Our journey into the first year as an entrepreneur.  You get to hear all the wins, losses, and lessons along the way I have learned. Not to rehash the start of this business too much, but after an impromptu presentation on social media at PodCamp Western Mass February 2018, two people came up to me after my presentations asking my business card.  That is where it got awkward, because I didn’t have a business and it was the first time I had ever presented in front of a crowd, so I had to thank them, and then tell them that I didn’t actually have a business.

Tasty Video and Prepared Food delivered to your Door

After 10 months of going back and forth, in November of last year, I soft launched the business with a half-finished Facebook Page and pulled in two clients.  My first client was Food for Strength LLC, where I took on their social media, and helped them significantly improve engagement, over doubling their page engagement, and getting them up over the 1000 milestone in under three months.  We featured a ton of cat pictures, did a tasty style video, got silly, and created a voice for them on social media.  Because it was my first client, I tried to undervalue my compensation, and Jen Howard, the owner, would have none of that.  If you are reading this Jen, THANK YOU!!

The award-winning Entrepreneur 

My second client was Lindsay Barron Labonte, an innovative badass, who has one of the most amazing entrepreneurial spirits I have ever met.  We started talking about her brand and vision to be the face of loans in the area.  She’s an award-winning loan originator at Applied Mortgage in Northampton. Her dad built the company and she is leading it into the future.   We worked on Facebook Ads, funnels, and she eventually had me come in to do the Social Media Summer Series, where I taught local entrepreneurs, realtors, and marketing pros in the area about Facebook and Instagram.  This taught me a lot about running workshops.

Impact Racing 

I worked as an assistant race director with Impact Racing for over a year, setting up social media, strategically positioning their races, and lead them into the Black Birch 10 Miler.  This was where I met one of my biggest challenges over the past year, which really hit me hard for a while. 

The Stone Cow Half Marathon and 5K – the race that never was. 

In a strategy meeting with Impact Racing, we were looking at venues to expand the company, and the place I took on was Stone Cow Brewery.  Looking at it from the outside, the venue is beautiful, beer is great, busy throughout the year, a brand that is on the rise in the area, and has experience with races in the past.  Well to be fair, they were obstacle course races there in the past, which is where the story takes a turn.

I worked my way through the channels, first with the marketing person, then to a manager, and finally to the manager of the farm side of the business, which is a separate business from Stone Cow Brewery itself.  I emailed 4 times first, a response to my first email showed some promise, but then it went cold. I called 6 times, but nothing, so I decided I would show up.  I put together a thank you bag with a bunch of swag, a handwritten note about the proposal, and went up there with my wife. I knew the person’s name who was in charge, talked up the bartender, and actually had a conversation with him on the spot.  Apparently, his email wasn’t working and he doesn’t check voicemails. He wanted in, but it was dark outside, so I would have to come back to look at the property and envision the possibilities. We set up a time to meet and brought the rest of the team along.  I was at peak excitement as this was a huge win and it would mean I could be more involved than ever. 

When we got there we quickly found out, the scariest drive of my life, the course was going to be difficult and very different from our other races, which wasn’t the biggest challenge.  We could not use the brewery itself.  I pleaded because it wouldn’t impact normal operating hours, but they were firm and the brewery was off-limits for the event.  The parking was off-site as well, so we would have to bus people in and I don’t have to go into more details, because you know what happened next.  It became the race that never was.  This was my baby.  I had spent tons of hours into this project, so much excitement, and then there was nothing. I know you are not supposed to take this kind of thing personally, but I did, and for a while.  From that experience, I learned not to get excited about a project until the contract has been signed.

The Restaurant World

There are certain industries that perform better than others.  As a business we also help short term and long-term clients.  Sometimes coming in for a single event, a refresh, or a six-month period, before coaching them on how to do it on their own.  Apartment complexes perform the worst as we have found out and restaurants perform one of the best, which was incredible for Leo’s Table.  We put together a plan and reached 1K followers on Facebook before we ever opened the building.  There was so much buzz on social media that some days it was too difficult to keep up with everything, which was a great problem to have. 

