About a week before Christmas, Tom Jelneck— OT’s fearless leader and unabashed founder — announced to our team he would step down from On Target. And for a group as tight knit as ours, it was a hard blow. (Plus it meant Tom’s cool LEGO Millennium Falcon would leave the office with him…)
Tom wrote a big, long, inspiring, midlife-crisis style tearjerker on his personal website, which you can read HERE, but we wanted to address his departure on this blog.
For 15 years, Tom’s effervescent personality drew clients across the country to On Target, and OT’s services and sick SEO skills kept people renewing contracts for nearly two decades. (Marketing agency years are like dog years. We’re ancient.)
But over the course of the following Tom-less weeks, we realized a couple of things.
At On Target, you don’t get one of us. You get all of us.
We’re well aware that a lot of our clients become attracted to Tom’s magnetic energy and sarcasm. Trust us; it played a role in most of us winding up at On Target for our jobs.
But I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Tom couldn’t do what he did without a team behind him. And 9 times out of 10, Tom ran his content or brilliant ideas by us — the team he entrusted to be the experts he hired.
Being a “team” is the backbone of On Target’s success. We edit for each other. We proof websites. We analyze each other’s work. We nitpick projects before sending our clients a finished product. We learn a little bit about each other’s fields because marketing isn’t just content. It’s not just your website. It’s more than your branding. It’s not an email campaign or SEO. It’s all of these elements and more — simultaneously growing, evolving and meeting your customers’ needs.
Some agencies only say they’re a team in theory, but thanks to how Tom structured this company and applied good marketing, On Target is a team in practice.
Why is this team mentality so critical? Because good marketing doesn’t happen in a vacuum.
Let’s take this real-world example. You might think you only need branding advice, so maybe you think one person (maybe just Tom) is enough. “Just a couple hours of consulting calls should do the trick.”
But branding itself involves customer-facing branded materials and employee-facing language, something you quickly realize. So our team pulls together both styles of branded materials because how you talk to your employees *should* be different from how you talk to your customers. Plus there’s a social media presence to consider, not to mention what your target audience will search on Google to bring them to your branding in the first place.
You consulted with Tom, but Tom consulted with us. Why? Because marketing doesn’t happen in siloed vacuums.
What you might consider to be a “branding project,” in the eyes of OT, reaches into content, social media and SEO considerations. And those considerations and recommendations come from people with a decade or more experience from freelancing, B2B, and B2C agencies in Florida and from other states.
Tom is gone from On Target, but a team that he equipped, trained and trusted is here to give our clients the marketing expertise they signed up for. Monique and Rick continue being absolute rock star leaders who keep the rest of us motivated and inspired. The content team (hi hello, it us) will write these blogs with as much sarcasm and sass as Tom did. The digital team will do what they do best — drink copious amounts of coffee and cry over code. And soon you’ll meet Michael — a new Star Wars-loving, Marvel-obsessed leader and fantastic creative partner to our team.
“… marketing doesn’t happen in siloed vacuums.”
And what about Tom? Well, much like your neighborhood cat falling from a fence, Tom is genetically designed to land on his feet, find another fence to climb and keep going to see what new adventures he can get into.
As with anything at On Target, if you have questions about content, SEO, digital marketing or you just want to talk branding to a friendly face, you can give us a call (or if you’re a millennial, fill out our form. Don’t worry, we’ll respond via email).
