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In the world of business, not all deals are what they seem.
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Fortunes rise, empires crumble, all with the stroke of a pen Mergers, acquisitions, hostile takeovers.
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Welcome to Mergers, she Wrote, where we examine strategies and stories behind the biggest deals in business, because in M&A, the real risks are the ones you don't take.
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Welcome back to Merger, she Wrote.
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I'm Paloma Goggins, the owner of Nocturnal Legal and your host Today.
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My guest, kim Grennan, will show you how, as a solo entrepreneur getting into a consulting business, there is a specific roadmap to follow in order to go from solo entrepreneur to exiting.
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Thank you so much for being on today.
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Oh, thank you for having me.
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Excited to chat Likewise.
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So I want to just hop right in and if you could just give us, you know, the backstory of how you wound up getting into digital marketing agencies and then we'll go kind of into more depth about how you grew it and how you decided to exit and all that jazz.
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Yeah, so it actually started.
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Um, I originally got my was getting my undergrad in marketing Cause that was my original intent.
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Like I love the creative side of marketing but I'm also a numbers person.
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My original intent I love the creative side of marketing, but I'm also a numbers person.
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I love numbers, I love being analytical, and so over the course of my undergrad career I was convinced to ultimately go and get my economics degree.
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So I ended up pivoting, but kind of in the back of my mind, I always knew I wanted to get into marketing.
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I love marketing for a variety of reasons.
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So I started working for an investment bank in Chicago.
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Then I started at Verizon working on their M&A and venture capital team, and at the time I was working with pretty early stage startup companies series A, series B type companies and we were really looking to figure out how we might be able to commercialize some of their products, whether that is through some sort of strategic acquisition or some sort of strategic partnership.
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And while I was working with these companies, they were all on the B2B side of things.
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So think about virtual reality, health care, education, transportation, you name it.
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I was working with these companies and I saw how impactful and how powerful marketing really was at that early stage and I really fell back in love with that.
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Like I want to get back into this.
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I want to figure out how I can do this and how I can make an impact on the marketing side of things for early stage companies.
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So I decided to quit my job at Verizon, moved to Arizona, started working for a management consulting company that did just that.
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I really wanted to kind of get the skill set and understand the foundational criteria for some of these companies and kind of put it into a management consulting framework.
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After I did that for a year I started my own agency and that's kind of where everything began.
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So I focused primarily on the B2B side of things with software companies.
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That was initially Now.
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That changed over the course of years.
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So I owned my agencies for about nine years before I sold them and I started working with B2C type companies and all kinds of B2B companies, not just software side of things.
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But that's kind of the impetus in how I originally started my agencies.
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Nice.
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So, for you know, I think I'd love to just hear you kind of explain for someone who perhaps has seen all of the stuff online about how you can start a digital marketing agency and grow it and, you know, become super wealthy and all these other things.
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You know, how hard is it.
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If someone wants to get into the digital marketing agency realm, you know, do you have to start it off with a baseline knowledge?
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Is there stuff that you can learn along the way?
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I mean, how realistic is it to start something you know?
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Do you consider yourself to be in the small minority in terms of people that made it?
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You know, to the finish line at the end.
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I think so.
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Extra context when I first started my digital marketing agency, I really had no background in marketing.
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I didn't even know marketing.
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Like most of the stuff that I've been doing was more traditional consulting and market positioning, go to market strategy, but not actually being the, you know, the one who's executing on many of those things.
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So I originally was kind of doing freelance stuff with a lot of different clients who were looking for strategy work and all of them kept asking me hey, can you do marketing?
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Can you do marketing Like well, in theory, yes, Like I have a social media account.
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I, you know, played around with a couple of things, but you know, I really had no experience and you know I just kept getting the question over and over again until finally one client's like I don't care, I want you to try to figure it out, I'll pay you to figure it out.
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You know I just need help marketing and they trusted me at the time.
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So that's kind of how it started, where I didn't have any background.
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I just a lot of YouTube videos.
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I looked at some like online courses, just consumed as much information as possible.
