We recently connected with Alexandra Radford and have shared our conversation below.

Alexandra, appreciate you joining us today. Quality control is a challenge almost every entrepreneur has had to focus on when growing – any advice, stories or insight around how to best ensure quality is maintained as your business scales?

As we’ve grown, we started experiencing some bottleneck with everyone’s capacity being tapped and not yet ready to make more hires. We had to maneuver roles in a way that would allow the same number of people to carry MORE weight. We did this by streamlining each role and the activity each person would engage.

We also have vendors on stand by so that if we get busier than our team can manage, we don’t have to say no to business or push start dates causing delays for the client.

We hired consultants and coaches to have all hands on a deck in a time where we knew we needed to level up our skillsets and carry more weight. We changed our agency model to a “pod model” which has worked well. Since implementing, the team has increased their capacity as a whole and alleviated burnout for the team. Win-win!

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I am Co-Founder of branding and marketing firm, The Edge Agency! We create bold brands that build trust and activate marketing strategies to increase brand awareness and sales for our clients. I started Edge Marketing Company in 2015 and merged with Virtual Executive Solutions in 2017 creating The Edge Agency. To date, we’ve worked across 35+ industries and served hundreds of clients ranging from start ups to small-medium sized businesses to enterprise businesses. Agency world is fast paced and ever changing and takes a village! After 5 years, I’m proud of all that we’ve accomplished as a collective group. It takes team work to make the dream work!

What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?

After college, I did sales and marketing for a real estate closing attorney. I didn’t know it at the time but I excelled quickly due to a great boss and simply finding my “thing.” I was in my wheelhouse and operating in a role that came naturally to me. This built my confidence and my reputation grew in the Atlanta real estate industry. Eventually, a broker asked me to do some marketing for her business -on the side. I hadn’t ever considered starting a business and felt my bandwidth was full enough as it was. I told her if she didn’t find someone for the job to ask me again in a few months. She asked again. And I said yes. I signed an independent contract agreement and felt this sense of power that I could make money outside of my salary. I felt this window open that had no ceiling. Soon after, I created an LLC, logo, website and started building my brand. Business came through word of mouth and before I knew it, I was taking on boutiques and insurance agents as clients while I worked my full time business development job. I was at max capacity with a few clients very quickly.

Then, I reconnected with an old friend for personal reasons and we realized we both had our own independent agencies. We worked with similar clients offering similar services. We decided to partner together on a project and soon after, we merged our companies and became business partners. This was one of many game changers. There was now another person who had the bandwidth and passion to focus on the business production while I focused on bringing in sales. This worked well and soon we needed an assistant and then an account executive.

We grew as much as we could with our own leadership knowledge and the raw skills we brought to the table in our 20’s. The next game changer was hiring coaches. We hired people smarter than us and took every word of advice they gave. By that point, we were doing about half a million in sales and really starting to need new expertise on how to scale, how to tighten the team, how to streamline, etc. Looking back, I think this bottleneck season was one of the biggest markers of our growth to date. So, we hired a very expensive consultant who had entrepreneur, agency and management experience. And it was the best money we’ve spent to date! She improved our processes, strategized our organizational chart and coached every member of the team how to level up in their craft. And the results were beyond worth it! Since then, we’ve doubled in size, represented politicians, multi-million and billion dollar companies, onboarded our biggest accounts yet, assisted with the transition through company mergers and acquisitions and we are just getting started! Next step: EXPANSION!

How’d you meet your business partner?

My business partner and I met at cheerleading practice when we were in high school. We were fast friends – mostly because neither of us knows when to shut up – HAHA! We love to chit chat!! We were actually late to practice because we were still in the bathroom talking when we were supposed to be on the mat! We eventually graduated from different high schools but had a similar friend group and came together over the years to celebrate birthdays and milestones. As life does, it moved on! We had babies, got married, she moved far away then got divorced and we eventually lost touch. Several years later, I went through a divorce myself and reached out to Lauren for an attorney referral. She sent me her {new} husband’s contact info and asked to meet for brunch to catch up. She had been through a similar scenario and wanted to lend her support. After we were done bashing our exes, the conversation turned to something much more productive: business. I told Lauren about my side hustle and new venture. She shared the story of how she and her husband had just made the prayerful decision for her to quit her corporate job and take a chance on her own business! We quickly realized we were both very passionate about our careers, had similar clients and offered similar services. We partnered together on a client soon after and it wasn’t long before we were crunching the numbers over margaritas to see what it would look like to go into business together. We figured we could do the same amount of business we do right now, separately OR we could make more. There was only so much bandwidth we could give separately and unlimited potential with what we could do together. We treated the business like a million dollar business from day one signing an operating agreement and dividing out our roles. There have been ups and downs but we still have a very similar arrangement today that we had 5 years ago. I bring the business in. She keeps the ship floating. And it’s worked quite well!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.theedgeagency.net
• Instagram: @theedgeagency
• Facebook: @theedgeagency
• Linkedin: @theedgeagency

Image Credits
The Edge Agency