Company: Jolly Creative Agency
Owners: Sarah Jolly
Year Started: 2012
Employees: 1 – 10
On this episode of *An Agency Story*, Sarah Jolly, co-founder of Jolly Creative Agency, takes us on a fascinating journey of entrepreneurship, creativity, and family. From an early hustle selling her neighbors’ flowers back to them as a child to her stint as a musician, Sarah’s path to running a successful web design and digital marketing agency has been anything but conventional. Alongside her business partner and mother, Wren, Sarah has built Jolly Creative into a thriving family-run agency that specializes in WordPress websites and digital marketing for mid-sized businesses.
In this episode, Sarah shares insightful stories about the evolution of her agency, from its humble beginnings to the challenges of the early days, including convincing companies why having a website was essential—a battle they no longer have to fight in today’s digital-first world. She reflects on the pivotal moment when they decided to niche down and focus on doing one thing exceptionally well, allowing them to slowly expand while maintaining a commitment to quality and transparency. Sarah’s emphasis on creating a genuine, client-centered experience shines through as she describes their unique team dynamic and the importance of fostering trust, both internally and with clients.
Listeners will also enjoy Sarah’s humor and honesty, like her lighthearted tale of mishaps on Zoom calls, reminding us that even in a remote business, unexpected moments can bring a smile. She also dives into the intricacies of hiring and training in a fully remote agency, explaining why slow, intentional processes yield the best results for both the team and the client.
Sarah’s blend of creativity, determination, and family values makes this episode a must-listen for anyone interested in the world of digital marketing or looking for inspiration on building a meaningful business. Tune in to hear more about Jolly Creative’s journey and what’s next for this tight-knit, dynamic team.
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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, I have the pleasure of sitting down with Sarah Jolly of Jolly Creative Agency, a remote agency based out of California. Sarah takes us through her agency’s unique path from discovering a love for web design as a teenager, to growing a quality business focused on intentional processes and white glove service. You’ll hear about many of Sarah’s lessons learned her approach to maintaining authenticity and hiring slowly and the art of meaningful training, this conversation is filled with insights, entrepreneurial spirit, and some good laughs. Enjoy the story. Welcome to the show today, everyone. I have Sarah Jolly with Jolly Creative Agency with us here today. Thank you so much for being on the show today, Sarah.
Sarah:
Thanks, Russel, for having me. I’m really excited.
Russel:
I’m glad to have you. Let’s get right to it. Start us off. What does Jolly Creative Agency do and who do you do it for?
Sarah:
Jolly Creative Agency has been my partner and I’s baby for over a decade. We do website design and development for midsize businesses. We also do digital marketing, SEO, Google AdWords, all in that vein.
Russel:
All important things in today’s marketing world. There’s so many great things about your story and what you’ve done with your agency that I certainly want to get to. But before that, I want to know a lot more about young Sarah. I had imagined she didn’t come out into the world and say, I want to own a marketing agency someday. Tell us about young Sarah’s dreams, hopes, and aspirations.
Sarah:
Young Sarah did not want to, but I always was running something. Even when I was very young, I, the first thing I did was I went out into all my neighbor’s yards and I clipped all the flowers off their bushes and trees. I made little bouquets and then went around door to door and sold their bouquets back to them. I was always coming up with some hustle. That’s very, very young, Sarah. How I got into this business so basically I’ve always been a go getter and very curious. How this came about is I was actually working when I was about 18 years old for my parents business. They ran a communications business. I had an eye for design and so I designed a couple of little things for them and I started to learn Adobe Photoshop. From there, I started doing a few things on their website and there was a developer that we had a relationship with that did the development and he would constantly tell me, that can’t be done. That can’t be done. And I had that young mind frame of no is not an answer. This is back in the day. I went and got books on CSS and WordPress was just coming about, the first kind of generations of it genesis. I learned WordPress inside and out and I fell in love with it. Then I completely set that aside. I moved out to LA in my twenties. I, got very heavily involved in music, was a part of a band. I’m a very creative person, as you can tell. Pursued that young dream for a little bit. Then ultimately we had to make a band website. I did that and then that actually ended up taking off into a freelance situation where just some people I knew needed websites. They saw what I did for our band. The freelance, it was just one thing turned into another. I did about a year of freelance graphic design, building things like that. It got to a point where I was blessed enough, I had enough business going that I needed help and my business partner and my mom, we are a family run agency. Her name is Ren Jolly. I flew home. She was in Arizona at the time. I said, I think I need help. She was just leaving a position of management at a business. I said, do you want to really start something with me and really dive into this? This has just been a passion project of mine, but do you want to make it something more and we can combine your business skills with my design skills and create from there? Bless her, we’ve always had a super, super tight relationship. This is like a dream come true. She said yes. We’ve taken off from there and not looked back since. That’s our origin story.