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So I definitely do think it's possible where cause that's exactly how I started I didn't have a background in it, I was just able to to get clients.
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You know, I had clients, I had these relationships and you know they needed marketing help and that is by far, even today, when I talk to people, everyone wants marketing, everyone wants lead generation.
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And how can, if you're good at being proactive and reaching out and you aren't afraid to talk to people?
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That's really how things started to fall into place for me.
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Where you know, I would go and get coffee with as many people as I possibly could.
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We had happy hours, dinners, lunches.
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I'd reach out to people on my LinkedIn network, strangers who I knew would be interesting to speak to, just started those conversations and those conversations led to them introducing me to other peers of theirs and more and more marketing work.
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So originally it was me, by myself, pretty much as a freelancer, growing, and I do think that is a pretty normal case for a lot of people who are kind of in the marketing world or they're thinking of starting their own thing on the marketing side.
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And that's how, I would say, 95% of digital marketing agencies form where it's just, you know, the freelancer, the owner, operator, and then all of a sudden just becomes too much for them.
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They might hire some contractors, eventually full-time employees.
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That's the trend that I see with almost every agency owner that I speak with.
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You know, we all kind of have similar paths.
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You know, some people might come from backgrounds where you know they've been doing marketing for years and now breaking off to their own or someone like me who really didn't have that at all.
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I like the part that you talk about where it really comes down, because I feel like this is so universal, especially in a service-based industry where this idea of networking and networking being the catalyst for growing and creating new business.
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I think there are so many people out there who start a business and they don't know why it has failed in the first year and a lot of times when you talk to them you realize they haven't done the work to network and build the foundation for their business when it comes to referrals and starting just an initial client base, right.
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And so whenever people come to me and they're like oh, you know how do you start a business and make it last, and I'm like well, a lot of it has to do with not just marketing but also marketing yourself individually.
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So I love that you talked about that.
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Yes, I say that that is most important.
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A lot of people you know getting into the digital marketing world is one of the easiest businesses to start, in my opinion.
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You know pretty low overhead, you can kind of get into it.
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You just you got to be fearless, you got to talk to people.
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It's all about, you know, getting people to trust you and proving to them your value.
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So that's number one, because there's a lot of competition out there.
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There's, you know, thousands of people out there who own digital marketing agencies.
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There's thousands and more who are freelancers who are doing the work that you're doing.
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So it's really competitive.
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So it's all about the relationships 100% and I had a guest on a couple of weeks ago that you know she owns and operates a pest control company with her brother and same concept, right, different, totally different industry.
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But relationships matter and also your integrity and your ability to you know provide.
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What you're agreeing to provide, I think, is also agreeing to provide.
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I think is also you know she had said on that episode you know people, competitors, will go knocking door to door in the East Valley and ask and try and poach clients away from them and and they're like, oh no, you know, I've got.
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You know, bug off, pest control, we're covered.
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And I'm like that is the ultimate compliment is to have someone reach out and try and poach your client and they like, oh no, we're good, we've got somebody.
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Totally, and they're like oh no we're good, we've got somebody Totally, totally.
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And what I found was really successful for me when I was first starting, I didn't reuse this for, you know, up until the day that I sold it also is kind of our approach where what's really important especially setting yourself up for an exit for a digital marketing agency you want the recurring you know monthly contracts, or you know recurring monthly contracts or annual contracts or whatever that might look like for that individual person, but get away from project-based work.
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You always kind of want the recurring contracts.
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That's key.
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But what I did was I always said, hey, I'm willing to work with you completely for free for a month.
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I'm going to prove my value and, you know, show you what we can bring to the table here.
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If you don't like working with us, for whatever reason, you don't owe us a thing we could walk away.
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And everyone loved that.
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Everyone's like, oh, that's great.
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And not a single person ever said they didn't enjoy working with us.
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I knew as soon as we kind of got in and they kind of bought into our process, all our work, that they would enjoy working with us.
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So we always did that.
