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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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.
Jeromy Sonne:
This week, we’re speaking with Trilce Jiron of TBS Marketing, an agency focused on interdepartmental marketing, which unites under one umbrella, design, social media management, marketing and sales strategy, and customer support to deliver a complete growth system for their clients. Trilce, thanks so much for being here.
Chelsea Hadaron:
Thank you for having me.
Jeromy Sonne:
So the interdepartmental marketing, I don’t know if I’ve ever heard that term before. And I think you were mentioned that you actually invented that term, is that right?
Trilce Jiron:
Yes, I would be very concerned if you had heard it before. I think I invented it.
Jeromy Sonne:
Somebody here says, “You need to give me their URL right now, if you have read that somewhere else.” Yeah. No, that’s super cool. So tell me, how did you come up with that specific term?
Trilce Jiron:
Basically, we were providing a bunch of different services at the same time that we considered basic for providing a proper strategy, an efficient strategy, and there was no way of explaining how it correlated. Every single different department in the business industry, you have your customer support people and you have your marketing manager, and then you have someone else that does this, and sales, and blah, blah, blah. So, we just wanted to create a term and find a word that could explain, “Okay, so it’s not just one department, it’s interdepartmental.” Everything needs to be joined together to work efficiently.
Jeromy Sonne:
That makes a lot of sense. I really, really like that. So, it’s not really just about one part of this, because it’s kind of like the whole. You hire a marketing agency ultimately for an outcome and you can only get that outcome if, I assume, if all of the parts work together?
Trilce Jiron:
Yeah. So, basically, all we try is to help everyone to work together, better. And if they don’t have a specific department, we become that department.
Jeromy Sonne:
That’s amazing. I love that. So taking kind of a step back, how did you yourself get into marketing?
Trilce Jiron:
My family has been a business-owning family for over 120 years, so I grew up in a business. I grew up in a factory. I grew up between offices and accountants, and I always loved what we did. My family does mattresses. It’s actually a very, very cool business. So growing up in that, I just loved what I did, and I wanted to help my family grow the business even further. My father, he made me work at the factory since the age of 12, every single summer, which I loved. And then, by the age of 18, we had to go a year into sales to understand how sales happened, and then we could choose which department we wanted to go into. And I chose marketing because I was studying industrial design engineering so I wanted to help out, and that’s how I fell in love.
Jeromy Sonne:
That’s amazing. No, that’s really interesting. So you chose marketing and then you started and so you learned completely how to actually do marketing through… Because you said that you were majoring in industrial design, right, engineering? So you learned marketing. You didn’t study it in school, you learned it just very practical, kind of on the job? Is that a fair way of saying it?
Trilce Jiron:
Yeah, exactly. I’ve always thought that marketing is not something you learn, it’s something you bring with you in your brain when you’re born. So just like working with agencies and seeing how the marketing system worked within the company, I started learning and creating my own systems, and I was basically self-taught.
Jeromy Sonne:
That’s fascinating. So, you self-taught through working for your family’s business, and I assume you rose through the ranks and everything. And then, how did you then take the jump to starting your own agency?
Trilce Jiron:
Basically, the thing was actually thanks to chatbots, even if it’s not the only thing we do, it was due to chatbots. Because I was trying to find an efficient way of communicating with my customers. And this agency, back in 2017, charged me $4,000 for a super simple bot. But my engineering brain was like, “Hell, no. I can program this myself.” So I went into Google, started searching, found about ManyChat and started coding with them and doing stuff with them. And I decided, “Huh, so this is easy. Making bots with them is easy. I already have the know-how. I am sick and tired of working with agencies because they never provide the full value that we need. I’m going to start my own.”
Trilce Jiron:
And that was basically just it. My parents fully supported me. I got an office. I started with $500 out of my own pocket because I wanted for it to be mine. And it has grown from there.
