Company: Purpose Marketing
Owners: Anna Woodlock and Erika Palmer
Year Started: 2018
Employees: 11 – 25
In the latest episode of “An Agency Story,” titled “Empower,” hosts Russel Dubree invites Anna Woodlock and Erika Palmer, the dynamic duo behind Purpose Marketing. This episode is a gem in the series that delves into the heartaches and triumphs of marketing agency owners. Anna and Erika, hailing from Lubbock, Texas, share their journey of building a purpose-driven marketing agency from the ground up, highlighting the power of partnership and mutual ambition.
The conversation covers a wide range of topics, from the inception of Purpose Marketing, its mission to serve a diverse clientele with digital excellence, to navigating the challenges of pricing and growth. What sets this episode apart are the candid revelations about the early days of their partnership, the pivotal moments of decision-making during the pandemic, and their innovative response to social issues impacting their business and community.
Listeners will be captivated by the humorous anecdotes, such as their laugh-filled interview mishap, and inspired by their commitment to empowering young women and creating a positive workplace culture. The episode also delves into their ventures beyond marketing, including a rental company that complements their event planning services, and the ambitious vision for Purpose Camp, aimed at mentoring and supporting teenage girls.
Ending on a note that encourages reflection on entrepreneurship and the value of determination and respect in partnerships, this episode not only provides insights into the world of digital marketing but also leaves the audience pondering the impact of purposeful business.
Tune in to “Empower” for a story of innovation, growth, and the power of purpose in shaping a successful agency and enriching the community. This is more than just a podcast episode; it’s an invitation to explore the potential of purpose-driven business and the difference it can make in the world.
You can listen to this episode of An Agency Story on your favorite podcast app:
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Show Transcript
0:01
Welcome to An Agency Story podcast where we share real stories of marketing agency owners from around the world. From the excitement of starting up the first big sale, passion, doubt, fear, freedom, and the emotional rollercoaster of growth, hear it all on An Agency Story podcast. An Agency Story podcast is hosted by Russel Dubree, successful agency owner with an eight figure exit turned business coach. Enjoy the next agency story.
Russel: 0:38
Welcome to another episode of An Agency Story podcast. I’m your host, Russel. Today’s guests on the show are Anna Woodlock and Erika Palmer, co-founders of Purpose Marketing, a full service marketing agency based out of Lubbock, Texas. Anna and Erika represent the standard when it comes to a successful partnership. Their mutual ambition unmatched, together they form an amazing left brain, right brain combination to provide top-notch marketing behind a winning team. Not to mention the other business ventures they’ve created as they stake their claim as women led trailblazers out in West Texas. Enjoy the story. Welcome to the show today everyone. I have Anna Woodlock and Erika Palmer with Purpose Marketing. Thank you so much for being on the show, Anna and Erika.
Erika: 1:22
Thank you for having us.
Russel: 1:24
My pleasure. If you don’t mind, start us off with a quick overview. What does purpose marketing do and who do you do it for?
Erika: 1:31
We are a digital marketing agency. We are based out of Lubbock, Texas, which is out in West Texas. Our bread and butter is social media marketing, but along with that we do a ton of email marketing, text message marketing, Blog writing, SCO, Google AdWords. Pretty much anything digital. We do some traditional marketing for some of our clients too, that are running bigger campaigns, but for the most part, I think we’re known for our social media marketing. As far as who we do it for, we have an array of clients. Being out in West Texas, as you can imagine, we have a lot of oil and gas clients. We feel really comfortable with real estate. We have caterers, we have boutiques, we have construction companies, so it varies across the board.
Russel: 2:17
Want to definitely hear more about all the good things you do for your clients, but let’s go back in time for a minute here. If someone were to go back and tell young Erika and Anna where you’re at today, would it make sense or would you say no way, given where your head was at or your goals coming outta high school and into college?
