64: Andréa Jones: Freelancer to Agency Owner + Creator of the Savvy Social School

Foreign hi there.

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And today I have Andrea Jones. Andrea is fiercely committed to helping businesses and podcasters build profitable online communities through simple social media solutions. She's the host of the Savvy Social Podcast and creator of the Savvy Social School, a digital platform designed to teach its 100 plus members, who are predominantly small business owners, how to implement organic social media strategies. And she has been named one of the Social reports Top marketers to follow. Andrea, thank you so much for joining me. I'm so excited to have this conversation with you today.

Oh, thank you so much for having me. This is going to be fun.

Yeah, we've been chatting a few minutes before and I'm excited to walk the listeners here through your entrepreneur journey. So why don't you take it from here and start from the beginning and Tell us how you got to where you are today.

Yes. And you know what? Growing up, I always said I did not want to own a business because both of my parents are business owners and entrepreneurs. And I saw the struggle of the ups and downs. You know, when business was great, we were, you know, going out to eat and going to Dave and Buster's and doing all of those fun things. And when it was not, it was like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. So I lived through the up and downs of it all. But I love creating content, and I actually started off as a YouTuber. I started my channel in 2007, and in 2013, I actually met my husband on YouTube accidentally. We were doing an interview, kind of like we're doing today. We kept talking, we fell in love, we got married. I lived in Atlanta, Georgia. He lived in Toronto, Canada. So I chose to leave my country, my home country, go to Canada. And it was with that move that I accidentally started the business. I started freelancing. At the time, it was like a process to get my permanent residency card, which is similar to a green card, and kind of get the opportunity to work in a different country. And that's when I started the business. I started freelancing, doing all of these things. I was already doing some social media things on the side for my friends and family, and it kind of blossomed from there. I saw a huge need in the market for people who don't really like social media. They don't understand it, but they run a business, and they definitely see a need to be present on platforms like Facebook and Instagram and LinkedIn. And so the business built from there. So today I run an agency. We have about 20 clients, and we do done for you services for them. And I also run the Savvy Social School, which our membership program for online business owners who want to learn how to use social media for themselves. And I can never go back now. Like, once I've. I don't know if you're the same way, but now that I'm entrepreneur, I'm like, I don't want to go back to doing anything else.

Oh, I could definitely relate to that. You know, once you get a taste of it and the freedom and how much joy it brings you when you can help other people, it is. There's nothing like it in the world. I definitely want to go back. You have an interesting story here. So when you started on YouTube in 2007, what were you doing videos on? What was your topic then?

Yes, I was doing observational videos on the Life around me, really nothing I was talking about nothing. But what I liked was the concept of creating content. And I found community and connection just in that, in the idea of filming myself and trying to be artistic with the content that I was producing. So basically it was a lifestyle vlog of sorts. Commentary on other YouTubers, commentary on my life. When I moved to Canada, a lot of it shifted to the differences between the US And Canada and the similarities and all of those things. But. So, for example, when I met my husband, we basically vlogged our whole honeymoon. Well, not all of it, but you know what I mean. We videoed our travels. And so it was just. It was just a reflection of what was happening in my life.

So observational videos. And I'm sure it was around, like, here in Atlanta. And I live in Atlanta, just so you know. We didn't talk about that beforehand, so.

Oh, my gosh.

Where did you live in Atlanta? I'm just curious.

Yeah, so I grew up in Beaufort and I went to Georgia State. So when I started university, I moved downtown and just stayed there.

Oh, that is very close to me. So I'm technically in the suburbs in, like, the Alpharetta type area. My son lives in Atlanta because he goes to Georgia Tech, so he has a condo down there. So very close to where you were.

Yes. Oh, what a small Internet world. I love this.

So fun. So fun. So you met your husband in 2013 when you were doing an interview on YouTube. What were you talking or chatting with him about at that point in time?

Oh, my gosh. Yeah, so we did. So like I said, we weren't. I was more like, comment. A commentary on YouTube. I just like YouTubers in general. So our video was, you know that game Kill Bang Marry? Like, you have to choose one person and you either have to marry them, kill them, or any of that. We were doing that with YouTubers and that's how we met. And I was doing videos like that at the time with so many other people because I was trying to grow my channel. So I had. I have, like, so many silly videos out there like that where we're just basically commenting on YouTube culture.

