Why Your Goal Shouldn't Be to Exit and How to Massively Scale Your Agency Instead with John Sampogna

Why is the “exit” glorified in entrepreneurial culture? What does it really take to scale an agency to over 100 employees, all while enjoying the journey and hitting your personal goals?

In this episode, John Sampogna joins The Takeover to reveal the behind-the-scenes strategies that took his creative agency from startup to acquisition. John is the founder of a leading creative agency that scaled to over 100 employees and he shares how he strategically used acquisition as a way to SCALE and not to EXIT. John dives deep into how he balanced creativity with operational growth, the pivotal moments of scaling, and the secrets to retaining clients long-term.

Learn how to overcome the challenges of business growth and build a thriving company from someone who's done it:

[02:11] Building and Scaling a Creative Agency 

[07:49] Delegating and Managing Teams for Growth 

[10:10] How to Retain Clients and Grow Alongside Them

[14:58] Scaling Through Acquisition: John's Experience 

[20:32] Handling Challenges in Business: Stress Management Tips 

[29:56] The Future of Marketing Agencies in 2024 and Beyond 

[32:52] Creating a Winning Culture and Retaining Talent

Connect with John:

LinkedIn: here
Website: here

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About The Hosts:

• Tim & Cindy Dodd are the Co-founders of PEMA.io, based out of Miami, FL. Connect with Tim and Cindy: Instagram

About PEMA.io:

• PEMA.io is a Inc 5000 Outbound Marketing Agency specializing in Enterprise Sales & Appointment Setting. With over 7-years and 1,000+ clients served in the industry, PEMA is the leading agency for cold outreach appointments & systems. Learn more about PEMA.io here: www.pema.io/discover

Transcript

00:00

If all you care about running an agency is the best work, the most creative ideas, those are all important, they're essential, but you also need to focus on the actual business side because you should be able to find incredible people to also replicate the way you'd go about creating compelling ideas and doing it time and time again. But you also need to think about resource management, building processes.

00:29

things like legal, contractual things, and ultimately building scale, so you're giving yourself the ability to consistently deliver for your clients the right type of ideas, in addition to making sure your business is cashflow positive, profitable, et cetera. The cost of doing business is that clients are gonna pull out, they're gonna pause projects, budgets are gonna fall through. It isn't a personal attack on you, it is literally what happens. So rather than get upset and stressed about it

00:59

figure out how to deal with it, retrofit your operation. So it assumes that at any given time, two to three times a year, this is going to happen, design against it and the process for it. Welcome to The Takeover with Tim and Cindy, where we show you how to dominate every area of life and business. Let's get with it.

01:20

Welcome back to the Takeover. Today we have a really special treat. If you ever want to grow, scale massively beyond 100 employees, if you ever want to sell your company, exit your company, if you want to work with big, big giant companies, I've got a guest that's going to show you how to do all those things and more. And in his own words before the show, getting to 100 employees was actually the easy part. So I'm excited to welcome to the show, John Sampoña. Nice to be here. Thanks, Tim.

01:45

Awesome, man. Well, hey, I want to just jump into it. You know, everybody that listens to our podcast, you know, they might be an entrepreneur, they might be a CMO, they might be just they they're looking to scale. They're looking for how do we grow this? How do we scale it? And I think on your side, it's said super easy. So it seems like you understand how to go out, how to get clients, how to scale. So maybe just kind of catch yourself just a little bit. I know you gave me some background on.

02:11

how you started your agency and just kind of a high level, what got you to where you're at right now. Yeah, of course. So Wondersauce is 13 years old. We're based in New York City. We're a creative agency. We do three core things. So content creation, campaign development, you know, that like traditional advertising thing, but mostly living on the internet. We do performance marketing and paid media, everything from linear TV, audio podcasts, social search, et cetera. And then we also build things.

02:38

apps, digital products, websites, e-commerce experiences. So basically, we tried to build the agency with a very integrated offering to ultimately appeal to brands that are reaching customers on the internet and understanding the customer journey and all the pain points that we have to design against to successfully lead to customer acquisition and retention. That's a little bit about the agency. We work with Fortune 1000 businesses, in addition to funded startups and even smaller businesses of all sizes.

