Ditching the “Perfect Time”: Jessica Robinson’s Bold Jump into Business

When Jessica Robinson launched AMP, she didn’t wait for a groundbreaking idea—she seized the moment. What started as side consulting during maternity leave soon turned into a thriving affiliate marketing agency laser-focused on the Finance and Fintech space. Her leap from a secure job to signing her first big client was bold, but in this Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur Spotlight, Jessica shares how trusting her instincts, building smart partnerships, and leaning into a niche unlocked her business success. Her story is a powerful reminder that timing is never perfect, but courage makes all the difference.

Hi, Jessica! Thanks for joining us today. Tell us about your business. Who do you serve, how do you serve them, and what's the impact that your business and work makes?

AMP is an affiliate marketing agency focusing on the Finance and Fintech space. We help brands find partners that can promote their services on a mostly pay-per-performance basis. These partners could be content sites, influencers, media buyers, technology platforms, B2B partnerships, etc. Our goal is to be one of the most efficient channels for our brands and we often find that our costs are only second to Branded Paid Search, which SHOULD be the most efficient channel because those users are already searching for the brand.  

Tell us about the moment you finally felt like you went from wantrepreneur to entrepreneur.

During COVID, I started doing some consulting on the side and had a lot of fun with it! After a promotion at my job, I put down consulting, but during my maternity leave with my first daughter, I had another opportunity come up and decided to pick it back up again. I was working at a major financial institution at the time, so getting to consult on a start-up was awesome because they were able to make changes a lot more quickly than I could at my full-time job. After returning from my maternity leave, I was approached by leadership at another enterprise financial institution, and instead of accepting the role as a full-time employee, I pitched hiring my consultancy. The CMO said that he loves small businesses and wants to be part of my success story so we signed the contract and I quit my full-time job to go all in on AMP! 

Describe the moment or period in your life/career that motivated you to make the entrepreneurial leap.

I'm the daughter of an entrepreneur and I find that it's contagious. My whole life I wanted to be my own boss - I just didn't have an "idea". Turns out, I didn't need to have a groundbreaking idea, I just needed to seize the opportunity when it presented itself and I'm so glad I did!

Describe a tool, service, or software that has been a game-changer for your business. How does it contribute to your success?

As an agency, we work with a lot of different people on a day-to-day basis. We use Slack constantly and leverage Monday.com to help with task management as well as a CRM for our affiliates, brands and prospects. We also utilize AI a lot - from using Fathom for note-taking or ChatGPT and Perplexity to help guide us in solving more complex business negotiations and challenges. 

We know that success is very often a non-linear path. Tell us about a failure, pivot point, or lesson that changed your course or direction and helped to get you where you are today.

I originally started out taking any new contract that came my way. I found out that not all clients and contracts are created equal, so it's much better to specialize in one niche and grow from there. We pivoted from looking at all business verticals to just Finance/Fintech pretty quickly and have been seeing a lot more success in our comfort zone. 

What unconventional strategy did you employ that significantly impacted your business?

I wouldn't call this necessarily unconventional, but we don't do much outbound marketing. That might change in the coming quarters, but we've spent a lot of time cultivating relationships with other technology partners or agencies that don't operate in the finance/fintech vertical to act as a referral stream for AMP. This has proven to be successful as we've signed all of our clients from personal relationships in my network, through these technology platforms or from other clients and agencies. 

What’s something you wish you knew sooner that you’d give as advice for aspiring or newer entrepreneurs?

There is never "the perfect time" to make this leap! I found out that I was expecting our second daughter 3 weeks into quitting my full-time job that offered a lengthy maternity leave. If I had waited just another month, I would have probably never gone this route, so take the opportunities as they arise! 

Want to dive deeper into Jessica's work? Check out the links below!

• Visit Affiliate Marketing Partners' website affiliatemarketingpartners.co
• Follow Affiliate Marketing Partners on LinkedIn