Starting and Scaling a Successful Agency in Your Mid 20’s! With Wondersauce CEO John Sampogna

0:00Hi, everyone. This is the Builders podcast where I interview CEOs, entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs, and leaders about building their business and career. And in today's episode, I speak with John Samponia. He is the CEO and co-founder of the highly successful creative and media agency, Wondersauce. After a few years working at an agency, John and his business partner took the leap of forming their own company in their mid-20s. And 15 years later, it's still growing and thriving. We discuss how John learned the agency business in the first place, how he explained to his parents he was quitting to start his own company, and how he runs and navigates the ever-changing digital landscape.

0:39If you like this episode and you're looking for more content around agency businesses, you might want to check out episode 21 with Nancy Posnoff. She built an agency after being at Starbucks and T-Mobile. Thanks.

0:56Hi, John. How are you? Good to see you. Doing well. Thanks for having me. Sure. Let's start at the earliest part of your career. You started out on the account outside at agencies and then you ended up building your own company, founding your own company later, Wondersauce. But I want to know about the first three or four years of your career. Why did you first get into the agency space when you did? Why did you say to yourself, I love this. I want to continue my career. What did you learn in the early years? Yeah, it's a good question because I ask myself that a lot still to this day. I never really planned to work in this industry.

1:34I went to school for music and I wanted to, I don't know, scout bands. I had this romantic idea of what it was like to work at a music label. And I interned at a bunch of labels in college and got a taste for the business. And I realized quite quickly that it wasn't for me. A lot of my friends were designers, developers, creatives. And I remember one night they were basically like, you should check out an agency. You'd think you'd be good there. And, you know, I was like 20, 21 years old. And I remember with my one night with my girlfriend, my wife, we were like on the computer writing random cover letters to different agencies that I thought were cool.

2:20And I was just writing kind of like stream of conscious why I thought this was interesting and cool. Wasn't like a traditional cover letter. And I ended up getting quite quickly a response from a company. And my first job was actually not account side. I was an executive assistant to the CEO of about a 400-person digital agency. And it honestly shaped my point of view on a lot of things. So I got to really see the agency business from that level. I was in his office responding to all his emails, seeing his meetings, all that stuff. So I learned it through the lens of the CEO. and uh i did that for about eight months until i was promoted out of that job but it was like really a crash course and um i really fell in love with like the agency model um but i never really aspired to be like the best you know manager or client services person strategist creative i i just liked the business itself um so my first job from there i was you know doing i think some client services for a while i did a little strategy work it was kind of a really cool time.

3:23It was like the beginning of social media with brands and mobile app development. So you got to do a lot and learn a lot because there was no playbook for what existed. So that paired with what happened in 2008 with the economy. I was asked to do a lot of things because I was probably the lowest paid person there and happy to do it. But my first three, four years was really a crash course on the business. And I kind of from there set my sight on, you know, one day doing my own thing. The experience that you just described, I would recommend to almost anybody who's early career, do everything you possibly can get your hands dirty and everything they'll let you do, because that's how you figure out what you what you really want to do.

4:12It sounds like, like you were like me, I kind of stumbled into what I liked. I went to school for political science. I don't know why. And, and then ended, you know, ended up doing what I'm, I'm doing. So you had an aha moment at some point that you wanted to start your own thing. Did you imagine yourself being, you know, an entrepreneur when you were, or a founder when you were in college or like, or like what, what, what flipped? I met my business partner at a second agency I worked that. It was a smaller shop. And it was one of those things where we were both in our mid-20s and we were good at what we did.

4:48And it was like, after work, you're going to happy hour and all you're talking about is work. And it's not like you're, you're not just talking about what happened that day or this with a client or this work didn't deliver, blah, blah, blah, a little bit of that. But it was more around, you know, what we would do differently, what we liked, what we disliked operationally about the structure of the business, where it was going, where we thought there was gaps. And we kind of had this running narrative that would last for weeks and months where we had this idea for a business. And it went from like, well, one day, one day, one day, to being one of those things where you literally can't stop thinking about it.

5:27And I remember weighing the risk in my head around, what does it look like to actually do this? And I remember calling my parents and letting them know I was thinking about doing it. And they were like freaking out because I was making a pretty good living and they didn't want me to start from zero and all that stuff. And I basically told them, I was like, look, I think I'm employable. And I've kind of analyzed the downside of this decision. If I don't succeed and there's no business for me or no work or I'm not good at it, failure looks like me going back to a job that I can do with my tail between my legs and a little bit of like bruised ego.

