Today we’d like to introduce you to Sarah Johnson.
Hi Sarah, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
My love of storytelling came early in my life. I had the incredible opportunity to travel across Utah, performing in a Shakespearean acting company for five years, and it was during this time that I truly discovered my passion for the stage. Afterward, I pursued an Organizational Communications degree from the University of Utah.
My first taste of the marketing world came when I interned at Red Butte Garden, where I worked in their marketing department. It was there that I received my first “By Line” in the Deseret News and even had the chance to appear on local television stations, channels 2, 4, 5, and 13, to promote the Garden. Throughout this experience, I learned valuable skills such as layout design, copywriting, editing for publication, press checks, and the art of gaining free news publicity through public relations.
In 2001, I leaped and started my first entrepreneurial venture, becoming a consultant and eventually earning the position of Sales Director. However, with multiple responsibilities pulling me and my husband in different directions – including him marketing for a manufacturing company and doing freelance web development on the side, I was a sales director for a cosmetic company, and giving birth to our third child – we knew we needed a change.
That’s when Jonny and I decided to join forces and start JamboJon. Jonny’s technical background and design expertise, combined with my sales and copywriting experience, made for the perfect combination to create a unique and powerful website development product. As a team of just two, we embarked on this journey, and over time, JamboJon has grown, and we now have a team of 10.
Today, the JamboJon team has successfully built over 400 websites for companies nationwide, and we aspire to continue helping advanced entrepreneurs and growing businesses with their online marketing needs.
Can you talk to us about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back, would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Has the road been smooth? No. Not in the slightest.
My life has always been a strange mix of duality—both incredible joys and drastic sorrows. For example, my father died of AIDS when I was just ten. He was in the first wave of New York City’s victims during the late 1980s. At the same time, my maternal grandfather, who acted as a surrogate father to me, invented computer graphics. His pioneering research and work helped pave the way for most of the computer graphic products we use at JamboJon.
As a child, I experienced profound loss while at the same time being enveloped in a family and church community that loved me. I believe the polarized experience of life and death is the most extreme version of the human experience that we all have to face. No one is exempt. The gift of time during life allows us to choose how to react and interact with these painful and beautiful realities.
My experience in business has been no different. Some of the highlights include having a family-run business to show our children how to work hard, to design our life, to include epic travel adventures, and also to enjoy the poetic grind of daily living; picking up and dropping kids off at school, baking fresh chocolate chip cookies and making time for family dinner.
My husband experienced a catastrophic medical challenge in 2017 that made a significant impact on our business. Before his surgery, we hit six figures in revenue, we had a small team and a growing customer base. Because of the side effects, his recovery, which was only expected to last a few weeks, stretched into several years. We nearly lost everything.
I feel like this experience, while painful, helped us regroup, and regrow our business from the ground up. JamboJon is a phoenix-rising story. We kept the best of JamboJon – using the storytelling archetypes and the mission-driven entrepreneurial message, and we eliminated all the ancillary services that didn’t align with our purpose. We rewrote the rules of structures of our business to create the phenomenal product we have now, and now we are helping other marketing professionals on our team provide for their own families too.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
After building more than 400 websites for companies nationwide, we have found that business leaders and advanced entrepreneurs lack the time, resources, or knowledge to implement a successful marketing campaign after launching a new website. They don’t know how to transform their expertise into content that inspires search engines to rank. They intend to communicate to customers but let it fall through the cracks because they are so busy running their business. And when tech troubles arise, they don’t want to learn a new language to fix website problems.
We created a new business service that gives business leaders a professional marketing team without the expense of hiring in-house, all using the time-tested JamboJon systems that embrace storytelling archetypes and the latest technology tools on the market. Plus, we will increase our value with growing residual income.
Our product includes:
Optimized text that inspires search engines to rank,
A customer communication strategy,
Tech support,
A marketing plan that includes promotions and events with homepage updates.
At JamboJon, we develop websites that help advanced entrepreneurs and growing businesses. We specialize in consulting, copywriting, graphic design, programming, and maintenance.
With a specialty in four primary website tools, we build WordPress websites, learning management systems for companies who want to monetize their education, e-commerce websites, and membership portals for non-profits and associations. We also build out customer experience marketing funnels and provide ongoing support through website updates, blog posts, electronic newsletters, and downloadable content.
Most web developers ask their customers to pick a theme and provide their copy, which they use to program a templated site. We provide so much more; consulting, messaging, strategy, custom graphic design, copywriting, and programming. With our unique expertise in mapping out the customer journey and capacity for creating marketing plans, we can guide our clients to fine-tune their messaging, resulting in higher conversion rates and a more loyal customer base.
JamboJon is a fantastic place to work for digital artists, copywriting creatives, and cutting-edge programmers. We offer flexible, remote work schedules, paid time off, and incentives to earn company trips. We’ve designed a leadership training work environment with a clear focus on accomplishment and self-development. We embrace new technology to strengthen our time-tested marketing strategies.
JamboJon is expanding its product offerings. We provide not only website development but also; brand development, the customer journey blueprint, customer communication automation, and relationship-driven marketing. We help our clients share their message, as well as attract and retain customers. We give back 1% of our profits towards scholarships to children who have lost a parent in the AIDS epidemic.
Can you talk to us a bit about the role of luck?
I believe luck is the combination of preparation and good energy.
We don’t attract what we think, we attract what we feel. So, if someone is feeling hopeless but thinking about abundance, he’ll attract hopelessness. The opposite is also true; even in a hopeless circumstance, if a woman feels grateful, optimistic, and creative, she’ll attract beauty all around her.
The challenge is that our human brain and the mortal experience can lead us to believe that hard is inevitable. It takes practice and patience, but it is possible to rewire our nervous and belief systems to feel good despite living through all flavors of the human experience.
Luck looks like a perfect introduction to an ideal customer, but that introduction came because of the great relationship and trust you already built. Luck looks like landing a big sale. But that couldn’t have happened without innumerable hours of practice, rewriting the sales script, and failing over and over again until you nailed it.
Luck looks like the stars aligning on the ideal school program or work opportunity, but that luck comes at the cost of generations before you, setting the way, and providing an example.
For sure, there are some magic qualities when it comes to success, but most of the time behind closed doors the magic happens with emotional, physical, spiritual, and cognitive effort. The universe rewards the courageous with the how when we are willing to dream big and work hard.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://jambojon.com
- Instagram: @jambosarah
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sarah.johnson.18847/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahjohnson6/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@sarahjohnson5806/videos
Image Credits
Cassie Jones and Adobe Stock Original Art by JamboJon
