August 30, 2018

Meet Jon Boles of Avintiv Media in Scottsdale

Local Stories

Today we’d like to introduce you to Jon Boles.

Jon, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
My entrepreneur story started when I was 21 years old and moved from a small town in Wisconsin to downtown Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life but I knew that I wanted to be self-employed and be passionate about my work. Getting mixed up with the wrong crowd in high school, I took two years off of college. I had to beg my dad to borrow 3 months of rent money to move to Milwaukee, WI because the city we lived in was going nowhere. Nothing but trouble. I didn’t have a pot to piss in from 20-21 years old.

I move to Milwaukee, WI and get a job as a barback in one of the new popular bars. Yes, I was cleaning bar tops, floors, toilets, puke, etc. I was that guy. I soon started meeting everyone in the city and the bar owners started to realize that I knew the majority of the people that were frequenting the bar. The offered me a promotion to test out being a promoter on a Wednesday night, calling it Ladies Night – Hosted by Jon Boles. It started off rocky as with any business venture but then it exploded. Within 6 months, I was hosting the hottest nightlife parties at 5-6 of the most popular nightclubs for a couple of years.

I started to hate my face and name is all of the posters and marketing materials as I didn’t have much privacy in that city. I started my first company, Promo MKE, to honestly hide behind a brand. The company offered nightlife event planning and we had a team of 30-40 interns marketing for us within the first year. We had accounts with 8-10 bars and nightclubs that we had resident parties at. The company became very successful in its first year and I ran it for about 4 years until the nightlife scene just tired me out. You can only do that life for so long. I stopped partying or drinking much 2 years in and it was still exhausting.

I did a business plan in college in 2012 and my college professor introduced me to his business partner, a PHD student at University Milwaukee. We met about a crazy idea that was on a piece of paper. It was just the thing that I was looking for. Fast forward 1-1.5 years later and we had a fully operational mobile point of sales system. You could go to any bar, restaurant, or coffee shop on our system, view their menu on your mobile phone and once you press order, it pays for your order. No credit card or wallet needed. This was back in 2013 before there was Apple pay or people trusting to put their credit card in the cloud let alone their phone.

We grew the company and were going for a pretty significant series A round of funding. Without getting into too much detail or listing names, myself and a couple of others found traps in our contracts and ended up getting really screwed over on the deal. I worked 100 hours per week for the company, which I owned equity in, gave up a $250,000 salary business I had and sunk everything into this company. I was heartbroken and left lost.

My mindset has always been to get back on the horse and never stay in the dumps. I got back into what I knew – marketing and consulting for bars, restaurants, and nightclubs. I didn’t want to be fully on the promotions side of things because these places needed so much more than that. I launched my third company, Boles Consulting Group, and I started to consult for a decent amount of companies in Milwaukee, WI. I would be interem owner and COO for a number of months while we rebuilt the entire business inside and out. Changed decor, food menu, drink menu, fired staff, hired staff, new website, new branding, new marketing – basically a full overhaul. The company did very successful and let me to my 4th venture.

I got brought on as a consultant to a 3-story bar and restaurant in downtown Milwaukee worth a little over $2 million. The business wasn’t doing well at all and needed help big time as there was a lot of money invested into it. I ended taking equity on top of a salary for consulting and marketing. We got the business booming again, was on the news and in the paper. It was one of the hottest spots around after my partner and I turned it around. Without going into too much detail, the partners and I decided to go separate ways as we had different points of views.

After having two back to back bad experiences in Milwaukee with partners, I knew that I wanted to move and start something new. I wanted to live in Scottsdale or Los Angeles when my new venture started doing better.

I wrote about 4 or 5 different business plans in the fitness industry, which was a passion of mine. My next company, Modus Apparel, came to me over years of built up passion and also frustration with the clothing I had been investing in for years. Nothing every fit right or they would get destroyed in the wash. I kept having dreams about some new vision and huge project I was about to launch. One day at the gym, it hit me. One of my tank tops ripped and I said, “ENOUGH, I am going to start one of the best activewear brands in the industry.” We did just that. I launched Modus Apparel in March 2015 and it soon scaled to be one of the top activewear brands of its time. We soon got passed by a lot of the top competitors that have been doing it for years longer but we definitely grew to be a multiple 6 figure company within its first year of business.