6:06But beyond that, that's the downside I see. So I was like, I think it's worth the risk. And that was it. We jumped into it in 2011. So that was about 14, 15 years ago. And it's been a rollercoaster ride ever since. I bet. Let's go back to the first few years. I'd be curious who your first client is, but also were you successful right away? Or was there a period of like serious trial and error out of the gate. We were actually successful right away, which is something that I've come to appreciate having now been through many, many battles over the last 15 years. But it was a once in a lifetime experience for me and I'll never forget it.

6:52I mean, it went from two people with like no clients and I'll just keep saying like every single week someone else showed up and it just didn't stop the first three or four years until we were like a hundred people. And, you know, we had no funding. We had no, we had, it was just lightning in a bottle. And we delivered great work. We really invested in client relationships and making sure they loved what we were producing for them. And it spread through word of mouth and reputation. And we were able to grow without any marketing or anything like that. You know, also, it was the time. It was the beginning of the direct-to-consumer era where all these brands were starting to pop up that were, you know, digital first.

7:28And we were perfectly built to service those businesses. So we had a lot of those clients and then a lot of the traditional clients wanted what we were doing for those for those businesses. So it was a good mix of things. Do you feel like perhaps your your age and relative lack of experience, maybe as an executive, were an advantage in this case? Yeah, because because direct to consumer businesses were probably trying to get you to buy their product. I am I thinking about it the wrong way? I think there's a little bit of that. But I think the fact that we were so young and inexperienced and naive, we were doing things that a more seasoned business operator would never do because they'd be more experienced and risk averse.

8:15And honestly, they'd be operationally focused where you're always thinking about the financial, the legal, how this is going to look for your cash flow, your AP, all that stuff. yes one was like we were the demographic for a lot of our businesses and also we grew up with the internet it was one of those things i always say like we were a really unique generation where i remember in grade school going to like the typing class where you would like they would track your speed per minute or whatever and then one day there was like a computer with the internet and then begging my parents when we were like 12 13 to get america online i remember like my middle school, high school nights on like Napster and LimeWire, we were of that generation of like junior year of college getting Facebook, where the first two years of college, we didn't have Facebook.

9:01And then, you know, in our 20s with the mobile app economy and everything that's going on with, you know, crypto and AI right now, we literally grew up with the internet. So I think our business model was like our only constant being change. And we want to build an agency that's as dynamic as the internet. I think that really helped. But I really think operationally, not having a traditional background in business allowed us to operate more freely. Where if I were to start a business right now, every single decision would be like run through a million filters. Just even subconsciously, because I know more than I did then.

9:35That's an advantage in some situations. But when you're moving fast and you're trying to just make the purest decision, it's not necessarily a great thing. So you caught lightning in a bottle, as you said, sort of quickly. That's really cool. But you also mentioned battles to come. Maybe you could talk about one of the early battles. Maybe, I don't know, maybe a client fired you. Maybe you had your first kind of crisis of, how is this going to impact my business? Maybe talk through one of those. I think there's different levels to challenges. But I think that very early on, any little hiccup is an existential crisis because you've never experienced it before.

10:22So I'm big into ways to trick yourself into calming down. And something I've always kind of run my conscious through is this idea of the cost of doing business. And it's a basic term people use around the hard costs of your business, whether it's your HR costs and your office space and travel entertainment software, all that stuff. And I remember the first time a client was late on a payment that we were counting on, or a client walked away from a project they had committed, or an employee unexpectedly walks out. you're scrambling and you don't know how to react and you don't know how to necessarily um go from a to b in a way that makes sense because you've never experienced it before and i remember like having week over week something happening and then thinking to myself is this because like we're doing a bad job and we're not experienced or is this literally just what it's like to run a business and when something happens twice or three times it's usually the cost of doing business.

11:32So you better figure out a way of doing it and solving it and operationalizing it. So when it happens next week, it's not a big deal at all. It's just Tuesday and this happens. So whether you're doing it or you're getting someone who's great at dealing with it, or you've got a third party to handle it, it could be anything like having a collections process, having a point of view on, you know, between your cash on hand, your bank relationship and your accounts receivable, that number you want to have amount of months of cash you have or trusted cash you have on hand to sleep at night when you're hiring someone.

