No Looking Back - The $250K Debt That Changed Everything - The James Agency

Company: The James Agency

Owners: Veronique James

Year Started: 2005

Employees: 50 – 99

What happens when life throws you a massive financial setback before your career even starts? 

Veronique James didn’t just overcome adversity, she used it as fuel to build The James Agency, a powerhouse of creativity and strategy. In this episode, she shares her journey from early struggles to scaling a successful agency, her leadership philosophy, and the game-changing decisions that shaped her business.

If you’ve ever wondered how to weather financial setbacks, grow an agency with intention, or implement open-book management for stronger team buy-in, this episode is packed with insights you won’t want to miss.

Key Takeaways

• How Veronique turned a financial crisis into the foundation for her success.
• Why transparency in finances can empower your team and drive growth.
• The simple yet powerful 10% Project that helped TJA stay lean and profitable.
• Pivoting in crisis,  how her agency rebounded from a 62% revenue loss during COVID without layoffs or pay cuts.

Chapters

• 0:00 The James Agency
• 0:41 Introduction
• 3:20 A Roadblock to the Fast Track
• 14:55 Pivot or Die
• 17:14 62% Revenue Loss in an Hour
• 21:09 Empowerment via Open Book Management
• 30:54 Doing Cool Things
• 33:05 Born or Made
• 35:05 Fake it Til You Make It

Transcript

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.

Russel: 0:41

What happens when life throws you a quarter million dollar curve ball before your career even takes off. Today's guest, Veronique James, didn't just survive adversity, she turned it into the foundation of a powerhouse agency. Welcome to An Agency Story podcast, I'm your host Russel. On this episode, we dive into Veronique's incredible journey starting The James Agency with sheer determination to scaling it into a full service firm. From overcoming financial hardships to navigating the chaos of the pandemic, Veronique shares her shares the hard earned lessons that have shaped her leadership and business philosophy. As the founder and CEO of the James Agency, Veronique has built a reputation as a leader who values transparency, champions a people first approach, and isn't afraid to pivot when the industry demands it. She opens up about the power of resilience, the impact of open book management, and why knowing your numbers isn't just a survival tactic. It's a game changer. If you're looking for a tale of grit, agency growth, and navigating uncertainty, this is the episode for you. Enjoy the story. Welcome to the show today, everyone. I have Veronique James with The James Agency with us here today. Thank you so much for joining us today, Veronique.

Veronique: 1:49

Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

Russel: 1:51

All right. Let's get right to it. Tell us what TJA does and who you do it for?

Veronique: 1:55

The James Agency, also known as TJA, is a full service agency. We prefer the phrase or, uh, naming of integrated. Integrated agency is all facets of marketing. You name it, we handle it. The agency started as a comprehensive brand development firm back in 2005, and through the evolution of doing great work, we've added PR, web, uh, video, crisis communication, social. We have a very strong, uh, digital team, um, and all facets of these services are handled in-house. We really pride ourselves on the middle market, uh, type of client. Pre-COVID we were definitely more B2B, uh, we've diversified to B2B and B2C, uh, which we've coined the phrase B2H, which is business to human. We believe the intent here is to connect the, the brand, uh, our client, to their end audience, whether that's business to business or business to consumer. The formula is essentially the same. We have the privilege of working on all types of clients, uh, but we love clients that engage us on that omni channel strategy, uh, really allowing us to be the quarterback for their marketing initiatives.

Russel: 2:55

I love that business to human.

Veronique: 2:57

B2H.

Russel: 2:58

In 2024 when, yes, when we think of all the words that people have coined up, that there's still an opportunity to, to have new nomenclature and terms. I love to hear it. I want to learn a lot more about all the things that you're doing in your agency and goals and all that good stuff, but I also want to know about young Veronique and where, where she was coming up in the world, where she thought she was headed. What was the young life of Veronique like?

