Josh Grossfeld is the Co-founder of AGENCY, a communications firm specializing in branding, direct mail, and political consulting, and the Founding Partner of Goodstock & Co., an e-commerce and fundraising platform. With over two decades of experience in direct mail, media production, polling, and grassroots organizing, he has been recognized as a Rising Star by Campaigns & Elections and included in the 40 Under 40 by the American Association of Political Consultants. Josh has developed successful direct mail programs for various campaigns nationwide, including initiatives at municipal, state legislative, congressional, and gubernatorial levels.
Here’s a Glimpse of What You’ll Hear:
- [2:21] Josh Grossfeld shares how growing up in a political family shaped his career
- [6:01] Lessons from working on the “No on English Only” campaign in Arizona
- [13:10] Why direct mail remains a powerful marketing tool in the digital age
- [15:19] How AI is transforming political communications and campaign strategies
- [19:01] Scaling from 12 to 50 employees during intense campaign cycles
- [21:05] How to manage cash flow in a business with unpredictable income patterns
- [27:56] The challenge of spending every campaign dollar strategically before Election Day
- [31:01] How the pandemic forced Josh to pivot and invest in paper futures
- [38:56] The impact of Entrepreneurs’ Organization on Josh’s business growth and mindset
In this episode…
Navigating the unpredictable world of political consulting and entrepreneurship comes with unique challenges. From managing fluctuating cash flow and scaling teams rapidly to balancing work-life priorities, the stakes are high. How can business leaders remain adaptable and innovative while facing these intense pressures?
Josh Grossfeld, a seasoned political consultant and entrepreneur, shares insights on overcoming these hurdles. With decades of experience, Josh emphasizes the importance of building strong processes to handle rapid team expansion during campaign cycles. He also highlights the value of balancing efficiency with creativity, using AI to streamline content creation while preserving human authenticity. Josh offers practical advice on cash flow management in cyclical industries and reveals how investing in paper futures during the pandemic safeguarded his business from supply chain disruptions.
Tune in to this episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast as John Corcoran interviews Josh Grossfeld, Co-founder of AGENCY, about the evolving landscape of political consulting and business growth. Josh discusses the enduring power of direct mail in a digital age, the impact of AI on marketing strategies, and the importance of fostering a sustainable company culture. He also shares insights on managing unpredictable revenue cycles and leveraging e-commerce to support political campaigns.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- John Corcoran on LinkedIn
- Rise25
- Josh Grossfeld on LinkedIn
- AGENCY
- Goodstock & Co.
- Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO): DC Chapter
Special Mention(s)
Quotable Moments:
- “Growing up in a family of political consultants taught me the value of navigating complex personalities and effective communication.”
- “In politics, you learn how to do more with less — how to break out of traditional molds and think differently.”
- “People’s bullshit meters are high. It’s crucial to communicate authentically and connect on issues people truly care about.”
- “If you’re successful and get a person elected, you’ve lost a client. It’s a unique challenge in the political industry.”
- “Every two years, I essentially run a startup, teaching me countless lessons about entrepreneurship and resilience.”
Action Steps:
- Prioritize authentic storytelling in marketing: Crafting genuine and relatable narratives helps build trust and credibility with audiences. In political campaigns or business branding, authenticity fosters stronger connections and makes messages more memorable.
- Embrace AI as a creative tool, not a replacement: Using AI to generate content can streamline workflows, but human oversight ensures authenticity. This balance preserves creativity while boosting efficiency.
- Develop transparent processes for scaling teams: Establishing structured onboarding and training systems maintains quality and consistency during rapid team expansion. This prevents burnout and ensures smooth operations.
- Diversify revenue streams for stability: Expanding into e-commerce or adjacent services creates additional income sources during off-peak seasons. This reduces financial vulnerability in cyclical industries.
- Leverage data to personalize outreach: Using detailed voter or customer data enables highly targeted and relevant messaging. This improves engagement rates and campaign effectiveness.
Sponsor: Rise25
At Rise25 we help B2B businesses give to and connect to your ‘Dream 200’ relationships and partnerships.
