Full original interview → https://valiantceo.com/insights-from-the-frontline-john-horn-of-stubgroup/
John Horn’s story at StubGroup shows how trusted relationships can turn digital advertising expertise into durable growth. From serving small and medium sized businesses to helping clients recover suspended Google Ads accounts; his approach centers on listening carefully; solving real problems; and earning confidence through measurable results and straightforward advice.
John Horn is the CEO of StubGroup, a digital marketing agency and Google Premier Partner. StubGroup has generated over half a billion dollars in revenue for over 2,000 clients spanning many verticals including ecommerce, lead generation, B2B, B2C, local services, SAAS, and more. John has taught marketing to over 100,000 students via online courses. The videos he creates through StubGroup’s YouTube channel have received millions of views, and have helped make StubGroup the #1 resource for fixing Google Ads suspensions.
Company: StubGroup
We are thrilled to have you join us today, welcome to ValiantCEO Magazine’s exclusive interview! Let’s start off with a little introduction. Tell our readers a bit about yourself and your company.
John Horn: I’m a husband and father of three, currently living outside of San Antonio in the beautiful Texas Hill Country.
I had the privilege of joining StubGroup’s founders over a decade ago as employee #1.
StubGroup was started based on a market need: Many small and medium sized businesses were moving from traditional advertising to digital advertising and needed help stewarding their ad spend.
We taught ourselves how to use platforms like Google Ads to generate business for our clients, and we used those same platforms to find new clients for ourselves.
As we grew, we found talented team members to join the company and give us the ability to serve even more clients.
Over time we developed a unique area of expertise in helping businesses whose Google Ads accounts were suspended by Google to figure out what went wrong, how to fix it, and how to get a second chance from Google. This opened up our ability to interact with businesses across almost every industry.
We continue to adapt to our clients’ needs and add to the services we’re able to provide to them including things like SEO, email marketing, and landing page design, and we’re now excitedly exploring the new world of GEO (optimizing for LLMs like ChatGPT and Gemini) to keep our clients at the cutting edge of consumer behavior and technology.
I took on the role of CEO around six years ago, and have had the absolute pleasure of helming the StubGroup ship and overseeing all of these initiates with the driving goal of delivering quality work to our clients and helping them grow and be successful in their businesses.
If you were in an elevator with Warren Buffett, how would you describe your company, your services or products? What makes your company different from others? What is your company’s biggest strength?
John Horn: We help businesses find customers online.
We take a no-nonsense approach to marketing that focuses on real results, not vanity metrics, and we’re honest with our clients even when that means lowering budget in areas that just aren’t working.
Our biggest strength is avoiding “cookie-cutter” marketing approaches and figuring out creative ways to help our clients accomplish their goals.
Quiet quitting, The Great Resignation, is an ongoing trend causing many businesses to struggle to keep talent engaged and motivated. Most are leaving because of their boss or their company culture. 82% of people feel unheard, undervalued, and misunderstood in the workplace. In your experience, what keeps employees happy? And how are you adapting to the current shift we see?
John Horn: I think it’s pretty simple. Pay your team well for the work they do and reward them when their value to the company increases. Give them engaging work that stretches them and makes their days interesting. Remove team members who aren’t able to meet your standards of excellence so that your team isn’t forced to work with subpar colleagues.
Online business keeps on surging higher than ever, B2B, B2C, online shopping, virtual meetings, remote work, Zoom medical consultations, what are your expectations for the year to come and how are you capitalizing on the tidal wave?
John Horn: The world is online and that isn’t going to change. What is changing right now is how much of that online time people are spending using tools like ChatGPT. We are focused right now on learning how consumer behavior is being changed by LLMs and how to help our clients capitalize on that change and capture market share from competitors who are stuck in the old way of doing business.
Business is all about overcoming obstacles and creating opportunities for growth. What do you see as THE real challenge right now?
John Horn: We’re in the people business because the primary product we’re selling is the time, attention, and skillset of our team. That means that the number one challenge is always finding the right people to be on that team, and having processes in place to quickly identify if team members are not the right fit.
In your experience, what tends to be the most underestimated part of running a company? Can you share an example?
John Horn: Identifying and tracking where your customers are coming from. We see so many businesses operating by the seat of their pants with no real idea, or false ideas, about how their customers are actually finding them. When you don’t know where your business comes from, you can’t double-down on driving more of that business, and you don’t know what to fix when that business dries up.
On a lighter note, if you had the ability to pick any business superpower, what would it be and how would you put it into practice?
John Horn: I would like to be a master at hiring. If you can bring the right people onto your team, you can accomplish almost anything.
