Solving a market problem and serving a larger purpose with Jonathan Grzybowski

Speaker 1:

If you’re going to take the risk of running an agency, shouldn’t you get the benefits too? Welcome to Agency Management Institute’s Build a Better Agency Podcast, presented by HubSpot. We’ll show you how to build an agency that can scale and grow with better clients, invested employees, and best of all, more money to the bottom line. Bringing his 25 plus years of experience as both an agency owner and agency consultant, please welcome your host, Drew McClellan.

Drew McLellan:

Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Build a Better Agency. This is going to be fascinating conversation and very different actually from a lot of our episodes. I’m hoping that it’s insightful for you. So, today’s guest is a 29-year-old entrepreneur, who has already started and shut down an agency, because he realized it was not the model for him, and then has opened up a different kind of business that now serves agencies. So, there’s a couple things that I want you to really listen for in this episode and a couple things that I’m going to be trying to dive deeper into.

So, Johnathan Grzybowski owns a company today called Penji. What they are is they are a design subscription model, where you pay them a flat fee and they do all the designs that you can request in the course of that month for the subscription fee. But what’s interesting about Johnathan is that at the ripe old age of 24, he started an agency. Here’s what I want you to get out of the conversation. So, if you are 40+, I think it’s going to be really insightful in terms of how the millennial generation, how the younger generation thinks about work and how they think differently about owning a business, because for a lot of you, you struggle with attracting and recruiting and retaining young talent.

I think it’s helpful for you to understand the way they see the world, their worldview, which is very different from how us, middle-aged folks, sorry, think about it. I think they’re much more willing to take risks. I think we’re seeing a lot of younger people start businesses either while they’re in high school or college or certainly right out of college. I don’t know about you, but when I was starting out, it didn’t occur to me that I should start my own business. I assumed that I had to work for someone else and I had to learn from someone else. I’m grateful for that learning, don’t get me wrong, but I think the mindset has changed. So, I want to dig into that.

I want to hear from Johnathan about, “What was his motivation for starting the agency and what went wrong? Why did he decide that it really wasn’t the right model for him? How did he pivot to do Penji? Now, how is that different for him as an entrepreneur, but also how does it serve agencies?” So, buckle in. I think this is going to be a fascinating conversation. For those of you that are my age and have kids Johnathan’s age, which I really hate saying out loud, it’s also insightful in terms of our own families and how we coach and guide our kids through the decision making of looking for a job or starting a business. So, hopefully, this is useful for you on a plethora of levels. I’m excited to dig into the interview and pick Johnathan’s brain.

All right. So, without further ado, Johnathan, welcome to the podcast.

Johnathan Grzybowski:

Drew, it’s an honor to be here. Thank you for having me.

Drew McLellan:

You bet. So, before we get started, give everybody a sense of your background and how you came to be where you’re at. I know, we’re going to dig a lot deeper into your agency background and all of that, but just give everybody a quick overview.

Johnathan Grzybowski:

Yeah. So, I am a Northeast Philadelphia, born and raised. I’m not going to finish the rest for Fresh Prince of Bel Air ’90 folks that are listening right now.

Drew McLellan:

Nice.

Johnathan Grzybowski:

Even though he’s at West Philadelphia, but that’s another story neither here nor there. So, yeah. So, I’m from Northeast Philadelphia and I grew up there. Moved my way to New Jersey. Now, I’m located in a city called Camden, New Jersey, which is right over the bridge of Philadelphia. It is a city that’s near and dear to my heart and something that I advocate for. I’m sure the questions will come up at a later time in this conversation about why Camden, but I started a business five years or so ago, almost six years now that revolves around marketing.

The reason why we started the agency was because of outside reasonings that didn’t necessarily call for a real business. We had outside influence from major entrepreneurs, because that was the cool thing to do six years ago, was to watch an entrepreneur, to believe in the entrepreneur and do very similar to that entrepreneur. This was coming from a young mind and a young heart. We realized six years later that the agency lifestyle just simply isn’t for our personalities. When we ran the agency, it was a very one-dimensional side of the business. We would work with organizations, but when we worked with organizations, it would just be a one-sided conversation.

It wouldn’t be a relationship, which is ultimately at the end of the day, the most important thing when it comes to a business, especially an agency. You’re a service-based business. We were a service-based business. In order to provide a service, you have to care wholeheartedly about what the other person is doing and the customer on the other side. I can say that we did care. We did care a lot about the customer, but we more said it more so than we believed it, if that makes sense.

So, after realizing this and going down this path of what I thought was the right way, it wasn’t fulfilling, because it didn’t necessarily bring that fulfillment in my life that allowed me to expand my mind, allowed me to be creative, allowed me to just continue pushing forward. And then we stumbled across the idea of Penji about a year ago to the date almost of this unlimited graphic design service. In October of 21st of 2017, we were asked a question and the question was, “What are you doing for the City of Camden, New Jersey?” The short answer to the question was, “Well, we’re doing absolutely nothing for the city.”

