We were lucky to catch up with Ivan Reed recently and have shared our conversation below.

Ivan, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. The first dollar your business earns is always special and we’d love to hear how your brand made its first dollar of revenue.

When I talk to new business owners about how they think a new business starts to become more than a hobby and how they might go about getting clients, the strategy goes something like the following. First, find a product or service you want to sell. Then, create an official business entity and get your documents and bank accounts set up. Next, start sending mass emails and social media posts to people you know or to cold lists you somehow source. Lastly, take all of the leads that you generated from those and start to sell to them and make big bucks!

If it were that simple, we wouldn’t see so many failed businesses. Don’t forget, being a business owner is an extremely difficult endeavor to undertake and will continue to be challenging even after the cash starts coming in. There is a lot of risk involved and, particularly in the beginning, the hard work and effort put in is largely not reciprocated in terms of revenue generation. Unless, you have a plan to put into motion before giving up your day job. That way, you can at least create a safety net if you need cashflow to survive.

In my case, I was studying at the University of San Diego and working on an MBA. I went full time during the weekdays so had limited opportunities to have significant income during that time. However, I partnered up with another MBA student and we came up with a plan. We started to do consulting projects for very limited fees and opened up our services to basically anyone who would pay us. We connected with our career services department and found that there were some small businesses locally who needed a bit of help. So, we began performing market research and other broad consulting projects.

The next step we took was to identify internships that requested skill sets that we were over-qualified for. We sat for interviews and obtained several positions. Once our work product was observed, we let them know that we would like to bill our time as a company rather than as an individual. This was the beginning of the business and only then did we create the official company name, SunCity Services, LLC. Upon graduation, we were able to hit the ground running with a few clients that provided recurring revenue, a couple special projects, and a plan to start to identify new potential clients.

The excitement of finding your first client is great, but building a business plan while simultaneously picking off a client or two seems to me to be a much more beneficial approach in securing a successful business that can thrive on “day one”.

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

As a San Diego native, I grew up going to the beach and playing golf year-round. The opportunities to enjoy great weather were seemingly boundless. So, I got a later start to my career as I took my time through undergraduate studies at SDSU. I took a finance job out of school and did that for 5-6 years. Once I decided that I wasn’t fulfilled and that I wanted to own my own business some day, I decided I needed to go back to school. The best option for me was to focus on a degree in business administration – so an MBA it was.

I chose to go to USD and concentrate on business finance. While there, I took courses that touched on all aspects of business, but noticed that my quantitative skills were significantly improving. That opened up doors to new projects and job positions that I didn’t expect. So my interests started to gravitate towards marketing and finance topics. The consulting projects I worked on showed me that there was a need for data-driven marketing tactics in nearly every company I consulted for. So, I began to focus only on those types of projects to improve my skillset and become familiar with the tools I would need to be successful working on them.

Once SunCity Services, LLC was created, we began offering services that were in alignment with that objective as SunCity Advising. Having once thought that marketing was all “fluff” and that I wasn’t creative or patient enough for it, my perspective had changed. The understanding that services like search engine optimization, paid advertising, website design, and really every marketing service, are connected helped to point us in the right direction. We really let the market tell us what services to offer and that proved to be a good idea.

SunCity Advising is now a turnkey digital marketing agency with dozens of clients ranging broadly in scope, verticals, and size. The ability to help our clients grow their own business is what keeps us motivated. And the growth that we see in return is evidence that what we are doing for them works. Watching our clients hit new milestones they never thought they could is probably the best feeling I have ever experienced as a business owner, and certainly what I am most proud of.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Starting a business, even with a bit of preparation beforehand, still didn’t come without challenges. The first of those were the opportunities that our clients began to give us if we were willing to come onboard as an employee for them. It may sound like a good problem to have, but the stress of being offered a large salary to work with a team you’re already comfortable with can make your decision to continue with a small business very tough.

In fact, my partner decided that one of those opportunities was simply too good to pass up. That meant that he was leaving the company and going to a client. Unfortunately, that was our largest client and meant that not only was I losing a great teammate, but there was no need for a contract with us any longer since they brought him inhouse. But, I understood his decision and he left the company amicably. We stayed in contact and eventually landing a new contract with the same client and I began working with him again!

I guess the point is that even when things look like they are heading in the wrong direction, it’s important to stay positive and focused on your business. You never know how things can change in an instant for the better as well.

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

The closest call I’ve ever had in terms of the health of SunCity Advising occurred a few years ago. We had expanded our headcount significantly and added quite a few new tools to improve our capabilities. It made sense to do this because we had new contracts coming in pretty regularly and the cash flow was very consistent. But, we had limited transaction history with our bank – which turned out to be much more problematic than I could have known.

One of our clients was prepaying us a 6-digit per month amount to manage their online advertising. Because they were a pretty large company, things sometimes moved a bit more slowly than we were accustomed to. This included their Accounts Payable team. Even getting behind by 30 days would mean that we were on the hook for hundreds of thousands of dollars. They were large enough for me not to be concerned about their ability to pay, but it was a matter of being able to float that cash until the payment came through that was the real problem.

So, I went to the bank and asked them to increase my credit card limit. That wasn’t as easy as just saying there was a lot of cash in my account because I didn’t have a long history of that cash being in there. After a few months of going into the bank and speaking to different people, they finally increased the limit. But, I was only a couple days away from having to ask friends and family to let me borrow money to pay for their ads. Luckily, everything worked out, but that was an extremely difficult situation that I wasn’t sure we would ever make it out of.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://suncityadvising.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/suncityadvising/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/suncityadvising/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/3759983/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/SunCityAdvising
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/suncity-advising-la-jolla-3