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

Hi Bobby, thanks for joining us today. So, naming is such a challenge. How did you come up with the name of your brand?

I really had no clue how to name a business or where to start. It ultimately brought me to look at the “why” behind what I was doing. I started my business and fully intended it to be strictly a side hustle. At the time I had a solid corporate sales job and wanted to do something to earn a little extra income to support my family, especially since my first daughter had just been born.

The name 4MJ Social ultimately was built off of that motivation. Social media was the industry so plugging that in somewhere was easy and made sense. The 4MJ portion was the real inspiration. I built this business FOR my daughter, Madelyn Jean (aka MJ).

Over the course of time the business has grown and I have focused on our branding and marketing and have considered a rebrand of the name from time to time but that original motivation always comes back to me. Marketing in my opinion always starts with authenticity and there is a real authentic piece of me and my family in that name. The only challenge now is that my other daughter wants a business named after her so that might be a different story for a different day…

Bobby, 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?

I never really knew what my career path was going to look like. Since I was a teenager I wanted to start my own business but I never knew what it was going to be. I studied marketing in college and loved the concepts but was driven to sales as a career path once I graduated. I spent over 10 years in my sales career through different roles but was never fully satisfied.

I started 4MJ Social in 2014 when I realized the impact social media was having for a lot of the businesses I was working with. Once I brought a few clients on board, expanding into website development, SEO, and other digital marketing functions was extremely organic and made sense for both me and my clients. The fundamentals of marketing always made sense to me and I tried to help clients implement them as effectively as possible.

The biggest challenge in running a marketing agency is the speed of change in the industry. Technology and expectations around social media and the internet as a whole are constantly moving and it’s my role to keep tabs of all of these changes and narrow down what is most important, relevant, and effective for our clients now and for the future. Being able to evaluate and make these decisions is something I have always taken pride in because there is a LOT of fluff in the marketing world. I’ve always believed that I can showcase true value if I can sort through that information and create something effective and easy for our clients.

This all leads to the one piece of value that I truly believe sets us apart from many of our competitors in the space – the human aspect. Marketing can be extremely analytical and extremely creative, both at the same time. When I am strategizing campaigns or working directly with clients and my team, the human aspect is always the lens I like to look through. How will this make things better for the client? What will their customer base take away that is valuable? How can we make life easier for our team and clients alike?

At the end of the day, I believe that I am running a people business, not a marketing business. As long as we keep the human aspect alive in our marketing efforts, it will be a win-win for everyone involved.

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

All that this business was supposed to be was a side hustle! I am still equally surprised and proud of how far it has come.

As a side hustle, things were going well after the first few years. I had consistent clients, a handful of referrals here and there, and the comfort to keep building things up outside of my 9-5. Eventually though there was one thing that happened that made me really believe that this could be a sustainable, full time business….

I listened to my clients.

It sound simple enough but it really started to trigger things for me. I started just by creating content and posting to social media and managing those accounts for clients. During meetings though I would just dive deeper and learn more about the challenges that these clients were facing. As I listened more in depth I started to problem solve on their behalf and when I was able to come up with solutions, I realized that they were scalable across all of our clientele. Some examples of this are how we have implemented software and technology to cut operational costs with our clients and reallocated those funds into marketing. Once I was able to showcase the ability to listen, identify, and resolve these types of problems, business really started to boom through referrals in the area.

Eventually I quit my corporate job and went full time in the business and learned very quickly that I was NOT ready for it! I fell on my face several times in that first year and had to go back to full time work. This lead to a much more motivated version of myself though and I knew I wanted to be in this business and out of the corporate world. I continued to focus on problem solving and simplifying marketing efforts for our clients, but I also did one thing that I never really wanted to do – I asked for connections and referrals. After a certain point, I felt that I earned the trust of my clients and could reasonably ask for that help. Doing that really boosted my business and a year after I fell on my face I was back in my business full time and have never looked back again!

How do you keep your team’s morale high?

Give people what they want! It sounds somewhat unreasonable but if you listen and learn about your team as people, it is much easier than it sounds.

I recently had a discussion like this with one of my team members. She has helped me build the business to what it is today and there was some discussion about her pay that we got into. As we dove deeper into it though, it ultimately was not about the money (although that’s always important). We needed to create some new structure to her roles and responsibilities that would give some additional peace of mind and improved work/life balance.

Her pay ended up roughly the same but with some clearer boundaries and expectations. Just by taking the time to understand the human behind the work is what it took to resolve the issue.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.4mjsocial.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/4mjsocial
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/4mjsocial
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bobbydimovski/

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