03:07

pretty well diversified on the client side. We started the agency when we were relatively young. So at the time, I think I was 26 or 27. There were two of us. And we had spent the last four or five years working at different agencies in New York City. And we kind of just really liked what we did, thought we could do it better. And we're at that phase where we were the employees who kind of like always had critique.

03:33

always were like, why don't they do it this way? Why do they do it that way? And at some point we were like, what are we waiting for? Isn't that like a lot of, most of the employees at a big agency? Or is that not true? Most of the employees, I think, at every company that's ever existed across every type of business. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I found that like when you keep doing that, you're clearly passionate about a lot of things about the industry. It's usually like when you're sitting there and after work you're having a beer and you're like,

04:03

mad about resourcing or the way a scope of work was constructed. Like you really like it. It's good. It's a good thing. It isn't necessarily like you're debating about the idea or the deliverable or man, I would have shot the video that way. Like that's the fun stuff. But when you find yourself debating the operational aspects of a business, that's when like maybe you should do it yourself because you clearly have a passion for the operational side. So

04:30

I love what you said there, man, because I have a friend and he does real estate. He's got a bunch of rental properties and he teaches people how to do the rental properties. And he says, don't fall in love with the property, fall in love with the numbers. And I think the same is true with you look like it, a Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates or any really successful entrepreneur. It's like they fall in love with the business and the business model. They don't fall in love necessarily with the products. And I think that's what really could differentiate.

05:00

people that do okay from great entrepreneurs is what you said right there, is when you find yourself obsessed over the business, the operations, the overall thing, not the widget you're making. Yes, and I mean, that's an amazing analogy. I think like rental homes are perfect. I think there's a little bit of everyone in the last, you know, 10 years with Airbnb's rise has kind of dabbled in, should I do a rental thing? And yeah, I mean, if you look at the analogy of like, you know, you have that beach.

05:29

house that is a share and you're like, we should get a slide for the pool. What does that introduce to your week over week, uh, liability, expenses, et cetera. And is it worth the extra time effort and potentially stress? Like, will it monetarily pay off? And it's the same idea as like, if all you care about running an agency is the best work, the most creative ideas.

05:58

Those are all important, they're essential, but you also need to focus on the actual business side because you should be able to find incredible people to also replicate the way you'd go about creating compelling ideas and doing it time and time again. But you also need to think about resource management, building processes, things like legal, contractual things, and ultimately building scale so you're giving yourself the ability to

06:26

consistently deliver for your clients the right type of ideas in addition to making sure your business is cashflow positive, profitable, et cetera. Yeah, totally, totally. Well, I didn't want to interrupt you there. We kind of got off a little bit, but you had launched this thing and you said you had exited, not exited, you had sold this about six years ago. What was that journey like scaling specifically? What was that like growing the client base?

06:52

And what did you do to grow? What did you do to sell? Were you selling? Did you have to sell some? What did that look like to get to that point where you could sell the company? It was a pretty wild ride early on. It was one of those situations where I feel like it was like a pinch me moment. Like, is this real? And it happened for like five consecutive years. So there were two of us that kind of quit our jobs and jumped into it. And after year one, I think there was about a dozen people there. And.

07:21

I think year one was all about survival. It was getting clients, going through that process of like delivering, seeing if they're happy and ultimately trying to get more work that way. The big scale moment, year one was, you typically have like the partners kind of like rolling up their sleeves and trying to take on as much as they can. And whether that's like the accounting and the finance side, the contract writing.

07:49

sales, negotiations, the project management. And when I remember year one, the point that was like stressful and breaking was project management. Because myself and my business partner, we weren't great at project management. So like, let's find someone who's better at that and have them own it. And that was like scale point one was that. And then there were probably two or three more inflection points over that first five years. I remember the second one was around like 25 to 30 people where

08:18

it became very clear we needed someone to own critical aspects of our service offerings. So putting a lead in place for creative, for tech, for project management, for user experience, whatever those buckets are or were at the time, someone who was accountable for the overall delivery across all of our accounts for those important service offerings. And then I think it was like around 50 to 75 people.

