A journey worth taking begins with a vision.
We began out of a small garage in Rocklin, California back in 2001. We have grown and learned so much in many aspects of what we do every day to help our clients grow.
To be considered an expert, it is said that one must have performed a task for over 10,000 hours. Experts are not born overnight, but only after years of study, focus, willingness to take risks, overcome failure, and a passion to get results.
Having been in business successfully for over 18 years, our founders alone have acquired well over 40,000 hours of experience in how to run a business and more importantly, how to help our clients. We have evolved over the years as an organization and with our roots as a technology company we have grown into a full service digital marketing agency. Give us a call and allow us to introduce ourselves in person. We look forward to getting to know you and your business better soon.
Team
A knowledgable team of humans working hard so our clients shine!
We come from different backgrounds with our own set of unique experiences. Leveraging passion to succeed in our areas of expertise, we combine our talents and years of developed skills to go the extra mile for our clients in the areas of digital marketing.
We are ready to be your digital marketing partner.
Founders
Plain and simple, the founders of LOJO are the Lay family. Eric and Niki Lay met at the local community college; quickly became best friends and within a week they were dating. Eleven months later they were married in the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints temple in Oakland, California.
Eric has a strong technical background with his bachelors degree in Information Technology and MBA with an emphasis in Marketing. Eric spends a good amount of his time outside work serving in his church and working to help young men develop life skills. Other time is spent with family, planning out the next adventure. His hobbies include playing racquetball, coaching soccer, working on a honey-due project, or working on converting his suburbia backyard into the ranch style yard he had growing up. Something many people don’t know about Eric is that he is a country boy at heart. He was raised on an ostrich farm out in Loomis, California surrounded with fruit trees. Originally he wanted to be a veterinarian or a Spanish teacher, but life had other plans in store. He is passionate about learning, teaching and helping his neighbor.
Niki is the finance brains behind the operation of LOJO. She manages the day to day finances and keeps the focus on the bottom-line. Her instincts with regards to human resource management are inspired. Outside of the office, Niki runs a full-time job in the role of mom; one of the most thankless jobs known, but certainly one of the most rewarding. She too serves in church responsibilities, working currently with the young women’s program. She loves to spend time with family, be outside, play games, and read. She is also a huge Jane Austen fan.
Jonah and Logan continue to be an active part of LOJO. They get excited to take on more responsibility as they become older and desire to be more involved. Jonah presently is serving a full-time church mission in El Salvador, San Salvador and will be returning in July of 2020. Logan is a junior in high school, very active in school, sports, drama, and musical interests.
Value Proposition
We value our belief that helping others succeed leads to an abundance of opportunities.
We are a company of people engaged in the creation and delivery of marketing services, seeking to pursue truth and integrity, and committed to creating value for our our customers, referral partners, shareholders, and our people in the process.
Who we are
We strive to be a company of diverse
people working together to create
and deliver marketing services
and solutions.
We strive to be an honorable
and dependable people.
We strive to be a faith-friendly
company.
What we do
We help our community, the nation,
and the world with trusted business
and technology solutions.
We serve as your interpreter, advisor,
and mentor to fulfill technology
and business needs.
We strive to provide a safe and quality
work environment for our
team members
How we do it
We strive to earn consistent and satisfactory profits to invest in our people, products,
and processes.
We strive to operate with integrity
and trust in all we do.
We strive to honor God and be respectful of each other, our customers,
and other stakeholders.
History
From its early beginnings as a garage startup in August 2001, LOJO began originally as ENL Computing with its sights on technology support services.
ENL stood for Eric and Niki Lay Computing. I was working at E*TRADE at the time within their information technology department and Niki had recently left E*TRADE’s record devision to take care of our first born, Jonah. In 2003, the need to evolve into a
larger organization was becoming apparent with the increase of clientele. I left my position of 5 years and both Niki and I cashed out our retirement and savings to rebrand the company into Rocklin Systems.
Rocklin Systems Inc. took on its first employees and with the desire for the rebrand to look great, a connection between tech support and graphic design was established. We found that many of our tech clients had graphic design needs which quickly moved the company into offering print, web design, and hosting services. With 5 employees out of the garage, although we were having a blast watching the looks from the neighbors during the warm spring days as we’d open the garage and work, it was time for our first office location.
Eric and Niki moved the business to a commercial location off of Rocklin Road, to become Rocklin Systems, n Rocklin CA, off of Rocklin Road. We sure must be big Rocklin fans! We had our first company car at the time with a large RS magnet on the good. It looked like a race car even though it was a 1996 Mazda 626. his location grew pretty large with an office of about 12 people at one time. Lots of good coverage with an add we ran with the local cable company. Pretty great having my dad be the actor in the commercial, playing the role as the client.
After some time in 2007, we realized it was time for another evolution of the business. We had lost a few large opportunities due to our small town named business as being perceived as too much of a mom and pop shop. We decided it was time to become something more than just an IT company based on our name and Niki said we should do something with the kids names. We had our second child back in 2002 and his name is Logan. We went back and fourth between JO LO and LO JO, LOJO wound up sticking and thus we formed the new entity as LOJO Group, LLC.
The change was good for business as we were able to really define what LOJO was and it actually really helped us to win a few large government bids. One of which was the Stanislaus Superior Court website project. At the same time, we had moved our
office to a temporary location in Roseville. Temporary as we were waiting to locate a good new long term location in the newer side of town in Rocklin. Eventually the new space was ready and we moved back into Rocklin off of Lonetree Blvd. In 2009, the IT side of our business was slowing down by quite a bit while the web design and development side was soaring well. The hard decision was made to slowly close out our offering of IT support. It was not long after this that the demand for marketing was becoming largely requested.
I had gone back to school to complete my masters degree in business with an emphasis in marketing. We expanded our team resource pool to include more marketing centric team members and opened our first service offerings of SEO, PPC, and Social Media Marketing. In 2013, we expanded into email marketing, content creation, and a variety of other marketing services combined together into Internet Marketing Plans.
In late 2015, the decision to leave our location at Lonetree Blvd in Rocklin was hard, as we will miss the golf course. The rent was continuing to increase and as an established service provider, we moved to keep our overhead low and did not feel we need the prestige of waterfalls and a mini golf course for clients to like us. LOL
We love our new office location off of Sunset. This really is one of my favorite locations. We are visited by turkeys quite often. Our evolving focus moving into 2016 has been all about digital marketing. This encompasses our passion for developing out beautiful functional web design sites and helping clients succeed with their online marketing goals. Starting in 2016 we have upgraded the name of the business from LOJO Group to LOJO Marketing with a new byline of Digital Marketing Partners.
In 2018, we made the hard decision to pivot ourselves to a decentralized virtual office environment. All team members work remote from their home offices. This has allowed us to increase our technology and abilities to assist our clients with increased marketing efforts, improved content creation, and optimized results amongst our marketing software and service offerings.
We look forward to working with our clients as their digital marketing partner to bring about the success of their marketing goals.
