We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Kayla MacVean-Salaun. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Kayla below.

Hi Kayla, thanks for joining us today. How did you scale up? What were the strategies, tactics, meaningful moments, twists/turns, obstacles, mistakes along the way? The world needs to hear more realistic, actionable stories about this critical part of the business building journey. Tell us your scaling up story – bring us along so we can understand what it was like making the decisions you had, implementing the strategies/tactics etc.

The first and most important thing I addressed were my packages–from both a pricing and service perspective. As a marketing agency with multiple services, it’s easy to fall into the habit of building a custom package for every client, which we all know is the exact opposite of what we want to be doing to scale. I set an hourly rate and reverse engineered my packages to ensure adequate compensation across the board. Additionally, I divided my services into more of an ‘a la carte’ model, where clients can pick and choose what services and add-ons they would like to move forward with based on our recommendations.

After that, I focused heavily on automation and documentation. And by this I don’t mean outsourcing everything to AI, but rather ensuring the processes I had in place were ‘rinse-and-repeat-able’ and ‘easily-explainable’. I’m fairly strict with my routines in my personal life (I’m still fun, though–I promise), and I brought that over with the same intensity to my business. I templatized what I could, leaned on apps like Asana, Airtable, and Loom for documentation and project management, and tidied up internal processes. This freed up a lot of time that I now use to find and pitch brands.

And finally, I accepted help–which as a Type A eldest daughter was hard for me to do (and is still a work in progress). I hired my first part-time employee, and I learn as much from her as she does from me on a daily basis. While I’m mindful of not having two brains working on the same thing, I love the support we provide each other and our clients by bringing different ideas, skills, and even cultural backgrounds to the table.

Kayla, 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?

If you knew me when I was young, it would make total sense that I ended up working in marketing. To paint you a picture, I was that kid that was always talking in class (when I was moved to the front I would talk with the teacher’s aid, and when I was moved to the hallway I would talk with the custodians), and all my notebooks were filled with bubble letters, random designs, and punny sayings. TL;DR when I realized I could make a career out of what came so naturally to me, it was a no-brainer.

After graduating with a degree in Advertising and Public Relations, I gathered experience first, and worked at a couple local tech and social media agencies before I took the leap of faith and opened Clearly Creative Co., a boutique agency that specializes in helping small to medium sized businesses grow through social media, email marketing, and other marekting initiatives. Our bread in butter is social media and email marekting, which when paired together, delivers awesome results for our clients.

What I’m most proud of brand-wise is what I think sets us apart: we’re human. We humanize the brands we work with, and run away from stuffy, salesy, inauthentic content. It’s how we also operate with our clients–we care for them as humans, and not just a business that pays us a retainer. The best part, though, is seeing the results reflect this: as soon as we prioritize connection (through the brand and with the client), the analytics improve.

What’s been the most effective strategy for growing your clientele?

Relationships. I constantly ensure our social media, email marketing, and advertising strategies have relationship-building on the forefront, and used any avenue possible to continue this. Additionally, I started to network and became intentional with fostering meaningful relationships in my local community.

If there’s one piece of advice I can give anyone that’s looking to grow their business, it’s to focus on relationships–not sales. When you do this, the sales come as a side effect.

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

Oooof. This one’s tough (because there are so many), but I would say that one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned (and continue to ensure I keep up) is spending more time working ‘on’ my business than ‘in’ my business, and to treat my business as my most important and demanding client (because it is). All agency owners that I know struggle with/have struggled with putting their clients’ work before their own, and my business (and mental health, truthfully) improved when I started doing the opposite.

And, because those who know me know I *love* action items, here are two rules I gave myself to put this into practice:
1) No calls, appointments, pitches, etc. on Mondays. I block off every Monday to do lead generation, follow up, and work on any marketing materials for CCco.
2) CCco. comes first–we work on our own content outlines, calendars, e-blasts, etc. before we work on our clients

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.clearlycreativeco.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/clearlycreative.co/

Image Credits

@nicolelebriscreative