You probably need better work boundaries. Would you agree?
Becca Bunch ran into the boundary-setting dilemma not long after she started her own social media agency, Homemade Social. Her business was scaling quickly, and with that growth came the need for clear boundaries with her expanding list of clients. Becca wasted no time taking intentional steps to protect her time, energy and resources. And she soon found that the boundaries she set would support her growth and benefit everyone involved in Homemade Social, including her clients.
In this episode of the Conquer the Chaos Podcast, Becca joins Clate Mask to discuss the importance of boundaries, the hesitations a lot of business owners have with setting them and why they’re imperative to scaling your business and enjoying your life.
Mentioned in this episode:
Transcript
[00:00:23] Clate: Alright, welcome everybody to this episode of the Conquer the Chaos Podcast. I'm Clate Mask, co-founder and CEO of Keap and your host of the Conquer the Chaos Podcast. Today, we've got a guest that I'm really pumped to talk with about a couple of the personal keys to success, as well as one or two of the business keys.
[00:00:42] Clate:Becca Bunch is our guest today and she runs a company called Homemade Social. I'll let her tell you a little bit more about that. But let me just start by saying, Becca, thank you so much for being with us.
[00:00:55] Becca: Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to chat. Like you said, I'll explain a little bit more about Homemade Social, but we're a boutique digital marketing agency based in Phoenix, mostly specializing in organic social media management.
[00:01:07] Clate: Awesome. You guys are doing really cool stuff. Becca and I are also both Sun Devils. We both come from Arizona State University. And so we're going to try to leave aside the go-devil excitement and just get focused on how you can establish the personal keys to success in a way that helps you to avoid burnout, particularly in certain times where it can be really, really challenging.
[00:01:34] Clate: And as I was talking with Becca just before we started, she said … Becca, you're telling me about COVID and how COVID enabled you to get clear on some of the aspects that I find are crucial that kind of underlie the personal key success. So maybe you start out by telling us just a little bit more about your social agency you have today.
[00:01:54] Clate: I know you've got eight employees. You guys have been running for a few years now. You're doing awesome stuff. And we'll dig in a little bit more on that on the strategy and automation side, but I think it's helpful for people to understand a little more context about your story as we jump into the boundary discussion around personal keys because I think people can really resonate with that.
[00:02:14] Becca: Okay, great idea. So I founded Homemade Social in February of 2019. I essentially was offering similar services but just as a solopreneur, as a freelancer, um, starting in the fall of 2017. So I was able to build up my own book of clientele. And I got to a point where I was like, “I need to scale and grow this beyond just me.”
[00:02:36] Becca: So that's when Homemade Social came to be in February of 2019. So in 2020, it was just a crazy year for our business. I'm technically one full year into business ownership. I think I had a team of two and a half at this point. Let's say it's April 2020, and like many other businesses, we saw a quick decrease in sales. Then, maybe within 45 days, we also had a really quick turnaround with a huge influx of inquiries and clients who needed social media and digital marketing help because so many of their out-of-home budgets or event marketing budgets were now being allocated toward digital marketing.
[00:03:20] Becca: So it was crazy because it was a series of events that almost forced me to then scale at a pace that I wasn't quite ready for. I didn't … Up until that point, I had the leisure of being able to solve each individual problem as my ship was sailing, and I got to this point where I was like, I didn't want to say no to these incoming leads. So we were just pretty slammed as a team.
[00:03:46] Clate: Okay. So let me just pause you for a second right there because you're a little over a year into your business. You've got two … And you'd run it for a couple of years just yourself, but now you're adding members of your team, so you've got some payroll responsibility, you've got clientele. And when the pandemic hits, you get the slowdown, it picks up. But you said something really important — you said “I'd been able to kind of handle it,” but then you had this surge in business. And the reason why I think this is super important is because as I've said many times, businesses don't grow in a smooth, linear fashion. They grow in stair-step fashion.
[00:04:25] Clate: And when you have that real quick surge and it's going up, and it can happen. In the example you provided, it's post-COVID. Now everybody's moving dollars to digital marketing. So you get this surge of business. But every business has these kinds of things where maybe they're getting a new partner and that partner is bringing in a bunch of business for them, or maybe there's been something that's changed in their industry or their geography, but something stimulates demand. And all of a sudden they're getting all this, and it's great. At first, you're like, “Oh, this is awesome. We're growing.” And then it's like, “Oh, wait, maybe not so great.”
