Company: Tagline Media
Owners: Jonathan Shepley
Year Started: 2001
Employees: 1 – 10
Welcome to “An Agency Story,” a podcast series that explores the journeys and insights of agency owners and leaders. Each episode offers a fresh perspective on the challenges, successes, and lessons learned in building an agency, featuring conversations that delve into the personal stories behind thriving businesses. In this episode, we shine the spotlight on Jonathan Shepley, the current owner of Tagline Media, a Tucson-based marketing agency with a dynamic vision for growth.
Jonathan shares his unique path, beginning with his experience running his family’s multimillion-dollar archery equipment business before acquiring Tagline Media in 2023. This episode explores Jonathan’s transition from manufacturing to marketing, highlighting his passion for creating scalable processes, building strong client relationships, and preparing his agency for the future. Central themes include the lessons learned from navigating the complexities of a family-owned business, his drive to avoid becoming the “hub” of his current agency, and his belief in the power of in-person collaboration in a digital world.
With fascinating anecdotes, Jonathan reflects on the challenges of balancing chaos and order in agency life. He also reveals his long-term strategy for using Tagline Media as a launchpad to acquire other businesses in industries like HVAC and charter schools—areas he believes offer recession-proof opportunities. One memorable moment includes Jonathan’s candid advice to agency owners: avoid naming a business after yourself unless you’re prepared for the implications when it comes time to sell!
Tune in to hear Jonathan Shepley’s insightful story and learn how Tagline Media is set to grow in both innovation and impact. This episode will leave you considering the delicate balance of control and freedom in agency ownership, as well as the importance of scalability in long-term success. Don’t miss out on the valuable lessons Jonathan has to share!
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Show Transcript
Welcome to An Agency Story podcast where we share real stories of marketing agency owners from around the world. From the excitement of starting up the first big sale, passion, doubt, fear, freedom, and the emotional rollercoaster of growth, hear it all on An Agency Story podcast. An Agency Story podcast is hosted by Russel Dubree, successful agency owner with an eight figure exit turned business coach. Enjoy the next agency story.
Russel:
Welcome to An Agency Story podcast. I’m your host Russel. In this episode, we’re joined by Jonathan Shepley owner by acquisition of Tagline Media based in Tucson, Arizona. Jonathan takes us through his unique transition from leading his family’s archery equipment business to acquiring a marketing agency in 2023. He shares how his passion for understanding personalities and how to set people up for success has been his key ingredient in running a business. Jonathan also shares some of the trials of a family business and his father’s hand grenade leadership style and insightful reflections on balancing chaos and control. Tune in to hear how he’s leveraging tagline media as a platform for growth and innovation and why this agency is just the beginning for him. Enjoy the story. Welcome to the show today, everyone. I have Jonathan Shepley with Tagline Media with us here today. Thank you so much for being on the show today, Jonathan.
Jonathan:
Hey, thanks for having me. I’ve been looking forward to this.
Russel:
It’s a pleasure to have you. If you don’t mind, start us off. Tell us what Tagline Media does and who you do it for.
Jonathan:
Tagline Media has been around about 20 years, but I recently purchased it about a year and a half ago, March of 2023. We’re a full service agency. We’ve got clients that range from charter schools, we’ve got medical, legal accountants. The university is a client of ours city of Tucson. We’re pretty diverse. We’re definitely not a niched down agency in, in today’s world, which I’ve seen a lot of people doing that. We’re not that at all. We’ve got clients all over the board. I think it makes it exciting. It makes every project a little more challenging.
Russel:
I can imagine. Some versatility in life is never a bad thing by any means. It keeps the creative juices flowing. Especially unique for someone to enter the space through acquisition is always a fascinating conversation. But before we get to that part, I just want to know what were the initial career plans of young Jonathan?
