We were lucky to catch up with Makena Delaney recently and have shared our conversation below.

Makena, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Are you able to earn a full-time living from your creative work? If so, can you walk us through your journey and how you made it happen?

From a super young age I always knew that I wanted to work for myself, and it’s been really cool to start a business (that I started just 8 months before the pandemic began) and be able to build something that has turned into a full-time income. It’s been cool to turn a one-woman show into a team and still have enough left over to be able to start working on purchasing my first rental property. All of that happened within a 4-year window during a worldwide health crisis.

It was not like that from day one. Right at the start of COVID in March 2020, I was working as a makeup artist for NARS Cosmetics and Bare Minerals. I got a phone call one day when I was at work to let me know that I need to go home for 2 weeks. 2 weeks to slow the spread, as they said; and from that point forward,  I didn’t get called back to work until October of 2020. Luckily for me, I had already built up a steady income and no longer needed those jobs by October 2020. And even more lucky for me, during that period I had a great family who I could rely on, and I just spent all that time that I wasn’t at work studying and learning my craft, learning different modalities of digital marketing, learning anything and everything related to owning a business that I possibly could.

I think without that 6-month period of just intense self learning and self education in the online business space, I would have been years behind where I am now.

I now had all this knowledge and the perfect opportunity to jump in and execute everything that I learned. So many people have to learn while they go, while I was learning prior to really putting the effort into the client acquisition side of business.

Another major milestone in my journey is networking. Anybody who knows me probably knows me through networking. Networking not only changed my life in terms of becoming more and more outgoing and more of a people person, it also helped me build my business because I learned early on how the networking landscape works. I had incredible people take me under their wing and teach me how it works and because of that, I was able to again have another kick start to my business that other people may not get to experience. It was about 2021 when I realized I was still struggling to book regular consistent clients, and I had been in business at that point for over 2 years. I took a moment to stop and do some reflection of how I acquired the clients that I had up until that point and what I realized is every single one of them came from local networking or virtual networking, and so I said to myself, if I want to make this business work I need to go do more of what’s working. That was March of 2021. That same month I went to 18 networking events. For anyone who is not in the networking world, that’s a whole lot of networking events. On average, I would say people attend two, maybe three per month and I went to 18, and I kept up with the upper teens for probably another year and a half. I even went on at one point to co-manage a chapter of Tennessee Women Connect. Networking helped me gain huge traction in my business. I could have sped the process up by networking earlier, networking bigger, and networking stronger but other than that the opportunity I was given to stay home and study, study, study, learn, learn, learn about running a business is unique and I kind of truly hope it never happens to the world again, but I can be thankful for that period for myself! Haha

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

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

For me, the most rewarding aspect of being a creative is seeing my clients become successful after launching their business. I like to look at branding and website design as wearing a strong outfit or having your makeup done professionally. It really helps you step out confidently, which leads to bigger and better successes for my clients! I have a few clients in particular who have just really grown their business exponentially since working together, and it’s just the best feeling in the world to see them soar!!

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

Originally, I wanted to make social media graphics and small websites as my service offering. During the height of the pandemic, a ton of digital marketers were harping on and on about the value of having a monthly membership. At the time, I didn’t have a ton of my own experience in anything strategy oriented, so I made a membership of what I did know – Canva! I made a Canva template membership. It was ultimately a GIANT flop in and of itself, but overall, I learned more from that than anything else. I always find that when you’re learning a new skill, you should apply it to something tangible. That project required me to learn automations, email marketing, copywriting, clickfunnels, making digital content, blogging, managing a Facebook group and tons of other amazing skills that I still use daily now! So ultimately, the lesson learned is that even when a project or a launch feels like a flop, it’s usually part of the path that you needed to take so that you could end up at your dream destination!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.MakenaDelaney.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/makena_delaney/

Image Credits
Beth Miller Photography