Jeffrey Sharlach tells the story of the agency, which has important players, such as Disney and Mastercard, as clients
With three decades of history, JeffreyGroup has consolidated itself as an influential force in the corporate communications market, building a team distributed across six offices and a large client portfolio, which includes giants such as Amazon, American Airlines, Bayer, Disney, Mastercard and Salesforce.
When asked about the secret to success, Jeffrey Sharlach, founder of JeffreyGroup, sums up the journey in one sentence: being in the right place at the right time.
Much of success in business and in life is being in the right place, at the right time, highlights the founder. In the following interview, Sharlach revisits his 47 years in the public relations segment, presents reflections on the promising future of the market and reveals details about his retirement.
Could you share a little about your experience founding JeffreyGroup?
I believe it has been a long and very emotional journey. When I started, JeffreyGroup already had 16 years of experience in New York, working for large agencies. The original plan was to do something different and not create a big agency, but really be a small consulting company. I felt it was a great opportunity in Miami because, from my experience working for a large international company, there was a great demand for Latin American businesses in Miami. This was in the 1990s, when there was a lot of excitement throughout Latin America, and people were expecting huge growth in the region. People were very excited about Venezuela, Peru, Colombia. So, there was a lot of enthusiasm throughout the Latin American region. Brazil, of course, was always important due to its size, and Mexico too, but it was not just focused on those countries. The focus was on the entire region, and many companies were moving their Latin American headquarters to Miami at the time. Nowadays, very few companies have regional headquarters, but at that time it was really important due to communication and transport. Communication wasn’t like it is today, where we can have a video call by pressing a few buttons. It was really very challenging. Therefore, companies had regional headquarters for two reasons: communication and transportation. Transportation has also become much easier, but when I started the company in 1993, if you wanted to fly from Lima, Peru, to So Paulo, Brazil, you would probably fly to Miami first and then fly back there. There certainly weren’t daily flights or multiple daily options to choose from. Regional headquarters made a lot of sense for companies at the time, as face-to-face meetings were very important. We didn’t have teams or Zoom. So to have meetings where you could sit around a table and talk to people, people would come together. I moved from New York to Miami, my hometown, but when I moved, I already had a good idea from talking to clients and working internationally that Miami would develop into a regional Latin American center for public relations and corporate communications. And this is what happened.
To what do you attribute JeffreyGroup’s success?
Most of it I attribute to being in the right place at the right time. I attribute the rest to all the great people I’ve had working with me here at JeffreyGroup, but a lot of success in business and in life is being in the right place at the right time, and that was certainly the case when I started JeffreyGroup in Miami in 1993. The idea was not to build a big company. I was trying to get away from the big agency life, but it didn’t work out like I planned, because JeffreyGroup really started to be very successful from the first year. Fortunately, we had the support of several large clients in the early years, which really helped us grow and expand in the region. And I think one of the things that all agencies experience is that the hardest part is getting those first clients, especially with large multinational companies and global brands, the types of companies that JeffreyGroup works with. They don’t want to take risks with a new agency. They want to wait and see. Oh, MasterCard is working with JeffreyGroup, they must be good, we can do it too. So we were very fortunate. And another important thing, I think, is that we’ve always had this focus on not trying to be everything to everyone. We want to focus on multinational companies and global brands because that requires a specific type of person, and that has always been our focus when hiring people, growing and expanding in the region.
What values do you believe make JeffreyGroup stand out?
This is one of our big challenges because, in my opinion, one of the very obvious things is that there is not a very big difference in the final product that JeffreyGroup and other high-level agencies deliver in our markets. In the end, much of the end product is the same, but I always felt from the beginning that we wanted to be an agency that did things differently, that really focused on personalized customer service, and even as we grew, we maintained our tradition of doing things the way we did when we were a very small agency. It was very easy for me when we were just 10, 12 or 20 people, because everyone knew me, everyone worked with me, and it was very easy to do things the way we now call the JeffreyGroup way. Now, of course, the JeffreyGroup way is something that is on posters in our offices. Something that all new employees become familiar with, is this idea of how we work with clients in a way that makes clients feel like we are respectful, attentive to detail, very creative, and always proactively coming up with ideas. When I talk to employees, I always point out that the people who will succeed at JeffreyGroup are those who want new challenges every day, not those who want every day to be the same. In that case, agency life is not for you.
Read the full article in the propmark February 19, 2024
