A snippet from my book, ‘Love At First Sale’
To this day, being naive has been my guiding light towards creating new and exciting ways to run my business.
Business industry veterans have always been the go-to experts for entrepreneurs who wanted to start a successful startup; the hope is to learn what they did to reach their success, and replicate it as much as possible to achieve the same results.
Personally, I find that boring. I understand the value of learning from someone else to avoid their mistakes, definitely, but doing so limits your decisions. Learning and working on how things were done before corners you into a realm of what everyone knows is possible, blocking you out of ways to do things that have never been done or explored.
Take for example, Eight Media, my digital marketing agency. My agency has:
- Never been marketed. We’ve never run advertisements to get clients online of offline.
- Never had a real branding exercise— our logo for almost three years came from a free logo making site.
- Never won awards.
- Never had an office until our second year of operations.
- Never had investors, or gotten a loan.
- And never had sales agents to close leads.
And yet:
- We’re currently being recommended left and right.
- Our service beats out agencies that have been running for years (according to our clients, and some competitors themselves).
- We’ve grown to a super fun team of 9 people full-time, plus 10+ part-time.
- And we’re currently working with awesome brands locally in the Philippines and internationally.