Veronique: 3:20

I'll give you a shortened version of a very long journey. Born and raised in San Diego, California. Went to Torrey Pines High School. Found myself loving architecture at a very young age. Applied to several schools, and found myself actually at the University of Arizona in Tucson. For their architecture program. About a year into school, I found that I was really missing the creative side. I'm a very high creative visual person. Love the math, love, um, the problem solving of architecture, but I have both sides of the brain. I'm very operational sophisticate, but I also love visionary thinking and brainstorming. My favorite question is always what if, right? The what if we could do this? I switched my major to a visual communications degree, a Bachelor's in Fine Arts. Graduated and found myself shortly thereafter as I looked for opportunities to work within the creative sphere. An entry level salary doesn't get you very much in a lot of the bigger metropolitan cities like New York or San Francisco or, even California where I grew up. That was an awakening for me. I was very privileged to come out of school essentially debt free, but my parents did say, generously, when I graduated, I was on my own. I have a very European mother and I have a, uh, uh, entrepreneur father who was an ex-Navy officer. Kind of strict, right? And I was an only child. I found myself actually at a female led and owned small agency, about eight people here in Scottsdale right out of college. While I never intended to go into advertising specifically, a small firm was the great kind of springboard for me to be able to grow, because you're required to wear a lot of hats. I think that's a great submersion into all facets of the business and being able to work closely with my colleagues and see that interdisciplinary thinking, I think, was really what allowed me to advance right out of school compared to some of my other fellow graduates.

Russel: 5:07

Okay, that sounds like quite the fast track. Where does it go from here?

Veronique: 5:11

I'll just tell you quickly, this is where the plot thickens. I fell in love quickly out of school, got married quickly out of school and shortly thereafter found that that wasn't a good decision. About a year, uh, went through a divorce that was really tumultuous. Unfortunately, um, my, um, ex-husband leveraged, uh, my credit score and my perfect debt free social security number to pay off a lot of his debt. And in the state of Arizona, they don't care. It's a community property state. I was awarded about a quarter million dollars of debt at a very, very, very young age. As you can imagine, um, having a lack of support from, and I'm saying this in a good way, like my parents said, you know, and they meant it, when I graduated I was on my own. Being in an entry level position, that really required for me to be extremely nimble and scrappy and to get thoughtful. Here I am, in my early 20s, I, uh, recently divorced, have a lot of, you know, this accumulated debt that wasn't really of my doing, unfortunately. Homeless because I had walked away from my home and my dogs and my car, so I'm living with my cousin. I was like, gosh, you know. At that time, during that transition, I had left that small agency and went to a larger firm. Started out as a graphic designer and was slowly making my ranks up. That firm, what's funny, I call it a larger firm, but at its prime, it was about the size that we are today. It's an interesting retrospective. That firm is, uh, no longer in existence, um, uh, but represented a lot of, like, large flag hospitality, Wyndham, and Golden Door Spa. That was an amazing experience. Big budgets, uh, more corporate clients, really got to learn about the hierarchies of business and professionalism with different personalities, not quite as scrappy or bootstrappy as I'm sure you can imagine. Plus, it was a sophisticated 40 year old firm, it was a legacy business, so they had a lot of well oiled processes and systems. But with that came some cultural disparagement that I didn't love. I felt like there was a lot of contention between the agency and the client, a lot of like, why does this cost so much money? How is this taking so long? You guys are so big, things aren't getting fast, you know, done fast enough. As a creative being in that tender environment, you bleed over your work. It's like, man, there's got to be a better way than having the client always pissed all the time. Pardon the expression. In parallel, my life is sort of coming into shambles. I'm going through an interesting intersection in my career where I'm not loving where I'm at. I'm like, gosh, there's just no time like the present. I, in a very brave manner, quit my job, quit my day job, um, and decided that just, you know, a few months prior that I would start to freelance, uh, to support some of these expenses that I had crewed through my dissolution of my marriage, um, to also get myself back on my feet.

