1 Bold Step: Evolving, Growing, Succeeding While Helping Their Clients Do the Same

Jen Jurgens and her business partner, Adam Clarke, have been hard at work since we last highlighted 1 Bold Step–a B2B growth agency–back in 2022. Like other small businesses, they have evolved with time and their continued expansion is a testament to their dedication to not only succeed, but to ensure the clients they work with also grow and thrive.

Jurgens’s path to business ownership didn’t follow a typical path, which turned out to be a powerful asset – her degree is in supply chain management, but she adopted lean efficiency principles like the Theory of Constraints, flow efficiency, and waste elimination, helping manufacturers streamline their operations. Now she applies these same principles to small business growth.

1 Bold Step has 18 employees, has served over 100 clients, and both the business and Jurgens have been continuously recognized and awarded for their many accomplishments.

Focus caught up with Jurgens, asking her about 1 Bold Step’s evolution, their lean approach to sustainability, and her “messy” Founder’s Story:

What’s been happening at 1 Bold Step since we last connected?

In 2022, we were still figuring out who we were. We called ourselves a marketing agency because that’s what people understood. But we kept running into the same wall our clients did. We’d fix marketing. Leads would go up. Revenue wouldn’t move. And every time we dug into why, the answer was the same: marketing and sales were running two different playbooks with competing priorities and competing budgets. Marketing would say, “We sent you a ton of leads.” Sales would say, “Yeah, well those leads were garbage.” Meanwhile, the customer was stuck in the middle waiting for someone to call them back.

That frustration forced a pretty big reposition to a “growth agency.” We now build 12 to 18-month growth plans that align marketing, sales, and customer success under one shared goal: revenue. It wasn’t an easy pivot, but it was the right one. This isn’t a new concept; it’s called Revenue Operations or RevOps, and it’s popular on the East and West Coasts, but we haven’t heard about it as much here in the Midwest. The biggest evolution has been our Growth Workshop: a six-week deep dive where we audit a company’s entire revenue process, find the biggest constraints, and build a focused plan to remove them. Think of it like a diagnostic before a prescription. Most agencies skip the diagnosis and go straight to tactics.

Explain your lean approach to sustainable and predictable growth.

I’ll give you an analogy that I got from a book last year called This is Lean. Think about the difference between the Mayo Clinic and a typical hospital. At the Mayo Clinic, the patient is the center of everything. You walk in, and the entire system revolves around you – tests, results, specialists, all coordinated. You can go from concern to diagnosis in days. Now compare that to most hospitals: you wait for the CT machine to have an opening, you wait for the referral, you wait for the specialist. The entire process revolves around the hospital. But the patient? They’re stuck in limbo for the majority of that time.

Most small businesses run like that traditional hospital. Their product is at the center of their universe, and every department is busy orbiting it. Everyone looks productive, but nobody is asking the real questions: How much value is the customer seeing at each point in their journey? Are they actually moving through the system or are they stuck in limbo?

That’s the shift. The book calls this flow efficiency – making the customer the unit of measure. How quickly and effectively does an ideal customer move from first awareness to closed deal to repeat buyer? Anything that slows that down is waste, and we eliminate it. We also use something called the Theory of Constraints. The idea is simple: every system has one big bottleneck limiting its output. Your job isn’t to improve everything at once; it’s to find that one constraint and fix it, then find the next one. Same logic that runs a factory floor. We just apply it to revenue. And we do this across marketing, sales, and customer success – not just marketing – because a lot of the time, the constraint isn’t where people think it is. A company thinks they need more leads, but we discover the real problem is their sales process takes 90 days when it should take 30. More leads won’t fix that.

Why is the fractional marketing model a great option for small businesses?

When a company goes through a season of transition or hits a point where they’re not growing and can’t figure out why, the immediate reaction is to hire – maybe a new CMO, Head of Business Development, or more recently, a Chief Revenue Officer. That’s an expensive hire when their main role is to sit solely in the strategy seat. For a lot of growth stage companies, that isn’t always feasible, but they still need a team to execute strategy and manage it all.

The fractional model solves that. Instead of the $150k–$200k salary you’re spending on a new CMO, you get a complete team of specialists that plugs into your existing staff (including a 12-month plan on how to do it). But you’re only paying for the capacity you actually need. Need heavy content production this quarter? We scale up. Next quarter it’s more about sales enablement and Customer Relationship Management cleanup? We shift. What makes our model different is that we’re not just executing random tactics. Every fractional team works from a strategic growth plan, so everything they work on ties back to revenue. It’s how we make sure we’re always focused on the right work, not just staying busy. And we don’t do locked-in contracts. If you’re not seeing the value in our partnership, we have a 30-day out clause that can be activated any time.

How do you ensure your own business is running at maximum efficiency?

My business partner Adam challenged me on this recently. He said, “Are we really flowing efficient, Jen?” It was the right question – practicing what you preach is harder than it sounds. Most agencies optimize for resource efficiency. Pack the schedule, maximize billable hours, try to keep everyone at 100% capacity. It looks productive, but it creates chaos the second a client has an urgent need and there’s no bandwidth to respond. Suddenly everyone’s in fire drill mode.