Jonathan:
I was lucky that I got to grow up in a family business that was into sporting goods. We manufactured archery equipment. My dad started the business in 1971 and so I got to be exposed to all aspects of an international manufacturing business. Sales and marketing were always my passions because I always knew that revenue solved most problems. When I would work with manufacturing or when I’d work on the floor with engineering people, they just didn’t speak the same language I did. I was more comfortable with the sales and marketing team. That was always my life preference. I always knew that if you could sell or market to somebody and influence their behavior through really great content and really talking to them to figure out what their problems are. I always knew my life path was going to be that. Our family business was around almost 50 years. My dad aged out. He retired for a while. I ran the business for about 15 years. Have a brother and a sister that were not in the business, but they were on the board. If you can imagine, it was a very typical family business. We grew it to the third largest private employer in Tucson. We had over 425 employees. We shipped product to every country in the world except, like, Iran. It was a really super experience for me because in the sporting goods world, not only did I see the manufacturing side, but I saw the marketing side where we were selling a product that no one really needed and we tried to get them to buy a new one every year because we were very engineering driven. Like golf, we’re very similar to golf. People’ll be way better off to buy a golf lesson than they would to buy a new club and in the archery and shooting sports world, people are way better off to go get lessons than buy new products. But luckily for us, we convinced a lot of people to buy new products every year through, I’d say pretty clever marketing and sales initiatives.
Russel:
I mean that, that’s part of the fun. Getting the new toy to go do whatever you want to go do with it. Surely some people need archery equipment, right? Maybe not as much as they used to.
Jonathan:
Yeah. They convinced their spouse of that, for sure.
Russel:
Oh yeah. Those are always fun TikTok videos. When you were growing up and going to college, did you just know you were going to be in the family business on, and that was going to be your path?
Jonathan:
Initially, it was my path. I hated college. I hated high school. I just never enjoyed it. It wasn’t for me. Going to college was not really my choice. It was part of the family trust requirement, where if you want to be in the business, you have to get an education. That was my dad really pushing it. My dad was an engineer by trade. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have gone to college. I struggled through college terribly but I always had a huge passion for the business, even though there was strife and dynamics to my dad and I were very similar personalities. When you got us in a room together especially as I got older, there was definitely strong opinions and a power of will being exposed to everybody that’s like, who’s in charge of this project. Like I said, it was a very typical family business. My dad, he did retire, but he didn’t really retire, if that makes sense. The founders usually don’t go away very peacefully.
Russel:
You got to get a straining order against those founders when they step aside, I guess. I know it was a pretty significant part of your career and your journey and your experience, and that you took the company in quite a large growth phase. Probably could have a long podcast episode just about that experience unto itself, but you just sum up maybe either just some key pivotal moments and in that personal growth journey that you experienced in that business that you feel like were transformative for you?
Jonathan:
Boy, there’s a lot of them. First, I would say to anybody who’s listening, if you’re going to work for a family business I would discourage it. I think that holidays are better. I think family relationships are more important than being the number two or number three or number four and somebody in your, you know, founder’s business. But for me, I pushed myself to be better, smarter, more driven, motivated than anybody else around there because of my last name and because I was the owner’s kid, so I had to live up to that, or exceed that. I’m the boss’s kid, so I had to do better than everybody else expected, and we did. I did it through hiring people. I got really good at behavior profiling. At building teams around people that, where do the people really fit? I did a really good job of that. Behavior profiling for me is a huge passion of mine because I really want to help people fit in a career and in a relationship where they are because there’s less stress and people do better when they’re less stressed out. Think overall from start to finish in that whole experience into just a couple words really is dive in, sometimes head first and get as good as you can be and be as driven as you can be and create goals for yourself. That’s what I did every day. We grew that business into a high eight figure business in a very short period of time. For me personally I was married twice. I have two kids. I have great relationships with my kids now, but I gotta tell you, during that time when I was really driven on the business side, my relationship with them was not that great. There was definitely a cost to that success on the financial side. If I could go back and do it again, I would probably do it similarly, but maybe a little less drive, if that makes sense.
