Company: Huemor
Owners: Jeff Gapinski
Year Started: 2011
Employees: 51 – 100
“An Agency Story” podcast is your window into the trials and triumphs of marketing agency owners worldwide. Hosted by Russel Dubree, a seasoned agency owner turned business coach, this series is a treasure trove of insights for aspiring and established entrepreneurs alike. Episode “Surge” is no exception, showcasing Jeff Gapinski, the founder of Huemor, a dynamic digital marketing agency.
In this engaging episode, Jeff Gapinski unravels the narrative of Huemor’s inception and evolution. Starting as a college side hustle, Huemor emerged through the murky waters of entrepreneurship to become a beacon of innovation in web development. Jeff shares profound insights on specialization and the importance of playing to your strengths, lessons that he learned while steering his company towards its ambitious goal: to be the number one agency both to work with and work for.
Listeners will find a goldmine of wisdom in Jeff’s journey, from humorous anecdotes about his early hustles with trading cards to powerful strategies in navigating business challenges like the precarious reliance on a single client and the pivot during the COVID-19 pandemic. One highlight is his story about the company’s name, “Huemor,” a clever nod to vibrancy and levity, which distinguishes it in a sea of conventional names.
Jeff’s reflections on growth, the realignment of his company, and his aspirations provide a roadmap for others in the industry. His candid sharing of the pressures and pleasures of managing a growing team offers a realistic picture of entrepreneurial growth.
To those intrigued by the blend of creativity, entrepreneurship, and the art of digital influence, “Surge” is a must-listen episode. As Jeff and Huemor continue to redefine what it means to be a leading digital agency, listeners are left contemplating what it truly takes to build and evolve a successful agency in today’s competitive landscape.
Tune in to “An Agency Story,” and let episode “Surge” inspire your next big move in the digital world.
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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 Storyt podcast. I’m your host Russel. On this episode, we have Jeff Gapinski the founder and president of Huemor, a digital marketing company based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Jeff shares his journey of starting his business while still in college. Initially freelancing for some extra dollars as the business grew, he realized the importance of focusing on his core expertise, web development. This allowed him to set on a path towards success. Jeff’s ambitious goal gets them out of bed each and every day as he aspires to become the number one agency to work with and work for. Enjoy the story. Welcome to the show today, everyone. I have Jeff Gapinski with Huemor with us today. Thank you so much for being on the show today, Jeff.
Jeff:
Thank you so much for having me.
Russel:
If you don’t mind, start us off. What does Huemor do and who do you do it for?
Jeff:
Huemor is a digital agency specialized in building memorable website experiences for mid market companies both in the B2B and B2C sector.
Russel:
Beautiful. I love hearing a good naming story. How did you come up with the name?
Jeff:
We started the business coming up on 13 years ago. Started the business in New York on Long Island for any listeners who are maybe familiar with that area. There were a lot of companies specifically on Long Island because Long Island is the suburbs of the metro New York area and none of them were cool. No offense to any Long Island agencies listening, I apologize, but it was things like blah, blah, blah, technologies or blah, blah, blah, limited or blah, blah, blah, IT solutions. We wanted a name that was distinctly different than all the other companies that were in our area that we were competing with at the time, something that was more of a nod to maybe some of the more memorable NYC Manhattan agencies that are out there. Being a couple of young guys, myself and my business partner at the time weren’t taking ourselves so seriously. We’re building websites, we’re not saving lives. We wanted something that had a little bit of levity to it. It’s also a nod to color because we were trying to bring more vibrance and things like that to the websites that we designed. That’s the story behind the name. It stuck, it seems to be pretty catchy and memorable for many people.
Russel:
And for those, obviously they can’t see the name while we’re talking about it, but it is H U E M O R, as you said, your reference to color. Similar, we had a name that was hard to spell. Do you find that to ever be troublesome, being a different spelling of the word humor?
Jeff:
Oh yeah we get people all the time that misspell our name or mispronounce it or what have you. One of the things that we did to try to combat that over time is purchase a lot of alternate domains and things like that to try to send people to the right place. Still trying to get Huemor, spelled correctly, dot com, but it’s a little bit out of my budget right now.
Russel:
We did the same thing. Our company was called LifeBlue and I think we bought L I F E B L E W and all the different ways you could spell blue. I’m not sure too many people would have trouble with that one, but a smart approach. Maybe someday you can buy the dot com domain. I want to hear more about the agency, but before we do that, let’s go back. Did young Jeff think he was going to be an entrepreneur or what was he wanting to do when he grew up?
