It’s our business-versary!
June 1st, 2024 marks six years in business for us at Email Mavens, and man, have things changed significantly since Erica started this thing back in 2018. In today’s episode, we’re sharing six key lessons from six years in business. You can learn from Erica’s mistakes or leapfrog straight to some winning strategies when you read all the way to the end.
If you’re new here, welcome to the Email Mavens blog! This is the place for winery owners and marketing professionals who want to sell more wine online by sending better email campaigns.
When our founder and CEO Erica Walter, started this business, she was four months into her fourth pregnancy. She wanted freedom, she wanted to make an impact, and financially, she just wanted to replace the $72,000 a year she was making in her day job for a wine email marketing agency. Yeah, she was working at a wine email marketing agency, and now it’s 2024. Things have changed: That fourth pregnancy is about to go to kindergarten. She had a surprise fifth pregnancy between then and now, and that stubborn little vasectomy dodger is two-years-old. Now Erica get’s to pay people salaries and employs five people. What? That’s banana pants!
Just like a barely showing pregnancy can turn into a stubborn about-to-go-to-kindergartener in just six years, our baby businesses can transform into something wonderful and totally unexpected in six years.
The first lesson from being in business for six years, is…
1. It often doesn’t turn out like you expected, and that’s MORE than okay.
Erica did not set out to be in the winery email marketing niche. In fact, the day job that she left was doing email marketing for wineries. But by going into this business and getting started, Erica learned all kinds of things that she wouldn’t have known any other way than by starting. She learned what she was really good at. She learned where she could make the biggest impact, and funny enough, she ended up coming full circle all the way back to email marketing for wineries.
In another six years, who knows what kind of impact we could be making? But we’re open to that evolving and changing as long as we’re continuing to serve our bigger purpose of helping small businesses be successful.
2. Yes, AND.
The next lesson we have learned in six years of business is one that Erica originally learned in improv. (Yeah, she was totally into performing arts.) That lesson is “yes and.”
When Erica was just getting started, she said yes to pretty much everything, and by seeing and seizing opportunities and possibilities, she was able to learn an enormous amount. So that’s the yes part.
But the “and” part is important too. Don’t just blindly say yes to possibilities without contributing your own unique spin and finding ways to add even more value. This is how hilarious skits happen on SNL, and it’s how brilliant collaborations happen in business.
3. Just because you can do everything, doesn’t mean you should.
Have you ever thought this to yourself: If only I could do every job in this business, things would be going right.
Or, how about this one: If you want it done right, you got to do it yourself.
When Erica was just getting started, she had to do all of the things because she didn’t have any startup capital and she was committed to making her small business succeed. But she says, she also wanted to do all of the things because, “I lacked the self-confidence in my ability to teach and inspire others and because of an ill-informed and sort of self-important desire to be in control.”
Taking not one but two maternity leaves during the email marketing Super Bowl sprint (that is Q4 btw), taught her that not only can she not do everything, but she should not do everything.
Erica says,
“I am not even the best person to do many of the things in my business. I am so grateful to my freelance friends and to the side hustlers and contractors that I’ve been able to give meaningful work to over the course of the last six years that have helped me grow and scale this business to what it is today. I am also forever indebted to the mentors and peers who’ve given me inspiration and guidance along the way.”
4. Done is better than perfect.
We are committed to excellence in the work that we do, and we pride ourselves on not just the quantity but the quality of the efforts that we put in here at Email Mavens. But there’s a dangerous trap that many high performers and high achievers can get sucked into, and it’s perfectionism.
Since starting this business, we’ve created products, trainings, and systems that are far from perfect, but they’re out there. They’re in the world. We’ve given them to people so that they can use them. We’re getting feedback on how they’re working for people. If we didn’t put things out there that were not quite perfect, we would never actually get the inputs necessary to get them closer to perfect.
We are learning that the shorter we can make the gap from idea to launch, the sooner we can get the feedback that’s necessary for us to iterate and optimize. Done really is better than perfect.
