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Tara Hunt on Creating a DIY Marketing Platform for SMBs
47 Plays4 years ago
Marketing can be painful for small businesses; spending money is a hard pill to swallow.
As a result, they adopt a DIY approach that often goes badly.
Tara Hunt experienced the small business marketing challenge while running a digital marketing agency.
Work easily done as a freelancer no longer made economic sense.
But rather than walking away from marketing-hungry entrepreneurs, Tara did something different.
She and her team at Truly created a program called Phlywheel, a marketing platform that combines DIY lessons, templates, coaching, and community.
It allows entrepreneurs to do marketing without spending a lot of money.
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Transcript
Introduction to Marketing Spark and Tara Hunt
00:00:04
Speaker
My name is Mark Evans, and I'd like to welcome you to Marketing Spark, the podcast that delivers small doses of insight, tools, and tips from marketers and entrepreneurs in the trenches. By small doses, it's conversations that are 15 minutes or less. On today's show, I'm talking with Tara Hunt, CEO and partner with Truly Inc. and the co-founder of Flywheel, a new DIY marketing platform. Tara's been described as a digital marketing maven and social media pioneer. Now that's great branding.
00:00:34
Speaker
She has a major social media presence, including her signature videos, which are a combination of information, insight, and entertainment. Welcome to Marketing Spark. Well, thank you for having me, Mark.
Tara Hunt's Marketing Journey
00:00:46
Speaker
I'm really interested in talking about your new venture, Flywheel, but let's talk a little bit about your digital marketing journey over the past few years. Walk me through what's happened and what you've learned about entrepreneurship and running a marketing business.
00:01:01
Speaker
Oh, boy. How long do we have for the loaded question? I know. But but I think your journey is really interesting. There's been some ups, there's been some downs. And you've constantly displayed the ability to reinvent yourself and to keep moving forward. Yeah, well, I mean, first of all, what I'll say is that I have been on and off entrepreneur as well as I'm
00:01:24
Speaker
always on marketing for over 20 years now. So I have been in multiple roles, including running my own business, but also working on agency side, client side, you know, I've kind of done the gamut of roles in this industry. And I've worked at startups, I've worked at big companies,
00:01:47
Speaker
Yeah, so I'm kind of I'm almost like a petri dish or some sort of like lab experiment. So where I have been able to see every side of things. So whenever I hear somebody say, Oh, the grass is always greener over there. I can tell you definitively the grass is never greener anywhere.
Freelancing vs. Running a Business
00:02:07
Speaker
Yeah, entrepreneurship and being employees, it has its pros and cons.
00:02:11
Speaker
The grass is the grass wherever you go. It has its ups and downs and positives and negatives. I think the most comfortable I've been in this role is usually as a solopreneur or what most of us would refer to as a freelancer. A freelancer position, if you have a nice steady stream of interest and clients coming in and you don't have to do a lot of
00:02:39
Speaker
hustling and getting out there and pitching yourself and you're in that lucky position can be really joyful because you are engaging in the work. You're doing a lot of interesting variable work. You're working directly with clients and projects.
00:02:55
Speaker
And you really do truly have that sort of that myth that entrepreneurship brings is the harder you work, the more you can make. So you control your own income. If you're in a lucky position or if you have worked really hard to build a good client roster and a good reputation as a freelancer, freelancing can be really lucrative as well as give you all that freedom that you would want. And that a lot of people talk about when they talk about entrepreneurship.
00:03:25
Speaker
But entrepreneurship comes in many different flavors, as you know as well. And I am in that flavor zone of having a staff, like paying salaries and benefits and all of the things that go along with having a staff.
00:03:44
Speaker
I mean, right now we're even still paying for a workspace, even though we're all working from home during the pandemic. I'm locked into a lease that costs me $10,000 a month that that's overhead that I need to continue to pay for no matter what the influx of client work
Challenges in Scaling a Business
00:04:02
Speaker
is and during the pandemic, it's definitely not been as lucrative as previously. I think everybody's budgets are being squeezed right now. There are a lot of fixed costs when you're running a business with employees and equipment and physical space, et cetera, that, you know, as an entrepreneur that you have to take into account there. So if I was to say like my journey as an entrepreneur, that is rewarding. It is rewarding as all that because I love that I get to
00:04:32
Speaker
employ a group of people create work for them, help them make a living, empower them, help them grow. That gives me so much pleasure. But it does like it's a wholly different beast to tackle than saying being a solo entrepreneur or a freelancer.