[00:04:59] Becca: Yes, exactly. So I think it was kind of around October. So six months into this madness of growth, where I finally took a look around and I was like, “Oh my gosh, I have to rearrange these automations and boundaries in my business to better serve me,” because social media especially is just one of those industries that because it's very fluid in it's deadlines, things are always being published, and so many people have access and a say in what is going out that everyone feels like they have a say. Deadlines aren't as respected.
[00:05:35] Becca: If this was … I always compare it to a magazine or a newspaper publishing house. When the publisher has a printing go-live date, there's no changes, right? But you don't necessarily have that boundary or that rule to set with clients, but you still have to, at some point be like, “We need to know when this is ready to be published.”
[00:05:57] Becca: So I got to a point, I remember that Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, a client whose Black Friday campaign had been solidified to my understanding two weeks prior texted me. I told all clients that our office was closed that Friday. Everything was scheduled.
[00:06:17] Becca: And it's something in my mind, I was just like not only is this guy … I didn't necessarily have anything in my contract that would, I don't wanna use the word punish him, but like, it's not like there would be a fee or some sort of penalty. I didn't really have anything like that to be able to be like, “I can't do this for you,” because essentially I wasn't working. He's like, “This needs to go out.” And so then I'm stuck there on my holiday, on my day off, being like, “How do I communicate this boundary to this client who I have a long-term contract with, who I want to keep a healthy relationship with, who I don't want to piss off, but he's pissing me off right now, right?”
[00:07:05] Becca: There's no respect right here. So I basically made it my goal before I sent over my contract renewals for the next year. I met with our attorney and I wrote all of these boundaries into our contract. A lot of it had to do with deadlines when content requests are due, when content feedback is due, how many rounds of edits are included in a round of feedback, and then like what happens if anything needs to be done after that, what feedback fees are imposed. How are those fees built? So those were huge. And those are things that went into legal writing. But other than that, I was able to make some boundary changes just in my personal life that didn't have to go into a legal contract. Have you heard of the app Opal?
[00:07:48] Clate: I haven't, but I do want to get to that. Let's get to Opal in just a second, but I want to put a fine point on a couple of things that you said because I think they're so appropriate and relevant for business owners, especially those who are running agencies or who are the talent, so to speak. They're bringing … Their clients are trying to get a piece of them.
[00:08:12] Clate: And what I see in these kinds of service businesses is when it's somewhere between two and 10 employees, the business owner gets pulled and stretched so much by the demands of the clients and is always running in and saving the day and putting out the fires. There's a certain amount of gratification that comes from that, and so people sometimes get themselves onto a hamster wheel of doing this over and over and over.
[00:08:40] Clate: But you did something different. In a period of six months, you got to a place where you're like, “We're not doing this. I see where this is going.” I see people sometimes do this for years. And what happens is they plateau in the growth of their business because they don't stop, create those boundaries, and make it possible for the business to grow because the customer understands, “Okay, you know, I've got to pay more, or I've got to lose the opportunity to make the change if it's not done in a certain period of time.”
[00:09:17] Clate: It regulates the relationship and those boundaries that you created are so … People talk about this all the time in personal relationships, but in a business relationship, especially when you're running an agency and many of our key customers are running agencies of one sort or another where the business owner is really integral to the delivery of that service …
[00:09:38] Clate: And so, if you don't draw those boundaries, you can literally go for years and you not only plateau in the growth but you really lose the satisfaction, the fulfillment of the business. And I see people burn out a lot because they don't do that. So props to you for recognizing it in six months, putting those in place, getting with your attorney and saying, “Okay, we need to make some adjustments to the contract.” Before we go to Opal.
[00:10:02] Clate: What happened? Tell me, tell the audience — what did you experience when you began? Maybe talk about some of the specific things you put in place and then how that changed your business and the strain on you.
