Zebras that Dazzle: Being a digital marketing Zebra with Justin Belleme

Hi everyone, this is Linzi Fidelin, coming to you with another inspiring Zebra that Dazzles!

This month I spoke to Justin Belleme, who is the founder and Director of Strategy at JB Media Group, a digital marketing agency that is a partner of Zebras Unite Co-op. I had so much fun learning about the highs and lows of being a digital marketing Zebra, thanks to Justin’s honest accounts (as he says, he is an ‘open book’!) and insightful learnings that he has gained over the years of running his agency.

Join us as we hear all about how Justin learnt to stay the course when things were not going as planned, and what being a Zebra digital marketing agency means in practice. If you own your own business — this one’s for you!

Hey Justin! Tell us about your journey to becoming a Zebra.

Hey Linzi, sure. So I started my career as a freelancer doing digital marketing work, and fairly quickly could not keep up with the demand. This led to me creating my own agency in 2010, which started with work that was rooted in my local community, and centered around tourism and hospitality. Over time we grew into a larger team with our own office space and a broader client base, and before we knew it we were landing bigger clients as well.

However, it was at this point that we started experiencing ‘values misalignment’ with some of our newer clients. It was a surprise to me, because to be honest I had been too busy growing my businesses and scaling my team to realize that establishing and documenting core values can help with direction and alignment. As a team we had shared a vision and a focus on our community, and I had assumed that would be enough.

It was clear that we needed a strategy to make sure our internal values translate through to the work we were doing and the clients that we were attracting. At around the same time I heard about B Corps and other versions of sustainable business through a lecture and TEDx Talk by Kevin Trapani, and I realized that I wanted our agency to be the marketing version of that.

We started looking for more values aligned customers, and a highlight of our early progress was when we landed the contract to provide all the marketing for SOCAP. This is where I first met Astrid Scholz and learned about Zebras Unite.

When the pandemic hit, and SOCAP had to cancel their conferences, we lost the contract and decided to run our own online conference called Shift, for and by the community. We designed and curated the content to be like a learning lab; we had all sorts of content on innovating businesses, impact investing and more, and Zebras Unite was one of our top 3 partners for the conference. The following year we became a partner of Zebras Unite Co-op, and the rest is history!

I love hearing about that transition to becoming more values aligned. What were the specific things that you changed in order to become a Zebra company?

This is something that is always evolving. Back at the time when I realized we had the values misalignment with some of our clients, we made a concerted effort to formulate our own values and to use them for hiring and for vetting clients. We hired a consultant who was heavily influenced by the Indigenous culture of his family, and he helped us create values that were centered around long-term orientation and sustainability. Over time, we worked more on those values and edited them for clarity, but this was really the starting point.

As we brought new clients through the door, rather than take a hardline stance on the ethics of certain platforms or channels, instead we decided to work with our clients to transition to marketing approaches that were most respectful of their users and audiences. We do also have some lines we won’t cross, and we regularly hold space internally to discuss ethical marketing approaches, and have published on the subject to share what we’re learning with our clients as well.

But as I said, the work to be an ethical, Zebra-influenced digital marketing company is always evolving. New platforms and marketing channels are emerging, new information on the mental health impacts of certain platforms and technology is being shared, and it’s important that we move with this new information and remain flexible in our approach.

That sounds like there were a lot of moving pieces involved. What are the main challenges of being a digital marketing Zebra?

Well, it tends to be the case that the industries that have the most surplus to spend on marketing are the most extractive. The emerging business models in the social impact sector that we seek to work with usually have smaller budgets. They are often cutting edge, just figuring things out, and not profitable yet. This results in smaller margins for us.

When you match this with the fact that we have strong values about not overworking our team, paying a good wage and not being extractive ourselves; you end up with a tricky situation where it’s hard to be highly profitable.

The truth is, many members of our team could get higher wages elsewhere. If they went to bigger agencies that take on clients in any industry without considering company culture or values, and are willing to put up with the most common cultural standard in our industry which is to extract as much labor as possible before the person burns out, and then re-fill that seat with a new body. Luckily, the people working with me tend to be happy and excited about the kind of work that they are doing, the values that we carry and the team atmosphere, but of course there are times when someone simply needs more money and they move on.

This is a dilemma that we have been facing for a long time. In our 12 years we have made great strides, but I’m not going to lie, being a Zebra company is tough. We have been considering moving to an employee-owned cooperative model in order to create more transparency and create a structure whereby the value that I receive is the same as the rest of the team. Apart from anything else, I’d like our business to be owned by the whole team, not just one white male.

What a journey. What has figuring all this out taught you about yourself over the years?

One of the biggest lessons I have learned is how to regulate my own emotions when things go up and down in the business. Part of my programming from childhood was to fear business failure because it happened in my own family. I guess as a result of this my emotions used to go up and down to a huge extent depending on how the business was doing. I had to unravel those deep-seated patterns, and work on creating a sense of peace and calm within myself regardless of how things were going at work out. I think this is something every entrepreneur struggles with to a certain degree.

Now, I don’t have as high of highs or as low as lows. When I sense that something is off, I try to maintain a focus on the long term vision and strategy, rather than quickly trying to fix the problem with a new product, project, or spin off venture. I’m learning to trust myself and stay the course, and it’s paying off.

That’s a big one. I’ve also been guilty of pivoting too quickly when something wasn’t working, and I agree it takes a great deal of self confidence to manage that.

What are you working on right now?

It might seem like a bit of a departure from my regular work, but alongside the digital marketing work I’m also looking at regenerative business models and unlocking community capital to help solve some major challenges here in our local community, which I also think could scale to other similar communities and cities across the country. Our business owns a couple of other businesses, and I’m leaning into how I can leverage the synergy between my companies to create greater value for our local community and to support the Black, Indigenous, and other non-Black people of color communities who have been systematically removed, displaced, and under supported for generations in our area and beyond. I want to pilot some new ideas and models in our local community, and am looking into crowdfunding as part of this process.

Some of the organizations that are really inspiring me in this space are;

• Small Change.co, who are working intersection of sustainable real estate development and historically under funded identities, specifically for BIPOC and women led projects and
• The 10K Project who are using group economics to invest in Black-owned businesses. I previously hosted a panel discussion with Nathan Schneider and Cheree Warrick, a co-founder of the 10K project and I was so inspired by their work.

Thank you Justin for your time today and I can’t wait to hear more about this work soon. How can I stay up to date?

Thanks Linzi! You can keep updated by following me on LinkedIn, checking out our website or following us on Twitter.