We were lucky to catch up with Abby Combs recently and have shared our conversation below.

Abby, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Do you take vacations? How do you keep things going – any advice for entrepreneurs who feel like they can’t step away from their business for a short vacation?

Yes! That’s a big time yes! My husband and I travel approximately once a month for various reasons and it has greatly improved our outlook on life, helped us to balance work, life, kids, and relationships, and also has seemed to increase our business opportunities!

I decided years ago that experiences would be a huge part of my life and the reason I love being and entrepreneur, is that the title comes with the ability to decide what I want most out of life and then it’s solely up to me to go after that. Because of this, I was able to set a goal early on in my business that I would travel once a quarter at minimum. With this goal at the fore-front of my efforts, I have created processes and policies that allow me to step away from work, take work with me, or empower my team to keep things going as I live the life that is the fullest to me.

Additionally, when I travel and take time for myself and my family, I come back to work more empowered, more renewed, and ready to take on the challenges of the business. Investing in yourself may not show a measurable return on a spreadsheet somewhere but there is almost ALWAYS a direct correlation to business growth.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I’m Abby, the owner of E-Studios! A marketing firm that supports community builders and creators by managing their overall marketing strategies, email marketing efforts, sms tools, and more so they can serve their audiences, sell their products or services, and/or scale their companies!

I came into marketing after losing our son, Easton, 2 hours after birth in 2015. After the loss of our son, I turned to a small business to help them with their marketing efforts as a way to start the healing process. Keeping me busy while I worked to heal our broken hearts, taught me that I am strong, capable, and have something to offer the world. I helped this company go from $1M in revenue annually, to $20$ M in revenue annually in just 3.5 years. After doing that, and deciding my family needed me to stay home, I had friends and family who wanted help with marketing their small businesses and because I had being doing it for awhile, I decided to help them. Fast forward 4+ years and we now have over 25 clients (and growing), have an amazingly talented team of 8+ employees, and are learning how to build and scale a business as we go!

We specialize in email marketing, Shopify website creation and management, and overall marketing strategies. We become your CMO (chief marketing officer) AND your full marketing team. We pride ourselves on having our clients truly feel like we are their team and not an outsourced agency.

If you are building an audience and want to connect with them more, not worry about following a tricky algorithm, or are ready to take your marketing efforts to the next level, you need us at E-Studios!

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

Resilience is a tricky word! There are times I am so proud to be “resilient” and other times I feel so exhausted from the constant fight. Anyone else feel that way?!

I remember in September of 2021, we were about to lose 5 clients that totaled over 6 figures in revenue. With my business only being 1.5 years old, I thought this would cripple us. Due to a lack of standard operating procedures (sop’s) being created and enforced, we had 5 clients that were mad! Like very mad! I knew things were getting sticky but this became a time where I had to dig in, spend a lot of time at the office, make things right, and figure out how to fix this so it never happened again.

In the moment, I knew that I would look back one day and be grateful for the dumpster fire I felt like I was sitting in, but right then and there, it felt really hard to find gratitude or appreciation for the situation.

After spending countless hours at the office, I created a new way of working with our clients so there would be little to no misunderstanding of what we provide our clients and the level of service they could expect. We created clear deliverables, strict SOP’s, and stressed the importance of consistent communication. 2+ years later, I can confidently say that we are better now because of the stress-storm that Sept. 2021 was.

(We still ended up losing those 5 clients but we have grown to replace them and their revenue a few times over. Not all stories have a perfect ending)

Can you talk to us about how your side-hustle turned into something more.

This completely started as a way for me to have an outlet. Something else to focus on. A self-care tool. And within about 2 years, it tuned into a full-time business and career and employs 8 team members.

I started by just wanting to help people. Another cheer mom was sitting in the parent room with me while we watched our daughters practice and when she talked about what her and her husband did for work, I quickly got excited and started asking her a million questions about what they’re doing for email marketing. After she asked what I would do in their current situation and I gave her my response, she asked for a meeting and wanted to hire me! I was pumped!

At this point I didn’t have a website. No social media. What should I charge?! I had no clue but I knew that a spark was lit by the opportunity of helping someone with something I am so passionate about.

That one cheer mom turned into another client who needed help with all of his marketing efforts and then that turned into another friend who I reached out to to see if she wanted help. And thus the snowball effect began!

I often thought that I should wait until the business is “legit”- create a website, have a device menu, etc etc etc. But some great advice from my husband who said that we should just see if we can make money with this first, was the way this was created! I often tell myself that if we can just do the work, the rest will fall into place and figure itself out and it’s always worked for us!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://theestudios.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/e_studiosmarketing/