How to Be the CEO of Your Online Business

you can be gifted a lot of things but what you want to see progress in you have to be diligent and you have to be consistent and that's the only way because you can be the most talented but if you never put out consistent content no one's gonna know you can be super talented but if you don't create consistent content no one will know how talented you are that's one of my favorite quotes from my friend vanessa darby who you're just about to hear from we're going to talk about content creation what has changed and what has stayed the same she's also going to be talking about what it's been like to transition from being a solopreneur to stepping into a true ceo role she's set up internships and uses that as part of her hiring process so she'll be talking about that as well and finally because we're in nashville she's going to talk about how being a musician has helped her to be a better business person i can't wait for you to see this interview i'm pamela wilson and i help people in mid-career to grow profitable online businesses and this is the online business expert series welcome i am so glad that you tuned in for this interview i have my friend vanessa darby here and she doesn't know the story but uh she is here in nashville and i saw her for the first time at an event called craft content nashville where i was the keynote speaker a few years back and i remember seeing her and going like oh she's she's awesome i want to get to know her and then it turned out that we discovered that we lived really close by we live kind of in the same part of nashville in the metropolitan area i would say and so we've had lunch together a few times and she is so smart and so savvy about so many things so i am just super grateful that that vanessa darby of moxie moxie nashville is here to talk to us today welcome vanessa yeah thank you so much for having me and for wearing the hoodie and for just being awesome yes i love having lunch with you oh my gosh this hoodie is so great it was such a great idea and i will talk more about how that came about later in the interview but before we dive in too deep i want you to tell people what you do now and who you serve with your business yeah that's a great question to kick it off so i own moxie nashville it is a consulting agency that specializes in business strategy and social media and we get to work with i got my start in the music industry in the gospel industry on the radio side and the mark the record label side i did digital um in both different areas and so then i parlayed that into doing it for different people whether it's influencers or sas companies or um still in the music industry still in gospel as well um sometimes in higher education and faith-based genres now so we're kind of kind of crossing the gamut here so just having fun you really are you've done so much really in your career so far and i suspect you're probably drawing from all of those experiences when you serve clients right yeah i actually i've been a musician since i was in elementary school so i taught myself how to read music when i was eight because i thought whitney houston performed i believe in you and me and the preacher's wife which i used to watch every day because of the soundtrack it's amazing and uh my mom had like a 66 key keyboard and so i would go over there and i would match the notes to share like the stickers on the keys with the letters and i would just match the notes and i was learning fractions at the time and i was like oh the key signature's just a fraction and so i literally would just do math over there and so they put me in lessons and so that's that sparked my interest for the music industry but i had no idea there was a whole business side or um you know marketing side or radio i wanted to go into production but i didn't practice enough for that so i ended up in in digital marketing i love it i love it but you bring all of those experiences to the table so digital marketing is what you're offering them like across the gamut right yeah we've got a niche down now um because we we used to do everything and when i first started it was just me and so when you run the whole you know digital marketing um department for a label you're talking to artists you're running ads you're making sure spotify and google play and apple music you know ha almost at itunes but now it's apple music but you're making sure that they have their content and also just the surge of content marketing um that really wasn't a thing you know so now it's making sure that they have not only the audio drops but the video drops and now there's podcasts that are coming out and so you know now social media is its own currency in a sense and so that has been where we have found our sweet spot with organic social media posting but also social media strategy and how to parlay what you're doing now into something that you can monetize and build relationships from one of the things that i wanted to ask you about because you're really in the digital marketing space is what you see that has changed in the year that we're talking like right now what is different about what has gone before and then i'd also like to know what you think is kind of evergreen what you think will not change in the digital marketing space yeah i thought about this you know i think that of course virtual reality and um you know like the digital currencies and stuff like that the nfts that's a new space that's emerging a lot i don't dabble too much in it i don't like to be in the future that much but but that's something that is starting to kind of knock and i can't ignore it too too much um i think content being not only a way of monetization because that's been there for about the past 10 years but really as far as telling stories i think that people are using content now as a way to communicate which before it was more so advertisement and commercial like it wasn't something that you did every day and then you know with the pandemic and tick tock just booming everybody was creating contents and adding closed captions and adding music beds and doing jump cuts and so the style