DGTL Voices with Ed Marx - 1% Better Every Day (ft. Ansh Singhal)

Episode Date: June 11, 2026

Ansh Singhal is 18 years old, a senior at Coppell High School in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and the founder and CEO of A1 Media, a digital marketing agency he's been growing for two and a half years. His client roster already includes Adidas and Paiwan Football, who recently flew him to Japan to lead marketing for an international tournament. He's headed to SMU's Cox School of Business in the fall. In this episode of DGTL Voices, Ansh sits down with Ed for one of the show's occasional non-healthcare conversations. He talks about the Japanese philosophy of Kaizen, 1% better every day, and how it changed his trajectory. He shares why every high schooler trying to start something should start with a co-founder, what reverse mentoring looks like from the other side, and what he thinks executives twice his age are missing about social media and AI. Ed also asks him to weigh in on the future of healthcare from a tech-forward Gen Z perspective. 🔗 https://marxadvisory.com

I'm 18 years old. I go to Coppell High School. I run a digital marketing agency. In about four days, I'll be flying out to Japan to basically lead market an entire event over there. When I first started, actually, you don't think of it as a business necessarily. It was a big passion project for me. That's one of the reasons I wanted to have you on the show is like what you've done at such a young age is super impressive. One thing that I've realized that a lot of people in the older generation are a little lacking is social media and AI. If you're not transforming your daily work today, you're going to be transformed out.

Oh, yeah. Welcome to Digital Voices, where Healthcare and Life Science Leaders explore the real work behind transformation. This podcast is about people, leadership, and the conversations that move healthcare forward. Now your host, Ed Marks. Hey, everyone. Welcome to another edition of Digital Voices. So excited today, because we're flipping it a little bit. We're going to have a lot of fun here with Ansch.

Ong, welcome to Digital Voices. Hey, thank you for having me today. I'm excited to, you know, hear about all the questions that you have for me. And it's just a blessing to be here. Yeah, we like to mix it up a little bit. A lot of times we just have health care tech. But every, I don't know, seven or eight episodes, we like to do something different just to add a little bit of diversity and flavor.

And you and I got connected, actually, because of your mom and dad. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it was, it's a crazy connection because it's like our, like how I know you, is literally through my dad, and my dad knows, like, we basically got connected to the CEO, like, D-Mode basically connected us, which is, like, crazy connections and such, so, yeah. Yeah, yeah, we were at a party together. I forget what Indian celebration it was. It was the...

Related to Ganesh. Yes, yes. It was related to that. You know, we do it every year, so... Yeah, it was a lot of fun, and then I found you to be super interesting. I mean, you're like a high schooler. I am high schooler. So tell us a little bit about yourself.

So I'm 18 years old. I go to Kapel High School. Again, like he said, my name is Onsen Kahl. I run a digital marketing agency. It's called A1 Media. I've been growing in it for about two and a half years now. I started my sophomore year of high school. And, you know, when I first started, I actually had a co-founder when I first started. So that's actually one of the biggest stories I like to tell people is that like, if you're in high school and you're trying to start something, try to start it with someone. Because it's way easier to start something in high school with someone else because they're going to push you and motivate you to do better than trying to do it. yourself. It's like one of the biggest things that I stood by at first. Yes. And it helped me a lot. Um, so when I first started actually, I didn't, you know, with any business at starting in high school, especially, you don't think of it as a business necessarily. You know, it was a big passion project for me. I love taking photos and videos. Before even I thought about starting a company. I love just, I had a freelance page. It was called Onshin-Haw Photos. Funny enough, my brother actually pushed me to start that Instagram. So we were on a little family trip in. in Vegas and he was like, hey, you know, you started taking photos and everything.

You should start showing this to the public. And I was like, okay, maybe I'll start Instagram. And that was kind of my step into like the photo world, the video world. Going into that first year, you know, my biggest thing was just like connecting with people and really learning the murkye, trying to see what I could do. Again, it wasn't in my mind that like I wanted to start a business. Yeah. It was just like, hey, this is a big passion for me.

I love taking photos. So yeah, that's a little bit of me. That's another great lesson, right? You have a passion, and oftentimes, you know, you follow the passion and everything kind of falls into place. So before we get too much further, two really important questions I ask all of my guests. And the first one, what songs are on your playlist? Songs. Okay, so I'm a big, I'm a big listener to rap music.

