Ellen Crawford, tell me about your vision.
Oh, such a good question.
I would say my vision in general for cultivate communications is to really
make marketing feel so accessible for every business owner out there.
I think marketing is an area that a lot of people feel stuck by.
They feel very constrained.
It's the first budget that goes.
And there's a lot of curve balls that get thrown at marketing, but there are
ways to go about those curve balls.
There are ways to work within the limitations.
And I really, my vision is to make everyone feel that it doesn't matter
what their limitations are, but they have the ability to bring their brand to life.
They have the ability to navigate whatever challenges are getting thrown at them and
know exactly how to move forward and do so in a way that they feel confident in
what they're investing in or whether that's time, money or energy.
And that's something that's incredibly important to me.
So the big vision is really seeing marketing, kind of changing the face of
marketing in a way and de-stigmatizing that it has to be this big complicated
system or process or creative strategy or whatever it is and truly see marketing
and the value it can bring for businesses and to show people that it can be way
more accessible than it may feel for them right now.
That's absolutely profound.
A lot of business owners, most of them, they're kind of worried about if they
know what to do and they've had bad experiences in marketing and they end up
being crapping on marketing and not investing on the marketing the right way.
And they don't see the results and they struggle, struggle with new business.
It's hard.
Yes.
It's so hard to see.
So that's exactly what we're here to shift.
Yeah.
Thank you.
So Caroline, where did this vision about you going into marketing and
helping business owners come from?
Well, I've been in marketing communications for 13 years.
I was in-house at companies, but I worked at a lot of companies that had very
dynamic marketing teams.
A lot of the times I was the only marketing person or maybe one of a few.
But what I didn't realize, I always thought, you know, oh, it's just the
company I'm at, maybe it'll be different at the next one.
But I started to realize that the same challenges that were impacting the
marketing team happened at every company.
And it was a lack of value that people saw in marketing, a lack of
understanding of what marketing was doing and where they were spending their time.
So that made people question wondering why we keep asking for more budget or
why some things are delayed or whatever it is that happened.
And I just started to see like all these different patterns, but also too, the
last, I started to see, cause it's not just the company side that's at fall.
I started to see the way that marketing kind of caused those challenges.
And even especially if like, if you were outsourcing support, finding marketing
support that you can trust is much harder than you would think it is.
And I've been burned by a lot of marketers.
I've been burned by a lot of agencies.
I've been burned in-house and external, you know, and it's really hard to
discern what's needed.
It's, it's so easy to go down a rabbit hole.
And so when it came time to when like cultivate community, you know,
cultivate communications really came into my purview of, you know, what's next for
me, I realized that it, there was a different way to go about marketing.
There was a different way to communicate with the business leaders.
And I real, I was cultivating that way throughout my career and how I
communicated with people, the trust I would bring.
I'm very proud of the reputation I had while I was in-house at companies.
And I wanted to carry that through and really show that there is a new way to
look at marketing.
There's a new way to, to envision it.
And there's a new way to get support from it.
And so that's what we're bringing.
And that really is what inspired the whole vision.
Wow.
I'm excited to hear about that.
Thank you.
Well, that goes directly into my next question for Caroline.
How did you get started?
Ooh, I got started.
I mean, again, marketing at just all the way back to marketing, I got started
because I was in journalism, studying journalism, knew very early on.
I did not want to be a journalist.
I liked some aspects of it and marketing was suggested as like a career path.
And I just ended up getting a couple of internships.
And at the time social media was so new, like it was not used for business
really at this time, this was a very long time ago.
And I got my first internship with social media, and then I got another
internship doing general marketing and another and another, and I just was
working throughout my entire college career, basically in marketing.
And I just never looked back.
So it's flash forward to my business.
When I started my business, you know, it really was me understanding what about
marketing that I loved and what was unique to what I was doing and my
approach, what did I really want to, what did I not want to lose by jumping out on
my own?
And that's, that's really it.
And so how I got started specifically is, you know, I was still kind of working
in house and needed to kind of dabble to make sure I could kind of do this on my
own, that I wasn't just crazy.
Cause sometimes when you first think about starting your own business, you're
like, am I crazy to do this? And so started out my own by really just
networking, finding people, finding business owners, going on Upwork, doing,
you know, finding Facebook groups, because Facebook groups, especially during COVID
were huge.
And so that's how I got started.
And I basically was testing this kind of philosophy that I had in this approach
that I had, and nearly four years later, here we are.
Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned into Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions as these episodes continue to
move forward.
This is going to get more and more fun.
We'll have more and more engagement as well, we'll invite people to
participate in the show.
And thank you for giving us your time and attention.
Have an excellent time building out your vision and becoming a Vision Pro yourself.