[00:10:17] Becca: Yeah. I would say some things that we made really clear were our scope of work. We had to really clearly define what is and isn't included because in the nature of our industry, it is typically most effective to charge a flat fee for the month and you're getting X, Y deliverables. So we make it really clear like what is and what isn't. And if a client needs something outside of it, we say, “Sure, we can help, but that isn't in scope.”
[00:10:44] Becca: We can do it at our hourly rate for you or whatever that is and other things that go into that. I always say with digital marketing and social media, it's like a glorified group project. As perfect of a world as it would be if I could just take your branding and some information about your company and post social media posts about you every day, it's just not … I have to be like your micro journalist. I need to be communicating with you and being told your story, getting updates on what's going on in the organization, listening to customer feedback, and what's going on with sales. I have to be very involved in conversations.
[00:11:26] Becca: And so as much as I was focusing on what our deliverables are, we ultimately decided to add an entire section to our agreement of client responsibilities. So then it clearly defines where I can be like, “Hey, in this line item or section three, it says every asset that's submitted to us is going to be assumed as it's approved to be used for social.”
[00:11:48] Becca: So what here do we need to eliminate? That way it forces the client to be like, “Do I really like this headshot of me?” If I see that headshot and I put it on your social media and they'll be like, “I don't like that picture.”
[00:12:01] Clate: You're like, well …
[00:12:02] Becca: Okay. Yeah. You should have thought … These are why we ask these questions sooner.
[00:12:06] Becca: Another issue that came up as we were implementing is “This is great. We got the clients to sign these new agreements. We've got the boundaries in place. What happens when a client is like, ‘Wait, can I, can I get one more edit on this?’” Then we ran into, “Okay, how do we communicate against pushback? What's the best way to go about it?” And the example I gave is a very simple one where it's like, “I want one more edit on this,” but there can be much more complex versions of that question. And so I ultimately hired basically a consultant. She was also a Sun Devil. She owns a company called Career Civility, and she basically helped us write semi-custom email templates or phrases that we now keep handy in our account management folder. For problematic scenarios, we have phrases we can just copy and paste and put them in an email. If a client is giving pushback on a boundary or is being disrespectful, now we kind of just have a Rolodex of solutions up our sleeves. So we don't have to rethink the hamster wheel.
[00:13:21] Clate: I love that. That's awesome. What was it? Civility. You said it was …
[00:13:25] Becca: Career Civility.
[00:13:26] Clate: It's great. Go Devils. More good stuff coming out of the Sun Devils. So let me see if I can summarize that. So what you did is you put some boundaries in place.
[00:13:35] Clate: First of all, by the way, I love that you're calling out that there's the retainer and then there's other things outside the retainer. So many times we'll have Keap customers who do this type of work. And their whole goal is to get the retainer. They're so excited about getting the retainer that then a bunch of stuff gets loaded into the work. From a profitability standpoint, it's not a great thing, but they were so thrilled with the retainer. So it's a very kind of predictable path that we see. You made changes to the retainer. You made changes to edits on the work. You got really clear on the scope of work. You help people understand the fees or costs that would be involved if they made a change.
[00:14:22] Clate: You kind of created schedules so that people would follow those. Before I ask you, what happened when you did all of that, I want to just point out why this is so interesting to me from the standpoint of the three personal keys to success. When people establish their rhythm of execution, which serves their life vision — the second key is life vision and the third is the rhythm of execution — what they find is, if their business does not serve very effectively that vision and the rhythm that they're trying to establish, they constantly bump into these challenges. They're trying to do certain things in their rhythm of execution that bring overall fulfillment and satisfaction.
[00:15:06] Clate: They haven't structured the business to be able to serve that well. And so when you and I were talking, I was like, “Oh, this is great.” What you just described is a great example of how you have to make adjustments on the business side that actually feed the vision and the rhythm of execution, not to mention just the overall sanity and the mindset that we need to have.
[00:15:28] Clate: So I really appreciate you taking us through that, but I also wanted to call it out because many people in what we call Keap Nation have a business around the space of what you described, whether it's marketing services of some sort, an agency of some sort. And so I appreciate you going through that and I love that you've now scaled the business to eight employees.
