Welcome back to another episode of she's Busy AF. I'm your host, lauren Loretto, founder of Brand Good Time. Host of she's Busy AF podcast. In this podcast, really, we set out to help entrepreneurs, creatives and business owners scale their business, smash barriers, all the fun things that have to do with growing a business.
Speaker 1:Today's episode comes at an interesting time. I scheduled it on my calendar because I was like it's been a minute since I've talked about, I guess, my story. I went back and I was like, wow, the first episode of she's Busy AF was my story and it was titled how I Built, skilled and Sold my Boutique Marketing Agency. The reason why that was the first episode well, stories are always impactful for first episodes. I love that idea. Going with the topic of how I built, skilled and sold my agency was centered around the fact that at the time I started this podcast, I was really working with a lot of creative business owners and a mentorship and consulting capacity. That was my focus from a marketing point of view. But I still had my agency, my second agency, going in the background. I was promoting and offering mentorship programs at the time. If you go back and listen to any of the early episodes, you'll probably hear about those programs. I'm so like don't, but anyways, the funny thing is that I didn't realize this till I sat down today to record this. That episode came out February 25th 2021. Today's February 21st, 2024, and this episode will come out on February 28th Three years.
Speaker 1:I think that it's time to refresh the story and come back a little bit and talk about that, because what I talked about on that episode it was a 12-minute episode. It was my first podcast episode ever. What I talked about on that episode is a tiny, tiny, tiny little glimpse into my story and what got me here today, what got me feels like narcissistic and egotistical, coming on here and having a whole discussion with myself around my story. However, I'm trying not to look at it that way, because I think a lot of things that I'm going to talk about are super relatable. I've gotten a lot of questions about it lately. Just interestingly enough, with all the networking I've been doing, I'm like, wow, come a long way. A lot of things have changed. I'm going to get much deeper than I did on that first episode. In this episode, I'm really excited to talk through everything that's gotten me to where I am today and where brand good time is going from here. Where I'm going from here? Because, as entrepreneurs, we are definitely more than just our businesses. Yeah, okay, let's do it, let's dive in.
Speaker 1:I like to look at stories in pivotal moments and I'm going to follow this framework of exhibits. The first exhibit here is going to be the backstory. This is something I feel like I've been talking a lot more about, about a lot more lately. That is, what was the path, what was the trajectory to get me to where I am today? I made this post on LinkedIn not long ago, sharing a picture of a key with a tag on it and it said be the CEO. I want to start the story here, this place where I was graduating college and I was at my graduation party, having a great time with my friends. One of my best friends brought me a huge bottle of gray goose, and I think that's the only gift I really remember receiving, which is so sad, but my mom had set up this table with these keys, with these tags, and the idea and the concept was that everyone comes and writes a key to success, and so I go through them once a year. The ones that stand out to me the most are always pack a snack I'm a hunger girl and be the CEO, and I immediately recognized the handwriting when I was going through these the next day and I saw it was my dad's handwriting. He had written be the CEO and it's it's still. It's something that follows me to this day. Obviously, that's the position I'm in now, but there's a lot of meaning behind that, and so I want to start there, because my dad was a big influence on, I think, my trajectory to entrepreneurship.
Speaker 1:Entrepreneurship doesn't necessarily run in my family. I have family members who are entrepreneurs, but growing up, my mom worked really hard and then when she had my sister, who's six years younger than me, she took time off of work, but she was always dabbling in something. And when I got into high school, middle school, she got her real estate license and used that to pay for my school. So I'm very fortunate that I don't have student debt because my mom was able to do that for me. But I watched her absolutely excel in real estate during the recession, like she had an incredible first year in real estate, even through a recession, and so that was part and and then the other side is my dad, so my dad is his. His career has always been a constant and my dad has climbed the corporate corporate ladder, basically. So he started at the container store and worked there for 17 years. That was kind of his first job out of college and he was doing like displays and facility work and stuff like that. So he went to school for architecture. Then he jumped and went to Dave and Buster's and that kicked off his restaurant industry career.
Speaker 1:I was really young. I remember having all my birthday parties at Dave and Buster's. I thought I was the coolest kid ever. I won't go into his whole story but he basically we moved around a lot because of him. So whenever when everyone anyone asked me where are you from, I'm like, well, I was born in California and I lived in Minnesota, but I really grew up in Texas but I lived in Florida and Georgia and then back in Florida and people are like, wow, was your? Were your parents in the military? And I'm like, no, my dad just was chasing his dreams, climbing the corporate career ladder and he did that through the restaurant industry and he got to work for really cool companies like Hard Rock and Dave and Buster's and now he's with Darden restaurants and he does facility work. So he's basically in charge of making sure that facilities aren't falling apart or being part of like launches and new construction for new facilities, new restaurants, and so that's that's my dad and that's that's kind of that's what he does.
