The Client Wanted His Money Back… or He’d Send a Crew - SAMA Labs

Company: SAMA Labs
Owners: John Florey
Year Started: 2018
Employees: 26-50

In this episode of An Agency Story, John Florey, co-founder and CEO of SAMA Labs, shares how early mistakes nearly derailed their agency including a client so unhappy he threatened a physical shakedown. From chaotic beginnings to scaling high-retention client relationships, John opens up about the turning points that reshaped his agency’s future.

Inside this episode:

• Why trying to help everyone is the fastest path to burnout
• The 5 traits SAMA Labs looks for in every ideal client
• A step-by-step shift that took retention from unstable to 18+ months
• The wild story of a celebrity client who threatened John’s team
• What most agencies get wrong when they chase $10M+ brands

Transcript

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0:02

Welcome to An Agency Story podcast where we share real stories of marketing agency owners from around the world. From the excitement of starting up the first big sale, passion, doubt, fear, freedom, and the emotional rollercoaster of growth, hear it all on An Agency Story podcast. An Agency Story podcast is hosted by Russel Dubree, successful agency owner with an eight figure exit turned business coach. Enjoy the next agency story. Welcome to An Agency Story podcast. I'm your host Russel. On this episode, we have John Florey co-founder and CEO of SAMA Labs, a global lifestyle and e-commerce company based out of Boca, Raton, Florida. In the beginning, John never even imagined themselves in the agency business, his passion for technology and people led him to sales, where he discovered as a knack for engaging with customers. This experience sparked a new ambition and he decided to start an agency with his best friend. Drawing from their own business experiences, they developed a group. They developed a blueprint for success. Helping businesses at the cusp of significant growth and guiding them through their most critical moments. Enjoy the story.

Russel 1:19

Welcome to the show today, everyone. I have John Flory with SAMA Labs with us here today. Thank you so much for being on the show today, John.

John 1:26

Thanks for having me, man. Appreciate it, Russel.

Russel 1:27

Looking forward to a good conversation. If you don't mind, start us off. Tell us what SAMA Labs does and who do you do it for?

John 1:32

We are a performance and creative marketing agency. We're pretty full service. We serve e-commerce brands mostly direct to consumer SMB to mid market. We do have everything from paid media to email and retention, all the way to creating content for brands. We do work with some startups, but we try to stay along the lines of brands that we know we could bring the most value to. We pretty much run the full funnel gamut up to even marketplaces like Amazon, Walmart, Target. com, which is a growing presence for most e-comm brands today, but it is a full gamut of direct to consumer advertising services.

Russel 2:05

Wonderful. We're going to hear a lot more about that, but let's go back in time. What was young John thinking he was going to do with his life, in the words of Matt Foley, before he ever got around to starting an agency?

John 2:16

The funny question is going to be how many people get that reference, first of all.

Russel 2:20

That's very true.

John 2:20

I actually went to school to be a pediatric psychologist. I liked working with kids. I babysat at a young age, have a younger brother. What happened was I got introduced to e-commerce pretty much young adult. Moved to Florida, I'm from New York originally, and roughly about 13, 14 years ago I was convinced by a friend I grew up with to move to Florida and he had a job lined up for me in the e-commerce space. I had never thought about anything in the tech world at the time, at least, but I always had a tech background. I was pretty, geeky nerdy at the time. I liked working with computers, big gamer. This was more of an introduction to this whole other space in e-commerce. At the time it was an old school Yahoo store and it was my introduction to the whole operation, I was packing boxes at the time. I got introduced to every aspect of the business from community management, the business I was working for at the time had a good following with forums and discussion boards. That was how they built a lot of their business. I was attracted to the community that the brand built and I got exposed to other aspects of it from a marketing area, from operations, everything behind the scenes. I was drawn to it. Moved into another e-commerce business after that, working for a company called Lethal Performance. Shout out to my friends there. They sold automotive aftermarket parts. That was my introduction to building and working with a Magento store. At the time, that was when Facebook started to release their ads platform, super new. I remember the owner and I were throwing money at it, trying to figure out what it was, how to drive traffic to the site, how to get more people to look at the brand, spent a couple of years there. Then I basically built my own e-commerce store in the wellness and supplement space, and that was my introduction to building something from the ground up. I got to experience what it was like working with another agency to help me with my concept and idea, all the way to eventually exiting that and then moving into the agency space. I worked for a local South Florida agency at the time. That was my introduction to being on the service end of the business, to serve people and business owners with their digital marketing and eventually led me to co founding SAMA with my best friend, Tom Discernia, who at the time was building his own brands as well. There was more of the chronology of being on different aspects of the business and ultimately being able to serve people and having what I consider an empathetic lens, because we know what it's like to be on the operation side, building a business. We try to introduce that to the experience with brands working with us on a day to day basis.

