Vicky Wu - Marketing Guru

Vicky Wu is a Marketing Guru starting a new business using a full team of freelancers to offer all types of marketing and design services to small business and entrepreneurs. We have conducted an interview with her about his great idea.

Which are your top bestseller marketing and design services?

Our Marketing Bootcamp is currently our top-selling service. While it’s called a bootcamp, it provides a completely individualized approach as a coaching and mentoring program.

We tightly limit the number of participants in this bootcamp to insure that each person receives individual attention and service. Each bootcamp participant receives 12 total one-on-one coaching/mentoring sessions which revolve directly around the goals they want to achieve and obstacles they may be facing in their business. We offer a choice of live (if geography permits), video chat or phone coaching sessions for six months, plus a whole selection of other services including a weekly webinar training call for the exclusive group, email support, and exclusive access to our private Facebook coaching group.

Participants also receive a great selection of bonuses, including a permanent discount on our freelance design services, access to all of our online training videos, registration for our 2-day Guru Marketing retreat, and discount to all other live training programs offered.

Which kind of small businesses and entrepreneurs benefit most from your services?

Our services are broken down into three level which benefit three different types of entrepreneurs:

Do it yourself – this is for the entrepreneurs who want to do the marketing, graphic or social media work themselves, have the time and desire, but may not have all of the technical skill. Our training programs help them learn the skills they need to know without having to make all of the mistakes that we learned from over the years.

Do it with help – this is for businesses that have someone on staff, maybe the owner or another employee, who can do the work (either they already know some of the technical skills or they’ve gone through our training) but need help with strategy and direction to implement it in the manner most strategic for their business to realize the greatest return on investment. This includes our marketing coaching programs, Marketing Bootcamp, business coaching, and the “Hire a CMO” program.

Have it done for you – this is for the business that wants to outsource some of their graphic design, social media, and other marketing pieces. The problem with finding your own freelancers is that you often have to go to multiple places to have the differing pieces accomplished, and this can result in a lack of brand consistency, which is very bad for a business. We have a whole team of freelancers on call so that you can have all of your needs met in one place, and provide an account manager who acts as your Marketing Director or Art Director to oversee it all and make sure your brand messaging and design is consistent.

How does renting a 'Marketing Director' differs and is a 'better deal'?

What we see with entrepreneurs, start ups and small businesses, is that as they grow, they may get to the point where they hire a person who can focus partially on doing some of the marketing or design activities. But often these employees may not be at the level to develop strategy, and the business owner may not have experience in this high-level marketing as well. So they may be able to get the work done, but need more of the guidance on what work to be focusing on to be most efficient and provide the best return on investment. A lot of that is learned through years and years of experience and training that you would find in a Marketing Director or Chief Marketing Officer. But those are expensive – the median salary of a Marketing Director is $130,000. For a Chief Marketing Officer is $218,000.

You may find yourself at the point that you need someone to help focus your marketing work, but you can’t justify “buying” by hiring a full-time or even half-time director or CMO. We allow you to “rent” one and only pay for the time used, even if it is in small quantities.

Today’s economy is trending that direction when you look at things such as Uber – you can’t afford to hire a full-time driver but you can afford to hire one only when you need. Or even something like Task Rabbit – you can’t afford to hire a full-time personal assistant but you can afford to hire a person to go pick up your dry cleaning the one time you just don’t have time.

That freedom to ‘choose when to use’ fills a critical need for small business owners. Plus since helping small businesses is something we love to do, and working with a variety of businesses makes our knowledge base both very broad and deep, so it works for us and for the business.

What is your goal in 3-5 years? What do you hope to achieve with this specialty in your business?

I love helping other people learn new skills and can think of nothing more exciting than to help even more small business owners. My goal is that in that time we’ve coached several hundred more businesses to attain the goals and success that they thought beyond their dreams, and in the process built our client community to be a group of successful entrepreneurs.