So, a combination of the experiences that we had from the agency, the plateau of just not being fulfilled, delivering a quality service, of course, but just not having that fulfillment and then also living in the city and being a part of the city and trying to grow this ecosystem within the city led us to the path of what Penji is, which is an unlimited graphic design service that delivers unlimited graphic design to agencies, to marketing teams, to entrepreneurs at a flat monthly rate. We also hire and provide jobs to the City of Camden.

If you know anything about the City of Camden or if you don’t know anything about the City of Camden, again, it’s right across the street from Philadelphia practically, but it’s a city that’s relatively ridden by crime, by drugs, by violence. There’s so much opportunity here that we see. We want to be able to try to do what we can to be socially conscious. I think that’s the overarching theme as to what we wanted to do when we wanted to create Penji was to solve a big enough problem and to give back to our local community. Within the agency for us, our way that we did business, our business model, we weren’t solving a problem. We were just delivering a service and we were just delivering a one-dimensional service at that.

Drew McLellan:

Okay. So, when you say we, who is we?

Johnathan Grzybowski:

We as in an entire team. So, at the time when we “shut down” the agency, we had 12, 13 people. We didn’t necessarily shut it down. We just transferred over to the new service offering and to the new product and brand. So, now, we’re at a much higher. We’re about 27, 28 now. Yeah, so that’s we.

Drew McLellan:

So, do you own it solely or do you have co-owners?

Johnathan Grzybowski:

I was the sole founder of what was Waterfront Media, which was the agency. Now, I’m a co-founder of Penji.

Drew McLellan:

Okay. You and I are looking at each other on video, but other folks are just going to be listening to us. So, I think there’s context here that matters. So, tell everybody how old you are.

Johnathan Grzybowski:

Twenty-nine.

Drew McLellan:

Okay. So, when you started the media company, what were the primary offerings at that time? What made you decide that that was a business model you wanted to launch?

Johnathan Grzybowski:

Yeah, the agency or Penji?

Drew McLellan:

The agency.

Johnathan Grzybowski:

The agency. So, the question was, “Why did we want to do the agency?”

Drew McLellan:

What did you guys sell? What did you do? Were you creating logos? Were you buying just digital media? What are the offerings of the shop?

Johnathan Grzybowski:

So, we were a full service marketing and development agency. So, we did web design. We did app design. We did web and app development, personal branding, company branding, SEO, social media marketing. I mean, you can just hear just from the service offerings of what we were offering, we weren’t specialized, but the one key thing that I could say with the five years of our business was, five, six years of being in the agency world, there’s one thing that everybody always told us that we were really good at and that was design. They always love the design.

Regardless of the customer service aspect, regardless of the development aspect, everybody said that our design was awesome. So, it led us to that spark. We’re like, “Okay, what’s the consistent theme here?” The theme is, “Well, they like our design.” Okay, well, what can we do with design? Okay, well, we’re pretty smart when it comes to design. We’re pretty smart when it comes to development. Instead of doing it for other people, why don’t we just do it all for ourselves? So, we actually created a tool within the agency to help us scale design.

Drew McLellan:

Okay. So, if my math is right, you’re 24 years old, right?

Johnathan Grzybowski:

Yes, yeah.

Drew McLellan:

At that point, had you worked for anyone else or was this your first foray into post-school professional life?

Johnathan Grzybowski:

It wasn’t my first venture into entrepreneurship. I’d say my entrepreneurship career started very similarly to most young adults, which was mowing lawns.

Drew McLellan:

Sure.

Johnathan Grzybowski:

For mowing lawns for two years, I just worked my butt off and made a lot of money. My mom was like, “You need to go get a real job, because you need to work out and go to college and have a good resume.” I was like, “Mom, what are you talking about? I have a lot of money. I’m doing what I love. I’m having fun.” I spent all the money on Pokémon cards and Junior Bacon Cheeseburgers at Wendy’s and stuff like that. So, I was feeling pretty good. I actually had a career at Apple as well, where I worked for Apple. I learned so much at that company.

Working for yourself at 16 to 18 taught me the work ethic of just constantly mowing lawns and going out there and sweating my butt off and not having a care. And then the career at Apple led me to this path of, “What does a company culture look like? What does a real business look like? How does it operate?” And then fast forward, I just got really upset. I got really depressed for about a year and ended up quitting my job at Apple.

I started this social media business, because I saw other people doing it, right? I saw other people doing it on YouTube. I was like, “You know what? If this guy could do it, I could do it, too.” I had no clue what the hell I was doing. I have literally no idea. Looking back now, social media is such a widespread thing, but I was just like, “You know what? I can make graphics and I could sell.” I personally did social media management for a year and I was terrible at it, absolutely terrible at it. So, that led me down to that path.

