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The Unsexy Side of Agency Growth with Ben Webber of Big Red Jelly · The Unsexy Businessmen

• Alex Skinner: Welcome to edition of the Unsexy Businessmen podcast. We talk about all things unsexy businesses and entrepreneurship. I am Alex Skinner joined by my brother Aaron Skinner. And today we got a special guest everybody from Big Red Jelly himself. We have ⁓ Ben Weber, the head partnerships over at Big Red Jelly. And you know what Big Red Jelly does everybody? ⁓ They do They build and they grow your business to limitless possibilities. And real quick fun fact, Ben, I used to work at 97th floor who was a partner with Big Red Jelly back in the day. And I worked on some of the brands that you guys brought over to us. So it's great to have you here. Did you work on that partnership with 97th floor? Ben: Yeah, yeah, was one of the original ones that helped really helped us grow. Was partnered with Trent Mortenson way back in the day. And yeah, it was fantastic to send over our brands to them and then vice versa work on some of their projects, help them get along with the branding. So it sweet. Alex Skinner: Yeah. Yeah, I know that we appreciated it. And I want to get a little bit into the big red jelly side of things, especially because as you mentioned before we hopped on right now, you were one of the original founding members of the agency. And what I'm most interested in is one, how did that come to be? How all three of you got together? And then how you went from what the, because I know that it's gone through a lot of iterations, how it started to what it is today. and keep your answer under 30 minutes. Ben: I could go on for days. Well, how we all got together was pretty simple. were brothers. We all grew up together and, you know, keeping the family. So Josh is, you know, the head honcho that the CEO, the original founder of the idea came to Zach and I and said, Hey, I want to do a creative agency. want to put out some, some effective and efficient marketing ⁓ for small businesses, for businesses around the country. And we Aaron Skinner: Hahaha Alex Skinner: Right. Ben: Loved it. Zach and I were in college at the time and we're like, hey, yeah, you know, this is a cool opportunity to gain some real world experience. And we started off, you know, just kind of doing everything. A big thing inside joke here is we started off doing interactive PDFs for people. And we started doing interactive PDFs, know, do some videos, do some social media work, just anything that we could do to bring some money in just to gain that experience. And then slowly we started to realize, hey, there's a gap. for lot of small businesses, mid-market businesses when it comes to really aligning their brand with their target audience. And so, a lot of people when they think of brand, it's just logo, you're good, you got your logo, your colors, go ahead and face out into the world. But we really wanted to be intentional and efficient when it came to, hey, what is your business? How is it solving a major pain point for your audience? And how are going to communicate that effectively so that you can grow your business in the right direction? And so that's what we've been working on and have worked on for the last eight, nine years is really refining out that process of, okay, let's figure out your target audience. How are you going to communicate to them, representing that effectively on your website and helping you grow from there. ⁓ Aaron Skinner: What were you going to school for? Ben: International relations. Aaron Skinner: Okay, so like not marketing, right? ⁓ What jobs did you have before this? Or did you do anything? Like any sort of jobs? Ben: No, no. ⁓ BYU moving crew. Yeah, Yeah. My first major job was actually the first major job was BYU continuing education. I was one of the like guys and they just plug in numbers into a computer into a spreadsheet. And then Alex Skinner: Nothing, was lazy Ben is what they called him. Aaron Skinner: Is that what it was? Yeah? Okay. Did you, was like, was it ever in your mind that you wanted to be like an entrepreneur or start your own business or anything like that? Ben: Yeah, it was always in the mind to do something that I wake up passionate about. And I didn't realize that I was passionate about marketing until I actually started doing marketing and branding stuff. Yeah. Aaron Skinner: So I just, I started to cut you off. I just want to point this out. You got into something like an industry that you like knew nothing about. This is for like all entrepreneurs out there. You got into an industry you knew you had zero experience in and were able to grow a very successful business. how, what for all the entrepreneurs who are starting out there, maybe you're in college, maybe you're 50 years old. What were the steps that you took? personally in that business to make it successful. Like from not knowing anything about marketing to being a super successful company. Ben: Yeah, a few things. Number one, one thing that really stuck out to me, ⁓ Mark Beeching, you've heard of him, he was the founder of Digitas, one of the largest digital agencies that came about. ⁓ A character on Mad Men is based off of him. He had an interview where they were asking him very similar questions of like, how'd you get started? Like, how did you, one of his greatest