This episode, I’m joined by the President of Social Hospitality Debbie Miller to discuss how she scaled up her marketing efforts as her agency grew, built a useful network of connections in her field, and turned her side hustle into a full-time gig.
Debbie is a marketing communications specialist who has worked in digital marketing, content development, and social media for over 15 years. A motivated digital marketer, Debbie brings a unique perspective from her brand, agency, and consulting experience. Debbie launched her business, Social Hospitality, as a side project in 2011. For six years, she consulted clients on a freelance basis, spoke at industry events, and taught social media courses while maintaining a full-time job at another marketing company, before transitioning to Social Hospitality full-time in January 2017. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of The Consulting Trap:
- Social media for the hospitality industry.
- How Debbie used a blog to get her first clients.
- How to build a useful network of connections.
- How to scale up your networking efforts.
- Ways to differentiate yourself from other agencies.
- The benefits of having a team if you want to scale up.
- The importance of being adaptable and flexible with your clients.
- How to find your ideal work-life balance.
Resources:
Connecting with Debbie Miller:
Connecting with the host:
Quotables:
- 6:29 – “I do tailor my message and my pitch based on who I’m talking to.”
- 17:14 – “It kind of happened naturally, at the beginning I only had a small number of clients so it was all pretty manageable but as I’ve scaled based on each client, I’ve learned so much working with different clients as well both in terms of their industry or whatever their business is as well as how they function as a business and how they manage their teams and their projects and whatever I’m working on so either their email campaigns or their social media management, just working with different clients and getting exposure to those different ways of working has been really enlightening and has helped me be able to adapt and be familiar with all these different options out there.”
- 18:23 – “If the mission becomes trial and error you need to be comfortable with both of those. You need to be comfortable with making mistakes, you’re going to make several and that’s ok.”