Cinematic – Lovage Inc

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.

Welcome to an agency story podcast. I’m your host Russell. On this week’s episode we have stephanie mkc with lovage inc a brochure web platform agency based out of dallas Texas. Stephanie’s story is a great Testament to how hard it can be to be an agency owner and that your path towards success and fulfillment isn’t always the same from when you started her start in the bright lights of Hollywood to our most recent career innovation of Dallas Love Bugs. You’ll connect to Stephanie’s creative passions and desire to make the world a better place. Enjoy the story. Welcome to the show today everyone. I have Stephanie M. Casey with Lovage. Thank you so much for joining us today, Stephanie.

Thank you for having me.

If you don’t mind, start us off with a quick overview. What does Lovage do and who do you do it for?

At this point in Lovage’s iteration, we make websites on the Webflow platform, primarily brochure style websites for progressives and innovators. Any industry, but people that pay attention to being progressive, either in their product and or the way that they run their company. We wanna see, company-wise, diversity, inclusion. Anything that might fall into the ESG category of how you run your business or the product or people who are trying to innovate for better. For savings environmentally or to make people’s lives better, that is what we look to collaborate with.

Lovely. I love the progressive approach as well. We kind of had a similar approach in our agency. Let’s jump in the time machine right quick and go back to the younger version of yourself. Did you always have your sight set on entrepreneurship? What were you thinking back in the day?

Absolutely. Especially for little girls, I was a child of the eighties in my youth and then a teenager in the early nineties, and that was not a word that I ever would’ve subscribed to, or even thought to assign myself or had been exposed to. But my earliest memory of entrepreneurship is getting my little brother to be my assistant, it was winter and on my block I made these warm bags of hot water that I put rubber bands around and went and sold’em for 10 cents or something to the neighbors. It’s cold. This’ll keep you warmer. I said, if the water gets cold just refill it with hot water. He was probably five and I was seven or something like that, or even younger. That was my very first entrepreneurial product.

A very innovative product.

I used to put together all kinds of stuff just to the neighborhood kids. Everything from media and radio shows to various things that we would sell or I would be a babysitter and I would go and get certified and then send all my clients, and this is a time when people let 11 year olds babysit infants and things like that. I would go get certified as CPR and then send around a note that I was raising my rates by 50 cents, because now I had the certification. Things like that.

It’s amazing what they did let young people do back then. I had a paper route when I was a kid. At nine years old, I would, every single day rain, shine, snow, all above, go out and collect money from people. I wouldn’t let my nine year old do that today.

Just wander the streets alone for sure.

Yeah. What a world we live in. From my understanding, you didn’t go into hot water sales when you started to begin your career. Walk us down the career road before you actually started your agency.

When I was in high school, I was fed up with all the school things by the end and you have these ambitions to apply to all these colleges. When it came down to it, I was so exhausted from all the testing that I did my automatic admission to the state school, University of Texas. I had enough good grades and test scores that I could just get automatic admission to University of Texas in Austin. Then I did my dream application, which was film school at NYU cuz I just loved movies and at that time, every school didn’t have a quote unquote robust film program. It was you went to NYU or you went to USC. Maybe UCLA, but I don’t even think they were as much on the map. It was one of those two. That was a lofty aspiration. I never thought I would get in, and then I got accepted. I went off to New York and went to film school at NYU, and then I worked in that industry. I worked my way through school, part-time jobs in that industry. I already had some good credits under my belt by the time I graduated. Then I worked on another job or two in New York and I worked on an HBO movie so I got into the editor’s union. I was doing motion picture editing and then I moved to Los Angeles and started working on feature films. I did that for about a decade. During that, I started playing guitar and I got pretty fed up with that industry so then I decided, I did sort of a Portlandia, this was in my very late twenties, and I had bought a house in Hollywood Hills. I sold that, took a little pile of cash, moved up to Portland, Oregon and just did a couple years where I was playing music and touring. I released a couple of records during that time. Then came back to Dallas and it was the middle of the recession and all of that coastal high-end media work didn’t have any relation to any company here at all. I started over, what do I wanna do, who do I wanna be? I had my first and last day job ever at Neiman Marcus corporate where I was, the title I think was Producer of Creative Online or something, but it was a very admin-y job. I did some stuff for New York City photo shoots and they were starting to do blogs and things, and I’d gotten involved in that. I always did freelance work and I always would have projects going on as well as actual freelance, basically producing work of varying kinds. I was working on my own name and I read the book, Rich Dad Poor Dad. It became apparent oh, if I want to try to garner much wealth, you have to have your company so that you’re making money off of other people working as well as yourself working. Whereas when you’re an employee, someone’s just paying you for your time or services, and when you own a business, you’re creating revenue from everyone that’s doing work with you. I decided to go on that path and Lovage was born.