I love like R&B and rap music, you know, just to get me hyped and stuff, especially when I'm filming and everything. My favorite artist is, I'm not sure, have you ever heard of Gunna? No, I know. So he's a big rap influencer. I just love his lyrics and stuff, which I think it's, I find it motivating a little bit. But he's great. So some of my top songs, sold out dates. I also am very, I'm very big into, like, religion and stuff.

So I'm very religious. I listen to the Handuman Chalisa every morning. So that's always on my top. That's probably the top of my playlist, actually. All right. We're going to add that to our playlist. We do have a digital voices playlist on Spotify. Yeah.

So we're always asking, adding new music and one of the reasons we asked that question. And then the second thing, are there like words that you live by or quotes or mantras? So one of the biggest things that I actually stand by, I picked it up in early of 2025. It was called Kaizen. So Kaizen is a Japanese philosophy. It basically just means like continuously improving yourself or getting like 1% better every single day. Right around January of 2025, so early 2025, I was kind of plateauing. that was the time when I had realized that like I'm transitioning this from a passion thing to like actually like an actual business and I had seen a vision in it so going into 2025 I read a book called Atomic Habits. You probably know of that? Yeah, I have that great book. It's an amazing book. I suggested for anyone at in high school. It's an amazing book talks a lot about you know self-discipline and really being able to do something crazy in high school. So one of the biggest things in that book was that phrase Kaizen and it had stuck with me really well and I was like you know this is something that I want to

want to implement in my life. So going into 2025, I implemented it. And I had seen so much growth with literally just that word. And I believe, like, God had literally put that word in front of me for a reason. So, yeah, I stand by that word all the time. And so tell us about your life a little bit, like growing up. So are you from Dallas, Fort Worth? Where are you from?

Yeah, yeah. So I've born and raised in Dallas. I've always lived Capello my whole life, which made it kind of easy to build friends and build relationships. I love moving around though. I'm a big traveler, a big adventure guy. So, you know, going on heights, doing all of that stuff, you know, just traveling to the beach, take an Airbnb here and there. I'm a huge, huge advocate for that stuff. All right, well, let's talk a little bit about A1 Media because that's one of the reasons I wanted to have you on the show is like what you've done at such a young

age is super impressive. I mean, this isn't like, like when I was in high school, my business was I had a TP company, like toilet paper company where we would get paid to toilet paper people's So this is much, what you're doing is adding much more value to people's lives. Yeah. I mean, it's significant what you're doing. So tell us, maybe you can't name them specifically, but tell us about a couple clients and what are you doing? So yeah, so a couple of clients, I actually just pick up one of my bigger clients just

recently, Piwan football. So they basically run seven on seven tournaments. It's a style of football that you can play where it's like two hand touch. So they basically run tournaments all around the nation. and I've been brought on as like the creative director of the brand and this is like this isn't like some small brand like this is a global brand so they're actually flying me to Japan next week it's crazy yeah so in about four days I'll be flying out to Japan to cover to basically lead market an entire event over there and that's

probably been my biggest breakthrough my biggest opportunity that I've been given so far other than that I work with Adidas as well so I run a lot of the tournaments in the South region, especially on the basketball side, running a lot of those lead marketing and also just creative direction on that stuff. But I'll say those two are my biggest fans currently. Yeah, no, that's super impressive. You're like, you know, my kids, and we're not here to talk about my kids, so we're not going to go deep there. But they're surpassing their parents, for sure, in terms of what they're doing. You're doing the same grade as your parents are. They're very great people. I really love being out with them. So that's really cool. So, and I know

you're expanding, right? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I was a little bit about that. Growing for sure. So actually one of my biggest goals for 2026 is to really build and expand my operational side of everything. I really want to grow more pillars of success within my business. So obviously we started with the media side of it. Going into 2025, I had picked up a mentor. Best decision in my life.

I think anyone at this age should have a mentor. Like that is what changed the scope of my entire business. And that's actually when I picked up the marketing sector as well. So the marketing sector consisted of things like website design, running SEO, you know, building Google and Facebook ads for clients, social media management. All of those different pillars of success that I had added on. That's one of the biggest things I'm trying to scale in 2026. So the media site is there. You know, I love it.

I love doing it. But there's a huge market within those other 4 and 5 pillars of success that I'm really trying to get into. So how are you learning all these things? So you come up with all these creative ideas. What's feeding you? you're pouring that out to others and to your clients. What's coming in? Where's that a source of what's coming?

