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

Hi Rachel, thanks for joining us today. It’s easy to look at a business or industry as an outsider and assume it’s super profitable – but we’ve seen over and over again in our conversation with folks that most industries have factors that make profitability a challenge. What’s biggest challenge to profitability in your industry?

Our firm serves as an outsourced marketing department for other companies, and we pride ourselves on simple contracts with flat monthly billing. All of which is based on making recommendations for what they need us to be doing for them and averaging out the hours per year we think it’ll take and dividing that over 12 months. But that can bring challenges with profitability when we want to help our clients any time they ask, and sometimes we end up “giving away” billable hours going above and beyond. Creating healthy boundaries, while still providing value to our clients, has been a hard balancing act to figure out and we’re still working on it. In the marketing and design industry, just doing “one more meeting” or “one more round of revisions” can eat away at your profit very quickly. And the larger your team is, the more likely it is for that to happen. We’ve been working a lot the last two years on either presenting our clients with options that are mutually beneficial, or with charging for the add-on projects that we used to do to create reciprocity with the client.

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.

After growing up in the Midwest and working on our family farm, I pursued a degree in Organizational Leadership while playing college tennis and working full time for the Chamber of Commerce in my hometown of Great Bend, Kansas. I found a passion for helping businesses tell their stories and stay in front of potential customers while working at the Chamber, and that ultimately led to starting my own brand management and design firm in 2016. Marketing Maven Consulting primarily serves as an outsourced marketing department for growing companies across the Midwest. But we also do website design, video production, photography, graphic design, consulting, public speaking, and other special projects.

Our business continues to grow because of our unique approach to client relationships. We adamantly resist the “big agency” model with unnecessary overhead and corporate jargon. We are everyday, down-to-earth folks with a passion for quality design and detailed execution. We leverage our Midwest roots and Kansas work ethic to fully integrate in our clients’ organizations, get to know their teams, and really become part of their company. We want their employees to view as as colleagues and coworkers, not some big city firm that swoops in to have a lot of meetings and then leaves. This approach has consistently led to word of mouth and referrals that have helped us grow from 2 employees in 2016 to a team of 6 operating remotely from 5 different locations across the state of Kansas. Our company culture is built around exceptional communication, humility, and a genuine interest in helping our clients win year after year. It’s so rewarding to watch them crush their goals, grow their organizations, and impact their communities. Knowing that we play a part in that success and get to celebrate those victories alongside our clients is what gets us out of bed in the morning.

This approach has earned the firm several awards, including a Business of the Year award in 2018, a NextGen Leader of the Year award in 2019, and Best of Web Design award in 2022. This fall, I was also privileged to receive one of the Great Bend’s Top 20 Under 40 awards. These accolades are barely worth mentioning, as they’re such a small blip in the successes we reflect back on and remember with pride. Our biggest accomplishments have everything to do with our clients’ organizations achieving and exceeding their goals!

Can you talk to us about how your funded your business?

When I decided to take my part time side hustle into a full time business, I pulled $3,000 out of our personal savings to buy a computer, some software, and to host a new website and email address. I worked from home for a couple months until I could cash flow a deposit on a new office space at a business incubator facility. Within 90 days of launching the business, I was able to pay myself back and the rest is history. Only one other time in my business have I borrowed any money, and that was for a major equipment purchase that paid for itself within a few months. I hate the idea of having debt that someone else would have to pay off if something happened to me. That commitment to staying debt free has made growth a slow and steady process as opposed to a major risk up front, which is something I would highly recommend to other creatives out there. It can be tempting to get the biggest, best camera or the highest end macbook. But if you can make a plan to keep upgrading and selling off old equipment every 18-24 months and do the slow steady grind without any debt, you’ll be able to make clearer decisions without fear driving your choices about what clients to take on or what next steps to take.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

As a farm girl from Kansas who also worked in the restaurant industry for two years training servers on hospitality and customer service, I was taught from an early age that “the customer is always right” and to do whatever you can to keep the customer happy. This isn’t a bad mindset most of the time. Humility is a huge asset. However, this definitely bit me a few times early on when ego-centered, narcissistic clients took advantage of my kindness and people pleasing nature. It took a lot of hard-learned lessons to figure out how to watch for those red flags and unlearn that training from my hospitality days. Now, I have tried to instill in our team that it’s okay to maintain a boundary, and it’s possible to keep a positive client relationship even if we have to tell them no sometimes. The book “The Power of a Positive No” by William Ury is an absolute must-read for entrepreneurs and leaders! It changed my life.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.hireamaven.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/hireamaven
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/HireAMaven
• Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/hireamaven
• Twitter: www.twitter.com/hireamaven
• Youtube: www.youtube.com/channel/UCVxPafP8nKV1lLRFW4Aaf2g

Image Credits
All photos were taken by Marketing Maven Consulting.