Russel:
There are a number of ambitious curses out there. It’s a hard thing to turn off, but it’s also the, the thing that makes you successful and great at what you are. But balance is always good. Some good advice for folks out there. Obviously you, from a young age and your career, did you think you were going to be running and doing that business until you just decided to not essentially work anymore? What was your long term plan as you were looking at that business?
Jonathan:
The true blessing was, is I got exposed to so many different things in the manufacturing world and also banking and everything that was involved with the size of business that we had. I just always thought, why would I ever get rid of it or why would I ever sell it or if that was up to me at that decision point. Like I said, I had a brother and a sister on the board. They were just not in the business. I loved it. I liked that industry. I liked the people that were in it. I liked our clients and our customers. It didn’t seem like there was a reason to exit. But there’s a whole story behind the family business dynamics of things that happen. But the positive thing was, is I learned so much about me and myself and what I was capable of and all the history of the things that my dad exposed me to in the business at a young age, just made me that much more prepared for what I’m doing now.
Russel:
Speaking of which, how did you go from running that business to actually owning and acquiring Tagline Media?
Jonathan:
The quick version is I didn’t know exactly what I was going to do. When our family business was for sale I had left and was going to go out and try to find something else my next career. I just dug around and asked everybody in town who I knew if they knew of any opportunities. There’s millions of business owners now that are aging out and they don’t have a succession plan for their business. I thought I could be that person. I was at dinner one night with some friends and there was a couple at the table that we were sitting at and she started talking about her business and I was familiar with it. At the end of the dinner I said, have you thought about selling your business? She said, this was a Friday. She said, come see me on Monday. I started working for her on Monday and then we put together a transition plan for the business. That took about six months and here we are today. Every day here is interesting and fun, exciting, fast paced. Sometimes it’s terrifying but overall, I love walking in to this business and helping other people make an impact in theirs. That’s what drives me for sure.
Russel:
When you think about that process that you went through to essentially take over the agency, anything you would have changed or done differently with hindsight?
Jonathan:
I think it went as best as it could at the time because the original owner had been doing it for over 20 years. She had her own timeline with her and her husband. I think I came in at just the right time. If you believe things happened for a reason at the time, then this happened. I was at dinner with them that night for a reason. The original owner, she made it painfully easy for everything. She was incredibly upfront. There were no surprises in the business. She had a great clientele that she had built in Tucson. Whenever I tell people now that I’m the new owner of Tagline Media, they go, oh yeah, we’ve heard of you. It’s never like, oh, we’ve heard of you, in a bad way. It’s always, oh yeah, we’ve heard of you. She left a great legacy for me to step into and I just want to make it bigger now.
Russel:
I’m sure there’s a lot of different types of businesses that you could have approached out there. What about an agency was especially attractive for you?
Jonathan:
A lot of things about it. One is it introduces me to other business owners. I feed off of a lot of energy of other entrepreneurial goal driven people. I always try to make sure that I know the owner of the business depending on how big it is. But more importantly is I try to find the right business owners to work with. The other thing about the agency for me is it gets me into the door of other businesses and I can learn about what they’re doing successfully. It’s not like I’m calling on them as a salesperson per se. I’m calling on them as a person who wants to be part of their trusted group. Somebody who’s sitting involved on their management team and not just a vendor. That’s where I get my juice and that’s where I get to do my best work is when I feel like I’m part of a team that’s really going to make a difference and somebody who trusts me. I thought this business would be that thing and it has been for a lot of cases and some of the clients that have left were the clients that treated us like a vendor. We didn’t get great results for them because they didn’t bring us into long term strategy planning. They had expectations for us that just weren’t literally possible based on what they were paying us and the results that they were looking for. When you throw all those things together, to me, the agency is, it’s like a five dimensional chess game. There’s so many things going on. There’s so many ways to market a business and how do we take the three or four things out of the 300 things that are out there that we can do to market a business. To me, I enjoy that part of the strategy. How do we figure it out? When I go home at night, a lot of times you don’t know if your decision was right for a month or two or three, sometimes never. But the thing about digital marketing is you know pretty quickly if your decisions are right and if you need to pivot or not. I like that quick feedback. It helps me make better decisions later on.