Russel 4:38

So much to unpack there. And as I understand it from our original conversation, it wasn't always the intended path you would meant to go down at one point. You wanted to be a pediatric psychologist and somewhere along the line decided that wasn't the route you're going to go to. Where did the fork in the road actually occur?

John 4:52

I think it was not that I wasn't passionate about that original path. I was never a good student. I was able to get good grades, but I didn't enjoy being in school. I didn't want to go down the path of being in school for the next several years, possibly being in this colossal amount of debt to get to maybe a doctorate level. When I was able to sink my teeth into the digital side of things, that was now introducing a different passion of mine, and something that I can see, okay, this is going to be the future. E-commerce is certainly not going to go anywhere. More people are buying online. That enabled me to focus on something that I was passionate about. Fortunately, through that experience, I was able to compound passions. I'm big into gaming, like I said, but also cars were a hobby of mine so those first two places I was working at, I was able to combine being in front of a computer, engaging with people, talking about something that I know very well myself, and that started to spitball into more of a sales type of experience for me. I got to relate to people that I was talking to, and that led me into the agency space, which I could do the same thing with. It was just a new passion, getting me to be able to focus on something that I was truly excited about. Something that was obviously was going to be a big part of everybody's future.

Russel 5:57

As a person at one time that wanted to be a chef, I can totally identify with not all roads lead to where you intend, but doesn't mean they don't lead to good places by any means. I love what you said there to compounding passions. If we can do that, we're probably doing pretty good in life.

John 6:10

Not every day is easy, of course, for me, it was also thinking about, all right, what could potentially be recession proof? Digital e-commerce service businesses, all those different things was more about securing my future and being able to grow. It all lined up nicely.

Russel 6:24

The pandemic taught us nothing else is that we're always willing to buy online. You got to the point, you decided to start the agency with a business partner. What were the early days like? What were you thinking, what were you feeling, what was going on?

John 6:34

We shot ourselves out of a rocket, in the sense of we wanted to help everybody, anybody. The brand and the business has always been predicated on bringing value to people. We knew there was this huge gap and there's a lot of good agencies out there, don't get me wrong, but there's more agencies that are, I would say, more malicious in intent than there are the opposite of that. We had a lot of people close to us that were getting burned. They would have bad experiences or they didn't know what they were doing. We wanted to help them. Our problem was we tried to help too many people too quickly. Was a great thing, the business was growing technically, but it wasn't growing on a solid foundation. That was our introduction to things. It was a little rocky at first, but fortunately we have a great team that was passionate about navigating the white caps, the rocky water is a little bit better than most. The early days were crazy, we were very ambitious. We work hard and we try to compound that with working with people that were like, help me. They saw the success that we had personally too. They saw my business partner and best friend who had his success with his brands upwards of nine figures in revenue on an e-commerce side, and then obviously my background experience, similarly. They were like, if anyone's going to help us, we hope it's you guys. That was the rude awakening as to, you can't help everybody, even though you have good intent to do that.

Russel 7:39

What was that process like? Cause I know that's always something a lot of agencies struggle from one or two reasons, right? The genuine nature to want to help people, which is often the case and then also compounded with, we got to bring in revenue. Anybody that's got a checkbook in hand or whatever you want to say there, they're our client. What specifically did you do, beyond a mindset shift, to actually transition from the two versions of your agency?

John 8:00

It wasn't up until COVID where things start to get rocky for us. It's easiest for brands to say, all right, the first thing we should cut is the marketing team. That's an expense that's easy to cut because we'll figure out ourselves. That's what happened to us in some instances. Fortunately we had a pretty diverse category of companies and brands that we worked with that wasn't apparel or supplements. It was spread across pretty dynamically, but it gave us a moment in time to say, we'll stop. Let's figure out who our ICP is, our ideal client profile, and let's hit that because we know that if we've hit these markers, out of five different criterias that we would look for, if a brand has a majority of them, there's a strong likelihood that we can bring them value and do a good job. Our retention went up, we're a month to month agency, so our average client stays on for a minimum of 18 months if they hit those markers. Then our goal is to make sure that they're sustainable for their future. They want to bring in their internal team. We changed our mantras a little bit to be about that. That was game changing for us. Like I said, our retention on our client side went through the roof. Clients stayed on board, our team stayed on board. We weren't getting as much burnout anymore, which is a byproduct of this business. People do get burned out because there's a lot of repetitiveness in the agency space when it comes to media buying and e-commerce marketing. I think that was the turning point for us, stopping, hitting the brakes, reassessing and then doubling down on that ideal client for us.

