Today we’d like to introduce you to Jennifer Johnstone-Lopez.
Hi Jennifer, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
Thanks for having me. I’m Jennifer and I’m a mother to three kids and wife to a serial entrepreneur. I am also the founder of Jalapeño Digital, a local digital ad agency, and I’m the author of a funny pregnancy book titled Why I Cried: Tales from Hysterical Pregnant Women.
Talk to us about what led you to become an entrepreneur. What was your journey?
I never really saw myself as an entrepreneur, and I definitely never saw myself as a data person. While at UCF, I made my way into the advertising industry and thought I would end up making commercials and designing billboards. And while I did do just that for some time, I had no idea I’d eventually launch my own agency, Jalapeño Digital, hyper-focused on digital advertising.
When I began in advertising, I started as a Public Relations Manager for an Orlando-based agency, and this was right around the time when PR was going digital. Our clients who had social media accounts or even only dabbled online were suddenly hit with praise or concerns right in the public eye. As a PR manager, I was tasked to handle it and soon began overseeing 27 social media accounts for the agency’s various clients. Around this time, Facebook Advertising was just becoming a thing, and in an effort to help further promote a burrito joint we were working with, I sat with our in-house media buyer and we developed our first set of Facebook Ads. The results = incredible. The amount of data we could get on each user who interacted with our ads, liked our page and more just gave me that huge lightbulb moment – that this data could be MAJOR for how we drove results for their business.
Fast-forward to a few years later, and I am no longer a Florida-based Public Relations Manager looking for the next newspaper spread for my client, or managing their social media, but instead, I am a Director of Paid Search living in California, where I am solely focused on training and developing a team of experts who specialize in Google Ads – who can make incredibly detailed strategies and keyword portfolios to advertise our client’s products and services to the right audience at the right time. It was a wild ride and I helped many brands along the way like Oakley, bareMinerals, Ray-Ban, Skullcandy, Volcom, and even helped drive the Google Ads strategy for Google themselves!
In 2016, I won an award for my efforts from Search Engine Land, called “Search Marketer of the Year”. This was an international award that can only be granted once in a person’s lifetime. That is when I knew that I could do more than just build teams for other agencies, but I could take on a bigger challenge of building my own agency. As my husband and I considered moving back home to Florida and having children, I knew that this had to be my next step if I wanted flexibility in my career – as agency life can be fast-paced!
Shortly after my son, Cameron was born I left my full-time job to focus solely on Jalapeno Digital. The company is now six years old and growing, and so is my family! I am a mother to Cameron (4), Caroline (2) and Carly (1). I have a great work/life balance for someone who runs a million-dollar company, and I also manage to be a WAHM (working at home mom). I have the best clients who value my team’s expertise but also see us as humans with families and lives outside of “work”. Everyone I work with and for is highly-vetted, and this ensures a happy team, great work and appreciative clients who now have thriving businesses because of the trust they put into my team and our work.
Outside of Jalapeno Digital, I have also written a book on my pregnancy journey called “Why I Cried: Tales from Hysterical Pregnant Women” and it is sold on Amazon, at B&N.com, Target.com and more. It’s a collection of funny short stories penned by my fierce mom tribe. I also love to cook and recently purchased a second home in Ocean City, Maryland that is very near and dear to my heart.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
The road to owning and managing Jalapeno Digital was much, much smoother than I anticipated. I had already built up great experience and a fantastic network before taking on the challenge, so clients and team members weren’t and still aren’t hard to come by.
Most of my challenges have been internal struggles. Am I making the right decision doing this on my own? Shouldn’t I just keep my cushy job? What if I stop getting clients? Or my team quits? All of those worries and fear have much to do with what I envisioned success to be growing up. I envisioned success to be starting at the bottom, working your way up, and eventually getting your gold watch and pension plan. I come from a highly successful and hardworking family, and this is how I had seen it done. I listened to stories of my grandfather working his way up at companies like G&E and Lucas Aerospace, had seen my mother start as an administrative assistant to being the CFO of an entire international organization. Going out on my own was scary because I didn’t know if I would make it. How would I grow? How would I level up?
All of those questions are still a work in progress, but each day, I am doing it. Six years later, I am doing it – and my family is more proud than ever of me for becoming an entrepreneur.
Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about Jalapeño Digital?
Jalapeño Digital is a network of some of the top digital freelancers, and we drive results for companies through digital advertising. We specialize in PPC, SEO, Paid Social, Analytics and more. We are a team of about 25 and work with two types of clients. The first is our direct clients, and the second is our agency clients, for which we white label our services. We are unique in that each team member has loads of agency experience and is a true specialist. When our team comes together to work on projects, you’re often getting strategies learned at some of the top agencies in the world, but because we all have different backgrounds, you’re not getting a one-size fits all approach. Many agencies unknowingly offer this because having that “one-approach” to digital is often how they scale and maintain their internal teams, but the results can suffer because of it.
We are most proud of our relationships with our clients that have been built on years of trust and incredible results. We value transparency, creativity, open communication and killer work.
Is there any advice you’d like to share with our readers who might just be starting out?
To anyone who is just starting out and wondering if they can “do it” on their own, my advice is to really spend some time with yourself. Break down those barriers and consider how they got there in the first place. It’s most often someone’s limiting belief system that holds them back, not their ability to actually DO IT, whatever it may be.
Also, hire a virtual assistant for the more mundane tasks so that you can focus on the parts of your business that light you up. For example, I love paying the team, so I always do payroll and I love seeing our clients’ businesses thrive, so I always review every monthly report to make sure they are getting their money’s worth by hiring our team. I don’t, however, like filing taxes or creating invoices each month, so my assistant does those things for me.
Contact Info:
- Website: jalapenodigital.com
- Other: https://whyibooks.com/
