The Secret to Successful Product Launches Using the “Perfect Launch System”
- Harvest Growth
- Apr 4
- 36 min read
Updated: Apr 7
Today, we flip the script. Your host, Jon LaClare, takes the guest seat as we dive into his new book, The Perfect Launch System. This comprehensive guide unveils the proven methodology behind his success, offering a blueprint for transforming product launches into market triumphs.
95% of product launches fail—often because they lack a structured, effective system for launch and marketing. But at Harvest Growth, we've developed a game-changing approach: the "Perfect Launch System," which has led to an impressive success rate 10x that of other product launch agencies.
Through compelling storytelling, Jon shares the pivotal moments that shaped his approach—from his early career as an accountant at Ernst & Young to his transition into marketing, where he worked on major brand campaigns and learned from legends like Billy Mays.
Join us as we explore his entrepreneurial journey and the insights gained from interviewing hundreds of founders and launching multiple successful brands. In this episode, Jon distills years of expertise into actionable strategies that can revolutionize the way you launch products and grow your business.
In today’s episode of the Harvest Growth Podcast, we’ll cover:
Why traditional launch approaches fail 95% of the time and how to avoid these pitfalls
A powerful 3-Phase framework for mastering the full launch process - from idea validation to sales
Jon's tried-and-proven system for launching a successful new product and preventing the most common product launch mistakes
The power of an iterative approach when launching your product in the digital era
The critical post-launch analysis that most companies skip, costing them valuable insights
You can listen to the full interview on your desktop or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Or, click to watch the full video interview here!
Looking to launch a product, scale, or improve ad performance? Visit www.perfectlaunch.com to unlock the proven system that's helped launch over 300 products and generate over $2 billion in revenue. Discover how brands like OxiClean became household names and the strategies we use at Harvest Growth to find and convert customers.
To be a guest on our next podcast, contact us today!
Do you have a brand that you’d like to launch or grow? Do you want help from a partner that has successfully launched hundreds of brands that now total over $2 billion in revenue? Set up a free consultation with us today!
Prefer reading instead of listening? Read the full transcript here!
Announcer [00:00:00]:
Are you looking for new ways to make your sales grow? You've tried other podcasts, but they don't seem to know Harvest the growth potential of your product or service as we share stories and strategies that'll make your competitors nervous. Now, here's the host of the Harvest Growth podcast, Jon LaClare.
Tate Walkush [00:00:20]:
Welcome to the Harvest Growth podcast where we dive deep into the stories, strategies and and successes behind some of the most innovative brands and entrepreneurs. But today, we're flipping the script. I'm Tait Wakeish, the Creative Project Manager at Harvest Growth, and I've had the privilege of working closely with Jon Leclair for the past two and a half years. Like many of our listeners, I'm eager to learn more about the man behind the mic, the host of the Harvest Growth podcast himself, Jon LaClare. He's hosted over 200 episodes where he interviews product marketers to share their journeys and what cutting edge marketing strategies are working in their businesses. He is also the founder of Harvest Growth, where he has helped hundreds of clients generate billions of dollars in total revenue since 2007. Today, he joins me as a guest on his own podcast to share a more personal side about his own business journey. Jon, welcome to the show on the other side.
Jon LaClare [00:01:23]:
Thank you so much. I'm excited to be here, I think, on this side, although I feel like I've prepared more to be a guest on the podcast than I do as a host. Maybe I shouldn't tell that to our past guests, but it does make me realize how much work they put into the show beforehand for sure. So thank you for hosting today. I'm excited to talk about my story and kind of our story at Harvest Growth.
Tate Walkush [00:01:41]:
I'm really excited too. And as I said, I'm just eager to learn a little bit more about your backstory and really what inspired you to start your business.
Jon LaClare [00:01:50]:
So I grew up always wanting, I think even as a kid, to own my own business before I really knew what that meant. My dad was a businessman. He went to Harvard for his mba and I remember hearing stories about that growing up. And he was always in sales. He was never a true entrepreneur, I would call it, but he was for my entire Life on 100% commission sales, which is about as close as you can get to being an entrepreneur without truly owning your own business, you know, running the rest of it. So it was always an inspiration to me. And I remember and frankly, I still have a picture of me on my fridge at home. My kids make fun of, but I like it. It's Me walking to kindergarten with a little briefcase again. I just want to be like my dad. I didn't know what it meant, right. Fully, of course, as a kindergartner. But it is something that evolved over time. So my personal journey to being an entrepreneur started and as I look back, I think sort of the perfect path for me. I didn't know any of this going into it. I certainly can't claim that I chose each step along the way in the right exact way or knowing what was going to come next. But as I look back, I was, I don't know, guided or whatever or just lucky maybe to be. Each step I learned so much. So my first, I guess, education was as an accountant, as an undergrad.
