Transcript of How Did Jeremy Jenson Turn STRUGGLE into LEGACY

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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another exciting episode of Mic Unplug. Today, we have an extraordinary guest who is the founder of Encore Search Partners, Houston's largest privately held executive search firm. Under his leadership, the company has been recognized as one of Houston's fastest 50... I'm sorry, has been recognized as Houston's fastest 50 companies for five consecutive years. There were a lot of Fs in there. Jeremy, that was trying to get out. But please join me Welcome. You're the innovative, the driven, the accomplished, the man who now has to go get new tail lights, Mr. Jeremy Jensen. Jeremy, how are you doing today, brother?

Excellent, man.

I'm doing well. Good morning. You got to tell me, bro. You just told me you had your tell stolen at 3:00 AM.

What freaking tail lights do you have that people just want to go get? Well, now I don't want to tell everybody because apparently there's a great black market for them. I've got two cars that I park in at 3:00 AM. Right in front of my house. The fancy car is in the garage, but I've got a BMW M8 Competition. I've got a Ford Raptor, and somebody just came and just gank the tail lights off the Ford Raptor at 3:00 AM.

We caught them on camera. But that's one of those things where we might just chalk it up to the game. Chalk it up to the game.

With my insurance background, I literally have 40 insurance agents in Houston right now that are just looking up to see if you're their client, so we have to be good.

Yeah. Man, so, Jeremy, very honored to have you on, man. It's not every day that we get to talk to one of the moguls in the executive search game, man. I would love for you to just share a little bit about your background before starting executive search partners.

What made Jeremy, Jeremy? I don't want to talk about the college dropout, but let's talk about the college dropout. Let's go deep into Jeremy Jensen. Yeah, man. There's probably a five-minute answer, and then there's a 55-minute answer. I'll give you the five-minute answer. Let's go. Born and raised in Keith, Texas, which is Southwest Houston, a very underprivileged, poor community. My mom had me at 16 years old. My dad left and abandoned my mom, my brother and I at a very young age. He left whenever I was eight years old. My mom had to work two jobs just to make ends meet, to live in an apartment complex in a decent area of town. That forced me to make friends really easily because we were constantly moving all the time. My brother didn't have the same skills. Instead of him developing friends easy, he became the kid that just sat by himself during lunch in the cafeteria or in the library, rather. I'm glad that it had that effect on me. But I played sports growing up, soccer in elementary school, football in middle school and high school. That taught me teamwork, competitive drive, coachability. I I was a standout, seventh grade, eighth grade, ninth grade, 10th grade.

Then, man, it had always just come naturally to me. Then by the time we got to 11th and 12th grade, when you actually had to put in the work and hustle and grind and then spend that time into the gym, other folks just started laughing me, man, and that was a big ego hit for me. I'm the guy where a lot of the stuff, it just comes natural. Then I haven't really learned until now that I'm a dad, a father of three kids myself, that component about focus, discipline, hard work. I recently went on a weight loss journey and lost 77 pounds over the last year. It's just like that take no shortcuts mentality, man. But I would say that it's like the reverse engineering and finding the cheat code in order to grow things is my superpower. That's a big reason The reason why I've got a 40-person direct-high recruiting firm here in Houston is instead of me rolling on my sleeves and doing a lot of the sweat equity myself, I did a good job of just delegating and elevating and focusing on business development, focusing on marketing. But To answer your question, grew up in a poor community, single mom, had a chip on my shoulder because all the other kids were getting nice new cars, nice new clothes.

Here I was wearing the Stefan Marbury Spaulding shoes.

I didn't have Jordans, bro.

I didn't have any of that Nike stuff. You had the $30 Stefan styrofoams, right? The Hakeem Olajuwans, if you remember those. We're about the same age. But it was tough, man. I think a lot of that, I wouldn't say insecurity or humility or whatever you want to call it, but that fueled my success because I really wanted people to be proud of me. I wanted them to know that I was successful. There's a lot of entrepreneurs that make their millions and they do a good job at hiding it. Well, I don't know if it was just poor Jeremy growing up and now he's successful, but I've got the Ferrari F8. I've got the M8 comp. I've got all of the shiny new objects and toys. I think that it's really driven by that wounded child that grew up in the apartment apartment complex in the nice neighborhood. You know what I'm saying? I probably need to work through that through therapy or something like that. But I'm just that one kid that was smart, and I used that intelligence and channeled it into starting my first company when I was 24, tweaking the business model at 26.

