Today we’d like to introduce you to Marcus London and Juliet Udeochu.
Marcus and Juliet, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
The Playbook Agency (TPA) is a hands-on consultancy designed to make a difference in the community through developing and sustaining charitable foundations. TPA consists of its two Co-founders, Marcus London (Chief Executive Officer) and Juliet Udeochu (Chief Marketing Officer). Between the both of them, they have over 15 years of experience in the non-profit sector. Marcus and Juliet met at Big Brothers Big Sisters of Metro Atlanta (BBBSMA) in 2018. For BBBSMA, Juliet worked as the Volunteer Recruitment Manager and Marcus, at the time, served as a board member for the Young Leaders Council. In our short period of knowing each other, we realized how much passion we equally shared in working in philanthropy, in particular working with young people and being advocates in our community. Our story started on two different coasts in the US, and through the grace of God, we both ended up in Atlanta.
Juliet was born and raised in Los Angeles, CA. She is the middle child of five kids in a strong and educated Nigerian family. As a kid, she was a busy body, always looking to learn new things and getting in trouble because she thought that she knew everything. But it was her creative mind that turned her into the multihyphenate adult she is today. It was her personality, work ethic, and love for life that made Juliet known in the Nigerian community and in various social groups in LA. Once Juliet graduated from college, she took a chance on herself and opened her own daycare at the age of 21 years old. Most of her clients were single-parent mother from these various social groups. After owning the daycare for several years, she decided to change career paths and transition into the nonprofit sector. She always had a passion for helping people and felt working in nonprofits would allow her to have a bigger impact. During the holidays, she would feed the homeless, donate toys and clothes for Christmas, and exploring ways that she could be helpful to those in need. Juliet was also the Co-Founder of an organization in Los Angeles called “The Teachers’ Lounge 90210”, an exclusive monthly social group tailored to like-minded young professionals.
As a product of Caribbean parents, Marcus was born and raised in the Bronx, New York, where he discovered his love of philanthropy. In a neighborhood such as the Bronx, there are always opportunities to give back. Whether it was through a church or a shelter, Marcus’ mother was always looking for opportunities to do God’s work, and because of that, she instilled in him benevolence and dedicating time towards charity. It wasn’t until after Marcus graduated from college, where he discovered he could merge philanthropy and business together to form a non-profit. Fast forward four years later, and being granted the opportunity to work for a start-up non-profit, Marcus took it upon himself to start his own non-profit for adolescence, which was geared towards college-readiness, after schools programs, and giving back, domestically and internationally. Subsequently, Marcus decided it was time to expand his view of the world, and took on a job opportunity in Atlanta, GA. From there, he reconnected with Big Brothers Big Sister, being that he was a Big (mentor) for the New York chapter for five years. Once a representative of BBBSMA expressed to him that his experience in non-profit was an asset, he was asked to join their Young Leaders Council Board and the rest is history.
Since Marcus is from New York, and I am from Los Angeles, initially we thought that we would not get along, because of all the East & West Coast beef from the early 90’s. But after becoming friends, we quickly realized that we had the unique ability to tolerate long hours around one another. It was then that we took a shot at taking our friendship to the next level and became a couple. We both realized that it was the passion that we shared for community service which brought us together. Our many weekends together on community projects or helping friends create ways to give back, led us to discovering that our bond was more than just surface level. As our relationship grew, we noticed that our date nights turned into discussing how we could make a greater impact in Atlanta; the city that we now call home. We both took a leap of faith by making sacrifices and moving to Atlanta, and did the same thing in combining our passion in philanthropy and starting a business together. This is how The Playbook Agency was born! The term Forbes used is “couple-preneur”, and we became excited to put our experience, expertise, and passion for service into an ideal game plan that matches the uniqueness of our clients to execute their needs.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
Is it ever a smooth road when you’re an entrepreneur? If you can find an entrepreneur that has had a smooth journey in building their business, please tell them to give me their handbook. However, the best part about this entrepreneurial journey is all the challenges that we’ve faced. It keeps us on our toes and out of our comfort zones. There is a phrase that the Stoics use which is “Amor Fati”; it means love of one’s fate. It is used to describe an attitude in which one sees everything that happens in one’s life, including suffering and loss, as good or, at the very least necessary. Although developing this mindset is not easy, it has helped us push through our challenges.