I will say, Modus Apparel and clothing in itself, is one of the hardest and most manual intense business. I had no idea how much it would take to not only grow but keep the business going and being profitable. Over its 3 years, we had over 100 influencers and ambassadors pushing the brand, NFL athletes, NBA stars, celebrities, and many other people. We created an amazing culture and family with our customers.

In-between Modus and the next company I’ll talk about, I had another company, The Standard Private Label, that handled all of the designs, manufacturing, and distribution for other apparel companies. We would help customers build apparel companies from the ground up. I leverage my experience and connections with Modus Apparel to have another company become profitable off of it.

After 2 years in business with Modus Apparel, I realized it was going to be extremely hard and nearly impossible to have this company grow to fit my ideal vision and lifestyle. People kept contacting us asking who did our website, social media, facebook ads, etc. I didn’t think anything of it until the 10th or 11th person asked and a lightbulb went off. I asked myself if there was a need in the marketplace for a marketing agency that can assist with all of this.

I launched Avintiv Media in April 2017. Avintiv Media is a boutique digital marketing agency that grows its clients through its award winning lead generation, web design, and digital marketing services. Trusted by prestigious brands like Ferrari, Maserati, and Lamborghini, Avintiv Media goes the extra mile to ensure our clients are always growing. Within its first 8 months in business, we scaled over 340%. In 2018, we have already tripled what we did in 2017 and its August.

Avintiv Media is a team of digital storytellers. We’re made up of fellow entrepreneurs and visionaries who have over two decades of experience building and growing businesses. Passion and impact is the fuel that keeps our team’s fire running into the wee hours of the night. Our team is driven by seeing life again in our client’s faces. The greatest moment is when a client shows up the happiest we’ve ever seen them and they share how we’ve changed their life forever. Avintiv Media doesn’t sell services and we don’t have employees. We are family from every aspect and we take care of our own.

I soon realized that my passion isn’t from growing my own products or businesses, it’s actually helping other entrepreneurs grow their brands. Nothing beats a client walking into our office crying and telling us how we’ve changed their life. So many entrepreneurs are stressed, barely see their kids, estranged from their significant other, and some on the verge of a breakup or divorce. This life isn’t easy at all. When clients work with us, we take the heavy lifting and stress off of their plate. Everything I’ve done in life that’s made me happy and proud has involved creating something that didn’t exist or helping other entrepreneur’s.

I ended up selling Modus Apparel to an investment firm on the East Coast early May 2018. It was my baby but I just didn’t have the time to focus on it anymore with Avintiv Media growing as fast as it was.

Has it been a smooth road?
Has most definitely not been an easy road at all. There are a lot to list over the past almost decade being an entrepreneur. I’ll share this experience.

When I first launched Modus Apparel, I just invested the majority of my life savings into a new condo and then I put the remaining savings into Modus Apparel. Since we had to run a very lean bootstrapped business, we were able to do our own fulfillment at a local screen printing shop. That warehouse didn’t have any ventilation, the paint fumes and toxins were very apparent when being in there for more than two minutes. After being there for about 30 days, I was packing up orders one night (remind you it was winter and -10 degrees outside so I was wearing a full snowsuit to stay warm) and I started to cough up blood and started seeing stars. I got so sick working out of that shop that I was almost hospitalized.

Another experience: Two days before we launched Modus Apparel, I received a cease and desist letter from a Venture Capitalist backed clothing company out of Texas, saying that he’d be forced to sue me if I launched Modus Apparel with its current branding and logo. We had our entire first round of inventory with that logo so I was in a very difficult spot and didn’t have the money to start over. All of my life savings was about to be thrown down the drain. I remained calm and humbly talked to him for a couple of days. He was kind enough to let us launch our brand and sell off the current inventory but change the logos and branding immediately. We have remained in touch ever since then and is actually a great guy with one of the top apparel companies in the market now.

