We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jess Rogers. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jess below.

Jess, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Looking back, what’s an important lesson you learned at a prior job?

Before I started my marketing company, I worked for someone else at a small marketing agency. It was my first job out of college, and it was something I just fell into. I was completely green and wasn’t sure that working in marketing was the right fit for me.

While I was pleasantly surprised to find that I loved the work, my clients, and my teammates, I really struggled with the leadership style of the owner. It became apparent that their credo was that underlings should fear for their jobs, and that ideology didn’t foster a safe space for learning, growing, or approaching issues with autonomy and critical thinking.

I decided that I would rather take the risk of working for myself than continue to work for someone who didn’t value the people who made their business a success — their employees and clients. Thus, Kismet was born!

I try to lead my team with transparency, understanding, and compassion. I want to give them the tools and the freedom to approach every situation in a way that will help them grow and become better leaders. I believe that making mistakes and learning from them is just as important as acing it every time. If I hadn’t worked at that previous agency, I never would have learned how to lead the way I do. Of course, we all have our bad days, and every day presents a new learning curve, but I’m thankful for the example that was set for me early in my career. Again, I believe that learning from mistakes —whether they’re yours or not —is just as valuable as celebrating a win.

I also want to emphasize that compatibility on leadership teams is crucial for running a successful business. Everyone should bring their unique strengths, but it’s essential to share the same priorities. I prioritize my team and clients above all else, and that hasn’t always been the case with other leaders.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Kismet is a tight-knit, full-service marketing agency based in Northeast Florida. We have team members and clients worldwide, and we thrive working with our diverse network of clients and partners.

We do not believe in just taking money from our clients. We make it our business to care about our clients’ successes as if they were our own. We do everything from web design and development to social media management, and everything in between.

While we decided early on at Kismet that we would not have a niche sector we provided services to, we have inadvertently created a niche that is all our own. We are the marketing agency people come to when they have lost faith in marketing agencies. Like with all industries, there is a darker side to marketing, and we have found that, unfortunately, some agencies do not fulfill their contracts when collecting their monthly fees. There are bad apples in every field, right? We often end up adopting clients who have been burned before, and we work with them to rebuild and restore trust in the power of marketing. I think that’s a really special part of what we do.

We like to say we’re your friends who run a marketing agency, and that’s something I’m most proud of. Everyone who works with my team loves them as people and as professionals. I feel so much love and pride for my team because they come to work every day and show nothing but respect and passion for their client work. We are a small team of six humans, but each is an absolute powerhouse in their respective specialty. It’s taken some time to complete the puzzle —and boy, has it been a bumpy ride at times— but most people on our team have been with Kismet since its inception four years ago. I could gush about the team for a million years!

What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?

I think our reputation within our market comes from the fact that we don’t gatekeep. If someone comes to us with questions about how we do things, we show them. We don’t conceal trade secrets from our clients to stay relevant and protect our bottom line. This might sound counterintuitive, but it’s really helped us build trust with our clients. We’re always transparent with our clients, which allows us deliver more efficiently because they’re honest with us in return.

Our main lead generation is our current book of clients. We have a high retention rate, with the majority of our clients staying with us for years, and these same clients refer us to anyone in their networks looking for marketing. I’m very thankful for this, and it’s a direct result of my team earning and maintaining trust with our clients while doing incredible work along the way.

Any advice for managing a team?

I always feel like I sound really woo-woo when I talk about this, but this is actually a question I get a lot. I put my team first, always. It’s important to me to know and understand the people I work with on a daily basis because I owe my success to them. Kismet wouldn’t exist without them, and I feel like founders and CEOs get all the credit. I want to rewrite that piece of the grind narrative: your team is everything.

I acknowledge that every single team member is different in the ways they need to be managed, receive feedback or constructive criticism, and how they synthesize information. I constantly remind myself that they all have their own needs and lives, and I respect that as best I can. I don’t manage my team with a one-size-fits-all ideology because that’s not productive to me.

I believe that employee satisfaction wanes under the ‘cog-in-a-wheel’ mentality, and it is my true nightmare to have anyone on my team feel undervalued. I want everyone on my team to receive the individual attention and gratitude that they deserve.

So, that would be my advice to anyone asking for it. I have always tried to lead my team interactions with kindness and understanding, even during tense or uncertain times. You can discipline in a way that allows for growth and learning without making one feel like a failure. This approach has never failed me, and makes going to work something I look forward to every day because my team isn’t afraid to be honest with me. As an anxious person, this helps me trust my team, and there is truly no price tag you can place on trust.

Contact Info:

• Website: kismetcreativeco.com
• Instagram: @kismetcreative.studio
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessicalindseyrogers/

Image Credits
Emily Mitchum