Company: Bright Marketing
Owners: Jennifer Sutton
Year Started: 2013
Employees: 1 – 10
Welcome to “An Agency Story,” the podcast that takes you behind the scenes of agency life, revealing the triumphs, trials, and transformations that define the industry. In this episode, we dive into the journey of Jennifer Sutton, the founder of Bright Marketing, a full-service marketing and advertising agency based in South Carolina. Join us as we explore Jennifer’s unique path from agency employee to serendipitous entrepreneur and uncover the insights that have shaped her successful career.
Jennifer Sutton’s story is one of resilience, innovation, and a relentless pursuit of excellence. The episode delves into Jennifer’s transition from working in large agencies to founding Bright Marketing, driven by a desire to break through the glass ceiling and create a more integrated approach to marketing. We explore the seamless integration of creative and analytical elements in marketing, ensuring that data-driven decisions support creative strategies for optimal results. Jennifer candidly shares the struggles she faced, including hitting a salary and title cap, dealing with the aftermath of the 2008-2010 agency fallout, and managing the complexities of agency ownership. Her approach to cultivating a strong, cohesive team, maintaining high standards, and creating a work environment that supports flexibility and autonomy is also highlighted.
Jennifer’s journey is peppered with memorable anecdotes and powerful insights. She recounts the serendipitous start of her agency, with her phone ringing off the hook with opportunities from past clients and colleagues as soon as she stepped out on her own. She also addresses the surprising biases she encountered as a female agency owner and her strategies for maintaining professionalism and resilience in the face of adversity. Jennifer discusses the innovative work flex policies she implemented to accommodate the needs of working parents and the lessons learned from bringing on and eventually parting ways with a business partner, emphasizing the importance of clear agreements and shared visions from the start.
Memorable quotes from Jennifer include, “I call myself a serendipitous entrepreneur… I found my way into starting the agency out of just the opportunity,” “You can only control how you respond and react to things, and that’s really a power, and it’s a little bit of a superpower,” and “Our own brand matters. As an agency owner, if you’re in the marketing and branding business, do a self-reflection on your brand because you’re.”
Jennifer Sutton’s story is a testament to the power of perseverance, innovation, and self-belief. Her experiences offer valuable lessons for anyone in the agency world or considering their entrepreneurial journey. Tune in to this episode to gain unique insights, laugh at humorous anecdotes, and be inspired by Jennifer’s unwavering commitment to excellence. Don’t miss the ongoing themes of resilience and growth that will leave you contemplating your own path in the dynamic world of agency life.
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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 Jennifer Sutton, the innovative founder of bright marketing based in Greenville, South Carolina, Jennifer shares her journey from hitting a glass ceiling in her corporate career to founding bright and agency known for seamlessly integrating the art and science of marketing. Hear about the serendipitous start of our agency and her story about sticking out like a sore thumb, hanging out with a client and the nightlife of New York. Discover how Jennifer’s resilience and a partnership split and unique approach to team building have driven Bright’s success. Enjoy the story. Welcome to the show today, everyone. I have Jennifer Sutton with Bright Marketing with us here today. Thank you so much for being on the show today, Jennifer.
Jennifer:
Hey, thank you, Russel. I appreciate being on.
Russel:
I appreciate having you. If you don’t mind, kick us off. What does Bright Marketing do and who do you do it for?
Jennifer:
Bright Marketing is a full service marketing and advertising agency located in South Carolina, but we serve clients all over. We were founded with the idea that we could serve the business community in a better way. Meaning, the seamless integration between the art and science of marketing, and really uncovering what’s really the friction or what’s the problem. Is it a branding problem? Is it a marketing problem or is it an advertising problem? How do we get them unstuck to scale?
Russel:
Nobody wants to be stuck. Beautifully put. Want to certainly learn a lot more about what you’ve built inside your agency, but, before we get there, we got to talk about the time before agency life. As I recall, you had a pretty extensive career before you started your business, but go back even before that, what was young Jennifer thinking she was going to do with her life?