Speaker 1:But I got to tag along with a lot of things with my dad, so trips and, you know, as I got older and he would come down and visit me, you know, in college and even after he would, you know, be going out with colleagues need say, come join us, and I got to meet a lot of his employees and a lot of his team members and they all said, like such glowing, amazing things about him, like that if he ever left the company, they were gonna follow him, and that's just so true for my dad. He's such an incredible leader and he's inspired me in a lot of ways to be the same, to try and strive and be an incredible leader and be someone people know and love, and so I always looked up to him for that and I always I always leaned on my dad for advice about career and business and he helped me through a lot of interviews and career changes and he was always the person that I was like what should I do when he'd be like just jump, just do it, you know, when it came to switching jobs or taking the leap and going all in on my own business. So he was a really big influence for me. So that that's my dad, that's the dad component of it. Because of my dad, I never saw the rungs in the ladder, the corporate ladder. Okay, so my dad climbed the corporate ladder right.
Speaker 1:But for me, when I envisioned graduating college and starting my career, I had a really hard time grasping having to spend so much time to work my way up the ladder, which on one hand, can sound really like, okay, Lauren, like you got to pay your dues, whatever. And I thought about that for a while. I was like, how you know, I don't agree with a lot of corporate culture. Especially as I got into corporate culture, I was like, wow, I feel smarter than a lot of these people in some ways. Or I don't feel respected my opinion, like I feel like my opinions aren't respected because I'm not, you know, I'm entry level or like right above entry level. So you know who am I, what am I doing?
Speaker 1:And I think that's in part the culture that I was in at a certain business at a certain company, but at the same time I was getting approached with freelance opportunities for what I was doing at that agency by, you know, like friends and colleagues and whatever. And I was like, well, yeah, I guess I can take that on and I very quickly just, you know, fell into figuring out all the things that have to do with running a business. So I was really interested in like operations and finance and marketing and like not just the doing of the service, and so that's where I kind of was like, okay, maybe I should give this a shot. So I had internships, backing up a little bit. I had internships all throughout college that I think fed that desire to like want to be an entrepreneur, because I got to see all those pieces and I really liked figuring out how to make all those pieces work together. Okay, so I had the job at this corporate agency.
Speaker 1:Going back to that, this was a job that I will say I got really scrappy for. If you listen to my story and back episode one, I believe I talk about this but I basically applied for a job at an agency because I knew the person in HR, but I did not. I don't think I was qualified for the position because it wasn't entry level. But I basically bought a paid search book, read the book cover to cover three days before the job interview and was really just trying to sound my best in the job interview to get the job. I knew that getting this job I would learn a lot and I would have my foot in the door in the agency. I'm not saying I recommend this, but I did it. I cried every day for the first two weeks of the job because I was like, oh my God, they're going to think I'm a total fraud and whatever. Fast forward. I asked my boss when he quit and moved on a couple months later and I was like, hey, did you know? I actually had no experience at all. He's like no, what are you talking about? It was a testament to. I really wanted to make this work at the agency because I wanted to learn and I wanted to get all the experience I could.
Speaker 1:Prior to starting my own business, I started working in one department. I moved to another department, which ended up being the social media department, which was the focal point of the agency. At this specific agency it was like a brand new building and so the social room was like this fishbowl, and to work in there was like being the popular girl at school. You were kind of a big deal to work in that room. I moved into that social room and, again, this is where I started to really learn a lot. I was managing ad campaigns with $100,000 plus budgets. I was working my butt off.
Speaker 1:This is where I learned a lot of toxic culture that I tried not to take with me into my own business. Like, always have your computer with you, even when you go on a boat on the weekends. It was a nonstop grind, but this is where I started my business. This is where I got opportunities because of what I was doing. People knew that People in my circle and were recommending me hey, this person needs social media, this person needs ads. And so I really started working as a freelancer on the side to build this.
Speaker 1:Okay, so very quickly realized that doing things someone else's way did not sit well with me. So I was like, okay, let's start building this, let's see how many clients I can get and how much I can truly handle. And it was insane. I was working all the time. So ultimately I decided I needed to take a step back from working like 60 to 70 hours a week to let's get a normal corporate job that I can work like nine to five or eight to four and then spend a couple hours a day outside of that building my business. And so I did that. So I left the agency, started working client side for a supplement company Again another toxic culture. I'm going to breeze over this one.