The problem is that some industries perform so well, it is hard to find value in paying someone professionally to do your social media for them, which is where we landed with Leo’s Table.  At the time we transitioned out from doing their social media, it really didn’t seem to make sense financially for us to keep doing their social media.  We sent them a report on what worked and didn’t work, the progress we made, and what we believed they needed to focus on in the future.  We learned the restaurant marketing angles and how much people love to see food pictures.

The Apartment Complex - Seventy University Drive

This was our big client that really launched the business to another level.  I am not going to dive into this too much, because I told this story in the past, and you can click here to learn more about it.  To sum everything up, we came on to do social media, then created a whole Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system for them, learned apartment management software, set that up too, and I was their leasing agent for three months.  Astonishingly enough with some time to spare, we went from zero presence to entirely leased up in less than four months.  Today Seventy University Drive is still one of our clients.

Our 1st Political Campaign - Committee to Elect John “JT” Thorpe

One of the most amazing, grateful, humble, and generous people I know, JT, with a ton of encouragement around him, decided he was going to run for Northampton City Council.  I kid you not, he went back and forth like 20 times before finally committing to running for office.  With a political campaign on social media, you have some added rules to follow, the page set up is different, there is an added approval process for ads, and what the hell do you post about on a political page?  I did market research, looked up many local politicians who promoted themselves on social media and the ones who did well, gave their community information inside the campaign and let you know who the candidate really was. 

As a social media marketer, I am not perfect.  I have some grammatical and spelling errors in my writing, which are probably present in this writing as well, especially when I don’t recruit my wife to proofread my work before putting it out there to the world. 99% of the time having errors, as long as they aren’t consistent, is a good thing, because it shows your brand is human.  I have had posts get twice the normal reach due to errors, because it sparks conversations with the people who point out your error, and how you who thanked them while cracking a joke about the whole thing.  With political campaigns, you don’t want to make mistakes, because getting people’s names, titles, and information right shows you are on your game.  I learned to let the candidate send me all the information for posting and that these posts all needed a second pair of eyes.  Fast forward, we celebrated this month, because he won his race, and although we don’t full confirmation, he may be the first African American to be a city councilor in Northampton.

24 Coldbrook Drive

For every success, there has to be a failure.  We were contracted to sell a house through social media.  When I met with this client, I gave no promises, because this was way uncharted territory, but had all the hope that we could leverage something nobody else was using effectively.  I did marketing research and no realtors in the area were using social media to sell houses.  We have learned why now, but at that point we had high hopes. 

We had tons of leads come in, but only a couple people bite on coming in for a tour.  It was one of the most frustrating experiences I had in this business, because it didn’t matter what we did, people wouldn’t set up a tour.  Calls, no answer, emails, no response, and even when we moved to a messenger campaign and people responded, they weren’t ready to come in.  Not great results for the client. We adjusted our lead ads and found out why.  It is because people viewing property on Facebook are at the very beginning stages of the buying process, so unfortunately these were not the people who were going to buy this house.  Once we put the house on MLS, within a day we had a realtor trying to set up a meeting.  MLS is not our jam, so it was time to put the process in the hands of a professional who could sell the house using MLS for them.

A system from the failure

Although we won’t share all the details on what we learned about the failure, we were actually able to take the research and are in the process of creating a system for Realtors to leverage social media effectively.  We are currently pitching it to realtors in the area and whoever bites will get exclusivity.  You will just have to stay tuned to find out what comes of that, because this could be huge.  But again, I am not getting excited until I have a signed contract in my hands and results to back everything up. 

What’s next?

What I have learned in this business, is that there is so much opportunity out there, it is just figuring out how to harness it all.  We started this business doing social media for others, then coaching others on how to do their own social media.  Now we have the capabilities to do a business’s social media on Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest, create a website, CRM system for email campaigns and newsletter through Constant Contact and MailChimp, segment audiences, connect everything together with APIs, create professional video, digital media and logo design.  We are becoming a one stop shop for the local business. 