Jennifer:
Oh, my goodness. Young Jennifer, I actually, I’m kind of doing what I went to school for, which is really unusual. I get that, but I never thought I would own my own business. I call myself a serendipitous entrepreneur. I found my way into, I’m starting the agency out of just the opportunity. I spent two and a half decades in agency life, working for large agencies, working on big brands. I grew up in the agency space, in research design and media planning and buying, really understanding the science part of marketing and all the data and the analytics to drive, how to support creative and their decisions, how to drive, decisions for companies. As I grew up in the agency world, I went from, being the owner of the data into leading brand strategies, and really the integrator or the doc connector, with how to execute and implement using all assets available. That was my agency life. And then I caught the serendipitous moment of, I found myself hitting literally the glass ceiling where I was at a point where I was told I was salary capped and title capped. I’m like, well, where’s my path? Took a couple of, gigs, of freelance contracts and said, you know what, maybe I’ll do this for a while. I left the agency in the summer, and just like the months after, people are like, oh, you’re out. You’re on your own. They’re like, we need your help. Can you lead strategy? We need your help. Can you do this research project? We need your help. Can you buy this media and run this media program? That’s where I got my aha moment of, you know what, I could create an agency that really brings the best and brightest in these different disciplines under one roof while I can create the infrastructure of, to bring stability and, help grow these individuals. But also create the infrastructure and the stability so that we could go into larger companies. I call it the unagency, um, to support their needs because we would then run and own kind of the brand, being the police of the brand. The client didn’t have to do that. It’s just a lot of work to manage multiple vendors, multiple freelancers. That’s why Bright, um, was invented. We’ve dropped the CO, but, our name for the first 10 years was Bright Co. Because it really stood for consortium, company, collective, you know, um, uh, cohort. It was all like the CO and now we’ve just streamlined and said, right, we’re just Bright.
Russel:
That works. I think it especially works in the agency space. I want to definitely, backtrack on a couple of things you mentioned. You mentioned this, hitting this level of frustration and I think you said kind of glass ceiling and capped, or as you described it. It sounds like, I mean, did you just get fed up one day and leave not exactly knowing what your path was? I know you mentioned taking on a few kind of side gigs and stuff like that, but was the path a lot more unknown when you left the company or did you really have an idea that you were going to end up doing this all, this whole thing on your own?
Jennifer:
No, I, so my father in law passed away the summer of 2013 and while we were in, back in Indiana, back at home, taking care of, of the estate, all the family dealings I had a couple of, colleagues that reached out. These were past clients, who were just giving their, their condolences and said, hey, have you ever thought about going out on your own? I was like, you know what? I was told earlier this year that I have no path here, you know, I’m considering it. I had two or three of those phone calls during that week period. I was like, you know what? I don’t even know what that looks like. I’ve never even thought about that. I honestly thought, when I started in the agency world, I love agency life. I thought I was, gonna, gonna be a head executive running, helping to support somebody else’s brand and somebody else’s business. Cause I saw how hard it was. I worked for some startup founder, agencies that grew, like I was the 25th employee. When I left, there were 500 people, at one of the agencies I worked for. Another agency was, you know, several thousand. I saw the blood, sweat, and tears. It was never a dream of mine. But then you’re faced with, okay, I’ve got four kids. My youngest is two. I’m not at home three weeks out of the month, I’m traveling. What am I doing this for? Having these conversations with these colleagues of like, what does that look like? They’re sending me proposals of this is what I need you to do. It’s only 5 hours a week.
Russel:
So your potential clients are sending you proposals. That’s something you don’t hear too often as a reverse proposal.
Jennifer:
That’s right, because I didn’t know. I had no clue of what do, what’s the scope? What are you guys thinking or what, what would you pay me? and we started looking at that and I, sat with my husband and I’m like, oh my gosh, just two of these, like, they needed me to start in a couple months, to get my, if I did this. But it’s 15 hours a week and it’s 70 percent of my salary of what I was being paid. I was working at that time, 90 hours a week. I was already, doing the, doing a lot of the long, the late nights. And I’m like, hey, this doesn’t seem right. My husband’s like, when we get back into town, you’re going to put your notice up and we’re going to take some time. They don’t need you to start till August or September, that gives us, four to six weeks. Let’s just get, life back. You always hear, hey, if you leave the agency, maybe you can become a consultant and they can become one of your clients.