Okay, so you met your husband, and you. You guys eventually fell in love and got married. When did you get married? And that kind of, you know, that's when you just. You moved out of the country. What year was that?

2014. So we actually moved very fast.

And.

Yes. So we met in September of 2013. We went on our first date in November of 2013. I moved in with him March 2014, and we married by June 2014. So not even a year after we met, we were married. Don't recommend it for anyone else. It just happened to work for us and we're very happy. But thinking back on it now, let's see, almost eight years ago now, I'm like, oh, that was, that was silly. Like, that was, that was extreme. I'm glad it worked out, but it could have gone really bad.

You want to know a crazy story? I met my husband around Thanksgiving of one year and married him June 11th. So basically, you know, what is that, six, seven, eight months? Seven months. Really? After we, you know, man, we got married. So it can work. And we've been married for 26 years. So it can work for people.

Yes. I mean, when you know, you know, right?

That is true. When you know, you know. So you, you accidentally fell into freelancing. So this was around year 2014. Tell me about your business and how you built your. You moved from a freelancer and now you're an agency owner and of course online course creator. So tell me about that journey foreign.

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Yes. So when I first started freelancing, I was doing all of the things. I was writing blog posts, writing product descriptions. My degree was in English literature, so I felt like the writing piece of it was where I should have been working. I didn't even really count social media as a full job at that point. 2014, it was just kind of building Instagram either just came into the scene or somewhere around there. And so when I had one of my clients, I was writing product descriptions for her. She said, hey, can you write a Facebook post as well? A light bulb went off. I was already doing this for a few Friends back home. My parents are both business owners. I was helping them with their Facebook pages. I had a friend who was a gospel singer. I was helping him with his Facebook page. And so I didn't really think it could be a viable business option until someone paid me for it. And then the light bulb went off. Because social media is constant, the product descriptions and the blog posts, I would literally have to keep finding new clients or wait for my clients to need me again. Social media was repeatable. People needed me every day, every week, every month to do this content for them. And so I started, started building packages around that, like I'll do this for this week or this on a monthly basis. And it built from there. I started hiring a team when I tried to go on my first vacation a year later, 2015, I was stressed the whole time. I couldn't relax because I was almost thought like something's going to go wrong. And so that's when I started expanding and hiring team. And at the time it was just, I want someone to help me so I can take some time off because social media never sleeps, which is the good and bad thing about it. So I hired my first team member and then I hired another and another and then it slowly built from there. I actually tried to kind of step away from the agency side because it is very time intensive, but I found that I need it for the course side for me personally. So I created my first course in 2017 which was teaching people how to design Canva graphics. And then I turned it into the membership model in 2018 when I added an Instagram course and a Facebook course and a LinkedIn course. And so it kind of naturally grew from there. In 2019, I tried to step away from the agency side and just run the courses and things like that. But social media moves so fast that I found that having this inside look at what all of my clients were doing, what was working well and what wasn't, helped me to create content for the courses. So now I do both. And I love, I just love that I get to kind of have both of these sides of the work that I do. And having the team helps because they actually do a lot of the day to day work on the agency side and I get to spend time creating the content and leading the team and kind of being the facilitator of developing the strategies that we apply to everything that we do.

So I love what you said there about the need for you to continue with your agency to really keep up to speed on everything that's happened in social media because it changes constantly. So I love that and definitely want to come back to that in just a second. Uh, let me ask you this. Several times you tried to step away from the agency was. Tell me a little bit about how you were feeling there. Was it just overwhelming with all the clients or what. What was, what was the reason why you tried to step away?

