The link to the podcast can be accessed at the top of the page. A full transcript of the podcast can be accessed below. Thank you for listening, and happy marketing!
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Speaker 1:
Welcome to the Agency Founder podcast. Are you ready to grow your marketing agency? We pull back the curtain to show you how real marketing agency founders struggled, built, and scaled their agencies. Practical advice, lessons learned, wins and losses. We hold nothing back. Now, your host, Jeromy Sonne.
Jeromy Sonne:
Welcome to the Agency Founder podcast by Moonshine Marketing. Every single week, we interview successful founders of marketing agencies at different points in their journey to pass on their victories, defeats, challenges, and lessons learned to help you take your agency to new heights. This week, we’re speaking with Jason Portnoy, founder of JPORT Media, an agency that specializes in scaling brands to seven figures plus. Jason, thank you so much for being here.
Jason Portnoy:
Hey, thank you so much for having me.
Jeromy Sonne:
So first off I have to tell people, Jason has a much more successful podcast than I have. He has a way better one. And he’s going to be probably judging me the entire time because I’m I’m amateur hour compared to this guy.
Jason Portnoy:
I don’t like this. I don’t like the start of this podcast already.
Jeromy Sonne:
What? Why not?
Jason Portnoy:
Because it’s so not true. I’ve just had really exciting guests on, but it’s not because of anything. It’s because I annoy people and ask them until they can’t say no. But the only judgment I’ll be doing is probably taking notes on how to become better.
Jeromy Sonne:
Oh, see, this is why he’s so much better than me because he’s flattering the host already. No, see, that’s… But like I’m learning a lot already like Gary V I’m coming for your inbox, man. Jason told me the secret. But no, for real, I appreciate you being here. JPORT, really successful agency. I’ve always been kind of curious how you actually got started with all of this, but before we get into that, who are you? Could you introduce yourself and talk about JPORT and what you all do on a day to day basis in like the 30,000 foot level?
Jason Portnoy:
I’m an entrepreneur. It’s in my nature. I was never a good student in school, not because I was bad and got in trouble. It was just because I was bored. I had trouble with authority. I never liked being told what to do. And I went into political science in university because I thought I wanted to be a lawyer. So I studied poli-sci and the only classes I showed up to were the marketing and business classes. It’s the only part of everything that excited me. Everything else seemed boring. And I have a pretty good memory, so I was able to just read notes and regurgitate back or read textbooks and regurgitate back to the professor and give them what they want, which is great for poli-sci because writing an essay and the whole middle of the essay could just be all made up.
Jason Portnoy:
But I kind of never really loved school. And then, I got into law school twice. I declined each time. And then I deferred. Said I would apply again. I applied again. I never wanted to go. I always liked the aftereffects of being a lawyer like the TV lawyers. And then I realized that that’s nothing like real life and I have to go to school to do something that’s not even like what I really want to be. So I said no. And I said I was going to go into the business world. I got a job doing business development for a recruitment firm. And right then and there, I realized I was an entrepreneur because I saw money that was being brought into the business because we had a board in the office, there was a board of what each sales person brought in. And then I got my paycheck and there was some sort of disconnect there. And I was like, this is not good.
Jason Portnoy:
And I decided what’s logical is I’ll start a clothing company. Because that can’t be competitive and that can’t be tough. But I had an idea of what I wanted to do in the sports world. And I started a clothing brand, made a ton of mistakes when getting started. But in the beginning I was lucky enough to be mentored by Daymond John. And another ask, I just annoyed that guy tremendously on Twitter until he finally gave me a meeting. And he was incredible, gave me tons of advice on how to grow my brand. And yeah, I built it. I was in over 250 stores across North America. Really did it on the backbone of social media. So I mean, Facebook ads was wasn’t even around when I first started. So it was really good organic social. Twitter was pretty big.
Jason Portnoy:
Yeah. And grew it and then sort of, kind of fell out of love, right? The passion wasn’t there. I saw where retail was going. I was getting more into the marketing side of things. I was playing around on Facebook ads. I loved the idea of building a brand and that kind of brought me to the agency really. It was, I fell out of love. The passion for what I was doing was gone and that’s an important thing to have. And it was kind of my wife. My wife was the first one to notice it. And she was like, “Look, when I ask you a question about clothing, you get super down. When I ask you a marketing question, you chew my ear off for five hours. So, find a healthy balance.”