Russel:
That does happen more frequently than one might think where someone leaves their company and then that becomes one of their first clients as their former agency.
Jennifer:
That’s right. I was not that fortunate. During that window when I was like, hey, I’m, you know, I’m a free agent. Literally my phone just blew up and that was really unexpected. By six months later, it was like, I think I can grow something and build something that’s bigger than me, doing something that’s a little, to support a bigger community. And Bright was born.
Russel:
When you started looking at, all these things that you had to set up as you were off on your own, how much did you leverage all your other agency experience just in terms of just different processes? The way you sold and different things like that? Or were you more hey, all these other places, they’re not doing it right. This is the way I’m going to do better. What was that balance of leveraging some of your past experience?
Jennifer:
It was probably 80 percent leveraging the experience and then, creating processes that I had developed inside the last agency I worked for as how do we integrate? How do we dot connect? But to scale that, that’s what was one of the reasons that I was frustrated. I was the only one that was assigned to be the integrator, the dot connector. How do you bring these teams together so that, okay, yes, we’ve got a media plan. But have we mapped out the landing pages and the user experience? What are we going to do when we generate the leads? What happens then? Who’s going to follow up? How does the PR program, how does that support the media plan and how are we integrating that? It was, just having all of those conversations as a team and the agency wasn’t equipped to scale. It’s a combination of people, but it’s a comp and also processes and a system to do that. That’s really what I perfected under Bright. Taking these, the proven methods and disciplines of how to think through, is it a branding problem? Is it a marketing problem? Or is it an advertising problem? Where’s the friction? When you start implementing the solutions, how do you do it? It’s an integrated force. That’s what we perfected here.
Russel:
Talk to about that in a little more detail. I’d say one of the more significant challenges in agency ownership is often, it’s often started by someone that has a lot of knowledge and experience about the work product and the service that’s being offered. Especially maybe sometimes agency in the early days, they’re not bringing on as near as experienced talent because they, you know, can’t afford or whatever. What specifically did you do when you think about how you downloaded that knowledge transfer and to get other folks on the same playing field as you were?
Jennifer:
It took me a few years. Things that I, I think I took for granted, of strategic thinking and how people do think. Not everybody thinks in a diagonal way. The first, four or five years when I was wearing that functional hat and trying to just delegate to other hires we were seeing gaps in our own service and friction in our own delivery and our own execution. Over the last two or three years, I’ve had these, epiphanies of, oh my gosh. I can’t just delegate at a top level. I need to, map out at a micro level, the things that we do, that are special to us, unique to us, or how we go about it. We started doing that, I think like four years ago and then started going, okay, these are the processes now. How do we create systems? What do we need to automate with tools? We’ve perfected that over the last several years. It was a lot of tough times because you’re bringing on like, what we, what you think is experienced agency people that you can go, hey, I’m going to hand this off. You know how to do, marketing strategy and think through. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then you get in there and you start playing oversight. You’re like, whoa, they aren’t delivering it in the way that I would expect it to be done or how it’s taught at, Harvard. The tried and true practices. I can’t take for granted those uniquenesses. A lot of it just came to, I didn’t have the confidence that these were proven. I felt like I was being bullied by my own team. I was a doormat of, you realize you’re in the people business. You’re in the people business to serve clients, but also you’re in the people business to cultivate and nurture your team. But that was one of my lessons learned of, of how do I stay strong and true to myself, my frequency, my energy, to not let people walk over that?
Russel:
I love a couple points you shared there. One, I want to make sure the key word that gets heard is how long it took to, as you mentioned, just even come to that understanding, but even how long the process is to actually download. This is not a, does not sound like, especially in your case or other cases I’ve observed where this is a two or three or six month process, this is a really a never ending process, but it actually does take a fair amount of time to, take root and get good at, you know, this, again, teaching of others. I also appreciate you, what you’re sharing there then is there’s nothing like an agency business where your team can make you go crazy. Is it me or is it them? I went through the exact same process and I’m sure like all things, there’s a balance. We have to realize that we probably know best, but we have to also have empathy in how we bring others along. At what point in time, I believe, as you mentioned before that you brought on a partner or had a partner in the business, how long was that into the business and what was the thought process when you were looking at bringing on a partner?
