Grow A Small Business Podcast Started Harvey with his wife to help conscious businesses grow and initially wanted to keep the team at 2 but have grown to 4 FTE so far and doubled their revenue in 2020 from the $300,000+ they generated in 2019 (Simon Smallchua)
In this episode, I interview Simon Smallchua, the Co-Founder at Harvey, a strategic marketing team and certified B Corp that helps conscious businesses grow, that is, businesses who are positively impacting one or more of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). They create marketing strategies, implement and manage them, develop content, crush data, build websites and tailor messaging to get businesses where they want to be.
Simon got his first taste for business at age 9 and by age 19, he had started his own digital agency, helping small businesses set up their brand and digital marketing. He grew it to a team of 10 with 130 clients and sold it in his 20s. He then joined Melbourne-based agency Isobar as a marketing strategist and over eight years helped build the agency's capabilities in analytics, social and experience design, and helped grow the team from 60 people to 350. Making the jump from agency to client-side, he headed up a global marketing team for a high-growth software and data company where he spent his days growing their US customer base.
His wife started Harvey in 2019 and Simon joined her soon after. In their first year, they made $300,000+ in revenue and doubled it in 2020 despite the pandemic. They always make sure they spend 10% of their time managing the business and 90% working with their clients and make a point of donating 5% of their revenues to charity. Simon says the hardest thing in growing a small business is balance and that the one thing he would tell himself on day one of starting out in business is, "Take your time and grow slowly" Get ready for some world-changing inspiration that may make you wanna be more impact-driven with your business. Enjoy!
This Cast Covers:
- Operating as the dedicated marketing team for impact-oriented and conscious businesses.
- The great opportunities that come with focusing a business on one area of expertise.
- Being the jack of all trades of marketing for businesses and how they eventually move out so the businesses can manage their own marketing.
- The career and entrepreneurial journey that led him towards starting Harvey.
- How things changed when they decided to focus on impact.
- Initial focus on keeping their team at only the two founders so they could stay close to their clients.
- Building relationships, mastering wealth building, and why happiness is not about money.
- Aiming at moving his time to be three to four days a week of work so he can work on more impactful projects.
- Being clear on your difference and niche, and tailoring everything to your target market.
- The beauty of a consulting business: Funding their business from savings but sustaining it purely from project revenue.
- Lessons he learned about cash flow from hiring the wrong people.
- Juggling long workdays and dealing with the times when he drops the ball on a project.
- Having clarity on where they deliver value so they can charge correctly for a product or service and not overdoing it.
- Why small business owners should master prioritization versus urgency.
- What B-Corp's are really all about.
- The importance of building a culture founded on trust and authenticity.
Additional Resources:
Music from https://filmmusic.io "Cold Funk" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com). License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/