The place where I started is now our future

It is serendipitous that the place I launched my business is also the place where my newest venture lies.  This event, known as an unconference, I know, probably the first time you had ever heard those words stringed together, has been running since 2009.  It started when Podcasting was at a peak, hence the pod in the name.  The unconference model is a unique one, where participants create the experience.  There are rooms, food, high energy, a schedule and then creativity unleashed.  People can walk in off the street and then be presenting about how to podcast or create a Facebook page 30 minutes later, which is what I did. 

The woman, Amy, who ran it for many years in the past, was ready to move on, so I decided to play a key role in keeping it going into the future.  I recruited a woman named Robyn Lee to join the team. What a firecracker of personality and energy.  She is keeping me at the top of my game for this project.  Her business is called Morningbird Media, which is a digital and social media service, much like mine. 

When you take a step back for a second, you may be saying to yourself, “What the hell are you doing, Jamie? You are working with competition!” I thought that at first too, but quickly realized that there are so many people who need help in these areas that there is enough for everyone.  It is also much better to be working with someone else who is going through exactly what you are going through, than to be jockeying for position and trying to outplay them.  We added another woman to the team Aimee, Two Moons Creative, another business who can service social media, who does digital media and put together the amazing new logo for PodCamp, pulled in a couple veterans, Steve Sherlock (badass name) and Seth Kayes.

Our mission is to breath new life into the event, giving the people who have always been coming a brand-new location, fresh energy, and a twist that we believe is going to add a lot of value to the overall experience.  The problem with PodCamp, which you have probably already discerned, is that there is no way to predict the value you are getting from it, right?  If I pay $999 to go to the Social Media Marketing World in San Diego hosted by Social Media Examiner, I know that I will get insights into all the social media platforms I am currently servicing and the ones we want to be servicing in the future.  I will hear professional advice from people who are at the top of their game in their industry.  I know that the value I get is worth $999. 

Now back to PodCamp.  How do you put value behind going to an un-conference where the sole purpose is that participants create the conference whether they are professionals or not in their field? I know that for me, I went to see what the potential competition was saying about social media.  What about the person who just wants to learn more about social media and digital media?  You are going to a crapshoot.  This is the adjustment we are making this year.  We are starting the un-conference off with some added value, before going right into the model they have been using for 11 years.  We are presenting on how to create a social media strategy in the first hour, so that every participant can say by the time they leave, they will have the blueprint to move forward with their own social media strategy.  Watch out for announcement on this event, because the ticket launch date is on Black Friday. 

The ending

This story of my first year ends with some milestones and with a nod back to the beginning.  Our newest venues include Sarah Kay Studio an incredible local lifestyle photographer, who I am sure you will hear a lot more great things about in the future, Amherst Boys and Girls Club our first non-profit, Dynamic Flow Fitness, an upcoming 8 week social media workshop series, our 1st Event Sponsorship at Frontier High School Telethon, and branding Lindsay Barron Labonte with a website, 30 video blog series, complete CRM system, and more to separate herself from other loan officers in the area. 

Grateful

Now that you have heard the ups and down of our first year, not all of our stories for sure, we have saved some for another time, we have to take a moment to acknowledge the people who have been so instrumental to everything.  My wife has given me so much incredible support along this journey with strategic feedback, many devil’s advocate sessions, and a place of comfort when I was disappointed by my many failures this past year.  She has helped shape me and the business into what it is today.  My first team member, Laura, who saved my honeymoon and has allowed me to keep working on the business even when having to on-board a new client seemingly every other week. You have been amazing Laura!  I want to also thank my family, friends, Kevin Murphy, Dee Dice, Robin Jaffin, Vera Bruursema, and Anita Eliason.  I also would never have started this business without Justin Killeen, with his like 1,000 different businesses, and Katie Lipsmeyer, Camp Glow it Up, who’s entrepreneurial energy fed me to push past my discomfort and start the business. Finally, thank you for reading, supporting me and the business along our journey, and I look forward to another year ahead with you in my Empowered Social Media community!