Anna: 2:32
Even though we didn’t meet each other until later on in life, I feel like I can answer this for both of us. We’re both very driven people, have always had leadership roles, whether it was the sports team we were on in high school, Erika even played basketball in college, to having multiple internships at a young age. There’s a song by Travis Tritt called I’m Gonna Be Somebody. When I was a little girl that would come on and I would tell my mom that song was about me and she would laugh at me. I feel like we’re starting to get there. It makes total sense to me that we came together and have figured this out and hopefully are gonna do great things moving forward.
Russel: 3:08
For all we know Travis Trit really did write that song about you, so we’re just gonna go with that. Anything to add to that Erika?
Erika: 3:15
No, she answered it just the way that I would. I totally feel the same way. I think that for me, I always knew I wanted to be a leader and own a business, so it really isn’t a surprise. I don’t know that I would’ve known coming out of high school which business it would be. I had no clue what I was doing in college. I’m sure my past college roommate and best friend could reassure that. Luckily I got it figured out and I met Anna.
Russel: 3:41
As I understand it, you both were working together before you actually started the agency, after you got into your careers and I’ll have to assume got along very well. How did that idea start to come about in terms of, starting your own agency?
Erika: 3:52
Anna was working at another agency in town and I was on the client side. I had gotten to a point where I was having to travel a lot and it required a lot of extra time, but I was wanting to start a family and be more settled in Lubbock. It felt like I was at a point in my career where I had grown enough to branch out on my own and do something. I had the opportunity with one of our clients now to do some consulting work, and I felt like I owed it to Anna to go talk to her because we had worked hand in hand on this specific account. We had never met for happy hour or anything, so when I reached out to her and asked if she wanted to meet for happy hour, I think she probably saw all the writing on the wall. We met up and was just telling her where I was at in life, what I was thinking about doing, didn’t know how I was gonna go about it. It turned out that she was in the same place in life that I was. We always say, it started over one glass of wine. Us telling a story, two glasses of wine. We’re both like, yeah, I think we wanna quit our job. On the third we were like, let’s start a business together. That’s kinda how it happened. In the end, once we decided we were gonna make a go for it, our values aligned so nicely. We both have a passion for young women, teaching them and growing them. Stars aligned for us.
Russel: 5:10
We have wine to think. From that conversation you had in that happy hour to when you actually made the decision to get going, how long a timeframe was that?
Erika: 5:17
It was very quickly, actually. I don’t remember, looking back, the exact timeframe, but I think we both sat down with our husbands and were like, hey, we wanna make a go at this. They both were on board. They’re both always very on board with what we wanna do, thankfully. I would say within a few months at least. There was the caveat of right after we signed our papers to become a business, I told Anna I was pregnant. That kinda threw us for a loop, but we made it through.
Russel: 5:46
Indeed, you have. How did you come up with the name Purpose Marketing and what does that mean for you guys?
Erika: 5:51
Being on the client side before this, I felt like every time I would talk to the agency that I was working with, whether that was here or previous jobs I had worked in the past, it was always a frustrating process. I felt like they were trying to upsell me when what we originally agreed on wasn’t even working in the first place or maybe needed to be tweaked. Anna, being on the agency side, felt forced into making those upsells the old traditional way of how digital agencies were handled. In coming up with the name, we kept saying, we don’t wanna offer anything or suggest anything to our clients unless it serves a purpose. That word in more ways than one kept sticking out to us, so that’s how Purpose was born. On top of that, focusing on providing a place for everyone that works here to come and have a purpose.
Russel: 6:42
Love a good naming story. Once you made the decision, got things moving, being pregnant and everything obviously something to navigate, how would you describe those first few months and how you guys felt when you were starting the agency?
