Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey in digital marketing but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with McKay Salisbury, a Business Development Manager at Five Star Commerce, located in Provo, UT, USA.

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

We're an "on-demand" marketing agency for brands selling on Amazon and Walmart Marketplace as 3rd party sellers. Our services include anything within those selling platforms, such as listing optimization, graphic design, Amazon & Walmart advertising, help with certain aspects of shipping & logistics, and such. Our customers are the product brands that make the products you know and love every day when shopping on Amazon. They use us to make sure they are competitive on those marketplaces in comparison with their competitors and are doing everything they can to sell more on those platforms. We're Amazon Advertising & Creative Services Partners, and we've done more work on Upwork than any other US-based Amazon marketing agency.

Tell us about yourself

I originally started learning about it when I was at a finance internship at American Airlines. I have recently read Rich Dad Poor Dad, and my first experience in corporate life was way more mind-numbing than I expected. I had always wanted to work at big companies, but I experienced some of the big downsides of working at large firms. I was spending time learning as much about business on my own as I could. In fact, at that time, I was learning everything about Amazon that I could online, and I was even going to a local real estate investing group each week too. I didn't have a car in Texas, so I would ride my bike the 10 miles in the Texas summer heat to go to the meetings. I showed up totally soaked in sweat, and I was just a little kid compared to everyone else, but I guess that shows that I was really trying to learn everything I could.

I ended up going back to Utah, where I worked at a tiny little consulting firm I had interned at the previous summer. I was making barely any money because it wasn't actually a very strong business, but I ended up kind of running that company, mostly because everyone left. The owner even moved to Florida and got a job working at one of the previous clients, so he left me running that company while I was in my last semester at school. I kept that up for about 4 months after graduating, and then I worked at an Amazon marketing firm. I really liked working at that company, but the pay was pretty low, and there wasn't really much opportunity to move up. I wanted to be the best at this job, so I even let people reach out to me personally so they could ask me questions and such.

After a while, I realized that I would probably make a lot more just doing it freelance, so I left that job and just did it on my own. I had an Upwork profile, and I had people reaching out regularly, so I knew I could do it. The funny thing was that I didn't even plan on that becoming a business. I just figured it would free up my time to find a better business idea and eventually grow that. However, it soon became apparent that there was a lot of need for the kind of knowledge I had. Since I already had a background running a little firm like this, I slowly hired more people to help me with the workload.

Our reputation grew, and we got more and more clients. It was not a quick process, though. It took a lot of time to train the team members, and I had to, and still have to, invest a lot of time in training and preparing the members of the team for the job. Eventually, we had enough great team members that the growth process got easier, and we just repeated and kept finding ways to improve. I love that I'm leading something and really making it happen. It seems at other jobs, I had more potential for what I could do, but there wasn't really an avenue to get there. There was a ceiling, so to speak. Now whatever I can think of or do, I can make happen. It's great, and it keeps things fun and exciting each day.

What's your biggest accomplishment as a business owner?

I actually measure my success by two things. How much revenue our business brings in each month and how much our employees are making. Our team is relatively small, but the team members are making far more than I made at any other firm. I see it as an indicator of success when our team members are making a lot more than the salary in the state, and their families are prospering because of their jobs here. When one of our team members passes a financial milestone like buying a house, which they can now afford because they got the job here, that's a big accomplishment for me.

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

It's definitely been the stress of dealing with "bad" clients. Going from being an individual freelancer to an agency has been pretty challenging in certain ways. For example, any time you have a service business, there will be some clients, particularly on the low end, who are just not good to work with. I noticed that when we got to the point where we had over 100 clients at any given time and were getting a new client every day, it seemed like there would regularly be a client causing problems. Often as the business owner, you've got to work that out. Sometimes a team member may have made a mistake or miscommunicated, which is easy to fix. But sometimes, there would be clients that are frankly just trying to take advantage of you.

It's usually these small one-person businesses that are barely starting out and just don't know anything about working with people. For example, we had one client who just needed a few hours of work. We got him on a billable hour arrangement, so he would just pay for whatever time we worked with him. The contract was very clear about what time he would be charged. However, once he got the bill, he claimed he didn't know that he needed to pay for time spent on a certain task. We refunded him that time and just made sure he was aware for the future that he did have to pay for that time. Then a few months later, he needed a little bit of extra help. It was like maybe an hour or two. We did that for him and sent him the bill. He claimed the same thing. We offered not to charge him again, but we told him that we weren't going to work with him anymore. At this point, we had probably spent more time addressing his complaints than we spent actually doing work for him, so obviously, it didn't make any sense. He ended up calling up everyone in the company for a week and wouldn't stop. We figured out that he basically wanted us to keep working with him but then just to be able to get the bill decreased by finding something to complain about each time.

It sounds crazy because it is. To this day, he still calls us up, trying to get us to work with him some more. The point of the story is that you sometimes end up having bad customers, like every business, and sometimes you have to deal with those yourself. I have an agreeable personality, so it makes me feel bad if someone is unhappy with the company. You find ways, of course, to try to weed out bad clients, but it still comes up sometimes.

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

  1. Start a SERVICE business. By that, I mean a business where you have people actually perform work. Almost anyone I know who starts a service business does well. Our business is great, I have a cousin who does HVAC, and I have family in construction. It seems like the economy went through this phase where everyone wanted to create software or sell products, but now there's so much of that, and there are not enough people there to actually get work done. Have you tried to find someone to work on your house? It's hard to find. You'll call three companies, and no one calls you back. Do a service business, and in most cases, you'll always find enough work. Compare that to a product business where you might spend a bunch of money buying inventory or designing a product, and then, after months of work, and you get to the start line just to find out no one wants your product.
  2. Find one thing that people need and keep focusing on that. Just do that one thing over and over again. Expand to different services slowly, not quickly. For example, when we want to add another service, we will usually get a list of our existing clients who need that service. Then we'll get them committed to a "beta" program where we provide the service at half price. We got through the process to provide that service for them so we can work out any kinks and have a track record and a portfolio to show. Then we add that to our service offerings.
  3. Don't have the goal of "passive" income. Passive income is for investing, not running a business. I don't know of any successful business owner whose goal was "passive" income. Usually, the people who push that are in some kind of MLM, and you'll find they actually spend quite a bit of time recruiting others into their schemes or courses. I've had friends who have tried to start businesses and have initially done pretty well, but they end up only spending like 10 hours a week on it. After a year or two, they end up realizing that they want to make a lot more money than they have been, and their chance to really grow their business is over, so they have to just go get a regular job. Instead, just focus on building a business and force yourself to work on it 9-5 every weekday. When I started, if I had just worked half a day and then not worked the afternoons, it never would have grown into something substantial.

Where can people find you and your business?

Website: https://fivestarcommerce.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FiveStarCommerce
LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/company/five-star-commerce

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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