette covers when I was in a band. So she
took a crappy job, and I started doing MySpace pages for bands. We got into a
groove asking huge bands if they wanted their pages done for free, and it
worked. We finally did one for a really huge band, Five Finger Death Punch, and
after that, everybody wanted us.

A year into that, we moved up
to Pennsylvania for a better school district, and that's when I learned the
power of networking — I think it's one of the biggest reasons we're where we
are today. My business was doing well, and one of my clients wanted me on her
payroll. I gave her an astronomical number thinking she'd say no, and she said
yes — most money I'd ever seen. So I took the job. Fast forward five years, she
fired me in 2016 — found someone cheaper to do what I'd helped set up. I was
down in the dumps for two weeks, until my wife smacked me around and said,
let's go, man, you're Freddy Vasquez. My friend took me to networking meetings,
and the rest is history.

Karen:
You are very gritty — having overcome all of those different
challenges. I feel like you've certainly found your sweet spot.

Freddy:
I'm nothing without my team — Joe, Heather, Paige, Karina, and of
course my wife, who keeps it all together. But before I had the opportunity to
even hire one person, it was tons of hard work, long hours. I'd stop around
five or six, have dinner with the family, hang out until about nine when they
went to bed, and then go back to work — maybe to bed at two, maybe five, maybe
not at all. Buying this building took my brand to another level, and that's
when the real magic started to happen. Being creative by yourself only goes so
far. But you get one other brain in there, it's amazing. Then you get six.

Freddy:
Number one, you have to treat your brand as a priority. People think
what they do is good enough, but they don't see the value in branding — they
see the value in closing the sale. What I've learned is that when your branding
is elevated, people pay attention. If you have a superior brand, people will
subconsciously trust that you'll take care of them, because of how much you
take care of yourself. When you treat everything you put out as the most
important thing you'll ever share, people respect it, and you become, for lack
of a better term, the Gucci of your industry.

On personal branding: I think
the first step is figuring out what makes you unique. For me, it was my glasses
— I can never change them, that's my thing. Eventually my beard became part of
it too, which was actually my barber's doing. I started paying attention to
people like Gary Vee always wearing his cap, or how Lori on QVC wears a similar
style dress every time — recognizable, consistent. We do the same thing with
our photos for Berks County Living's Face of Issues — we'll never just stand
there and smile. This year someone recognized me from a magazine photo because
of it.

I actually lost a job once
because of a weak About Us page — a company in San Francisco told me, your work
was great, but your About Us page was terrible. That taught me the human factor
is huge. The About Us page is the second or third most visited page on most
websites, and if people see a team that looks like they're having a great time,
they want to work with you.

Karen:
Is there anything else that's contributed to your company's growth?

Freddy:
Risk. Risk-taking — you can't be afraid. I use a pool analogy with
the entrepreneurial classes I talk to. You put your toe in, it's cold, you ease
in for 20 minutes until you're finally in. If you'd just jumped in, you'd have
been fine in 20 seconds. You have to put yourself in situations that suck,
situations where you're afraid — if you're not afraid, you're not doing
anything that matters. I was scared out of my wits renting my first office; I
doubled my bills in one day. By 2019, I owned the building, and when I bought
it, I emptied my bank account completely — zero. I maxed out credit cards for
the grand opening, and my wife thought I was nuts. Then the grand opening
happened, and everybody showed up — people just driving by, wondering what was
going on. I got jobs out of that alone.

At the end of that day, my wife
and I were alone in the conference room, and she looked at me and said, now we
know why you do what you do. That made everything worth it.

Karen:
You went to a local high school and happened to run into my nephew.

Freddy:
Joey was a happy accident — a teacher asked me to speak to his
entrepreneurial class. During the talk, I mentioned American Crane as one of
our best clients, and Joey raised his hand and said, my mom works there. Turned
out his mom was Stephanie, your sister — so he's your nephew. We had a great
conversation, and I ran into him again later at a dinner. It's such a small
world, but it's also the ripple effect — you never know who you're touching in
that room, or how it comes back around.

Freddy:
A lot of it stems from my upbringing. My dad taught me hard work, my
mom taught me how to love. Both of my parents grew up poor, in big families —
my mom's family got a lot of help from local churches and nuns growing up. As I
got more fortunate, I started asking, what are we doing to give back? That's
why we started the Awesome Toy Drive — it's grown to 40 local businesses
collecting gifts for Berks County kids every year. A lot of what these kids ask
for isn't toys — it's toiletries, backpacks, t-shirts, underwear, because they
have nothing.

To quote Roberto Clemente: if
you have a chance to help people and you don't, you're wasting your time on
this earth. He lost his life doing exactly that, on a plane headed to deliver
aid. That's what we have to do as human beings — help your fellow man.

Karen:
What really fuels your fire, or helps you re-spark when you're
feeling tired?

Freddy:
I still get a kick out of people seeing what we do and just reacting
— wow, that is awesome. I think it stems from growing up; school was rough,
kids were cruel, and when you're told a lot of negative for years, you hold
onto the positive you get. Now I seek that reaction professionally, because of
the work we do. Please and thank you go a long way too — a woman at a Wawa once
told me, good morning, I hope you have a great day, and I told her, you don't
know how much I needed that today. A little positivity in someone's day goes
further than you'd think.

The number one answer for who's
lifted me is my wife, Jill. My parents instilled values in me, but when it
comes to the nitty-gritty, she's my number one fan, the one who believes in me
most. She's the common sense that keeps me in check.

Karen:
Freddy, thanks for bringing the energy, honesty, and insight here to
Always Lifting. Your story is proof that you lead with passion and purpose, and
the lift is real — you've lifted everyone around you.

Freddy:
Karen, thanks for having me on your show. It's a straight-up honor.