Jeromy Sonne:
That’s incredible. That’s really cool, I love hearing that. You found, basically, a market inefficiency, right? A lot of people were way overcharging because bots… I mean, bots sound a lot scarier than they are. I mean, it’s not that I’m any sort of bot expert and could talk about that at all, but I’ve set up a few here and there with some tools like ManyChat and things like that. It’s not-
Trilce Jiron:
Oh, it’s super simple to get yours together. Yes.
Jeromy Sonne:
But the other side of that, I assume, as somebody that started in that world, but obviously does a lot more now, kind of the jump between zero and like 90% good is probably pretty easy, but the 90 to 99 is probably a lot of work, right? The doing an okay bot, most people can do, but you have to be an expert to do a great one.
Trilce Jiron:
Yeah, exactly.
Jeromy Sonne:
That’s great. Okay. So you started on your own, which is incredibly admirable. Got yourself an office, $500, it’s really cool. Definitely inspiring. So you start doing that and you start… Well, tell me about the early days. Like you go out and you’re getting clients, how are you finding those clients in the early days? Was it just you? Did you bring in employees or like a co-founder right away? Tell me about that getting started process with building your agency.
Trilce Jiron:
Okay. So my dad has always said, “Never start a business with a friend, if you want to stay friends.” So I decided to do it by myself. And I thought that I could start out just me. So I thought of talking to friends, I also, co-founded a group made by kids who have grown up in the same situation as myself, kids with families who own businesses. So I started telling them about this new agency that I was setting up and the services that I was going to provide. And they were super interested because they knew my background. They knew that I knew talking business. So they got me meetings with different friends of theirs or even their own companies. And I got my first big client two weeks after starting. And I was super scared on week one because I was like, “Oh my God, I’m not getting anyone and it’s only been seven days.” So I felt like-
Jeromy Sonne:
I think I do that like four times a day, even now.
Trilce Jiron:
Yeah, I know.
Jeromy Sonne:
So I don’t blame you.
Trilce Jiron:
I know. So I was like, so, so, so scared. And I got this huge client. And I also had two small clients, that they were family friends, and they had no sort of marketing system whatsoever in their business. And a month in, I was so overworked, my mom, she actually sat me down and she was like, “I know you think you can do this by yourself. I know you can actually do it, but your mental health goes first. So you’re going to hire someone to help you out.” And I was like, “Okay, sure. Let’s do this.” So I got my first employee that way. And yeah, that’s how it started. And now we have over 30 accounts, 100% retention rate. We are five people on the team, moved offices.
Jeromy Sonne:
So you just kind of casually dropped something that’s like a pretty big deal, which is 100% retention rate. I don’t know if I’ve ever heard that before.
Trilce Jiron:
Yeah.
Jeromy Sonne:
And you’ve been in business for how many years, again?
Trilce Jiron:
All four.
Jeromy Sonne:
Four years with 100% retention rate, that’s incredibly impressive. How do you… What’s the secret? Because I want to know.
Trilce Jiron:
It’s actually very simple. The main thing is you’re not there to sell, you’re there to provide. So for us, our main thing is we need to become friends with the people we provide services to. It’s not just me as an agency, it’s us together as companies, against whatever problem they’re having. So we do meetings, and we buy bread, and we buy custards, and we buy coffee and we all get together, to different business owners and myself, on their respective meetings. And we have coffee together, we laugh. It comes to a point where we are so close together, their company and my company, that we actually get invited to their Christmas parties or their weddings. Like when they have weddings or something going on with the team, we get invited because that’s the thing. It’s not about what service you provide, it’s about how close you are or how close you become to these people.
Trilce Jiron:
Because if you are honest with them, and this is actually a super important thing, you need to be super honest. Do not keep things to yourself just because you think that it’s going to help you keep a client. What we do is, we show them everything. I show them step by step how to build an ad. They’re not going to go do it themselves, but they feel like I am being honest. They feel like they can trust me when I am showing them my secrets. What is making their business run, I am showing them step by step.