Jason Portnoy:
And I loved meeting with people. I got a lot of consulting offers from different companies saying, “Hey, I saw what you were doing to build your own brand on social and just PR and whatnot. Can you help us?” And I loved talking to those people and I figured it was a natural transition. The part that wasn’t dead inside me towards a clothing business was a marketing and branding side.
Jeromy Sonne:
Right. No, that’s huge I think. It takes a lot of introspection to kind of see that and say, this is the shift that I need to make. And it’s a hard. It takes a lot of bravery, dare I say, to walk away from something that’s working especially when the failure rate for entrepreneurs can be really high for some people. So, I commend you for having the introspection and realizing that and kind of taking that step. So, now where we’re at is you leave this successful clothing brand that you built and you found JPORT media. And you had these consulting offers and I assume that turned into your first clients. Tell me about kind of like the early days of JPORT.
Jason Portnoy:
So the early days, I mean is like every other business, right? So I’ll go back one second. So when I first met with Daymond John, he gave me some great advice. I was super passionate. I told him I was going to build a billion dollar clothing business. He laughed. And then I’m like, “Maybe I’m just naive and a dreamer.” And he’s like, “Remember that feeling. Remember this feeling you have right now, because as entrepreneurs, we get excited. We’re very passionate. And then what happens? You go out and get hit with a no and a door closed in your face. Someone hangs up on you and you get no after no, after no, rejection after rejection, after rejection. Then you get the hatred. You get people who don’t know you telling you that you’re not going to do it, and you’re not going to build it. Then you get family members and friends who, for some reason, don’t want you to succeed and they start telling you, ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ And everyone starts weighing in. And that’s when it takes its toll. It’s getting punched in the face over and over and over again. And you need that passion. You need that feeling to get back up.”
Jason Portnoy:
For the clothing business, I lost it. I couldn’t get back up. I wasn’t there. For the marketing side of things, believe it or not, I know we’re inundated with Facebook ads and different gurus and courses and different ads coming out for that. When I first started, there weren’t a lot of people saying, “Hey, we’ll run your ads for you.” So my biggest pushback that I ever got from clients or prospects was, “Great. I get you had your own clothing business, but how do I know you could do it for me?” And I have to figure out a way to get over that. And yeah, you could take clients for free. You could do some work, but at the same time, I sat there and said, “Well, look, if I could run an ad and sit there and say, “Hey, look, this is what I’m going to do. I’m going to run your Facebook ads. We get on a call. And when you sit there and say, ‘Well, how do I know this works?'”
Jason Portnoy:
And back then people were really questioning, “How do I know these Facebook ads work?” My answer to them was when they said, “Well, how do I know this works?” I would say, “Well, how did we get on this call?” And they’re like, “Well, I clicked on your ad. Ah, I see.” It was really not to run ads to promote myself. I never even thought of it like that in the beginning. I thought of it more of as a handle to objections. And that’s when I started doing it. And I definitely didn’t start the wave of every single marketer going on Facebook, running ads for themselves. But in the early days, not many people were doing it.
Jeromy Sonne:
Yeah, no, that’s like really interesting. I actually got a lot of that super early, too. Like, “What’s this Facebook thing. I don’t think it’s going to work.” And I bet they wish they would have started doing that when I started doing it for other people around 2014.
Jason Portnoy:
And look, a lot of what I built has been taking advantage of opportunities. So one of the first people I got on a phone call with, they were doing $2,500 a month in sales. A client that the agency side of what we do right now, probably wouldn’t touch them now, but back then you want your shot, you want your at bat. So we took them on and we were able to scale them to $300,000 a month and under a year, all profitably. So look a lot to do with Facebook ads, but they really did everything right. And that’s what happens when you have a winning product. That’s what happens when you have winning owners who understand the game. They make your job look easy. And at the end of the day as media buyers, or as marketers, we’re just guides on that journey.
Jason Portnoy:
At the end of the day, as a business owner, your product has to speak for itself. Otherwise, no marketing is going to fix that. In fact, marketing, if you have a bad product, all marketing will do is speed up your fail rate. And if you have a good product or service, it will just accelerate that. So I landed a unicorn, they did everything right. Facebook ads became super easy at that point in order to scale them and it was match made and that became my lighthouse. And that’s kind of when you go into a client meeting and they’re like, “Well, who else do you work for?” And I’m like, “Well, we took this client from $2,500 a month in sales to $300,000 a month.” All of a sudden ears perk up and they’re willing to listen.