So I got my accounting degree at byu. It's a very good accounting school, and went from there to work at a big accounting firm, Ernst and Young, back in the day. I think they've all changed names at this point. There's fewer than there used to be, these big accounting firms. But it gave me the chance to sort of see behind the curtain of running businesses what made them successful from a financial perspective. Understanding the numbers behind business, which is so important. But I never felt like, as I enjoyed my job, I think I did it well and got good reviews and that kind of thing, but I just couldn't see myself or my own personal journey 20 years in the future doing that same thing. So it was a great experience. But it made me realize, like, for me personally, I like to look to the future. Right. So create things. Marketing is where I ended up. A long story short, in accounting, you're looking back, so it's great to understand. At least what I did was auditing. Right. So you're looking what happened last year. Were the books correct? Right. Were the numbers correct, et cetera.
And so I learned a lot. But I transitioned from there. Got my own MBA from the University of Chicago, and that's where I transitioned over into marketing. I love. You know, I'm a big believer in sort of lifelong learning and my own personal journey at that, as I try. Right. I'm sure I don't learn all the lessons I should along the way, but. But I did learn from, I would say, very smart people that were all academics, right. So they had learned how to launch new products, how to market products, and a lot of financial stuff as well, but less practicality to it. Right. Some had experience, but most of it was very academic. Great learning opportunity. And more importantly, I think it afforded me the opportunity to go on and work at Kraft Foods and Nabisco in the brand management program. So one of my first jobs, I got to run the, the $450 million cans and jars business at Planters. Run it. You wrote it on the team that ran it. Of course, you know, as a junior, a brand manager at the time.
But I learned how to not only run businesses, run PNLs, but also how to launch products for a big company. So they talk about like P and G and Kraft Foods at the time and some other companies like that that are sort of quote unquote, premier marketing firms, right? Or CPG consumer products or consumer packaged goods companies. They talk about being classically trained in marketing, right? So you learn a lot in marketing about how to market products, etc. And sort of these classic techniques, but at a big budget, right. I certainly could not have left there and launched a product on my own, right. Without a $2 million budget, right. Which is what's kind of what we had to craft. So I launched some new products there. One of them was the Nabisco 100 calorie packs still on the shelves today, now, 20 odd years later, which is cool to see. But again, I couldn't have done that without the big budget behind me.
So I went from there. Again in reverse or in the rearview mirror, I can see exactly why. And what I learned from these. Maybe I didn't realize it at the time, but I went from there marketing big products for a big company to Orange Glow, which is the OxiClean company. It's a brand everybody knows back in the Billy Mays days, right. So this is 20 odd years ago to help them grow and really work on the new product side with Oxiclean. Now the cool thing there is it's, it was a big company, you know, bigger than my company is today, right? They were, you know, several hundred million dollars in revenue. I think we had 150ish employees at the company, but still family owned. So the whole time I was there, it was the Apple family that owned and ran the company. So I was able to learn and meet with them every day.
So when I launched a product, I'm meeting with the people that launched the original Oxiclean, right? Not somebody that launched Oreos 100 years ago or whatever and kind of trickled down. But being there so close to the inception, I learned so much from them. So this helped me to now understand, okay, with smaller budgets it was still a big company, right? But smaller budgets and craft how to launch successfully get to profitability much faster. And that sort of Catapulted me to my next gig, let's call it, which is Harvest Growth. That's where I'm at today. So 18 years ago. I can't believe it's been that long. I launched Harvest Growth after leaving orange glow OxiClean, and since then we've launched hundreds of products. And along the way, I continue to learn. So one of the things I love about doing this podcast, usually when I'm in your seat, is I get to hear and learn from the guests on the show that have been successful, learn from their journeys, and apply that some of those things into our clients, businesses, or marketing campaigns as well. So I learn every day. That's what I love about marketing, is it does change. You can learn a lot and you kind of have to in order to be successful. But that's a fairly long snapshot of my. My life so far.
Tate Walkush [00:07:33]:
I love your background. I think you've gone through so many things. I will say I've known you for two and a half years, and I do not picture you being an accountant at all. You're way more creative and you've done so many things, and it's so cool to see how much your business has grown even in the last 17, 18 years. I really want to know what was the initial idea or problem that you were really trying to solve in the beginning?
Jon LaClare [00:08:02]:
Yeah, great question. So OxiClean or orange glow was the name of the company, was sold again about 18 years ago to a company called Church and Dwight. They're still owned by them. They're the arm and hammer business. People know that that brand pretty well, and when they were sold, it gave me the opportunity to launch Harvest Growth. But I can't say that I knew this was my next step at the time, until one night, it was the perfect opportunity for me. I was able to work there for a few months to kind of transition things, but at work was pretty slow because it's the nature of transitioning, right? They're moving locations, et cetera. So I was there to answer questions, but I was also able to spend some time thinking about my next step in my own journey. And I struggled with it for. For some time.