Jeromy Sonne:
That’s really powerful, I think. You’re doing a lot of education. A lot of, I don’t want to call it customer service, because it seems like it’s a lot deeper than that. It’s really about relationship building on a very deep level. I don’t hear a lot of people talking about it in that way. How did you come up with that? And do you think that that’s like something that the rest of the industry largely misses? I’m curious.
Trilce Jiron:
Yeah. I do think it’s something that the industry is not doing, but again, it all goes back to my family and my upbringing. My great, great, great grandmother always said, “You do not make business, you make family.” So every single time we’ve gotten a product supplier, or a new salesperson or put products somewhere else, we try to become part of their family. And that’s something that the [Hedon 00:10:52] family has always done. So the family that has been selling us fabrics for the mattress company for over 30 years, I call them uncle Vicente, Pia Palomar, they’re family to me. And we met them through a service thing. So that’s the thing, the Hedon’s, we’ve always thought that you’re not doing good business if all you do is business.
Jeromy Sonne:
No, this is really fascinating. I think that there’s a couple of interesting elements here that set you apart from anybody else I’ve ever interviewed, which is the, one, this way of doing business kind of as like your family, which is fascinating. A lot of the people that I talk to, maybe some of them come from a tradition where their father and grandfather or something were entrepreneurs, but most of them are kind of doing it on their own. Would you say that that’s been a big advantage for you? To be able to learn from this tradition inside of your family, to know how to conduct business?
Trilce Jiron:
Totally. I mean, if it weren’t for them, we come from a very powerful line of women who have been business owners and have been carrying the business in their hands for, as I said, 120 years and very powerful feminist men. So that actually gave my parents, both my dad and my mom, like all the tools they needed to raise a girl who was prepared to be a business owner. I never got my parents all saying like, “You cannot do this. You should not go into engineering. You should not do this.” They were always very supportive and very like, “Push yourself harder. You know you can do this, start your own business.”
Jeromy Sonne:
Right. No, that’s really interesting. I liked hearing that, that tradition is used in a very positive way to uplift and motivate, and help push folks in your family forward. You’ve shared a lot of really interesting things about your background and how you got started. What is it like, really running your business, day-to-day now? What is your day-to-day look like? And as an agency owner where now you have 30 clients and how much… Do you mind if I ask, how many, roughly a range of clients that you have and employees and stuff like that?
Trilce Jiron:
Oh, so it’s exhausting, especially now with the whole Coronavirus situation, because basically no project manager can help you through this. You need to take everything day by day, which building is burning? Which company is having a meltdown? What do you need to do to fix their problems? So that’s a day by day scenario. So right now my day looks like, get up at 9:00 AM, go on a Zoom meeting with the entire team, see what they have to get done on that day. Talk to every client, check your WhatsApp messages to see if anyone’s panicking. And if no one’s panicking, don’t ask. Just don’t ask and keep working, wonderful.
Jeromy Sonne:
Don’t fan the flames.
Trilce Jiron:
Exactly.
Jeromy Sonne:
Yeah.
Trilce Jiron:
And if anyone panics, just send them a Zoom link, get on a call, start talking about what can be done. And okay. So in terms of the types of businesses that we have as clients, we have gyms, we have restaurants, we have black belt certification services. They’re a school that provides manufacturing and green belt and black belt, et cetera, certifications. So it’s like a very different business from what we’re used to. We have a mattress factory, of course, stores.
Jeromy Sonne:
That’s interesting. And I’m glad you kind of touched on, I haven’t explicitly talked about the Coronavirus thing, but do you mind sharing about how that’s been affecting things? How are you, your agency, handling it? And you mentioned that you’re spending a lot of time on Zoom calls and things with your clients, which I think is really fantastic, but I would love to dig into that a little bit more.
