This is the second episode as we talk about the origins of Adelsberger marketing, for those of you that are interested. Not long after I started the business, I ended up having the opportunity to go through Leadership Jackson. Leadership Jackson is an area-wide leadership development program and networking opportunity. And in 2015, when I went through the program, I had no business going through the program. I had barely started my business. I was not very successful at that point, and I didn’t have a lot of connections. But someone in the program felt it was a good idea to bring me in and allow me to go through the program and give me a scholarship to help pay for my class tuition. That was a huge pivotal moment for our business, where we started to be more and more legitimate and make more and more connections around the community. That’s also when Alexis Long started bringing us in to do work for the chamber doing videos. It It turns out, looking back, that there was a niche in the market for affordable videography that was not being served by, really, by anybody in a meaningful way. And so I was able to fill that for places like the chamber and chandelier in a way that other people weren’t able to.
Not too long after that, Renee quit her full-time job and joined us part-time, and has helped ever since then with books and things. But then things started to really ramp up when I I brought on Ricky Santos from part-time, he was an intern at the co, and I stole him, and he came and worked part-time with me doing graphics and things. Ten years later, one of the first projects that he did was a brochure for Gibson County Tourism. It’s still in rotation. So Ricky’s been doing good work for a very long time. And then when he was getting ready to graduate, I took, which seems crazy now, but I took the huge risk of saying, I think I can employ you full-time. Would you like to work full-time? And so I’m thankful that Ricky said yes. And I’ve said it multiple times, and I’ll say it till the day I die, I could not have asked for a better first hire than Ricky Santos. Not too long after Ricky came on, we had some increased growth, and We brought Brittany Crockett on part-time to take over social media in a lot of writing. And she has been a huge godsend to our team and to me personally.
And she is the best second hire I could have ever asked for. Around 2019, Alex Alexander Thompson and Arnold at the time, their name is now just ATA, Alexander Thompson and Arnold reached out to me about doing some projects and potentially joining their family of firms, to which I promptly said no. I was not interested in selling any part of my business. It didn’t make any sense to me why I would do that. And fortunately, to their credit, Steven and the team here said, Hey, we’re not in a rush. We just want to see if it works for everybody. And if it does, we’d like to go forward with that. And I had some stuff personally going on at the time. We had just adopted some children. And so my The entire life was crazy at that time, and I didn’t have the mental space to consider it. But sure enough, when my life got a little bit more simple, and I had a friend who also sold part of his business to the ATA family of firms, I came around to the idea to consider it again. And I thought, there are three reasons why I could do this.
One is get some cash. Two is to insulate us from economic instability. And three would be a client referral basis. Well, that was December of 2019 when we they sold the business, or sold part of the business to ATA. Renee and I still maintain a majority of ownership, but we have been in a great partnership with ATA since then. Now, one of the reasons was to insulate us from economic instability. So three months later, the pandemic hits. And for some people, that was the end of their business when the pandemic hit. It turns out, it was one of the best things that’s ever happened in my business, which is hard for me to deal with because it was such a hard time for so many people. But for our business, it was a game changer. Initially, it was slow. During that time, I took the time to write a book. But then also, when the federal aid packages started coming down, we got more opportunities to help businesses communicate. And one of those things was the Move to Jackson campaign. We were hired to do a big video campaign and design campaign for the Tourism Bureau and the chamber here.
And during that time, we brought on Alex Russell. And Alex has gone on to continue to grow with us and gone on to be our lead videographer. And then also during that time, we met Roshni Patel, who has joined our company as well. Not too long after that, we had our first intern. His name was Kendall. Kendall is doing photography work in another country right now, so that’s fun. And so over time, we became an overnight success years and years later. But I would say in spring of ’22, things really started to pop off for us. First of all, we hired our first Hall of Fame intern, whose name is Eric, who’s right behind the camera here, because we had the pleasure of getting to hire him after he graduated. But then also, I attended West Star and Leadership, Tennessee, next And we worked on AJ Massey’s campaign all at the same time. And so we went from just a little standard business to something that was doing something that everybody saw throughout the entire community. And that has helped us fuel some growth as we continue to grow. And since then, we’ve been able to welcome on Tammara Waller, and Krista Hale, and Katie Howerton, and like I mentioned, Eric Archer on full-time.
We are now looking at how do we build infrastructure structure, and how do we build the company in a way that allows us to meet the vision of the company, which is to be the best place to work for creatives in West Tennessee. And so I’ve implemented things called EOS, which is the entrepreneurial operating system, which allows us to work on things above the working day, improvements to the business increasing capacity. I’m working on building my job into the most valuable version of it so that I can help the company grow and not hinder it, because sometimes I’m the bottleneck in the company. We’re adding new service lines that will be announced later this year. And I think the future is bright. But the only reason the future is bright is, well, there’s two reasons. One, I’ve got an amazing team that has allowed us to be successful up to this point. We really believe that if you want to run fast, you run alone. But if you want to run further, you run together. And that’s what we do at our company. It’s a team effort, everything that we do. And the community. I’m not from here.
I’m from Illinois. I’m a transplant here. But the community has been so welcoming and encouraging to us. Our customers have been so kind and gracious and expanding us, our reach to other people and introducing us people, is one of the major reasons that we’ve been successful. And so if you’ve managed to listen to all of this, I want to say thank you for that support that you’ve shown. And a big thank you to our customers and our team for allowing this to become what it is. I’m very excited about the days to come because I think we have a bright future ahead of us. Thank you for listening to the Content Machine podcast. If you want to tag along to see more of that future, and as it gets brighter, go ahead and subscribe. And if you have any questions about marketing, feel free to visit our website at Adelsberger
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