This episode, the Founder of Rise Marketing Group Ben Lund talks about the first steps to starting your own hustle, how to get proof of concept, and the way your role in your business changes as it grows.
Ben Lund has worked in advertising for over 15 years, leading and managing accounts for top firms like Google, Yahoo, and Monster. Having found his passion for advertising and wanting to start his own business Ben founded Rise Marketing Group, a performance advertising agency that creates curated programs tailored to drive growth. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of The Consulting Trap:
- What a performance marketing group is.
- How Ben got his first clients through leveraging his network.
- The first steps to starting your own hustle.
- The agility that comes with working in the small business space.
- How to get proof of concept.
- Assessing market demand relative to profitability.
- The way fees evolve as a company grows.
- When to hire your first employees and managers.
- The way your role in your business changes as it grows.
Resources:
Connecting with Ben Lund:
Connecting with the host:
Quotables:
- 4:02 – “Every client no matter how small it was was a huge win because that was just proof of business concept, ok awesome one client two clients that means I could do this for that much longer but it came down to hustle, hustle, and getting out there and not shying away and not being afraid of going to conferences and putting yourself out there.”
- 4:28 – “One of the challenges with the entrepreneurial mindset is that we tend to forget or gloss over a lot of the suffering that we go through when we start up and we put it in words like hustle, or we put it in words like grit and those things sound great from a rearview mirror but it’s super difficult for someone to leverage that concept.”
- 15:57 – “Early on we were charging not that much for Google Ads because it was just me and a computer so there’s zero overhead and now we have a team and we go to conferences and continue to educate ourselves so our rates have increased appropriately because we offer so much more now and we have multiple levels of management and the expertise so that’s another thing that’s been evolving over time.”
- 18:39 – “You want to have that right balance of hiring or bringing on resources for growth but you don’t want to over-leverage yourself like oh shoot I thought this would be great and we’d have so much work but a lot of people are just twiddling their thumbs this isn’t good, so it’s a balance and sometimes it’s luck.”
- 24:06 – “When you start a company or product or whatever it is you just need to get out there, and getting back to the whole hustle even though hustle is way more than just a glamorous term like ah he hustled just like Gary V, it’s a lot of work but you have to get out there in some format with your network, your peers, go to conferences and just get out there.”