Anna: 6:53
There was definitely the traditional ,oh my gosh, okay, we’re actually doing this. How do we start making money? How are we gonna pay some of these bills? Erika and I are yin and yang, I’m good at the things that she’s not and she’s good at the things that I’m not so for me, it was very much tactical of how are we gonna figure all of this out? I was logging into the bank account multiple times a day figuring out, okay, this much money is gonna come in tomorrow and that means we can pay this bill, but we can’t afford to hire this person. There was a lot of juggling. I think too, we struggled early on with setting our pricing. When you’re a young business, you’re hungry just to get some work and get your name out there that you find yourself wanting to sell your services for less than what they’re worth. I feel like we are finally at a point, this is year five for us, where we feel confident in our pricing, but I would say that it’s taken us those full five years to figure that out. Early on, pricing was definitely something that we weren’t confident in, but Erika mentioned it earlier. Thankfully, both of our husbands were supportive and have good stable jobs, and that allowed us to chase our dreams here with Purpose.
Russel: 8:07
How did you get your first set of clients?
Anna: 8:08
We each came to the table with some clients, is the short answer. Erika had someone in the community reach out to her before she had even decided to have happy hour with me and say, hey, would you ever do some marketing consulting for me? I had a company that I had been helping with marketing on the side for several years, and they were at a point where they were able to increase their retainer and take on the digital side of things, take it more seriously. Those two clients are still our clients to this day. We are very protective of them and very appreciative for them. We each came to the table with some income and that helped for sure.
Russel: 8:43
Moving on, not too long after you’re into the business, along comes the pandemic. Pretty much every show we’ve done so far has some element of the pandemic story. Your story sounded very similar to a lot of folks, especially in the digital realm, that grew quite a bit during the pandemic. One of the things I was fascinated by is you went against the grain in your own words in terms of afterwards, how much value you still placed on working in person. Why has that worked so well for you and have you found any adverse that focus has impacted you?
Erika: 9:12
Our team here, everyone feeds off of each other so much. Creative ideas and the energy that each unique person brings to the table. We can notice whenever we’re not together the creativeness that comes out versus the creativeness that comes out when somebody’s like, hey, you know what I’m struggling on coming up with content for this client. Can you guys all send some ideas my way? Being able to do that and play off of each other in person versus office Slack message is so much more impactful. I think you’re able to accomplish things way quicker than you are in Slack and be able to detect people’s feelings and even facial reactions, all of those things that can get misconstrued from messaging each other. That was a difficult time and a difficult thing to figure out because obviously nobody knew what the heck was going on. Looking back, we do place so much value and are so thankful that we do have a place to come together and work.
Russel: 10:11
Nobody revolted or anything like that in a world where it seems like, especially digital companies went more remote and distributed, but I guess you could say your team enjoyed it just as much as you guys have felt the impact on it?
Erika: 10:22
Yeah, our team is so close and a lot of ’em hang out outside of work. We’ve never forced anybody to come into the office. We have that luxury, being in digital marketing, where you can work off your computer a lot. If you’re on vacation or you’re gonna work from home, that’s always an option for us and we always provide that option. Thankfully, everyone here really likes each other and they genuinely enjoy each other’s company. A lot of times we’ll find them in the conference room, working together or they’ll be sitting on the couch together. It’s really nice that they get along so well and feed off of each other’s energy.
Russel: 10:59
That’s awesome. I’m very excited to talk about so many different parts of your story, especially in terms of where you’ve been able to get the business to today and the success you’ve achieved. Before we get to all that good stuff there was an incident that I did want to ask you about that sounded like that really had to force you to answer questions about what you stand for. Maybe put your name to the test a little bit. Can you share what that story was with us?
