Jeremy Weisz 16:12
Yeah, I love those that’s really interesting, those thought-provoking questions.
Josh Shultz 16:18
I like all the questions for future interviews.
Jeremy Weisz 16:22
Hey, listen, if they took the time to watch this interview and learn more, maybe they deserve to grab that edge on people. Talk about the co-CEO thing for a second.
Nathan Imperiale 16:39
We were warned that that was a bad idea. The number of people who said like you really shouldn’t do that was pretty long, including some of the business consultants that we’ve worked with, and other executives that we have as mentors. But essentially, since day one, Josh and I have been operating as co-owners of the company. And despite the fact that it’s my initials, unfortunately, on the door, because I had to create the LLC very quickly and couldn’t be more creative than using my initials. The two of us have a way, or have had a way over the last 16 years of working collaboratively on everything. And most decisions that we make we discuss in one way or another sometimes it’s a quick banter back and forth. Other times it’s a micro conversation where we mentioned something and want to just get some quick feedback. But that constant level of communication and trust in each other has sort of been at the backbone. If you haven’t noticed, Josh, and I also have a pretty good healthy banter between us and that happens all day, every day. It emanates to our team, our team knows that when we have a feeling about something or we don’t like what the other has done or said, we’ll say something quippy. We mean it lovingly, but we move quickly. And we recognize, like a married couple, I can look at Josh and I can tell you how he’s feeling without him opening his mouth. And vice versa, the number of times a week that Josh is like, yeah, you said yes to that. But I can tell what you really meant is no, that sounds like a terrible idea. So, I think that we’ve been really, really lucky, I don’t think that this is a good model for a lot of people. And I think we spent a lot of time over the last 16 years, figuring out how to best manage the team between the two of us. And we’ve sort of fit into two very good grooves that Josh is really good at the operational side of our business understands and wants to better understand our efficiencies and our inefficiencies and how we can better service our clients. I want to make sure that creatively, we’re thinking beyond the next 10 steps, we’re looking at ways that we can bring our clients that wow factor and ensure that our agency is seen at the top of our game consistently. And so those two overlap, but we also do a pretty good job sticking with our strengths and then giving each other feedback and just being consistently open and honest with each other about just about everything.
Josh Shultz 19:59
Yeah, I mean, what I’d add is in Nathan nailed it. First time for everything. Yeah, it allows, I mean, honestly, it allows thoughtful decision-making, which results in better outcomes. Because we each have our unique perspective on something. And Nathan nailed it. Like if you could summarize our relationship, it’s just always been collaborative. And I think the co-seat look, we’re not gonna go on a show a roadshow and teach a masterclass and co-CEO going. But I do feel like we’re doing a pretty darn good job of it. And part of the reason is, there’s also enhanced accountability, which is huge when you’re running a global agency. If you think you know the answer to everything, you’re just wrong. And quite frankly, some CEOs feel like they’re on an island. Sure, they can have strong leadership teams, but at the end of the day, the decision is on their shoulders. And like Nathan said, we basically, and co-CEO ing for 15 years. We’ve been able to, to do that in a way that really works well for us. And on the flip side, it also helps with work-life balance, when you have CEO sharing the workload in that’s huge for both of us in our team knows that to balance work in our personal life, which we want our team to do and reduce the stress and help the mental health aspect of what we do. Because what we do is not easy. That allows Nathan to lean in more and I can unplug and vice versa, which is great.
Jeremy Weisz 21:31
I want to talk about going international. Right? You start off domestic what were some of the good and some of the challenges with going international?
Josh Shultz 21:43
How many hours do you have?
