50:6 Hard-won lessons from an agency leader

Lee:

Welcome to the Trailblazer FM podcast. This is your host, Mr. Lee Matthew Jackson. I'm here with the one and only Jon Tsourakis. I got your name right first time, mate, from the company Oyova, which I also had to write down in phonetic just so I could get both of those right. Mate, welcome to the show. How are you this fine day?

Jon:

I'm great. Lee Matthew Jackson. Yeah, I appreciate you pronouncing those correctly as well. It's all right.

Lee:

Let's go through this entire episode calling each other by our Full names.

Lee:

I'll be a little bit awkward. I'm going to call you Jon. I give you permission to call me Lee for the rest of the show. Got it. So, mate, for the folks who are not aware of who Jon is, could you give us a little bit of a background of who you are, what you're all about?

Jon:

Yeah. Agency owner, been on 8,000, I think, three times. Been in business since 2008. Got around 30 people right now. We work with clients of all shape, sizes, and colors in digital marketing and web development as well as software development.

Lee:

Nice. Now, we have a little time machine that we like to jump in. Let's say it's a Tardis because I'm clearly got a British accent. If you can go with that, we'll do Dr. Who. Can we go back to before you built that agency back in 2008, how did you even begin to get into the industry? Was it when you were drawing as a child, you're like, Yes, I'm going to be creative. What was your starting story as it were? Origin story, that was the one.

Jon:

Yeah, the origin story. Everything was so wonderful as a child. No. My family had a home building business, and I worked alongside my father, my brothers, and it was a decent size. There was crews and whatnot. It was construction. I wanted to go to college. I did not really want to be in the construction industry because growing up in Florida was exceedingly hot. In any event, he didn't want me to go into school, so he made an example of me and he fired me in front of a bunch of people. Then while I was going to school for marketing, this guy that was there had started a marketing company with his father. That company was rapidly growing and it was more traditional based stuff. In that, I got entirely two corporate and I decided, you know what? I like the more digital things and I'm going to go ahead and leave here. So I quit one day. And there was a... How would you put this? It was rather unceremonious. It was an abrupt quitting. I don't know if I can curse on your show and tell the whole story.

Lee:

Do what you want, mate. That's fine. There's no beep going on here.You're good. 

Jon:

Yeah. Anyway, there was this big expansion with this large retailer, which I won't mention. It rimes with Sears, and they're no longer in business in any event. So we were doing this, and we had a certain part of the country, and I was working day and night. And I remember asking for a raise, and they're like, No, we can't do that. And I'm looking at going to work for other ad agencies, and they're telling me I would get paid peanuts. I was actually pretty well compensated. And I'm walking down the hall, and we have a new CEO. He undermines me in front of my staff. I have six team members, and as I'm walking down this hall. He says, Hey, why was this mailer late? Some really small mailer, I believe it was in Ohio or something. It's a state here. I said, Hey, I'll tell you after the meeting. He said, No, you're going to tell me right now. He hands me a marker and he pokes it in my chest and he tells me to draw it right there on this board. I looked back at my team members and they all look at me and they're like, Dude, don't do this.

Jon:

We believe in you as a leader. This is really emasculating. I looked back at the guy and I said, You know what? Go fuck yourself. You draw it. That's the day that I quit and I started my agency.

Lee:

Wow. I wonder if a little bit of that as well was driven by being unceremoniously fired as well. I did say we weren't going to do that. This does feel like you're talking to a shrink now, doesn't it? However they phrase it in the States.

Jon:

I don't know. But I think these are defining moments where you have to make a decision and you have to make the best of it. You have to look at who you're going to be in those moments. There's miles and miles of tragedy and whatnot, but look at the bright side, know that there's something good around the corner, and if your head's on mostly straight, you'll figure it out.

Lee:

That's awesome. What did you feel like that evening?

Jon:

I was pretty pumped. I was pretty pumped because there was some friends at that company and I was just like, I'm done so I got to figure this out. That was brutal because that was also in the pit of the recession. I remember it well. There's nobody spending money, especially on marketing related things. That marketing company was more in the healthcare space, which is a much safer space. In that, I was just trying to figure out making a plan. The plan I made looked great on paper, completely flopped. I pulled some team members together and tried to go and sell, but just pitching and pitching and pitching and pitching and not winning anything because I couldn't sell anybody in that space either because of a non compete. But yeah, that evening, I want to say that I was pumped. I'd say it was like two months later when you're realizing that you're now running out of gas and your idea was pretty crazy that you begin to hate on yourself a little bit.