And then, to be honest, one night it was, if you want to call it an epiphany or just indigestion, I don't know. But I was up all night, one night, excited by this business. Right. I didn't have a name for it at the time. I didn't. It was, you know, maybe different a little bit from what it is. Today. But I sort of saw this, had this vision of what it could be, and I noticed an opportunity. So what I loved about my time at OxiClean is learning how to launch products in a way that pay for themselves. Right. It was TV infomercials at the time. We still do a lot of that and we'll talk more about that in a bit. But getting your media to pay for itself as quickly as you can now, you can grow quickly without having to get a ton of outside investment. And today you can do that same approach on tv. Yes. But also on digital platforms like Facebook and Instagram, et cetera. But it's. I, at the time there were. It was still kind of expensive when it was just tv. So if you didn't have six figures, it didn't have to be millions. Right. But you had to have a couple hundred grand to put into a business at least to launch. And even with that methodology and people weren't even familiar with that. So really to do the kind of old fashioned Kraft Foods way, like I said before, it's a couple million dollars and it's hard to do without serious investors behind your business.
So we wanted to create an approach that would help people launch their products and avoid, if they didn't have endless supplies of cash to go to investors or venture capital or whatever it might be to be able to launch on their own and really build it up. Because at the time a lot of, a lot of these inventors would go and get license deals. They still exist kind of. It's not as easy or smooth as it used to be 20 years ago, but you can still get a license deal. But it was sort of the only path for most investors that weren't really well funded. So we wanted to develop an opportunity to launch, but without having to have immense investment sort of behind the scenes. And that's really what we've done that, that we'll talk more about the business and how it looks today. It's different. Yes. But the same approach or general methodology or goals behind what we do are very similar to that that time I was up all night with indigestion or whatever.
Tate Walkush [00:10:46]:
I love that. And marketing changes so quickly, as you said. I mean, even from you starting two years ago to today. What were some of those biggest challenges you faced in those early days and how did you overcome them?
Jon LaClare [00:11:02]:
Yeah, great question. So when I left oxiclean, when the company was sold off, I had a good Rolodex on showing how old I am. You probably know what Rolodex Is do you?
Tate Walkush [00:11:11]:
No idea.
Jon LaClare [00:11:12]:
So Rolodex is kind of like, you know, before we had smartphones, it was a flip thing where you had everyone's names and addresses and phone numbers. You'll see them on TV shows or whatever. Right. I never actually had one, but I, you know, it was kind of a term you used a long time ago. But I had a Rolodex or a contact list of businesses, people, et cetera, that I'd built up for my time, especially at Oxiclean, a little bit at Kraft Foods. So in the early days, we were able to get a few of these clients from that, or, you know, friends of friends, referrals, et cetera. But eventually you hit a wall with that, at least with the structure of our business. So one of my biggest challenges in the early days was, all right, how do I get clients? We've got a great system. It works. But how do you get the word out without a massive investment? Same kind of approach or problem, I guess our clients had.
So once I just kind of a corner we turned in the early days or started to learn was content marketing. I probably would have called it something different back then, but starting to educate. And we still today. That's one of the reasons I love doing this podcast, which we're now in our sixth year. I think we've been doing this a long time, and I love to do it because it's a chance to teach. Right. It's not always me. It's often our guests that are doing the teaching. But I'm part of it, right? I'd love that. But also our general marketing, the content we put out there, whether it's a blog or an email, campaign or series, right. Or podcast or videos that we put out on YouTube, it's really about teaching others. And that education was a corner early on that helped us to get a following. Right. Didn't have to be massive in order to get enough people to reach out.
And still to this day, works really well for our business. It's about educating others, giving them a peek behind the tent of how to do this. And some, if they want to run off and do it themselves, great, good luck. And you can, you know, hopefully we teach you enough that you'll be successful at it. We'll talk more about my book. That's part of the goal of the book. But if you need help, then we're here to be able to help as well.
Tate Walkush [00:12:55]:
We're going to bring it back now, your first major success story and how did it shape your business?
Jon LaClare [00:13:04]:
So very quickly after the oxclean business was sold, I want to say within a month, I had a meeting with a gentleman that became a client for many years after that. Ken Theiss was his name. He owned a company called Sonic Scrubber. This is again now 18 years ago. It's for those of you who haven't heard of it in our audience that are listening. Right. It was like essentially a household cleaner. It's like a Sonicare toothbrush. So it vibrates very quickly. Cleaning grout lines, etc. I still use mine today. Love it. It's a great product. Great team that we were able to work with. They went on to sell over 10 million units. And we were lucky enough to be involved at the very beginning. We helped them to. They were in a little bit of retail kind of just starting.
We got them at the time onto TV and that helped to really expand their retail presence and became this massive success. And it was pivotal, pivotal, pivotal for our business in one, because any success is a good thing to now speak of to others as you just kind of grow from the experience and meet a lot of people through it. But maybe most importantly is the team themselves. So Ken and his partner Aaron at the time, Ken especially had been an entrepreneur for many years. I don't remember his age at the time, but he'd been doing this for decades. Right. And I was new at being an entrepreneur. I learned so much at his feet. Right. So I taught a lot because I knew the TV side that he didn't know. But he knows so much more beyond that of running a business. And he became a real mentor for me in the early days. So having that success and also such a great client to learn from. And I discovered that, you know, if you can realize you can really learn from anywhere. Like, he was easy with him. Right. But with others along the way, there's. Anybody can teach you. Right. So we learn from our clients all the time and hopefully we teach them as well. Right. It's this kind of like symbiotic relationship that really helps us to grow together.