[00:15:49] Clate: Tell us what happened when you put this in place. How did your clients receive it? How did it … What effect did it have on the business? And then really what did it do for you? How did it impact you?
[00:16:01] Becca: Yeah. I remember being really nervous. My goal was to send all clients this new finalized master service agreement before December 1, so that way they had 30 days to review it before renewals were coming up for January. And I presented it in a way which I think was really smart. Looking back, I'm so glad I did that. But I presented in a way that it was a benefit to them because it allowed us to really focus on our deliverables and we weren't going to be spending wasted time on projects that weren't in scope from, let's say, other clients. We knew exactly what work we are going into for the week and how much extra time we would have if people needed it. So I was certain that certain accounts were going to give me pushback and no one did, maybe they didn't read it all the way, but it was so much easier to implement than I thought.
[00:17:04] Becca: It honestly just gave me so much more peace of mind knowing that we have these systems in place and we're protected. If the client approved something, it's approved. It's good to go. We don't … It's no longer our responsibility because they gave us the thumbs up and they like it this way.
[00:17:23] Clate: Yeah, it gives you greater confidence in the way you execute because you have that system, that structure in place. And I hope people caught the very subtle point you just made, which you had the experience of frustration on Black Friday, and by December 1, you had put this in place. So I just want to call out how quickly you moved on that.
[00:17:48] Becca: That's true. I didn't even think about that. Yeah, probably that next week I was like, “Attorney, we need a meeting.”
[00:17:52] Clate: But then you created that space for yourself and for your team as well as the confidence.
[00:17:58] Clate: Okay. We're going to keep this going, but first a quick message for you. Conquer the Chaos listeners, let me talk to you straight for just a minute. You're running your business, and it dominates your mind. It can be very difficult to take a step back and see what's needed to create balance in your business and your personal life, and to create great growth and development and progress in your business and personal life.
[00:18:20] Clate: One of the most powerful ways to gain the perspective that you need is to get away from things and immerse yourself in an environment where you're going to be inspired, where you can see possibilities, where you can create connections, and where you can learn and grow and develop. And I know of no better place for entrepreneurs than Keap’s Let's Grow Summit. For years. We ran this conference as just an amazing mecca for entrepreneurship. And then, truth be told, for a few years, we didn't run it. We got back to it last year, and this year, we're putting it on and it is going to be awesome. I am so excited about this.
[00:18:57] Clate: And I want you as our listeners to not miss out on this event. It's going to be November 20-22 in downtown Phoenix with the main days being the 21 and the 22. You can register for it by going to keap.com/letsgrowsummit. That's https://keap.com/letsgrowsummit. And you can take advantage of our early bird registration pricing, which expires at the end of July.
[00:19:21] Clate: So if you are needing a reflection time, an opportunity to take a step back, gain greater perspective, inspiration, and most of all, see what automation — the fifth key to success — can do for your business, then make sure that you attend the Let's Grow Summit. Keap.com/letsgrowsummit, November 20-22 in Phoenix. I look forward to seeing you there. Alright, now back to our chat.
[00:19:46] Clate: That's awesome. Okay. Let's talk about personal boundaries that you described because this also feeds the personal keys to success.
[00:19:54] Becca: Okay. So a lot of the boundaries that I set from a personal standpoint went in relation to my phone and my screen time as a social media agency owner. Part of my job is to be connected and be on social media so I can know what's trending and what cultural zeitgeist is going on.
[00:20:11] Clate: The blurry line between business and personal is really tough in your world. I mean, it is for everybody, but especially in yours. So by the way, this is why I want to draw it out because if you can do it running a social media agency, then anybody can say, “Okay, I can create the boundaries.”
[00:20:26] Becca: True, true. Okay. So two apps changed my life. One is called Opal. It is basically a very advanced version of Apple's screen time limitation feature and you can set it. My favorite feature that it has is a 15-minute auto-doom scroll feature. So if I'm on a singular platform like instagram for 15 minutes, it shuts me off. It makes me take a 15 minute break. And there are instances, of course, you can set rules for how strict you want it to be before it lets you back in or you can determine how focused you'd like to be. But that one was huge. The other one that was huge is an app called OpenPhone and OpenPhone is an app.
