We recently connected with Heike Reagan and have shared our conversation below.

Heike , appreciate you joining us today. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?

I jokingly call my decorating business my “midlife crisis job”: I had worked as a translator specializing in patent litigation for 15 years and needed an environment to satisfy my creative side as well as my need to interact with people in real life. I had a relatively slow start because at the time I was still homeschooling my young teen and I had to keep translating to pay the bills.

I’m all about celebrating and being happy, so I rarely tell people that this was also a very difficult time for our family because we lost several close family members to illness in a very short period of time. These experiences made me realize that the only thing we truly every “possess” in our lives are the memories that we make. And memories most often include celebrations: celebrations of special events, of milestones, and sometimes of everyday moments.

I want to help people make memories that last forever.

Heike, 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 originally started out offering only balloon decorations but quickly expanded to offer many different kinds of decorations for all types of large and small events. I live and work in a popular vacation destination, so tourist requests quickly became my specialty: if you’re in the area to celebrate a birthday, wedding, anniversary, honeymoon, or plan a proposal, I decorate your vacation cabin, hotel room, or venue for you.
Of course I also decorate for grand openings, festivals, and much more.

I love the challenge of creating just the right thing for different occasions and different budgets. Most importantly my daughter and I have discovered that we love working together and that we work well together. She’s now my business partner and we enjoy getting to work at all the amazing locations in our beautiful East Tennessee region.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

When I first started my decorating business, I followed the advice given to me: start a page, do some giveaways, raffles, freebies, paid ads, etc. While that does certainly work for some, it wasn’t very successful for me. I spent more on giveaways and ads than I got back in new orders.

Paying for ads most certainly has its place in the marketing strategy, but organic growth is where your most loyal clients will come from.

The best strategies that have resulted in organic growth for me are
– figure out your long-tail keywords and use them consistently
– figure out the best hashtags for your customers and geographic region.
– sign up for Google My Business (now called Google Business Profile) and use it consistently like social media.
– tag as much as possible without being spammy

With a marketing budget of zero, I’m ranking higher than national chains in my local area and I now even offer a class on this for other decorators.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

One of my teachers had a rather rigid “my way or the highway” mentality and at first I believed it – he was my experienced mentor after all. But once I started working at a variety of venues and learned more techniques from different teachers, I quickly understood that there is no “one right way”. Everyone does things differently. Every person, every venue, every event is different and has different needs and resources.

What’s important is that you really master your basic techniques and that you understand potential problems and risks inherent in your work. After that it’s equally important to remain flexible and open to new ideas, new trends, and new developments in your field.

Now I’m a proponent of “whatever you need, we’ll make it work” while I also try clearly explain if something won’t work for whatever reason. My job is to help my clients create great memories and I use a variety of techniques to achieve the outcome that they want at the venue that they choose.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.tncelebrates.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/tncelebrates
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/tncelebrates
• Yelp: www.yelp.com/biz/tn-celebration-balloons-knoxville
• Other: www.tiktok.com/@tn_celebrates