Tate Walkush [00:14:51]:
That's what I love about this job too. It's just we're constantly learning. You're constantly on your toes. You're constantly thinking. That's one of my favorite things about marketing is you really have to stay on top of everything. And in today's world, it's hard to get noticed. So could you share an unexpected way one of your videos has gone viral or exceeded your expectations?
Jon LaClare [00:15:17]:
Yeah. So when I think of viral videos, luckily we've had quite a few of them over the years, but the one that always comes to mind first was a real surprise to us, let's say. So it's a product called the Pony Up Daddy. I'm sure a lot of our viewers and listeners have heard of this if you've been around for a while. So this was. I don't remember how many years ago exactly, but several years ago. It's a saddle that moms or dads wear. We call Pony Up Daddy, but it's for moms or dads to wear for your little kid to ride on your back. When you're on your all fours running around, it kind of straps around you with Velcro. It's a saddle for them to sit on. At the time, I had small kids. I've got four kids. Three of them are in college now. So we don't do this anymore, of course. Right. We're way too big. They would kill me. But even at that day, it was hard to get on your knees and whatever, but lots of fun.
Do you need a saddle for that? No. Right. Like, we had plenty of fun with our kids riding around like a pony ride in our house before that, just like we did after we had the product. So it's not a necessary thing. To be honest, when I fielded the phone call the first. First time, I kind of questioned it, like, is this a product we want to work with? We'll see. The client was super smart, really sharp, a lot of fun. And it was a fun product if nothing else. Right. So like, we took it on and it became a big success. Ended up selling millions of dollars in revenue.
But part of the success was driven in the early days by videos that really went viral. It was one of the first digital marketing campaigns that we did. We kind of pivoted, not away from, but we added on digital to the TV program and they ended up on the Today show on the Ellen show, back when that was a thing and. And a lot of PR behind it because it was funny. Right. It's. It's not needed, but it's a cool product. It's designed well, attract, you know, it looks great. It's high quality. It work. It works when you get it home. It's not something you try once and throw away and a gag gift. There is a purpose behind it, but it's not needed. But it's a lot of fun. So we had a lot of fun producing the video series for them, but really seeing them go viral and grow. And it was successful in the paid campaign, but the virality of it really just skyrocketed their growth and it was a fun thing to see. One thing we learned from that, I would say is just incorporating fun doesn't have to be funny or humorous or whatever, but having fun visuals in your videos can make them more viral. Not everything's gonna go to the same extent they did and have tens or maybe even hundreds of millions of views on some of those videos by now, right. It's been years. But even getting more than you have, right? Adding some component of virality through making your videos, your content fun.
Tate Walkush [00:17:52]:
Probably one of the first videos that did go viral back in the day, which is so cool because it really exceeded your expectations. Sometimes those products that you don't think are going to do so well do amazing. And that's what's cool about this job. What is one common mistake that businesses make with video marketing?
Jon LaClare [00:18:11]:
Yeah. Giving up too early. It's a very common mistake. I'm better now than I used to be of communicating the entire process to make sure you think about this. Now we've got a program. We'll talk about the perfect launch system a little bit in the book as we go over that later on. But there. So there's a system that we use and we've been able to improve the success rate of new product launches over 10 times versus the normal average and frankly 10 times what it used to be when we were just on tv. There's a whole system that we use and it works, but it's still not perfect. Right? Of course there's any launch you've got, there's a lot that can go into it that can go wrong. Right. And it's risky. It's a risky business. You know, on average it's, they say 5%, I think industry wide of products that are launched or successful. I think back to my time with Kraft Foods, Nabisco, we wouldn't launch a lot of product.
I did new products, 100 calorie packs became a big success. But as a big company, it was so expensive we stayed away from the risk. So instead we launched flavors. Right? So I was there at the time. My good friend ran the Oreo brand and. And they launched Chocolate Cream Oreos. It was the first one back then. It was groundbreaking. Now you walk down the Oreo aisle and there's a hundred flavors, Right. In fact, I just saw a video the other night of like there's a failure museum in New York City and right at the entrance there's a bunch of packages of Oreos of All the ones that didn't work, right. So they've had, who knows, but hundreds probably of flavors over the years. But they launch things close in a lot of companies because it's lower risk. Launching a truly unique product has risk behind it. Now, again, it's usually 5% industry wide. We've been able to grow that to over 50% of brand new products. So 10 times. But there's still some risk involved. And I always get the question, like when we have a new client talking to us, okay, how do we make sure we're not in the, you know, the half that doesn't work, Right. The biggest and best answer to that is just going in prepared to be able to have enough Runway of testing.
