We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Kristin Stewart Aungst. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Kristin below.

Kristin , thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Do you think folks should manage their own social media or hire a professional? What do you do?

Social media is a funny marketing tool – it’s the ultimate smoke and mirrors, the most misunderstood, and generates the greatest variance in success. It presents as a simple, uncomplicated effort that any kid with a TikTok, Facebook or Instagram account can manage. It misleads many business owners, pulling them into a vortex of misconception. Social media is a necessary evil, akin to an adorable gremlin – it’s all warm and fuzzy until you feed it after midnight.

For me, the essential keys to social media for a business are brand voice and story. They are the very essence of what you’re marketing online. It’s not the individual beliefs, thoughts or opinions of the business owner or the person managing social media. It should not be the buzzworthy topic du jour, or the platform to put bad customers/vendors/competitors on blast. It should be calculated, strategic, and aligned with everything the business is, and nothing it isn’t. It’s because of this that I don’t trust anyone but myself to manage my five business’s social media accounts – I personally handle each and every post, every private message response, and all engagement.

I want to ensure it’s seamless, consistent, on brand, and wholly representative of my businesses. I’ve seen many digital marketing train wrecks in my 20+ years of experience, and they typically involve an agency/team/marketing person taking advantage of the business owner. I’m lucky in that I have experience, education (Bachelor’s and MBA degrees in marketing), a long track record of success, and clients that pay me to handle all their marketing (one of my five businesses is marketing consulting for medium-sized, second stage businesses – I manage $2M in combined annual marketing spend). It’s not always realistic, however, to manage your business’s online presence. One of the cornerstones of entrepreneurship is embracing the aspect(s) of your business that you’re expertly skilled at and turning the tasks that you’re not as competent at over to experts that you trust.

If social media must be outsourced, these are my five tips for finding the right person or team:

1. Find someone that understands your brand’s voice. They must be dedicated to guarding its integrity like a mama bear, and maintains it so seamlessly, no one knows it’s an outsider. If your business is a seafood purveyor, don’t hand your social media over to an agency that would post a picture of salmon with a recipe for tuna (both very distinctive looking fish, and yes, this really did happen to a small business that I know who trusted their marketing to an Orlando agency).
2. Don’t hire family or family of friends. You need to have real, honest dialogue with anyone that manages your online presence – you can’t do that if you’re worried about hurt feelings or lost friendships.
3. Watch your social media like a hawk, especially when someone new takes the reins. Yes, this is a bit of a time suck, but you catching a picture of salmon with a recipe for tuna is way better than me catching it. It’s a kick to the gut when a customer messages you to let you know there’s errors, misinformation, typos, or disjointed content floating around on the internet for all to see.
4. Insist on a social media plan. It should at minimum include a schedule of posts and content with metrics and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). If a marketing person can’t tell you what each post will do for your brand, how it will support it, and what the strategy is behind it, cut bait and find someone that can. Success isn’t always measured in dollars – with social media it almost never is, but there are many other metrics that still matter.
5. Create a “hard noes” list. Define parameters around the type of content that’s NOT acceptable to post. I stay away from all things political and “buzzy” – for every social media scroller that agrees with whatever political or “buzz topic” stance your content takes, there’s someone on the opposite side. At the end of the day, regardless of whether they agree with you, their money is still just as green and matters just as much to your business. People “vote” with their wallets – don’t make it easy for them to choose a competitor simply because of your social media content.

Kristin , love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I’m a lifelong entrepreneur – I was an entrepreneur before I even knew what the word meant. My first business was a lemonade stand outside my mother’s clothing store in the first grade. I moved on to drawing the Simpsons characters and selling them to my third-grade classmates, and then selling sweet corn in junior high and high school. I’ve started many businesses that flopped, and a handful that actually worked. Currently, I own five businesses, two entirely by myself and three with my husband. I’m in the process of creating a sixth – a novelty product.

I grew up on a sprawling cattle ranch in northern Nebraska, and cherished holiday meals with the “good” china dishes. This ignited my love for pretty dishes and is an integral reason behind the creation of my vintage china dish rental business, The Vintage Dish. In addition to the dish business, I am also a marketing consultant for medium-sized, second stage businesses. I turn $2M annual marketing spend into a combined $50M+ in revenue for my clients. My other three businesses include a premium coffee company, Chef Bob’s Coffee, which offers small batch roasts, as well as white label (so companies, individuals, wedding couples, etc. can have their own brand of coffee for gifting or sales enablement), a temporary chef staffing agency, League of Extraordinary Chefs, and my husband’s corporate and private chef career, Chef Bob Aungst.

In all my businesses, I strive to offer the greatest customer service experience. Much of what I do is centered on creating lasting memories – especially with The Vintage Dish. Weddings, tea parties, and milestone celebrations become even more memorable with beautiful place settings. However, the dishes on the table only matter if the client has had a great experience, and that happy energy is carried through to the event. As Maya Angelou said, “At the end of the day people won’t remember what you said or did, they will remember how you made them feel.”