ideas was that American Express membership program. He was the one that was a part of that initial thing. And obviously that's a huge. Aaron Skinner: Mm-hmm. Ben: part of the business now. They asked him a very similar question, you like, what would you go to school for? What did you study? What was it? And he went to school for children's theater and he graduated in children's theater. But the way that he framed it, he said, you know, yeah, I went to school for children's theater, but I learned how to apply that into my work, into what I do. And so the way that he explained it is you got to take a complex idea like Romeo and Juliet or anything like that. Aaron Skinner: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Sure. Ben: simplify it down so that children can understand it and recreate it, but leave it complex enough and profound enough so that when the parents and the guests come and watch it, they get something out of it. And he likened that onto branding, right? He said, isn't that just taking a complex business idea, complex product or whatever, simplifying it down so your audience can understand it in 10 to 30 seconds, but leaving it complex so they can really dive into the nitty gritty aspects of that brand. Aaron Skinner: Right. Ben: And that's that I saw that in my freshman year of college and I really loved that idea. And so that's where I took that experience of studying international relations and said, well, international relations is very similar to branding. How do two different groups of people communicate? How do you get across communication barriers? How do you relay complex ideas to different groups that might oppose those ideas? So that was one big thing of just, you Aaron Skinner: Mm-hmm. Ben: using my experience, using things that I was learning at that time and finding ways to apply that to what I was doing and working on is number one. And then number two, ⁓ find that area within it that you are passionate about. I'm passionate about, again, the partnership side of things, of finding, working with 97th floor, working with other agencies, working with fractional CMOs, working with people and having their ideas come to fruition and seeing that benefit for the businesses that we're doing the work for. is something that I'm passionate about. So applying that and diving into the research, finding out best ways to make that happen through trial and error, through other people's experiences was a big benefit as well. Aaron Skinner: Was it pretty overwhelming in the beginning when you were first starting out trying to figure out that aspect of it of applying what you learned in college to your business venture? Ben: Yeah, very hard. Because how does Internet relations apply to interactive PDFs, right? How do you make that work? ⁓ Aaron Skinner: Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Probably better than children's plays. Ben: Exactly. But yeah, it was very challenging, especially being in college and interacting with, you know, the likes of 974 and big partners and big projects. It's like, I'm just a college dude. So what kind of value can I bring? And so that's where we really doubled down on, all right, let's get really good at our process. So if anything else, we're just efficient at the work that we do. And then the experience, the strategy, all that sort of stuff will come along if we're just, hey, we know that we have to do A, B, and C. Let's get really good, really efficient at doing A, B, and C. Then we'll be able to outgrow, not that you ever outgrow imposter syndrome or anything like that, but outgrow some of those worries ⁓ which we still are. Aaron Skinner: Yeah. Yeah. Alex Skinner: Was that like a process from the very start? Because obviously we preach standard operating procedures religiously whenever we're talking about this. How early on did you guys realize, ⁓ we just need to process this really, like was it at the very start and that's what's led to this great growth or was there's a moment where you're like, and now we're going to start growing? How did you guys figure out, like, yep, let's just process, document this? Aaron Skinner: Awesome. Ben: Yeah, it was very early on. Josh, again, has a great mentality when it comes to it, where he says, be excellent at everything that requires zero talent. And that is process stuff, right? Where it's the follow up emails, the checking emails beforehand, it's the reminders, it's all the sort of things that are just, you that you can process out and that leaves more room for creativity. And Josh gained that experience from working with other agencies. He saw that there was a lot of, you know, fluff and fat that could be trimmed off. And so he applied that experience really well to Big Red Jelly and said right from the get go, hey, if anything else, we're gonna be efficient and processed no matter what. And then, know, creative will come. Aaron Skinner: So Ben, would you say the small unsexy things that you are doing in business are crucial in order to make your business successful? Ben: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's not sexy at all. And Josh going to test this, you know, time and time again. You know, he sat long into the night for weeks of just, all right, how do I automate this little thing in our CRM into our project management tool? How do I do that? And that you're, know, I'm sure it'd be great to watch that on YouTube, but you're not going to get millions of views on that sort of stuff. You're not going to talk about that sort of thing. Alex Skinner: You Aaron Skinner: rate. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Right. Ben: It's not sexy at all. It's hard. It's frustrating at times, but it pays huge dividends down the road. Aaron Skinner: Right. What were some of your, like, especially, I mean, in the beginning or even just a few years in, what were some of the struggles that you guys were running into and how did you get over those? Because every business is gonna have their ups and downs. So what were some of those that you guys experienced and what did you learn and how did you kind of pivot to grow? Ben: Oh, how long do you guys have? I know I'm supposed to keep it under half an hour, but a lot of challenges. Obviously, you know, the biggest thing, especially on my side is sales. You know, finding out where how to make sales, especially in the agency world. It's really hard. Nobody cold calling is almost non existent when it comes to agency world stuff. Right. Everyone's getting talked to everyone's getting sold to about marketing, about all that sort of stuff. Aaron Skinner: Uh, 20 seconds. have 20 seconds. Alex Skinner: Like it's Ben: So one of the biggest challenges, at least for me, was how do we find a more efficient and effective process to make these sales? And that's where we really leaned into the partnerships. Because we saw, hey, we're really good at the branding, website design stuff. There's agencies in the Valley across the country that only do SEO, only do advertising, do a combination of the both. And a lot of the challenges that they were facing were they wanted to run these ads, they wanted to run SEO campaigns, but they weren't Aaron Skinner: Mmm. Ben: affected because they're sending them to a landing page that wasn't converting or their brand wasn't communicating to their brand to their audience and so you know we really had to figure out how to make those partnerships work and that was a big learning curve for us because first three years it was guerrilla marketing those guerrilla sales you know going networking groups all that sort of stuff and it just banging our heads against the wall but once we figured that one out it was super helpful Aaron Skinner: So the partnerships were a big deal. How were you getting those partnerships? I'm assuming you're just spam emailing everybody and ⁓ cold calling. That's the most effective way. Ben: One of the biggest partnerships that we got, one of our first big ones was with disruptive advertising. Shout out disruptive. ⁓ And Josh ran into him at a barbecue and they just got to talking. Jake Baggard. Aaron Skinner: Who's the owner of that? ⁓ I know Jake. Yes, okay. Ben: Yep. It ran into, it wasn't Jake, but ⁓ Steve ⁓ Covey, John Covey was one of the executives there and they just started talking about barbecue and realized that, you know, mentality was the same, that there were gaps within each other's businesses that could be solved by partnering up. And so once we had that one, we worked out the process, figured out, hey, how is this going to work? How is this going to look? And then once we saw that we were able to replicate that and be affected in it, Aaron Skinner: Mm-hmm. Ben: we're able to take that to other agencies and then cold call or cold email and say, hey, you know, we're doing this with disruptive. We'd love to try it out with you guys, you know, and figure that out. And then obviously networking groups are huge as well. Aaron Skinner: How effective was the cold emailing and cold calling in your experience? Ben: Truly cold? Not at all. It's challenge. Especially, you know, the messaging is always so rough because especially in the agency world. Aaron Skinner: Yeah, right. Yeah. Well, they're probably getting a bunch of calls like that that are, you know, not legitimate all the time. Yes, exactly. Yep. Alex Skinner: LinkedIn in mail. Ben: Yeah, I mean, you get them on LinkedIn all the time. Like, hey, we're an outsourced, know, what design agency, you know, send them to us, all that sort of stuff. So trying to filter through that was hard. But once you had, you know, a good case study, once you have people that they knew already that you're working with, so can name drop or reference them, or as you're at networking events, you know, you know that person. So you go over to them, talk to them, set something up. Like I met Trent at a networking group. ⁓ And we just had a conversation and said, Hey, we're doing this. Aaron Skinner: Right. Ben: disruptive, we'd love to do it with 97th floor and that's how it got started. Aaron Skinner: Gotcha. Cool. Alex Skinner: Yeah, what's like the, have you run into any issues like with partnerships? I imagine that they're not 10 for 10, a hundred for a hundred. Like how do you go about having those types of conversations? Like have you ever had to like, you don't have to give specific examples. Have you ever had to like break a partnership? You're like, ⁓ this is like bad for us. Like how do you guys deal with that? Ben: Yeah, yeah, early on, you know, we were willing to take any work that would was given to us. And so a big part of that was, you know, strategists or agencies that would white label us. And one of the biggest benefits we have is our