Well hello there, Catherine Langman here, and welcome back to the Productpreneur Success Podcast.
This week on the show, I’m joined by a guest Felicia Rusher, owner of ecommerce boutique I Still Call Australia Home.
Felicia’s business specialises in Australian gifts, from tim tams and twisties to beautiful and unique gifts and souvenirs that celebrate Australia.
During our conversation, Felicia and I talked about how she got started, the sorts of marketing and strategies that worked and didn’t work to help get the business off the ground. And we also talked about how she had to adapt her business this year in 2020, to respond to the changing market place since Covid-19.
And then we take a deep dive into her 2020 Christmas campaign, which she actually launched in July this year and is still rolling out.
Often times, I find people approach marketing as in they think of Facebook ads or Emails or social media content, and they treat them all completely separately.
Whereas what you want to do is think about the creative concept or idea for your campaign first and then think about how you can communicate that concept to your audience through those different channels.
Felicia has been able to do such a brilliant job with this campaign and I really want you to listen to how she’s gone about it so that you can learn from her and take the ideas into your own business.
And let me tell you, this approach to your marketing campaigns really, really works! Despite the fact that Felicia lost a big portion of her market with Covid, thanks to tourism and international business travel effectively grinding to a halt, she is still 50% up in her business compared to this time last year, and she’s still got the busiest time of her Christmas sales still to come!
So without further ado, let me welcome Felicia to the show.
Catherine:
So I’m really excited to welcome Felicia Rusher from I Still Call Australia Home onto the show. Welcome, Felicia.
Felicia Rusher:
Hi Catherine. Thank you. Thank you for having me on your show.
Catherine:
Super exciting to have you here and we’re going to talk all things marketing campaigns, but before we get into some of the specifics of all of that, I’d love for you to just introduce your business and maybe just talk a little bit about your idea for getting into this business and the inspiration for getting started.
Felicia Rusher:
Sure. So we love sparking joy and delight by selling a wide range of gifts that celebrate the wild splendor of Australia. So this basically includes sending care packages of Tim Tams, Twisties, Caramellos to homesick Aussies in New York, LA and London, for example, as well as creating hampers. So the likes of the prime minister and the head of the Australian army to give to their visiting VIP’s. So there’s a part of our business where we basically cater to that market and sell Tim Tams.
Catherine:
I love that bit.
Felicia Rusher:
And then we also sell a wide range of individual gifts for those who just love Australian themed items, which I know is a big trend right now, but we’ve been doing that for a while now. Things like Christmas baubles, jigsaw puzzles, reusable shopping bags, hand creams, mugs, things like that. As long as they basically have a koala or a kangaroo or a banksia on them and are high quality standard gifts, we’ll sell it.
Catherine:
So they’re really beautiful gifts. They’re not your tacky touristy gadgets.
Felicia Rusher:
Yes. We try hard to do that. I basically was a customer of my business that didn’t exist probably 10 years ago when I was overseas traveling. So I used to work with CEOs and board members of quite large international organizations. And I always wanted to give them a really nice gift in Australia and struggled, found it very difficult. So that was really how I got the idea and started my business.
Catherine:
So you jumped ship from big corporate land into your own startup.
Felicia Rusher:
Yes, I did. Like many people I think.
Catherine:
How long ago was that?
Felicia Rusher:
Five years ago.
Catherine:
Fantastic. I love it. So, five years ago, you had this idea to start your business and you decided to quit that corporate career, or did you quit the corporate career straight away or how did you go about making that transition?
Felicia Rusher:
Well, I ended up quitting my actual full-time job at a management consultancy and that same day that was the idea to start my business and the same day I did that, my biggest client offered me a job, which I didn’t want, which I turned down. I was like, no, I’ve always wanted my own business. I want to do that. But they made me such a good offer, I did that. Did do consulting for them for a while, which was good to build up cash flow for the business, basically and I’m grateful for that. After a year or so, what ended up happening was I was still working full-time and the business hadn’t started, so I finished up with that and just decided to go cold turkey and finish working and start a business.
Catherine:
That’s amazing. What were the next steps that you took to really get the business off the ground?
