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

Sarah, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today To kick things off, we’d love to hear about things you or your brand do that diverge from the industry standard.

After years of working either in marketing agencies or with marketing agencies, I wanted to do something that broke the mold. In my mind, traditional agencies are a thing of the past, and I wanted to create a network that embraced new technologies, new work philosophies, and overall just a better relationship between service provider and client. Traditional agencies typically employ full-time staff members, each specializing in a specific marketing service or skillset. They also have physical office locations and a higher overhead. In order to justify the full-time staff and cover their operating expenses, most agencies aim to bill back 80% of their employees time to their clients. This creates an environment where the people serving your clients are not motivated by efficiency–they just want to ensure they’re logging the appropriate number of billable hours to save their own necks.

Imagine this example. You are scheduled to meet with your agency team. You arrive to your meeting and are greeted by a team of 5 people. In this meeting, only 2 of those 5 people contribute to the conversation. The other 3 nod along as their eyes slowly begin to glaze over. Each person in this meeting is billing you at a rate of $175.00 per hour. So this hour long meeting just cost you $875, and $525 of that was spent on 3 people to nod in silence.

Here’s another scenario. As an agency employee, each day you must track your time. Around 6.5 hours of your 8 hour day must be ‘billable’ time (time that can be billed back to a client for any particular project). Well let’s say today, the only project assigned to you is designing an email. You’re pretty good at what you do, so this only takes you about 4 hours to complete. You then have 2 options. You could a) go ask for more work. But let’s be real, how many employees do you think would willing seek out more work? Or you could b) log that the email project took you the full 6.5 hours and spend of the rest of the day surfing through social media. This model is inherently flawed, and not usually in the customers’ favor.

So that’s why we founded Aloide. We are a network of independent marketers–each representing our own individual business–that have banded together to offer our clients an ‘agency-like’ experience without the excess. We believe businesses should spend only on what they need–smart strategy, strong creative, and minimal in-betweens. We aren’t concerned with hitting a billable hours cap. We are motivated by providing top-notch, efficient services to our clients that will keep them coming back.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Oddly enough, my path into advertising started in an auto shop. My father was a mechanic and instead of playing with dolls or Barbies, I spent a lot of my youth helping my dad in the shop. He would teach me about cars and how to fix them, but also how to use tools to build things. This fueled my interest in creating things and seeing things for what they could be–not just for what they were. As I grew up, that foundation transformed into a love for all things that required creativity. I spent most of my free time building, drawing, painting, or writing. When it came time to go to college, I wasn’t entirely sure where that passion should lead. After trying out classes for education and the medical field, I hadn’t found my place. It wasn’t until I began studying graphic design and advertising that I knew I found it.

After completing my degree, I found myself a lowly production artist at a traditional ad agency. For those who don’t know, when we say “traditional” agency, it refers to the time before digital advertising had really taken hold. It’s hard to believe that really wasn’t that many years ago. I stayed with this agency for 5 years before I felt the need to make a change, and moved to a “digital-first” agency that was leading the way in new marketing technology. Having worked my way up the ranks from production artist up to art director, after a few years there I was ready to make another leap. I took my first-ever internal marketing role with a tech start-up company based out of the Silicon Valley.

That leads me to the present. After spending over 12 years working with or for advertising agencies, the inefficiencies and pitfalls of the industry became painfully obvious. I felt like there was a need for change. A system that not only worked better for the clients, but also the people providing the service. Aloide was my answer to that need. I founded Aloide with two primary goals. To provide great work for our clients without all the unnecessary fluff and overhead and create a community of ex-agency professionals and independent entrepreneurs to work together and support each other.

The Aloide network is made up of people who are not only amazingly talented, but also just downright great human beings. Simply being a part of this amazing community of professionals is what I am most proud of–hands down.

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

Throughout my entire design and marketing career, I was also doing a few side hustles on the side. I was working with clients on my own doing graphic design and even set up a fairly successful Etsy shop with some of my custom illustrations and designs. In my mind, there was always a hope and a dream that one of these hustles would grow into an income stream that would allow me to become a fully independent business owner. It was never NOT on my mind. I guess you might say that I always had an entrepreneurial spirit that could not be assuaged.

