Episode 1: My Biggest Business Breakthrough

Dawn McGruer:

Hi, I’m Dawn McGruer and welcome to Dawn Of A New Era, the podcast “Chronicles of a Serial Entrepreneur.” Now, in this episode, I’m going to share my journey of how I got started in business and my very first business experience, where the idea came from, how my passion changed, but basically, what I stood for, and what I thought business was going to be. Now most importantly, this is a very honest portrayal about being an entrepreneur and business leader, because at 21, when I started my business, I had a huge passion for life, and I was really motivated. I was a very disciplined person. And you might think that that is quite young, some of you may have started your businesses at similar ages. What I didn’t know is, I had no idea what I was going to face over the coming years. I had no idea really, the pains, problems, and pitfalls that I was going to experience.

Dawn McGruer:

And I definitely wasn’t set up for the loneliness that I felt along some of those areas of the journey. And what I want to do is I kind of want to share with you my story from start to finish, because it’s important to see what was good, what was bad, and really what was the ugly, because it wasn’t plain sailing. And as much as starting my business at 21, I was really excited. I’d been working in a multinational, and I’d started my life in IT. I’d gone through the normal sort of academic roots. And I don’t really know how I fell into it. I started working with a business, it was a startup, it was their the first office, it was an American company, and it was an amazing, amazing job because I could never have wished for learning that I got there.

Dawn McGruer:

I mean, it literally taught me so much about business. It fast tracked me about 10 years worth of business, because setting up an office, and learning everything from start to finish, I was doing things from operations to IT, to marketing. And this is really where I found my feet because I didn’t leave school, college, university, whatever, and think, right, this is exactly what I’m going to do. I’m going to be X, Y, and Z. Quite honestly, I had no idea. I’d worked in different jobs, I’d worked in marketing in Volvo, and it was quite exciting because it was when they were going through a rebrand, and the car was featured in a movie, and they were repositioning how their brand sort of was from sort of the older clientele, to kind of getting it into the more sort of hip and trendy, if that was possible.

Dawn McGruer:

The funny thing was is that, when I started with this startup, this American company, I landed the job and I was 18 so I didn’t have a huge amount of commercial experience, but I think I was a bit ahead of my years. I had always been kind of older than I was, and quiet sort of responsible. And I think because I’d had ever since the age of maybe 13, 14, I was sort of used to working, and I was used to the working environment so it didn’t really phase me. I remember going into working at Volvo and working in a car garage at the age of 17, and getting loads and loads of banter from the mechanics, and the engineers, and the sales team. But I think because I’d worked in restaurants as a waitress from about sort of 13, 14, I was used to that with the chefs, etc.

Dawn McGruer:

And I think it really changed the way I was with interviews and things. When I got this job at 18, I started off, I learned a lot, and it was tough. There was a lot of responsibility put on me for such a young age, but as I say, the learning was massive. It was like having my own experience of having a business because at first, I was the only person in the office, and then I was put in charge of recruitment, and everything from sort of software to operations in the business so I saw it from start to finish. And this is really where I think it enlightened me of what a business could be, but also invigorated this passion, it lit a fire for me that I thought I love this.

Dawn McGruer:

As much as it’s tough, there was nothing nicer than seeing a project come true, and seeing how this business grew and evolved. But I ended up working kind of very much in the IT side of things. I thought, well, what I’ll do is I’ll upscale, and I develop my skills in this area. And I started learning programming. I went to college on day release from this job. I also did all my Microsoft Engineering exams. So not only was I doing programming, I was looking at the hardware and the software. And the laugh of it is, is that for many people who know me, when I say that I actually learned how to do things like Category 5 cabling, and patch panels, and setting servers up and things like that, people would not naturally think of me in that role, but I really enjoyed it.

Dawn McGruer:

And it was something that I thought, maybe this is the career for me. But as I started working on the marketing aspect and looking more about the promotion and the branding, et cetera, of the business, that’s where things changed me because my creativity was basically brought to life. And that was something that I wasn’t really getting on the programming side of things. Quite soon I decided, right, what I’m going to do is I’m going to really kind of carve myself out in the marketing department. And I did my Chartered Institute of Marketing exams back in 1996. And I love doing it because I was going to college, and I was going every Tuesday night and Thursday night, from six to nine. I was knackered, but I was listening to some of the most amazing people, from amazing brands and businesses because the people who were doing this qualification was such a mix, a mix of ages.

Dawn McGruer:

And I learned just a lot by listening to what they were saying. Once I got my exams, I started working in more and more of the marketing. I got to travel, go to the exhibitions. And all of this, at sort of 18, 19 years of age. Now I stayed with this business up until I was 20, 21. And I made a big decision, I decided, in my wisdom, that after working for this business, and I’d been working on the client side so I was basically, there was rental companies for this business, and I was sort of in charge of the pull through marketing. Really kind of getting to the end users, getting the demand for the products and services in place. And I loved it. I absolutely loved it, but it wasn’t enough for me. And because I was kind of quite solo I thought, well, I could do this on my own.