08:45

you start to actually work in more traditional layers of management where the person who's owning creative needs to have like a lieutenant or two underneath to ultimately work with the team and show what career growth looks like because that is so essential at agencies. You want to basically build an on ramp for people of all different skill levels and tenure to learn to grow and prosper at the agency because you want to keep turnover low. You want to basically keep your IP in house.

09:14

your IP as people. We have a very non-traditional sales dialogue. It isn't following a script. It's not necessarily so focused on price, process, et cetera. I'm just trying to set a vibe and ultimately get a conversation going to see if there's a mutual fit. Yeah. I think anybody listen to this. So oftentimes, people are trying to rush out of the sell seat as the entrepreneur. I have a friend, she just exited her agency.

09:41

She had salespeople on her team, which she was primary in sales till the day she exited. I mean, you think Jeff Bezos isn't in the room for the biggest deals that are being done in the company. And so I just think what's so powerful is every entrepreneur that I've talked to doing eight, nine figures plus, they might have a sales team, but they're in there still doing the deals. They're still in there. It seems like just a common theme that is being willing to do it. And it's, I think another really powerful thing I'd love to hear from you that kind of comes to mind is...

10:10

Client retention is super important. That's a big way behind how you scale. When you're doing, you know, because we do appointments that we do lead generation for, for bigger companies that have sales teams and we do high volume. And it's, it is the same thing. Like we're not just putting leads on a calendar. There's like a whole purpose why your client's hiring you. It's because there's a whole process that you fit into. And as a company, you do have to kind of plug in. It's like, for us, when I'm looking, I'm like, what's the whole sales process?

10:38

What kind of calls are your guys taking right now? How are they closing right now? How is what we're going to do look different? How do we make sure that that transition works well? And sometimes you go in with a client, and it's like you do have to be a part of that process. So what are maybe, as you come in and you're kind of an extension, as you said, of the company, what are some common things that you found that really do start off a relationship and keep a relationship? Not just retention, but.

11:08

as you said, grow with them so their accounts grow. Cause I'm sure there's some big challenges that you know, if you don't handle X, Y, Z at the beginning of the relationship, then it kind of sets you down a bad path versus if you handle stuff. So what does that look like, that journey? It comes down to transparency across a number of things. The first aspect that I'm usually looking out for is the role that we're trying to play, or intended to play, I mean, within the partnership. So sometimes the role...

11:37

is to be creative, to be innovative, to be all the flashy things. And sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's executional. And it's about cadence, pace, delivery, and speed. And there's a big difference between those two. Of course, you can also, you can be creative and deliver fast, and you could be delivering fast and doing it in a way where the work looks good. But they're two totally different types of projects. And I have found that in the past, if

12:06

A client is asking for something that is like speed related. You shouldn't try and make it about trying to be the most creative and reinvent the deliverable. They're clearly asking for something. So you either need to decline and say the work is not for you. I only want to focus on X, Y, and Z, or you build a process and a team that can meet that exact demand. Don't try and change what the client wants. So I think it's really qualifying at the very beginning.

12:36

what is the nature and what is the role we're going to play. And there's a bunch of different ways to slice it. But those are two things that I've found where sometimes Wondersauce is extremely executional. We come in, it's not sexy at all, but we do a great job. And then it ultimately leads us to proving that we can deliver under incredibly stressful time periods. And they're likely to use us then for something else in the future. And then vice versa. We're coming in. And the sole purpose is to...

13:06

kind of shake up what they've been doing and come up with something unique and interesting. The second thing... Do you find that's like that that kind of differentiates you being able to do both of those well? It's always been a differentiator for us, but it doesn't necessarily have to be for other agencies. I think some agencies could just be hyper focused on execution. Some could be just focused on that like strategy and creative piece. And that's totally fine. For us, it's always been this balance of...

13:33

we value the idea of being able to deliver high concept work and then being able to execute it fast and at a good value, not cheap, but at a good value. So it's always been for me that balance of ideation and delivery. And that's always been like where I value where we sit within the agency landscape. But there's totally room to just kind of go all in on execution or all in on ideation. Yeah.