Yeah, yeah. So I would say the biggest thing I had mentioned it earlier is, you know, having a mentor. Yeah. So the mentorship is really good because you're able to learn from someone that's potentially doing eight to times more or better than what you are. Yeah. And it's just like that's going to give you the motivation and the kind of the mindset to be like, hey, you need to, you know, you need to do better every single day. Yeah. So he has taught me a lot on the marketing side of like things on the operationals.

So how to build and scale a team, how to build SOPs, how to run SOWs properly, all of that stuff. But it's not something of like he's, you know, he's doing all the baby steps. Yeah. He's not making, you're not making me do any of this. He's like, hey, I'm giving you the asset for this. It's your choice to implement it. If you actually want to, you know, do something amazing, you have to be willing to actually put in the work and makes, you know, something happen.

Learning by experience is a huge thing for me. So making mistakes and understanding where I'm coming from from those mistakes, that's a huge thing for me. Yeah. What about creativity? Like, do you think you were just born with it? Or what are some other things that happened in your younger self that helped you to be creative and be the way that you are? So the creative side, that's actually, that's a great question, actually.

So on the creative side, I would say I picked it up really through, I actually love playing the drums. So in middle school, I played the drums for three years in my life. And I enjoyed it so much. Like, I found a lot of passion and just like, you know, with the marimba. There's so many different keys and stuff. And you have to be so creative with that. Even if you had descriptive music, like, you had to be able to be creative on how you would get to those notes,

how you would be able to, you know, influence people with that music. So I feel like that's actually kind of where my creativity had spanned out of, you know, it's kind of crazy from something like, from something like drums. and stuff, but I would say even before that, I loved, I've always been in like the sports realm. So it doesn't have anything to tie into like creativity necessarily, but like just, you know, being with sports and such, I feel like I found a lot of like enjoyment in that. And just like that kind of helped me find a passion in something. So yeah. What about parents? Are there anything your parents ever made you do that you kind of rolls

your, no, you're 18. You can talk or face. That it kind of rolls her eyes. But it kind of like in hindsight now as you're growing up and building this business, you're like, I'm glad they sort of made me do that. Yeah, 100%. Like, I mean, I couldn't have been in the position that I am without my parents. Like, that's just like a God-given gift. Like, genuinely, I don't, what they do for me is like more, like, it's, it's amazing. It's so blessing for someone like me.

And I appreciate all the opportunity that I have. So I, you know, I'm a huge advocate for school and such. Obviously, they want me to do the best that I can in school. But just me being a 17-year-old doing the things that I am, I had a little bit of an ego. It was just like an arrogance thing. Nowadays I understand where they come from. But, you know, I kind of wish I hadn't. Obviously, I wish I didn't have that arrogance and stuff.

Yeah. But it was just like a thing of like, oh, like, obviously I'm going to do good at school. Like I'm going to get as good as great as I can, build the relationships that I can, do all of that. But it's just like, I really want to build this business. Like, I'm just so passionate about it. I love it so much. So that's probably the biggest thing is they just make me stay grounded on the school and stuff. and that really helped me, you know,

understand how to build discipline and do all of that. Really good stuff. So, you know, oftentimes we talk about mentoring. You mentioned quite a bit. I'm also a big believer in reverse mentoring. So this is the younger generation, mentoring, the older generation.

So let's just say that I or a prototype someone like myself is your mentee. What are some words of wisdom? When you look at the kind of the next generation above you that's, you know, older people, what are some words of wisdom you might drop on them? Oh, that's a great question. So that's a great question.

I would say one thing that I realize that a lot of people in the older generation are a little lacking is social media and AI. I'm a really big believer in building a personal brand. So building a brand around yourself, even if you have a business, I think building a brand around yourself is a huge thing. And I feel like a lot of people older than me, you know, they don't understand that part of it. They're like, oh, you're building A1 media. Why are you trying to build on Singh Hall on top of it? You know, isn't that too many things to cover? that's a huge thing I feel like

and I feel like a lot of people around y'all's age kind of lacks that that and also AI I think learning AI is just like a must have at this point I mean I feel like you're gonna fall behind if you don't so that's something that you know they kind of have to incorporate

in their life whether they like it or not like it's just kind of has to happen so yeah a lot of people were sort of raised in this I call false huck humility okay and so you can't talk about yourself you can't build a brand they would never use the word brand building your brand because that means that, you know, you're all about yourself. But those same people are the ones that are a little bit of trouble.

