Franchise Marketing Secrets with 

Alex Pujji

[00:00:00] Alex: franchise marketing is this black box you really need to capture the right person.

[00:00:04] Courtney: Hi, my name is Courtney and welcome to how they scaled it, where scaling is done with both sides of the brain on this show. We sit down with growth stage businesses and speak to their founders and industry leaders from e commerce and SAS sectors. We showcase their journeys, unpacking the pivotal moments of their journey.

[00:00:21] Courtney: Marketing strategies and key decisions that shaped their success today. I’m bringing on Alex Poojie Alex has a very special place in our podcast as she is the founder of right left agency in addition to founding our digital marketing agency She has also helped to build a studio craft franchise called Pinspiration from two locations to over 45 I wanted her to help us understand how to build a franchise through digital marketing.

[00:00:47] Courtney: Alex, it is so great to see you and welcome to How They Scaled It.

[00:00:51] Alex: Thanks so much for having me. I’m excited.

[00:00:53] Courtney: So I kind of want to start with where it all started. So you left a really secure career to launch Right Left Agency, And I wanted to know a little bit about how you made that decision because you were pretty young when you made that choice.

[00:01:09] Alex: Yeah, it was right after college, right after I did my undergrad. And I had worked at several in house marketing teams and at a couple of different agencies. And it was, there were a few different components to that decision. First and foremost, I knew that I loved the building phase of launching a new brand, getting everything set up.

[00:01:30] Alex: It was very exciting to me. But once it started to scale and it turned into more routine, I kind of lost interest, honestly. Like I have a little bit of that entrepreneur, like I love the startup phase and I love all of the big ideas, but I don’t necessarily love operating a company. And then secondly, I couldn’t find the time.

[00:01:50] Alex: A company that felt like home to me. And so I ultimately decided to leave my job as an e commerce director because the culture, which just wasn’t what I was looking for. And I thought, okay, this might be my, the exact right moment for me to launch something where I can focus on the parts of marketing that I love the most, which was helping brands get all of those initial pieces and ideas in place and test and iterate on different marketing ideas.

[00:02:17] Alex: So I left that job. I pretty quickly picked up my first few clients and, found that it was just so much more rewarding of work. 

[00:02:27] Courtney: Yeah,

[00:02:28] Courtney: I knew you back then too and so I remember us kind of going through these These major challenges with just not feeling like what we were doing was quite right. And then I remember when you started the agency, everything kind of just felt like it was scary. I remember it being very scary and not sure like how it was going to work out, but it felt so much more.

[00:02:49] Courtney: So much better than working at this, like, office job that you were at before. was there any, like, initial steps you took when you were building your agency specifically around paid social acquisition? Like, how did you know that this was the right thing to do?

[00:03:05] Alex: You mean specifically like the niche that I was going into within the marketing world?

[00:03:10] Courtney: Exactly. 

[00:03:11] Alex: I just saw the growth there. So at the time it was fairly new. Like we were, I don’t know, sub five years into digital marketing being like a big spend category for businesses. And a lot of businesses were going online for the first time.

[00:03:24] Alex: And I thought, okay, this is only the beginning. I just knew there was going to be a lot of opportunity in this space. I also love that it was changing so frequently. a platform like Google ads, yes, there are updates over time. Google has algorithm changes. But compared to social ads, it’s pretty slow and steady in terms of change.

[00:03:44] Alex: The world of TOK, et cetera, changes every week. There are new trends. There are new entire aspects of the platform that come out every year. And so it kind of fed that same part of me that loves new, exciting, pivoting. growing. And so it just was the combination of there being opportunity and a good fit for my own interests.

[00:04:11] Courtney: Yeah, yeah, no, amazing. And I will say that the agency has picked up different service offerings and has changed so dramatically over the years. How have you kind of been staying on top of that and making sure that we are kind of understanding what the landscape looks like over the years?

[00:04:29] Alex: Quite honestly, hiring the right people. It’s too much for one person to be able to digest. And so I felt like we were always a little bit behind until we got the key people in place. So we needed a head of creative. We need a head of digital advertising. We needed someone who was focused just on web updates.

