We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jamie Matusek. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jamie below.
Jamie , appreciate you joining us today. One of the toughest things about progressing in your career is that there are almost always unexpected problems that come up – problems that you often can’t read about in advance, can’t prepare for, etc. Have you had such and experience and if so, can you tell us the story of one of those unexpected problems you’ve encountered?
I think one of the biggest challenges that I have faced was stepping into the unknown world of taking the seat as CEO in 2023. Literally had the feeling of, “I’m the CEO. Now What?!”
There were so many learnings and I am actually in the process of writing a book to help others navigate the unknowns and the pressures of this seat. I took the position in also one of the most challenging markets for our industry. Sales dried up and what had worked for over 12 years was no longer working. It was like standing at the edge of a cliff and all of a sudden the firm foundation you thought you were standing on began to crumble. Businesses that had committed to signing backed out of deals due to the unknowns of a declining macroeconomic environment. I was faced with having to make massive changes quickly.
Decreased budgets, dried-up sales, layoffs for the first time in the history of our company, and pay decreases—all had to occur in the first few months of my leadership. It was heart-wrenching and hard. The ugly parts of leadership many keep hidden or are embarrassed to share. But I hold a different mindset. I hold a mindset that our challenges and the hard times are our opportunities to LEARN and then to SHARE so that others can be strengthened.
Many businesses when faced with obstacles don’t make it. We saw this as an opportunity to reinvent ourselves and go back to why we were driven to do what we do every day. What were our passions? How could we leverage our expertise to a specific industry to drive those passions forward? What needed to change? How could be position ourselves and our team members to be true experts.
The decision was to niche down and focus on an industry our founder had always been passionate about. An industry that works day in and day out to change the landscape of our communities. The Nonprofit sector.
I went to work crafting a completely new business strategy for our organization all with the intention to:
1) Provide our team with an opportunity to become true experts in an industry sector. Allowing them to grow and to prosper.
2) Provide our Nonprofit clients with the support they need to be known in their marketplaces, share their mission, grow their contributions, and meet their organizational goals.
3) Provide a way for our agency to flourish.
We re-positioned ourselves to focus mainly on nonprofits and a few for-profit organizations that prove they are giving back to the community. We had worked with nonprofits for years, volunteer every month as a team with a nonprofit, provide team members with personal time to volunteer, and many team members serve on nonprofit boards and committees. It was a perfect shift to truly focus here.
We also changed our service offerings and narrowed them to stop trying to be “all things to all clients.” We crafted five core solutions including: Marketing Communications Assessment, Marketing Partner Program, Ad Grant Edge Program, and Marketing Playbook Program. We’ve since taken our offerings a bit further to focus on leadership and strategic planning coaching and consulting, and are about to launch our first live training program where we teach nonprofit leaders how to craft their marketing communications strategies and plans.
This pivot and focus led to our rebirth and growth as an agency stepping into 2024.
What I learned through these challenging times is to keep steady and focused on the goals. I am personally a faith-filled person and my commitment to that foundation had to remain for me to be strengthened, encouraged, and inspired to keep going in the face of adversity.
My leadership expertise grew in internal communications, strategic planning, financial planning, business reporting, and sales. I also focused on continued personal development and achieved my certification in life and leadership coaching—skills that will only continue to strengthen our client relationships and my team.
Jamie , 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?
About My Career Journey
My career journey is filled with stories of trial, challenge, and overcoming. All of the experiences prepared me for the position that I hold today. One of my biggest pieces of advice to those on their career climb is to pay attention when you go through the trials. They are preparing you. Choose a mindset that you are being served an opportunity to LEARN.
Here is a bit about my career journey.
My first career step was to serve as an intern and part-time employee for “Brazos Valley this Morning” in College Station Texas. My shift started at 3 a.m. each morning where I would prepare the news copy for the anchors to read live on the air each day. This is the first position where I really had to focus on setting my routine to balance my final year of college at Texas A&M University, this position, waitressing for a local steak restaurant, and still fitting in time for friends and family.
I then moved to Dallas to take a position with a small emerging organization in Dallas Texas called MonsterBoard. I worked in the Yellow Pages division selling ads for Pearl Vision with no desktop computer or wi-fi to speak of and I often comment on these humble career beginnings that quickly helped me gain confidence and be able to take a “no” and keep on pressing through. I mean…selling Yellow Page ads? What a grind!
Within a year I was hired at a start-up Marketing firm in Dallas, TX. I was the 22nd hire and part of a strategic growth plan to expand the agency to more than 150 employees. I started as an Account Executive and was promoted within a year to an Account Supervisor. This role allowed me to learn so many different aspects of business and management. I wore many hats and was responsible for project management, account management, and client management for brands such as General Mills Cheerios, Pepperidge Farm, and Wyndham Hotels and Resorts. Leadership was something I had always aspired to step into and this job marked the beginning of my leadership journey.
After a move to Austin and a shift from a large agency to a smaller organization, I further honed my marketing and leadership skills in-house, guiding the 18-year-old organization through a complete rebrand, establishing an online presence, and serving on the team to create the first app allowing their customers to order print-on-demand materials directly from their mobile devices.