We help you cultivate amazing relationships in 2 ways.
#1 Podcasting
#2 Strategic Gifting
#1 Our Predictable Podcast ROI Program
At Rise25, we’re committed to helping you connect with your Dream 200 referral partners, clients, and strategic partners through our done-for-you podcast solution.
We’re a professional podcast production agencythat makes creating a podcast effortless. Since 2009, our proven system has helped thousands of B2B businesses build strong relationships with referral partners, clients, and audiences without doing the hard work.
What do you need to start a podcast?
When you use our proven system, all you need is an idea and a voice. We handle the strategy, production, and distribution – you just need to show up and talk.
The Rise25 podcasting solution is designed to help you build a profitable podcast. This requires a specific strategy, and we’ve got that down pat. We focus on making sure you have a direct path to ROI, which is the most important component. Plus, our podcast production company takes any heavy lifting of production and distribution off your plate.
We make distribution easy.
We’ll distribute each episode across more than 11 unique channels, including iTunes, Spotify, and Amazon Podcasts. We’ll also create copy for each episode and promote your show across social media.
Cofounders Dr. Jeremy Weisz and John Corcoran credit podcasting as being the best thing they have ever done for their businesses. Podcasting connected them with the founders/CEOs of P90x, Atari, Einstein Bagels, Mattel, Rx Bars, YPO, EO, Lending Tree, Freshdesk, and many more.
The relationships you form through podcasting run deep. Jeremy and John became business partners through podcasting. They have even gone on family vacations and attended weddings of guests who have been on the podcast.
Podcast production has a lot of moving parts and is a big commitment on our end; we only want to work with people who are committed to their business and to cultivating amazing relationships.
Are you considering launching a podcast to acquire partnerships, clients, and referrals? Would you like to work with a podcast agencythat wants you to win?
Rise25 Cofounders, Dr. Jeremy Weisz and John Corcoran, have been podcasting and advising about podcasting since 2008.
#2 Our Comprehensive Corporate Gifting Program
Elevate business relationships with customers, partners, staff, and prospects through gifting.
At Rise25, thoughtful and consistent gifting is a key component of staying top of mind and helps build lasting business relationships. Our corporate gift program is designed to simplify your process by delivering a full-service corporate gifting program — from sourcing and hand selecting the best gifts to expert packaging, custom branding, reliable shipping, and personalized messaging on your branded stationary.
Our done-for-you corporate gifting service ensures that your referral partners, prospects, and clients receive personalized touchpoints that enhance your business gifting efforts and provide a refined executive gifting experience. Whether you’re looking to impress key stakeholders or boost client loyalty, our comprehensive approach makes it easy and affordable.
Discover how Rise25’s personalized corporate gifting program can help you create lasting impressions. Get started today and experience the difference a strategic gifting approach can make.
Email us through our contact form.
You can learn more and watch a video on how it works here: https://rise25.com/giftprogram/
Contact us now at [email protected] or message us here https://rise25.com/contact/
Episode Transcript
Intro: 00:00
Today, we’re talking about how to ride the highs and lows of the roller coaster that is entrepreneurship. Today my guest is Josh Grossfeld. I’ll tell you more about him in a second, so stay tuned.
John Corcoran: 00:13
Welcome to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast, where we feature top entrepreneurs, business leaders, and thought leaders and ask them how they built key relationships to get where they are today. Now let’s get started with the show.
John Corcoran: 00:30
All right. Welcome, everyone. John Corcoran here I am, the host of this show. And you know, if you’ve listened before that every week I get to talk to smart CEOs, founders and entrepreneurs from all kinds of different companies. We’ve had Netflix and Grubhub, Redfin, Gusto, Kinko’s, IPO, Activision Blizzard, lots of great episodes.
Check out the archives. And of course, this episode was brought to you by Rise25, our company where we help B2B businesses and clients to get referrals and strategic partnerships using podcasts and content marketing. And if you’ve ever thought about starting a podcast. One of the privileges of my life has been to be able to talk and feature, you know, interesting people like our guests here today, and to feature them in episodes that go live across the internet for everyone else to check out. So if you want to learn more about how that works, go to Rise25.com.