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We never did annual contracts, we always just did month to month 30 day contracts that, you know, just kept kind of going until you know we mutually decided the partnership no longer was needed, or you know different directions, or whatever that looked like.
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But that was a really great way, and I think that was why we grew so quickly and why we were able to get clients from the get go.
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If we're able to prove our value for free, then you know most people say you know what, why not?
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So that really helped me.
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I will say, though, that having annual contracts, especially for an exit, is good, but I won't say it's the end, all be all.
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They just want to see that you know buyers are looking for hey, this is recurring revenue versus project-based stuff.
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Where you have to, you know, keep hunting every single time, it's not really recurring.
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So those are some things that I think are important and some of the reasons why I think we were successful in the beginning.
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I like the idea of giving away something of value in order to prove worth.
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I think there's so many ways that in a world where, especially in the marketing space, where there's so much noise, there's so much competition, a way to set yourself apart and also prove that you can do exactly what you're saying you can do.
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I mean, even in my line of work, there's been plenty of bad experiences that my clients have had prior to coming and working with me, and so I think part of that early on discussion for anybody in a service-based industry has to be partly here's how we do things and how they're different knowing exactly what the pain points are in your industry and, and kind of, you know, circumnavigating them.
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And I think giving away 30 days is a really easy way to say, hey, we're not like the rest, you're not going to sign a lock in contract for one year, and also we're going to prove that we can do what we say by giving away service for 30 days, which is awesome, yeah.
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Yeah, no, I really recommend that, especially for anyone who's starting a service-based business.
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If you can kind of show some value up front, that's going to get you know the client acquisition rolling and kind of get you that initial traction to then be able to make more scalable decisions and hiring decisions and kind of see what that looks like.
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So, yeah, it was great for us.
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So let's turn you kind of mentioned it in your last statement, but let's turn to the scaling piece of this, because I feel like, inevitably, when we're talking about people building, starting building and then exiting a business, I feel like we always focus.
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You know us being on the advisor side.
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The focus is always how do we exit?
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How do we exit where everybody gets a lot of the pie right?
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How do we exit in a way that makes sense?
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And then how do we exit in a way that you know ultimately gives the seller what they want, post-closing, whether it's lifestyle or, you know, changing what they're doing for a living?
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But I feel like you know, one of the things that I try and weave into my podcast is how people are scaling, how people are building, how they're getting from A to Z, with A being starting a business, usually from the ground up, and then ultimately selling it as the B.
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And so, with that being said, you know, when you were talking briefly a few minutes ago about how the business gets to be really busy and you start hiring people and you kind of grow, what would you say is sort of a good, I think from a service-based business, but also from a digital marketing space perspective.
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How do you find good talent?
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How do you bring on talent?
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How do you decide when you have enough work to bring on talent?
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Because I know for every business owner the key question is when am I big enough that I can start affording to bring on someone to help?
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Yeah, For me.
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I really viewed it as I was just so busy.
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I'm like I have like, and I was landing contracts, contracts, contracts I'm like I need help immediately.
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So at that point that's where I'm like, ok, I need, I'm thinking, at this point I just need immediate immediately.
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So at that point that's where I'm like, okay, I need, I'm thinking at this point I just need immediate help.
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So I'm hiring contractors, freelancers, to help me with.
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You know, the contracts that I did, you know, get signed.
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Until I could just kind of breathe, I'm like, okay, now I need to hire full-time staff.
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I kind of got up from, or got out from under the stress of the initial stuff, like, okay, let's close all these contracts, I need to fulfill them.
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It's just me.
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So hired some contractors immediately and some freelancers, and it probably took me two or three months just operating and managing these contractors, to then say, okay, no, I need full-time help.
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This is going well, I've proven this model and I'm continuing to land more contracts.
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So at that point and that probably took, you know, once I got to the probably about $500,000 in annualized revenue mark, that's where I really started to think about hiring full-time employees.
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So then I hired, probably over the course of four or five full-time employees in the first six months after that, and then just really focused on closing more deals just to kind of support that.
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Because that hit.