Seven years later, after experiencing a divorce and being in a new season of life, I was led to seek new opportunities and positive energy and took a client-side role as marketing director for a fitness startup.
This experience turned out to be one of the most rewarding experiences of my career. During my tenure I continued to gain key insights and experience, adding national television ad placement to the resume, along with exposure to operations, finance, and expanded sales experience. My greatest achievement was mentoring the marketing and sales teams to go from unorganized, unmotivated, and stagnant to a thriving team.
From there, my career took me into a new industry where I turned an in-house declining design team into a full-service marketing agency where I restructured the operations, teams, and overall service offerings, and was eventually promoted to the role of President. It was the first opportunity I had to leverage the culmination of experience throughout my career journey to shape and develop a completely new organization. Business strategy, structure, new offerings, new team members, financial planning, and rebuilding company and divisional culture was my greatest accomplishment.
That five-year journey ended with a layoff which led me into consulting. I went into business for myself and worked with so many great organizations on operational improvements, leadership development, sales growth, marketing, and branding. It was a great experience of staying steady and focused.
This is where my career came full circle. I had been a long-standing client of Bloom Communications and the founder, Brianna McKinney, with whom I had a 12-year working relationship and friendship with. Brianna asked me to join in a contract capacity. Within a year, she brought me on as COO and two years later asked if I would consider leading the company.
I took on the role of CEO in January of 2023, marking another transitional season in my career journey.
What does Bloom Communications Offer?
We provide strategic conulting and marketing communicaitons support for nonprofit organizaitons and select for-profit organizations that have a community give-back component. Bloom helps nonprofit organizations with their 3-5 year strategic planning practices, developing marketing strategies and plans to expand awareness of their mission and increase donor participating, gain ad grants to support that expansion, marketing implementation support across a variety of platforms, and coaching to help guide both leaders and more junior-level team members in their growth plans.
What makes Bloom different?
We are a team that is focused on driving impact in our communities. By focusing on serving nonprofits, we get to see an amazing cycle of community impact. We work with nonprofits to grow, their organizational mission expands, community members become aware and contribute of their time through volunteering and treasure through donations, and our communities are strengthened.
We also provide pro-bono financial contributions through strucuture dpricing that matches to the size of the nonprofit, allowing them to step into these services they normally wouldn’t be able to afford.
Our team also volunteers with a local nonprofit every month and the company provides each team member with paid time to volunteer at an organization that they are passionate about.
We are different in that we don’t just say we care, we show we care!
The problems we solve for clients include:
Providing Executive Directors and CEOs with strategic planning support to help drive their mission forward.
Provide Executive Directors and CEOs with the necessary marketing communications support for their teams, taking this off of their plates.
Ensuring nonprofits receive key grants such as Google Ad grants to utilize free dollars.
Providing nonprofits with a Marketing Playbook to end the hassle of “guessing” what marketing tactics should be used and providing a comprehensive guide for their teams to follow.
Providing nonprofits with communication best practices to steward donor audiences for continued impact and financial growth.
Serving as a senior-level marketing expert to guide and direct more junior staff members taking this off of the Executive Director’s plate.
Providing full-service marketing services with strategy and implementation tactics to drive the mission forward.
Providing Executive Directors and CEOs with leadership coaching to help them navigate their roles with success.
Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?
Relationship building with good old-fashioned relationship building. Truly showing you care for your clients as people—not dollar signs.
With everything being so digital, it is easy to migrate toward emails; however, the best strategy is face-to-face meetings and communication when possible.
I established a process to connect with our clients every quarter outside of any meetings or communication that my team members have with them. This is important as the CEO to show I value them as people and their continued business. I try to meet in person with each other over coffee or lunch, but for those that I can’t, we set a video call. I use this opportunity to get to know them better, allow them to get to know me better, discuss what is working well, and what may need to be improved, and talk about new big-picture goals that have emerged for their organizations.
Email is great for summarizing and a quick touch base, but phone calls and in-person connections build trust.
How do you keep your team’s morale high?
I love this topic! Internal communications is truly the most important part of your role as a leader—No matter the size of your team. Without your team, what will be accomplished?
It’s important each year to look at your communication routine with your team and reestablish new practices to ensure they know what your goals and objectives are, how their roles impact those goals, allow them to have a voice in idea generation, and establishing a reporting routine to share how the business is doing.
We chose to be an open-book management company which means that we share key financial statistics. Does it get hard at times? Yes. However, it allows the team some visibility into company performance and allows them to frame ways to contribute to the growth.
What we have structured that has worked well includes:
Weekly team meeting to share gratitudes, wins, focus on a professional development topic, and share company goals and performance metrics.
Monthly “Work Together Wednesday” opportunity. Being a remote organization, this is key to building relationships with team members.
Weekly or Bi-weekly Leader and Team Member one one-on-one meetings. Allowing team members to get the support they need, share ideas and wins, and work through challenges.
We also poll our team members throughout the year on various topics such as benefits, company culture, and more.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.bloomcommunications.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bloom_comm/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/bloom-communications-inc-/
- Other: [email protected]
Image Credits
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