process. But when it came to white labeling, that was our biggest detriment was our process was not working well with the white labeling because that middle person so much was getting lost in, you know, in the sauce and translation and all that sort of stuff. So We've had to cut a few things off as part of the learning curve, especially when it comes to white labeling. ⁓ We really steer away from that now just because we've had a few too many bad experiences with that. Aaron Skinner: Gotcha. Alex Skinner: Nice. what's, know, digital marketing is constantly changing. One nice thing about branding is essentially storytelling never goes away. We've been storytelling for forever. What's most exciting for you guys over at Big Red Jelly, like heading into heading into the future? Like what's what are you guys like? This is the thing. Ben: Honestly, this might be contrary to a lot of agencies and what they're thinking. I know a lot of agencies are afraid of AI coming in and replacing search and a lot of services that they offer. But here at Big Red Jelly, we're really excited about it. Because AI is only helping companies connect with their target audience in a more direct way. And so if you're really putting out content that's helpful, if you're putting out messaging that is resonating with the pain points and the motivations, and the different variations of that with your audience, you're just going to see a huge explosion of success when it comes to AI marketing, AI search, all that sort of stuff. We're really excited about it it's dropping a lot of the best practices approach of a lot of the marketing where it's just, hey, we need to do a bunch of backlinks and a bunch of keywords and a bunch of blogs, but they're not necessarily answering questions that their audience is asking. And so we're really, really excited about working with And these companies end aligning that with the audience and then seeing the success from that. Alex Skinner: How has like the AI revolution, if we want to call it that, aligned with what you guys were already doing? It seems perfect. It seems like a perfectly aligned with you guys, but I'm curious if that's how you felt. Ben: Yeah, it feels really good to be where we are with the AI. Like I mentioned, it's just helping them get connected with their audience better. The biggest change though is the depth that we go in terms of the audience research. Because if we're thinking about a certain e-commerce shop that sells socks, they sell a special kind of socks, there's going to be specific decision-making paradigms that their audience has as to why they're going to buy that sock. rather than a different competitor. It might be for comfort, it might be for style, it might be for something else. And so it's no longer can you just have an overarching brand message and hope that that resonates with everyone within your audience. You've got to start to really dive into the research, really dive into those different decision-making paradigms and understand what are the differences between these? What kind of questions, what kind of pains are the style stock searchers having rather than the functionality or the comfort or the everything like that. ⁓ And so that's just one of the challenges that we've seen with AI in terms of what we do is the breadth and depth of the audience research we have to take. Aaron Skinner: Are there aspects of AI that you hate? Ben: Yeah. ⁓ Aaron Skinner: Yeah The end. Alex Skinner: In particular and how it impacts your business too. Like I'm sure there's like, ⁓ I hate this type of content that's being created, but like things that you hate for like big red jelly. Aaron Skinner: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Or that you see like competition, you're like, can't believe these people are trying to just use AI for that. Ben: Yeah. Yeah, I, again, because we're in the creative space, I hate it when clients or competitors use AI for creative things. I had a conversation with a financial advising company ⁓ and they used AI to create their logo. And they said, Hey, you know, we think it's pretty good, right? Like it looks awesome. And you could just see, yeah, it was free. You know, it drafted it up. It's like, yes. And, you know, everyone has different opinions when it comes to their logo, but Aaron Skinner: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Alex Skinner: It was free. Ben: the details of it, it just doesn't feel right and there's no research behind it. It doesn't convey an effective message to the audience on that first look of the logo. ⁓ That's something that really bothers me is there's fantastic creatives all around the world in Big Reggielli in particular, but all across the country and the world. And replacing that creative aspect with a bot or an AI is just heartbreaking for me. Aaron Skinner: Mm-hmm. Right. Ben: sucks to see, you it's great to use AI for research to be creative, but using it just as your creative source, that's frustrating. Aaron Skinner: Yeah, okay. Alex Skinner: How do you convince clients not to use it? Ben: Yeah, it really goes back to the audience research, right? And it's like, hey, what kind of emotion or feeling are people going to see when they initially see this logo? Have you done any research to that? Or did you just put in cool mountain logo in grok and, you know, get something out of it, right? And