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topicprinter · 5 years ago

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Hey - Pat from StarterStory.com here with another interview.Today's interview is with DShawn Russell of Southern Elegance Candle Company, a brand that makes southern inspired candlesSome stats:Product: Southern Inspired CandlesRevenue/mo: $20,000Started: January 2016Location: RAEFORDFounders: 1Employees: 3Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?Hello! My name is D’Shawn Russell and I am the founder and CEO of Southern Elegance Candle Company. I started the company 4 years ago as a side hustle to make some extra money on the weekends and to get me out of the house. But it quickly grew to much more than I expected.Southern Elegance Candle Company is all about loving and living in the South. We created home fragrance products that all have a southern theme to them and all of our fragrances are based on Southern agriculture. Apple? Check! Pine? Check! Cotton (or course) Check! Missing the Southern Sunshine? We got a fragrance for you. Our core group of customers are women that live in the South or people that appreciate Southern culture.Our flagship products at the moment are our candles. We offer three different sizes; travel tin, mason jar and large tumbler. We also have wax melts and room spray. But, we will be slowly rolling out new products over the next year to include an apparel line.I started the company at our local Farmers Market making about $200 per weekend. We now average about $20,000 a month in sales through our retail site, wholesale site and Faire. Most of our income comes from our wholesale accounts. We were able to branch out from our core Southern states and are currently in stores all over the US.You can check out our brand story video here: Southern Elegance: Candles Crafted In The SouthimageWhat's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?I started Southern Elegance right after my son was born as a hobby. Initially, I made a bunch of random bath and body products in addition to the candles. When I decided to get serious, I looked at everything and decided to just focus on one product and chose candles because they had the potential to be the most profitable. I chose a niche that I could speak authentically about. My ideal customer was easy to identify because it was basically me. (But, don't use that a marketing strategy. It just happened to work in this case) I was born and raised in the South. I LOVE living here and couldn't imagine living anywhere else. I created a company around all the things that I love to do.I was working in education at the time and I absolutely hated it. One day walked into work and quit my job to make candle making a full-time career. I had absolutely no background in sales, manufacturing, marketing or anything business-related. I basically had no clue as to how it was going to work or if this was even a viable plan. Everything was a learning curve, and I spent hours learning a new skill then implementing it.With very limited resources, (basically no money) I went to the school of Google and Youtube. I took some online classes on Branding and Wholesaling. I hired a business coach and I literally hit the streets selling. For the first year, I would sell my candles at any Church function, fair, festival, school bazaar… I did not care. I sold candles outside in the middle of the summer and the dead of winter. I also sold on any and every online platform that would accept me. Etsy, Amazon, Faire, Modalyst, Houzz, etc. All the money I made went back into building the brand, I was lucky to have a husband to pay the bills but it was tight financially. When I finally felt comfortable I approached stores to carry my products. And we slowly built a base of stores to sustain the company.Eventually, I moved my retail site to Shopify and settled with Faire for wholesale.Interview with Candle Science about the beginning of Southern Elegance Candle Company!Take us through the process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing your first product.Making candles isn't that difficult, melt some wax, add fragrance and color, pour in a jar and let harden. But, my first candles were terrible! I had to use local items. So I had wax and fragrance from Hobby Lobby and jars from Walmart. I quickly realized this wouldn’t work because (1) the quality was horrible and (2) you can’t scale a company buying supplies from local retail stores. So, I researched local candle supply companies. CandleScience became my main supplier. They were local and carried professional-grade products. I was also able to buy very small quantities in the beginning and now I order pallets. I am not able to buy direct from glass and wax suppliers so CandleScience serves as the middle man as my company grows.When I first started in my home, all I had was two pots and my stove. After a few months, I bought my first large wax melter and moved into the garage. Two months after that I bought another melter and started looking for my first space outside of my garage.imageMy GarageI live in a small town (approximately 5000 people) so the manufacturing space wasn't available. My first space was a small restaurant. We stored fragrance in the former freezers and wax in the former deep fryers. At the end of that lease, we moved into a slightly larger retail space. But, we covered the windows with paper and a coming soon sign because the area wasn’t zoned for manufacturing and we didn't want anyone to know what we were doing. We had supplies delivered to the back door and prayed no one would check to see what we were doing. After about a year of stress, a real warehouse space became available and we moved into it.Unfortunately, I had no idea how to set up a real candle business because everything up until this point had been ad-hoc. So I went back to the school of Youtube and watched every video I could find on manufacturing candles. I would stop the video and study them frame by frame. I used this information to set up my current space. We have 4 zones; An office area, a production area for each product, shipping and receiving area and finally an area for storage of supplies.imageYou can watch the process of how we make the candles here: Behind the scenesDescribe the process of launching the business.I didn't have a traditional launch. It was more of a slow-rolling out of the business. I quit my job and had to hurry up and figure out if I could make money doing this. So, I started selling at any event that would accept me. I really didn't have a cohesive plan and had no clue about E-commerce or how it works. I basically was shooting in the dark.After wasting a lot of time, energy and money going to events that didn't include my ideal customer, I narrowed down the types of events that I would attend. That allowed me to at least make some money on the weekends at Farmer’s Markets and local festivals. Hauling candles is hard and heavy and I soon got tired of that. The setup and breakdown is hard on the body and I was tired all the time.I decided to build a website and set it up using Big Cartel. Back then, they had a free plan if you had under 10 items. I created a basic site that I could send people to buy stuff when I wasn't on the road. It had ZERO personality but it worked.After about a year I moved to Woo-Commerce to have a more serious presence on the web. I chose Bluehost with Woo, again because it was cheap and I wasn't making that much money from online sales. I was doing my own photography (which sucked), printing my own labels and designing my own website (which was very basic). The website was hard to manage with all the Apps that I needed and security was a constant issue. It was constantly crashing so I eventually moved to Shopify.I still didn't understand how to drive people to the site and really made sales through the website. I was bootstrapping everything and was still broke. I had to make some changes. I chose the fanciest FREE theme from Shopify. I started having boxes and labels printed professionally. I found a Facebook group that had photographers that would exchange products for photos. I went to Upwork and hired a copywriter to review what I had written. And finally, I took an online class for FB ads.Then I began to see the turnaround. Then another class on Email marketing and google ads really rounded out what I need to start seeing sales. It was trial and error and I wasted money learning but eventually saw results.As online sales grew, I stopped doing the festivals and now totally depend on my online sales.As far as my wholesale side, I did several trade shows and have worked with Reps and really feel like they are pretty old school. It costs a ton of money (around $10,000 per show) and requires a lot of time and energy. (plus commissions) For the same price, I could run some paid ads and take my chances with my retail site for about the same return. (And never leave my couch) It’s just easier to go straight to the consumer now with social media. In addition, we do almost $100,000 in sales with Faire, so it doesn't make financial sense for us to continue to do trade shows. So, moving forward we are going to focus on growing our followers by creating engaging content. If new accounts approach us, we have the margins and systems in place to accommodate but it will not be our primary focus.imageBefore and afterSince launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?Below are all the things I WISH I had done when I first started. I am only recently able to see how all this fits together.Social Media Use your social media platforms to drive traffic to your website. Make your posts engaging and relevant to your community. BUILD YOUR COMMUNITY through social media. Facebook groups, Facebook business pages, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. Make sure people know what you do and what you SELL. Don't be afraid to sell… don't beat people over the head with constantly trying to sell them stuff, that gets old… but provide information and entertainment and then ask for the sale. Always eventually ask for a sale. Remind people of what you are selling and give them a reason to buy it. If you don't have time to post every day, use a scheduler like Buffer.Capture emails: Once you engage your customers, capture an email so that you have a direct link to them. My one regret is that I didn't get emails at the festivals. Literally, thousands of people slipped through my fingers. Have some type of pop-up. I used to spin the wheel for almost a year and now we recently changed back to a regular pop-up. Run contests and giveaways… always engage in some type of activity that is capturing emails. We are currently using Privy, but used Justuno also.Email Marketing; Once you get those emails… send out emails. My first emails were terrible. I eventually got better. And now I have someone that designs and sends them weekly. Stay in contact with your people and continue to provide relevant content. We used Mailchimp but recently switched to Klaviyo.Paid ads (google, FB, Instagram): This is the hardest part. I took classes and I know I will never be as good as a professional. I know the basics and can run a decent campaign. Yes, I lost money in the beginning. But, I learned what worked and who to target based off the losses. I've hired firms that lost just as much of my money as I did, so I don't feel bad. Ads are hit or miss. But, I know enough now to know if a campaign is being profitable and I know the right questions to ask any firm that may be running my ads.Retarget: You know how those ads follow you after going to a site? It works. Do it a lot.imageHow are you doing today and what does the future look like?In the big scheme of things, we are doing pretty good. The doors are open, taxes and people are paid. We are still in business and not in danger of going out of business. We have a strong wholesale business and a growing retail business. But, I think we are just scratching the surface.Southern Elegance will develop into a lifestyle brand. Now, before you roll your eyes (which I would have totally done at that statement last year), let me explain. If you create a community of like-minded people and create products they like, they will begin to trust you. And in turn, you can sell anything. Although we sell candles, what we really sell is a community. We sell culture and a sense of belonging, candles just happen to be the product. We are really going to focus on serving our community/customers in the coming years by leveraging social media.In 2020, we plan on introducing Southern-themed apparel. If that goes well, then bath and body products. Once we build the community, we can sell them anything that supports our mission of celebrating Southern Culture.The future looks like world domination.Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?Choose your partners carefully and trust your gut. I made very bad decisions by going against what I thought I should do and listening to “experts”. I lost a ton of money by hiring a fancy firm to run my Facebook Ads. Their results were on par with my own except I didn’t lose thousands of dollars per month paying them.I also lost money by paying a fancy firm out of NYC to do my social media. I do it myself now using Buffer to schedule, my free pics, and recipes & memes from Pinterest. A custom collab with a celebrity cost me almost $10,000 in time, inventory and design fees. I still get pissed when I look at those containers… but it is a reminder to trust my gut. If a mistake has to be made, do it early and cheaply. I’m glad I made those mistakes while small and it wasn’t too disastrous.What platform/tools do you use for your business?Shopify Easily the best place to have an eCommerce site.Privy Capture emailsJustUno Capture EmailKlaviyo Run email campaignsBold (Discount, Loyalty Points, Upsell) A better User experience on the websiteOrder Printer Makes the orders look pretty and less genericTax Jar Sale tax is a pain!!! This makes it so much easier.Yotpo Collect Reviews and use them on social media and marketing campaignsAffiliatly If you decide to use affiliates. It’s simple to set up and use.The Social Sales Girls Teaches you how to get reliable, predictable income when you build it the right way on eCommerce platforms. (FB ads, contests & give-aways for email, email marketing, etc)Lucky Break Consulting Assists with Smart Business Strategy for makers and designersimageWhat have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?All my books are on Audible. I listen in the car and whenever I have downtime.The Purple Cow by Seth Godin Explains why you need to stand out in a crowded market place.Clockwork Mike Michalowicz Helps to teach you how to automate the business processes.Crushing It: Inspirational stories from the experiences of dozens of entrepreneursTribes by Seth Godin: It’s our nature. Now the Internet has eliminated the barriers of geography, cost, and time. Find your tribe and make some money.The Blue Ocean Strategy: Blue ocean strategy is the simultaneous pursuit of differentiation and low cost to open up a new market space and create new demand.You are a Badass: Create a life you totally love. And create it NOW, Make some damn money already.Start with Why: it provides a framework upon which organizations can be built, movements can be led, and people can be inspired. And it all starts with WHY.The E-Myth (Highly Recommend) Gerber draws the vital, often overlooked distinction between working on your business and working in your business.Profit First (Highly Recommend) Offers a simple, counterintuitive cash management solution that will help small businesses break out of the doom spiral and achieve instant profitability.Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?Do it. Start something. Screw it up. Fix it and then make more mistakes. Rinse and repeat. There have been some spectacular mistakes made by myself… and I learned a tremendous amount from them. And I just kept on trucking. Mistakes happen and usually don’t doom a business. Learn as much as you can and do as much as you can for free...BUT don’t be afraid to pay for knowledge. Google and Youtube can only get you so far, then hire a coach. Take a class. Find people that know how to do what you want to do… and PAY them to do it.Eventually, you have to pass off roles and responsibilities, hurry up and do it as soon as you can afford to. Don't be like me, at the cardiologist wondering what’s going on with your heart. The Doc was like “Stress, it’s gonna kill you.”imageWhere can we go to learn more?WebsiteFacebook Business PageFacebook GroupInstagramPinterestTwitterEmailIf you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!Liked this text interview? Check out the full interview with photos, tools, books, and other data.For more interviews, check out r/starter_story - I post new stories there daily.Interested in sharing your own story? Send me a PM

