Ep 115 – Jason Hennessey, Hennessey Digital – Owning a Niche and Scaling It to 8 Figures
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Featuring: Courtney Jason Hennessey, Hennessey Digital
In episode 115, I sit down with Jason Hennessey, internationally recognized SEO expert and CEO of Hennessey Digital. Jason shares the story of how a single talk at a legal mastermind sparked his first agency, and how he’s since scaled a powerhouse SEO firm serving top-tier law firms. We talk about niching down, the power of building a personal brand, and why delegation was key to scaling without burning out. Jason opens up about leadership, team culture, and how stepping back actually helped his agency grow faster. Plus, we dive into strategies like direct mail, personal outreach, and even outsourcing genius to level up results.
Key Bytes
• Jason Hennessy has been in SEO since 2001 and started his first agency in 2008.
• He transitioned from his first agency to Hennessy Digital in 2015, focusing on law firms.
• Innovative marketing strategies, like sending personalized books, helped him secure clients.
• Hennessy Digital primarily serves personal injury lawyers but sees potential in other legal niches.
• Building a personal brand has significantly increased response rates to his outreach.
• Delegation and outsourcing are key to scaling an agency effectively.
• Jason emphasizes the importance of investing in leadership and team development.
• He still engages with SEO on a personal level, leveraging external expertise.
• Agency culture is a priority, fostering support and recognition among team members.
• Asking for help and seeking coaching is crucial for agency owners.Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Agency Bites and Guest Background
01:04 Jason Hennessy's Journey in SEO and Agency Growth
03:55 Transitioning from First Agency to Hennessy Digital
07:00 Innovative Marketing Strategies for Law Firms
10:06 Market Potential and Niche Focus in Legal SEO
11:58 Building a Personal Brand and Leadership Structure
16:01 Scaling the Agency and Delegating Responsibilities
20:03 Passion for SEO and Outsourcing Expertise
23:05 Expanding Services Beyond SEO
24:54 Agency Culture and Team Dynamics
27:04 Personal Insights and Advice for Agency Owners
Jason Hennessey is an entrepreneur, internationally recognized SEO expert, author, speaker, podcast host, and business coach. Since 2001, Jason has been reverse-engineering the Google algorithm as a self-taught student and practitioner of SEO and search marketing.
Jason's expertise has fueled the growth and successful sale of multiple businesses, starting with a pioneering dot-com venture in the wedding industry. Serving as the CEO of Hennessey Digital since 2015, Jason's leadership has transformed a modest consultancy into a thriving eight-figure agency, earning a place on the prestigious Inc. 5000 list for five consecutive years. He is also the author of two Amazon bestsellers, titled Law Firm SEO and Honest SEO.
As a sought-after keynote speaker and a frequent guest on podcasts and webinars, Jason shares his wealth of knowledge. He contributes as a columnist to respected publications such as the Washington Post and is a regular contributor to Entrepreneur, Forbes, Inc., Newsweek, and Rolling Stone Magazine. Jason's accomplishments extend to being honored with the Gold TITAN Business Award in the Entrepreneurship, Branding, Advertising, & Marketing category, as well as being recognized as a National Law Review Go-To Thought Leader.
Jason's journey has been enriched by his experience as a United States Air Force veteran and his attainment of a Bachelor of Arts degree in Marketing from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Commencing his SEO career in Las Vegas and later establishing a strong presence in the legal industry in Atlanta, Jason now resides in the Los Angeles area with his wife, Bridget, and their three children.
Contact Jason on his personal website, his agency website, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, IMDB, or Muckrack.
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Steve / Agency Outsight (00:01.376)
Welcome to Agency Bites, a podcast dedicated to helping creative entrepreneurs thrive. My name is Steve Gooberman. I'm from Agency Outsite and I coach agency owners to build the business of their dreams.
Steve / Agency Outsight (00:14.286)
Today my guest is Jason Hennessy. Jason is an entrepreneur, best-selling author, internationally recognized SEO expert, and he's the CEO of Hennessy Digital, an eight-figure agency that's been on the Inc. 5000 list five years in a row. Jason's been reverse engineering Google since 2001, and his work has helped grow and sell multiple businesses. He's also a veteran, speaker, and a contributor to outlets like Forbes, Entrepreneur, and Rolling Stone. Jason, thank you so much for joining me.
