We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Alissa Jacques a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Alissa thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

My background is in education – I’ve taught pre-k, 4th, 5th, 8th, and college freshmen – and while I loved teaching, the profession is not the most sustainable in terms of work-life integration. Teaching during the pandemic accelerated my path to burnout and so in June of 2021, I decided not to return to teaching. I knew I wanted to leverage a different skillset, and, as a child of the Internet, had always had a fascination with social media marketing. Growing up I would spend hours on Youtube and Tumblr, and in college, I gravitated towards taking on extra work in social media management.

Given my background in education, I decided I would freelance in social media marketing within the education sector. This decision seemed like a natural fit for me, especially as I saw how the best ed-tech tools we used for students also had a large social media presence and solid marketing. But there were also tools that were making a real difference in how students approached their education but didn’t have the time, budget, or knowledge of how to show up on social media.

After a few months of pitching education clients, I realized that ed-tech fell into a larger bucket of purpose-driven businesses, and over a few months switched my pitches from just businesses making a difference in education, to businesses making a difference in the world.

Naturally, this also aligned with my interests as, growing up, my grandmother would always say to “leave places better than you found them,” and although she wasn’t thinking about the legacy I would leave (she always meant my room), it was a saying that stuck with me, and was an unconscious driving factor in why I chose the profession and the clients I worked in.

I officially launched Good Theory Agency in November 2021 and have been working since then to support businesses, brands, and entrepreneurs who actively make the world better. I believe the world needs more good businesses, and that businesses have both an opportunity and a responsibility to use their social platforms for advocacy.

While I started Good Theory based on my beliefs, my target market has been confirmed by consumer trends. 76% of consumers want to support businesses that have some social impact, and Gen Z specifically is the most likely demographic to support brands that are aligned with their values. We’re seeing a shift toward consumers supporting brands based on their values and their societal impact, which means purpose-driven businesses need to know how to show up on social and communicate their values to find their community.

Alissa, 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?

Our vision at Good Theory Agency is to be recognized as a leader in ethical and sustainable social media marketing, empowering and amplifying the voices of brands, businesses, and individuals who are making a positive impact on the world. To make this vision a reality, we currently offer three core services: one on one consulting, social media strategy, and social media management.

More so than amplifying the voices of purpose-driven brands and people, we advocate for sustainable social media practices. We prioritize transparency, collaboration, and engagement over vanity metrics and quick-fixes, and are vehemently anti-hustle culture. We believe our values as a whole really set us apart from other social media management agencies, including our approach to democratizing knowledge (can you tell I’m still an educator at heart?)

Our values:

– Head in the clouds, feet on the ground.

We’re dreamers. Visionaries. Risk takers. Changing the world means you have to be. We believe in “keeping our head in the clouds” where we dream up the loftiest ideas, while also “keeping out feet on the ground.” We have an ear to the communities we help and never get too caught up in theory, that we’re not prioritizing the lived experiences of the communities, founders, and businesses we’re helping.

– Ethical marketing is at the core of everything we do

Transparency, authenticity, and honesty are the name of the game. We don’t use false or misleading tactics, and call them out when we see other brands doing it (i.e. greenwashing).

– Sustainable social is the only way we play.

We’re committed to creating unique social media strategies for our clients that take into account their individual goals and capacity for showing up on social media.

We’re against hustle culture and any forms it might take, and believe in prioritizing mental well-being.

– Collaboration, first.

We don’t compare and believe social media shouldn’t make you feel bad about yourself or your journey. We use social media as a source of inspiration and will gladly collaborate with others who share our values.

– Experts, but not gate-keepers

Staying on top of social media marketing trends is a key pillar of why we’re good at what we do, but we’re not the gate-keepers of knowledge. Whenever possible, we explain our decisions and work to democratize social media knowledge and empower our audience.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

The biggest lesson I’ve had to unlearn is that mainstream productivity advice was slowly killing me, and was a major factor in what led to my burnout. I’m a first-generation college graduate, eldest daughter, and I was diagnosed with ADHD in February of 2020. All of these identities meant I had a warped few of productivity – that I had to be perfect, had to take on projects and problems that weren’t necessarily mine to take on, and that if I didn’t stick to a habit or a goal, I was a failure.

All this to say, my day-to-day life was both exhausting and anxiety-inducing as I worked to live up to an expectation of “being productive” that for reasons unique to me, were not sustainable and didn’t work with my brain.

When I started my journey into building Good Theory Agency, I knew I wanted to build a company in a way that went against conventional hustle culture wisdom (sleeping when you’re dead, prioritizing working over self-care, etc).

What I realize now is that I craved gentle productivity, or the idea that my physical, mental, and emotional health don’t have to take a backseat to my growth. In fact, by leaning into how I’m feeling, being compassionate with myself, and resting, I can show up as a better founder, leader, and partner for my clients. I’m more creative, more resilient, and generally more excited to show up on social media because I have boundaries and non-negotiables.

Speaking about building a business without burning out, and how we can incorporate more gentle productivity into our lives is a topic I’m passionate about because doing the opposite literally led me to burning our and depression. And that’s not a way to live a fulfilled life.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

Being open and honest about my journey, and share what I learned in real-time, has afforded me a highly engaged audience on TikTok. The first video I posted that went viral was a video of me sharing what I had (very recently) learned around rest and my enneagram type from the ninetypesco. I was just sharing to share, but that particular piece of content resonated with a pain point thousands of people have – getting enough rest.

Once I realized that was the solution my audience wanted, I continue to share content around prioritizing rest, working intuitively, and gentle productivity strategies.

If you’re just started to build your social media presence, I recommend sharing what you’re interested in and seeing what sticks, and practicing. Before landing on my current content pillars, I posted over a hundred tiktok videos of trying different things – topics and video formats – to get an idea of what I liked to create, what I wanted to be known for, and what resonated with my audience.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @alissajjacques / @goodtheoryagency
• Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/alissajjacques
• Other: tiktok.com/@alissajjacques