how does that logo? Yeah, exactly. How does that logo convey to the rest of your brand? You know, what is the overarching message and theme and how can the variations of that? Aaron Skinner: Yeah That looks cool. Ben: ⁓ impact your brand and the different services and products that you're offering. ⁓ That's really what we want to do is, yeah, it's more than just a picture. It's, you what's that initial feeling and then how is that going to carry out throughout your experience. Aaron Skinner: And not only that, but also like how many other people put in the exact same prompt to got the exact same logo, right? let's, yeah, just barely. There's one more ridge or whatever. Yeah, exactly. There's nothing unique really about it. Yeah. Ben: Yeah. Alex Skinner: Right, or slightly different, but it's like, ⁓ you can tell this all came from the same source. Right. Ben: Yeah. I'm going to give credit to the general populace. It's like eventually, you know, people are already seeing AI ads and you can see the negative effect of people that have like, come on, like, you you're seeing this. And I think people are going to get better and better at identifying AI stuff. And they're going to notice that's inauthentic. It's not genuine. And they want to do business with people that cut corners and, you know, find cheap ways to do things. Aaron Skinner: Yeah. Yes. Alex Skinner: I asked that question because obviously I deal with clients quite a bit and a big ⁓ push is trying to get as much juice out of the squeeze as possible. So you see a lot of these people who are coming in and being like, all right, so before it would take us 40 hours, 100 hours to create your website, create your brand, like whatever, throw your number on that. But now we can use these AI tools and it will be half the price and half the time. but the output might not be like, but you don't know until the output has been created, right? I've seen this with people who come to me to like just audit, just look like, hey, so like how are, how's this agency doing? How's this freelancer doing? And it always comes back to what the end goal is. And I think it's a great opportunity for a lot of agencies to, it's almost like you're just waiting for, we're at like this, Aaron and I were talking about this the other day, like, I think the AI bubble is less about like all of these businesses going out of business and more people just wanting to move away from it. Like you were just describing Ben where it's just like, that's fake, that's fake, that's fake. I now am apt enough to be able to discern when something is real or is not. And so you're gonna get this swing back, like all these people, like I've been able to steal business from you because I can do 20 articles compared to year five. But then it's gonna be like, but we saw nothing come from that. So I'm just interested in how to have like those conversations. Cause when I have those conversations with clients, a lot of times it's like 50 50, it's like output, like for us, know what output and these vanity metrics are super important. And then other, usually business owners are like, now like it's the bottom line. How much money is this actually making us from the investment we put into it? AI is a wild space. Ben: Yeah, and the thing that will always be consistent, in my opinion, and we had a great event with this with Pressable and Automatic a couple weeks ago, is human connection. And it's like, you you got to convey that from the very start of your brand all the way through consistently to really make that shine out. And that's going to become even more important as AI starts to evolve and progress. People are going to hunger more for human connection than ever before, in my opinion. Aaron Skinner: Mm-hmm. Yeah, no, I agree. There's nothing more frustrating than when you're trying to reach out to a company and all you're getting is the AI bots doing whatever that can't answer your actual question. And then eventually you have to talk to a human anyways. Like, why did we go around this whole rigamarole when I just could have talked to somebody? So yeah, I totally agree. Alex Skinner: Hey Ben, I have a hard left turn. ⁓ wait, you got something else? Yo Ben, go. Ben: No, I was just going to say, mean, it's like calling, you know, the insurance companies. It's like, representative, representative, just get me out the phone with Zero, zero, zero. Aaron Skinner: Yes, yes. Alex Skinner: zero zero zero zero zero zero zero Aaron Skinner: Yes, exactly. Just zero, zero, zero, zero. Yeah, Alex, we were seriously, we had a, think one of the podcasts was one of the things we were just complaining about the whole time, which is like, just, we just want to talk to real people. My thought of it was though, like the kind of the next generation, we're kind of the old men yelling at the clouds right now, but this just, maybe the AI is for this next generation who they don't like to talk to people. and they like to do everything through chat and they like, so I don't know. So I don't know if that's an aspect to it where this next generation of kids as they grow up, like I never wanna have to talk to someone or interact with somebody. So I just, I'm not sure. I'm not sure if that's gonna maybe swing back more towards the, just want the, we wanna talk to a robot. That's all we wanna do. But I don't know. Right now I don't