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Because for my line of business it was very minimal overhead, I was working remotely, I had to pay for some software and things like that, so a lot of that was profit.
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So I knew I had the capacity to hire people who I did need.
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I brought that on.
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But now I'm like, okay, now I need to figure out how to bring on more clients and continue to kind of increase those margins as well.
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So I knew, once I get to I got to the million dollar mark I wanted to hire a GM, I wanted to hire a president, someone who's going to really be my replacement, because I was the one who was, you know, working all kinds of hours, all kinds of hours through the night.
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And every single day I was pretty stressed as an owner operator.
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It's just going to be a lot to take on.
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And now you have these employees that are their responsibility and for me that was something that was really important to me financially, making sure everything was good to go.
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But I wanted to extract myself from the business.
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I knew for exit planning wise, I couldn't be that owner operator who was going to be in there every single day.
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That's just not as valuable to buyers.
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So once I hit the million dollar mark, I actually had a contractor who was working with me since before I even had hired any of my full time employees and I knew I wanted her to be my GM and my president.
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So I was kind of you know tailoring, kind of like, hey, you know this, this would be perfect for you.
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And she's like, yeah, you know, not right now.
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Blah, blah, blah.
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So finally, when we got to the million dollar mark, I finally convinced her to come on and run the agency for me.
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So I was able to extract myself from the day to day operations.
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She was already fully familiar with all the clients, all of our processes, how we run, how we do everything, so she was able to easily slot in.
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So that was great kind of trial, running her almost as a contractor slash freelancer for, you know, a couple of years prior to that.
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So she slotted right in, I was able to extract myself and I was able to then solely focus on sales and marketing for our own business and that really helped.
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I cannot say enough how important that was for just even my own mental health.
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But also being able to be in the position that I wanted to focus on sales, focus on those relationships, bringing a new business without having to be in the weeds of everything, and managing the team, Because for me managing people is really difficult.
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It's not something that comes incredibly naturally to me.
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I love my autonomy and I kind of give full trust to all my employees, but if things start to kind of go outside of the guardrails, I'm not the best.
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I'm not very detail-oriented, I'm not going to be the one that's going to be finding that and figuring that out right away.
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So I knew I had to find someone to do that for me.
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Well, I think you've made a lot of really great points for, especially for listeners who are they themselves thinking about?
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How do I, how do I scale?
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I feel like, inevitably, most business owners get to a point they go from solo entrepreneurship to team-based thinking.
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And I think this idea of okay, I'm working too many hours, I'm not happy with my life anymore, how do I make that transition into bringing on the team so that I can get my life back per se right, or at least get more hours back, and I think one of the things that you said that's that's really.
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I think I wish owners would hear it truly is that freeing up your time as an owner gave you the ability to go out and close business and be the, the rainmaker right, which was originally for a lot of solo entrepreneurs.
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You're, you are inherently a rainmaker to begin with, because otherwise how would you have gotten your business started in the first place.
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So I think this idea of going back and scaling back, you doing the physical work allows you to go back into that marketing mode and start landing clients and doing the.
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I always make the joke in the legal world.
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There's this guy back in Wisconsin, which is our home state Um, one call that's all the guys a personal injury firm.
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He's like the, the Wisconsin version of Rafi, but he's, he's, he's on every billboard.
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He, you know, just like Rafi.
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He's got, like you know, sponsorships for the bucks and the brewers and everything else and, um, but like you know, at the heart of it he does no legal work.
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He is really the spokesperson and, ultimately, I feel like every business owner should find that one person in their industry that's doing that and look to them and say, okay, that is.
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My goal is to be that that spokesperson, to be the person that's shaking the hands, having the coffee, having the lunches and obviously there's some parts of the business that you may not be able to fully replace yourself and you know you'll not want to be a full backseat driver on everything.
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But this idea that you cannot grow without giving yourself back your own time, I think is so critical.
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Yeah, no for sure.
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And it really did change things, just with, you know, my free time and everything, and it really became a business that I really started to enjoy, because I was getting to the point where I was like this is a grind, this is way too much for me, there's a lot going on and, you know, it really kind of gave me renewed energy too, so that was so nice.
