JB Kellogg and the advantage of being a beginner

JB Kellogg went looking for an internship and found a problem he could not yet solve. Near the end of college, with his last football season behind him, he walked into Zia Publishing, a travel-magazine company near campus. He had design skills and time available. The publisher needed a website. Asked whether he could build it, he admitted he could not, then asked for a desk, a computer, and a chance to learn.

It is a pleasingly awkward beginning for someone who would become the co-founder and CEO of a marketing technology company. The missing qualification was rather central to the assignment. Yet the offer contained something a résumé would have struggled to communicate: he was prepared to stay with an unfamiliar problem until he could make something useful.

That episode sits near the beginning of a career in which learning and selling have often happened close together. Kellogg went on to found Madwire with his father, Joe, in 2009. Its Marketing 360 platform would eventually combine business management tools with marketing software and services. Before any of that, somebody had to let a former football player sit down at a computer.

A desk before a business plan

Kellogg grew up mostly in Colorado, with sport occupying a large part of his attention. Football took him to college on scholarship. At Western New Mexico University, he played strong safety, served as team captain, and also started two games at quarterback. Those positions offer rather different views of an approaching collision.

His public education history places him at Western New Mexico from 2003 to 2005. He has also written about playing at Eastern Arizona Community College. The football years help explain why the end of his final season felt like an opening in the calendar. A commitment that had organized his days was suddenly finished. He still had a semester to complete.

The publisher’s website gave him somewhere to put that newly available attention. There is a useful distinction between being interested in design and accepting responsibility for a functioning site. The latter has a customer attached. Someone needs the thing to work. His first assignment joined an appetite for learning to the practical demands of another person’s business.

In retrospect, that combination looks like preparation for Madwire. At the time, it was simply a student finding work before graduation. The larger meaning arrived later, as larger meanings tend to do, once the bills and the experiments had supplied enough evidence.

The father-son apprenticeship

Back in Colorado, Kellogg joined his father at Traders Network, a futures and commodities brokerage. Joe brought experience running a business; JB brought an increasing interest in what websites and online marketing could do for one. They worked on the brokerage’s digital presence before offering those capabilities to other companies.

By 2009, the opportunity had become a separate venture. Small businesses needed help reaching customers online. Father and son started Madwire in a small office, during a recession, with the ambition of making that help into a business of its own. A family partnership gave the new company a relationship that predated its incorporation papers.

Joe had been his coach in youth sports. Later, he became his employer and business partner. That progression matters to JB’s account of himself: he repeatedly credits his father as a teacher. Their partnership carried years of shared experience into decisions about clients, money, and work.

Early competence had its gaps. Kellogg has recalled a client mentioning SEO during a call and searching for its meaning while the conversation continued. He then sold the service. It is an anecdote with comic timing and a certain entrepreneurial audacity; a browser tab was doing a fair amount of professional development.

He tells the story candidly. The beginner from the publishing office had acquired customers without entirely losing his habit of learning in the middle of the assignment. The responsibility, of course, was to turn the promise into work that deserved payment.

“Execution excellence is our standard and our standard is non-negotiable.”

JB Kellogg, on Madwire’s company motto

Five years of listening

Madwire’s software ambitions took time to become a product. The company began in services, helping customers with the immediate work of websites and marketing. Kellogg has explained that the founders wanted a technology company but needed experience to understand what they should build. Working with small businesses supplied that education.

The first Marketing 360 platform arrived in 2014. Five years separated the company’s founding from that launch. Services generated revenue while exposing the recurring tasks, needs, and frustrations that software might address. The customers were paying for work; the founders were also learning where a product could be useful.

The resulting proposition reflects that history. A small company can need a way to manage customers, collect payments, and market its services, while also needing people to help perform the work. Kellogg’s description of Marketing 360 brings those needs together. Software and dedicated talent occupy the same business model.

There is a practical sympathy in that arrangement. Buying a tool does not automatically create time to use it. The owner still has a business to run. Madwire’s service background helps explain why the human contribution remained part of the offer as its technology developed.

Kellogg’s published account puts the first customer’s subscription at $190 a month. That number has a different texture from the later milestone of more than $100 million in annual revenue and over 500 employees within the first decade. One describes a company at scale. The other describes somebody saying yes.

The coach’s vocabulary

Kellogg talks about championship teams and championship performance. Given the football background, the phrasing has an identifiable origin. His business advice also spends considerable time on developing leaders, creating repeatable processes, and giving people feedback. The team has to learn how to operate beyond the founder’s immediate reach.

One of his more concrete recommendations is a regular all-hands meeting. He advocates telling employees where the company stands, what its goals are, and where changes are needed. He also encourages listening to employee and customer feedback. Those practices give the sporting vocabulary a working schedule.

At Madwire’s online all-hands meetings, he shared recordings of customer calls to recognize good work. A customer seeing a completed website could react in front of the people who had built it. The result of the work became audible, rather than disappearing into a report.

That is a particularly fitting ritual for a company born from web design and marketing services. A website can pass through several pairs of hands before its owner sees it. Hearing that owner respond reconnects the finished product to the people behind it. Recognition becomes specific enough to mean something.

Glassdoor recognized Kellogg among its top CEOs in 2016, 2017, and 2018. In 2016, the Kelloggs ranked first in the small and medium company category. Those are dated achievements in a longer working life, and they belong alongside the daily practices that make leadership visible to a team.

The classroom at home

Family has a place in Kellogg’s story beyond the father-son partnership. He married Gina in 2005, and they have four children. On his personal website, he describes faith and family as priorities and himself as a work in progress. It is a modest qualification to a biography containing plenty of numbers.

In 2019, he and Gina founded Horse & Chariot, a Christian ministry concerned with virtue and character. Its beginnings were domestic. Gina encountered the horse-and-chariot analogy, with its account of intellect, will, and passions, and shared it with JB. Their interest developed into teachings they could use within their family.

They began sharing short lessons more widely, and requests followed for material suited to families, schools, churches, and small groups. JB now serves as co-founder and chair, with responsibilities that include directing, producing, and editing teaching content. Gina is co-founder and vice chair. Joe serves as treasurer.

Another family undertaking, then, with a different purpose and familiar collaborators. The connection to Kellogg’s business life lies in his recurring interest in lessons that can be passed along. A difficult experience becomes a video, a conversation, or something another person can put to use.

“Because a lesson learned should be a lesson shared.”

JB Kellogg

Back within earshot

There is room in this portrait for a less industrious afternoon. Asked to plan a visit to his part of Colorado, Kellogg proposed mountain trails near Estes Park and Poudre Canyon, time on the lake wake surfing or wake boarding, and evenings in downtown Fort Collins or Loveland. It is a busy itinerary even before anyone opens a laptop.

Work continues to generate fresh material. In March 2025, he appeared on the Fort Collins Fellas podcast to discuss building Madwire, hiring in Northern Colorado, and the role of AI in marketing. The conversation returned a technology business to its local setting and the people it needs to hire.

In a 2026 LinkedIn post, Kellogg described stepping back onto the sales floor. He acknowledged mistakes and the loss of talented colleagues, while describing renewed energy and plans to recruit. “Truth is, I should have done it sooner,” he wrote. The admission gives his teaching about leadership a present-tense test.

The founder is back close enough to hear the work. That seems an appropriate place to leave someone whose first useful move was walking into an unfamiliar office and asking for a chance. Experience has accumulated. So have responsibilities. There is still something to learn by taking a seat.