Turning Setbacks Into Strategy (Unica of Seas the Day)
Unica Buitizon, founder of Seize the Day, shares how dropping out of college, failing 12 businesses, and even going viral for the wrong reasons shaped her approach to entrepreneurship, lifestyle design, and lasting success.
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Transcript:
Mike: Hey Unica, how are you?
Unica: Hey Mike, I’m good. How are you?
Mike: Doing good, thanks. Thank you so much for being on the show—I really appreciate it.
Unica: Absolutely. I’m so excited!
Mike: Me too. And we’re actually here in your place, which is interesting. This is one of the first times a guest has said, “Hey, why don’t you come by my place?”
I’ve got a completely mobile rig—I’ve done this before at panels and conferences—but this is one of the first times I’m doing it in a guest’s home.
Unica: The in-person is so much better.
Mike: I totally agree. Are you the kind of person who prefers in-person meetings?
Unica: I have to literally see your eyes, your face. There’s so much non-verbal communication—it’s just better talking in person.
Mike: 100%. I prefer it too, though virtual is a lot more convenient. I’ve interviewed guests all over the world, so it’s not always feasible. But lucky for us, we’re local—this setup makes a lot more sense.
So thank you again for inviting me in. I always like to start these interviews with how I met my guest. Quick shoutout to Emily Grieve—she’s been on the podcast many times, and she suggested I reach out to you.
Unica: I love Emily!
Mike: She’s the best. I’ve been researching what you’ve done with your business—we’ll get into that—as well as your success on social media. But first, I want to go back to the beginning.
Entrepreneurship is a very unique trait. Was there a particular moment you decided this was what you were meant to do?
Unica: There’s this whole debate about whether entrepreneurship is made or born—I’m a purebred entrepreneur all the way. I honestly think I was born with it. There was nothing else that could ever satisfy me.
I’d rather be stressed working like crazy for myself than work for someone else.
Mike: Even if it’s a cushy job?
Unica: I’ve had a cushy job! I had a high-paying job without even having a college degree. I dropped out of college and got into tech, did really well in sales, got promoted, became a project manager.
I was making great money, and I was miserable. That’s when it clicked—if they’re paying me this much, imagine how much they’re making off me. So I decided to start my own business.
Mike: That’s a huge realization. To leave a stable, high-paying job for something risky—that takes guts.
Unica: Absolutely. But that’s what being an entrepreneur is. And I’ll say it again: entrepreneurs aren’t made, they’re born.
It’s this feeling deep in your gut that you're not where you're supposed to be. It claws its way to the surface until you can’t take it anymore. I never even had a “great idea”—I just knew I wanted to work for myself.
And I failed a ton. I still fail today. The only thing that makes me successful is that I keep going.
Mike: It sounds so simple when you say it—just keep doing it. But there’s a lot of discipline and resilience behind that.
Unica: Right. One of the best quotes I ever heard was, “Starting a business is like jumping off a cliff and building a plane on the way down.”
It’s the most accurate thing I’ve ever heard. Because it’s true—you jump off, and there’s no turning back.
Some people try to do it halfway. They keep the cushy job and hope the business works out. But those people crash. The only way to make it is to have no backup plan.
You have to be starving for the opportunity.
Mike: So you dropped out of college. Were you working at the time?
Unica: Yeah, I worked at Planet Fitness. Got fired—of course. Every normal job I’ve ever had, I’ve gotten fired from.
I was supposed to go to ASU and take a standard business course. I even had a scholarship.
But I went to orientation, and on the first day of college, I couldn’t figure out parking. I just drove around, couldn’t figure it out, and went home. That was it.
Mike: Just like that?
Unica: Just like that. I had to sort out the scholarship because if you don’t attend, you have to pay it back.
But I had this thought in my head: “How do I fail as many times as possible in one year?”
I wanted to get 50 years of failure in one year. So I started doing door-to-door sales.
Mike: In Arizona? In summer? That’s brutal.
Unica: Yeah. Brutal. I was selling office supplies to businesses. Think “The Office”—literally paper, pens, folders—all while there’s a Staples five minutes away.
I was terrible at it. But I learned so much—how people lie to you, how they say “yes” just to be nice, how rejection really works.
I’d knock on 50 to 80 doors a day.
Mike: That’s insane volume.
Unica: And the number one thing I learned? It killed my ego. No one cares about you. They think lowly of you.
That was the best lesson I could’ve ever gotten—something I would never have learned in college.
Mike: It’s the importance of practice, right? That’s essentially what you were doing—practicing rejection, putting yourself out there, learning volume.
Unica: Exactly. And you can’t read about this—you have to do it. It’s like being a guitar player; you build calluses. You have to build that thicker skin and bring your ego down. And then do it over and over again.
