How Jamar Landed a Fortunate 500 Company with Spark Sessions
Welcome to Thought Leader Stories
This series highlights the incredible stories of ambitious changemakers, experts, and thought leaders. Read on to explore how we helped them transform their business and amplify their impact—on their own terms.
As told to and written by copywriter, Nailah King of The Content Witches.
Meet Jamar
Jamar Diggs (he/him) is a YouTube Marketing Strategist. He helps experts and brands market their businesses easily and sustainably. Following a successful career in the more traditional working world, starting as a social media strategist, he also started doing social media management.
In 2020, Jamar decided to go all in on his business. The business evolved, increasingly incorporating more video marketing, especially YouTube, and eventually grew into a done-for-you agency. But after two years, Jamar was ready for his next chapter, beyond agency life.
Built for Strategy
In 2014, Jamar landed his first job out of college as a social media strategist. At the time, most businesses only expected a ‘proof of life’ style of posting, even as Jamar expertly encouraged posting with more personality and depth, which sparked his initial interest in strategy.
“This is back in the day; this is more just a matter of you being alive on the platform type of content. And I didn’t feel really good doing it because I was really itching for strategy, but with the scale and scope of their package, we just didn’t have the bandwidth to do that.”
Already skilled at strategy from the beginning of his career, the lack of capacity and limited scope within the organizations he worked in delayed his move into strategy.
While working full-time, he had amassed a solid client base in his side business. Eventually, the intensity of the delivery work facilitated his transition to coaching, which he thought would reduce the burnout he was experiencing as a service provider.
Soon, he would transition to another job at a mortgage group where he was able to make a significant impact, including launching their YouTube channel and successfully attracting leads to their business.
“Over time, I built their YouTube channel, and they started to attract the type of homebuyer they wanted to work with.”
Jamar was also experimenting with his own YouTube channel and would get his chance to go deeper into his business and YouTube. Soon after, a serendipitous opportunity came knocking at the onset of the pandemic when he opted to be packaged out and go full-time in his business in 2020.
"I knew that I had something, and not a lot of business owners knew how to leverage YouTube. They would see influencers or creators using it, but they never knew how to use it for their business."
— Jamar Diggs, YouTube Marketing Strategist
Betting on video brings significant returns
Leaning into video marketing, especially YouTube, would soon pay off for Jamar. He landed a partnership with Honeybook after they saw one of his videos on YouTube and included him in an Instagram guide.
“I knew that I had something, and not a lot of business owners knew how to leverage YouTube. They would see influencers or creators using it, but they never knew how to use it for their business.”
Jamar had unlocked something magical with YouTube but knew it was just the beginning, and he needed to go deeper.
Soon, his business evolved and expanded its offerings, including some solo consulting, before transforming into a full-blown, done-for-you agency.
But after two years, Jamar became dissatisfied with agency life.
While he credits the agency experience with teaching him so much, ultimately, the client churn and realities of running an agency started to wear on Jamar. Despite having a solid roster of clients at his agency, his overhead skyrocketed, and he wasn’t charging enough to make a profit.
Even after implementing more documentation and processes, Jamar was exhausted by becoming more of a people manager versus an agency owner and taking on tasks he had hired others to execute.
Faced with the choice of continuing to grow the agency or move on, Jamar found himself at a difficult crossroads:
“When I came to Sarah, I was at the point where I was so tired of going through getting clients and losing clients due to the growing pains of having an agency.”
Jamar had already proven himself a strategist who excelled at creating incredible impact for his clients. He wanted to explore doing something different in his business but believed that the agency model was the only way to prove that what he did worked.
Jamar had known Sarah since 2018 and had already worked with Sarah on SEO back in his social media management days. From that experience, he knew she was the right person to help him articulate and build the key messaging he’d need for the direction of his future business.
“I needed someone who understood my business elements, who understood what I wanted to accomplish as a consultant, and how can we take my skill set and create something easy for someone to understand. Sarah went through the same things that I did. I knew that I could trust her to help me figure out this framework and get it out of my head.”
— Jamar Diggs, YouTube Strategist
Navigating Major Changes
Jamar, being the strategic mind that he is, already had a unique and proven way of working, but it wasn’t documented as a solidified framework.
As part of their work together in Spark Sessions, they were able to build something that would help Jamar reach his goal of speaking directly and more consistently to more aligned clients who value his strategic expertise beyond delivery.
Designing a framework allowed Jamar to create a tool he could leverage to bring in the right sorts of people into his business and create more targeted messaging that resonates.
“If you design your framework in a way that helps you attract the type of target audience you want, then you get to leverage that as a messaging tool in the future.”
Jamar was still transitioning away from his agency and needed more time to be ready to launch the full version of his framework. The framework they co-created was so dynamic that he was able to create an alternative version that coaches and consultants could understand.
He credits Sarah as being supportive and understanding how it fits in with his broader plan to transition to the then-new offering eventually.
But making changes to your business model takes a lot of work.
Jamar understandably had concerns about making the transition, but Sarah held the space for him to navigate his fears and concerns while bravely addressing them.
“She gave me the opportunity to talk about my concerns, like my fears about returning to consulting and my goals. It was really nice of Sarah to create that space for me.”
— Jamar Diggs, YouTube Strategist
A journey of self-(re)discovery
After following his intuition, Jamar returned to primarily consultancy-based services and has since rebranded and updated his website to align with this direction.
The messaging component of Spark Sessions was especially compelling because he could apply it to his future copywriting. They explored core narratives around business, including core beliefs, values, and what he wanted in business.
Since relaunching, his messaging has already reached the aligned audiences he was searching for, landing him work consulting with a Fortune 500 company.
What’s more, Jamar reconnected with his most true and expansive self and regained confidence in his expertise and the impact he can have on his clients.
He credits Sarah for giving him the space to explore without interruption or being told what to think. He sees this journey within Spark Sessions as one of self-discovery, where he could come into his own.
As for the future, Jamar is well-equipped to expand his already excellent work. He still regularly refers to the resources in the client portal because the work is so valuable and transferable.
Thank you, Jamar, for sharing your story!
Ready to spark your own next big idea?
Then Spark Sessions is just the ticket to doing so—on your terms, your way.