How to Start a Marketing Agency with a Full-Time Job

Jes Schroeder is an Australian marketer living in Medellín, Colombia. She works full-time, remotely, for Red Tomato, a promotional merchandise agency in Australia, and had just started her own marketing agency, Ideas Factory, when she joined the show. Gray MacKenzie hosted. He asked how she runs both at once, why the Colombian market changed what Ideas Factory sells, and how the conversation with her boss went.

The agency started in four free hours a day

Jes spent 15 years in marketing and sales in Australia before Red Tomato. The move to Colombia came first, and the job followed her there.

I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to work remotely on Red Tomato from Colombia. My husband’s Colombian, so that’s the reason why I’m here in Colombia. I did it all for love. So with the time difference working in Australia and Colombia, I start at 1pm in the afternoon, and then work until 9pm at night to be able to catch the first half of Australia’s time zone.

(Listen at 2:55)

That schedule left her mornings open.

I’m a bit of a workaholic, a bit of a passionate marketer and salesperson, and instead of doing coffee with my friends, I decided to start a marketing agency here in Colombia and tackle a different language and a different culture… I had four hours free in the morning, and I found three amazing people to join me. I got a designer, a salesperson, and a marketing professional to come into my team, and poof, now I have an agency.

(Listen at 3:26)

Promotional products didn’t work in Colombia

Her first plan was to copy the Red Tomato model and resell promotional merchandise. In Australia, that industry protects whoever brings the idea. Colombia doesn’t.

It’s all done on price, it’s all done on who can get it done quicker, and there’s no protection of I go to you with my idea, and then you work with me because I’m giving you that concept. That creative strategy doesn’t exist. So I was getting price shopped, and the quality was terrible, and I couldn’t produce the results that I was wanting to do.

(Listen at 5:15)

Every product had too many touches, she was losing her margin fixing other people’s mistakes, and as a blonde foreigner with “a funny accent” she got quoted prices 50 to 60 percent higher. She didn’t want to be “part of the bottom scrapers.” So over the two months before the episode she moved Ideas Factory to work she could control: websites, SEO, content in English and Spanish, and brand strategy, with clients now in Australia and the US as well.

Selling inbound to buyers who think about now

Gray asked what the hardest part of the switch had been. Jes said it was understanding Colombian culture and what clients there actually need.

The main difference that I’ve found so far is that their needs are about now, and they’re not hugely planning for the future. So, setting that seed, and the gorgeous thing about inbound marketing is that it’s so logical. It makes sense.

(Listen at 9:56)

Her case for a website:

They’re not going to call you until they have enough information. They go, ah, so I do need to have a website. Yeah, that’s the reason why you need to have a website. It’s not because everybody has one. It’s because you want to give enough information so that they can call you now.

(Listen at 10:31)

16-hour days, and telling her boss

Listeners ask the same question constantly: I have a job, I’m freelancing on the side, when do I let go? Gray put it to Jes.

Right now I work 16 hours a day. I work a lot, but it’s for the greater good. I don’t see that being sustainable for 20 years, no? But I do want to be able to make sure that whatever I do is quite open and clear.

(Listen at 14:07)

Open and clear meant telling her boss at Red Tomato, Justin, that she was building something of her own.

It took me a little while to actually kind of get the confidence to tell Justin that I was actually starting something new. I was actually really quite nervous about it, but his response was perfect. And now we work together on how can we both make both of our businesses the best and most successful. There’s no crossover with our client base either, especially now that I’m going more digital and… Red Tomato is completely strategic promotional products.

(Listen at 14:48)

Leaving on good terms is part of the plan

Jes expects to go full-time on Ideas Factory once it can support itself. But she’s a salesperson first, her Red Tomato clients “mean the world” to her, and she won’t walk out without handing over a strong replacement.

So for me, it will be a point where, hopefully, the Ideas Factory is sufficient, and that’s where I’ll go. But at no point would I ever want to leave Red Tomato on bad terms or not give them the best version of me to replace me.

(Listen at 13:29)

The relationship already runs both ways. Justin was a client of hers when she was a supplier, then a friend, then the boss who offered her the job. Her designer and digital specialist in Colombia now work on Red Tomato’s site too, which makes the two companies, in her words, “almost clients of each other.” Before wrapping, Gray asked about tools. Jes named two: commonsku, an operating system built for the promotional products industry that she still uses for the digital work, and Asana for sharing and splitting up tasks.