So if you launch a campaign and you're thinking, okay, I've got enough money to launch this for a week or two weeks, right? And after that, if it doesn't work, I'm out. Well, it's not going to work, right? Very few are successful right away. Sometimes they are, but you've got to have enough Runway. We always say 90 days. And it's not that long, right? It's not years like it used to be sometimes for some products. But giving yourself 90 days and going through a systematized process to really test it has made all the difference. And that is really, frankly the difference in the successes or failures that we've had for the most part, is people give up too soon or as part of that, not having enough content. So you go, let me produce one video, one version of ad copy, one marketing channel, and one week and see how it works. You gotta give yourself variety. You need time, you need variety. So there's, there's points to it. It doesn't have to be crazy expensive. There's still ways to do it and keep your budgets down low. But giving yourself that time to be able to test, tweak and optimize is the best way to make sure that you are not in the failure side, right? To make sure your launch is successful.
Tate Walkush [00:21:11]:
The one word that comes to my mind is patience. You need to have patience, especially with video marketing and launching a new product. You just have to give yourself that time. We've said now a couple times. So it's been a few, few years since you started this business. How has it evolved since you started this in 2007?
Jon LaClare [00:21:33]:
You know, going back to that epiphany or whatever at night that I had, it's funny how a lot of it is the same, right? So the, the general, I call it the Science behind what we do today is very similar to what we did back then. You know, I learned a lot, and I'm so grateful for my time at Kraft Foods and frankly, you know, my business school experience and of course, oxiclean. I learned so much along the day. We still sort of. We use a lot of that in our. In our science and our systems. A perfect launch system will go over that, that works. And I'm so grateful for all that. But what has changed is kind of the. Maybe the marketing channels, which is probably the biggest part, right? In the early days, as I mentioned, we were 100% TV infomercials. I used to call my job. I was an infomercial producer. That's how I introduced myself. I haven't used those words for a long time to introduce what I do. And we still do them, right? Direct response tv, or infomercials, if you want to call them that.
They still work, right? And we have a campaign we're working on right now that's set to launch soon and another one that launched, I think a month ago or so. So they. They work well. But a lot of what we do is certainly digital that has transformed. Even when we do TV today, which is, you know, maybe 20% of our clients end up on TV, it's bigger budgets and it's only certain types of products that work. The other 80% are purely digital. Both of them work really well. But it's. It's really the kind of science of where do you send them? In the early days, I was just after the time when, if you've seen these old infomercials, this is way before you, but you've probably seen these on YouTube where send, check or money order in. They used to say at the end of the spot, like an address, you'd have to write down. And there was no TiVo even that's old, right? But there's no way to pause your tv. But people had to write, like, get a piece of paper, like scramble and write down an address to send a check to. Crazy. I was just after that, like, when I entered this industry. But we still had phone numbers, right? And they still exist, but a lot less today, into a call center. And it used to be like 80% of our orders or more would. Would go to that and maybe 20%. Everything's flipped, right? So we're definitely in a digital world today.
One of the biggest differences, I think, is, is it is how you interact with your customer. And part of it is the journey is a little bit longer. It used to be run a two minute spot on tv. You could do a two week test and you know if it's going to work or not because it had to work right away. They either bought or they didn't. Where now it's, it's about getting them to the website and starting the journey, retargeting to them, getting them on an email list even, but certainly retargeting on Facebook, Instagram, Google, other platforms to continue that conversation and continue the journey and really make a connection with your, with your customers as opposed to a single ad, get them to purchase right away. It's really a relationship and a little longer term build but still very profitable.
Tate Walkush [00:24:16]:
Let's touch on the journey part. What was. Could you actually share with us just a pivotal moment or a turning point in your business journey?
Jon LaClare [00:24:27]:
Yeah, I think of my first thought is to go to our team. So. Which you're a great part of. Right. We've got a small team here that is very efficient and we're able to actually do a lot for how big we are in terms of number of employees. And one of the reasons is the type of people we bring on board, including yourself. And it started with, I'm going to talk about Brad, who's behind the camera. He's going to blush but you can't see him because he's, he's off camera right now. But he was, I would say the first entrepreneurial partner employee. Right. That I brought on board. We had a couple of employees before that. I used to have a business partner. It was just the two of us. We kind of did everything back in the day and then we brought in a couple of junior level employees and they were just kind of traditional employees and they were good. But Brad, who's been with us for 15 years, something like that, he's nodding his head. So. Yeah, long time. Fifteen years. Holy cow.
Time flies. Uh, we're both getting old. Um, but he was the, the first of now several to come, including yourself, that I, I would say it's the type of person that joins us that makes the difference when I, I say entrepreneurial partner because we are really partners with our clients. In order to do that effectively, we need to be entrepreneurial now. You don't need to start a business on your side. Right. To actually, you know, quote unquote be a true entrepreneur. But it's the attitude, right. That we have when we work together with our clients, it's ownership of not just doing a service and getting paid a fee for what we do and sending Them on their way, but feeling ownership in their success makes all the difference. And I feel like the reason we're able to grow our business so much with a fairly limited staff and we have freelancers that help with some of the tasks outside of what we do, et cetera. But it's the type of team we have, being entrepreneurial, to join our clients, our partners on this entrepreneurial journey with them.
Tate Walkush [00:26:12]:
I would 100% agree with that. I do really enjoy that we feel like part of our clients team as well. Our clients are normally just a one or two person team. So to be able to help them on their journey I think is. It's really fun and creative. And how do you balance creativity with these data driven decision making strategies and marketing?