Anna: 11:20
During the pandemic, you guys were just talking about all the different effects that it had on our business, but as a human, everybody realized during that time how much social media became everyone’s outlet if it wasn’t already or if you were skeptical of certain platforms, or maybe you thought that social media didn’t apply to your business or didn’t affect your business. I think during the pandemic, everyone learned that in some way, shape, or form, this is just the way that the world communicates. As we’re going through the pandemic, and I feel like this part has been even more emphasized for us as business owners since the pandemic, Erika and I often talk to each other about how the juxtaposition of that we do social media for a living, but neither one of us are super active on social media. We both have a similar view of there’s still certain parts of your life that were meant to be lived in the moment or in person. It is something that we joke about, but when we were in the pandemic there were so many social issues that were floating around social media and businesses and human beings feeling the need to speak up for what they believe in or stand for what they believe in. We were probably a little naive and thinking, we’re just little Purpose Marketing over here in Lubbock. We’ll just watch and see what the world does. We had a situation where an employee had come to us asking us to make a stance on a particular social issue, so Erika and I had to have a discussion of, okay, this is gonna affect us. People are watching what we’re doing and what are we gonna do? We had time to reflect on that. At the end of the day, we came back to the root of what Purpose Marketing was created for which is to provide a place for young women and our community to grow and have a seat at the table. Our platform, while personally we may all stand for different things, whenever we come together at Purpose Marketing, that’s our platform. It was a hard lesson to learn. There were some things that happened with an employee that were really unfortunate, but I would say, looking back on it, it became a positive because we, from that, created a value statement that each employee has to sign whenever they agree to accept a full-time offer from us that states that this is the platform of Purpose Marketing and that you’re gonna do everything in your power to pay it forward to other young women in our community.
Russel: 13:46
That’ s always unfortunate in terms of pandemic and even the social issues you were referencing, but I always love a good turnaround story and how you can make a lot of good out of an unfortunate situation. Certainly glad you were able to come out of that on the positive side and solidify which is a really great purpose. You mentioned in our previous conversations that things were “falling into place” in the air quotes that people can’t see on the show. What milestones or accomplishments ring that statement true for you?
Erika: 14:12
I would say the fact that we have two bathrooms now.
Russel: 14:16
It’s the little things in life, right?
Erika: 14:17
It’s a really big deal. We actually purchased the new building that we’re in, we were so excited about that. During the last few years, it’s always been a goal of ours to be able to own our own building. We were able to make that happen this year and provide what we feel like is a really cool and fun space for our employees to come to every day. We added a Peloton, we have a cool yellow couch that matches our brand colors, and like I said, two bathrooms, which is maybe the biggest deal. We put a full length mirror in the women’s bathroom too, which they were very excited about. We just moved into this new office. This is our second week and I think the first night that we were able to light up our backlit sign was a pretty cool moment for Anna and I. We made a decision to not let the employees see the space until it was all put together because we were so excited to be able to share this space with them. Coming from, the very first place we worked at was Anna’s kitchen table, and then we luckily had a client that let us rent a room from them, so we went to a room. From there, we rented our first office that we had been in and we were crammed in. As construction goes, it was supposed to be ready in September, but here we are in December, just now getting in. That was challenging, managing all the new employees we were needing to hire this year and then this space. Now that we’re in here it feels really good. That moment of seeing the backlit sign on for the first time was a pretty cool feeling.
Russel: 15:47
I’m getting goosebumps as well. I remember a similar feeling when we moved out of our rugged office space where, as you mentioned, bathrooms, we basically had an out house inside a building. Certainly appreciate the little things in life. What a cool moment to own your own building and really invest in what you’ve obviously said is such a great asset for your company in terms of having a great place to work together. Along those lines, investing in your team has clearly been a big focus for you. In what other ways has that been present in what you’re doing with the team today, investing in your team?
Erika: 16:15
Another cool moment of this year is we decided to offer 401k to our employees. I know a lot of agencies utilize contract workers, but we want Purpose Marketing to feel like a place that you are invested in, this is your career and this is your home. Being able to offer that and health benefits and a cool space to come to is something that we place a lot of value in. We’ve made a promise to our team that, when we grow, you grow financially as well. Being able to provide bonuses to people that worked their butts off this year, be able to give raises when that comes along. Those are things that are very important to us. Especially as women, we want to teach them that they have a value, they have a voice, and you should get rewarded for that whenever you are putting in the work and you’re proving yourself.