Speaker 1:I worked there for eight months and then got a job at a completely remote social media agency, so the whole agency was completely remote. That was awesome. I loved working remote. This is where remote culture. Really I learned a lot about remote culture from this agency and like the positives of remote culture because this company had been built solely on being remote across the whole world and I really loved the way that they respected everyone's time and aspirations. And so during my time at the social element, I was able to build my business. Oh well, I just shared the agency name. It is what it is. You know what they deserve a shout out. They were an awesome company. So during my time there I was able to build my business even more and then I was able to jump ship. So I had my company my first company at the time called LBMG Marketing, from the time I was working at the first agency to when I was working at the completely remote agency and, man, that was interesting. So if you go back to my story of how I built, scaled and sold my boutique marketing agency episode one I talk a little bit about this.
Speaker 1:But I built my first agency, you know, out of being a freelancer. So I was a freelance into an agency. I hired a salesperson and not saying that was like my best hire it absolutely was not and I built the business solely on networking in the local community that I was living in, which was really funny because we were a digital marketing agency. So it felt disjointed. It also felt really sloppy because I'm 23 years old building this business. I don't know a lot. There's really not the access that we have today to like mentorship programs we did not have back then. The online space did not really exist. Like.
Speaker 1:I was kind of in the silo of like doing research and figuring out how to build a company and like guinea, pigging clients and things I probably wouldn't do again if I was starting a company. Like you know, when I started to bring good time, things were much, much, much different. And, yeah, I was getting really burnt out on it. I was working a lot. I wasn't sure about the trajectory of the business. We were kind of like this whole agency that would do everything. So if you came to us and said I need a logo, I would find a way to make it work. And I wasn't paying attention to profit and loss and balance sheets as closely as we are today with bringing good time and so, yeah, very quickly, I was getting burnt out on it.
Speaker 1:So when we acquired, when we had a client who wanted to acquire my business and the clientele we had in it, I was like, okay, yeah, let's do this. It was April 2020. The pandemic was happening. Things were really unsure, but this company wanted to acquire my agency and I said, okay, what's next out of this? And so, again, you'll hear a little bit about this in my episode one. If you went back to that and I said, okay, let me join. And they were like we will. You know, we'll acquire your book of business and you can join our team as a marketing director. And I'm like, oh my gosh, this sounds kind of crazy, like hanging up my business. I can't believe I'm doing this, but okay, let's give it a shot. So I joined the team and two weeks later the investors pulled out. Now what's funny about all of this is that I was kind of hesitant to hang up my business, but I knew if I didn't I was going to completely rebrand my business. So I had already put wheels in motion to create a new asset, a new brand, and that's what brand good time is today. So when I got that phone call that like hey, we're no longer a thing anymore. Investors are pulling out, I made a joke about being unemployed and I was like, okay, well, I'm unemployed, I'm going to wallow in this for two weeks, but then I'm going to go full force into starting my new company.
Speaker 1:So at the time I was working with two good friends of mine. They helped me build the brand together. We landed on the name brand good time because they were asking me questions like what are things you say all the time? And I'm like I just like to have a damn good time. Like I want to have a good time all the time. Growing up I hated being bored. I always how can I make anything I'm doing fun and enjoyable and help pass the time if we're in boring situations. And so I think like damn good line was one of the names. And then I looked at that and I was like damn good line, brand good times, brand good time.
Speaker 1:And then there was like this dilemma around should it be brand good time or brand good times, brand good time? Because damn good time is what we landed on and the branding evolved around that. So if you've ever seen our business cards like one of them on the back says for a good time call we really leaned into it heavily and again I started. This was my chance to like really build the brand with a new, clear vision of helping ambitious entrepreneurs and creative businesses grow their business without sacrificing their sanity to do it. That was kind of our like tagline. Meanwhile I was still working with clients on the back end. So, if you don't know, brand good time is a show at design partner.
Speaker 1:When I started brand good time, there was a. There was an opportunity to submit to show it to be a design partner, which is basically you know you get a listing on their website. It means you've launched a couple of sites with them. I was able to put into submission some of the sites I'd done with my former business and so shortly after launching brand good time, I got this email that was like you are a design partner. I had no intentions of having a web design side of the business.
Speaker 1:I wasn't online with brand good time talking about how we offered marketing and marketing consulting services, because it was really. It was just me as the business owner and I wanted to do more mentorship programs and I was running like courses, masterclasses, workshops, like in the early, early days of brand good time, and so I was like that's misleading. I can't also talk about this agency side, because that's separate. But I was still taking clients in that way and we got this show it design, show it designer like certification. I was like, well, now we're getting a ton of leads to my website that don't have anything about show it. This is not a good look.