Mike: That’s real. So much of it is repetition. Do you think your curiosity also plays into it? Are you the kind of person who wants to try everything?
Unica: Yes! I have major FOMO. I want to experience everything. I want to build everything. Curiosity is a skill in itself.
Mike: But how do you find that balance? I’m inherently curious too, but that spreads me thin. How do you stay focused?
Unica: That’s a really good question. A lot of people struggle with that—especially people like me with ADHD. Even with simple tasks, I’ll walk through the kitchen and forget what I was doing halfway through.
In business, you have to learn yourself. Know your limitations. I’ve been on my entrepreneurship journey for four years now. In that time, I’ve started 12 businesses. Only one has been successful.
Mike: Wow.
Unica: And that’s okay. Maybe that one business would be 10 times bigger if I had only focused on it. But I’ve learned so much from all the failures. It’s a win-win.
For me, I don’t beat myself up. It’s fun. I started all of these because I was curious. I’ve lost every one of my businesses—even the current one, at least once. But I’ve come back. That used to hurt, but now I’ve taken my ego out of it.
You can’t be your business. If you are, that’s when you truly fail. But if you keep going, you can always rebuild. Because the skill? No one can ever take that from you.
Mike: That’s incredible. Honestly, Unica, it took me 14 years to learn that one lesson. The fact that you’ve internalized it in just four years is amazing.
I started an independent record label—80/20 Records—and I made it part of my identity. And that blinded me. I thought if it failed, I failed. So I did everything I could to keep it alive, even building mini-businesses under it to try to make it work.
Eventually, I realized it wasn’t working anymore. And when I launched my new venture, Omelette Prevail, it felt totally different. Now if something fails, I don’t feel like I failed. It’s just part of the journey.
Unica: Yes! That’s such an important shift. You have to realize that sometimes you have to lose something to become who you’re meant to be.
So many people stop after their first failure because they don’t want to be seen as someone who didn’t make it. That was my sin—my ego. I asked myself, “Who am I if people don’t look up to me anymore?”
We had just gotten our business appraised at over a million dollars. The next summer, we went bankrupt.
Mike: Wow.
Unica: Yep. Just like that. We had $50,000 left in the bank, and my monthly bills were $40,000. I took the last of that money and put it into a new business—real estate. Bought land. Bought a tiny home. Flipped it. That saved me.
I was literally down to my last dime. But that pivot put me on a whole new path.
Mike: That’s incredible.
Unica: That rock bottom summer was brutal. I was crying alone in my room. We had a full team—now it was just me and my fiancée. And when you’re at your lowest, no one’s going to save you. You have to have your own back.
But I wouldn’t trade that for anything. That loss was part of the journey that got me to where I am now.
Mike: And where you are now is with Seas the Day—which is such a great name, by the way.
Unica: Thank you!
Mike: Tell me more about that. How did it start?
Unica: Seas the Day is a boat rental company. Funny thing is—I know nothing about boats.
Mike: Wait, really?
Unica: I started a UTV rental company before this—and failed—because I didn’t know anything about UTVs. I literally rented out four of them before I ever drove one myself. That’s how bad I was.
So when I launched Seas the Day, I did it differently. I thought about lifestyle first, then business.
I asked myself: How much free time do I want? What kind of clients do I want? What kind of life do I want to live?
Boats checked all the boxes.
Mike: That’s a really creative framework—designing the business around the life you want.
Unica: Exactly. I realized I don’t want adrenaline-seeking customers. I want low-risk, slow-paced, family-oriented clients. I want an asset that lasts a long time. Boats have great lifetime value if you maintain them. And I wanted something with low overhead—no shop needed. Just storage and a lake.
The biggest key? Low digital footprint. Meaning: I looked at the competition and saw that most of them weren’t doing digital marketing well. That’s an opportunity. So I added better tech, better customer service, and a unique vibe—and I was able to stand out.
Mike: That’s brilliant. You’re combining creativity with systems thinking.
Unica: And it works. It really does. But I wouldn’t have figured that out without all the failures before it.
Mike: That makes a lot of sense. And what I really admire is that you knew what you wanted—you tried so many different things to figure it out.
Unica: Totally. I needed something that made me happy. I realized I didn’t want adrenaline-seekers as customers. I didn’t want stress. I wanted to work with families. I wanted something slower-paced.
So when I transitioned into this business, that became my checklist.
Mike: It’s funny, because that’s what I did with my new venture too. After 80/20 Records, I started Omelette Prevail. And I basically used a checklist of what I liked and didn’t like from the label.
That helped me design something that works better for me now.
Unica: Exactly. And that’s something people forget—your business has to reflect you.
At its core, your company is made of people. And if your heart isn’t in it, it’s not going to grow the way you want it to.