Jason Hennessey (00:44.701)
Steve, it's a pleasure, man. I appreciate you having me on.
Steve / Agency Outsight (00:47.66)
Yeah, I love the small world on how we got in touch and what got you to join us today. Give it kind of the backstory. mean, you run an eight figure agency. It's not an overnight thing. Give us quick kind of backstory on that whole process.
Jason Hennessey (01:04.317)
Yeah, so been doing SEO since 2001. I started my first agency in 2008. I sold that in 2015 to my partner and then took a sabbatical leave and started Hennessy Digital. And so that was started in about 2015, late 2015. And so now we're approaching 10 years in business.
We cater mostly to law firms in the United States. Mostly a lot of the large law firms that have billboards on the side of the road and are on the TV commercials. Those are for the most part like the clients that we service.
Steve / Agency Outsight (01:35.054)
Mm-hmm.
Steve / Agency Outsight (01:47.052)
Because you can say, stop throwing billboards up that you can't track and understand if they're converting at all. Let's do digital instead.
Jason Hennessey (01:55.089)
Yeah, you know, that was the approach that I used to take, right? You know, but then, you know, when you work with some of these larger billboard attorneys, right? And you see, you know, just how building a brand can be in a market and how it really lowers the average cost per client over time. you know, and then there's also a benefit to
brand search volume to where Google gives you extra credit in the algorithm when people are searching for your brand as well. there's a lot of benefit from kind of building a brand. so, you know, I support those that are kind of spending money on, on TV and billboards and stuff like that, as long as they're investing, you know, properly, you know,
Steve / Agency Outsight (02:39.01)
Yeah. So was your first agency law firm specific as well?
Jason Hennessey (02:43.643)
Yeah, it was. It wasn't like that by design. mean, you know, in fact, I didn't even want to start an agency. I went and spoke at a at DUI lawyer mastermind. A friend invited me to speak to talk about SEO. I knew nothing about it. I got on stage, gave a presentation about how I was able to rank for keywords that were not related to law firms at all. But I was just transparent in teaching them how to do link building and how to write content and how to structure pages.
And when I got off that stage, I had probably about six or seven attorneys that were in the audience that approached me and said, that was awesome. Like I'm, paying my SEO guy like $5,000 per month. And I don't think they're doing any of this stuff. Like, do you do consulting or can you help me? And I'm like, and so I left there with like seven business cards. And that was kind of like the genesis of, of my first agency I left with, I don't know, maybe like 30 grand per month and reoccurring revenue just from one presentation. So.
Steve / Agency Outsight (03:42.114)
Beautiful. Yeah, it's a great testimony to speaking in your niche, getting on stage, you know, where your niche lives. Because yeah, lawyers don't want to be writing content. They don't want to be tinkering with SEO. So they're going to hire somebody like you. When you sold your first agency to your partner and took that sabbatical, was there like a non-competent place? Like how did that transition into a new agency for you?
Jason Hennessey (03:46.694)
Mm-hmm.
Yep.
Jason Hennessey (03:55.377)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Jason Hennessey (04:06.801)
Yeah, good question. So the terms of the deal were that I couldn't take any of the current staff that was working at the agency at the time. And so there was an exhibit list that had everybody's names and I couldn't take any of the clients that the agency was working with at the time. And again, there was another exhibit that listed all the clients.
Steve / Agency Outsight (04:28.846)
Mm-hmm.
Jason Hennessey (04:32.124)
And of course it was a discounted price that he sold it to me for, for the right of being able to, you know, compete outside of those exhibits, I guess.
Steve / Agency Outsight (04:44.822)
Okay, so then when you launched Hennessy was the focus of we're going to kind double down and do the same thing law firms.
Jason Hennessey (04:51.517)
I mean, yes and no. know, I actually it's funny. So I created this book and it was called like it wasn't really a book. It was like more of like a guide. It's called My SEO Blueprint for Lawyers, right? And so it just kind of talks about like.
you know, what you should be thinking about. It's funny, like, this is so old that it says you should be in the Yahoo directory and you need to be in DMA. And I mean, like, I mean, some of the old school people here probably understand what I'm talking about, right? But, so I just said, you know what, I'm gonna try a different strategy. I'm gonna take this and I'm gonna mail this out to 50 lawyers in a market. And the first market was Atlanta.
