You Can't Afford Me
You Can't Afford Me
Passion and Perseverance in Business: Louise Strickland's Inspiring Story
In an era where company culture can make or break employee satisfaction, we emphasize the importance of creating a positive work environment. Louise recounts how her journey from custom bridal design to wholesale floor manufacturing was made enjoyable through creative outlets like website redesigns and managing social media. We further explore the evolution of social media platforms from 2013 to 2017 and debunk the myth that younger employees are automatically adept at handling a company's online presence. Louise's experiences underscore the need for a deep understanding of branding and marketing.
Discover the transformative power of consistent marketing efforts and a well-designed website. Through personal anecdotes and Pixel Strike Creative's growth story, we highlight how proactive strategies can enhance brand credibility and profitability. From the initial $300 investment to a thriving enterprise, Louise's journey illustrates that creativity and dedication can overcome financial and experiential limitations. Tune in to learn why maintaining a professional online presence and regularly updating your marketing initiatives are crucial for long-term business success.
www.themrpreneur.com
Hey guys, thanks for joining us on another episode of the you Can't Afford Me podcast. Now, today we got something a little bit different. It's not often that I have another person in the marketing space on the podcast, but this young lady has a fantastic story on how she got started with her business. And also, I like doing this because too many people think that, like, if you sit down with somebody that's in a related field, that they're your competition and you guys shouldn't be talking. I actually found it to be the opposite. The more I collaborate with people in this space, the more that seems to work with us. So today on the podcast we have Louise Strickland. Louise, how are you doing today?
Louise:I'm doing well. Thanks for having me, Sam.
Sam:Absolutely so give us 30, 60 seconds.
Louise:Give everybody a quick overview of who you are, what you do, sure, so I'm Louise and I'm the chief marketing officer at Pixel Strike Creative. We are a digital design and marketing agency. We specialize mostly in branding and websites, and so I handle a lot of the overall client strategy, brand strategy and content strategy. So I still get my hands dirty day in and day out with a lot of the content writing and a lot of the moving parts for each project as well.
Sam:Love it, love it. So let's go, because I really want to get into your story about how you became a business owner. That was the big thing that really popped out for me with you. Let's talk about what did you do before you became an entrepreneur.
Louise:Yeah, I've had an interesting road to getting there. I grew up in Connecticut and I went to UConn and I majored in music, and so I used to be a classical opera singer, whoa whoa hold on.
Sam:Can you drop a couple bars for us real quick on the mic?
Louise:Sure oh my goodness, y'all hear that. So that was kind of my background. I never really wanted to do opera professionally, but music was something I was really interested in Wait.
Sam:How did you get into opera? Because you don't run into somebody every day that knows how to sing opera.
Louise:Yeah, I was really involved in music as a kid. I did not only just played piano and trumpet and did marching band and jazz band, but then I got into chorus and show choir and wassail which was a magical choir. I, I just I just couldn't get enough.
Louise:Everything, everything. I wanted to just do everything that there could be to do in music. So when I was in high school and I was doing all these programs and you know, all the musicals and everything, I kind of thought about going to college for music. And I was in the position where I kind of needed needed to get some some grant help, some scholarship help to go to college. So I was like, well, I might as well choose something I'm good at, because maybe I can get a little help there. So I started auditioning at schools and I got into the UConn School of Music and originally I was a music education major and then I switched about halfway through to just do music, because once I got into the classroom I have so much respect for teachers. But I was like, oh my God, this is not for me. So I just got my, my BA in music.
Sam:So you got grants or scholarships for yeah, yeah, and so pretty amazing.
Louise:Yeah, it was great and I loved it and it was really fun and I used to like call my parents on the phone in college and be like I can't believe I just get to go to school for music. This is so amazing and I just I did love it, but I knew I didn't really want to do it professionally. The audition cycle wasn't really for me. The going from gig to gig with not a lot of stability wasn't for me, which is kind of ironic now being you know how being an entrepreneur goes.
Sam:There's not a lot of stability sometimes. Oh yeah, and the Megadeth is an opera singer. I would think that you'd have to move to a town like New York City Exactly.
Louise:Yeah, I did do one ill-fated audition down here at the Virginia Opera, like way back in the day when I first moved down here, but I kind of I just knew that it wasn't for me professionally. It was kind of a means to an end to get a degree. It's something that I was good at and something that I really liked. And so then, though by the virtue of that I didn't really have a lot of hard skills, you know, I hadn't done like an internship somewhere. I didn't have a lot of direction in terms of what I was going to do career wise, so I kind of fell into a lot of administrative jobs. Originally and that's a little bit what we were talking about last time At my first job that I had here, I worked at a mergers and acquisitions agency downtown just as an administrative professional, and that is where I met my current business partner, juliet.
Louise:She was working on the marketing team for that company at that time and she kind of took me under her wing and was the first person professionally who realized that, even though I didn't have experience and even though I didn't have a lot on my resume, that I maybe had some talent that needed to be nurtured and maybe I just needed a little bit of confidence in someone believing in me. So she really took on that role and we would sit in her office talking like work stuff, and she would give me advice on what I should do in certain situations. She would bring me into the projects that she was working on just to give me a little bit of creative work. That wasn't, you know, the just logistics that I was normally doing, and so I did that for a while and then, as far as right there.
Sam:For a second, there are two major gems to pull out of that. One, if you are in a position of leadership, always having your eye open for the next talent, for sure. And especially when someone's coming in. This is what I love. Like we've put a lot of effort into our internship program here over the last couple of years. And for me it's like just being able to identify talent. I equate it to being a. What do you call it?
Sam:A scout for sports, oh man, these guys are traveling all over the country going to high school football games to figure out who the next big talent could be and what college needs to recruit them.