Russel:
We got a florist turned musician turned back to web designer, creative designer. Fascinating. I love the florist business. Did you make good money? That’s what we need to know here.
Sarah:
You know what, I think I was like 10 years old at the time. I think I did. I think I made 25 bucks in a weekend and that was a lot back then.
Russel:
You’re a richest kid on the block.
Sarah:
I was very proud of myself. I never thought how silly it was till my brother, he said, Sarah, did you pick their flowers and then sell them back to them? I’m like, oh, yeah, I guess I did. I’m still into floral design. As you can tell I’m a very creative person Have a lot of passion for visual creative arts.
Russel:
It’s similar enough. I’m curious about musicians there. What kind of music are we talking about? What’s the band’s name? We gotta know more about this.
Sarah:
Oh my goodness, all right. We did like a country folk rock style. Those were our influences. All the people in the band came from different veins. One was a country guy, one was a rock and I’m was a folk writer and singer. Our band was Mercy West. You can get on SoundCloud and hear some of the stuff we did together.
Russel:
As I will be doing.
Sarah:
We had a good time. We toured around Santa Monica and LA. We all worked out there and those guys went on and are now professional musicians and have done a fantastic job. And I’m very, very proud of what they’ve accomplished.
Russel:
I love it. Another kind of just interesting point is I imagine a lot of folks, I’m sure it goes both ways. I think more so these days we have good relationships with our parents, but they’d be like, no way in hell am I starting an agency with my parents. That sounds horrible. But you said quite the opposite, that this was a wonderful experience. I’m curious because you said your parents or it was just your mom or your parents had a communications business, but then it sounds like she went into corporate world. Did any part of her entrepreneurial past shape your desire to be or not be in a business of your own.
Sarah:
That’s such a good question. I did grow up with my parents having a very entrepreneurial spirit. I watched them form two businesses and do so very successfully and then sell them. At the time, my mom was working for a pre established company. I think she hated it. She’s just, you know, wants the creativity and the freedom to build a business that not only makes sense for our customers, but also makes sense for the team members that are that business. Part of our coming together was building something that we hadn’t experienced before in, in our working lives. But yeah, I would definitely say having entrepreneurial parents who weren’t scared to start something new. They’re extremely supportive in go follow your dreams. That’s absolutely a huge, huge part of how we got here today.
Russel:
Love that for you and it’s clearly worked out well. You decided to make this a thing. You’re starting a business. The first year, were you all just emotion and adrenaline? Just tell us some of the ups and downs and feelings that you’re going through in that first year or so.
Sarah:
Oh gosh, the first year was so much learning. It was like, you don’t know what you don’t know. In some ways, that was very liberating because I took on things that it shouldn’t have worked out in so many ways for us. But that dreamer spirit took over. I look back now, I talk to Ren all the time and I go, knowing what we know now about this industry, about business, would we, do it on all again? We were young, hungry, ready to go. It’s been an up and down. It’s been a journey, we remember in the very beginning we used to walk into conference rooms with potential clients. We’re the only females in that room and we would have the person saying, I don’t even get it. I don’t even get it. I don’t even get why we would need a website. We’ve been successful in business for X amount of years so I just don’t get why this would be something we’d even invest in, let alone digital marketing. We’re brick and mortar. We’re old school. We still pick up phones here and we’d have to sit down and explain why the internet is an important source of knowledge and how that can support your business. We had conversations like that, of course, less and less as the business grew and as people’s understanding of technology and how things can help your business grew. But that really truly ended in 2020, we still had weird conversations like that from time to time. It wasn’t as prevalent, but come 2020 people got it.
