TJ Jorgensen - TJ21 Media Group

South Bend, IN

574-607-8112

info@tj21.com

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A little about TJ21

This isn’t a marketing agency, this is a media marketing firm, so while people lump us in as an advertising agency or marketing agency, we’re not just that because of the fact that we do video production, web development, graphic design, social media marketing and out of that marketing representation is probably the biggest thing we do.

I like to look at this two different ways. It’s not nearly this sexy but like a lawyer or attorney or like a sports agent. My client is the big athlete or even just an average athlete and my job is to make sure they get the best deal. So from a marketing aspect, if most of my clients don’t have a marketing team, we are their marketing team, us and our 16 employees...basically my job is to be able to represent them.

Our platinum level clients, we’re everything to them. They don’t sponsor a soccer team without us being in charge of it. And I mean that’s not an example, that’s not a metaphor, that’s a real true thing.

Jorgensen, a Michigan native, attended high school in Berrien Springs, then college at Lake Michigan College and later, Andrews University where he studied marketing.

I'm doing exactly what I said I always wanted to do.

When I was a kid, it was just my sister and I and my mom. We were very, very poor growing up and I would take my dresser, big tall dresser, and I would take all the drawers out, kick it on its side and break all the rails out of it so I had no dresser anymore. I just left all my clothes in the drawers on the floor and I would put a chair up against it and then that would be my desk, and I would have a phone, a little plate that said president, and here I was at twelve years old and my sister was my secretary and we ran businesses... point is is that I wanted to be what I am today, even at twelve years old...I mean everyone wanted to be a baseball player or supermodel or something like that, but once I realized I wasn’t going to make it to the major leagues I focused on being the best marketing and business person I could be.

Q: How did you work your way up to where you are now?

I worked at a company that is no longer in business called Burch Inc. They were a marketing fulfillment company and I was given the task as an 18 year old not even intern... I was given the account of JB Hunt Trucking and JB Hunt Trucking is huge. They’re enormous, I mean they’re all over the country now. My task was to create a way for them to hire drivers. So I came up with a plan that said 'well why don’t we give them a bonus but don’t give it to them right away because they’ll quit. Give it to them where if they work for us in the first three months give them half of it, you work for us the next three months you get the other half.' And they’re like, that’s brilliant. So here I’m 18 came up with this idea. My boss, my supervisor, got a huge promotion, became vice president of marketing and I got a little promotion up to something, full time job is basically what it was. It earned me the chance to work with other clients.

Jorgensen felt there was no room for advancement at Burch Inc. and decided to move on, unsure of where to go next.

I knew from early on that I wanted to be Denzel Washington. I did not want to be the best supporting actor I wanted to be the best actor. So I knew that I wanted to be an entrepreneur but I didn’t know what that would be yet. Do I want to own my own marketing company what do I want to do?

Jorgensen's future wife had a relative in the sign industry, which landed him his next job.

I started doing some sales for him on the side to learn a little bit and then I was like "I love everything about this." So with in a year I opened up TJ Sign Design in my hometown of Berrien Springs, first out of my home and then it grew and I got a building, a couple employees and four years later it was good enough for somebody to want to buy it. So I sold it and then I got headhunted by the Sign Pro franchise…they found me and asked me to be the general manager of a location in Elkhart. I did that for a couple years and then orchestrated a sale from Sign Pro to Fast Signs.

Jorgensen stayed with Fast signs for exactly one year before moving on to his next venture.

I’m in my mid twenties, late twenties, and I’m all about marketing and promoting products. I decide my avenue is going to be graphics and sign image and signage and stuff like that. I was really good at designing a brand campaign for my clients. After I left Fast Signs, I wanted to start something of my own. And as I started to do that another company came along and said it's too hard to do that all by yourself. I was like, "nah, I was able to build a pretty successful one when I was only twenty years old." But he said here’s an amount, do you want to come be our director of marketing. I said, "ope, that’s pretty good!" So I went to that company and I stayed there for 10 years as their director of marketing and basically served under the owner. I was the number two person in command at that company.

Jorgensen says he didn't have a typical ladder climb in the industry.

You’ll notice that in any of those I didn’t work my way up to do anything. I came in as a general manager, as a “I owned my own” and then I went to this company and I knew since this was a ma and pa type company that I was maxed. There was no way I could do anything because the son, who was about my age…he was going to own this company and he does today. So I knew there was no way for me to go beyond that.

One day, seven years ago, I had to choose if I wanted to continue serving that master or the other master of this idea of TJ21…and I decided to go for it. We launched TJ21.

One client said "I will let you start on our company, you can have this office and grow your company and we will be your number one client, we’ll be your first client." So that grew. And seven years later, big building, lots of employees, we’ve done 5,000 different video projects, hundreds of websites, we have 100 clients.

Jorgensen had mentors give him advice as he worked his way to owning his own marketing business.