Louise:I noticed you have a lot of nice young folks in here.
Sam:Yes, so, looking at it from that perspective, like you know, taking the time like she did with you to mentor you, take you under her wing, you know, because she saw something in you that you may not have necessarily seen in yourself. The other big key from your story there is that someone's always watching.
Sam:Yeah that you may not be in a position that you want to be in now, but if you give that job, that you currently have the attention it needs and you're making that extra effort, generally someone else will notice you and another better opportunity will come along for you. I think too many people. This is why I hate going to fast food restaurants. Number one, just because we shouldn't be eating that crap. But number two, it's typically outside of Chick-fil-A, it's typically the customer service you get there. It's obvious that this little girl doesn't want to be working at Wendy's right.
Sam:But when you can give that extra effort, like because there are times I've gone by Wendy's and I don't want to make it sound like I go to fast food places all the time, I'm just using this as an example. Um, I remember one time I was like months ago I went to a Wendy's and a young lady was like oh, like she complimented my car, like she just started a little conversation, like at the drive-thru and I'm like whoa, I'm not used to this service there and it's always been a dream of mine like to be at a restaurant and I have a waiter or I run, run somewhere and like somebody just gives me excellent customer service and to be be in a position and say to them hey, do you like working here? Well, not really.
Louise:I want you to work for me. Yes, yeah.
Sam:That is like a dream of mine to accomplish that.
Louise:Oh, that's really nice. I love that.
Sam:I wanted to make sure people got those quick tidbits from what you just said.
Louise:Yeah, I was thinking a lot about that recently when I was thinking about me and Juliet's journey together and our relationship that we've built. And yeah, I think it's really important A lot of times to look at the next generation and say, oh, they don't know anything or, you know, they don't have enough perspective on the world. Well, that might be true, but how do they? How do they learn from us teaching them and how do they gain perspective by being allowed to share their thoughts in a space?
Sam:Plus, they're going to have perspective that we're not going to look at, like if we've been in our perspective fields for years, someone coming in and having no knowledge of that industry and being able to say well, hey, I know you guys do it like this, but have you ever thought about doing it this way?
Louise:Yeah.
Sam:And it's having that different perspective there. So all right, so she brought you in, you're under her wing. Yeah, she's kind of teaching you bringing you on deals, yeah.
Louise:I stayed at that job for about a year and a half, and that was really the half. I ended up leaving that job on my birthday the following year, which I won't get into that story but I ended up leaving that job on my birthday the following year and we'll give us a little tip.
Sam:Why did you leave?
Louise:You know, let's just say it was a mismatch of personalities. I think it really was like not feeling like I was respected by the other people who were much older than me, who were mostly men, being in like a financial mergers and acquisitions space that I was not familiar with and just feeling like I was super overlooked or kind of belittled you know um go get me coffee or something like that, yeah, yes, very much like that.
Louise:And so I just realized, after you know, a year of like, okay, this isn't for me, it's time, time to move on, um, and so, just kind of like, agreed to part ways with my former employer, and but it was my birthday, I don't know, I guess I was just feeling extra good that day Getting a little spunky there yeah. Like I can do it, I quit. No, it wasn't quite like that. But when I told Juliet that that happened, she was like well, I don't want to stay here without you, so she quit.
Sam:Jeez.
Louise:We really have each other's back.
Sam:That is a very committed mentor. Yeah, I will say that in the least.
Louise:I think she just thought it was going to be less fun with me around, because then she would just have to deal with all the other people. So you dropped another gem there. I want to pick up and make sure people understand how important company culture is.
Sam:Sometimes it's not even necessarily a job because, let's be honest, you break down a lot of jobs. They can be not that fun.
Sam:all the time job because let's be honest like you break down a lot of jobs, they can be not that fun all the time, yeah. But if you're working with a group of people that you enjoy seeing every day, like if it's like oh man, I can't wait to get to work today and tell Tim what happened last night, or whatever it is like when you have that type of culture, like people buy into that, yeah, stick around a lot longer if you have the right culture so true, exactly, um, yeah, not very culture-centric, um, and I would say probably not at the next few jobs that I worked at.
Louise:So from there, obviously, as I'm sure if you're listening along, you're like, ooh, that girl, really that was not a great idea there, right, yeah, no, it was really hard for me to find another job, um, cause I had now one job of experience that I had left, you know. So, yeah, not a lot of foresight there, but so I bounced around from different types of jobs. I worked in custom bridal design for a while. I worked at a wholesale floor manufacturing distributor for a while.
Sam:Oh, so you covered the game.
Louise:Riveting stuff yeah yeah, but in each of those positions I tried to find outlets for doing something creative. So when I was working, at the bridal salon, aside from just doing sales and assisting the clients and making sure you know the alterations were done and things were on time. I really wanted to like redesign the website because I felt like it wasn't a great you know, representation.
Sam:So um redesign the website Um so where did you pick set up Like being able to do web development?
Louise:So it was just like it wasn't development, it was just design. It was like a plug and play builder. And the people that I worked for they had kind of been like yeah, I think we're going to do this. If you want to like help, you know, do this, that can be one of your tasks. And so they kind of stretching the creative outlet. And then in all of those places I had always done the social media for the companies and even from that was kind of the main thread that carried through all the places that I worked.
Louise:I always did the social media for those companies, so I was always a little bit a part of the marketing that was going on there and about what year is this to? Give people perspective little bit a part of the marketing that was going on there, and about what year is this to give people perspective?
Sam:um, this would have been 2013 through 2017, gotcha so social media is still on the rise, like it's getting a lot more traction yeah, I mean, it was really like facebook was the main thing back then.
Louise:Instagram was just starting. I remember 2013 2014 was the year that Vine was really big.