Jon LaClare [00:26:38]:
Yeah, great question. And before I answer that I want to go back a little bit because you talked about how some of our clients are, you know, one or two people, true entrepreneurs, launching a product many times for the first time, and they certainly appreciate it. Like you said, I would say, you know, the other half or whatever of our clients might be bigger companies that are many several hundred million dollars in revenue and some of them have hundreds of employees and it still works. I think the value of our team makes all the difference.
And it's great advice for any marketing agencies that might be listening to this or watching this as well, is having that entrepreneurial mindset, no matter how small or big your clients or your partners are, it really makes the team better, I think more effective and, and certainly do that. Now back to your question of kind of combining quantitative and qualitative data and creativity, whatever you want to call it, it's part of, it's part of what I love about our business, part of what I love about what I do. And you referenced me being an accountant before and it's, you know, funny to think that's a very quantitative role. Right. Not a lot of creativity in general. Certainly, you know, you can be. I don't want to refute accounts by. In fact, my daughter's applying right now to become an accountant in her same school I went to. Right. So it's a great journey, certainly support those that do. But what I love about what we do is it kind of combines the two. So I, when I went to undergrad, got my degree in accounting, I had to take a marketing class, right.
One on one or whatever it was. And I kind of went in there like, this is lame is what my thought was. Right. Like I just kind of thought of he'd look at like ads, you know, that's videos. And it's just, just creativity. And it didn't match my personality, I don't think when I ended up being in direct to consumer or direct response marketing, it's sometimes called. What I love about it is very quantitative and very creative. It's very unique. It's, it's, I think, important for us to. That's why, you know, getting the right people as a team that can kind of do both, it's a rare skill set, I think, but it makes a lot of fun. I feel like every day we use our entire brain, right? It's not, it's. It is numbers. We gotta. We run spreadsheets to figure out what exactly is working or measuring version versions of creative and ad copy and marketing channels against each other and trying to see what works. And we're doing a lot of split tests. We call. There's a lot of data behind it one day, right. Or maybe in the morning, in the afternoon, we're coming in back at our studio here and doing a video shoot and like trying to make a product look perfect on camera and really that creative side of it. So it's a lot of fun, I think. And I don't know if that answers perfectly your question, but it's really what I love about that combination approach of creativity and data. And for us, it makes all the difference, but it makes a lot of fun as well.
Tate Walkush [00:29:12]:
Yeah, you have to have both qualities. We have to be creative, but also quantitative. So what qualities do you believe are essential for a successful entrepreneur?
Jon LaClare [00:29:21]:
I like this question too. You know, we've worked with hundreds of entrepreneurs over the years because I consider myself an entrepreneur as well. But I've also interviewed a lot more in our podcast and I think a couple of attributes that I've seen in the most successful ones. One is humility. The other is passionate. I think humility is a great one to think about it. You gotta realize you can learn from others when you're an entrepreneur. I think in my mind you kind of have a screw loose. Right. Or certainly myself. Right. Like there's. You're not normal to be a successful entrepreneur, you know, however you want to describe it. I don't mean to say it's a negative thing. I love doing it. Right. But you're different. And I think sometimes it's easy to think you can do it all yourself because in the early days of launching most businesses, you kind of have to. You wear a lot of hats, but you gotta realize you don't do all of them extremely well. Nobody can, right? We can't do it all.
And so being able to learn from others eventually bring on a great team, right? To expand capabilities of what one of us could do on our own. But also in every situation, you do just learning from others, having that humility to network and find out others that have been maybe more successful in your field or might be further along you can learn from, or, you know, it might be vendors or suppliers or whatever it might be, but being open opportunities to learn, I call it kind of lifelong learn. As I mentioned in the beginning, most of the interviews and clients that I deal with, that describes them to a T, right? They're always looking to learn the next thing and master something, right? And really learn along the way and truly be humble with that. The other side I mentioned is passion. So, you know, I've discovered this in the interviews I've done in our podcast, for sure.
But also I love to read biographies, and a lot of entrepreneurs do. And you look back at Phil Knight from Nike or Elon Musk from everything he's done, or, you name it, Howard Schultz from Starbucks, there's a commonality. Even Steve Jobs, right? There's a commonality between them. There's early days of a lot of failure along the way, and it's hard. And frankly, even 18 years in, there's still a lot of failure, right, that you have to deal with on a daily basis or whatever. So having you have to have a passion for what you do and that when you've got that passion, you can be successful, right? That combination of passion and humility or the willingness to really learn from every situation, I think really makes all the difference. If there are a lot of great people out there that are going to have great careers without passion, maybe without the same level of humility, and that's great, but maybe pursue a different path. That's not. Not an entrepreneur. I think these are the two, the two key attributes I've seen in almost everyone.
Tate Walkush [00:32:02]:
Passion is huge. You got to have it to keep showing up to work each day and loving what you do. I bet our viewers want to know, and listeners, if you weren't running a marketing agency, what do you think you'd be doing?
