Navigating the Path from Military to Digital Marketing: A Journey of Entrepreneurship and Growth

It’s going great!

Okay, for sure. Yeah, going through the army is probably not the traditional path to digital marketing. I think one of my main takeaways from the army was I don’t like people telling me what to do. So that might have started my entrepreneurship journey there. But in undergrad, my degrees were in computer science, engineering, psychology, and I feel like digital marketing is the perfect union of those. And I like solving problems for that. And so I think it really made me lean the creativity and also just to find those tangible solutions that we work with a lot of stores that are in the 100,000 to 5 million revenue a year. And at that site, they don’t have these huge staffs to do everything. I think that military get her done, Okay, let’s just figure out how to get you where you need to go, has worked really well. You would ask me before we started how I got the name Yellow Web Monkey, and I was saying, I wish we had this really cool origin story, but I am for Type A, which follows along with the military, and actually made a list of adjectives, nouns, and what not that I liked. Yellow is the favorite color. Monkeys, I think, are awesome. That’s how we get Yellow Web Monkey.

I let go of clients all the time. There’s lots of calls. I think that’s one of the mistakes that agencies do all the time is that they take all clients. And you’re not the best fit. And I think you can figure that out. One of my best advice for people starting out agencies, go with your gut. If something seems off or whatever, you’re going to know that at the beginning. And it’s not necessarily always a bad thing. It’s just, Hey, my style is different than yours. My communication style is different. We have different expectations. And I think it’s good to recognize that when you’re doing a proposal. Every single one of our clients is on a month-to-month contract. We do no long-term contracts. And all of them are either party can cancel in two weeks. So if our clients aren’t happy with their performance, they can let us go. If it’s really not a good relationship that we don’t agree with how they treat people or some of their values or doing shady things, then we give notice. We obviously give them more time to transition than that, but it gives us flexibility.

One of the things that has helped our own growth the most, I think, is letting go of trying to do everything and partnering. We’ve really developed some great partnerships with some pay-per-click and email marketing that I can say, Hey, these guys are great. They’ve gotten some good results, and they can stay on it. Because everything in this field changes so much. There’s no way you can be an expert in everything. You just can’t.

The old adage of under promise, over deliver is definitely something that’s great in the beginning. One thing that, and we’ve been around for 15 years, but one of the things that helped me when I first started was I went to some pretty big local clients. I said, look, here’s the deal. I’m going to build you this website for, and I quoted them a stupid low price that I don’t even want to mention on this podcast. But I said, the only thing I ask is if anyone ask you paid full price. And so I got this client that everybody knew they had billboards all over town and what not. And then all I ever had to do is go, oh, yeah, I do this guy’s website. Nobody ever asked anything else. Oh, you do their website? Okay, yeah, you can do mine. It worked like a charm. So that’s a great trick along the way. But you mentioned staying afloat. You think you get through those first couple of years and you think it’s going to be smooth sailing, and every once in a while, it just throws you a curve ball. Covid was one. I think about two years ago, we had the lowest first quarter we ever had, and it was humbling to be like, Okay, I haven’t thought about making payroll in a long time.

And so I think being humble and always have lots of money for your payroll and what not, as well as to stay on top of things changing. I mean, I’ve had to retool this agency, I don’t know how many times. When I started 15 years ago, we did Joomla and Opencart, which just dates myself. So to figure out what are the best softwares, how do we move our clients so they can be successful.

I think a lot of it’s the education. We just talked about how quickly it changes and whatnot. To be privy to that information, to have the education, to have those softwares information. I went up to Toronto for Shopify Editions this year. I mean, they blow your mind every single time with all the features they drop. I think it’s being in on that, knowing what’s coming, being able to do dev sites and beta test things, really helps you grow that. You have to make the best recommendations for your client, and those change. What was the right answer six months ago may not be the right answer now.

