0:00 Introduction

Welcome to the Give It A Nudge podcast. Today is a very special episode for a couple of reasons. One, she’s a great friend. Two, she helped us as a business with our strategy. And three, she is now the only person to have ever been on Give It A Nudge three times. I’d like to welcome Stephanie King. Today you’re here for a very special reason. For the very first time we are becoming your provider and you are becoming our client. We wanted to talk about your company and the update, because your business has completely changed, into a really well-run recurring revenue model.

3:00 What Ask Marketing does

I’m Stephanie King, one of the co-founders of Ask Marketing. Ask Marketing provides B2B and service-based businesses primarily to do three things: build demand, establish thought leadership, and own the industry. We do that through two ways now. The first is developing a decisive digital marketing strategy. Now we’ve been able to layer on a recurring revenue model, a managed marketing service, which is an executional arm to our business.

6:00 Why they added managed services

Multiple things. Scalability of a project-based business is challenging. We were working with epic clients and we’d essentially get to the end of our strategy project and almost say goodbye. They’d come back saying we actually want you ongoing, but we weren’t staffed to support that. We also saw marketing salaries increase rapidly, up 30 percent in one year. Marketing and sales roles are the hardest to find and the hardest to retain. So we built a managed marketing service: senior local marketers in Australia paired with senior marketers in the Philippines, acting as an embedded marketing team for our clients ongoing.

10:00 Team growth and the 2023 plan

We’ve grown from four to seven people. We launched the managed service around July to September last year, and the feedback from existing clients was immediate. For 2023, the vision is really just to finesse what we’re currently doing. We’re very mindful of scaling too quickly. The focus is continuing to grow, but growing steadily and growing smartly, because we always want to be a premium service provider.

13:00 Running a business with your sister and team culture

Ali is very much in sales and business development. I’m in charge of client relationships and client management. Our roles are very distinct, we rely on the other person for that specific role, and there’s no overlap. Day to day, the conversations we have about huge business decisions always come back to: are we happy as human beings, are we happy with our relationship, are we happy with where the business is going? We also have happiness sessions with the team, where we talk about life, goals, professional and personal evolution. The feedback has been that they feel incredibly supported and empowered to do their job with autonomy.