Trilce Jiron:
So the most interesting part of this is seeing how some other friends who have businesses are not being supported by the agency that they hire. I think that’s very interesting. If you a business and you’re not there to help your clients, then you should not be in business. So for us, it has been mentally exhausting, not only for me, but for the entire agency. We are a very tight knit group, we share everything. We are very honest with each other like, “This is going on with me.” I always ask the team about their mental health. So this past few days and weeks have been extremely, extremely tiring for everyone. But I mean, we’re hanging there. We just have a rule that, after 6:00 PM, everyone shuts down everything, unless there’s a super, major emergency. You’re not allowed to work after 6:00 PM because that’s the only way you’re going to keep your sanity right now.
Jeromy Sonne:
Right. No, I like that a lot. I think that it’s really important to have that work-life balance, especially at a time like now, where it’s so easy for work to spill over if you don’t have a physical space that you travel to and from.
Trilce Jiron:
Exactly. And especially taking care of your team, because taking care of them for the past year and a half, that is the amount of time the oldest one has been with us, I’ve come, like at 9:00 AM, to the office, meaning my dining room. And one of them tells me, “Hey, just so you know, this happened at 11:00 PM last night. I handled it, it’s all good.” And I’m like, “Dude, thank you.” I mean, they didn’t even bother me. They handled things by themselves. They were there for the clients in the same way that I would have been myself. So knowing that your team has the same values as you do and that they are there to help everyone, is just such a relief.
Jeromy Sonne:
Well, that’s interesting that you’re talking about team. I’d love to hit on one of the things you talk a lot about, doing business in a very familial sort of way, having these very tight relationships. And now what I’m curious about is, how do you find the right team members to fit into that and continue on that tradition? Because it sounds like you have a really great team and you’re all very close and everybody steps up and takes the initiative, which is fantastic. Love to hear how you find and grow that culture and find the right people to fit into it.
Trilce Jiron:
I think I’m going to suck at this answer because they found me, that’s the thing, they found me. So every single time I’ve held interviews, it’s a group of 10 to 15 people and I believe a lot in energies. So for example, there’s this kid, Christian, who the first time I met him, my vibes were just like, “This is him. He’s the guy you’ve got to hire.” And he has been with us for a year. And [Jaid 00:17:35] and other kids, same thing. I’ve only had to fire one person in my entire business lifetime. And it was because she actually said, “I don’t want to do this. And you cannot force me to do a job I don’t want to do.” The job was putting a simple background on a PDF. So I was like, “Oh honey, no.” And she got super bitchy and we do not do bitchy.
Trilce Jiron:
And we don’t do, “This is my account, this is my client.” There’s no separation whatsoever. So everyone has their accounts, yes, of course. It’s basic. Everyone needs to have their accounts to keep an order. But if account A, who belongs to employee A has an emergency and employee A is stuck on employee B, on customer B, I’m sorry, then I’m just going to ask any of the other kids like, “Hey, can you help me out with this?” And they are going to be okay with it. They’re like, “Yeah, sure.” They know what every single graphic is. They know what personality the business has. They know what the owner’s like. So we don’t have the problem of, “Hey, so no, I cannot take care of this because I don’t know what the account likes. I don’t know what they’re like.” No, everyone knows what everything’s like, even if they don’t work on that account, on a day-to-day basis.
Jeromy Sonne:
That’s really cool. I like that. And it seems like you have a very transparent work culture. And it sounds like everybody knows everything that’s going on and that’s got to lead to a lot of trust among everybody, right? Where there is no secrets or anything, it’s it seems like. Which by the way, I do want to mention one other thing, that’s a little off topic. But you mentioned that you have like an office religion?
Trilce Jiron:
Yes.
Jeromy Sonne:
Which was really fascinating. You mentioned it right before we started recording. I was like, “Oh, I can’t not talk about this because I’ve never heard this before.” And since we’re talking about team anyways, I want to ask about your office religion.