Russel: 17:06
Another thing that stood out to me that you had said, focusing on creating development paths and growing their skillsets to start to replace some of these higher level positions in the company. How has that been going for you and what are some of the specific things you’ve done on that front?
Erika: 17:18
Yes, that has been something a lot of our employees were asking for, so we did put together an organization chart. As you probably know from being a business owner, it lit a fire in some people and they have come in and stepped up to the plate. Anna and I always tell everyone, people that we’re interviewing, if you can come in and figure things out, like that’s a big deal. We have Google for a reason these days and some things don’t require you to come into our offices, and that sounds terrible ’cause we always have an open door policy. I think there is a difference in people that can go figure it out versus just being like I’ll just go ask her and get the easy way out. In providing that pass for people, we have seen who’s stepping up to the plate and that’s been cool. It’s been rewarding for us cause it’s some of our employees that have been here with us from the beginning.
Russel: 18:08
As if one business wasn’t enough, it sounds like you’ve also got into some other business ventures as well, including being real estate moguls. What else have you been doing and how has that been for you?
Anna: 18:20
I wish we were real estate mobiles, maybe we’ll do that next. Within Purpose, one of the services we offer to our retire clients is corporate event planning. We don’t do as much of it as we would like. Honestly, our team really enjoys that part of it, but we do have a handful of clients that we plan a couple of events for each year. Through doing that, we live in a market where there is only one large scale rental company. When I say rental company, I’m meaning like tables, chairs, things you would rent for a corporate event. We didn’t love the style of the chairs or the tables, or we felt like it didn’t adapt with the times or the themes, so we weren’t able to offer our clients the full experience of planning an event for them because we were limited to this type of furniture or this look of furniture. We have started a company called Seated Rentals, where that’s what we’re focused on, large scale events with cool seating options for tables and chairs. It’s funny, after we came up with a name for it, Erika and I realized that one of the pillars we’ve stood on is this phrase “everyone has a seat at the table,” and that’s what we say all the time at Purpose Marketing. When we came up with the name Seated Rentals, it was totally a coincidence, but it involved the word seat, which clearly is for a chair, but also ties into this tagline that we feel has got Purpose Marketing to where it is today. They’re definitely integrated, one helps the other and vice versa. It’s been cool to see that grow and see our community’s appreciation for what we’re trying to do.
Russel: 19:58
You are really living out your brand, which I think is really awesome. Speaking of the naming and the brand, another awesome thing you had shared before was, and I can appreciate this so much as a father of a once teenage daughter, your idea of Purpose Camp. Can you tell the listeners the idea behind it? I know it’s gonna fit into the relevancy of your overall business, if you don’t mind sharing that.
Erika: 20:17
We haven’t actually started it yet, but we have the wheels in motion. We have paperwork filed. We have the logo created. As Anna mentioned earlier, the platform that we stand on is teaching young girls how to grow and have strong careers. It’s interesting because we run a social media company, but we also are very aware of the downsides that social media plays, especially on teenage girls. It can be a horrible, dark place for teenage girls. The amount of pressure and hate, it’s confusing for me sometimes. You have anybody that has a platform now, being young and not knowing, does this person have credentials to be teaching me this? Whether it’s something innocent or something terribly bad. It can be a terrible place and we recognize that. What we wanna do is form this camp where we give a place for young girls that are around the high school age to come to, and we will be teaching them, how to set up your privacy settings on social media, how to write a resume, how to start developing your personal brand because nowadays that is so important. If you’re on social media, you have a personal brand. When we go to hire somebody, we’re always scouting them on social media and how you present yourself online is so important these days. Not only teaching that, but also giving them somebody to talk to. I know as a teenage girl, luckily, I had a family and parents that were incredibly supportive. I always felt comfortable going to my mom, but, I know there’s plenty of girls that don’t have that luxury. There’s some girls in our own company that grew up and didn’t have that luxury. Being able to be a voice of reason for them, not only providing this camp, but also continuing that relationship with them, giving them a phone number to call if they’re feeling some type of way about something or not knowing, what’s going on. Eventually what we would like to do is be able to offer scholarships through that. That is definitely goals, every girl that works for us is on board with that and so excited to be involved. We’ll get people outside of Purpose Marketing to be on the board and all of that. It’s in the early works, but it will happen. It is definitely a huge goal of ours. We hit the ground running when we started Purpose Marketing, I think that was unexpected and we haven’t looked back since. That’s always stood at the forefront and we wanna do it right, so we’ve never rushed into it. We have taken our time, from logo development to picking out colors, fonts. Everything we do with that is so sensitive and sacred to us, so we wanna make sure it’s done right.
Russel: 22:46
I’m excited about it. I don’t have any more teenage daughters to send to it, but you let me know when the first one is and I’ll make sure all my friends send their daughters down that way. One of the things that was very evident from the very start of our first conversation, and I always find partnerships to be an interesting dynamic in some ways good and some not, it’s clearly evident that your guys’ partnership is working, how you divided and conquered the business. If you don’t mind sharing, what that has looked like for you and then on the flip side when things aren’t so good in disagreements, how have you guys handled that?
Anna: 23:13
I think when we worked together in our previous positions, we knew that we worked well together. That was all we knew. There was several people involved in the efforts and so the wheels always clicked. When we left those positions, and it was just the two of us at the beginning, we learned very quickly what Erika was good at and what I was good at. It is polar opposite things. Erika is very much the creative, big picture, visual branding. The whole creative part that goes into building a brand, Erika is so good at that. Me, on the other hand, I am more analytical and strategy focused. I love to be behind the scenes. I wanna be looking at the numbers and I wanna be analyzing why this ad didn’t work or why this post isn’t getting engagement, and then trying some A/B testing or tweaking the image. What can we do from a strategy perspective to see if we’re totally missing the mark or how we’re not connecting, on our client’s behalf? Our employees, the people that have been with us from the beginning they can see it very clearly, we are very different. It’s always funny to watch the team see how Erika would answer something versus how I would answer something. But honestly, that’s the reason it works. It’s hard enough as it is to have an office full of women, but then to be two women business owners without the traditional assumptions of what that may look like. If Erika and I weren’t polar opposites, it wouldn’t work.
Russel: 24:42
I know there’s had to have been a disagreement or two. What does that look like? How do you guys handle that?
Erika: 24:47
Anna had mentioned that we didn’t start this out as a friendship. It started from a working relationship. Going into it, the amount of respect we had for each other, from a working standpoint was so huge, from the beginning. At least for me it was. From the moment I met Anna, I knew she was sharp. My career’s always been so important and I’ve always been so driven, so when I recognized that, especially in another female, it’s cool and I’m like, I wanna learn from you. I want you to level me up. We tell that to our employees all the time. We’re always saying level up, and Anna truly makes me do that. We’re not perfect, of course there’s been things that we didn’t agree on, but it’s always a conversation, a very respectful conversation. If it’s something that I wouldn’t have necessarily done or vice versa. It’s not an attack. It’s hey, let me know why you did it this way. It’s a conversation. In the beginning it was a lot of learning how each other works and how each other responds. Anna works late at night, I work early in the morning. That was a learning process in the beginning, but now we understand each other so much that, knock on wood, we haven’t had that many disagreements. Our trust in each other has developed so much and I’ve never doubted a decision that she’s made. I honestly mean that. She probably makes better decisions than I would make sometimes, and I’m humble enough to admit that. The trust and respect that we have in each other is something that’s sacred to both of us.
Russel: 26:12
It’s evident in that dynamic you guys have together, even that approach you just walked through. How you handle different things I have no doubt has been very instrumental in your success. Thank you for sharing that. Last big question, I’d love to hear each of yours take on this. Are entrepreneurs born or are they made?
Anna: 26:28
Made.
Erika: 26:30
Made.
Anna: 26:30
We all come from situations or family histories or environments that may not be ideal or what the movies say an entrepreneur should come from, or, what the movies show that a successful person comes from. I think it’s all about the individual and the decisions that they make to put their life path on a trajectory for success. For me, entrepreneurship equals success. That means that you are convicted enough in what you believe in, that you’re gonna go out and do it yourself, that’s how you’re gonna put food on the table, but it’s not an easy process. Not everybody’s cut out for it. I think they are definitely made.
Erika: 27:09
I agree. I would say made for sure. I have been fortunate enough to be surrounded by a handful of people that I look back on and I’m like, okay, this person’s part of my story and why I am where I am. Not that I’m anywhere near the top. I still have a long ways to go for sure, but I can look back and look at the people that I was fortunate enough to have in my life and that are still in my life from, watching my dad work his tail off from a young age to my best friend who works at FC Dallas and watching her work her tail off. She was so instrumental in my life, helping set me up for success and I respect her so much. I feel you’re a hundred percent made because I look back on the things that got me here and it wasn’t just because I was born, that’s for sure.
Russel: 27:59
Great answers. If people wanna know more about Purpose Marketing, where can they go?
Anna: 28:03
People can visit our website, which by the way is just recently redone. Purposeco marketing.com. By the way, to the person who still owns purposemarketing.com, we would still like to buy that from you.
Russel: 28:18
Make an offer.
Anna: 28:19
Yeah, I hope so. Until then, it’s purposecomarketing.com, but also I would direct people to our Instagram, Purpose_Marketing. It’s probably the best representation of our culture, our personalities and all the things that, that go into Purpose.
Russel: 28:34
Folks at home, go check out the fresh paint on purposecomarketing.com, and then the owner of purposemarketing.com, make an offer. You can email me, I’ll connect you. Find Anna and Erika and sell that site to them. Gosh, it’s been an absolute pleasure chatting with you ladies today and sharing so much of your story. I sincerely appreciate and thank you so much for being on the show.
Anna: 28:53
Thanks, Russel.
Erika: 28:53
Thank you for having us.
28:58
We hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of An Agency Story podcast where we share real stories of marketing agency owners from around the world. Are you interested in being a guest on the show? Send an email to podcast@performancefaction.com. An Agency Story is brought to you by Performance Faction. Performance Faction offers services to help agency owners grow their business to 5 million dollars and more in revenue. To learn more, visit performancefaction.com.
Erika: 29:33
Anna and I are opposites when it comes to things. She’s very much the planner. I’m, let’s wing it, let’s shoot for the moon and see what happens. We were trying to hire for a few positions, so we had this whirlwind of interviews happening during this one particular week. During our interview process, once they get past the screening of Anna and I, we like to bring them in to meet the team. We’ll do a group interview, which as you can imagine, with a bunch of women, I’m sure is completely intimidating for the people that come in. I like to see that side of people. Of course, Anna being the planner, she has sent everybody their questions beforehand and I think at that moment I was probably picking my kids up from school or picking up lunch or something, so I was completely unprepared for this group interview. We’re going around the table and all I could remember was Anna’s question. It got to me and I asked what was supposed to be Anna’s question. All of our employees knew it. They know how Anna and I are, so they were like, she for sure stole her question. That got everybody laughing. You know those moments where you’re like laughing and you’re not supposed to be and you just can’t stop because you’re like, I know I need to stop laughing. This poor girl, I’m sure to this day probably thinks we are crazy people because it sets the whole interview off. Nobody could keep a straight face. That’s a true example of me not being a planner and Anna being a planner.
Russel: 31:00
Bound to happen, I’m sure. Were you guys on laughing gas or what else are you guys taking in there?
Erika: 31:05
There could have been wine involved.
Russel: 31:06
Natural catalyst there. I assume they didn’t end up coming to work for you guys.
Erika: 31:10
No, they didn’t, but during that round we did find somebody that still works here and she’s amazing.
Russel: 31:17
Okay. Good. I’m glad that all came out to a positive end there.