Then here we are, fast forward 14 years later, and we're number one in Houston. I love that. That's an amazing accomplishment, man. I want to unplug a couple of things that you just talked about in your opener. To make Unplug, we talk about your because, that thing that's deeper than your why. I could guess Jeremy's why. You talk about proving yourself. But your because is that internal thing that holds you accountable to doing whatever that standard or goal is every day. It changes over time. I'm sure your because when you were younger is not the same because that you have today. I'd love to talk just briefly about your because and how that transitioned. So young Jeremy, what was that because?

I think we heard a little bit of it. Then college Jeremy to entrepreneur Jeremy, how did your Because change for you? Yeah, really, I haven't even thought of those early days very much, to be quite honest. I've been hyper-focused on growing this business since 2010. As far as the Because back then, maybe I wanted respect and admiration from people who I respect and admire. I don't think that that's changed over the last 30 years. I think what has changed is the people who I respect and admire have changed. You know what I'm saying? When we're in high school, who do we respect and admire? The captain of the football team, the prom king, the head cheerleader. Maybe we wanted to vive for their attention. Vibe for their respect and want to be included in the cool crowd. Maybe we were willing to sacrifice our morals or our character, even sometimes, in order to get access to that room. I can say whenever I went through a divorce in 2019, the people who I respected and admired back then is very, very different from the people who I respect and admire now. I was idolizing the single dudes that were popping with the bottle girls at 3:00 AM.

I thought that that was the standard for what it was in order to be successful as a wealthy single man in the city of Houston. I tried to pursue that lifestyle and realized not only does this not make me happy, it leaves me empty. No fulfillment. It leaves me challenging my own self-worth and feel unfulfilled. It was counterproductive than just fucking sitting at the house watching Judge Judy at midnight on a Saturday night. I've found true love here recently in the last six months or so. It's a young lady that prioritizes health and fitness and nutrition and physical activity and traveling. She's really helped me reframe my mindset on what success looks like on us driving into the future. Yeah, man.

One of my good friends accountability partner, mentor, Carlyser Crumpler, he always asked me, Mick, is it about happiness or is it about joy and fulfillment? Because when you seek joy and fulfillment, what you realize is your true self. That's That's what I hear with Jeremy. It's like, throughout everything, it's like, what fulfills you? Sometimes you need to empty the cup to get filled again with something new. To me, that's what life and life journey is about, especially in the business side of things. When you're starting out and it's you and maybe one other person or you and a couple of people, or sometimes it's just you, that cup has to get filled, and then it changes, and that changes you as a human being, too. I say this all the time for entrepreneurs, especially those that are starting out, make sure you're willing to step into the game of entrepreneurship, not just dabble. It's different than being a side hustle. Side hustle is one thing, but when it's the main thing and you got to keep the main thing, the main thing, make sure you're really prepared for those lessons that you're going to learn.

To me, again, I go back to joy and fulfillment because if it was just about being happy, I probably would have never lasted as an entrepreneur because happiness lasts until you got to make your first payroll.

It's like, Oh, crap. What's that? What's funny is us as entrepreneurs, and I went to a lunch in one time that was facilitated by a gentleman named Cameron Harold, who's the founder of the COO Alliance. Very successful entrepreneur. But he showed these 13 characteristics, and he went through them in the slide, and he goes, What are these the characteristics and then everyone said, Oh, an entrepreneur. Then it went to the next slide and it said, No, a sociopath. For us as entrepreneurs, we have to be wired differently in order to pursue the that direction in our careers. But one of the things that I found is that happiness and success is a moving target, man. Where it's like, when I started, it was like, man, if only I could make $250,000 a year. Then I made $250, and then all of a sudden it was like, well, now I got to make 500. Then I had to make a million. Then when I was making a million dollars a year, it was like, oh, now I got to have 20 employees. I got to have 30, 40 employees. Now you fast forward 15 years and it's like, we're doing a million dollars a month in revenue, and I've got my team sending out six-figure invoices, and it really doesn't bring me a tremendous amount of joy or happiness because it's almost the status quo now.

I would say I had way more fun and it was a lot happier those early years when that $20,000 direct deposit from the client hit the bank account and it fucking meant something, man. I think we rob ourselves of that joy whenever we're super early career because we're always hustling and grinding, wanting more. I want to pivot and give you two experience shares from a couple of things that you just shared. Number one, I think early, Jeremy, I chased money. Then I got money, and I went through a divorce, and I cut my money in half, and I woke up the next day and was like, Oh, wow, that didn't really hurt that bad. I still have a very successful business. I have my health, I have my children's health. Then I channeled that energy, and then I chased power. What is power? Okay, headcount, the more people that I can lead, more soldiers that I can develop. I built this company. You introduce more people in your business, there's going to be more headaches. There are very unpredictable variables. Then over the last few years, I chased influence. I hyper-focused a lot of my direct marketing strategies that I utilize on LinkedIn, and I channeled that on to Instagram after I created an Instagram in 2019 and created some notoriety.

