We were lucky to catch up with Aiyana Grant recently and have shared our conversation below.
Aiyana , thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What do you think matters most in terms of achieving success?
In order to be successful, it takes consistency. In my personal opinion, I feel as though once a business owner gets comfortable within their business and the money they’re making, it’s easy to lose the original motivation you started with. I have experienced struggling with consistency at times and I still am til this day. With this being said, my advice to others would be to master time management before anything else. Social media is one of the main resources to promote your business and with their being so many businesses out there, it’s very easy for people to forget about you. Lastly, it’s important to stay consistent and stand out from your competition.
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.
My name is Aiyana Grant and I am the CEO of Branded By A. As a child, my favorite hobby revolved around creating things no matter what it was. As I grew older, I still loved creating but I wasn’t completely sure how I wanted to go about doing it because in this day and age the possibilities are endless. During COVID, everyone was home, bored, and finding ways to keep themselves busy including me. My first thought was to create a YouTube channel. I figured it would keep me busy and I would be able to showcase my authentic self. Which it did! I loved creating content and all the support I was receiving. Once I knew for sure that I wanted to continue with it, I knew that I had to design my channel in a way I would love and would draw people to my page. I started practicing how to create my own YouTube intros, outros, and banners. I caught on quick and it made me want to create more and more designs. Once the motivation to keep creating came across me, I knew I had to act on it. After doing a lot of research and speaking to another graphic designer that motivated me to create my business page, I got started and instantly took off. In the beginning, I was hesitant to charge my worth, but starting off affordable has to be the best thing I could’ve done because that’s what brought so many people to my business page, so when my prices did increase, people didn’t mind because they were supporting me from the start. It’s been three years since I became an entrepreneur and not only has my business grown but I’ve grown as an individual. Not only do I just provide YouTube services, I now provide business branding services to help other upcoming entrepreneurs to start their brand such as logos, websites, business cards, video editing, and the list goes on. I’ve dealt with many different types of people within this time frame and seeing how passionate these people are to create a brand that reflects them, motivates me to continue to help. Most people struggle with brand identity and my experience with being a business owner not only helps them in the designing aspect, but being apart of their journey that’ll take them so far in life.
We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?
My advice for those just starting to build their social media presence would be to build relationships with other entrepreneurs. When I first created my business page, before I focused on gaining clientele, I focused on building bonds with not only just other graphic designers but other business owners in general. I made this my priority because support goes a long way when being an entrepreneur. When you surround yourself with people who have the same passion as you, it gives you the opportunity to always stay motivated.
Have you ever had to pivot?
As I stated before, once I started my business it completely took off. I had so much clientele, support, and gained new followers daily. When winter came around, everything started to slow down and I didn’t understand why. I was consistently posting, still building relationships with other business owners, and overall just doing everything that I was doing to begin with. I remained humble whether I received clients or not, but seeing a decline in your business would make any entrepreneur second guess what they could possibly be doing wrong. As time went on, I came to the realization that all businesses have their ups and downs. All businesses have their good months and bad. I learned that as far as my business personally, I receive more clients in the summer because that’s when people want to start businesses or YouTube channels. I just had to learn that during my not so busy months, there’s other things I can do to fix that as far as having giveaways or sales.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://linktr.ee/brandedbya
- Instagram: @brandedbya_
- TikTok: @brandedbya