What helped me to get more recognized and everything is one of the things I learned early on – although I’m a very hyper and very energetic person – when I was young I was horribly excited and wouldn’t let someone finish talking. So I had a mentor at that time tell me….talk less smile more. I took that advice back then and I stopped talking and I started listening more and that enabled me to just keep learning and learning and learning.

Having that account [JB Hunt] and having my boss at Burch believing in my ability to execute to the next level is what enabled me to say, "I can do more than just this."

As president, Jorgensen has a hand in every aspect of the business. There are daily team meetings where he touches base with the marketing team and web development team to check in on current projects. TJ21 also utilizes a program called Asana, a production management software that sends alerts to him and the departments about current project deadlines to make sure everyone knows that what they need to be working on.

Jorgensen has a heavy hand in the video projects. That team goes over scripts and holds preproduction meetings for commercials they will be filming. They also film a television show, created by Jorgensen for a client, weekly in their studio.

I love cameras in my hand. I believe I’m a great cinematographer, so I’m definitely a working owner.

We don’t do corny, we turn down more projects than we take... I don’t like to side one way or the other. Even though I am a man of faith, I don’t like to position myself where I could potentially alienate another party or another particular company or client, so I’m just very careful with which way we go with things.

Everything we do is with purpose and passion.

Q: You work with companies that have a lot of data. How are you and your staff able to manage all that data?

A lot of companies have different servers and stuff like that. We have a server in-house. We also use Dropbox as our main server...we are on the paid version of Dropbox so we have a large account. Every single client has a folder on there and we share folders with those clients. If we just picked up a new client that started with us today and I asked him to create his own dropbox account and invite us to that and then we add it to ours and now he can be on our project today, take a picture throw it in there...and then we get a copy of that immediately in our server and because its synced to my computer and all of our computers. So we use drop box as our main server for all documentation for all photos, PDFs, things like that. Anything video related we put on our server which is in-house.

Q: What kind of analytic systems do you use to make sure that all of the content your company is generating for your clients is working?

Every client wants to have the measurables. They want to know the money they’re spending is working. We do sometimes what you refer to as global marketing. What we do is something that, not all the time can you take a seven day snapshot and see if it’s working. Sometimes you can, depends on what the promotion is about. But most cases we have to take a 50,000 foot view. And that might mean that six months from now or nine months from now or a year from now we may have to go back and say, "okay, let's go back to May of 2020 when we started this."

Most of the stuff is all analytics you could pull from your Google Analytics...your Facebook management software, all that stuff you could pull and get the data you need.

Snapshots are taken of every business prior to TJ21 starting analysis so that they have baseline numbers of that company's revenue and profit margins. These snapshots are updated every year.

We want to know about your business because our goal is to increase your business, to increase your revenue, so when I look at this six months from now, I look at this from a year from now, I know the global view is that we are trending up, that we’re going somewhere.

But people also want the 20 foot view and they want to know what marketing is doing for them this week. We just ask them to never hold that against us, and they don’t. There are some that are like, "well this ad has been going for seven days and I’ve only had one phone call." I know, but we built a [expletive]-load of awareness and our reach, the engagement, has hit 10,000 people. So we know that it’s being seen. It's just a matter of when they need you will they call.

Another thing people don’t understand is that…we are going to bring people to you, we’re going to make sure you get noticed. Our motto is 'passionately committed to getting you noticed.' We get you noticed, but if your product sucks, or your customer service sucks, or you have a Google review of 2.8, there’s a reason why. We’re going to do our best to get you noticed, but it's your job to deliver. If you need help with delivering, that’s something else we can work on with you.

Q: Other than the video production and the fact that you’re the president overseeing everything, what is making this job unique as far as how you’re working with the clients and how you’re working with their data?

They have to trust us. That’s probably what is unique with this...we manage their finances, which means I have to be able to allow their website to accept payments, I have to have their bank account information...I think what makes us unique is that…our customers have to be able to trust us to do a job for them. And we have to make sure we are giving them what they want.

I think what makes us unique in general over our competition is that we are not afraid to push the envelope and do things differently...don’t be afraid to put your butt out there...don’t be afraid to take that step that your competition won’t do.