think it is. Ben: Yeah, I think it might be a variation of that where it's like, you know, they either so used to communicating, you know, on their phone. I mean, I think I'm on the border of millennial Gen Z. So I don't want to say those younger guys. But, know, I think what I've seen, yeah, they like to communicate that way. And so I think brands and companies just have to find a way to, again, keep that human connection in the method and format that those that generation prefers to communicate. But Aaron Skinner: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Sure, sure. Ben: Whether AI is going to do that or not, who knows? Aaron Skinner: So the left turn Alex was gonna ask you about was thoughts on the Iran war. I'm just joking. ⁓ Ben: ⁓ I'm in international relations, but it's been a while since I've done that. Alex Skinner: ⁓ Though the hard left turn, obviously Aaron and I are brothers and so it's always a fun icon of you running businesses together. And I just wanted to left turn on that. How is that been? ⁓ Obviously you don't have to go too in detail on if there's like very private moments or anything like that. But like, what's it been like running a business with family and in particular brothers? Ben: Yeah, overall, it's been a lot of fun. It obviously has its challenges and everything, especially in the early days when it was so scattered and not everything was processed out. But the two biggest things that helped us out were, number one, knowing what our errors responsibility were specifically within the business and having the trust and faith that that would be taken care of. And Zach and I We said, Josh is the guy, he's the head honcho. Not that we said that, but Josh was the head honcho. And ⁓ allowing him to have that position and us falling to where we're really good at, Zach, on the operations side, me on the sales side, was a big benefit. And then number two, ⁓ putting up, being really good that once you leave the office, you're not letting that, those conversations drain into family barbecues, family dinners, family get togethers. Now can still talk about some things, but not letting that dominate what your relationship is outside of work so that it isn't just work, work, work. It's, hey, you still have this familial relationship, but we can go and grind when we need to. Work hard, play hard. Alex Skinner: Yeah, would you? mean, obviously it's gone really well for you guys. You guys are killing it. Winning all these awards. Congratulations on I think it was best workplace for like, I don't know how many years in a row. I feel like I've seen it for like five or six years in a row, but maybe it's less than that, but it's been a few years in a row. So congratulations on that. Like how Ben: You Thank you. Alex Skinner: Is it really that simple? Like what you just described there, because there's a lot of people, we get these questions a lot, like is it worth working with your friends or family and like how to go about it? Is it really as simple as those two things? Know your responsibilities and keep it out of your private conversations as much as possible? Or like do you feel like there's other things that have helped let Big Red Jelly grow with this familial relation? Ben: Yeah, I mean, it's never that simple. And, you know, a big thing as well is as problems arise and everything, you have to be good, you know, the straw man approach or something like that. you know, my approach when I go and meet internally with Josh is, hey, I am employee now. You know, and having to, you know, dissect that so that the criticisms come as, you know, peer to peer rather than brother to brother. Alex Skinner: you. Ben: And so I don't take that personally. Right. And that's a hard thing to do. It's not easy. It's, it's, it's a continual work in progress, but, ⁓ that is, you know, a challenge, but a big benefit of that is I think the environment that we've created here is very familial. It's very, you know, fun to work. You know, there's lots of jokes. People are communicating really well together. ⁓ but when it comes time to actually have those hard conversations, switching that on and off is a bit of a challenge. Aaron Skinner: Mm-hmm. and not avoiding the hard conversations, right? Like just getting right to it. Yeah. How many employees do you guys have? Ben: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. think we're at 37 now? Aaron Skinner: All right. ⁓ How do you manage that? That's like a, that's something we get all the time as well is employee issues. Like I, I, that's a very broad question. How do you handle 37? But just like, is it, is it just almost the same thing where you have all your SOPs in place and you know, you, you, this is how you deal with Ben: you Aaron Skinner: you know, problems that come up or if someone's getting in trouble and you have like your process of, know, if you gotta let somebody go, this is the whole thing. Like how do you, how do you guys deal with that and still be one of the best places to work? Ben: Yeah, I think having clear expectations upfront, ⁓ even in the interview process, is super helpful. Saying, hey, this role, here's the expectations of what month one, month two, month three looks like. And then by month four, you're rocking and rolling and here's what that looks like on a recurring basis. Especially in a creative field, it's like, how