Let me start by saying that I took an arts degree in university, and majored in Spanish. I had no intention of having anything to do with what I perceived to be “business”. In retrospect, I really have no idea what my intentions were, but if I had to sum them up in a meaningless phrase, it might be, “vague white girl loftiness involving saving the world”.

Many of my friends were taking business degrees and I thought all they did was take courses in accounting and something horrible called ‘quants’. I assumed they were going to end up working for a big bad boring bank and they assumed I was going to end up in the jungle with malaria.

Fast forward to now: After wrapping up a successful six-year copywriting and branding freelance practice (after working for agencies and nonprofits for 15+ years), I joined the Proposify team in 2015. I’ve also been running a profitable side-business since 2011.

So, surprise, surprise, I am malaria free and I work in “business”.

I’ll save all the gory and glamourous details about how I ended up being a non-business business owner for another post but what I want to tell you about is what I learned about buying an existing business as my side hustle.

Brad Martineau of SixthDivision feels that one of the biggest hurdles entrepreneurs and small business owners face when it comes to marketing automation is that their understanding is inaccurate. “I have two major beefs with the concept of marketing automation,” says Brad. “The first one is with the word ‘marketing’ and the second one is with the word ‘automation’”. In this interview, Brad talks about how at SixthDivision they want to change the way companies think of marketing automation from just marketing tactics (Facebook ads, auto responders, etc), to instead looking at their business as a whole and from the perspective of the client journey. Brad shares the two important first steps to help entrepreneurs decide which strategy, idea, or software to implement in their client journeys.  

As a former agency owner and now the founder of a software company, I’ve experienced the pros and cons of hiring in-house vs. outsourcing. I’ve hired full-time employees, I’ve contracted freelancers (heck, I’ve even been a freelancer), and both have brought benefits and challenges to my businesses.

Let me start by saying that I believe founders should do as much as they can themselves for as long as they can. This familiarizes you with the critical foundational aspects of your business and ensures you understand how things work so you can then lead your team to do them better.

When we started Proposify, my co-founder, Kevin Springer, and I did as much as we could ourselves until we could afford to hire full-time specialists.

For example, I designed every version of our logo and the marketing website myself, and then we contracted other design marketing pieces to freelancers until we finally hired Steve Huntington as our in-house designer.

We handled quality assurance ourselves until we hired Janani Ramani, our head of QA.

I looked after our paid spend (Facebook, Adwords) until outsourcing it to a PPC agency for a year and a half. Then we hired Patrick Edmonds, our growth marketer, and transitioned the management of the paid spend over to him.

Kevin handled most of the sales activity until we hired two sales professionals, Amy Sears and Ryan MacDougall.

In each case it went > founder does their best to get the job done > transitions to freelancer if possible > transitions to new in-house hire.

This post was inspired by a question from a reader of this blog:

“What gets my attention is the part you explain how you search for a growth marketer. You said you didn't want an inbound/content marketer (I assume you already had one), what exactly you were searching for in term of this position? My question might seem weird, but growth marketing can be an obscure word. I'm curious to know who you hired and what kind of stuff he did.”

Great question, and by the way, we love getting questions that we can turn into blog posts, so keep’ em coming.

When you first start your company, whether it’s a startup, marketing agency, or really any business, you need to wear many hats, including performing every sales and marketing task to the best of your ability. As Greg Poirier of CloudKettle said on our Proposify Biz Chat podcast interview:

But eventually, you will need to hire specialists to come in and take the reins. Experts who can do what you could do x10 and free you up to focus on other important tasks of leading the company.

Read the full post here: https://www.proposify.biz/blog/two-types-marketers-marketing-team

Or watch the video on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8SQm8b2Y_o&t=60s

In many ways, it’s the perfect symbiotic relationship; SaaS companies need to acquire and retain a high volume of paid subscribers at a low acquisition cost.

Agencies want a consistent source of quality clients and additional revenue streams.

Enter the software/agency partnership.

I’ll explore both the benefits and drawbacks.

Read the post here: https://www.proposify.biz/blog/agency-partner-program-software-platform

Or watch it on our Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8SQm8b2Y_o&t=57s

It’s not just toddlers who don’t like the word, ‘NO’ - no one likes to hear it. No matter how nicely they do it, or the valid reasons behind it.

And it’s especially painful in business. Your business is built on people saying, “YES.” You wrote a proposal based on yes. You did your sales forecast based on yes. And now, here are you with a big, fat NO.

Watch the video on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGTuk0PXGQ4&t=3s

Read the article on our blog: https://www.proposify.biz/blog/your-client-said-no-lost-sales

Having been both a trade show attendee and exhibitor for a wide range of industries like food and beverage, tourism, web design, and technology over the past 25 years, I’ve given out and collected my share of stress balls over the years. I’ve attended trade shows of all sizes - from small regional conferences to massive super shows with 50,000+ attendees spread over acres of exhibit space.

After stuffing my business card into thousands of lucite boxes and spending endless hours making 30-second product pitches, here’s what I’ve learned about how to prepare for trade shows and what to do to maximize your return on investment.

See the video on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPq0n7VbPWA

Read the article on our blog: https://www.proposify.biz/blog/tips-generate-leads-conferences-trade-shows

DON’T PANIC. In any business the tides can change very quickly, and some months are just busier than others. The key is to not lose your cool.

You should have a system to generate new business leads into your sales funnel and not rely on word-of-mouth to drive traffic. But regardless of whether or not you already have an existing system, sometimes you still need to get some qualified leads in the door NOW.

Here are some ideas and strategies I’ve used to build a sales funnel fast. 

You can view the video for this on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kV3zyr7Y3bo&t=5s

and read the article on our blog: https://www.proposify.biz/blog/how-to-generate-leads-sales-funnel

Cameron Brown is walking the talk. In 2015, he sold or gave away everything he owned, started to travel the world, and launched the #dreamlivegive project. Cameron believes many people use material things to fill a void in their lives. He wants to show people firsthand that you can be happy with minimal things, and that you can create successful opportunities and relationships no matter where you are in the world using technology, and by being open, vulnerable and authentic.

Shownotes: https://www.proposify.biz/podcast/006

Greg Poirier and his team at CloudKettle have worked with a lot of SaaS startups and one thing they’ve encountered time and again are early-stage founders with no sales systems in place, like a quality CRM. They’ve stored everything in their heads, in Google docs, or in their inbox. The real problems emerge once they’ve closed a round of investment and they’re ready to scale but they have no technology to support growth. “We’ve literally had to line up outside a founder’s door and take turns extracting relevant information out of his brain in order to get what we need to set up a sales system,” says Greg. His advice? Set up a sales system right from the start that will scale with you and that system should be Salesforce. In this interview, Greg shares why your startup needs Salesforce to scale efficiently and effectively.

Shownotes: https://www.proposify.biz/podcast/005