November 22, 2019

JSL Marketing is Thankful for So Much this Season

JSL Marketing & Web Design has a lot to be thankful for! From new developments, wonderful clients, to new team members and locations, this year has been a fantastic one! And we don’t want to hide our thankfulness, we want it to be infectious and shine over all our readers and clients!

So here, the week before the US’s Thankfulness Holiday, we want to share with you the many reasons we are so thankful, humbled, and feel so blessed.

What makes you thankful? What about this past year do you look back on and smile at? This is a great exercise to start your day, week, or meetings with to keep everyone positive and forever looking for the good!

JSL Marketing is Thankful for Our Growth

This year we were so blessed with a booming business, which lead to being able to open a new West Michigan branch covering the Grand Rapids, Holland, and Grand Haven area – the hometowns of many of our team members! This growth is something we’ve been working towards for years, and to have it actualized has been a dream come true!

Additionally, our growth has been through more than just locations, as we’ve been able to move many of our team members to higher positions, more leadership opportunities, and even plan some great work trips to West Michigan, Dallas, and San Diego for networking, shoots, conferences, holiday parties, and more!

Expansion always comes with some growing pains as well, but we’re even thankful for those, as it means we are still learning, perfecting our business processes, and gaining success and size! We love working in an industry that is constantly changing, all with a team that is committed to seeing JSL Marketing grow year after year – and in the end, what more could we ask for!

JSL Marketing & Web Design feels truly blessed by our growth this year, and plan on continuing this growth for years to come!

JSL Marketing is Thankful for Our Clients

We wouldn’t be where we were today if it weren’t for our amazing clients, their diverse businesses and industries, and the trust they put in us to help them grow their trade and livelihood.

We feel honored to have received so many glowing reviews, awards, and recommendations from our clients this year, and look forward to serving them even better next year – as we are always working towards becoming better and beating the competition.

From new web design projects to redesigns, content marketing, SEO, or branding, it’s never a dull day at JSL Marketing with our varied customers, their needs and business strategies! And what’s more – this year we’ve been able to work with new clients in new areas, such as our West Michigan office, and the joy of working with companies we grew up knowing has been a real gift this year.

JSL Marketing is so grateful for a year of new client relationships, growing past relationships, & working in new areas & industries!

JSL Marketing is Thankful for Our Team Members

We have gained some new team members this year, like Lindsey and Anna, two amazing digital and print designers who bring their creativity and expertise with them to work every day.

We are so thankful to be able to expand our team, all while keeping our previous members challenged and happy as well. And we can’t wait for all that’s to come!

JSL Marketing is Thankful for Our Littlest Team Member, Too

As many of you know, the JSL Marketing family gained its littlest team member this year by welcoming Quinn Harper to the family in August! As if we didn’t have enough to be thankful for, our little bundle of joy blows everything else out of the water this year!

Contact JSL as a Gift to Yourself (& Your Business) This Holiday Season!

JSL Marketing would love to make your new year bright with our digital services. Worried about the winter slump? Get ahead of it with new marketing strategies, branding, or a redesign! Let’s make this holiday season the best one yet!

Contact JSL Marketing& Web Design for a Free Consultation

June 28, 2019

How I Deal with Success & Imposter Syndrome [5 Tactics]

Did you know that Psychology Today’s very first tip in achieving and dealing with success has to do exclusively with imposter syndrome?

That’s because people often feel that they do not deserve the success they have received – this usually goes one of three ways:

They fight the undeserving feeling so hard they ultimately reverse it, becoming big-headed. This leads them to feel that they deserve every bit of success they have, and that success is owed to them. This isn’t an ideal situation, as it breeds arrogance, egotism, and entitlement.
They fully fall into imposter syndrome and feel that they are not worthy of their success, have not done enough, and become afraid that others will realize they are ‘a fraud’. Their fear of being found out and the guilt that the carry wears them down and ultimately leads to poor decisions and poor self-esteem. This is also not ideal, as it goes far too far in the opposite direction.
They accept that their success is a mix of their hard work and luck, or, both their efforts (which they fully control) and opportunity (which is less controlled). This leads to a healthy balance between owning your success and being grateful for it. This is the ideal, as it breeds a heart of gratitude, giving, but still leaves room to be proud of your hard work and its ultimate payoff.

But how do you become that third type? How do you make sure that neither arrogance nor imposter syndrome takes hold?

Well, for starters, you can follow the same five tips that I did when my company skyrocketed to the forefront of the DFW digital marketing and web design industry – a hugely competitive market that JSL Marketing & Web Design has been dominating for years.

1. Remember Your Failures – They Can Teach You

Remember that one failure that really sticks with you. Maybe you tried to start a business and it flopped. Maybe you tried to get a big sale and you lost them. Maybe you tried to learn a new skill just to discover it was much harder than you expected. Maybe you even worked for a company and it ultimately wasn’t a good fit – whatever your ‘failure’ was – hang onto that memory.

You can use this as a way to stay humble, as well as a lesson. There is something to learn from every situation, whether it be a win or a loss, and remembering to always look for that lesson is the first step in becoming successful (and ultimately, dealing with that success).

2. Remember Your Wins, Too – They Can Motivate You

The inverse of the above tip is true too – your successes are great lessons and great motivators as well. Make sure you don’t ruminate on your failures so much you forget about your big wins.

Remember, in order to be ‘type number three’ from above, it’s all about balance. Balancing your hard work with gratitude, and your acknowledgment of failures with successes!

3. Comparing Helps No One – So, Don’t Do It

You will probably never be Bill Gates or Steve Jobs – and that’s okay.

But comparing yourself (to those above or below) isn’t healthy and helps no one. Comparing yourself to those less successful will simply inflate your ego and comparing yourself to those more successful will dishearten you.

