We recently connected with Jake Tlapek and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Jake thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. What’s been one of the most interesting investments you’ve made – and did you win or lose? (Note, these responses are only intended as entertainment and shouldn’t be construed as investment advice)

About 2 years ago I was approached by a friend who was running a conference for small business owners. A few days before he had his marketing presenter back out of the conference and he needed a marketing based talk. The previous presenter was planning to talk about the importance of tiktok and my friend asked me if I would be willing to speak on the topic myself.

Even though I owned a marketing agency I knew relatively nothing about tiktok at the time. But never one to shy away from a challenge I said I would accept. I had about a month to prepare.

Rather than prepare a presentation based off of other people’s data and anecdotal experience I decided to give myself a challenge. I was going to invest in learning it by using it.

For the next 30 days I was going to create two tiktok videos every single day. I was going to scroll the platform for a minimum of 45 minutes a day. I was going to leave at least five comments a day. And I was going to explore all the available features within the program. In addition I did research on the current statistics around the program and prep the generic slideshow as well.

Over the next 30 days I learned a lot about the tiktok environment, both as a user and as a creator. I was able to generate 400 followers in that time period, which I thought was pretty good.

I gave the presentation at the conference to much interest and success. I didn’t realize that this small investment in creating a good presentation for people would turn into the best investment I’ve made in my business.

You see I’d built up a rhythm in my day. A rhythm that felt off if I wasn’t doing something creative on tiktok. So I said I’m going to do 30 more days.

After four more days I had a video go viral. That viral video took me to 10,000 followers but more interestingly I started to receive inquiries to work with my marketing agency.

You see I chose to talk about what I knew which was marketing thought leadership. I’ve been running an agency for many years and I had things to say about running an agency and how to find marketing success. By sharing that knowledge and information on tiktok I was starting to get people interested in leveraging my agency.

The agency space is very difficult. There’s a lot of competition and many of the common marketing Avenues are dominated by large agencies so finding a steady stream of opportunities is pretty rare. Most of the time small agencies win by going to local networking or referral events.

Two years and hundreds of videos later, my agency is crossing the seven figure mark, with no signs of slowing down. That tiktok account is now grown to 70,000 followers, and is generating over 10 leads a week for my business.

It’s increased the livelihood of both my family and my employees, as well as enriched all of our customers lives and businesses.

All this because I was challenged to give a talk about something I knew nothing about and rather than phone it in I went the extra mile and invested in actually learning something.

Jake, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I’m Jake the wizard of marketing and I run a marketing agency called wizard marketing for the past 5 years. We are a search engine marketing firm focusing on creating websites that can be discovered and convert.

We’ve helped dozens of businesses grow their brands to 6,7, and eight figures.

I believe that we’re set apart as an agency because we don’t concern ourselves with vanity metrics. Anyone can get likes, Hearts, shares, views, and clicks. We focus on Revenue as our core metric. If the needle doesn’t move was there really value?

And we do this through a concept called brand positioning. By creating a more defined and thorough brand identity, we not only create cohesion in every activity we do in the marketing and sales space, but we create resonance with the marketplace allowing consumers to enter a valuable, lifestyle orbit around our brands, encouraging them to land and engage whenever they’re ready.

Have you ever had to pivot?

When I first launched wizard marketing we had two names. Wizard marketing was my core business entity but we were advertising ourselves under the name landscape web Pros.

We had chosen to focus on the niche of landscapers for our marketing agency. One of our earliest clients was in that space and we had great success and we felt that we could repeat that over and over again.

While our offerings were appropriately priced and our deliverables were excellent, many of the types of clients we dealt with were not in the right headspace to appreciate great marketing.

See they felt that it was an unnecessary expense for most businesses and that if we weren’t constantly increasing the output of the marketing that we weren’t doing our job.

This resulted in a high churn rate and an unstable cash flow for the business.

We did try doing some Education and Training around the expectations of marketing within the Landscaping space and that had some positive improvements for our churn rate. However it wasn’t enough to stabilize the business.

We were forced to Pivot out to be in a more generalist marketing agency. At the time this felt like a massive failure, but in retrospect it was very positive for the agency, both in our growth of marketing wisdom and in our revenues stability.

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

One thing that I encourage businesses on is to separate their marketing into two parts: business brand and personal brand. I have a few reasons for this.

I think it’s important to understand why a business exists. This is the impetus for the business brand. When you understand why a business exists in the first place it clarifies all of the marketing and sales messaging and creates a more impactful resonance with the marketplace. It also allows everyone in the company to feel like they have a positive impact when they’re moving towards the clearly defined goals of the business.

However I do like to see Founders within companies create their own personal brand. When a Founder creates a personal brand there are two benefits to that founder: 1) the founder can create a personalized, humanized connection to the marketplace. This connection is much more powerful than the connection people can possibly have with a brand. It allows that founder to have true influence into the marketplace and can leverage that influence into the Brand’s Revenue stream. 2) it creates an asset that can never be taken from the founder. When a Founder wants to exit a business the business is going to take everything that you’ve built away from the founder. However when you invest in a personal brand and you exit a business, they can’t take that audience and that awareness away from you. You can still happily send them to the business you’ve exited as a part of the lifestyle experience you’ve curated around your personal brand. However you can also take that influence onto your next project whatever it might be. This way you’re building lasting value in yourself that you can leverage into any project you ever touch.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://thewizard.marketing
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thewizardmarketing/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/The-Wizard-Marketing-113731970068990
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacob-tlapek-10b55962/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/JakeTtheWizard
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC26G_o-cTFCcPo-CyGf_3YA
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@thewizardmarketing