[00:21:09] Becca: I believe it's like $16 a month and it gives you a secondary phone number. So you have a second phone number, but on the same phone and it's only connected to a certain app. So this now becomes the phone number you give your clients. And what is amazing about this app is you can set it to automatically have out-of-office notices.
[00:21:29] Becca: So if a client calls me at 5:01 p.m.? Straight to voicemail and anytime out of work hours, they get sent to voicemail and in my voicemail, I say, “In my contract, I actually say email is the only approved form of communication.” In the nature of our work, we need a document. We need links. Oftentimes, we have digital assets we need. But sometimes I need to send them a code for two-factor authentication and it goes to their phone. So there are instances where I will be communicating with them on the phone, but same thing.
[00:22:05] Becca: I have that set up for text. If a client texts me, auto responses go out. That makes my life a lot easier. That way, if a client were to text me on a holiday or on a Black Friday, I don't even get notified. But another great component to that is it integrates with Slack. And so I can have a Slack channel for my team called “Phone.”
[00:22:23] Becca: And if a client sends a two-factor authentication code, that's someone on the team needs, or if a client's asking a question, multiple people, like whoever is on the account, can chime in and reply. So that has been really great. The last thing I did on my phone was I deleted the email app.
[00:22:42] Becca: So I don't even have my work email app on my phone. Granted, I'm on my laptop. I'm there all the time, but in our contract, it states that we'll reply to any business-related email within 24 hours, if not sooner. So clients, they know what to expect. It just takes off the pressure of me feeling the need to always be in the know.
[00:23:09] Becca: And in the case of an emergency, I can go to the Chrome app and I can just go to gmail.com and log in. Do it the old-fashioned way. But that way I don't have any notifications or distractions.
[00:23:21] Clate: I appreciate the tools and the hacks that you've shared, certainly OpenPhone. A second business line is something that’s part of our software.So people can get that benefit and be able to separate out their personal business life. But whether it's Opal, OpenPhone or even just putting in place some of the things you described, like removing an app that’s going to take you down a path that is not going to be productive …
[00:23:50] Clate: I appreciate the hacks and the tricks there. What I especially love is the underlying principle of designing your life in a way that serves your life and that's the whole point of the key to success around the vision and then the rhythm of execution. Too many people get pulled down a path as entrepreneurs, where they're just chasing that task.
[00:24:13] Clate: They're chasing the project. They're doing those things. They're not designing what it is that they want to achieve as a really fulfilling business life. So I appreciate you sharing those tips. And I always love hearing some of the different things people do. I have all kinds of those things as well.
[00:24:27] Clate: And for different seasons in life, you do different things. Different times of the year, frankly, different seasons of the year, I do different things, depending on if my kids are in school or not in school — those kinds of things. But what I find is that the tips are really important.
[00:24:42] Clate: But it's that underlying principle of designing the life you want as an entrepreneur. Design it and don't be beholden to the projects, the clients, the work, the normal things that people do. So thanks for modeling that. I totally appreciate you sharing that. One last area that I'd love to talk about is around strategy.
[00:25:01] Clate: I talk a lot about company strategy and customer strategy. And the customer strategy is all about how we take a customer in our business through the lifecycle or the customer journey that we want them to go through. And when you get really Intentional about this. you can design something that's really awesome. And I know you do a lot of these kinds of things, so I just thought maybe we take a second to talk about when you think about your client journey that you bring people through and you bring them on board, but sometimes they're coming on, they're not ready to do it — to sign a retainer with you or sign a master service agreement with you to be a client in a certain way … What have you found in your strategy that you're using … I'm asking you this because in the world that you're in on social media, I think a lot of people can learn from this.
[00:25:51] Clate: But what have you found that's useful in your customer strategy to bring those people gradually into your world of Homemade Social for your brand?
[00:26:03] Becca: Yes. So what I've learned is the larger we grow, the better and larger size accounts that we are able to work with. It's been an interesting adjustment because our points of contact have changed because when we first started, we're usually working with solopreneurs representing them.
[00:26:25] Becca: And so we're working with someone who is in the day-to-day of every single aspect of that business. And so as we've grown and scaled, oftentimes, we're now working with only the marketing department or only an internal marketing contact. Sometimes we've actually been like … There was an example in this last client we onboarded.
