We were lucky to catch up with Jon Ruhff recently and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Jon thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Before we get into specifics, let’s talk about success more generally. What do you think it takes to be successful?
As a rule, I’ve always been pretty conservative when it comes to money (ok ok, cheap). But I will tell you looking back it was the moments that I went big and took a bet on myself, that paid off the most. I’ve learned through it all that if you spend your life looking for stability, very rarely does that include the heights you could achieve if you took a risk on yourself and stepped out into the unknown. It’s a scary place to be at first, but eventually you’ll find that betting on yourself brings with it a sense of satisfaction that most people will never truly experience.
We started the company with not much money invested. That’s the beauty of being in the creative industry, your biggest asset is your ability to think differently about things with no need to purchase heavy equipment, inventory, land etc. But we soon found that we needed more than creativity and ambition, we needed to market and find our niche, and that’s when things got dicey for us. We blew up our one page cheapo website and went big with a shiny new, state of the art website including blogs, custom graphics, samples, top ten lists, etc. And then, we were told we needed to do this thing called ‘Google AdWords’. Ugh, more money to cough up. The scary thing about building a business from the ground up is that you keep throwing money into what seems like a black hole of consumption, and you wonder if you’ll ever get it back.
And then, it happened.
After implementing these changes, on one random day we received a call from the largest privately held agency in the country at that time, Cramer-Krasselt out of Chicago. They presented us with a project so large and so unconventional that of course we had to say yes. And that’s when we realized how big the world was, how much potential was out there, and how little we really knew about anything. I will say, when that project was completed, we were the only vendor to finish on time and on budget. Boom! Our company officially launched into stardom, and nothing could stop us from our glorious destiny that awaited us. And then the Great Recession hit.
Through the next several years we hit several highs and lows (mostly lows) but we kept moving forward and trying our hardest. We moved offices, locations, renovated offices (sometimes twice), bought an office, renovated that office, weathered covid, attended a Tony Robbins course (highly recommended), and have reached a point today where our growth continues to astound us month in and month out. By constantly tweaking, discussing, trying things, and re-tweaking, we’re now at a place that we always thought the company could aspire to be.
At first when things don’t work out, you think that’s the end of the world. “Woe is me, this sucks, why did we do this? Why didn’t we go into another area of work? Why aren’t we millionaires yet??” But as you stick with it, stick to your convictions and keep the ultimate goal in sight, your hard work and risks will pay off. I just wish I could go back to that poor guy in Gainesville who couldn’t sleep because his credit card bill was sky high, his bank account was record low, and tell him, “Hey man, it’ll work out. Just stick with it. You’re a taurus, you know the drill.”
Jon, 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?
My name is Jon Ruhff and I am the owner of Push Button Creative Audio in Central Florida. I stumbled upon this area of work while I was still a student at UF. While playing in a local rock band, the owner of a local CD store asked me to write him a commercial for the radio since he said I was ‘creative’. My only requirement was that I did the voices and when I went to the radio station to cut the voice-over, I was hired on the spot to write and voice commercials for local businesses. Fast forward some years and I would meet my future business owner at the same radio station, this time I was the full time Creative Services Director. We noticed that the level of creativity increased exponentially when we worked together on commercials and it only seemed natural to start a company and see if there were other businesses across the country (and globe) who would need creative audio production. Turns out they did!
Our clients come to us when the production they receive from other sources doesn’t quite hit the mark. We approach messaging from an audio branding perspective where someone could only hear your commercial for 3-5 seconds and know exactly who it was for. We execute this strategy in the forms of consistent voice, custom music, audio logos, consistent creative etc.
I am really proud of the fact that we started this business when everyone else was starting a website company, digital marketing company, and social media companies. It seemed for a minute that we had gotten into the wrong arena for long term success. And then, just like 90’s fashion, audio came back around and became cool again! Whether it’s audio branding, podcasts or everyone singing the latest burger king jingle, audio is back in a big way and we are in a position to make our clients successful with our almost 20 years of audio branding experience.
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
An odd thing about me is that I have an inability to commit to many things, but when I do finally decide to commit, baby we’re married and sticking through it. Push Button’s roots began in the great recession which was not the ideal time to be running a business in the advertising industry. Some businesses will cut advertising and marketing at the first sign of economic uncertainty, and we felt every bit of it. Amidst my professional career on shaky ground, personally I had just moved my wife and I out of Gainesville and into Central Florida and my father had recently passed away. It was an extremely hard time emotionally with very little income and little end in sight. When I look back, I see an era of doubt and frustration but also a willingness to keep going and a belief that this business could yield us the type of work life balance we sought so badly. Eventually, and I mean slowly, it did finally pay off after several years of sticking to it and eventually became the kind of business I always thought it could be. As my dad always said, ‘the key to anything is longevity’.
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
One of my personal hurdles to overcome was the feeling that I had to be doing something all the time in order to make my business a success. When we went out on our own, I had this constant unnerving feeling that we were going to close up shop if we weren’t always hustling. It’s a heavy blanket of guilt that hangs over you and if you don’t come to grips with it, you will start to get weighed down which could lead to burnout. Looking back, I see this can be traced back to my retail management experience, witnessing my hard working father as a kid growing up, etc. What I would eventually learn is that you have to give yourself time to rest and recover. Being in a creative industry, your mind is your biggest resource so you have to give it room for play, time away from the studio, or simply switching off work. I remember reading a book that highlighted the best practices of major religions and one of them was resting. It went further to say that if farmers constantly plant on the same soil throughout the year without giving it time to rest, dangerous results can occur. Now, I can say that I’m still perfecting the rest/work relationship but I’m a lot better at it now than I was a decade ago.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://pushbuttonproductions.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jonruhff/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pushbuttonproductions
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jon-ruhff-9892b08
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/jonruhff
Image Credits
Gator100 Image: credit Matt Pendleton