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

Alright, Jarrod thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. If you could go back in time do you wish you had started your business sooner or later

I am a firm believer in the idea that everything happens for a reason and on its predetermined timeline.

Since I was a kid growing up on a small ranch in rural Colorado, I was exposed to lots of let’s say tinkering. There was always something that needed to be fixed or maintained and often my mind would race with new inventions or new ways to do things. So from a young age, I had that entrepreneurial spirit within me, it was just a matter of time before I settled on an idea to pursue and went after it.

I was also exposed to entrepreneurship since I was young with most of my grandparents having their own businesses. Either in the summer or after school/sports practice, I would help my grandparents in their businesses and I think that provided me with not only the work ethic needed to succeed but also the resilience necessary to stomach the idea of stepping out on your own to create your own business.

However, actually starting my own business was still a huge leap. After high school I did what everyone else was doing and went to college. I’ll be the first to admit that college was probably a mistake for me. While I received a bachelor’s degree, I also collected a pretty hefty amount of debt. Once I graduated, I had to scramble to find a job that could help support my student loan payments while at the same time allowing me the flexibility to grow into my own role. I was lucky enough to work my way up into a sales role at a wholesale company and it was within this role that I was able to stabilize my finances and get back to the idea of creating something for myself.

It was in the fall of 2018 that I was sitting with my late grandpa Don at his kitchen table and I finally asked him… When did you know you were ready to start your own business and how’d you do it? He replied pretty frankly and said “You’ll never be ready, you just have to do it and figure it out along the way.” And without too much more conversation, I knew that was exactly what I had to do.

So in December of 2018 I quit my sales job with enough money in my savings to pay my bills for 3 months and thought well it’s now or never. I knew if I could find a way to just pay my bills, I could build the figurative airplane in the meantime and work on getting it off the ground. Now I am in my fourth year of running my own business and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I think some have the opportunity to start early and others have to take care of real life things like bills and finances before it makes sense to make that leap. So my advice is still that everything will happen when the time is right, but once the time is right DO IT. Don’t wait another second because time is valuable and time is the greatest teacher of all.

If you have the opportunity to start earlier I would encourage that because the amount of wisdom and experience you will gain by simply being in the act of running your own business will compound into the future. Whereas if you wait your whole life you may run out of runway to get your airplane off the ground.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

In my last role as a sales director, I had the opportunity to work with a lot of small and mid-sized businesses pretty intimately. I was able to see first hand the passion that many of these entrepreneurs had for their business or craft and that was motivating on its own. I love small businesses because they are so genuine. However, I started noticing that some of these small businesses had challenges when it came time to scale or grow beyond their initial phase and to me these are the folks that I wanted to succeed the most.

I started observing the general business landscape and noticed that the main thing that set apart a growing company from a stagnated company was really just visual appeal and access to information for customers. If a company had a clean, branded image, a website and an active social media account these three things would almost certainly correlate to company growth. Of course the actual product/service they were offering had to be good too, but it wasn’t the ultimate determination of success. I saw big companies with terrible products succeed just fine because they had great marketing and an attractive brand.

So I knew that if I simply helped some of these small businesses clean up their online image, they could find success and reach a larger customer base.

Today we offer three core digital marketing services to solve this growth problem; Web, Brand, Social.

We help small businesses organize, define and create a solid brand first. Then we help them establish an online presence with a user-friendly website and then use social media to stay top of mind and keep customers up to date on the company. It is an integrated approach, and also a simplified approach to today’s digital marketing world.

Often, digital marketing can become convoluted and many practitioners get lost in the metrics and forget to address the basics. We address the basics from the start and let the metrics take care of themselves.

I believe it is our simplified approach that sets us apart the most. Small business owners don’t have time to pour over metrics or talk about the latest fad in digital marketing. They need sales. They need people to show up to their events. They need employees. They don’t need a report detailing the conversion rate of an instagram post last March.

So we simply focus on the basics of digital marketing and give these small businesses a solid online foundation to build from. We also do this in a way to create the most value for the company. We don’t upsell or overcharge for services, we work hand-in-hand with these companies, remaining conscious of their budgets, delivering the assets they need when they are ready for it.

This has allowed us to build a ton of trust with our clients and be the go-to with any of their needs, even when they grow into needing some of the more technical digital marketing tools like paid ads or SEO. Being an all-in-one provider lets us grow right alongside our clients and we are most proud of that. Being able to help a small business with a genuine purpose and watch them compete is the greatest feeling in the world.

Where do you think you get most of your clients from?

The best source for new clients for us has definitely been referrals. We’ve found it’s much easier to convert a referral into a long term client than cultivating a cold lead or a warm lead that comes through organic or paid efforts.

This has a lot to do with trust, both from the individuals being referred but also from the individual who is providing the referral. We have built that trust with our referral partners to get the job done so they feel comfortable sending people our direction.

So we focus a lot on building out our network and being vulnerable. We will even ask other competing agencies for referrals because ultimately our goal is to help small businesses. If they don’t have the bandwidth or the small business doesn’t have the budget for that larger agency, we love to explore those leads to see if we can provide the value the client needs.

Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?

Our focus is on providing a high quality experience for our current customers so they keep coming back and they bring their friends with them. We receive a lot of return business and that in turn helps us grow ours.

We recognize that it cost’s roughly 5x more to obtain a new client vs retaining an established client, so even from a cost perspective it’s much more efficient to grow our business with our current clients.

And the bonus to maintaining our current customer base is they become advocates for us and help us generate organic referrals just through word of mouth. It’s been by far the most effective strategy for us and one that also is rooted in our ethos that we simply want to help and our customers find value in the help we provide.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.youwhodigital.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/youwhodigital/?hl=en
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/youwhodigital/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jarrod-mason-5a32a3106
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheJarrodMason