Episode Details

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Do you feel along or isolated in your agency leadership journey? Wonder how it feels to have people who 'get you' and understand the unique challenges of owning an agency? Today's featured guest faced numerous insecurities and challenges on her growth journey. Ultimately, the pivotal moment came when she joined a peer community, which encouraged her to adopt a new mindset and explore various solutions and strategies. Discover her unexpected journey into entrepreneurship and how the support of her peer community empowered her to confidently remove misaligned talent and pursue strategic partnerships, alleviating the burdens of ownership.

Andi Graham is the CEO and founder of Big Sea, a marketing agency that began its journey as a web development firm in 2005. She shares her unique educational background, her interest in the intersection of communication and behavior change, and discusses her self-taught journey into graphic design and how realizing her vision was bigger than her skills paved the way for starting to build a team and eventually starting an agency.

In this episode, we'll discuss:

• The role of community in embracing a different approach to agency challenges.

• Learning the importance of due diligence in an agency merger.

• Lessons on the high price of misaligned talent.

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Although Andi graduated with a bachelor's degree in Sociology, her true passion was advertising and understanding the connection between communication and behavior change. She also taught herself design and had fun creating menus for the pizza shop where she was working at the time.

Later on, in her first professional role, she got to dive into other marketing activities like starting the company's first email newsletter. To enhance her skills, she learned coding to implement more visual modifications than the newsletter platform could offer. Eventually, she started building websites and taking freelance clients and realized she had built something more lucrative than her full-time job.

When the time came to intentionally start growing her business, Andi knew her strengths are copywriting and project organization but lacked in design and web development skills. It was time to start hiring people with expertise in these areas to improve the quality of her services