Sam:I'm praying they bring Vine back. That was so fun, vine was so good and so many like YouTube stars and TikTok stars that we see nowadays. They all came from Vine, but it was like it forced you to be creative because we had like five, six seconds for Vine, right? Yes, you had to share that message really fast like five, six seconds for a while.
Louise:Yes, you had to share that message really fast and I think that now that we're talking about it, kind of piecing it together. But I think that because I was always the young person on the team, I was always the social media person on the team and it's always like oh well, you're closer to this, you use this right Now. I feel like I'm at the age where I have aged out and I'm looking at the young kids like show me how to TikTok.
Sam:I don't know what to do, so let's talk about that, because I that's a pitch of mine to a lot of companies that we work with is like typically, what you'll see is like you know, some guy owns a business and his daughter's coming out of college and she's 23 years old and he's like well, hey, let me throw you a bone. You just run the social media. There's a drastic difference between the 20 something you know running their own personal Facebook page where they're taking duck face selfies at Gold's Gym and managing the brand.
Louise:Yes.
Sam:So I want to urge people don't just hire somebody because they're in that demographic and you're like, oh, they know how to do this. They may know, they may have an understanding of it, but branding and marketing for a company is a lot different than you taking pictures in a cute dress or doing X, y and Z, like there's another element to it there.
Louise:Absolutely. And to expand on that, when I think people think that social media is a low hanging fruit, right, so they'll put you know the young person on it, or the new person, or the person that doesn't have a lot on their plate, oh, you can run the social media, but a lot of times social media is our very first interaction with people in the world, and so they're on your social before your website often.
Louise:Often? Yeah, exactly, and so you want to think about what you're putting out there and what you're curating. And it's not that young people can't do it, and often they are very good at doing it but, like you're saying, it shouldn't be an afterthought.
Sam:Yes.
Louise:That is one of the main first touches that you have with the outside world, and so you want to make sure that that is a good first impression and a good representation of your brand. And so social media shouldn't be like a low-hanging fruit of the afterthought. It should be like one of the most important parts. Absolutely, that's the afterthought, it should be like one of the most important parts. Absolutely. My soapbox about couldn't have said it better myself but um, yeah, so I did that. And then, um yeah, I just was really really unhappy because I wasn't fulfilled at what I was doing. I didn't have a lot of direction and juliet and I had stayed in contact this whole time. We were, you know, really good friends. We'd been through breakups together, we'd, you know, gone trips together and stuff which was just stayed friends, and she, in the meantime, had gone to work at Capital One which, like everyone, cycles through.
Sam:Everybody Thanks Capital One for keeping the Richmond economy going. I feel like I'm literally the only person in my friend group that's never worked at Capital One.
Louise:Me too, I've never been there either, but I'm always like, well, if things don't work out.
Sam:There's always Capital One. There's always Capital one.
Louise:There's always capital one. Yeah, everyone's been there. So she was there and she was on the design team and so she learned a lot about UX and she was always in that space. Like she went to school for graphic design, she knew she wanted to be a graphic designer. She did this like in every single job. She was always a graphic designer. So she had a very clear linear directory direction and as we were talking and I was telling her I'm so miserable, she was kind of saying you know, I like Capital One, but a lot of it is very process driven and it's very iterative.
Louise:It's not creative in necessarily the way that she wanted to be creative in her design.
Sam:And if you're not on the team working with Samuel L Jackson making those commercials, then you don't need to be too creative.
Louise:Yeah, no, I think she was doing a lot of the digital UX design, like when you log in to check your bank account information but, it's a lot of like what should this button say or what should this present, on why you think this button should function this way.
Louise:So it's really important, because you have to go through that when you have such an important product. But if you are the kind of person that likes to really stretch your creative arm, maybe that's not exactly what you want to be doing. So she loved the people at Capital One, she loved her job, but she just wanted to do something additional. So she had met Joe Baker, who is the third and silent partner of Pixel Strike Creative now. But she had met Joe at Capital One. He was a developer, she was a designer and they both felt like you know, we want to do some kind of like freelance projects on the side, you know, after work, and kind of collaborate and stretch our creative muscles. So they started Pixel Strike Creative and they would do website design and development, just like you know, for very little money in their free time, nights and weekends they would meet at the library.
Louise:That was their office, which I just think is so cute. They really did it because they liked to do it and they wanted to do it and they wanted to help their friends who are becoming that age, you know, like mid late 20s, 30s like starting to think about what their own businesses were going to be. And since they had some experience doing that, they wanted to be able to be in a position to help them For sure. So they started Pixel Strike Creative and I was like, oh, wow, gosh, guys, that sounds so cool, you know.
Louise:And um, juliet was like, yeah, we'd like to bring you on board as, like a part-time freelance copywriter right so I think they gave me like 10 hours a month yeah like writing email copy and website copy and I would do their social media.
Sam:So I'd do the pixel strike social um and what was it in you that said obviously she was a good friend of yours, but what was it in you that said this sounds like a good opportunity. I need to roll with this.
Louise:I knew that Joe and Juliet were both really smart and. I knew that they I mean they were choosing to do extra work because they liked to do that and it was fun. And so something clicked in me like no one ever wants to do extra work you know, like they must kind of be onto something here.
Louise:I really really liked both of them. Again, it was even though there's only two of them, it's still a company culture, right, and I really liked working with them and they believed in me and I believed in them and the projects that they were doing were really interesting and cool, even if it was just writing email copy. It was about writing email copy about an industry that I didn't really know about, so I'd have to research it and look up what other people were doing and like subscribe to other people's email lists, so that I could see what the marketing emails looked like, so it was just kind of stretching my brain again.
