How Bonsai Media Group Was Formed

Bonsai Media Group was created purely out of the drive our team has for risk takers and small to mid sized business owners with big dreams and huge passions. There's nothing more exciting than venturing off in to the unknown purely driven by the passion for what you do.

We live in Amercia and have the wonderful luxury of expressing ourselves in the form entrepreneurship. If you have the ambition and are crazy enough to make the plunge, you almost have an obligation to give it a shot given the constructs we live under totally support our ambitions.

Small to Mid sized businesses are underdogs...the odds are against them, however the internet has leveled the playing field.

At Bonsai Media Group our team's vision is to leverage emerging internet technology to help small to medium sized businesses succeed in these exponential times, and our mission is to use our knowledge of these resources and integrate them to level the playing field in this wild and vicious business jungle.


My Journey to Bonsai:

I took a position at Entercom radio for the number one Rock station in the country...KISW 99.9 The Rock. It was a very cool and exciting job. Entercom is a truly great company. They invest in thier people, and train them very well. I feel very thankful for working in that atmosphere. I also had the privelge to sit next to one of the greatest salesmen I've ever encountered. Jim Smalls. Jim is an incredibly successful guy and would close huge massive deals, but he would get all giddy when he would work really hard connecting the dots on the little deals. He wasn't a radio salesmen he was a compelling ideas salesman. Ideas that helped business increase brand awareness, and drive retail traffic.

As a new Account Executive I had to hit the phones. Most of the time I was meeting with small to mid sized businesses. I would meet with them and figure out their aches and pains, ambitions and goals, etc. What I found often times was they were so busy trying to live and run their business they had no time catch up with the world around them. Or they were so caught up in older styles of marketing and advertising because that was what was familiar. Plus many were overwhelmed by the internet not having grown up with it the same way younger generations have.

It was against my integrity to sell $3500 monthly radio schedules when they had a horrible website, or no website, in coordination with no search engine optimization tactics it so search engines could file it appropriately so their sites could be found...then I started to find myself educating these business owners and putting these seemingly abstract ideas in to language they could comprehend, and empowering them with the knowledge of why these small investments in their infrastructure were so important.

Months prior to my renegade journey I had the opportunity to pitch Miller/Coors on some plans for the summer. Before my pitch I stated "I had over 758 friends on facebook, and that my away message said I was chillen with Coors." I did my pitch and then my colleagues went. The end of the meeting turned directly to a conversation about facebook...it blew my mind how little many of the people in the room knew about facebook and the culture inside of it. I had been living inside of it since its birth.

The minute I returned to the office everyone had a facebook. I mean everyone. The D.J.'s, my managers, all the sales people. You had to have one all of a sudden.

Social Media Marketing simultaneously became the hottest buzz word that existed, and I dove in hard. I couldn't believe all these "experts" emerging in this growing industry. While in college my friend Jason Labaw and I ran an entire business for years off of social media platforms. We were doing social media marketing before it had a name.

Pretty soon I was up all night lost in books, blogs, magazines, and every website known to man, hardly sleeping...waking up everyday ready for more and more.

Incredibly my cubicle on "easy street" was right down the road from Josh Dirks. Josh Dirks is one of those few individuals who speaks fluent "nerd" and fluent "normal person." That's out of his own mouth and that couldn't be more true. Great leader and brilliant dot connector. He mentored me, and gave me resources and so many words of wisdom that I will be paying forward for the rest of my life.

Anywho...Josh entertains advertising firms, marketing big wigs, media buyers and the like, for his digital luncheons once a month at the station covering a variety of topics. One day he had some SEO experts come in and speak with us. I begged him to let me be in the room. Most of what they said I already knew, but I was curious and amazed how uninformed the visitors in the room were, again asking really basic questions about social media and Search Engine Marketing...things I felt irresponsible of them not to know.

A realization occurred at that point. This is serious. Small and Mid sized businesses don't get this and even large massive companies don't get this. We're at the beginning of a massive brand renaissance.

After the meeting I watched this video.

My brain popped afterwords. It actually made a sound. Ping!

I thought to myself you've got Social Media Marketing houses, Creative houses, Web dev...inside of which there is front and back end, Media buyer houses, SEO companies, and SEM shops...the list goes on they're all speaking different languages with different theories of how to do business and market, and hardly coordinating effectively.

On top of it you have people at the top of these places so arrogant to think they are untouchable. Yikes!

It's never been easier to start a company and take over an industry using the internet and leveraging Search Engine Marketing, especially Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing and a sprinkle some traditional media in there. Or if you're an existing organization struggling...these things are game changers...or even more, if you're at the top already, you could leave everyone in the dust. Literally in the dust...Poof....Gone!

While tweeting with Jason Labaw @caffeinateSEO my old business partner in college we were going back and forth about these creative and affordable ad campaigns to shoot the under dogs to the tops of their industries. Both of us being serial entrepreneurs could talk on these topics for hours but we came back to a theme with our dad's businesses. We were legitimately concerned about our parent's businesses. We decided to take our knowledge and implement it in their companies and take them to the next level to put them so far ahead they will never be caught. So we slowly implemented our strategies and just like we knew their businesses were taking off.

What makes Jason unique is he has a marketing degree, a web development degree, and 5 years experience in Search Engine Marketing. He could speak all the languages. I knew sales and social media, and so it was only natural we work together.

We met at Tullys on Capital Hill and we threw out an idea of a company purely based around helping small to mid sized businesses soar in this new world creating highly effective affordable marketing campaigns.

Since then we've have 8 clients and are building our team daily.

We have a great service, and I'm excited to share more about what we do exactly and how it helps businesses soar.

Stay tuned for more.

Gus Zadra
President
Bonsai Media Group