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apprenticeshipsinlondon · 8 years ago

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Apprentice Nursery Assistant

Cirencester, Gloucestershire GL7, UK Lifetime Training Ltd What is the purpose of the job?To provide the highest level of care and education for children attending the nursery. Whilst you are gaining hands on experience in a high quality childcare setting you will be working towards recognised childcare qualifications. What do you have to achieve?• With support, the individual needs of children are identified and met.• With support, equality of access and opportunity is given to all staff, parents and children.• Company policies, procedures and operational practices are adhered to at all times.• Positive working relationships with children, staff, parents and carers.Key Responsibilities • Ensuring that the children's individual needs are identified and met. You will be expected to promote positive relationships between the children and will be expected to develop friendly and professional relationships with parents and carers. • • You will also be expected to be a positive, practical role model for the children, whilst supervising and supporting them at all times. You will ensure that the children are kept safe and that you fully understand and follow Safeguarding Procedures.• Your duties will be dependent on your level of qualification but they will also include a wide range of interactive tasks, including setting up activities for the children, reading stories, playing games, helping at meal times, assisting with nappy changing and toileting and any other duties as necessary, along with joining in with play and creative activities, as this will be an important part of the role.• You will also help to ensure that practice and provision in the nursery meets the requirements of the Early Years Foundation Stage.• You will adhere to all health and safety policy and procedures and be fully aware of all emergency and security procedures.The duties and responsibilities in this job description are not exhaustive or restrictive, changes and other duties relevant to this post may be added. This job description may be reviewed in the future. Personal Qualities :You need to have a keen interest in the childcare Industry and be dedicated to working towards your NVQ. Skills Required :Any experience with working or caring for children is great! You will need to be able to work in a team and independently Future Prospects :To gain full time employment once the apprenticeship has been completed and possibly complete further education. Training to be Provided :Level 2 Certificate in ChildcareKey Skill in Application of Number Level 1Key Skill in Communication Level 1Employee Rights and Responsibilities Workbook (ERR)Personal learning and thinking skills Other Information :From 1st of October 2016 the National Minimum Wage (NMW) rate for apprentices is £3.40 per hour. This applies to 16-18 year old apprentices and those aged over 19 in the first year of their Apprenticeship. For all other apprentices the national Minimum Wage appropriate to their age applies. The minimum wage for apprentices applies to time spent on the job plus time spent training. Things to consider :The key dates are to be used as a guide only. Should the right candidate be found, this vacancy may close early. from Youth In Jobs https://youthinjobs.co.uk/job/28366/apprentice-nursery-assistant/

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oxfordpapersedu-blog · 8 years ago

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dq 1Employee Orientation (graded)Employee orientation is handled diffe

dq 1Employee Orientation (graded)Employee orientation is handled differently in each organization. Lets talk about this in both the theoretical perspective as well as in practical terms. Here are a few questions to get started.Should companies offer formal orientation programs for all new employees, or should they be designed and run by each individual supervisor, manager, or department head?…

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imperialschoolpapers-blog · 8 years ago

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dq 1Employee Orientation (graded)Employee orientation is handled diffe

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jbrock1592 · 10 years ago

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Fresh this is for you. #fresh #slimgreen #blondie #flavorflav #1employee #youdabest (at Hickory Fork Road)

#1employee #flavorflav #blondie #slimgreen #fresh #youdabest

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topicprinter · 5 years ago

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Hey - Pat from StarterStory.com here with another interview.Today's interview is with Graham Cochrane of The Recording Revolution LLC, a brand that makes audio recording educationSome stats:Product: Audio Recording EducationRevenue/mo: $100,000Started: October 2009Location: TampaFounders: 1Employees: 1Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?My name is Graham Cochrane and I’m the founder of Recording Revolution, an online education company that teaches musicians how to record and produce their music to a professional level in a bedroom or home studio.I sell a variety of online courses and membership sites including Mixing University, a complete system for turning your home recordings into “radio-ready” songs that sound like they came from a big recording studio.Right now I’m generating about $1.2M a year in revenue with virtually no ad spend and in working only 5 hours a week.imageWhat's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?I started Recording Revolution back in 2009 as an accident.I had just moved to Florida with my wife to help a friend start a church. I found a job at a financial startup, bought our first house and had our first baby. And then 5 months in I lost my job because the company I was working for ran out of money.My background was in music. I grew up singing, playing guitar, and writing/performing songs. I also went to college for audio recording and had created a side income as a freelance audio engineer, producing albums for bands and artists.When I lost my job I did my best to pick up work freelancing again, but I didn’t have much of a network since moving to Florida. So I decided to start blogging about what projects I was working on in the studio in hopes I might drive some traffic and potential client leads.What ended up happening instead was I developed an audience around my blog and YouTube channel who wanted to know more about how to record and mix music themselves (rather than hire me).They loved my content, and with each video and article that I released I build up more and more credibility in their eyes because they could put my material into action and see results.The problem was, it didn’t make any money. Plus we had to go on Food Stamps (government assistance) for an 18-month stretch because we were basically broke.imageTake us through the process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing your first product.I needed to find a way to monetize my content. I considered ads but thought a more direct method would be to create a longer, more in-depth video training (as compared to my YouTube videos) and see if I could sell it to my people.That first product was called “Pro Tools Boot Camp” and it was a 3+ hour training on the most popular audio software in the world, Pro Tools.I screen recorded the videos, zipped them up in a folder, uploaded it to my $5/mo GoDaddy server, and built a free sales page with iWeb (anyone remembers that?!) with a simple PayPal “Buy Now” button that linked to that zipped file.I remember being on the other side of the country attending my grandfather’s funeral when later on that evening when checking email I saw a “You have payment” email from PayPal and it was my first sale of $45!That was a turning point for me as I realized someone was willing to pay for my video training!imageDescribe the process of launching the business.I didn’t have a formal “launch” - I just figured it out as I went.I started with a free WordPress theme and the economy hosting with GoDaddy for $5/mo. No logo either.Then I committed to blogging 2 times a week and posting one video to YouTube each week also. I was smart enough to focus on capturing email addresses and building a list from the start which gave me (and still to this day gives me) a curated group of warm leads to sell to.Between hosting, a custom URL, and some basic screen capture software it cost me a whopping $50 to start my business and build/launch my first product.Granted my first launch was pretty sad, amounting to just a few hundred dollars. But it was a start and it validated that I was on to something.imageSince launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?My business growth strategy is stupidly simple. Content marketing, content marketing, and more content marketing.What this means is that I focus on putting out new free content (articles and videos) every week that center around my niche and market. Content is the best SEO and allows me to show up on Google and YouTube searches. It gets me discovered.For example, open up YouTube and type in the keywords “home studio” in the search bar and one of my most popular videos pops up in the first couple of results: “How To Build A Home Studio For Under $350”. It has over 2.4 million views and continues to send people to my email list daily.imageNow I’m not some SEO wizard, but I do know what “keywords” or buzz words are common in my niche and I try to make videos around those words or phrases.I also use YouTube analytics tools to discover what keywords people tend to find my videos with and do more content on those words.Then at the end (and sometimes beginning) of each video and post, I offer them something more valuable in exchange for their email address. Usually, it’s a PDF cheat sheet or checklist or guide. We call this a “lead magnet” as it attracts leads to your email list.Once on my list, they get put into an email funnel that offers even more free valuable training and promotes my products. This creates automated passive income each and every day.How are you doing today and what does the future look like?This type of business is insanely profitable because the costs are virtually zero. My biggest expenses beyond web hosting, email marketing, and my digital product delivery back end (I use Kajabi) are a few contractors that work for me. These include a part-time VA who handles customer service emails and posting of my content and in recent years a marketing manager who runs my promotions, launches, and helps write sales copy.My YouTube channel has over 500,000 subscribers. My email list is just over 250,000 strong (after recently cleansing 100,000 people), and my customer base is over 20,000 strong.The great thing is that as revenue has grown over the past 10 years from a few thousand dollars a year, to averaging over $1.2 million a year, my work hours have dropped significantly. I used to work 32 hours a week (I always take Fridays off). Now it only takes me 5 hours a week to run my business. Thanks in large part to eliminating much of what’s unnecessary (thank you Tim Ferriss!), the automated nature of selling digital products, and making a few part-time hires.All that extra time has allowed me to start a second business aimed at helping people build and grow their OWN online business with automatic income. I have a weekly video podcast at GrahamCochrane.com where I dive deep into how I run my business the Recording Revolution and what’s working now in the industry. It’s a lot of fun!Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?I’ve learned a lot over the years - mostly about myself. I’ve learned that I’m a bad delegator. I always want to do it all myself. But the moment I made my first part-time hire (my VA) things completely changed. I gained back so much of my time and sanity that it helped me focus on creating more content and products - and the business grew.I’ve also learned to keep things simple and keep my costs low. Content marketing and direct sales via email is such a powerful and simple method but it can be tempting to try and “do all the things” like you see everyone else doing. But I’ve learned to stay in my lane and focus on slow but steady growth rather than explosive and inconsistent growth.Too many of my peers have tried to focus on launching new things all the time and didn’t commit to the content strategy. They made money for a while, but then their biggest and best source of leads dried up and their businesses floundered.My relentless commitment to content on YouTube and elsewhere has helped me have a predictable stable income for years.What platform/tools do you use for your business?My absolute favorite tool for both of my businesses is Kajabi. It is THE best platform for selling digital products (courses, memberships) on the planet.It’s so complete of a platform that I’ve moved my entire Graham Cochrane website and email marketing over to it.Other tools I’ve used are ConvertKit, Mailchimp, and Wordpress.What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?Two books that have been game-changing for my business are:The Go-Giver (Bob Burg and John David Mann) and The 4-Hour Work Week (Tim Ferriss)The Go-Giver is how I run my business. The big idea is simple: the more you give, the more value you offer for free, the more attractive people will be to you and your brand and you will grow. It’s counterintuitive but I’ve seen it work time and time again.The 4 Hour Work Week is a convicting read because it challenges you to stop just doing “work for work’s sake” or just working to make a lot of money. It encourages you to build a business that serves your life, not the other way around.Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?This might sound strange, but I personally believe that the biggest key to my business’s growth, beyond the grace of God, has been my commitment to generosity as my primary strategy.When you have an abundance mentality when generosity is your core belief...everybody wins!One of my favorite bible verses is…“One gives freely, yet grows all the richer; another withholds what he should give, and only suffers want…Whoever brings blessing will be enriched, and one who waters will himself be watered.” - Proverbs 11:24-25 (ESV)And in this age of digital content and social media, this verse becomes even more relevant. Why?Because generosity is attractive. It magnetizes you and draws people in. A generous person and a generous business will always grab people’s attention.And attention is the first step to business growth.So - be generous.Be generous by giving away free content every week. Be generous by overdelivering to your clients and customers. Be generous by giving a percentage of your profits away to charity each month. And even be generous with your competitors. Show them respect and honor them in your space.And then watch what happens.Where can we go to learn more?RecordingRevolution.comGrahamCochrane.comInstagramIf you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!Liked this text interview? Check out the full interview with photos, tools, books, and other data.For more interviews, check out r/starter_story - I post new stories there daily.Interested in sharing your own story? Send me a PM

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shitcuntbutt-blog · 12 years ago

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My phone's flat and so I can't play games :( this means I might have to do work. Or stay on tumblr.