Sam:That's one of the coolest things about this field, too, is that you'll learn, and when you're in the marketing space, you learn so much about different industries that you never would have learned about before, because a client said you're working, yeah.
Louise:And it was just fun, it was fascinating and I, liked you know, eventually we got a little office off of Quiocasin and it was like a shared office space before gather and everything was a thing and we would go in there on Saturdays and we would whiteboard on the board and it just felt like fun to be involved in the decision-making process about things, because I was always the low man on the totem pole in every job that I had, just by virtue of being young and unexperienced which I mean okay, yes, that makes sense.
Louise:But I just felt like I wasn't getting any opportunities to grow anywhere and this felt like an opportunity for me to grow. So I think at the time I still had a full time job, but I was working, you know, a few hours for them and then it just really like snowballed quickly to the point where, um, they I think joe went full-time first and then I was the second full-time employee and juliet was still at capital one and doing pixel strike like very part-time, yeah, um. And so then for a while it was just me and joe together in the office and I. We had a little office, um, off of emory wood parkway that we rented from Bob Ramsey from the Virginia College of Emergency Physicians.
Sam:And we love Bob.
Louise:He's so great. He was like a really big mentor to us and it was like a sublease of a sublease and it was just me and Joe in a room like the size of this table. But it was so fun, it was so awesome, we had a blast and it was the first time that you know when we would talk about projects. It would be like, okay, do you want to take the lead on this one? Do you want to account manage this one? Because?
Louise:as you know, even though, yes, I'm now, like you know, in marketing. When you run a small business, you do all of the things right?
Sam:You're the janitor, you're the accountant, you're the marketer, you're doing everything.
Louise:So I got a lot of experience in like client success and being an account manager and project management and, you know, creating timelines for when things needed to be done and talking with, you know, the other contractors that we would bring on and just sort of getting a feel for how it all worked. That was when I started to do networking, which was like brand new for me at that time, and I would give marketing presentations and we did a presentation called Social Media Mythbusters that me and Joe wrote. So it was just like finally starting to get to create content for people and share what I had learned and be listened to and for people to say like great job. You know that was really the first time that I had that in my professional life.
Sam:So it's a big thing that I'm hearing recurring through your story as you're walking us through this journey of making that transition. The number one word that's popping out of my head is relationships. Yeah, you spent those years cultivating relationships and I tell people all the time the major capital that I'm always focused on the most is relationship capital. That comes over financial capital. If you have the relationship capital, you can make moves in so many different directions. But it's not even with you, like you're talking about your two other business partners how they formulated a relationship when they were working together in Capital.
Sam:One. So, like everything that you've seen in your business career has all cultivated off of these relationships You've seen in your business career has all cultivated off of these relationships.
Louise:Yeah, it's very true, and they still continue to serve us. Now we have people who call us and they say you did our website 10 years ago. You know, like, really it happens and it's really impactful and it's really powerful. And Richmond is such a small town city.
Sam:For sure.
Louise:That relationships between people matter. And if you burn bridges with people like that's not, you know they might find out and it just is really about that. It's really cliche to say right, especially if it's like, oh, I'm all about client success or I want people to have a great experience. But if you try to keep that focus day in and day out, I think it really does work.
Sam:And when you focus on that, it's not logical in our minds of like hey, if you focus on you know client retention and client experience and things like that that the money will come but it does.
Sam:Like when you just focus on those elements of your business and saying you know, I want to give people the best experience that I can possibly give them. You think of some places that you've been to or product that you've purchased. It may be subpar product or service, but the experience that came along with it makes you remember that and you're more likely to do business with them again.
Louise:Yeah, that's, very true.
Sam:So once you got so they started upping your hours you went full time. Talk to us about the transition of you then becoming part owner of the organization.
Louise:Yeah, so it's really just like very sweet. I feel like Joe and Julia are one of a kind people in this way. Like they from the beginning, they had this vision of us building something together and they wanted us all to be equally invested in the success of the business us all to be equally invested in the success of the business. And what I've learned now, too, is you know, a lot of times you'll train people up and they'll leave you. You'll end up being a stepping stone for them if you're a small business, and I think that will always kind of be the case for a little bit.
Louise:But because the three of us work together so well, joe and Juliet were kind of always thinking about how they could take care of me and make me want to stay and make us all build something that we could all be really proud of. So I think I got married in 2017. And shortly after that is when they approached me about like the ownership piece. That is when they approached me about like the ownership piece, because they really started this company with, like I think, $300 and they didn't even have a lawyer and they just like printed out a contract like online or something you know.
Louise:I mean it was very, very informal, but as it grew it started to be like oh, okay, we need to actually have an owner, like write up a contract about our you know ownership shares and contingency plans and what happens if the business goes under. And oh, we're going to get a credit card for our business. Now how do we go over? Who's going to be responsible for?
Sam:the debt, keyman insurance, all these different things.
Louise:Yeah, exactly, and that didn't really matter before we were doing it full time. But then when we were doing it full time and we wanted health benefits and all these other things, like we had to kind of do it above board and we were all kind of learning at the same time.
Louise:but it was always Juliet and Joe's intention like, okay, we're gonna make Louise a part of this. And so they approached me and said, like, do you want to be part owner in this business? And I was like, yeah, absolutely so. The way it was at first was Joe and Juliet were each 40 percent and I was 20% ownership. And then and that was great for a while and then Joe, he had started a family and so he kind of wanted something a little bit more stable and he had also, like, built up his skill set over the time that he, I think he went to it was either Xbox or Google or Amazon.
Sam:He went somewhere really big on the West Coast.