Jeromy Sonne:
Right. Yeah, no, absolutely. I think that most successful agency owners have that like feather in their cap from the early days. It’s interesting to hear that that’s kind of like a common thing that I’m hearing across all these interviews is like you take what you can, you get that first big win. And then, you just use that as like the case study to like work your way up into bigger and better and more clients.
Jason Portnoy:
And as marketers, we use that ad nauseum. We know everyone with that one case study. It’s like we’re a one hit wonder and I have nothing else, but we always go back to that one case study because it’s that comfortable feeling of what we’ve done.
Jeromy Sonne:
Right. Right. No, it’s true. I definitely do beat it to death a little bit. But I think that’s really interesting. So, you get that first client and you’re starting to get more and more clients. Talk about like that scaling process. You know what I mean? As you’re starting to build a team and starting to put processes in place and figure it out, I think there’s always that moment where you’re like, “Okay, I’ve found something that could get me clients. People believe that I can do what I say I can do. They’re interested in buying it.” And then you just get like overwhelmed completely because you’re just like drowning in work. But then you’re like, “How do I actually scale this up? Because I can’t just work 120 hour weeks forever.” Talk to me about that scaling process a little bit.
Jason Portnoy:
So we’re still not perfect at it. It’s an ongoing learning curve and we’re still young in the agency. So we’re still making mistakes and figuring it out. One thing I realized very early on was that in order to scale, if I wanted to build something at scale, we needed systems and processes in place. And without that, I always look at like an Apple computer, for example, for the most part the whole tagline was, you take it out of the box, you plug it in and play with it. So it’s plug and play. That’s kind of how I envisioned the agency. I wanted no matter who came in at what position that came in, there’s something there for them to get going. That not a lot of time is spent wasting in training. Not saying that training people is a waste, but not a lot of time goes into that and we’ll cut the learning curve.
Jason Portnoy:
So something I’d been always really focused on was those systems. So I think one of the first hires I had was a project manager who could come in and kind of look at what’s currently in place and start building out. And then, we moved into account reps. And then now, we’re hiring sales, more sales people. It’s really I believe in solving the bottlenecks as you go. I think a lot of people fall for what’s sexy, “Oh, I need sales. I need tons of sales. So I’m going to go out and hire a sales person.” But then you don’t have the systems in place or the client account managers or a project manager in order to handle that influx, if you do get an influx. And then, the system all breaks and everything falls apart. So there’s no simple answer.
Jason Portnoy:
I’ve read Traction like twice and everyone has their opinions on how to build it out. But at the end of the day, it’s really looking at where you’re at. And you as an agency owner have to sit there and say, “Okay, what’s the best use of my time?” I think I’m pretty damn good at Facebook ads, for example. But I believe there are other people who are probably just as good, if not better than me. I have no ego. The one thing that I can take away is, is I’m a visionary and I’m the face of this agency. That’s the one part that I can’t outsource. So everything else has to be hired around. So eventually you have to hire media buyers and you have to trust that they’re going to do your job and they’re going to have the execution. And then, you need to make sure your clients are taken care of. It’s really looking again at the bottlenecks you have and solving as you go, especially in the early stages.
Jeromy Sonne:
Yeah. I definitely agree. I think that a lot of people I see they try and future-proof, you know what I mean? They think like year four, I’m going to be making this amount of money and then I’ll have to find these sort of clients. And so, that means I need to… And it’s just like whew. If you’re a little more in the moment, you’ll find kind of more organic ways to solve the problems you’re running into right now and that’s going to be really what gets you from like A to B. And what gets you from A to B isn’t necessarily what will get you from B to C. Is that sort of your experience that different solutions, different kind of approaches and the learning that you had through the process is kind of what is going to get you to that next step? Talk to me about how your challenges have evolved basically as you’ve grown.
Jason Portnoy:
The challenges always evolve. At every stage you have something else. I’ve talked to someone who owns an agency with around 300 people in it. And he told me, “My challenge every day is that I have to deal with John doesn’t like Susie and Mary thinks that Bill doesn’t shower and she wants to switch her desk and wants to sit somewhere else.” You think they are like, “Okay, wow. I would take those challenges because I’m starting my agency. My challenge right now is getting leads. So, I wish that was my problem.” But at the end of the day, it’s still a problem. You’re still always getting put into a different situation. I think it’s a matter of just as you get to the next level, I think it’s everything’s great. You put a system in place. These systems evolve depending on what your aspirations are for your agency. If you want to be a 10 person agency, you can pretty much do that pretty quickly. And your systems will last for a long time. If you want to scale it to 300, you’re probably changing your systems every time you get to a certain level, a certain milestone.