Jeff:
Young Jeff and current Jeff is always on the more creative side. Actually, when I went to university, I wanted to be an art teacher. I was always an individual that was drawing or making things. That was my passion, figuring out ways to have a creative outlet. I also was always an individual who was a little bit of a hustler. A lot of hobbies, there’s this like popular card game that I played when I was younger. One of the things I figured out was, when they’d sell you a pack of those cards, there was a different weight between a pack that had a holographic card in it and a not holographic card in it. So I had my mom’s food scale and I would weigh out these packs and I would have two separate little stacks of the cards. Then I would go to a card shop for a tournament or something like that and I’d be in the back dealing out like, hey, this is a guaranteed pack of holographic cards. This is not double charging for the holographic packs, charging a discount on the non holographic packs. I think it’s always been in me to an extent, but I don’t think I ever thought that I would grow Huemor to the size it is today. I always did want to do something on my own and have it be in a creative space, cause that’s what my passion is.
Russel:
It sounds like you have grown into a pretty sizable company, for the folks at home. How many team members do you have? What does Huemor look like today?
Jeff:
We’re shy of 75 people on our team right now. I think we hired our 73rd, 74th person.
Russel:
Wow. That is a lot to manage. Want to certainly hear more about that journey. How did you get to actually getting to start the agency? What led up to that?
Jeff:
It definitely was not a calculated and meticulous plan to start the agency. I think like a lot of agency owners, it’s more of maybe an accidental start. I was in college, I was freelancing as a way to get some additional cash, pay for my books, maybe pay for some beers and I continued that even to my post grad. I was lucky enough to get a full time job as a graphic designer at the tail end of the last depression that we were dealing with or recession, whatever we want to call it. it was an entry level job. There was not a lot that I was doing on a daily basis there. I’d finished my work in maybe three, four hours and find myself with idle time. I continued my freelancing thing. I worked with a company that was a plastics manufacturing company. They did a lot of actual display work and things like that for businesses in a retail setting. One of the businesses that they were working with was a wholesale cosmetics distributor local to Long Island. That individual introduced me into that cosmetics company. Basically, they wanted to break into retail, direct to consumer. They wanted to launch their first e commerce site. This is back when it wasn’t as easy to launch an e-commerce site. You actually had to have some technical chops to get that first store out there. I’d never built an e-commerce site at that point in time, but I was a pretty decent web developer and was able to navigate my way around that. The project with that client went well and they saw the potential in more than this website, other things that could be done. Before I knew it, I started to become their entire marketing department. This is a company that was a well established company. They’d been around for 50 years. They were investing a lot in me and I was very fortunate for that, but it was obviously like way beyond my capabilities to handle as an individual. That’s when I started to recruit. Mainly friends and referrals that I had to join me predominantly facilitate this one account. My first recruit, one of my very best friends, we met in college. We’ve been friends for over 15 years. He’s my business partner today. He was the first person I called, look, you do a great job with this print design stuff. My passion is more on the digital side. They have all of this collateral and things that they want to make. Would you want to join me and work on this with me?
Russel:
Were you still in your full time day job at this point? When did you finally decide, hey, this is looking pretty good. I’m going to stop that and focus specifically on my own thing?
Jeff:
I was 22 years old at the time and very ambitious, so I was working my full time job and then probably an additional 40 to 50 hours a week on the agency work. I didn’t sleep much, I didn’t do much for probably six months before I decided, you know what? I’m making way more money doing this side hustle than I am actually working this full time job. I actually enjoy the work a whole lot more. It was something silly, like three months of runway. I was like, oh, that’s enough. Let’s do it. We made the leap. I quit my job. Friend and business partner quit his job. Set forth with this one account, which, in hindsight, mistake, but at the time it was what allowed us to get our start.
Russel:
Whatever gives you that initial spark. You mentioned the word mistake. Was there some school of hard knocks that came later from jumping off with one single large client?
