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

Mona , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Your ability to build a team is often a key determinant of your success as a business owner and so we’d love to get a conversation going with successful entrepreneurs like yourself around what your recruiting process was like -especially early on. How did you build your team?

I was working a full time 9-5 position while building my marketing company. I was trying to replicate my income with my marketing clients before I quit my full time job. I didn’t even think about building a team when I first got started. After 3 months of building my clients, I couldn’t do it on my own. My first team member was not the right fit. She was a great person, but didn’t fit the company culture and values. That was really important to me. After my first hire, I was motivated to find someone who really loved social media and had the drive that I did. My second hire, was AMAZING and is still with me today. I have built a team that is excited to come to work, gives their all to their clients, and are rockstars at their jobs! One thing that I do that is not traditional in the hiring process, is hire based on culture fit rather than experience. We have a great training program that can teach you what we do, but it can’t teach you how to be a good team member if you don’t come with those qualities already.

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?

MCT Marketing started out as an Influencer marketing company. I would get paid by brands and companies to promote their products on my instagram. I would have companies reach out to me and ask if I could manage their social media, because I had done a great job growing my own (I grew to 10K organic followers in 6 months). After accepting a few, my referral base was flourishing and I had to hire a team. Today, we have account managers all over the United States that specialize in different industries. We are a digital marketing company, but 80% of our clients are social media based. We don’t use fake followers or fake likes for anything and we really want our clients to see the ROI. We take on a personal approach to every account and we have stats to back up our work. It is so easy to hire a social media manager, but not every social media manager is a strategist. We are all about strategy and growth.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

Social media audience is important. Find someone who has grown on social media and learn everything you can from them. Don’t waste your time googling, “how to grow on social media” and NEVER hire a company that promises you followers. Those companies are going to feed your account robots and hurt your account in the long run.

Any advice for managing a team?

Your team comes first. Not a popular opinion for marketing agencies – some people would say that your clients come first. You can always find new clients, but finding a good team member is drastically harder. Do whatever you can to make their life easier and their job fun! Whether that is doing a team lunch every now and then or going on a trip! This will keep turnover low and help you build a team that wants to be around each other.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.mctmarketing.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mctmarketing/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mctmarketing1
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/mctmarketing/

Image Credits
Wild Bliss Photography @wildbliss_photography