5. Boundaries create freedom.
When your office is your bedroom and you set your work schedule, you could literally be working 100% of the time. Ew.
In the early years of this business, Erica’s work seeped into every corner of her life, from early morning copywriting sessions to midnight blog post scheduling.
One of the primary motivators when she started this business was freedom, but she had created a business that chained her to her work almost 24/7.
Then she invested in a program called the Clockwork Accelerator that was created by Mike Michalowicz, who’s a business author, and Adrienne Dorison. Over the course of working with this program and going through the trainings that they shared, Erica started building a business that could run without her. She created systems and processes that were replicable for others to do. She learned how to delegate and inspire action from the people who worked in our team. Shoot, she didn’t even have a team when she started, and she created a team because of this program. She learned to clarify who we serve and how—a boundary in and of itself. And she created boundaries on her time by taking totally unplugged vacations from work for the first time in her career. And now Erica works four days a week. She has taken four weeks of totally unplugged vacations (not consecutive), and this is the kicker—we grew our business by 150%.
Erica worked less, we grew more.
Boundaries may sound restrictive, but they are actually liberating. The business that we have today is limitless because of boundaries, not despite them. How freaking cool is that?
6. Starting might not be the best decision you ever made, but it could make the rest of your best decisions even better.
Starting a business wasn’t the best decision Erica ever made, but it does make the two best decisions she ever made even better.
The BEST decision Erica ever made was the decision to marry her husband who she affectionately calls, Mr. Whiskers. Right on its heels was the decision to have a family, and they have five incredible human beings to show for it. Being a wife and a mom are Erica’s top priorities, and she is so glad that she started her own business so that she could create a life with her husband and kids that many traditional workplace cultures simply couldn’t accommodate.
Taking that one step further, creating a workplace culture for herself that she had craved before she started her own business, motivates and challenges her to replicate that workplace culture for everybody who comes into the Email Mavens ecosystem, from employees to contractors, so that they’re given meaningful work that helps them create freedom, impact, and contribution.
You want to know something cool? Erica changed the world when she married her husband. She changed the world again when she had each of her five kids, and she has the opportunity to change the world every single day in this business by creating jobs for awesome humans and profits for small wineries.
Wondering how each of these lessons can help your winery sell more wine online?
Great news!
Each of these lessons can be applied to your email marketing program.
1. It often doesn’t turn out quite like you expected, and that’s more than okay.
Let’s say an A/B test hypothesis that you have is totally disproven. What can you do with what you know now? You might discover something that’s totally brand new for your winery—an entire new avenue for how you market and sell your wines.
2. Yes, AND.
Take inspiration from other winery campaigns or totally different niches, then add your winery’s unique spin to create an email marketing campaign baby that could never have existed without the two of you.
3. Just because you can do it all yourself doesn’t mean that you should.
If email marketing is a headache that you’d love to outsource, you could get in touch with the Email Mavens, and we would love to be the Tylenol for all of those aches and pains.
4. Done is better than perfect.
Don’t send sloppy email campaigns, but do get something with value at its center out into the world.
Don’t let perfectionism hold you back from pressing send on something that could help you create a deeper connection with your subscribers.
5. Boundaries create freedom.
The next time you have to create an email campaign, give yourself half the amount of time. Instead of four hours, give yourself two hours to create and schedule your email campaign, and then see what you can do with the new two hours you just freed up for yourself.
6. Starting might not be the best decision you ever made, but it could make the rest of your best decisions even better.
We are talking about starting your email marketing campaigns, and right now, the opportunities for creating an even better business because you’re sending emails are limitless: Try passive income, better customer relationships—the list goes on.
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We are so proud to have reached the six year mark. We’ve grown and evolved, and it’s been a delight to share just a little bit of that with you today in these six lessons learned from six years in business.
Make sure that you sign up for the Email Party in the footer to get stick around as we watch the next six years unfold.
And until next week, keep pressing send on your next best email.