Recently we got into the political world a little bit…a guy running for sheriff, he was a twenty-five-to-one underdog and everyone said 'you need to go talk to TJ, he can help you get noticed.' And he sat in my office and he said, "I want to do this" and I said, "Bill, I don’t know anything about politics." He said, "you don’t have to, you just have to market me." I said I’m going to do this on two conditions. One, I don’t ever want to be part of a slanderous campaign. If you want to talk about your opponent I don’t want any part of it….number two, you've got to trust me that we’re going to try to win this election with no commercials. He said "excuse me?" I said no commercials, I said I want to do something that no one else has done before. I want to do this purely digital. I want to win this election with social media. And he’s like alright I’ll trust you. Shook on it and a little bit later we made national attention as we pulled it off by eight votes, which was the closest election in history (of this caliber election). Of course that was just the primary but he won the general election big time. So that was pretty big because it got my name down in Indianapolis. So it's like I created something not a lot of people are doing. So fast forward this last year, that elevated me up to another level of House of Representatives. So now we are representing a man running for statehouse… his opponent has done nothing on social media and we are everywhere...we did a live town hall event last week, I mean we’re killing it. So that’s something that I’ve always said is…what makes us unique is that we’re doing something that everyone else was either too scared to do, didn’t know how to do, or just wasn’t sure if they would have done it what the ramifications were going to be.

I said let's take a chance let's try it.

Q: Over time, how have you seen things change?

Social media and the way that everything can be so instantly fast has changed every aspect of business. Today I’m getting notifications, my wrist is vibrating because a client is telling me to make sure I have this ad over to them by 4 p.m. Years ago I would have to wait, because you didn’t have your email open all the time, and I’d have to wait to get that information. So technology has evolved so much, and the downside of that is our attention spans have just shrunk. We are now squirrels because we can’t do this anymore because we are distracted by this…Technology, while it's great, has allowed us sometimes to be so connected that we’re disconnected. We’ve gotta find a way to make those two work together.

Social media has allowed our clients to be seen instantly. We imbed social media feeds in the websites. We can update a website fast, but then you can update what you’re doing faster than I can even update your website just by saying 'we’re open for business at 5 pm today.' By having that social media feed imbedded on the website, if somebody’s looking up your website to see more about your company, your feed is right there. So social media has allowed your brand, your news, your information, to be up to the second in front of people’s faces.

TJ21 utilizes a few social media management programs to help post to their clients' pages. With the number of clients that TJ21 has, it would be almost impossible to post live to every single account, making scheduling softwares necessary. Jorgensen also does live videos on social media for his clients. The office has a studio with ten cameras and a closet full of shirts with his clients' logos, so he is always ready to represent those companies.

Q: Do you notice a lot more engagement with the live vs. some of the other postings?

Yes and no, it depends on who you are, how many followers you have. Depends on what your message is. Depends on how you make your post. Half the battle is your email subject line. If you want a click through rate, if you want a click open rate you have to get them to want to do it... it’s the same with your content. I have to make something that gets you to click. So when we make a live video and that subject line and that opening post, if it's strong and you tell them what you’re talking about today, not misleading…guess what? People are going to watch. So yes, we do get some good engagement with live but again, we’re in this era of do I have time to watch this video right now?

I think just posts are going to get a little bit more engagement but there’s just something special about live that people love, seeing people and interacting with them. Can you imagine ten years ago or 20 years ago if I could tell younger me that 'hey, one day you’ll be able to comment on your biggest favorite celebrity and he may retweet you or he may comment back saying hey thanks TJ! Oh my gosh Michael Jordan said "thanks TJ" to me that was like my dream 20 years ago for Michael Jordan to acknowledge me and now its so easy, you know? [laughs] So yes, technology has changed this world completely.

Q: We’ve already talked about how managing the data has changed, how has some of the software been upgraded and changed over time?

It changes often. And the reason why is that...computers have finally started to level out, and what I mean by that is one of my first IBM PC computers…the hard drive was 400 megabytes. Four hundred megabytes was the entire hardrive. If I turn a camera on and I record for 10 seconds, I’m at 800 megabytes. And that’s not even 4k that's just 1080p. So it's just funny to see how it has evolved, computers have become faster. Now it's to the point where they’ve made a computer that’s fast, the processor is good, they may make little tweaks to make it better but the fact is it's here, it's expandable, you can do amazing things with it. So becaue of that software has evolved...it has been a significant jump in technology all the time…and it’s good that they’re doing it to make your job more streamlined and make your job easier.

Q: How do you think analytics softwares and data management softwares can be more efficient for you to help your clients?

It needs to be able to make it easier for the end user to understand. When we get our Comscore reports, you can’t just hand it off to the client. They’ll be like "this is Russian and I have no idea what this is." So we have to interpret that, we have to build our own graphics, we have to build our own stuff based on that data. Google Analytics is a little bit better because Google did make it for the end user. But we still have to explain it because a customer is like "TJ, I pay you to understand what this means." We need to be able to make it a little easier for us to be able to give it to the client. That would make our job easier. Every month we spend between four and six hours on just one of our big accounts...just pulling data and then interpreting it to English so they understand. I would love to see that a little bit more streamlined a little bit easier so the data comes in and we could literally just put it on our letterhead and hand it off to the client.

Q: What would you say to someone who was interested in a career in this field?

It’s a fun environment, it's exciting. You’re meeting new people all the time, we travel the world. It’s a very exciting industry. You don’t get bored. In this industry nobody here is ever watching the clock.