[00:04:46] Alex: And each of those people had to have the same hunger for knowledge and growth and learning new things that you and I had as a founding members. 

[00:04:54] Courtney: Yeah, no, I, I think that most entrepreneurs face this issue where they start and they’re like, I know everything. I know exactly what I want it to be. And then they run into scaling problems because one person can only do so much. And so by finding the right people, that’s really where it’s going.

[00:05:12] Courtney: Our agency, at least, kind of took off. But also finding the right people is so difficult. Like, we’ve worked with a lot of different folks, and it takes a long time to find the right quality of person who fits the culture, Alright, so every marketer has that first campaign that changes everything. Can you tell us about the first paid social campaign that really made a difference for one of our clients?

[00:05:36] Alex: So I think the first one that I, that really grew a business super quickly and had me excited was a client called pink dust cosmetics. And this was maybe only six or eight months into us actually being an agency that this client came to me.

[00:05:54] Alex: And they were doing just a few orders a week out of their garage. And it was a side project for the founder. She was working a full time job and she just wanted to get a little bit more business. And we started advertising and she had such a unique product, such interesting content that it just really took off.

[00:06:11] Alex: We were able to achieve her target cost per acquisition very quickly. We were able to scale her ad spend very quickly. And within a matter of months, she was leaving her full time job to take on this business full time and had so many orders that her husband had to help her fulfill them. And that to me just That it was so rewarding.

[00:06:30] Alex: It was such a good feeling to see someone achieve their wildest dreams with their business. that was also when we kind of started to focus more on e commerce businesses because we saw how quickly we could scale them.

[00:06:42] Courtney: no, the Pink Dust story is really amazing just because, It, it kind of gave us like a case study and like a blueprint lot of other businesses. And we were able to apply a lot of the learnings we had on that account to other accounts. And we really started to see how this knowledge kind of works together.

[00:07:00] Courtney: And also one thing that I’ve always found with our clients is that if you start with a good product, your marketing is going to be so much easier almost. And Pink Dust had like a really good, group of customers who bought really regularly, which gave us this kind of proof of the product, and we were able to capitalize on that and really scale based on the feedback that her customers were giving us.

[00:07:26] Courtney: Like, that’s how we figured out the angles. And that gives a lot of learnings to apply to kind of these future campaigns that, that took off even more.

[00:07:34] Alex: Absolutely. And it was a great example as well of the ability of different channels to work together. Like the founder was incredible to work with and that she really gave us the power to take on her. SMS campaigns, her email campaigns, her website and make everything a cohesive strategy that could feed into each other.

[00:07:53] Alex: Which is something that not all of our clients give us liberty of.

[00:07:57] Courtney: Yeah, definitely. So AfTer years of working on the digital marketing agency end of your business, you decided to take Pinspiration, which is a studio Craft franchise that has grown really dramatically over the years which is obviously very different than a digital marketing agency.

[00:08:17] Courtney: So what drove you to take on that challenge?

[00:08:22] Alex: So I actually grew up in a family of franchisors. My parents owned franchise businesses. They were the franchise or they were a franchisee. My dad was a franchise consultant. And a CEO of various franchises when I was a kid. And so it was kind of the talk at the dinner table when I was growing up. And I had this background knowledge of it.

[00:08:44] Alex: And then we took on a few franchise clients in our early years because of that. I knew how to speak the language. I had connections in that industry. And it was actually a client of my dad’s, Pinspiration, that he franchised. So she was the founder, Brooke Rowe, had built this incredible concept that was basically similar to a paint and sip studio, except instead of just painting the same thing everyone else is painting, you could choose from literally hundreds of different crafts that were the most popular crafts from Pinterest.

[00:09:15] Alex: And so, the concept blew up in Phoenix. She was very popular. Her studio was doing really well. She franchised, but was having a really hard time. Finding franchisees. Part of that was she rightfully wanted to be very picky about who she was bringing on board. These were people who were going to represent her brand in cities all around the world.