of content and storytelling that we're seeing now is different from myspace you know it's different from early youtube days is there you know or even early instagram days or vine and you know now being able to i think you know igtv came out with the past two three years you know um now we're able to see people actually tell their own story and be their own narrator of their story and i think that now people are taking control of that and it's across various ages you know there are plenty of people that are doing cooking channels on tick tock and you know they're well into their 70s and i love to see it and so now whereas a newspaper was a way to get message out social media and your phone is a way to get your message out so i think the boundaries and the barriers to entry of storytelling and also owning your own brand have significantly decreased with that however comma there's also still a highly technical skill level that you have to have in order to break through so it's not just anybody and everything you still have to be relatable you still have to be um able to communicate and express your emotions and express what you're messaging and you also have to have if you're monetizing it some sort of call to action so some of those things aren't going away um what software you use to edit what camera used to film on of course the higher quality the better but there are plenty of people that are making it out here with their iphone and using their lotion bottle as a tripod right totally totally so it's interesting because almost everything you said involves video so it's all about video people if they're not using video they need to sounds like get over that right yeah i mean video could be different ways and i like talking to camera but that's not everybody's jam you could do voiceovers um you can do you not saying anything but doing some sort of um thing in emotion in action have a music bed you know so there's different ways to look at content now versus before it was very you know i'm talking to you through this camera through this lens i'm making eye contact we're doing all that and i can literally set my tripod up and have i'm looking at it now instead of set it up and start and be packaging hoodies and put a kanye west music bed and have some you know an inspirational quote on it and that's content now you know we can take this video that we're recording and chop it up and that's content so i think a little piece yes right yeah so it's looking at it as everything everything can be content if you want it to be it's the question of if you want it to be so right and that whole i mean people in my generation are used to having this barrier between the work you do and your personal life and those are two separate things and they do not cross and that i feel like that is completely gone especially now because so many of us are having to work from home whether we want to or not we're working from home i mean you and i have worked from our homes forever but a lot of people are experiencing that for the first time so this idea of there being this super strict boundary be between like your work and your home life is i feel like that's kind of gone forever yeah and i will say this i actually just did a i interviewed my sister who's way smarter than me she's a psychologist and she we were talking about that i interviewed her for our podcast and the the negative thing about social media social media and i stopped trying to i try to stop labeling as good or bad it's a tool in my mind um the user is the person that can make it something to your advantage or you know something that can be a disadvantage for you because there are you know correlate this is correlation and causation between depression and anxiety and social media you know like we can't get around that um additionally having boundaries between what your personality is and what your persona is online and who you are at home is critical right so you may now that it may not be that the boundary is completely gone but there is is definitely a little bit more see-through than it was before um so i i definitely advocate for having a some sort of split between what you consider content and what's actually your everyday life because when people have access to you all the time or perceived access to you then it can get a little it can get a little much you can get a little much though right absolutely so you are you've kind of moved into this situation where you were doing it all yourself and now you're more of a ceo and i would love to hear more about that transition and how that went for you because i think a lot of people watching are maybe in a situation where they're managing everything on their own yeah and then you know looking to move into having a team so what has that been like for you so one time i just had too much work and i was writing out my to-do list my admin skills are pretty strong naturally so i just writing on my to-do list and it just kept getting longer and longer and um it wasn't just editing content it was like building strategy make this deck you know do these different things and i was like okay and so i had planned to start an internship program in the fall and literally i was like oh this is for the spring and so i started an internship program and that really was the start of me bringing on people i had four interns at first and i used to teach at tennessee state university i used to be professor there teaching entrepreneurship and so i value internships i got into the industry as an intern so i it was a full-fledged program i was bringing in virtual guest speakers and all of that so it definitely allowed me to test the waters and see how are people tracking their time how do i bring on people even if they're contractors or part-time what does that look like how are people getting paid what do we need a team meeting all the time what project management tools like base camp asana monday what do we want to use what fits moxie so going through all of that really happened on the internship program and that was great because it was a limited amount of time that we could do it um then i realized i needed them