[Fully Managed] Amy Atkinson from The Fremtepreneur Ep. 152

Daniella: Hello everybody. Welcome to the first 100 podcast. This is where we explore the journey of entrepreneurs, business owners, agency leaders as they share with us the strategies, the challenges and the trials that have led them to secure those first 100 customers. First, finding your followers or first 100. So today, I’m very excited to tell you that we have with us Amy Atkinson.

Hi, Amy, How are you?

Amy: I’m great! Thank you. Thank you for having me on.

Daniella: Thank you for being here. Very excited to have you. Just to kind of get warmed up and get everything started. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, what you do, what you’re all about? For anybody listening that doesn’t know you?

About Amy Atkinson

Amy: Yes, of course. So my name is Amy Atkinson, and I am really simply a serial entrepreneur. So I have two businesses in digital marketing, but I’ve also got a property investment firm. I’m a mum. I do a lot of speaking. I also have my own podcast called the Simply Digital Marketing Podcast.

I am busy, but I bloody love it. Oh gosh. And I swear.

Daniella: I have no worries.

Amy: Okay, good. That is a real positive version of me.

Technical Issues & Resume

Daniella: Interesting. So, Amy, you said you have like you don’t just have one business venture, but you’ve sort of dabbled into a few, right? Can you tell us a little bit about that?

[Technical difficulties resolved]

Amy’s Business Journey

Daniella: So, Amy, you told us that you have ventured in different kinds of businesses, right?

Amy: Yes. So I have got a digital marketing agency as well as a training and coaching company all in digital marketing. And to be honest, I don’t know if this is going to be our next question. But the reason I started the group coaching and the training side of the business was that’s where my passion is when I left corporate.

So I’ll tell you a bit about my business journey. I left corporate because basically the job that I was in at the time, everyone was being made redundant in my team. So there were about 30 of us being made redundant and we were all backstabbing each other for six jobs. That’s not my personality, it’s not me.

I was like, “Bye, I’m going to go out and do my own thing.” However, there was this little thing in me that was like, “Well, can I go and do my own thing?” I was really worried about it. Do I know enough people? Am I going to make enough money because I had a cushy corporate income, which was a big amount of money to leave on the table.

And so I did go and applied for other jobs, and I got offered a job. And the guy said to me on the phone, he was like, “Oh, congratulations, you’ve got offered the job.” And I was obviously elated. I was really happy about it. But literally ten, 20 seconds later, he said to me, “Oh, but you’re really commanding a high salary now.”

That obviously annoyed me a lot.

Daniella: That’s it.

Amy: I said to him, I was like, “Okay, well, can I think about it?” And basically I went home. I was crying to my husband. I was like, “I don’t want to be told what I am and what I’m not worth” because he gave me the job. He knew I could do the job. But what comes with me is leadership, authority. All of the things that you need to make a team perform really well, which is why I did really well and always got promotions before.

I left corporate obviously because he annoyed me, but also because I really wanted to help people who had small businesses to really make a difference to themselves and to the people that they were trying to make an impact with their customers.

And it ended up not being that way. When I first started my business, it ended up becoming the agency and even more the agency that we now work with multimillion dollar, multi-million pound companies, which is obviously not the people that I initially wanted to help. So I started coaching and training actually in the pandemic, and I really amplified it this year and it became my priority this year to really work with those small business owners because they are the people that are going to make a huge impact. 90%, 99% I think of the UK’s income is from small business. So you guys really do make a difference and I know that I can help you.

So it’s now actually probably 50% of my entire income overall across both the digital marketing agency, the property and the group coaching company, because it’s growing so quickly this year.

Running Multiple Businesses

Daniella: Interesting. And you also run a digital marketing agency at the same time, right?

Amy: Yes, I run the digital marketing agency, but I actually run it nowadays with somebody else. I’ve got a business partner. I started it myself eight years ago and honestly gone through the pandemic, lost business in the pandemic and grown again. And now I run it with somebody else so that I can now focus on what I’m calling a passion project. But it’s so much more than that. It’s just something that I truly, truly care about. So yeah, we work on the agency together and then probably 30 to 40% of my time is the group coaching and training.

Daniella: Interesting. I’d like to ask a question about that since your training and coaching goes so hand-in-hand with having an agency. Do you have overlap of clients or are they kind of like divided into different buckets?