Jennifer:
We said, what we do differently is that integration between the art and the science and marketing art being, how are we using data to inform creative? Within like a, my first year, 2014, the agents of community, they were like, hey, there’s a really good creative director, chief creative officer, came from like one of the leading agencies in the country. He’s out on his own, too. You guys should team up. We started working on projects together and he was really leading creative. Using the creatives that he wanted to bring in. That control over creative, which was great, when you’re starting to form. Quality of the work was there, he understood strategy, and it was this, as we started working together, it was under the, I guess under the guise of I think we have a shared vision. We both want Bright to be this, to do this and be this way and be thought of this way. Let’s work towards that. He was like, well, we’re partners. We’ve got to be almost like, yeah, we’re partners, but we never, like, wrote anything down. It was just a handshake, for the first several years. Then you started going, okay, we’re trying to scale. We’re 18 people. We’re 20 people, we’re rocking and rolling. We probably need to make sure that we have our ship buttoned up.
Russel:
You started to hint at that, this wasn’t going to be a forever partnership, and we’ll dive more into that. When you think back about, how you went about the process to bring on a partner, what would you change or do differently? Or how would you think about that differently? Knowing what you know today?
Jennifer:
A couple of things. It wasn’t until, much later. We had been working under the, the perception that we were partners from an external view and also within our internal team, we use the word partner. But from a legal, from a documentation, it was not buttoned up, right? It became, as we started to grow and scale, then you could start sensing, I would hear things in the market, like in our community of, well, he’s working on stuff outside of Bright, under his own LLC. It became selective. We would have these conversations of, why are you not bringing that under Bright? Oh, it’s too small for Bright, but I’m like, yeah, but that hurts. That hurts the team, it hurts our vision. We’re not going to achieve our goals if Bright is the, is the wife and your LLC is like your little metric mistress. Cause that’s what it felt like. If I had to go hindsight, I would have had the conversations within like the first year, like the first month of, hey, are you really serious about being a partner? Let’s talk about this. Is it a shared vision? Truly a shared vision? What does that look like? What’s the end game? What are the rules of engagement? Is this a 50 50? Is this a 51 49? I’ve invested this much already, to develop the infrastructure, the insurer, what are you investing in? Is it just time, that you’re investing in? Is it leads? What is that, investment? Or is it just, is reduction in the percentage of ownership? And then what’s the exit? How do we make decisions? How do we have conflict resolution? Those were the conversations we were having at the latter point, like seven, eight years into the relationship, which really ended up going, um, all right. You need to exit’cause it’s, this is not a partnership. You’re getting all the benefit but without the risk and the accountability.
Russel:
We could probably do a multi part episode on just all things on setting up a good partnership, but I think the few key things that I heard in there is, have those tough conversations early and often. I often think of when I hear good or bad situations and partnerships. It’s like any relationship. What are the expectations? And just being very open and honest about that. For the folks listening out there, get those buy sell agreements in place. That’s not to help the relationship, but that is, when anytime we might have to unpack this thing that, that it’s not left to emotions. Sounds like you approached the situation, just very trusting someone else like me is going to think and do like me, but again, goes back to having those conversations. As I understand, I think you shared that the unpacking of this thing was a long and somewhat difficult process. How did you unravel all of this?