Jon LaClare [00:32:17]:
It's funny, you know, I think back to my early careers. I worked, you know, a couple years at each place kind of thing along the way and, and moved on to the next thing. And now it's been 18 years here. It's, you know, I wish I could say it was half my life, but not quite. But a good chunk of my life, I've been doing this and honestly, I can't imagine doing anything else. I feel like I'm in the perfect situation for me. So I'll answer it in a slightly different way, if you don't mind, because I do get the question oftentimes of, you know, you have launched so many products over the years, had a lot of great successes with these clients. Have you ever launched anything on your own? And we do, we, we test things, right. So we have a product that we, we market right now called Brazilian Energy. And it's, it's been a lot of fun. I've got a lot of personal passion for it, but it's, it's secondary, right, to running campaigns for our clients. And really the reason we do that business is to test new things with our own money, our own time, our own efforts in new ways that are more risky before we test them with clients or before we implement them with clients along the way. And it's. So the answer the question, I guess, would I ever be an adventure?
Because it seems so similar. I do, right? We launch products every day. I can't do it though. Like, it's that the quantitative side of my brain on the financial side, on the data side of understanding numbers, making changes, it's there. On the engineering side, maybe I understand it. I don't know. It's not my strength. It's certainly not what I enjoy to do, like making tweaks to design products, like going back and forth with factory factories. I just, I don't like it. Right. I can't, I can't do it. So where as a kid I thought I was going to be an inventor, like it was, you know, one of 20 careers, we could have a whole other. In view of the crazy things I thought of along the way. Right. But one of them was to be an inventor. Like probably a lot of people I think, think that today I realize that's not me. I couldn't do that. But I'm adjacent to it and the path I have along the way of marketing others inventions, these other great products where they've done all that engineering, they found the factory, they've got the inventory, where it's on its way. That's what I love to do. And it's a lot of fun.
Tate Walkush [00:34:20]:
I would agree with that. Not me. I would not be an inventor. That's why I love to be the creative project manager here on the other side of things, helping people get to the end. You know, this is obviously marketing is a very competitive market. How do you differentiate harvest growth from everybody else in the market?
Jon LaClare [00:34:44]:
Yeah, good question. And there are literally, I should look it up at some point. I don't even know how to answer this question of how many agencies there are that do quote unquote, Facebook marketing or social media marketing. I mean, there's got to be tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, especially across the world that we ultimately compete against. It's just. It's a ton, right? It's like a sea of agencies because it's easy to start, right? Maybe it's not easy to be good, but anybody can put up a website and work out of their parents basement and become a Facebook agency tomorrow, right? Video marketing agencies or video producers, not quite the same number, but there's a lot of them, right? Like you graduate film school, you want to get into movies, kind of a normal path.
And you realize maybe it's easier to get into advertising. So there's a lot that end up that road and. Or freelancers or whatever. But. So there's a lot of those out there as well. It's not nearly as many, but there's. It's like again, this sea. I feel like we're in a competitive space that is much smaller. It's kind of a combination of the two. So we certainly do both, right? We do social media and TV advertising as well, but direct response media, buying, campaign management. We of course do video production here in the studio and elsewhere as well. But it's the unique combination of the two. There are very few agencies, relatively speaking, that really focus on both. A lot of Facebook agencies will say they do video, but when you peek behind the curtain, they're using freelancers from overseas to do simple ads or whatever. And you can kind of tell by the videos they do. Or maybe they hire, if they're more expensive, they hire other agencies they partner with, et cetera. But not to be under the same roof. And I think that is one element that's very different that helps us to compete, let's say.
Because I see value in that. Like, there's a big difference. I think of when our media buyer can walk a couple offices down and talk to you, right? Our creative project manager or Brad, our video director and say, hey, this type of video is working well. How do we get more of those? This one's not. Let's turn that off. Let's learn from that and have those conversations back and forth, which we're actually like physically in the same office as opposed to like emailing or zoom, calling somebody overseas or you know, some other agency that doesn't have the same. Even if they're good. Right. They're not a part of the company. They don't have that shared vision or shared goals. That's one element. The other I'd add to that is the experience in launching products is so unique. Again, we have, when we talk to potential clients, they share others that they might be talking with and kind of what they've said sometimes or whatever, and anyone wants to do it. It's fun. Right. But not very many have the experience of doing certainly hundreds. Right. Everyone's launched a product or two. If you're in the agency world or whatever most agencies focus on, let's get a campaign that's either moderately successful or very successful and try to make it better. Right.
And that's fun. It's, let's say, easier, Right. Not to say what they do isn't important and valuable because there's a lot of work to do there. But getting it from zero or from low levels to grow is kind of a harder battle, I would say. It's riskier. And it's different how you do it as well. And it's helped us along the way. So half our clients are not launching something brand new anymore. They're existing businesses, and some of them are very big. But having that same understanding of doing these launches, of having to be scrappy in everything we do, we've learned so much, I think. And that makes all the difference in standing out against, quote, unquote, the competition. Right. Other. There's a lot of other good agencies, a lot of friends that, that run these agencies, and they're great at what they do, but they're different. And I think it's. That's. That's where we stand out, is those two ways.