Trilce Jiron:
Okay. So when I was decorating our new home, our new office, I found this beautiful hippocorn, a hippopotamus/unicorn piggy bank in the store. And I was like, “I need to have this. This is perfect for the aesthetic of the company.” Because it’s like yellows and like bluish wood. So it’s very, very cool, like a very millennial aesthetic. So I found that hippocorn piggy bank, and I was like, I need to have this. So I bought it. And a week after that we hired one of the kids and his religion is, I can never remember the name, but I had never heard it before. So we’ve got atheists, that religion which I cannot remember, Catholics, I’m Agnostic myself. So there were a lot of religions in the same place and I didn’t want any conflict.
Trilce Jiron:
The first thing I say to my employees when I interview them is, “This is a very inclusive office. If you are not an inclusive person or if you feel like you have mistreated someone because of their lifestyle, then you’re not going to fit here. And I did not want you on my team.” So that’s the first thing we say, and the only kids that I have hired are the ones that go like, “I don’t have a problem. I’m super inclusive. I’m very yay love.” So perfect. So I took Frank into the office and I was like, “Okay, kids. So this is going to be Frank. Frank is going to be our god. And he performs miracles for 5 cents. So he’s a capitalist god.”
Jeromy Sonne:
That’s fascinating, actually. I think that most people think of the capitalist god as like a Gordon Gekko on Wall Street or something, I’m not sure. But…
Trilce Jiron:
A hippocorn with me, yes. And he actually does perform miracles, that’s the fun part. Whenever they have loose change, they put it into Frank. So they’re having troubles with an account, if they cannot move forward in a project or they lose something, they put a little coin in Frank and he cannot accept large coins, only like super tiny ones. So every single time they put a coin in, everything gets fixed automatically. We don’t know why, but Frank is a benevolent god.
Jeromy Sonne:
That is absolutely hilarious. Yeah, I’ve never heard anything quite like that, but it’s interesting and it’s kind of cool how it aligns with your values as an agency of inclusivity and all of that.
Trilce Jiron:
Oh. And it has expanded. I’ve had clients who say, “Oh, thank Frank.” Instead of, “Oh, thank God.
Jeromy Sonne:
That’s hilarious.
Trilce Jiron:
Same as friends, clients, friends, the kids, everyone at the office, they say, “Oh, thank Frank.”
Jeromy Sonne:
Oh gosh. Pretty soon. We’ll have hippocorns out in town squares and stuff. No, the-
Trilce Jiron:
I’m starting my own college.
Jeromy Sonne:
Yeah. Taking marketing to the next level, right?
Trilce Jiron:
The holy level.
Jeromy Sonne:
Yeah, yeah. So that’s really interesting. I’ve loved learning about yourself and your agency. I guess I would ask, what are the lessons learned so far? And specifically, what is something that you wish you would have done sooner in your journey of growing this agency? And what do you wish that you would have avoided or not done, and could have saved yourself some headaches early on?
Trilce Jiron:
So I wish I had never hired a friend because I actually don’t have that friend anymore. And I do highly recommend, people… No, it actually usually happens when you hire a friend, like that hierarchal level gets a little bit twisted. So I highly recommend people not to hire friends ever, ever. Because every single time I’ve seen someone do it and when I did it myself, it never goes right. So avoid that.
Trilce Jiron:
I do have one thing that I wish I would have learned earlier, say no to clients you don’t want. Because I think that in the early days you’re like very pro money. Like very, I need to meet that need and whatever I need to get money and you don’t say no. But as you grow as a business owner, and as you grow as a company, you start figuring out what types of clients you want. I just had an experience where this people, they wanted our agency to provide them with services. They had a little hiccup with their Facebook page, they got hacked, like super hacked. And after helping them a lot to recover it, I told them like, “Hey, just transfer this to my business admin account so I can transfer it back to you from the hackers,” right? And they said, “no,” because they didn’t know if I was going to steal it from them.
Trilce Jiron:
And I was just like, “You know what? It’s okay, fine. Just know that in the future, the agency’s not going to provide any services whatsoever, because if you cannot trust me with this right now, you’re not going to trust me in the future with the strategies that I provide.” So just say no.