Russel: 7:49

I gotta pause. I mean, there's just so many things we gotta go back and unpack a little bit because, I mean, I think some people, this could be life forever crippling. What you're talking about of a situation saddled with debt, a very young age and I know I'm sitting across from a confident, successful businesswoman today, but what were you thinking back then in terms of just, I mean, the word kept in my mind, I'd be scared shitless. Or is that just, that was just, wasn't in your DNA?

Veronique: 8:14

There's no playbook for those types of life events. Let's call that my first dosage of adversity, you know, as a young adult. Looking back, yeah, certainly I was afraid and there was a lot of uncertainty. I was very fortunate I had a lot of people that were, you know, psychologically supporting me. I had some friends that were very supportive. As I mentioned, I had left, you know, everything kind of behind to leave my husband. One day I sent an email and said, hey, I'm meeting furniture. I have nothing. I had finally found a home that I could rent for a low expense. Within 24 hours, I had a full home full of donated furniture from people's storage. It was events like that, that made me realize if people believe in me, then I have no right to be looking rearview mirror thinking I can't do this. Tenacity was really fueled by one, proving to myself that I was capable kind of honoring the commitments of the people who believed in me. But every day was a new day and when you're young and you're naive, and remember I went to school for art. I didn't know how to run a business. Having a crash course in entrepreneurialism is. I think, an amazing way to learn fast. It's also can be quite expensive and exhausting. But you know, I apply that tenacity and that, you know, there is, there is only one way. There is always a way, uh, through all of my phases of adversity. You asked the question, is it my DNA? I think it is. It just kind of became part of who I am.

Russel: 9:34

Iron sharpens iron. I've had a lot of conversations with folks lately of, uh, there's some, some kind of test out there that measures and, you know, what they're finding is so many entrepreneurs have some adverse circumstances that they faced in their life. Probably just speaks to, you know, just, yeah, you've got to have some of that, I don't know what to call it, scar tissue or tenacity, some of the words you're using to, to make this whole crazy thing we're doing work. I'm so glad we're sitting here and we know that, uh, it did in fact work out for you. How much of that were you balancing as seeing is being an entrepreneur, your only way out of this debt you're facing versus just kind of an unhappiness that you shared about just, the agency life that you were experiencing?

Veronique: 10:10

I would say money was not necessarily the scorecard for me. I measure my life on moments more than I do things. Even in my Instagram handle, it says experiences over things and quality of life for me was really crucial. I think that if you get, you know, that aligned, money will come. As a young person, entrepreneurialism wasn't really in the forefront of my, my definition of who I was. It was more about like, how do I recover? How do I hold true to my inner voice and my inner truth that there's gotta be a better way to do my craft? To serve people through visual communications and solve these business problems in a, in a creative way. I know there's these like seven stages of growth and it wasn't until, you know, I was on the journey to hit my first quarter million when I started to realize, like, I should probably put my big girl pants on. This is turning into sustainable little business. I was calling on friends to help me because capacity was starting to become relatively shallow. I had a sort of a boy band or a consortium of freelancers that were kicking in extra hours at night. I was, you know, paying them for their time. That's really the evolution of how the functional term agency became. I don't know if I ever looked ahead and said I'm going to own a 12, 000 square foot, you know, office space with, you know, close to 50 employees, but by nature of persevering and, and believing in what I felt to be true. Thus the evolution, you know, is what has become today.

Russel: 11:37

Again, I'm impressed already and we're only what, you know, a quarter of the way into your, your story so far. That's amazing. All right. You started your agency. When was the first point where you felt like, hey, we've got to rethink how I'm going about this or, or, call it a pivot or whatever that might be of just a, what, what we'd been doing up to this point isn't going to work anymore?

