We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Polina Weidner a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Polina, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Is your team able to work remotely? If so, how have you made it work? What, if any, have been the pitfalls? What have been the non-obvious benefits?

Working remote can be a challenge for some business owners especially when they start hiring on employees. The number one thing that makes this work for our business is constant (daily) communication. I speak to my employees every single day, a morning check in usually, I’m open for questions through the day, and receive weekly recaps at the end of the week.

I believe it’s important to make your online workspace streamlined. We use Notion and have it pretty simplified so each employee has their own dashboard and within that there’s a to do list of their own plus a place where I, the owner, can add tasks for them. That being said, in my personal dashboard, there is also a space for them to add their needs from me.

This keeps us on track to complete tasks and guarantees there’s no “he said, she said” or “I didn’t finish it because I was waiting on you”.

We also have an app that allows for messaging and voice messaging so we can quickly resolve problems.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

My name is Polina Weidner, owner of The Marketing Model. I’ve owned my business for over five years and I’ve been in the marketing world for over 10. I never planned to own my own marketing agency but in 2019 I quit my corporate job with no plan and quickly gained momentum with freelancing. Within 5 months I had not only matched but exceeded my corporate salary and knew that this is what I was meant to do. Come January 2020, I started my own agency and have just grown from there.

My first year in business I said yes to nearly everything. The industry or the scope of the project didn’t matter and this was honestly the best thing I did for my business. I was able to discover what types of businesses I can make the biggest impact on, test different tools, and put a lot of clients under my belt to gain validity and grow by word of mouth too.

I am proud of being able to run my business on my own terms for over five years now and mainly as a mama of two girls. I have found a way to really balance, if we can call it that, motherhood and entrepreneurship which is no easy task. I’ve figured out how to stay motivated, stay dedicated, and stay on track. I pour into my family but I also pour into my business because my agency is the reason I get to have the time that I do with them. I don’t have a full time nanny or anything like that, I do have a very supportive and helpful husband and grandparents, they’re my village that I can lean on when needed.

My agency is full service. We do photography, videography, content creation, influencer management, brand activations, event planning, email creation, and more. I have specific contractors I’ve worked with over the years as part of my team alongside my employees.

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

Flashback to January 2023. I let go of two clients because they weren’t the right fit, and simultaneously, two others let me know they will no longer be continuing services. At the time that was 2/3 of business. There were tears and stress, a lot of crunching numbers but in the end I took it as a chance to finally work on my business instead of constantly in my business and growing client accounts.

I realize that most of my time is spent on clients and my leads were drying out so this was the moment to prioritize business development. I penciled in CEO days every single Thursday and also set other parameters on the rest of the weekdays. Mondays was always client work focused, Tuesdays and Wednesdays would be heavy meeting days because I knew those would be interruptions to when I needed focused content creation time, and so on.

I wanted to give up in those months, honestly I was scrolling through Indeed and reaching out to contacts to go back to the corporate life, but every time I got close to going in that direction, something told me no. I knew it would take time away from my daughter and really, I wasn’t willing to give that up.

So for a few months I laid low, I built again, I reworked my offers, I invested in a course, and I pushed forward.

Have you ever had to pivot?

One of my biggest business pivots happened when I got pregnant with my first daughter. At the time, a big portion of my client roster included sales coaches, authors, and service-based businesses that needed constant nurturing, communication, and last-minute posting flexibility. I knew that nine months down the line, I wouldn’t be able to respond around the clock or whip up a same-day post — I’d be deep in diapers and teething days. I needed to find a way to keep my business running with less day-to-day involvement.

I met up with one of my close friends and mentors, Shannon, the owner of The Social Bungalow, for coffee and shared that I was pregnant and unsure how to move forward. Together, we mapped out a plan to shift my focus from high-touch service clients to more e-commerce and product-based businesses. These types of businesses would allow me to batch content further in advance, plan shoots that could cover months at a time, and work with clients who didn’t require daily (or even weekly) communication.

Over the next few months, I shifted my content strategy to speak directly to product-based brands. I also started offering free product photoshoots — all businesses had to do was ship me their product, and I’d send back professional photos. It was a win-win: I built up a portfolio, showcased product content on my website and social channels, tagged the brands, and demonstrated what we could do — all before I had any official e-comm clients on the roster.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://themarketingmodel.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/themarketingmodel/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-marketing-model/