can you have KPIs? How can you have expectations tied to creativity? Or things like that and stuff. Aaron Skinner: Mm-hmm. Right. Yeah. Ben: Again, that ties back to that unsexy part of it where it's the process, where it's, hey, where can we process out? Where can we have KPIs in terms of timelines, in terms of deliverables, in terms of these sorts of things? And how can we communicate that as early as possible so that we can hit them? That's a big part of it. And then number two, again, with creatives, big egos, big, big things. so allowing enough space for them to have that creativity and that ego be beneficial, but also having a rigid process so that again, we are really good at the things that require zero talent. And that just relieves a lot of stress from them because a lot of the emails, a lot of the things that are nuisances to creatives are processed out. So it's almost a second thought rather than, ⁓ I have to go send that email at 8pm. And so their lives become a lot easier and they can focus more on the fun things of life. Aaron Skinner: Are you constantly hiring or like have people in the pipeline for, how do you guys, how do you guys manage that as you're growing so quickly? How do you manage the employees and making sure you have the right amount of people to take care of all the new customers that are coming in while still taking care of your old customers? Ben: Yeah, I mean, the agency industry, you guys know this, it's churned ridden. Agencies go through employees like there's no tomorrow, right? And a lot of the times it's out of your control. It's, you know, they do such a great job, they get poached by clients, they do such a great job that somebody saw them and then come in and grab some. So there's always a ⁓ continual, you know, not rotating door. you know, yeah, focus, focus on bringing in talent. Aaron Skinner: churn, churn, yeah. Ben: And so number one is representing Big Red Jelly is one of the best places to work so that we always have that interest of people that want to come and work that and having that strong brand presence within the Valley so that people, when a position opens up, we get flooded with application. Number two, we're right next to BYU. We're three-minute drive from the campus. And so, and UVU, we're five-minute drive from them. So having a nice, you know, healthy inflow of interns, of people that are passionate about creative work, of the work that we do is really helpful. And then working with, if you know Darryl Klingeman, shout out Darryl, with Hire Day, he has some great resources in terms of, know, temp work, fractional work, so that if we do need an influx of work, he's got a fantastic resource for us to go and tap into. Aaron Skinner: Is your internship program pretty robust? Do you have like, know, five interns at any given time? And then you just, I the nice thing about that is you can see who's awesome and be like, we don't want that person to leave kind of a thing. Or how do you guys do that? Ben: Yeah. Yeah, right now we don't have any interns, which is a concern, but we're just in between. We're just in between, you know, because we like to do it in phases so that they have an intern class to come in with and they can work with it. But yeah, it's very robust. We like to keep a healthy stream of interns coming in on a regular basis. And really cool thing about our internships is they get hands on experience with clients. Aaron Skinner: ⁓ hey, put your application in. Ben: is because oftentimes, you know, we get influxes of clients and everything like that. So they'll actually join the calls. They'll actually be a part of the work. They'll be a part of the discussions. So it's a lot more engaging than the usual, hey, go put some numbers into a spreadsheet or, you know, go get some coffee or something. Yeah, exactly. Yep. Yep. Aaron Skinner: Yeah, go grab lunch. Yeah, yeah. Alex Skinner: Weird question, because I've actually I've sometimes wondered if that's like one of those LinkedIn isms, you know, where somebody like says a thing like, do you know of like marketing internships? We're like getting coffee is a thing. You don't have to say anything specifically. I just I've never I've I've I've worked at crappy internships, but I've never had one where it's like you're going to get laundry or like, you know what I mean? Ben: You Yeah, I don't know one specific one, but I do know of, you know, marketing internships where it is, you know, keyword research, where you're just copying and pasting keywords and the volumes and the difficulties and never get to talk. Never actually understand why you're doing that keyword research. All you know is you have to go look up, you know, stocks, use that example again, and variations of stocks and what people are searching for stocks, but you don't actually understand why the audience needs that, what the purpose is behind that, where the alignment is. Alex Skinner: Right, yeah, yeah, yes. You never get to talk to the client. on. Ben: ⁓ So I think that's a fun thing about our internship is they actually understand the why behind what. Aaron Skinner: Okay, so then what makes your company the good place to work? mean, besides like, you we have the clear expectations, things like that, but like, what is setting you apart from the competition where people wanna come work for you? Like, how are you, I'm gonna assume