Day: November 14, 2019

Tell Us About Yourself and What You Did Before Owning Wojo Media (Digital Marketing Agency)

Hi, my name is Jason Wojo. I’m 22 years old and I’m from a small town in New York called Walden. I grew up with my two parents and my older sister, Megan. Where my journey truly began was in Culinary School believe it or not. I worked at a café from the ages 16-18 where I made breakfast food, did simple food prep, and cleaned dishes to make a living and get myself off my parents’ payroll at a younger age than most kids. I wanted to be independent.

At a time where I wasn’t self-aware at all, I always took other people’s opinions and never really asked myself if I would be happy doing x, y or z. Since I was already in the Culinary world, I figured I’d just go to Culinary School because “Hey why not? Nothing else interested me other than Call of Duty but god forbid I brought that topic up to my parents it wasn’t going to look pretty.”

So I packed my bags and went to Culinary school where I met a lot of awesome people who I still talk with to this day and I couldn’t be happier to get that experience of freedom in my life until things took a turn for the worst but on a good note.

During one of our culinary monthly seminars, we had a guest speaker who gave us the unforgivable truth about the industry saying that we would be working 15+ hours a day barely earning $18/hour and we would need to earn our place in the ranks. I said to myself, “FU** THAT.” I wasn’t that passionate enough to be hurdling over the paycheck to paycheck without being happy one bit, so like me and a couple of others who heard that same sentence…

WE LEFT!

 

I called my Mom a week before final exams and said, “Mom, I like it here, but I don’t really see myself doing this long term and I want to make more money. I’m going to see if there’s a business program here and if so, I’ll switch to that and stay here.”

As a loving mother, she supported my decision but sounded a little disappointed as she thought school was the only route for a kid like me who was so rambunctious and had too much energy to doing anything on my own.

 

You’re probably wondering why I chose business??

 

While I was in culinary school I stumbled upon Gary Vee, world-renowned speaker, CEO, Influencer and would consume his content to the point where I quit video games and I would just watch his Daily Vees and consume myself with positivity, kindness and patience. I knew I was going to be great.

Along with watching his content, I started flipping Pokémon cards from my dorm room where I would wait until all my roommates left the house and I would steal printer ink from my downstairs roommate, Alyssa. I would use the ink to print the shipping labels to ship the cards haha. That’s what you call hustle and cutting costs!

I had a bigger smile on my face making $5 per Pokémon card than barely making $18/hour flipping food that I didn’t care about, I just wanted to eat it. Who doesn’t love food?

So, I packed up and went back to Walden, New York to live with my parents and now the story is still just beginning!

 

What Did You Do Once You Got To Business School?

I was setting myself up for a new journey and I was nervous but EXCITED at the same time! I knew this was my place in the world and I was meant to be the guy that others feared and were scared of because I didn’t just want to be great, I wanted to be the GREATEST!

My mindset changed completely once I got to Sophomore year because, at this point, I HATED SCHOOL! I was currently working at a Life Insurance Company pushing data and meaningless papers to get enough money to do something for myself!

Then I got a job at a financial firm where I helped revamp their whole website, record financial commentaries and more digital advertising.

I had to save enough money so that when school was over, the red light turned green.

 

It was GO TIME!

 

I started getting into what Gary Vee was preaching… “content.”

Content creation was on the rise and I knew I had the work ethic to figure it out, but the systems in place, help others achieve it, and be the man known for the most attention-grabbing Instagram stories money could buy!

One day I was on Fiverr and I found this gentleman, named Pedro. Pedro plays a key role in my journey and Is currently, 2 years later, still my employee. He knew the editing portion of these Instagram Stories, so I hired him. I was slaving at the insurance company making decent money for a 19-20-year-old so now I got the opportunity to create something bigger than $18/hour… an Empire!

So, we started selling these stories and while Pedro was making samples for companies we wanted to acquire, I stumbled upon a brand that would take my entrepreneurial shift to a whole new corner… Hustle Island.

I messaged them at the time when I had around 7,000 followers and used that as leverage to have them send me some free merch because the brand related to me and my audience so well that I could easily use the apparel for videos, pictures and shout outs, but little did I know where this was going to take me.

Months went by and I was wearing the merch tagging the page constantly and then one day I went in for the right hook because I saw that they had a mediocre social media presence with little to no creative ads being made that could grab attention to get new customers.

 

Who Guided You In The Right Direction?

This is where I met Greg Berry. This man saved my life emotionally, mentally and financially. (Greg is in the middle here, Troy Ericson on the right, Me on the left)

He found me on Instagram when I was posting 3x motivational videos a day and my account was blowing up fast and on top of that he saw my Instagram Stories I was making for my own personal brand and he wanted them to!

So, he invited me to drive to Connecticut to have lunch with him, see what my couple of clients’ results were with the videos I was making and decided to hire me on the spot.

Greg was the underground Tai Lopez that never came on camera and preached his intelligence. He was more about sticking to himself, making his money and not being “famous.” I learned a lot from Greg, but most of it took a while to stick in my head. I was a little egotistical because I was running a pretty decent company at my age considering the flock of geese I went to school with and people that surrounded me. I had a real company: Employees, business license, retainer clients and I was somewhat happy!

The one thing Greg would always say to me was, “You need to slow down. You’re hopping on a trend, not a business. Ads is where the money is, NOT social media management and IG stories.” That clicked in my head to go above and beyond content creation and use that content to get brands and local businesses… MORE CUSTOMERS!

 

Because that’s what made the world go round… money!