00:04:51
Speaker
on your own. So it's that classic adage of be careful what you wish for, right? We all want to be entrepreneurs and it's and having been a freelancer and enjoying that, that the idea of being a solopreneur. That's great. But when you're faced with the growth question about whether you want to move forward, that's the hard part, I think. Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, because the upside can be amazing, right? So the upside of
00:05:15
Speaker
starting to hire people and scale your operations is you also potentially scale your income, but you're taking on a lot more risk and a lot more fixed costs that makes for you needing to go out and bring in that business a lot more. It turns from the joy I have from being a freelancer where I'm hands-on with all the projects to
00:05:44
Speaker
Instead of being in the business, I have to work on the business. And that's a very different muscle group. And that's where I've, you know, when you talked about the ups and downs, that's where I've hit the downs because that is not a muscle group that I had developed previously. And so there were a lot of things that I wasn't doing, you know, when I first started truly.
00:06:07
Speaker
I didn't expect this to be, you know, to turn into an agency where I employed people and grew like this. I kind of just like went with the flow.
Planning for Business Growth
00:06:18
Speaker
Would not recommend that, by the way, to anybody. You know, when you look at, when you're standing at that crossroads, and that's where I was in, I do believe it was 2016, I was standing at that crossroads where, do I take on more business?
00:06:33
Speaker
and hire somebody to help me scale and scale myself and the business so that I can take on the more business. Or do I turn that business away and just kind of keep doing the freelancer thing? I only saw that, oh, well, I can hire somebody and we can just sort of play it by ear. If you're standing in that crossroads, I highly recommend that somebody sits down with somebody who has taken the path to scaling and
00:07:03
Speaker
ask them, what are like five, 10, 20 things that you wish you would have known at that moment and wish you would have set up and then take that action to set that up in your business right away. Everything from timesheets, which as a freelancer, I don't know about it, freelancers out there, but I was not keeping timesheets. I was just like, just doing the work all the way to setting up different processes and quality checks and calculating things like margin.
00:07:33
Speaker
you know, margins when you're on your own is are great. Pretty fantastic. But once you're hiring people and you're adding equipment and software and then the salaries and benefits, and then there's the office space that becomes, well, maybe it's not as necessary post pandemic as it was before, but it definitely was when I was hiring people, like all that stuff starts to add up and cut into your margins. And then you need to really, really pay attention to that stuff. So that's stuff that I,
00:08:02
Speaker
found out the hard way. I drifted until it was like, oh crap, I just painted myself basically into a corner.
00:08:13
Speaker
Well, that's part of the tough road of entrepreneurship some days is, is you don't know what you don't know until you go through it.
The Birth of Flywheel
00:08:18
Speaker
So let's talk a little bit about flywheel, which, and I quote, has a mission to simplify the digital marketing landscape and provide members with the skills and tools needed to execute successful marketing strategies. And that's, that's a really good value proposition. Tell me about flywheels and what inspired it.
00:08:37
Speaker
How does it work and who needs it? I know that's a loaded question, but I'm really interested, this next part of your entrepreneurial journey, did you wake up one day and decide this is something I, we should do? Give me a backstory on this new venture. The story of Flywheel was really came out of some of the challenges that we faced when we were scaling truly. As we grew bigger, as our overhead was growing with that and our margins were tightening,
00:09:04
Speaker
We found ourselves so early days and truly when it was just me, I could take on little tiny clients. I could take on bigger, like a little bit, not huge clients, a little bit bigger projects. I could grow and, and contract as needed. But once I had a staff, all of a sudden there was like, um, kind of a minimum mandate that we could take on. So we couldn't take on little projects here and there because.
