We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Sarah Martinez-Murray a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Sarah, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?

We created Cookie Dough Marketing to be the blood line and in house marketing team for our other brands that we have.

Let me rewind… I joined the crew at Kings of Neon back in 2021 with Steve Pastor leading the scaling ecommerce business. I sat in branding and creative director to bring together the business from the core team and to get really clear on who we were as a brand, what we represent as a business and who we are talking to out in market. In the first year we were able to get really gritty and built everything from the ground up. In that first year we got some incredible deals over the line, travelled overseas for huge events and grew our team out across the globe.

As we scaled, we were outsourcing our marketing work through agencies and often weren’t getting the returns with the lag between comms and dilution with workload and accountability. Our business moved quickly and we needed to make quick changes and constantly push the boundaries. What we were getting was a set and forget framework and it just wasn’t working for us. Looking at how much money we were spending on agencies and poor results we decided for Black Friday 2022 Steve and I decided to bring our marketing all in house. We ran every element of the campaign and we got the best results we had ever had from a campaign and had a record week in rev.

From there we sat back and said… we need to do this. From there – Cookie Dough Marketing was created. We do a lot of creative in house with a heap of designers and creative unicorns so we just built on that and started offering that as a service. From there we have built it out into a full suite to compliment what we do best and how we can help other businesses do the same. Where the gaps are – that’s where we have been able to lean in and get some great partnerships.

Our mission with Cookie Dough Marketing is to be partners with our brands. Our biggest point of difference is we are business owners first. It sounds simple but it is a game changer. Treating your partnerships and clients like your own business is literally the magic to what we do. We know what it is like to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on advertising and how important it is every step of the way through a campaign and for a business. We have got a full team of absolute guns now and we only have a small portfolio to keep it tight and so we, as the business and agency owners are able to be across every campaign and every moving part in the businesses we are working with.

I have recently relocated to London so we are now building out our agency with an Australian team, a London Office and soon a couple more of our crew working in our business remotely from the USA. It is incredible when you start to get really clear about what you need to do for you business and how to move the needle. We have been able to find and share space with some incredible people and building a brand remotely has been wildly cool and new. Connected and all spread out across the world is so fun!

Our goal originally was to have a fully stacked team to service our own brands that are on track to hit big 7 figure numbers and now we get to also share that and help other brands get record growth and market share in the crazy, fun filled world of e-commerce. We are partnered with a couple of big brands that are going through global expansion and have plans to bring all of their marketing in house. We are helping them bring this to life and put all the pieces into place while still growing and aligning all of their own teams. It is so cool to be able to level up businesses and see the wins and celebrate together along the way.

Our mission for Cookie Dough Marketing is so simple, it is to help businesses grow with complete transparency and holding accountability. We move fast, we action quickly and we understand the importance of every move. We don’t expect or want to take money for ad spend or extras. We win when you win and we get you winning by doing a heap of work with you.

I am so proud of the crew that we have built and the business model. It is also feeding a passion project of mine that is a female led brand…. That one has a mission all on its own to change the world and working life for mums and female leads so there is some really cool stuff happening and so much yet to come!

Sarah, 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?

My personal journey in business is a mixed bag. Hairdresser by trade, owned my first salon at 23. Always worked in service based industries for the first 15 years of my working life and it taught me how to build relationships that are powerful plays in life and business.

I was lucky enough to have some very inspiring women in my life throughout the beginning of my career to show me how to work and grow relationships, business and kick down doors when needed. I was always so inspired by these women and knew that if I was ever in a position to own and run businesses with teams, I wanted to be that for them as well.

Through my years in salon and owning a business, I was giving the opportunity to go into a big corporate for sales in the hairdressing industry. Opportunity I couldn’t refuse I jumped into that and learnt the world of sales. I honestly thing that if you have the skillset of sales and relationships – you can do anything.
Juggling in salon, a business, staff and a sales rep role and travelling, it all got to capacity pretty quickly. I decided to sell my salon after 6 years and pushed on in other areas.

I worked in the sales roles on and off for about 10 years with different contracts for the same company which was an incredible role with opportunity and access to wonderful resources.

I continued on with sales roles and started to expand into marketing. Throw in owning a couple of businesses, some study, marketing and consumer interests, fitness industry passion side hustles and life I popped out after having a baby looking at what I was going to do.