Russel 9:15

How do you describe that ideal client today? In terms of, as you mentioned too, you're in a very competitive space, obviously, even if sometimes the general market doesn't understand how to differentiate. How do you seek out and find your ideal client?

John 9:26

Every agency that does what we do I think would say that their ideal client is a business that does probably more than 10 million a year in revenue. The harsh reality, this is more of inside look for a brand owner that's listening to this, is that it's easy for nine out of 10 agencies. If you're doing more than 10 million a year, they're probably going to do a good job if they know what they're doing, because you've already established success. There's not many crazy things that need to be done to do something that's sufficient enough where you're like, okay, we're getting value out of this investment. I like the brands that are doing, I'd say between 1 million and 5 million because they've now scratched the surface of success and they want to scale. In our experience of sailing a nine figure brand, we've got the blueprint and it's easy for us to articulate because we know what they're going through at that very moment, where they're at that next inflection point of going to 10 plus. Being able to sink our teeth into brands like that, I get most excited about because they're owner operated usually. They're not injected with institutional money where it gets a little bit muddy. We can get creative with things and they're willing to test, they're willing to try, and they're super, super easy to work with. I'd say that's probably our excited sweet spot, of course, would do a great job with the brands that are exceeding that type of revenue, but goes back to my original point. Shopify stores, great retention, great margin, easy AOV, average order value. I'd say usually around 50 is their average order value. If their attention is anywhere between 30 to 60 percent, it's easy for us to identify that and then hit the ground running.

Russel 10:47

I like the thought process there. You have to put your money where your mouth is, the smaller the organization, right? I've seen this more kind of on the employment side. If someone can be relatively ineffective in a large organization and no one can ever pinpoint the success, but at that level they're either growing or they're not, which is correlated to your effectiveness. Very fascinating approach there. Speaking along the lines of success, what stands out in your mind as like, gosh, that's the quintessential success story we have for a client? If I could do this again and again, I'm winning at this game a hundred percent?

John 11:14

I think the best one is, we had worked with a coffee brand that was doing sub 10 million at the time. This is going back a couple of years, one of our early clients. They scaled to in the mid eight figures with the recipe and got to a point where it was like, all right, it's time for them to move on, whether as they find another vendor or they we're looking to build their internal team. There's stuff like that. There's more brands that we've worked with that we have great case studies for. The Amazon space. They weren't leveraging Amazon and then we injected some new strategies along those lines, help them grow a new revenue stream. Then there's new platforms. Brand was doing pretty much flat revenue and they were like, we want to start looking at different platforms. Came up with a cool TikTok strategy. This is in the supplement space. They almost tripled the revenue overnight because of those things. Things like that is what we get hyped up about as a team.

Russel 12:03

Gosh, I love TikTok. Such a cool app.

John 12:05

If it's going to stick around, I don't know if it's going to be around in the next couple of months.

Russel 12:09

I think it'll be around. The user power is strong with that one but who knows? We'll see. Looking back, you've obviously had some success, different turning points and challenges you've overcome. Are you behind the curve, ahead of the curve where you thought you'd be when you first started the agency?

John 12:23

That's a good question. I would say we're still behind the curve, only from the sense of we're super forward thinking ambitious and want to be as successful as possible. We don't want to bite off more than we can chew, which was the foray that we had when we first launched the agency, and repeat history. But for the sake of having high standards and setting the bar high, I'd say we're still behind the curve. We're testing new things this year to be able to bring in more of the right business faster from a volumetric and a quality standpoint at the same time. I think we'll always think of ourselves behind the curve because of those things. That's who we are genetically, as a business.

Russel 12:55

I always referred to that as the curse of the ambitious person, where, I probably thought I was going to take over the world when we first started our agency and then quickly found out there was a whole lot of work to be done between where we started and taking over the world.

