We were lucky to catch up with Sarah Mae Ives recently and have shared our conversation below.

Sarah Mae, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

I’ve never fit in at the traditional 9-5 job. I was a good girl though, and did all the traditional “steps” that were expected of me! I went to school, got a Master’s degree and started climbing the corporate ladder, but when I realized that didn’t make me feel good, I started thinking really hard about what else I could (and wanted to) do. That began a decade-long search and struggle for what made for a good business choice. I got sucked down the vortex of bad businesses and wasted a lot of time!

One of the biggest challenges that I overcame when starting up was the belief that I needed to have a “passion” business. After several years and getting $33,000 into debt, I realized that you must marry your passion with a need that’s highly valued to be successful. Otherwise, you just have an expensive hobby.
I overcame this by getting real about what I enjoyed: writing, creating, and talking shop with other business owners. I initially offered advertising services out of practicality. I didn’t expect to fall in love with this business and become so passionate about the entrepreneurs I helped. If you follow what you’re good at, and can critically assess the market’s needs, your passion will find you in unexpected ways.

What I set out to do was create a platform that helps to educate women on profitable business ideas, plus give them the motivation and the right mindset in order to achieve breakthroughs in the status quo.
I want to be known for providing crystal-clear direction on what works in business and what doesn’t, because having a successful business dramatically transforms your life. While I love many things about the coaching industry, many would-be entrepreneurs only get half the answers they need to find success.

We are taught that we can buy a $997 DIY program and bank a million bucks, which is far from reality. We’re also confused by the droves of people who say that it takes “seven years to overnight success,” which I don’t believe. I aim to be one of the clearest voices about the fastest way to find success so I can empower a new wave of female entrepreneurs. That’s my ultimate dream.

I found my home and place in the world when I got into business; I met my forever friends and suddenly I no longer felt like an outcast! I want to be that “home” for other women as well, who want to set out on the road less traveled. I have a passion for teaching and for motivation, and that is my gift to the world: to inspire and help gently guide and nudge people towards where they really want to go, and even helping them give themselves permission to dream bigger and do more.

Sarah Mae, 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 am the founder and president of Sarah Mae Ives Social Media Inc (SMISMI), a company dedicated to empowering women (and some incredible men!) to start their own businesses. The company focuses on providing education, motivation, and entertainment that will inspire women to more closely examine what matters to them in their day-to-day lives, and how to identify what they need to change in order to take their lives to a place of fuller enjoyment. SMISMI delivers this content in a few key ways:

1). The Sarah Mae Ives’ No-Fluff Ads Agency mentorship training program. This program is a comprehensive training program that teaches students the skills to build their own successful advertising agency business. The goal of the program is to teach students how to create and run advertising campaigns, build websites, and post to social media for companies on social media platforms: real skills that pay better than learning to code! There is no prior business or marketing experience required, and from day one, we provide the support to feel confident and empowered in building the foundational skills to understand how to successfully create, run, and sustain social media ads for businesses and coaches around the world.

2). The course provides a 3-month mentorship time frame where there is extensive personalized training with myself and my team as we help students build their own agencies, obtain clients, nurture these clients, and continue to expand on their knowledge, business development, and client growth.

3). Within the program itself, we provide a self-paced course with 285 lessons and videos to guide students through the why of being an ads manager, and the foundational elements of creating their agency, from setting up their business manager account, creating their own company logo and business pages, to in-depth sales call training, how to set up ad campaigns, and how to manage client deliverables.

4). Lifetime access to course training + materials, all call replays from live support calls as well as special bonus training on supplemental processes of ads management.

We have trained and educated over 2500 women on what it takes to start a profitable ads agency. We have hundreds of alumni that are successfully running their ads agencies and many more who have branched out to other types of businesses. We have many raving reviews to support this which can be found here and here.
I’m mentoring an incredible group of smart, kind, and driven women and teaching them the ropes of owning a digital agency. While Facebook advertising has been the bread and butter of my business for years (and will continue to be), I’ve always felt most at home as an educator. I guess I’m just naturally bossy!

When I decided to follow my heart’s call and pursue this passion project, I had no clue the journey it would take me on. I couldn’t have imagined that I’d attract so many great women, and I am learning just as much from them as they are from me, which is something I truly believe helps me give back to my community, and invest my energy and time back into their journey. There is a true reciprocal collaborative environment that has been cultivated, and we all come to the table eager to learn, with open minds, the courage to take risks, and the curiosity to expand our comfort zone.

One of my proudest moments was when my business exceeded multiple six figures. Nothing beats that feeling of, “Wow, this is working.” This milestone was an incredible taste of victory, especially after failing at business since 2011, and wasting nearly $50,000 on an endless string of certificates and DIY courses.
We have since generated over 10 million dollars in a short amount of time (2.5 years) and we now employ a team of 13 full time employees and 5 additional contractors! Our outlook for the future is more growth and impact.

That success is directly tied to my ability to pivot. When my first business failed, I reimagined my next steps when most people would have packed it in. While single-minded focus is mandatory, you also must marry that with practicality and be able to admit when something isn’t working and tweak it to fill a need.