14:01

Yeah, I love it, man. I love the way you think through just business process. One thing I just love about this conversation is a lot of the way you're thinking is more about like we were talking about earlier, like the model, the SOPs, the process, how do you duplicate? You know, because it's one thing to be creative. It's another thing to run an agency like yours where you're duplicating creative into a process. So, you know, you can reproduce a certain quality level of creative over and over again, and then underneath certain deadlines.

14:30

you kind of probably have that pretty dialed in. We know if we have this kind of deadline, we know about the quality we're gonna get versus if we have a little bit longer. And so I kind of would love to switch gears and talk about what does your role look like? I wanna look like what did that transition when you sold the company and kind of moved in as, and continued as a CEO? It was a great kind of journey and learning experience. We grew really fast over the first five to six years. We got to about a hundred people and...

14:58

there was like a lot of operational burden that became not all encompassing, but a good chunk of our day to day where it wasn't necessarily as fun to run the business because we were so focused on like the least sexy aspects of the agency operating model, like cash on hand and collections, managing the relationship with the bank and all that stuff where it becomes a lot when you're

15:24

your HR costs are very high. Thankfully, we spoke to a bunch of different potential companies and we found one that was incredible. Their whole value proposition, the company is called Project Worldwide. They own about 13 or 14 independent agencies that cover everything from PR, events, creative agencies, gaming, etc. And what we loved about this business was that I think it was like 90% of the agencies post-acquisition still had the founder leading the company.

15:54

So they're doing something right. And that's almost unheard of within the agency holding co-model. So for us, it was important to find a company that could help us with that operational scale, but we still wanted that entrepreneurial aspect because we were not done building. And that was so key for us. So those were the decisions that we made. And I think that, you know, it's worked out great for us. We love the fit. And, you know, I think that for any agency founders out there listening,

16:23

There's a number of ways you can go about ultimately exiting or being acquired. For me, it was always about being very transparent with where we were in our journey. I was not looking to exit. I was looking for that next chapter. For some looking to exit, I think that's a totally viable path. If you have an asset that people want, I think it's super important to be transparent during the sales process that this is in fact an exit for you. Make sure that you're evaluating the business as if I'm no longer here.

16:53

And what does that process post-sale look like with the person who is exiting? How are they going to go about making sure that the integration is seamless so everyone kind of walks away from the deal really satisfied? And if you're like me and you want to stay with the business post-sale, it's really making sure that you feel comfortable with what you're walking into and what does the reporting structure look like? What is the level of autonomy look like? And all those things that could...

17:22

ultimately lead to success or the opposite. Yeah, man. So you were looking at getting acquired, not as a, I'm going to now go drink my ties on the beach. And well, of course you'll get bored after a couple of weeks doing that. But that was not the goal. The goal for you just, it sounds like, correct me if I'm wrong, John, but it was like, Hey, I've got this mission. I got this thing to build. And if essentially if we partner with the company, we get more funding, this allows us to get bigger, better, faster.

17:52

What was kind of was that the main goal behind getting acquired or what was kind of your intent behind it? If you're loving what you're hearing, subscribing is the best way to ensure you never miss an episode. You can also follow us on all our social media channels at TimAndCindy. To get the latest updates on new and upcoming episodes.

18:15

Yeah, it was to keep growing, to keep scaling and honestly, to better the business, make us more relevant for a wider range of clients. And of course, there's monetary sides of any acquisition, which are nice. But for me, that was never the primary goal. I know that sounds a little ridiculous, but obviously that stuff is really nice. Glass of champagne, awesome. But I do think that we live in a culture right now where the idea of exiting is way over glorified.

18:44

And I talked to people who had exits and I'm like, okay, in my head I'm like, that wasn't really an exit, like whatever. But I try to like normalize exits, right? It's not that big of a deal. You could make it like the culmination of your life, which it's definitely a giant life moment and something that deserves a little self reflection and congratulatory, you know, events, but I don't know, but we weren't done. That's funny. I think of like, so the first company I had years ago was like a detailing shop and.

