We talked to Taisiya Kudashkina about building a personal brand, the agency's inner workings, and a little about personal matters. Here we have collected the key points that we managed to discuss on the air.
We had 5 clients, a team of freelancers, and we were saving up for an iPad.
Starting a business. It was 2012, we lived in Bali and worked at an IT agency. When we left, we faced a choice - to stay or return to Moscow. We did not want to return to Moscow.
We had serious motivation, knowledge and experience. We decided to apply it and start developing independently. We had 5 clients, a team of freelancers and we were saving up for an iPad.
We started working remotely, called each other on Skype and worked japan mobile phone numbers database on Moscow time. After a couple of years of continuous heat and endless summer, we packed our bags and returned to Moscow. We needed to go to meetings and build work processes.
Now, thanks to Facebook, it's not that important because people think they already know you. Back then, it wasn't that way, and getting your first client was terrifying.
We immediately stipulate that we can say in a week: “Friend, nothing will work out for us.”
We made the biggest mistakes in finding people. At first, we had a small team. We hired people we liked personally, without any clear rules. We looked at what a person could do and how nice he was. This is not quite the right way and we made a lot of mistakes. Now, after several years, there is a clear system for filtering people. And there is a result from it too - we have an amazing team.
We need people with sparkling eyes, so that they themselves enjoy what they do.
The selection process is very strict at all stages - a test task, a letter. We look at people at the level of how they write. There is an interview on Skype, then an in-person one. We immediately stipulate that we can say in a week: "Friend, nothing will work out for us."
Sometimes we find a use for people in another area. After all, the person has already succeeded in something, since he got into the team. We did this twice, and realized that this is what is needed. It was we who put the person in the wrong place, and the one who could not be a good manager turned out to be an amazing creative person.
"P" - planning. "D" - delegation.
You can fit one, two or three projects into one day - it is important to distribute them correctly so that there is no imbalance.
Smart planning means understanding that you have 24 hours in a day, not 48. Understanding that you have a team to whom you can delegate processes so that you don’t get bogged down in a routine. You focus on what you can really do for yourself, where no one else can do it for you, where you understand what you need to do to move forward in the project.
We teach how to make long-term plans. If you have an idea and a desire to implement it, you need to describe it in iterations and understand what you will do to get closer to this goal. If you have an idea, but no intention to plan, just give up on this idea, because otherwise, it is like background programs that hang, eat up resources, but do not bring any results. Like a virus in a computer.
Pump up your Facebook like a muscle.
What you pump up, pumps up. If you are interested in SMM, you need to write more about SMM. If you are interested in selling consultations, write about consultations. Now we are not taking some orders in SMM, because the process has started working without us.
Take care of your page.
Content shouldn't be boring - you can't write only about work, jokes or cats. There are several types of content: "sacred cows" - what excites the audience, content based on stories - this is a series, it can be about work, broken pixels.
Content needs to be written for someone. For Facebook to work for sales, you need the right friends who will eventually buy. In addition to these friends who will read us, Facebook itself must be designed quite competently.
A small intro on the page should be clearly written. If there is a website, write its name, remove all the garbage from the left blocks. Leave only relevant education and places of work. A person who comes to your personal page should immediately understand how to play with you. I advise you to make your own website and place all this there, so that a person can follow the intro link and read what services you have, so that everything is there.
Don't write about what you don't know.
We can call ourselves experts in everything we talk about.
Anyone can say, "I'm cool." It's more effective to show why you're cool, and people will understand everything themselves. Show your kitchen, tell a story. We have a rule for writing texts at our agency - explain every point in this ad, every word. The person who writes must understand why he does it.
For example, if I talk about advertising, I often talk about personal experience. For example, about the case in which we used the hidden motives of men and their sense of importance to sell pelmeni. We made ads “Food for alpha males”, collected statistics. I talked about it on Facebook and in an article in Netology. The idea is that repeating someone’s thoughts without personal experience is pointless.