You can still make money. But if you don’t love it, the stress won’t be worth it.
Mike: Yep. You have to love it enough to push through the hard parts.
Unica: Right. No morning routine is going to save you. You have to be excited to wake up and do it. That’s the only thing that’s going to carry you through the BS.
Mike: Speaking of digital footprint, I want to pivot into social media.
You’ve done incredibly well there—especially on TikTok. When I looked, you had something like 15 or 16K followers. But your videos were getting hundreds of thousands, even millions, of views.
Unica: Yeah—one of our videos hit over 13 million views.
Mike: That’s wild. So was that planned? Did you have a strategy going in, or did it happen by accident?
Unica: Oh, I love this topic. Because people hire agencies to help them with this—but going viral is actually super easy.
Each platform has its own viral formula. You have to understand the audience and algorithm.
What works on TikTok won’t work on Facebook. You need totally different types of content.
For local businesses like ours, TikTok and Instagram Reels are gold—especially if you rely on tourism or geo-targeting.
Mike: That’s really smart.
Unica: The key thing to understand is this: the algorithm today is designed to give everyone a shot at virality.
You don’t need a huge following. You just need to hit the right chord once, and boom—you’re everywhere.
Mike: So that viral video you mentioned—what was it about?
Unica: Oh God. It was chaos. A customer completely destroyed our boats.
Mike: What?!
Unica: Yeah. He was drunk, stumbling through waist-deep water. One of our jet skis was upside down. Our boat was slammed into the mountain.
And I had a chest cam on, so I recorded everything.
Mike: Oh wow.
Unica: I walked up to him—he’s wasted—and he goes, “Just so you know, the speaker wasn’t working.”
That was it. I lost it. The video of us yelling back and forth? That’s the one that went viral.
Mike: That’s nuts.
Unica: The video hit 13 million views. News stations were reaching out. People started recognizing my voice in public.
I went to a car dealership, and the salesperson was like, “Wait—you’re the girl from that video!”
Mike: Did you get any positive traction from it? Or did it just turn into a spectacle?
Unica: That’s the thing—once something goes viral, you have to feed the flames.
Go to the comments, find the ones with the most likes, and make new videos responding to those within 72 hours. That keeps the views going.
But I didn’t like what I was being known for. People wanted more videos of drunk clients, boat crashes, chaos. That’s not our brand.
And that guy—he never paid for the damages. But people were trying to find him, dox him. It got scary.
Mike: So you ended up pulling back from content?
Unica: I completely stopped. I didn’t want to fuel that negativity. Even though he cost me thousands of dollars, I didn’t want him to be harassed.
That’s not the energy I want in my business.
Mike: That makes sense. It’s a real danger—going viral for the wrong reason and attracting the wrong audience.
Unica: Exactly. You end up building a platform that doesn’t reflect who you are.
Some creators chase that because they want the numbers. But then they realize—it doesn’t help them sell anything.
It’s just spectacle.
Mike: Right. And that’s something I see a lot in music too. Artists go viral for a trend, but then it doesn’t translate into streams or sales or fans.
Unica: Yes! It’s the wrong attention. It doesn’t help your long-term goals.
That’s why we rebranded the company. We got rid of all our speedboats, anything that attracted reckless behavior.
We went slower. We pivoted into luxury pontoons, more family-focused clients.
Mike: That’s such a powerful decision. And it goes back to knowing who you are, and what kind of energy you want around your business.
Unica: Yes. We asked ourselves: what kind of home do we want? What lifestyle?
We don’t care about luxury cars or big houses. We want freedom. Time. Peace.
That clarity helps you make better business decisions.
Mike: That’s so important—knowing what you actually want. And also taking care of your personal growth in the process.
One thing I noticed on your social media is that you post a lot about exercise. I talk a lot about mental health on this podcast, but not really about physical health. And this year has been big for me in that area.
For the first time in my life, I’ve started exercising daily. And it’s made a huge difference.
Unica: That’s amazing! And I’m glad you brought that up.
When we hit that first major milestone—being appraised at over a million dollars—and then lost everything, that’s when I realized I had been completely neglecting my health.
Turns out I was pre-diabetic. I had a lot of physical and mental issues that I wasn’t addressing. And I believe everything happens for a reason. I had to lose everything to wake up.
Mike: That’s a powerful wake-up call.
Unica: It really was. Because I thought being successful meant being stressed, being busy, being exhausted.
And then I realized—no, that’s not success.
That’s sickness.
I started working out, got into powerlifting—turns out I love lifting heavy weights. I want to compete just for the experience.
Mike: That’s awesome! Entrepreneur by day, powerlifter by night.
Unica: Basically! And honestly, I became a better business owner because of it. My nervous system is calmer. I reflect better. I make decisions more clearly.