Veronique: 11:56

I remember it vividly. I'll take just a kind of a sidebar moment. As I was talking about this, like boy band, I say that in like a loving manner. It was me and like four dudes, five dudes. One gentleman, uh, had emailed me one day and said, hey, I'm leaving my agency for pretty much the same reason that I've heard that you left your firm. Will you look at my portfolio? I'm going to be going out and looking for other, you know, opportunities. Can you critique my work? I said, got a better idea. Come meet me for breakfast. There's a really cool breakfast place here, Popular. I said, I, I want to tell you what I'm working on. He came, he met and we, you know, we sat at the community table and what probably was supposed to be a 45 minute conversation turned into five hours. That gentleman today is still employee number one and is our chief creative officer. He is not an equity partner, but he is essentially a founding, you know, contributor to our firm as our CCO. Shane and I, um, sat there and we talked about all the things that we believed in and really the future and the voice of what we wanted to be represented as a firm. There were many moments where the external noise, the influence from competitors, client opinions would challenge us to not stay the course of our North Star. That's probably like lesson number one for young entrepreneurs who are especially in this space is, it's very easy to lose sight of what you're calibrating your objective towards when you've got a lot of people telling you how they think you should run your business. Fast forward, here we are. We're approaching, I want to say, I don't have the actual dollar amount, but let's just say it's three quarter of a million. I've got five freelancers. Some of them are coming to me and work at my house half the day in my little studio. I was introduced to a really amazing woman. She was a contract like CPA, CFO. We had met through one of the networking groups and she and I sort of befriended each other and were giving each other business advice. One day she says, V, like, I don't think the IRS is going to love the fact that you've got all of these contractors and you're giving them a place to work and there's, you know, perpetual, you know, cashflow here, um, all on a 1099 basis. You're potentially going to get into some hot water, um, you need to think about converting to an LLC and formulating an actual entity here. That was really sort of the birth of going from a one woman shop with a bunch of friends to now a, a corporate entity. I was like, okay, let's do this. This is real. With that comes its own idiosyncrasies of taxes and insurance and you don't really realize what you're signing up for when you take on the responsibility of, of becoming a formal business. One of my personal core values is do what you say you're going to do. When I essentially, you know, formulated this agency, I now had people accounting on me for some livelihood. That was a, not only a contractual agreement, obviously, with their employment, but also my emotional, you know, agreement or commitment that I would make sure that they, you know, aligned with my truth and what I wanted to have happen and that they could have a great work experience and produce, you know, really killer creative, you know, stuff. That was our first moment of like, okay, it's time to pivot. Back to your question. I think we probably have a warehouse full of those moments between then and now, and every day, literally every day, my president and I are constantly, in a good way, not in a disruptive way, turning dials, pulling levers, looking for places to optimize, you know, blowing up systems in a positive way that's not disruptive to the agency, because if a firm is complacent and just sort of stays stale, you're going to die, right? You're just going to die.

Russel: 15:24

I think that, that was our pain point a little bit in, you know, once we'd kind of had a good growth and success run and we got a little lazy because we just didn't force ourselves otherwise. You're kind of saying pulling these levers, but it did just make me leave with the idea of, yeah, if you're not growing, you're dying.

Veronique: 15:41

I subscribe to that in, in a lot of ways. I think that there will be some months where you will, by mandate, flatline because my agency needs to cure from the changes that we make previously, right? There needs to be a point of like chill mode to, you know, test those revisions and not over disrupt. Smaller tweaks can be made here and there, and that's really important to continue to optimize. But, um, we always find ourselves around this goal season, when we're planning for the oncoming year, you know, what are some things that we can really disrupt and change and look ahead? That's where we find a lot of that juice from the squeeze from those revisions. Tangent here, um, going back to your question is like, when are those moments of pivot? Sometimes they're small, sometimes they're big, sometimes they're obvious, sometimes they're by mandate or they're, you know by de facto. Sometimes they're economically influenced. I think so many agencies, of course, in 2020, had to pivot by, by proxy of what was happening within, you know, the world.

Russel: 16:36

It's funny, when I first started doing podcasts, uh, launching podcast episodes, so this is 2022. How common people were talking about the pandemic, right? I think it was still fresh on everyone's mind to some degrees we'd been living it and it's still a little bit maybe. But it was just so neat to see in such a petri dish, people having to pivot in a very short amount of time. Really that's the same thing that happens on a more expanded timeline, whether that's an economic crash or something, uh, along those lines that. It was just really fascinating to hear all the COVID pivot stories. As I understand it, you guys kind of had your own running into a wall or however you want to describe that. I haven't heard a good, heard a good COVID story in a while. Tell me yours.