Jeromy Sonne:
Yeah, absolutely. That’s really interesting. I’ve often held the theory that, you end up losing money when you take that short term money of somebody that isn’t a good fit. Because it’s not even just that you end up having to spend a lot more time servicing the accounts or whatever, but ultimately it’s time that you could have spent finding somebody that was a better fit. That’s like really the lost opportunity is the big cost.
Trilce Jiron:
Yeah. And let’s also go into the part of the respect that your employees must feel as employees. For example, we also have this case that we told this woman, they were not going to provide her with our services. Because one of our designers sat down with her for an entire afternoon, they designed their new graphic line together. And then when we sent over the PDF, the next day, as if she had never seen it in her life, she goes like, “This looks like a university project.” And I was like, “Oh honey, no.” So I respectfully texted her, “So I think that for the services that you require, you can contact these numbers.” And I just sent her the numbers of the most expensive agency in the country.
Jeromy Sonne:
Oh no. That’s funny. That’s funny. Yeah.
Trilce Jiron:
My designer comes first, not her, my designer. The people I work with.
Jeromy Sonne:
I think that that’s really important. And I think that it’s very valuable and definitely aligns with your goal of having like that family, like you talk about, that you work with. And I noticed that you use kids to refer to your employees, which I think is a really cool thing. You treat it like family, right? Like you walk the walk.
Trilce Jiron:
Yeah. They’re my babies and they’re almost my age, but they’re my kids.
Jeromy Sonne:
Yeah. But you walk the walk, right? Like you say, they’re like family and you refer to them like family, which I think is really cool. I think that it’s an interesting approach to be sure. And then it sounds like it’s working really well for you.
Jeromy Sonne:
So I really appreciate your time today, thank you so much. I think I’ve learned a lot about different ways of approaching client relations, I guess you could say, but I almost feel dirty using that word because it’s so much more the way that you use it. And it’s really opened my mind to the way that you can have this super close relationship. And obviously it pays off. You’re growing, you have a lot of clients, you have a great team and stuff. And so that approach, I think a lot of people think that in business you almost have to be like cold, but you’re showing a different way of doing things. And so I really appreciate that.
Jeromy Sonne:
With every episode that I do, I always let my guests pitch anything that they want at the end for one or two minutes. So I’m going to go ahead and give you that time now.
Trilce Jiron:
So I think that right now, it’s very important for business owners to take care of their employees, their clients, everyone they can, promote the stay at home, promote quarantining, promote being healthy. Of course, if you can not stay at home, just take the proper precautions. Right now, more than ever, I feel like client communications have gotten colder, especially since they’re all digital. So make sure you pop on the phone with people every once in a while. Like something we are using as a strategy with several businesses, and I think would work perfectly for other businesses, is pitch an automated response that says, “Hi, I am Jake, Paul, whoever. I would love to help you with your purchase. Would you mind giving me your phone number so we can talk?” Everyone gives you their phone number because everyone is desperate for some human communication right now that doesn’t feel like you’re just typing on a computer or on your mobile phone.
Trilce Jiron:
So that has actually increased sales for a lot of our clients, just providing that warmth of, “We are here. We know you’re scared. We know you’re at home. We want to make your purchase feel personal, not just the cold emptiness of the internet.” So whoever has the capacity of doing that, whoever feels like they could provide, even just a couple of phone calls each day, you’re going to be providing a little ray of sunshine for someone out there who did give you their number, who is feeling like they could talk to somebody. And trust me, that they’re going to become the most loyal customers in your entire life.
Jeromy Sonne:
I love that. And that’s so just aligns with your ethos too. So thank you so much, again, for your time coming on this show. For everybody that’s out there listening, take this to heart, business doesn’t have to be this cold thing. It can be like a family and you can utilize human connections to really drive business forward and you make customers happy, make employees happy. And everybody take all of this to heart. Thank you all for listening and happy marketing everybody.