I took a role in marketing after maternity leave to ease back into it and quickly found myself loving juggling mum life with a career. After a year or so and Covid / some working from home – I went for a role with Kings of Neon and the rest is history.

I am a mixed bag of life and experience and just having a go. I look at everything as an opportunity to grow and learn and that is literally the most rewarding thing of career and work. I get to chase dreams with my tribe, I get to grow and evolve along side awesome people and we get to change the way business is done.

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

Biggest lesson for me as I roll towards 40 is that you don’t have to fit into a box.

Like so many people (women especially) I know, we have shrunk to fit in and not to upset or stand out. The goal was to fit in and be liked and to toe the line. I spent so many years trying to be so many things to so many people.

When I bought my first business at 23 I started to see how you can make things different and giving people space and opportunity. The sometimes stuffy ‘right’ way of doing things just because that is the way it’s always been done has slowly faded and I love the fact that you can flip it on its head.

In Cookie Dough Marketing – we are unapologetic about who we are. We are just us and we are good at what we do. There are tattoos, we swear, we are parents, we have life throw curve balls and we want to do business differently. We absolutely aren’t for everyone but it is so refreshing to also be totally okay about that and embrace it.

My goal is to have enough revenue and profit to have incredible benefits for my team. To have paid maternity leave, extended carers leave and loads of flex for my working parents. I know for me – I need that flex. I sometimes work at 2am and I sometimes work at 3pm. I want to support that and continue to grow our team and crew that just get it done. No rigid rules but always goal focused.

The more I learn about making your own rules – the better we get in business and the clients and crew keep getting better too. Watching people thrive – have a safe space to put it all on the table and shed the BS that can come with just being authentic and being able to show up exactly how they are is so awesome.

Business is people. People want to be themselves. When you are authentic – it’s natural and real. Living and working in a space where it’s all just flowing, honest and trusted is my favourite thing in being able to own and run a business.

Let’s talk M&A – we’d love to hear your about your experience with buying businesses.

I have bought a couple of businesses through the years.

I bought a hair salon through a broker back 17 years ago. The process was super traditional and I had help with the process with my mum being my business partner at the time. I now know that I bought a job. The business needed a lot of work and my mission was to grow it from nothing – which we did. Owning and running a small service based business was honestly one of the hardest and most incredible learning experiences I have ever had. I couldn’t have paid for the experience or learnings that I got from that.

Second proper business I bought was with my now husband, 6 weeks after we started dating. Crazy.
It was when F45 was kicking off in Australia and was growing rapidly. We were living in Sydney at the time and both into fitness. I was working in industry and a girl I worked with came to us with an opportunity to jump in. The two couples – my friend and her partner, and myself and my partner all went in and hustled money we didn’t have. Borrowed and sold things to raise the funds to get it happening. Going through a franchise business buy in is really interesting. The business model was already there and F45 have a really excellent structure so it was awesome to be a part of. At the time the areas that were only just taking off were in another state. So the boys stayed in Sydney and my friend and I moved 9 hours away to get the gym up and running. We were given all the foundations to get it off the ground but it was one hell of a mission. Fly in, Fly out, building and renovations, pre launch, socials, admin and everything else we had to pull together was wild. The support and everything through the franchise was excellent and was a completely different experience buying into a brand that has market share and equity. Easier in some ways – harder in others. The biggest challenge through all of this is cash flow – you need it and need it up front. You can’t chip away at it as you scale. You need money straight up to get it to the level the business model and brand is at. We did it for a year to get in, crush it and get out. It was very profitable for us so the hustle was well worth it.

Everything else I have done from a side hustle has just been small and extras. I have a couple of things on the side for passive income that fluctuates. My plan is to have multiple income streams over the next 10 years to build out more passion projects and I would absolutely love to be in a position to tell my husband to go chase his own passion projects as well.

In the last couple of years, I have been fortunate enough to buy into Kings of Neon as a shareholder and then my business partner (Steve – Kings of Neon founder) have started Cookie Dough Marketing and have a couple of other brands rolling in the background. Super small at the moment – but very exciting.

Tip here – get partners and an accountant that is kickass. Having people that are real and keep you in check and are awesome in the finance side is a must. Get educated – know where your money is going and what it is doing.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.cookiedoughmarketing.com
• Instagram: @cookiedoughmarketing
• Linkedin: Sarah Martinez-Murray
• Twitter: @marketingjunkee
• Other: Our website is currently getting redone so if you let me know publish date I will make sure it is sorted