#1employee

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oxfordpapersedu-blog · 8 years ago

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dq 1Employee Engagement (graded)Employee engagement has become popular

dq 1Employee Engagement (graded)Employee engagement has become popular in HRM these days. Measuring it and determining whether a companys employees are engaged are actually vendor services for which companies pay through the use of anonymous surveying tools. The science behind employee engagement is not yet perfectedthere are many different ways that employers can help their employees get…

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imperialschoolpapers-blog · 8 years ago

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dq 1Employee Engagement (graded)Employee engagement has become popular

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topicprinter · 5 years ago

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Hey - Pat from StarterStory.com here with another interview.Today's interview is with Joe Griffith of Wander New Mexico Food Tours, a brand that makes walking food toursSome stats:Product: walking food toursRevenue/mo: $20,000Started: January 2016Location: New MexicoFounders: 1Employees: 1Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?My name is Joe Griffith and I’m the founder and owner of Wander New Mexico Food Tours. We offering walking food tours of downtown Santa Fe and Albuquerque.Never been on a food tour? Imagine visiting a good friend in a city you’ve never been to. This friend plans an afternoon food crawl, taking you to her favorite restaurants, breweries and culinary spots in the city. Along the way, she introduces you to some of the locals, who give you a sense of the city, the culture, and what it’s like to live there. She also introduces you to some of the chefs and owners at the restaurants – they’re excited to have you visit, and they take the time to share with you their story and the inspiration behind the dish they’ve prepared for you.That’s our product – an immersive culinary experience that leaves people with a better understanding of Santa Fe and it’s a rich history and culinary traditions.I launched our first walking food tour in the winter of 2016. That year we did $300 total in sales (no, I didn’t forget any zeros) and operated one tour each week. Today we offer six different tours, operating 17 times/week in three different neighborhoods of Santa Fe and one neighborhood in Albuquerque. In peak months this past summer we did over $30K/mo in sales, and we’re growing around 70% year over year. During this time we’ve garnered several accolades, including ranking as the #1 tour in Santa Fe on TripAdvisor as well as being named by USAToday as one of the “10 Must-Try Food Tours in North America”.imageEnchiladas, posole, and a Silver Coin margarita at Del Charro, a stop on our downtown walking food tourWhat's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?I never thought I would have my own business, much less a tourism business. It was born of necessity, a bit of luck, and good timing.First, some important context – this is technically my second attempt at entrepreneurship. Back in 2011, when I was living in Dubai, I had the idea of starting an online food delivery business – basically UberEats, for Dubai. At the time there was only one serious competitor, Foodonclick.I did a lot of the initial legwork in getting a new business started. I bought a domain (yallaeats.ae), had a semi-decent logo designed, built a giant spreadsheet database of menus from 100s of restaurants in Dubai, and got to work on a business plan. I never pulled the trigger on leaving the comfort of my office chair to go and meet with restaurants and sign them up, mostly because I knew deep down inside that I wasn’t going to take the risk, quit my job, and jump into the deep end of entrepreneurship. I know what it feels like to have an idea but to delay taking the risk – and I believe it’s what’s holding back so many potential entrepreneurs out there. I’ll return to this in the advice section.imageYalla!Eats, my first attempt at starting my own companyHow did that story end? I never went forward with the delivery company. The parent company of Foodonclick ended up selling for $589M to Delivery Hero, a German company. I’m not saying that could’ve been me – but hey, it’s fun to dream!In 2016, my wife and I decided we wanted to leave our lucrative jobs in management consulting to start a new, quieter and more relaxed life in Santa Fe (she was working for McKinsey, I for Bain & Company). We didn’t know what we were going to do for work, but the consultant in me knew that tourism in Santa Fe was a big market and that if I was going to start a company of any sort, tourism would be a smart move. Before moving, I started some initial business planning by researching the tourism market and sizing up the competition. My initial plans were to start a bike tour company – it’s something I had done (and loved!) during visits to other countries, and it was a concept that I was eager to introduce to New Mexico.As I worked more on the business plan I realized that starting a walking food tour would a) be in higher demand b) be lower risk, requiring lower investment to start and c) would mean I could share my real passion with people – finding (and eating at) great restaurants. I got to work designing the tour route and recruiting restaurant partners to work with. We moved to Santa Fe in late September 2016, and by late December we had our first paying customers.Take us through the process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing your first product.Food tours are pretty straightforward – you come up with a brand, tour name, design the route, sign on restaurant partners, and away you go. As I thought about designing the tour experience, I knew I wanted the experience to be something I would pay for and love to experience. That’s been a guiding principle since day one. As a very curious person, I wanted for the tour to leave people with a deeper understanding of our city, its restaurants, and the chefs/restaurateurs/owners behind them. I looked for restaurant partners with food I was excited to eat, but also with people passionate about the food and excited to tell their story.imageGuiding during the “soft launch” tour with friends and family in November 2016 (I’m on the right)Beyond the product (i.e. tour experience), a lot of time in the initial months was spent on brand and website. I paid to have a logo designed, and I built the website myself using Squarespace. Thankfully, there were plenty of established food tour companies in other cities whose websites I could emulate.Startup costs were minimal. Being a risk-averse person, this is part of what made taking the leap into entrepreneurship palatable for me. The main expenses, in the early days, were the logo, website, and bookkeeping.Describe the process of launching the business.The launch consisted of a “dry-run” tour for friends and family, followed by my first tour with actual paid customers. I’ll never forget that tour – it was New Year's Eve of 2016, and the tour was a mix of some of my wife’s family and their friends, and then my first actual paying customers, an unsuspecting family of five on vacation in Santa Fe.Our launch was made easier by the fact that several of the restaurants I was working with were already a part of a food tour with operators in Santa Fe. For those restaurants that hadn’t been part of a food tour before, the dry-run gave us a chance to work out the kinks and test out the route before launching more substantially.One thing that wasn’t intentional, but worked fairly well, was launching during the slow season. After a tour on New Year's Eve, it wasn’t until February that we had the next paying customer. At first, sales were very, very, very slow. This ramp-up period is a challenge and something we’re currently going through with our expansion to Albuquerque. As much as you can try to have a solid marketing and PR plan in place in the months and weeks leading up to launch, we’ve seen that it can take months before word of mouth (i.e. TripAdvisor reviews) get out and people actually find our product as part of their research in preparing to visit a city. The reason I say that this worked well is that I was able to use the slow season to work out kinks, not only with the product but also with our approach to marketing and customer acquisition.In the first several months I’d say 90% of marketing spend was wasted. Initially, most of marketing spend went towards printing and distributing rack cards, which ended up being a waste of money. I also spent a bit on un-targeted Facebook ads, which was even more of a waste of money. Since then I’ve learned a lot more about what works and what doesn’t when it comes to marketing - more on this later.imageimageOur first rack cards (from early 2017). These were a big waste of money.Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?I like to think about customer acquisition by looking at the cost to acquire each customer (CAC, or customer acquisition cost) and the value of each customer (CLTV, or customer lifetime value). Let’s start with the easier one first – CLTV.CLTV is a function of how much each customer spends on a transaction, and how many transactions you can expect from a given customer over their lifetime. Our business and product are unique in that 90%+ of customers are one-time. Not because they didn’t love their experience and become a promoter, but because of the nature of tourism. Most tourists visit a location, check it off their bucket list, and visit somewhere else next year. Given this, we have to fight hard to acquire customers. Further complicating matters is our average order value – around $300 – means that our budget for cost per conversion is lower than many businesses in other industries. So, let’s say our CLTV is $333 ($300 divided by 90% non-return rate).The other lever we can pull is customer acquisition cost (CAC). This is how much you spend on marketing in order to drive one transaction (the lower the better). Although we’re much better now than when we started, there is still a ton of opportunity for improvement. As a general rule of thumb, I aim for a $30 CAC (10% marketing spend as a percentage of sales), but in practice, this varies greatly by marketing channel.Below is an overview of the various marketing channels I currently rely on, the pros/cons of each, and what has and hasn’t worked.What has worked for us (in order of priority):· TripAdvisor: the obvious industry heavyweight, and the go-to for many tour operators. (+) it’s the go-to resource for many travelers. (-) it isn’t effective until you climb the rankings· Blog: this has been an inexpensive way to get discovered by folks researching / planning their trip to Santa Fe. (+) it’s free, or low-cost, depending on whether you write the content yourself or hire a freelance writer (-) if your content doesn’t relate to your product, or you aren’t good at getting people in the first stage of your sales funnel, you can end up with a bunch of traffic that bounces· Google Adwords: thankfully, the only time people search several keywords related to our businesses (“Santa Fe food tour”) (+) their intent to buy is pretty high. We’ve had success here, but unfortunately (-) the volumes are limited· Facebook ads: in the first year, (-) I wasted a considerable amount of money with lookalike audiences and other attempts to reach new customers. Facebook has proved effective only when it’s directed at (+) retargeting visitors to the blog.· Local partners/referrals: there are a few local tourism-related sites that I advertise / list on, some paid, and some not. When we first started, the local tourism and state-level tourism bureaus were great places to be listed for free. (+) intent to buy is very high, but (-) volumes are limitedWhat hasn’t worked for us:Rack cards: you know these – the flyers in the racks at airports, hotels, tourist rest stops, etc… When I first started we tried this, first with a traditional vendor, and secondly, with a local vendor that specializes in a smaller format, “concierge” cards meant to be placed at the desk of concierges. My hunch on why these don’t work - the majority of my customers plan and book their tours around a month in advance. With rack cards, folks don’t see these until they’ve already arrived in town, and it’s tough to convince people to spend $100/person on a food tour at the last minute.Instagram: this will probably come as a surprise, but simply having an active presence on Instagram hasn’t led to very many directly attributable ticket sales. We’re still active for brand and image reasons, but isn’t a big focus.Print ads: maybe this work, but given my limited budget I haven’t tried. When I look at the cost and think about how many conversions will result, I have a hard time making the math work.Concierge/hotel word of mouth: when I first launched I went around to all of the hotels in town, introduced myself, and took time to meet face to face with many of the hotel concierges. This paid off in a few instances (one hotel, in particular, sent me many bookings), but again I’ve found it’s tough to convince folks to sign up for our tours after they’ve already arrived in town.There’s always more that we could be doing - some of the areas where I’d like to improve our email marketing and in increasing our CLTV by introducing non-tour, ancillary revenues (merchandise, for example).How are you doing today and what does the future look like?We’re doing really well! In terms of profitability, we’ve been profitable since nearly day 1 (the benefits of a nearly entirely variable cost business) and in terms of growth, we’re almost doubling revenues each year.Beyond the financials there are a few other things I look at to measure progress:TripAdvisor ranking: with how critical this is too marketing it’s something I constantly keep an eye on. In just under three years we’ve very quickly climbed the rankings - in 2018 we achieved the #1 ranked food tour in Santa Fe, and earlier this year we achieved the #1 ranked tour (overall) for Santa Fe. This is major bragging rights, and something that the team and I are hugely proud of.Developing relationships with local restaurateurs and chefs: the quality of our product heavily relies on long-term relationships with passionate restaurant owners and chefs at top-notch restaurants. Without them, we wouldn’t have much of a tour. Because of this, we pay a meaningful tasting fee to all of the partners we work with - COGS is typically in the range of 50-60%, which is quite high relative to most food tour operators. This is very much an intentional strategy - not only does this mean our tour guests are getting a great value, but it also means we’re supporting local area restaurants and keeping our relationship with them sustainable. Given the explosion of food tour operators in recent years, there are many companies out there that expect free or nearly free food from the restaurants (in exchange for the “marketing exposure” of the tour). I don’t think that the model will be sustainable over the long-run.Repeatability: a big focus for this year has been putting the systems and processes in place to make the business scalable. By this, I mean creating a well-oiled operation that can be easily duplicated in new cities. I’m also using this as a chance to document how we do things and lessons learned, with the hope of creating a “Food Tour Playbook” that others can use as they work to start their own food tour companies. More on this later.In terms of future growth, the main focus will be geographic expansion. We just launched Albuquerque earlier this year, and I’m currently researching and evaluating other small to mid-size cities with a great food scene and a walkable downtown area. Colorado, Arizona, and Texas are interesting (and nearby), but I’m also casting a wide net and looking at locations as far as Vermont.There’s also of course still more potential in Santa Fe. In addition to offering more frequency of our existing tour products, we also might launch one or two new tours next year. And I’m also exploring online retail/merchandise, as well as brainstorming possible ways to monetize all of the non-food tour related blog traffic that we’re seeing.Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?There are three big lessons I’ve learned since starting Wander New Mexico:Marketing is HUGELY important! You can have the best product in the world, but that won’t do you any good if customers don’t know about it. The single biggest limiting factor in driving growth has been getting our tour in front of folks planning their trip to Santa Fe and convincing them our tour has to be a part of their trip. It’s been even more of a limiting factor when entering new markets. As we expand geographically I’m hoping that we continue to get smarter, better, and faster with market entry and ramping up sales.Be thoughtful about what work to insource/outsource: while I spent the first year doing nearly everything myself, there comes a point in the business where you won’t have the time or necessary expertise to do everything. When this time comes, be intentional about what you continue to do yourself and what you choose to outsource. For me, the two factors I consider are a) does this work bring me energy and b) how do my skills at this work compare to hiring someone else. Applying this, I spend time on things I enjoy and am good at (like developing new tour products) and outsource things I don’t enjoy and am not good at (bookkeeping, for example).Invest the time and effort to find great people: it sounds cliche, but it is really true. For us, tour guides are at the core of what we do, so over the past few years, we’ve really dialed in our hiring and interview process to ensure that only the best make it through. It definitely took time to figure out what made a great tour guide and to develop an interview process where we could quickly identify these attributes in applicants. We spend a lot of time screening, interviewing and training, but this has paid great dividends in the quality of guides that we have a result.What platform/tools do you use for your business?Although I try to use as much technology as possible in the business, outside of our reservations software most of the platforms/tools I use as the same that probably 95% of other startups are using – you won’t find many surprises.The core of our operations is an online booking software for tour and activity operators called Peek Pro. This main function of Peek is to receive customer bookings, email customers with their booking confirmation, and provide guides with their tour assignments and tour manifests. I’ve been using them since Day 1, and while I’m generally happy, I would encourage anyone thinking about starting a food tour to also consider Peek’s main competitor, FareHarbor. Both Peek and FareHarbor charge a percentage of sales, so while it’s very cost-effective in the early days, I have lately started to consider switching to a fixed cost platform such as Xola. Two others that should be on anyone’s shortlists when conducting a vendor evaluation are Bokun (now owned by TripAdvisor), and EzTix.Another tool that’s been great for us is Jive, which we use for the phone system. Jive is basically Google Voice on steroids – probably the feature I love most is that both I and my customer service rep receive calls simultaneously, and we can see which option someone chose in the phone tree (which helps us prioritize which calls to immediately answer).Since each tour guide is paying restaurants directly, we have a fairly significant volume of expenses. I use Expensify for this, and to pay the guides their fees. I have a love-hate relationship with Expensify – while some of the functionality is great, and it’s the best solution I’ve found for our particular needs, I’ve found their customer service is horrendous/next to non-existent.Everything else I use is pretty standard – Squarespace for the website, Upwork for finding niche technical expertise, Quickbooks Online for bookkeeping, Hotjar for UI/UX work, a bunch of Google Sheets, GSuite for email, etc…What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?I really enjoy meeting with other business owners and entrepreneurs in person. Where I live there are a number of entrepreneur meetups and speaker series, and I’ve found these events to be a great chance to take a step back and think about my business in a more reflective setting. Sometimes hearing from others about their business, challenges they’re facing, or how they’ve approached things, even if it’s an entirely different industry, is helpful for me as I think about my business.One resource I can recommend (and put a plugin for) is a project I’m in the early stages of working on The Food Tour Playbook. I’m the process of compiling a practical handbook of everything we’ve learned during our journey and is meant to serve as a playbook for others looking to start their own food tours.Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?Most of this advice is fairly well-worn, but they are all the points that have been very helpful to me in the last several years:1) Stop reading this blog, get out there and TAKE SOME RISKS!2) Figure out how to test your idea quickly3) Done is better than perfect4) Do what you love/build a job that doesn’t feel like a jobAs someone who has always been risk-averse, the biggest advice I can give is if you’re reading Starter Story and considering starting a business but haven’t yet taken the plunge, stop reading now, get out a blank sheet of paper, and write down a list of everything you need to do to get from where you are today to having a customer give you $ in exchange for your product/service. Then, set an aggressive deadline and get out there and make it happen! Speaking from experience (including the experience of my first failed startup), it’s very easy to spend time and resources on logos, websites, and business plans. It’s harder to actually take the leap of faith and get out there, be vulnerable, and put yourself in front of possible partners or customers. The sooner you do this, the sooner you’ll have that first $1 of revenue.For a food tour business, minimum viable product (MVP)-driven product development has meant pushing ourselves to design and sell new tour products as quickly as we can. We often start selling tickets to new tours before we’ve even finalized the tour route. This helps combat procrastination and forces us to find the path of least resistance to getting things done.This resonates with me in particular as it’s the antithesis of what I was taught during my five years at Bain & Company. But, as an entrepreneur, you will always be stretched thin, and the sooner you become comfortable in acknowledging that most things don’t need to be perfect, the more you’ll be able to leverage where you spend your time and where to over/under-invest.Another cliché, but you’ll have a lot more fun if your business involves something you’re passionate about. For me, that was food and history. It becomes harder and harder to stay true to this as your business grows, and management activities start to consume more of your time. To combat this, it’s important to occasionally revisit how and where you spend your time in your company and to consider what to insource/outsource (see point #2 under lessons learned).Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?The short answer is yes, I’m always on the lookout for qualified, passionate folks in a number of different areas. A few specific things:· Food tour entrepreneurs/city managers in other cities where we are considering an expansion. I’m most interested in Tier 2 cities (1M population or less) with more than 2M visitors annually, a walkable downtown area, and a great food scene· Current food tour owner/operators interested in selling a stake in or exiting their business· Tour guides in cities where we have existing operations (currently Santa Fe and Albuquerque, NM)Where can we go to learn more?WebsiteFacebookMy contact infoThe work-in-progress resource for anyone looking to start a food tour business: FoodtourplaybookLiked this text interview? Check out the full interview with photos, tools, books, and other data.For more interviews, check out r/starter_story - I post new stories there daily.Interested in sharing your own story? Send me a PM

