Joe Shelerud is the Co-founder and CEO of Ad Advance, a digital ad agency out in Minnesota specializing in Amazon advertising. Ad Advance has been helping e-commerce brands advertise on Amazon since 2017 and offers full-service PPC and DSP management in-house.
Every role Joe has ever played always comes back to the numbers and data piece – being able to track where things are going and then that continual progression that you can see through the numbers in the data.
In this episode, Joe shares his journey to agency co-founder and CEO, why he decided to partner up with his co-founder Matt to build Ad Advance, and the nuts and bolts of how they grew their agency.
This Cast Covers:
- Joe Shelerud introduces himself and talks about how Ad Advance started (01:21)
- How Joe started building a joke website as a 12-year-old to becoming a chemical engineer and eventually co-founding his agency (03:33)
- Trying out a lot of different business ideas (including a brewery kit that bombed) and finally having the Amazon piece stick (05:57)
- The challenges of starting an agency with no marketing or finance background (07:28)
- Meeting his co-founder Matt Wiklund and what he realized was missing from all his previous business ideas that didn’t lead to success (08:10)
- How they started a partnership and the conversations they went through before signing off on their agreement to become co-founders (09:32)
- Making sure both Joe and Matt were fully aligned in all of the things concerning the agency (11:39)
- Joey explains the slicing pie model which is all about slicing up the company based on formulaic contribution (12:21)
- Letting go of the ego is what makes Joe and Matt work well together (14:26)
- The first two to three years of Ad Advance were just focused on developing the tools that would allow the agency to scale what they were doing (17:11)
- Why Joe and Matt are dead-set on building Ad Advance as a big sustaining asset as of now (19:12)
- How the agency has historically grown – through word of mouth, inbound marketing, or outbound sales (21:27)
- Where Joe sees a lot more opportunities for growth and the priority and focuses on the agency moving forward (28:07)