We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Marissa Pick. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Marissa below.

Hi Marissa, thanks for joining us today. If you could go back in time do you wish you had started your business sooner or later

I always dreamed of consulting, and four years ago, I finally decided to make the leap from full-time to consulting and set up my LLC. I was running a global team and traveling extensively with work and after our second son Reid was born I decided to put myself first after realizing I was missing precious moments at home with my family, friends, and kids. Once I refocused and prioritized what mattered to me at that given moment, I felt at ease and knew I’d made the right decision.

Life is too short to be unhappy, or miss out on those precious moments. I was commuting to NYC over 3 hours daily, getting stuck on trains, and as my mother would say, “burning the candle from both ends.” I believe in making a plan, working hard, and doing my best. I am motivated each day by the ability to be on the important things which matter for our family and greeting my kids every day with open arms. I know building a business won’t happen overnight. It’s a process filled with both successes and failures, and I’m focused on living in the moment and appreciating each step of the ongoing journey.

My business, Marissa Pick Consulting is focused on developing digital media strategies and executives through leadership. I’ve had a great career leading global social media teams within financial services and have been awarded a lot of honors throughout my various jobs, but I’m finally able to achieve a work-life balance I’ve craved for years as a business owner. It’s the best of both worlds and I wouldn’t have it any other way!

For those of you considering setting up your own business, I urge you to consider making the leap and doing it! It’s a lot of work, and you have to hustle but being in charge of your own business is something I love deeply and it’s one of the best decisions i’ve ever made!

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

My name is Marissa Pick, and I am the founder of Marissa Pick Consulting LLC., where I provide strategic consulting focused on Digital Transformation, Content Marketing, Social Media Strategy, Personal Branding, and more. Customers include those looking to build a strategy for leveraging social media and digital marketing as a part of long-term success for their business.

I have an extensive background in digital marketing and I’ve worked across several industries such as events, publishing, and eventually found myself very niche and focused within financial services. I found the field to be somewhat behind within digital marketing strategies and I was able to align myself with compliance teams to ensure the safety of the regulated brands I’ve worked with. It has been very exciting and dynamic to enter rooms with people who simply don’t believe in the power of social media and eventually work to showcase what success looks like.

At one of my roles as social media director I acted as a shared resource across numerous brands and would hold “social media” breakfasts globally across the companies offices. I would showcase latest trends, and feature internal case studies showing what success looked like to generate growth, engagement and most important- revenue! These breakfasts became very well attended and it helped me to create ways to showcase impact to get maximum buy in!

Sometimes when you’re selling something new or trying to change the culture it’s frustrating but you have to work even harder, remain open minded and practice what you preach! Digital Marketing and social media was a new and emerging field when I began my career, and I’ve worked hard to show the impact of having a strong strategy in place. While other businesses struggled during the covid outbreak I was able to help businesses “catch up” and put the fundamentals in place to digitize and maximize the impact of their digital channels during a time when brick and mortar stores were shut.

I urge any of you reading to be open minded and network as much as you can. You never know where life will take you and how your career path may diverge from what you planned.

Do you have any stories of times when you almost missed payroll or any other near death experiences for your business?

Covid was almost a killer for my business.

The minute the pandemic picked up I lost all of my clients except once. My client believed in me and helped me help them make resources available they were offering for people impacted by the pandemic.

With all of the time at home I was able to do something which has helped me tremendously, I put together a business plan and decided to invest in myself and figure out how to run a business by diving head first into several consulting groups. I spent time networking, listening to webinars, and brushing up on things within my industry which eventually would help me to expand my business offerings.

I networked without an agenda, and was able to connect with new people and have conversations which months later turned into clients. Never give up. You have to hustle if you own your own business and constantly network and put yourself out there.

How did you build your audience on social media?

There is NO quick win here. Building an audience takes time on social media. It should start with a brainstorm around your personal brand and what niche or industries you’d like to highlight. Someone years ago told me to treat yourself like a brand, stay consistent with the look and feel, naming and posting. I’ve built my audience by putting out consistent content across the channels I’d like to amass a following within. I’ve posted memes, visual images, emojis and kept it light while also sharing longer form content as well.

I engage constantly thanking people for comments, likes, etc and sharing other peoples content. No one wants to follow someone who just posts about themselves constantly. I like to change it up on social media and throw out content to generate engagement such as open ended questions, surveys, polls and get people to engage.

There is NO one sized fits all for everyone reading this, take chances, mix up your content, see what works and stay consistent! The followers and audience will come if the content is good, trust me :)

Contact Info:

• Website: www.marissapick.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marissapick/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marissapick/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/marissapick

Image Credits
A lot of those come from speaking appearances or content I’ve been featured in