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

Rebecca, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. The first dollar your business earns is always special and we’d love to hear how your brand made its first dollar of revenue.

I’m what you would call an “accidental entrepreneur.” I decided to become a Realtor at the WORST TIME EVER, right after the crash in 2010. Having sold housing advertising for years, I thought the grass would be greener on the other side. During that time, other Realtors kept asking me for assistance in doing their flyers and brochures and social media. I realized I was really having so much fun doing that. And NOT having fun attempting to sell real estate. Going out at all hours of the day and night was just not in alignment with my lifestyle and our son was still young and I didn’t want to miss out. My husband and I decided that if I could make a go of it doing the marketing instead, that I should go for it. I started poking around Facebook groups for other opportunities and hooked up with a lady starting a digital agency for dentists in Florida. She brought me dental clients who needed social media and I brought in my own realtor clients and hence, my business was born.

Rebecca, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I have been a reader since kindergarten. My great-grandmother worked at Goodwill and started bringing me Nancy Drew books. I have nearly the whole original collection, first editions most of them, and have read them many times over. I have a Kindle Unlimited subscription and read pretty much every night. To be immersed in a great story is more exciting to me than watching nearly anything on television. I never wanted to write my OWN stories but I’ve always wanted to work with authors. We created the Authors’ Allies by Blue Dot brand to showcase our author work. We are transitioning to more and more authors as they make up the majority of our business. On the Clifton Strengths test, my top two strengths are strategic and achiever. This means I am excellent at creating the strategy and can then easily be able to start checking off the tasks.

I will meet with an author and get to know them, their product, their audience and their goals and then we can come up with a strategy to help them sell more books. From podcast pitching to promotions, social media and book tours, we’ve done a lot of fun things to get our authors to climb those Amazon ranks.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

There are so many scams online right now and it’s challenging to find good, reliable help.

I was raised Old-German style, meaning you do what you say you will do, when you say you’ll do it and you’ll do it well. I come from a long line of entrepreneurs and this is what they were all known for. This is something we are trying to instill in our 20-year-old son and he has already spent some time supervising at his company because of it.

Our clients not only stay with us for years, but they also refer us to their other business acquaintances and do testimonials for us to share. The #1 thing they tell us is that they respect our reliability and experience.

Alright – let’s talk about marketing or sales – do you have any fun stories about a risk you’ve taken or something else exciting on the sales and marketing side?

In a “boys club” real estate market many years ago, I kept trying to get an appointment with the owner of an apartment rental company. He was reluctant and kept putting me off month after month. I saw him at a meeting wearing Converse tennis shoes. I found an old pair of Converse at a thrift store. I took one of the shoes, filled it with candy, the magazine I was selling ads in, and a handwritten but huge tag saying “I just want to get my foot in the door. Give me 15 minutes.” He called me laughing and set up the meeting. When I walked in, he started immediately using the F word. “Why should I F-ing do business with you? You’re a woman in a man’s world. How can you help me?” He was being very derogatory and I never used that word (this was the 90’s and I was a lady dang it). I really braved up and said something along the lines of “I have more balls than your F-ing maintenance guys and you know damn skippy my ads will pack your apartments.” He paused in shock, told me to send him a contract and he’d sign it. Conveniently, I had a nice contract and pen handy and made him sign it right there. He never gave me any grief after that.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.bluedotdigitalmarketing.com/
• Instagram: https://www.bluedotdigitalmarketing.com/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BlueDotCommunications/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rebeccapaciorek/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/RebeccaPaciorek
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCX2aMFXOuSlx471afRH_a7Q
• Other: https://www.pinterest.com/rsp4717/

Image Credits
Photos by Chaylene Hardy.