Kia ora,

I’ve been mentoring a couple of people recently, and a question I get asked is “how did you get started in your business?”

I was 23 years old, had no agency experience, was fresh out of university and had few connections, but I made it work. The newsletter talks about why I started and how I did it.

Any further questions? Hit reply to this email and let me know 🙂 

The Deep Dive: How I Started a Marketing Agency at Age 23

If you'd asked me at age 19 or 20 if I was going to run my own business, I would've probably said no. 

I'd done the odd slightly entrepreneurial thing as a young person and was very motivated by money, but I'd never really had entrepreneurship modelled to me in my immediate circle.

Throughout my university degree, I started working within larger companies doing part-time marketing or promo work, and in one case even doing maternity cover for a full-time role within a media company.

But in every situation when I looked around, there was nobody whose job I wanted.

I realised that climbing a career ladder didn't appeal to me. I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do, but I knew there were a couple of things that were important to me:

1️⃣ I didn't want to be tied to an office or a single physical location.
2️⃣ I wanted to be able to get my hands on heaps of different disciplines, not get pigeonholed into one area of specialty.

The accidental beginning 🌟

The beginnings of my marketing agency came about when I got the Prime Minister's scholarship to Asia for India for six weeks, which was obviously very amazing. The complication was that it took place over summer, which was usually when I would really double down on working at my jobs so that during the year when exam season hit, I could work a bit less.

Therefore I needed a way to earn some money remotely, otherwise I wouldn't have any money for the following year. 

I went on Student Job Search and found a health recruitment company that needed someone to create PowerPoints for them. I met the owner who mentioned that the marketing manager was on maternity leave and asked if I wanted to cover that for a few months. Then through this health recruitment agency, I was introduced to a few other small businesses who needed help with their marketing.

"Do you know how to use InDesign?" they'd ask.
"Yes, of course!" I'd say, then go home and frantically YouTube how to use InDesign. 😅

Things got to a point where I was finishing my uni degree, working 20-30 hours a week in a marketing role for a hotel chain, and doing marketing for six small businesses on the side. People were saying to me "you should start a business," but I didn't really know where to start.

The birthday party business plan 🍷

A good friend of mine who had always been very entrepreneurial moved up to Auckland. We had heaps of similar values around our vision for life, a similar approach to finances, and a desire to lead an unconventional life. We'd also hiked together and travelled together well.

At her birthday BYO in July 2019, after a bottle of wine, we got onto the topic of work and said "we should start a business!" We put a calendar appointment in our phones for the following Tuesday called "Biz chats" and went from there. 

What did we actually do first? 

The first step was the business plan. We initially wanted to pair up student labour with small businesses who couldn't afford a typical marketing agency, based on the demand I had seen as a student doing the marketing for lots of small businesses.

Every Tuesday evening and every Saturday from a café, we would work on the business. We decided on the name (I will always love the name Brandsitters), experimented with a few different types of websites, crafted packages and offers, and did a series of cringey photoshoots in very public cafés and restaurants. We set up a tripod to take self-timed photos of us "working” on our laptops for photos for our social media and website. Live, laugh, love, bootstrapped.

We got incorporated in January 2020, and the dream was to get this business up and running quickly so we could become digital nomads the following year.

The reality check 📈

We onboarded our first client, a Christchurch-based law firm who I'd met through one of the small businesses I was doing marketing support for. We created our first invoices using a combination of Excel and Word docs, using a logo we'd very roughly put together in Photoshop. 

COVID hit and the digital nomad dreams went out the window, but the flip side was many small businesses realised the importance of being online, so we got busier. 

We spent lockdown designing brochures, setting up social media campaigns, writing website copy, doing SEO, and doing product photo shoots from our homes on top of our day jobs.

We came out of lockdown at the start of June 2020. I immediately had brain surgery, while my business partner went full time into the business and moved us into a co-working space. We spent the next few months picking up a couple of clients through the co-working space and through our contacts, and we were also introduced to our fabulous mentors, Cecilia and James. 