Nathan Imperiale 21:44
It’s a whole other podcast. For me, it’s been the best decision we ever made. Given the fact that we have this sort of uniqueness in our qualities about being a creative agency focused on public affairs, and public policy here in the US, that gave us a calling card that was unique here, it’s even more unique on an international scale, the sort of the political background that we have, and understanding how governments work, how government leaders and those that work around them and influence them operate is relatively unique. And as we moved from working in government in the US to working in working for and alongside organizations that have real policy issues that need to be heard and need to be brought to the forefront. Our background as an agency has really sort of allowed us to flourish, especially in the European market, being based out of London, and then expanding into Singapore on a smaller scale. But from looking at the future, we see a huge level of potential there working with corporations and issue advocacy or trade groups that have major policy issues that span the globe. And in the UK, we had to spin up another business, and it’s a subsidiary of NJI. But the jumps you have to make in order to do that, and the accounting and the management of team members and payroll and benefits is just entirely different than it is in the US. And so, God bless our finance team and our operations team. Sarah Fritz, who’s our Director of Finance, or SVP of finance, really was put to task and opening up the various entities internationally, which was no, no easy, easy haul. And without the infrastructure that we had in place already, it would have been just nearly insurmountable. It was not an easy thing to do. And I don’t think we really knew that going into it. We thought, oh, we’re just going to open up an LLC like we did in the US and we’ll just start, we’ll find a payroll provider.
Josh Shultz 24:25
We just need an office in a mailbox. How hard is it.
Nathan Imperiale 24:28
Yeah, exactly. We’ll be good, no problem. start hiring people. Singapore, completely different animal as well. We set up a company and their rules and regulations that force you to do things like have an outside auditor review your data security policies, that and that alone costs 10s of 1000s of dollars, and things like that we went into it knowing that there were going to be costs and hoops that we had to jump through, but there were some nuances there that made it particularly interesting. And then setting up the international bank accounts. Very, very different. You don’t just go online and go to Bank of America and then within five minutes open a checking and savings account, you have got to go through a very significant screening process, especially in the UK. And ultimately, we ended up having a fabulous relationship with JP Morgan private bank. And the doors that they opened for us on the finance scale were tremendous. And that really streamlined the process. But it took a while for us to recognize that that was the direction we should have gone through on day one. So I would say best decision we’ve ever made a lot of work getting to where we are.
Jeremy Weisz 25:58
I’m curious, what prompted the expansion? Was it a client inquiry? I mean, I just, I like talking about this global conversation a little bit, because at least I can speak for myself, I feel like I can be narrow-minded and just think US, right? And there’s a whole world out there, right just from an abundance mentality. Just that global thinking in expansion is huge. So I always liked this conversation, and that you kind of ventured into these different countries. What prompted the expansion, I’m sure you didn’t like throw a dart at a map, or like, I think we should go to Singapore.
Josh Shultz 26:46
Actually, that’s next. A lot of fun.
Nathan Imperiale 26:51
I don’t want to do all the talking. But I’ll just quickly say that my rule of thumb for business and I come from a long line, my parents, my grandparents were entrepreneurs and started businesses. And I learned early that having an anchor client that could help or pay all the bills upfront, when opening your doors, it’s pretty quick critical to having a well-balanced life and lower anxiety when starting a business. Because you’re not putting everything on the line, you know that you have something as a backstop. And the same thing happened for us in the UK, in our expansion into Europe. And the same thing in Singapore. We had clients that we were working with, in both cases that were a US-based, that wanted our work to focus more internationally. And we were probably the only agency that they were working with that was willing to sort of make a leap and put resources on the ground internationally. Josh, I think thought I was crazy. I came out of a meeting, I think I was in London meeting with our client there. And we were talking about the budget for the upcoming year. And I walked out of the meeting, and I called Josh and I said, so I just committed to, if the client gives us X amount of budget for next year, we’ll open an office in London. We did not go into the meeting thinking that that was going to be the case. And then the very next day, we got the green light budget approved. And so we quickly worked to open an office and hire team members on the ground. We moved some team members from the US there to help open the office and make sure that the NJI brand was carried over from some emissaries in our in our DC-based office. And then COVID hit which was another story altogether. But that really impacted how things got jumpstarted in the UK
Jeremy Weisz 29:04
Talk about Intuit. And what you did with Intuit.
