Hi, I’m Jonathan Low.
I’m a specialist lead gen copy and content marketing expert based in New Zealand and the founder of JLow and Co – a digital marketing agency for professional service providers.
I started digital marketing in 1998 selling health supplements direct to consumers. Digital marketing was brand new back then and because I was able to turn Internet traffic into leads and customers it wasn’t long before other entrepreneurs asked me for help.
So in early 2000 I sold my supplement business and started working as a digital marketing consultant. But I soon found myself struggling to grow my consulting business beyond a handful of clients. I was constantly frustrated by inconsistent lead flow, poor quality leads. My revenue would see-saw as I was forced to pivot between hustling for leads to get a new client…then my leads would dry up as because I was too busy working with clients.
I then spent years buying every course I could on marketing for coaches, consultants and service providers. I attended seminars, boot camps, workshops and “intensives”. I invested tens of thousands in coaching from many of the biggest gurus out there. I took a “Dilbert cube” job as a corporate IT Engineer.
The result…I was still struggling to grow my consulting business beyond a few clients at a time…only now I was also $197,000 in debt. My IT job wasn’t covering the expenses and we couldn’t afford rent. I moved my family, my wife and two young kids, into a tent on my folks property. And so we slept for weeks in the wind and rain with all our possessions in a tent and the trunk of the car. I felt like a failure as a husband, father and as an entrepreneur.
Any rational man would have quit long before that happened. I’m so glad I didn’t. Because it was at that point, my personal “rock bottom”, that I had my breakthrough.
I’d forgotten the fundamentals that had made my supplement business successful. I wasn’t even following my own marketing advice, my clients were more successful than I was. I began relentlessly studying the marketing, ads, funnels and business models of every leading coach, consultant and professional service provider I could find. I stopped buying their marketing courses and instead of doing what they told me to do in order to have their level of success I reverse engineered what they were actually doing.
In the process I discovered that while the tools, tactics and media changed between all the leading experts they all had common marketing frameworks, systems and strategies at work in their business. These were what was REALLY driving their businesses forward. They didn’t talk about them, most of them seemed to be completely unaware. These were the hidden strategies, quietly at work.
I set about documenting everything I had learned from studying the industry leaders. I combined that with what I knew had worked in my supplement business and what was working for my clients. And I put those same strategies and frameworks to work in my consulting business.
The very next month I had my first five figure month in my consulting business.
I then applied some of the strategies to my Dilbert Cube IT job. I’d been promoted to a senior management role while my entrepreneurial world was crashing and burning. We grew the revenue in that company department from an average of $110K per month to $1.2M per month within 18 months – more than 10x growth while our costs only doubled.
As I kept applying what I’d discovered my clients kept getting great results. I left my Dilbert Cube job, when my employer decided to sell his now wildly profitable business to a larger corporate in a very lucrative deal.
But I still saw so many other coaches, consultants and professional service providers struggle with the same problems I did. I knew there wasn’t enough good training, advice and support that could really help them.
So I made it my mission to help as many expert coaches, consultants and professional service providers overcome the challenges I had experienced.
I’m filling this blog with free actionable advice, learned from the trenches selling products and services B2C and B2B for more than 22 years (and helping clients do the same). I know that not everyone is ready, or can afford, agency or consulting fees…so everything here is for you pro bono.
Cheers,
JLow