Russel:
Great quote you said there and I think probably a lot of people are shaking their heads and nodding is the five dimensional chess game. I think that very accurately encapsulates the agency space and even what you’re saying of, I don’t know that there’s too many other businesses out there that really just have to go down and dirty in the trenches in their clients businesses to actually execute the work they do. To your point of just using it as a mechanism to learn about other types of businesses, probably you absolutely chose what was probably the best type of business to do that with.
Jonathan:
I believe so too. I think it helps me meet other business owners and to get in the door of other businesses to see how they’re doing things. Maybe that what they’re doing I could take for my business and say, hey. With what you’re doing here would work for our business as well. Let’s work together on it somehow.
Russel:
That’s a great quote there. How much are we as agencies taking in what our clients are doing or doing well and baking it into our own recipes? I like that nugget for sure.
Jonathan:
I’ve asked other clients to your, is your marketing agency, strategic partner, do they sit on your long term planning meetings? Some of them say yeah and some of them say no, but I’ve never really asked them why. Because I don’t have, I don’t have that level of trust either with some of the people that I’m asking these questions to.
Russel:
It is certainly a thing of trust. I’d say the good ones are, the smart ones are, I think the industry is learning that we have to really be in that seat. Because you’re talking about the sophistication and the complexity of digital marketing is only getting higher. We’ve got to really sit at that strategic level. The quick to die is the commodity of marketing just as a one off tool. I know the good ones are hopefully everyone’s trying to get there. I’m just curious. Just coming from what is just a vastly different industry, what was your biggest surprise once you took over the business?
Jonathan:
In the couple years that I was out of the family business and the timing of it, how much more information was available about consumer behavior? How much it had grown in five years or four years? How scary it is on what people know about what we do from day to day, what we’re thinking, where we’re driving, what we’re scrolling. I don’t know if all of that information, hopefully it’s in good hands, but I think that was probably the biggest thing for me is, if the general consumer really knew what information gathering companies really knew about them, they may not have a cell phone. 100%.
Russel:
I probably guaranteed would not have a cell phone. We all make the jokes that like, our cell phone is listening, everybody talks about. I’ll mention some random business and that’s the next ad I see. We’re aware, but I don’t, to your point, I don’t think we’re aware. It gets to this idea, I I don’t know, it made me think of Jurassic Park what’s the Jeff Goldblum’s line, if it’s, what does he say to the guy, you’ve been so busy thinking about if you could, you never thought about if you should. I know we’re deep in the middle of this idea of what is ethical and unethical when it comes to leveraging information and things we can gather about our audience and our consumer how should we be in that process to achieve whatever goals we’re trying to achieve? It’s a very fascinating conversation. I’d love to go sit in on an ethics class on digital marketing in 2024. It would be really fascinating. What experience do you feel like you’re able to lean on the most from your time in your archery business?
Jonathan:
I think for me, it’s just a matter of figuring out from the work standpoint here is who fits where, what motivates them, what information do they need to make a decision? That’s towards for employees here or contractors that we work with. The people that we’re marketing to specifically, it’s what motivates people. Since about 2005, I’ve been this huge fan or study of behavior profiling and personality types and what drives people and what makes them make a decision. What is the word free do to an ad or those kinds of trigger words to people. What I bring over to this business the most is it’s all about human behavior for me. What makes people tick? I use those same traits that I learned in our family business on motivating people here, mainly by hiring motivated people. I don’t motivate people myself. I think I just hire motivated people and they stay motivated as long as I don’t do something that triggers demotivation. Working with clients, understanding their needs, understanding their personalities, are they security driven, are they really big goal oriented people, and figuring out what makes them tick, and then figuring out how do we market that to the consumers. In the sporting goods world, we marketed to, obviously, outdoor people, There was all kinds of different personality types in there. There was the people that were technically oriented. There was the people that just wanted the least expensive product. They were all across the board. Figuring out how to reach all those people uniquely, that was the challenge. In this business, one of the things I like about not being a niched agency, where we have a diverse client base, is that every day we have to figure out a new way to reach a client that we may not be talking to today. That’s something I really like to do. It gives me energy.