Felicia Rusher:
Well, I knew that I wanted an online product business and I wanted to cater to that market. So I created hampers, I started just selling hampers. And my idea was to create really beautiful gift boxes that had lovely banksias and cicadas and butterflies on them that really catered to that corporate level market. So I spent a lot of time just doing illustrations and finding the right supplier who could help me create my first beautiful product, and it took off from there. I got my website, like we all do, and realized very quickly I had a market and was attracting a market that I could sell a lot of things to, which is how I expanded the business by bringing on… Being a stockist to lots of wholesalers of the products that I thought would suit to the market I was attracting.
Catherine:
What I definitely see happen quite often with new businesses like that, they start with products they think are going to take off and sometimes it’s a win and sometimes it’s a miss. What was that like for you?
Felicia Rusher:
Definitely. I have to admit it was very painful because at first, I sold to everywhere through a lot of painful risks and learning or ironing out how to sell to six countries internationally. And also, I started with these great ideas and it would be these high end gourmet products I put in these hampers. What I was hearing from my customers a lot was, we just want Tim Tams. For about a year or so I didn’t sell Tim Tams in my hampers, which was a big mistake. Now, our homesick Aussie care package just has Tim Tams, Caramellos, Milo, Twisties in it, is our best-selling hamper for that market. I thought I was seeing a bit of, not a snob, but I was trying to cater for a market that didn’t really listen to what they wanted. So definitely, it’s been important to keep your ears open and when customers give you feedback to respond.
Catherine:
I guess at the time, you probably would have felt a little disappointed they didn’t want to go for everything nice, high end gifts to go with the beautiful boxes.
Felicia Rusher:
Yes. But I also looked at my bank balance and I thought, well, if that’s what they want, I will sell them.
Catherine:
I love it. Once you got your website and you got your product range off the ground, what were the strategies that you initially employed to start growing the business?
Felicia Rusher:
Well, I thought because I didn’t have a background in marketing or sales, I would hire an agency who knew that digital marketing better than I did. So I was at first, surprised that I had a beautiful website and a beautiful product, and no one was coming to it because I think many of us go through that, face the realization.
Catherine:
It’s a well trodden pathway, that one.
Felicia Rusher:
So I did what a lot of people do. I had actually saved up quite a lot of money, and I spent a lot of that within a couple of months on an agency to do my Facebook ads and Google ads and mind my Facebook page. This was a really big mistake for me because, well, for a number of reasons. I didn’t actually understand digital marketing at all so I didn’t understand what I needed. So I really put the, if you want to call it blame, I put it firmly on my shoulders that I gave someone a lot of money without really understanding what I was asking them to do.
Felicia Rusher:
People in Silicon Valley say, failing fast is a great thing, but when you’re actually spending your own life savings, failing fast is not necessarily helpful to paying the bills. So it didn’t feel really good. And I didn’t get a lot of sales and had very unfocused, because I hadn’t developed a brand strategy or a vision or guidelines for content or any of that. I didn’t have any of that. And it really meant that I didn’t get much back for spending a lot of money externally. So I stumbled around… sorry?
Catherine:
Super frustrating. That happened to me as well in my first business. And I thought, I really need someone to do SEO, and I thought it was really tricky and techie and so, I didn’t research it or learn it at the time. Got taken for a massive big ride.
Felicia Rusher:
It’s frustrating isn’t it.
Catherine:
It is.
Felicia Rusher:
I think most people who start an E-commerce business go through some form of that.
Catherine:
Sadly.
Felicia Rusher:
Super frustrating. So I fumbled about for a long time and I wasn’t actually very good at Facebook, and I’m still not good at Instagram either. First I realized, I was working a long time trying to tweak my website to make more people buy, spent a lot of wasted time doing that. Then I realized my real problem was I just wasn’t getting enough people to my website.
Catherine:
Needed more visitors.
Felicia Rusher:
So I realized that, and then I was thinking, how can I get more traffic to my website? And for me, someone said, or I read something somewhere that said, you can get about 50% of people searching for something in Google will click on one of the first three organic listings, three listings. And I thought, that’s great. It was like one of those aha moments, so I thought that’s all I have to do and I’ll be fine.
Felicia Rusher:
So probably, my background suited that type of activity. I think the best thing I did was I stopped trying to do all the things I was really bad at, which was Facebook and Instagram and social marketing for the time being. And I learned everything I could about getting up in those rankings and search engine optimization.
