We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Reka Juhasz. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with reka below.
Reka, appreciate you joining us today. Owning a business isn’t always glamorous and so most business owners we’ve connected with have shared that on tough days they sometimes wonder what it would have been like to have just had a regular job instead of all the responsibility of running a business. Have you ever felt that way?
I am happy as a business owner. I work well on my own, I enjoy my freedom, and I enjoy knowing that everything in my business results from my actions or inactions. While I don’t have other people depending on me for their salary, a few times a year—especially when things are tough—I wonder if I should apply for a regular job. I consider these moments my getting back in alignment prompts, doing work even when it’s scary, leaning into the unknown, and trusting my highest purpose and alignment. If I didn’t have these thoughts I would consider my business endeavor a failure. I’m not saying we should live on the edge and want to quit often, but I do think it’s healthy to wonder what the F we are doing in life from time to time.
Reka, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I love to tell the story that in college I took a theatre class. While I hated being on stage and memorizing lines I quickly realized that gathering bios, editing them, creating the playbill, and being extra about it all was my absolute calling. I learned that I liked graphic design before I knew what graphic design was. For the play Our Town I created a playbill in Word (yes, it took weeks) that we printed on 11×17 newsprint paper, rolled it up, and tied together with a piece of twine. I thought I was the most creative and clever person on earth. Little did I know, every good designer thinks like this. I obsessed over every font I selected, making it look like an actual newspaper, with the actor bios looking like classified ads. It was then that I realized that information can be organized in various ways, that the final product the customer/client receives can be really fun, different, and inventive, and that there are no rules to how to make it work. I try to remind myself often that just because there is a specific way to do something it doesn’t mean that’s the only way.
Any thoughts, advice, or strategies you can share for fostering brand loyalty?
This may be controversial—but I am friends with or become friends with most of my clients. They find me because we align based on our core values, and that’s very much by design. This allows for easy decisions to follow them on social, exchange phone numbers if appropriate, and stay in touch. I know some people have hard boundaries to be involved in their client’s lives, but I love it and wouldn’t have it any other way. It doesn’t mean that I get work requests via text at 10 pm or on the weekend, and if I do, I just kindly ask them to email me so it doesn’t fall off my radar. Ultimately, with good boundaries and creating meaningful relationships a lot of my clients will come back to me for quick jobs, refer me to their friends, or chat me up about ideas that sometimes develop into super epic projects, because they trusted me as a friend to hear them out when they had no idea where the project was going to take them.
What’s been the most effective strategy for growing your clientele?
I have tried a few traditional avenues but honestly, word of mouth has been my most amazing strategy for getting clients. It requires you to do good work, follow up, make the changes, have your shit together, but when you do, people will refer you to others. It’s so simple yet so very effective.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://paperreka.com
- Instagram: paperreka