19:11

It did pretty good. It became the number one detailing shop in Kansas City, but that's not necessarily saying much. I sold the company. I mean, it was a five figure exit. You know what I mean? But what you're talking about, some of those guys, I'll go out there and they'll put that like three exits and you're like, what'd you exit? Exactly. I could sell something tomorrow. I could start something random and sell it to someone and that's an exit, I guess. I actually think the number one detailing shop in St. Louis, that was a very cool story.

19:41

If your primary focus is an exit and you're not even at the 10 yard line, I think your priorities are wrong. I think that before even thinking about exiting a business, you need to really love the business and make sure you're creating something that has value and equity or you're never going to exit. You're not even going to be a viable company. So I think focusing on why you started it and...

20:07

Having a true passion for the day-to-day operational aspects of the business, making sure your clients are happy. If you're doing all those things, the monetary side will come. It always does. There's going to be tough times. You're going to have to weather the storm. You're going to have to be conservative with all the financial aspects of the business. But yeah, that's just a kind of observation I've had over the last 13 plus years. It's just like...

20:32

don't focus on the exit stuff. It's so glorified in our culture. I think that it can lead to bad decisions. Well, you kind of said something I wanna probe into and that's like, you go through tough times and I don't know about you, but as an entrepreneur, I kind of feel like you step into the boxing ring and you sign up for boxing classes. And it's like, I think too often people sign up for boxing classes and they go, well, I got hit in the face. I don't know if I'm ready to do this. It feels like something's going wrong. Over time, I realized it's kind of part of the game and your ability, the goal is not to get hit,

21:02

not to be surprised when you get hit, the goal is to learn and grow. So for you, I'd love to hear your thoughts overall on what challenges mean to you in businesses and over time, how you've developed the way that you perceive and you look at and you respond to challenges because I'm sure you've had a few of them along the way. Of course, still do. I think that you need to figure out a balance where you can wake up every day with as clear a mind as possible.

21:32

just conscious decisions. So I use like little tricks, or just kind of like little mental tricks I use to kind of keep me sane. And this is from just like years of, I guess it's imposter syndrome. But like when you first start the business and you're a co-founder or a CEO, I always feel like you've got to kind of earn those titles as you scale. And for me, you earn those titles in the difficult times. So one of the early things I remember doing was thinking about...

22:01

everything that we do as a line item on a spreadsheet. So I have this mental exercise as like the cost of doing business. It's a very literal definition. And it's things like your office lease, your HR costs, your insurance, travel, entertainment, software, hardware, et cetera, right? All those things, you add it up and that's your total monthly cost. And you need to make as at least that or more to turn a profit every month.

22:29

So your kind of cost of doing business exists. And as an entrepreneur in the early days, it's stressful trying to make that money to pay that monthly cost of doing business. And then I remember like the first time we got hit with something, it was like, I don't know, a client backed out of a scope that was signed and we had basically hired against it and we were like, oh my God, this is so bad. What are we gonna do? And I remember not sleeping that night. I was so stressed out.

22:59

So you had gotten a whole staff for this client. Not a whole staff, but we had like basically hired a someone assuming that this would be part of their core responsibilities. You work it into your kind of just your balance sheet and it's just, it was like the first blow. And I remember freaking out about it. And then I think like, we got through it, it was fine. It wasn't ideal. Then it happened again, like three, four months later. And the second time it happened, I was still like,

23:28

upset, a little angry, and we dealt with it again. But for me, it happened twice now. So this wasn't necessarily an outlier. It wasn't random. This is something that like, it's the cost of doing business, is that clients are gonna pull out, they're gonna pause projects, budgets are gonna fall through. It isn't a personal attack on you. It is literally what happens. So rather than get upset and stressed about it the next time, figure out how to deal with it, retrofit your operations.

23:58

it assumes that at any given time, two to three times a year, this is going to happen, design against it and the process for it. So we started doing it for that. You start doing it for, okay, at any given time, there's going to be an unhappy employee. There's going to be an unhappy client. What do you do to manage against that? At any given time, there's going to be an ongoing contractual thing where you're barking up a legal document. How do you deal with that?