Jeff:
Absolutely. We actually got about a year in the business. This is beyond the first, let’s say the first six months was like pre Huemor because we weren’t officially operating under that name at that time. Late 2011, we formed Huemor as the entity, and for the majority of 2012 things were going smoothly. As we got to, I believe the start of the fourth quarter of 2012, I got a pretty unsettling call from the client. They basically over invested in production because they had this deal. I’m not going to name names of the big box store, but we’ll say a big box store was going to be selling their product on shelves. They ramped up production in order to sell their product direct on shelves, and then the deal got heist. They were stuck holding the bag of millions of units of product that they had created and didn’t have cash. We had been working with them at that point for about a year and a half. On good faith said, okay, that’s all right. We’ll keep doing what we need to do with your website. This’ll help you offload some of these extra units that you have. We’ll put your billings on pause for a month. One month turned into two, two months turned into three. Three months turned into four. Before we knew it, we were starting to get into a pretty dicey place cash flow wise, because they were the majority of our billings, probably 80 to 90 percent at that point. We ended up terminating our relationship with them based on this, never went into litigation or anything like that. We didn’t want the headache of it all. It was our first real knock on the chin of like, all right, you got to have a more diversified client group. You need to have a better plan for how you’re acquiring new customers and all that. Learned it early on and was lucky enough to be young enough and resilient enough to deal with it.
Russel:
How did you pull out of that? Losing that much of a revenue, basically as a business killer, but obviously you’re sitting here today. What was the couple of key things that you did to come out of that?
Jeff:
I did not grow up with a lot of money as an individual. I’m not going to say I was poor, but wasn’t a lot of extra to go around. Early on in life, I learned the value of savings and being responsible with my money and all of that. A lot of what we earned early on with the business was saved and we didn’t have much overhead. It was me, my business partner, one other young woman who we had gone to school with that was working with us full time but not getting paid nearly what she was worth, and I think one more freelancer. Our overhead was very limited for a long time. We didn’t have an office. We were working out of my basement. There was a lot of profit that was getting stored away. I think the other thing that kind of saved us was saying no and exiting that contract with that client early enough that we didn’t get into a dangerous spot with what reserves we had on hand. I ended up still having to get rid of people that were a part of the team and then cut back to just mike and myself. At that point, we still had a good amount of money, maybe six to nine months saved up for ourselves. That was enough for us to scrape together a plan to acquire new customers, which we were lucky enough to do. It changed our outlook on how we were operating.
Russel:
What year was this, for context?
Jeff:
End of 2012, I want to say maybe November, December of that year is when we broke things off with that client and then basically took a pause and reset things going into 2013.
Russel:
Like most business stories, I have to know that growth not a straight linear line up into the north. I assume at some point in there, there was a wake up call moment where things started to take fire and get moving. Is there something specific you can look back to and say, this is when this occurred?
Jeff:
After that moment, we ended up experiencing very slow but steady growth as a company. Year over year, we were not sophisticated enough to set actual growth goals at that stage, but we were steadily growing as a company. In 2019, we started to gain steam and we started to scale up our team. We invested in a larger office. We were probably at around 20 or 25 people at that time. Put together a formal growth plan, the whole thing, cause at that point we had started to bring on external advisors and people that were more sophisticated business operators than ourselves to help us plan out that growth. Then like every other business we got hit in the mouth again with COVID in early 2020. I had this beautiful, freshly renovated office that nobody was able to be in. We ended up having to reduce staff during that period of time. We were fortunate to have people that were willing to also take us like a temporary reduction in pay so that we could continue to operate. Out of that we continued to invest in our marketing and we continued to invest in our plan there. That started to create a lot of demand in the second half of the year as companies started to realize that, you know what, I can’t go to these expos or I can’t do these things in person. My digital presence is poor, I need to invest there. We were there when people were ready to invest. It also altered my perspective of who can be on our team. At that point, we were operating in Pittsburgh, our entire team, with the exception of our some of our employees who were still in New York, we’re all in the greater Pittsburgh area. What we started to do in the covid era was actually expand to a global workforce, where we’re starting to bring on people from different countries and different backgrounds that frankly, in many ways, were outperforming the average level of talent that we were seeing in the states and also allowed us to do that scaling affordably. When previous times we maybe would have struggled to hire on engineers or something like that at what the market rate was. Also during that whole period of time, the US talent pool was a whole mess. That expansion to a global workforce I think is what transformed the business and what allowed us to like confidently scale as the demand came in.
Russel:
Obviously, there’s these thresholds you hit when managing a team of a certain size. Requires you to rethink or redo how you’re structured or maybe how you go about things. Has that happened to you? Getting up to 75, which is quite a feat, how many times you had to rethink your whole model in that process?