Jason Portnoy:
And the milestone really is for me, I’ve heard different opinions on it, but for me, when I look at the systems is when something’s broken. If something’s not working, if something’s falling apart, we’d go. I’m very easy to say yes to the team I have in place even if I disagree with it because A, I could go back to them and be like, “See, told you.” Or if I’m proven wrong and it works, great. It’s a win win scenario. I either look really smart and I can tell them, or I looked really smart because I give them the freedom to do it. So from a personal standpoint, it’s win win.
Jason Portnoy:
But the time for me to really look at things is when I’m like, “All right, this isn’t working. What broke it? How do we fix it?” So I’ll give you a perfect example, emails. Emails were going back and forth between clients and account managers and whatnot and things were getting lost. So we moved everything to Slack. Then, Slack became almost like they felt the freedom to use it as text message and things were getting lost in there because they would write something and then another conversation would start and things weren’t going. So we moved everything to Asana. It’s really solving as we go along and realizing, “Okay, look, everything can be solved right now in a project management tool.” We could use Asana for communication. Things can be smooth and easy. Things won’t get lost. I believe in transparency and accountability. So everything’s there. There’s no, “You said this.” “No, you said that.” Everything’s there. And that’s one of the challenges that we had to figure out was how to communicate with clients and how to make sure work gets done and nothing falls through the cracks.
Jeromy Sonne:
No, I really like that. So first off it sounds really smart, but dare I say, it sounds like almost like intentionally being reactionary, if that sort of makes sense? You’re spending your time like being present so that you can react in a way rather than say, I’m not going to build for a problem that doesn’t exist yet because who’s to say what that problem will be in the future? I really like that. It’s kind of an interesting approach that I haven’t heard from anybody just yet.
Jason Portnoy:
I mean, yes and no. I think in the early stages you have no choice but to be reactionary a little bit, because you don’t know what problems you’re going to get hit with. As things go and as you start seeing things and as you get your feet wet or as you start building your business and this goes for any business, not just an agency, as you start building your business, you start to understand and start seeing things like, “All right, this is what’s around the corner.” And things become predictable and things become… You can start seeing trends of what’s going to happen. So right now, yeah, we’re reactionary, but we’re still very proactive in the sense that I sit there and say, “We need systems in place.” The pushback you’ll get is we’re not there yet. I’m like, “I don’t care. I want one built for when we get there because that’s just around the corner and I don’t want to break things when we get there.”
Jason Portnoy:
And then what happens is we have that SOP in place. We have that system in place. We get there and then things break because it’s not the right system. And then, we just adapt. But, I think it’s a balance of both. But yes, in the early stages, when you’re not a big agency or a big business, you have no choice but to be reactionary because you can’t really plan for things you haven’t seen yet.
Jeromy Sonne:
No, I really like that. I think that that’s really interesting. And I appreciate that additional perspective that you gave. I think I kind of butchered it a little bit when I was interpreting it, but I think that makes a lot of sense. It sounds like you’ve kind of learned a lot of ways to look at what’s coming up next, kind of seeing the trends, seeing the patterns. What do you think that the biggest kind of lessons learned you’ve had are? And those can be wins or losses. What are those? And if you could give advice to people of things to look out for that you see a lot.
Jason Portnoy:
Business is hard. The end. It’s true. I think we’re in a time right now where things sound sexy and cool to do, but I don’t think everyone’s cut up to do certain things. I think the idea of wanting to have an agency sounds really, really good until you start building an agency. And then, most people realize and I’ll be honest with you, I speak to a lot of people. It’s closer to that I would say 70% to 80% of people realize that they don’t want an agency. When you’re a media buyer and you’re just doing things, things are great. Everything’s gravy. And then, when you start managing teams and when you start doing things and getting pulled out of the things you love to do and have to run a business, it’s not that fun.
Jason Portnoy:
And you’re like, “I wish I could just go back into ads manager all day and play around.” You just want to go back to doing all that. You love the strategy side of things, but you’re no longer involved in a lot of the strategy stuff as you get bigger. So I think it’s a lot of people sitting there saying, “This is your freedom. This is what you want.” But at the end of the day, the biggest lesson I’ve learned in everything and I’m not that old, I’m 38 years old. So maybe I’m old to some but young to a lot of other people.
Jeromy Sonne:
38 is not old. 38 is not old. I just turned 30. 38 is young.