you're gonna say the environment, but what are you doing to create that environment? Ben: Yeah, the biggest thing is the clients that we work for and work with. ⁓ You know, it's it's really again, the process and environment is great. And we're really efficient when it comes to our work. And what that allows us to do is have our creatives work on various types of projects. And the creatives that we've been working with, they love that challenge, right? Because they can apply again, going back to the you what you study in college, they can apply what they learned for an e commerce job. And the Aaron Skinner: ⁓ okay. Ben: the aspects of that to another company type or another industry. ⁓ And so I think they really love that challenge of working with a diverse group of clients that have different challenges, different issues. And so each day, each new client is something different, is something unique. And so that keeps them on their toes. That keeps them continually learning and progressing as an individual rather than just sitting down and doing the same thing for a financial company time and time again. And then after two years, it's like, okay, I haven't really grown. haven't really... rest because I'm doing the same thing every day. Aaron Skinner: Gotcha. Alex Skinner: It helps the fact that you are a branding creative agency that allows for that too. Because when you're doing SEOs, like, all right, another content brief, another content brief, another article, another article, another article. So that's smart. the irony being, brand is the most important thing. And then all of that other stuff are just tactics and things that you need to execute as part of the entire package. I love... Ben: Yep. Alex Skinner: I've always been a big fan of Big Red Jelly from the sidelines. Like I'm always trying to give you guys love on LinkedIn here and there. Um, and even like I said, mentioned when we were partners with you guys, I've, you guys have grown like crazy and you just seemed to, this is almost turned into a promotion for Big Red Jelly, but apologies for that. maybe that's a bad thing for us, but no, I, I'm, I'm a big believer that there's pie for everybody. And I want you guys to get more of that pie. Cause you guys, from what I hear, do fantastic. Aaron Skinner: Yeah. Ben: Hahaha! Thank you. We like to think so. We believe we are. Alex Skinner: I did have one more question for you, Ben, then we'll let you get out of here. And once again, thank you so much for your time today. For those budding entrepreneurs out there, for the, like, I love that question that Aaron asked earlier, where it's like, so you went to school for this and then did something completely different. The one thing that you now versus you eight years ago, like wish that you would have known to speed up the growth process. Ben: Oof. Alex Skinner: Take your time. Aaron Skinner: Bitcoin. Ben: Yeah, I wish I bought Bitcoin. That would have helped out a lot. ⁓ Create a fantastic product that people love working with and you'll grow organically. Because the word of mouth referrals are aligning with that audience. Again, it's all about the customer. And so if you can have a fantastic experience from the first time they see your brand to the time that they're leaving with the final product, If they go, wow, that was unlike anything else I've ever experienced, then that accelerates your growth way more than anything else, because you're going to get referrals, you're going to get, you know, reviews, you're going to get an explosion of growth. And it, again, going back to the AI conversation, it's all about human connection and authenticity, right? If you're there and you're showing that authenticity, you're showing that you care about your clients and customers, that you're giving them the best possible experience of working with your brand. it's just so helpful. And so I wish we had that earlier on in terms of, what is the experience of what is working with Big Red Jelly? What is it of being a Big Red Jelly client that's different than other agencies? And how can we better reflect that more consistently? Once we, and we're still work in progress, but once we really understood that and worked on it, we saw a huge influx of growth. Aaron Skinner: Perfect. Yeah, that's honestly one of the things Alex and I talk about is there's nothing better for business than crappy competition that aren't doing, aren't doing like the little things, like even though you're just responding to emails quickly or calls quickly, there's these little things. It's something that Alex and I preach all the time is just be really good at communicating, really good at communicating and over delivering on everything that you say. And they're never going anywhere. They're always going to stay because all the other companies, most of your competition, isn't doing those little things and people notice it. It's that you're not getting that connection that you were talking about. And so yeah, dude, that's awesome. Alex Skinner: Ben, ⁓ we really appreciate you giving us your time today. ⁓ And we just hope the best for Big Red Jelly and the continued growth and we'll continue to be cheering you on from the sidelines and in whatever other capacity that we can for you. And ⁓ for everybody listening today, ⁓ thank you for listening and we will chat with you all next week. Ben: Exactly.