[00:09:37] Alex: And part of it was that she just didn’t have the lead flow coming in to be that picky and grow the brand at the same time. And so my dad had worked with her and he came to me and said, should we partner on this project and see if we can grow this brand? And Brooke was excited about it. She said. We’ll give you guys majority equity in the franchise or if you take over the marketing and sales aspect.

[00:10:00] Alex: And so we decided to do it, partially because I love the concept. And partially because it kind of, it was it was tied into my central passions, which were seeing a brand grow, learning something new and taking that the brand from zero to hopefully 100. And initially we kind of took it on as a, let’s see how this goes over the first few months, and if we want to put our full time effort into it.

[00:10:29] Alex: we had to be super scrappy in the beginning, which I love doing. Like, my sister and I literally went, flew out to the store in Phoenix. I, I told my sister that I would pay for her hotel room if she would come with, We were young men and it was like an exciting, fun trip for us. And we took our iPhones and we filmed the videos of her studio and her customers and just tried to capture the joy of the studio.

[00:10:54] Alex: And like you said about pink dust and other clients of ours, that spark of joy that it brings the customers. It’s kind of like the foundation of marketing. Like that’s the thing that the emotion of the customers is what you want to put out into the world as a marketer. And her studio was just so full of that, that it was easy to capture.

[00:11:19] Alex: So we came back, to New York. I put together this video, just editing myself and I movie, and put it out on Facebook, put a little bit of ad spend behind it and the leads just came. Pouring in. I mean, we were getting hundreds, sometimes even thousands of leads a week of people who wanted to be a franchisee.

[00:11:39] Alex: And so, 

[00:11:40] Alex: that for me was exciting enough that I wanted to jump in with both feet and be the head of growth for this new brand.

[00:11:48] Courtney: Yeah, I mean, that’s that’s incredibly impressive. And maybe you could give a little bit of context of how rare that is for franchise because finding a franchise or or finding a franchisee for a franchise or is extremely difficult and expensive. and there’s all there’s this entire industry devoted to it.

[00:12:06] Courtney: It’s really challenging space to be. And so when you saw all those leads coming in, I mean, there must have been some kind of like light bulb that went off that was like, this is something special. This is something different. Yeah.

[00:12:19] Alex: absolutely. Yeah. I knew that brands were paying up to 20, 000 to franchise brokers for a closed franchise lead. And we were getting it down to, In the beginning, a 10th of that cost for a closed franchise was incredible. And then the percentage of the leads that were qualified was incredible as well.

[00:12:37] Alex: If you’re thinking about selling a franchise, inspiration, it takes 200, 000 or sometimes more to start a franchise between the franchise fee, finding a location, getting all of your inventory, et cetera, et cetera, building out the location. So you have to find people who have sufficient net worth and cash available, who are interested in the franchise, and then also who fit all of the other qualifications that you might have.

[00:13:05] Alex: So you might want someone who has some business experience, or in the case of Inspiration, people who had careers that showed that they could be a good teacher, work with people. And we were checking so many of those boxes, I thought, oh wow, we’re, this is going to go big in no time.

[00:13:22] Courtney: Yeah. And, but I’m sure it wasn’t all easy. So

[00:13:27] Alex: No,

[00:13:27] Courtney: were the biggest challenges that you guys had? Kind of in the early days when you were just getting started, what, what was kind of holding you back a little bit?

[00:13:36] Alex: think in the early days, despite so many of our leads being qualified, we still had to kind of navigate the nuances of what we wanted our ideal franchisee to look like. So some of our early franchisees, really just knocked it out of the park in terms of their performance. And some didn’t. And we looked at them and we said, okay, these are both qualified.

[00:13:57] Alex: They both hit all of the, everything that we wanted in a franchisee. And it was finding people who had the hunger to grow it beyond just a passion project. So we found that some of our franchisees, despite being perfectly capable of doing so, we’re kind of like, Hey, you know what? It’s making a little bit of money.