Steve / Agency Outsight (05:19.72)
Yeah
Jason Hennessey (05:36.997)
And so I just dropped it in the mail. And from that, there was a nice cover letter too. said,
something like, don't know anything about me, but boy, do I know a lot about you. You know, here's what I know, right? I know that this is where you actually stand in terms of your market, in terms of the SEO value of your website. At the time I was using SEMrush, the actual traffic value score that they give you. And I'm like, your website has a value of $2,000 per month. Here's what the top competitors in your market, right? 50,000, 80,000, 120,000. You know, I'd love to be able to come down to your office. I'm local.
Because I was living there at the time to explain what how this all works. And so I mailed that out physical mail And I probably got about four or five responses from that
I went and met with three different law firms and I signed my first client and that was at like 15 grand per month to do SEO for that one client. And I just really like doubled down and I just made that like an amazing case study. Like I was kind of managing the SEO, I was the account manager as like a team of one. And then from there I just leveraged that one case study to get more clients.
And you know, I followed a very similar strategy. And so even today, like I wrote a real book. so this book is a real book. This book is called Law Firm SEO. And so same thing. I probably mail out four or 500 books per month to deal clients. We run Facebook campaigns where it's like, hey, just give us your name and information. And if you're a law firm, we'll mail you out this book. No cost to you. You don't have to pay shipping, handling nothing. Right.
Steve / Agency Outsight (07:00.034)
real one.
Jason Hennessey (07:23.037)
And so the ROI that we get from that is so valuable. And the reason why I named it Law from SEO is because if you go and do a search on Google for Law from SEO, you'll notice that there's a bright red book, you know, in one of the knowledge panels there, and I don't have to pay for that, right? And so that was part of the strategy as well.
Steve / Agency Outsight (07:42.67)
You literally wrote the book on law firm SEO. Yeah. So that initial strategy to launch Hennessy great case study. So you sent out 50, got a 10 % response rate, met with three of those four or five closed one. I mean, I'll take those numbers all day long, but the trick was each letter was highly personalized. It was about their specific digital properties, their specific law firm.
Jason Hennessey (07:45.999)
I did it.
Jason Hennessey (07:57.734)
Mm-hmm.
Jason Hennessey (08:06.941)
it was.
Steve / Agency Outsight (08:11.402)
It was nothing generic, so you leaned into a market, you leaned into a niche, and you were highly personalized in your delivery system.
Jason Hennessey (08:19.643)
That's exactly right. And I didn't have a personal brand at the time at all, right? I mean, now it's 10 years later, right? And so I've really invested in building out my personal brand in that space. So now if people get a message or an email from me, their response rate is a lot higher, right? But back then, yeah, they didn't know who the heck I was.
Steve / Agency Outsight (08:21.334)
Love that.
Steve / Agency Outsight (08:39.79)
Mm-hmm.
Steve / Agency Outsight (08:44.408)
So fast forward 10 years, you closed that first one. Now you've got God knows how many law firms. Do you feel that that market still has room to dominate? Do you feel like you've got it somewhat saturated? Like what's your market hold there?
Jason Hennessey (09:01.885)
So no, we feel that there's a lot more market share. We're very boutique, I would say, because we're not...
a $3,000 per month SEO agency. You know what mean? That's not really how we're set up to serve as clients. In most cases, our minimum is like 8,500 bucks per month. And I posted something on Facebook this morning and LinkedIn about, we've got clients that spend north of $50,000 per month just on SEO, right? And so we're...
we're pretty selective in kind of who we work with, know, not everybody has the budgets to work with us. And so, but, you know, we could go into a lot of the other practice areas, like we mostly cater to personal injury lawyers, but we could easily kind of change the strategy and start to market more for like criminal defense lawyers, bankruptcy lawyers, right? And we've never really tried to tap into those specific practice areas, you know, with.
going to conferences where bankruptcy lawyers go to. mean, most of our equity, brand equity is kind of built in the personal injury space.