Jennifer:
I don’t know. I’m, still reeling from it, but I’m coming out of that. It was hard. You had personalities, they were relationships that affected our greater team. During that, those hard conversations of look, you know, guy, like we, we’re not on the same page. You’re getting all the positive benefits of being a partner, but I’m taking the risk. I’m financially accountable. We’ve got toxicity in our team. Our culture is being affected because of the way you lead and you operate. We had a lot of turnover during kind of that time. There was a lot of fear of, oh my gosh, you know, he’s this great creative officer. There was that fear of, well, if we let go, am I going to lose my access to my entire creative team? What about keeping our output, the quality output that we’ve been delivering? Can we deliver on that? Having plan B, plan C, plan D, that you’re operating that in parallels as you’re also trying to exit this relationship, and trying to keep it positive of like, look, we just, we’re just not on the same page. We’re still friends. We still meet once a quarter for coffee and chat. It didn’t end like as a, this bitter kind of fight. It just was like, we probably should have had these conversations a lot earlier. He just wanted to have gigs and control the gigs. There became a battle of like, hey, we’ve got this, these other great creatives. I don’t know that I don’t want to work with them. Through the process, as you start operating like the plan, the parallel plans of the backup, the backup to the backup, it allowed us to broaden our creative community and our creative access. It forced us to go into our own brand to go, are we able to deliver on our promise that we set forth when we started?
Russel:
One, that’s good to hear that. It doesn’t sound like could have been a very, was a difficult situation that the way it, you know, it sounds like it, it ended not too harshly as some, sometimes those can go a lot worse. There’s a lot of folks that, one, think the idea of starting your own business, having your own thing is really cool and tend to only think of the benefits and stuff like that. But the actual risk involved, all those, some of those things you mentioned, the pressure, et cetera, some people just aren’t cut out for that. Especially to walk in a situation of something that’s already established or know just what that actually takes to run and build. It’s just water and oil. Allah, some people are great entrepreneurs and some people are just being great team members. Sound like we had similar situations where those folks don’t always know exactly which side of that fence they’re on, as it sounds like this was in your case. It sounds like, just knowing who you are and you seem very resilient that, this wasn’t the end of you. This wasn’t the end of your agency that which does not kill you, makes you stronger. What was that like, coming out of that? How were you ultimately better or your agency better coming out of that entire process?
Jennifer:
For me personally, I, through self, self reflection and discovery, I think I found who I was as a leader, a manager. More confident, kind of what we deliver as a, as a brand strategist, even as like the function that I perform. You have to be humble. Humility is your saving grace to be able to, to go through that and really find out truly who you are, um, and stand tall. We’re in the people business and we all are going to battle, clients, team, people in the community. You’re gonna, engage with really great people, but you’re also going to engage in some asshole behavior. It’s unavoidable. and some are hidden. Like you said, there’s people that come on to your team and you think, oh, my gosh, they’re great. And then they come in, they’re like, they can’t handle the pressure or they’re like, I want to, as we’ve heard from some previous team member like, I want to live softly. What the hell does mean? What does that mean? But because you know yourself, you know how we, like, we went and reflected back on the agency of who we are. What is our promise? Is it different than what it was before? When we did the exercise, it wasn’t. We just reframed it. We kind of said, this is a better way that we can talk about ourselves. It lifted all of us up with more confidence. We also stopped apologizing as a greater team. Our team gave me more confidence of, you’ve got to stop apologizing for the energy and the frequency that you bring, you are operating on a high energy, high frequency. Don’t let other people bring that down and surround yourself with people that operate at that same frequency. In agency life, sometimes they call it the A team versus the C team. We need to operate and surround ourselves with 18 players, and not apologize for going, I don’t think you’re a good fit. I don’t think you’re going to gel well with our team because we don’t operate that way. We went through a period of, uh, because of the turnover and the churn, we were like, let’s, we need to hire people, hire fast. We got to hire slow. We got to make sure people fit. I’ve got to make sure that I don’t let how I respond to people, they can’t bring my energy down. You can only control how you respond and react to things. It’s a little bit of a superpower and I feel like that is something that today, I feel so strong and confident to, to be able to do that. I didn’t have that power before in the last like two, three years.
Russel:
We all develop at different levels and obviously you’re someone that holds yourself to a high standard. Rising up to your high standard and having that confidence, sounds like a, it’s always a work in progress for all of us, but you got to a good place. Those are dangerous words you shared there. That would be like a canary in the coal mine. For folks out there, anytime someone says hire fast, we need to take a strong look at what are we doing and why are we saying that? Probably we need to think of alternative strategies for whatever we’re trying to achieve there. A couple more questions for you. Going back to even how you started your agency and the kind of this cap and this glass ceiling and correlating that to what, faces a lot of women in the workplace. How do you feel like you’ve done that differently when you think about running your own agency?