Louise:Yeah, and he, yeah, he really like leveraged his skills to do something really awesome and he moved out to the West Coast and so when that happened he was like, look, I don't want to leave Pixel Strike, like I still always want to be a part of it, but Louise should really be as much of an owner as Juliet and I'll kind of be like the silent partner. So he sold his part of the business to me or we swapped shares or whatever for a symbolic one dollar because he had to like make it legal or whatever.
Louise:So we did I like bought it for a dollar, um, and then he kind of did his own thing, went out to the west coast and juliet and I have really been running it ever since. We still do quarterly meetings with him where we check in and talk about stuff and if there's big decisions that need to be made, he's always a part of it. And if we ever like, if mike, our developer, is ever on vacation and something pops up, we're like joe, I know it's like 5 am in the morning, you're done, but come and look at this um, and he's always there for us and he's always like really interested. We send him like pixel strike swag on christmas and he'll always be a part of it because he was such a big part of building it and he, he was a really great mentor to me. But it's really the past few years have definitely been the me and juliet show, yeah, of running it.
Sam:Okay, so here's where we need. Let's open up the luggage and start unpacking.
Louise:Oh, gosh Okay.
Sam:So, first off, that should take excuses away for most of you listening to this in terms of I don't have the capital to start a business, Like I don't have the skillset, all this stuff. Everything you've shown in your story is you started with little to no capital and you started with little to no experience and you cultivated relationships in order to scale yourself up. So that's number one. Number two I love these deals where people can ultimately put in sweat equity into a business and get a portion of the company in terms of ownership.
Sam:So everything doesn't have to be for a check. You can figure out situations Like, in fact, I'm about to start working with a guy. I need my car detailed. I'm starting working with a guy. He just started this business. He has no marketing. So I said, hey, man, I'll make a couple of videos. You detail me and my wife's car.
Louise:Yeah, Fair trade. We still do stuff for trade.
Sam:I mean, I think that's a great way to do business honestly All the time, like even I haven't paid for maintenance on my vehicle in five years. We have a mom and pop mechanic shop that I work with. We've been doing their social media for like five years and anytime I need oil change or tires or whatever, I just stroll in. They take care of it. I walk out no money exchange.
Louise:That's great yeah.
Sam:And it's just been such a relief for me, like somebody on my team managing their social media and then I get to go in there and get the service. But I want to harp on that and make sure people truly understand how you can get creative with this, because you didn't approach them they approach you.
Sam:So you just went the approach of I'm going to add an extreme amount of value and these are the results of the hard work that you did. But people need to understand. You said they initially started the business with like 300 bucks yeah, yeah, really, they really.
Louise:They did not have much.
Sam:Yeah. So if you're like I ain't got no money or I don't have the skill set or whatever, like I mean what I do, I learned everything from YouTube.
Sam:Yeah nobody taught me. I just spent hours and hours online like studying this stuff. So you guys need to get rid of these excuses Like there is no excuse. If you truly want to do something, think about in your personal life. If there's something, say for instance, you're like I'm broke, I ain't got no money, but then you got a little kid and they break their arm and a hospital bill comes. Are you going to? What are you going to do? You're going to say sorry, honey, I'm broke, like you're just going to have to, like, wrap this up yourself, or of so when you make something a priority, like your mind will literally get to work and you will just figure it out. There's something to that.
Louise:I agree, and I think people need to think about like scaling as well. Right, because Joe and Juliet started this with $300, but they did it part, very, very, very part-time at the beginning and grew it to a position where they could go full time with it, and you have to have that in mind if you think you're just going to start tomorrow and it's going to be this fully fleshed out thing and you're going to start taking home benefits and a paycheck.
Louise:No, you need to have a plan for how to grow it. But to have that motivation that you're talking about to actually make it happen and not just let it be like oh, I kind of have this side thing that I sort of don't pay attention to and so it never goes anywhere. You have to have the dedication.
Sam:So how many years were they working on it part time before you came in full time with ownership?
Louise:Probably two or three, I think they started it in 2015. I know that that's true, started in 2015. And I would say I think I was probably part owner during the year of 2017, because I remember that year, because I got married, so it was kind of a milestone year for me.
Sam:Yeah, you should remember that.
Louise:Yeah, so I think it was probably two, two and a half years, so I feel like that's a pretty fast growth. I mean they did a great job.
Sam:I'm glad you said that, but it's fast Because a lot of people will listen to this and be like, oh my God, two, three years, like that's Tank. He's just a dog.
Louise:He gets a bad rep, but I'm like he's just working off the numbers and he's right.
Sam:When he says that you're going to squash you like a cockroach, he's not trying to be a dick, he's just being real. You're not going to make it out there if you go about it this way. But a big thing, he says, is with his personal life. So my wife didn't know this, so this is a tip for the fellows out there. Mr Wonderful has a rule that he gives everything that he does 36 months. So whether it's a business on Shark Tank that he invests in that's not making a lot of money, he'll stick with it for at least three years before he pulls the plug.
Sam:Same thing in his personal relationships. He dated his wife his now wife for three years before he decided he was going to pop the question. So I told all of my boys uh, and hopefully one of them is not listening, one of his uh girlfriends is not listening, but uh, one of my boys been dating his girl for like two and a half years and she's like where's the ring at?
Sam:and in my mind I know it's been three years, because after three years you fully know someone and you know if you want to spend the rest of your life with someone. What is 36 months? Yeah for sure Nothing. So same thing in business. Like I tell people if you're not willing to work for no pay for at least three years, then don't even start.
Louise:Yeah, that's really true, and it also, I think, having that time to build up it prevents you from getting too in over your head, which I've heard happens to a lot of people. And if you do look at the statistics, a lot of small businesses fail, a lot of new businesses fail 90% fail within the first three years.
Sam:Right.
