We were lucky to catch up with Sam DiNicola recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Sam thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Before we get into specifics, let’s talk about success more generally. What do you think it takes to be successful?

I think success looks different to everyone. For me, working for myself is success. Being able to grow my business how I want so that it supports me and allows me to live the life that I want – that is success.

It’s become popular in the last few years to become an entrepreneur. I truly believe anyone can start and grow a business. But I also think that the Internet and social media have made it look incredibly easy. Being a successful entrepreneur requires you to grow and learn, just like anything else. But it also requires you to have an incredibly clear vision for what success looks like to you and for your business.

To many of us in the online business space, success doesn’t look like a 7-figure business with many employees and flying private jets. It might look like a business that let’s you work part-time from anywhere, allowing you to take vacations without worrying it’s all going to come to a screeching halt while you’re gone, and paying yourself a great salary that allows you to do the things you want in your personal life.

But with all of the content we consume around growing and running a successful business, you have to be clear on your goals, or you will drown in other people’s visions. Creating the business of your dreams is completely possible as long as you have clarity on what that looks like and you develop the skills you’ll need to get it there.

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?

I started out like many service-based business owners as a freelancer after someone I knew asked if I could help with their social media. I quickly realized that my skills were in demand and I love learning new things and being able to apply those to further help my clients. I continued to grow and add on services including social media marketing, email marketing, web design, graphic design, etc as the business became full-service. We act as the entire marketing department for businesses that don’t have the budget to hire in house but don’t have the skills (or time) needed to build a digital presence themselves.

Over the years we have added digital ad management and SEO services to our offerings because we recognized those were two areas where business owners were struggling to find success by doing it themselves.

We take pride in working with our clients to meet them where they’re at in terms of budget and goals. Acting as more of a marketing “partner,” I love working closely with business owners and growing with our clients. Because of that, I also work as a consultant and coach for entrepreneurs who need help fitting all of the pieces of growing a business together so that they can make strategic decisions.

To this day, we are still working with some of our very first clients. We know that our services and skills don’t live in a bubble and that there’s so many things that can affect the success of a business. So even for our digital ad management or SEO only clients, we love working with them to identify how those efforts will fit into the larger goals and vision for their business.

We very much believe that a rising tide lifts all boats and I’m so happy to be able to support other small business owners.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

In 2020 I was trying to get pregnant. At that point, I had a few team members to help with client work and bandwidth but I was still very involved with every aspect of the business and clients. I knew that if I wanted to be able to have the business run smoothly and support me through pregnancy, maternity leave, and raising a baby, that I needed to make some changes. So we adjusted our strategy to focus more heavily on digital ad management and SEO for new clients. Those services allow me to drive higher level strategy, without requiring me to be on a ton of calls and taking a lot of my time while still delivering fantastic results for our clients.

We still have full service marketing clients but now, the only way for new clients to work with us is through starting with digital ad management or SEO. This allows us to be a lot more picky about our full service partners to make sure they are a great fit and that we are already familiar with their business. We’re not only more effective for clients but we’ve been able to continue to grow while I work less than ever.

That was a major shift for the business overall that I planned for very far in advance and that worked out really well both for me, my team, and our clients.

We’d love to hear the story of how you turned a side-hustle into a something much bigger.

I ran my full-service digital marketing agency on the side for about 5 years while working a day job running a marketing department and living in NYC.

I knew I wanted to leave my day job and work for myself early on but…NYC is freaking expensive. So I did both. When I finally reached the point where I was ready to go all in, my husband and I left New York to reduce our living expenses. We decided to buy and renovate a camper so that we could travel the country while he worked remotely and I continued to build my business. Little did I know that once I gave it the time and attention it needed, my business would grow to over 6-figures in less than a year. But having that adventure at the same time was amazing.

My business continued to grow as we decided to settle in Jacksonville, FL and we used the income from the business to start investing in real estate.

My business has taken both the slow and steady growth path and the fast growth path. They both come with pluses and minuses. I’ve learned different lessons and skills from both. But when coaching clients come to me wanting to start a business while they have a day job, I always highly encourage it. Doing it that way allowed me to bootstrap and self-fund my business. It allowed me to save a runway so that leaving my day job didn’t feel like as much of a risk. It allowed me to build my business mindfully and to try different strategies without the pressure of wondering how I’d pay the bills. Is it time consuming and tiring? Yes. But it is also really rewarding.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.samdinicoladigital.com/
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/sam.dinicola
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/samdinicoladigital/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sam-malone-dinicola-18b64637/
• Other: TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@sam.dinicola