Amy: No, there isn’t. For some things, there is an overlap of clients. So by overlap I mean somebody will start group coaching and they’ll start coaching and training with me. Then they’ll start working with me directly 1 to 1, and then they might move up to the agency, which is effectively the done for you side of things. But at the moment that’s the only overlap is that they might move from one business to the other based on their income and their growth, which is very interesting.

Getting Started: Finding First Customers

Daniella: And can you tell us a little bit about, you know, when you got started and how everything was – you told me that you were sort of coming from corporate. And I think for a lot of people it’s a really scary transition to start your own thing. How were you able to actually start securing customers and clients and, you know, starting to get leads at the beginning?

Amy: Yeah, that’s a really, really, really good question. And I think it depends on – what I’m going to say to you now is what I did, but I’m then going to follow it with what I tell my clients because what I have experience in terms of my business and what I’m giving people advice on in the agency is what I used to do in corporate.

So I have always worked in digital marketing, which means that I have got contacts in that industry and that therefore to some people might seem easier because you have already kind of got your leg up in an industry. But what I say to my clients is actually no different to what I had to do, which was promote myself, talk to my friends and family, really start blowing your own trumpet, which when I was in corporate, I was petrified to do.

I hated doing it. I hated talking about myself and whether I was good or bad at something. I felt like I was being egotistical. And I think that’s a British thing. I don’t know whether you’re based in America.

Daniella: Yeah.

Amy: Yeah. So I don’t know whether you guys over in the States have that same trouble but in the UK people hate talking about themselves. It’s almost like we’re allergic to it. So when you suddenly go out and you start on your own and you’ve got to start talking about how good you are and the results you’ve got, then you freak out. You have this massive freak out. I know I did, but you have to do it in order to help yourself to grow, especially through digital marketing.

Authenticity in Business and Social Media

Daniella: Interesting. I think like here what happens is more that I guess what you say is that I think that happens a lot with social media. Maybe, you know, you have a digital footprint and it can be tracked down to you and associated and I think people are a little bit more concerned with how a certain opinion is going to make them look or close off or open up opportunities based on like the type of person that you portray yourself as, right?

Amy: Yes, that is exactly that. Okay. So I will give you a story around that. When I left my very first job and went to the second job that I was headhunted to. So this is actually not quite to do with business. However, I’m going to relate it back. I promise. My boss at the time said to me, “Whatever you do, don’t bring yourself.” So you might get a sense of who I am on this podcast. I’m quite easygoing, I’m quite lighthearted. I don’t take life too seriously, and that’s who I was in that job. And I suddenly moved to this other job and I was feeling like, “Oh, I’ve got to -” because I didn’t really know what he meant. So I made an assumption as to what that meant and I was like, “Okay, I need to be corporate. I need to never laugh, I need to not have fun and I need to not swear. I need to not have much of a personality.”

But what that does is hinder – what it did was hinder me. I didn’t then progress in my career, and when I started doing my own thing and started promoting myself, I carried that through. So when I was talking in networking events or talking on social media, creating content, I felt like I had to be quite a formal professional person, but I didn’t enjoy being that. It wasn’t me. So it made creating social media content and any content really hard work. And I think that – in fact, I know – so many people feel exactly the same that creating social media content is really hard and nine times out of ten it’s because they aren’t being true to themselves, because they think that they have to be someone else. And it all comes down to exactly what you’ve just said, which is people are so worried about putting an opinion out there that it’s going to make someone irritated or not like it or think that you are a bit of a wally.

Daniella: Well, there are so many horror stories out there as well that I think we see all the time of people sort of getting into a lot of drama just because of like opinions that they have or, I don’t know, I guess like stuff that they’ve interacted with that has made them look bad. And I think like for someone who has a business, the stakes are higher because it’s not just like, “Oh, I got hate online.” It’s “Oh, my business has just been affected because of like this thing that I said,” right.

Amy: Yeah. And I think also mentally that just comes down to your confidence in yourself and your business and your services. And I create opinionated content, but I also don’t engage in a ridiculous debate. I just don’t see the point in it because you are always going to get – I’m never going to tell you I’m not always going to get people who disagree with your opinions and they want to try and have an argument with you. But is it really needed? No. And therefore you’re entitled to your opinion. We’re all living in a free world, so it’s okay to say it. But if you don’t want to engage in an argument with somebody, then don’t do that on social media. Ultimately, that’s probably your biggest problem.