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

I’ve often been discounted in my life. I was bullied in school, thankfully at a time before social media and cell phones so I could escape it the minute I left the limits of the small town and headed to the ranch 23 miles away. I still struggled, silently, with depression and suicidal thoughts, and battled an inner war of being my true self or abandoning my roots to fit in with the cool kids. I couldn’t wait to get to college and away from small minded, petty people. It was a cultural and emotional shock I wasn’t prepared for – the first time I had ever lived inside city limits, and with more people in my dorm than were in my entire hometown. I also put my head through my windshield in a nasty car accident (that wasn’t my fault) my first semester of college, adding physical pain to emotional distress.

My emotional challenges continued through college while I tried to find my way. I initially majored in nursing, completing the prerequisite courses at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln before transferring to a hospital nursing program. A year into nursing school and I decided it was not for me – it was like wearing a pair of no stretch jeans that were a couple sizes too small. I’d actually known all along that I didn’t want to go into nursing, but my parents pushed me in that direction, and I didn’t want to disappoint them. It took an immense amount of courage to abandon a path I’d been forcing myself to walk down and move in a different direction, without even knowing what that direction would be. After six and a half years, transfers to other colleges, a break to work at a cutting horse ranch in Texas, and numerous hurdles, I finally earned a bachelor’s degree in business and marketing.

In my twenties, I was discounted for either being too old to be a “young professional” (because of the extended time in undergrad), or too young for any responsibility, regardless of my demonstrated track record. In my thirties, I was discounted because I married someone older than people thought I should. They saw me as a “young bride” and didn’t consider I was a vital part of the relationship – an equal half of the team. I was the glue that held everything together and propelled our lives forward. All classic examples of “judging a book by its cover”.

Through all the adversity and the years of struggle and strife, I persevered. I fought and scratched for every victory, large and small – I wanted to give up many times, but being on this side of the challenges, I’m thankful I pushed through.

I consider myself a dark horse, quietly and steadily building my own empire. One day, my terrible schoolmates, horrible bosses, and demeaning acquaintances will realize they were wrong about me. While they were focused on cutting me down to feed their egos, I was focused on growing my businesses and building a life I cherish. A life well-lived is the best revenge. And if they never realize, and karma never holds a mirror up to each of them, that’s ok too. I know I’m not any of the things they labeled me, and the most important takeaway for me is to be my true self, above all else.

How’d you meet your business partner?

During the Daytona 500 NASCAR race in February of 2010, I met a chef in the hospitality village. I was supporting a NASCAR tour company, assisting with their guests’ needs. It was a historic race in that it was exceptionally cold weather, and the track kept breaking down, which would require stalls in racing to patch the asphalt. This made it the longest, coldest NASCAR race in the history of the sport. The chef and I exchanged numbers, and we talked a few times following the race, but I was in a relationship – an unhealthy one with a physically and emotionally abusive person – when my significant other at the time found out I was talking to another man, he became irate and broke my cell phone. Obviously with that happening, it wasn’t a great time to continue a friendship with Chef Bob, so I ghosted him.

The years passed and I eventually exited the abusive relationship. Memorial Day weekend four years later, I saw Chef Bob in a boutique grocery store. He was walking from one end of the store to the other and I stopped him. He looked at me somewhat blankly, having been on a mission and clearly thinking about a million other things besides a girl he met years prior. I said, “You don’t remember me, do you?” He politely excused himself to complete his task at hand and promised to find me in a few minutes.

I continued to shop the store and he eventually popped back up. He said, “I remember you, but I don’t remember where we met.” I told him the Daytona 500 in 2009 (I had the year wrong), and he somehow pulled my name out of the sky. He asked me to go out for a glass of wine the following day and I agreed.

We met the next day – Memorial Day – on Park Ave in Winter Park. I walked over to where he parked, and he marched straight up to me and kissed me. The Universe kept me from whacking him upside the head with my clutch, and we had a lovely time together. We were inseparable from that point forward.

Within a couple months of that day, we rebranded his private and corporate chef business and launched a coffee company. We’ve continued to create and grow additional businesses together and currently own five businesses, with a sixth in the making. We’re lucky in that we can maintain a marriage and a professional working relationship – not all entrepreneurs or business owners can do that! We’ve broken many of the “rules” though, so “never work with family” was just a challenge that spurred us on and didn’t deter us.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.thevintagedishrentals.com/
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/thevintagedish
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/timelytableware/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristinstewartaungst/
• Other: Podcast: anchor.fm/cb-and-mrs

Image Credits
Sydney Morman, Heidi Mitchell, Hendricks, Sierra Ford, Mackensey Alexander