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Hey - Pat from StarterStory.com here with another interview.Today's interview is with Janeen Brown of Balloon Haus LLC, a brand that makes balloon decorations and installationsSome stats:Product: Balloon Decorations And InstallationsRevenue/mo: $20,000Started: February 2019Location: Toronto, Atlanta, Fort LauderdaleFounders: 1Employees: 4Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?I’m Janeen Brown! Founder and CEO of Balloon Haus LLC. In February 2018, I started Balloon Haus - the first opulent online and in-store Balloon boutique - where lifestyle and decor enter a "luxury" level of design. Our team consists of dedicated and loyal employees in Toronto, Atlanta and South Florida destined to create iconic balloon memories to last a lifetime.With the launch of Balloon Haus in 2018, the demand has exceeded all expectations with our corporate or personal clients. The Balloon Haus team is at the forefront of creating custom exquisite and trendy balloon installations and decorations. At Balloon Haus, we ensure passion and commitment in all that we do. Balloon decorators have been around for ages, however, the industry has taken quite the peak within the last couple of years due to social media and the picture-perfect moments. Thankfully, this has assisted in the quick growth of the company.Our notable clients include players from the Miami Heat and Dolphins (due to NDAs, cannot state names), Instagram, Levi’s, Marriott, Hilton, Ruth Chris, American Express, BMW, and many more. Our average sales generate about $20K/monthly.imageJaneen Brown Styling for Femology Detroit, 2018imageBlossoms Birthday, Toronto October 20th, 2018What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?I’ve always had quite the entrepreneurial spirit, always thinking of the next best idea which is how my first business was created - a non-profit focused on helping young women, followed by an employee concierge, I started with my father Jeluxxe Lifestyle Solutions. I was always intrigued to hear about others’ journeys and how they became full-time entrepreneurs but never thought I’d get there but here I am, thanks to Balloon Haus INC. As well as, reading and learning have always been an interest of mine, which is why I was able to start this “little balloon company.”Balloon Haus was a random idea that turned a successful business. A client from one of my other companies was looking for balloon decor and my assistant agreed to help with finding a vendor. This was much harder than we thought it would be and with no luck, we turned to youtube and figured out how to create the requested installation ourselves and the rest was history. I registered the business the same day, contacted my father and he told me, “this was the best decision you have ever made.” This was the only validation that I needed to know, this was going to be a successful business.I had 0 expertise in this industry and everything I’ve learned has been self-taught up until recently. When we first opened, I was still working my full-time job at an Ad agency while operating a non-profit and another business part-time. Although the start-up costs are minimal, it is NOT an easy business especially now that there are A LOT of competitors which include a lot of mom and pop (home-based) companies. Our day to day costs are much more than the average balloon designer as many works alone, don’t charge tax and are willing to negotiate. However, your team’s talent speaks wonders and will attract the right target audience.As social media continues to gain popularity, people are always looking for the next best backdrop for the perfect picture and talked about the event. This can explain why the balloon industry has spiked and there are so many new balloon companies popping up. This is why attending frequent balloon training is crucial as this will determine the success and revenue generated. We strive to remain different from the type of installations we create which is why we are able to have multiple client installations daily.At the time of opening, I was in a good place financially as my career was paying me well and my parents were quite supportive, providing any assistance when needed.Take us through the process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing your first product.When I first started Balloon Haus, I was trying to take the cheap way out and blow all of the balloons up with my mouth for the balloon installations and that didn’t last for long. The process took too long and I realized in an industry like this, we must be efficient with our time. I then started using a hand pump thinking that would make a difference which ended up with my hand aching the following day and us missing out on clients. You can tell by looking at our first few installations the difference between then and now, and how we have become experts in the industry. Thankfully, our starter costs were minimal minus the cost of insurance, company registration, and contractor fees when we got too busy.imageMeagan Ward x Essence Magazine - Detroit, MI May 2018 (one of our first Detroit installations)imagePartnership with Lavelle, Toronto, Ca June 2018imageApril 2019 Birthday Party Installation, Fort Lauderdale, FLDescribe the process of launching the business.The first three months were definitely a learning experience for me as we were still perfecting our craft, we worked on a lot of sponsorship partnerships and pro bono to get our names out to the public. We had customers but it took some time before we snagged corporate clients and public figures.We launched with our website done, insurance, and company registration however, pre-launch we started posting on Instagram to build up engagement and traffic.imageBalloon Haus Photoshoot, 2018Luckily, the balloon industry has very low start-up costs allowing you to purchase supplies beforehand and practice without losing any money. This is one of those industries that you don’t have to take any type of financing out as the markups are high, you can generate a decent amount of money to use towards equipment by the time your target market is introduced to your company.One suggestion I would have for anyone starting up, be selective of the sponsorships you agree to as, in the beginning, the ROI may not be what you expect but you will get the needed experience. Do not agree to work with everyone!When we launched, many of the balloon companies that existed were not up to date with how to’s on garlands, arches, balloon mosaics that we were able to have somewhat of an advantage. We also implemented a consulting program for any prospective clients to understand the needs they had to ensure they received exactly what they wanted. We were also open for 24 hours, which allowed us to take more orders than the majority of our competition (this helped us get our name out faster).imageFirst balloon Haus online ad - (February 2018)imageFirst Balloon Haus Website - February 2018imageSeptember 2019, Atlanta, GASince launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?To be transparent, these past two months, I’ve spent a lot of time with a mentor learning marketing strategies - segmentation, building storyboards, and all that fun marketing staff to assist with pushing forward a marketing campaign in 2020. Prior to this, I’ve spent money on AdWords, Google Advertising, Facebook and Instagram ads but since I’m not an expert on marketing, it’s hard to target the exact customer you are looking for due to all the algorithms changes.I also know in order to really see a difference with marketing, you must have at least 5K a minimum set aside and we are not there as of yet. I would rather use this towards hiring a salesperson and get leads the old fashioned way.We are in a visual industry so posting on social media helps but as we are so busy, we tend to go months without doing so which has gotten us messages asking, “are you even a real company?” since all the known balloon companies post everyday. We are working on hiring a social media coordinator for the new year.We do offer a VIP discount to customers who have purchased from us repeatedly which is where about 35% of our income is generated.I think next year, our team will be focused on pop-ups and installation in each city we are in to promote the Balloon Haus brand.I did see an increase in customer inquiries for about three months after my feature in Voyage Miami Feature, this was great as we received several Quinceañera requests.How are you doing today and what does the future look like?The majority of our sales are through our brick and mortar and calls but we would like to see this changed throughout the new year to see an increase in online sales.As the new year approaches, we anticipate 2020 to be one of the most successful profit-wise. As we have taken many losses these past two years but they have also taught us lessons which we will be sure to never repeat. We know what events balloon decor is a necessity and which ones not to focus on. We have learned our customer avatar and will generate sales from that. We are also focusing on attracting more corporate and notable clients as we are in a space that we can honor larger discounts to do. This would include grand openings, experiential events, brand launches, etc.imageMay 2019, Detroit, MIimageJune 2019 - Boca Raton, FLOur short-term goal is to snag 10 long-term corporate clients which involve working on all of their events throughout the year. As well as, moving into larger retail spaces to add additional decor services to our clients.Long term, we would rather not discuss as it’s going to disrupt the industry.Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?As I wasn’t too familiar with the balloon industry when I started, there were many mistakes that I made and wish I could go back and change but you can’t excel without failure.I had employees that didn’t show up to installations which left me to deal with upset clients and trying to maintain our reputation which was TOUGH. As we do not answer calls throughout the day on our 1-800 but give callbacks, it has left many old school customers upset that they cannot get a hold of us at their leisure but it has also helped us source through the serious customers.Creating a competitive analysis has really helped with competition and providing our customers with what our competition doesn’t.One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is NOT TO TAKE ON A DIFFICULT CUSTOMER. If you notice communicating with the customer from the beginning is not easy - do not continue as you will regret it and most likely end up with an unhappy customer by the end of the transaction.At one point, we didn’t want to turn any of our customers away so I would tell my staff to accept everyone but we would outsource the installation to another balloon installer. Let’s just say many of the installers were not as people-friendly and/or didn’t have the same work ethic as my teams.What platform/tools do you use for your business?Currently, I am obsessed with Slack and Airtable - efficient ways of communicating with the team and project management. What makes it even better is you can sync Airtable with Slack. We set up our client process, projects, etc through the airtable.Google Trends and Analytics can really help you distinguish what is popular in your industry and what your potential customers are looking for.As for CRMs, we currently use Hubspot to keep track of our current and potential clients - makes things much easier.Instagram and Facebook have been great for advertising our services as we are a visual industry but shockingly enough a lot of our business comes from referrals.Lastly, Buzzsumo is AMAZING for seeing what content your competitors are posting in relation to your industry.What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?First thing first, NEVER STOP LEARNING as it is crucial to your success.I’m such a lover of learning that I could go on about great books, podcasts and resources however, I won’t. I will name the few that have gotten me through tough times and given me the motivation to keep pushing.Quit Like a Millionaire by Kristy Shen & Bryce Leung, The Most Powerful Woman in the Room is You by Lydia Fenet, The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari by Robin Sharma were great books, and I have so many more recommendations but you would be reading all night. I’m quite the advocate of female entrepreneurs as they inspire me to go harder and one day I will be where they are. Podcasts that I enjoy listening to by other entrepreneurs are Girl Ceo - Ronnie Brown and Often Ambitious. Quite insightful and they tend to discuss real-life entrepreneurial issues.As of lately, I’ve been reading through a lot of Udemy courses on Marketing and Sales as we are growing, I’m looking to be introduced to sales tactics to increase revenue and disrupt the industry. Shockingly enough, Twitter has also taught me A LOT - there are so many business gems and if you are not on there, get on there. There are tribes of entrepreneurs giving out helpful advice discussing on the entrepreneurial journey.Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?JUST START.I would recommend not jumping the gun to full entrepreneurship until you are 100% sure financially and emotionally that you are ready as it’s much harder than it looks. Give yourself time and be patient with your journey. No day is the same, especially as you grow your team and clientele. Be prepared to be the owner, installer, accountant, etc for your business until you can financially pay someone else and/or find the right team. I had to take a lot of losses when it came to finding the right employees as no one will believe in your dream as much as you do. I had to learn how to be apologetic when my staff wasn’t returning calls fast enough, missing appointments and choosing to show up late to events. THESE WERE VERY HARD LESSONS TO LEARN. We also grew much faster than anticipated which caused us to contract some of our client work and not every installer is going to be as efficient as your team.Your entire life will change when you become an entrepreneur because you are no longer in routine; whether it’s your eating, health, mental habits, etc.Get a mentor who will invest in you, but bring quality to the person you are being mentored by, if it’s as simple as ensuring their coffee is ready for them. Read, read, read. Never stop upgrading yourself.Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?Currently, we are hiring for our newest location in Atlanta we are looking for part-time balloon installers. Your main task would be to complete balloon installations and possibly, work in the store as well. We are also hiring remotely for 1 Sales Person, 1 Digital Marketer, and A PR Coordinator.Where can we go to learn more?WebsiteFacebookInstagramIf you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!Liked this text interview? Check out the full interview with photos, tools, books, and other data.For more interviews, check out r/starter_story - I post new stories there daily.Interested in sharing your own story? Send me a PM