Tate Walkush [00:38:15]:
That's incredible. I think, as just a final question for our interview, you know, you just recently published a new book called the Perfect Launch System, and I'd love to just close out this podcast. I. Tell us a little bit more about the book. What is it about? How did you come up with it? Anything you want to tell us about your book? I'm so excited.
Jon LaClare [00:38:38]:
Thanks. So it is brand new. So it's. It's been a lot of fun. It's taken me a long time. I started writing this, I think, six or seven years ago, and it's stopped for about six or seven years and then kind of re. Picked it up again, you know, a few months ago and, and finally finished it. And it's just, it's a passion project of mine. I did write a book years ago called Sell on TV that I think is still valuable, but it's a little dated, right? It's like I think 13 or 14 years old. Things have changed. So there's a lot more details in this. But also our system has evolved over the years and it, it's as you said, it's called the perfect launch system. Earlier I said that, you know, no launch is perfect and there's. But there can be a perfect system to follow, right? You know, sometimes a product is just not going to sell, right. And it. But if you use the right system, you're going to give yourself the best chance at succeeding.
So in this book, obviously if you read it, you can learn more about it, but I'll share a couple of nuggets from it. So one is I go into a full chapter on the behind the scenes of the Oxiclean story. I've shared that in this podcast as well. We go into a little bit more detail in the book. It's a question I get all the time. It was such a lucky opportunity for me to be there, right? So I learned so much and yes, I learned a lot that I can apply to others and it's a great, valuable experience to our clients. But man, it was a lucky experience for me to be there with the Apple family that ran the business with Billy Mays back in the day that used to run it or not run it. Sorry, it used to be a talent for the business and salt of the earth guy, right? So I learned so much from him. Just on, on how to be a. Not that I'm a pitch man, right? But how to find a good pitch man, right? Somebody have that same energy and passion that he has, but a lot of fun behind the scenes stories there that I'm again a big believer on using stories to grow your own business. So alongside that, there's a couple of dozen other shorter stories from other clients and podcast guests that I summarize in the book as well.
So key nuggets of okay, what do you learn from these? I think it's 24, 25, something like that. Behind the scenes stories of what are they doing that's making them successful that you as a reader can implement in your business today, whether you're just launching a brand new product or a new campaign, right. To really reinvigorate or grow your business. And the subtitle of the book is something like I should know off exactly what it is, but it's like the system to avoid costly mistakes and that's why I call it the perfect launch is we're trying to avoid mistakes, right? So these mistakes can be so costly. But if you implement a system that's been proven with now hundreds of product campaigns that we've done over the years, that's really proven, tried and true into your business, then you'll learn how to, if you make, if you get learnings, rather mistakes along the way, right? How do you learn from others mistakes? How do you learn to avoid the wrong system, the wrong approaches along the way? And then finally we get into the system itself. There's really three elements. Plan, produce and profit. So a lot of times clients will come to us or when they approach other agencies, you want to jump right into produce production, where the money is, right? For a lot of these creative agencies especially. But slow down, right? Just a little bit, get a plan in place before you do so. And I go into how to do market research. It doesn't have to be crazy expensive. How to do competitive analysis to really learn not only from potential buyers and market research, but from what your competitors are doing in their businesses as well. Not that we want to copy, but you want to learn from what's working, what's not, et cetera.
Getting that plan in place doesn't have to cost a lot of money. It doesn't have to take a lot of time, but it saves so much. This is really the avoiding costly mistakes part of the book is when you plan correctly, you can do that. And then how to take those learnings into produce or the production side of the business. So how to turn that into creative videos or images or copy and into your marketing campaigns in a way that is going to deliver growth to your business. And the final stage is profit. So as we dial things in during the produce phase, we're continuing to learn. So you don't learn everything in stage one, and then like just implement and then you're good to go. You can, even if you're profitable, you can always become more profitable. You can grow faster. You can, you know, generate more revenue for your business.
So in that production phase, we're dialing it in and I talk about how to do that. And then finally the third step is profit, right? So the profit stage of your business is, okay, now that I've got it working, how do I really escalate the growth through other marketing? You know, if it's working well in Facebook, adding on email marketing, add, you know, growing your retargeting, maybe adding TV on as a, as a secondary platform later on, but really growing your profits from there. So whatever stage our listeners or, you know, the readers of the book might be at, you could learn again. Whether you're brand new, just starting out with a brand new invention or an idea, or whether you've got a business that's 100 million and you want to grow it to 500 million, the journey is this, you know, similar, right? So it's learning this process or this system to launch a new campaign or new campaign system that's really going to grow your business profitably.
Tate Walkush [00:43:36]:
Jon, this was so much fun. I've been with you for a few years and a lot of the stuff I didn't even know, it was so exciting to have you on the other side of the mic. As Jon said, we have a passion for helping people succeed and we'd love to help you too. If you're an entrepreneur, business owner, or just someone with a big idea looking to grow, check out harvestgrowth.com to see how you can connect with us. Thanks for tuning in, we'll catch you next time.
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