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

Georgina, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Please tell us about starting your own firm and if you’d do anything different knowing what you know now.

I met the other founders of The Alkimie Collective in 2020 when the world had shut down and we were all confined to our homes and looking for connection. We were all marketing professionals who had been running our businesses for different lengths of time. We started informally and started to talk more and more as a mutual support system. Gradually we started to team up to pitch and work on clients and did that for about a year. At that point, we thought about formalizing the working relationship in some way and were working out how to do it. All of us had individual businesses and wanted to keep things simple for something new so we decided on a collective model.
To us that means that our collective brand (Alkimie) isn’t a formal legal entity, we don’t have a joint business bank account, and the brand doesn’t file taxes. From the client’s perspective, we’re a unit, but the contracts, invoices, etc. all go through the company of whoever is leading the project and the others are subcontractors. In some ways, this adds complexity at the end of the year, but in other ways, it keeps things simple. And it gives us a lot of flexibility.

That’s how The Alkimie Collective was born. The first thing we did was take ourselves through the branding process we go through with our clients to create a strong identity for the company and help us stand out in a busy market of marketing agencies and consultants. That was fun.

Now, we’ve moved from the “Forming” stage of our collective to the “Storming” phase as we work on clients together and start to go through growing pains to work out how to scale while delivering great work and staying true to the values and original intentions behind setting up the collective. It’s an exciting time!

I guess my advice to anyone setting up their own business would be to throw your expectations out the window but stay strong in your values and what kind of business you want to be. There will always be curve-balls, but you don’t have to betray who you want to be.

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

The Alkimie Collective is a strategy-first brand and marketing collective designed to help you uncover your brand, activate indelible truths, and connect you with your audience.
What does that mean? Well, first we want to help our clients uncover their brand because too many companies have lost sight of who they are. This might be because they’ve grown fast, have pivoted into something new, have niched down, or just because it’s been a while since they thought about it. They may have mission statements on their website and posters, but they’re distracted by the latest shiny object and feel pressure to react to every social trend. Even when it isn’t relevant to them or their audience.

Then, we want to take these indelible truths and look at what this means for our clients’ marketing. Are there things that they should be doing that they’re not? Are there things that they should stop doing because it’s no longer serving them?

Finally, we help our clients connect with their audience in a way that resonates. We want our clients’ customers to care about them as well as buy from them. And that all starts with a customer understanding the company they should care about. We believe that people connect with brands that are connected with themselves.

In practice, this means that we help our clients with brand strategy, marketing strategy, and content strategy, with design services that bring everything to life.

We are taking this approach because, in a rapidly changing world, clients are overwhelmed by marketing; we want to help them identify the essentials and stay strategic with their marketing. We know this approach won’t be for everyone but for the clients that want it, it works!

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

For me, I think something I had to unlearn is that I have to have all the answers. As a consultant, or in an agency, part of what a client is buying is your expertise and experience. They are paying you to tell them what to do because you’re the expert. To a certain extent, that’s fair because I shouldn’t be asking for money if I don’t know what I’m doing, or if I’m giving bad advice.
However, I think it’s dangerous to pretend that I’m all-knowing. Particularly in the sphere of marketing, everything is always changing. Just because something worked, or didn’t work, a few years ago, doesn’t mean you’ll get the same result now. Marketers who rely on tried and tested tactics are going to get tripped up eventually. So part of my commitment to myself is continual education and learning in the industry. And if a client asks me about something that I’m not confident about, I will be open about that and I will look into it. I also try to set expectations with clients and not over-promise something, because that’s a surefire way to disappoint a client. I’ve found that clients respond well to this approach and if a client doesn’t, then they’re not the client for me.

Have you ever had to pivot?

When the global COVID-19 pandemic hit the US in March 2020, everything went online. In my industry marketers were already spending a lot of time on their computers, and now everything had to be done virtually. Like everyone else, I stopped going to anything in-person and started networking virtually in earnest. Now, we can go out and meet clients and prospects in person, but the general embrace of online technologies and meeting virtually means everyone knows HOW to use these things. For us, in the collective, this pivoting was essential because we might not have come together without it. We met virtually and we do 90% of our collaboration virtually. We all live in the Denver Metro area, but we don’t have an office we all go to. We live in Zoom, Slack, Loom, Click-up, Dubsado, and Gmail so we can work together.
For our collective, this was also a real business opportunity. Now that everyone knows how to use Zoom, and is used to online collaboration platforms, like Google Docs or Click-Up, geography is not an issue. We are not limited to Denver or even where we can drive to in Colorado or fly to. We have clients on the East Coast, in Canada, and collaborators in South America and Europe. The hardest thing is remembering the time zone and working out payments in different currencies! That’s not to say we don’t love having local clients, but it means we can make better use of our time. We can have workshops in-person and then recap online, or vice versa.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.alkimie.co/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alkimiecollective/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/81484323