John 13:07

It's one of those things, we always try to find good talent. We try to install the best people to serve our clients the best. It is a client service based business, even though it's digital marketing. At its core it's a service so you have to treat it that way. A lot of people do experience burnout over time, very relationship driven. Oftentimes we work with clients that develop rapport with the people they're working with inside of my team. While I encourage that, I stay away from it sometimes. I try to remove myself from the day to day of the client experience because I never want our team to be minimized against the clients that are working with them on a more regular level. I want to empower them obviously to want to creatively think and give them that ability to flex and stretch and not take away from that. It's easy for any brand to be like, I want to talk to the CEO, that's what I want to only deal with, and the person who founded the company. Which I enjoy doing. I love talking to clients, coming up with creative solutions, but that's the reason why we put the team in place that we do have. I trust them wholeheartedly. The other part of that is obviously with scale comes getting the right hires at the right time, which is another challenge that you're going to have owning and operating an agency or a business period, regardless of who you are.

Russel 14:09

For sure and certainly more so the case over the last two to three years. It was always a challenge within the tech space, agency space, marketing space, if you will, prior but then it got turned on its head much recently. What's been successful on that path for you in terms of finding good talent and getting them on board?

John 14:24

We take a different approach to it. We do obviously need to bring in net new team members over time as the company grows, but we've been very adamant about nurturing and growing the people that we do have. Someone who comes in super green, I want to give them the education to figure out how to do this and also figure out if this is the right path for them, is this is something they want to pursue as a career? They get exposed to a lot quickly, and that's by design. That's a big part. The other part is we have a pretty defined vetting process too. We do it backwards. I usually lead with the introduction to feel them out and tell them the reasons why they wouldn't want to work for the company, as opposed to painting this beautiful picture, and if they're still invested into learning more than they connect with the team, my upper middle management to get a little bit more relatable to that. By then we see if they're good fit, if they will gel well. Chemistry is a big part of what we do, even though we're almost 100 percent a remote company. It's one of those things where you still have to vibe with the people that you work with. That's what we focus on as well. I like to promote from within. I think that's the best way to do it. If they show loyalty, if they've shown hard work and dedication to the business and the craft, and they want to continue to get better, I'll give them that runway to do that, 1000%.

Russel 15:26

Certainly love that approach. Similar to the overall digital space over the last 10, 15 or more years where the technical knowledge from a person, if you go back 10 years, had to be much higher than what it is today to get a website up and running. Even e-commerce, the addition of Shopify and then we have all these third party sites where it used to be just eBay, Etsy and Facebook marketplace, even assembling on Amazon. Where do you see the evolution of e-commerce going and likewise, how that affects your business?

John 15:51

I think Amazon is going to continue to evolve. I don't see that ever going anywhere. It's only going to get more convenient for people to buy products they're looking for through that vehicle. I think it will get more challenging for brands to maintain that moat of themselves off of that platform. It is a necessary evil in some senses of the word and obviously it's going to continue down that path. I think that the challenge is going to be for brands to focus on the brand first and leverage that, against growth. I don't think that necessarily the mechanisms of what's happening now are going to evolve too drastically. You could talk about how AI is going to play into that somehow, which you probably will, finding products and the best prices and the fastest delivery. I think it would be continually more about convenience. People want things as fast as possible. When you look at the evolution of how AI is going to start to play a role in our everyday life, it's about speed and how quickly you can absorb information or products or anything else of the sort. I think it's going to come down to how convenient can you get for somebody while maintaining brand equity?

Russel 16:47

Speaking of the future and success, where are you hoping to take SAMA Labs in the longterm?

John 16:50

We're going to keep leveraging what we have as far as the team and the services, getting a little bit more bullish with marketplaces because we want to be able to serve the brands and do the best thing we can for them to help them grow and drive more revenue. Our content team is incredible and content being a real important bedrock of being able to scale and grow brands. We do have a, it's a division called Posh Content and C reative. That is an extension of us to help produce the assets. We have a studio in South Florida that we create that content. That's a big area that we're focusing on. Then getting into more of the influencer experience too, that's another big area, but of course we're going to continue building our own brands, because that's what we've always done. We're going to continue doing what we've done successfully, alongside servicing the right type of clients that we want to work with.

Russel 17:30

Last big question for you, John are entrepreneurs born or are they made?