So we’re trying to take a different direction, building a buffer so the client can be the focus, not the work. We want our team to have the capacity to be responsive without creating a crisis every time. We set annual targets based on the previous year’s actual capacity and industry benchmarks – good, better, best scenarios – and those guide the system, but they don’t drive daily decisions.

What everyday strategies do you use to keep your employees happy and on top of their game?

I heard a CEO once say that everyone is either an aspirin or a headache, and you always want to be the aspirin. That stuck with us, so much that we turned it into a core value. Our other core values are Be Accountable, Be Bold, and Be Real. Those values aren’t wall decorations; they actually shape how we operate every day. From our hiring process and workflows to the strategies we build.

I also think sharing the “why” matters. Everyone on our team understands how their work connects to client revenue outcomes. And we don’t hide this. Everybody knows where we are with revenue, what opportunities are in the pipeline, and what we’re doing collectively to grow the business. When you know your work matters and you can see the impact, that changes how you show up.

On a practical level, there are a couple of key things we do. The biggest thing is we try to protect people’s time and energy. We don’t want to squeeze every billable minute out of someone’s week. We build time into the week for learning, for strategic thinking, for rest. Because when people are running at 100% capacity all the time, they burn out. The quality of work suffers. The client feels it eventually.

The second is establishing a culture committee that breaks up the work week with fun events, builds a health and wellness program, and organizes opportunities for us to support local nonprofits like Hope Network and the YMCA.

Why is it so important for owners to share their “messy, expensive journeys”?

I wrote my Founder’s Story because I realized it isn’t really about me. It’s about the same expensive mistakes I’ve watched kill growth at every company I’ve worked with over 22 years. Campaigns you can’t tie to a single closed deal. Beautiful systems nobody uses. Reports that don’t actually help anyone make a decision.

I spent years bouncing around – Michigan to Hawaii to San Francisco and back – through supply chain, tech startups, the dotcom boom, a breast cancer diagnosis, nonprofit mergers, and eventually running a software company. Least lean career path possible, but every seemingly random pivot taught me something I use every day about why businesses stall.

I’m also tired of the polished LinkedIn highlight reel from founders. The people who say, “I got an MBA from Harvard and have never made a mistake” – that’s not approachable. Nobody connects with that. More of us should tell the real version. Because when someone reads my story and recognizes their own patterns – the same mistakes, the same frustrations – it gives them permission to be honest about theirs. It makes them more vulnerable, but also more approachable. I think that’s a super important trait in a good leader.

Where do you see 1 Bold Step in five years?

Adam and I always ask ourselves this question. For 1 Bold Step, I want us going deeper, not wider. In five years, I want us to be the company every B2B organization in the Midwest thinks of when they’ve hit a growth ceiling and know that relationship-based selling alone won’t get them to the next level. We’ll keep refining the Growth Workshop, which I think is the most important thing we’ve built. We’re leaning more into sales operations, sales process improvement, and speeding up the sales cycle. We also offer business development resource services now, doing prospecting calls and sequencing to test messaging in real conversations.

But I think we’re at an interesting point in time. The skills that will matter most in five years are discernment and critical thinking. Sure, AI lets us do 50 things at once. The question is which of those 50 things actually need doing – that’s our approach to AI. We are an AI-forward agency, but we also don’t use AI the way most people mean when they say, “AI isn’t replacing our team, it’s helping them do their jobs better.” That’s not good enough for us. We want our team doing work that matters, which means spending more time understanding customers, building data-backed strategies, and being creative. AI speeds up the middle work. Anybody can ask Claude or ChatGPT for a marketing strategy, but they’ll probably get a generic template. My team knows what works, and we use AI within our current processes. AI isn’t the process.

Culturally, I want to keep growing in a way that sustains the team we’ve built. Find the constraint, fix it, find the next one. And AI helps my team to do that.

How has SBAM’s advocacy helped support your business?

Being part of SBAM has been meaningful for me personally and professionally. I’m on the Leadership Council and was part of the Women’s Entrepreneurial Fellowship, which gave me the space to think about lean principles – not just as a business strategy but as a philosophy for how I show up as a leader and a person. That kind of peer environment is invaluable for small business owners who are often figuring things out alone.

Here’s what I mean: When we were thinking about buying a building, it was the knowledge we gained about the SBA 504 program through SBAM that made it possible. When we needed to expand, we got financing through Consumers Credit Union because we met them at an SBAM event. When we hit a wall with the Employee Retention Credit forms from the IRS, SBAM referred us to a CPA in their network who helped us figure out the best approach.

That’s the thing about SBAM. Whatever problem you’re facing as a small business, someone on their team or in the SBAM community has faced it and has a solution or a path forward. And the legislative advocacy piece matters more than people realize. SBAM is always looking for policy that positively impacts small businesses and ensures our collective voice is heard. That’s not something any of us can do alone. Their events are also some of our favorites of the year. Great people, real conversations, and the kind of connections that turn into something meaningful.

Bona Van Dis is Editor of Focus.

By Bona Van Dis, Editor of Focus; originally published in SBAM’s May/June 2026 issue of FOCUS magazine.

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