We didn't get a website until about August/September of our first year when my business partner’s talented flatmate became our first part-time employee and created it for us. By the end of that year, I'd gone full-time in the business.

The more we shared what we were doing on social media and through word-of-mouth, the busier we became. 

What worked for us in our first 12 months 💪

1. Low cost to entry. A professional services business is pretty easy to start from an investment perspective - you really just need a laptop and an internet connection. We didn't require any investment aside from $1000 each which we put in right at the beginning, and we had the ability to keep our outgoings low.

2. We weren't worried about spending money on appearances. We were happy to pay ourselves conservatively so that we always had a buffer to invest into the business. That being said, it was amazing that we could pay ourselves at all in that first year, because lots of people can't.

3. We didn't wait for perfection. We didn't wait to have the perfect branding. We didn't even have a website. We didn't wait for permission - we just got cracking.

4. We had a small but valuable network. It helped that I'd already been working in a casual contractor capacity for other small businesses, so I'd built up a little bit of a network among small business owners. It also helped that we were both well-liked and good at our day jobs, despite being very junior. This meant that both of our previous workplaces (which were both big name brands in their respective industries) came on as clients when we announced we were leaving to start a marketing agency. Having big brands as clients within our first 12 months gave us an added layer of credibility. Moving into the co-working space was also a great move - it exposed us to more business owners and people doing their own thing, who in turn had people they could introduce us to.

5. We had very low life responsibilities. We only needed to pay our rent and feed ourselves. We also knew that if the business didn't work out, going back into employment would be fine. After all, what business is going to look at a young person who started their own company and think that's lame? 

6. My business partner and I really had each other's backs. Having a good business partner is a real asset, and we really showed up for each other.

What didn't go so well 😅

1. Difficulty finding a niche. We realised quickly that the original model we had with students was going to be hard to keep profitable, because we'd need to quality control all the work. However, businesses wouldn't want to pay too much for work that was largely being done by students, thus eroding our margins. After that, we struggled a little to find our niche. In that first year it didn't matter so much because at the time, businesses just really needed someone who could do Facebook ads, social media, and a bunch of other things - and that was us, but the niche aspect became more challenging in later years.

2. Offering too many services. We offered too many services for an agency of 2 (sometimes 2.5) people. We did rebrands, we did websites, we did social media, we did Meta ads, we did Google ads, we did SEO, and we did it all ourselves. We did a good job of it all, but it meant constant context switching and a really broad range of projects that were hard to manage.

3. Pricing. We had no idea how to price things as an agency. Our initial Meta ads packages started from $250 including design, copywriting and management. We struggled to productise our services, which meant starting from scratch every time, and a lot of hard work for not enough remuneration. We learned quickly that margins in professional services are pretty slim once you start to scale, so process becomes hugely important.

4. Not leaning enough into mentors. We felt too bootstrapped to pay for a lot of advice, and I think we felt we needed to spend a lot of time doing the doing in our business before asking for advice. For me personally in future, I’d like to lean into an advisory board more. 

My favourite part 🌱

I am so proud of what we created and what we achieved. Nothing was perfect, but honestly, to get started in business, it doesn't need to be and it shouldn't be.

If we'd waited to make everything perfect before launching, we'd still be working on getting started now. But here we both are, five years later, with heaps of experience and learnings under our belts, and great relationships with clients we’ve worked with for years.

It sounds trite, but the only thing standing between you and a business is really just getting started. Granted, some businesses require heaps more money and investment, but there's so much you can test and validate before you go down that road.

Inspo & Recommendations:

LinkedIn post: “A list of book recommendations by founders and CEOs” by Sam Parr

Podcast ep: The Truth About Building a Business that Buys You Freedom by Girls That Invest

Learning: Sophia Amouroso’s newsletter. Love reading this every week!

Tech: Nuz knives. If you’re looking for a nice knife that’s relatively affordable, check out Kiwi brand, Nuz!.

Love from your business-minded friend,

Elise

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