Veronique: 17:14

Here's a quick one for you. We had just celebrated our 15 year anniversary as an agency, literally weeks before I had taken the entire team on a Mexican cruise to celebrate. We had the best time, definitely one of my core memories. We come back and as you can imagine, that fateful day was incredibly difficult as an agency. We were highly capitalized in the, uh, hospitality, food and beverage and entertainment sectors and destination marketing, uh, which were all the verticals that got crushed the most, you know. Within 30 minutes, it was a email, a text message, a phone call, if you can imagine, of cancellations and pauses and, you know, these, um, kind of desperate messages of like, we don't know what to do, but we know that you're going to be the first one that needs to cut right now. I remember laying on the floor of my home and saying, this is the day I'm going to lose my business. Up to that juncture, um, we had about 36 employees at the time, full time employees with a few contractors. We were not a hybrid, work from home type of environment. My team really embraced in real life culture. We were not really built from a, um, a collaboration perspective. Yes, we had the infrastructure to log in through our VPN and access our files so our it wasn't an issue. It was more about how do we navigate our culture and our connection in this remote capacity? Many people, you know, when they reflect back on 2020, they think about the time that they got to spend with their families and the connections they built with their children. My kids were four and five at the time, and, you know, our family did not get to have that, um, privilege because, um, unfortunately, we did not get the first PPP. Our large, uh, institutional bank funder fumbled the platform and had some coding errors. And if you can imagine that very next morning waking up to a sorry, not sorry email was pretty scary. Every day was some new challenge, right? I sat in the swamp for a minute and kind of prayed about it. Many people were giving me advice of you should lay everybody off. You should, you know, do furloughs or AWOPs or, you know, pay cuts. I'm like, gosh, but then I'm going to have nothing to build back from. We didn't do any furloughs. We did not do any pay cuts and we did zero, um, AWOPs. Just reshuffling, you know, rear ends in the right seats, um, putting talents where we felt like could benefit the growth of the business and started focusing hardcore on doubling down on sales and, you know, making sure we didn't have customer concentration and doing a lot of, you know, internal marketing for external purposes. Keeping the team busy and the morale high, sending score cards every Friday, uh, to the team at large with, you know, financials, client attrition, you know, really being extraordinarily transparent and sort of letting everybody be along on the journey. I think that earned me some street cred as a leader to everybody to know, I really wanted to have that team to rebuild from. It was hard. We took a 62 percent net loss in one hour. We recovered only 100k in the red by the end of 2020. That was my first, like, badge of honor to say, I may have not gone to school for crisis common business, but as an agency, we certainly, you know, kind of rose from the ashes and we recovered. There's a story to be told about, you know, how we navigated that, um, and how we made sure to maintain the business that we did. While everybody else is sort of like rebuilding their teams. We maintained the culture and the connection, the transparency and the confidence, which allowed us to bounce back a lot faster.

Russel: 20:35

I want to get into some of that because I do want folks to, to, you know, not just think they need to be superwoman, like, like you were, but, um, you know, what, what are the practical takeaways there? Hands down, and I was, had an agency in the 2008 recession. The takeaway I always got was you've got to invest in yourself. It's time to get lean and to get efficient and all these other things, but when you think about that, that kind of after effect, so clearly you were doing some things you had to, clearly investing in yourself. What will you think were the top one or two game changers that you actually did during that time that, you know, still exist or are very impactful to where the business is at today?