Russel:
Took me down memory lane there. I forgot in the early days of how half the battle sometimes was making a case for having a website, which all the young folks are thinking like, you know, that’s just things they don’t have to deal with today in starting an agency or running a digital firm. Although on occasion, I’m sure we’re well past that.
Sarah:
What a blessing, right? We used to get a lot if it was being female, they said, well, I just don’t see the value. We’re like, all right. You wait.
Russel:
Don’t tell Sarah no. We’ve already learned that lesson in this story. Be careful, you might get something amazing from it. I think every agency goes through this, like, where you’re of all over the place in terms of what you’re offering and just to make it all work and then you start to realize that maybe this isn’t the best way forward. Do you remember that mindset shift, that turning point, if that was in fact a scenario that played out in your business?
Sarah:
Oh, 100%. I remember that like it was yesterday because it was a major turning point for our business. I’m sure a lot of agencies can relate to this, that your average consumer doesn’t understand that being great at building websites or creating a digital marketing plan is not the same as social media marketing or not the same as print ads or that design work doesn’t mean, like, digital and print design are two totally different, skill sets. Animation design, totally different skill sets. Yes, we got the very beginning. Of course, our clients. When they ask for something, they go, well, do you do social too? Do you do this too? And you’re just wanting to say yes, yes, yes. We made a really important decision early on, and I think it, it was just a blessing how it came about. I did have that background in WordPress. I saw that it was trending up in terms of being the number one CMS, which of course it has been for quite some time now when we first started, it wasn’t still on the trend up. We thought, you know what, let’s niche and let’s do it right now. We started with WordPress only websites. For a long time, we didn’t even do the digital marketing aspect of our business. We really just thought there’s so much about this industry that is, there are some amazing strategists, incredibly intelligent, who are really honest and doing the right thing. We wanted to align with that. When we didn’t have our full team built out to take on all those roles, I thought, well, this just doesn’t seem right. What some of our competition was doing where you can tell they’re just Googling the answers and then coming back to their clients and going, yeah, we do this. We do that. We thought, that doesn’t seem right. We started by really niching down. We started with websites first. WordPress websites. Then we built out an excellent care and maintenance plan for our clients. And then when we really nailed down that process then we broke out into the digital marketing strategy, SEO, and that, that type of work. We really built slowly and that’s something that we pride ourselves on because we feel really honest about the work that we do turn out.
Russel:
I love that intentional path. I think we get obfuscated a little bit, it seems like, in the agency space because we are multi-talented, we wouldn’t be where we’re at if we didn’t have a different level of skills. But there’s always the one thing that we’re best at and it’s what I hear in your story. Create one product really well before you create the next, because it’s hard enough to create one really well, much less, as you shared, several. I love that approach. Another thing that I can just tell in the way you talk about the work you do is how important quality is. Did that come naturally to you, especially in more of a service environment, right? Because now we’re trying to not just do quality, but we’re trying to make this profitable and kind of work on the money side. Just tell me about your quality journey and how that’s looked in your business.
