Business, Learning, Online Classes
A Bad Business Decision: Not a Win
Recently, I hired a marketing team to handle my social media accounts and two individuals to help create an advertisement for my Masterclass. The videographers canceled last minute, and the marketing team has not fulfilled the deliverables in the proposal they sent me…two months ago. So, I am out of pocket some funds, but I have learned my lessons. As much as I want to build a team, I have to be more diligent about who I hire (and pay, because I paid upfront).
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In the last three years, I have hired five different individuals and companies to handle my social media (content creation, images, captions, hashtags, engagement, and outreach), I have hired six people for designs (flyers, logos, cover designs, and book formatting), and two people to assist with ad campaigns. I finally decided I just needed one solid team, so I ventured to UpWork to find a team I felt would be suitable to complete all the tasks I needed to market and brand. Doing it solo was entirely too much work and to better leverage my time, I needed assistance (still do). Plus, I was taking free online digital courses and just felt that it would be better to let an expert handle that workload.
I narrowed my options down to three of the over fifty people that responded to my proposal. I was very specific in the criteria for the people I selected. I checked their previous work, I reached out to clients that they worked with in the past, and I checked their websites and social media. It came down to two individuals. Now, my final selection wasn’t really based on merit and that’s a hard lesson I will have to take with me in future business.
My objective was to have the team market and brand my Masterclass. I was sent a proposal which listed all the deliverables and expected completion dates. However, had I gone with my intuition, I would have passed up on signing the contract. My biggest concern was that I would pay for a month which included “research” and “gathering information about the industry.” Why was this a red flag? Ever other person I hired only required a week, never an entire month. The problem was that I wanted to release my Masterclass on a certain date through pre-sales. With the timeline they provided, I had to push everything back. The second concern was the spelling errors in the proposal. I am aware of human error, I notice spelling errors in my posts months later, and they were minor. I had previously hired someone, and English was their second language, but they did an amazing job with graphics, I just made sure to spell-check all submitted work.
When it came time to reconnect (after the month of prepping and research), I had to reach out and request a meeting because I hadn’t heard from the company. This lack of communication was the third concern. The other concerns came when I was presented with the content that did not match what was in the proposal. There were posts with one sentence captions and dead links. The post dates on the calendar came and went, but nothing was posted. The ad campaign was proposed but there was no follow up. I sent an email about the video, the budget, and asked when the campaign would begin. *Crickets*
Finally, I reached out to end my contract and request an itemized invoice about how the funds I paid were utilized. As I am typing this, I have yet to receive a response. (The original contract date was 10/13).
So, even though I followed my own procedure of quality assurance, it still didn’t work out. Thankfully, I was able to reach out to the alum from the business cohort I attended in the spring and ask for some advice and recommendations. While I am a bit wary about going through this process again, I know that eventually I will find the right team.
Trying to build this team is hard, but I am not going to let this deter me from building one. I don’t want the title of “solopreneur”.
I now understand why some people request trial classes and the importance of having one time classes. Nobody wants to be out of pocket money for something that isn’t delivered or matched with someone that isn’t a good fit.