Lee:

Well, at the point when you were doing that, how did you manage to turn things around?

Jon:

You just don't give up. There's two ways you can do it. Either you can let the world wear you down or you can wear it down and get your way. So I prefer the latter.

Lee:

Well, I'm imagining you've spent two months here trying to get this agency off the ground. Was it an agency or were you just doing freelance at first initially? .

Jon:

No, it was an agency. I was like, All right, we're going to go full board. What I ended up doing is like, All right, I came up with my own brand. I had everything. Then I realized there was this other guy that was doing it. We decided to partner up, and then we ended up getting another guy involved. We realized the one guy that we initially partnered up with didn't really want partners. He was like, All right, cool. So he went on his own. Then this other guy and myself, we created an agency which was Revital at the time. We just merged. He was doing the developing and I was doing anything related to marketing and sales for our clients as well as for us. I remember we would get called in and we would do anything. It was like, Oh, you need a logo? Yeah, we'll figure a logo out. It doesn't matter. Or you have email issues, network connection issues? Yeah, we'll crawl into your desk. It didn't matter. It was just really survival at that point. I remember he had either a kid or two at the time, so he was actually getting a bigger share of the money so he could take care of his family.

Jon:

I'm pretty much homeless at the time, just being a single guy, just doing whatever I could to make ends meet. Then just slowly, brick by brick, client by client, employee by employee. Then in 2018, I met a Mastermind group, met a friend of mine who then became my business partner. In 2018, the economy was going so well, so we merged our companies together, which is away over today.

Lee:

No way. It's a lot of hard graph for many, many years saying yes to a lot of things that you probably regret. What was the pivotal moment for you when you realized what your strengths was? Because I assume you don't still crawl under desks nowadays.

Jon:

No, the desk crawling days are over. Now I'm on top of them.

Lee:

You're on top of the desk, you said, other people. I guess that's a serious question, of course. So for me, quick background, I did the very similar thing as an agency owner. We did absolutely everything for anybody. If someone said we need a social media campaign, I had no idea about social media, but I knew I could Google it, so we would work it out. And there were really unprofitable projects, et cetera. But eventually there came a point where we realized what our strengths were, and we were able to diverge into that. What point was that for you guys when you're like, We've got to stop crawling under desks now. This is what we're all about.

Jon:

Yeah. So it was nothing related to email us. It was a communications campaign. I think it was mainly communication. So we whittled that down. Then we realized that we're a digital agency. So if it's not digital, we would do print stuff, we would help people with billboards. Then we got out of that space as well. Just finding really good partners that are better at that than we were. We figured out that those relationships could also be reciprocal. So you would find partners and you would send them business. And then, of course, they would send business to you. So it's essentially building a network of your master agency, the thing you believe, with just people that are much stronger at those spaces than you are. But yeah, it was just learning through profitability and just really some awful things where you're just like, oh, we got to give them back all their money because this is not good, man. This is not good.

Lee:

We've done that very often. To be honest, I will confess, even a year ago, we had to give someone a massive refund because we absolutely screwed up. We know what we're doing now, but we still hadn't quite... In all fairness, it was the height of COVID and we were putting on an online event for a company and we hadn't thought about what will happen when 500 people hit the server all at the same time. Everything went to hell in a hand basket, as they say politely, and we had to give them a massive refund and it was totally awful. I still think to this day, people will still screw up, things won't be perfect. What's your main niche then nowadays? What's your bread and butter as an agency?

Jon:

If somebody needs to drive either lead gen or awareness or engagement on the digital marketing side, we do that through paid search. We're really solid at SEO. Social media as well. We haven't figured out the organic side. We're decent at the organic side as well as the paid side and then programmatic. We build campaigns in that way, or we can just essentially just have a standalone, one of those type of services. The companies we work with there are usually around two million in revenue, up to probably like 50 million. We have a couple that are close to a billion in that client space, but they usually fall between that range. Then when it comes to web dev, the web dev typically falls between the same. Every now and then, we get startups and whatnot. Then we'll also do e-commerce. It'll be the Shopify or WooCommerce there. When it comes to software development, we do a lot of business integrations, automations, and things like that, connecting different systems. The strategy for the company, real quick, was, all right, if we were merging, we can bring in leads affecting top line revenue, and then we can build a website.