Yes, it, it did get overwhelming. And part of this was I was priced too low. So when I started bringing on team members, I didn't adjust my pricing properly. So I was not only paying myself, I was paying my team. And if there were ever a bad month, like I remember 2018, like July 2018 burned in my brain forever because we had two really big clients leave at the same time. And we had just launched the membership at that point, so we had just a handful of people and it was $29 a month, so it wasn't going to replace two massive clients. And I had to let go of some of my team because I could not afford to have that big gap in revenue and keep paying people. And that was one of those moments where I was like, man, do I want to keep doing this? And I, you know, I ultimately figured it out. It was a pricing issue one and it was how I was staffing my team. So today most of my core team are actually employees or full time people. At the time, I was paying a lot of contractors and contractors are great to start with, can be very expensive as your business grows. And so that was a lesson learned is that now I have employees or full time people on my team, which can help alleviate the cost, actually, and we can expand faster and do all of those things. The other part of it was as I was expanding, even after I adjusted my prices, I really struggled to find the right people. This is a tough, interesting job in the sense that you're working at home, you're working by yourself. A lot of the time you're dealing with demanding clients who, you know, a lot of our clients are kind of well known in their own right. And you're dealing with all of the nastiness of social media all wrapped into a job. And so not everyone can do this. I struggled to find team members because some of them were really extroverted. They thought they could work at home and they couldn't. I struggled to find team members because some people don't like the drastic ness of social media. Honestly, it changes every day. Like if you can't keep up with that, this isn't the job for you. And so at that time too, I was like, do I want to grow this business? Because if I can't find the team, then I can't grow. And so for me, it really came down to investing into the right coaches and the right training programs. I increased my own leadership skills, I invested in learning how to hire the right people, learning when to fire, working on, like my organizational structure. Like all of those things that I think as entrepreneurs we forget about because we think about developing the product. But where I kind of fell a little bit and stumbled was not just developing the product, but like keeping this thing going without it all relying solely on me. And so those were two moments in my career where I was like, do I want to keep doing this? But thankfully, I put my head down, I did the work, and here we are today.

So I want to go back to something that you said or insinuated that contractors were costing you more than your full time employees, which that's a little bit counterintuitive. So tell me about kind of how you found out about that.

Yes. So the nature of the work that we do as well is I need my team to wear a lot of hats. So instead of hiring five contractors, I could hire one employee. So, for example, my assistant also manages my calendar. She manages all of the podcast stuff. She manages customer service for our members, and I can just pay her one fee for all of that. When you hire a contractor, even a va, you're paying them by the hour, typically a higher rate, because they're paying for, you know, their own email, they're paying for their own asada or whatever the case may be. So with the team, I am actually cutting my cost by hiring one person or, you know, fewer people to do the tasks that need to happen in the business. I pay for all of the tools for the team, which still ends up costing me less. And I have flexibility. So, you know, if. So, for instance, one of my team members is going to be off next week, so I'm basically like dispersing her tasks to the rest of the team. They're salaried, so it's not costing me any extra. When you have contractors, that's very challenging to do because they could easily just say, that's not my job, or, you know, if you have a last minute request, I have to charge you a rush fee or, you know, you're working at the basically whatever their business is because they're running a business. Whereas when you have a team, they are fully committed to you, all of their time is yours. When you have those full time team members and they're really committed to helping you grow as a company. And so it's just a totally different vibe. But also it's a cost savings as well.

And that's certainly a testament to hiring full time employees. The other thing that you mentioned is that you struggled in the beginning to find the right people. Do you have any tips to share? Because I think a lot of people listening here can relate to that.

Yes, I think I approached hiring full time team the same way I approached hiring contractors and it is a little bit different. So what I found with a contractor is they already have the skills, they know how to market themselves. So for instance, if you're hiring a copywriter, you just need to see if they can write copy. Basically look at their past examples and then you hire them for the job and they do the job with the team members. I found that there was more training involved a little bit sometimes and you need to have them do more tests. So typically, especially for the work that we do, if I'm hiring a full time copywriter, they're coming from either another agency or they're coming from another business owner. And maybe that's the only way that they know how to do things is based on their past experience. So the hiring process needs to go a lot slower for hiring that person also because it's a lot slower to, if you, you know, hire someone who's a poor fit, it's a little bit, you're a little more entangled now because you've made that big, big commitment. So for me it's going a lot slower in the hiring process. I have a basically an assessment that they do. We do one interview, they get a second assessment and we do a final interview. And then depending on where we are at that stage, we may also do personality tests like Strengths Finders or Myers Briggs, because again, it takes a certain personality type to do this job. And typically like introverted people thrive in this environment. If you're super extroverted, you may actually feel differently about working at home by yourself all day. And so we do some tests like that to try to see if they're a good fit. And then we do a trial period which is typically on a contract basis. And then if they pass that, then they become an employee.

