James LaJoie:
So.

Chris Simmance:
Thanks, Voice Over Guy. I’m really pleased to be having James from PSP Compass on the line today. How are you doing, James?

James LaJoie:
I’m doing well, it’s a pleasure to be on here, I really appreciate the invite.

Chris Simmance:
Well, welcome. I mean, it’s your morning, my evening. We’re doing this from sunny,

James LaJoie:
Yeah.

Chris Simmance:
well, not cloudy London and Denver, Colorado.

James LaJoie:
Denver, Colorado and it’s pretty sunny today. Oddly enough this year it’s been very rainy, almost like it’s first monsoon season.

Chris Simmance:
Oh, right. Well, you know, let’s not get into global warming conversations when we could be talking about agencies.

James LaJoie:
Yeah,

Chris Simmance:
So

James LaJoie:
yeah.

Chris Simmance:
James,

James LaJoie:
Right.

Chris Simmance:
give me a little bit of a rundown. What is it you guys do? What do you do in the agency? How long you’ve been going? Just in case you never know, there might be a potential client listening.

James LaJoie:
Yeah, absolutely. So I am one of the co-founders and chief operations officer for PSPCompass Solutions. It’s typically coined now as just PSPCompass because three syllables is too much for everybody. So

Chris Simmance:
It is a net.

James LaJoie:
what we do is we’re a full service agency, but we specialize in consulting and educating business owners on the most effective, most efficient way to market their business depending where they’re at, their go-to-market strategy. Kind of we take their product, their service, what they’ve done so far, how long they’ve been around, put that all together and we help the business owner understand the best way to move forward from there, most efficiently too, because you don’t wanna throw everything all at once without knowing where your money’s going.

Chris Simmance:
So how long have you guys been running?

James LaJoie:
We’ve been running for about a little over five years this past March.

Chris Simmance:
Okay, so you had a couple of good years, massive pandemic, couple of good years.

James LaJoie:
Exactly. We started right before the pandemic. And I remember me and my business party, we were a little scared when the pandemic

Chris Simmance:
Yeah.

James LaJoie:
came on. And

Chris Simmance:
You heard

James LaJoie:
we

Chris Simmance:
me.

James LaJoie:
actually had the opposite effect. Everybody was trying to get their website up and running, trying to optimize it, trying to start new businesses and everything.

Chris Simmance:
Yeah.

James LaJoie:
So and then, yeah, that went well. And then we kind of felt we did a whole started the whole roller coaster thing with all the recession talk and everybody’s

Chris Simmance:
Yeah.

James LaJoie:
spending money some point taking away money. It was it was interesting.

Chris Simmance:
And what’s your typical kind of client makeup? Is it like SMEs? What kind of businesses are they?

James LaJoie:
Yeah, so we started with SMB, small businesses. We were specific in the niche of like med spas, medical field, but throughout the last couple years, just because our name’s getting known, how we operate, how we do business, the whole education part where we spent a lot of time consulting with clients, we’ve kind of expanded in a bunch of different niches, and then now we’re going more into medium sized businesses.

Chris Simmance:
Mm-hmm.

James LaJoie:
We still work with SMBs, SMEs type thing, just in terms of the longevity, the reoccurring revenue, being able to expand and grow the medium-sized businesses. They tend to not make quick emotional decisions just because they have the budget,

Chris Simmance:
Yep.

James LaJoie:
which we have realized unfortunately does affect us. So we have to limit the amount of small businesses we have at any given time or every quarter.

Chris Simmance:
Yeah, it’s that kind of like balancing the risk versus what you can actually achieve. You know, with the smaller businesses, the needle moves a lot quicker, but also is a lot more risk. There’s a lot more

James LaJoie:
Yeah,

Chris Simmance:
risk.

James LaJoie:
it’s

Chris Simmance:
So

James LaJoie:
interesting.

Chris Simmance:
yeah, exactly. I mean, if it weren’t interesting, I don’t think any of us would be doing this industry. It’s the it’s one of the few industries where everything changes on a on a on a tiny little moment, you know, AI pops up and everyone loses their heads. Couple of years ago, it was, it was something else, but everyone’s forgotten about it now. So, you know, if it wasn’t interesting, I think we’d all give up.

James LaJoie:
I agree. I agree. I think this is, I was trying to explain what I do to my parents and I was just telling my mom, it’s just one of those things where every week there’s something different so it’s always a new challenge. You thought you knew it but you’re spending another 10, 20 hours researching what in the world is this and how is it going to affect me.

Chris Simmance:
Yeah, exactly. Bloody hell, you pay this guy once and he keeps coming back. So if you could go back in time, just before you started, is it one co-founder or are there more of you?

James LaJoie:
Just two co-founders, me and a business partner.

