Today we’d like to introduce you to Tara Kester.
So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
Growing up, I always wanted to be an interior designer. I also had to pay for college. So I did my foundation art classes at a state school (Grand Valley State University in Michigan) with the plan of moving on to a more expensive art school my sophomore year. This state school didn’t have an interior design program, but it did have a rock climbing wall (yes, I had my priorities straight). And it had an impressive, very competitive graphic design program (~15% acceptance rate). I didn’t know what graphic design was, but the senior portfolio projects hanging on the wall looked pretty cool. So I applied at the end of freshman year and got accepted.
After college, I moved to Boulder, CO where I somehow managed to rock climb, mountain bike, and ski during the day and work on freelance projects during nights and weekends. Somewhere in there, I also did some contract work on-site for agencies and had a couple of in-house graphic design jobs for rock climbing companies.
One night at 2am, after getting back from visiting a friend in San Diego and scraping ice off my windshield at the Denver airport (in April), I decided to move to SD to learn how to surf and take my career more seriously. I knew only two people out here, so I joined a few different networking organizations and just started meeting people. That was nearly ten years ago. Seven years ago, my family was in town, and I had this realization over tacos with them in Old Town that clients weren’t being responded to and work wasn’t going out while being with my family. I had to sacrifice time with my family that week so that I didn’t fall off the planet with my clients. My first hire roughly a few weeks later was a project manager. Then slowly over the years I started hiring to fill in the additional roles (a web developer, graphic designer, and a digital marketing director). This also allowed me to focus on business development and client strategy. It’s been a slow and steady climb, but I’ve liked it that way. We’ve been able to work on our internal processes for scalability vs just hiring for the sake of having too much work. We had close to double the work come in this year as compared to last and were able to manage it. We didn’t need to hire anyone new (up until recently) and still made every client feel like they were our only client because of how we’ve built our processes over the years.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
One of my biggest struggles was the hard realization that there is no work/life balance when starting a business. After roughly a year into my business of working 80+ hr. weeks, I started to buy into the mentality of all these “experts” saying that it’s possible and necessary to work 20-35 hr. weeks while still in the infancy of a business to prevent burn out—“You can have your dream business within months AND make 6 figures too!” No, you can’t. Contrary to what many life coaches say, I needed to put in long days and weeks’ worth of time into my business—for the competitive nature of my industry and the cost of living in San Diego. When I went from working 80+ hr. weeks one year to working 35 hr. weeks the next, I no longer spent time networking and improving our processes, which nearly destroyed us.
It was still important to take care of myself—working long hours isn’t an excuse for poor diet, excessive drinking, and pulling constant all-nighters. It just meant that my social life and hobbies should have taken a back seat for a longer period of time until my business was off and running. I think there are seasons of life where you need to take your foot off the gas—i.e. I’m about to be a new mom any day now (due date was yesterday). But I’ve worked super duper hard these last couple of years to prepare my business and team for this time. And I know that if I want to continue the momentum of Shovel’s growth, I will need support in my personal life—such as a really good nanny and my husband to help continue on. Other struggles along the way… competition with contractors and WordPress themes that boast of cutting project costs in half (you get what you pay for), learning how to lead my team (servant leadership is the way, and I still have a long way to go), learning what expenses are necessary and which are not (I spent way too much money on things for the business that weren’t needed in the beginning), and learning how to build proper internal processes (and getting the team and myself to follow them).
Please tell us about Shovel Creative.
We work mainly with marketing directors and mid-size businesses. We help them position their brand, build websites that aid in their lead conversion and sales process, build digital campaigns and funnels in which to drive paid and organic traffic, manage social media, and write SEO-driven content. On the print side, we also design logos, brochures, catalogs, and trade show materials.
What sets us apart…
1. Our clients say they love us because we get stuff done when we say we will and proactively manage projects. We’re easy to get a hold of and quick to respond. This shouldn’t be a key differentiator in our industry, but it is.
2. For our retainer clients, we don’t set it and forget it. We have a client in particular who we’ve doubled our allotted retainer time for the last couple of months (and haven’t billed extra for it) due to tweaking campaigns that weren’t working. Though we can’t always promise favorable outcomes, we work darn hard using data to help inform next steps and new campaign ideas vs just providing the client with reports and having them interpret those reports for themselves every month.
3. We start with a roots-first mentality. No matter how small the project, we make sure that we have a firm grasp on our clients’ brands. We help them define their core messaging and user personas before any marketing and branding decisions are made. We get a lot of feedback that this is a key strength of ours.
If you had to go back in time and start over, would you have done anything differently?
I wish I would have been more frugal in the first few years of starting Shovel and would have worked with a financial planner from the start. I spent way too much money on certain vendors in getting started and should have done a better job of researching and vetting them. Thankfully, I never had to go into debt. But I also put all of my extra pay back into the business vs investing some of it into mutual funds, real estate, etc. So many mentors said to me “pay yourself first”, but I never listened. After all, my company was my investment, right? Maybe. But that’s really putting all my eggs into one, tiny basket. I know I’m not alone in this. Most of my business-owning friends are/were in a similar position. Recently, I started working with a financial planner, and it was one of the best decisions to-date.
Entrepreneurs work incredibly hard and need to make sure that sweat equity isn’t the only equity they’re building. Opening my eyes to financial stability in and out of my business was something I wish I considered more heavily early on.
Any final thoughts you want to leave the readers with?
There’s the saying that many people end interviews with, “If you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life.” Loving what you do is important, and I do enjoy my work. I also think that loving people—I mean really loving them, i.e. sacrificing an extra 15 minutes listening to what’s going on in someone’s life, being patient with mistakes, and examining my own first—is what makes work the most enjoyable in the end. This is extremely hard, and I have a long way to go in this area (especially in the patience department). But I sure am thankful for all the people along my business (and personal) journey who have been compassionate and patient with me. And I want to be that for my team and clients too. Growth in this area is my favorite thing about what I do.
Contact Info:
- Address: 325 Carlsbad Village Drive
D-1 - Website: https://shovelcreative.com
- Phone: 7604537810
- Email: info@shovelcreative.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shovelcreative/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/shovelcreativeinc/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/ShovelCreative
Image Credit:
Greg Helton
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