I love the process that you've put in place and bringing up the fact that this might not be a good fit. Even though working from home sounds great to a lot of people. I can tell you in my house, an introvert and I've been working at home for, you know, since 2005. And I absolutely loved it. My husband, on the other hand, is an extrovert, and he has been working from home because, you know, with COVID and everything, they still have not. Their office has still not gone back to work, and he hates it. So I love the fact that you brought that up. I'd like to switch gears a little bit and talk about your courses or your social. Your savvy social school. Can you tell us a little bit more about that, why you develop it, and who you help with that school?

Yes. So for years, I offered just the done for you services, and I kept getting requests from folks who could not afford the monthly commitment to have someone do it for them. They just wanted to know how to do it for themselves. And so I started teaching people, and that's what grew into the school. And my perspective on the way that I teach is different because I. I, like I said, I'm an introverted person. While I love social media, I actually don't spend a lot of time on it. And because of the way the agency is structured, I have to be very disciplined with social media. Like, when I'm working on a client, I can't get lost looking at cute dogs because I'm not working right. So I naturally developed those habits and I wanted to start teaching them to other people, other business owners, and even virtual assistants and social media managers who do this for their clients as well as. So that's where the school was born. Yep. Go ahead.

No, I was just going to say I like what you said there about, you know, as business owners, we need to be very focused on working in our business and not letting all the cute puppies and the videos distract us. So I like. I like that tip you gave us.

Yes. And I think that that's what's different. So a lot of people out there who teach social media teach it almost from the perspective of being a content creator. So, like, you have to post this many times a day, and you should be here and there and the other place. And I think as business owners, it's a different perspective. We're not, you know, creating YouTube videos for the sake of getting as much attention as possible. We're trying to run a business. Right. And so that's kind of my perspective on social media. So when I started the savvy social school, I just had a handful of courses in there and some, like, templates and things. It was $29 a month. And basically the people who had been following me on social for A while were my first members. I think we had like 15 members when we launched, so not a lot, but it took us two years to get from 15 to 100. So I think that's important to note as well for membership model is that it took quite a while for us to grow. We tried a bunch of different things. I was on Teachable and then moved to WordPress and moved back to Teachable. We tried hosting weekly training sessions, monthly trainings, courses done for you, post content, calendars. Like, we tried a bunch of things to see what worked for our members. And then in 2020, we went from 100 members to 200 members just at the beginning of 2021. And so I think that's important to note as well, is that it took us a while to kind of figure out what makes us different, what products do our members actually want, and how to sell that and really simplify it. Because Churn is also a challenge with memberships in that if someone joins and they go, this isn't for me, they're just going to leave. Or if they join and they feel like there's way too much here, I'm never going to get through all of this, they're also going to leave. So it's finding that sweet spot. It's not really the amount of content that you produce. It's actually walking your members through a journey where they can actually see results along the way.

So what did you find that worked? And what do you think was the reason why you went from 100 to 200? I mean, you doubled your membership in 2020? Maybe. Maybe it was in a few months. What. What strategies were working for you?

Yes. So really it was a handful of events that really helped for this, but I also think it was the history of it. So, you know, I'd been talking about this membership for three years at that point. Two years, two plus years. And so there's a lot of history of me, you know, being on podcasts, speaking at events. 2019 was my year of visibility. That's that I dubbed it. And so I spent all of 2019 speaking at events, being on podcasts, speaking on summits, and it just kind of all culminated into what was 2020. I hosted in the beginning of 2020, my LinkedIn challenge. It was the third year, and it was the most engagement and the biggest turnout, the biggest conversion that we had. I want to say we had something about like 13% of attendees converted into members. And I think it's because it was our third year running it. It was a very Smooth program. We knew exactly what to do in the challenge. We knew how to upsell. We had a way better product as well. And so also, I think the repetition of these promotions helped people go through it. It helped us be more confident selling. Then 2020 pandemic happened in March. We did see a downturn in the business, both on the agency and in the school. We saw people canceling their memberships. We saw clients, especially the clients who host events, saying, we don't know what's going to happen, so we're just pausing and canceling. But by April, we saw an uptick. So in March, we totally shifted our marketing to talking about the value of being online and the value of marketing online. And that's what really helped us stand out. Basically, we spent two years laying the foundation enough so that in 2021, we pivoted our messaging. I created a new lead magnet that said it was like how to write captions for the pandemic, basically because a lot of people didn't know what to say. And so that lead magnet brought us a lot of new people to product we already had developed. It put us in front of a lot of people. So that was the first thing. And then that whole summer, since all of my speaking gigs were canceled, I doubled down on speaking in summits. And that also increased our traction. So because we already had a great product, we spent time developing it. And then a lot of people were basically spending way more time online than they ever would in normal circumstances. There was more awareness about what I was doing, and I was really putting myself out there. And then the last thing I would say, too, is I did get quite a bit of press, especially in the summer of 2020, because there were a lot of business owners looking around and realizing they didn't know a lot of people of color in the online space. And so I was getting tagged in a lot of things. A lot of notable people were lifting up my brand. And it's not just the fact that they paid attention to me because I was black. Maybe that was why they discovered me initially, but when they saw that I also had a great podcast. I create all of these videos. I have great content in the. In the programs that I teach and in my services. I had the kind of the qualifications behind all of this. We also saw a lot of increase in activity because of those measures as well.