Drew McLellan:

Now, I’m thinking about my listeners all over the globe and I’m thinking about my own age, which I’m 55. One of the things I think is fascinating and it’s insightful in terms of the generational differences, because when you’re my age, A, I have a daughter your age, but B, I have employees your age. So, I’m curious, at what point did you dismiss the idea of actually… Because other than your gig at Apple, you’ve really never worked inside an agency or professional services firm. So, I was talking to a colleague the other day, who’s about my age. We were marveling at the difference between generations.

One of the things that makes your generation very different is I think you’re much more likely to start off on your own without the decades of experience that some of us had before we had the courage or the boot on our butt to start our own shops. So, what do you think it was about either your upbringing or your generation? What makes 24-year-olds who have very little world experience at this point? What’s happening in your brain that makes you go, “You know what? I’m just going to start a business”? Because I wish I had had that when I was your age. I would have been much further along, much faster. It didn’t even occur to me until I was about 30, right?

Johnathan Grzybowski:

Yeah. So, there’s two parts to that. Looking at it now, I think people are doing it too much because of that outside influence of… I’ll take it this way. My personal journey has been to try and solve a problem, to be able to help people, right? So, I always wanted to be able to help people. Just every aspect of my life, I wanted to give back. I wanted to do something for others. That was why I started the agency was to help people, was to help people with their marketing, to help people with their social media. That transpired through and through.

Now, I think a lot of people are doing it for more fame and fortune. They’re seeing the Gary Vaynerchuk’s. They’re seeing the Grant Cardone’s and the Tai Lopez’s of the world. They’re like, “This guy’s driving an awesome car. This guy’s saying the word hustle 24/7. I want to hustle too.” So, I think now it’s much different. A lot of people are going after it for the money. I can’t speak for the entire generation, but I can speak for myself and say that personally, I feel like I’m an anomaly in my family. I also believe that my dad in particular was probably the one who had the most entrepreneurial spirit but didn’t necessarily go out there and do it. I don’t know why.

Maybe it was because he was growing a family and he was trying to raise a family. I don’t give a F. Maybe that’s the entire generation, but I just simply don’t have that mental filter of being, “Well, what’s going to happen? How am I going to do this?” I literally quit my job. Actually, I didn’t quit my job. I put my two weeks in, right? I put my two weeks in. I’ve been preparing for this thing for six months or so. This is what I need to do. This is how I need to do it. In order to make what I made at Apple, I need to have 10, 15 customers or something like that. I just did the math. Well, if I meet 100 people, the percentage is pretty high. If I can get 15%, it’s not bad out of 100.

So, I was just calculating and doing the math internally. It just led me to, “Okay, this is possible.” I put my two weeks in and my manager was like, “You know what? How about you just leave today?” I was like, “Well, crap, man. I guess this two-week thing is going to be now.” So, I just went out and did it. I failed and I didn’t make any money. I think a millennial in particular, we have the luxury of depending at least a little bit on our parents. So, I literally lived with my parents for two years to get my butt off the ground. I was very grateful for that opportunity, but yeah. I mean, I don’t know. I think now it’s a little bit different, but before, I didn’t even know what entrepreneurship was. I just did it.

Drew McLellan:

I do think you’re right. That is interesting. There are all of these internet famous people who make it look really easy. They talk about the upside of it. They don’t really talk about the worry and the difficulty and-

Johnathan Grzybowski:

Absolutely.

Drew McLellan:

… the challenges when you’re not making your clients happy. So, I love the entrepreneurial spirit part of it. I think it’s good for people to get out on their own and try things, but I do think that right now, we live in a world where it’s been whitewashed a little bit.

Johnathan Grzybowski:

Absolutely, yeah.

Drew McLellan:

I think if all of the people that are not Gary Vaynerchuk, which is 99% of the people who have tried to do what he’s done, would also get on the internet and talk about their life and their reality in a really transparent way, then I think people would probably give a little more pause before they just chopped it all and hung up a shingle somewhere.

Johnathan Grzybowski:

Yeah, I mean if there’s a young professional that’s listening right now or even somebody who’s thinking about just starting their own thing, I highly recommend don’t be as stupid as I was, just quitting my job. I think that was the smartest and the dumbest thing I’ve ever done in my entire life. It led me to who I am today and I couldn’t be more grateful for that. I would recommend that you want to submerse yourself in a culture first, study from the entrepreneur that started it or the CEO, whatever it may be, and just ask questions to be curious as often as you can, and really just create the blueprint.

And then if you feel like marketing agency or design, whatever it is that you want to get into, is the right thing, you at least had the background first. I had no background. I relied on reading Forbes articles and all that stuff in order to piecemeal what it is that I need to get together. That’s good and bad, because then you’re getting outside influence from people who don’t necessarily have the credibility. I can read an article now and it can be from John Smith, who just started out but paid $1,500 in order to get on Forbes. That doesn’t happen all the time. It does happen more times than not, but you have to be able to live the experience.