Josh Shultz 29:08
Love Intuit. I’ll back up and what I’ll say about Intuit is a lot of our business because Nathan and I have built the business, on relationships and referrals. Because we came from Capitol Hill, we worked with really smart individuals on both sides of the aisle and then those individuals that obviously leave Capitol Hill and they go to work at agencies and think tanks and wonderful places. And because we were basically the one-stop shop for all the digital for them for years, like what do we do? I have no idea where to start. And sometimes we’re just said that warm blanket we give them advice and other times we’re able to work with them. And this case Intuit was relationship brought to us by wonderful human Being Paul Lindsey, who I worked with on Capitol Hill, we worked with him at pharma trade association, that represents pharmaceutical industry here in DC. And then we also knew Daniel Eubanks, who worked at Intuit who is one of the nicest people we’ve ever worked with. And they came to us and said, hey, Intuit is opening up a kind of a corporate affairs arm, they didn’t really focus much on public policy. Paul did a really good job of that at pharma doing advocacy and public policy. So they decided to let Paul open up a shop Daniel’s already they’re doing lobbying. And they gave us a decent budget. And Daniel and Paul were like, alright, this is kind of on all of us to see if we can impact, some change, and at least start to articulate better who Intuit is to policymakers, because you hear TurboTax and you know, you’ve heard of Mint, and you know, but a lot of people don’t know that Intuit owns both of them. And they now own MailChimp, which obviously, you and a lot of other people in the creative space understand. But they don’t know the impact that the company has around the United States, and particularly in the UK, is we’ve been able to work over there. And there’s huge economic impact and a lot of success stories. And so it was just starting slowly to kind of build out this repository of really good creative that they could share with policymakers to help them understand the importance of this company. And then it’s grown. And we’ve done some really neat stuff in the UK, we got to work with them on a decent-sized campaign over there, kind of the same thing to get in front of Parliament, help them with an event that they co-hosted with Politico, with some Trade Representatives from the UK, just really nice stuff born out of the relationships that we already had with these individuals. And again, nice people we love to work with. And that’s kind of the sweet spot for us. So it’s exciting work. And quite frankly, one of our favorite clients.
Jeremy Weisz 32:08
What about I want to talk about Meta, and what you do with Meta? And some of those events, are you allowed to bring sword swallowers? Or is that prohibited?
Josh Shultz 32:20
We have our hosts with Meta next week, but it’s on safety. So I don’t think that would be very happy to…
Jeremy Weisz 32:26
That would be perfect. Now, what did you do at the Meta?
Nathan Imperiale 32:34
Yeah, the Meta has been a long-standing client of ours. And they have been a tremendous partner. The team that we work with on the public policy side, are incredibly smart. As you can imagine, Meta has attracted some really amazing talent. I mean, it’s an example of a true partnership, where we were brought in on a very, very small scale, the first project we got with them was to review their public policy collateral, so anything they were using to present to showcase whether it be a one-pager or a PowerPoint presentation, or an educational seminar on meta tools with Facebook or Instagram, that they were using across the globe, I think it was 65 different offices at the time that they were using on a policy level to whether it was meeting with a member of parliament or staff for member of Congress here in the US. We did a review of all of it. And they had an issue where a lot of this was being produced really rapidly across the globe. And there wasn’t sort of this nexus that brought it all together. And so our relationship started there. We went in, realized you’ve got really amazing content. But there’s no strong cohesive brand to bring it all together. And I’d say the one thing that we have focused on with just about all of our clients is driving a cohesive brand and in the public policy, space, Public Affairs space. A lot of times government affairs, a lot of times those teams are very separate from the corporate marketing teams, or even the corporate comms teams. And so their resources towards creative are usually limited. And so they’re off sort of a little bit on their own. And we’re brought