Chris Simmance:
So if the both of you went back in time and you were sitting down together, you popped into the room and saw your younger selves, is there one piece of advice you might give yourselves just before you started off?

James LaJoie:
Ooh, I appreciate the dynamic of meeting my business partner because I think that answer would be different for both of us.

Chris Simmance:
Oh, okay.

James LaJoie:
I think for me though, I’m more analytical, more

Chris Simmance:
Mm-hmm.

James LaJoie:
I look in the details of everything. I would tell my younger self not to stress out so easily. The ups and downs after I got used to it, the constant. stress of there’s always a fire to put out. There’s never gonna be, you’re never gonna have your to-do list 100% done. And if you did, something’s wrong because

Chris Simmance:
And you should

James LaJoie:
there’s

Chris Simmance:
definitely

James LaJoie:
always

Chris Simmance:
worry.

James LaJoie:
something

Chris Simmance:
Yeah.

James LaJoie:
to do. So I probably would tell myself to kind of relax a little bit. Take it

Chris Simmance:
Mm-hmm.

James LaJoie:
one day at a time, you know, learn the balance of, you know, put effort and of course, care about what you’re doing, take responsibility with it, but also, you know, take some time to take a break.

Chris Simmance:
Yeah.

James LaJoie:
Let’s let things go.

Chris Simmance:
And I think, you know, the early days of running an agency, it is very much a cashflow game, it does die very quick if you don’t get the cashflow going. And, you know, looking at numbers is great, but making the numbers happen is, is greater panicking usually causes, causes terrible things. I often say that running an agency is like going on a rollercoaster, except you get champagne on the way up and punches in the face on the way down. And the game

James LaJoie:
Oh, no.

Chris Simmance:
is to make it, the game is to not avoid the punches in the face because you’re on rails. happen. Just just be ready for them and have plenty of champagne in you on the way.

James LaJoie:
I agree, that’s a good one. I might take that one.

Chris Simmance:
Please please it’s not uh I haven’t done any I don’t think I’ve got any registered trademarks in the US just yet so you can carry

James LaJoie:
We got a hashtag

Chris Simmance:
on.

James LaJoie:
at all, your social media.

Chris Simmance:
So so you say about your co-founder it might be a different story what do you think uh what do you think um what advice might you give your co-founder? That’s a good one to ask. Bear

James LaJoie:
I

Chris Simmance:
in mind

James LaJoie:
was just going to say, I think it’d be the advice that I give him. Um, I would tell him to slow down and don’t take too much risk. That’s the, that’s been the best dynamic, I think, between both of us where he’ll risk it all and he’ll, he’ll jump over the edge with not knowing what, where we’re going to land. Whereas I’m kind of the opposite. I need to not know where we’re going to land. You got to take a risk, but I need to have like a direction of, okay, we did everything possible we could to that we can on our side, let’s take the jump. So with him, I think it’d be a little. slow down a little bit and kind of look where you’re going sometimes.

Chris Simmance:
Yeah, yeah, I think in every agency, it’s, I never had a co founder or indeed anyone at the, um, and the decision making area to help me. So quite often I’d either, I’d either do a you or him. Um, I’d either make a decision and it would work out well. And I’d try a snappy decision a second time and it would really be a slap. Um, or, or I’d agonize over something for so long that it stopped being important. Um, and something else came and took it, took it away.

James LaJoie:
Yeah.

Chris Simmance:
But I think when you’ve got two co-founders who have like opposite sides of the same coin from a perspective of, you know, one is very much like visionary and go, the other one is very much implement, think, plan, and actually know what they’re doing. You know, you’d still jump off the ledge if you just, as long as you knew where the plan was to land and you know, how far the drop was and things like that. And then that would mean that everyone was safe.

James LaJoie:
Yeah, no,

Chris Simmance:
and it’s

James LaJoie:
I agree. It’s, it’s, it’s interesting. Kind of what you said. I’d never experienced, I guess, doing on my own, except with some other stuff that I’ve done. So that’d be interesting to think if I had to play both sides

Chris Simmance:
Yeah, well

James LaJoie:
without the business partner.

Chris Simmance:
just imagine all the decisions and all the types of things that he thinks about, all the types of things that he does, they’re all the things that you would also have to do, but your brain is your brain, so you do them differently and God knows from your, you know, you know from your perspective how it might pan out I guess. Okay,

James LaJoie:
Thinking about it makes me feel crazy. Do you ever feel crazy doing both sides of that?

Chris Simmance:
yeah you never know what hat you’re wearing at any given point in time, it’s very schizophrenic.

James LaJoie:
Nice.

Chris Simmance:
So… Is there something that you guys did like really early on in the agency that has set you up for this current success?

