Imagine going above and beyond for a client, only to discover a talent that sparks a new business venture – with your boss. That is the journey of Ad Ignite cofounder Dylan Geustyn, who, while working as a director of an accounting business, CFO360, found a gap that small business owners desperately needed filling. The digital marketing specialist shared his story with us.
At CFO360 we were dealing with a lot of small business owners who had the same challenges: they were struggling to scale. We had managed to get that right with our entity, so we sat with one of our accounting clients and explained how we do Google Ads and market our business. The client said it was extremely helpful for them and they felt we should start a business. So that’s what my cofounder Montaque and I did.
Other marketing agencies have a minimum barrier to entry: unless you spend R50k or R100k they don’t help you. We understand why other marketing agencies might do that; it’s a lot harder to market someone with only R5k. It’s very challenging. But we set out to help all SMEs, not just cherry-pick the ones that are already successful and fairly easy to market. So that’s quite close to our heart. We want to help SMEs; we want to help them grow.
SMEs are what really drive the economy forward. That’s how we help create more jobs so that we can create a better future for South Africa. If we can enable SMEs to be more visible online, get more clients, grow and potentially employ more people, then we’ve won.
My best description of running your own business is feeling like you’re driving a car, but the wheels are falling off, and it needs fuel, and the engine is on fire. So you’re busy extinguishing the fire, changing the tyre and refuelling – but without stopping. You need to keep on going.
Every single year, it doesn’t matter what happened during that year, when you look back, you’ve climbed the hill and made some good progress, although there are ups and downs. So at the end of the year, I think you should look back and reflect on what you’ve done as a reason to keep on going.
That’s some advice I would give to new founders: although things feel like they’re falling apart, just know that you’re making progress, and don’t let that stop you. Being a business owner is not easy. It’s not like in the movies: living a nice lifestyle, waking up at noon, maybe doing a little bit of work and making a lot of money.
It takes a lot of hard work to make something successful and to build something successful. So don’t feel discouraged when you hit those lows. And then my other advice is: never quit on a bad day, only quit on a good day. If you want to throw in the towel as a business owner, quit on a day when you’ve signed a big client, because I can guarantee you then you’ll always keep on going.
Operations are more the issue, keeping up with the growth – finding good individuals who are aligned with your goals. Scaling a professional service business is a difficult task because a lot of it is in the founders’ heads. Trying to flow that down to the people below us is a challenging task, but what we’ve learnt is to set up processes. That way the new people who join the company can very quickly get up to speed: putting in place processes and systematising things really helps when you’re growing quickly, to make sure that you’re producing the same quality work for all of your clients. But as much as we try, it’s always an ongoing process. Our business isn’t perfect. Our processes aren’t perfect. There’s always room for improvement.
Once, when we signed up a handful of new clients in a very short space of time, we turned off the marketing, because we felt like we wanted to do a good job for those clients – to keep the quality and service them properly. However, we’ve now realised that we should rather just recruit more qualified people to deal with the workload.
We were looking at the problem in the wrong light. Our problem was that we didn’t have the capacity to sign up all these clients at once, so we needed to employ more people to create a bench of sorts.
Trust is key. If there’s no trust, then it’s very hard to build off of that. Montaque trusts me with a lot, and I trust him with a lot. We’ve got other partners too. We all trust one another. That’s really important for having a very successful relationship. And you shouldn’t just be a “ja bru” – you shouldn’t just say yes to everything. You need to challenge one another and say what you really think because that’s how we make progress.
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