Dawn McGruer:

It’d be easy. I will start my own agency, but guess what? It wasn’t quite that easy. I embarked on my journey and I thought, “Well, great. I’ll set my business up and Aurora Marketing was born. I remember getting my first offices, and these offices were in Wilmslow, in Cheshire. And they were above the cinema. And the Rex Cinema, which weirdly enough, has actually just reopened as a cinema, used to go up the old cinema steps to get into this office. And I remember painting it and the hours spent getting this office looking beautiful, getting the furniture. It was all bright. I remember getting, I think it was Benetton metallic paint in yellow, and painting all of the rooms. Very bright, very marketing focused. And this was the agency that I was going to start, and I was going to position myself as a consultant.

Dawn McGruer:

Now, I hadn’t really thought about this too much because when I was thinking about my business, I just kind of thought, I’ll work with any business. And this is probably my biggest mistake when starting the business, because I hadn’t really thought about who my ideal client was at this point. I opened my doors and not a lot happened. And then having to go and start and find clients was quite difficult. Now, I had a bit of a feast and famine. And let’s be honest, my first year, I think choices of, obviously, I owned my own house at this point. So I bought a house, so not only was I paying rent rates, mortgages, all these things, I put a lot of pressure on myself. I think the biggest mistake was obviously just thinking that work was going to come to me. Having a website and everything and having a presence, that I would just naturally find clients. Now I did, but there was no consistency.

Dawn McGruer:

I would go through feast and famine. And honestly, in that first year, choices of buying Fairy Liquid or food were quite real. And that it would be great one month and then I’d have a delay until I got a new client. What I learned is that in that first year, I started to really carve out who I wanted to work with. And this is the game changer for me, when I got super clear of who I was working for, and not just sort of marketing myself as a consultant, but what I could do for them, that’s when everything changed. And I started a program called The Virtual Business Partner Program, really exciting program because back then it was when digital marketing had just begun. And my expertise now, I’m a digital marketing author, speaker, and trainer, but it was the online marketing aspect that I thought I could really help with.

Dawn McGruer:

With my experience as a programmer, it really lent itself to the world of online marketing and social media. Many businesses hadn’t even some emails, so my whole kind of ethos in business and my agency was positioned to help businesses get online and start optimizing getting an online presence, and recruiting new clients. The Virtual Business Partner Program, because there was only one of me, the biggest stumbling block I had in business, first of all, was that because there was just one Dawn, I couldn’t operate more than X amount of clients. And that was really where I was going through this feast or famine because I’d have to finish a project to start a new one. This working one-to-one, wasn’t working. And I thought, well, if I could work one to many, how would I do this?

Dawn McGruer:

The online Virtual Business Partner Program, was online consultancy so I didn’t have to go and see anybody. I could work in groups, and I could really help these businesses through, like a monthly membership. Now that was a game changer. And yes, I got to a point where I couldn’t take on any more of those clients, and I had to evolve again. And that’s really where my business changed that to the next level. I had the agency, Aurora Marketing, and I decided that I would start with a panel of experts. And this is where a Business Consort was born because I was approached by a large northwest exhibition company. And they were hosting this huge exhibition. And it was a great opportunity because they asked me could I create an online forum, like a directory, that all the exhibitors and all the attendees could participate in?

Dawn McGruer:

And I said, “Yes, of course I can.” So I put this together and we had 50,000. 50,000 people joining this. I was just absolutely delighted. This was a massive project for me. But as soon as this ended, people were saying, “Well, what happens next?” I’d named it Business Consort, now my business today is still called Business Consort. Over the 20 years, my business has grown organically through demand. And I think this is really why it’s worked so well. Don’t get me wrong, there has been some pitfalls I’ll show with you over the years, but this gave me an opportunity. I mean, Business Consort, it was like an online directory. It was by no means social networking, it wasn’t like Facebook. It was the real nitty gritty, old fashioned forums, but it worked. Now, with that, we decided, “Well look, if people want to do something, now let’s start networking.”

Dawn McGruer:

And I started doing networking events all around the UK, but the difference was is that we had two distinct business levels. We had events for business growth, and then we had the elite. Now there were for different sized businesses who were at different stages in their career. The elite was for businesses who were large businesses of 10 million onwards, and the growth was for anyone, an SME, up to about 10 million. And I’d hosted these events like cocktail parties in car showrooms. Now in Ferrari, it was in Aston Martin, you name it. And it was in the evening, and we did it on Park Lane in London, and we’d clear out the showroom, they’d move all the cars around. We would have chocolate fountains, we’d have cocktail bars. They were amazing events, and we would be getting anything up to about 150 people at these events.

Dawn McGruer:

Now, we did raffles and prize draws, but it was all about building this panel of experts, and it was a membership. It worked really well and it was at the height of networking. And then it kind of hit a point where networking was fairly saturated. Yet again, we had all of these people who were a panel of experts. The great thing is, is we were getting a commission through for any business they got through our network, we’re getting our membership fees, but there was a next level, people wanted not just expertise and consultancy, and it was a great pull through for me in the agency, but they wanted to really learn. They wanted upskill their teams. And this is where the Academy was born. Business Consort Academy came again through demand.

