Jeff Sexton

Who I Can Help:

As my opening blurb says, I specialize in helping companies that FIX $5 haircuts. So if you’re tired of getting beat up by low priced competition and would like to de-commodify your product or service, then you’re my kind of client. I don’t want to just bring you more customers — I want to bring you more customers willing to pay a premium for your authentic, high-quality, first-rate goods and services. Because I think that improving your profit margin is at least as important as improving your top-line revenue. If you truly are better at what you do than the competition, and if customers only knew what you knew about your business they’d all buy from you, then I can help.

Who Is Not a Good Fit:

My two favorite branding lines/slogans are from Heckler & Koch and Ronseal. H&K’s slogan is “In a world of compromise, some don’t.” Ronseal’s slogan is “Does exactly what it says on the tin.” If you don’t get those slogans and why they’re awesome, or if your business is the opposite of the kind of business described in the previous paragraph, then I’m probably not the ad guy for you.

What I Do For Clients:

In a word: “decommodification.” I take businesses that don’t have enough brand power to create demand from customers willing to pay premium pricing and I fix that. I put your business in a category of one; if the customer wants awesome, you’re the only choice. This allows you to fatten your profit margins AND grow your top line revenue at the same time. I do this through a combination of business strategy, positioning, and kick-ass ad writing. I work with a team of fellow WOA Partners to take care of everything else, such as media buying, digital advertising, etc.

Success Stories:

James Sylvestre Enterprises (JSE) is a construction company in Southern Ontario, not far from Windsor, just across the river from Detroit. They build barns and pre-engineered steel buildings. And they are awesome, by which I mean that they are totally honest (a rare trait in construction) and absolutely committed to build quality and delivering their buildings on time and on budget. They were also quite successful and decades old before I began working with them. But despite all that they still got beat up on pricing when competing with the cheap-bid charlie competition. As the name implies, cheap bid charlie would bid low and hope to make up the money by charging the client extortionate fees for change orders. This was especially the case for wooden pole barns and it forced James Sylvestre Enterprises to lower their profit margins in order to compete against dishonest builders.

Through smart strategy and kick ass advertising we were able to change all that. Now farmers and business owners seek JSE out and hire them directly. Those clients don’t bother getting bids because they don’t want anyone else building their barn. Oh, yeah, also: margins have increased by 80-100% and top-line revenue has tripled. We’ve now begun concentrating on steel building revenue because JSE owns all of the premium barn building business in the area. The client gets to continue building barns and steel buildings the way he insists on building them — the right way — and he gets to make the kind of profit he deserves without having to get beat up by low-priced competition.

Interested? Here Are My Recommended Next Steps:

1. Go to my blog (jeffsextonwrites.com) and read a few of my posts. It’ll give you a sense of how I think about advertising and a better feel for whether we’d be a good fit to work together

2. E-mail me with a short introduction. Tell me a bit about yourself and why you’re interested in hiring a Wizard of Ads partner in general and why you’re interested in me in particular.

And that’s it. I’ll answer your e-mail and we’ll set up a time to talk. If things look good after an initial conversation, we can discuss terms and logistics and whatnot.