Our Story

2015 Paradox Marketing and SMB Advisors Merge

For 5 years Joshua and Aaron had been discussing the idea of merging the two agencies. Whilst Aaron played largely the sales and account management role whilst operating as an individual business, Paradox had assumed almost 100% of all client work and implementations.

At a certain point enough is enough, lawyers are called, documents signed, domains redirected and the rest is history!

2015 The 3rd Paradox Philippines Summit

This time we had chosen Bacolod to host our next summit. Only this time things had started to shift for Paradox, as we were numbered in the 20’s for Philippine team members and even had 1 USA team member and an Australian.

2015 The 2nd Paradox in Person Philippines Summit

This time we decided to host the summit in Cebu, Paradox had grown to being 6 employees in the Philippines plus Joshua but we still only managed to get a four person turn out for our summit.

2015 Paradox’s First In Person Team Summit

It was early days still, Paradox consisted of some freelancers, and 4 full time staff in the Philippines. In order to try and build some culture, raise some morale Joshua organized to fly everyone in to Manila to work from a coworking center for a week and see what it felt like to have real world colleagues.

This has gone on to become a very important (almost annual) tradition for Paradox. We believe that remote work is the best option for most people, but that real world connection with your colleagues is extremely valuable for fostering multi decade long digital relationships.

2015 Paradox Marketing Starts its Own Internal Development Team

In March of 2017 Paradox welcomed Sonny Nabong into the company. In more ways than one, Paradox would not be where it is today without this pivotal hire. Sonny brought a raft of technical capabilities that Joshua was never going to be able to grasp and tackle, and represented Paradox’s maiden voyage into being able to handle the full technical requirements for managing client sites. No more freelancers, no more self directed tutorials through stack exchange, Paradox finally had a full time developer to call their very own!

2015 Paradox Hires its First Full Time Employee

For the first year everything we did was a combination of Joshua’s time and effort and bringing in freelancers wherever was needed. After a failed attempt at building  a partnership with another firm handling web development it became apparent to Joshua that the only way to build Paradox into the company that he wanted it to be was to have people that were 100% dedicated to the cause.

Hiring a full time employee is nerve wracking at the best of times, but hiring the first is a major step in the right direction.

2015 Paradox Marketing Was Born & Registered

On the 21st of September, the business name and domain name Paradox Marketing first came into existence. No longer was it Joshua Ballard alone, we stood for something larger. Something grander.

The word Paradox holds a deep meaning to Joshua, and was blazened across almost all previously failed business ventures. It was only fitting that it would be the name of his last shot at the entrepreneurial dream before he accepted that he was best off being an employee.

2015 Joshua Goes to Inbound 2015 – Joins HubSpot Partner Program

In many ways, the birth of Paradox Marketing can be tied back to the HubSpot Inbound 2015 conference. Last minute Joshua decided to head on over, beg forgiveness from his Boss for missing some work days, and see what the conference would be all about. He took this as an opportunity to meet many other digital marketing agency owners, pick their brains, and ultimately decide that he wanted to start an agency. Not just a freelance side hustle, a fully fledged agency offering Inbound.

It was at Inbound 15 that Joshua made the contacts needed to launch Paradox Marketing into a primarily USA serving agency.

Before we even had Paradox Marketing as a brand name, we were already enrolled as HubSpot partners from the very beginning.

2015 Joshua Begins Moonlighting

Joshua was working as a marketing manager for a small business in Adelaide. The temptation to market a broader range of businesses was too strong, so with his boss’s permission he entered some freelancing platforms and started to take on some additional clients.