Steve / Agency Outsight (10:16.344)
So yeah, so you're niche within the niche of law firms. You're not even touching the divorce lawyers and all these other ones who are just adjacent to that micro.
Jason Hennessey (10:23.185)
We're not marketing. We're not marketing to them, right? But we have a, you know, a few clients that don't do personal injury, you know, but that's not really who we're trying to market to.
Steve / Agency Outsight (10:36.13)
Yeah. And you mentioned kind of your personal brand that you've developed over the past bunch of years are on the leadership team. Are you the only one who's kind of elevated into thought leadership?
Jason Hennessey (10:47.325)
For the most part, yeah, I'm kind of like the face of the brand. I was able to delegate and outsource most of everything that I do in the business. I think that's where a lot of agency owners fail potentially or kind of get stuck is they become their own constraint in their growth. And so I was able to do this.
basically take some of the profit, reinvest it into real good leadership, who then reinvested that profit into good team members. And so now for the most part, the agency kind of just works without me. You know, I can go travel, I can speak at conferences, I can write books, I can promote the books. And that's kind of where I think my zone of genius is in terms of helping the business.
And then sometimes I'll parachute in and I'll look at like, what's the biggest constraint of the business right now? And I'll come in and I'll really spend some time just trying to dissect that so that we can kind of get past that one constraint and then move to a different constraint.
Steve / Agency Outsight (11:49.006)
Mm-hmm.
Steve / Agency Outsight (11:58.818)
how long have you been kind of hands off with the agency?
Jason Hennessey (12:03.325)
I would say, so my COO has been here and my executive assistant for about five years. And so when they both joined, we were probably just under, I don't know, maybe let's just call it like 4 million in top line revenue. Once the CEO.
COO came in, he brought in a CFO, my assistant took over and was able to relieve me of a lot of duties. And that year we went from 4 million to 8 million in just one year, right? And I'm not saying that, that I was like relieved of all my duties, right? It took time to kind of get more things off of my plate. It's funny, my executive assistant has two executive assistants that report to her. You know what mean?
So over time, I was trying to figure out how do I make her time more efficient, right? And so, and so from there, just over time, you know, like I think in October or September, October, I took like 35 days and I went to Asia with my wife and my daughter. spoke at the HREF's conference in Singapore. Then I spoke at the conference in Chiang Mai, the big SEO conference. And I really didn't have to work with the exception of doing those two keynote presentations.
and I came back in the business, you know, had more clients than we had when we left, right? You know, so that's kind of like the goal, I guess, in business, you know.
Steve / Agency Outsight (13:34.574)
Yeah, I recently was talking with another owner about the same kind of epiphany. I think it was episode 103 with Greg Hickman. We were talking about taking time away, go on vacation. And it's like, oh, things didn't burn down while was away. And then the following year, oh, we landed clients while I was away. Like, what a great feeling to see things grow. So 35 days away from the business is pretty spectacular to be able to do. And a lot of people dream about that, but like, I don't know how to make it happen.
Jason Hennessey (13:52.22)
you
Steve / Agency Outsight (14:03.374)
So you kind of outline those steps of start to delegate, get things off your plate. Or some of the tougher things to get off your plate or the last things to get off your plate.
Jason Hennessey (14:13.445)
Yeah, you know, cause it wasn't, it wasn't always that way. Right. you know, there was many times early on when we were like a $2 million agency where I would go to Hawaii with my wife and children, you know, and, you know, we'd be out at the pool. and, know, I'd look at the clock and it's like, it's one 48. I got to go upstairs and get on my computer because I got to get on a sales call. Right. You know, and then.
take the sales call, I come downstairs for two hours and I'm like, oh, I gotta go back upstairs at 415 because I gotta do a call with a client, you know? And it's just like so many disruptions, right? But during that time, the key here was I was very profitable, right? My margins were as high as like, let's just call it 55, 60%, right at the time, right?
Steve / Agency Outsight (14:52.482)
Mm-hmm.