i needed people here because when they stopped i said hey this is kind of still a lot for me um and that was during especially the pandemic happening so i had always led teams i've been presidents of organizat a president of organizations um i've just always been a leader so i understood that aspect of it but doing it within moxie looked different and i had to approach it in a different way so how how did that look different then how what did you end up learning about that process and how did you sort of evolve into the leader you are today one thing i learned was that i can attribute my ability to cross different industries to everyone some people may be very specific uh at music business they may be very specific in understanding how our higher education works we had one client that was um basically the number one digital news source for all the news associations and so having to understand a 24-hour news cycle very different from a music release schedule right and so learning how people actually tick we would we would do different personality tests and i i got my masters in organizational leadership so i love understanding people and how they work that was a huge thing and i made some mistakes i'm not gonna sit here and act like i made everything you know everything was perfect um also understanding that my business had grown its own culture outside of me but um i started it and i realized then that this is not a business anymore that's just me in my apartment with my roommate you know um so that that unlearning took a lot for me um and also not coddling people like if you hire them like let them fall let them do their job but um that that took a process too because i like things to be a certain way um so really it was more of some of the personality and and um i would say eq traits when you're hiring someone whether it's contract part-time full-time whatever that is there is that time especially if you're going from solopreneur to any sort of leadership role you have to train you have to put in processes you have to put in those procedures so that people can actually do their job without you around without you hovering so right exactly and so when it comes to communicating culture then what are you doing for that besides having team meetings and you being you and communicating how you are what are you doing to communicate a culture that is bigger than any of the individuals that work for you or work in your company yeah that's that's definitely a a work in progress um for me people were able to kind of catch on and see what the culture was but i also had to get some brand guidelines which i never had to do i never had to do um and so also because we work in social media you know i had to have i have to go over copywriting with them because you can write something and it can technically be correct but it's not in the slang style jargon or culture that we have or my clients have and so that part actually wasn't too difficult because when you work in social media you're used to kind of switching voices and switching tenses and so when you work with creative people sometimes you could just give them two or three words and say hey we're bubbly we're spicy you know we're you know we're our client is this our client is that um so they were able to pick up on that and then also we had to put in an approval process so before anything you know goes out i have to take a look at it because ultimately i'm the one that knows the voice so that changed what type of software we use we moved from hootsuite to loomly you know stuff like that to where that approval process was built into the program and we were able to um really kind of um overcome that because that having good software people can do their jobs even if they messed up mess up it makes for the accidents easier to to overcome if that makes sense i work with creative people because i have creative clients so realizing that creative people sometimes we're not all the way here right so we can physically be here but our mind is somewhere else or we're working on our own thing that we want to do and so asking them you know what are you working on and what does how are you learning what how's what you're learning here adding value to your personal or creative life um because that helps to limit the distraction but to also put it in a paradigm to where what you're doing here is building what you what you need in your personal creative life like you should be learning here the biggest compliment anybody can give me is that because they came through moxie they were sharper when they left that's the goal i never want people to be limited and so it's kind of a boot camp in that sense where i'm you know i'm okay with people passing through because i passed through a couple different companies before i got to my own um and so that approach and and being transparent in that has been working to my advantage whereas traditional companies it's you know what you do here it's what you do here no i want you to take what i'm doing here and you go do something else with it i want you to do that because you're gonna you're gonna bounce back to me anyway you know but i never want to take credit for for anybody's creative work i hire you because you're creative the analytical stuff we can we can talk through but i hire you because you're creative i want to ask you about something that you mentioned really briefly at the top of the video which is that you play piano and i know at some point we were having lunch and you were saying that you were going back to taking piano lessons and we had a whole conversation about that i i want to hear about how that has helped you as you've stepped into this next level of your own business yeah that's so funny my pm teacher her name is anna lynn shout out to anna lynn um she always says piano lessons are life lessons and that's all that's the thing that she's kind of drilled into me and i forgot what being a musician the level of discipline that it requires to be a musician because there's literally no shortcuts you know and social media you can kind of get around you know doing different things you can schedule you