 

Also, while working with Greg he put me in touch with Troy Ericson. Troy is someone who is one of my best friends still to this day and I trust him with most of my projects because the work he did with us at Hustle Island and is one of the best copywriters I knew. We are very close to this day and I recently just hung out with him for 3 days in Chicago. (pic below)

Moving forward I knew businesses needed new customers and I wanted to be the middleman, so Greg decided to take me under his wing and build an empire that he still has to this day where we were able to acquire over 200,000+ leads and 24,200+ paying customers in under 12 months! 

 

Just like that, I was in the game and my life changed forever from here on out!

MY NEXT STEPS

As I was learning a ton from not just Greg, but a lot of my clients who signed on with me I was starting to realize that I could really make this work. “Jason, you could really go against the grain here and build a business that could make you financially free, free from societal norms and allow you to do whatever you wanted to do when you wanted to.”

To 99% of people out there, this was a facade lifestyle. It was unattainable as most people said because like all good things come to an end. Living the laptop lifestyle wasn’t realistic at the time. School was… a 9-5 was… and this last year of school really put me in line to not just excel my business, but my life!

For the 2 years before my senior year, I grinded like no other 19/20-year-old ever! I met a ton of awesome people travelling all over the US with my client, Jose (Master Barber Hov), and many other clients who took an interest in my personal branding services.

My parents were so worried I wasn’t eating enough or sleeping enough they started having midnight interventions with me telling me to slow down, but I knew I couldn’t. Work is how you get it and I wanted to put myself in the best scenario to succeed.

Greg was the only mentor I really needed because these 3 years of business school was a great time for me to live at home, learn and stack up so much money that when I wanted to get up and move I could with no fear AT ALL!

I put in hours of work, worked with a whole new tier of clients because as soon as Greg opened his mouth about me, they hired without asking a single question because of his reputation. I was someone that he trusted for a reason. Greg didn’t work with a lot of people and he saw a lot in me that he saw in himself at my age and we both had mutual respect for each other to grow and always be there for each other.

 

And then Senior Year came…

 

SENIOR YEAR

My teachers respected me even though I barely did any work, was on my laptop the whole class, texting clients during class, editing videos with the volume on sometimes, and stepping out the room to make a business call every 10-15 minutes. I was what they called the “ghost” of college. I did work when I wanted to, completely bullshitted most of my assignments just to graduate and get it over with already. I wanted to live my life already and this definitely was not the life I was dreaming of living.

The months ran down, assignments half-assed but I still got the respect from every single person in that school because the crazy part was, I was making more money than the people teaching me! Sadly, that was the truth. My teachers knew it, some of them even followed me on Instagram and LinkedIn where I would fly around the US, working with clients, and without paying a dime. They knew I was insane, so insane the next part of this story will shock you and give you a whole new perspective on the education system as we know it.

 

The days before I moved to Orlando

At this very point in my life, while sitting on a cruise ship with a Stella in my hand while my fellow classmates were picking up their diplomas, I realized the education system was an absolute “scam.” At the end of every graduating class, there are awards given out to the best two business students in the class and they gave someone the opportunity to speak on behalf of the graduating class.

Me, being an influencer at the time, I wanted that speech for content and that was it and when they released that it would be based on a voting premise, I knew I had it in the bag.

I had 30k followers at the time before I got hacked in January of 2019, so even if I got 1% of those people to vote I would easily beat the second place, clueless, book worm any day of the week.

I found out through the grapevine, (my teachers respected me, so I got the inside scoop on everything. Why respect is more important than book intelligence) that I won the tally for the speech and the two business awards. They told me no one has ever received all of the top awards like that and the speech, but then this happened.

 

Equal opportunity happened!

 

They wanted to give someone else a piece of the pie so they revoked one of my awards and gave the speech to someone else because the school was afraid of what I would say up there. As you know entrepreneurs are against the school system so having me up there definitely wasn’t a good idea, but I was astonished of how they didn’t give credit where credit was due!

So, when I found out the news I immediately wanted to spend time with my parents before I went to Orlando to start my new life so I booked a cruise for us and we skipped graduation and let’s just say, I pissed a lot of people off!

 

What am I up to currently?

The day after we got back from our cruise (May 20th) I took myself, my 12 clients, and moved to Orlando, FL to only drive to a house that A: I’ve never seen before in person, B: Only spoke to the owner on the phone and C: Was closer to one of my good friends and clients at the time, Ryan & Jenna.

 

What a leap of faith this was!

 

Now I have around 15 clients who I run Facebook ads for, driving revenue and leads from all channels: Facebook, Instagram, Google, and more! I do social media advertising, content creation, funnel building, social media management, personal branding, SEO, website design and basically the whole digital marketing bundle!

I have grown a passion for building eCommerce brands from scratch for the past couple of months and have had the opportunity of taking a planner to 6 figures in under 5 weeks (no joke) and a “Drunk Wives Matter Wine Tumbler” to 6 figures in 2 months and adding multiple 5 figures a month to small and local businesses all over the US!

Over my 3 years of being in Digital Marketing, I have had the opportunity to work with multiple brands that spend over $50,000-$100,000 a year in Facebook ads and have generated well over $1,400,000 in revenue for my clients.  

That’s all folks! I hope you enjoyed and got inspired by this if you’re between the ages of 18-24. Follow me on Instagram @TheJasonWojo where I upload twice a day giving you entrepreneurial insight, advertising tips and free value that shouldn’t be thrown to the side and a front-row seat on my journey to navigating an industry that is a lot easier when you do what you love… LIFE.