[00:26:45] Becca: They onboarded us before they onboarded their marketing manager. They wanted to be live on social before they even … They hadn't even hired their marketing contact. So that was a whole client learning experience for me because. Some of the jargon we use, their CEO, who was older, wasn't even familiar or didn't quite even know what an Instagram reel was.
[00:27:05] Becca: I'm starting to learn that, I have to kind of customize what we're asking of the client in these initial phases, depending on where they're at in their business.
[00:27:15] Clate: And you guys use templates as well. I imagine that the templates that you make available for purchase are also kind of teaching and training, so they're getting a little taste of what you do before they're getting all the way into the client engagement.
[00:27:33] Becca: Kind of, yes. And what I do is if I'm on the phone with a new lead, if we're in a discovery phase, and I can either tell that they have hesitations or maybe even I have hesitations about … My biggest concern when working with clients … I say we can work really with anyone, but I want to make sure you're nice and you need to be organized.
[00:27:55] Becca: So I have what we call a foot-in-the-door offer. That's only what we call it internally, but it allows them to get their foot in the door with us and allows us to get a foot in the door with them. It's just a one-time project. We do a social media strategy dive-in. And what's nice about it is once we complete it, they've already done, on their end, 80% of what needs to be done to onboard us fully as a recurring social media management or digital marketing agency. So that's great. It's like a one-time thing. And then I get a taste of, “Okay, did they meet the deadline we asked for to get the login information? Did they show up to the strategy call on time? I'm looking for these little data points just to make sure this is the kind of person I want to work with.
[00:28:41] Becca: Because I'm not the kind of entrepreneur who Is going to just say yes to every client. I think I maybe was when I, you know, in year one of business, you know, we'll all say yes to anyone, but now I'm, I'm a little more picky. I'm, you know, more protective of my energy and of my time. And I want to work with people who get really excited to work.
[00:29:00] Clate: I appreciate you sharing that because, as I heard you describe your company's evolutions, you've gone from working with solopreneurs to now working with some larger businesses that have a marketing contact. I know if an entrepreneur is doing that — they're going through and they're doing it as quickly as you've been doing it — they're going through a pretty intentional process of identifying their ideal customer and how they want to work with them. So I could hear in what you described, just the fact that you've moved your business that way, you've scaled it that way, it demonstrates that you have a way that you're doing that.
[00:29:42] Clate: And I love the way that you're using your foot-in-the-door process. I think that's a fantastic way to describe it because you're using it to actually identify an ideal customer, the ideal client profile for you. And they're getting a chance to get a taste of what you guys do and how it's going to serve them.
[00:29:59] Clate: So that's a really great … Maybe take just a second and tell us, what is that idea? What is that foot-in-the-door type of offering that you do? Because I think a lot of people could learn from that and improve the profitability of their business by getting the right kind of customer through a filtering process that you're using called foot in the door.
[00:30:22] Becca: Yes. So, essentially when, let's say we're looking at the onboarding period for a full management digital marketing client, the first 30 days, when we are onboarding that client, we're going to be doing some internal strategy already and figuring out what it is that they want to do. But sometimes, clients come to us and they have no idea where they want to take things.
[00:30:45] Becca: They know they don't like what they have, but they aren't sure where they want to go. And so it can be hard to sell someone when they maybe aren't as involved in the world of social media, like what a good social media strategy looks like. So I was like, “Okay. Our offering is a social media strategy call and someone from my team …” And I round robin on the industry or the client who's reaching out.
[00:31:15] Becca: We have this templated, we call it a content cookbook. Again, our name is Homemade Social, so we're kind of playing a game on that with our deck, but we have this template we more or less customize depending on the client, depending on what they're wanting us to look into. We do a deep dive into their current content, what is and what isn't working. We're doing a little audit or going into their competitors showing what they're doing.
[00:31:42] Becca: And even I always like … For example, we had a client work with us and her business was very online and she's a nutritionist. She works with clients one-on-one. So instead of looking at her competitors in the nutrition space, my favorite account I found to look at a strategy comparison was with someone who does one-on-one gardening strategy calls. And so thinking outside of the box and seeing what someone in a similar space is doing, but in a completely different market that can really open your eyes to the possibilities. We put together this whole document and we go over on it on a one-hour call with a client.