Louise:And I don't know this for a fact, but from what I've seen and from what my hunch is and from talking to other people, a lot of people do really go in like guns blazing gung-ho get a huge line of credit, buy a building, rent an office, do all of these things, and then they wonder why they're constantly in the red, bite off more than you can chew and you understand the economic model that you're creating and how to make that sustainable or how to grow it in certain areas to fulfill the things that you want to happen in your life and whatever your goals are, then you have time to think and plan and try and fail. But if you bite off too much and then you fail, then there's no room to grow. You still owe that money on debt. Yeah, all that.
Sam:Let's's talk. Let's get into web development. So I want to play devil's advocate because I'm a firm believer in website development and having the right website, seo ranking, all those different things, um. But there are businesses out there, in particular, like you can see as you're walking through my office, that I'm a big sneakerhead uh there was a shop, uh, in richmond called kicksomin and it was two guys actually, I think it was three guys.
Sam:They all dropped out of VCU like their sophomore year and they said we're going to start this sneaker shop. It's going to be, you know, used sneakers, new sneakers and vintage clothing. They didn't have a phone number, they didn't have a website. They started the whole thing on Instagram and it eventually got so big like one of the owners got a deal with Nike. He got to design his own shoe, which is literally one of the most expensive shoes that you can find on the resale market right now. They opened up stores in Chicago, Miami, New York Like they got huge and they did it all from Instagram.
Sam:And still to this day, all of their stores. There is no website, actually, no, I take that back Now. They started doing online orders now, so it has become a piece of their model. But for a lot of people that think, hey, I can just build up my social media, I don't need to take the money and invest in a website, what would you say to that individual?
Louise:I think I do.
Louise:I do see the merit in that for some certain brands, but the thing that I think about the website that I really do think is important is A it works for you 24-7.
Louise:So whether or not you are posting on social media or you have content lined up or whatever, your website's always going to be there, right, making the first impression that you want.
Louise:It makes it easy to find, so you can be generating sales in your sleep, you know right, or generating connections in your sleep.
Louise:But the other thing that I like about it, which we're really big on at Pixel Strike, is accessibility, and social media has certain limitations in terms of how the content can be consumed by people of different abilities or who maybe have impairments, and if you design your website the proper way, it's a way for anyone to interact with your brand, and I think that that's really important. And it's not important to everybody, but there are laws governing ADA compliance and certain standards that websites have to have, and I think people are trying to think about things more inclusively now, and inclusivity is a big, big deal that people are talking about, and I think that that's one way that it kind of levels the playing field and offers an equal opportunity for everybody to engage with the content, to understand what your brand is about, to reach out to you. You know, via a contact form or you know a phone call, that maybe they, you know, can use their assistive technologies to access that information where it might be harder on social media.
Sam:A thousand percent. One thing I think a lot of people don't think about and I'm kind of building myself up in this area is using your website to generate income and not in the way of just hey, customers will find me on here and they'll give me a call and we'll do business. How can your website generate you income?
Sam:so, if you're getting x amount of clicks per month, that's going to monetize that that's going to be a space that other people want to advertise, and maybe partners with you or whatever. The case is writing a, a blog post Downloadables eBooks?
Louise:Yeah.
Sam:Video library with some training courses, things like that, like there's a ton you can do on a website. Like you said, it's something that's making you money 24 7 if it's properly built.
Louise:Right If it's properly built and if it has your goals in mind, right, Like I think like that's kind of the trap that people fall into is that a lot of websites are kind of very one size fits all.
Louise:They have the same kind of content on the pages. There's nothing really exciting going on, and so people don't see the value in it necessarily, or they feel like they know that they should have it, but they're okay with having a low level website that doesn't do much for them because they feel like they just have to have that bare minimum presence. Right, and we hear that a lot If people are, you know, excited to have a website, but then they get like sticker shock and they say, okay, well, not really ready to invest in like a nice website. Now I just want to we hear this a lot I just want to have something up. I just want to slap something up in the meantime so that people can find me and I always think about it like would you want to go up to someone and be like hey, you know what? I'm going to make a really lukewarm impression on you now, but later I'm going to come back and redeem myself.
Louise:You're going to love me later, but right now you're going to be skeptical of who.
Sam:I am. You only get that one time to make a good first impression.
Louise:And I just want to shake people and be like don't do that, because I get what they're. Again, I get what they're saying Like I'm never trying to like. You know really strong-arm people into it.
Louise:I understand and I totally get it, and you have to make decisions when you're a small business owner, but it really just seems to me like people are shooting themselves in the foot because it really like I don't know about you. But I really do like make snap judgments on like brands or companies that I'm going to work with based on what my first few initial reactions are.
Louise:And as much as we want to say, we give people the benefit of the doubt. I think that's true in personal relationships, but with, like, a brand that you're interacting with online, if their website's hard to use, if you can't find them, or if their website just looks like they didn't try very hard, what does that say about the effort that they're putting into their business or the effort that they're putting into their brand? Like, if links don't work and it doesn't work well on mobile, or it just looks like it's not very fleshed out, it's like why, why would I choose to work with this company over someone else? Or even just in general, like why do I need it? You're not selling me on it and the website is a sales tool.
Sam:Yes, and I think too many, often too many business owners look at their marketing budget or branding as a luxury. No, this is an investment in your business, and something that you must do. So, like when people talk about just slapping something together and getting it out there. You know, I think about you know, if you have to get major surgery, do you want a doctor? That just I think you can just pull it together and like figure it out, or do you want the best yeah? I want the best.
Louise:Yeah.
Sam:That's one reason I'm just trying to get filthy rich. I always want to have access to the best medical care I could possibly get if I find myself in that situation. So just slapping something together or just like doing this for now. Now I get the fact that, like, like we said, when you're starting out as a small business owner, you have a limited budget, like you're trying to figure it out along the way.
