We recently connected with John O’Hearn and have shared our conversation below.

John, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. One of the things we most admire about small businesses is their ability to diverge from the corporate/industry standard. Is there something that you or your brand do that differs from the industry standard? We’d love to hear about it as well as any stories you might have that illustrate how or why this difference matters.

I have spent my whole career waffling between running my own consultancy and building digital marketing divisions for larger agencies.

In my current consultancy, I am able to truly dig in and find solutions irregardless of scope, hours or an overly tight grip on “profitability”. The real reason I am able to do that is because I have cut almost all of the normal overhead expenses of an agency model to offer a truly consultative and hands on experience for my clients.

As an example, I have a client in the outdoor apparel space that has historically focused on B2B sales. We are currently trying to launch their products directly to consumers but we are having a hard time breaking into that very noisy space. I am currently scoped to help this effort through Meta ads. I was able to take additional time to look at data and determine that our sales are currently requiring more touches than brands that already have equity and awareness in the space. Because my margins are healthy and I am not a slave to my internal P&L, I am able to take extra time to ideate some solutions to that problem that are outside of the digital ads themselves. Collectively, we decided to pursue some really great brand collaborations wherein we can borrow some brand equity to sell our products. I was able to help with those specific partnership ideas but also what that campaign messaging could be, how that could come to life visually and what the user experience might look like.

John, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I honestly fell into marketing on accident. During the recession I was actually going back to school for finance in hopes of getting into mergers and acquisitions. I took a customer service position while I was studying and found out after the fact that the owner of the company had an eCommerce website as a side project. He gave me the reigns of that project and we were able to grow it exponentially through content marketing efforts on YouTube and organic SEO. I fell in love and the rest is history.

Currently I provide Fractional CMO services as well as tactical digital marketing execution. The services that make up the bulk of my business are Google Ads, Meta Ads, Klaviyo Email Automation, Organic SEO and programmatic advertising.

Being a Growth Marketer, I am brought in when companies have a proven concept and are ready to scale or they have hit a roadblock in their growth. I bring my decade-plus of experience to help solve problems creatively and grow.

I think I am most proud of the fact that I am very intentional about the clients and projects that I take on. I only work on projects that add to the marketplace and with people that are doing good things in the world.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

After my initial job growing an eCommerce website I was recruited to work for an electronics accessories company. Unfortunately, that company folded about 6 months into me working for them. I had moved my whole family across the country to work for that startup and had little to no prospects in my salary range as I had moved from San Diego, California to Charleston, South Carolina.

With my back to the wall I quickly spun up a simple website and went door to door soliciting small and medium sized business owners. It was incredibly difficult but I was able to replace my previous income, plus some, in a few months.

That first entrepreneurial endeavor was a slew of trial-by-error learning and burning the candle at both ends to make it work.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

Before I got into marketing I briefly held an outside sales position. I went through some pretty rigorous training and learned all the tricks to get from call to close efficiently. Fortunately, and unfortunately, I was exceedingly good at it. I sold a ton of stuff to folks that may or may not have needed those services. Nothing I ever did was dishonest but I definitely perfected the “hard sell”.

I learned that those techniques worked for short term sales but didn’t take into account long term relationships. I had to learn that the best approach to sales is truly a consultative one. Now I try to position myself as a knowledge resource on sales calls. If I identify an opportunity where I can be helpful to folks through my professional services, great! If not, that is also totally fine. My goal is to create real relationships and be as helpful to people as possible. The business seems to follow.

Contact Info:

• Website: ohearn.io
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnohearn1/