Podcast Recap: Antonella Pisani Joins the 10-Minute Podcast
The 10 Minute Entrepreneur is a podcast for entrepreneurs and small business owners. Seasoned serial entrepreneur Sean Castrina shares quick-hitting tips to help equip you for success. Both tactical and practical, Sean's advice will help you thrive.
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Find highlights from our conversation on how to scale a successful and diverse company in today’s remote working world.
An Entrepreneur from a Young Age
Sean Castrina: When did you first know you wanted to be an entrepreneur?
Antonella Pisani: I was always an entrepreneur, probably from the time I was 12 years old. I used to buy and resell baseball cards as a dealer when I was a young kid. I wanted to work for myself; my dad worked for himself, so I grew up in that environment. When I left corporate about 7 years ago, I never actually set out to build a company. I just didn’t want to work in political chaos anymore. So I just started freelancing on my own and grew it into a business along the way.
A Step in the Right Direction
SC: And it grew into something amazing! So, you started as a one-person operation and then got it to where you’ve replaced your salary and don’t have the nonsense. It sounds like it’s a win.
AP: Yes. And I was even comfortable not taking my full salary and taking a step back to live a more peaceful life. I never expected what Eyeful Media has turned into! We’ve grown 100% through word-of-mouth, never really promoting ourselves. It’s been a pretty amazing journey so far.
Starting a Business and Learning Along the Way
SC: What have you learned by starting Eyeful? I’m sure you’ve got some really good experiences.
AP: What haven’t I learned? It’s been about six years. A lot of the mistakes made were around accounting. I grew up in marketing and e-commerce and knew what I had to do and deliver on that side.
But I think when you go into it not planning to start a business, you’re doing things like paying people through PayPal or QuickBooks before realizing how critical it was going to be to move to a CPA to support the scale.
We have people in 16 states and 23 cities, so my CPA and I have become good friends with all the state taxes. I never expected that, so there’s a lot to learn in every discipline of starting a business, but those are some of the things I wish I’d known on Day One.
You don’t think about things like consistency and naming conventions on what you send out and how you organize. As we’ve scaled, we want to get deeper into the financial analytics and understand year-over-year trends by division. We want to get to a point where we don’t have to do everything in spreadsheets. Retrofitting all of that within QuickBooks has been a process.
Company Growth Through Purpose
SC: You’ve had extraordinary growth. What do you attribute to your growth?
AP: I think it’s been our focus on our people. Having been through some crazy environments, I’ve done a lot of turnaround work and sometimes turnarounds don’t bring out the best in people. When you go into something not intending to build a business, you focus on surrounding yourself with kind people who you want to spend time with every day. The way that you treat them and work with them makes a huge difference. The happier they are, the more they’re going to care about the clients. The fact that we grew through word-of-mouth — they say nice people refer you to other nice people.
So I think it’s been the focus on culture development and measuring that and a lot of rigor around employee NTS scores and making sure we’re living our values and giving people something to focus on beyond just profit and growth. We give back to quite a few different charities, and we do pro bono work as well. So I think just giving people purpose beyond only serving clients directly.
SC: That’s what makes owning a business so great — you can make that choice. I can see it in your face, that when you can create a company that reflects your values, it’s exciting. When you can recruit a team that reflects your values, and shares your values, it doesn’t get any better than that. You’re working with your best friends.
AP: It’s amazing. We work hard, and everyone has their rough days, but we laugh a lot. The sense of humility and gratitude among the team is amazing. We use a performance management solution with a feature called High Fives, which allows anyone on the team to give anyone a High Five, which is just kudos. To see the stream of people thanking their boss, their colleague, or their direct report, creates such a cool environment. I think when you combine that sense of humility and gratitude, it creates something special. Clients can feel that — that these employees are here because they want to be here. There are a million agencies out there, but I think that’s been the most rewarding part of all of this.
Growth of Eyeful Media
SC: What made you want to go to other cities? How does it work?
AP: We don’t have an office anywhere. It’s been about finding the right people with the right skill set. That’s the bare minimum, but most important — they have to have the right skill set we need. But to find the right culture and background and drive, we’ve just gone wherever the talent is. I joke that my VP is on a quest to find someone in every single state, just to add more complexity to it.
We’re 100% remote. It started as just me, then me and freelancers and contractors, so when you’re working in that model, they can be anywhere in the US. At first, they’re usually referrals or former colleagues, so it’s about finding people you trust. That was the first layer of team members, then we started hiring full-time employees about three years ago as the need grew to have employees and resources to be able to commit to projects and clients.
SC: If the last two years taught us anything, it’s that we can do the work from anywhere without an office. If you don’t have to, don’t make them. Some companies will ask their staff to come in on Wednesdays to build culture. Now, the employees hate Wednesdays. While the company may think it’s a culture builder, it’s really a cog in the wheel to the employees.
AP: Yeah. Instead, we’ll try to get people together for lunch or to volunteer together. I jokingly call them volun-teams, where it’s some of our team and some of our clients teams. We have several clients here in Dallas, so for example, we’re volunteering at a toy drive that we sponsor next month. It’s a much better way to get together with your colleagues and have fun and do something that they’re going to enjoy, rather than forcing people to come to a building. It’s worked well for us.
I struggled with it a little bit, whether to get a location here. One of the topics that came up from our VP was, how would colleagues in other cities feel? Would they feel like they’re missing out because they’re not near the office? So we use that money to fly people in on occasion instead.
SC: If you can do without an office, and there’s a better use for that money, for sure.
AP: Yeah. Our investments are people and software to support them, whether it's performance or project management, or Gusto for payroll, or things like that. Or supporting a marketing channel. I’d rather fly 10 people in for 3 days and spend money on that than a physical office to see people every once in a while.
Eyeful’s Value Proposition
SC: Tell me, what do you think is the biggest value proposition that you offer to your customers?
AP: I have two; one is that we only hire folks that have a minimum of 6-7 years of experience in digital marketing. That’s pretty different for ad agencies; the average number of years of digital experience on our team is 13. Clients have the opportunity to work with someone who’s seen a fair amount in their careers so they’re not learning on their dime.
The second one is we’ve stripped out the account manager layer, which is common for ad agencies. Account managers are good for profits, but not necessarily the clients or employees. Both sides get frustrated not being able to connect directly about strategy and having to go through a middleman. These are the two largest differentiators and what’s led us to scale.
To listen to the full podcast and interview, click here. For more details on Eyeful Media, learn what makes our digital marketing consulting firm unique, and contact us for a consultation.