Jon:

It's their hub, all roads lead to Rome, that type of scenario. But then we can also affect bottom line revenue by creating efficiencies with software. We've done that with, I'd say, a fair amount of on a client. So that works. We come in through the marketing or we come in through the software and then we end up selling them the other services.

Lee:

That's interesting. We run a company called Event Engine. That's my other agency on top of Trailblazer FM. We position ourselves in, first of all, as consultancy. We'll come in and consult, helping them essentially break down a blocker, work out what they want to achieve, work out what the blocker is. It's usually some software and automation and just going to give them their IT service. But then what we upsell after or later on in that relationship is the web build. They can actually use our software that we've got and we can also implement new CRM systems. There's a whole range of services we can do within the events industry. I think people very often are hammering home, aren't they? Hey, we do web builds, we do websites, we sell you websites. You want a website? Yeah, we can build you a website. T hey don't think of finding that one in. It's not a small in what you've just described, obviously, but it's a highly valuable in. We need to resolve this. We're going to build the relationship with you on this, and there is therefore no reason why you can't then expand on that relationship and say, Hey, we don't just do this.

Lee:

We have all of these supporting services which will add even more value and help you generate even more money or help you grow etc.

Jon:

 It is. But what's interesting, and you probably experienced this as well, it's a branding problem. You get positioned in their mind for this one thing that you do, and they're like, No, we're so much more than that. We can do these things. Going back to one of the clients we had back, I got them in 2009. It was literally two guys with a magnet on the side of their truck, A. C. Company. That was one of the companies I helped with their email problem. I had to get in there. Dude, in their phone, probably till this day, they've sold that company for multimillion dollars. We helped them really grow. Fantastic case study. But in their phone till this day, it says, Jon the email guy. Dude, I was like, All right, I fixed the email, but we can do this. I'm just continually hammering. I'm like, No, we can do all these different things. They finally were like, Okay, yeah, we get it.

Lee:

But that's the problem, though. Don't you think that people dilute their message as well? Because they think they want to tell everyone everything they do.

Jon:

Totally. I'm still guilty of that. Yeah. So anybody listening to this, if you're smart, you're going to focus on your niche, whether these are things you warned me about, but it's either going to be horizontal, you either do SEO or you do web dev or whatever. And then if you really want to be targeted, you focus on your vertical. You work with veterinarian clinics, or you work with basket weavers, or you work with doctor's offices. Those are always going to be the most profitable. But here's the issue. A lot of people don't realize this. It's really difficult to find solid employees, and you can be difficult to be the best at your game because nobody wakes up and says, You know what? I want to be the best web developer, best designer, web developer, marketer for basket weaving companies. It's this balance that you have to create between business as well as an HR side in keeping really good talent.

Lee:

Well, that leads perfectly to the next question. You mentioned right at the very beginning, you've scaled your agencies, I think, to 30 people so far. Yeah. How did you go around? Maybe your first employee or your first employees, how did you go around finding those? Because we've had the same problem, especially in the early days, very high turner of staff trying to work out who was good, trying to understand the hiring process. Did you have any of those issues? Have you been really lucky?

Jon:

Yeah, my first employee, it's a weird story. I didn't really want to hire him, but his mom called me. He was a childhood friend and she said he was suicidal. I was like, Oh, man. I don't know how true that was. I think she was just really plugging for a job. He didn't really seem that way when I hired him. But anyway, yeah, I gave him a job and he worked out pretty well for quite a while. Then from that point, I was like, Oh, all right. This is what it's like to actually have an employee. Their timesheets aren't always going to be accurate. But you need to assume the positive, not like, You're lying, you're cheating me. It's just like, Hey. So creating the structure and creating processes. Then it was looking at the difference between contractors versus employees. What I realized is the agency had more control over employees than they did contractors. That's when people still came into the office. By I mean, control is I mean, control of the work, I mean, control of the deadlines. Then it was just the next one. I think it went from somebody that was literally helping on just doing link building for SEO, and then hired another copywriter, then social media, and then another SEO expert, and then two designers, and then just kept stacking and stacking, and then realizing certain things that don't work in house.