Sarah:
I love that question, Russel. Thanks for saying that. First of all, I feel very humbled and seen by that comment and that’s, I think, a fantastic question. That’s built into my DNA, and it’s built into Ren’s DNA, and to be honest, every team member that we’ve hired, it’s built into their DNA as well. I wouldn’t say it’s something we’ve necessarily cultivated through the business, I would say the business is a reflection of that genuine, honestly, wanting to provide a service that’s truly of service to that business and it’s not a smoke and mirrors. Of course, we’re all growing and learning. It’s an industry to grow and learn. We just went, let’s just do us. Let’s be honest. Let’s say what we know. Let’s say what we don’t know. Let’s make great partnerships with other entrepreneurs, freelancers or agencies who do what we don’t do and who do it well. Cause we just hear stories of clients who were, we’ve been working on our website for two years and it’s a 15 page brochure site. Or I, I don’t have access to any of my files or my, passwords or everything’s being held hostage unless I work with this business. We just thought, no, and that’s the joy of owning your own business. You get to decide what you want it to be. We’d rather slow down and do what’s right. And do that in transparency. We always say with our clients, we’re transparent. What you see is exactly what you get. We don’t hold our clients in long term contracts. We don’t want to be pirates that are taking them on our ship and you can’t get off. We want to develop long term relationships with people that they want to work with. We want to be that to them and we want to work with you. This should be two way. We always say we want to work with our friends. That’s what we’ve worked to develop over, over time, and I think a lot of that does come down to quality control and also producing more than you promise, which is a big part of our business motto as well.
Russel:
In some ways, I sit here and listen, like, okay, that sounds so simple and fundamental, which I think oftentimes most success or good things come from simple and fundamental. But I also know in the world of business and even my own experience, there’s just so many things flying at you. It’s easy to lose sight sometimes of those things. Maybe speak to, and I’m just really curious how this was in your own journey making quality work. I think we could both agree that quality takes some level of time and especially to make that into a process and deliver that to a client because they had their own time and complexity into the thing. It sounds like that you started with quality first. How do we do the best possible work and refine that over time to maybe make sure that you’re making the dollars and cents work.
Sarah:
I see what you’re saying there. What we did and what we were able to do, because we chose to niche so early, we made excellent processes. After each project launched we’d have a team meeting and say what worked and what didn’t work. That could be maybe something worked great for us, but it didn’t work for the client. We might go, oh, the client loved doing 800 revisions, but that was an absolute nightmare for us. So at the end of every project and like people say, you’re not competing with the person next to you. You’re competing with yourself. That’s how we’ve handled that in our business is we just want to be better than our last project. It might be a small improvement that we make for our clients. It might be a small improvement that we make for our own internal process and then we document everything to a T for our team. Because as you know, not every project is the same. You might get an awesome, full redesign and it came with copywriting and a whole SEO analytics. But then your next project is a homepage and then your next project is adding in WooCommerce. We’ve allowed all of our team members autonomy with the client. What we mean by that is not just being yourself, which should just come baked in. We say, if there’s a moment where you need to make a decision for the client that feels like a gift. If you just know they would love that one little thing, if you just know that this’ll make it so much easier for them, even though it’s not a part of our process, you have our entire backing to just green light it. All of our team members that are client facing know that. We practice that on the project side. We practice that on the maintenance side. If our team says they’ve gone over their hours for the month. We’ve used up their budget, but they’re just our favorite client and we love them and they have this really big push that they’re doing. They don’t need to get approval from senior management. They can just green light it and go, we’re just going to give this. And all we say is just make sure you’re letting the client know, cause a lot of times people don’t know. So for any agency people who are still learning, agency owners always let your clients know what you’re doing for them. Because most people think the internet just happens. If you’re doing things that you’re adding into the sauce behind the scene, they’re going to have no clue you did that thing and just think that was super average.
Russel:
And just want you to keep doing it over and over again because clearly it must not have been a big effort if you’re not you’re not sharing it. I want to circle back and really highlight, you know I was taking a couple notes there and now we’re talking magical stuff that, again, you could gloss over and maybe not, think as deeply about it. The first thing and then I want to hear if this conjures up any thoughts in your mind, because I think this is a great stuff. One taking the time to learn about what you did, how you did it, what worked and what didn’t and doing that as close to real time as possible because we can’t sit down and build a process out from beginning to end and think it’s just going to work like magic. We have to be fluid and flexible to that, which speaks to I think what you’re leading to is no project is the same. A website is not a website. I recently heard a talk that every project is a snowflake and just this idea that we have to be malleable in terms of how we’re approaching this. And then the last thing that I heard there was just empowerment and how much of this is a process of if we can make the team feel empowered to make a certain level of decisions or even understand the boundaries of what decisions they can make, that they’re more bought in to the work. It’s just the power of intrinsic motivation is just going to be so high. That’s my summary of, I think all the magic it sounds like you’ve been able to capture in your business, but feel free to correct or add to that in any way.