00:09:31
Speaker
they would cost way more. Like our margins were shot with these little projects. And then we would have a tough time balancing those little projects with the bigger projects. So we had to actually start turning business away at some point. So a small startup or, you know, even like small accounting firm would come to us. Um, and they had a budget of, you know, $2,500 a month freelance to Tara could have worked with that. But now that I'm owning an agency,
00:10:01
Speaker
and having a bunch of people and the amount of work that we have to put into that, I no longer could take on a smaller mandate like that, so we had to start saying no. The problem was I would meet these amazing entrepreneurs, these amazing startup founders, and think, oh, I can see a path to really helping them, but they're going to need
00:10:24
Speaker
time and they're going to need a lot of time to be put in. I could give them that path, it's going to take some, but it's just clunky and we weren't able to make it work with our structure. Literally, I woke up one day and I had this idea and the idea came out of actually we had taken on one client startup, they had had some funding out of Montreal and they said, okay, yeah, yeah, we can't afford 10,000 a month, but we can put in 5,000 a month
00:10:51
Speaker
and could you just use that time to just work with our junior marketing staff, put together maybe lessons for them? So we kind of did this three-month mandate with them where they would tell us at the beginning of the month what they were struggling with, and then we would work together to kind of create like a workshop to work through these problems with them by the end of the month. And we created at the end of this three months
00:11:21
Speaker
mandate a wonderful amount of material, wonderful amount of lessons that could be used for them.
Flywheel's Approach to DIY Marketing
00:11:29
Speaker
But also we took a look at it, we thought, you know what, I bet there's a lot of startups out there that could use this kind of material, everything from like putting together a better
00:11:40
Speaker
content calendar, right? Everybody wants to do content, but where do you begin? And we actually put together or we use the process that we use in-house and mapped it out for this startup in a presentation deck. And we were like, Hey, wait, we could probably redo this so that it's more general and but aimed at a similar size of a size of business.
00:12:05
Speaker
and sell it, sell it for a lot less, and then scale it that way. So we started thinking sort of in that educational realm. And then, you know, as we looked around, we did a lot of ton of research early on, we spoke with a lot of different startups and a lot of different businesses in this with this size of marketing budget, we also testing and when we we'd have inbound
00:12:29
Speaker
We'd have inbound leads that we couldn't take on. We would start asking them what would work for them. We netted out that it's not just education because part of our mandate for this startup had also been that we're kind of on-call coaching for them. If they were having a tough time with
00:12:48
Speaker
implementing any of the ideas or they needed to bounce their progress off of us to make sure that they were on the right track. We were there, so there was that coaching part that was there as well. Okay, we needed to add the coaching. There's a third part that I felt was also missing that I've always wanted to do. I've always wanted to be able to bring my clients together in a bit of a community, thinking, you know what? If we had a community for our clients,
00:13:14
Speaker
especially if they're not really competing with each other. What they could also do is learn from one another and that would also fill gap in their knowledge that we wouldn't have to fill and then we could totally scale what we were doing. You know, as this came together and we realized, oh, we combine content, here's
00:13:34
Speaker
great templates and guides and spreadsheets that we use already. And we've tested a ton of times over here, you know, is our step-by-step plans and checklists as well as learning materials. So all this learning material that we could put together with everything from small little lessons to bigger masterclasses. If we could combine that with some sort of coaching and this community.
00:13:58
Speaker
I bet we could create a really affordable level of support where small businesses would get agency expertise. They would get our input, but they would also be able to share with one another. This would be like a fraction of the budget that they would have. And then they would have all this budget leftover to spend on implementation. All they would need is to be ready to like roll up their sleeves and do it themselves. So whether they hired somebody
00:14:26
Speaker
more junior, or whether they had there was a partner sort of on board that was willing to take on this sort of work. And so that's sort of the evolution of flywheel and then everything else, you know, we did a lot of testing and building and implementing from there.
00:14:44
Speaker
how has it worked? And what have you learned along the way? In theory, it sounds great, especially for companies that don't have a big enough marketing budget to afford an agency but really need marketing help. Any surprises along the way? Has it panned out the way that you expected?
Flywheel's Community and Impact
00:14:59
Speaker
So yeah, there's been a ton of surprises. So number one, I'll say on the positive side, non surprise side, is that we actually proved our thesis
00:15:10
Speaker
couple of times over. There are super engaged community members who fit that profile that we envision early on. The co-founder who is in charge of business development, super engaged comes to every webinar, engages in every what we call our weekly planning jam sessions.
00:15:30
Speaker
and spends a lot of time in the community listening and learning and then digs into our knowledge center on a regular basis. And he calls it his Willy Wonka chocolate factory of marketing knowledge. Because we have a ton of different resources in there. So he can go into that anytime and pull out ideas and spreadsheets.