[00:14:17] Alex: I love going in there and interacting with customers. I think it’s fun. I don’t really want to. Work the extra hours to make it into a star franchise. And then other people were like, I want to be number one out of all the franchisees. And obviously that’s important to us as franchisors because when we want this to be something that is lucrative for our franchisees, but also that’s how we make money as a franchise or is royalties off of the revenue of our franchisees.

[00:14:46] Alex: And so we kind of had to. Get a little bit of a better feel of the level of hunger and drive in our applicants. And that took 

[00:14:55] Courtney: Yeah. 

[00:14:56] Alex: to figure out.

[00:14:56] Courtney: Yeah. What’s kind of interesting is that it’s almost like you weren’t closing a lead as much as you were like interviewing, not, they’re obviously not employees, but it’s kind of the same mindset of like, do I want to work with this person? Are they going to be a good fit for, you know Inspiration as a brand, and that’s very different than if you’re just going in and, you know, selling something to someone even though ultimately it is a sales pitch that you guys are doing.

[00:15:21] Alex: Yeah. No, I think, we really had to think about it like marriage almost and have this long period of dating and getting to know each other before we could even get to the pitch part.

[00:15:32] Courtney: Yeah, would you say that’s the most important element of franchise marketing, or is there something else that you think is more important that people should focus on when they’re, you know, promoting their franchise?

[00:15:43] Alex: So that was handled by the sales team. And so my job was to basically get as many leads in the door as possible and set up a automated, filter on the backend so that the sales team wasn’t bombarded. Basically what we did was we had this incredible video that was generating tons of leads.

[00:16:03] Alex: We basically just put as much marketing spend behind it as we could. And that would create the leads on the website. The leads, we added more and more questions over time on the website. And what we counterintuitively found was that if we added a question to the form, the conversion rate went up. Which,

[00:16:20] Courtney: interesting.

[00:16:21] Alex: up until a point, obviously.

[00:16:23] Alex: But, in the past, every online form I made, I said, okay, let’s make it as few questions as possible. And simple questions as possible. But what we found was that people were actually more likely to click submit at the end if they had invested a lot of time in filling out these detailed questions and they wanted it to feel like a legit opportunity that they were applying for.

[00:16:45] Alex: If it was four or five questions, it felt like, okay, these people aren’t serious because. No one would want to offer a business to someone after just learning a few things about them. So we added questions that were type in the answer questions about why they were interested in the franchise. We added a lot of questions about their financial, like credit score, cash available, etcetera.

[00:17:09] Alex: And then also about their business history. Had they own a franchise before? Had they owned a business before? And then we put all of that information to salesforce and we gave leads ratings based on that. And so we could tell them what leads our sales team should spend a lot of time on and which leads should maybe just actually be completely disqualified.

[00:17:28] Alex: Then we had automatic emails and text messages that would go out. And for people who looked like they weren’t a good fit, we would send an email saying, Hey, thank you so much for applying. We’re actually looking for people who X, Y, and Z. If you still think that this applies to you, please reach out to our sales team.

[00:17:43] Alex: Otherwise we’ll be in contact in the future if there are any other opportunities. And so we, it was very kind and like a gentle way of letting someone know that they weren’t qualified, but we would actually automatically disqualify as time went on a greater and greater portion of the leads that came in.

[00:17:59] Alex: And so as marketers, it was really about giving the sales team The most information and precision they could have in order to then handle these very detailed and lengthy conversations with the leads.

[00:18:12] Courtney: yeah, that’s a that’s amazing. I think that especially in the sass, this happens a lot where marketing and sales are always at odds with each other because marketing is bringing in leads and the sales team is always about, you know, quality and it sounds like you kind of really bridge that gap by just not cutting any corners and testing through what length of form and all this automation and I’m sure your sales team Team really appreciated that because dealing with a thousand leads in a week is probably a huge challenge for a small sales team that’s kind of scrappy too.

[00:18:43] Alex: Absolutely. Yeah. And I think that’s one of the benefits of having a marketer on, cause I was one of the owners of the company. And so I think oftentimes marketers are left out of the, like, the Head table decision making process, or even aren’t considered critical as finding like an equity holder that has marketing experience.

[00:19:04] Alex: But marketing kind of like bridges the gap between your customers and your internal team. I think it’s so important.