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Hey - Pat from StarterStory.com here with another interview.Today's interview is with Michael Martinez of Eat Clean LLC, a brand that makes healthy, natural prepared mealsSome stats:Product: Healthy, Natural Prepared MealsRevenue/mo: $300,000Started: January 2015Location: Fort LauderdaleFounders: 1Employees: 68Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?My name is Michael Martinez, the owner and founder of Eat Clean, a healthy meal delivery service located in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. We prepare healthy meals with all-natural and organic ingredients, then deliver meals directly to the consumer's doorstep.Our customers are typically 25-44-year-old professionals that are too busy to cook or want to live a healthy lifestyle. We opened for business back in January 2015 with just three of us in a shared commercial kitchen space. We have now grown to monthly revenue to over $300k per month in sales.imageWhat's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?The idea came from my desire to enjoy healthy foods as well as to help others live a healthy lifestyle. I did not have a background in preparing food although my roommate at the time was a chef and helped start the business and prepare our original menus.At the time the business was started I was fresh out of college renting an apartment. I actually had to downsize and move into a mobile home due to the massive cost of starting a food business.Kitchen equipment such as commercial ovens, walk-in coolers, and freezers are very expensive. My goal was to grow fast and I learned quickly that without investment it was only possible if I was willing to sacrifice and invest everything into the business.Take us through the process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing your first product.We prepare our meals from scratch using only natural and organic ingredients. We have a full kitchen staff that includes three executive chefs, one chef is for our breakfast menu, the second chef is for our dessert items and the third chef is for our lunch and dinner menu.We receive all of our ingredients fresh, then prep all the vegetables and marinate the proteins. Our kitchen staff will then cook all of our ingredients in the oven or on the grill. None of our items are ever fried.imageDescribe the process of launching the business.The business was started with three of my long-time friends and just $3,000(which was all that I had in my savings account at the time). That money was used for kitchen hours in a commercial kitchen, food and our original website. By our third month, we were delivering to over 100 customers each week and we then had to lease a space and build our own kitchen. Initially, our customer base was family, friends, local gyms, and sports teams.The space we leased was a pizza restaurant that we had to tear down and build it to our requirements. Later on, we then leased the two locations next to us for additional space to prepare our meals.Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?Social media was a huge resource for us to attract customers. Back in 2015 some of our competitors did not even have an Instagram account and we used that to our advantage. We offered meals at a discounted rate or even free meals to social media influencers that were in our area.https://www.instagram.com/p/B38KDZSAU29/https://www.instagram.com/p/B5LwzE7ALkT/https://www.instagram.com/p/B5eDvxNA8lp/Once we started to grow we made sure to branch out and started advertising on Google, Facebook and a lot of events, giving potential customers a chance to taste our product. Such as Health Fairs, Corporate Lunches, and Gym challenges.How are you doing today and what does the future look like?When I look into the future I see us shipping our meals nationwide and opening kitchens in different states to offer our local delivery system to big cities such as New York and Los Angeles.Our goal is to one day be the biggest meal delivery service and go beyond that in time.Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?I have personally learned a lot and made a lot of mistakes. One mistake was the way I managed people in the beginning. Trusting people a little too much and I was not patient enough with our staff in the first few years.I have learned that people learn at a different pace. I have also learned that sometimes it’s better and more advantageous to find someone with potential and take the time to mold them, rather than to pay big money for someone experienced that may not buy into our culture as much.What platform/tools do you use for your business?We use a CRM called Hubb. We are fortunate to have a great relationship with them and they have customized it around our form of business.We also use a delivery software called Workwave which allows us to receive pictures of each delivery and track our drivers in progress to make sure our drivers are safe and on time.What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?I personally listen to Ben Greenfield's podcasts, I research healthy foods daily and I’ll watch documentaries for inspiration. Watching what others had to go through to accomplish their goals, is very motivating and that’s why I enjoy watching documentaries.Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?The advice I would give is to put the business first and to keep your foot on the gas. Earlier I referred to the fact that I had to downsize to live in a mobile home for a certain period of time.I would strongly recommend doing something like that or moving back in with your family for a certain period of time. Do whatever is necessary to be able to grow your business and usually, it takes a lot of sacrifices that are not fun at the time but when you look back on it your proud that you actually did go the extra mile.Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?We are currently looking for sales representatives that have knowledge of the health and fitness industry. The main goal would be to acquire corporate accounts, where we can provide their employees with a healthy option for lunch. Hours would be from 10-6 pm.Where can we go to learn more?WebsiteInstagramIf you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!Liked this text interview? Check out the full interview with photos, tools, books, and other data.For more interviews, check out r/starter_story - I post new stories there daily.Interested in sharing your own story? Send me a PM

