For any entrepreneur, letting go of part of the business can be tricky. You know your operations and your customers, handing things over to someone else is hard. Letting go of some of your ownership in the business can be even harder.
Jordon Meyer, founder of Milwaukee-based digital marketing firm Granular, has done just that as the company’s president, Steve Kroll, became an equity partner in the business a little over a year ago.
“It’s a reality that something that I built basically from scratch, it’s hard not to be really possessive of that and want it all to yourself,” Meyer said.
Today, the business has grown to 25 employees, but before Granular became a company, it was a side gig for Meyer. He was working 50- to 60-hour weeks at his corporate job and then spending all of his free time working on his consulting business.
Meyer started his career in Milwaukee working in digital marketing, e-commerce, pay-per-click and search engine optimization. He worked at a few agencies before he was recruited to join Best Buy in Minneapolis.
The chance to work with big budgets – think eight figures a month – and establish a presence on new things like Google Shopping was interesting work, but Meyer didn’t love the red tape of a big corporation. He moved on to roles in higher education that still were in a corporate setting, albeit a smaller one than Best Buy.
“Once I left the agency in Milwaukee and went to Minneapolis, I kind of kept growing my brand presence, my personal brand, and started answering emails of people asking for help and figuring out how to make money from that,” Meyer said.
In 2013, the work started to reach a point where it was too much for just Meyer. He started paying a former colleague from Best Buy for part-time help. Meyer also came up with the Granular brand and built out a website for it.
Around that time, a client in Milwaukee was asking for even more of Meyer’s time.
“I said, ‘Literally, I don’t have any more time, I’m maxed out,’” he recalled.
As it happened, the clients were entrepreneurs and had an interest in getting into another business. Their investment and support offered just enough of a safety net for Meyer to make a go of it with the Granular brand. He moved back to Milwaukee and launched the business full time, working from his client’s office for the first six to 10 months.
Around the same time, Kroll was on an entrepreneurial journey of his own. After leaving his role as president of Rocket Clicks in late 2013, Kroll wanted to launch a venture-backed startup. He ended up at startup accelerator gener8tor as an entrepreneur-in-residence, helping others with digital marketing.
“I had my own software startup that I wanted to build,” Kroll said. “I was like, I don’t want to be an employee and I don’t want to just be in a service business. I want to be in a software business that scales through server space, not through headcount.”
Kroll launched the company, Dibbr, with a business partner. The company’s software aimed to help customers generate lead lists and do cold outreach.
“It was great,” Kroll said. “The problem is we just didn’t make any money. Any money we had, we had to use to pay our developers.”
Meyer and Kroll did not know each other at this point, although they were connected on LinkedIn.
“I would connect with anyone on LinkedIn who did anything with Google Ads in Wisconsin,” Kroll said.
When he saw a notification that Meyer had started a new role as president and CEO of Granular, Kroll clicked through to the company’s website and felt a connection to Meyer’s work.
“This is a person who really knows this stuff,” Kroll recalled thinking after seeing Granular’s website. “He’s very certain about the things he’s certain about. He has a willingness to be misunderstood, and he’s got a very clear position, and he’s willing to go against conventional wisdom. But it totally made sense to me.”
He reached out to Meyer to get to know him better and to pitch him Dibbr’s product.
“Bought him a really bad meal at a barbecue place that no longer exists,” Kroll said.
The two stayed in touch and before long, Meyer had a need for help with paid search. Kroll’s business partner was on board with the idea of joining Granular, but Kroll wasn’t.
“I was like, ‘absolutely not,’” Kroll said. “I didn’t want to be an employee somewhere. I had the entrepreneur bug, and I didn’t want to be involved in an agency again.”
In late 2015, they ended up reaching a deal in which Kroll would rent a desk at Granular’s office. He could help Meyer out on some work but keep his dream of building his own company alive.
But Kroll acknowledged he isn’t one to do things halfway and he found it difficult to have each foot in a different area. He also found Meyer to be someone who did not need to hoard all the credit, who was willing to trust and to delegate. By March 2016, Kroll had joined Granular full time.
As Granular has grown so too has Kroll’s role at the company. In 2021, he was named president and became an operating partner in the business at the start of 2023.
“Steve’s had Granular’s back and my interests in mind along every step of that journey,” Meyer said. “It made a lot of sense to put even more trust, more faith, more reward on Steve and make him an official partner in the business, which I think is a massive deal.”
Kroll said money is important as a tool for recognizing someone’s contribution, but added it is not a driving force for him.
“For me, I have always made it clear, having ownership is important to me. I don’t ever want to think of myself as an employee,” Kroll said.
The advice Meyer received from other business owners was against adding another partner, whether it was Kroll or someone else.
“I’m still young, the company’s still young,” Meyer said. “I’m not going anywhere. I think this is unusual because this isn’t an exit strategy. This is a growth strategy to get somebody else like-minded marching forward together.”
The duo got a dry run of sorts in 2018 when they launched a separate business, an SEO firm called Momentic, but bringing Kroll into the ownership of the business Meyer built from scratch was a different story.
One of the benefits comes in the form of peace of mind. Kroll said even as a committed employee looking out for the company’s long-term interests, it is hard to rule out the possibilities of other opportunities.
“That closes once I’m a partner,” he said.
Another benefit for the company is the additional focus it garners from Kroll. Even if just 1% of his energy each month was spent on his compensation or job security, that’s time not spent on clients or the business, Kroll and Meyer said.
Now, Kroll sees Granular not only as Meyer’s company but something that belongs to both of them.
“I still have to get comfortable with that,” Kroll said, nearly a year after the change was made official. “I still do look at it as it’s his company and brainchild, but that’s been a big orientation shift for me is thinking about us, our company. … I had the mindset, but there is a psychological shift.”