So So Love Shop is I love to sew, and I did baby blankets for friends, and realized women spend an obscene amount of money on baby shower kits. It is ridiculous. And so, two, the value propositions for it is people wait till the last minute to buy, but they want something custom. So the ability to do next day shipping on something customized. I went into that because I could do things with the website, having live preview of the personalization. I didn’t mind getting all my craft supplies for wholesale. I’m not going to lie. But that was a really big learning opportunity to me to change hats from digital marketing to being store owner and realizing how many other challenges are there outside of marketing. And that store, when we really started getting momentum going, we had one product that represented like 80% of our sales, and that particular fabric went on back order for six months. And it just gave me an appreciation for what these store owners, what my clients are going through that we’re trying to Hey, do this, spend on this. A lot of times, that’s the least of their worries with logistics and all the other issues out there.

I’m really glad I did it because I feel like it makes me a better agency owner. It also made me realize what it feels like waiting for ROI when it’s your money. It’s one thing to tell a client on pay-per-click, Give us some time. It takes a while, versus you’re feeling like you’re bleeding money and getting nothing out of it. I feel like it gave me a really good perspective of how to communicate to clients, how to set realistic expectations. Sometimes we do 90-day wins a lot of times with newer clients, especially if they’re budget-sensitive, where we try to prioritize what’s going to put money in their pocket, and then we grow on that. But it’s great to say organic SEO, which I love. That takes a little while to blue. To do some things to get money in their pocket, and then we can put that down the road.

We touched on earlier, it’s okay to say no to clients. Sometimes you need to fire clients. There are some clients that no matter how much money they’re paid, are not worth it. I think recognizing that. And equally on the internal side, bad hires do not become better over time. They just don’t. And nobody wants to fire somebody or to say it’s not working or whatnot. But I’ve learned as an agency owner, you got to get the right team, and it takes a while to build them. Then the other thing, as I said, is a lot of times with software, I feel like you’re betting on horses. Did I bet on the right horse? Is the software that’s going to pivot and adjust and be with it long, or are they going to flash out and have a competitor overtake them? I think it’s trying to research to pick the right softwares, but again, also admitting, Okay, Jumla was not our best idea. Where are we going? How are we migrating people? And to adjust so that you actually are in business 15 years later.

I would say San Antonio Humane Society. They’re one of our WordPress clients. They’ve been a client for probably 10 years. I have a special place in my heart for animals and whatnot. It’s a fun website to have cute pictures of dogs and whatnot. They’re on the Google for Nonprofits program, so it’s nice to help get them set up on search and to see what they’re able to do with those ads for like, spay and neuter.

I think one of the funniest things is I really love it for brand voice because we have some clients being a veteran owned company. We work with a lot of veteran owned companies, and there’s a lot of very strong, masculine brands whatever. It’s so interesting to write a product description and do it for organic SEO and then put in AI and be like, Hey, can you briefly this for me? It’s hilarious when it spits out because it’s like, Spot on, dude. Thank you. I was not going to come up with that. A funny AI story is we had a brand voice for one of these just very, as we say, cool and the military brands. One of the girls that works for me decided to use our AI tool to help summarize her Bible study. To see what it spit out, accidentally using the brand voice for Jesus Just speaking to his followers with the bro voice was very funny.

The trust your gut part, but also ask for help. I think a lot of times you look on LinkedIn or you meet some people and ask for advice of, Hey, how would you handle this? I love going to conferences because I’ll meet up with other agency owners. There’s one I work with that her agency is probably fivefold the size of ours. But we will sit and get a cup of E-Coffee and talk about, Hey, I have this difficult client. How would you handle it? Because a lot of that’s so universal. Sometimes it’s nice to get an outside perspective, whether it’s a client thing or dealing with your own team of, Hey, from a management perspective, how do you develop this talent?

Our website is yellowwebmonkey.com, so you can hit the contact form on there, or you can reach out to me on LinkedIn for Alexis Pradee. That’s P-R-I-D-Y.

Yeah, For sure.