Jason Hennessey (15:04.7)
So very profitable. Um, and so, um, it's one of those things, right? You know, I'm trading, you know, um, time for money, right? Um, and so, you know, I quickly realized at the end of that year when I had to write a large check, um, to the government, right? Because when you're profitable, that's what you have to do. And so I thought to myself, I'm like, why did I do that? Why did I waste all my vacations? Like,
Like I'd rather defer that profit and put it into real good people that can take a lot of this stuff off of my plate. and so that's really the journey that I went down for the next couple of years where we brought the profit margin down from like 65%, you know, all the way down at one point to like seven, 8%, right? Whereas really uncomfortable. but those were the years that we were investing in things that you really need to scale. Like,
learning and development team and HR team and accounting team, executive leadership team, right? A lot of these people that don't necessarily add to the, you know, top line, right? You know, but it's important to scale. And so then we got to the point where we put all the systems and processes in place, and eventually the margin started to go from 9 % to 13%. You know, now I think we're hovering around like 23, 24 % margin, right? You know, but it took, you know, that's where people are not
Steve / Agency Outsight (16:13.422)
Mm-hmm.
Jason Hennessey (16:30.907)
you know, most people are not business owners and can't think that way, right? You know, so.
Steve / Agency Outsight (16:37.934)
What about the numbers during that year of growth where you doubled after you put the COO in place? How did your margins reflect that 100 % growth?
Jason Hennessey (16:48.613)
Yeah, so that was, there was still margins in that period, Because we were like putting infrastructure in place to scale, right? And so, you know, we also brought in an executive coach to kind of help us get to the next level, like help us get to 10 million in revenue. But yeah, I would say that the margins were not.
Steve / Agency Outsight (16:58.894)
Okay.
Jason Hennessey (17:16.199)
definitely we're not 65%, you know, because even the COO and the CFO, right, were not cheap. mean, these were very competent people who are still with me today, right? You know, here we are five years later, they're still with me today. And they've been instrumental in our growth. I wouldn't be here without them. And there's other leaders too, like our VP of People Success, you know, our marketing, senior director of marketing, our business, you know, and SEO team.
Steve / Agency Outsight (17:26.561)
Mm-hmm.
Jason Hennessey (17:45.071)
leaders, everybody, right? They've all played a role. but you know, eventually the margins, because we were hiring all those people slowly started to dwindle, dwindle, dwindle down to, like I said, like 70 % and it stayed there for a couple of years while we were kind of really ramping things up. Yeah.
Steve / Agency Outsight (18:01.934)
Yes, that's a scary place to be, but knowing that you're doing it for the long-term investment of here's the strategy, here's where we're going and those numbers, you know, to your point, they're 23%, which is super healthy at scale that you're at. being so removed from the day to day, is there any part of what you used to do in a hands-in-hand in the agency that you miss?
Jason Hennessey (18:15.506)
Yeah.
Jason Hennessey (18:23.805)
The SEO, I mean like man, like that's the funny thing is I love SEO. I love it so much, I own iloveseo.com, right? bought that. But, you know, cause that's really what was the passion to kind of start this in the first place, right? I was just like, it's just a competitive game, you know? And I've played it at like some of the most competitive levels, right? I used to do SEO in the online poker space for a while.
Steve / Agency Outsight (18:35.194)
gosh.
Steve / Agency Outsight (18:42.872)
He
Jason Hennessey (18:52.133)
then I got into affiliate marketing for a bit. and now I'm in legal, right? Which is a very competitive space. Right. and so like, there's nothing that like, it drives me then like logging into HREFs and like studying link patterns of like, you know, some of the most competitive like keywords in our industry and figuring out different strategies to kind of accelerate growth. Right. So that's the stuff that I really love, but I knew that.
Steve / Agency Outsight (18:59.47)
Mm-hmm.
Jason Hennessey (19:19.385)
If I was doing that all day, you know, like the business isn't really growing, you know, I've got to take a different hat and put that hat to the side and maybe wear that hat on the weekends or stuff like that, you know, for fun, you know, but I need to be a CEO, right? If I really want to kind of.
Steve / Agency Outsight (19:36.95)
I know plenty of CEOs and I'm not like saying don't do that, don't do this, but I know plenty of CEOs who still will kind of cherry pick, I'll play with this client, I'll jump into this strategy, I'll do this. Because like you said, it drives their passion. It's a thing that they love. It's creative. It's the SEO, it's the technical, it's the dev, writing code, whatever. But I don't necessarily think that there's pros or cons to it. It's personal choice and how they structure things. And to your point, you can do it on the weekends for more of a fun thing.
