How We Created A Free Facebook Group To Grow Our Agency

Kaila Piepkow

•

Published: July 13th, 2020

save

Kaila Piepkow

Founder, Dox Design

$20K

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Dox Design

dox.design

from Ann Arbor, MI, USA

started January 2018

$20,000

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Discover what tools Kaila recommends to grow your business!

Discover what books Kaila recommends to grow your business!

Want more updates on Dox Design? Check out these stories:

1. How I Turned My Passion For Puppers Into A Thriving Design Agency (2019) ➜

2. How We Added A New Branding Package To Our Business (2021) ➜

This is a follow up story for Dox Design. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published almost 5 years ago, check it out here.

Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.

Hey, Fur Friends! Kaila here—the crazy dog lady behind Dox Design. I’m a proud fur mama to three dachshunds, wife to my smarty-pants husband and your fellow small-business owner and entrepreneur.

After taking my first few years out of college in the traditional agency route, I felt restless… like my cup wasn’t being filled. I had a vision, and I knew the kind of clientele I wanted to serve. I wanted to take my two favorite things—dogs and design—and create something that nobody had done before. Something big, bold, and most importantly, drool-worthy. And so, Dox Design was born!

Today, I’m proud to lead my fearless team on a mission to create strong, compelling brands that flaunt our clients’ stand-out qualities in fun and daring ways.

Together, we work seamlessly to create what we like to call “drool-worthy” brands and design for people just like you: the doers, the dreamers, and the dog-obsessed. Since launching we have grown our team to 2 designers and 1 copywriter and have helped over 70 small businesses with their brand identity shine through #droolworthy design.

how-we-created-a-free-facebook-group-to-improve-marketing-and-sales

Tell us about what you’ve been up to! Has the business been growing?

Since we last chatted, Dox Design is now my full-time gig! We’ve now been in business for three years and have grown our team to three very talented designers, a copywriter, and a customer service rep. Through lots of hard work, we’ve been able to gain more clarity around our product offer and sales process to help bring in a consistent flow of clients from month to month. Instead of being another do-it-all design firm, we’ve focused our services on specifically branding and packaging design and have established ourselves as experts in that space.

When you’re first starting out, try a few platforms, and spend your time and energy on the one that’s gaining the most traction and, more importantly, helping you land the most leads.

The newest and best thing we have done for our business in terms of marketing and sales is creating our Free Facebook Group, which you can find here . In our group, we host monthly brand training for small businesses and provide monthly social media freebie packs.

It’s been a fabulous community to grow and a consistent place for us to get leads for our branding spots we open every month. Having our group at the top of our sales funnel provides an opportunity for our new community members to engage with our team with quick branding questions, allowing us to spark a larger conversation around the importance of branding for growth in your business!

With these conversations happening directly with our team every day, we’re able to successfully vet qualified leads and get the ball rolling with the small businesses that need our help most in a quicker time frame. The results have us booking our clients months in advance!

Our biggest change was the mindset aspect of the business. When we first started, we would wait for leads to come to us—but then we quickly realized we had to put ourselves out there as experts and create a community to get the leads coming in!

What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?

Our two biggest lessons have been mindset and teamwork!

When you’re first starting out as an entrepreneur, it often feels like you have to say YES to every opportunity. But if the opportunity isn’t helping your business, it’s really just wasting your time. We quickly learned that not all clients and opportunities are for us and that saying no is okay! When you say no, it usually opens up time for better opportunities and clients that are more of a true fit for you and your business.

The second business lesson had to do with scaling. Once we got to the point where we were adding team members, I had to do a major brain dump of our processes and put it on paper. Working together as a team has been a huge learning curve but overall has made our business stronger and allowed us to serve more small businesses with their branding and design.

What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?

Over the next five years, we hope to grow our Facebook Community to 5K+ and to continue serving small businesses with all things designs. To get the ball rolling on this goal, we recently launched an online course as a way to fill the gap between small businesses just starting out who aren’t ready to invest in their entire brand.

We plan to continue growing our team to serve more clients with their branding every year while still building up our digital product suite to serve clients and small businesses in their first years of business. We have an online store in the works as well as more courses and templates, too!

Have you read any good books in the last year?

Most of the books I read are fiction and aren’t business-related; however, we do listen to a TON of business podcasts.

The one I’ve found to be the most helpful is the Gimlet Startup. This podcast offers an inside scoop of a larger business and their founder, and also validates that everyone stumbles through the beginning stages of owning their own business.

Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?

Focus on one platform at a time! It can be very easy to be distracted by ALL THE THINGS and to spread yourself thin trying to keep up with an email list, Facebook, Instagram, etc.

When you’re first starting out, try a few platforms, and spend your time and energy on the one that’s gaining the most traction and, more importantly, helping you land the most leads. Then, focus on growing one platform at a time. If you aren’t putting 100% into a platform that’s already proven to bring you success, then you’re leaving leads on the table!

Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?

We’re always looking for talented creatives to add to our team. If you’re a branding expert, website designer, Shopify expert, or illustrator, reach out with your portfolio and resumé!