[00:19:10] Courtney: Yeah, yeah. And I’ve also found that we are the most success that I’ve ever found is whenever I’m allowed to talk to the sales team and get feedback and like work together to develop the marketing message too, because I’m sure that the sales team would come back and say, we’re getting a lot of people who think this way.

[00:19:28] Courtney: And by just tweaking some of the language, you’re able to educate people before they get to sales. So it’s a little bit of an easier process overall.

[00:19:36] Alex: Yes. Yeah. I remember we had do a lot of tweaks around language to find people who are more serious about owning a business. So the language kind of went from are you passionate about crafting to have you always dreamt of owning a creative business and even that slight tweak in messaging made a difference.

[00:19:54] Courtney: Yeah, because those two things, they sound pretty much the same, but they mean very different things. And when you’re seeing it, you’re associating totally different meanings to them. So small changes and not cutting corners sounds like the, the key here. Um, do you feel like this is kind of the standard approach to franchise marketing or like when you look at other franchises, what what are they doing that’s kind of different than how you approached inspiration?

[00:20:21] Courtney: Yeah, 

[00:20:23] Alex: is that it’s a lot less of let’s find a mutual fit, and a lot more of like desperation to just get as many leads in as possible. But then what happens is They get these leads in that waste the sales team’s time and everyone is frustrated and spending a ton of time on conversations that never lead anywhere.

[00:20:42] Alex: The other issue that I see that is super common is not understanding how many leads you need to bring in in order to be picky and close the right people. And so they, I’ll talk to a franchisor and they say, you know, we’re getting like 10, 15 leads a week. Or a month and we should be closing them anytime now.

[00:21:03] Alex: And what I know from this process is that sub 5 percent of your leads will even make it to the final stages of disclosure. And so you really need huge beginning of funnel, when you have that many steps to close.

[00:21:21] Courtney: it is wild how long the franchise process is. There’s just so much legal stuff they gotta get through that you really do need to go volume. But also quality, as it always is, huh?

[00:21:34] Alex: And the final thing I’ll say is that I think what we were able to capture in the video that we used for marketing was the actual day to day experience of being in the franchise location and working with customers. And I think a lot of times what I see is that franchise marketing is kind of this black box of Do you want to own X, Y, and Z business?

[00:22:01] Alex: And you, you really need to give people the feeling in their heart of what it’s going to be like to make them motivated, but to also capture the right person.

[00:22:11] Courtney: right. Right, no, it, it, I, that conspiration video that you guys filmed, it’s like, there’s so much energy involved and there’s so much excitement and I think that, You’re not selling a business, you’re selling a life, like you’re selling a lifestyle of because you want, the, the thing about franchises is usually you want someone who’s going to be an owner operator, who’s like in the store every day.

[00:22:32] Courtney: So you want someone who’s excited about that, which does feel very different from a lot of other franchise ads I’ve seen.

[00:22:38] Alex: And that’s not true of every franchise. There are a lot of franchises where you don’t have to be in a location. Like, I think you hire a manager and you might have 10 different locations. That was something that was unique to inspiration is that we knew that for the locations to be successful, we had to have an onsite operator who had that level of buy in that was going to take care of customers because it’s really each location is a community.

[00:23:02] Alex: And if you hire a manager, it just doesn’t have the same level of heart in it, but it needs. What 

[00:23:07] Courtney: yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Um, so, Where do you see franchise marketing going in 

[00:23:13] Courtney: the next 5 to 10 years? 

[00:23:14] Alex: regulated, and it’s also becoming more and more challenging to

[00:23:24] Alex: get low cost leads on social media platforms. So I think what we’re going to see is that franchises have to be really excellent in order to compete and work in this space. And I think we’re going to see that the franchises who don’t have Happy franchisees, good numbers, happy customers, good online reviews, are gonna kind of like slowly wither away.

[00:23:48] Courtney: Yeah, no, that’s so true of like everything with online advertising is that everything’s just getting more expensive, more competitive. So quality of product, quality of service, all of those things are coming more and more into play. So focusing on having a good overall business is always going to be like your foundation for marketing.