Felicia Rusher:
So I probably spent a solid six months just literally, just doing that and creating a heap of contents that attracted my ideal customer on Google. And I created spreadsheets where I was monitoring traffic every day and what pages they were coming to and what content I was creating online that worked. And I just kept every day learning more and more and more about that and implementing it with the goal to increase traffic to my site. That worked really well and I’m very grateful because it really got my business off the ground at a very low cost, obviously, a high cost if you consider the time I spent to do it.
Catherine:
So you were doing the work, putting the hours in and learning how it worked and all of that implementation.
Felicia Rusher:
So that worked really well. And I think for me for that, it wasn’t just about learning the skill, it was really having confidence to work on your own strings because I had a lot of pressure from a lot of people saying, if you’re not on Instagram, you don’t have a business. If you’re not doing Facebook, you’ve got to do this, you’ve got to do that. You’ve got to be on LinkedIn. This worked well for you. And there were a lot of voices in my ear telling me what to do. I’m really pleased I just doubled down on one thing and focused on that before I looked at the other thing to do.
Catherine:
Such great advice. It’s so easy to get distracted by all these shiny objects, I guess.
Felicia Rusher:
And I got really frustrated by people who said, you’re going to be an overnight success if you just do this one thing. There seems to be a lot of that in digital marketing for some reason.
Catherine:
But unfinished projects get you nowhere, do they?
Felicia Rusher:
No.
Catherine:
You have to just put your head down and your bum up and just get some stuff done.
Felicia Rusher:
Digital progress goes a long way.
Catherine:
That’s a good way of putting it. So how long ago was that when you really knuckled down on the SEO side of things?
Felicia Rusher:
It was within the first year of my business. It’s probably about four or so years ago. And I really gave it a massive effort in six months and by massive, I mean, I was creating at least one blog a week, which I would spend 10 hours on each blog, as well as generally other things around the meta-tags and descriptions and things like that. So I was creating a lot of content for that time and I was motivated to do it because I could see what I was doing was working because I was tracking it. And then once that period was over, I slacked off as [inaudible 00:11:54]. I haven’t put that amount of effort into SEO since. And those blogs that I did four years ago are still some of my top performing blogs [crosstalk 00:12:04].
Catherine:
Right. So they still bring traffic. That’s fantastic.
Felicia Rusher:
Absolutely. So for me, it was a really good way to get my business to a point where I could afford to spend money on advertising and on training and on other things.
Catherine:
That’s so cool. When I look at businesses and people come to me, I try and break it down into different components. And one of the first things that any business needs, is an audience to sell to. You’ve got to have people coming to your website, otherwise nobody knows you exist. And definitely people take different ways, they go about building that audience in different ways. But this has obviously worked really well for you, and it’s still paying dividends. That effort you put in for six months, four years ago, and it’s still paying off now. So cool.
Felicia Rusher:
Yes. It’s amazing. I feel really lucky. It’s really great.
Catherine:
Another question that I was going to ask you, and you answered this a little bit already, but one or two strategies that you tried that didn’t go so well. Because I know a lot of people love learning from other people’s mistakes or not necessarily mistakes, but things that you tried that didn’t work out the way you wanted. Outsourcing at first was one, anything else you would care to share in that regard?
Felicia Rusher:
I think it’s really the whole trying to do everything at once, really is all I can say, because I dabbled in email marketing and I dabbled in Facebook ads and I dabbled in Instagram. And sometimes I still fall in the trap because if you went to my Instagram account, which I’m not going to do, because I don’t spend any time on it because I’m still building all these other channels. So I know it’s important and that’ll be great to do it, but I’m very much a slow and steady. I’ve just learned to trust my own personal style and other people will work differently to other people. It might work for them to outsource all these things or do them themselves and just keep going on all of them. I think the best thing that didn’t work well for me is listening to everyone who turned up every day and all these conflicting messages of what you had to do, that’s my biggest mistake.
Catherine:
Totally.
Felicia Rusher:
And I can’t tell you how many little trainings I’ve bought. Hundred dollars trainings on Instagram and Facebook and whatever over the years, besides your own, which is fantastic, that I’ve never actually looked at or I’ve looked at and half implemented. I might as well have just accepted the fact that I’m working on these other things and these other channels, and that’s okay.