I started a dating podcast. I had a different Path to Success podcast. Again, all of that left me unfulfilled until I went to a legacy planning seminar in February that was facilitated by a group called Petra Coach. I realized that all of that didn't mean shit if I didn't have purpose. There you go. Because they say that a man who doesn't have purpose will seek pleasure. I think we all know that pleasure is fleeting. That doesn't really bring true happiness. I think true happiness as men is really bred in moments of achievement when we're achieving. It's really It's easy to hit these milestones when you're in your 20s. The first time you buy a house, the first time you set up your investment accounts, you buy that dream car that you wanted, you have kids, you build a family, you start a company, you hit certain revenue milestones as me as a 40-year-old man, it's much more difficult to hit that next level of achievement. It's important to really channel that humility and that gratitude component and be a a little bit more comfortable in how far you've come and not how far you still need to go.

I love that. I love that, man. Let's talk to the entrepreneurs right now because you're best, fastest, growing, best company in Houston. I'll bribe for Jeremy so he doesn't have to. You are the gold standard in the city of Houston and the state of Texas. What that tells me is that you prioritize culture. I think that that's where entrepreneurs, and I don't care of any size, where they get it wrong, where they think, Oh, I've got a team. I'm going to let my team do their thing. Your job as a CEO is to be culture. How did Jeremy make culture a priority at Encore?

It's definitely been about eight years in the making. Whenever we were I was a small company, I'm flashback 2015, 2016, had five, six employees. I knew that I was the best recruiter. I knew I was the best salesperson, the best at calculating commissions. I was a control freak to some extent. If you didn't do it my way, you were doing it the wrong way. Mind you, I was in an unhappy marriage. I was going through a divorce. I was very arrogant, cocky. I was super, super aggressive in the way that I communicated with my and that bred a tremendous amount of turnover. Then in 2016, I brought in a vice president to help come implement processes, systems, and accountability. He brought a system called EOS, the entrepreneurial operating system. He's actually my EOS integrator. He was hired as VP, promoted to COO, and he's now the President of the company. He's been here since October of 2016. Really, the culture was developed by implementing our mission, our vision, our values, and really being hyper consistent on interviewing, coaching, hiring, firing to those core values. It required a tremendous amount of openness, honesty, authenticity, vulnerability as a leader.

If maybe we were going through challenging times, not hiding it from your people. Whenever we were experiencing big wins, being transparent about the revenue figures and the profit figures. I think that transparency and that honesty and vulnerability from leadership breeds trust and camaraderie. I don't think culture is built on having fucking ping-pong tables in the break room. I think that's a common misconception that, Oh, we've got-Fun is not culture. Unlimited PTO. We've got great culture. I think that as long as you have clarity around what do you stand for and why you stand for that, and you provide consistency, then your culture will organically take care of itself. The culture at GoPro is different than the culture at Microsoft, is different than the culture at Tesla, is different than the culture at ExxonMobil. But as long as people know what they're signing up for and are excited to live those values each and every day, then that's going to breed a positive culture that's congruent with what leadership wants.

Totally agree. I want to I want to add on to something you said about hiring and terminating to the values. Because, again, here's what I see a lot of leaders do wrong. Well, Jeremy has been with the company for 15 years, and Jeremy's managing $2 million of accounts. If we let Jeremy go, then all of a sudden now we got to figure out what to do. And I'm like, Well, so what? That's what you're supposed to do. If Jeremy is crushing your culture, then you're about to have 30 Jeremy's really, really soon, because all it takes is one example to be the norm. Again, I think that's where people go wrong. They're fast to higher and slow to fire, and it needs to totally be the opposite Okay, because the moment someone's not adhering to the values of your company, all it takes is one other employee to see that, and now you have two, and then you have four, and then you have 20, and then you have 100, and now you're stuck with trying to figure it out, or you're a company that's run by your employees, and people might think that that sounds great, but that's the worst thing you make it happen.

I can promise you that.

100%, man. There were two things that I've learned over the last five years. The first thing that I want to share with your listeners is, if you fire your top salesperson because they violate core values or they're toxic or combative or whatever you want say, right? If you fire your top salesperson, then guess what? You have a new top salesperson 100% of the time. It's true.

You let go of Tom braided, you have a new starting quarterback the next season. Correct.

Yeah. Okay, that's number one. I forgot what the second one was just because I was so passionate.