Or you can email us at [email protected]. All right. My guest here today, Josh Grossfeld, is the Co-founder of an AGENCY. It’s a communications firm focused on branding and direct mail and Goodstock & Co. It’s an e-commerce and fundraising platform.
He’s based in Washington, DC, where he’s a recognized figure in the political communications realm. He’s received a number of awards, including Rising Star Award from Campaigns and Elections Magazine, which is the magazine for his industry, and 40 under 40 award from the American Association of Political Consultants. And so he’s been involved in political consulting his entire life. And we’re going to talk about that. That’s the world that I was in for a brief period of time.
And so it’s exciting for me to be able to dip back into it. But Josh, let’s start with your upbringing. So you grew up in Arizona and you actually your father was an entrepreneur. Your father was a political consultant. And so you got to witness that from a young age. So tell me about that. What was it like growing up, witnessing your father involved in local political campaigns?
Josh Grossfeld: 02:21
Yeah. No, he, you know, started a political consulting firm when I was about 8 or 9. So I spent my entire life on the back of, you know, campaign offices, pounding the pavement and putting yard signs in really hard dirt and going on TV shows, etc.. So, you know, he had a general consulting company. So GC, which is a, you know, a pretty common model back then.
So they would do polling, they would do television ads, direct mail, etc.. And I just loved being a part of all of that. So every summer we’d spend at the office getting over here, you know, strategic conversations about who we’re going to target, you know, on TV shoots. I got to design direct mail design websites, did the Navajo Nation’s president’s race and really just got to be exposed to sort of all the intricacies of how, you know, campaign strategy works. And I think the most important part of it was really the client service component of it. You know, it is part therapy, part strategy when you’re dealing with a lot of a lot of candidates and staff.
John Corcoran: 03:15
Yes.
Josh Grossfeld: 03:15
Yeah, yeah. How to manage that? My mom’s a therapist. Have those two sets I think we’re really helpful growing up and, you know, have proved really helpful in my career moving forward is sort of really being able to navigate all those different personalities and making sure that, you know, you’re able to communicate effectively the candidate’s message, but also internally within, like the staff and all the different personalities involved in a lot of these campaigns and who they draw out.
John Corcoran: 03:39
And you were actually a bit of an entrepreneurial kid because you said you had your own local blockbuster business. Tell us about that one.
Josh Grossfeld: 03:46
Yeah. So we were on the CUL-DE-SAC. We were like one of the two houses that had HBO. So I would record movies all the time and then, you know, rent them out for $0.50 to a dollar to kids in the neighborhood until one of my teachers told me it was probably violating some sort of copyright law. So I just pivoted back to my baseball card stand, which I, you know, sell stuff on the weekends at different card shops and whatnot.
John Corcoran: 04:08
I still have a box of them in my garage. I’m waiting for them to suddenly spike in.
Josh Grossfeld: 04:11
Value to be my lottery ticket. It did not pan out.
John Corcoran: 04:14
It’s crazy. I mean, I bought like these full complete sets like Upper Deck in the late 80s and early 90s that were like 100 bucks then. And they’re like less than that now, or.
Josh Grossfeld: 04:24
They’re at 89. That 89 Ken Griffey Junior rookie card was supposed to be my ticket to everything.
John Corcoran: 04:30
I know, I know, I wish I’d gotten one Bitcoin instead. So you and then you also started a website development company. Let’s talk about that.
Josh Grossfeld: 04:39
Yeah. So I mean this was you know, the mid 90s. So you know, anyone that knew how to do HTML was a wizard at the time. And one of my dad’s clients, the Utah State Democrats, needed a site. So he encouraged me to sort of register my own company with the state.
And so I created Merlin Media Works, Which was my little website development company and built out that website and a handful of other candidate sites when I was like 13 or 14. For a handful of different political sites.
John Corcoran: 05:04
Any businesses or just consultant campaigns?