There was a point where the combination of my side hustles presented an opportunity to take the leap. I grew enough clients and sales that it became nearly unsustainable to maintain that volume with my full-time job. Unfortunately, due to other changes in my life at the same time, it was too overwhelming to pursue. I ended up dropping it all, and taking a different full-time role with a new company that offered an attractive salary. It was a short-term win that proved to be a long-term loss.

One of the stipulations of this new job, was that I had to give up any and all external work. It was an incredibly difficult decision but due to the circumstances of my life at that time, I said goodbye to all my clients and took the job.

I think this is an important piece of the journey. You often hear entrepreneurs and business owners speak on their great success and triumphs, making it seem like it was a straight shot from zero to hero. But the road of a successful career is not linear. It’s full of peaks, valleys, detours, dead ends, and u-turns. It’s important to know that it’s flippin’ hard (not sure if I can curse here). And sometimes it just friggin’ sucks. But if the story wasn’t full of twists, turns, trials, and tribulations, it wouldn’t be a story worth reading now would it?

Anyway, I worked my little butt off for 4 more years and it wasn’t all for naught. I learned a TON. It was actually an experience I am quite thankful for. It’s hard to know for sure, but had I taken my first opportunity to go out on my own without gaining the knowledge and ‘street smarts’ that I gained from new job, I may not have been as prepared for business ownership as I ended up being.

The final boss of my journey to independent business owner was a big one. FEAR. I think it’s fair to say that no matter how much you prepare, how much you study, how much you save, you will always have to stand in front of the mirror one day and face down your fear. I had held a job since I was fourteen years old. I was getting regular paychecks for almost my entire life. I knew when they were coming and almost exactly how much they would be. Making the leap into employment was terrifying to a Type-A Planner like myself.

But. I had a powerful weapon against my fear. That weapon was this question: what’s the worse that could happen? When I talked through the fact that the absolute worst case scenario would most realistically be me burning through my savings and ultimately have to go back to the corporate world and find a new job, taking this risk didn’t feel so scary. The question then became: would I be ok with that? And for me, that answer was yes. I knew that even if I had to blow through my entire savings, it would be worth it to know that I WENT FOR IT. I followed my entrepreneurial spirit all the way to the (potentially) bitter end. And even if that’s the road I end up on, you better believe I’m putting the pedal to the metal and loving every flippin’ minute of it.

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

Everyone always says that business is all about relationships. I think we all understand that. We all know that. But it still felt like a big lesson to me in my first few months of business. Knowing something felt a lot different than living something.

When I opened the doors to Aloide, I was naive to think that by simply offering a unique model that (to me) just made sense would be enough to get clients in the door. Again, I’ll reiterate–this was super naive. In a service industry, I think you could offer the absolute best service at the best price, but if your client doesn’t LIKE you–if your client doesn’t want to have a RELATIONSHIP with you–they aren’t going to engage.

When I opened the doors to Aloide for the first time, we had an exhilarating rush of clients that were people who had worked with me before, or knew me from a past role, etc. And that was great! We were off and running……until we weren’t. We quickly worked through those projects, making them all very happy customers in the process, but the well was drying up. It was hard to not let panic set in. Until one day the phone rang again. And again. And again. NEW customers were calling in because they had heard from their friend that we did an amazing job on their XYZ project.

Oh.

This was both enlightening–and reassuring. I realized that building a service-based business would take TIME. It would take TIME to build trust and reputation which yields repeat customers and referrals. Now I’m not saying that outbound marketing isn’t still an important component because it certainly is, but I do believe that the best investment is providing above-and-beyond service for the customers you do have so they continue to come back and tell their friends.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.aloide.com
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AloideMarketing
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aloide
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@AloideMarketing

Image Credits
Maddie Peschong Photography – https://www.maddiepeschong.com/