Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey in branding and marketing but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with Arjan Mundy, Founder of EveryDayDreamers, located in Vancouver, BC, Canada.

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

I run EveryDayDreamers. It's a marketing agency focusing on storytelling marketing and strong copywriting. We help business owners of all sizes by developing strong inbound and outreach campaigns. Our outreach campaigns are generally for smaller-sized businesses. They help get immediate sales for companies that need revenue and cash flow as soon as possible. They're also invaluable as a means of refining your target audience. Our outreach puts you in hundreds of conversations with your target audience each month. This helps our clients clarify their ideal audience, their habits, and what they like/don't like about their product.

Our inbound campaigns are generally more complex. They rely heavily on storytelling to create content that the target audience enjoys consuming. The average person is subjected to over 5000 adverts per day. We create content (think YouTube videos, comics, etc.) that the audience seeks instead of being subjected to. For example, we recently completed a manga around a video game for a real-world game.

Tell us about yourself

I started working on my business after a stint as a United Nations Communications Consultant. Right out of university, I worked for a few marketing agencies and some marketing departments within large corporations. All in all, I found that my work had little to do with bettering the world - I was just selling something.

So I applied for a job at UNESCO in Paris, thinking that it would be more in line with my values and ideals, and it was, but the flip side of that was that making any progress within organizations like UNESCO tends to be slow. Organizations that are trying to do good in the world tend to be quite bureaucratic in nature, and it takes time to make any real change or progress.

After that, I took some time off to travel the world. During a month-long silent meditation retreat at the Dalia Lama's temple in Dharamsala, I decided that I should try to create my own agency. It felt like no job was perfect for me, so I created my own perfect job.

EveryDayDreamers moves fast and does good work that betters the world. Specifically, we're contributing to a new wave of advertising that creates content that people actually enjoy consuming instead of implying bombarding people with messaging.

What's your biggest accomplishment as a business owner?

Implementing storytelling marketing in a way that I find delivers exponential results. Being on the 30 under 30 lists in B.C. Providing jobs, income, and livelihood for 11 employees and contractors and their families.

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

Choosing the right clients to work with and having the strength to say no to the wrong clients. I want to work with people who are doing good things in the world. Things that contribute value, but I often get asked to market scams and products that simply siphon money from people. It's easy to say "no" to these now, but it was much harder to say "no" when my business had no revenue and needed to pay the bills.

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

  1. Understand your target audience. Know what they need, where you can find them online, and what they enjoy about your product and the digital world. This is impossible without having multiple conversations and refining what you can do to best serve them.
  2. Have a marketing strategy that will get you short-term revenue first; then, you can transition into a strategy that will build towards continuous revenue. It sucks, but you'll probably need to do some outreach for short-term wins before you can fund inbound campaigns that will pay off in 1-2 years.
  3. Do something good. Don't just focus on making money, but contribute to a discipline or solve a problem. Do something you're proud of, and then talk about it. Use your personal social media to build a platform, an audience, and a following that you can use for target audience research and can eventually translate into a following for your business.

Where can people find you and your business?

Website: https://everydaydreamers.ca/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EveryDayDreamers
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everydaydreamers.ca/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/DreamersEvery
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/everydaydreamers/

If you like what you've read here and have your own story as a solo or small business entrepreneur that you'd like to share, then please answer these interview questions. We'd love to feature your journey on these pages.

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