Speaker 1:So I had to pivot on a dime in that moment and say do I want to hang up agency forever? Do I think I can give this mentorship thing a shot? And there's a lot of backstory behind that that I'm not going to get into today, but I will tell you that ultimately I decided I can't hide behind this mentorship thing. I can't hide the digital side of the agency side of what we do, behind this. And so I was like, okay, let me bring back on some team, some contractors at the time and let's start to develop this as an agency. We'll still offer mentorship, let's see, you know like, let's see how we can take this. Well, started doing that and was shouldering a lot. You know it was working a lot, a lot, a lot.
Speaker 1:And then I got pregnant. I got pregnant and realized very quickly I cannot be wasting my time and I was looking at a lot of the efforts and things I was doing to grow the mentorship side as a waste of time. It's not that I didn't know how to market myself, to sell the program, I just think it came back to this like moral dilemma. I was someone who had a digital marketing agency, was trying to start my own business forever ago my first business and couldn't find access to resources that were reasonable and affordable. And I all of a sudden looked at what I was doing is like this is not accessible, this is not reasonable, this is not affordable.
Speaker 1:I was also seeing a lot of people, a lot of business owners, exit the business space because the pandemic had cooled down. People decided they wanted to go back to work or work in a different environment, or they were getting burnt out on building their own business, and I couldn't help everyone. You know what I mean. I was like, what's the budget to work with a mentor or invest in a program, and so it was a big dilemma. I was happy with myself there on that side and on the side of, like, I no longer have time to just test things. I need to go back to what we're getting leads for and how we're growing and what I want. And so it was a big fork in the road Do I scale an agency or do I stick to consulting and figure this out while I have a baby? Because I was pregnant at the time. I had the baby and again was faced with this dilemma of do we scale? Because I cannot be in every single meeting all the time right now, given I'm like I just had a baby and this is getting really difficult. And so ultimately spoiler alert because here we are today I decided to scale the agency and start to bring on true employees. So we're talking now. We're fasting fast, forwarding to 2022. We had a good book of business of monthly retainer clients for marketing services and we were getting a ton of website projects. So we had two pillars of the agency running and running really well. I would say that the, in terms of revenue, the marketing consulting was bringing in about 80% and web was bringing in about 20. And so, yeah, decided to lean into that and bring on employees, and so we basically transitioned one contractor from contractor to employee. We brought on a client strategy manager and, shortly after, a content manager, all within like a couple of months, and that was the start of the agency back in 2022. And then are really the scaling of the agency in 2022. And so 2023 was a year of interesting times.
Speaker 1:Okay, so I'd been a mom for about a year. Being a mom was is my greatest and most fulfilling challenge yet, and it's why I'm so passionate about creating sustainable strategies for businesses. We work with a lot of female founders who have children too, and so a lot of our values are around like honoring your capacity as a person, as a leader, as a business owner. I was having this internal dilemma because I was seeing these words like mom per newer, and I'm like that is so cringe to me, like literally so cringe, because for me, my business came first, not the baby, and so I had to fit this baby into my life and figure out how the business was going to mold around that.
Speaker 1:And so it was a big identity crisis for me and I felt like this term mom per newer, or the concept of it, takes away from hardworking women like myself who had the business before the baby or who don't want kids or don't ever have kids Like is that to say that all these women out there saying mom per newer is like you should hire moms, because moms work hard and they know what they're doing and they know how to juggle. Who's to say that someone who's not a mom can't do the same? Who's to say not me, because I'm someone who worked really, really hard and figured things out on my own before having a kid and then, in the mix, figured out how to balance that too, and I don't think that makes me any better than someone who never has kids and figures it out and grows a big but a successful business. So that was like a big crisis I was having and I think worth mentioning in the story here, because I think a lot of women can identify with that. I mean, I will tell you, and I had my first kid. I did not bond with that baby right away. I did not. I was like this kid hates me, I'm struggling. It wasn't until she almost turned it was about one, one years old that I started to feel an incredible bond with my child and like I miss her now when I drop her off at school. And I think a lot of it had to do with figuring out what was going on with the business, because I didn't want to hang it up as much as my husband was. Like you can be a sad home mom if you want. I didn't want that for myself. I wanted to give everything I'm doing a shot and I still feel that way because I found the balance and I found a way to make it work. And I just want to say to any moms out there or any women out there who want to have kids one day like you can figure it out, you can make it work. Being a mom and being a business owner are not like. You don't have to make those things mutually exclusive. You can be a really great business owner and unplug and be a part of that, or you can make being a mother and a business owner a part of your identity, if you really want to, I like to separate it. I have to separate it for, like, my own mental health and my own like decision making, both as a family member and as a business owner. So, yeah, anyways, that's the mom component of it, and if we're switching back to the team In late 2023, we decided to bring in an HR consulting company and really hone in on Brand Good Times mission, vision, values and believe that into the culture.