in to bring that creative edge to their world. And so in the case of Meta, our work with them snowballed, and we helped them to develop everything from global economic reports where we’re helping to tie together hundreds of pages of economic resources to help to tell the story of how Meta’s tools across Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram are helping small businesses and what that impact is in the UK, what it is in Europe, what it is in APAC region, et cetera, et cetera, and then helping to distill that down to tell the story on a congressional district by district level. What is the impact of a major corporation like Meta on a smaller group of individuals, and hyper-focused, localized content that will make sense to someone living in Idaho, or to someone living in Singapore. And those are very different audiences. And so part of what we have done with Meta, as we have grown is we’ve had to become experts in localization. And we’ve got some tremendous partners. Freedman in the UK is a fabulous localization translation firm that we worked with for years. And our team works alongside them to make sure that our creative and the copy all match up perfectly for every piece of collateral and content that we’re creating, both in the Meta world and for a lot of our other clients as well. The nuances that we now deal with on a daily basis are things like the color of clothing, on an illustrated individual on the cover of a report in Hong Kong, and in New York, or in Belgium, and you name it, that individual who’s on the cover needs to look a certain way needs to be culturally appropriate, needs to fit in with the environment that we’re trying to showcase this content. And then the copy also has to be nuanced, he can’t just translate a piece of content, and think it’s going to work locally, in Brussels and translate just the same in Paris. So that’s become a huge part of the work that we do with Meta. But we’re also you know, we’re the agency that sort of ties a bow on all of their public policy work or a lot of it. And we’ve been successful, mainly because we’ve had such a strong relationship with the client, and we take their lead, and they take our lead on when our expertise is really, what they’re looking for, we’re there to support them. And vice versa. There’s nobody who’s a better expert on Meta than our Meta clients. And so, having that collaboration on a second-by-second basis, is pretty critical. And I’d say that’s the same across the board of all of our clients.
Jeremy Weisz 38:07
I’m going to have Josh, we need you to talk about in a second. We were talking before we hit record how some of the public policies helped various groups, but specifically, female entrepreneurs. And before we get into that, how did they even find you? Right, it seems so random for them to hey, can you look over this collateral? How does Facebook find you?
Josh Shultz 38:35
I can’t use specific names, although I’m very tempted because the agency that recommended us it was an agency out of DC we worked adjacent with for Pharma. They just didn’t want to work. Because it wasn’t a huge budget to be frank. So they just rattled off a few other firms that they knew could do it and that they trusted. And this is a well-respected, larger agency. And so we got a phone call to our front office, which rarely happens. And thank goodness, somebody answered it. And they were like it somebody’s like, yeah, it’s somebody’s calling from…
Jeremy Weisz 39:09
This is Mark Zuckerberg, you’re like, yeah, right.
Josh Shultz 39:13
We just assumed that it was something like, it’s like their ads team or something like because we’re an agency, we get these calls, right? Hey, are you effectively using our platform? And we’re like, okay, so we call back and we’re like, oh, this actually might be something like how many 1000s of firms were called, come to find out, not many. We had an initial kickoff call or video with them. And we just got along with the three of them on the video so well. And it was initially a very small, tiny project. And Nathan’s, right, we were trying to figure out cohesively, how they could kind of bring all these assets together globally and standardize that brand. And we did that to a certain degree, but they were so excited to work with us that we barely even got to finish that report before we were just knee-deep and ever anything else. And so essentially this other firm that recommended us really lost out, because it could have been an open door to something else.
Jeremy Weisz 40:08
Well, it just proves like adding value and smaller projects lead to demonstrating value and showing in gaining that trust in the relationship. And it can start small, right?