Catherine:
I know when we worked together, you did really take on board the whole email marketing side of things. And maybe that wasn’t something that you focused on initially, but that did become something that you were more consistent with.
Felicia Rusher:
I love email marketing now, thanks to you. That really got me going on email marketing and now it’s probably 30% of my sales every month. I really focused on that a lot. So between those campaigns and [crosstalk 00:15:30].
Catherine:
Different promotions and stuff.
Felicia Rusher:
And this building give aways and things now just to cover…
Catherine:
I was just going to say, in some respects, it’s not that dissimilar to your efforts on the SEO, where you put that effort in and you’ve built up that cache of content that’s constantly bringing new people to you. And your email list is almost like that too, because you’re building up an asset and you’re always going to be able to make money from it.
Felicia Rusher:
Absolutely. It’s probably the best thing you taught me around email marketing, actually.
Catherine:
Appeal to the management consultant in you.
Felicia Rusher:
Yes, I think so.
Felicia Rusher:
I love it.
Catherine:
I wanted to talk a little bit about this year as we record this. This is October 2020 and we’ve all been living through probably the craziest year of our lifetimes. A year ago, your business was much more about all the amazing gifts that you would send overseas, but COVID changed things in a massive way. So do you want to touch on the impact that COVID had on you and what you’ve done? I know you pivoted in a very quick way and responded to the situation.
Felicia Rusher:
Or tried. I don’t know if it’s more a tweak than a pivot, but I certainly did have a panic over those, I think in March when COVID was first announced. I could see that the traffic dropped immediately on the site and it was a two week period that probably happened to everybody. Nobody was buying anything. I was very concerned. Your mind turns towards what do people want now and how can I provide that? I remember there was a week and also, without going to off-brand, that was really important to me that I didn’t just suddenly start [crosstalk 00:17:32].
Catherine:
Selling hand sanitizer
Felicia Rusher:
Selling hand sanitizer. I didn’t want to do that because it’s very inauthentic. And for me, business is a long game and you can’t just be so reactionary that you go off brand. So I realized, jigsaw puzzles was something if someone were locked down. So I must have rang around 50 places and I luckily found some jigsaws that were left in stock and I bought up big because I knew a lot of people would be after that product and there’s no point dribbling it in. And I know jigsaws sell for me, so I knew if it was a two week thing and it was all going to be over, like we hope, in a month, I’d still have products that I knew I could sell and was on brand for me. I wasn’t going to be left with a lot of stock that wasn’t saleable over time. And I also, having these SEO on search engine skills, I focused on linking for lockdown gifts for Australians.
Felicia Rusher:
I did that very quickly and created some bundles that would suit people in lockdown. And I made sure there were a lot of price points to my normal price points. I also realized in times of crisis, people don’t have confidence in spending larger amounts and some will likely be saying yes to something, if it’s a smaller, nicer thing.
Felicia Rusher:
So that’s probably the main two things that I did during that time and just created a world around that, so to speak, in terms of my website. Creating these just practical things, like creating a new menu bar items, not making people search for these things, making it very easy they’ll see it. Even if someone was on my site and they weren’t thinking about lockdown gifts, there was a lockdown gift menu bar item that would maybe make them think, I could send nana a gift box or [inaudible 00:19:11]
Catherine:
Which I did. I sent my gran a jigsaw puzzle and she loved it.
Felicia Rusher:
That’s great. Fantastic.
Catherine:
Exactly.
Felicia Rusher:
And we’re probably spending a lot more within Australia now. Lockdown to Victoria has been a big market. Obviously, it’s a lot for people and people have been in lockdown a little bit more there.
Catherine:
Totally. I was going to ask you if things are still different compared to this time past year, or is it still changed because of COVID? So it sounds like more domestic gifts.
Felicia Rusher:
I think I didn’t mention probably the biggest impact for us. We have definitely picked up on we’re selling boards. Over 50% up on sales this year, which is what we’ve consistently been doing every year, but probably, we have lost a massive market because of COVID, which is our corporate customers. We would get a lot of, for example, high-end luxury travel companies would regularly buy gifts off us as a welcome gift to an international VIP at the Shangri-La in Sydney, for example. So that whole market…
Catherine:
No travels and no tourists coming in.
