Yahoo Finance Critical skill that helped 25-year-old build $1 million marketing business
As the CEO of a small marketing firm, Maddy Avery has worked with dozens of small business owners.
The most common mistake she sees them make is the same one she fell prey to early in her career: a failure to delegate and a belief that she had to do it all herself.
“There’s actually a reason [business owners] try to do everything themselves: they don’t believe they’re ready for a real investment in their dreams,” Avery told Yahoo Finance.
Read part one of Maddy's story: ‘I can’t believe I lived like that’: Lesson from CEO’s hardest year
“I see people that come to us and say, ‘I have this great product, but I’m not getting sales’, and I look at their website and their website is a complete mess. They built it themselves because they wanted to save money.”
However, the money spent on hiring someone to build a website would have led to greater profits.
“People aren’t seeing that they’re losing the opportunity cost by trying to do it themselves, and doing a pretty shitty job, really,” Avery said.
It’s a problem Avery herself struggled with when she launched Birdcage Marketing from her granny flat at 25 years old.
From its 2015 launch, it grew quickly and it wasn’t hard for her to replace the salary she’d been paid by her former employer. However, the workload was growing intense.
“It was just me and I had no overheads so I didn’t need a lot of work to make a lot of money, but what I found hardest was doing every single thing myself - every aspect of actually running the business, and then also doing the marketing work,” she said.
“I wasn’t necessarily trained in all aspects of marketing - I was a quick learner but it was really tough doing everything.”
It took her a year before she felt confident in hiring anyone at all.
The first internal hire
“I remember when I put on the first girl - who is still with the business - for one day a week,” she said.
“It was the scariest thing I’d ever done, knowing I’d have to pay someone for one day a week, regardless of what money came in.”
Avery believes this fear of investing is a trap female founders in particular fall into.
From what she’s seen, this group of founders is more likely to have a DIY approach, and a belief that they shouldn’t “bother” anyone to help them with their business.
Conversely, the businesses that she sees “raking in the sales” are the ones that are clever with who they outsource work to.
While Avery eventually hired more staff, by 2018 she still hadn’t hired enough and she experienced a major burnout episode.
“I had fallen pregnant [with my second child] and I felt that I had a deadline to get the business to a point where I could take maternity leave, but I never actually got there,” she said.
When she came back from work, she felt like she couldn’t take any time away and struggled setting boundaries.
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She struggled through it for a while, but by 2020, Avery knew that in addition to redefining Birdcage Marketing’s work-life culture, she was going to begin to hire more staff and also outsource responsibilities.
The first external person she brought in to support the business was a business coach, who taught her how to reinforce her boundaries and prioritise.
“I was focusing on making sure I was the best version of myself and [to] show up and make the right decisions,” she said.
“Obviously with COVID, you’d think it would be a really bad time to grow a marketing agency, but we noticed a lot of people were forced to finally start the business they’d always wanted to start because their job wasn’t going to work in this new world.”
Today, Avery is confident, hiring three people at a time and has grown her business to include 14 full-time staff. Last year, Birdcage Marketing hit $1 million in revenue.
Avery has also been named a 2022 Telstra Best of Business Awards finalist in the Accelerating Women category.
However, asked what she is the most proud of after seven years leading Birdcage Marketing, Avery names her staff.
“It’s my team. I’m proud of myself for being brave enough to hire that many people, and I’m proud of them because everything we do is a new skill.”
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