No, that's it, You've got to be quick to fire and not let the rest of the team see that you tolerate that. Because I will tell you, your culture is the equivalent of the least value that you accept. That's your culture. If you accept tardiness, that's your culture. If you accept cutting corners, that's your culture.

Absolutely. Another thing that we rolled out, I remember what it was now. One of my colleagues in EO, the entrepreneurs organization, went to of like an executive education strategy session at Harvard last year, and he sent a screenshot of the presentation, and it basically said there's two types of cultures. There's companies that run it like a family, and then there's companies that run it like a sports team. That was a huge eye opener for me because I realized that we run it like a sports team. As long as you communicate that to your team and you're consistent with actually living your words through action, then I think that's perfectly okay. You think about, where do you live? What's the say? South Carolina. South Carolina, right? So Cam Newton was a great quarterback for many years for the Carolina Panthers. But that didn't mean anything until whenever he wasn't performing to the standard of what he was being paid for. Unfortunately, they had to make a change. We tell our team, We don't care how much revenue you've generated for the company in your history with the organization, we're going to hand the ball off to the person that gives us the highest probability to score.

Just because you've been here for six years doesn't mean that you get exclusivity to those key accounts. If I have a rookie that's coming in and he's got the right skills, experience, work ethic in order to increase the probability to close. That consistency really breeds them self-managing themselves because it doesn't allow complacency.

I freaking love that because when I talk to organizations and I'm working with the sales team, I pretty much mimic that exact same thing when I'm talking to the CEO or the VP of Sales, I'm like, Okay, let's think about this. You say that you have your salespeople in different niches, and if it's this type of niche, it always goes to Jeremy. Well, Jeremy knows that, and I promise you, Jeremy's getting complacent. He's not going to be as hungry because he knows you're feeding him 100% of that business. If Jeremy has competition, and if Jeremy is the salesperson that you think he is, Jeremy's going to start rising and closing faster and producing more. Again, I think another, I say, myth that CEOs follow is, I'm going to silo these people into these silos. I'm not saying that silos aren't right, but you can't have a one-person silo and expect that silo to be the best silo that it could ever be.

Absolutely true.

Let's talk about the success you've had in Houston with your company, man. Again, culture is dynamic. I know that that's there, but it also takes that visionary, which is Jeremy. It takes that visionary to see where the world and where the trends are going. That's why I applaud you for being one of the top five Five CEOs in the world that I know, right? Like, literally, and I mean that from my soul, bro.Thank you.Because the characteristic of the best of the best, the elite ones of one, is they can see things that most people can't see, and they know how to build the plans before that they can become a problem or a challenge so that you can build, Hey, we're going to run into this obstacle. Here's going to be our plan of attack. Doesn't mean it always works, but at least you know that it's coming. How has that been a part of who you are? Because I know that that's a part of who you are.

Remember, I told you that I was really smart whenever I was in primary school, right? Yeah. I have a unique ability to look at data and to come up with hypotheses, and then I'm very, very quick to act. Once I have information, I don't really sit on it. Unfortunately, sometimes I get it wrong because I move very quickly, but more often than not, because it's an educated decision, it pays off. Really analyzing the data, looking at market trends, I think one of the biggest things for us to grow our revenue over the years was, I think I saw on LinkedIn where a company paid McKinsey to come in, and they paid them $2 million in consulting fees in order to come up with a strategy in order to increase revenue. After paying them $2 million, they told them, Well, we suggest that you increase your prices by 10%. It was like, Yeah, no shit. If I just increase my price, then my revenue is going to go up. But it was a big eye opener for me because it was like, it takes the same amount of energy to take a deal from origination to close, whether it's a 10K fee or whether it's 100K fee.

If we focus on building a brand around 100K fees, and we become very consistent with direct marketing to potential buyers for 100K fees, then that will obviously help increase our revenue with just the same level of labor in-house, the same number of people. Again, it was really watching Steph Curry in the NBA and saying, Hey, look, if I have a 50% chance at making a two, but a 40% chance at making a three, well, I'm just going to shoot threes all day. That was a massive game changer for us in business just to have the discipline to walk away from the easy fucking sales and to be hyper consistent on our messaging and our branding in order to go get threes all day.

There it is. I love that, man.

Yeah, and I'm sure you tell your clients that, right? What is our core focus? Who's an A client? Why do these A clients buy from Who's the number one person in the market? How is their brand different than our brand? Is there some confusion? A lot of times it's tweaking the brand might be a way to increase revenue by 33%.

