Terrah's Solo1

Tara and Audrey, from TJ Creative Agency, discuss the importance of digital marketing strategies. Tara reflects on the early days of their podcast and expresses gratitude for Audrey's hard work. Tara then shares her personal journey, from growing up in Utah to starting her own agency in Palm Springs. She talks about her experiences in modeling and auditions, which led her to realize her passion for the agency world. Tara and her friend Crystal started their own agency, Desert Models, and had success with casting models for a Hollister campaign. However, the rise of Instagram changed the industry's focus on follower count rather than experience. Have you ever wondered what goes into your favorite brand's digital marketing strategy? I'm Tara, the founder of TJ Creative Agency. And I'm Audrey, the Creative Marketing Director of TJ Creative Agency. Whether you're an influencer, a business owner, a content creator, or just an overall creative person, we'll teach you how to create the perfect social media strategy and build your brand online. All right, guys, welcome back to Social Sessions. Today's episode is going to be a little different. Audrey is actually, well, she's typically the one leading the show, whether it's with me, a guest, or solo. Audrey's headed this project, and I'm actually so grateful for everything she's done to make sure that you, our beloved audience, gets a new episode every single week. I actually went back to the count, which I think there's probably an easier way to do that, but it was fun to go back and look to see where we've started, and hopefully we've brought some valuable content along the way. So today's episode, the reason why I wanted to do it solo was really just to give her some weeks off as needed, because we know she never takes them. And two, I mean, it's really important for me to know what goes into the business. This podcast is part of our business, and I think it's really important for me as a leader to know what that is and what it takes to make these episodes happen every single week. Yeah, so for those of you that don't know me, my name is Tara Jade Holder. I'm the founder of TJ Creative Agency, the agency behind Social Sessions. I started the agency in 2019 after moving to Austin from Palm Springs, California. And so in my first solo episode, I decided maybe what sounds the easiest, but what makes the most sense to me, which is to share with all of you kind of how we got here, how the agency was founded, and yeah. I figured I would just go back through my life and kind of what's led us to here. We'll go back to my upbringing. I could do a whole episode on the chaos that was my childhood, but that's not really the episode I want to do. So here's a generic overview. Basically, I was born and raised in Cedar City, Utah. It's a small Mormon community just outside Zion National Park. My dad worked in the trucking industry, and my mom was an artist. I'm the oldest of seven kids, not all from the same parents. My dad married once and my mom five times. So as a kid, I was definitely more creative, which we can assume comes from my mom. I was in pageants and dance and loved being on stage, actually. Given the circumstances, you could say I was pretty independent from early on. An example of that was that I enrolled myself in each of those pageants and each of those dance competitions. I didn't have a huge support system when it came to that, but for whatever reason, I just signed myself up in fifth grade for a pageant. And I did my own talent. I practiced the interview. I guess I really just didn't have a fear of doing what hadn't been done before. And really, what I think is kind of why we are here. So back to early childhood, I wasn't a great student. I never was. I did surround myself with great students. I always hung out with good kids that made good choices. I was probably the one that always made the bad choices. And in fact, I actually barely graduated, y'all. I don't love to admit that, but it's true. And I think it's something that kind of makes my story unique. I think the reason why I think it's unique is because we're always led to believe in those years that those are the years that define who we are, and I just don't agree with that. So I think that's an integral part of my story. Another thing that people are always shocked to learn about me is that I got married to my now husband, Anthony, of 22 years, one month before I graduated high school. So to clarify, I was married in high school, and I barely graduated. That's not your traditional story of success, and definitely had been labeled with doubt and judgment. I think people had a perception of me that I knew wasn't true, but I found this, like, thing that I was going to prove everyone wrong. You know, I wasn't then, and I'm not now, someone that likes to listen. I don't really like to do life with rules or plans necessarily. I actually hate planning. So conforming is something I've always struggled with. I've always believed that in order to do something different, you had