I authored a Wall Street Journal Best Selling book called, “The No-Fluff Business” which has sold over 7000 copies! It has also hit the Amazon best seller list twice in the last two years. This book is truly an insight into my business journey and how I learned from years of experience how to better define the business that’s right for each person, rather than trying to make the “one-size-fits-all” business ploy work. I discuss how to avoid businesses that are more likely to fail or be overly saturated, and most importantly finding a calling that aligns the reader with their passion and purpose.

The aim of this book is to help educate women of starting better businesses, ones that are rooted in demand, versus elaborate scams, or questionable business models like MLMs and affiliate marketing (and importantly how to avoid those as they are money pits). By inspiring them to start their own business or at least their lives in a direction of more fulfillment, I hope to create a connection between my past and their future.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

One of the biggest challenges that I overcame when starting up was the belief that I needed to have a “passion” business. After several years and getting $33,000 into debt, I realized that you must marry your passion with a need that’s highly valued to be successful. Otherwise, you just have an expensive hobby.

I overcame this by getting real about what I enjoyed: writing, creating, and talking shop with other business owners. I initially offered advertising services out of practicality. I didn’t expect to fall in love with this business and become so passionate about the entrepreneurs I helped. If you follow what you’re good at, and can critically assess the market’s needs, your passion will find you in unexpected ways.

What I set out to do was create a platform that helps to educate women on profitable business ideas, plus give them the motivation and the right mindset in order to achieve breakthroughs in the status quo.

I want to be known for providing crystal-clear direction on what works in business and what doesn’t, because having a successful business dramatically transforms your life. While I love many things about the coaching industry, many would-be entrepreneurs only get half the answers they need to find success.

We are taught that we can buy a $997 DIY program and bank a million bucks, which is far from reality. We’re also confused by the droves of people who say that it takes “seven years to overnight success,” which I don’t believe. I aim to be one of the clearest voices about the fastest way to find success so I can empower a new wave of female entrepreneurs. That’s my ultimate dream.

What’s been the most effective strategy for growing your clientele?

The primary competitive advantage of my mentorship program is the unparalleled level of personal support throughout the 90-day mentorship program. More than anything, we want to educate women on identifying the pros and cons of different business models to find the one that fits best for them, and to help them be more critical in understanding if that business will actually meet a market need.

Women in particular are being bombarded every day with get-rich-quick schemes, and their emotions and vulnerabilities are being preyed upon in very real and destructive ways, and we want to stop this flood of mis-information and help women recognize what truly won’t help them become profitable. By giving them the tools and the straight talk that’s missing from the majority of business and motivational coaches today, we hope to bridge the gap between our students’ passion for helping people, while also ensuring that their passion intersects with a demonstrated market need.

Our program is committed to providing the greatest level of hands-on support because the foundation of the program is to help our students become successful ads managers, and they can’t do that if they have to follow along with a static pre-recorded course that they’re not able to question, clarify, and grapple with in a meaningful way. The live support is where the magic happens, where the connections are made, where the “ah ha!” moments get solidified, and where there is that beautiful synergy of people working and participating in something bigger than themselves.

We have live calls that students can join every day of the week, many days with multiple calls. We aim to actually deliver on the word “mentorship” which many programs do not. We also train women on a real and demonstrated skill (advertising) and train them to work with real companies like gyms, spas, doctors, chiropractors, etc… We are equipping women with a skill that’s greatly needed and increasing in demand as more and more companies stop advertising in print and television, and instead transition over to social media advertising.

But more than equipping them with a profitable skill set that they will be able to competitively market in the digital space, my approach is one that centers around instilling confidence, belief, and empowerment in the (mostly) female students that I get to work with. One of the pillars of the course is mindset, and encouraging students to cultivate an entrepreneurial mindset, and to believe in the possibility of their own potential. Whether or not they ultimately become ads managers, I hope that they leave with a mindset that gives them permission to say ‘yes’ to their dreams and the possibility of more.
Many marketing and ads management courses are very isolated in terms of the type of material that they provide, which is often self-paced and provides a very generic “one-size-fits-all” model for gaining clients, setting up ads, and learning about how to create audiences. In my mentorship program, students are provided live support access the day they sign up, and we have multiple live Zoom calls every day, not only on questions and support about the program material, but topic-specific training on sales calls, mindset, tech support, special guest events, etc…

In addition to the live support, a secondary competitive advantage of my program is that it offers a certification process at the end of the program. As part of the certification process, students have the opportunity to submit a final project that demonstrates their competence at being able to build a full ad campaign, and walk through the important performance analytics and metrics that would be key in a client relationship.

One of the most valuable lessons that I offer in my training is helping students learn to ask if a potential business venture is a quantifiable “hard skill” that’s highly valued in the marketplace. Too many people start businesses based on “soft skills,” where getting paid depends on the size of your audience and the reach of your brand, which can be costly to establish. Or, they offer hard skills, like social media management or virtual assisting, that don’t pay well for the hours required. With those businesses, it’s much harder to prove a return on investment, but with a skill that has ROI, you’re not selling transformation so much as you’re selling a smart business decision.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.sarahmaeives.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sarahmaeives/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sarahmaeives1
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahmaeives/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@SarahMaeIves/featured
• Other: TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@sarahmaeives Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/sarahmaeives1/