Make Money Where You Make Money: Liz Beaudry

Episode 5, Tales of Misadventure with Nicole Donnelly

On the latest episode of Tales of Misadventure, Nicole and Liz Zurek-Beaudry of Envisions, and MDNA Cloud have a candid, hilarious conversation about disrupting the corporate ladder climb to start a business, finding joy integrating home and work lives, the misadventure of not doing market research, the importance of authenticity in your small business and branding, and so much more.

Nicole Donnelly

Hi, Liz. You are a friend and business partner, and it is such an honor to have you on my podcast and super fun.

Liz Zurek-Beaudry

Likewise. I'm so happy to be here with you.

Business Ownership Wasn’t Always the Plan

Nicole Donnelly

You have built an amazing business Envision, a branding and culture organization that helps companies differentiate themselves in a way that aligns with who they are and their vision, both internally and externally. You also own MDNA Cloud, a proprietary software that measures an organization, an organization's culture. 
This data helps companies identify what makes them unique and build a strong brand culture.

And I love this. I've seen it in action with the clients that we've worked on together. This service is such a differentiator from a lot of other branding companies because you really take the time to go deep and really focus on the employee experience and the culture and all that goes into that. 


I understand you purchased Envision. Did you always wanna be a business owner when you were a young girl, like, or did this kind of come to you organically? 


Liz Zurek-Beaudry

I had no intention of being a business owner and entrepreneur. When I graduated from college with a business major and an art minor, I was on the corporate track. My plan at 21 and a half was to become the CMO or senior VP within six months.

Nicole Donnelly

You've always been super ambitious, even straight outta college. You were in it to win it.

Yeah.  


Liz Zurek-Beaudry

Yeah. We all know how unrealistic that was. I ended up going through a really interesting review at my job. I was told
 have very limited abilities with people, my communication skills were lacking, and there was really no future for me at this company. Literally, two or three days later, I was escorted into HR and escorted out.


You’re kidding. I’m shocked.

Liz Zurek-Beaudry

Don't let anyone define who you are. Do the work.

Most people have the same reaction but I tell people, don't let anyone define who you are. Do the work. 
I clearly had some work to do, but I wasn’t going to let that moment define me. Now, I own a branding and communications firm. It forced me to do some digging and just introspection.

Some friends of mine were serial entrepreneurs who owned several small businesses. One of the businesses was a bus and limo company that contracted with schools. I was the breadwinner. My husband was going to aviation school and I needed a job. We needed the money and I told myself that I would for their business and in a year or two, I'm gonna go back to my CMO plans.

I got my bus license and I drove a bus route.

Nicole Donnelly

I can see you, wheel behind the wheel. Oh my gosh.  


Liz Zurek-Beaudry

They had me doing everything, you know, running their limo company, taking phone calls, and performing customer service duties. I was cleaning puke out of limos at one in the morning and then running payroll. It was a very humbling experience, but it also gave me a front-row seat to their entrepreneurial lives. 
And I fell in love. 

Discovering the Love of Entrepreneurship

Nicole Donnelly

What did you love about it?

Liz Zurek-Beaudry

They lived and worked out of their home and they had this beautiful, messy life where life and business and work and family just kind of all comes together. My experience had been getting up at 4:00 AM, doing the grind and hustle to get my butt to corporate America, slogging it out for 10 hours, then driving home, making dinner, and slogging it again. Even though I was doing all these really hard things, hard tasks, I was learning the beauty of this integration of work and home life. I discovered entrepreneurship and you know, to this day I understand payroll. 


Nicole Donnelly

I love that word integration. People talk about work-life balance as if it's like these two separate things, but this idea of integrating both of them into your life is so freeing. It takes the pressure off. I got some great advice from an executive coach - talk to your family about your business, what you’re doing, and bring them into it. Let them be part of your world.

The Boss Move that Launched an Entrepreneurial Journey

Liz Zurek-Beaudry

It’s different for everyone. I think the question we need to ask is to what level of integration do I wanna go? What I saw with this couple was complete integration and I loved it. So much so that the husband actually pulled me aside and told me “you can go do this marketing work on your own.”

So I worked for them during the day and I would work on my business from six to midnight. I called Beaudry Creative. When I launched, I got several large clients from being me, networking, and helping people. It eventually led me to write this crazy letter, on my own letterhead, and mail it to the owner of Envision, this amazing company who I thought could benefit from a contractor with my skills.