[00:32:25] Becca: It's theirs to have if they want to take that document and implement it internally, they can. If they want to work with us to implement our strategy, they can. So it's no questions asked. It only takes up one hour of their time after they've given us the information we need and it's something we're relatively able to streamline.
[00:32:45] Clate: Yeah, so you break off a little piece of what would be the overall engagement. I imagine you're charging a more modest price for that to try to get their foot in the door, but then you're giving them a deliverable. It's valuable to them.
[00:33:03] Clate: And it's also helping … “Okay, do we want to move forward with this client in a way that's going to be good for both of us?” That's awesome. Thank you for sharing that. I appreciate that. Is there anything else from a strategy standpoint that you feel like you've figured out that's really helped you to go from the two or three-employee agency to an eight-person agency?
[00:33:29] Clate: Anything else from a strategy standpoint that you'd like to share?
[00:33:34] Becca: Yes, one more thing on that. Going back to our templates. We have a template section of our shop and I don't necessarily have that template section of our shop for recurring revenue or passive income. So I originally started that part of our website when I was a solopreneur, and I wanted to grow my email list. So I had an Excel spreadsheet that I would use to track my client's social media analytics because I couldn't find one out there that I liked.
[00:34:19] Becca: And so I offered it for free in exchange for someone's email. So that was my first-ever download. We send out a weekly email now with industry news. We send out a link to our weekly blog, that sort of thing. As we've grown, if we are in need of a tool to complete a client project, I know that other people are in need of that same tool. And so I either find a way to make it where it's a really simple version, where it can be free, or if it's like a more advanced version — like this is a done-for-you, plug-and-play template that you can implement into your business. What has been great about that is not only the passive income, but we've been able to grow our email list.
[00:35:01] Becca: I think we have like almost 20,000 subscribers, but what's unique about that list size is it's mostly other social media managers. But what happens is when we have … I've never had to basically … When we have a job opening at our agency … I had 60 people apply for our last opening, and I didn't have to spend a single dollar or do any promotion for it.
[00:35:27] Clate: This is brilliant. I'm so glad I asked you this because everybody can do a version of what you're describing. They're taking something that's working for their business, making it available. You're getting passive income and residual royalty, however you want to think of it.
[00:35:41] Clate: And you're able to build a following around it because you're giving value. You're providing resources, giving value and building your list. And then you're also building your pool of potential employees as well as you do that, which is just awesome.
[00:35:59] Becca: Okay, but there's even a part two that we've noticed is these people then turn to leads because what happens if they're no longer in a social media role, or they're in an organization that is looking to then outsource social media. They're like, “I know someone.”
[00:36:14] Clate: That's awesome. Yeah. That's so good. Thanks for sharing so much. I know we have a lot of people in our community that are doing agencies of some sort.
[00:36:25] Clate: And obviously, there's so much going on in the world of social media that everybody's wanting to learn, so I want to just make sure that I give you a chance to share where people can learn more about you. Where can they see where these resources are? Anybody wants to learn more about homemade social, where should they go, Becca?
[00:36:43] Becca: Awesome. Thank you for having me. So you can head to our website. It's HomemadeSocial.com and there you can head to our shop for any of our templates. We also have our Instagram and our social media links there. But get on our email list. It's a great way to get some freebies.
[00:36:57] Clate: Thank you so much, Becca. I appreciate you sharing your wisdom. Congratulations on the business that you've built. I love the lessons that you learned coming out of COVID. I love the adjustments you made. I just want to honor the intentionality and design of your business and your life that they work together. That's the whole point of the six keys to success is to work together to achieve balanced growth in your business and personal life that creates freedom. So you're doing it and a great example of it. So thank you for coming on the podcast and sharing your expertise with us.
[00:37:32] Clate: Everybody, it’s been another episode of the Conquer the Chaos Podcast. Thanks especially to our guest Becca and go check out Homemade Social for some of the resources that she's shared with us. Until next time, keep growing.