to do things that had never been done before, and rules to me always looked like a one-way street. It was this way or no way, and I fought it all the time. Anyway, back to the story. So it wasn't but six months after walking the stage to get my high school diploma as a married 18-year-old to learn that I was pregnant with our first child, Kyson, who is now 20, and when he was only four months old, y'all, I found out I was pregnant with our second child, Andy, and she's now 19. So there I was, 20 years old with two kids, a high school diploma, and a big dream to prove everybody wrong. Anthony and I bought our first house actually not long after that, and I enrolled in school, and I did that because I was like, I ain't no teen mom. I think my major at the time was interior design, and I think I chose that because I knew I wanted a job in the creative industry or in a creative role. I always loved, like, the idea of acting and TV and all these things, but in Cedar City, Utah, all we really had was the Shakespearean Festival, and it just, I wasn't aligning. So I knew I always wanted to work in production. That's something that had always resonated with me. I, again, loved being on stage and whatnot. I wanted to go to L.A., but I knew I had two tiny kids, and they were under two, and it probably wasn't going to happen. But it was at the end of my sophomore year when Anthony got an opportunity as an assistant golf professional in Palm Springs, and I was like, this is our way out. This is, like, what we need to get out of this lane of mediocrity. It wasn't L.A., but it was two hours. It was so close. We'd be so much closer. Just to have opportunities that a small town doesn't usually provide. So we made a decision, and we sold our house, and we moved with two little kids to California. I actually look back at that decision now, and I think how brave we were. Neither of us knew a single soul, and we were making pennies, like, literally pennies. I think Anthony was making $13 an hour, and he was valeting cars on the weekend, and then I was serving tables at Macaroni Grill. Like, I was the one writing my name upside down on the white paper cloth, like, night after night. But within a few months of getting there, I did find an agent, and I began to pursue modeling. I auditioned for literally anything and everything that I could. I got some good jobs, but I also took, like, really crappy jobs, like, really crappy jobs. My agent actually, she loved me because I would never say no. The things I did, we'll have to do an episode. They're silly, silly modeling jobs. Actually, it's funny. I remember driving to L.A. to audition for Dill or No Dill, and I was thinking, like, what am I doing? I am 22. I have two kids. I'm married. Realistically, I have no business auditioning for this TV show, but I kept thinking of this quote that I had heard from Will Smith, and it was, being realistic is the most traveled road to mediocrity. I remember not promising I wouldn't live this mediocre life, whether that meant working at a bank or a library. I don't know. I just wanted to do something different, and no, this wasn't realistic, this driving to L.A. to audition for Dill or No Dill, but it was right in my eyes, and I had to do things that had never been done before. So I didn't end up getting casted. I learned a lot from that experience. I went to audition for America's Next Top Model and Janice Dickinson Modeling Agency. I would get further into the auditioning process, but nothing ever happened. I guess the bright side looking back now is that I did get used to hearing the answer no. So another thing that I think came from going in and out of those auditions was I was able to see how many people it takes to make these productions happen, and I was really intrigued, like, with the agency world. I kind of felt like, you know, if I wasn't called to be the talent, maybe I could be called to be the director or the producer, and it was kind of an aha moment. There's a lot of people that go into the creation of these things, and it's not just being the face or, you know, the name. So it was really eye-opening for me. I continued to serve tables, and I was taking the modeling jobs. You know, I kept hoping one day something would happen, but I re-enrolled in college, and I had a thought, and I was like, I wanted to start my own agency. At the time in Palm Springs, there was one agency, and the rest were in L.A., and this agent in Palm Springs was old school, like, old. She still did, like, photography on film. She still did comp cards. Like, she was just old. I'm like the Internet lady. Have you heard of it? I was like, we can do this better. So I felt like that was my next step. I met with my friend Crystal, and together we made our first LLC, which was Desert Models. We actually, like, had an office, and we had these amazing murals. I had a mural of Twiggy on my wall. My mom painted the artist. So, yeah, that was my first business. I think we did pretty decent. Our first big job was actually casting 20 models for a Hollister