Jeff:
There’s definitely been a lot of iterations of how we structure the company, even within the last three years, and we’re continuing to go through those evolutions of how we structure and streamline the company. Who we were at 25 people and then who we were at 40 people, very different company. Now going from 60 to nearly 75, it’s a different company. We’ve had to expand into a formal leadership team, as well as a middle management tier to keep everybody running efficiently and that was very different from where we were when we were 25 people. I was still able to have, to a degree, a hands on approach with a lot of our team members, as well as a lot of our clients. As we’ve gotten larger, I can’t do it all. I can’t be involved with all of our different client projects. I can’t be in touch with all of our employees on a daily basis. It’s important that you hire the right people in the right seats to own parts of that process. That’s been the biggest evolution for us.
Russel:
What is your favorite thing and what is your least favorite thing about where you’re at today?
Jeff:
I would say my favorite thing about having a company this size is our ability to provide our team with what I consider best in class perks and benefits. These are things that we couldn’t afford when we were a smaller company, but we can afford now. Being able to move to a four day work week, being able to cover a hundred percent healthcare premiums, 401k match, paid holidays, paid time off, education reimbursements, whole bunch of things that we’re able to give our employees that I’m very proud we’re able to give. I think the least favorite thing about being at a company this size is maybe the shift away from some of the work that inspired me to start the company in the first place. That’s something that I’m actively trying to figure out within our organization now is, how I can maybe get out of spreadsheets and get more into having some influence over creative work. Cause that is who I am and what I enjoy doing. I don’t get to do as much of that these days, but we’re working on a plan to allow me to do more and more of that within the organization. I do have my moments where I get to exercise that with our own brand, but it’s definitely not as often or as much as I’d like to.
Russel:
I talk to a lot of folks and if you ask them the question of, hey, would you want a team that’s 50, 75, a hundred size team? And they’re like, no. I want a handful of people maybe 10 top 10’s, my max. I can’t tell if that is because it seems so unknown, so scary, so fraught with difficulty that there’s no amount of money seems like that’s going to be worth it, but that maybe more once you get there, oh, 10 is not so bad. And then 20 is not so bad, then you figure all this stuff out. If you go back to younger Jeff, did you have some trepidations about having a larger company or was it always the goal and the dream?
Jeff:
My wife actually reminded me of this recently. She was like, you said you never wanted to have a company more than 40 to 50 people. When we started out, that was my footprint, cause in my mind that would make us capable enough that we can work with some serious brands, but not large enough where I felt like I would be out of touch with what was like, what was happening. To my previous point, at this scale I am much less involved with our actual work that we are producing and much more involved with growing, organizing and scaling the team. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with running a smaller agency or a larger agency. I think it depends on what your goals are and what type of business you’re trying to build. If you were running a smaller agency, most cases it’s going to be a lifestyle driven business where you’re still very much involved in the work and the delivery of it and you enjoy doing that. Running that agency affords you a lot of flexibility that you might not get with a corporate job elsewhere. I think that’s amazing. I know agency owners personally who run those types of businesses and do very well for themselves. When you get into the realm of a larger agency I think the difference is that you are focused a bit more on profitability and what the actual financial output is of the business. You have to be more focused on building a business that can operate without you. In many cases, your end goal is some sort of an exit or acquisition or something to sweeten the deal. I think those are the differences. It comes down to what you’re willing to work with. I’ve had tons of headaches as a small agency. I’ve had tons of headaches as a larger agency. The main difference is as a larger agency with headaches, there’s more things that need to be considered, but you can have pretty terrible problems either way. We lost 90 percent of our revenue as a four or five person shop versus, we may have staffing challenges or what have you at this stage. But you’ll run into problems no matter what.
Russel:
Yeah, I talk about that a lot of, growth is nothing more than finding new problems you have to solve, but you never reach this place of no problems. Like kids. You have your first born recently, I understand. Congratulations on being relatively new to the parent community. Problems of a two year old, they’re not big, but they’re a lot in frequent versus problems with a 16 year old. I have teenagers that they run into things with their cars and the cops call you for when they’re speeding and all kinds of things like that. They have big problems, less frequent. Sometimes seems like business is the same way. Let’s talk about the future. What are you trying to achieve? What’s the big goal? You’re going to get to a thousand folks someday? What are you thinking?
