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

Hi Sarah, thanks for joining us today. So, naming is such a challenge. How did you come up with the name of your brand?

When I was trying to name my business, I STRUGGLED for weeks. I am such a perfectionist and tend to overthink everything I do. I knew that I wanted my social media management company to become more than a one-person show at some point. So naming it “Sarah Maxey Management” or something along those lines didn’t feel right. Plus, when I get married one day I didn’t want to go through the whole rebranding process if I didn’t want/have to.

I liked the idea of the initials of my business being ‘SM’ like my name’s initials being the same as ‘social media’/’social management’. The letter ‘S’ is so on brand for me since my name is Sarah, so I knew that I wanted it to start with S. Once I knew it was going to start with S, that helped narrow down some of my options.

I wish I had an inspirational or crazy story about coming up with my company’s name, but honestly, I thought of it randomly. I spent days on end thinking and researching different ‘S’ names and words to use for my name. I was randomly going into a tanning booth one evening after a work day and the word ‘Slate’ came to mind. I loved the boldness and strength that word has, but how feminine it still felt. I loved the idea of a ‘Blank Slate’ because that was truly what this business and the next chapter of my life was for me. Plus, I knew I wanted the branding colors to be a dark grey, a shade of black, and then a cream – very neutral vibes. So the fact that ‘Slate’ is a shade of grey, felt perfect.

Now I love the name ‘Slate Social Management’ and love the initials ‘SSM’. And ‘Sarah from Slate’ has a great ring to it.

Sarah, 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 went to school for Elementary Education with a pathway in specialized education – I never thought I had a future in digital marketing.

I worked full-time in college while doing mostly online classes (thanks to COVID) and night classes. It was a grind working 40+ hours a week while being a full-time student on the honors roll. I am so thankful that I finished school and got my degree even though I knew I wanted to pursue marketing because it really showed me that I could push through and do anything I set my mind to.

I started a job at the beginning of college as a receptionist. That position slowly morphed into a marketing and merchandising position and after a couple of years of learning from pros in the industry and getting experience under my belt. Soon I was the director of Marketing & Merchandising for that company.

At the end of 2022, the owner of that business came to me saying she was shutting her doors and going down a different career path. I knew at that moment that this was my sign to start my own social media management company. I’ve been looking at and researching different parts of owning an agency/company and was very interested in the process.

So at the beginning of 2023, I started Slate Social Management and the rest was history.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

A lesson I had to unlearn was the belief that I wasn’t going to succeed. This belief, subconscious or not, surfaced A LOT when I first started Slate and over the last two years. This thought cycle was put in my brain by people who didn’t have the best intentions for me, were insecure about themselves, or were just jealous. It gave me a lot of imposter syndrome over the years and it was only in the last year and a half that I was able to drown those negative thought patterns out and prove to myself that I will succeed because I will not give up. And that mindset really pushed me through tough times when the majority of people would’ve given up. So in a way, those negative thought cycles actually helped motivate me and push me to be where I am today.

Where do you think you get most of your clients from?

As a social media manager/marketer, of course my best way my dream clients find me is through social media. I always prioritized my business’s social media because I knew that no one should trust me to market their social media and help them find their dream clients if I couldn’t do the same. In a way, my social media was my biggest case study. Now I have local and non-local clients finding me through social media, I have a 10+ waitlist of businesses and brands waiting to work with me, and am going to be hiring a team in the next coming months!

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slatesocialmgmt/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahmaxey-slatesocial/

Image Credits

@floriiphoto