I thought I would never hear from her but then she sent me an email asking if could meet over coffee. She brought me on as a contractor and I was doing a lot of creative work, and account management. Within a couple of months, we were discussing a partnership that eventually turned into a discussion about me just purchasing the company. I was 25, 26.

Nicole Donnelly

Gosh, that's amazing. Then you ended up purchasing MDNA later, correct? So you've purchased multiple businesses,  


Liz Zurek-Beaudry

I kind of forget about that and there’s been a lot of trial and error. 

A Niche without Market Research is Just A Costly Business Blunder

Nicole Donnelly

I think it so interesting how you came to be an entrepreneur. I'm so inspired by that. I'm sure that you've had plenty of business blunders, we all do. Do you have a story of one in particular blunder and what did you learn?

Liz Zurek-Beaudry

I'd never talked to a law firm - this is true vulnerability here. 

I could talk forever on blunders but one kind of stands out. I had this bright idea that I wanna sell a product because a product wouldn’t be tied to me, writing, designing or even managing. So I decided that we were gonna do note cards.

We weren't just gonna do note cards. We were gonna do letterpress, note cards for law firms. I was so proud of myself. I'm like, I've picked a niche. I have picked a product. I am on my way. There were about five employees at the time that included a very talented designer on my team. I said, let's do it!  This was after I bought Envision and had been running it for a year or two.

The team developed a website, designed this beautiful newsletter, and even had business cards printed. So we designed these holiday cards for law firms. 
Mind you, I'd never talked to a law firm - this is true vulnerability here.  


What was I thinking? Do law firms even wanna send a holiday would have been a really helpful question to ask.

Nicole Donnelly

Even just talking to one law firm.

Liz Zurek-Beaudry


Who cares what they need? They're gonna need that. They're gonna want this. When they see this amazing design coming off the presses. Between printing and designing, I had spent about $15 to $20,000  


Nicole Donnelly

If you build it, they will come. Isn't that like the worst phrase ever?

Liz Zurek-Beaudry


I went all in hundred and 25%. I ran the first batch and then I call my first law firm. I called five or 10 law firms and they just weren't interested. They were sending e-newsletters and had forgone sending out physical cars. I start to get this sense that I had developed this great product, but there was no need.

A lovely, lovely retail business owner allowed me to put these cards up for sale in bunches of 10 for 10 cents or  
something crazy. And those didn't even sell.

Nicole Donnelly

What a way to be scrappy and try to be resourceful about it. Right?

Make Money Where You Make Money


Liz Zurek-Beaudry


Make moneky where you make money.

Oh my gosh. I even tried to offload them on a friend who had a very successful Etsy store but even she couldn’t sell them. It was so bad. I didn’t sell one card. I learned to stay in my lane and make peace with this realization.

Envision was finding success by doing service-based branding and design. Companies were and still are paying top dollar for this service. There are, obviously, times for businesses to pivot but I just really learned a lot about just making money where you're making money.
 Build on what you’re good at and stay in your lane.

Nicole Donnelly


That's such good advice. I think as business owners, we are always trying to make sure we’re being relevant. Personally, I am always asking, am I really offering the services that are gonna be the future of marketing? I put a lot of pressure on myself to make sure I'm being innovative and creative and addressing all of that. But you're right.

The more you stick to the core services of what you do and you just go with it, you just gonna get better and more efficient at it. 
This is where you're gonna really continue to position yourself as an expert. If you try to spread yourself out in tackling too much at one time or pivoting too frequently, you’re setting yourself up for failure.

The other thing about that story is you witnessed the negative impact of not doing any market research first to see if there was actually a need for your product or service. I see this all the time with clients - they wanna jump right to the tactics. They wanna jump right into doing social media and run Facebook ads before taking the time to understand who their customer is. 

Recognize the Sunk Cost Red Flag


Liz Zurek-Beaudry


When you’re going down this route, on a project, you have hope that it’s gonna get better as soon as your the corner. I'm just gonna put another X number of dollars into it and then I’m going to find success. I’ve fallen into the Sunk Cost trap a few times. As a leader, you have to have the courage to say stop the presses, we’re stopping.