Jennifer:
When we started the agency and we bought our building, in 2015, that was a weird aha for me. I was leading boardrooms and corporate, and agency. When I even started Bright, it was like, it’s not Sutton strategies. It is Bright. It’s bigger than me. It was always started to be a scalable company. Not a solopreneur, not at a, a gig. It was literally established to grow and scale. When we bought the building and hung our shingle out, the amount of people in the creative community, but also like the corporate community that I had been operating in for two decades were like, oh, like you’re serious. You’re a real agency. You’re a real company. You’re not just trying to be a mom, to go home by two to pick up kids. I’m like, no. And I think that’s just, that was a big, is that what you think when women start their companies? It’s just a way to have a, a working mom kind of gig practice? I guess people were saying it out loud, to me. That was a, whoa, I didn’t even realize that was a perspective out there. And then really just trying to normalize those stories. There’s a lot of gender biases. I’ve talked to other agency owners, um, and men run agencies that we either have gotten their, their past client or, their contact went to a another business and they hired us. The language that, and commentary that I get, that I’ve like shocked. I don’t even know how to respond to this. I can’t believe, in all my years, people that talk this way, that are so ugly. When I go and say did they, how did you respond to stuff like this? They were your client for 15 years. And the agency owner’s like, they would have never spoken to me that way. I’ve leaned on, the, like, peers and colleagues who, you know, just to go, how do I respond to this? You’re a man. How would you respond to this? Or you’re a female, you’ve already been running your business for, you know, 10, 10 years. Are you getting the same shit? They’re like, I get that every day. It was just interesting of, you talk to 10 agency owners. They’ve never even encountered that kind of crap. You talk to female owners of agencies and we’re getting it daily. How do we respond? How do we show up? Even trying to, teach our team of, we don’t, we, we’d never, we never stoop that low. It’s always, we respond in facts. We respond in kindness. Again, the only thing that we can control is how we respond and react. We don’t even address the ugly. We don’t let it get us down. The way that our agency is structured from a business model perspective, I, being a working mom in the agency, traditional agency world. It was very frustrating to have to use my PTO for taking a doctor’s appointment or to sit and take my kids to doctor’s appointments. I’ve always believed that people operate at that 18 level. That same frequency level and have that drive and passion and professionalism to do their best work. Doesn’t matter when and where they do it, as long as it, cause they know when to get it done, how to get it done. They’re self starters and independent. We have a work flex environment of, we’re not checking in, you’re not being micromanaged. We judge based on your output. Was it done on time, and right? Is the client happy? Does the team feel satisfied working with you? Are we gelling? We’ve got working moms and dads. Our office has a playroom and people come and, use the space how they need to use it.
Russel:
I love that. Thank you for sharing that. I always hate to hear those stories and what you said you had to encounter there. It just makes me shake my head. I’ll leave it at that. I really appreciate the transparency and honesty and what you’ve had to go through as a female entrepreneur. Even just overcoming stereotypes by what are the underpinnings of what you said there, just be good, focus on yourself, focus on what you can do, can help change maybe some of those perceptions over time. When they don’t see what they might’ve expected to see for whatever random weird reasons they, coming up with the expected to see it. That certainly makes this whole thing a lot harder when you got to go through those things. Couple more questions. I may have already said that, but I’m just so fascinated by so many parts of your story. What’s the big goal? We talk in, uh, 10 years from now or 20 years from now or lifetime from now. What is the goals, what you’re trying to achieve with Bright?
Jennifer:
We’re on an aggressive growth, path, so we’d like to be five X in five years. That’s the path we’re on from a, from an end game perspective. I would love to grow it to a point where, um, I can either look at, do I sell it, to, and be absorbed by another agency or become an ESOP and sell it to the employees, that, and let it live beyond me? Like I said, it was, I started it for it to be bigger than me and to last longer than me. I hope that, um, gets played out. But I’m in my fifties. I don’t know if I want to work till I’m 70. If I can hit the five X goals, and then, do another double in that in 10 years, that would be fantastic. Then we can see where we go. Does it, go back to the employees or is there someone out there that liked to buy it?