Jason Hennessey (20:03.793)
Yeah.
Jason Hennessey (20:07.217)
And I do some of that still. like, you when I'm out and about and I'm like speaking at conferences, you know, I'm in Chiang Mai, I'm at Ahrefs, right? I'm meeting like some of the literally world's best SEOs, people from all over the place from, you know.
India to you know, Australia, know people that are just die-hard passionate about this, you know, some people might be more passionate about like Schema markup other people might be more passionate about local some people might be like extreme gurus and technical SEO, right? You know, and so as I meet some of these people, know, I build relationships with them And then what I'll do is I like to call this outsourcing genius
And so like, if I find somebody that's just a diehard guru on like schema, right? JSON, LD, whatever. I will engage them to come in and audit one of our clients websites, right? and the lessons that we learned from that audit, we then will basically test. And then if the tests are successful, then apply that to all of our clients. Right. and so that's where I still get to geek out is because I'm able to kind of.
see and learn from some of the gurus all over the world based on, you know, the relationships that I'm building and then our clients benefit from that as well.
Steve / Agency Outsight (21:26.19)
That's a really super powerful kind of strategy to bring in somebody who's not on your team. Take a look at what you're doing. How does it impact and revise your process to deliver better results for your clients? Yeah, I don't, there's so many agencies that are, I want say they're built too much on ego, but they just don't have the foresight, I think, to think outside of their own box of how do we improve? How do we improve? And so bringing somebody from the outside who's geeking out with you is brilliant. I love that. Yeah.
Jason Hennessey (21:36.817)
Mm-hmm.
Jason Hennessey (21:52.987)
It all starts from middle school and I would have to like look at the kid next to me to get to be able to pass the class.
Steve / Agency Outsight (21:56.905)
Hahaha!
Steve / Agency Outsight (22:02.104)
That's amazing. I love that. Very cool. What else are you up to outside of geeking out on hrefs and SEO stuff?
Jason Hennessey (22:09.853)
Yeah, you know, I'm a big family guy. You know, I've got three children. We do a lot of things as a family. Just this week, we took a just an impromptu trip to Disneyland. We live in California, so it was pretty close to do that. We like traveling. I have a studio in Hollywood, California, where we I'll record some of my own video content, but then we also lease it out.
to other, content creators. so like we've even had this show, love Island. filmed their podcast there. We've had the bachelor filming podcast there. So like, it's actually centrally located in Hollywood. And so we market it to that industry. So it's kind of like a separate kind of a business, if you will, that, that caters to many different industries, you know, not just legal, guess.
Steve / Agency Outsight (23:05.912)
Very cool. So thinking about kind of your lane in SEO and in the legal space from a service delivery standpoint, Hennessy doesn't be your outside of just SEO, pure SEO as well, right? You're not doing digital marketing, email marketing, things like that as well.
Jason Hennessey (23:24.645)
We do some, we will design websites, develop websites. We will do all of the SEO, right? So content writing, link building, technical SEO, some conversion rate optimization. We'll do paid marketing for lawyers. And we're starting to kind of get into a little bit more paid social as well.
And that's kind of the extent, like we don't do like logo design. We don't do email marketing. You know, there's, there's so many other things that I guess we could offer. but you know, if I'm not going to be like the greatest at that one thing, you know, I don't want to just kind of water down what we're, what our core competency is, know?
Steve / Agency Outsight (24:10.766)
Yeah, it's the quickest way to just drop that profit rate. Big time. Yeah. Even the websites. I mean, there's a lot of SEO shops that are deeply niched in their verticals that are not building websites because so many website processes just are garbage and they're losing profit on it. And so they'd rather let a web shop do it.
Jason Hennessey (24:27.025)
so true, yeah, because that's one of the toughest things about scaling, you know, is develop, because when you, but the thing about it is like typically when we get a website, you know, a lot of times we need to kind of go in and kind of rebuild the website anyway, if we really want to implement the strategies that we use at our agency. And so while we're in the process of kind of rebuilding the website anyway, it's like, hey,
Why don't we just kind of leverage some of the conversion tactics that we know to kind of redesign it, right? So that if we do start driving more traffic that, you know, the traffic will convert a little bit better, right? Cause a lot of times we inherit a website and in some cases it's not good, you know?