Sam:But the rule of thumb I go in with clients now is saying, hey, give me and I don't want people to give me exact numbers, but hey, give me a ballpark of what you guys gross per year.
Louise:Right.
Sam:All right, we make, you know, $5 million a year. Okay, 5% is what you should be dedicating to your marketing budget. So 5% of that 5 million please don't be in the comments with this, I'm not good at math. Let's say it's a quarter million dollars, 250 grand. I think that's it, because I quoted somebody on this the other day.
Louise:So 250 grand 10% would be 500,000. So I think that's right, okay, boom.
Sam:See public school paid off, but for me, I'll go to them and say, okay, a quarter million dollars is what your budget should be. I don't need you to pay Enzo all that. Let's look at what you need. Okay, out of that 250 grand for us to complete what we need to do for you, enzo is going to need 100K of that. So now you've got $150,000 a year left to spend on marketing.
Sam:Okay, now let me link you up with Luis. Let's get your website up and running. Let me link you up with my SEO guy. Hey, I got somebody over here that does Hulu ads. Here's a local radio station. We're going to help you distribute the funds, but then they're also going to see when we're taking that advisor approach. Hey, before you engage with us, you weren't doing anything different. So in the next three months, when we go to reevaluate this and we see that the numbers are up, you're going to know it's because of the service that we provided, whether it was a website upgrade, whether it was the video marketing we did for you. Whatever it is, you can directly link it back and say, okay, it wasn't until we were working with these guys that profits went up 25%. They were just taking 2% out of that 5% budget. Now let's bump that up a little bit.
Louise:Let's take them to 3% and we can get more results if we spend more money with them and you're driving them in the right direction to things.
Sam:Absolutely, absolutely. Let me ask you this what is one of the biggest mistakes?
Louise:you see business owners making with their website. I think kind of what I talked about before, which is not having something, not having. You're slapping something up before you're ready to make the investment and the other big thing I see people doing is Not keeping up with current trends. So I think a lot of the clients that we get they've had a website for five to 10 years and they may have gone through a rebrand in that time, or at least just like a facelift, as we call it Name might be the same.
Louise:Logo might be similar but they look a little bit different. But, yes, services that they're offering or a lot of times even see like if they have pictures of their personnel. The personnel is like not updated and that's as you like. That's really easy stuff to update on the backend. Um, and that's how we try to build our websites, so that they are very easy.
Louise:We use something called ACF on the backend in WordPress to make it like like a plug and play builder as easy as Wix or Squarespace, but you actually own your content, rather than it being like a website rental company, and we make it easy for our customers to do that. But I see a lot of people being like beholden to their web developers and so they don't want to reach out to get those updates made because, again, they don't want to like pay for the time to make those updates or they're like well, it's going to just change again, so why should I? You know, if I don't, if I do it now, I'm just going to have to do it again. And we try to tell people a website is a living, breathing thing.
Louise:It's like a car, it needs maintenance. You don't just launch it and say, okay, great, now I'm done, mark that off the to-do list. You do need to give it some love and give it some attention and keep it updated Because, also, if you want people to be re-engaging with your website and going back, I'm not going to go back and read the same content every single time I'm going and I'm looking for something new.
Louise:Is there a new news article? Is there a new blog? Is there new content? Who just got a promotion? I'm looking for what that content is.
Louise:And so people just don't they don't want to put in the time or the money for it. And I'm like again your website is what is working for you when you're not out there, when you're not networking and you're not talking to people and you're not having conversations with people? Your website still is. There are still users finding you and they're having an interaction and a conversation with your website, whether you like it or not. And so if it's not saying what you want it to say and it's not looking how you want it to look, then you're not saying what you want to say or looking how you want to look. And mostly people put a lot of effort into the other parts of their business and the website. Just, it seems to be like well, as long as we have, as long as we have a website, then we're doing okay, we're doing the absolute bare minimum, and typically people don't advertise their services as we do the very bare minimum that we can, you know.
Sam:So it's like why do you?
Louise:why do you do that in the web space? So it's the same thing with social media. Why do you do that in the web space?
Sam:So it's the same thing with social media too. Like we have these conversations with clients all the time where it's like, or I'll use video, for example, a lot of people will come to us Like I probably got three phone calls this week Like, hey, we just need this one video, this big brand anthem, and I'm like, okay, cool, like we can do that. But 80% of the clients we work with here are working with us on a monthly basis, because we know that if you're not consistently marketing time and time again, people will forget you. So you put out that one awesome video that we charge you a lot of money for. It looks great. You're all excited, there's a buzz around your business for the next two weeks, two months from now.
Sam:Nobody remembers that video. So it's like if you haven't been steadily making content, if you haven't been making updates to your website, your social media because people look at that stuff Like if someone goes to your website and they see the last blog post you made was 2017 and here it is 2024. They're like huh, number one is this company still in business?
Sam:Yeah, exactly, and it's the same thing with their social Like. If you're having made a post since last year, people are wondering oh well, they must, must not be doing that. Well, right, if they're not at least posting, they may not even be in business anymore. So yeah, every component of your marketing is a living, breathing organism and you need to continually update it, work on it. We never get to a point where it's like you look at some of that, and this is always my argument. You look at the biggest companies in the world your Fords, your Apples, your Microsofts, meta, all these different things. I don't care if it's a bull market or bear market. You see new ad campaigns coming out for them all the time.
Sam:So if companies that are making billions of dollars a year are doing it, what makes you think, with your little $60,000 a year business, that you're so high and mighty that you don't need to be investing in this? And I say that you know I don't mean to be condescending, but it doesn't. I'm not saying you have to have the budget that an Apple does but it's you gotta be doing something.