[00:24:07] Alex: Yeah, absolutely, and there’s so much more transparency through the funnel too. Now that you can, you can Google a franchise and see what franchisees and customers are saying and find articles and the history of the locations. You can’t, you can’t hide online anymore.

[00:24:26] Courtney: Yes. Yeah. sO you, you kind of mentioned this before that you’ve always kind of been like a serial entrepreneur and you’ve worked in a lot of different businesses. How do you feel like your background in digital marketing has supported you with your entrepreneurial initiatives, 

[00:24:41] Alex: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think it gave me just literacy in the language of modern growth of Businesses. and I think if I had had, for instance, a background in accounting, Yeah, I don’t even know if it would be possible for me to have had a role like this at a company,

[00:24:59] Courtney: I always feel like whenever I talk to other business owners or leaders or whatever, and they don’t have this like digital marketing background, it’s always hard about the numbers. It’s all black and white. And I feel like digital marketing, just marketing in general, brings a lot of color and brings a lot of the nuance of the people that you’re selling to, you know, it, it kind of makes you think.

[00:25:23] Courtney: One step further of like, okay, yes, we are selling to females ages 18 to 34, but like, what’s their deal? Like, what are they into? What are they, what does their life look like? And how does this product solve their problem? And I think that that is missing a lot with people who don’t have any kind of marketing background.

[00:25:42] Alex: That’s so true. I think one of the things that was exciting to me about digital marketing, especially in the early days, is it’s almost like you are running focus groups and you get to peer into the psyche of the company. The consumer. And so you put an ad out and the cool thing about social advertising is not only do you see click through rate conversion rate their behavior with the ad, also actually get to read their comments and what they’re saying and how they’re 

[00:26:09] Courtney: Yeah. 

[00:26:10] Alex: it.

[00:26:10] Alex: So that is cool.

[00:26:12] Courtney: Yeah, I actually just had this conversation the other day with our creative director and we were talking about how, Like direct to consumer that DTC exciting industry is kind of starting to change a lot because we’re realizing that you have to also be in retail. Like all of our DTC brands were like, you just, you have to be in retail too, because there’s no way that you can like the way that ads have been working is going to continue working.

[00:26:41] Courtney: You’re not going to get a low enough cost per acquisition, but what you should be thinking about with your digital ads is not necessarily only bringing customers and only doing brand awareness, but really treating it as like a focus group It’s like the cheapest focus group you’ll ever have because you can test all kinds of different messaging You can see how people respond to it and then you can use that information for other marketing efforts for your emails for your Packaging for what things you want to focus on and so I think it’s about kind of shifting that mindset and Realizing that like you said the beginning here is digital marketing is always changing.

[00:27:16] Courtney: This landscape is constantly moving It’s very exciting, but you have to kind of always be aware of the next thing that’s coming

[00:27:24] Alex: absolutely, yeah.

[00:27:25] Courtney: Can you tell me what your biggest challenge is? Since you’ve started your business what what has been the hardest thing for you as an entrepreneur over the years? overall?

[00:27:37] Alex: Think in general, my biggest challenge personally is always letting go of control. And I noticed that every time I do our business gets better, but I think you and I share this in that we were always the A student. We always do. Completed things ahead of time. We always cross every T and dotted every I and relinquishing that to someone who doesn’t have the same investment in your business as you do is when it’s hard to find the right person to give up that control to.

[00:28:11] Alex: But even when you do find the right person, it’s a scary process. And I feel like over the last three, four years, especially, I’ve taken some major steps back from day to day operations in both businesses. And the result has been, there’s no more bottleneck of Alex stopping things from going at the pace that they should.

[00:28:32] Alex: And so many people are better at so many things than I am. The, yeah, it’s, it’s been a really cool process and I think it’s, it’s cured me of some of my control issues and perfectionism to watch. Yeah.

[00:28:46] Courtney: there now, the bottleneck is me, but I think we’ve kind of like found, like been on that journey together where we will sit and have these conversations of like, why, why can’t I hand this thing off? Like, why, what is stopping the actual handoff?