Russel:
I’m a big fan of just all things, brain mechanics, human behavior. I probably done more studying that than I did and what my degree was. I’m just curious for folks that are equally interested in the subject out there, want to know more, what’s a good resource or two book or otherwise that, uh, that you feel like is have to go to when you talk about that subject.
Jonathan:
There’s a handful, but I think if you get familiar with some of the personality surveys that are out there there’s some really popular ones. Figure out which style talks to you. When I really got involved in behavior profiling, the real need was in our family business. I needed to hire about 15 really top producing salespeople, and I received about 500 resumes. I was totally lost. I didn’t know what to do. I called this person who was a big behavior profile coach. At the time, her role was to work with professional golfers. She would tell the golf company and the golfer who could be around the golfer for the week prior to the golf tournament. Because certain personalities would affect their game. She would be in charge of hiring the caddy for the professional golfer because she showed them statistically how the personality type of the caddy and the personality type of the golfer, if you didn’t match them up correctly, it would affect the golfer’s score. I started just studying all these different personality survey types and I chose one, and it’s out of Colorado, and it’s called Personal Dynametric Programs, PDP is the acronym. It’s easy, it takes about 10 minutes. It really has helped me build teams of people and helped me also work at relationships. It’s helped me with people that get promoted to the wrong job. It’s helped me primarily in hiring and building a team and a culture of people that just perform really well naturally. Because the last thing that I want to do as a business owner is have someone come to work and be stressed out and take that stress home. I want to make sure I have the right people. There’s nothing better for me than walking into a business where I feel the energy when I walk in, and I feel excited, and the people are coming to me with ideas. And more importantly is, the ideas and the business don’t revolve around me. The business hums whether I’m there or not, and it performs whether I’m there or not, because I don’t want to be attached to the business every minute of every day. When you do have the right team of people in the right place, with the right direction. The success just comes, I wouldn’t say easily, but it’s a whole lot easier than if you had the wrong people. That’s why I like it so much. There’s so many different personalities out there. And when you get a resume from all these different people, you have no idea what it is. To me, resumes are big polished nuances of their life. They’ve polished the resume to look like this is what I think this person wants me to be, not who I am naturally. To find those big picture, accountable, authentic people where success is important to them and they function in a fast paced environment, those people are rare. You have to dig through all those resumes and ask people to take this eight or ten minute survey. I love it because I’ve shown the results on how well it works. I think it’s hugely impactful to have the right people and the right team around you. It’s the old adage, the right people in the right seats on the right bus, basically.
Russel:
Great takeaway. I love the concept just how important it is to grab onto a framework and there’s so many out there. Again, as you said, whatever your flavor is, but to really help you understand the nuances of human behavior, even as you were alluding to and interviewing and things like that, we have to be able to read a lot more things than what people are saying. Or like you’re saying what goes on a resume, right? We have to get past the billboards of how people are presenting themselves and get into the underneath layers. That can be such a great mechanism for that. Awesome takeaway there. I’m curious what you’ve been, what you’ve experienced so far that’s been the most challenging part when you compare from your previous role?
