07

After being at a network and a production house for several years, you just instinctively know how to fake it. So when the timing was right to start Mojo, my partner and I bought a Canon T3. (My mom has a better camera than that.) So we started with a T3 and an iMac, and faked it with clients who didn’t know any better.

But the thing is, we did some great commercials with what we had. We were able to upgrade to an $800 T5 a couple months in, which still was a crappy camera but, you know, it’s two better than a T3 obviously, because it’s a T5.

And so we were good to go for probably five or six months, until we got hired to do a commercial for an agency where the creative director would definitely know the difference between a good camera and a bad camera. So, we had to take out a loan and get a Canon Mark III – a legitimate DSLR. Then we got a second one. And, well…here we are.

A guy told me once that, when you start a business, you have to say “Yes” to everything. So that’s literally what we did. “Do you guys place media?” “Yes” “Do you have an agency of record letter?” “You bet – let me get it signed for you.” Nobody ever questioned us. Of course, every “yes” was followed by a mad scramble and phone calls to our lawyer, but suddenly, we’re an agency. Doing grown-up agency things.

And any time it came up, I just looked at it this way: We may not have actually done it before – or, for that matter, had any idea how to do it – but I knew without a doubt that we were going to do it. And we were going to do it really well.