Sarah:
Great summary. I wish I’d said it so succinctly. That’s completely it. And I liked how you said, you’re right, it’s so important to do those reviews as close to real time as possible. We actually prioritize those meetings before updating our portfolio on the project. We make those as fresh and they’re not always comfortable. It’s not always comfortable to look in the mirror, but we also make sure that on our team, we’re a family run business. We like to say the whole team is the family. We all just come together, have honesty. If you messed up, no one’s going to get in trouble. You just raise your hand and go, yep. I could be the one to do that better. I think that’s a really important part of, of, growing an agency, running an agency. What we do is, we always say what’s happening inside the agency will directly reflect what’s happening outside the agency. What our clients are getting in terms of service and quality and communication is a direct reflection of what’s happening internally in an agency. We like to keep our family really tight. We’re communicating, constantly, very open. Everyone’s just responsible for themselves. There’s no dictators on our team. Everyone’s really open. I think that’s a really important piece of the pie too. There’s so many things we could talk about hiring. We could talk about that for hours.
Russel:
Which even just speaks to how complicated the businesses this really gets into. I don’t know what the hardest business is in the world, but I would go to a business hardness competition and I would try to make a case for an agency because there is just so many dynamics that have to do with people as you’re alluding to.
Sarah:
You know what? Thanks for saying that. That’s something that Ren and I were laughing about recently. We were saying when we speak to other agency owners and maybe this is just built into the entrepreneurial DNA, everything’s great. Great, great, great! Best year I’ve ever had. Everything’s growing, oh, yeah. We just hired 10 new people. Oh, such a surplus, taking everyone on vacation. We go, really? There’s so many moving parts of our business and like we touched on in the beginning, our industry is constantly moving as well. As tech changes and it becomes more accessible, our jobs need to change. For all we know, AI is going to put development out of business in five to 10 years and the thing that we’ll get hired for is a hundred percent our creative genius. If you find that conference, Russel, I would like to go with it, do it with you.
Russel:
I don’t know if it exists. I might have to create it, but maybe at least I know I might have one attendee. All we need is one. To the point of our fascinating conversation, and because you brought it up, and I think it’s always a great topic, we can never get too good at hiring and finding great talent in this business. What are your thoughts, lessons learned or otherwise that you could share with us on that front?
Sarah:
When I say family, I truly mean it. But we have a process that is so low. We are slow to hire. Our entire agency is remote so we’re especially slow to hire because once they come on to our team, you’re not seeing them in the office every day. There’s an incredible level of trust and communication that has to go into that type of relationship for it to be successful. We have multiple rounds of interviews. Our questions are a little out of the box. We try to really get to understand who someone is. We’ve had times before where we’ve even sent personality quizzes to take. What’s your star sign? We’ve gotten incredibly creative in how to get to know someone, because I think it’s baked into your DNA to jump on a call and tighten up and then give a presentation. That’s not really who you are. Part of Jolly is that transparency, like I said, in, in the beginning. Who our team sees is exactly who our client sees of me. There’s not two different versions and I don’t think there should be. We hire very slow. We’ve been very blessed. Our team members, gosh, we have our very first developer that we started with is still with us. Our newest team member has been with us three, three years. No, two years. Our project manager has been with us now two years and I think that’s a testament to slowing down and making sure it’s a fit because we feel like with our clients, I said you want to work with your friends. You want to work with your friends at work too. Making sure this personality fits. We also do like to get into our maintenance team. You have to pass a test. It’s a surprising amount of people who say they know how to work in WordPress and then that meant that they worked on their parent site or something. We do a lot of, I guess I should say, like, screening. We try to make it fun, but also, we try to get to know who the person is. It makes a really big difference. If it’s not a fit, you have to have that hard conversation fast.