Dawn McGruer:

My clients started wanting training so I started training in Microsoft Office, I started training on marketing on a shoe string, traditional marketing, and then evolved in the world of online marketing and social media. But one of the things that was really apparent to me at that time was that, the unfortunateness of training was that so many people saw themselves as an expert in their field, but they really weren’t teaching best practice. And there was so many people rogue out there that were teaching principles that were just quite honestly damaging to business. It broke my heart when I met a client and they said to me, “Well Dawn I’ve been trained and I’ve been told this and I’ve done that. And it didn’t work.” And I just thought, do you know what? There’s a massive opportunity here, to be accredited, to be the elite, and to be a place where people come and they know that whatever they’re learning is right, and it’s the best strategy, the quickest, the most efficient, and it’s going to get results. And it was about real world business marketing.

Dawn McGruer:

At that point, we decided to get accredited and we got accredited by the Chartered Institute of Marketing. It was a game changer for us because being able to be an agency and a training academy, all rolled into one, the two were feeding each other. It was a match made in heaven. And then we realized quite quickly, that as the team grew, and there was probably about five of us at that point, there’s 17 of us now, that there was a huge opportunity then to take these skills to a next level. And we started the agency in 2005. And me as a business leader, the training side of things has been huge for us because when we started doing qualifications, and we launched the Digital Marketing Diploma, this for me was something at the heart of people’s businesses, it wasn’t just training. It was about them developing skills, but it was about professional development. It was about carving out a career, getting pay rises and promotion.

Dawn McGruer:

It was just this next level. Now, in the next podcast, I will share with you some key learnings that looking back from the age of 41 to 21. But the main ones along this journey was that you have to be dynamic, you have to be agile, and you have to be able to pivot your business. I think if I could share anything with you, at the age of 21, my passion sometimes outshone my logic. And I would delve into things and get excited about things before I truly explored them. Some of me feels that that was good because I learnt a lot along the way. And I was definitely a doer. I didn’t procrastinate, I kind of just got out there, but maybe I rushed things too quickly because growing The Training Academy, it grew very quickly, and we were perhaps not as geared, and ready for that as we should have been, but I don’t know whether I would necessarily change that.

Dawn McGruer:

I may have probably been better in the planning side. I was never really one for the devil of the detail. I would fill it all in later. Now that’s evolved as time has gone on, but my podcast, it’s all about obviously, what I’ve learned as an entrepreneur. And my biggest lesson would be that to really, really carve out who your ideal client is. Now, I’m going to share with you my ideal client worksheet, so you can fill it in, and it’ll give you ideas of just getting super clear of what you do. Because my biggest learning at 21 was definitely understanding not what I did, but what my clients needed, and what was in it for them.

Dawn McGruer:

When I started marketing that way, and people said to me at networking events, “Dawn, what do you do? I’d never say I owned an agency or an academy. I’d always say, “What I do is I help businesses shine online. I will help businesses scale and grow their business through developing digital marketing skills.” I would always gear it to them. Now, as this evolved, I position myself very much as somebody who helped brands and businesses not only get online, but as digital evolved itself so did my proposition. I maximize digital marketing profits to help scale and grow businesses. And this is all empowered through learning the right strategies and techniques. Go ahead and fill in the worksheet, download a copy of it, and see whether your proposition really matches. And sometimes it’s just subtle tweaks in your marketing that is a key game changer.

Dawn McGruer:

Now, on the upcoming episodes, we will be incorporating all aspects of marketing, motivation, and mindset. We’ll be looking at your wellbeing, your work goals, family, friends, adventure, home, and money. And this will all be structured around our eight pillars. Now, you will start to see that being an entrepreneur is not just about business. It’s about all of those things together. And when you look at achieving your dreams and goals, it is about being happy and having that kind of work life balance. Now I’ll come onto that in the next episode, where I will share with you, at the age of 41, some of the key learnings that I’ve had over the past 20 years, because at the end of the day, we spend a third of our life at work. That’s 90,000 hours over the course of an average lifetime, so we got to be happy, yeah?

Dawn McGruer:

Go ahead, fill in the worksheet and let me know how you get on and join me in next week’s podcast, where I will be sharing all about my journey from the age of 21 to 41. And some of my key learnings of how you can avoid some of the pitfalls I experienced, and overcome these challenges. Don’t forget to follow me on social media as well @dawnmcgruer, and @businessconsort. I hope you enjoyed the episode and remember, subscribe and share in Apple Podcasts.

Dawn McGruer:

I hope you enjoyed this week’s episode, and don’t forget I’m going to be with you each and every week. So download and listen on dawnmcgruer.com or on iTunes, and come and join us in our Facebook community too. All the details are on the website and I’ll see you next week.