Founder@ Interview
Interview with Binita Shah and Emma Creese
“Start. Don’t wait to feel ready as you will never quite feel ready so just take the leap. Stay on top of your tax income and expenses every month. Don’t wait until D-day to go through it all and save a portion of your earnings for the tax bill each month! Do proper research into what can be expensed and what can’t. It helps so much!.” – Binita Shah & Emma Creese
Today we feature Binita Shah & Emma Creese, the founder at The Social Media Tini. We hear their story in their own words, their successes, their challenges and their insights.
Let’s start by getting to know you. Can you please tell us a little bit about you and what you do?
Binny has run her own social media & marketing agency for 3 years after taking the leap to have a career change. Her clients are in the hospitality, travel, real estate, and finance sectors.
Running her agency for 3+ years, Emma has worked with international charities whose causes she is incredibly passionate about, national chains full of personality, and helped passionate small businesses to reach their target audiences.
Together they run masterclasses packed full of genuine advice teaching businesses and influencers how to supercharge their channels strategically.
A great introduction and start to this interview. Can you please tell us, how did you start, from what age, and what made you decide to change direction and start?
This year, in between lockdowns, we suddenly had a lightbulb moment to combine our expertise and knowledge and found a business together to offer social media training to small businesses to help navigate through these turbulent times.
Thank you for that insight. So can you tell us…What does your business do and where is your company based?
We are London-based though with the power of Zoom we have been able to deliver our training to attendees as far as Antigua, Canada and New Zealand! We offer training on various social media and digital marketing topics to help small businesses, PRs, Influencers navigate through turbulent times and make the most of their marketing tools.
What’s the story behind your success? What led to your aha moment? how did you get to where you are now?
The story behind our success has been our online personas and our own experience. Between us, we have 6+ years of full time social media agency experience – we have run accounts for international charities, Michelin-starred restaurants, national chains and passionate, award winning small businesses.
We’re also experienced bloggers/influencers who have worked on both sides of the PR fence with international brands and tourism boards.
Our aha moment actually happened whilst discussing how we were dealing with 2020 for our own clients and how we could put that experience to use to help others.
Technology has helped reach audiences way better than it had done in-person events as we have had global audiences turn up for our masterclasses. The option to offer a recording means that people can still secure a spot and watch it later if they can’t attend at the allocated time.
Thank you for sharing that. What’s been your life’s biggest lesson so far?
Our biggest lesson so far has been pricing correctly and fairly to be affordable yet be able to make a viable return. It has all been self-taught through experience. Our first challenge was actually a silver lining.
Initially, we had wanted to host a lunch and learn event but changes in government guidelines meant we couldn’t go ahead and so we re-strategised and looked at Zoom as an option, got an Eventbrite set up and it turned out to be better as we could keep our overheads low and reach a wider audience too! Win-win!
How much demand there was for our services! We would have definitely have both wished we did this earlier.
If you were to go back in time, what piece of advice would you give to your younger self?
The advice we would give our younger selves would be take that risk earlier and don’t get too comfortable. If you want to make a decent living you have to diversify your income streams and use your skills to their full potential.
When we both thought about starting our own businesses we faced a lot of negative opposition from friends and family. To overcome any financial worries we had both saved up a lot before taking the leap to have rainy day savings that would be a buffer.
The best thing to do is keep your eye on your goals and not get distracted. We have no regrets. We love being entrepreneurs. We can work from anywhere in the world, we can schedule our days to balance work life and chill time and we would recommend that anyone that is thinking about becoming an entrepreneur should just go for it!
We’re nearly halfway through our interview so it’s a great time to ask how does your business run. What three tools make your business run better?
3 tools that make our business run better are Zoom, to host our masterclasses, Eventbrite to help sell tickets, and Instagram to promote our business.
What do you know now that you wished you had known before?
How much demand there was for our services! We would have definitely had both wished we did this earlier.
What has been your greatest or proudest achievement or moment?
Being featured in Startups.co.uk and also our attendees messaging us saying how our advice has led to an improvement in their social media marketing strategy.
What future life goals do you want to achieve and why?
Bigger scale events, physical products, and being able to create an additional passive income stream
To finish our inspiring questions…” We believe that sharing inspiring words can inspire others.” If there was one positive thing you would say to someone to inspire and empower them what would it be and why?
Start. Don’t wait to feel ready as you will never quite feel ready so just take the leap. Stay on top of your tax income and expenses every month. Don’t wait until D-day to go through it all and save a portion of your earnings for the tax bill each month! Do proper research into what can be expensed and what can’t. It helps so much!
“Thank you it has been great learning more about your founder story and The Social Media Tini”
To learn more about The Social Media Tini Visit https://thesocialmediatini.com/
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