campaign. It was kind of, like, based around Coachella, that Coachella vibe, and I remember getting that check and being like, I did it. I did it. It was awesome. It was amazing. It literally lit, like, that entrepreneurial spirit inside me, but as we know, the agency world kind of shifted with the release of Instagram, and we started to see, like, people get booked by their follower count over their experience, their height, anything that had ever mattered in that industry before was kind of just, like, dissolved. It was a shift. I want to say it was a bad one, but unfortunately our agency wasn't kind of built on that. So we closed the agency in 2013, I think it was. I was still working on my degree and had now kind of focused that back to business and marketing. It was at that time I received an assignment to start a blog. So I learned the ins and outs of WordPress. I made a logo, and I started this fashion blog. It was a twain fashion blog because why? Because those are the clothes I was buying. I mean, I spent a lot of time in justice, y'all, and I hated all the clothes. So Andy kind of became the center of the blog. We began to actually see traction on that right away. Small Instagram boutiques and stuff were sending our clothes weekly. It was crazy. And this is at a time kind of when blogs were the rage and collaborations were a way that, like, things were happening and businesses were being built. And so Andy became kind of my muse in that moment. I was lucky enough to know some people and some bloggers along the way that kind of led me. I went full-fledged into it, and I became a photographer, too, because you know what? If you had a blog, you had to have good photography. So the blog grew. The connections came, and pretty soon I would say I was shooting a lot, a lot of bloggers, influencers, musers, musically, YouTubers, people in the industry that knew the importance of social media and that they had to keep up with it. So from there, Andy's account, like, continued to grow, and the photography was just becoming a huge part of what I was doing. I think I was driving to L.A. like twice a week. I was shooting actors and actresses, and it was wild. Musically had pushed this influencer market into, like, this whole different world where you would, I mean, like, in L.A., you would see people walking with selfie sticks, full film crews. I mean, it took on a life of its own. You know, we even did a pilot called Insta Moms. Thank God that didn't go through because, you know, with Hollywood and social media, there's just a lot of negativity, and I've survived it, so I can talk about it, but it's a lot of comparison. It's a lot to take in, and there becomes competitiveness, and it ultimately broke me. The friendships that I had lost depth, and they became, like, very transactional, and I just felt like things had changed. I was kind of lost. I felt frustrated with where I was. I still love the photography side, you know, but, like, when Anthony was, like, I think it was, like, 2017, he said, let's move away from this. He had an opportunity in Austin, outside Austin, and I knew probably was right. It was probably the best thing we could do for our family. It's something we'd done before. We were familiar, so what did we do? We sold our house, not knowing a single soul, and boarded a plane to Austin. It was truly, like, a breath of fresh air. Like, it was so good. Like, not an influencer in sight, not literally, but I was still relying on my photography as income, and I had a base in L.A., so I would fly back, you know, every three to four months. I would shoot. I would come home. I would edit. I would do it all over again. I think I did that, you know, for the first year. I had created this system and this, you know, strategy, I think is what I would call it, really, and I thought, you know, if this is working for influencers, I think this could work for businesses because businesses were beginning to see the need for social, and they were realizing that the stock images and the little pictures they created were not giving them results, and I knew the answer was because the people on the other side of the phone, from what I'd seen in the influencer world, is they want to get to know you, so they want authenticity, and in order to create authentic content, you have to be forward-facing. So that's really when I found Dr. Franco. He's a plastic surgeon here in Austin who loved literally every bit of being forward-facing, never met someone who loves the camera more, so I began working with him in 2018, and I think he had like 25,000 followers on Instagram. He didn't have TikTok. He was pretty active on Snapchat, and we kind of just followed Dr. Miami's lead. We grew that following to 120 on Instagram and then 315 on TikTok, all organically through collaborations, which I introduced him to, and, yeah, just charting these unseen territories of being a surgeon on social media. I think with the success of Dr. Franco, I just, like, had this epiphany. Like, I figured it out. This was, like, it was the