Veronique: 21:09

From an employee perspective, having that extreme ownership and having open book management during that time was really critical, allowing people to understand truly on a week by week basis, that cash flow, um, so they could understand. It essentially displaced the responsibility, not only me, to feel like I was the one that's having to toe the line, but everybody had a part to play to ensure that we survived. Internally, some adaptations are some really great tactics, and I can't take credit for these. I'm very privileged to be a part of entrepreneurs organization. I was tapping into my EO form quite a bit, but building literally a day to day cash flow on an eight week rotation. We had a really good cash flow document, cash in, cash out, but it was for more of an expansive amount of time. But having literally to the day, cash in, cash out in a large spreadsheet, and we did it for an entire year so I could do a look back on 365 days. Very granular, but that was hyper focused at the time. Cash is queen or king or gender agnostic, so that was important for us. The other thing we did is what I call the 10 percent project. We pulled up and I think that this is a good rule of thumb for any business owner when you're not in a state of adversity, but when you're just generally operating, to have a strong handle of all of your dues and subscriptions, your tech stack, you know, where are all the little things, the extra drop box seats. Fortunately we were obsessive compulsive with our organization and being able to understand. For three days I went through every single line on the PNL, every expense, every software receipt, and I either went back and negotiated 10 percent off terms, my goal was to try to get as much off that top line as I possibly could, uh, to offset the losses. It's kind of, you know, a numbers game knowing what we were taking in a deficit from income. The saying is, don't wait for the rain, go to the well, uh, for income, and so that's what I did. I went to the well. We were hardcore, and we still are pretty hardcore and cutthroat when it comes to added dues and subs, or contract renewals with licensing, you know, sometimes that can be a runaway train, and it can become extremely bloated. I cannot tell you how many clients we talk with that have zero kind of understanding fiscally around like that warehouse of expenses. It's okay to have a bread basket, you know, of little crumbs, but when you have a warehouse of that stuff and you have no understanding. Those were two really good, the kind of internal tactical moves that we made, um, during that time to have a strong pulse on cash. Sort of a tertiary but overlapping effort there was, you know, assuming that we needed to stay away from having a another portfolio that could be hurt in the future because nobody really knew the aftereffects of COVID. It was hyper, hyper, hyper focused goals for all of us to make sure that we didn't have more than 10 percent customer concentration moving into the next 12 months, um for both client vertical as well as client type revenue because that risk mitigation allowed us to have that confidence and knowing that if there was a particular industry that was just going to get pummeled, uh, that we wouldn't have that, that feeling of being, you know, completely crushed again. That was important for us and we still maintain that practice today.

Russel: 24:21

Wonderful tips and takeaways there. If I apply a holistic blanket on it, it's just, how important it is to just not be fast and loose with things when in times are flush and then wait until, you know, times are rough to you know, oh, now go do all these things. Know your numbers and just constantly be on top of these things because they can creep up on you and they can build up into something significant over time. If we're just constantly on them. It's just about putting, making the best use of capital dollars, resources to do this thing we're trying to do. So many great takeaways along those ends. I really just want to hit record for three more hours and just let you go off on, on sharing those things. But, um, if I could just pick one, I want to go back to open book management philosophy, because I think this is a struggle for agencies in two realms. One, scared to show maybe that level of transparency but also knowing that it's not just about showing, that it is about letting people take ownership of the line items and the elements of that. But can you just one, just share a little bit more about maybe what open book management is for folks and how maybe some of that, a little bit of granularity of how and why that's effective in your business?