[00:29:02] Courtney: Like, I trust this other person. I know they’ll do a good job, but why can’t I actually give it away? And I think. It is just like a control thing. And once you like, identify it and name it is so much easier to like, okay, look, and I can name all these other times in the past where I have let it go and it has worked out.

[00:29:21] Courtney: But it is a very big challenge. I think for, for

[00:29:24] Courtney: people like us. 

[00:29:25] Alex: Yeah, and I, I had to also do my own work cause I, I realized that so much of my identity was in like doing a kick ass job and getting the A and feeling like, Oh, I, I built this campaign and I achieved this thing. So there’s a lot of ego wrapped up in it too. If I’m being totally honest and vulnerable, like letting other people have those successes is on some level an emotional thing that you have to let go of too.

[00:29:50] Courtney: yeah, so true. Is there any point where. You wanted to give up or you weren’t sure that you could keep going. I know there have been like, some. Hard, hard times. I mean, you’ve been running right left agency for nine years. We’re almost at our 10 year anniversary, which is

[00:30:05] Alex: Yeah. 

[00:30:06] Courtney: But at any point where you’re like, I don’t think I can do this anymore.

[00:30:10] Alex: Oh, gosh. I think that those moments for me were always team related. A big one was when I lost who was my first employee. She was my right hand woman, she built a lot of these campaigns with me from day one and she left to go work at a bigger agency. And I was, I was like heartbroken about it, I took it so, I felt, it felt very personal to me, and so that was a hard moment.

[00:30:38] Alex: I don’t think there was ever a time though where I genuinely considered, not doing the business anymore. Because I think you and I talked about this before where it becomes addictive over, over time, the level of, control to be able to to choose who you work with, both in terms of employees and clients and the freedom that we’ve built into the business to be able to have freedom of both location, and, projects that we choose is it would be really hard for me to give that up.

[00:31:15] Courtney: Yeah, what’s really interesting is that it’s one of the very rare occasions where I can confidently say the grass is not greener on the other side. Like, like there are times where I’m like, this is so. Hard. This is so challenging. Like, there are so many elements that I don’t have control over. And I just want to do the right thing.

[00:31:34] Courtney: And then I always think, like, well, if I wasn’t doing this, I would be working for someone else or doing this other thing. And I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t nearly have as much fun. I wouldn’t have get as much fulfillment out of it because, it wouldn’t be kind of our thing that, that, we felt it wouldn’t have this history.

[00:31:53] Alex: And and I think that’s, it’s, Yeah, 

[00:31:56] Courtney: Yeah, I always look back and be like well, it can’t be worse than it was, you know Six years ago when that major crisis happened like we can always Grow bigger and better as long as you don’t stop, you know Awesome. Well if there was I mean this we’ve kind of talked about this a little bit But if you could give yourself one piece of advice when you were just starting your career, what would it be?

[00:32:19] Courtney: Yeah

[00:32:21] Alex: That was a great question. I think I took everything very hard and very personally, especially in the few years, first few years of starting my business. Where if I pitched an idea to a client and they didn’t like it, it would really hurt, or if a client left us to go to a different agency, I would be up at night about it.

[00:32:42] Alex: And I think with time and perspective, I’ve overcome that quite a bit. But I think if I could tell myself to just let go of the, not everything is about me, it’s not always personal about me. It’s, it’s almost never personal in business. and just take everything a little bit more lighthearted,

[00:33:05] Courtney: Mm hmm.

[00:33:07] Courtney: Yeah, than done. 

[00:33:08] Courtney: Awesome. Well, Thank you so much for being on the show, Alex. Is thank you everyone at home for listening.

[00:33:13] Courtney: If you enjoyed today’s episode, please make sure to subscribe, share it with a friend, leave us a review. And if there’s anything you’d like to hear on an upcoming episode, just let us know for more insights. Please follow us on LinkedIn or visit right left agency. com and we will be back next week with more stories of success, innovation and marketing strategies to help you grow.

[00:33:33] Courtney: Thank you so much.