Two years go by and here’s another experience. We got a cease and desist letter from a billion dollar clothing company suing us for a very large amount of money (7 figures) for trademark infringement. I thought, “here we go again.” The only difference was I actually wear a ton of this companies clothes so it hurt even worse. In my eyes, our logo was very different but this company has a lot of money behind them so I remained calm and played ball with them. After 3-4 months of going back and forth with our lawyers, they were kind enough to drop the case if we just added the letters Modus Apparel underneath the logo. My lawyer said that they could have squashed us like a bug in legal fees and he’s never seen a large company like this back off.

Needless to say, that was 3 experiences with just one of my companies.

We’d love to hear more about your business.
Avintiv Media is a boutique digital marketing agency that grows its clients through its award winning lead generation, web design, and digital marketing services. Trusted by prestigious brands like Ferrari, Maserati, and Lamborghini, Avintiv Media goes the extra mile to ensure our clients are always growing.

At Avintiv Media, our mission is quite simple: to give our clients their life back which will allow them to live their ideal life and focus on what matters in the business. Avintiv Media doesn’t sell services. People own businesses, no matter the size of the organization. People make decisions based off happiness, life, emotion, and so many other factors. Our client’s businesses grow tremendously when we take the pressure off their plate, help them create their ideal vision and assist in making it come to life. Our individual services that we offer are simply tools that contribute to their end goals.

We specialize in web design & development, branding, SEO, Facebook Advertising, and digital marketing. We separate ourselves in the marketplace by how we operate our company. We aren’t a typical marketing agency. We spend 2-3x the amount of upfront time with potential clients in a discovery process. Avintiv Media only takes on very select clients as we want to make sure this will be the right fit if we’ll be working with each other for years. This discovery process also shows people that we truly care about them and their business. The other factor is that every service we offer is built from scratch and developed entirely around that client’s business and needs. A lot of other agencies use templates or cookie cutter techniques. Not all of them but some do. Our process for how we do each service is by far once one of the best I’ve seen for what it does for a client or the entrepreneur on the other end. Every employee we have has been an entrepreneur or understands how an “actual business” runs and operates. When you work with us, we get it. We understand not only marketing but how to grow a business from every angle. Most boutique agencies have never owned multiple companies or have been a consultant for over 6 years. By no means do we know everything but we’re fully transparent about what we don’t know so the client doesn’t get taken advantage of.

I’m most proud of Avintiv Media staying true to who we are and why we started the company. Usually after a lot of growth, companies change their mission and it goes in a different direction. We not only have stayed the same course but we’ve refined it to help more people.

I’m also pretty proud of the 8 awards that we won in the past year. That’s pretty cool:
– Best Advertising Agency: Boutique 2018 by AZ Foothills
– Best Graphic Design 2018 by AZ Foothills
– Top Design Firm in Phoenix 2018 by Clutch Co.
– Top Web Design Firm in United States 2018 by Clutch Co.
– Top Web Designer in Phoenix 2017 by Clutch Co.
– Top Social Media Firm in Phoenix 2017 by Clutch Co.
– Top Digital Marketing Agency in Phoenix 2017 by Up City
– Top 3 Web Designers in Tempe by 3 Best Rated

Is our city a good place to do what you do?
Let’s just say, I wish I would have grown up in Arizona and started entrepreneurship here. Residents of Arizona have no idea how good they have it. When I started entrepreneurship back in Wisconsin, I was made fun of, called a loser, a fraud, a fake, a failure, etc. I was pointed at and ridiculed for not staying in the “box.”

Arizona has so many amazing opportunities, the schooling system is better, and the network is amazing out here. I highly recommend businesses or entrepreneurs to move to Arizona.

Contact Info:

Website: www.avintivmedia.com
Email: info@avintivmedia.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/avintivmedia/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AvintivMedia/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Avintivmedia
Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/avintiv-media-scottsdale

Image Credit:
Scottsdale Health Pictures – James Patrick

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