Veronique: 25:27

Absolutely. I'm going to first start with the foundation of our why and why we do that. Just a quick remembrance of where I started, quarter million in debt. The agency wasn't able to secure any credit until our 7th year so everything was based on cash that we had in hand. We were not leveraged in debt. We didn't have any capital investors. Today we are still a debt free agency. We have very low credit lines that we use just for media and, you know, cost of goods sold that we pay off. But we still operate in that philosophy, which is interesting because you're not playing with other people's money,. Your liability is your own and your liquidity is your own. It's a win together, lose together component. In 201 6, that fear of sharing was very real for me, I think, because the agency was profiting and we were growing and there was a lot of perceptions and what, you know, what's the adage like, uh, revenue for vanity, profit for sanity. I was afraid to, like, share, cause I didn't want to people to start asking for more, you know, we were just in a really accelerated time. I started to feel like the sacrificial lamb, like the, the weight of the world was on me and it was getting harder every day. The business was becoming more complex. We were in the multimillion dollar phase. HR was becoming a thing, uh, because we had more people, just lots of layers. I remember feeling like that sacrificial lamb and I was like, I, I don't want to feel this way. I don't want to feel this, you know, it should not be this hard. I was coached by another entrepreneurial friend with a larger, enterprise sized business. He asked me, he said, you know, what is the shame in you showing your balance sheet, and we have a very clean balance sheet and your PNL, and like, exposing that just to your leadership team? What's the worst that could happen? I was like, I don't know, judgment? perception and all the things? All the limited beliefs that I was making up my head. He said, okay, valid, valid. But you know, what if they said, wow, thanks for sharing. I didn't realize that I have such a contribution into the profitability of this business or to the expenses of this business or the decisions that I make? He's like, I guarantee you that you'll find that the conversation leans more that direction than it does about this perception. I was scared. I was really scared. I got to the point, kind of a breaking point where like, okay, I got to just kind of dig my heels in and get this done. I really opened up and we had a two hour working session and we went line by line. Overhead, you know, our service delivery team costs, how our utilization and capacity, because as you know, in the agency space, professional services, it's not just about sales. It's about efficiency and getting projects done on time, getting stuff out the door. The conversation was so transformational and so informational for all the members sitting at the table. I immediately felt this, like, sense of relief and clarity and more importantly, I felt like I was trusted and I could trust them. It was in the congeniality of, like, our leadership team really coming together at that point was pretty amazing. Because of that, the sense of community that we get to experience, this beautiful office and the cultural initiatives and the, and the speakers and the team builds, they understand that everybody's contribution matters, right? On my executive level, they have access to the full, full PNL. They get to see everything and we review it on a monthly basis. The entire agency has more of a roll up PNL during our, um, our quarterly, but then we dive down into month over month, year over year. We talk about trends, um, benchmarks. What's great about that is we also create a space for questions. If one person's asking a question, probably that means that somebody else is also wondering it too. So everybody gets to learn. We want everybody to be financially sophisticated. That takes a lot of responsibility off of myself because being a solopreneur can be extremely lonely sometimes, sitting on my own island. And I do not take that for granted, that I have this incredible leadership team now. President, 13 years, I mentioned Shane, 19 years, my career director coming up on 14 years, and some members that are approaching 10, uh, because they believe, right? They believe that they make impact and purpose.

Russel: 29:30

So many things we could break down with, with that, but, you know, talk about ownership. One is transparency first, but then, you know, letting people take ownership. Love to hear that. Just even maybe some of the theme of it, that ownership gets another 10 or 20 percent out of, you know, what people can contribute or inspired to do and it's being on top of your expenses outright, what you shared before, that's another amount of percentage. All of that compounds over time to clearly what you have today, is a successful agency. Impressive.

Veronique: 29:56

Thank you for saying that. And like, I don't have it all figured out, right? Every day is a new day. Political uncertainty, there's so many things, dynamics that are consistently happening. But, you know, as I mentioned, going back to the beginning, you know, we stay true to our core. We try not to be influenced by all the opinions and there's a lot of them. What our competitors are doing and the social influence and all of that. We honor the relationships that got us here. I think a lot of people in business sort of forget the grassroots and the early, the early contributions. I'm so privileged to have people that were with me since day one. They remember when we used to take our iPhone one and put it in a bowl on speaker, right? I used to answer the phone in a British accent, uh, when it was just me pretending to be a receptionist. You do what you gotta do. But staying, staying true to that humble, you know, swagger is really important.

Russel: 30:45

Oh yeah. I got all kinds of fake it till you make it stories. Those are funny. Kind of down the line of wrapping up, how are you looking at the growth and future of the company? What does that look like for you guys?