One of the best encounters about being an entrepreneur is that no two days are the same. Despite all of the challenges, our faith, trust in one another and fortitude has helped us get to where we are today with our business. We see challenges as opportunities to be creative and think outside the box. Juliet likes to express that one of her best qualities is that she is an out of the box thinker. So, I think she does her best work when she’s faced with a challenge or when things are not working the way she wants them to work.
When we both started this entrepreneurial journey one of our biggest struggles was finding our first client. Although we’ve both worked with local celebrities on different projects, boards and events in Atlanta, we could not sign them as clients because they already had their own management team or they were already signed to an agency who offered the same services as The Playbook Agency. After being rejected a number of times, our dreams of getting our first client started to get deterred. But, we refused to let all of our hard work, time and money of creating The Playbook Agency dry up like a raisin in the sun.
Then, one day Juliet received a text from her friend Shelden Williams, former NBA Player and Duke University Alum. In the text Shelden stated that he was moving back to Atlanta to be the assistant coach for the College Park SkyHawks for the NBA G-League. Simultaneously, he was also looking to get active in the community through his Shelden Williams Foundation. This was exciting news for us, because Shelden’s Foundation was already doing great things in his hometown Oklahoma. It was a blessing to know that he wanted to do charitable work in Atlanta. Williams’ NBA career started when he was selected by the Atlanta Hawks, with the fifth pick in the 2006 NBA draft. Now, that he was moving back to Atlanta, where he started his NBA career, he wanted to use his foundation and influence to impact youth through basketball and education.
Once we expressed to Shelden what we were doing with The Playbook Agency, and how we were looking to work with athletes and celebrities to impact the community, he asked us to be a part of team and manage his foundation here in Atlanta. Our initial meeting with Shelden was at a coffee shop. We asked Shelden to meet with us to learn more about what he wanted to achieve with his foundation in Atlanta. We discussed the mission of The Playbook Agency, our services, and why we believe athletics and celebs should use their star power for good. Before the night was over, The Playbook Agency had its first client in Shelden Williams!! Although, we were finally excited to sign our first client, we knew that in order to sustain and grow this company that we need to build up our clientele.
Please tell us about The Playbook Agency.
The Playbook Agency is a hands-on consultancy that works closely with our clients to draw up creative and innovative plays to help them achieve their philanthropic goals! We are a team of strategists, developers, event planners, and marketers who are passionate about non-profits and sports. Working closely with athletes, celebrities, and influence’s we connect them with local non-profits, schools, and other community partners to make their communities and the world a better place. This is accomplished through identifying key civic partners, building awareness, providing strategy, and event planning. The goal of The Playbook Agency is to provide our clients with the necessary tools, ideas, and confidence to improve the way they give back.
What separates The Playbook Agency is that we both have a love and passion for young people and the community. We are not here to help celebrities create a one-off community event to post on social media to get likes. We are here to help celebrities use their influence to give back to the community and to influence their fans and others to give back as well. We like to say that we would not ask our clients to do anything that we wouldn’t do or anything that we haven’t done. If we create an event for our client to go out into the streets of Atlanta to feed the homeless.
Marcus and I, will be there alongside with our clients feeding the homeless as well. We believe that helping the less fortunate should not be something that is coerced, but rather organic. We believe that giving back is DOPE! Our ultimate goal is to get people to understand the greatness in being advocates in the community and helping others. Since we do not have the star power to push people, we want to use our skills, experience and knowledge to build up a clientele of people who can achieve that. We specialize in curating and customizing the ideal game plan that matches the uniqueness of our clients to execute their goals. Our consulting services include:
Refine Strategic Mission & Vision
Marketing and Communications
Branding
Partnership Cultivations
Strategic Planning
Event Planning
Volunteer Recruitment
Philanthropy Positioning and Messaging
Public Relations
One of our proudest moments was successfully executing three events in one week for our client Shelden Williams and his foundation. At first, we thought that it was crazy to attempt to do so much in so little time, but we took on the challenge. Our client wanted to do it big for his inaugural, Shelden Williams Foundation, events. Shelden wanted to make sure that what he was doing was going to have a real impact on the communities he focused on serving.
On, November 20 2019, we hosted the first event, which was tagged “The SWF Canned Food and Water Drive”. The purpose of this initiative was to provide, over fifty families from the KIPP Atlanta Collegiate High School, with donations for the Thanksgiving holiday. The event was held at Aurum Lounge; shout out to Ali for allowing us to use his club for this endeavor. The people who came to show support donated cases of water, boxed mac & cheese, canned food, and countless of other nonperishable food. Because of years of working in nonprofit we know that children who live in lower SES communities get most of their meals at school. Therefore, we wanted to use this food drive to help feed families for the holiday and the holiday break. We set a goal to raise enough canned food and waters to feed fifty families from KIPP Atlanta Collegiate High School and we exceeded our goal! The event was a HUGE success!
Our next event took place on Friday, November 22, 2019. The Shelden Williams Foundation donated food and water supplies, all of which was received from the Canned Food and Water Drive, to almost 100 families from the KIPP Atlanta Collegiate High School. The event was led by Shelden in conjunction with the Atlanta Food Bank. All of the big smiles and hugs that we received from families that morning let us know that we had another amazing event under our belts.
The final event was on Sunday, December 1, 2019, which was the Shelden Williams Foundation’s first ever youth basketball clinic. The clinic was held at the KIPP Atlanta Collegiate High School where over 75 youth between the ages of 13 and 16 were in attendance. The event was led by Williams, a team of coaches, instructors and players from the College Park Skyhawks, to teach kids different basketball drills. Williams used the event platform to share some of his life’s experiences with the youth, while answering questions that bordered on his career in the NBA and other aspects of life. The Clinic was designed to help youth by improving their fundamental basketball awareness and life skills, both on and off the court. All the youth who participated at the basketball clinic were each provided breakfast, lunch, and given a ‘swag bag’ as complementary gifts for their participation. Krispy Kreme Doughnuts and Subway sponsored the breakfast and lunch for the event. We are able to feed all the youth who attended the event and their families.
If you had to go back in time and start over, would you have done anything differently?
To be honest, if we had the opportunity to start The Playbook Agency from scratch the first thing we’d change is our marketing. There are many businesses that are started, but fail before they make it to two years. What we’ve learned is that anyone can start a business; however, it takes strategic marketing to bring that exposure to your business. However, we can talk for days about what we could have done differently, but, to be honest we are still trying to figure it out as we go along. One important aspect we would change would include doing our research on how to receive financial assistance for small businesses. There is so much money out there for startups and small business, especially those that are doing work in the community.
I think what was difficult is that we both have full-time jobs; Marcus, has a real estate investment company. At the time when we started TPA, Marcus was in graduate school, as full time student at Syracuse University. We both also served on countless boards and were still heavily involved in the community. What was funny is that our friends would joke and ask us how we make time to do everything that we’re doing and then start a company. Quite frankly, we both thought that starting TPA would be easy because it was our passion, and it was what we were doing already for our boards, the only thing is, we were doing all of this work for free. So, we decided to start something that could take both of our careers to the next level. Ultimately, that’s why we both moved to Atlanta, to become successful doing what we love.
Contact Info:
- Email: theplaybookagency@gmail.com
- Instagram: @theplaybookagency
- Twitter: @agencyplaybook
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