Jeff:
Our vision is to be the number one web design agency to work with and work for. All the decisions that we’re making surround that from the quality of the work that we deliver to the quality of experience that our employees can experience. That’s what we’re focused on. I don’t necessarily have a goal of size or scale from here. I think the goal is to have symmetry between sales and delivery, because I think that’s a struggle for all agencies. With the goal of being the number one agency to work for, you can’t necessarily do the thing that a lot of agencies do where they run hot or they run over capacity forever. It creates a churn and burn situation for employees. We’re striving towards figuring out how can we be profitable, but then how can we also be equitable to our team? It’s not easy and we’ve not quite figured it out yet, but it is an active focus of ours and I think we get closer to it every day.
Russel:
I’m sure we could probably do a whole episode on that journey in of itself. It sounds like you’ve already gone far down the road of being a great place to work, which is very near and dear to my heart as well. Congrats on your mindset and approach there. Last big question for you, Jeff, are entrepreneurs born or are they made?
Jeff:
That’s tough. I feel like entrepreneurs are born, but successful entrepreneurs are made. Is that a cop out of an answer?
Russel:
Not a cop out at all. I have had a couple people say that, but I actually, if I had to say one overarching statement that I think encapsulates it best, I think that’s it. If you don’t mind sharing a little more about your thoughts there?
Jeff:
Going back to what I said at the beginning of this call, I always had a little bit of entrepreneurial spirit, right? I was a kid trying to find angles and maybe make a little extra money. I had a lot of drive and I had the ambition to go out and do something on my own and I don’t think everybody has that innate desire to do that. I know many friends of mine who have gone off in the corporate world and excelled there and never have had ambitions or thoughts of going out and doing their own thing. That being said, there’s still a considerable amount of people who try to do their own thing and fail. It’s not uncommon for somebody to do that and then stop. I think the difference maker is learning from those failures. Using those failures is your biggest opportunities to improve and leveling up, making yourself better and keep moving forward. If somebody continues to do that, I think that’s what is the makeup of a successful entrepreneur, somebody who is willing to not only go out there and try something, but do it, fail, not be afraid of failing, and then try again. You do that enough times, I think you’ll eventually come out the other side successful.
Russel:
Amen to that. If people want to know more about Huemor, where can they go?
Jeff:
Our website is Huemor, H U E M O R dot R O C K S. Or you can follow me on LinkedIn. It’s my full name, Jeff Gapinski. I’m pretty active and always trying to share some thoughts on how people can make the most out of their websites.
Russel:
Love it. Absolutely fascinating conversation today, Jeff. Thank you so much for sharing all the highs and lows of your story, congrats on your success. Congrats on being a relatively new father. I look forward to seeing your success down the road.
Jeff:
Thank you so much for having me on, I 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.
Jeff:
We were operating in a very bootstrap fashion out of my parents basement, very stereotypical tech starter story. It’s what we had. Again, we were very young. We didn’t have a lot of capital going into this. That’s how we started things off. One of the companies that I had an opportunity to speak to that was a referral actually from the cosmetics company that mentioned earlier in our discussion today. Larger company in Midtown Manhattan, very prominent beauty company. I’m not going to name any names, but you can imagine who some of those people are. Talking to them, giving them our proposal, things are going great. Then the CEO of the company looks at me, pauses, puts his hands on the proposal that I had, flips it around, points it at me, and goes, while pointing at the price tag on the proposal, that seems like a bit much for a company run out of a house in Brentwood. What can you do for me on the price? That was the moment that I was like, oh shit, like we need to get an office. If I’m having discussions, these people are savvy enough to go look us up and try to figure out what’s going on. That was my first kind of humbling moment of, oh, maybe we do need to actually invest a little bit more in this business. We went out and got an office and started actually operating a little bit more like a proper business.
Russel:
Looking back on that, I remember some of those insecurities we had when we were first starting out, like age. We did the same thing, we started out at my business partner’s bedroom. But I look back and it’s, if I’d had been better about crafting, yeah, I’m running leaner and meaner than that company down the street. I don’t know if you’ve had those same thoughts of yeah, I didn’t need to worry about something like that versus, own it or craft a narrative that validates it versus the opposite.
Jeff:
I was definitely not savvy enough in the moment to think of a way to play that off. I think the climate of it today is completely different, right? Working from home is so commonplace. I don’t think anyone would even question it. But we’re talking like 2012, definitely was not common.
