Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with Karen Amundson, founder of Apiary Digital, located in Port Townsend, WA, USA.

What's your business, and who are your customers?

What we do: We are a performance digital marketing collective of high-caliber, seasoned independent professionals dedicated to growing client businesses by offering flexible access to deep expertise across a variety of channels. Our customers range from fin and health tech companies to direct-to-consumer shoe outfits and everything in between.

Why we exist: Apiary makes business work for humans (not the other way around!). We exist to help people live their stories—our clients, their customers, our talent.

Tell us about yourself

Apiary began with a dream of breaking free of the 9-to-5 jungle of desk jobs to travel the world while somehow continuing to nurture my career in digital marketing. Between milking cows in New Zealand and exploring rice fields in Bangladesh, I began independent consulting, which quickly turned into way more than one person could handle. Before long, I was organically building a flexible model for accessing specialized experts in a variety of digital marketing disciplines as very talented professionals were coming out of the woodwork willing to take on consulting work. This model quickly grew and evolved into what was officially dubbed Apiary Digital in July 2015.

What's your biggest accomplishment as a business owner?

My greatest accomplishment as a business owner has been creating a model that is sustainable beyond me. I take great pride in seeing dozens of talented Apiary consultants contributing to big client projects while working remotely and with the flexibility to do important things outside of work—people with young children, people with side hustles, people going back to school for another degree or certificate, travelers, and more.

What's one of the hardest things that come with being a business owner?

Knowing that other people's livelihoods depend on the health and success of your business is a huge responsibility to shoulder. Often as the founder, you have to make decisions for the company. There are no "good" options, just trade-offs that impact people and need to be carefully considered. Especially in the early days in business when you don't yet have a lot of data to go on, it can be hard to know even retrospectively if you made the "right" or best decision. You just have to be the one to shoulder the responsibility for making conscious decisions.

What are the top tips you'd give to anyone looking to start, run and grow a business today?

  1. Build a selection of advisors who can challenge you to build the self-awareness to identify your blind spots and help you navigate the edge cases, so you have good sounding boards to aid in your decision-making. Early on, when every variable in the equation is unknown (and you don't even know how many variables there are or in what order they should go), you need people you can casually get advice from. Who you surround your business with is what your business will become. This means you also have to be willing to carefully part ways with some people.
  2. Over time, observe what decisions you have made and, more importantly, WHY. Based on this, you can begin to codify your values so that you have a framework for decision-making, which allows you to have something to hold yourself and others accountable to in a consistent fashion. This becomes the basis of building a culture and enabling other leaders to step up and shoulder decision-making responsibilities so that the company can grow beyond you.
  3. Build what customers actually want to buy. Not what you think they SHOULD want to buy.

Is there anything else you'd like to share?

If you're not thinking about DE&I, you're probably under-serving your stakeholders and self-limiting your business growth. DE&I is both the right thing to do for people and for business. 48% of Gen Z come from communities of color: Your potential customers today and in the future are diverse. Especially if you're just starting out your business, you have the ability to build DE&I principles into the DNA of your business from the start, which is an advantage over established companies who may be thinking too narrowly about who their customers are and talent are. At Apiary, we have established DE&I KPIs that leadership is held accountable to. We report on each month as part of our financial reporting. This helps us stay on track in this critical area of business.

Where can people find you and your business?

Website: https://apiarydigital.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/apiarydigital/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/apiarydigital
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karenamundson/

If you like what you've read here and have your own story as a solopreneur that you'd like to share, then email community@subkit.com; we'd love to feature your journey on these pages.

Feel inspired to start, run or grow your own subscription business? Check out subkit.com and learn how you can turn "one day" into day one.