You have to test it out and go to conferences like the one we were talking about or meetups and meetings that we were talking about out there. Study, do data. Now, more than ever before, we are a data-driven company. We created a tool for ourselves, right? We were literally our target customer. We created something that was internal only. We used it so well that we knew that it was bigger than ourselves. This solves a huge problem when it comes to design. That’s what Penji does.

We created it for ourselves and then we gave it to other agencies. We gave it to other people and we looked at the data. How many of our customers are X? How many customers are Y? Who are our longest customers? Where did we get them from? How did we get them? Every single time that we get a customer or they’re in a particular demographic, we categorize them. We find out how we got them there. So, when we come back and we say, “Well, how much money do we have to spend in order to get another client?”, we can say, “Well, we are going to be spending $100.” I’m just giving you an arbitrary number. It’s going to go all towards Facebook ads via desktop and no mobile, right? That data is critical to somebody’s success.

We are 100% self-funded. We have no outside funding at all. We’ve done this from the ground up, from literally $0.00 to now $200… I think we just got a customer last night and we’re about to get one this morning. So, it’s going to be 217 customers, 217 customers paying us on a monthly basis all from just processes and procedures and the mental fortitude to be able to categorize and analyze data.

Drew McLellan:

Right. So, I’m smiling because I’m asking a 29-year-old what they learned five years ago about starting a business, but what do you wish you had known when you were 24 and you were launching the agency that you have now learned through the painful process of starting a business, trying to run a business, really shutting a business down because it wasn’t successful, and then having to pivot and reinvent yourself? If somebody is listening and they’re thinking, “Man, I want to start a business,” what are the lessons learned?

Johnathan Grzybowski:

Be data driven. You want to be able to check your ego out the door. That is probably one of the most important things that I’ve learned is just getting in your own way and having an ego. We all have egos, let’s be real. That’s why we’re starting a business in the first place. But being able to get back up and allowing your ego to be tarnished, just like tickled a little bit. It doesn’t have to be gut punched. But just get out of your own way. You’re not bigger than the company. We have employees. So, we have a team of 27, 28 people. We have realized very early on that it’s not about us anymore. Yes, it is to a degree, but it’s about them. It’s about giving them opportunities to succeed, because that’s why we hired these professionals.

So, allowing them the opportunity to shine and not getting in their way in order for them to be creative. I’d say that that’s something that we learned. Be patient, because it’s not going to happen overnight. We anticipated. We did our calculations. We’re like, “We’re going to do X, Y, Z at this exact time and this is what we’re going to do when we get there.” And then we realized that we’re two months over the actual goal that we set ourselves out for, which is fine. We still reached it, but you have to have the mental fortitude of understanding that it’s not going to happen when you want. What else?

You have to have a purpose, I’d say. It has been a life lesson, because if you just go towards money, which I would say that I personally did in the very beginning, it’s not fulfilling. You’ll see if you just work for money that on a random Tuesday at 7:00 at night, which is Saturday now, but on a random Tuesday at 7:00 at night, you’ll just be like, “What the F am I doing?” That moment, that’s when you realize you got to change it up a bit.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah, I think one of the things that young… I don’t mean by age, but I mean by in terms of years of owning a business thing. I think one of the things that young business owners have to recognize is it’s too hard to just do it for the money.

Johnathan Grzybowski:

Absolutely, yeah.

Drew McLellan:

It’s too much work, it’s too much sacrifice. You really do have to have a reason why you’re doing it that is bigger than just the money. For everybody, it’s different, but it does have to have a higher purpose for you. Otherwise, it’s easy to get discouraged, especially on the months or the years that you’re not making money. I think that’s what gets you through that tough times is when the reason is bigger than you will endure the natural ebbs and flows of owning a business. Whereas it’s easy when it’s just about the money to say, “Screw it” when you’re not making money.

Johnathan Grzybowski:

So, I want to actually add on to that, because I think that’s a really good point. Another lesson that I wish that we have learned was our ability to maintain focused and to stay focus. This is what I’ve seen in the people that I know and our customers and nothing against these types, but the all-encompassing type of agency where you’re doing everything and you have a piecemeal, a Frankenstein of all different types of customers from all different types of sectors, I think that’s great if the overarching theme is, say, you do social media or content creation strategy, whatever it is. That’s specialized.

But I would even go a step further and say specialize even further and say, “Well, I do social media management strategy for the healthcare sector, for the healthcare sector that specializes in et cetera.” So, it’s a microcosm of a microcosm, because then your client pool is going to be smaller and you’ll be able to specialize and speak their language and be able to talk to them. I think that’s such a life lesson that I wish we would have figured out.

