We recently connected with Maggie Swift and have shared our conversation below.

Maggie, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Taking care of customers isn’t just good business – it is often one of the main reasons folks went into business in the first place. So, we’d love to get a conversation going around how to best help clients feel appreciated – maybe you can share something you’ve done or seen someone do that’s been really effective at helping a customer feel valued?

Gift-giving is one of the best ways to show appreciation to anyone, but keep in mind that it should still be super strategic. We don’t purchase a bunch of swag to box off and ship; who wants to get that? We prefer to surprise our clients with thoughtful gifts that show we really listen to them day in and out. One day, our client expressed to us that she was feeling overworked, stressed, and downright exhausted. We surprised her with a gift card to a local spa in her town. It wasn’t over a major holiday; it was just on a random Tuesday in the middle of February, but it was a thoughtful gift from an empathetic heart that she will most likely never forget.

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.

I am a co-founder and CEO of Unframed Digital, a full-service SEO agency with a mission to repair the broken brand-to-SEO agency relationship. We fix poor SEO strategies that aren’t driving results, increase the quality and quantity of traffic, and implement SEO optimizations from a user-experience and human-first perspective. We liken ourselves to a marketing fiduciary: always choosing what’s best for our client’s long-term interests over our own. We stay at the forefront of the ever-changing landscape of SEO with constant data analysis and testing, an investment in traveling the world to meet and learn from the best SEOs out there, and keeping a constant plug on what’s next. And our results speak for themselves: our clients see at least a 100% increase in organic search leads by the end of year one, with many clients over the 200% mark.

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

Being an entrepreneur is one of the most grueling yet rewarding paths you can choose. It’s especially challenging when you are a founder who has been diagnosed with depression and anxiety. It was the beginning of the fourth quarter, and we had let go of several clients who weren’t a great fit. A few weeks later, we learned that several other clients were canceling due to one reason or another. It had already been a few months of crickets on the sales front and I let my pipeline dry up. In the blink of an eye, we went from a comfortable place financially to being in the red with 3 months to turn things around before we had to make a layoff.

I was depressed and ashamed. I used to be a Sales Director who preached about a sustained pipeline! How did I let this happen? My business partner and I were both incredibly anxious as we had someone’s entire livelihood at stake. It had been a long year of ups and downs, learning from mistakes both big and small.

We were on a teary call with our CFO when he told us to buck up. It was time to pull ourselves up from our bootstraps because being an entrepreneur is all about resiliency; getting beat up and beat down and pulling yourself back up again. We nodded and tried to stop our weeping.

My CFO’s words resonated with me so much. On our next team call where we had to come up with a plan to save the business, we acted like Olympic athletes, ready for anything. With all hands on deck, we saved the business within 2.5 months.

Are there any books, videos, essays or other resources that have significantly impacted your management and entrepreneurial thinking and philosophy?

I love a great business read; I find them to be inspiring and energizing. An absolutely life-changing book I read was Rocketfuel, by Gino Wickman and Mark C. Winters. It is one book in a series about the EOS model, which is an operational system you can implement into your business to streamline and grow. I, however, loved the book more because it allowed me to understand the type of leader I am in a business and the negatives AND positives that are attached. I felt so validated!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.unframeddigital.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/unframeddigital/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/unframeddigital
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/unframed-digital

Image Credits
Maggie Swift