combination of everything I'd done up until this point. It was all the experiences, the nose, my face, the film agency, the camera, the being in the right place at the right time with the Instagram and influencers and collaborations and content creation. So that's why in 2019, I founded TJ Creative. I continued to work with Dr. Franco, and I filmed over 400 surgeries with him. I then added Dr. Patel. He's a cosmetic dentist here in Austin, and we grew his following to, as well, on Instagram and TikTok, 98,000 and 2.8 million. And the agency had traction, and I knew that if this was going to work, I would need help. So I asked my friend Lacey, who had built a successful business on Instagram. It's laced hair, if you're not aware. And I asked her what I should do next, and she said hire people. So that's what I did. I hired Mikey, and then I hired Audrey, and then I hired Maddie, and TJ was in business. Four years later, we have evolved so much. Our team members have left. Clients have changed. But what stayed the same is that we're still here. We're still in the game, and we're almost five years in, and I've wanted to quit so many, so many times. I can't count. But, you know, I recently read The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek, and he applies James Kars' distinction between two games. So I'm going to give you a short description of what that is. So there are finite games and there are infinite games. As he explains, finite games are like chess or football or baseball, and they are played with the goal of getting to the end of the game and winning while following static rules. Every game has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and a final winner is distinctively recognizable. In contrast, an infinite game, like in business or politics, those are played for the purpose of continuing play rather than to win. He explains that leaders who embrace an infinite mindset aligned with infinite play will build stronger, more innovative, inspiring, resilient organizations, though these benefits may occur over larger timescales than benefits associated with a finite mindset. I think this year has been arguably the hardest year, so many ups and so many downs. But I know that we all win and we all lose, and I know I have and so many of you have. It's obviously unrealistic to believe that we won't fail, but I do believe that for those of us who can endure it, endure the failures, the doubters, the unbelievers, and we can still wake up and put one foot in front of the other, that we will make it eventually. And to kind of close the podcast up today, I just wanted to kind of give you an update of where we are. As of 2023, September 2023, I recently appointed Anthony, my husband, the CFO and the CPO of the agency, and I chose to do that now because I know my strengths and I know my weaknesses and we are growing. And the reason that our marriage has worked for 22 years is because we complement each other, right? He speaks my language, he speaks Terra, is what he says. He knows what I want to say and sometimes I have a hard time getting it out. I've been known to be lost in translation, I guess you could say. I have a hard time explaining things and I definitely have a hard time delegating or making rules or keeping rules. We're entering this new season where we have, you know, some of the best players in the game, at least I think so. And we have opportunities that are coming that I could never have imagined on my own. So that being said, I tell you this story today because I think it's important to hear. I think it's important to hear stories of failure and stories of perseverance. And I think this is a story of both. It's not always a straight line. I encourage everybody to challenge rules. What you're going through as an entrepreneur, a creative, a mother, an influencer, student, wherever you are in your journey, that there's every little thing that you're going through, every job you have, every relationship you have, every no you get, every conversation is part of your story. You are living in a time when you have complete access to your dreams to literally do whatever you want. Try and fail and try and fail. In fact, the more you fail or the faster you fail, the quicker you get there. So, yeah, I just encourage you to play the game without the intent of ever giving up. There is no destination. It is all the game. You hear it all the time from all the great leaders that it is the journey, not the destination. I know it's cheesy, but it's actually like so, so true. So, yeah, thank you guys for listening. That's a little bit about me, Tara. A little bit about the agency. Thank you so much for all of you that have listened for 70-plus episodes. Thank you to Audrey, who has continued to bring you guys the best and most up-to-date social media changes and trends and all the things. If you haven't already, I ask that you could rate and review the podcast. That obviously helps us as we continue because we're not going to quit. So, thank you so much, and we'll see you next week.