can you know but the only way you can get better at piano or better any instruments if you practice on a consistent basis that's it like you can't even block out them i'm going to practice for eight hours on friday no you need to practice 30 minutes on monday 30 minutes like you have to practice and so that going back into piano lessons has been something that i never thought that i needed to do for just me so one it gave me my own sense of creativity where i didn't have to how can i phrase it i was still performing but i it wasn't coming from my personality you know it was it was coming from me interpreting someone else's work and seeing how i added my own value to it and how that that came out like what kind of create what thing could we create so it's kind of like cooking where yeah you can follow the instructions but you got to put your own love into it you got to put your own thoughts into it and so um that's the first thing so for me being able to produce something that um that actually was a marriage between someone's um someone's art and my own interpretation phenomenal the second thing that discipline that it required because i did not want to give up on piano because my schedule was getting crazy and i really couldn't get the hang of it at first and so i remember talking to my teacher like i think i think i just kind of outgrew this i think i kind of outgrew it and she said um she said if you don't have time to do piano that's fine i get it you're an adult you know adult students are kind of difficult because of the demands that they have she said but if you're quitting piano because you don't think that this is your gift then that's a different thing and i don't want you to walk away thinking that you're not gifted at piano just because you don't have the time to put in because all it the only thing you need is time and to practice she's like you don't practice and that's why you're not getting the results that you want and so from an emotional standpoint right deep right i'm just imagining myself hearing that and going oh my gosh that was right it kind of gets you right in the heart right it does and so what i started to look at in my life was where was i at where i was on the fence because i was questioning if i was gifted at it or not and not because i just didn't put the time in to schedule and to get myself together right and so that actually parlayed into my business because i'm not trained in marketing i'm not trained in social media all these things download from jesus self-taught and experience that's it my degrees are in management and organizational leadership in business management administration so i i love a spreadsheet just as much as i love photoshop right and so i had to realize that what i'm able to do in my business is a gift it's not something that i can train to do now with that gift you have to have a discipline right so it is not enough to be gifted you have to have a discipline and so piano has reintroduced that idea to me that you can be gifted a lot of things but what you want to see progress in you have to be diligent and you have to be consistent and that's the only way that you're going to see growth and i hate to say the only way sometimes but that's literally it because you can be the most talented but if you never put out consistent content no one's gonna know and then from there then i kind of get my my mojo back and that's another thing too as a business owner you have dips you know you do have the peaks in the valleys and so having someone that says hey you know i see you i know you this is your gift and to affirm that for you so that you can say you know what okay so it's not the fact that i'm not gifted what's wrong then you put on your hat as a manager or a leader and say okay what is inefficient in my business that i need to kind of iron out and not questioning should you be in business or not and i think a lot of times we as business owners we don't talk about the days we're like just burn it all down i don't need any of it but you have them you have those days it doesn't mean that you don't love what you do but there's been plenty of time my friends know there's been plenty of times where i'm like i don't think this is a child i don't think so piano has allowed me to welcome that questioning to affirm that i am gifted in different areas and to challenge myself to say if i want to see progress in the areas that i'm gifted in then i have to put in the work consistently over time not just put in the work today but i have to put in consistently and those small steps can be big moves later on but you got to start it's never going to be perfect you're never going to have everything that you need you you're never going to have perfect clients although i have very good clients i love my clients but you're but there's always going to be something wrong always and so when you take that expectation of perfection off then you can actually get to the nitty-gritty and say okay i like problem solving and that's why i'm in business and that's why you know i hire people that i hire and like that's what i like and so then it becomes what problem are we going to solve today versus what's going wrong now um with two different approaches to the same problem oh that's so awesome that's so awesome all right vanessa darby how can people find you what is the best place they can find you and i know you had some special links and those will be down in the description below this video but in general what is the best place for people to find you um honestly i'm everywhere on the internet i'm on instagram tick tock um linkedin facebook all at vanessa darby that's two n's one s d-a-r-b-y but yeah you you'll find me there oregon vanessa darby.com everything's linked there too so it's just my first and last name and i definitely love talking to people so feel free to come on over awesome thank you so much for being a guest on the online business expert series i can't wait to see you in person i hope it happens soon right thank you so much for having me and yes definitely gotta happen son

2022-02-01 02:09

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