Now, we have three core demographics of who we service. Even then, I think that might be too much, which is the agency world. That’s number one. Two, the Amazon merch community. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard about print on demand. Holy cow, stuff is going on in that world. I’m just really intrigued by it. And then just the internal marketing teams of startups and small businesses and things like that. Over compassing, it’s marketers, it’s entrepreneurs.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah, I think many agencies struggle with narrowing their focus, but for most agencies, it is the decision that allows them to really propel themselves forward-

Johnathan Grzybowski:

Exactly.

Drew McLellan:

… and be more profitable and more focused to your point. So, what was happening in the agency towards the tail end? What were the signals or the clues that perhaps this was not the business for you? What was happening?

Johnathan Grzybowski:

The buying decision, I’d say it was probably pretty high.

Drew McLellan:

In terms of your customers?

Johnathan Grzybowski:

Yeah. Well, it takes a lot of time and dedication to be able to… We didn’t have the patience to withstand a six-month during contract or negotiation and then be able to be like, “Well, we’re going to go somebody else.” It happens.

Drew McLellan:

Which is normal in an agency life.

Johnathan Grzybowski:

Absolutely, 100% normal. I would even go a step further that because we were young, I mean, I’m the oldest person in the company. Let’s talk about that for a second. I’m 29. I’m the oldest person in our company. Even right now, I’m the oldest. We go out there and we sit down with somebody. We say, “Well, we’ve been doing this for a while, but this is who we are. This is how we do it.” We sit down with Fortune 500 companies. Sometimes, listen, they have said yes. We have worked with Fortune 500, Inc 5000, top universities. We’ve worked with a lot of incredible company.

So, I’m not trying to dilute that by any means. But being able to sit down in a boardroom with somebody else and then being able to look at you and say, “What have you done?”, I think that’s probably one of the ways. So, the buying decision overcompensating and the presentation aspect wasn’t all that high and then just being rewarded of the work that you’re doing. And then the last piece I’d say is just giving back to the community. We didn’t have any of that. That led us to where we are today with Penji.

Drew McLellan:

But you could have retooled the agency to be more community focused. So, at some point in time, you made two decisions. One, I want to be more community centric and I want to serve Camden. Two, I don’t want to do it in this business model. What were the last 30 days like? What was that decision process where you decided you had to pivot and become something different to be sustainable?

Johnathan Grzybowski:

Just the problem. I mean, you could argue cash flow, but I mean even then, our cash flow was pretty good. I mean, it allowed us to build and grow and everything like that. Again, it just wasn’t fun anymore. It wasn’t rewarding. We weren’t solving a big enough problem. We were solving problems for people that we thought were so huge, but the lack of care that a lot of customers have in the world, we could have created the most valuable tool and resource design wise and then they’d just grab it and they’d go, “Okay, thanks,” and then that’s it.

Especially with a Fortune 500 company or a large company, they’d just grab it and then they’d go, which is again, fine, good for them. Right now, the problem that we solve is giving agencies and marketing teams the ability to obtain a reliable and dependable graphic designer. For us, the problem just wasn’t large enough. So, the last 30 days for us was just like, “Is our problem that we’re solving going to change the world?” The short answer to the question, as an agency, we weren’t revolutionary by any means. We literally just created a service. We did the job and then we said thank you and then we walked away.

Drew McLellan:

So, for you, was the lack of uniqueness-

Johnathan Grzybowski:

I would say yeah.

Drew McLellan:

… is part of what motivated you to make the shift?

Johnathan Grzybowski:

Yeah, I would say that. There’s just no pizzazz on it. It was just like a business. You just went into the monotony of everyday life where you woke up, you prospected, you created the service, you had to perform the service, and then you went back to square one and did it all over again. There’s no dynamic aspect to the business. I’d say now more so than ever before, I mean, there’s so much moving and so much happening and so much going on in Penji that it’s the happiest I’ve been in my short life on this earth.

I’m amped. I’m ready to go. I love the stimulation of 800 million things going on at once. You could feel it in the air when you walk into the office. There’s this spark. There’s something happening that’s bigger than us. That’s what we were looking for. We didn’t feel that from the agency aspect. Nothing against agency models, it just didn’t work for us. We weren’t the right type of people to do it. I mean, I’m happy that this happened because it led us to where we are today, but we just listened to outside influences in order to get us to where we are and it wasn’t who we are. Now, this is who we are. This is what we were meant to do and meant to be.

Drew McLellan:

So, I want to talk about the pivot and what you guys are doing now, but first, let’s take a quick break.

If you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while, odds are you’ve heard me mentioned the AMI peer networks or the agency owner network. What that is really is that’s like a Vistage group or an EO group, only everybody around the table owns an agency in a non-competitive market. So, it’s a membership model. They come together twice a year for two days in the spring and two days in the fall. They work together to share best practices. They show each other their full financials. So, there’s a lot of accountability. We bring speakers in. We spend a lot of time problem solving around the issues that agency owners are facing. If you’d like to learn more about it, go to agencymanagementinstitute.com/network.