Josh Shultz 40:22
Again. And that’s how we built a business, I mean, brick by brick. There was times where Nathan and I would look at each other and be like, all right, we’ve heard this once we’ve heard it 1000 times like the budgets small. But if we can do this, right, it’ll be bigger. And you can kind of smell that out now as a larger agency. And we have the benefit of kind of knowing when to take that leap and when not to. But yeah, you’re right, like those projects, pay dividends. And that’s how we built the business. Like, it’s not like, we opened the public side of NJI and all of a sudden, the Metas of the world were knocking on our door. I would love to think that that’s how it works. But that is far from the truth.
Jeremy Weisz 41:02
And I mentioned the female entrepreneurs, how does that relate to Meta?
Josh Shultz 41:08
So they asked us, it was part of APEC programming, that they were doing a conference and Sheryl Sandberg was running it. And we had already done the collateral for Sheryl, in a lot of the presentation materials. And they thought it would be a good opportunity to bring together they had done these a lot of smaller videos with female entrepreneurs and told the story of them. We’d also worked with them during the pandemic to send out video kits, and train them during the quarantine, to kind of help continue to grow their business because everybody was, it was a little different. But Facebook was still a huge platform, especially for these small entrepreneurs and female. And so we put together a video package and other collateral that really kind of shed light on all the amazing women around the globe that had built the successful businesses because of Meta and Facebook products in using the tools that is available on platforms like Facebook. And quite frankly, they would say like, I wouldn’t have a business had it not been for the ability to do this on Facebook. And they allowed to tell their stories. And they focused on females because Sheryl was running the program. And it was wonderful, like working on that kind of project, it’s kind of a once-in-a-lifetime, incredible way to kind of flex what we do, and our team loved it. It was wildly successful. And it’s still one of the proudest projects that I’ve personally ever worked on.
Jeremy Weisz 42:46
To go full circle for a second. One of your first clients, I thought it’d be fun, I was looking through your page, I’ll bring it up here in a second. And a couple organizations and companies stuck out to me. So right now on the njimedia.com/workpage. And the National Beer Wholesalers Association stuck out to me because I just feel like it was your Home Depot, we have Intuit, we have Meta and then we have the National Beer Wholesalers Association.
Nathan Imperiale 43:22
So fun one. And NBWA is a trade association, which, like many of our clients, they’re representing a larger group of businesses across the country. And as you can imagine, in the alcohol industry at large, there are a lot of policy-related issues. And they represent their constituency, here in DC, and on a state level as well. But really, really fun client. They’re not only like many of our clients, their team is great to work with. And we’ve been working with them for almost 15 plus years. And it’s a really good example of a relationship where our services have evolved tremendously over the last 15 years. But our knowledge of the industry is obviously significant 15 years later, and so we’ve become really close partners with them. But I remember day one, when I got a call from Rebecca Spicer, who was someone that I worked with previously and she asked how we could be helpful. And we immediately jumped in and our goal was to provide some immediate value to them. Budget wasn’t huge, but we dove in and our goal was to put some points on the board early on to showcase that, in a really good creative could be instrumental to the success of their communications team, and the communications initiatives that they were embarking upon, and then using great digital comms strategies to tell their stories to policymakers and the medium. And it’s also a really good example of a client Rebecca Spicer is no longer with National Beer Wholesalers, and is now at Airlines for America, the Airline Trade Association. And we went through a competitive process to then be brought over to Airlines for America as well. And she sort of recommended us because she had worked with us but she sort of removed herself from the process and finding an agency or approving one because she had had a relationship with us. But again, we’ve now worked for Airlines for over five years, and done some really tremendous work there. And again, another really strong trade association that also has a challenging environment to work in. And we’re using great creative to help them create content and create stories that are more impactful.
Jeremy Weisz 46:21
First of all, Josh, Nathan, I just want to say thank you, this has been fantastic and I love hearing your journey and in learning more about what you do. If people have questions or they want to learn more they can go to njimedia.com to learn more and check out more episodes of the podcast and I just want to be the first one to thank you both and thanks everyone.
Josh Shultz 46:46
Thank you very much for having us. Appreciate it.
Nathan Imperiale 46:48
Really appreciate it.
