Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to William Bessette Brandon Washington. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
William Bessette, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What’s the best or worst investment you’ve made?
The worst investment we have made as an agency is hiring with unsuccessful lead-gen companies. Quite a few years back, we had ideas to scale our business to get more clients, so we interviewed a few agencies that specialize in lead-gen automation. We didn’t have much money to spend on lead generation, so we went with a company we thought would give us a great ROI. We quickly realized that this might be a scam.
The company promised ten calls per week, but in three weeks, we only received three calls, all from clients who didn’t need marketing services at all. At that point, we realized this was a bad idea.
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.
We are Brandon and William of The Brilliam Group (a combination of our names). William started the company as a freelance copywriter in 2014 after leaving his corporate 9-5 at a big bank. With previous writing experience as a journalist for Q Vegas and a passion in that field, he decided this would be the best way to get out of the corporate world and work for himself. After six months of sending in pitches to countless publications, he got his first gig copywriting for a marketing company (who we still write for to this day). Then he got another one for an entertainment website in Portland, Oregon, another highlighting restaurants and their head chefs, another writing play reviews, and finally one writing for a trucking load board company. The copywriting turned into writing SEO-rich blogs, which turned into learning about marketing, and then that turned into learning about SEO and SEM, which snowballed into learning about web design.
While William was teaching himself these skills, I was still in the corporate world, working in Retail Management for an organic grocery chain in Portland. I really liked my job because I was able to create classes teaching DEI initiatives and how to respect people in the LGBTQIA+ community. I was able to move up quickly in the company and gained a lot of respect from peers and the people in the corporate offices where I had aspired to be within a year. Now that William had a few years under his belt in Marketing, he could make enough money to go on a 4-month digital nomad trip with Remote Year, which taught him the ability to work and travel simultaneously. He also started passing some of his expertise down to me.
At the end of his four-month program, he came home and convinced me to quit my job, go full-force into the marketing industry with him, and travel full-time. We then created Floppy Hat Adventures, our travel blog chronicling our world travels and giving little-known tips/tricks to fellow travelers. We spent almost three years traveling to 35 countries together, then stopping in Costa Rica to rest. The pandemic started in our 9th month in Costa Rica, which held us in Costa Rica for five years. We fell in love with the country and built our luxury vacation rental, The Oasis at Puket.
Currently, we are focusing all of our attention on the web design portion of The Brilliam Group, our travel blog Floppy Hat Adventures, and our vacation rental, The Oasis at Puket. I am most proud that neither of us is a college graduate and that we were able to teach ourselves and be successful with those skills.
Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?
We organically built our audience on social media by posting consistently and keeping them engaged. We are always doing something or going places, not many people have heard of. This keeps our audience wondering what is next and gets us easy engagement.
How do you keep your team’s morale high?
We always tell our staff how much we appreciate them and give them raises in pay very often. People want to hear that they are doing well in for their efforts.
Contact Info:
- Website: thebrilliamgroup.com, theoasisatpuket.com
- Instagram: @floppyhatadventures, @theoasisatpuket
- Facebook: Floppy Hat Adventures, The Oasis at Puket, The Brilliam Group
- Linkedin: The Brilliam Group
- Twitter: @thefloppyhat, @theoasisatpuket, @brilliamgroup
- Youtube: Floppy Hat Adventures
Image Credits
Image credits to Floppy Hat Adventures