Today we’d like to introduce you to Joe Staiber, CEO of Tampa Entrepreneurs, which is a 501 (c) (7) non profit organization aimed at building a community of visionaries and thought leaders by hosting 100% free events for the Tampa Bay community. They just recently hosted an event for 400 entrepreneurs at American Social, and are already in works to host an even bigger event later this year.
Hi Joe, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
It would be my pleasure! My name is Joe Staiber and my backstory is quite unique. My journey began in e-commerce back when I was in college. I was dead broke, fresh out of a serious relationship and had no idea where to begin. Luckily for instagram, I came across a business model known as dropshipping, and after losing thousands of dollars trying to build a business, I decided to seek some help from those already succeeding. I bought the courses, I paid for mentors, and I spent every dollar I had to my name to fly out to an event and meet/learn from the industries best.
After months of trial and error, It finally worked. I slowly figured it out and over the course of the next 2 years was blessed and fortunate enough to scale multiple stores to over 6 figures in sales. Inspiring friends and family along the way, they began to ask me to help them do the same, and once I realized I was able to help them as well, I decided to launch a course teaching others.
Over the next year, the course grew to over 200 students and amassed over 7 figures in student sales. Soon after, I launched Staiber Consulting, A paid ads agency for e-commerce brands, which grew to a six figure business in year one. Meanwhile, at the same time my personal brand began to blow up as I was being asked to speak at events all across the country to teach others what I knew about paid advertising and ecommerce, and garnered over 400k followers across all social media platforms. These events changed my life, and also introduced me to my closest friends, who are also now my business partners, but more on that in a moment.
After a few years of running a digital ads agency, we began getting our clients featured in the news to help them rank better on Google, Increase their awareness and credibility, and close more deals. They saw staggering results. This led to the creation of my third and most recent company, NewsFeature, where we get business owners and entrepreneurs featured in media outlets such as New York Weekly, Miami Wire, Yahoo Finance, Business Insider, and more. And since its inception, Newsfeature.com has published over 1000+ articles for its clients.
I obviously skipped over a lot here as my story could take up pages, but to summarize, I have done a lot and one door always led to another opening and the skills I’ve acquired with each door opened has better equipped me for what I’m building today with NewsFeature and Tampa Entrepreneurs.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Oh man, too many to count. I’ve lost friends, I’ve lost money and Ive lost alot of time. But all of them were necessary to get to where I am today. One of the biggest challenges I’ve been faced with came In 2020. At the time I was running my marketing agency and running ads for clients, while also still building my own ecommerce brands. During Covid, I built a store selling face masks and we got wrecked.
Due to Facebook’s policy update when they banned selling masks due to “price gouging” I was running ads for one of my stores “stealth mask” and were doing thousands in sales every day with no issue, then within minutes, lost access to our entire Facebook account.
We experienced what is known as a profile ban, for violating FB’s terms of service, even though selling masks were completely legal when we began, they changed their policy and banned us without any time to shut things down. This resulted in not only Stealth Masks ads being stopped but all of our clients. The damage was devastating and we had to reimburse all our clients and took a huge financial hit. This is one of the reasons I decided to pivot from Staiber Consulting to News Feature – I did not want my entire company dependent on one service such as facebook.
Another challenge I faced was a personal one. I amassed a huge following on social media, over 56k on IG and 330k on TikTok, this was how I generated most of my speaking gigs and found most of my clients. One day, all of a sudden one of my competitors paid an insider at instagram to have my account deleted.
Similar to my ads account with facebook, I instantly lost my account and with it my entire audience and lead flow. This caused a bit of an identity crisis as a lot of my self worth was tied up in my brand. This forced me to do two things: one, take a big step back from my brand and focus on myself, my mental health, and two, build out more stable lead acquisition channels so I wasn’t fully dependent on a big social media page such as instagram.
There are plenty more, but both of these obstacles have had a massive impact on where I am today and have helped me grow immensely.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
Absolutely! So as I mentioned I have a few, NewsFeature which is my PR agency that gets clients featured in the news, Press Automations which is my program that teaches others how to start and scale their own PR agency, and most importantly, Tampa Entrepreneurs, which is a 501 (c)(7) non profit organization with one core goal in mind; creating a community of people not just to do business with, but to do life with.
Impact > Income is our motto, and community is our purpose.
My co-founders and I decided to found Tampa Entrepreneurs to solve a problem and create a community that Tampa so desperately needed. Over the last few years I have been blessed with the opportunity to speak on stages at entrepreneurship events and seminars all over the world to share my knowledge on paid advertising and sales, one of them being Netcon (founded by my co-founder of TE Simon Lerner).
Through these events, not only did I meet my closest friends and business partners (Ryan Horst, Errol Coleman and Jenna Schwartz) but we also got to witness firsthand all of these incredible communities that exist in other parts of the country. The only problem was there wasn’t one here in Tampa and we decided we had two options. One was to move, the other was to build that same community here.. And who in their right mind wants to move out of Tampa..
So, we decided to pool our networks, our resources, and our skills, to build it here. The only difference is we are doing this to make an Impact and to give back. We do this by hosting free quarterly events that combine networking with masterminding with fun and unique experiences across the Tampa Bay area. Our team is dedicated to ensuring we always prioritize Impact > Income and provide unforgettable experiences and opportunities for our community. Where everyone sees dollar signs, we see an opportunity to give back and leave a lasting impact.
That’s incredible Joe, What does success mean to you?
I’ve always had a different view of the word success. In a culture where success means having anything and everything and is fueled by materialistic possessions, many people are celebrated as “successful” yet are unhappy and unfulfilled. To me, success means being able to take care of and provide for the people I love.
It’s the ability to own my time and spend it however I want, whether that’s traveling or with loved ones. Success is being content and happy with who you are, what you have, and what you’re leaving behind – the impact is important for me; which is exactly why I started Tampa Entrepreneurs.
One last thing before you go; How can people get in contact with you?
You can follow me on instagram and linkedin here:
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/joe.staiber?igshid=MjEwN2IyYWYwYw==
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe-staiber/
You can follow Tampa Entrepreneurs here:
And if you want to get yourself featured in media outlets through my company NewsFeature, you can do that here:
