We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Ronii Bartles. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Ronii below.
Ronii, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to start by getting your thoughts on what you are seeing as some the biggest trends emerging in your industry.
Across all industries, businesses are trying to figure out how to make social media platforms work for their brand. When I first started in the marketing field our advertising options were print, radio, or TV. And those marketing channels were hard to track the results. Then Facebook came along and a whole new world of connecting to potential customers became available. All you needed to do was start an account and start posting about your business. Fast forward 15 years and social media platforms are legitimate marketing channels. With all the platforms now so crowded with people and brands, businesses are trying to figure out how to stand out from the crowd whether they are paying for advertising or just posting to their accounts. Consumers are very savvy and want authenticity so brands are trying to balance that authenticity with actively selling. Over the next year, we’ll see the real, live people behind the brand and let personalities shine without being so polished all the time. They will still be professional just not so polished.
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?
I started my business in 2008. I was working as the Business Manager of a marketing research firm and the economy was tanking. When a recession hits big Fortune 500 companies start to cut budgets and marketing research is the first to go. It’s not an operating expense like payroll. The partners in the company came to me and said, “you’re the MBA here, we see this coming, what do we do?” The solution was to lay off. I was not in that group but in the midst of that conversation, I approached the partners and said I have an idea for a company and pitched it to them. They said, “that’s a great idea, we’ll be your first client.” And they are still my client to this day.
Over the past 15 years, I’ve worked on a lot. I’ve worked on everything in a business from bookkeeping to Facebook Ads. I’ve sat at every seat at the conference table. I’ve made money and I’ve scraped by on pennies only to have to choose between toothpaste and cheap wine (the wine won, it has alcohol and alcohol kills germs hence your teeth are clean, you’re welcome). This has made me a well-rounded business person because I understand how a business works and how it needs to work holistically to be successful.
I believe that business isn’t hard, we make it hard because we’re human. Business is just science where we have a problem, gather data, make a hypothesis, and then experiment until the problem is solved. My clients work with me because of this straightforward approach. It takes the emotion out of it so that you can make informed decisions. As business owners, we think we don’t know enough and are always searching for the magic formula that turns everything around. It’s emotional. But every business is unique and has its own set of problems and data. This is why cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all funnels don’t work. We know everything we need, we just need a framework to assess, gather, and problem-solve.
While I wear many hats, I’m the Fractional CMO for Buy Way of Charleston, where I manage all the marketing activities and advise on business options. It’s a small company but has taught me about the e-commerce industry. Of all the businesses I’ve worked with, retail is the easiest to market because it’s a tangible product that people can touch and feel. There is an obvious deliverable compared to services that are intangible.
Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?
Relationships. Over the past 15 years, I’ve done every trend and fad on the planet to market my business. I’ve run Facebook ads, Google ads, set up free lead magnets and sales funnels. I’ve even danced on Instagram. But when I look back at all my clients and the work I’ve done, every single one has come from a relationship I established at some point in time. I co-host a Facebook Live Talk Show every week called Mimosa Hotline and we have a lot of shop talk about how to run and market a business, and at some point in every episode, we talk about how our best marketing is relationships and connections we’ve made. Even when I think about Buy Way of Charleston, which is a retail company that you don’t traditionally think of as a relationship company, as a brand we have established a relationship with our customers and they keep coming back and buying because of that relationship. As business owners, our instinct is to think it must be more complicated than that. There must be a secret we don’t know. But the secret is that it’s really that simple. Relationships.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
We live in a culture where the “hustle” gets high praise. Growing up the path to success was to go to college, get a business degree, get a job at a big company, get health insurance, spend 30 years climbing the corporate ladder, get your retirement, and then you can enjoy life. After college, I started down that path, then veered off to work for myself. And being an entrepreneur isn’t much different with its hustleprenuer culture. And I’ve had to unlearn that working harder doesn’t always accomplish your goals. For years, I made busy work for myself thinking that I was doing “all the things” to be successful and make more money. All of sudden, one Friday night I was in the emergency room with the worst pain I’ve ever felt in my life. They ended up admitting me to the hospital and spent the weekend trying to figure out what was wrong with me. I had to quickly scramble and cancel every meeting I had for the upcoming week and really prioritize the things I had on my to-do list. I was really sick and felt absolutely awful, and even the effort of sending a quick email to people took all I had. It took 3 days but we finally figured out that my appendix had ruptured. I was in the hospital for 14 days after that. Not only did I have to cancel all my meetings and rearrange a packed to-do list, but I also had to back out of a conference in Portland because I was literally still in the hospital during the conference. It was too late to get my money back too. After leaving the hospital, I spend 10 days at home in bed because I was still on so much medication. Do you know what the funny thing was about that whole month? I made the same amount of money that month doing the bare minimum as I did in the months when I was so busy “hustling”. Unlearning to work smarter not harder is one that I work on every day. It’s easy to fall back into old patterns and want to pack my day full of busy work. I look at my task list and ask, “is this a revenue-generating activity”? If not, then I scratch it off.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.buywayofcharleston.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamronii/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/iamroniibartles
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roniibartles/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjpfonVNT-g6ArY0sug-GvA
- Other: Personal Website: https://www.roniibartles.com/
Image Credits
Dana K Photography