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Hey - Pat from StarterStory.com here with another interview.Today's interview is with Matthew Paulson (u/MatthewDPX) of MarketBeat, a brand that makes financial informationSome stats:Product: financial informationRevenue/mo: $665,000Started: January 2011Location: Sioux FallsFounders: 1Employees: 6Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?My name is Matt Paulson and I’m the founder of MarketBeat, a financial media company that empowers individual stock investors to make better trading decisions by providing objective financial information and real-time market data.In other words, we make it easy for investors to research stocks. We publish a series of investment newsletters surrounding different investing strategies, such as following Wall Street analysts’ recommendations or investing in dividend stocks. Our flagship newsletter, MarketBeat Daily Ratings, currently has more than 1 million active email subscribers. Our website, MarketBeat.com, offers a variety of financial calendars, original news content, stock screeners and other investment research tools. MarketBeat’s network of websites attract more than 8 million visitors each month.Our company operates on a freemium model. We cover our costs for our free subscribers through advertising on our website and in our email newsletters. We also sell premium subscriptions at $20.00-$40.00 per month which provide additional features, data and research tools. Currently about 75% of our revenue is from advertising and 25% is from subscriptions.MarketBeat is expected to generate approximately $8 million in revenue in 2019 and end the year at about 1.3 million unique email subscribers.imageWhat's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?MarketBeat is a business that has evolved and iterated upon overtime. MarketBeat’s predecessor, American Consumer News, started in my college dorm room in 2006.imageThere weren’t a lot of good ways for me to generate an income as a computer science student in a college town of about 7,000 people. When I was a freshman in college, I worked the cash register and the deep fryer at McDonalds. I knew I didn’t want to repeat that experience the following year. I was able to scrape together an income working a few odd jobs for the university, but what allowed me to graduate debt free was freelance writing.The first time someone paid me to write an article was in 2005, which I became the technology editor of the university’s student-run newspaper. Soon after, I found other freelance writing jobs on the ProBlogger job board and eked-out $1,000 to $2,000 per month in income as a freelance writer. It didn’t take long for me to figure out that I should start to build my own content brand instead of getting paid a flat-fee per article to build someone else’s brand. I started a personal finance blog called American Consumer News which leveraged the writing skills of myself and other freelance writers to generate advertising income. That blog grew to $5,000 per month in income after two short years.During the great recession, I accidentally discovered there was an opportunity to write about stocks that were teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. At the time, everyone wondered if Bank of America, Citibank, JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo would all go bankrupt due to the subprime mortgage collapse. We would often see 5,000-10,000 readers per article when we wrote about Citibank. This was a big deal on a website that got about 30,000 visitors each month at the time. Our success in writing about stocks and generating website traffic from places like Google Finance, MSN Money and Yahoo Finance led to a pivot from focusing on personal finance to focusing exclusively on investing.Ultimately, I knew that the recession would end eventually and writing about stocks would be less exciting in the future. We also knew it wasn’t likely that Google, Yahoo and Microsoft wouldn’t keep sending us gobs of free traffic indefinitely, so we started shamelessly collecting email sign-ups on every article we published for a data-driven newsletter that we put together. That way when our traffic stream eventually died out, we could still send email to the people that previously engaged in our content. Initially, we weren’t really making any money from our email list, but I knew it would eventually become a long-term marketing asset.By the time American Consumer News had pivoted away from personal finance to focus exclusively on investing in 2010 and 2011 and become a brand called Analyst Ratings Network (later renamed to MarketBeat), I had graduated from college and was working as a web programmer for a local digital marketing agency. It took another two years for me to learn how to generate serious income from our newsletter and sell premium subscriptions to our email subscribers.imageAmerican Consumer News WebsiteTake us through the process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing your first product.Our email newsletter ended up getting quite a bit of initial traction. It turns out that stock investors tend to get emotionally invested in their stocks and want to know the latest tidbits and news headlines about them.MarketBeat was able to package that information and provide it to our subscribers in a convenient, real-time format. After about six months of running the free newsletter, it had grown to about 10,000 subscribers. At the same time, I was also getting requests to change the format of the newsletter, add some different data, send it earlier in the day, etc.I took all of the feedback that I had received and made a premium version of the newsletter and called it MarketBeat Daily Premium. With the premium newsletter, subscribers will get the newsletter earlier in the day, they can get SMS or email alerts for their stocks, have some more customizability for the newsletter and can setup a watch list of their stocks to get more information about the companies they’re most interested in.When I launched the premium newsletter in July 2011, I only sold about 30 subscriptions that first month at $15 per month or $150 per year. It was not a big success, but it wasn’t a total failure either. To be honest, I didn’t really know what I was doing at the time. I didn’t know how to properly market the newsletter and I didn’t have the premium product where it needed to be yet. We tried a lot of different things to grow our business and made a lot of mistakes early on, but eventually we began to figure out how a subscription business model can work.MarketBeat has really grown up since we launched our premium newsletter in 2011. While our basic business model hasn’t changed much, we’ve gotten a lot better at what we do. We’ve built out a product line of additional products and services so that we can sell more to our existing customers.We changed the name of the business from American Consumer News to Analyst Ratings Network, which was not a good name in retrospect due to its length and lack of memorability. Finally, we were able to acquire the name MarketBeat in 2015.By adding new marketing channels like co-registration advertising and content marketing, we’ve been able to grow the number of opt-ins we receive from a few thousand each month to more than 30,000 each month. MarketBeat is growing so fast right now that I’ve had to rewrite a lot of the software that sends out the newsletter because of the sheer number of emails we have to send out every day.imageAnalyst Ratings Network website in 2014Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?Our primary focus is to grow the number of email subscribers to our free newsletters. I know that if we regularly have new investors sign-up for our free investing newsletters, some of them will click on our advertisers’ ads and buy their products and some of them will buy our products. All of our advertising and marketing surrounds growing our email list. We don’t do brand advertising, display advertising or anything else that doesn’t have a high likelihood of generating an email sign-up for our mailing list.We generate email sign-ups through a mix of organic search engine optimization efforts and paid advertising. Our SEO strategy relies around being the best website to research any publicly-traded company. So, when an investor goes to search for the name of a company followed by the word stock or simply types in a stock ticker (such as NASDAQ: AAPL), our aim is to be within the first few results. We simply try to be the best place to research a stock by having a ten-year history or a company’s earnings, financials, insider transactions, analyst recommendations, dividend and other information. We don’t buy links or do any form of unethical SEO, but we have done well ranking our website in Google, Bing and Yahoo when people search for stock tickers.We have been able to get higher than average opt-in rates by aligning the copy of our opt-in forms to the content on the page. If a user is on a page about Microsoft stock, the email opt-in will make specific reference to Microsoft. Our thought is that if a user is researching a particular stock, they are more likely to opt-in to an email list if the opt-in mentions the stock they are researching.We also currently spend approximately $100,000 per month on paid advertising. These dollars are spent between co-registration advertising networks, content recommendation ads such as Taboola and Yahoo Gemini, and lead generation service providers. Our average cost per email sign-up is currently around $1.00, which is compelling in an industry that says a financial lead should cost an average of $6.00.We do have some social media marketing efforts in play, but social isn’t a big focus. Our audience is primarily 50-80 year-old men and our customers just don’t spend a lot of time on services like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Pinterest. Some of them use Twitter and StockTwits, so we market into those platforms. However, we’ve never been able to make a Facebook ad work profitably for our company.How are you doing today and what does the future look like?As of late 2019, MarketBeat is an $8 million/year business that’s run by seven employees. We have no debt, have healthy retained earnings and operate on a 70% profit margin, so life is pretty good. Other than taxes, payroll, advertising and infrastructure, we just don’t have many hard costs. We hope to generate $10 million in revenue in 2020, but don’t have any other major long-term goals. We’ve already “won the lottery” in the business world by creating a company that throws off $5 million in profit per year with a small team, so we simply try to do a little bit better than we did the year before each year.On the non-financial side, our web traffic and email numbers continue to climb steadily. We’ll be at 1.3 million email subscribers by the end of 2019 and have averaged 9 million pageviews per month over the last several months. We don’t pay much attention to our social media following, but all the numbers worth tracking are heading in the right direction.This year we launched a major redesign of MarketBeat to put it on the cutting-edge of design in the financial and investing space. We also launched a second brand called The Early Bird that offers a simplified, easy-to-scan newsletter for a younger generation of investors. We’re doing a lot of work surrounding search engine optimization right now (look us up on SemRush, you’ll be impressed). I’m not sure what the next year will look like in terms of launching new products or improving our existing offerings, but our team is always asking “What should we do next?”Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?I’ve learned a bunch of lessons during the 13 years that I’ve been an online business owner and outlined many of those principles in my book, 40 Rules for Internet Business Success.One “rule” that has helped me build a business that stands the test of time is building a business that isn’t dependent on a single customer acquisition source. So many people build businesses that rely exclusively on Amazon sales, Google search traffic, Facebook ads or App Store sales and then go out of business when their big tech company of choice changes the rules on them. Ideally, your business will have 5-7 repeatable customer acquisition sources in place so that you won’t lose your business if one of your marketing sources just stops working.A corollary to this is building your audience on platforms that are federated and not tied to any one big tech company. While Facebook can change who sees the posts of your Facebook Page or your Instagram account on a whim, no one tech company can mess with email, podcasts and websites. By building your audience on one of these three technologies that nobody owns, you know that you will still be able to communicate with your audience for years down the road. We’ve been primarily focused on building an email list over the last decade and we have some subscribers that signed-up for MarketBeat in 2011 that continue to receive our emails today. That just doesn’t happen on social media due to algorithm changes and the ephemeral nature of those platforms.What platform/tools do you use for your business?MarketBeat is hosted on three bare-metal dedicated servers from LiquidWeb. We use SendGrid to deliver more than 50 million emails each month. We use Twilio for SMS delivery. We use Cloudflare as a content delivery network (CDN) and web firewall. We use Stripe and PayPal for payment processing. We use Slack for team communication. All of our development work is done inside Microsoft Visual Studio.What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?My two favorite business books are Business Brilliant by Lewis Schiff, Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss and The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy.My favorite business and personal finance podcasts include Dough Roller, Publisher Lab from Ezoic, Startups for the Rest of Us, This Week in Startups and Tropical MBA.Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?Talk to your customers! I see this mistake made over and over again. Would-be entrepreneurs assume that they know what problem their potential customers are facing and that they have the solution for it. Instead of doing customer development and identifying what their customers’ problems actually are and what solutions they’ve already tried, they just jump head long into product development and end up building something that nobody wants or needs.Another mistake that I often see new entrepreneurs make is that many of them just don’t work hard enough and when they do work they focus on things that won’t make them money, such as designing business cards. They spend a lot of time designing their business and thinking about what type of products and services they might offer, but the rubber never really hits the road. It’s easy to think about what a business might be like, but it’s much more difficult to turn that idea into reality. The only two things that cause a business to succeed is building a product or service that there’s demand for and then actually selling it to someone. Everything else is superfluous.Mike Tyson is famous for saying, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” This is true both in the boxing ring and in business. Everyone has an idea how their business could work, but they often don’t have the motivation or a true understanding of what it takes to be successful until they’ve tried something and failed. After you’ve been knocked down in business a couple of times, you’ll realize what tasks matter, what tasks don’t, and what the clear path toward success looks like. Growing a business takes 40+ hours per week of distraction-free work on the right tasks (product development and sales/marketing). If you aren’t putting in that effort, success will likely elude you.Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?We currently have a team of seven people and are not actively hiring for any positions. We hired three people this year and probably won’t be hiring anyone for the next 18-24 months.Where can we go to learn more?Website - https://www.marketbeat.com/Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/marketbeatcom/Twitter - https://www.twitter/MarketBeatNews/My Blog - https://www.mattpaulson.com/My Books - https://www.amazon.com/Matthew-Paulson/e/B001TA5CW6%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_shareIf you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!Liked this text interview? Check out the full interview with photos, tools, books, and other data.For more interviews, check out r/starter_story - I post new stories there daily.Interested in sharing your own story? Send me a PM