Speaker 1:This is something, too, that I've talked about a little bit perhaps not on the podcast, but if you know me, you've heard me talk about this. I was so scared to go and become compliant with HR, which, if you have employees on your team, you absolutely have to do this. Having the HR side of things for your business is not to have rules and be strict. It's to make sure, legally, you're compliant and can't get sued as a business owner. That's one component. I was so scared to go into anything HR or touch anything HR, because I didn't want to ruin this culture we had. That was have a good time, do good work, yada, yada, yada. But long story short, we worked with an HR company to develop those things within our business to help the culture and give our employees guidelines to follow. Actually, having a handbook and having rules for how we operate as a remote team has enhanced our culture, helped our culture and made us a stronger working team. I just wanted to touch on the HR component real quick because I felt like that was so pivotal for us. Now in 2024, we did all of that in Q4 2023.
Speaker 1:Now in 2024, I'm about to take a maternity leave. For those of you turning and tuning in who may not know, I am pregnant with my second child, due in April. I'm so proud of the team we built. Today, while we're still going through a lot of transitions and changes, I'm going to try and take a little bit of a maternity leave this time around. I'm feeling really confident about being able to do that, whereas last time I maybe took two weeks off and was right back in it trying to figure out how to make it all work. This time I'm going to do things a little bit differently. While I'm behind the scenes there because I'm not someone who can just chill I'm going to be thinking about a lot of different things. I have different business ideas I want to just tap into and do some research on and also thoughts for how we're going to scale brand good time in the rest of 2024.
Speaker 1:We have totally transitioned our service offerings. We worked with some really incredible brands last year that brought a lot of visibility to our business. Now it's insane, but our revenue is pretty much split 50-50 between retainer marketing clients so doing content marketing and strategy and web design and development and web retainers around SEO. With that it was just wild because we were at about an 80-20 split prior and now web is really a huge pillar of our agency. How are we going to develop the website? And then how are we going to narrow in? We've decided to narrow in on our marketing side of the business with strategy, so overall marketing strategy, but honing in on implementation. Being around content marketing, we are really building the content marketing side of the business there. I'm really excited about it. It feels like for the first time in years I have clarity on the simpleness of how to scale the business and I'm really excited about it because again we felt an incredible team around it. I know the team appreciate structure and I am really excited just to see where the rest of this year takes us. I'm excited to now.
Speaker 1:At this point in the business, I focus a lot more on sales and marketing, and so I've been doing a lot more networking and intend to get out to a lot more events and hopefully potentially be speaking in Q4 this year, because the podcast has given me a three-year platform to be able to do that, and so now I feel like I can get up and talk about things. So, yeah, thank you for listening to somewhat of a disjointed episode about my story. I hope that this gave you a lot of insight into the background and how Brain Good Time got to where we are today. But I am proud I can honestly sit here and say for once I don't feel so disjointed in who Brain Good Time is and what we do and my place in it all. I love our team. We felt an incredible team. I love our clients every single one of them, which I can't say the same about last year or even the years prior, and so if you're listening to this and you do feel disjointed, or you do feel like you're still trying to figure out how to grow your creative business or how to just grow your business in general, time will help you figure things out, not that it has to take a lot of time, but just know in those moments of things feeling hard, it's going to get easier, things are going to get better, you're going to figure things out.
Speaker 1:Biggest resources for me have been other business owners and other business owners who are moms too, as I came into motherhood, to just have someone to talk to and lean on and then making more strategic investments in my business rather than hiring a coach. I can't tell you the last time I had a coach other than I do work with a leadership coach to help me kind of on the leadership side of things. Otherwise, I hire consultants and strategic advisors who can really lean in and provide the strategy side, which is what you need as a business owner to grow your business. You don't need someone asking you how you think something should be done, which is usually what coaches do. Don't come at me if you're a coach.
Speaker 1:Listening to this, I just think a lot of business owners need more of that strategic push through the different pieces of the business. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode. I have been really hot and heavy on LinkedIn lately talking about these topics. If you are interested in banter or talking more about these things or engaging with me over there on this type of topic. Please do, my link will be in the show notes. Thank you so much for tuning in to another episode of she's Busy AF. I will catch you on the next one.