James LaJoie:
Yeah, one of our, so both me and him worked for different agencies beforehand. So we kind of see the do’s and don’ts. One of the biggest things that we did early on that was part of why we started the business was with marketing, especially what I’ve learned is digital marketing can be very ambiguous. A lot of people don’t know how it applies to them. What’s, what’s it, what’s, what’s a part of it, what it consists of, how to use it. and everybody has a different way of explaining it. It’s like a recipe that has, it’s all the same recipe, but everybody has a few different ingredients, they take out of it, they put into it, and it makes it, I can understand for business owners, could be a bit ambiguous of like, very kind of, they tend to be very slow to act, because it’s like, wait a minute, why isn’t it all the same across the board? So.

Chris Simmance:
I mean.

James LaJoie:
One of the main things that we wanted to focus on was focusing on people. It’s where our name came from. PSP stands for People Service Profit. And one of those things was understanding the people we’re working with, the business owner, the executive, what is their vision? What do they want? What are they envisioning? What are they, what’s their goals in the company? And then how do we best offer our expertise in terms of here are the parameters, but also help them understand and help them get to their goal, help them get to their vision. That is the biggest, I think, part where a lot of, I’ve seen a lot of people either give up trying to understand and bridge that gap, or they just have no idea how to talk and ask the right questions

Chris Simmance:
Yeah.

James LaJoie:
to the people they’re in front of to really understand where they’re coming from. And

Chris Simmance:
Yeah.

James LaJoie:
that’s something that we started early on because we had worked in marketing before and we saw it was just, it was not well done. And the companies we had, they did great work. but it wasn’t valued and it wasn’t even, the clients didn’t keep them on long because we couldn’t understand what they wanted and what they were trying to go after.

Chris Simmance:
Well, this is the thing and quite a lot of agencies get this wrong. Um, and, and it’s that, you know, you’re delivering something that’s invisible and that invisible thing, um, is relatively intangible as well. You know, it’s not like the invisible thing is just a website because that’s sort of a product. Um, you’re delivering a service with numbers that someone needs to understand, uh, but for the money right now. And so, you know, like you say, if you understand the value, the vision, the purpose of the other business, you can make almost everything you communicate to them or everything you do for them tangible to the thing that they know to be true. And I’ve had a look over your website and I can see that, you know, that does come through when you’re speaking to me now. So it’s good to hear that it’s not just words on a page, which is

James LaJoie:
Yeah.

Chris Simmance:
great. A lot of agencies do. try really hard to essentially productize a service, which is, I think, where it kind of goes wrong. If you add in the this, we know where you want to be, you know where you want to be, everything we speak about will be aligned to that. You’ll get it, we’ll get it, and everyone will be happy.

James LaJoie:
Right. Yeah, I agree. I’m not going to lie. When we first started our agency, as you say, productizing kind of what we were given out was something that we were trying to do. And then we realized over the couple of years, talking to clients, dealing with them, they were more happier when we just focused on the consulting part, the communication, the always talking with them, always explaining, always encouraging them to ask questions of

Chris Simmance:
Mm.

James LaJoie:
how does what we do add value to their business overall. That’s where we noticed that they tend to be happier in the end, they tend to be even more understanding even when we run into issues. I don’t know if this is later on the show, but we’ve run into issues even where we’ve overspent on ad spend and had to give the clients back money and everything and just that constant communication. They were very understanding, which I was very surprised early on in the business.

Chris Simmance:
Hmm. Well, I mean, we are literally coming to that point now where we can talk about the war as well as well as the beauty.

James LaJoie:
Jumping

Chris Simmance:
So

James LaJoie:
ahead of myself, sorry.

Chris Simmance:
yeah, no, it’s okay. You just want to talk about bad things. That’s fine. I’m happy we could go on all day. I’ve got a list for myself. And so in the in the last five years or so, you know, like you say, it’s not been it’s not been all ups, there’s been some downs, there’s been some problems and things like that. But in reality, you know, you’re still here. So it must be must be going well. Is there something that you did during the last five years that you went? Oh, no, never again. We’re not touching that.

James LaJoie:
Yeah, I think there was picking certain types of clients for us just weren’t the right fit. The turnover, the ones that want immediate results and just want to do something just to get something on paper, I’ve realized that that’s not kind of who we are and what we want to be. So understanding that they are needing a different type of marketing company or a different type of marketing service and just being more, well, that’s not us. It’s not bad, but that’s not us. We need to refer them. And then… I think the biggest thing with that in terms that comes in with our culture and how we want our clients to know it is hiring the right people. I have hired a lot of the wrong people in this company, in this industry.

Chris Simmance:
Not easy in this industry.