24:25

So you start to build all of these things into your quote, cost of doing business, where it's a bunch of like light items that are actual costs. And then there's the things that are more mental costs, and they're gonna be physically taxing on your ability to deliver. So when you start to actually think about it like that, and build the scale to service those stress points, you're making yourself more sane. So then when something truly gnarly happens, you can then approach it.

24:54

with a slightly more clear head. So that was a trick I used early on and I still use it to this day, where when something happens for the first time, I'm like, okay, is that like a new scale point we reached where that's gonna start happening a lot and we have to figure out how to design against that? Or is that just a random one off? You gotta have an SLP for it. You gotta predict, okay, we're gonna have this percentage. I love that. And the way that you did that, anybody listening, I mean, what's profound about what you did there, John, is there's generally...

25:23

the two camps, the pessimist and the optimist and like, oh, we just lost this client, this sucks, the world's over, the over optimist, but be positive thinking, what are all the great reasons why this is a great thing? And it's like, what you're doing is going, this is an event that happened, like what do we gotta do to deal with it? And I think when you put it not in negative or positive, but you put it in neutral, like, what is this event? How do we deal with it? What's the next step? And then you start to build processes and pieces around it because I think,

25:53

A lot of times, I've thought for a long time, the differentiator in entrepreneurship is oftentimes not when we're going to face challenges, but how do we respond to them? The cost, the line items you're talking about there, it's mental, it's emotional, it's physical, but that cost can be lower if you do put it into a neutral. If you do go, this is something I have to deal with. What's the next step? What's the execution? What's the process? You actually are lowering the cost, the emotional blow.

26:21

of those light items. So I don't know if that's just something you just made up, your brain made it up out of necessity or you heard about it, but like what made you kind of think, I got to start dealing with challenges a different way? It's just my own weird way of dealing with stress, I guess. But when you zoom out, it's like if the people starting the company, if their skill set was delivering for clients creatively, strategically, et cetera, before starting the company, we were used to the idea that clients would...

26:50

dislike deliverables and there'd be really gnarly feedback that you'd have to address. When we saw feedback that was gnarly, we wouldn't get upset about that. We'd be like, yeah, it's going to be a lot of work round two. We need to kind of keep going and keep iterating and we have to nail it next time. So they're happy. So if you think about like the idea of a client pulling a scope or an elongated contractual negotiation, blah, blah, blah, that's why COOs exist. That's why CFOs exist. Those things are the equivalent of.

27:19

feedback on client work, it's just a different skill set. Like them getting, you know, red lines on a master service agreement isn't scary. It's a Tuesday. It just happens. So like you start to kind of have some reflection and some understanding that like this is why businesses that scale invest in financial roles, operational roles, strategic roles, all the things because to run a business that has a chance of scaling and succeeding.

27:48

You need a well-oiled machine to deliver all aspects of the business, not just the work. Wow. This is really good, man. Because I think that there's this, if it's when it happens, and the differentiator is how you respond to it. And it's super clear to me. Like I hear two things. Anybody listening, there's two things that really stick out to.

28:05

about you to me, John, and big parts of why you've created the success you have is, number one, the way that you do see challenges and difficulties. I mean, anybody that sits and wallows and is sad and this sucks, you're not going to win in business, just period. And then number two, which I would say is the primary, is an obsession about the business. Sometimes people fall in love with the widget and sometimes people fall in love with the business, the process.

28:32

For me, I always like to build things. I was an engineer. I built go-karts. I built the, and it's like, then when I found entrepreneurship, I'm like, oh, this is like building something really cool and big. And I think that's what is just really sticks out. Anybody listening, John, you, you have like this obsession about building the business and all the facets of it. And man, I think is, is that something I don't, not to get too into it, but I think that's something that's really stuck out to me about you and anybody listening.

28:59

Those are two things you got to be incredibly good at is get obsessed about the business and like just get really good at neutrally dealing with problems. And a lot of times you can turn those into opportunities because you started dealing with, okay, we lost the scope of work. We lost this. Okay. So now what's the opportunity here? It's like, okay, well, this is going to be a normal part of business. Now we factor this in. Now this doesn't come as a surprise. Now when we do our numbers, now when we do our processes, we have everything.

