Up to $2 million | 2025 Revenue: $766,000
Jason Pratt credits relationships built over decades in Jacksonville as the foundation for his entrepreneurial career.
Pratt has lived in Jacksonville since age 4, when his family moved to the city from Flint, Michigan, in 1986. His social and professional circle includes childhood friends, connections he made during seven years as a photojournalist for The Florida Times-Union and other relationships he established both as co-owner of a construction company with his two brothers and in a role helping Mayo Clinic in Florida establish its social media operations.
In early 2020, he founded the Prattify marketing and advertising agency. Facing uncertain prospects as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold, Pratt said he immediately learned the value of his relationships when he landed his first client through a friend he’d known since elementary school.
“I’ve always been obsessed with the company his parents started in 1996, Baymeadows Movers,” he said. “I’d always told him, ‘Your company’s awesome, but I cannot stand your logo and your branding.’ I was telling him this decades ago. I said, ‘One day, if I ever have the opportunity, I want to fix that.’”
When that opportunity presented itself, Pratt updated and modernized the company’s old logo, which he described as clip art of a moving truck made to look like it was traveling fast.
Baymeadows Movers still uses his new logo and branding today, Pratt said.
From that beginning, Prattify not only established a foothold during the pandemic but expanded its client base to the point where Pratt had to hire another staff member in the fall to help cover the workload.
He said reaching out to people he knew was “100% the key” to getting the startup off the ground and building it to a company with a 10-person workforce today.
Pratt said he developed an interest in media while growing up in Jacksonville and reading the Times-Union. That interest, combined with a fascination with visual imagery, led him to study photography in college.
From 2004 to 2011, Pratt held what he called his dream job as a photographer at the T-U, becoming colleagues with people he had long admired as a faithful reader of their work. Among them, he names T-U columnist Mark Woods and former columnist Karen Brune Mathis, now editor at large of the Jacksonville Daily Record.
At the newspaper, he said, he became interested in internet technology, which led to an opportunity to train staff on video production and use of social media.
“I was probably one of the first 20 people on Twitter in Jacksonville,” he said.
After his position was eliminated amid the contraction of the print media industry worldwide, Pratt worked for Mayo in photography, videography and social media. He also became more involved in Pratt Guys, the construction company he and his brothers operated.
In 2019, he began seeking another career step.
“We all have these seasons in life where we self-reflect and look back,” he said. “I was about to turn 40, about to have my second child. I felt very successful with Pratt Guys and that there wasn’t a whole lot more work to do with marketing and operations.”
In deciding his next step, Pratt said he determined that he wanted to make a living “working with energized entrepreneurs.”
That idea led to the creation of Prattify, which launched on March 1, 2020. Six years later, Prattify is still growing. In keeping with his work experience, Pratt said the company sets itself apart by producing an above-average amount of photo and video content. He said the company’s client list fluctuates but averages about 25 at any given time.
Now the father of three children, Pratt said he expects the business to keep getting bigger but at a manageable rate.
“I definitely have a kind of grow-or-die mentality,” he said. “What I don’t want to happen is that more growth equals more time away from the family. So I’m very intentional with that. But I enjoy building a team, being a small-business owner and helping others make a living as well.”
Whatever comes next, Pratt gives a strong impression that he’ll face it with a positive attitude. He says his core professional and personal principles center around a couple of key acronyms — the “JOT method,” standing for joy, optimism and trust, and “being a KID every day” translating to being kind, involved and dependable.
Pratt’s trust in people, he said, has helped him sustain and expand his business while maintaining the base that helped him get started.
“Most everybody I reached out to early on still to this day are clients,” he said. “Which is really cool.”