Joe Sampson has been an entrepreneur for pretty much as long as he can remember.
If his mother was having a yard sale, young Joe set up a lemonade stand there.
If a teenaged Sampson needed to buy clothes or pay costs associated with playing high school sports, he’d do everything from cutting grass to running a mobile detailing business.
Doing that was more out of necessity than anything in a family where both parents had jobs, but his father also had to work on nights and weekends to make ends meet.
Sampson’s career has been fueled by mirroring his father’s work ethic, something that has helped drive his entrepreneurial hustle.
“I’ve always viewed his work ethic as my inheritance and the greatest thing he passed down to me,” he said.
Early on, Sampson had a few jobs where he worked for established companies, each of which taught him something that helped shape his career.
His first was with Lockheed Martin, where he said he learned about time management and people.
At Watson Realty Corp., Sampson said he developed more sophisticated sales skills and grew his marketing talents.
But mostly Sampson, 35, has spent his career building and molding new ventures, either with others or by himself.
The most public was as executive director and chief operating officer with the One Spark crowdfunding festival that showcased creatives and entrepreneurs.
His time there ended after two years, a parting that he has said little about publicly until now.
But it’s something that’s had a lasting impact on Sampson and, he believes, the city, as well.
“People started trying things, relationships were formed, collaborations were born and as a result, the effects of One Spark are still developing today,” he said.
After that, Sampson followed his instincts and started two businesses.
First came EventReal, a company he started with Lisa Goodrich to pair event organizers with sponsors.
That was followed by Nuera Marketing, of which he is cofounder and chief strategist.
The small San Marco agency has doubled its core team in the first year, as well as working with about a dozen part-time/flex team members who help on projects that best match their skill sets and styles.
“Sort of a collective of great talent,” Sampson said.
Learning value of working early on
Working hard was a natural way of life in Sampson’s home in Lakeland. He grew up in what he described as a “blue-collar, working-class family that was lower on the socioeconomic totem pole.”
Neither of his parents went to college, both having to spend their teenage years helping raise their siblings.
Sampson didn’t have to look hard for role models with a strong work ethic.
His dad worked full time at a moving company and did odd jobs and handyman work on the weekends and most evenings to help make ends meet.
Sampson first started helping him when he was 9 or 10.
By the time he was a teenager, he was working after school with his father on those night and weekend side jobs.
“My dad has always been one of the hardest-working people I know,” he said.
Sampson’s mother worked in banking after years in administrative jobs.
The family didn’t take vacations nor did they have money for a lot of nice things.
“If we wanted to do something or have something, we had to figure out how to pay for it,” Sampson said.
He was the baby of the family, five to seven years younger than his brother and sister.
“They were close and I was always trying to get their attention through any means possible, and of course, to prove to them that I was just as smart, athletic, talented, etc.,” Sampson said.
In college, he studied music and church ministries, a choice he said was made “almost exclusively to make my parents proud.”
Christianity played a major role in the family’s world, so having a son pursue a career in ministry made his parents happy.
But, it wasn’t what he wanted to do and Sampson shifted to other career goals in his early 20s.
His first venture
Sampson Trading Co. was his first real business ownership experience. He had grown up buying and selling antiques and collectibles.
When his Lockheed Martin department was going to be outsourced, he was offered a job in another city.
“Ultimately, I just remembered the valuable lessons of working smart and hard that I learned in my teen years and decided to get back to carving out my own path,” he said.
At the trading company, he paired buying and selling online through eBay with a traditional brick-and-mortar store in Downtown St. Augustine, where he sold larger pieces he bought from estate sales.
Sampson sold the business in 2006 to a larger antique store in St. Augustine in what turned out to be just before that market crashed.
The business taught him how important the story and positioning of products are to customers.
“For them, it created value, and for my business, it generated a greater net profit,” he said.
Building on what he’d learned about people at Lockheed Martin, Sampson said it was his first real step toward a marketing-driven career.
He used those skills at Sight & Sound Productions, where he was vice president of marketing and general manager.
And then came One Spark.
Nearly two years at One Spark festival
Sampson said he met festival co-founder Elton Rivas during the crowdfunding campaign before the inaugural 2013 event.
He left Sight & Sound to join the effort about six weeks before the first festival.
“But, there wasn’t really a single detail of the actual event in place,” he said.
Details such as permitting, logistics, production, catering and staging had to be completed in that short period of time, Sampson said.
“And all of that fell squarely at my feet,” he said.
Those six weeks, paired with five 20-hour festival days, were the hardest he’d ever worked.
“We pulled something off in such a short period that very few teams might have,” he said. “It was the most energizing experience of my life.”
Sampson was there for the second festival, whose attendance of 260,000 doubled the successful inaugural year.
And he was part of what he said was a successful One Spark Berlin, the organization’s first effort outside of Jacksonville.
Those successes came under his leadership, Sampson said, since Rivas was focused “almost exclusively” on KYN, an incubator for startups that was funded primarily by Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shad Khan.
Sampson said fundraising for One Spark 2015 was ahead of targets five months before the event and expenses were below budget.
Khan then pulled financing from KYN, saying he was unhappy with how little went to the businesses.
Rivas returned to One Spark and the board named him CEO, Sampson said.
“With Elton stepping back in, I delivered my resignation letter,” he said.
Sampson said he offered 60 days’ noticed to help complete fundraising and creator recruitment.
Sampson said after Rivas met with board members that day, he was asked to meet with Rivas and Peter Rummell, who funded most of One Spark’s expenses.
He said he was told his resignation was accepted and it was preferred he left immediately.
“That was it,” Sampson said. “From that day forward, I did what I could to help the organization but was essentially locked out of the thing that I had built with my team.”
He takes with him many good memories, especially one night in the 2014 festival where he stood at the intersection of Laura and Adams streets during the festival.
“There were seas of people in every direction, smiles on every face, people in disbelief at what was happening downtown, and a tear rolling down my tired but overjoyed face.” he said.
But he didn’t wait long to start a new path.
Launching new era
Sampson started EventReal in January 2015, followed by Nuera Marketing with his partner Grant Nielsen 11 months later.
The space the agency moved into in San Marco was a mess, he said in a website post. In one week, they cleaned, painted, furnished and got the office ready for clients.
At the same time, they built a new Jacksonville Jazz Festival website in eight days.
The first year included working with about 30 clients across the country, including 14 website builds, 15 brand designs or redesigns and 12 social and digital clients, he said.
The agency did that with help from several members of the original One Spark team: Meredith O’Malley Johnson, Jack Twachtman, Chad Landenberger, and Jack DeYoung.
Another way the effects of One Spark are still being felt today.
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