Rich Dad Poor Dad success story. I feel like there could be a whole podcast on your film career. While we can’t spend all our time there, what’s gotta be a cool story, an interesting project you were part of that might be worth sharing for everyone that’s more curious about that part of your life?

We glamorize movies in general, movies and television, and we obsess over celebrity. When you’re in it, it’s almost like you are a slave and you’re being paid well compared to a lot of other industries, but on those productions there’re these machines that have to be, you’re a slave to their timeframe. It’s very challenging work where you just have no other life, but it’s neat because you’re in that industry. A lot of it would be where you’re exhausted and you just want a break and you can’t get one because the production’s in motion, and while all the production is assembled you have to keep producing. But then there would be neat things. I got to take some neat trips. One of them was to Amsterdam for what is Show West. I was working on this movie called The Guru. It was a Universal and I think working title, which is a UK co-production.

Was that the one with Mike Myers or am I thinking of something else?

No. This had Heather Graham and who else was in it? There were a few other people in it, but they didn’t push it in the US. It was actually a great movie. I got to go there and do this kind of marketing trip in Amsterdam to this thing where they market it for international distribution and there’s all these big parties and stuff. I would do these various marketing trips. I took Freaky Friday. I was working on the Lindsay Lohan Freaky Friday movie and they sent me up to Vancouver to show it to Ben Affleck cuz the director was trying to work on another movie with him. Little private screening with him. I got to go on a neat marketing trip for Lady in the Water, an M. Night Shyamalan movie I worked on where they fly you to London. Those were fun because I was not above the line, which in the movies, above the line people are the directors, the writers, the actors, and they roll out the red carpet for them when you’re on those bigger budget films. You just have your servants around you and people are tasting your food for you and tying your shoes for you, and those are not jokes or exaggerations. I’m below the line, so you don’t get all those perks all the time, so when you got to go on those marketing trips, I’m in Vancouver staying at the Four Seasons. You got these perks, you’re flying an international business class and going up a little staircase on the plane and that sort of thing. Those things were fun and it was creative work. There was a lot of good stuff about it, but there were an equal amount of hard things and it pushed me out. It was not a life that I wanted to continue to lead.

Thank you for sharing that. Sounds, as you said, some mix of interesting and tough things to deal with. I’m sure there’s much more to that, but we shall move on. Back to Rich Dad Poor Dad, decided to start your own agency. What did that transition look like? How did you actually get going?

I had no idea exactly what it was gonna be, except I knew just as a producer of things my entire life. Even when I was working on films, I always was doing these producer-y things even though that wasn’t my official title, where I would have an equal hand in systems, managing teams, and creative. All of that was equally distributed with what I did. Any space that I walk into or event or situation or work environment, I always see these pieces of this would be more efficient, or people would like that better, or this would be more fun or that would work better if you did. I started with the slogan, which I still use all the time, let’s make it better. It started as a consulting of producing things and I was trying to figure out what that would look like, and I brought in other strong women like me to help with that, but there isn’t a checkbox in the world of exactly what that is, and I didn’t know how to define it exactly. It morphed into sort of marketing services. People, they want very specific deliverables and we ended up helping with the creative things. Within that we were always needing to do a website because people always need to get their website updated or redone or whatever. That was always included in the packages. I would do these monthly retainers to, let’s work through what needs to be worked through as a consulting situation and we’ll also be building you a website because again, everyone always needs that almost. At some point, a few years in I had specifically been working on the Wix website platform for a long time and loved how you didn’t have all the restrictions as when you were working on something like WordPress. There weren’t as many of the more DIY, user-friendly non-professional platforms as there are now. I mean everyone from MailChimp to GoDaddy has build your website on our platform. Wix was one of the ones and I loved its flexibility and I got in early with them in a partner type of way where I was meeting directly with them all the time and they take the feedback and were growing and changing their product. We were building small business websites on that platform. A few years in, it was like I had people here at my dinner table and I’m like I gotta get these people outta my house. We get a little office and things were going well. We honed in on just doing websites at some point. I still had some of the leftover clients from more of the consulting. The reason also that I shifted to that was because even when I had other people in to take leadership roles to say, okay, ultimately I want them to have that client and I’m not involved. They always still wanted me and I can’t replicate myself. I’m like, that’s not scalable, so let’s just make a product. Here it is. Websites. Long story short, went through that during the pandemic. I productized how we did it. I made this very defined six week process where we could churn out these good Wix websites in six weeks. My idea was to do volume and not even hang onto the customers, just burn insurance so that we could get to volume. I could keep expanding my base, but we wouldn’t hold onto them for smaller bits of retainer or little fixes that take time to jump back in and relearn who they are and what they are. I just wanna churn and burn. I launched that, went through all that productization work and that started off strong and then it fizzled. I also had outgrown Wix as a creative, that there were limitations to it that I was not satisfied anymore with as our clientele was growing, being able to provide what they need, the quality that they need, and the design with where I wanted to go with our work. We switched to Webflow last year and have been doing that with that more targeted clientele. I say a good company’s doing good.

Nice. Yeah. Wix and sexy don’t necessarily, even though they’re both share an X don’t necessarily sound good. Quick segue, what’s the timeframe of all this?

I started my company I think six and a half years ago. I kept some of those consulting things going, but we started doing websites only for new customers. Then I productized that summer in the pandemic. Some YouTube ad or some social ad or something said, are you an agency owner? Do you hate doing X, Y, Z? And I was like, yes. It was this agency called Alt Agency that you went through a self-directed program with support in a one-to-many model. What they were teaching you is how to do that, instead of handholding every specific customer for creative work that you could have these defined things. It taught me a lot about automating product, productizing anything, making things systemized in ways that even though I had so much experience and that’s how my brain worked, there were just some things that I hadn’t quite had the key turn of oh, okay. Going through that program and doing some exercises, and different things that they took you through. It opened the door to me on how to further create efficiencies, which I’m all about in general with everything I do. But that, from a business standpoint, gave me a lot of tools.

It sounds like the pandemic was both a boon and I guess you could say you had both sides of the fence, success and some struggles during the pandemic. What did that look like for you in the stage of your business?

I definitely gotten to the point where one of the things that’s very much not fun in creative work is when you have to pass off, here’s the estimate and the breakdown of the work, because every project’s a little bit different, right? The needs are gonna be a little bit different. Those are torturous. When we had the productized version, and still, I pretty much do this with all requests for proposals and things like that is, it’s just one document. I’m not making a new document every time. I have the gist of what the production is, that is standard. Sometimes the pricing is different based on needs, then I’ll create a very brief custom document of that. But it’s quick instead of having to do a whole long proposal which is what I used to do. When I had it productized, I didn’t even do the individual pricing. It was like, this is the fee, this is what it is, this is the package, and boom, here’s the info. That was helpful and I’ve streamlined all of that from how I take meetings to how I do sales calls to the follow up from a sales call. It’s very clean with a very organized high touch feel, even though it’s all already set up. I’m just sending a link basically to something that exists, but it feels on the other side very comprehensive and professional and plain, clear, obvious of what the situation is and what the product is and all of that.

I always love hearing the innovation that came out of companies that either they were fed up with something or inherently challenged, they had to overcome in the course of the pandemic. It sounds like you solved something great for your business as well. As I understand it, you eventually had a difficult situation with a larger legacy client. What happened there and how did that effect your business?

That was one of the ones that was consulting initially. One of the owners of the company I’d been working from my very first iteration. When I initially started my company, the way that I reached out to people to get some of those original clients is just me consulting. Let’s make it better. This is nebulous and undefined. I reached out to people that I knew, that I’d ever met with. There was a restaurant group owner that I had done an interview for when I was doing a column. One of my content creation things, influencer type of projects was food-based. I had a little local column at a local newspaper for years, and so I’d interviewed him for that. I reached out to him and I told him what I was doing and he said, oh, I need this in my life. I actually, I do need someone to help me push through these ideas that I’ve had and never follow through on, to make this thing or do that, or, put together this program, whatever. I was working with him, and then he needed some sort of marketing supervision help at his company. I pitched him, I said, hey, I’ll come in. This other woman that I’m working with will come in and do supervising. It was supposed to be consulting and we were supposed to be able to have all these people at his company that we were directing and able to orchestrate to get the work done. But it soon turned into that we had to become much more responsible for deliverables. That went on, I worked with them for years and there was a lot of good work that came out of that, but it was almost like a bait and switch, where it was, come in as this consulting thing and then, no, actually. Doing all the work and making sure it gets done and having a much more involved in the minutiae role. That was a legacy client that not only did I have a history with, you’re tied in with the company and the operations based from our angle of what we were helping them with. It’s hard to let one of those go, but when the pandemic hit, that was a restaurant group and so immediately, everybody’s business went boom. They all closed right away. They asked everybody who was on contract like myself, the person doing PR, things like that if the first month, we could do half our rate just for that month, and of course we’re all like, everyone’s in panic. Yes, for sure. The next month, same thing. Then it got to the point where it was hard to let go of it when it was the regular retainer, but then when that became halved for indefinitely, it wasn’t worth it. It was a good time to cut ties for both of us. Then I did that program and productized our website service and moved on from that. That was one that was lingering. That was hard for me to let go, but I knew I had to shed that to grow. It was having two jobs, running my company and then basically being outsourced CMO for their company.

Can certainly understand. I think there’s a lot of agencies that end up in that double-edged sword of a particular client, especially a larger one. You were hinting at this and maybe even somewhat the theme. You sound like a very creative person, worked on a lot of creative stuff in your career, in various forms. Sometimes even being a sense of this desire for autonomy, but also still wanting to be able to do creative things. It seems sometimes it can be a very tough thing to navigate especially in an agency world. What’s been the highs and lows for you with that juxtaposition in mind?

Every once in a while I’ll do an exercise when I feel frustrated. You know how you qualify your dreams and goals and wants and needs and what makes me the happiest and that sort of thing. One of the things that always comes out of it, or the couple of things, is definitely the desire to do creative. I always wanna be creating, but then freedom and flexibility. Some of the highs, like in business, I’ll tell you one of the things that I will always treasure is when I was full on in Wix and I was growing and I saw the future is bright with what I was doing at that time. I was partnered with Wix and my Wix partner manager asked me if I would appear for them on a segment on Cheddar News, which is filmed on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. They purchased a segment, but you go and they want a real interview, right? They said, you just talk about why you choose Wix and what your business does and all of that. I said, sure. They said, oh, you can do it remotely and I’m like, oh no. I’m going to the floor of the stock exchange. There’s no way I’m missing that opportunity. I’m in New York as my second home anyway, so before the pandemic, I was up there frequently. I was there and I’m walking in, even though I lived in New York, I maybe had been down to Wall Street once or twice, once for jury duty and maybe one other time or something. It’s a very historical American spot around the stock exchange and you feel it. You feel the gravity of that. They still had barricades up and all of that where there’s high security and I’d go in and have my badge with my picture on it and I’m in the stock exchange. You’re down there and it’s no longer anything like the movies from the eighties or nineties, where there are people screaming with ticker tape flying and all of that, but the structure’s still there and the pneumatic gold or copper piping, whatever it is, running all over the place. How they used to send this stuff around fast. There’s, CNBC and Cheddar News and various other people use it to film now. It’s primarily a TV set, the bell’s there and it’s marble everywhere. I’m just in there thinking oh my God, like me, like how am I even in here and about to be interviewed on a live tech news, whatever channel. I did the thing and the people before me were stiff. It was the CEO from Build-A-Bear or something and they were stiff executives. I came on and I was laughing with the guys and we had a great time. When we cut and it was over, one of the two guys, one of the interviewers turned to me and you said you crushed it cuz we just had a great time and it was a great interview. Then I spit out, the way that you spit out, you end up right under the sign that says Wall Street, the real Wall Street, New York. And I felt wow, like that is such a unique, amazing experience. That’s definitely one of the highs of my career or general life. That opportunity is just a swirl of all my choices and the work that I did and ended up there. That’s something that was a special opportunity that you can’t buy or recreate. It’s just something crazy that happened. Then, let’s see, a low.

We can keep it all at highs if you want, I’m all about positivity.

There’s been so many. I helped this event here called the Texas Veggie Fair that went defunct over the pandemic, but it had a good 10 year run. It was a vegan vegetarian festival that had products and food and performers and all sorts of things. I’d gone to it when I first came back to Dallas to live and it was cool but I noticed it felt like a backyard event. I reached out to the producer and said, can I help you make this better? And he’s, yeah, come on in. I co-produced it with him for a couple years and the first year I doubled the attending. I got Erykah Badu there.. I was standing on the stage with Erykah Badu, she was DJing and standing up there and me and some of the other people that were the producers on it, just kinda dancing on this stage with Erykah Badu at this event, with this giant crowd dancing that we had created. Things like that are neat and special. When I played music, I went on teeny tiny little tours that I put together, but, you’d be somewhere like Washington DC and there’s 20 people in this little bar watching you, and somebody comes up and says, we love it. You sign the thing and can you wait a picture? Having that kind of impact from wherever I was making music in Oregon and it reached out. There’s always stuff like that that’s special. Now I do, my creative project is called Dallas Love Bugs, where I do media for our Dallas Municipal shelter. I created an account cause I was taking photos of the animals when I was working with them at the shelter and playgroup. That has blown up where people send me notes constantly about how much hope it gives them. Cuz this is a whole nother podcast and segue, but we have a major overpopulation problem in the United States, but especially the southern United States of animals. Way too many big dogs, and we have to euthanize a million animals a year in this country because of the overpopulation, and there’s nowhere for them to go. How inspiring it is and how it inspired people to adopt or foster or volunteer or learn about the realities without feeling depressed about it, but knowing there’s a path forward. I think it’s just those connections and experiences are what are most memorable.

Lovely, thank you for sharing that. From our first conversation, it sounds like you’re at an interesting stage in where you’re at with your business and where to next. To the extent that you feel comfortable or want, do you mind just kinda sharing what that looks like for you and where your mind’s at?

Right now I have some clients on retainer that we maintain their websites. I’m not pushing right now for sales of the websites. The ones that come in that are appropriate, taking those on. Dallas Lovebug is the project that I’m running under, that runs through Lovage. Not that there’s a lot of, it’s monetized very minutely now. Meta Facebook tagged me as a digital creator. I get some monetization for reels, plays on that platform and Instagram too. They have me lined up for various things once I get to a certain amount of followers that I can trigger in, where you can do subscriptions and all these other monetization things that you can do, to actually generate money. And then I can grow that. As an entrepreneur, of course, I wanna be able to go bigger and bigger with that because it’s having a big impact. I’m now looking for a more stable executive or consulting executive type of position that will fuel that and straddle all those things and just see where the growth happens. But I feel burnt out on chasing the website business. Right now I’m leaving that just bubbling as it is without push effort, but I will say that it is amazing to have. Even if it’s a teeny, tiny little company, to have something established that exists out there that people find. I have it all automated how the sales calls work and things like that. You see it come in on my calendar and the way I have the sales call automated is they book a sales call, then it drives’em to a brief questionnaire, and it puts the calendar invites on both our calendars and things like that. We do still get some people that we would wanna work within for that. I’m just not going out there and actively soliciting, posting on LinkedIn about how great the work is or reaching out to people. It’s just out there in existence.

I’m sure it will lead to something amazing that we’re not even quite certain what it is yet. Sounds like a pretty cool journey you have there. If we could hop back in our time machine again, and you could go back at any point in your career and give yourself some advice, do you know where you’d go back to and what you would say?

Yes. I think that I would go back to, it’s hard to pick the exact time, but it would be young adult Stephanie, either when I was still in school and working my ass off in the industry that I was training for or shortly thereafter. Even if you whisper this in a 21 year old’s ear, it doesn’t matter because you just don’t have the experience to have this. But it’s just about having faith in your confidence and abilities and not being scared of certain things. I was running motion picture cutting rooms and teams when I was in my mid twenties. Now people that work for me that are in their mid twenties, I can’t get them to complete three outta four jobs on a task list. They’re like, I thought it was a good job cuz it was three outta four, oh my gosh. I was working with giant movie stars on giant studio lots on tens of millions of dollars of budgeted films and they were putting giant responsibility in my hands. The people that were on my team were 10, 15 years older than me and I was the manager of those people. Then running these other departments and, again, working with these big directors and things. Gary Marshall and M. Night Shyamalan and whatnot. I had a keen sense when I was young that I needed to get exposure and experience to a lot of things, so I didn’t feel scared or uncomfortable if someone came to me with something and I didn’t know what it was or didn’t know the answer, to feel vulnerable. I don’t know where that comes from or if that’s something that all young people deal with or not. But it would be great if you could have a conversation and it would stick to younger me to say it’s okay to not know things. It’s okay to admit that, because look how strong you are. Look at all these things you’re doing and accomplishing and those outweigh any of the other stuff, and it’s not gonna make you look bad if you admit that you don’t know this certain thing or say, let me figure that out, or will you teach me. I always wanted to seem impenetrable, to be not vulnerable, I don’t know. Not vulnerable to what, because I was making a lot of money and working on these big projects.

That seems to be the theme. Whenever I do ask that question, it doesn’t matter what I’d say. I wasn’t gonna listen to myself anyway. Our younger selves not gonna listen to our old self anyway, but maybe that’s just to say we’ll have to be very creative in terms of how we plant that seed or that idea or that advice, that we take heed to. But then, yes, so much of it is the journey itself anyway is important, more so than the advice. Thank you for sharing that. Last big question for you, Stephanie. Are entrepreneurs born or are they made?

I think it’s a lot of born, but I also was the first born. By default you figure it out and then you know you’re helping your little brothers, or that’s just my case. I think being the oldest child of clever parents that urge you to chase the things you wanna chase is part of it. But I definitely, like I said, at a young age had that entrepreneurial spirit, just had no idea what you would call it at that time. I was always leading, inventing, producing from the time I was very young.

If people wanna know more about Loveage, where can they go?

Lovageinc.com baby.

Easy enough. Go there. Very fascinating, what an amazing career you’ve led and all its different turns and twists, can’t wait to see what you’re gonna do in the future. Thank you so much for your time today, Stephanie, and being on the show.

Thank you for finding me and having me on. It was a nice convo.

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.

At one point I decided that I was ready to do some advertising and spent some money on that. Google had actually contacted me and they said, oh, we have this outsourced and we give you all this credit and we basically support you and and it sounded great. So I’m like, okay, great. We’ll do the three grand for the month of whatever? They supposedly have these experts that are Google from Google. It was Google certified. They have Google email addresses and everything, and so they were trying to get more small and medium sized businesses to purchase Google result advertising. They had these support systems for them and said, basically you’re getting this free account expert on Google Ads to help you. We did it and we did everything we said and then we started getting calls. This was when we still had telephones and an office, started getting calls for the most random, ridiculous things like car towing and things that had nothing to do with our business after having these Google experts. I thought that was such a funny lesson of everything is not what it appears to be. You can’t necessarily trust anything especially in the realm of digital advertising. They ultimately refunded it all because I just said hey, this is weird. I told my team, I’m like, okay guys, this is it. We’re going next level. I’m gonna put some money behind advertising. We’re doing well. We’re gonna get out there. We’ve got Google on our side, and it was the worst possible digital advertising that anyone could set up ever.

Google experts that work in the company don’t even know their product.

It was very funny. We couldn’t believe it cuz all the phone started ringing. We were like, it’s working. They’re like yeah, are you guys a tow company?. We’re like, no, not at all.

That’s hilarious.