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Hey - Pat from StarterStory.com here with another interview.Today's interview is with Sam Evans (u/haulincubes) of You Call We Haul Junk Removal, a brand that makes junk removal servicesSome stats:Product: Junk Removal ServicesRevenue/mo: $18,000Started: May 2016Location: Central PennsylvaniaFounders: 1Employees: 3Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?My name is Sam Evans. I am 23 years old and a recent graduate from Penn State Altoona. I am the founder of You Call We Haul Junk Removal, a junk removal company that removes anything from single items to hoarder home cleanouts. We’re located in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and have been in business (part-time) since May of 2016.We service any and everyone who may have unneeded items they are looking to get rid of. People often ask what items we consider junk, to us junk is anything you no longer need or want.Our main customers are middle-aged and up adults, typically with a higher income that do not want to or are unable to do the work themselves. We complete over 75 jobs per month, bring in about $20,000 in revenue per month profiting about 65% per job.imageWhat's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?When I was ending my freshman year of college, I was sitting in my dorm room one day when I got a call from my cousin. Both of us had been flipping items on eBay since we were 14 and always loved to find ways to make some extra money. He told me about a book called Effortless Entrepreneur, written by the founders of College Hunks Hauling Junk which is currently the world’s second-largest junk removal franchise.I ordered the book on eBay for $4 and as soon as it came to my dorm, I immediately started reading. About 20 pages into it, I called my Dad who is a used car salesman. I told him that I was going to start a junk removal company and that I needed his help finding a truck. After nearly a week of calling him telling him every reason I could come up with as to why I needed to start this company, he was finally in. He helped me find a $1,000 truck on Craigslist, a 1991 Ford F-150. imageI bought the truck, printed out some flyers at my school’s library, ordered a few hundred horrible business cards, and was officially in business.I had zero validation for the idea other than that big companies were making a killing doing it and I figured I could as well, after all, who doesn’t have some extra items lying around that they’re dying to get rid of? I minimized the risk as much as I possibly could because the truck that I bought was worth a lot more than the thousand dollars I paid for it. I knew that even if I failed, I would be able to resell the truck and make some money. Starting with a beater truck was my way of putting out a minimum viable product.I had zero expertise and am still learning every single day that I work on my business. The only business experience I had before this was flipping items on eBay and running Facebook pages while I was in middle and high school. When I was 14 I built, grew, and sold a network of Facebook pages with over 5 million daily active users that were based on different teenage jokes and issues at the time. The biggest page had over 3 million likes and was called I HATE WHEN MY PARENTS ASK WHO I’M TEXTING, if you were active on Facebook in 2010 and were in high school at the time, I bet you like the page - go check and let me know. My financial situation at this time was a few thousand dollars that I had in my bank account from these previous businesses. Knowing absolutely nothing ended up being an advantage. I failed a ton in the first few summers of running the business but learned more than I ever did in the classroom. Everything takes time and effort, if you put in the effort you will be successful in the long run in whatever business you decide to start.Take us through the process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing your first product.There was no design process when I started out. I put out the most minimal viable product I could. The truck was cheap but luckily it did not have any rust so it had a tiny bit of curb appeal if you appreciate old Ford trucks. My flyers and free craigslist posts were really the reason I started to get business.In my area, saying you are a Penn State student or graduate holds a lot of weight and people love to support a fellow Penn Stater. On these flyers and posts, I really honed in on the fact that I was a current PSU student home for summer vacation, looking for a way to make some extra money. The original flyer had a picture of a roommate of mine holding up a random couch that we found sitting in a field by campus.I did not do anything legally for almost two years after starting this business, as I ran it only in the summer while home from school and on breaks when I could actually find some work. My first summer in business in 2016, we did barely $3,000 in sales. Once I took the business legal 2 years later before my senior year of college, I had about $1,200 in total legal and insurance costs to turn into a legitimate business. Upon graduation and taking the business full-time, the costs of insurance ramped up having employees and a much larger truck.Describe the process of launching the business.When we first started we did not have a website, Facebook page, or Instagram account. We spread the word by taping flyers to mailboxes, free Craigslist posts, and sharing screenshots of our flyers in local Facebook groups which were our biggest source of customers.It took us about a week to get our first customers and we were profitable by the end of month one in which we did about $2,000 in sales. Starting with very humble beginnings in a beat-up old Ford truck and no advertising budget taught me that just getting started and taking action is the most important step. When it comes to service businesses that are already a proven model, I always think about the line from Field of Dreams, “If you build it they will come.” Whether it is junk removal, landscaping, garage door repair, or any other home service business, proven models like that work.I also learned that even having a small web presence like a Wix website or a Facebook page can do wonders. Showing people what you do rather than telling them is key to any business becoming successful.Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?Since launch, the only paid advertising we have done is Facebook ads. We are starting to roll out Google ads this month but Facebook has done wonders for our business thus far. If I were to restart, I wouldn’t put as much faith in Facebook ads as I did though because the costs have nearly doubled in the past year.We typically spend less than $600 a month on ads but really need to up the ad spend to reach our current goals. We do a ton of grassroots marketing. Bandit signs, stickers, signs in customer’s yards, door hangers, giving out t-shirts, etc.image imageOur biggest successes from organic marketing have come from midnight bandit sign drops. Going out in the middle of the night allows us to put out 50-60 signs in high traffic areas in under three hours. We map out where to put them based on incomes in various local zip codes. Zip code incomes can be found through USPS Every Door Direct Mail tool. We’ve also been utilizing the Nextdoor app which is tremendous for home services. If you are recommended on that app, customers treat it like the bible. They will hire you blindly and agree to any price you say.We also post on social 2-4x per day, every single day. It is a great way to gain customers organically and get a lot of exposure for the company. Videos work great for home services because as I’ve said before, people want to see who they’re hiring to come into their homes, especially women hiring men. They want to be able to trust a brand and social media is a great way to build that trust for free.https://www.instagram.com/p/B4prmVJHDvC/How are you doing today and what does the future look like?Today, we are growing every single month. We are doing about a 75% profit margin on each job but expect that to go down over time as we hire more employees and acquire more trucks. We are going to start investing a lot more heavily in PPC ads and SEO to gain more exposure in our area. Right now we have about 1,200 facebook likes and a little over 700 Instagram followers. We typically have about 400 people visiting our site each month. Short term we want to reach 100 jobs completed in one month and hit $30,000 in monthly revenue. We believe we can do that with the one dump truck we currently have as long as we up our ad spend.Long term, we want to franchise the business. Junk removal is growing at an extremely fast pace as we live in a society that thrives on convenience and wants to show off to their peers, so people are buying more items than ever before. Studies have shown that less than 2% of people know how to get rid of unneeded items so the industry is really just getting started.We’re confident that through the culture we are building we can get our employees on board to start their own locations. We will give them the choice of where they want to start because we believe the model we’re perfecting will work in any location. Junk removal is an extremely fun business because no two days are the same, you meet very interesting people, and you never ever know what you are going to find.Employees love it because they can keep some of the stuff they find too which makes it all that much more enjoyable. It really is the perfect, simple business model that anyone who is willing to hustle can start and succeed in.Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?Since I’ve started this business I have really learned to appreciate services. The home services industry in particular is only going to grow in the next 5-10 years. We’re moving away from the times of people wanting to do everything on their own. Our society is starting to value time over money and that means paying people to do the things they do not want to do, like removing the broken freezer from their basement.I was very lucky to start my business during college when I really could not fail. Being able to work on it for three summers and research it not stop during the school year set me up to succeed post-graduation. I didn’t have to jump in blindly and hope it would work, I had already proven the model and created a solid base of customers that were constantly referring me business.One of the best decisions I made was joining a junk removal mastermind group. It taught me more in 3 months than I learned in 4 years of college studying business. I highly recommend that people try to find Facebook groups or subreddits where they can share ideas with other owners in their industries and if there aren’t any, start one.What platform/tools do you use for your business?Platforms I use are: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube for learning, Housecall Pro, Quickbooks Online, Nicejob.What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?Books:The Power of BrokeEverything by Malcolm Gladwell to challenge how I thinkEverything by Dale Carnegieto challenge how I interact with otherLiving With a SealThe Last LecturePodcasts:How I built this with Guy RazThe Home Service ExpertHumans 2.0Business WarsApps:Alarmy- I used to hit the snooze button multiple times, every single morning. This app allows you to find a barcode in your home or elsewhere and scan it, you then have to scan the barcode to shut off your alarm. There’s no other way to get it to stop other than to scan that barcode. It’s a blessing and a curse, trust me.Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?Start. Just start. If everyone waited for the right time to start, we wouldn’t have any entrepreneurs. Don’t think you need to know everything, no one knows everything. Take a ton of risks, every successful person ever credits their risk-taking ability with them becoming successful. Don’t try to build the next Facebook or Instagram, you do not need to reinvent the wheel. I bought a thousand-dollar pick-up truck and got started.If you over-think things it just makes it harder for you. Put out a minimum viable product and hustle, the results will come if you do not stop.Most people think they’ll make a ton of money and their business will boom from the beginning. Rarely is that ever the case. Give it time, lots of it, and do everything in your power to grow your business. Everything takes time and effort, if you put in the effort you will be successful in the long run in whatever business you decide to start.Where can we go to learn more?WebsiteFacebookInstagramLinkedinIf you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!Liked this text interview? Check out the full interview with photos, tools, books, and other data.For more interviews, check out r/starter_story - I post new stories there daily.Interested in sharing your own story? Send me a PM