There's such a belief or culture in society that revolves around just grind, hustle, and stick with it. I’m not stopping until I make 99 calls. There is a time when you just can't give up. I think that never-give-up mentality is one of the reasons I am in business. 
But I would've probably stopped the process a lot sooner than trying to get my friend to sell on Etsy.

Nicole Donnelly


That Sunk Cost thing is so huge. Sometimes you have to apply this concept to employee, partnerships, and vendor relationships. I find myself missing the red flags of a bad hire or vendor relationship. I believe that if I just give them feedback, it'll get better. And then Absolutely it doesn't get better. And you can usually identify those red flags pretty early in the partnership or in the relationship, you know? 


Liz Zurek-Beaudry


Absolutely. I'm the same way. 


Nicole Donnelly


I tend to be very trusting by nature.


Liz Zurek-Beaudry


Our brain starts to reason and say, well, that can't really be true. 


Nicole Donnelly


Or we just give people the benefit of the doubt, you know? You're running a business and you have to be fierce about it. 

Small Business Marketing Advice. Know Your Goals. Be Authentic.

Let's shift gears a little bit. When it comes to marketing your own business, what are some of the things that have worked and haven’t worked? If you were to advise someone with a small business trying to market themselves, what would you advise them to do? 



Liz Zurek-Beaudry


You do not have to do everything in order to be successful.

First, I've tried everything: cold calling, Facebook, lead generation, newsletters, etc. At the end of the day, what works for me, personally, is relationship building and referrals. I am just authentically being me on social media. 


I gravitate more toward Facebook than LinkedIn. So my philosophy, from early on, with Facebook was I'm just gonna be me. I'm gonna have friends that are clients and vendors co and if I'm posting something that a client shouldn’t see, then I shouldn't be posting. I've actually gotten some business just doing that.

The biggest thing I tell clients all the time is something you shared with me. it was so simple, but it was so powerful. You asked me, “what are your goals?” Know your purpose, know where you're moving. So I tell clients to choose one or two marketing focuses.. 


You do not have to do everything in order to be successful.

Nicole Donnelly

Agreed.


Liz Zurek-Beaudry


What does the business culture tell us? Get a lot of followers on social media, have this massive email list, and then you'll build your business. It's simply not true. If your a small to midsize business, let's start with your vision. Your why. Why are you doing this? What are your goalsand how can we use them to build your brand culture. It may be just focus on LinkedIn for the next 18 months.

Nicole Donnelly

I love that so much. I've experienced that myself. You know, really try to understand your goal - knowing your goals first and foremost will help you determine how much you should be investing, what channels you should target, and who you're reaching.

So that's really great advice. Marketing is becoming so much more complex over time. There are so many more new channels that are being implemented and so it can be really overwhelming for small businesses to navigate that. Identifying who your target audience is and focusing on the channels they are in is critical.

I got really intentional about LinkedIn last year and was determined to start building relationships with potential clients. Up to that point, I hadn’t done a podcast, live event, or anything else but I decided that I wanted to be a guest on one live event, sharing what I had learned and what I know.

And I did it.

I can't even count how many live events I did last year. Now I'm doing this podcast and it all came from the relationships that I built. The shift happen when I become intentional with networking on LinkedIn. It was terrifying. You just have to do it scared.


Liz Zurek-Beaudry


I do have to say, you are one of my favorite people to follow on LinkedIn because you just have this beautiful way of integrating heart into the content. 
From my perspective, like from a brand perspective, you have done so well on LinkedIn and it started with your goals, right? So how many clients do I wanna have? where are they hanging out? Then how do I bring my authentic self to the table and just show up there?

Nicole Donnelly

I think that's gonna become even more important for brands in the future. They need to show their authenticity, whatever that is, in order for them to really resonate and connect with buyers,  



Liz Zurek-Beaudry


And people are smart. You know, they can kind of cut through when there's BS in socials. People's BS meter is higher than ever and it should be.

Nicole Donnelly 


Wonderful. Thank you so much for being on the show, Liz. It's such an honor. 
I wish we could just talk all day.


Liz Zurek-Beaudry
  


Me too. 
Thank you! This has been so much fun.

Connect with Liz on Facebook at www.facebook.com/lzurekbeaudry. Discover how Envision can help build your brand with your culture at www.thinkenvision.com.

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