And also what I'm hearing as you talk through that is you've put a lot of work into this membership, into your business, and, you know, with the, you know, Making sure that you had visibility, getting, getting press, getting, being on podcast. And you, you know, you had done your challenge several times, so you've had some time to optimize your, your funnel. So that's, that's what I'm hearing out of that is all the hard work that you had done to build up to it. Tell, tell us a little bit more about your LinkedIn challenge. Was this a live, like a live virtual event, like a five day challenge that you were doing online and through a Facebook group?

Yes. So we don't, we didn't do the Facebook group this year and I actually think that works to our benefit. We use teachable and every day we would post the video. So they were the same videos that we had done for the prior years. We would just basically open them up for a limited amount of time and it's a very actionable challenge. So I think one of the differences as well in the way that I teach is that there's no fluff. It's like this is what you need to do and you're actually going to do it. And so people were seeing transformations because they were actually doing the work and I was giving them a ton of value. So five videos, actionable videos in teachable and there is comment sections under the video. So people commented with the things that they were doing each day. We had hundreds and hundreds of comments every day. And then at the end of the challenge, I did do a live event. It was more like a Q and A event. We gave away prizes to everyone who commented during the challenge. So there was rewards for people who were commenting and participating. Things like T shirts and mugs and journals and things like that. And then I also made the offer to join the Savvy Social school during that live event. And you know, we had our current members also participating in the challenge. They got extra special treatment. We did extra Q and A sessions with current members, gave them extra prices and things like that. And so because there was members and non members kind of in community together, I think that's why that event works so well for us and for our product because it gives people kind of like a sample of what the actual product is like.

Do you think that having the challenge in teachable really helps people actually do the work and complete it as compared to a Facebook group where they might get distracted? Do you think that was one of the keys?

I do. I think that did really help for people to do the work and complete it. And you know, we do have a Facebook community as part of our membership so we have tried that in the past. What we found is that, number one, our members were getting confused about which group they should post in. So having multiple groups was confusing to our members. And then the second piece of it is it felt more like homework than socializing when they went to like a traditional course platform to complete the work. And so I think it really, it really did help with engagement to have that platform there. And then also it helped us with the upsell because when they're checking out, it's in teachable, then when they join the program, it's in teachable. And so it really helped us with kind of like promoting our offers because it was all together.

When you did your Q and A session, did you do that like on a webinar platform or how did you host that?

You know, I actually did it live public Q and A. And I use a tool called Restream to go to Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn all at the same time. And so that also helped because if people weren't participating in the challenge, they could see still come to the live Q and A session and I could still talk about, you know, the challenge and what we did, hype up everybody and offer like present the offer to join the savvy social school. So it's just a public live session. I have tried webinars style in the past, which is okay, and it works. I just find that viewership was down a little bit for the webinar style. So whenever I do a webinar, I just make it kind of like a completely separate event.

Okay, I love that. So let me ask you this. What can you share with us in terms of numbers? You can, you know, talk about your agency, you can talk about your savvy social school. What? Tell us a little bit about how all that breaks out.