12:05But all these little things that you start to learn when you're operating a business, they start to basically become the new cost of doing business where, you know, if your business is 30 people, 40 people, 100 people, your cost of business is going to be different. It's going to be, yes, all those things you have to pay for monthly, but it's going to be two unhappy clients, three unhappy employees um something that you have to deal with from an accounting standpoint and something whatever and you figure out how to deal with it so in my early days those were the things i always kind of looked for and thought of where it was like is this one-off or is this going to be like something i need to figure out and get used to dealing with yeah you name it we've dealt with it like whether it's i'm getting let go by a client unexpectedly not paid for something, your best employees, you know, best employee unexpectedly resigning, all that stuff.

12:55The company name is Wondersauce. I'm not sure I mentioned that yet. Maybe tell the audience your capabilities, your perfect client, if you will, the type of work that you do. We're a business kind of growth agency. We help unlock different stages of scale and growth for businesses. So almost like digital transformation, only we actually kind of give you the strategy that we can prescribe for you and also execute upon it. And we offer like two unique kind of services. One is around revenue acceleration, where we're using creative and paid and earned media to ultimately get you to a new threshold, whether that's launching your business, going from five to$10 million in revenue, or whatever that challenge is.

13:41But typically, our clients are kind of spending all in on marketing, inclusive of media between, you know,$5 to$15 million annually a year. So that's one thing we do. And then the other thing is really around, you know, transformation from a digital standpoint, where we're building apps, e-commerce experiences, websites, and new digital products, where someone has an idea, they want to kind of test it against a small group of people, you know, identify whether or not it's going to be viable and then build a commercial product. So we do a lot of like heavy user experience, technology and design work.

14:21So kind of two distinct offerings, but one really around like unlocking revenue growth and one around building infrastructure. Let's talk about the revenue growth part of your business. And you probably work with a lot of, you know, of the media you're talking about. What are some of the biggest challenges that those types of companies have with growth? Is it a function of creativity? Is it a function of in-house talent? Is it just not understanding the media landscape? What are their biggest challenges? Right now, it is this habit that everyone's developed around immediate return on investment and speaking in ROAS and cost per acquisition every chance you get.

15:09I don't know if it happened during the pandemic, but basically this idea that you put money into Facebook and money and revenue immediately comes out, and that's how you run your business. To a certain degree, yes, that's true, but it's not a sustainable way to build a marketing strategy or a brand. So we try and help advise businesses on building sustainable brands and marketing strategies that are more diversified and more full funnel focused. not so heavily focused on just like mid to lower funnel all the time. We love that stuff. It is super, super important, but you need to replenish the top of the funnel and keep expanding it.

15:44So right now we're doing a lot of work, expanding businesses beyond meta, Facebook and kind of social and really like performance marketing into new areas to ultimately allow them to tell longer form or more compelling brand stories that allow them to get some recognition from consumers that aren't just like in that immediate thing on Instagram where you're buying right now. So it's a lot of that. And then I really believe there's a huge opportunity right now in truly pairing creative with media in a very contextual way where the creative lifts the placement and the media and how the media performs, you know, tees up and inspires the creative team to really cater to that.

16:28So sounds basic stuff, but that's what we're doing. a lot. And you'd be surprised at how different it is for a lot of brands. I want to go deeper on both those things that you mentioned. It really resonates with me, filling the top of the funnel with brand storytelling. And I'm curious if you're still, though, looking for a specific CTA, such as not trying to get someone to purchase right away, but maybe give their email address so they can be educated over time and buy later. is that i'm sort of sussing out what what you're saying is that kind of what you mean or do you mean filling the top of the funnel in a different way sometimes it doesn't have to lead to a call to action i don't believe okay i think that you're going to want to have rationale for your decisions to top a funnel to ultimately you know you don't want to waste money but i think like good brand awareness plays don't necessarily have to immediately correlate to an email a click or a sale i think that you could be a little bit more um long term with it and understand that like this is a three, six, 12 month investment.

17:29And if we stick with it, we're going to see new people visiting our brand. Sometimes though, like, you know, you do want to cast something to develop a relationship with the customer. But I think like the brands that are doing like pure awareness, the best right now are doing things that are not necessarily attributable immediately. And I was driving the other day and I don't know why I was listening to like, local radio it was one of those morning talk shows and the people were talking about whatever they were talking about a uh like a liquid death promotion where basically like something along the lines of like i think it just came out but it's like it's okay to to murder a clown while you're sleeping and they were talking about like the ethics behind that clearly it's a joke but i was driving and i'm like this is like what i'm talking about in terms of brand awareness and truly building a brand and they're all they're known for doing like very um evocative fun you know advertising right and um the fact that there was you know talk radio in the morning just talking about this campaign as a form of entertainment that's like the dream for for brands so like they should get attribution for that talk show like that should count as something and everything else they're getting.