Jon:

So designers, like, Okay, we need better design than I can pay for in house. Work with contractors, and then vice versa. It's just this continual game. But I think that's the thing you can't be afraid of. Being super flexible and not worrying about moving all the pieces around, or what that might mean. I think we get so attached to the significance of, Well, this is what our agency is built on. You just need to look at what works. And if it doesn't work, then okay, it's probably not going to be profitable, or it's probably not going to be good for your people or for your clients.

Lee:

People do hang on to things, don't they? This is the way we've always done it. Totally. We've always done our design inhouse, but actually, why not take it out? My favorite phrase is the definition of insanity is doing the same thing every single time, expecting different results. Yeah, absolutely. Don't get too attached.

Jon:

Yeah, don't get touched the outcome.

Lee:

You mentioned lockdowns, or at least when you said everyone was coming in. I've mentioned lockdowns. How did that affect you guys?

Jon:

Well, I was old school. My business partner had the same thinking where we just assumed that if people were not in the office, they would not get their work done. That was as wrong as could be. People do. In some cases, the productivity was up at 20 %. They don't have the drive time where they're just gritting their teeth, sitting in traffic before they get to work. We were wrong about that. The other thing, too, is now we're actually downsizing our office spaces because we can't call everybody back in. We know that's just not going to be fair. But I miss it. I enjoy going to the office and I would enjoy just having conversations with people. But what are you going to do? You're going to have them go work somewhere else? Are you going to force them to come back in there where they're miserable? I don't think that's the right approach.

Lee:

What's the feedback, though, generally from the rest of the team? Are there others that miss it?

Jon:

No, they don't. They all say, Oh, you're going to come in the office? It's like, Well, you're going to come in? No.

Lee:

See, I miss it too. We do have an office. Yeah, we still.

Jon:

Have two offices.

Lee:

Yeah, well, we still got two offices. I'm in one of them on my own. Then there's two left in the other office down south. Everyone else is online. Some of our folks have moved away in that and I get it, which is fine. But I really do miss it. I often wonder if other employees miss it or whether they just think it's great that they're at home. I feel a little bit depressed over time if I'm on my own too much.

Jon:

I think it's all routine, though. I love a change of state. I like you shower, I get ready to go, and then I go somewhere and then I go do this work thing, and then I come back and then I can unplug for the most part. Then when it's from home, I think it all gets muddled. It's not effective. I have friends that work at some huge enterprise companies, one at Google. She was telling me when she first got there, she was managing these huge teams. Nobody was actually at this work from home. All in their calendar, it was like, Take dog to vet, drop kids off at school. She was like, What the hell are you guys doing? Nobody's even working. When do you work? That's amazing.

Lee:

Well, my wife is forever feeling guilty because I am home a lot more nowadays. That's exactly what happened. She's like, I've booked an optician's for Friday. I hope that's okay. 12 o'clock. I'm like, Yeah, that's fine. But in my head, I'm like, It's an interruption. I've got to go out. I've got to do this. Oh, I hope she's not watching. Because at least when I'm at the office, everyone knows I'm there for eight hours and then I'll be back and then I'll be ready. I do still go two or three days a week nowadays just to be in a different space because I'm like you. I just like that whole travel process. I'm at work. This is what I do. When I'm here, the fridge is calling to me. Even now, there's a beer in there saying, Hey, Lee, it's nearly five o'clock. Drink me.

Lee:

No worries. I'll stop goofy around. But no, that's really insightful. I think one of my biggest insights, at least so far from our conversation, has very much been around not being scared to change things. It sounds like you've built your business over the years, not by saying, This is our plan and we're going to stick to it. Hello, high water. It's been a case of, Let's try this. Okay, that works. Let's adjust it, see what happens next. And you've not been scared to keep changing and you've evolved your business. I assume you do this to this very day. You are still continuing to refine your process and refine your offering. Or do you feel now you've made it and you just keep repeating the same thing?

Jon:

Yeah, entirely. The issue is that I think you should be a little bit scared. If you're not, then you're probably just going to run things right into the ground. You're just going to keep just shooting from the hip and you're not going to have the necessary constraints so you can build something. But the bigger you get, the harder it is to make some of those changes. So you want to make sure that you have the flexibility and you're not entirely too rigid that you can change your offering and then really just motivate the people to actually do the work. I think that's one thing that we've done quite well is pulling people in where they don't feel isolated. So they always feel like they're a part of the conversation. 