29:26

in place. So anybody listening, like that's come back, listen to this episode again. I think that's going to stick out to you. If you start operating more like in the way that John's thinking about business, it's going to make a huge difference. Now, John, I'm, I'm curious as where you guys are at now, what, where's your big goal? Like where's your big focus? Where, what's kind of that next thing for you? You know, like, are you looking at just massively growing scale or is this more about like creating more partnerships? What is this next year, two, three years look like for you guys?

29:56

For us, it's scale in a different way. It's no longer necessarily tied to the size of the business in terms of headcount. I think when you've gone through exponential growth and all the pain associated with scale, it's not as exciting. And I also think that there's so much amazing work out there that it's about finding the right type of businesses to partner with. And we're starting to understand where we really fit and what our sweet spot is.

30:26

is. And trying to find more clients like the clients we have right now, where we're able to be successful with their businesses and grow with them. So for me, it's really just a constant game of trying to attract the right types of businesses. So our team at Wondersauce feel really excited to work and deliver great solutions for them and ultimately create a place where people could prosper and grow their careers.

30:56

It's a lot of the same, but we've also been on this kind of journey for a while. And since day one, we believed that being an integrated agency, AKA full service, was going to be the future for marketing. And it's been a very unpopular take. People don't think full service is really that great because they think you're kind of like a master of nothing. And we've been on this crusade trying to prove that you can be excellent at buying media, delivering creative campaigns, and building digital solutions.

31:25

And we've got years and years and years of examples and expertise under each side of those businesses. And it's kind of reaching this moment now where the work we're doing for a lot of our clients where we are actually hitting each of those spectrums, the work is really good. And it's so rewarding because there's been so many experiences and times we've had to defend our positioning that, you know, we can deliver across.

31:54

that whole journey and here's why. And you're starting to see it more and more as a need in the market because people are starting to realize that the internet is a very small place. The monopolization of like dozen or so companies really controlling it. It's so critical that your kind of awareness led marketing is completely informed by your website, your e-commerce, that your media is there to contextualize it. And you need to have a really great understanding of that whole balance, that whole journey.

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to be an effective marketer in 2024 and beyond. So part of me too is like getting more clients that trust us with that whole spectrum, which has always been really exciting for us. So it's less about like growing bigger head count and keeping it growing that way. And it's more about the type of client, the quality of clients. And I've heard this probably about three times now throughout this conversation, it's creating great opportunities for your team. At our company, we have what's called PPFs, personal, professional, financial. And so we'll meet with all of our employees.

32:52

once or twice a month and we go over their one, three, five year personal, professional and financial goals. And when we started implementing that a few years ago in the company, we just saw the client results go through the roof. You don't wanna find shitty talent and do this, right? Like you don't wanna have like bad people and then help them. It's like you wanna find the best talent and then set like a culture where you help them reach their goals. So for you, like what is that when you say helping create an opportunity for your teammates, like what does that mean to you creating a culture

33:22

Like you've got great talent that you're able to actually help advance their career. For me, it's always been personal growth. And I have always rewarded people that were comfortable jumping into the unknown and learning along the way. So there's this like baked in entrepreneurial environment that exists at Wondersauce. And I don't necessarily equate years of experience or a fancy degree with someone being really great for a position.

33:52

I really value people that just love what they do. And you can tell, like, they're reading about what's going on with brands and in the marketing space and tech space on a Saturday, not because they're trying to be ahead of their peers, but because they like the stuff and they're always up on the latest trends. So for me, it's about creating a team and a set of managers that have relationships with everyone in the business. It's impossible for me to...

34:21

have a one-on-one relationship with 100 people. It's not gonna work, it's not scalable, nor is it valuable because I'm not an expert in everything that we do, so I should not be in charge of everyone. So making sure we have management teams that can know everyone on a one-to-one level and understand where they wanna go. For some people, it's achieving a specific title. For others, it's learning a new skill set. For others, it's managing people. So really understanding where people are at.