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So I think take home message for anyone listening is that if you're at a point where you feel financially you're stable, you know, take a pause and consider whether there's a way to dip your toe in the pond right.
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Kim had just explained.
00:21:05.196 --> 00:21:15.565
You know she worked with some part-time people to really start kind of bringing on new talent and then ultimately she took some of those people and converted them to full-time talent, which I think is an awesome idea.
00:21:15.565 --> 00:21:25.884
To your point, being able to onboard someone that's fully aware of all your systems and the process that you love is priceless in a lot of ways.
00:21:25.884 --> 00:21:31.961
So at the beginning we talked about how you had three agencies.
00:21:31.961 --> 00:21:34.869
Now, how does that fit into the story?
00:21:34.869 --> 00:21:39.843
Did you have one and it grew so big that you decided to offspin and do two separate?
00:21:39.843 --> 00:21:42.679
Or were they different focuses, or why the three?
00:21:44.390 --> 00:21:54.324
So the first one was truly there was myself and one other 1099 essentially.
00:21:54.324 --> 00:21:57.393
So this was like the babiest of baby things.
00:21:57.393 --> 00:22:11.954
It was a small lead generation service basically for companies and I had turned around and sold that within a year just to another competitor and that was pretty quick.
00:22:11.954 --> 00:22:25.096
But that was like when I first started as a solo kind of freelancer Kim the marketer freelancer that was kind of early stages as I was also building, you know, my other freelance marketing work.
00:22:25.096 --> 00:22:34.800
I just kind of created this subscription service on the side, quickly sold that and kind of went away with that Like, hey, I'm focusing on building this agency.
00:22:35.041 --> 00:22:50.972
So Axolite is the agency that I built, which was my larger agency, larger agency and like really truly the, the marketing agency that I view myself as being the primary owner of, and that's kind of more of the, my legacy in regards to digital marketing agencies.
00:22:50.972 --> 00:23:08.082
So actually I started that and scaled that over the past, you know, over eight years, and at the end, the year end of, you know, before I was going to sell, I just started I decided to spin off a service line that we didn't offer at Axel 8.
00:23:08.082 --> 00:23:15.872
So I saw this big demand for cold email outreach and it's more of a sales activity than a marketing activity.
00:23:15.872 --> 00:23:22.107
So I decided to kind of decouple it and created its own little entity and that was called Leadstrike.
00:23:22.107 --> 00:23:32.184
So Leadstrike was a cold email outreach service that got leads and scheduled appointments for businesses.
00:23:33.450 --> 00:23:37.236
So as I was growing, axel8 spun out for Leadstrike.
00:23:37.236 --> 00:23:41.202
I sold Axel 8 and I was still operating Leadstrike.
00:23:41.202 --> 00:23:57.242
I only operated Leadstrike for I think like 13 or 14 months, had a couple of freelancers and contractors in place and you know recurring client base there and I sold that two months after I sold Axel 8.
00:23:57.242 --> 00:24:02.362
So they were kind of they kind of started out similar but then I broke them out separately.
00:24:02.362 --> 00:24:08.323
But Axolite was kind of my, my full focus and really the agency that I built for eight years.
00:24:08.323 --> 00:24:10.377
That was kind of my, my bigger one, nice.
00:24:11.869 --> 00:24:15.999
So and then I have to ask was the sort of lead strike?
00:24:15.999 --> 00:24:18.403
Was it something that you stumbled upon?
00:24:18.403 --> 00:24:30.357
It sounds like and I love how all entrepreneurs that I talk to, they always have this like story that they, you know, they never meant to end up where they are today and it just all came together, and I love that that.
00:24:30.798 --> 00:25:03.112
I have yet to find someone that was like I purposefully went out and I did this and I you know, from just day one, I knew exactly what I wanted, and so I think, if anything, the take home message from all of my podcast interviews so far is that you never know where life is going to take you, and you should just buckle up and take a ride, but so, like you're building your main agency and this cold email outreach idea, was this something that you had to build and like for coding and all of that, or was it something that was more like a like a service?