Yeah. And so there's always a careful battle. So I'm a big believer in building your brand. What's next? Like you're building your business. You're expanding. Uh-huh. But like if you could look out even further, like, you know, you're 18, like when you're

about to hit 30, what do you think your work might look like? So on the long-term scope, I really want to, one of, another one of my biggest, beliefs and one of the biggest things I want to get into is philanthropy. I love giving back. Like I just realized that how much I love being able to give value to people, especially people that haven't been given the opportunity that I have. If I can give them any type of value, whether it's knowledge based, whether it's an actual opportunity, I would be more than happy to do that. So obviously when I'm in when I'm in my 30s, I want to be able to really get into philanthropy in the sense of like giving out free knowledge. And I want to start.

that now. At 18, I'm doing that now. I post on social media about different frameworks that I use. One of the frameworks actually I just implemented is called the A3 framework. Have you ever heard of? Yes, I have. It's a great framework. It's problem solving framework. Just actually started implementing that. But like things like that, I want to be able to give value like that. Even in one on 25, 30, I want to be able to give as much as I can to the people that don't have as much opportunity as me. It's just like the created, I feel like as I'm going to get older, the creativity might fall apart a little of it, you know, who knows, though? When I'm 30, I might want to sell the company, you know, and go straight into building something new and also, you know, devoting a lot of my time

into philanthropy and actually giving back to people. I actually tell you a funny story. So I was, I hired a video editor for my personal brand. He basically scripts all my content, does basically everything for my personal brand and just really builds it really well. I had gotten an hour call with him. At first, we were talking about how to color grade and everything. you know, how to make the footage look cinematic and really beautiful. But it got really deep. And he actually just got married after a seven-year relationship. And he was like, oh, you know, like my wife is moving to Canada.

And I'll see her for a year. And like, the thought, after he told me all of that stuff, he basically was like, oh, I'm going to move to Canada in like five or six months. And I'm thinking like I'm going to drop the agency, like the video editing agency and pick up plumbing. And I was like, man, I was like, where is this thought even coming? You're like one of the best editors I've ever worked with. And the thought of you going from video editing to plumbing,

that didn't even like shock my mind. And he had told me that. And I had realized I was like, I mean, this guy's working 20 hours a day on video editing. Like he's, I mean, his opportunity and obviously him living in India and stuff, it's way harder.

Him telling me that story, it like stuck to me. And I was like, man, like that really motivated me to be like, if I can do something amazing in life, Yeah. I want to be able to give people like him an opportunity because he's, he's passionate, he loves it and he's disciplined. And it's just that he can't grow it well because he doesn't have the opportunity, right?

So like, that just stuck with me. And it's just something that I really want to do, especially when I grow older. I think giving value at 18 is a little bit. You have to be more credible. But, you know, I think any type of help I can give. Oh, yeah, yeah. That's very cool. So our audience is primarily health care.

Okay. And I know you're 18. You haven't worked in health care, but your dad works in health care. Huge health drink. I detect. And so when you take what you do know about health care, what are your ideas around health care? How can we improve health care, whether it's the experience or medicine or, you know, any thoughts about it? Healthcare.

Okay. So the healthcare sector, I'm not a huge health care guy, obviously. I mean, you know, big into like the business and marketing and all of that. On the healthcare side, I really want to, I'm just, I would say I'm more. curious about what's going to happen on healthcare. Yeah. Especially with AI and stuff, I'm really curious. What do you actually think?

What do you think about, like, the healthcare sector in the next 10 years? Yeah, well, I think it's going to completely get blown up. Okay. From what we know it today. And that, you know, you won't be seeing a primary care doc to control everything that you do. I think you'll use AI. I'm already doing it. Yeah, yeah.

I've been doing it for over a year. And I talk to other people and it's just the wave. Yeah. No one's going to stop it. Do you think it's an exponential growth? Yeah. I think we will see a hockey stick type of swing. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Probably in the next year, you know, Chad GVT. We're recording in January 2025, Chad GVT just came out with their health version. And there's a weight list. And I think as that gets better, it's kind of like Waymo. When Waymo first came out and people were like, oh, it's going to get an accident. And sure enough, I don't remember the exact number, but, you know, you had twice more accidents than you did a person driving. But now it's twice less.