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in their personal journey and making sure that we're aware of that and we're talking about it at the executive level. So when something comes up, we can say, hey, so-and-so really actually wants this. Why don't we get them involved in this client conversation because they'll really like that. And little things like that really help. For us, an agency is a people business. Our intellectual property are our people. We're only as good as our people's ability to deliver. So...

35:19

If we aren't investing in retention and career journeys and all that stuff, we don't really have a business. We're not building a platform that we can sell to people. It's the people are first. If we have happy people, we have happy clients. That's always been the case. We don't build businesses, we build people and the people build the business. I love that. Exactly. One last question. You said you want people to reach out to you. I want to tell our audience how to reach out to you and talk with you here in a second. I have one more question for you.

35:48

You know, the takeover is all about winning. Like even our company, we have 10 core values, but they all really culminate to one of our core values, which is winning as our resolve, you know, winning for ourselves, winning for our team, winning for our clients. So John, what does winning mean to you? Winning is finding balance. It's being able to mentally and physically sustain the day-to-day rigor of running a business and making sure you're delivering at a high level, while also having...

36:16

appropriate and adequate time for your family, your friends, and your interests outside of work. So for me, it's about balance. And if you have balance, you'll have longevity in your career, whether it's the one you're doing right now or whatever you're doing next. So it's simple for me, balance. You don't seem like a guy that's this balance. You seem like a guy that like obsessively builds stuff. So I was not expecting that. I'm compartmentalized. I can keep things in like little cubes in my brain.

36:46

and put a lid on it for a minute. So it's not something that I was always good at doing. I've gotten very trained at like, okay, like right now I'm all in on work and at six o'clock, I'm not, cause I'm gonna spend an hour and a half with my two and a half year old before she goes to sleep. But then if I get an email, I can quickly like zoom back in and nail it for a minute or two. So it's about just like.

37:10

It works for me, but it doesn't work for everyone. I know that. Well, to be able to do one thing at a time, that's a superpower these days. And if you talked, I was, it was like, he was friends with like Arnold Schwarzenegger and like a bunch of different people. And he said, the one thing about them is when you were with them, you were with them. They were with you. They were present. They weren't, they weren't somewhere else. And it sounds like that when you're talking about balance, anybody listening, balance is not just like not working hard and just kind of mixing out the whole day.

37:37

You're talking about hyper focusing on what you do, and then making sure you've designed a life for, hey, family's important to me, business is important to me, these friendships are important to me, and let me make sure that I do all these things on the level that I wanna do them, and then when I'm doing them, I'm doing them. I'm not doing this, and three other things. I think the term is deep work, and people are like, you can only do two hours of deep work, you don't have to work for eight hours, and it's maybe in some businesses that's true. But the idea of deep work is interesting, and it's 100% accurate. I mean,

38:07

If you're sitting down with pure focus and you're able to knock out a bunch of tasks without any distractions, you're going to be incredibly effective. And that's those same tendencies should translate to spending time with your partner and your kids and whatever else. And you don't necessarily need tons and tons and tons of time to make your business better. You need the right time. And obviously, shit happens. Sometimes you're hanging out with your family and work happens. And that's...

38:35

It is what it is. You have to deal with it. That should not be the case every single moment of every single day. It means that there's something broken in your business. I love it, man. Well, hey, John, I know we were talking before and you really wanted to have a way for people to connect with you. What's the best way for our listeners to connect with you? Maybe what are a couple types of people that you're looking to chat with and connect with? Yeah, sure. I mean, drop me a DM on LinkedIn. I'm happy to talk to...

39:01

any kind of agency entrepreneurs or people scaling businesses and we can share war stories. Any brands out there who may be interested in working with us or learning more about our service offering, obviously hit us up, but I'm easy. If you want to chat, I'm here. So just drop me a line. Awesome. Cool. Well, John, it was awesome to have you on the show for sure, man. This was just super insightful. Anybody listen to this, I would highly suggest listening back to it a few times because there was some golden nuggets that John really gave.

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that were pretty critical to not just his success, but a lot of very successful entrepreneurs I talked to share these kind of common themes. So definitely listen back to it. John, it was great having you on, man. And again, this is the takeover where domination is not a destination, it is a way of life. Stay winning. Thanks, Tim.