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Hey - Pat from StarterStory.com here with another interview.Today's interview is with Lars Helgeson of GreenRope, a brand that makes complete crm & marketing automationSome stats:Product: Complete CRM & Marketing AutomationRevenue/mo: $160,000Started: June 2008Location: San DiegoFounders: 1Employees: 15Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?My name is Lars Helgeson and I am the founder of GreenRope, a CRM and marketing automation platform. Our company started in 2000 as an email marketing SaaS and in 2008 decided to focus on the challenges that businesses face in managing sales, marketing, customer service, and operations.GreenRope is an all-in-one Complete CRM, with sales and marketing automation, surveys, event management, project management, support ticketing, learning management, knowledge management, forms, websites, landing pages, advanced analytics, and much more, all within a single interface.We made the decision at the outset to build the company organically, never taking outside investment, so we could focus on creating a positive, customer-centric culture without the pressure or sacrifices of having to repay investors.GreenRope has over 1,000 customers in over 20 countries, ranging from startups to universities and municipalities.imageWhat's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?After being honorably discharged from the US Air Force, I struck out on my own to build a different kind of software company. One that focused on providing real, long-term value to customers. I taught myself how to write code and worked day and night for 3 years to build the first version of our email marketing software.In 2008, I realized that we could better serve our customers by taking a broader, more holistic view of business management. We worked with hundreds of our customers to come up with solutions to real problems they were having every day and found out that most of those problems had to do with managing information. Most businesses have disparate departments, software, and data, and the integration of that data is often an afterthought. GreenRope solves this with a single, unified platform that sales, marketing, customer service, and operations staff log in to.When we started with GreenRope, we focused on the core CRM, email, and website elements of running a business. Then, we expanded into project management, customer service, and a few other functions common to many businesses. The last part was building automation, scoring, and predictive analytics since we were able to gather data from all of the other parts of the business’s operations.Our team grew slowly, but we have always been focused on providing the best customer service possible. We provide free videos, white papers, e-books, walk-throughs, cheat sheets, webinars, and more. If a more personal touch is needed, we offer free support by phone, email, live chat, web conference, and support ticket.I believe the key to long term growth is about focusing on the customer. Products must solve problems reliably, and customers have to feel confident in the company and the platform. GreenRope’s mission and vision have always centered on that, and we are transparent about every element of our business.Take us through the process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing your first product.GreenRope’s design is a combination of two platforms we built - MyTeamCaptain (a side project I worked on for my hockey team) and CoolerEmail (the original email marketing platform I started in 2000). When we started creating the architecture for the platform, we knew we were taking on something ambitious. It took 2 years of development before we had a minimum viable product (MVP).From there, we released it to a small group of users, migrating them from CoolerEmail to GreenRope. We learned from their feedback, adapting the user interface to better suit their needs. With a platform as all-encompassing as GreenRope, our biggest challenge was providing the broad capability businesses needed without making the user feel overwhelmed.The GreenRope of 2019 represents a gradual evolution of functionality and user experience over the 8 years since we officially launched. We have continually worked to improve the UI look and feel, as well as speed, while adding relevant features that our users have asked for.One key part of our business model is that we have built a private labeled value-added reseller (VAR) program. Our website shows how we are able to launch a clone of our platform with custom domains and branding for a customer who wants to sell and market CRM to a channel. Our channel partners see rapid growth in their own businesses providing software that every business in their channel needs.imageDescribe the process of launching the business.GreenRope’s official launch was relatively quiet. We had performed 18 months of testing and improving the initial MVP, so in November 2011, we were ready for release. We started initially with rolling it out to our existing customer base at CoolerEmail, and then a measured PPC campaign to attract small business customers.The uptake was slow at first, as people generally don’t like changing the software so integral to their day-to-day operations. As we gained momentum, more and more of our users switched, and we began marketing GreenRope to the general public.Our initial target was very small businesses and startups, and our price point reflected that. Our starter plan was just $25/month. That was good for them, but we found that the size of the company at that time simply wasn’t ready for all the features we had built into GreenRope.After about a year of trying to make it work, our churn rates were too high and the cost per acquisition wasn’t paying off, so we increased prices and started targeting larger businesses. This has become much more fruitful for us, as businesses with over 5 employees typically have someone on staff with experience with CRM and/or marketing, and someone who has the responsibility and drive to make a CRM work. Our churn rates have gradually decreased since then, and our clients have steadily become larger businesses (although we still have many very small businesses as clients).Development, marketing, and operations costs related to the startup and growth phases of GreenRope have come from revenues created by the company. We have never taken outside funding, although from time to time, we do have to leverage debt financing for significant investments.Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?As a privately-funded company, we have tried, tested, and proven a number of strategies to attract and retain our loyal customer base. At the top of the funnel, we typically rely on PPC, social advertising, SEO, and our blog. At first, we relied primarily on Google AdWords. As we have grown, both in our online presence and our customer base, we now heavily rely on organic searches, PPC, social, our website, and referrals to fill the top of our funnel. Other methods include review sites, trade shows, and industry events, and publicity. Our PPC represents about 50% of our lead gen, Organic results in about 25%, and additional marketing efforts bring in the remaining 25% of the leads.Complete CRM is a concept that is pretty unique to our solution. Campaigns and blog posts that highlight how much users can save in total cost of ownership when investing in a platform like GreenRope tend to get a lot of traffic. We do not charge per user, which is different than most of our competitors. We also integrate so many different features that the user would have to rely on a third party for if they were to choose another software.One thing that we have found is that our blog plays a large role in contributing to conversions, whether the lead initially came from PPC or another marketing effort. Our blog is not only fundamental in attracting leads, but also in retention. We create a plethora of content to help our users build their own successful businesses using integrated technology.In terms of retention, our most effective strategies are the GreenRope blog, email marketing, webinars, and social media user groups. We use the GreenRope blog to share how-to’s and other important information about effective strategy both in business and using the software. We send out monthly newsletters that highlight new features, upcoming events, and webinars, and feature our newest blog articles.We host four monthly webinars that cover both strategy and GreenRope features. Attendees can ask questions and actively engage with our support team. We also have a LinkedIn user group where users can connect with both the GreenRope team, other GreenRope users as well as our support staff to ask questions and learn more about the system and its features.The last retention strategy that has worked really well for us is our 24/7 support access. Users can connect with our team via live chat, ticketing, phone, etc. to get the support they need when they need it. This is one of our most valuable assets for keeping our users happy!imageHow are you doing today and what does the future look like?GreenRope is a steadily growing enterprise, helping more and more companies around the world with CRM, sales, marketing, customer service, and events with automation. The most important metric we measure is the conversion from trial to paid account. This number fluctuates between 40% and 55%, which is a strong indicator of how our software performs, both relative to our competitors and in the market in general.The largest resistance to growth is finding companies that are ready to change the way they do business. GreenRope requires dedication and an investment by the client in defining the process and changing over to a single, unified platform.Our long term goals center around steady, organic growth. We haven’t taken any investment to date, and we don’t intend to in the future. My vision is for us to continue to provide great software, with outstanding customer service, at a reasonable price. We have built a sustainable business this way and intend to continue to do so.imageDatabase growth in one month periodThrough starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?Many lessons have been learned along the way of starting and growing GreenRope, some personal and some more related to operating business.One key lesson is to be careful about outsourcing development work. Good developers are hard to find, but finding quality companies that write software is even harder. Ultimately, it comes down to process and communication, and if the development team doesn’t do that, your project will at best be more expensive and take longer. At worst, you could end up with expensive, unusable code.Another lesson is when working with public relations and other companies that don’t have payment tied to performance. If anyone claims to be someone who can help you, but won’t tie their payment to how well they do, 99% of the time, they’re going to underperform. I’ve been amazed at how hard people will work to sell you on what they can do, only to disappear once they’ve been given the business.An expensive lesson I learned was to always have financial checks and balances in place. When my best friend of 20 years and CFO was caught embezzling money from my company, I wondered how something like that could happen. And then I learned that it happens all the time. The financial and emotional cost is staggering, but with financial controls in place, it makes stealing from the company harder and easier to find early on. Don’t blindly trust anyone in your company with control over money, no matter how close of friends you are with them.What platform/tools do you use for your business?At GreenRope, we use our own platform for our CRM, sales and marketing automation, customer service ticketing, and more. Our team of 20 people supports our 600 direct clients, and our 20 resellers support their own client base (500 additional customers collectively).In addition to using our own software, GreenRope, to manage sales, marketing, customer service, and operations, we also employ some additional tools for our marketing efforts.We use Buffer for our social media scheduling, SEMRush for content, SEO, and analytics. We have in the past used some additional content syndication platforms, but have found that we have more success distributing our own content.What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?Most of the resources I have used have been informal. Over the years, I have learned from fellow entrepreneurs, occasional podcasts, and articles on LinkedIn, Quora, and other sites about CRM and related technology.Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?The first piece of advice I have is to take a step back and think about how you will commercialize your product. Think about who you’re selling to, and how you envision selling it. Take some time to map a high-level customer journey. If you expect different kinds of interactions with leads based on demographics, interests, or behaviors, make sure you plan to have a way to collect and use that data.From a business ownership perspective, be very cautious about sharing equity of your business, particularly with equity partners, early on. Get to know your partners before you get into business with them, and have clear, objective requirements for maintenance of equity shares. If a partner decides to not put any effort forth, make sure there’s a way to cleanly extricate that partner from the agreement and stock ownership.If you do end up selling your company, be sure you are familiar with both methods of sales - stock and asset purchases each have very different tax implications.When it comes to buying software for your business (and every business will need software) make sure you think about the integration of that software as part of the buying process. Take the total cost of ownership (TCO) into consideration, and involve your team. Start with requirements and make sure the software you choose can accomplish those requirements.Where can we go to learn more?WebsiteFacebookTwitterLinkedInGreenRope BlogContact Email - Marketing/PR: [email protected] you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!Liked this text interview? Check out the full interview with photos, tools, books, and other data.For more interviews, check out r/starter_story - I post new stories there daily.Interested in sharing your own story? Send me a PM

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