All right. I’m back. Johnathan and I have been talking about his five years in the agency business and their decision to pivot and retool their offering. In some ways, all you did really was the very specialization, which you’re talking about, and changed your financial model, because really, you went from a full service, “We do everything” agency, basically to being an outsourced graphic design department that people pay for by subscription, right?

Johnathan Grzybowski:

Correct, yeah, yup.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. So, how did you get to the decision that that was the business model to pivot to or was it just a happy accident?

Johnathan Grzybowski:

So, it’s actually interesting. So, when we first started Penji, we didn’t even have a platform to do this. We just created the service of unlimited graphic design. At the time, we actually had unlimited graph design and unlimited development, because we were doing both as the agency. And then the development piece wasn’t necessarily scalable, but people kept asking us for design requests. So, we had a good bulk of customers. So, that was validation to us, that was like, “Okay, we got it. We got a customer without any type of software. That’s cool.” Then we got 10 customers and then that grew a little bit more. We’re like, “Okay, this is something here.”

And then what we did was we polled our closest friends and our resources and our network. I think we sent out to the 200 and something plus people. We got 150 responses or something like that. The short answer to the question, the summarization was, “If we build this, will you buy it?” A large majority said, “Yes.” We’re like, “Holy crap. This is bigger than us.” We literally just talked to 150 people and a large majority said that they would buy it. And then that’s when we were like, “Okay, it’s game time.” We had to develop it. We had to design it. We had to go after it.

Drew McLellan:

So, one of the things you’ve talked about throughout our conversation is the idea of serving the community. So, how does your business actually serve Camden?

Johnathan Grzybowski:

Yeah. So, right now, it serves Camden. It could serve Philadelphia. It could serve Detroit. It could serve anywhere. But primarily because our main office, our headquarters is located in Camden, New Jersey, now what we’re trying to do is give back to our local community of jobs. So, what we do is every time we hire somebody in the United States, it’s coming from a student or a resident from the City of Camden. There is a lot of talent here in the city. There is a lot of students that are qualified to do what it is that we do, but they don’t necessarily get the respect that they deserve, because maybe their name, their upbringing, their background, they don’t have the perfect resume, so to speak.

So, we give them the opportunity to come in under the pretense of a couple of things. They don’t have to be the most skilled person in the world. We can help them develop that. We can give them the resources and tools, but they have to be compassionate. They have to be dependable and reliable. They also have to have a dream. So, they come in under the pretense of, “We’re going to help you achieve your dream.”

Because we’re able to help them achieve their dream and I recommend this for any business owner, asking your team members now or your employees, “What is your dream?”, and in helping them achieve their dream, whether that’s financial freedom, whether that’s helping their family, going to traveling for an entire month, opening their own business, you need to find that out as the owner and be able to help them achieve that, because by you helping them achieve their dream, they in turn will be able to help you achieve your dream.

Drew McLellan:

There’s a great book about that called The Dream Manager.

Johnathan Grzybowski:

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So, in that same breadth, that was just one aspect of the community part, but also, if you Google Camden, again, it’s not pretty.

Drew McLellan:

Right, it has a horrible reputation.

Johnathan Grzybowski:

Absolutely. So, we also decided to give back to the local community by creating a nonprofit initiative called Camden Unlimited, where we offer our services to Camden nonprofits for $1 a month. We did it in the very beginning. We got close to 100+ signups, but we only accepted about 25, 30 of them. That started our initial referral network, because we are giving back to our community. That initially started the people who wanted to be able to test our software when we created it. It led us to who we are. So, we’re going to be doing it again shortly. I don’t know when.

Once we were able to focus on the community and actually help others, the paradigm shifted and people started caring about us. People became interested in what it is that we were doing and they listened every time that we spoke. Now, we have a core group of professionals that know who we are, know what we do. We were never able to talk to them when we are an agency. We’re never able to have a conversation and sit down with these professionals, these people that are from our local government, our local news publications, and then even a widespread audience. On a global scale, people are interested in what’s happening here. I would recommend that if you’re listening to this, you can do this in your own backyard too.

Drew McLellan:

Sure.

Johnathan Grzybowski:

I implore you to do so. It actually makes for a better world by you doing that.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah, a lot of agencies, I think, are very community and service oriented. So, I think a lot of them have programs where in some way, shape, or form, they serve their local community or a nonprofit that matters to them. I think, as a general rule, the population of agency owners that I know anyway are very generous people who want to use their talents to make-

Johnathan Grzybowski:

I agree.

Drew McLellan:

… the world a better place. So, that’s part of what I love about working with them.

Johnathan Grzybowski:

Yeah, I agree.

Drew McLellan:

So, in terms of your offering for agencies, because I’m mindful that we’re running at a time, the old agency model has always been, “I have designers on staff.” So, what do you think has changed that makes agencies open to the idea of outsourcing one of their core competencies, which is design?