00:15:50
Speaker
So we have a few of those people at various degrees, and then we also have more, not the junior person, but the person that was, we didn't even see it necessarily, the person that would be buying flywheels, the junior person. We saw the person that would be buying flywheel as, I'm, and this happens a lot, and you probably noticed this in your work,
00:16:12
Speaker
the person that's put into the marketing position doesn't necessarily have a marketing background. They might have a finance background or a legal background or even a business development background, but marketing is not their background. They're just been put in that position because they're super smart. Maybe they even have an MBA and they're like, you could do this digital marketing thing. How hard can it be? How hard can it be? And then they get into position. They're like, wow, there's a lot of stuff going on here in this
00:16:42
Speaker
marketing world, that person we find who's been hired by this organization is more likely they do attend some of the webinars, but they're more likely to really dive into the knowledge center. And they also tend to do a lot more with the weekly planning jams. So they get stuck on something or they have goals that they need to be held accountable to, but they also really love the community because
00:17:07
Speaker
Quite often they're kind of lonely in their organization. The CEO or whoever's put them in that position is, okay, you go and solve this. And they're kind of the only ones that are in that role. Flywheel actually became a bit of like an extension of their team and then they feel like they're not as alone. And I think it's been especially important during the pandemic for this group.
00:17:28
Speaker
I run into marketers like that. A lot of we're quasi marketers and I can see how this completely be a great resource for them. And they're super smart and they pick up things in no time. For instance, we were doing a whole researching your audience. And by the time we were finished kind of the week of programming, the people in this group already had these amazingly robust built out audiences and they had fully adopted the tools that we suggested.
00:17:55
Speaker
It was really, that group is super, super quick and they'll pick up and absorb everything, a sponge. What we have found though, that's been surprising on the other hand, is that we actually have quite a few marketing professionals in Flywheel. I thought eventually we were probably going to attract some marketing professionals because part of the roadmap for Flywheel is, hey, maybe you can, and marketing professionals can come on board and then they can actually find mandates.
00:18:24
Speaker
through these companies as they grow. That would be great to be able to match people up. And because we already know that they're friendly to our approach, that's great. We have probably a good one third of our membership are these marketing professionals. And they're there engaging in the content, learning, and utilizing it just as much as anybody else. Not that they don't know this stuff already necessarily. It gives them sort of a
00:18:52
Speaker
I think a lot of marketing professionals have their own processes and we're sometimes really curious. I don't know about you. I'll read, for instance, other marketing professionals all the time and be like, Oh, that's it. I try to solve the same problem a slightly different way. This actually looks more efficient, like a better process. So
00:19:11
Speaker
I think we're always, and I didn't even realize that coming in, but I think we're always learning from one another. As marketing professionals, we can't service everybody. The beautiful thing about our industry, and it should never be a winner takes all, it should be a, we all grow together and we can all take on so many clients at any given time. So it's not a zero sum game. I am perfectly fine with
00:19:35
Speaker
opening up by my promoter or whatever, you know, the saying goes like sharing our processes with quote unquote, the competition because that's great, better marketing practices are going to grow more broadly. So I lost my job the end of April and jumped back into marketing consulting. And I almost feel like I've gone back to school in terms of the kind of insight that I've got from LinkedIn, from listening to podcasts. And I think you're right. I think that marketer marketing is is a
00:20:04
Speaker
you're constantly learning new approaches, new ideas, new ways of doing things. And I think that may be the appeal of Flywheel to marketers is that there's always
00:20:13
Speaker
a different approach or new perspectives. Marketers who are open to that, I think, are the ones that will be successful. I feel like we haven't covered a lot of ground because we've only talked about your entrepreneurial journey and flywheel, but on the other hand, we've covered a lot of ground. So thanks, Star, for the insight. I really appreciate it. I mean, it's really great to talk to people who are in the trenches and doing some really new and interesting things.
00:20:34
Speaker
If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review and subscribe via iTunes or your favorite podcast app. If you like what you heard, please rate it. For show notes on today's conversation and information about Tara, visit marketingspark.co. If you have questions, feedback, would like to suggest a guest or learn more about how I help B2B companies as a fractional CMO, consultant and advisor, send an email to mark at marketingspark.co. Talk to you next time.