Daniella: Yeah, probably. Getting you riled up because I think like also a lot of people will say just random things on social media just to get a rise out of people. Yeah well is that they’re trying to bother.

Amy: Yeah. Yeah exactly. Exactly.

Biggest Business Challenge: COVID-19

Daniella: So that brings me actually to another question, Amy, with your business, with all of these ventures that you’ve sort of been going on. What do you think has been the biggest challenge that you had to face as an entrepreneur, and have you been able to overcome it? Or do you think that’s still like a work in progress?

Amy: One of the biggest, biggest issues I’ve had in business was COVID, but it was also the biggest blessing for me. So I had a thriving business before COVID had hit. I’d hit the level of success that I really wanted to hit. I was really happy. I had my team around me that I felt comfortable with, and I went away on holiday thinking that as long as we get there, it’ll be fine. We won’t have to come home. Nobody knew that borders were going to shut. Nobody knew all of the trials and tribulations that was going to come with COVID.

But we got there. We got on holiday for four days, and we were being served papers from the hotel, but ultimately from the airlines to say that if you don’t get on the next flight home that we give you, you are liable for the costs of staying where you were staying. So I was in the Maldives, which as we all know, it’s not the cheapest place on the planet. So I had no idea how long I might have to stay there for. So we had to get on a flight home.

That aside, because I was checking my emails constantly to check which flight we had been put on, I also then started to see client emails come in and my very first email came from a client and she said to me, “I am really sorry, but I don’t know what’s going to happen to my business over the next few months. Can we put all of our work on hold together?” Now I’ve got contracts in place with all of these clients, but it didn’t sit right with me and my values to say “No. You absolutely have to stay accountable to me and you have to pay your bills and blah, blah, blah.” It’s just not me. So I said, “Yes, of course, no problem whatsoever.”

48 hours later, I lost every single one of my clients who all sent me very similar emails. So when I came back, I went away with a business. I came back to no business. I had to think about how I was going to put food on the table for my own family as well as how I was going to pay my staff. And I don’t know about you guys in the States, but over here we had this thing called furlough where people were getting support for their income and what they were earning. That didn’t kick in, I don’t think, until maybe three or four weeks into COVID. So I had to seriously think, “What the hell am I going to do?”

And that was when I was like, “Right, I’m doing my coaching and training” and you have to – whenever there’s a difficult moment in business, you have to take every opportunity. You have to think on your feet, you have to be open minded, and you also have to be really resilient. All of these things enabled me to come up with a new idea, come up with – although now nowadays it doesn’t seem remotely new. The course creation industry is wild now – but at the time it was pretty new. Not many people were doing it. And so you had to come up with these things. You have to look for opportunities which you don’t even necessarily think are going to be there for you. You have to be open to them, you have to look into them, you have to do your research. You have to spend time doing that stuff as well as keeping everything else going. But I’m so glad I did because now my business is nothing like it used to be.

Daniella: I mean, it sort of opened up a new avenue that you actually really enjoy as well, right? Which is great. I think COVID was also definitely something that I think nobody could have predicted, and that threw everybody a curveball. I think I’ve talked to a lot of people on the podcast who told me that like, “Oh, I got fired. And so I decided to start a business” or, you know, like “COVID was horrible. So I was in a crisis. And then I started doing this,” you know?

Amy: Yeah, exactly. I think there’s always things that are going on in the world and let’s face it, nothing stops. So if you think about COVID, then there’s always something else that’s happening, whether it’s a cost of living crisis, whether you guys have got tornados in Florida at the moment, major flooding that also happens, the wildfires in Australia. And I think did you have some in the US as well?

Daniella: There is in California.

Amy: You know, there’s terrorism, you know, there’s things constantly going on. So if you allow all of what’s going on in the world to slow you down, to stop you, rather than to push you and keep you going, then of course your business isn’t going to survive. Whereas if you just be like, “Buckle up, hold on, let’s go,” then you’ll keep going.