Okay. And it's going to keep getting less like flying an airplane. And so why would you not want to do Waymo? And it's the same with AI and healthcare. Yeah. Probably right now there's still some junk out there. And you know, you've got to be careful, kind of double check, whatever. Yeah.

But there's a lot of low risk things that you could do yourself now. And that, like, that's what I do. And I think a lot more people are doing it. And as it gets better and better and better, I think that risk goes way down. And is that risk goes way down, utilization goes way out. For sure. For sure. And then, you know, we talk about how health care has a crisis in terms of a shortage of

physicians, stuff like, yeah. Well, I think it solves that shortage. And those physicians, instead of doing mostly primary care, will do specialist type things. Okay. So you always need the specialist. Yeah. But man, basic primary care, I can go on and on and I don't want to steal this time from you.

Yeah. But I'm always curious, you know, what younger people who are sort of tech forward. Yeah. I don't think about, man, because I, you know, it's kind of ridiculous the way that our healthcare system obviously. Oh, yeah, for sure. And I think I'm, that's just one of the things I'm curious about. I was like, obviously moving into, I think more specialized jobs are going to be more so.

I don't think, I mean, you think those are going to get. take him? No, no, I think you always need, you know, specialists that are going to, you know, have to get in and cut you or what have you. But even a lot of that's going to be AI driven. Although you think so. It's a AI driven. Yeah. But they'll still be that need. It's interesting at Arizona State University, which I think is by student population, maybe the biggest. They have a new med school. I think maybe one or two years old. And all physicians not only are getting their medical degree, but also engineering. Oh, wow. And to me, that makes total sense. It does. It really does. Because you want to be allowed to prompt. You want to know how the tech part of it. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And I know a lot of colleges are implementing AI classes now, too. Like, I had, I remember some school. So I just got into the school of SMU, the SMU School of Business. So I'm actually just committed there. And one of the programs it offers, like, an AI, an entire course around AI.

So I'm definitely going to take it and just kind of see, you know, how can they teach me? And what are they going to teach me about? Yeah. I mean, is it going to be prompting? Is it going to be, like, what model to you? use who knows like yeah it'll be yeah it'll be super interesting to watch and i and again i think it's all the ever it's so fast the changes oh yeah where in the old days you know it's even though things were definitely transforming with just take years and years you kind of take your time but like

you said you know i think it's a great lesson for our audience is if you sit around uh you'll be way passed up yeah and it's gonna be hard catch up shows i always tell people you know try everything all the new stuff try it to experiment and if it's if it's if you're you're not transforming your daily work today, you're going to be transformed out. Oh, yeah, 100%. Especially these days. That's the biggest thing. So as we wrap up, you know, we talk a lot of different things, got some new music,

learned a lot about you and learned about your business that you started a couple years ago and now it's growing, growing, growing, and side of the customers are just amazing logos that you have and your whole future and some of your thoughts. If you think about my audience one more time being mostly health care and most of the mostly probably around, I'm going to say the average age is 40. So you can have some early career. We can have some people like me that are passporty, that are, I don't want to say towards the end of our career, but you know, getting into that next generation.

Words of wisdom. What else would you say to them? So one, actually, another thing I would say, I think a lot of people, like I said about opportunity, I think a lot of people have so much that they could give to people my age, value you wise, if people were to post, kids are all over social media. If you were to start a social media and literally just talk about something healthcare related or something in the medical space, that is, you don't understand how influential that is for someone like that.

Because that's the best way to learn. Learning from someone else is so, it's so impactful. I mean, like, genuinely, that's what's helped me grow what I have. And that's one thing I would tell people at your age and 40 year plus is that give value to people like me as much as possible. You know, whether it's on social media, whether it's in person, wherever it is, just give value.

You don't know what that value could take it to someone. Like, it could change someone's life. You don't know. Yeah, I love that, especially in this day and age of old, heck, back in my day, didn't really have that ability unless you met someone. Exactly.

And happenstance, but now with media, we can scale all that. Exactly. You're a delightful human, a great person. I've earned a lot, and I know my honest as well. Thank you for view my guest on Digital Voices. Thank you so much, and I appreciate you having me on here yourself.

Thank you for listening to Digital Voices. We hope today's conversation sparked ideas, reflection, and connection. Subscribe on YouTube, Apple, and Spotify Podcasts so you don't miss an episode.