We were lucky to catch up with Trevor Jones recently and have shared our conversation below.

Trevor, appreciate you joining us today. What do you think matters most in terms of achieving success?

In order to be successful in your career, you must go through a period of grinding. You have to realize that everyone else is lucky besides you, and your inputs will ultimately determine your outputs. We, as a society, is convinced that you can get rich quick, lose 30 pounds tomorrow, and learn a new skill in the matter of minutes. Unfortunately, for those who have been successful in life, this just isn’t true.

Speaking from the sense of financial freedom, success can look different to different people. My goal in life is work because I want to, not because I have to. I take on a lot of work as learning opportunities, as you’re able to form more unique solutions when you harness skills from various areas of business and industries.

Learn a skill, go become the best at it, then figure out how to start a business. Once you’re able to gain credibility, you can scale through others. Without a strong foundation of knowledge and ability, you cannot build an empire of success.

I found success by having the mindset of being a lifelong learner and to remain as unbiased as humanly possible. You look at business challenges objectively, and seek to find multiple solutions, testing each one of them in a controlled environment. Once you have enough data, you implement the change and start again.

There is a book called The Compound Effect (Darren Hardy) that is true in the sense that success comes in the form of small, exponentially impactful changes, that occur over the course of a long time. It’s true for personal success, and it definitely applies to professional success as well.

Trevor, 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 Trevor Jones and I am a mid thirties business professional with over a decade of analytical marketing and operations under my belt. I’ve always been fascinated with marketing, mostly digital, since I was a teenager selling paintball products online. I was between marketing or finance when I went off to college, and ultimately decided to complete a bachelors and masters in marketing.

My career started off with digital marketing, working to add revenue to small businesses through Google paid search ads. Fast forward 3 1/2 years, and I ended up building a marketing department within a home improvement company. Here, I learned how to apply digital marketing KPIs to traditional forms of media, and ultimately grew that business from $5m to over $28m in annual revenue over just a 4 year period. At the time we sold that business, I was their COO and had over 180 team members, operated in 3 separate states, and was recognized as one of the best service business in the East Tennessee area to work for.

Since 2019, I’ve focused on investing into businesses in the Knoxville, TN area that I feel could scale if the marketing was right. Alongside these investments, I created a marketing agency focused on providing creative services to small and medium businesses and a strategy that makes sense, works, and can be delivered at an affordable cost.

It’s been reassuring over these last few years the amount of growth that my investments, and their clients have seen, when you provide custom tailored solutions based upon their own data, and delivered in a efficient manner.

Most of my clients either don’t understand advertising, don’t believe marketing works, or never built a business to scale before. I come alongside them and work with them until they are successful.

Are there any books, videos, essays or other resources that have significantly impacted your management and entrepreneurial thinking and philosophy?

The book that has had the biggest impact in how I see business was Good To Great. You first find the who, then you focus on the what. I’ve fallen victim to trying to repurpose current team members for no other reason than to keep them on the team. In reality, we all have team members better suited to seek greatness elsewhere. The hedgehog concept depicted in the book was another eye opening lesson. We as entrepreneurs somethings like the new shiny object, or make false statements on why we’re not growing. It’s so easy to add a multitude of products or services, when in reality it’s about getting really good at few things. Simple scales and fancy fails.

Can you talk to us about how your side-hustle turned into something more.

I’m about talking very calculated risks. In fact, I’m very risk adverse. I’ve practically always had a side hustle since I was 15 years old selling paintball products online. After graduating with my bachelors in marketing, I thought I was going to go directly into the field of marketing. Oh, how I was wrong. In 2011, the economy was very much so still recovering from the 2008 housing market bubble. I graduated with honors, involved in local communities, had the extra stuff beyond just the academic grades, and even served as an intern with Walgreens Corporate out of Chicago.

For over a month I applied to marketing positions and never even would get recognized that I applied. I ended up working in customer service/collections for just under a year, then transitioned to IT/technical staffing. During this time, I’m out in Knoxville practically giving out free work in the hopes one day I’d have enough to get someone to actually recognize me as someone who has value to offer. As I worked my way into consulting gigs, I eventually became the marketing director at a home improvement business.

Contact Info:

• Website: ENVYBrandStudio.com
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trevorcambridgejones/