We recently connected with Kayla Klein and have shared our conversation below.

Kayla, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Often outsiders look at a successful business and think it became a success overnight. Even media and especially movies love to gloss over nitty, gritty details that went into that middle phase of your business – after you started but before you got to where you are today. In our experience, overnight success is usually the result of years of hard work laying the foundation for success, but unfortunately, it’s exactly this part of the story that most of the media ignores. Can you talk to us about your scaling up story – what are some of the nitty, gritty details folks should know about?

My business partner, Connor Foltyn-Smith, and I started Kreativ Alchemy as a side hustle while working at our 9-5 corporate jobs. We’d wake up early, work before work, take calls on our lunch breaks, and work when we got home.

We wanted to scale up and match our corporate salaries before we resigned to run Kreativ Alchemy full-time, but some potential conflicts of interest arose that forced us to resign far earlier than intended. When we left our corporate jobs to run Kreativ Alchemy, we were making around $500 per month (and living in expensive Southern California).

As bad luck would have it, our forced resignation also occurred in March 2020, just a few days before COVID also forced our entire potential client base to shut down. We felt pretty down on our luck and didn’t see a bright future for our agency.

However, seeing as nearly every other business owner or hopeful entrepreneur was in a similar disheartened mindset, we shifted our approach to meet the market’s demands. Kreativ Alchemy has always operated in the digital marketing space, but, during the first few months of the mandated shutdowns, we shifted our services to focus on helping other business owners and entrepreneurs launch and grow their brands and ideas – branding, website design, graphic design, content marketing, etc.

For months, we persevered an endless cycle of waking up early, working all day on marketing our services, and talking to tons of potential clients who didn’t have the funds to hire us given the economic circumstances. We went to bed at the end of every day dreaming of when we wouldn’t have to drain our savings accounts to make Kreativ Alchemy work.

It took about six months to land our first serious client and about a year and a half (and leaving SoCal) to start making enough money to live comfortably. In doing so, we learned two of the most critical elements of successful entrepreneurship: conducting market research and understanding how to pivot.

Market research allowed us to value our work appropriately so we would not only have enough money to live comfortably, but enough to invest back into our business for continuous growth. We spoke to other entrepreneurs in our industry and business owners who fit the mold of our target client base to determine what they needed from a branding and design agency and what they were willing to pay for professional services.

Understanding how to pivot gave us the flexibility to pursue different niches and ideas until we found the most profitable and beneficial ones. As a business owner, you cannot get so attached to an idea that it blinds you from adapting to meet your market’s needs.

Overall, I would attribute Kreativ Alchemy’s growth to our drive and open-mindedness. It’s been an incredible and taxing journey to get to where we are. After four years, I finally feel like we have achieved the perfect balance between helping our clients, working flexibly, and earning enough to enjoy our freedom.

Kayla, 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?

Kreativ Alchemy is a branding agency. That’s a simpler way to say that we work with small businesses and entrepreneurs to develop brand identities and marketing assets to help them connect with a target audience and successfully promote their products and services. Our primary services include brand development, graphic design, website design, and content marketing.

Kreativ Alchemy is the brainchild of myself and my business and life partner, Connor Foltyn-Smith. I come from a colorful past with experience as a journalist, editor, public relations professional, and social media specialist before starting Kreativ Alchemy. Connor is a decorated graphic and web designer.

We met in Southern California while working on the same corporate marketing team. We bonded over our shared dream of one day using our skills to more directly impact business owners whose missions we understood and supported.

As small business owners ourselves, we offer our clients a unique perspective and refreshing approach to succeeding in the digital marketing space. We are thrilled to work with a vast array of business owners and entrepreneurs – from brand new idea makers to established corporations – to bring their brand visions to life and help them achieve their business goals through branding and design.

We are more than artists or creatives – we are problem solvers. When we design a logo, graphic, website, or brand, we’re thinking deeper about how the art can help that business connect with its target audience. It’s an amazing position to hold because we get to combine strategy and artistry every day.

Let’s talk M&A – we’d love to hear your about your experience with buying businesses

In February 2020, Kreativ Alchemy actually acquired one of our clients’ businesses. For about six months prior, we had been working as social media consultants for School Video News, a digital magazine about video production in the education space.

Through working together, I had become close with the publisher, John Churchman, and I considered him a mentor and a friend. He had a fantastic sense of humor and never failed to make me laugh on a phone call. Tragically, John had been diagnosed with cancer, and he unexpectedly passed away in early 2020. It was heartbreaking.

Nobody at School Video News was ready to take his place. The magazine still needed a lot of work to modernize its brand and digital marketing approach. I not only wanted to continue John’s legacy, but I felt like Kreativ Alchemy was perfect for the job.

We worked out a deal with the person who was originally in line to take over, and the business was ours. We rebranded as Stream Semester, designed a new website, and developed some new marketing campaigns to keep our name on the map.

Ultimately, the acquisition helped Kreativ Alchemy fine-tune our skillset and paid homage to John’s hard work. It was a tremendous learning experience.

Now that Kreativ Alchemy is doing so well, we don’t have as much time to dedicate to Stream Semester, so we’re looking for a new buyer to continue growing the new brand and take it to new heights… if any readers are interested, I would love to chat about it!

What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?

Word of mouth will forever and always be the most impactful form of marketing for Kreativ Alchemy. Great testimonials and referrals from past clients to new ones help us stand out in the over-saturated digital marketing space.

In 2021, we joined a professional networking group to connect with other business owners and establish referral partnerships. That was tremendous for business! We were intentional about forming relationships with the other members of the group. Once they got to know us as people and Kreativ Alchemy as a business, if they didn’t work with us, they kept us in mind for referral opportunities.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.kreativalchemy.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kreativalchemy/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kreativalchemy
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kreativkayla
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@kreativalchemy