Steve / Agency Outsight (25:10.574)
Yeah, in most cases it's probably not good. And so you're doing an SEO first strategy as opposed to let's make it pretty. And that makes a ton of sense. Yeah. So I want to wrap up with a couple of random rapid fire questions. So the first is, what's your agency's unofficial team anthem?
Jason Hennessey (25:13.063)
Yeah.
Jason Hennessey (25:16.465)
Yeah, exactly.
Jason Hennessey (25:28.285)
our agency's unofficial team anthem, I would say we live and die by our culture. So like we really support each other. We've got a great culture. So culture would be our anthem.
Steve / Agency Outsight (25:40.238)
Hmm.
Steve / Agency Outsight (25:47.416)
Do you have an internal culture champion or champions? Yeah.
Jason Hennessey (25:52.561)
We do. have some new culture committees. and you know, right now we're actually doing something, it's kind of like March madness where everybody submits their animal. and then there's brackets and the whole company votes. It's like a cat versus a rabbit and the rabbit accelerates. And so we do stuff like that. We do rack week, random acts of kindness where we give our staff like team, you know, time to kind of go and give back to their communities.
Steve / Agency Outsight (25:55.587)
Nice.
Jason Hennessey (26:20.669)
There's employee appreciation day. think last week or the week before we gave everybody half a day to just with a bonus to go and just get their nails done or you know, go get a massage, right? You know, so like we've got a recognition channel and in slack where people are recognizing each other based on one of the core values that they saw them do, right? So there's it's heavily integrated in the organization
Steve / Agency Outsight (26:44.192)
Love that. That's got to be paramount. What's something that people would be surprised to learn about you?
Jason Hennessey (26:47.069)
Mm-hmm.
Jason Hennessey (26:51.581)
that I am a military veteran was in the air force for four years and that I made special forces and I turned it down and I didn't pursue. Yeah. So I could have been one of the Navy seals of the air force, I guess, if you will. but at the time I, I was enlisting in the air force to help pay for college and I would have had to enlist for another two more years.
Steve / Agency Outsight (27:04.974)
Wow.
Wow.
Jason Hennessey (27:21.957)
And I'm in bootcamp and I'm like, what did I sign up for? And I was in great shape. was like a good wrestler in high school as a sports, you know, into sports. so, so, yeah, I made it and it's funny. They called my mom, the Colonel brought me into his office, you know, they celebrated it in my dorm and, and I'm just like, I think I'm going to turn this down. I'm sorry, but you know, but anyway, it was all meant to be because here I am.
Steve / Agency Outsight (27:49.592)
Mm-hmm.
Jason Hennessey (27:50.513)
doing SEO, right? Instead of jumping out of airplanes or protecting the president. yeah. Thank you.
Steve / Agency Outsight (27:56.44)
Special Forces SEO, I love it. Yeah. Well, thank you for your service. Finally, what's a question that agency owners should be asking more often?
Jason Hennessey (28:07.547)
What's the question agency owners should be asking more often? Asking for help, I think. Like you said, I think there's a lot of people that have egos or think that their way is always the best way. It's okay, right? And think we grew up in life having coaches. know, like from little league, had a baseball coach. In high school, if you played basketball, you had a basketball coach. know, in college, you you...
for studying for the SA too, you might've had somebody that came in and tutored you on that, right? mean, but all of sudden you get out of college and it's like, you're on your own and you don't have any more coaches, right? So it's not a bad thing to get somebody to help coach you and to give you cliff notes to get to the next level. And so ask for help.
Steve / Agency Outsight (28:58.126)
I love that, I did not pay Jason to say that. So plug for coaches, yay. Jason, thank you so much for spending time with me, your experience, what you built, both from family, culture, the businesses. Really appreciate you sharing that with everybody that's listening. So thank you very much.
Jason Hennessey (29:02.342)
Mm-hmm.
Jason Hennessey (29:13.767)
Thank you, Steve. Appreciate it.