Josh Grossfeld: 05:07
I just did 2 or 3 campaigns and I did a handful of things like local companies. So like an event, an events company. And like a restaurant at the time. But, you know, knowing that the HTML was very the whole web was a mystery at the primitive.
John Corcoran: 05:22
Yes. I mean.
Josh Grossfeld: 05:23
You could figure it out like you’re golden. So I just, you know, it wasn’t too hard when you dug in.
John Corcoran: 05:27
So I did some, you know, programming in HTML back then, and it’s so laborious and slow and time consuming and just, like, make one little tweak and then you go see it go live, like, oh, cool a word, you know? And it was just, like, so rudimentary. Yep. Yeah. I mean, you talk about wizardry.
I mean, the wizardry is designing websites today where you can just, you know, design it and, you know, think it and tell ChatGPT and they create it. Yeah. You worked on some interesting campaigns. Talk about Prop 106. No on English Only in Arizona campaign.
Josh Grossfeld: 06:01
Yeah. So there’s a, you know, kind of thing coming back full circle at the time that in Arizona there was a movement to make English the, you know, the only legal language in Arizona and change a lot of documents around. So a full English only campaign. So got to work on that campaign, the no. 106, to kind of ensure that there were multiple languages available to folks for filling out, you know, certain government forms, etc., which was, you know, important at the time.
It’s still important. There’s a lot of different sorts of probably less than ideal rationales for why people are trying to do that. So it was, you know, proud of that, that victory got to do the Navajo Nation’s president’s race. Sam Coppersmith for Congress, who was a really, really great guy to get in Congress at the time. And then, you know, got to do the Clinton campaign with my dad.
John Corcoran: 06:47
And you actually hung up on the white House once.
Josh Grossfeld: 06:50
I thought it was a crank call. So, yeah, Unfortunately, during a conference they were trying to conference people in before their actual conference call.
John Corcoran: 06:56
You got a phone call? Someone said, this is the white House. And you’re like, yeah, whatever. Click.
Josh Grossfeld: 06:59
Probably not. Yeah. So I hung up on them as well. So yeah, but you got to have a really great experience with sort of all that exposure that was, you know, pretty unique. And you know, frankly, as someone who’s been in this industry for so long, reflecting back, I really recognize how privileged I was to be able to have a family that understood that this was a career you could be in, particularly given the cyclicality of it all.
Like most folks that work in politics, that work in campaigns, they work for 6 to 12 months and they’re out of a job for another 6 to 12, where they while they hop around and knowing that that was a career path that you could actually do at such a young age, was great.
John Corcoran: 07:32
I have to say, one of the privileges of my life was working at the tail end of the Clinton years in the Clinton White House, and one of the privileges of doing that was being able to call virtually anyone on the planet. And it didn’t matter, like who you’re calling just, you know, you could leave a message back then and be like, yeah, can you just tell them to call John back at the white House? And you’d get a call back instantly. People would call back so quickly and I’m sure I had some people hang up on me too, thinking it was a prank call. And I want to ask about it from a business perspective.
So it sounds like your dad was operating a consulting agency on the left side of the spectrum. The Democratic side of the spectrum, as you are. Arizona is traditionally a very conservative, Republican leaning state. What, from a business perspective, can we take away from that? You know, working, you know, being kind of on one side of the spectrum when overwhelmingly the majority of that state, at least at that time, was more Republican.
Josh Grossfeld: 08:27
Yeah. I mean, I think a couple of other things, like one like the business, the business business side of it is so strange because you do have to pick a side, right? When I went and launched my own firm, my father in law was so excited. He’s like, great. He’s going to do all these introductions to these wonderful Republican friends of his and like, I can’t get it. So as a businessman, he didn’t understand the fact that.
John Corcoran: 08:43
He immediately eliminates 50% of the potential.
Josh Grossfeld: 08:46
Market.
John Corcoran: 08:47
Clients.
