We recently connected with Dominique Binns and have shared our conversation below.

Dominique, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. How did you come up with the idea for your business?

I found Modo together with my business partner, Mon, after meeting her on a South African entrepreneur app. We had similar backgrounds in owning agencies but were both drawn to offering solutions to clients who wanted to DIY their own marketing and branding. The thing was, we had repeatedly come across the same thing in the SME space.

Many entrepreneurs didn’t necessarily want to go the investment route, so they were cash-strapped and couldn’t always afford a whole marketing shebang. Without a proper, omni-channel, consistent strategy though, they couldn’t sell, couldn’t grow. But what they did have was time, a willingness to learn and an insider’s perspective on what they were selling and why it was awesome. We knew that entrepreneurs were in desperate need of comprehensive, trusted courses that would help to market their business from day one. How did we know? Because many clients had approached us in both of our agencies to ask for DIY help.

Mon and I settled on the idea after our very first virtual ‘coffee meet.’ A week later, Modo was registered – an amalgam of my name (Dom) and Mon’s name, as well as a word where the ‘M’ stands for ‘Marketing’ and the ‘D’ for ‘Design’ – and the bank account was set up. We both invested some of our savings into the business and started developing our flagship course – the DIY Design Academy – right away. It took us 20 months to create, test, film, test again and finally launch this labour of love. During that time we gave too many workshops to count, one-on-one training sessions and took on recurring retainers for some of the biggest corporations in South Africa to keep momentum.

We’ve only ever met in person twice and have strategised, disagreed, debated, cheered each other on and ultimately built a business that employs ourselves and a full-time team member virtually. This comes with its own sets of lessons learned, including how important a ‘holy’ stand-up meeting is each week to ensure comms are going back and forth and progress is happening.

So, in essence, we came up with the idea based on direct market feedback. I’d strongly recommend anyone who is dreaming of starting a business – but isn’t really sure about which idea to chase – to choose a general industry that they are passionate about. When you’re boots on the ground in that space, you’ll inevitably have customers tell you to your face what it is that they need that they can’t find in the market. And when this happens, you’ll have discovered a niche that probably isn’t being served. Hello, market share and brand fans!

Dominique, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I started my first company when I was 21 in the digital agency space. I actually fell into it by accident. I had started teaching myself design and marketing as a hobby and had accumulated a few paying clients while studying Disaster Management (a field I am still lucky enough to have circled back to a few years later and work in). Starting an agency built around the clients I already had just made sense.

After exiting, I went on to co-found another communications company – Modo – that focuses on teaching marketing and design to business owners and aspiring professionals. At Modo, we help you communicate. Whether you’re a business owner trying to figure out how to talk to your dream client, a marketer trying to learn how to help a customer with a killer email strategy, or a student trying to create showstopping presentations that will boost your marks, we’ve got some training ready!

Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?

My philosophy on growing your client base in a service-based business is to give away as much magic for free as you possibly can. Be it via workshops, freebies (i.e. lead magnets), or tips on social media, the more you give the more clients you will attract. Not only does it say something about your personal character and thus the business’s character but it gives your audience the opportunity to experience working with you at low stakes. They get a feel for your voice, your thinking and your approach to the problem they have. Once you’ve built trust with a possible customer, it’s easy peasy to convert them into a paying client.

We closed our biggest deal at Modo on the agency side without even intending to. We spent quite a bit of time creating a (seriously) useful Content Repurposing Roadmap that showed business owners exactly how to plan out their entire marketing and content plan for an entire year…using 4 main ideas. We then spoke for free as guests at an entrepreneurial community. Not only did the SME owners who attended genuinely love it, but the Marketing HOD for a rather big company was in the room. She loved the strategy so much that she offered us a GIANT retainer to work with their brand using the approach.

Lead with a truly generous nature and good things will happen!

How do you keep your team’s morale high?

I’ve had the pleasure of managing small and large virtual teams over my entrepreneurial journey. Working virtually comes with its own challenges to morale since team members miss out on organic interaction and in-person brainstorming.
I got around this by instituting weekly check-ins with each of my team members and weekly team meetings on a Friday.

The first and third Fridays were dedicated to learning and building up a new skill together and the second and fourth Fridays were dedicated to silly fun. We played online battleships together, went head-to-head with online Pictionary and loads more. Many team members chose to work in a remote setting because they enjoyed the flexibility and yes – perhaps even the isolation (ahem, there were quite a few introverts as you can imagine) – but almost every team member made a point of telling me how much they enjoyed our Fridays.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://modocourses.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/modocourses/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/modocourses?_rdc=1&_rdr
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/modocourses/posts/?feedView=all
• Other: Dom’s personal LinkedIn – www.linkedin.com/in/dominique-binns-123abcLearn graphic design and branding on Canva with the DIY Design Academy – https://www.udemy.com/course/the-diy-design-academy/?couponCode=LETSLEARNNOWPP

Image Credits

@Kirsten Goslett