Russel:
I’m sure you will get there. All the more confident that, and we’ll have you on the podcast a few years from now to see how it all played out. The last big question is, are entrepreneurs born or are they made?
Jennifer:
Oh, that’s a good question. I’m going to say it’s a little bit of both, cause I was not born with the mindset of an entrepreneur. I think I was born with the mindset of aggressive work ethic and, I would say a dreamer, of able to think big. But like I said, I always thought it would be thinking big inside of somebody else’s brand. I think you can learn entrepreneurship, but you’ve just got to recognize who you are as a person and what’s your own end game. Why are you in it? Is it just for money? Well, that ain’t worth it. It’s too hard to do it just for money. If it’s for freedom, you might want to look at solopreneurship or just being a, independent contractor gig where you’re not taking a lot of risk. A lot of, that responsibility of others. That’s the difference of like entrepreneurship, solopreneurship or a founder of something. Are you taking truly a risk buying property, taking on employees, owning and being responsible for other people? That is hard work and whether that is you feel that, that drive that or that accomplishment because it’s yours, you own it, you did it, but you can also accomplish that by, by coming in and having that spirit inside of somebody else’s organization and lifting somebody else up. I think people can find their path in multiple ways. It doesn’t have to be, I got to own everything.
Russel:
It just speaks to so much success lies in finding your why. The what is only so much as important as the why, and in terms of how you can be successful. We don’t always need to go down this entrepreneurial path if it doesn’t fit. Very great insight there. If people want to know more about Bright, where can they go?
Jennifer:
They can go to Brightcomarketers. Com, our website, or you can find me on LinkedIn. I’m, Jennifer John Sutton and, all our links are there. You can look us up or you, if you can follow me on Twitter, I’m very active out there doing tips and tricks on different, different stuff within the marketing, branding, and advertising, world. But, and I’m JJMediaMaven.
Russel:
I love it. You said Twitter. We’re not bowing down to this idea of X.
Jennifer:
I can’t say X yet.
Russel:
It’s going to be, yeah, no, it’s going to, we’re going to win this battle. It’s Twitter. Thank you so much for being on the show today, Jennifer. Thank you being so open and honest about the good parts and the not so easy parts of your journey and what you’ve gone through to get to where you’re at today. It was an absolute pleasure getting to hear more about your story. I’m sure the listeners at home appreciate it as well.
Jennifer:
I appreciate you having me on, anytime.
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.
Jennifer:
One of our clients, I had to negotiate. They’re in concrete. Their name is, has sack in it. So we had, one of the media programs, we did a national with, I think like, NFL program where I had to negotiate, I think like 12 different contracts with different NFL teams. Having fun to negotiate that, but we got to meet, team owners, players, with all that. Michael Strahan had just left and he was, before he got into the, the broadcast game, but that was the path that he wanted to go into. We were looking at him being our spokesperson through like a media series of, like a vlog. A video series that we could, that we could launch on, through a, like a cable network. He had just, like I said, just retired from the game and we went up and met him. He signed off like just the nicest, the nicest person. The reason he had an affinity for the client because it was home improvement and he was renovating a bunch of stuff. That’s a fun, experience of, he took us all out through, it was like me and a, a bunch of marketing nerds and took us to all the nightlife of New York. We were up until like five, six in the morning and he was just in his circle. His circle for, they just couldn’t have been nicer. We were obviously not in, the, the celebrity kinda look and feel. We stuck out like sore thumbs. We were in business suits, going to like these bars. We were so fish outta water. But he was so pleasant. I talked to that, the CEO of that company, she’s now retired and she said, she was like, I tried, cause he then sent her a follow up of like signed jerseys, um, that he had framed. She was like, it is like my prized possession. I just love it. She was like, she goes, I still have it. It’s hung up in my house. That’s kind of a fun, fun little story.