Johnathan Grzybowski:

So, there will always be a need for design and there will be a need for high level design. That will never go away. However, there are things that can be done from a smaller scale. For example, if your senior designer is bogged down, overworked or is doing the work of a junior level designer, that’s a problem within your business. We help you with that. If you just need the small one-off projects and you don’t want to be able to go through the monotony of hiring a freelancer or not having to trust because they don’t know your brand well enough or have to go to Fiverr… This is no disrespect to any of these companies.

Drew McLellan:

You have all options, right.

Johnathan Grzybowski:

Fiverr or Upwork or something like that. When you work with that, you have to hire someone, you have to interview them, you have to find out that they’re the right fit. Of course, they will tell you that they’re the right fit, because they want a job. So, however, they may not be qualified to actually do it, because they don’t understand the brand and et cetera. So, what if there was a way that you could sign up for a service, know that the designers are vetted, know that they’re trusted and be able to communicate directly to the designer in real time?

That to us is a huge problem that we are solving. We give you the ability to talk to that person, no matter what time of day it is. We will respond to you. Our job and our reputation that we want to uphold is that we want to be a dependable design team that’s always available and always online when you are. So, whether you’re kicking at 2:00 in the morning or you’re waking up at the crack of dawn at 4:00 AM, regardless, we want to be online when you are.

Drew McLellan:

From a practical point of view, how do you do that?

Johnathan Grzybowski:

You don’t sleep. No, I’m just kidding. That’s something that we’re still figuring out. We don’t have it all down pat yet, but it’s a combination of internal US-based designers and project managers and also designers and project managers overseas in the Philippines and in Vietnam and things like that. So, there’s a combination of just constant synergy of all time periods of the day.

Drew McLellan:

When someone hires you and someone buys a subscription, because I know that’s your model, do they always work with the same designers?

Johnathan Grzybowski:

Yes and no, you can request that. You can ask and request that, but right now, it’s just whoever the best designer is for that particular role in this specialization. However, we’re seeing from a business perspective that that may not be the best case. Sometimes you can get two or three designers. Sometimes you just get one on the entire time. But you can always just have a dialogue and conversation with the project manager to say, “Hey, this person’s style, she kicked butt. I need X name in order to work for my brand, because she gets it or he gets it,” whatever it may be.

Drew McLellan:

I would think from the customer point of view, once they have had the initial conversations with a designer and feel like they understand the parameters of the brand and the style and the voice and the tone and all of that, they wouldn’t want to keep repeating that to a new designer.

Johnathan Grzybowski:

Exactly, yeah. So, for us, we have an entire platform that allows you to communicate with your design team, but also, we have a way to track your entire brand. So, as soon as you sign up for Penji, hypothetically speaking, you would go on and it would ask you about your brand. What do you do? How do you do it? What is your brand color scheme? What is your brand logo? What are the different variations of your logo that you use? What are some past materials that you used in the past.

Drew McLellan:

Right. So, an agency would have to fill that out for every client that they were going to have you guys work on, right?

Johnathan Grzybowski:

Correct, yes, yeah. That way, we can fully submerge ourselves into the culture of that company. We do our due diligence and research for that. So, that’s just our way of just further understanding the customer.

Drew McLellan:

So, I’m sure listeners are wondering, how in the world is this profitable for you?

Johnathan Grzybowski:

Yeah, sure.

Drew McLellan:

They’re going, “Okay, I’m going to spend X number of dollars a month on a subscription and I could ask you to do something new every day.” So how are you finding the demand is versus the subscription rate? How are you managing that so it’s profitable for you?

Johnathan Grzybowski:

Sure. So, I’ll speak to the agency. So, we have two tiers. We have a professional tier, which is one brand unlimited graphic design; the agency tier, which is two unlimited brands and two graphic designs done at the same time. Because we are video, I’ll physically show you, but I’ll try to verbally state as much as I possibly can. Think of it in terms of blocks. So, you have a block going down from top to bottom. Each block is a design request. We won’t move on to the second block until the first block is complete. So, when it comes to the agency model, we work on two blocks at a time. So, we take the block, the two blocks.

Once the project’s done, we remove it. And then a new block, AKA a new design request, goes down to the bottom. And then it just keeps stacking and stacking and stacking. So, you can submit unlimited graphic designs. We have one client that has over 100 graphic design requests requested in Penji, but we’re only going to move on from one to the next, to the next, to the next once the first one is complete. So, the first one could take 24 hours in order for us to complete it, but we need you to request it. We need you to approve the finalization of the design.

Drew McLellan:

Got it. So, if we keep having swings and misses and I keep going, “No, not that. No, not that. No, not that-”

Johnathan Grzybowski:

Which is totally fair and fine.

Drew McLellan:

… we could literally be working on one design for the whole month, right?

Johnathan Grzybowski:

Hypothetically speaking, you could, yeah. Ideally, what we found is we usually get it right. If we don’t get it right the first time, which it does happen a lot-

Drew McLellan:

Sure.