Daniella: Well, in a lot of aspects, I guess the people that are more successful are the ones that learn to adapt. And if you translate that to business, it’s the same thing, right?

Amy: Exactly. Exactly.

Standing Out in a Saturated Market

Daniella: And so I was also kind of interested in asking you, since you said like when you started this coaching thing, it wasn’t as big as it is now, right? And right now there is definitely a surge in people who are offering coaching services. I mean, I’ve seen coaching services for so many different kinds of things that I had no idea you can even coach for. Right now, it’s just like business and marketing and things like this. But there’s coaching for like, you know, connecting with your inner child, spirituality. Then there is like courses for learning to do like more tangible things like, oh, like learn to get your nails done, makeup, whatever. With all of this sort of growth in the market, what has been your strategy to stay ahead of that curve and sort of maintain your relevance? Because I feel like with that saturation of people, it can sort of present a difficulty for someone who had not been facing that much competition to stand out.

Amy: Yeah, that’s a great question and it’s something that is becoming more and more important now because the industry is growing astronomically. On social media, whether you’re into course creation or whether you are into digital products or not, you have to – in order to make a success and make sales through social media, you have to understand who your ideal client is.

So gone are the days – 2020 you used to be able to say, “I’m a coach for anybody that creates a course.” No, you can’t do that anymore. You have to specialize in your industry. You have to specialize. Perhaps, maybe the income level where somebody is in business. So, for example, I’ve got clients who only work with high ticket clients. I’ve got clients who only work with emotional eating disorders. So no longer is it about nutrition, which is a huge topic – it’s about emotional eating disorders. I’ve got clients who are interior designers, but you can’t be an interior designer anymore. You have to be an interior designer for people who like quirky things, you know, you have to literally think of who is your ideal client. Who is the one person, the one person only.

That is how you’re creating content that is going to stand out amongst other people. And this is also how you can start to make sales without having a ginormous audience. So I only have – well, I’ve got less than 2000 followers on my Instagram at the moment. I don’t even know how many I’ve got on LinkedIn, maybe less than 5000 on LinkedIn, and I’ve got less than 200 people in my Facebook group, and yet I still make thousands and thousands of pounds worth of sales every single week through social media. But it’s because I know my ideal client, what they want from me and what they need from me, and that is how you are going to stand out in a busy market.

Followers vs. Sales

Daniella: That’s very interesting because I think a lot of business owners who are trying to get sales through social think that the success comes from like virality and a bunch of followers and a bunch of engagement. But I think that’s probably the goal for someone who’s looking into influencer ventures. Right? But if you’re a business, not necessarily. Having millions of followers means that you’re like a successful business with sales, right?

Amy: Yeah. I mean, I’ve had influencers come to me with 60,000, 90,000, 140,000 followers who aren’t making money through their Instagram. Having that many followers honestly means nothing to the amount of money that’s in your bank account. Whereas knowing – there’s two strands to this. If you are in growth mode and you really want to get in front of the right people, it’s understanding your ideal client. But the second thing is actually asking for the sale every single day, and there is a process and structure to actually getting sales through the door through your social media. Yeah, I mean, I could literally probably spend an hour, more than an hour talking about it, so I won’t even go into it.

Misconceptions About Entrepreneurship

Daniella: That’s a fair question that I had for you was actually: What do you think are some misconceptions that people have when it comes to entrepreneurship, business, starting your business? I think we live in a society where like having, being sort of your own boss and having your own business is becoming increasingly more interesting to people because corporate tends to suck for everyone. So what do you think? But I think a lot of people sort of think like, “Oh yeah, I’ll just start selling and, you know, I’ll be like the new Empire” and there is not like a lot of thought into it. What do you think is that misconception or what do you think people just kind of like gloss over when it comes to starting businesses?

Amy: I can tell you the misconception I had about starting my own business. I started my business because I wanted to do what I wanted when I wanted, and I kind of took that to a whole new level because I was so fed up of working the 9 to 5, which as we all know in corporate world it’s not 9 to 5. It is like any time from 7:00 in the morning till 7:00 at night. And some days I was doing 5:00 in the morning till 10 p.m. at night. I mean, it was wild. It was completely wild.