John 17:34

That's a good one. I think it's a little bit of both. I look at myself and people that I'm surrounded by and try to relate that into an answer. I think there's a genetic code that you have to be entrepreneurial, and then it's also what you're exposed to and taught as well. Not everybody's entrepreneurial and a lot of people don't want to be. They want to stay along their lane, and there's people who would want to break against that mold and find their own path. I think if you have some sort of ambition, and if you surround yourself by the right people, mentors who can help you get to that maximum potential, I think that's where that the taught aspect comes into it. You can be entrepreneurial and you can learn how to apply those things, as long as you have the right drive. That's all I think it comes down to sometimes. I think it's a little bit of both and I've witnessed it myself through myself and through people that I surround myself by to help me get to the place that we're at today.

Russel 18:20

Love that. I often ask myself this question. I'm curious your answer to this. Along that same line, is there a path you could ever seen thinking of yourself? Could you have stayed in the corporate world? Certain things happen where you ended up this or do you think you were always meant to end up in this entrepreneurial path?

John 18:32

I think it's how you're raised, too, in some form or fashion. I was fortunate to live in a comfortable household. We weren't beyond any sort of level of I would call middle to high income as far as where we raised and where we grew up in Long Island. That was my upbringing, but I was never spoiled. I had to work in the summers to earn my keep and I was surrounded by two parents who worked hard, so I was always exposed to hard work and earning those things. I think it's one of those things that you have to want, and then if you have that desire, you find the right outlet to do that. It was very easy for me to find some sort of corporate job in this city and go through the rat race and do it that way. But I never saw myself being that way. I always wanted to be independently successful, be able to provide even beyond what I was fortunate enough to have as a child and be able to provide my own children one day with even more than that, as far as opportunity. I think it goes both ways.

Russel 19:18

You can certainly chase rats, too, but thank you for sharing that perspective. If people want to know more about SAMA Labs, where can they go?

John 19:24

Our website, www.SAMA-L abs, L A B S, dot com. Or search for us on LinkedIn, always posting some sort of value add content. Then of course, if anyone's interested, DM me personally on LinkedIn, we have a cool eight figure e-commerce email marketing guide where we basically give you a blueprint for free. It shows you how to get the most out of your email marketing, no cost. It's the playbook. Of course, if anyone needs help, we're happy to walk them through it or anywhere we can help if they're a mutual fit for us.

Russel 19:51

Go get your eight figure email marketing playbook today, folks. Love giving that free value out there. Very cool. I know that's gotta be a successful strategy for you. Learned so much today. Thank you for sharing the world of e-commerce with us today, John. I appreciate you being on the show and taking the time.

John 20:05

Awesome, Russel. I enjoyed the conversation, thanks for having me.

20:10

We hope you've enjoyed this episode of An Agency Story podcast where we share real stories of marketing agency owners from around the world. Are you interested in being a guest on the show? Send an email to podcast@performancefaction.com. An Agency Story is brought to you by Performance Faction. Performance Faction offers services to help agency owners grow their business to 5 million dollars and more in revenue. To learn more, visit performancefaction.com.

John 20:46

Towards the beginning when we launched the agency, we worked with somebody in the entertainment business. They wanted to launch a brand and also promote their own personal brand. They were under the guise that running some Facebook ads would make them a million dollars overnight. We told them it wasn't possible, but they had this grander idea that, because of our success they had, it was foolproof that they would be successful. I think we worked with them for maybe two or three months. We created a cool strategy. We'd shot some content and then we started launching some campaigns. Then he started seeing that Facebook story trend, hitting the card for their ads. It happened a couple of times and it wasn't popping as quickly as he wanted to. I actually got a call one day that he wanted all of his money back. Want a total refund. I'm like, it's not happening. We did our work, we did our job. That's not how this works. He proceeded to tell me that there would be a truck full of people that would come to the office and basically shake me down. I'm not going to name any names, but knowing who that person was in the industry, my partner and I were like, let's do it. It's not worth it. We're not going to have people show up and shake us down and God knows what else could happen. We ended up refunding them. We laugh about it today that we almost had God knows who from what gang show up at our office and try to take, I don't know if they expected to stop cash on hand, like it was a cash register you could open up and take your money. It was all obviously through Stripe. That was a funny moment and funny in the sense of it was scary at the time, but we laugh about it now. It was very early on in the agency space, so we were trying to stay out of trouble.

Russel 22:02

Every time I think I heard it all, that's the first story of a near agency shakedown I've heard. I'm glad you made it out okay on the other side of that. Gosh, I can remember so many similar stories of the miracle business that it would be our pleasure to work with, or thank them for allowing us to work with them more so than the service we're providing.