The only person you should ever compare yourself to – is your past self. And make sure you blow them out of the water!

4. Don’t Advertise Your Success (& Don’t Hide It)

Here is yet another tip that directly related to balance – don’t shout your success, and don’t hide it. Your success isn’t the entirety of you, which is why you shouldn’t advertise it as if it was, but it is still a part of you, which means you shouldn’t hide it.

Instead of taking one of these two extremes, let your success be a small part of your overall self. Meaning, it can come up at times, it can be acknowledged at times, but it isn’t the only conversation piece or tried-and-true small talk topic you have in your arsenal.

Lucky & Grateful VS Undeserving & Pretending

This is where it all comes to a head, isn’t it?

Ultimately, you should feel lucky and grateful for your success, not undeserving and pretending, or arrogant and entitled. If you focus on having a grateful heart and a thankful outlook, then you will be able to avoid both imposter syndrome and the possibility of straining your neck by how large your head gets.

Find the Healthy Balance Between Owning Your Success & Being Grateful for it

If you want to learn more about my company, myself, or read more articles written by me, stay tuned as my personal website www.JamesLeff.com will be launching soon.

Want to jump right into Sales Coaching or Business Consulting? Contact me here!

May 25, 2019

Starting a Startup from Scratch [The 3-Step Startup]

This article isn’t about giving a detailed look at each and every legal and strategic step you need to follow in order to start a small business, because frankly, there are enough of those guides out there (like here or here) and they’ve done a great job.

Instead, this post will look at how my wife and I started JSL Marketing, how we built our team, and how we made it a success – all in three simple steps (with a few sub-steps sprinkled throughout).

Not to oversimplify the process of creating a business or starting a startup, as a lot goes into it, but instead, I want to highlight some of the problematic areas that people often get hung up on, along with common mistakes and how to avoid them.

Just Start | Just Sell Something | Just Jump

Take a note from our beautiful coffee mugs – and just start!

What is your passion, your skill set, or your product idea? You could spend 15 years honing it, or you could go for it now. There are plenty of inspirational quotes out there that tell you in 101 ways to just try, to just keep going, or to just start. But this is actually completely true!

If we had dragged our feet when we finally decided to go from ‘part-time freelance’ to ‘all-in-digital-marketing-firm’ it would have taken us years longer and lost a lot of the momentum we had gained in the industry.

Sometimes it can be scary to jump into something, and I don’t think you should go for an idea that is only half-baked, but you need to understand that if you keep waiting for the stars to align and all the pieces to fall into place, you’ll be sitting on your startup idea until the day you die.

Starting a startup isn’t always smooth sailing, but it does teach you to think on your feet, be flexible, and brave. Sarah and I were brave when we started JSL – and though our company still took a lot of planning, when we felt unsure if we were ready to jump or not, we pulled the trigger and dove headfirst into the business.

Even if you gain nothing else from this post – understand this: your startup has a 0% chance of succeeding if it never starts. No matter what you do, you raise those odds when you do it.

Build Your Team of Wizards

As surprising as this might be to some, you can’t do everything yourself. In fact, you shouldn’t even try. If you want your startup to be a success, you need to work with people who have skills that are different, experiences that are different, and minds that are different.

Take JSL for example, our team consists of a group of creatives who each have unique skills they bring to the table. From ad creation and implementation masters, email marketing and CRM software specialists, digital design and print professionals, SEO and audit experts, all the way to content creation gurus and hard-coding geniuses – we have a team that rivals The Avengers.

Yes, when we started out, it was just Sarah and me, but we quickly had too much work to handle, especially while trying to elevate and grow our business

We needed help.

So, we went out looking for people who were teachable, passionate, ambitious, loyal, honest, and fit with the company culture we wanted to create. We took the hunt seriously and started out on a ‘trial-period’ with each of our new members, but as they grew with the company, as they continued to learn and try new things, we saw that we had created something invaluable – a team of professionals who were truly dedicated to making JSL a success.

We didn’t hire experts from the very beginning, instead, we hired the type of people who were hungry to learn and hone their skills. Those who were passionate about their area or field and wanted to improve it each and every week.

Ultimately, we decided to work with people who wanted to become the best in their field – and wanted their company to be right alongside them.

Market Like Your Business’s Life Depends on It (Because It Probably Does)

Here is something the team at JSL knows about twofold – marketing is king.

How do we know this? Well first, our company is built on the facts (and statistics) that say you need to market yourself (and market yourself well) if you want to succeed in today’s instant-information, online age. And second, we experienced the need for marketing firsthand when we started a Digital Marketing company in Dallas at just about the same time the SEO and Digital Marketing boom hit.

Think of it like this – if you are looking to work with a call center, yet every time you call them you get a busy signal, are you going to trust them with your business? If you go to speak to an architect and their office is in an unfortunate-looking building, are you going to trust them with your build design?

This is exactly the situation that JSL wanted to avoid.

If we were going to try to be the very best web design company in Dallas, then we needed a great website. And if we were going to try to be the best digital marketing company or SEO experts in Dallas, then we had better show up in that number one spot on Google.

So, we worked hard, learning all along the way, and we made it to that top spot.

Though other forms of marketing are still viable and popular, digital marketing is overtaking them all, because no one goes to their phonebook anymore when they need to find a new service, restaurant, or product – instead, we all turn to search engines, our laptops, and our smartphones.

There is no point in daring to create a startup and staffing it with the very best team, just to let it fall through the cracks because no one knows you exist – so, after step 1 & 2, don’t forget to market like your company’s life depends on it.

Need More Tips, Inspiration, or Practical Steps for Your Business or Startup? Check Back Next Week or Contact Me for Sales Coaching, Marketing Analysis & More.

Tag: small business