Johnathan Grzybowski:

… second or third time, usually fine. And then obviously, if it needs to go further, we’re going to jump on a phone call and say, “Hey-”

Drew McLellan:

How come we keeping missing the mark?

Johnathan Grzybowski:

“… we just don’t get it. How can we fix this?” And then you talk to a physical project manager over the phone and we come to a solution. If we were to expand further, if we were to have four or five customers like an agency could in order to be profitable, then yeah, we wouldn’t even have a business. The way our model works is the more profitability comes in, the more customers that we have, because it’s a membership model. So, the more customers that we have, the more profitable we would definitely become and we could provide more tools and resources to our customers that way.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah, makes perfect sense. So, if folks want to learn more about Penji, want to track you on social, all that stuff, what’s the best way for people to find you?

Johnathan Grzybowski:

Yeah, I would just say go to penji.co. That is the only thing that matters to me. If you want to search me up and look up all my social media, you most certainly can through Google, but in the sake of this conversation, just head over to penji.co. Check us out. Read a little bit more about us. If you need a designer and you feel as if that your current design team is working too hard, they have a lot of projects on their plate and you just need a little bit of the additional resources, we want to be that company that earns your business.

So, let us know how we can serve you, just penji.co. The pricing is relatively inexpensive. It’s anywhere between $349 a month to $698 a month, which caters somewhere around $4,000 to $8,000 a year for a trusted graphic design team. That’s just unheard of when people are hiring $60,000 to $80,000 a year for one designer. So, if you feel as if that you need that, you believe in what I believe in and what we believe in at Penji, we’re happy to serve you.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah, awesome. Thanks very much for the conversation. Thanks for your transparency. I know it’s hard to talk about when things don’t go well. So, I appreciate you being willing to do that.

Johnathan Grzybowski:

That’s the only time we can grow, man. If you accept what it is, the past failures that you’ve had, that’s the only way that you can grow as a man and as a human being. So, happy to talk about that. Thank you, Drew, for the opportunity.

Drew McLellan:

You bet. All right, guys, this wraps up another episode of Build a Better Agency. Lots of lessons baked in here. I suspect for some of you, this is validation that you’re on the right path. I suspect for others, it may be a reminder that what you’re doing is a choice and it’s okay to make a different choice. Honestly, for some of you, it may be a reminder that if you’re my age and you’re raising adult children, that their generation looks at work very differently. So, both as an employer and as a parent, these are insights that we can use to have better conversations with the young people that are in our life. So, hopefully, this was super valuable to you.

In the meantime, a couple things. One, please make sure that if you’re trying to track me down, you can find me at agencymanagementinstitute.com. That’s where you can find me and you can shoot me an email at [email protected]. Always grateful for ratings and reviews. Don’t forget that a lot of our guests have written books or have courses or are giving away free six months of their service, whatever it is. So, make sure you go over to agencymanagementinstitute.com/podcastgiveaway and sign up. If you have not done that, once you sign up once, you’re in the drawing every month. If you have already done it, then hopefully you’ve either won something or you are on the cusp of winning something.

So, we’ve given away free courses. We’ve given away a lot of books. We’ve given away all kinds of things. We’re going to keep doing that as long as our podcast guests continue to be as generous as they are. So, make sure you swing over and sign up for that as well. I will talk to you soon. I’ll be back next week with another guest. In the meantime, give me a shout out if I can be helpful. Talk to you soon.

Believe it or not, that wraps up another episode of Build a Better Agency. Man, the time goes by quick. I love sharing this content with you and I love spending the time with you. So, thanks so much for listening and sticking all the way to the very end. For those of you that did stick around to the end, I’ve got a special new twist for you. So many of our podcast guests have books or other things that really expand upon the information and knowledge that they share with us during the podcast. So, we’ve reached out to them and we’ve asked them if they would like to give away some of their books or whatever classes, whatever it may be.

We’re going to throw some AMI things in there as well. We’re going to have some AMI swag and we’re going to actually give away some workshops. So, all you have to do to be in all of the drawings, you only have to do this once, is go to agencymanagementinstitute.com/podcastgiveaway. So, again, agencymanagementinstitute.com/podcastgiveaway. Give us your email address and your mailing address.

Every week, you will be eligible for whatever drawing we’re doing. We’re going to change it up every week. So, we’re going to have a lot of variety and we will pop an email to you if you are the lucky winner. You can also go back to that page and see who won last week and what they won. So, you can see what you’re in the run for. So, if you have any questions about that or anything agency related, you can reach me at [email protected] and I will talk to you next week. Thanks.

Speaker 1:

That’s all for this episode of AMI’s Build a Better Agency, brought to you by HubSpot. Be sure to visit agencymanagementinstitute.com to learn more about our workshops, online courses, and other ways we serve small to midsized agencies. Don’t miss an episode as we help you build the agency you’ve always dreamed of owning.