What if you could swap 100 cold calls daily for content reaching thousands?
In this episode, Justis shares how going digital didn’t just scale his reach, it nearly doubled his revenue.
Justis Pederson is an award-winning recruiter and the CEO of the Pederson Group of Companies in Winnipeg, which he has grown from $500K to $1.8M in revenue.
His group of companies includes recruitment, media, and real estate. On the recruitment side, they specialize in construction & engineering.
I’m excited to learn that Justis complements his recruiting business with his media business. They have turned video production into a differentiator, specifically leveraging video and digital marketing as a key differentiator.
Justis serves on two boards and is a member of the Pinnacle Society, a collective of the top-performing recruiters in North America.
Episode Outline and Highlights
- [02:57] How Justis got into recruiting – from door-to-door salesman to becoming a top recruiter in construction.
- [11:33] Justis’ insights on critical attributes that differentiate a great recruiter.
- [13:19] The story of how they shifted from mainly cold calling to primarily digital marketing.
- [26:10] The ROI of hiring an effective marketing person.
- [31:22] The three pillars of content.
- [34:55] The hiring process of a good marketing person.
- [37:39] Strategies and systems to start posting content.
- [43:18] Discussion on the hows and whys of building a brand.
- [47:30] Shifting to a retained business model.
- [51:38] How to get business ‘without asking for business’.
- [53:02] Justis shares his personal story of resilience.
Shifting from Cold Calling to Digital Marketing
If your primary source of leads is through cold-calling, would you consider shifting to digital marketing? Justis realized the benefits of doing so, as cold-calling usually limits him to reaching 100 people a day, but with digital content, he can demonstrate their subject matter expertise to thousands.
“So we started posting content online. And instead of going from one to one cold calling, it’s one to many: one to 1,000, one to 10,000, one to 20,000 plus people. So what you’re doing is you’re actually just demonstrating what your subject matter expertise is. Instead of on the phone to people that already know you, you’re doing it online to a larger population of people that do not know you.”
How did they transition from pure cold calling to digital marketing?
When Justis first started, both at Hayes and later running his own recruitment business, it was all about cold calling. But like a lot of recruiters, he hit that point of burnout. You can only hear “no” so many times before you start asking, Is there a better way to do this? They began putting their expertise out there online, mainly on LinkedIn, aiming to reach not just dozens, but thousands. Then came the big move: hiring Cass in 2022 as their first team member, not another recruiter, but a full-time content and social media manager. Instead of hiring another 360 recruiter, Justis placed his bet on the potential of digital marketing.
Eventually, it paid off. They started producing all kinds of content—videos, thought pieces, scroll-stopping visuals—all tailored to their niche in construction and real estate. And people started paying attention—not just candidates but clients, too. Inbound leads started rolling in.
The ROI of Hiring an Effective Marketing Person
Was there a return on investment from the step that Justis took? That is, focusing mainly on being top-of-mind via digital content? There was! “To quantify that, when I first hired Cass in our first year, we did about, I think it was about $500,000… And in our second year after hiring Cass, we did closer to a million. So, just simple numbers there. Like, we almost doubled our billings.”
Justis, however, reminded us that hiring an effective marketing person is not an instant result-generating move. You also have to invest time, like what she did with Cass. He spent at least a year working with her, and it took almost two years to see actual results.
“But it did take like a lot of time to get there. Mark, I don’t want your listeners to think like, oh, you hire a marketing person and 30 days later you’re going to be getting all these inbound leads, because that’s not how it works. And a lot of people are wired to think, you know, 30, 60, 90-day return. But this was something that happened for two years. Not 30 or 60, 90 days. Like when I hired Cas, the idea was, okay, we’ll give it a year and see how it does.”
The Three Pillars of Content and How to Start
For Justis, there are three pillars of a well-curated, quality content:
- Graphic Design
- Video
- Writing
Justis elaborated on these three pillars and how they emphasized the importance of writing as the basis of videos and graphic designs. He also shared strategies on posting at least 4 pieces of content a week, and why spreading too thin on different social media platforms may not always work. He also shared that to start and build a brand, you don’t even need a high budget.
Justis shared, “But I think what I would say is it doesn’t have to be an extremely high-budget effort. Like you can do this with a low budget effort.”