James LaJoie:
It’s very frustrating to me because I’m more of the analytical, I want to know where we’re going and I hate making the same mistake more than once. When you’re making it three times, it’s just like, okay, something’s wrong, but talking with other people in the business and the industry. You could do the best you can with hiring people, but it’s people. You cannot control anyone else but yourself. So you do the best you can to filter out, but you’re still going to have some people that seep through the cracks that just not a good fit or they didn’t understand your culture or what you were trying to do for clients. So I think that I talked to my business, but that has cost us the most money. At one point in our business, we were trying to debate whether we were going to do a higher all our positions overseas or if we were still going to try to hire people within our state and within the US. It’s been very interesting to navigate and very frustrating at times.

Chris Simmance:
Well, you know, as George Bush said, for me once, shame on you. For me again. You can’t fool me again or something along those lines. Um, you

James LaJoie:
I

Chris Simmance:
know,

James LaJoie:
remember that.

Chris Simmance:
it’s, it’s P the people bit is, is impossibly hard. Um, because you’re balancing, uh, the need to, to deliver your balancing the skill fit as well. you’re balancing their own individual behaviours and their individual needs. I think the only way I’ve ever seen it work is with, or work consistently well is if you hire for fit and they just happen to have skill and then you don’t hem them in with like loads and loads of processes. But it’s still a minefield because people… are different and you’re expecting them to do the same as someone else and it’s really tough.

James LaJoie:
Yep, I think that’s been the biggest thing. I think my brother, he’s an entrepreneur as well. He gave me some advice years ago. He was always telling me, hire people that have great character. You can always teach the skill.

Chris Simmance:
Thanks for watching!

James LaJoie:
And so that’s something we’ve been trying to do in a way, but you still, you know, with marketing and some of these services, you still need someone that understands marketing. I’ve hired a couple people that, you know. they end up not having any type of social media or any type of platform. So they are really good with people, but they just don’t know how marketing works on online because they don’t use it.

Chris Simmance:
Yeah, and then there’s plenty of very skilled people in say SEO, for example, who are experts at SEO, but have no idea about marketing.

James LaJoie:
Right, right,

Chris Simmance:
They’re good

James LaJoie:
exactly.

Chris Simmance:
at a technical skill, which is totally fine and very, very sought after, but, you know, get them to think about the business aspects of, of a change to a website and you know, it’s crickets, you can’t hear and you don’t know what they’re, what they’re up to. So James, someone’s listening to this podcast right now. They’re they’ve been waiting to hear. The first episode from Denver, Colorado, the first piece of advice for any new starting agency owner, what would you give them? What piece of advice would you have for them?

James LaJoie:
I think it would be more of that along the lines of that character and that integrity. I would tell any agency owner because our industry and our field is filled with, my client told me this, it was snake oil and potions.

Chris Simmance:
Yeah.

James LaJoie:
So because it’s filled with so much snake oil and potions, it’s very important for agency owners and anybody that wants to have a good reputation to be honest, upfront. integral and even though it’s frustrating at times, no one’s going to understand what you do. No one’s even going to understand some of the channels, but it’s very important to just put your best foot forward and explain it. Try to do the best you can, but always have that character of trying to help people.

Chris Simmance:
Mm-hmm.

James LaJoie:
And I think later on, I’ve noticed even in the last couple of years later on, that reputation will follow you. But

Chris Simmance:
Yeah.

James LaJoie:
if you create that reputation just to make a quick buck at first, it’s… It’s hard to get away from that, especially in something like marketing.

Chris Simmance:
Yeah, and like Google’s index, people don’t forget. It’s just it’s there. The industry is massive. The number of businesses in the world are massive, but it doesn’t take a huge amount for you to be remembered for the wrong thing.

James LaJoie:
Right.

Chris Simmance:
And there’s plenty to go around, but you don’t have to take it all just because it’s there.

James LaJoie:
Yup, that’s uh, I try to tell other people I have some friends that are marketing. I’m like, Hey, I’m not trying to compete with you. There’s plenty of businesses that need marketing.

Chris Simmance:
Exactly. And the thing is as well, you know, if you, if you turn down a lead that isn’t a fit for you, it might be a fit for someone that you know, you’ll do

James LaJoie:
Exactly.

Chris Simmance:
them a good turn, everyone will win. It’s it. There’s a, I my wife, she I can feel her like grimacing. When I say this, I like to say like a rising tide raises all ships in that you don’t have to you guess you’re in competition. Yes, money’s at stake. But the reality is you can treat people well and you can do a good job and everyone will win in a different way.

James LaJoie:
I agree 100% on that, I love that.

Chris Simmance:
James, it’s been wonderful having you on the podcast today. Thank you so much.

James LaJoie:
Thanks Chris, I really appreciate being on here. It’s been great.

Chris Simmance:
And in our next episode, we’ll be speaking with another agency leader to hear their story and the lessons they’ve learned along the way. In the meantime, thanks very much for listening.