Lee:

On that, then, how do you keep them motivated or feel a part of it? Because we're owners, we're totally invested in this. But I've often found employees, I can give them the brave heart level speech, and for five minutes they're like, Yeah. But 10 minutes later, they're like, I just want to go home now.

Jon:

Yeah, we're more like Long Shank. We use fear and shame and now even drugs. No, it's making people feel connected. I think whether you're working with clients or just anybody, anybody wants to feel connected to the decision and they want to be the conversation. Not saying it's like this, it's a full democracy over here where we're voting and dropping and stones and the buckets for choice. But we lead with logic and saying, Hey, this is why we're doing this. This is why this is the best decision. And then we also take feedback. So it's not just authoritarian where we're pushing it down. It's like, Guys, what is the best thing we should do here? You're really smart people. That's why we hired you. Based on that feedback, we'll typically move in the best direction. W e make mistakes all the time, but it's learning from them.

Lee:

What you've just said reminds me of the book Culture Code, where you as a leader are making yourself vulnerable to the team and you're saying, Hey, we think we should do this, but we're not sure. We're being vulnerable. What are your thoughts? What's your feedback? We've hired you guys because we know you're experts too. You can help us here so people become way more invested. I'll put a link to the book. I don't look at.

Jon:

That as a vulnerability, though. Huh? I don't look at that as a vulnerability.

Lee:

It is a vulnerability. You're opening up. You're saying, Hey, look, you're not positioning yourself as the captain who knows everything. The captain who knows everything would not then say, Hey, could you give me your input? Because that's, in theory, a sign of that you're not sure what you're doing.

Jon:

Got it. A captain would also probably be a dick.

Lee:

Oh, yeah, totally be a dick. Yeah, absolutely. But it is. They are building up trust in you because you're opening up and asking for their opinion and you're often then applying that to your business. It's what we do with our company as well. In fact, some of the best decisions we've ever made as a business has been because of our employees telling us we're doing it completely wrong. We're like, Oh, that's embarrassing.

Lee:

Including our marketing. At one point, we were trying to come up with all of these Facebook campaigns with little itty bitty downloads and everything, and we're spending hours designing all of our landing pages. And Karthi, you're a legend, mate, one of our employees is like, Why don't you just talk with our existing clients? Because they absolutely love us and there is more that we could be doing with them. But equally, they could just recommend us into other companies as well. And we were like, This was a group roundtable meeting and I literally felt stupid. I was like, Mate, that's exactly what we should be doing. Great idea. We will. That changed everything for us, we repositioned ourselves more down the consultative path because we recognized that is actually our strength is going in, building up those relationships and then selling off on that. Anyway, enough about me. This is about you, mate. Thank you so much for giving us a little insight into how your agency got started and how you are not a dick as a leader, which is fantastic and good to hear. Now, I believe you run a digital Mastermind. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Jon:

Yeah, it's a Mastermind group called the Digital Mastermind. It's got about 100 members in it. We come together, having Zoom calls. We do a yearly event. It's all about just helping one another out. It's just peer to peer. And based on that, there's been a lot of partnerships that are created. I have mergers as well and just agencies lifting. When I went in there in 2012, another guy was running it at the time before I was. I just had a handful of people. And then, yeah, just steadily grown based on the knowledge that's continually shared from agencies all over the world. There's a few in other countries as well.

Lee:

That's amazing. How can people find out more about that?

Jon:

Digitalmastermind.Com. Submit a form if you're interested in joining and we'll schedule a conversation and see if you're a good fit. Chances are you probably are if you got the fire in your eyes and you want to share and learn from others. Nice one.

Lee:

Then as we come into land, how can people connect with you, mate?

Jon:

Linkedin is the best place. It's Jon Tsourakis. Last name is spelled T S O UR A K I S. Just drop me a note on LinkedIn, we can connect and if it makes sense, let's have a conversation. I love meeting new people and learn about what they're doing. Nice one.

Lee:

Folks, I'll make sure there are links to all of this in the show notes as well as the LinkedIn profiles. Jon, all that's left for us to say is thank you so much for hanging out with us and we hope to meet you again real soon.

Jon:

Likewise, Lee, thank you so much, man. We had a great time here.

Lee:

Cheerio.