Yes. So 2020 was actually our best year yet. We crossed the half a million mark in the year, which is exciting for us. So 500,000 in total revenue and the breakdown of agency work versus the training. So I actually don't know that number for the year, but I can give you this past month as an example. About 12% of our revenue comes from the trainings and the rest is agency services. So a lot of our revenue still comes from the agency services. However, a lot of my expenses to go to the agency services are very expensive, expensive business to run. But at the end of the day we are 20% profitable. So that means at the end of the year, 20% of our top line revenue was profit and we did do profit Distribution as well. And we're working on doing that more with our employees this year. So it shows up as things like bonuses for the team as well as some nice gifts for our clients. And then I still pay myself a salary, so it's after my own salary as well. And I basically calculated my salary as what I need to make to live, because I know I'll also get profit distribution at the end of the year as well. And so basically, like, my monthly living expenses ends up being my salary. And so just for context, last year, 2020, we just passed 500,000. At the end of the year, my personal Pay was about 170Ish for the year. I can't. I can't give you the exact number because some of that was my salary, some of that was profit distribution. But that's kind of like the breakdown of how our numbers go.

And I love the fact that you're, you know, sharing profits with your employees. And I venture to guess, and I don't know the answer to this, but I venture to guess that keeps, you know, keeps them around. They stay with you.

Yeah. And that's the thing, too, is that my core, like, team members are very loyal, and I love that because as mentioned previously, the hiring process is so long, I actually do not like it at all. Like, if I don't have to hire ever again, I'll be very happy.

I can feel your pain there.

Yes, yes. And I do want to try to maintain that loyalty with my current team because I literally could not do what I'm doing without having the support that I do.

Andrea, what do you see as next steps for your business in 2021?

I actually feel like we finally have a really good system in place. So for my business, it's just working the system from here. We did raise our prices in 2020 again for the agency and for the school. So the school is now $57 a month. And so just naturally, by continuing to do that work, the school's $57 a month, our agency services are 2,500amonth and up. And so just by not changing anything and keeping doing what we're doing, we're going to be more profitable this year. So for me, it's just putting one foot in front of the other and working this business that we currently have working very well for us and really taking the time to understand our members and why they choose to learn from us versus all of the million other social media people out there. So. And I also gave myself a rule this year. No new products no new. No, nothing new. Like, keep doing what you're doing. Because I have a little bit of shiny object syndrome, which I think is just part of being an entrepreneur, is that we always go, ooh, I could do this product or that thing or the other thing. I'm like, no, pay attention. Do what's right in front of you. So that's what I'm working on.

I love everything that you said. There is, you know, from our discussion, I know that you have a weld old machine that you're working in. That's a testament to everything that you have done over the years to get it to where it is today. You've been doing this for a while. You have a ton of experience. What advice would you have for other online course creators or entrepreneurs out there?

Yes, listen to the feedback of those people who are paying you. I think sometimes we listen to all sorts of feedback out there, which is great and can be very helpful, but it also can be confusing. And so, for instance, with my product, I get the feedback all the time from people that it should be more. Like, it should cost more, you should charge more. But what I found is that I can actually make more money if I don't charge more because more people can experience the product. And the feedback I'm getting from my members is that it's an easier commitment for them and they stay around longer when it's not, you know, a $300 a month product, which it could easily be. And so I think listening to the people who actually pay you for the things that you do is a huge, huge strategy for a lot of business owners and can really help you further develop something magical that people actually will keep paying you for.

And that's some great advice. And, you know, I think continuing to talk to your customers and get that feedback from them is so very valuable. Where can people find you? Andrea?

Yeah, so my favorite kind of social media platform to hang out on is Instagram. You can find me Nline Drea, that's online D R E A there. And if you want to kind of see what my program is all about, I do have a free course. It really teaches you how to build a foundation to social media strategy. You can find it at onlinedrea.com free f r e E. And you'll get to kind of see kind of like the setup when I talk about teachable and how we use that to get our members. Even if you're just curious, that's where you can kind of get a little sample of what that's like, thank you.

For that and I will make sure that all of those links are in the show notes so people can definitely find you. Andrea, thank you so much for all of your insight here. I know that the listeners got a lot of value out of the information that you provided, so thank you so much for joining me today.

Thank you so much for having me. This has been such a great conversation.

Thank you so much for joining us today. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you love the show, we'd appreciate a review on Apple Podcast or your favorite podcast platform and show us some love there. Have a great rest of your day and bye for now.