Veronique: 30:54

Coming out of COVID and I'll tie this back to that really quickly. Many clients came to us and said, gosh, we knew what our client, our audiences were, but we don't know what the crystal ball looks like for three to four years. We really doubled down on strategy and insights. We built a, uh, a formula or process that allows us to really eliminate the bias and subjectivity of what marketing should look like for our clients looking forward. People say, really, you can give me the GPS coordinates, and we say, yes, like, not only can we really personify who your audiences are, but how are they consuming information, you know, and then knowing even more, what is that channel selection and the cost and what's that potential ROI? So people can go to pen to paper with confidence. We've really leaned into that insights first philosophy. Yes, we do killer creative work and web and all those things, but rooting that in objective insights has really built a longstanding and encouraging relationship with our existing and new clients. We just added 4, 000 square feet to our, 4, 000 square feet to our physical footprint, um, and that's interesting because in contrast to a lot of agencies that have shrunk and have gone to either full remote or hybrid, my team is back to liking to be in real life. While we do allow our staff to work a couple days work from home on a flex schedule, we find that clients engage agencies to be a part of something bigger than themselves or their business. Offering that brand promise, you can come here and collaborate and be inspired, and we can solve those complex business problems, which is exactly why I started the business 20 years ago, is really special. I just extended our lease to June of 2028 with our current, uh, landlord. At that point, we hope to either buy a building and expand our footprint even more. We're really going to try to continue to honor and own that authentic agency, um, voice. It's one thing to say you're cool and then it's another thing to do cool things, right? I think there are a lot of agencies out there that say that they're the fastest growing or they're the coolest. We're going to be very steadfast in our thought of being authentic to who we are as people. We're fun to work with and we're collaborative and crazy and casual, but we are also a five star luxury performance agency that delivers exceptional results and we do whatever it takes.

Russel: 33:01

I'm going to net that out to do more cool things.

Veronique: 33:03

Do more cool things.

Russel: 33:05

No one better to do that than yourself. All right. Last big question for you. Are entrepreneurs born or are they made?

Veronique: 33:10

Oh, no. Gosh, it depends on the day. Sometimes, because of the circumstance, they're made. I talked to my dad about this, as I mentioned, he's getting ready to retire the day before Thanksgiving, he'll be 75 in December. Watching him and his journey, I think he was born an entrepreneur. He says the same about me. His stories about me as a little girl. I don't have the answer for you on that one. It's a privilege though. It's hard, but it's a privilege.

Russel: 33:33

Hey, it takes all kinds. Love that perspective. It sounds like you might be leaning a little towards born, uh, maybe it just took you a while to realize that in yourself. Who knows at the end of the day? Well, if people want to know more about James Agency, where can they go?

Veronique: 33:46

Thejamesagency.com is our website and then on all social platforms@TheJamesAgency. You can find us across, um, all of those mechanisms. Of course, um, you can find me, uh, online, you can call me or text me, smoke signals, you know, pigeon birds, whatever works. We're always looking forward to hearing from people riffing some great ideas and hopefully collaborating with some cool concepts.

Russel: 34:07

Beautiful, beautiful. What a great story. Resilience to the max and just, you know, just some of the innovations, but then just getting downright in the weeds, in the sand, grabbing efficiency anywhere you can. So many great takeaways from your story today, Veronique, and I really take, really appreciate you taking the time to share it.

Veronique: 34:24

Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate the opportunity.

34:29

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.

Veronique: 35:05

I always go back to that story of, um, acting as if right in the very beginning stages of bootstrapping. I had mentioned about how I used to pick up the phone in a British accent and then, you know, put it down and then pick up the phone as myself. That kind of caught me in the knickers because, um, at the time I was working on an infill multifamily project with a gentleman who I'm still very close with and we continue to do deals with. He's from London. I answered the phone in my very terrible accent, put it down, answered myself, and then he goes on to ask me where I am from, uh, in London. That's the moment of reality where I'm like, okay, I got to stop pulling this charade because this isn't going to work.

Russel: 35:42

Oh, got called on your accent. That's too funny.