Jason Portnoy:
Well, you’re a baby. Now I feel old. Thanks. You didn’t have to tell me your age. [inaudible 00:19:54]. But I think the biggest lesson I’ve learned in my entire journey, this doesn’t even come from running an agency. This comes from walking away from something that was doing well, was happiness matters most. And I know that’s super easy to say, but I walked away to start something from scratch. And I think that’s what makes me specialize as a person, is I’ve always marched to the beat of my own drum. I’ve always wanted to do things under my terms, my way. And that you start realizing that your happiness is so important. And you could grind things out. You could do things, but life is so, so short. You start realizing that nothing could substitute happiness. And that’s what I realized. And that’s why I walked away. And that’s why I held myself accountable to my own happiness and walked away.
Jason Portnoy:
And I have zero emotional attachment to business. I don’t get emotional over things. And at the end of the day, if I lose that passion for what I’m doing now, I’ll walk away again. And my wife asked me one time when we were sitting at dinner and she’s like, “Well, how many times would you walk away from something?” So I’m like, “I hope I never have to walk away from this. Right now I’m still passionate and love it. If I fall out of love with it, then yeah, I’m going to walk away and I’ll keep doing it for the rest of my life.” But you also have to be honest with yourself. You’re getting three rejections in a row and being like, “Man, I quit.” Isn’t falling out of love with something. That’s you just not having the stomach to be an entrepreneur or business person because that’s not falling out of love. That’s going to happen in any business that you ever do.
Jason Portnoy:
So you have to be honest with yourself. Like, “Why am I unhappy? Am I unhappy because it’s not succeeding? Am I unhappy with this part?” And be honest. And I think a lot of people looking inside themselves will realize that maybe they’re just not cut out for an entrepreneurship or business and it has nothing to do with their happiness. And honestly, I love being an entrepreneur, but sometimes I look at my friends who have, I guess in quotation marks, because you can’t see me quoting, security. They have a 9:00 to 5:00 job and they come home and they don’t think of work. The only time they think of work on the weekend is, “Oh my God, it’s Monday tomorrow. I got to go back to work. This sucks.” I don’t turn off. I go to bed thinking about work. I wake up thinking about work. That’s your life as a business owner. So there’s beauty in also being able to have a different life. You have to know yourself, you have to be self aware enough, and understand your happiness.
Jeromy Sonne:
I think that’s a great answer, honestly. One of my buddies, a good friend, he ran an agency. Successfully exited. Sold his shares, all that. Living the dream. Is like, “No, I just liked doing the media buying.” Works at one of the big holding agencies now. He said he’s so much happier than he ever was. He goes, “I’ll never be an entrepreneur again. I’m done.” And I’m like, “Good for you.” Really knowing yourself I think is so much a part of this game. And I’m happy to hear you say that, prioritizing that over everything else. Because you’ll do the best at what you’re passionate about and where your values lie. So I love hearing that. Really appreciate you being here. I always like to give my guests one or two minutes to pitch whatever it is that they want at the end of the episode. So just want to give you that time to throw whatever you want out there.
Jason Portnoy:
Agencies are a dime a dozen. There a ton of them. A lot of them bad a lot of them good. I believe winners win and you’ll win with or without an agency. I just think with us, you’ll do it a hell of a lot faster. And I think if you believe in transparency and honesty and you believe you have a brand that could scale to seven figures and you have proof of concept and you want the help that you need or the help that you want, then we’re the right agency to call. I think we have to be the right fit. I believe in that. We don’t just take on every single client that comes our way. There has to be a fit and not many people like that transparent and that honest. Some people like fluff and things being sugarcoated. We don’t do that.
Jason Portnoy:
Our goal is at the end of the day to get you the results that you’re looking for. It’s not to be, it sounds harsh, but it’s not to be your friends. We want to celebrate and you’re going to be part of our family. But at the end of the day, it’s we have a job to do. And that job is to get your results and we’re going to work with you. And that means sometimes looking at your business and answering questions, honestly, too.
Jeromy Sonne:
I love that. I can personally vouch for Jason. Incredible team. Awesome people, very, very smart. So if you’re looking to take it up to the big time, definitely give him a call. Jason, thank you so much for being here again. Really, really appreciate your time. And for everybody out there listening, take this advice to heart and I think we got really deep. Talked about kind of what you want out of life and stuff. And I think that that’s such an important part of being a successful agency, founders really saying like, “Is this for me?” And if it really is, kind of embracing that piece of yourself. And so, thank you all for listening, everybody, and happy marketing.
