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.