Josh Grossfeld: 08:47
Yeah, I don’t understand how you could do that? Yeah. But there’s, there’s a certain amount of, you know, of, of, of devotion that folks expect out of, you know, you being in an ideology while you’re working. But, you know, yeah, being the underdog in a state like Arizona or other places, I think you learn how to be scrappy. You learn how you’re usually not going to get as much funding.
Oftentimes for those campaigns, you learn how to do a lot more with less, less resources and really learn how to sort of, you know, break out of traditional molds that you might expect. So I think, you know, one of the biggest challenges for any party that is sort of in the minority in any particular district or state is like, how do you set yourself apart from, you know, the party, right? So how are you ? Are you not a traditional Republican or not a traditional Democrat? And so those types of lessons, I think, in sort of how to go against the grain and really think differently and present yourself differently in a way that is, you know, as appealing and widely possible to voters as well. While remaining authentic is the big challenge and really good lessons to learn.
John Corcoran: 09:47
Especially helpful for businesses that are kind of in a commoditized industry where they have a lot of different competitors. How do you break out from that noise and establish yourself and, you know, communicate to potential clients and customers that you are different from everyone else who’s out there, whether it’s you’re selling widgets or, or a service or whatever.
Josh Grossfeld: 10:06
Yeah. And I think it comes down to what we found oftentimes and like, we’re, you know, while we do a lot of political work, we’re looking to do more and more outside of just the purely political space. It comes down to sort of how do you tell that story? Well, how do you tell it authentically? And, you know, people’s bullshit meters are high.
And so how do you navigate that in a way that really presents in particular with politics? Everyone assumes you’re a fake. Right. And so how do you really present those candidates in a way that is true to who they are and authentic and really connects with voters about the things they care about versus what they’re told they should care about.
John Corcoran: 10:37
Yeah. Now, now, at some point, you decided that in order to really if I want to be in this industry and learn this industry, I need to go to where the industry is everything, which is Washington, D.C. so you come to Washington, D.C., and you end up working in agencies. Tell me a little bit about what that was like. I’ve been an intern in Washington, DC, bottom of the barrel. And But what culturally, what it was like for you, you know, going to where politics is the industry.
Josh Grossfeld: 11:04
Oh, yeah. I mean, so going from Arizona to DC, I didn’t have any, any suits or anything like that. So my, my really wonderful cousin bought what he said was like the suit I had to have, which was the gray pinstripe suit. That was wool.
John Corcoran: 11:20
Oh, jeez, man.
Josh Grossfeld: 11:22
Yeah.
John Corcoran: 11:22
Not many of those are in Phoenix.
Josh Grossfeld: 11:24
No. So I got my gray pinstriped suit moved to DC, and I think I’m going to work on the hill. I don’t think about going to consultancy. I’m like, oh, I’m going to go learn where you know how laws are made and spend, you know, a whole month of July walking around DC Hill, just absolutely sweating bullets the whole time in.
John Corcoran: 11:40
A wool suit.
Josh Grossfeld: 11:41
Yeah. To the point where, like, one of the staff assistants who was kind enough to like, you know, try to get me to get me into an interview, pulled me aside and made sure I was okay because, you know, just sweating so much. And really, you’re from Arizona.
John Corcoran: 11:51
You should be okay with this, but I should wear a wool suit.
Josh Grossfeld: 11:54
The dry heat is a real thing. Yeah, and the humidity in DC is a totally different thing. So I figured out pretty quickly that that was not something I wanted to do. But I ended up getting a great job at a firm called Hobby Cooper. At the time, I think they had switched.
It was Schlackman’s hobby prior to that, sort of the preeminent direct mail firm in the country, so it really fit well to what my goals were. I want to kind of come learn from the best. Got some really, really great, you know, mentors there, met my wife there and really learned about sort of like the forefront of, you know, how how things operate and then just kind of kind of stuck with it and then worked helped start an organization called Democratic Gain with with a woman named Amy Pritchard, who which was devoted to sort of helping make sure more people could get into the the work of politics and work on campaigns. And there was like a structure and a pipeline to make that happen. And then went and worked at another direct mail firm for like the next ten years. Kind of continue to learn and grow my craft and learn about, you know, how all this works.