Jonathan:
The most challenging part is pretty easy. It’s when a client comes to you with a challenge, sometimes it’s a recurring challenge, they’ve had it before, you lay out what you think is a really great plan and they just say no. It’s frustrating because, based on your experience, based on what you know about their company, the plan you put together for them will be successful. And they just say no, or they’ve tried it before, 15 years ago, and it is a signal to us why they need an agency because they’re not open minded enough about new data that’s available, new techniques that are available to reach their clients. We’re challenging them to come up with a new message. What’s your guarantee? What are you really promising to deliver? But when you just get that flat out, no, we’re not going to do that from the client. That’s when I go home with a little less energy, is you get that big no from the client, even though you put together something that is, based on your experience and knowledge, is something that’s really going to work well. And they’ve not done something like it before, but they’re either afraid to try it or they just, we didn’t do a good enough of job of selling or convincing them that the value is there.
Russel:
I can definitely see that coming from where you’re from, where the product, the results, what you’re selling and giving to people is just, it’s tangible, it’s visible and things like that, that there isn’t a lot of this nuance, but that is certainly a challenging part of the agency space is we got to get a lot of buy in, we got to get the teams buy in, we got to get the clients buy in, and then ultimately we got to get the client’s clients buy in. There’s a lot of buy in that needs to happen. That’s certainly a, an art form that does take some time to get through. That makes total sense. Per where you’re sitting right now you have a really fascinating add on that you’ve done to your business, or I don’t know what term you’d use for it specifically, but the Tucson podcast studio I’ve seen the pictures. It looks absolutely fascinating. How did this idea come about and what are your plans with what you’ve done there?
Jonathan:
This plan came about from a friend of mine who had been in the Tucson marketing arena for decades. I think he was looking for a location and I had some spare room in our corporate office. Without his help, I probably never would have done this or built the podcast studio simply because I don’t have the knowledge. I’ve never dug into it to where, what does it take to do it? He just made it all sound so easy. We did a little homework and in a matter of a couple weeks we had a, the best podcast studio in Southern Arizona, hands down. We’ve got five cameras rolling. We’ve got 4K production. We do live editing real time, so a person walks in and records something in a podcast, and they can walk out with a finished a finished podcast before they leave. We’ve been, at least I have, I’ve been giving it away a little bit for certain clients to say, hey, why don’t you come down and sit in front of the cameras and we’ll just sit down and talk about whatever you want to talk about. Once they do it they get hooked. Of course we don’t show them, I mean there’s a lot of electronics in this room sitting around behind me and there’s a lot of stuff going on. They don’t see any of that. We just make it painfully easy for them to sit down in front of the camera and walk out with a finished podcast because once we showed them the data about how many people are out there watching and consuming this kind of information, they want to be on it too, especially if they’re a really hard charging business owner that’s I want to make a difference and do something different.
Russel:
I know you were just in the early phases of testing it out, or you’re thinking that maybe this can even be almost a lead gen model just to get, a very attractive way to get business owners, like you said into your fold and then take it from there? How’s this all line up?
Jonathan:
Both, um, It’s definitely going to be a lead generation tool for us because there’s a lot of people out there that want to have a podcast and simply don’t know how to do it. With us making it as white glove as possible for them, then it’ll easily generate clients. The struggle that I have right now really is other agencies are not going to bring one of their clients into our studio because our studio is located inside of our agency. I’m probably going to miss out on some of the people that would make really great podcast producers. But that’s okay because we’ll eventually get them. They’re going to come here eventually and say, hey, we want to sit down in your studio and try it out. Because there’s no cell phones in our studio. They’re all 4K cameras. We have production lighting all around us. I’m just sitting in one chair and there’s four. We have two studios as well. We have another studio that’s purely soundproof. This room is not a hundred percent soundproof, but it’s pretty quiet. I’ll tell you this. When I think about the studio, the podcasting stuff, I get more excited or as excited about this as anything else in the business. For me, it’s more fun.
Russel:
I could see that. It’s a really cool set up there. I can’t wait to as it matures, just to see all the different ways you can leverage that into your business and another creative venture. Speaking of down the road, what, how do you see the future of your agency? What are your longterm goals for growth and overall development?