Louise:Yeah, and I think I was going to ask you this too. I was thinking about this before we were talking like how do you deal with trying to explain to clients that being reactive is not the way to go?
Louise:right explain to clients that being reactive is not the way to go right, like, like you're saying, you always have to be doing something. Just being proactive about your marketing, whatever facet that is, is so much better than being reactive, and that's what we see a lot too. I don't know if you see it with social media, but a lot of times people will say we had like a builder recently, one of our builder clients, and we had like we'd been working with them for a long time but hadn't done a lot to their Web site and they hadn't done any other marketing.
Louise:They hadn't done any social media. They hadn't done any like trade shows, which, for them, were big, like no other email marketing, like no other digital or like physical marketing, no other email marketing, like no other digital or like physical marketing. And then they were saying you know, hey, we want to talk to you about what we can do because we're really slow right now. It was, I think it was like the winter time. They're like, we're really slow right now. You know, we don't have any jobs lined up and we need to figure out what we can do to like get some jobs on the books and it's like okay, well, we can do that and we can bump up your marketing efforts and we, you know, if you give us a budget to work with, we can, we can do something.
Louise:But the phone isn't going to ring tomorrow. And so if you, if you've been slow in it, whatever business that you're in, if you've been slow, the time to do it is when you first realize that, not when it's like totally dried up, you know, and then you're waiting by the phone for it to ring. Because, as you know, seo or social media, it takes time to gain traction. Even if you revamp your website and you relaunch it, it's still going to take time for people to care and to go. And so if you're just always, like you said, putting a little bit of money, putting a little bit of time into doing it, you are making that constant investment. Hopefully the highs won't, you know, the lows won't be as low as they will and the highs will be higher, but I'm always trying to get that point across to people.
Sam:So I got the perfect response for that. So have you ever noticed that, like, let's say, you're taking your daily commute into the office every day? Have you ever noticed that you always see the same people like running like down the street, like same time every single day, like if you're used to coming in the office at 8 o'clock, it's that same guy, that same lady, running? Have you also noticed that the people that you see out there consistently every single morning look like they don't need to work out?
Louise:Right, like they're in great shape, yeah.
Sam:So it's really that like understanding, that like just maintaining. Because, if you're like me and a lot of other people, this year and I don't believe in New Year's resolutions I said goals, but this year, like the health thing kind of hit me a little bit different because I'm like you know, we have a four-year-old and a two-year-old now and it's like you know, health for me now ain't about being sexy and having a six pack, it's I want to have longevity, right. I don't want to be a hunchback granddad when my kid walks across the stage against their high school diploma. I want to be able to run with them, be able to do all these different things.
Sam:So it's like if you, if you're heavy into fitness and all of a sudden you stop and then you try to get back into it eight months later, it is so much harder like getting back into shape, like it's going to take your body a little bit longer to respond Versus if you just maintain, right, get your ass in the gym 45 minutes a day, three to five times a week, to maintain that and get the results you want, it's a lot easier. Yeah, you just do the little things over and over every single day. So that's basically what I tell people is. You know, do you want to? It's like rolling the boulder, like once you get momentum going, that thing rolls on its own. But if it completely stops and you have to get all your momentum up again, it's going to be so hard, that's exactly what it is with marketing, so like and it's going to cost more money, which is what people don't realize.
Louise:It's always they're scared to spend the money because they're worried about the ROI.
Sam:Yes.
Louise:But then when push comes to shove and they really need marketing to generate sales right, Because sales and marketing are not the same. They're related, but they need marketing to help in the sales funnel Then they're going to have to spend more money than they would have if they had been stretching that budget out. It wouldn't hurt as bad.
Sam:Yes.
Louise:But it's hard to you know, hindsight's always 20-20.
Sam:Oh yeah, it's hard to tell people that that thought process of oh we're doing so good, now we don't need a marketing budget anymore.
Louise:We'll save money on it now.
Sam:And then comes that slow season. We all I don't care what business you're in, you have a slow, the time of year for us it's probably more in the holiday season I was gonna say, is it december and january for you? December january, crazy january normally january february normally ends up like halfway through january and the february normally ends up being our strongest months, because people are excited.
Louise:Yeah, it's a new media.
Sam:I'm gonna take my brand up another level this year, but it's just like if you just maintain that over the period, you wouldn't see as much of a lull there and it's like when those slow months come, you're making more money in your busy months that can get you through those slow periods of time yeah so it's. It's really just getting that understand. That's why I try to tell people like you're not spending money, you're investing money back into your business, the same way you would hire somebody that's investing money back into your business yeah developing a new website, getting your social media off the ground video production, podcast and whatever it is.
Sam:That is an investment in your business and it's something that's needed, like I like your metaphor with the vehicle, like it's just regular maintenance. You can only go so far in your vehicle without putting in more gas yeah or charging it at this point.
Sam:Um, so you got to keep that going. Um, man, this has been awesome, so I didn't expect and this is why I love doing the podcast like this, where I don't send people questions- I like the conversation just to flow, so if people want to get in touch with you, their website's looking dusty right now.
Louise:They need some help.
Sam:How can they reach out to?
Louise:you Give us a call Our number is listed online or send us an email. Fill out our contact form. Hit us up on social media. Yeah, give the name of the company again. Pixel Strike Creative. We are based out in Chesterfield, and we also have a presence at the Gather at Short Pump too. So we're around. We've been around since 2015,. So we know what we're doing by now.
Sam:And people. You work with clients outside of Richmond area too, so it doesn't matter where you're at um.
Louise:We specialize in small to medium-sized businesses. But you know, whatever the need is, we'll see if we're the right fit to help you out and, if not, hopefully point you in the right direction beautiful.
Sam:I love it thanks for being here today we'll see you guys on the next episode.