That’s something I think a lot of people don’t realize. When things fall apart, that’s normal. But if your body isn’t regulated—if your health isn’t in check—you can’t reflect. And that’s when the cycle repeats.
People get stuck because their nervous system is stuck.
Mike: That’s such a great insight. And it’s true—you keep repeating patterns if you don’t have the space to process them.
And I’ve been guilty of that too. Blaming other people, blaming the industry, blaming outside forces. And then eventually realizing—nope, it’s me. It’s how I’m showing up.
Unica: Yep. I did that too. I’d say, “Why isn’t this business working?” or “Why aren’t these customers the right ones?” or “Why isn’t this industry profitable?”
The answer? Me. I was the common denominator.
I’ve had a trailer rental business, a mechanic shop, a bunch of things. It wasn’t the economy. It wasn’t the president. It was me.
Mike: That’s a hard thing to admit—but once you do, it’s freeing.
Unica: Yes! Once you realize you’re the one who has to change, it empowers you.
And part of that is boundaries too—protecting your peace and energy. I’ve had to choose my partner over business. I’ve had to walk away from things that looked good on paper but didn’t align with what I wanted long-term.
Mike: That’s something I’ve had to come to terms with too.
There’s always going to be more opportunities. But they come at a cost—time with family, time with friends, your own well-being.
And I’ve made the decision that I’m okay if my business journey takes longer. I’m okay if I don’t “maximize” everything, because I’m not willing to sacrifice the things that matter to me.
Unica: That’s so real. Hustle culture is just another rat race. It’s the bigger hamster wheel. And if you’re not careful, you get trapped in it just like any 9-to-5.
Mike: That reminds me—are you a fan of Gary Vaynerchuk?
Unica: Of course! I love Gary.
Mike: He’s very “acquired taste” for some people, but I love his energy.
One thing he always says is, “I get eight hours of sleep. I just maximize my waking hours.”
And he’s very clear that hustle isn’t for everyone. But if you want the results, you can’t complain if you’re not putting in the work.
It’s about knowing yourself.
Unica: Exactly. People see viral success and think, “I want that.” But they don’t know the trade-offs.
Some people who are famous or successful are also miserable. Some love what they do. But you have to ask yourself—what do you want?
Mike: And what are you willing to sacrifice for it?
Unica: Right. I’ve had business partners who looked super successful—big house, expensive boats, luxury cars—but they’re paycheck-to-paycheck millionaires.
One guy I knew owed the IRS hundreds of thousands of dollars. And people looked at him like he had it all. But he was barely holding it together.
Mike: Wow.
Unica: So for me, wealth is freedom. It’s time. I want to be able to pick up and go whenever I want.
And now that our monthly expenses are lower, I feel richer than I ever did when we were making a ton of money.
That took losing everything to figure out. I built what I thought I wanted, lost it all, had an ego death, and rebuilt something way more peaceful.
Mike: That’s such a powerful arc. And honestly, I think that’s the perfect place to start wrapping up.
Mike: I have a couple of fun wrap-up questions for you. First—what’s your favorite outdoor activity?
Unica: Oh my gosh—paddleboarding. 100%.
Mike: Paddleboarding?
Unica: Yeah. Slow is my theme now. I don’t like off-roading, I don’t like fast. Boating is okay, but now I love slow. Paddleboarding with my dogs, just relaxing in the sun—that’s my favorite thing.
Mike: That’s so funny because your social media is like, “I’m on a boat, I’m off-roading,” all this wild energy...
Unica: Oh my god, no. I’m chill now. I want zero danger, just vibes.
Mike: Do you have a guilty pleasure? It can be a show, a snack, music—anything.
Unica: Hmm... I love spiritual journeys. Let’s word it that way.
Mike: Fair enough. That works.
Unica: Yeah. We'll just say that.
Mike: We talked about a lot of amazing things today, but if you could only give one piece of advice to someone else—just one—what would it be?
Unica: That’s so good. I’d say: If you’re going through hell, just keep going.
There’s nowhere else to go—just keep going.
I’ve had summers where I cried myself to sleep every night. It felt like everything was falling apart. But I truly believe tragedy is a beautiful part of life.
You won’t realize why it happened until much later—but when you get through it, you’ll know.
So if you’re in it right now—just keep going. That’s all you have to do.
Mike: That’s beautiful. Unica, thank you so much again for doing this. I had such a blast, and I really appreciate your time.
We’ll make sure to include everything in the show notes so people can check out Seas the Day—and if you’re local in Arizona, definitely go out on the water.
Unica: Yes! And for your listeners—we’re offering a 15 to 20% discount if they want to go out on one of our pontoons.
Maybe we’ll even get to see them out there!
Mike: I’ll include that in the notes too. Thanks again.
Unica: Thank you so much!