Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Angela Leavitt. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Angela, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. 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?

For my business to scale, the key ingredient has been sacrifice. I bootstrapped this business with no debt or funding, so the early years only happened because I lived very lean, paying myself only enough to handle bills. I survived by shopping for clothes at thrift stores, hardly ever eating at restaurants, and going years without a vacation. I paid my staff more than myself during the first six-seven years, giving myself only modest increases when our profit margins grew.

I certainly could have earned a lot more as an employee at another company, and sometimes I worried that I was behind my peers in terms of things like owning property and retirement savings. But the vision of what we could become drove me to keep pushing.

Thanks to those early sacrifices, I was able to continue reinvesting in the company. We’ve grown every year and that growth began to accelerate in our eighth year. Yes, you read that right. It took EIGHT YEARS to get out of ‘super lean phase.’

Now in our 12th year, we are pacing to hit $3-4M in revenue and employ nearly 35 digital marketing pros. I’ve also been able to achieve some personal goals I had put off, like saving for retirement and purchasing a home.

I’m grateful for those early years and look back on them fondly. They were tough, but they taught me discipline and financial literacy. The team was small and scrappy, and it was simultaneously exhausting and exhilarating. But I’m convinced that had it not been so hard to start, we wouldn’t be where we are today. And coming from such humble beginnings helps me to appreciate our current success that much more.

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

After graduating college with a B.A. in Spanish Translation & Linguistics, I spent my early career in a variety of sales and marketing positions. In 2007, I landed the director of marketing position at Telesphere (now part of Vonage Business). While there, the company grew from $4M to $25M in a 3-year timespan, and that helped to establish me as a go-to person for B2B telecom marketing.

In 2010, I left Telesphere to go out on my own, thinking I would freelance for a while and potentially land at another company. But as fate would have it, that freelance gig grew and has turned into a full-service marketing agency with 25+ staff and 300+ clients over our 11 years in business.

My company, Mojenta, provides Marketing as a Service for B2B telecom, IT, cloud and SaaS companies. That means we support their existing marketing departments, or act as their entire marketing department if they don’t have one. We offer branding, web design and development, inbound marketing, digital, content, social, email, and account-based marketing.

Most companies we work with either have an understaffed marketing department, or none at all. Because we specialize in their industry, we can quickly help our clients build and execute effective marketing plans, which helps them grow their sales pipelines and top-line revenue.

Can you open up about a time when you had a really close call with the business?

In 2014, we lost our largest client with very little notice. This came after months of them promising to grow their account with us and requesting that I not work with their competition, which I honored.

This shocking news was a major kick to the gut, since this client had been with us for nearly four years and represented about 25% of our total revenue. They were a large company and while their budget was significant to us, it was a drop in the bucket to them. To lessen the financial impact on us, I requested a sunset arrangement where they would pay us a decreasing amount over a period of three months, but they refused.

I think everyone who knew the story thought it would be the end of the company, including me.

But then I got angry. Mostly at myself, for putting us in that situation. And I let that anger fuel my actions.

I began to make plans on how we were going to turn things around and not let this cancellation kill us. And I vowed to myself that we would not only survive but grow to be stronger than ever.

To do that, I had to make some hard decisions. Part of that involved reducing our staff, which was so unfortunate, especially because this happened during the holidays. I held on to everyone on as long as I possibly could, but I simply couldn’t keep everyone and save the company.

At the start of 2015, I made some operational changes to make us more efficient, and onboarded several new clients. When I could, I hired new staff and we got an office downtown San Diego. It was major turning point for the business, and when you look at charts of our growth, you can see it massively increase in 2015.

About two years later, one of the owners of that business sought me out to apologize for the way they had handled their relationship with us. By then the anger was long gone, but the changes had taken root and had us on a much better growth trajectory. I was happy also to mend the broken bridge.

There were so many lessons I learned from this experience. Never let one client have so much power over your income. Get commitments in writing. Protect your staff with strong termination clauses. And perhaps most importantly, when things look their most bleak, there’s a deep reserve of drive and resiliency waiting for you.

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

Because we focus on specific niche industries, we’ve built our reputation by consistently creating thought leadership specifically for those industries.

This has included speaking and exhibiting at their conferences, and creating content like blogs, videos, white papers and other resources for their media outlets.

We’ve also built strategic partnerships with some of the largest companies within the industries we serve, which helps to shine a spotlight on us.

I’d break it down into three simple steps: 1) Pick a niche. 2) Add value. 3) Be consistent. By doing this, we’ve found ‘riches in the niches.’

Contact Info:

• Website: mojenta.com
• Instagram: @angelakleavitt
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mymojenta
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/angelaleavitt/
• Twitter: @mymojenta
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPNN4CrCaG1XiGMx6DD38zA