00:25:03.713 --> 00:25:12.394
It was more of a service, but I coupled together five or six pieces of software to put together in the system.
00:25:12.394 --> 00:25:31.895
But it really was built because I um, I was using the same system within Axel 8 to get us new business and I've been using it for years and I became a technical expert in cold email outreach because it is a highly, highly technical service.
00:25:31.895 --> 00:25:38.452
There's all different kinds of things you need to do to make sure that you're landing in primary inboxes.
00:25:38.452 --> 00:25:39.936
These aren't designed emails.
00:25:39.936 --> 00:25:42.691
These are, you know, one-off, you know plain text emails.
00:25:42.691 --> 00:25:46.893
I'm sure everyone's received a million of them, but there's a good way to do it and there's a bad way to do it.
00:25:47.434 --> 00:25:50.708
And what I found was that you know a lot of my clients.
00:25:50.708 --> 00:25:52.153
A lot of people kept asking me about it.
00:25:52.153 --> 00:25:53.676
Hey, can you do this for my business?
00:25:53.676 --> 00:25:55.481
Would love for you to set it up.
00:25:55.481 --> 00:25:57.522
You know this seems great.
00:25:57.522 --> 00:25:58.923
You're getting what kind of results.
00:25:58.923 --> 00:26:05.727
You know people were really impressed with you know how we were generating all of our business and the lion's share of it was through cold email.
00:26:05.767 --> 00:26:15.971
So that's why I decided to break it out, and I knew that I was selling Axel 8 at the time also, so I was like, well, if I built it within Axel 8, then I might not be able to extract as much value from it.
00:26:15.971 --> 00:26:24.134
I was thinking kind of more in terms of, okay, exit wise, I can make it its own entity, build that up for, you know, a year, ideally build it up for longer than a year.
00:26:24.134 --> 00:26:27.553
But you know, build it up for a year and then sell that also.
00:26:27.553 --> 00:26:40.240
So that's why I ultimately broke it out, because I knew I was selling Axolite and I didn't want to just start this brand new service line within Axolite and really not be able to get as much you know, get much value from it, when I knew I was going to sell it in a couple months.
00:26:40.240 --> 00:26:44.605
So otherwise I would have probably just looped it into Axel 8 as a service line.
00:26:44.605 --> 00:26:50.762
But that's why I ultimately chose to break it out, just to kind of capitalize on another exit.
00:26:51.673 --> 00:26:55.730
Nice, I'm going to put you on the spot here in terms of like on the fly advice for marketing.
00:26:55.890 --> 00:27:04.574
But for anyone listening who's not in marketing and has a small business, what would be like the baseline top three things that someone could do?
00:27:04.594 --> 00:27:29.736
Because I feel like when you were talking about cold email outreach, which is absolutely outside the realm of what I do, I actually don't even know if the rules of ethics would allow me to do that, to be quite honest, but like my thought process was from all that I know about cold outreach on email is that it is exceptionally difficult and for you to sit here and be like, yeah, we mastered it, and I was just thinking to myself that is so cool, I want to know more.
00:27:30.190 --> 00:27:41.595
So tell me, like, what are three nuggets that you could give a business owner that just and this is a total sidebar, we'll get back to your journey in a second but what are three things that you could tell a business owner?
00:27:41.595 --> 00:27:44.280
Like, what are three things that you could tell a business owner?
00:27:44.280 --> 00:27:48.148
Like, what are key things that they could be doing, you know, either on their own or with a partner?
00:27:48.148 --> 00:27:51.958
Like what you had Do you mean for with cold email outreach specifically.
00:27:51.958 --> 00:27:57.034
Oh no, it could be something else, it could be whatever you think is like more important, cause I feel like not all businesses are perfect for cold outreach.
00:27:57.775 --> 00:27:58.154
That's right.
00:27:58.154 --> 00:28:08.852
I always say, though, if you're a B2B business, 100% you should be doing cold email outreach for anything On the B2C side.