And I thought starting my own business, I could have lie-ins. I could start when I wanted. Well, yes, I can have lie-ins and yes, I can start when I want. But ultimately you still have to put in the work. So while you are working a nine till five and you’ve got to be accountable to your boss and they’re going to tell you what you can and can’t do, you still have to do 20 minimum, depending on what your income level goals are. You still have to put in part time hours, 20 hours minimum a week to actually see success with your business. And anyone that tells you otherwise is lying.

Daniella: Yeah, that’s true. I think like because corporate business that’s not yours is going to give you the hard lines you know, like you have to be here at this time. You have to meet these criteria and do this to be successful. Whereas when it’s your brand, it’s your own business, you’re the one who is holding yourself accountable. So it’s harder to have that discipline.

Amy: Yeah, exactly. And I think that – yeah. So if you’ve got your own business, it’s not necessarily easier because I think in my head I thought it was going to be easier and more flexible. Yes, it’s more flexible, but it’s not easier because you could be working late into the night because you’ve been able to pick your kids up from school or you’ve been able to drop them off and you don’t have to put them in after school club and all of that stuff. But ultimately, if you have gone out for a coffee with your mates in the day for a couple of hours, or if you’ve gone to Costco to do a food shop, or to get some bits and pieces for Halloween, because at the time we recorded this it was near Halloween, you still have to do those hours at some point. You just can choose when. So you can’t just not do any work or you’re not going to earn any money.

Daniella: I know some people end up just organizing themselves into a similar schedule of 9 to 5 just because it makes more sense. So it ends up being the same thing, right?

Amy: Yeah, exactly. Although I’m learning at the moment, I’m learning to give myself permission that if I work late the night before to fit in with a client, then I don’t start at 9:00 the next day. Because if you don’t give yourself that permission, then you can work more than your 9 to 5. You can work more than your 40 hours and you can end up working 70, 80 hour weeks. And that’s just mad and exhausting. You’ve got burnout then and nobody wants that.

The Dangers of Burnout

Daniella: Yeah, no. And I feel like burnout is the worst way. When you’re tired, thinking is not even good.

Amy: It’s not at all. You come up with things and then you just have to redo them because your heart’s not in it. Because you’re so tired. It’s just not – it’s not the one.

Daniella: That happened to me in college because I remember I used to have like, there was like a couple of years where I was super busy with school and I would get like, a lot of essays and homework and stuff that I had to do, especially around finals. And I mean, I guess that’s the student experience, but I really remember just kind of like going into very late hours trying to cram and just write everything. And then I would go to sleep and like two or three days later I would go over whatever it is that I was doing and I was like, “What was I even writing? This is ridiculous.” I was like, “I did all this work, and this is trash” because it was so bad, I had to redo it again with like a fresher mind. And I was like, you know what? If I’m too tired, I’m just going to go to sleep.

Amy: Yeah, you need to just go to sleep sometimes. Otherwise you’re just coming at things like a wild child. You’re just not thinking straight.

Daniella: And you probably just want to get it done. You know, you’re just kind of like, “Yep.”

Amy: Just get it done. Yeah.

Where to Find Amy

Host: Well, it’s been great having you today on the show. Before we go though, I do want to give you a space to tell our followers where they can come find you. If anybody is interested in working with you, with your agency, getting coaching from you. Where are your thoughts?

Amy: Oh, thank you so much. So the best place to find me is on Instagram. So if you go to @theventurepreneur, spelled entrepreneur, but rather than the ‘n’, it’s ‘ven’ and so that’s the best place. If you want to come and DM me there, follow me there. Otherwise you can email me [email protected] and ask away any questions and I’ll be happy to help you.

I have honestly so many freebies that probably will help you in one capacity or another, right? From understanding your ideal client. I’ve got a free masterclass on that, but right for you to ditch your marketing strategy and get a basic plan if you want that. I’ve got that as a freebie too. So go email me, DM me and I will send those over to you.

Daniella: Awesome. Yeah, I will be adding your links to the description of this video for the viewers and for the listeners – go click the links on the video. So go watch the video too, so that everybody can go in and find you. And Amy, it’s been great having you today.

Amy: Thank you so much for having me.

Daniella: It’s been great to be on. It was very fun. So everybody, I will see you on the next episode. And Amy, thank you so much.

Amy: Thank you.

Daniella: Bye bye.

Amy: Bye.

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