Jonathan:
Even though this agency was 20 years old when I bought it, there were it was missing some processes and procedures in place to really make it scalable. I’ve spent the last year doing a lot of that. In the next couple years as we bring on new clients, I, I don’t think we’re going to remain a Tucson agency. I’d love to take the entire process of this building from our accounting, employee handbook, operations our workflow software, we use software called ClickUp, and be able to take this agency and drop it in three or four different cities. I don’t know which ones they are yet because I haven’t done enough homework, but long term I think that’s where we’d end up being, is to make it big enough, fast enough, so that I have a good exit strategy. Because I think if it just remains a Tucson based agency, if I can build it to eight figures. There’s a decent exit strategy for it, but I, hopefully I can do more. That’s what I’m driven for. Long term, five locations, five U. S. cities, and let’s go from there and see how it goes.
Russel:
Sounds like a great path. Can’t wait to see that come to light and more amazing podcast studios as well in other cities that they’ll get the benefit from. Last big question then for you, Jonathan, before we wrap up here is, are entrepreneurs born or are they made?
Jonathan:
100 percent born and then they’re polished. They’re born with certain personality traits, and over time they get polished, because if they don’t get polished, they turn into, I call them dictatorial steamrollers. There are people who don’t have any emotional intelligence, there are people who just want to walk around and tell people what to do, but as they get polished, as they grow and mature, they turn into visionary strategic leaders that have the human empathy side. There’s actually some data coming out now that you can actually predict personality types based on a retina scan. There’s the old expression, eyes are the window to their soul. You can, with an 80 percent confidence, break people up into 5 major personality types based on a retina scan. I think that information is going to get more and more interesting.
Russel:
That’s, I don’t know, certainly fascinating. I don’t know if that’s scary or not, but that is definitely fascinating.
Jonathan:
It’s a little scary.
Russel:
Yes. And I always appreciate a confident, solid born answer. As I do with every answer, but that one’s always the most interesting. If people want to know more about Tagline Media, where can they go?
Jonathan:
We’re located in Tucson, Arizona. It’s taglinegroup.com. My name is Jonathan Shepley. You can find me on LinkedIn as well. I’d love to connect with as many people as I can. I love meeting new people, finding out what they do and what makes them tick. I love it.
Russel:
Clearly a passion and lots of good experience and nuggets there. Eventually you’ll have a handheld retina scanner, people can come to you for that and you can see into their soul. Thank you so much, Jonathan, for taking the time today to share so many wonderful parts of your story. Obviously you’ve done this round one and had a lot of success. Can’t wait to see what round two looks like for you and really appreciate you taking the time to share that with us.
Jonathan:
I’m excited. Thank you for this opportunity. I really appreciate it.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of An Agency Story podcast where we share real stories of marketing agency owners from around the world. Are you interested in being a guest on the show? Send an email to podcast@performancefaction.com. An Agency Story is brought to you by Performance Faction. Performance Faction offers services to help agency owners grow their business to 5 million dollars and more in revenue. To learn more, visit performancefaction.com.
Jonathan:
I grew up in Illinois and we lived near a, a golf course. We would go and find all the golf balls that got hit out of the greens and a lot of them got hit into the water. We would go and dive in there at night and grab as many golf balls as we could. And then we’d sit along the side of the golf course and sell lemonade and golf balls back to the golfers.
Russel:
Genius.
Jonathan:
That was one of the hundreds of entrepreneurial kinds of things that, that I did.
Russel:
Did you make good money?
Jonathan:
I made enough to put gas I had a little, I had a little dirt bike, a little motorcycle. I had enough, I put gas into my dirt bike. But the golf course people weren’t crazy about it. They figured out that we were going onto the golf course at night and snorkeling into the ponds to get the golf balls out of the ponds. They didn’t like that. They were probably worried we were going to get hurt or drown or something.
Russel:
Fair. But I can appreciate, talk about a born entrepreneur right there, selling golf balls and lemonade.