Russel:
The key, right? You said a couple of times there, is really get to know the person. One, it sounds like in what you’ve adopted of take the time. That just sometimes does take time. You can’t have a one or two step interview process of a 30, 45 minute interview each or something like that. You have to have these other things baked into it. Another thing that caught my attention was just getting creative about how you figure out who a person is. As you said, we have to find out who they are when they don’t quite know that they’re being on. There’s no one way to go about it, but just be creative about how you get to know a person. I actually talked to another podcast the other day and he said we should take everybody we want to hire playing golf because you find out so many things about a person in terms of how they play the game of golf. Whether they’re good or bad, doesn’t matter, but are they honest? Are they competitive? Are they supportive? All these different things. That’s the definition of being creative. I love to hear that’s worked out well in your own agency as well.
Sarah:
What a, yeah, a good way to say that. I love that. That’s fun. It’s almost like, I don’t want to say seen as taboo to spend too long on something that’s not profitable for you. Hiring is incredibly profitable, but the actual experience of it is not. It’s incredibly time consuming. I do feel like people feel the urge to move through it very quickly. But the other thing that we spend a lot of time on is training. Back to processes, we have a very documented process of training because we write down everything we do. We very slowly take that person through we’d have a two week hardcore training and then we do a month, which we let them fly but stay very available for questions and we check in often. Then we a three month period where we say we want to make sure that you love it here.
Russel:
It doesn’t end at the hire. I was going to wrap it up, but I want one more question because I’m very curious in just how you approached that. That two week training, you said intense. Give me a sense and listeners at home of what does that actually look like?
Sarah:
I love this question. I personally train every single person that we onboard so I’m the right person on the team to ask. Those first two weeks, one first day onboarding. You’re meeting everybody. There’s a, an introduction to all the systems that we use. Then also being really mindful that this person is on a zoom call. Again, we’re a remote agency. Just being mindful that it’s easy for, especially with a creative agency. Creatives tend to like, need a little bit of juice to keep going. Training can be incredibly boring, easy to disassociate from. Hey, now that we just went over, like we work in base camp, for example, why don’t you show me where this is? Okay. Now, why don’t you show me where that is? We do a lot of just taking time with another person rather than shoving all this information in their face and then going, here’s our database of where you can look this up. We literally go one by one for all the processes. We start from a large umbrella point of view. Here’s what we do. Here’s what we doing it for. Before we even get into all the nitty gritty of here’s what your day should look like when you clock in, this time to this time should look like this. Then we’re into client communication. Then we’re into team meetings. We even have all that scoped out, but before we get into any of that, we start with who is Jolly. Who is the company that you’re representing. How are you going to fit into that fabric? Connecting with what we’re doing here. We’re working digitally, It’s easy to feel disconnected from customers. Then we start with all of our systems and then next we go into their specific job. How to communicate with everyone again working remote. Then we do training, where they start in their day and I will literally just sit on with them and just help them because they have a million questions out the gate and I just don’t think that’s fair to be like good luck, let me know when you’re sinking and in the woods. People don’t want to feel inferior, like, I couldn’t figure it out on my own, the purpose is to support you, not to micromanage you. The purpose is to be available and then once you got it and you go, Sarah, I am feeling so good. We’re done. Then you become totally autonomous and you sit in your seat very confidently, and you just ask the appropriate team member if you have a question from there. It’s been an incredibly successful procedure. It’s very slow and very time consuming, but like I said, we don’t hire often so I would say it’s worth it.
Russel:
Wonderful. Amazing content you shared there. Maybe just at the end that it is a little painful. It’s probably further than maybe some folks natural instincts might want to go, but it is that extra, I don’t know, maybe 40. I don’t know what the percentage is, but in terms of how you’re taking it and walking someone all the way to actually be able to do this autonomously.