Dude, I tell people all the time, and when people hire me to come into their business, I tell them all the time, Growth and scaling isn't as hard as you think it is. It's discipline. It's not easy, but it's just discipline. It's How do I not get distracted by low hanging fruit? How do I not make other people's priorities my priorities? Then scaling isn't hard. There's no rocket science to scaling. Hey, if I've got to sell 5,000 widgets, then let's go sell 5,000 widgets. I don't need to figure out the quantity of this and the color of this. No, I just need to sell 5,000 freaking widgets. Let's just go sell 5,000.

Yeah. One of my good friends, he's a client of mine. They're an ammo manufacturer. He's got 30 employees here in Houston, and then he's got a factory in Mexico with 2,000 employees to just make ammo all day. For years, he's been selling to local police department, and sporting good stores. Then a couple of years ago, he's like, Why can't I sell to the nation of Israel, Saudi Arabia. By being hyper on chasing that business, he's been able to 10X his revenue just because he's targeted the right clients through focus, discipline, and accountability. That's what you talked about, that lack of discipline where people can get distracted. I think that focus and discipline are critical whenever you're an entrepreneur.

Dude, I think we just need to do a master class for CEOs. Charge everybody 25 grand to sit in on this master class, and we together will help them scale their business in two hours because we can do it.

Well, it's funny. Another big light bulb moment came for me whenever I started to consume different fucking content, man. Whenever I first created that Instagram in 2019, my feed was like bikini models, right? And the algorithm almost knows us better than we know ourselves sometimes. Then I started to retrain the algorithm to where now it's Alex Hormozy, right? Yeah. Cody Sanchez, right? You've got so many thought leaders in the B2B space where we can get those master classes for free just by retraining the way that we think, man.

Absolutely freaking love it. Jeremy, I know you're a busy guy, so I appreciate you taking some time just to talk to the viewers and listeners. What does Jeremy have going on? What's coming up next for Jeremy?

Man, hiring over the last 12 months, companies aren't creating positions. They the way that they were in 2021, 2022, whenever they were getting infused with all this PPP money and ERC money. A lot of the growth that we've had has been penetrating new markets. What we want to do is we want to really invest in more demand generation and not as much lead generation. What I mean by that is for so long, we've been so reliant on cold calling. We've been so reliant on going and trying to acquire a customer just through brute force. But whenever we've reverse engineered who are our A clients that have signed up with us over the last 24 months, it's been due to providing content and establishing ourselves as thought leaders in our space. Then by the time they engage us, they've already decided that they're ready to buy. We're hiring more marketing people. We're hiring more people that are skilled with social media advertising and things of that nature, and being a little bit less focused on some of the old-school strategies on client acquisition. Because the reasons why people buy in a digital age are very different Maybe then the reasons why they bought 10 years ago.

Absolutely. The reason, the path of how they buy. Honestly, now people know what they want to buy before they contact you. Pretty much they know, they've done their research, they know your pricing structure. They need you to be a concierge in the process. That's what I train salespeople on, just be a concierge now. You don't need sales tactics. You still need to build relationships, but where you build those relationships are different. The approach that you have should be that of a concierge, not of that of somebody who's going to just spit out a bunch of knowledge because people have knowledge now. It's there. Jeremy, bro, where can people find and follow you?

The two best places to find and follow me are if it's business-related. Linkedin is the number one resource. It's just my name, Jeremy Jensen. I've got a little God emoji after my name, the CEO of Encore Search Partners. If you DM me there, I'm 100% going to reply. If you want to follow the personal life, follow me on Instagram. It's just my name, Jeremy Jensen, J-E-N-S-O-N. I'd be happy to do a follow back there. But man, I have a lot of fun with my three boys, with my girlfriend. We just got back from Belize yesterday. Nice. That was an exciting trip that we did over the Thanksgiving week. I'm going to Poland this month to meet the future in-laws. That's going to be a super exciting trip. It's 14 degrees there right now, so that's a little bit scary for a Texan.

It's not Houston.

Yeah. But, man, I'll tell you, man, I'm really excited for the near term, and I've got a lot of ducks in a row in my business in my investments, but really hyper-focusing on getting fulfillment through my personal life is something that I'm super excited about in the near future.

I'm excited about that for you, brother. For everybody, just know Jeremy's an amazing follow, both on LinkedIn from business strategy. He gives out a lot of free stuff that he shouldn't be given out for free. Then on Instagram, you'll get to see some behind-the-scenes things with Jeremy Jensen. Jeremy, brother, I appreciate you more than you know my man.

Excellent, man. Thanks for having me on.

You got it. For all the listeners and viewers, remember, your because is your superpower. Go unleash it.

Thank you for tuning in to Mic Unplug. Keep pushing your limits, embracing your purpose, and chasing greatness. Until next time, stay Unstoppable.