We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Mercades Lias a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Mercades, thanks for joining us today. Often the greatest growth and the biggest wins come right after a defeat. Other times the failure serves as a lesson that’s helpful later in your journey. We’d appreciate if you could open up about a time you’ve failed

When I was looking through the interview questions that I could pick from, the question about sharing a story of failure immediately stood out to me. Not only because failure is a part of business, but because learning from failing is the only way to make a successful one. My first business failure was in marketing. When we first began promoting our business, we were spending lots of money on marketing by paying for different ways to promote. After a few months, we noticed that our finances were changing, but not in a good way, until we figured out that we could use social media sites for free promotion for our brand, helping us cut promotion costs and giving us a wider range to reach our consumers. Now almost three years later, we are still finding ways to better promote our business by using social media sites helping us gain more exposure.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

As a child I always loved making up stories and telling them to my peers. Then one year while I was in middle school I had this teacher named Mrs. Loverock, who taught me that education should be fun and showed me how to use my love for writing as a way of looking at education differently. I remember one time, she took me to this retirement home and had me tell stories to some of the residents. It was the coolest thing ever! She taught me how to include math, science and history into my stories making me see education in a different way. Then one day I had a parent-teacher conference explaining to me that my child was having trouble in math and comprehension. Naturally my first thought was like any parent to look up tools that could help her, but then I remembered Mrs.Loverock and how she taught me about math and reading by stories. Right then, I decided to write my first book making my children as main characters to help them better relate to the tales and the rest is history. I saw how much they enjoyed it and decided to peak into the market of education and book writing and it worked. What makes our products so different is that we pride ourselves in making our stories fun and relatable for all children. Our audience isn’t just based on nationality or culture, but on the true needs of making education fun for kids who struggle with learning in the basic systematic standardized way. Every kid learns differently, that’s why we are most proud of our products and how many people enjoy them! We want all our potential clients to know that each story we write is relatable to them in some way, making education fun.

Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?

The most effective strategies for growing our clientele would have to be social media sharing, attending vendor events and lastly word of mouth. Since the beginning of our family’s company these three strategies have gained huge weight in our community along with helping us grow our brand. When we share an event on our social media, a lot of our consumers share their stories because we have products that their children can learn from, which makes selling our products easier.

Do you have any insights you can share related to maintaining high team morale?

When it comes down to advice on managing a team and maintaining high morale, the most important thing I think is loyalty and trust. Our company is family oriented and based education. We knew that there had been an untapped market of stories and books for kids to read that they could better relate to and help them learn in a new way. As the owner I started with my own children and now my children have become the new face of the company. Our children are our futures and if we want them to be successful we must pour more value into them then we do for ourselves.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: Mercadesliaspublishing
• Facebook: Mercadesliaspublishing
• Youtube: MLP Readings
• Yelp: Mercadesliaspublishing
• Other: Tiktok: Mercades_Lias_ Author

Image Credits
Mercadesliaspublishing Team Media Productions, Editing, Marketing- Layla Lenior Illustrations, Media Production- Egypt McGhee Youtuber, Book Author- Joseph Peterson Youtuber, Book Author- Jade Peterson Youtuber- Aaliyah Jones Youtuber, Owner, Book Author- Mercades Lias