18:53So I feel like if you're developing really interesting creative ideas that resonate with people enough to talk about, then the attribution speaks for itself. So yeah, to answer your question, sometimes I do think direct attribution makes sense. Other times, if it's a good idea, let it feel pure and live on its own. Yeah, if you're trying to hold the hand of a CFO that you're working with along those lines, would you coach that that person like look at how often people are searching for your brand or look at the percentage of users that are new that come to the website are are there some are there metrics where you can say i feel like this is working 100 so you just referenced a few great metrics you can look at but um for me it's important to go into that conversation even i mean everyone should be is even if you're not under the gun of delivering results, you should want to do it because it's responsible.

19:51But take a snapshot of, I call it like your business vitals. It could be like your website traffic, your month over month social media follower growth on key platforms, search, all that stuff, right? Like understand and assess your key vitals for like six months. And I always say, if you're going to invest in like a sustainable awareness play, make it last. like something three, six months minimum, right? So if you have your look back of three to six months and you're about to invest three to six months, you're going to want to see something. And also make sure too, you're not going into like the darkest period of your brand's existence.

20:29Maybe then you'd want to do like a 12 month look back of seeing how it actually works. But yeah, you want to basically be able to point and say, look, an increase in traffic. We're getting more search results coming our way. where we're seeing better growth that's not coming from ads on meta or whatever. So yeah, there's definitely ways of tracking it. John, where do you spend most of your time now in the business compared to 15 years ago? I'm sure it was all client side. It's funny. Now I spend most of my time advising my executive team. So in many instances, I'm very behind the scenes. I stay very up to speed on all of our accounts and everything like that.

21:07I'm still pretty much involved. And it's funny when I have catch-ups with people on a one-on-one basis. And they're filling me in on something. And they think they're like, oh, this is going to take a while. And then I'm like, no, you don't. I got it. I already know all this stuff. And it's funny because I'm usually on the phone now. It's like about a dozen people every week advising on very nuanced situations, whether it's client-related, personnel-related, or even just like an idea, a creative idea. So I spend a lot of time kind of like talking to our executive team, you know, still very involved on all the operational and financial stuff.

21:39and I'm working a lot on our positioning, our outward facing marketing and all that good stuff. But no, I still join pitches and I help a lot of business stuff and I join client meetings too when it makes sense and I'm not gonna like throw a wrench into something and ruin the flow. That's funny. I think probably folks got a glimpse for it at the beginning of our conversation, but what advice would you give early career agency talent? Maybe it's someone who's day one at Wondersauce, but maybe it's anyone who wants to get into this business and understand if it's right for them for their career.

22:17I mean, for me, the agency space is a really fun industry business to get yourself involved in. And I'd say first and foremost, you want to find a place that has a track record of growing talent. I don't care about how sexy the agency name is. I'd be asking questions like, how many people have been here for over three or four years, five years? I've always been most proud of that at Wondersauce. We grow people. And they leave after a while and they go somewhere else. But we leave an impression on their career. So one is look for a place that actually invests in their own talent. And also a place that is okay with mistakes to a certain degree.

23:01I think that the agency space is so dynamic and it changes so fast. And you're asked to wear multiple hats. that you need to be in a place where you can ask questions, you can feel comfortable asking questions and learning, and you can make the same mistake a couple times as long as you're kind of learning from that and being able to apply it to an expertise you're developing. So I do think that being able to feel comfortable in a dynamic environment is still really important. And then I would say you need to do this because you love it and you love working on the stuff and deploying campaigns and apps and websites and media strategies.

23:40You have to love that. If it's just for the paycheck, there's other industries that can just give you a paycheck. And I think you're going to get outworked in the agency world because there's a lot of hungry people. So you should do it because you really like it, not because you think it's a quick way to six figures or something like that. Because I do think it'll burn you out if you're not into it. A lot of people that are really great are always learning because when they're not working, they're consuming blogs, podcasts, news, etc. That makes them better at their job, not because they're studying, because they actually choose to listen to that stuff and consume it, because they find it entertaining.

24:19So know that you're up against that if you're not into it. John, congrats on all the growth at Wondersauce, and thanks for joining me today. Of course. Thanks for having me.

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