Sarah:
It’s all full circle too, like you said. When we started, how do you ensure that quality and precision to the clients? It starts with quality and precision with our team members. So if they don’t like that out the gate, if someone comes in and goes, ooh, oh, I didn’t I didn’t want to know all this. Then we go, then you’re not a right fit for Jolly because we have few team members who get in the details and do it really well. How your team is a reflection of how you’re going to be with your customers.
Russel:
Absolutely. Very great stuff. To keep this from being a two hour episode, as much as I would love it to be, they say a good episode is 30 minutes or something like that. We’ll adhere to those statistics or whatever, but, a couple more questions to round it out. What are you looking at the future for the business?
Sarah:
What we’re doing right now, as we mentioned before, we’ve been growing slowly into different niches. Something that we’re starting to grow right now is social. We’re exploring different marketing concepts in social, even for our own, which is, our own brand, which is something we’ve never really done before. We’re not officially giving those services to our clients yet, but that’s definitely a vein we’re growing into. We’re also, looking to break into perhaps a new industry. Ren, my partner and I just moved out to beautiful wine country in central California. We’re looking to put some wineries on our client list soon.
Russel:
I assume it’s not for the perks of working for a winery. Or maybe it is if you were being smart.
Sarah:
How could I say? Should they invite us to their winery? Who would say no? That’s just good business.
Russel:
We need weekly testing of the product to make sure that we really understand the brand and the vision. It’s just part of doing business. All right. I think I might know your answer to this question, but I will assume nothing. Last question for you. Are entrepreneurs born or are they made?
Sarah:
I’m going to say born. I think that anything you want to be good at in this life, you have to work at. In that way, yes, they’re made. I don’t know. It could be different for everyone, but for me, I just think I was born with that, that instinct to, to want to create something new, to want to be at the helm of something. I’ve had that thread throughout my whole life. I’m going to say, for me personally, born. That being said, anything that you’re born with has to be nurtured. Whatever you’re born with, make it something amazing for yourself.
Russel:
I am never going to shy away from a solid born answer. Perfectly put. If people want to know more about Jolly, where can they go?
Sarah:
Yes, please come visit us. We have a brand new redesigned website and portfolio that we just launched. Jollycreativeagency.com and that’s Jolly like, Ho Ho Ho. J O L L Y. Like I mentioned, um, we’re just branching into our, our social era, in the words of Taylor Swift. Come join us on Instagram
Russel:
All right. There it is. Easy enough to remember. Go find it folks. Amazing conversations here. Just so many fundamentals and aspects that you really can tell you just polished and honed within your business to be where you’re at today. I just really thankful and sincerely appreciate you taking the time to share that with us.
Sarah:
Thank you so much, Russel. I’m really humbled by you saying that, and I really appreciate the opportunity to talk to you and to your audience and to be talking to such an incredible mentor who’s been here, done it and graduated. Your history is quite incredible, so thanks for the opportunity.
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.
Sarah:
Being a remote agency and everything is on zoom, I have been on many a calls where someone hasn’t muted their screen. If anyone listening wants to have a laugh at this, I’ve been on many calls where people have tooted and then their screen blows up. It highlights in their screen. That’s so stupid. I don’t know why I’m thinking of that, but, I don’t know, Russel, that’s what popped into my head first. That always makes me laugh a little bit. If you need to make your meeting more lighthearted, turn your zoom screen out of gallery mode and into speaker mode. You might get some surprising, surprises from that call from people who are making a little wink, wink background noise. That’s all I’ll say on that.
Russel:
At least I can’t think of, but maybe I don’t sit on enough group meetings these days, but I don’t have that experience. I’m a little jealous that, uh, that I’ve not had some of this.
Sarah:
If this doesn’t make the cut, I won’t blame you. Oh goodness.
Russel:
No, it’s going to make the cut. It’s for sure going to make the cut.
