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Ellen Crawford, tell me about your vision.

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Oh, such a good question.

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I would say my vision in general for cultivate communications is to really

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make marketing feel so accessible for every business owner out there.

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I think marketing is an area that a lot of people feel stuck by.

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They feel very constrained.

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It's the first budget that goes.

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And there's a lot of curve balls that get thrown at marketing, but there are

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ways to go about those curve balls.

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There are ways to work within the limitations.

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And I really, my vision is to make everyone feel that it doesn't matter

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what their limitations are, but they have the ability to bring their brand to life.

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They have the ability to navigate whatever challenges are getting thrown at them and

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know exactly how to move forward and do so in a way that they feel confident in

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what they're investing in or whether that's time, money or energy.

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And that's something that's incredibly important to me.

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So the big vision is really seeing marketing, kind of changing the face of

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marketing in a way and de-stigmatizing that it has to be this big complicated

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system or process or creative strategy or whatever it is and truly see marketing

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and the value it can bring for businesses and to show people that it can be way

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more accessible than it may feel for them right now.

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That's absolutely profound.

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A lot of business owners, most of them, they're kind of worried about if they

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know what to do and they've had bad experiences in marketing and they end up

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being crapping on marketing and not investing on the marketing the right way.

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And they don't see the results and they struggle, struggle with new business.

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It's hard.

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Yes.

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It's so hard to see.

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It's so hard to see.

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So that's exactly what we're here to shift.

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Yeah.

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Thank you.

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Thank you.

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So Caroline, where did this vision about you going into marketing and

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helping business owners come from?

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Well, I've been in marketing communications for 13 years.

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I was in-house at companies, but I worked at a lot of companies that had very

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dynamic marketing teams.

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A lot of the times I was the only marketing person or maybe one of a few.

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But what I didn't realize, I always thought, you know, oh, it's just the

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company I'm at, maybe it'll be different at the next one.

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But I started to realize that the same challenges that were impacting the

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marketing team happened at every company.

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And it was a lack of value that people saw in marketing, a lack of

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understanding of what marketing was doing and where they were spending their time.

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So that made people question wondering why we keep asking for more budget or

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why some things are delayed or whatever it is that happened.

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And I just started to see like all these different patterns, but also too, the

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last, I started to see, cause it's not just the company side that's at fall.

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I started to see the way that marketing kind of caused those challenges.

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And even especially if like, if you were outsourcing support, finding marketing

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support that you can trust is much harder than you would think it is.

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And I've been burned by a lot of marketers.

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I've been burned by a lot of agencies.

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I've been burned in-house and external, you know, and it's really hard to

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discern what's needed.

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It's, it's so easy to go down a rabbit hole.

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And so when it came time to when like cultivate community, you know,

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cultivate communications really came into my purview of, you know, what's next for

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me, I realized that it, there was a different way to go about marketing.

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There was a different way to communicate with the business leaders.

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And I real, I was cultivating that way throughout my career and how I

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communicated with people, the trust I would bring.

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I'm very proud of the reputation I had while I was in-house at companies.

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And I wanted to carry that through and really show that there is a new way to

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look at marketing.

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There's a new way to, to envision it.

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And there's a new way to get support from it.

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And so that's what we're bringing.

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And that really is what inspired the whole vision.

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Wow.

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I'm excited to hear about that.

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Thank you.

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Well, that goes directly into my next question for Caroline.

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How did you get started?

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Ooh, I got started.

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I mean, again, marketing at just all the way back to marketing, I got started

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because I was in journalism, studying journalism, knew very early on.

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I did not want to be a journalist.

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I liked some aspects of it and marketing was suggested as like a career path.

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And I just ended up getting a couple of internships.

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And at the time social media was so new, like it was not used for business

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really at this time, this was a very long time ago.

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And I got my first internship with social media, and then I got another

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internship doing general marketing and another and another, and I just was

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working throughout my entire college career, basically in marketing.

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And I just never looked back.

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So it's flash forward to my business.

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When I started my business, you know, it really was me understanding what about

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marketing that I loved and what was unique to what I was doing and my

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approach, what did I really want to, what did I not want to lose by jumping out on

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my own?

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And that's, that's really it.

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And so how I got started specifically is, you know, I was still kind of working

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in house and needed to kind of dabble to make sure I could kind of do this on my

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own, that I wasn't just crazy.

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Cause sometimes when you first think about starting your own business, you're

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like, am I crazy to do this? And so started out my own by really just

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networking, finding people, finding business owners, going on Upwork, doing,

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you know, finding Facebook groups, because Facebook groups, especially during COVID

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were huge.

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And so that's how I got started.

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And I basically was testing this kind of philosophy that I had in this approach

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that I had, and nearly four years later, here we are.

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Thank you for being here today.

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I'm really happy that you tuned into Vision Pros Live.

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I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions as these episodes continue to

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move forward.

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This is going to get more and more fun.

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We'll have more and more engagement as well, we'll invite people to

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participate in the show.

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And thank you for giving us your time and attention.

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Have an excellent time building out your vision and becoming a Vision Pro yourself.