Felicia Rusher:
Equally, a big part of our market is business people traveling overseas who want to take something nice who would like a nice [inaudible 00:20:34]. That market is a hundred percent gone and there’s a lot less international business. Another thing when international companies would get people into continents in the US or London or wherever, and that’s a gift giving opportunity when people are here and that helps our little business, which can be quite liquid with a large volume sales has gone. It’s just lucky that I have been in the E-commerce for a while now, and I know how to do marketing better than I did when I first started. So I’m really pushing a lot of effort into attracting more of the local markets.
Catherine:
Well, you’ve obviously been able to do that because if you’re still 50% up, despite losing a big target market, which I’m sure is just temporary.
Felicia Rusher:
That’s what I hope.
Catherine:
Totally. Part of this conversation that I’ve been really keen to have, which is to talk about your Christmas campaign. So something that everyone really needs to go and check out on the, I Still Call Australia Home website, which I will link to, is the Christmas stuff. It’s amazing. I know you put a huge amount of work into Christmas and really emphasizing an Australian Christmas, obviously. So can you talk a little bit about what Christmas is all about for you and for your business before we talk about your fun Christmas campaign?
Felicia Rusher:
Sure. Christmas has always been a big thing for me that I really love and I was overseas for many years and I just loved the cold Christmas with all of the wintry things, the snow and mulled wine, and those Christmas wintry things. It used to really frustrate me and still does that, in Australia for a long time growing up here, all we had is the wintry paradigm in our Christmas wrapping, in our Christmas gifting. And it seems to have changed this year, which is wonderful. And I’m really happy to see a lot of Australia in Christmas. I think it is a trend right now, which is great, but it frustrated me that that didn’t exist.
Felicia Rusher:
As well as loving Christmas myself, and being very passionate about all things Australian native, flowers and fauna and flora, animals and flowers, I really wanted to have that represented in my business as well. So I sourced product which was hard to find, but easy to find out were popular. That [inaudible 00:23:17] Australian things and things and it doesn’t have kids with mittens throwing snowballs at each other on it. It’s specific Summer Christmas in a kind of romantic way. It doesn’t have to be chicks with a red bikini on the beach, or a sand Santa. I think it can be done. I think Australia is such a young country. We’re still developing all our pretty pictures and paradigms around a hot Christmas.
Catherine:
I really wanted to dive into your Christmas campaign that you are in the middle of right now. So tell us a little bit about the concept that you came up with for this particular campaign.
Felicia Rusher:
It’s probably worth mentioning that Christmas always starts very early for us. We usually get a pre-order of our Christmas baubles and things out in June. This year it was a bit later, it was July we launched our pre-order, but I am excited about our 2020 campaign. It’s probably one of our best ones yet. Actually, I’m sure it’s not perfect, but we’re excited about it and advice a little birdie gave me one time was that, you need a single theme. What’s worked really well is thinking about Christmas as a whole campaign that’s lasting six months, and having a really strong theme that we can leverage across those whole six months. It actually has so many benefits and then creating assets around that theme that we can use across channels, basically.
Catherine:
The same theme goes through email and website and all of your other ways of communicating with customers.
Felicia Rusher:
Absolutely. And we tried to do it last year and I think we did do it, but not as well as now. I really understand the concept of this because, you taught me how to do it. What we’ve come up with is, I Still Believe in Santa campaign with is around, because of COVID, everyone needs something to believe in. Santa is not the only one who can deliver gifts internationally this Christmas. Ours is branded, I Still Call Australia Home, so I Still Believe in Santa is a brand recognition thing as well. What I’m really excited about with this campaign is, it’s not just about the quick sale, it’s really about cold audience attraction and brand awareness as well.
Felicia Rusher:
And I think this is the first time as a business, we’ve really ventured into that space of thinking more broadly about what our customers emotionally are going through and what they want emotionally. So I think that’s why I’m really excited about it because it is very authentic from us and we do really care about sharing beautiful gifts that represent Australia around the world. Just trying to tap into that market with a strong theme. So the way we’ve gone about it is, I have created, I do a lot of illustrating and for the first time, I’ve used my illustrations for the campaign, which is exciting. Finally, it’s only taken me five years, but we’ll get there.
Felicia Rusher:
So I created a image of a koala looking up at the moon with Santa and the [inaudible 00:26:35] for the, I Still Believe in Santa, was the first really strong image that we created. So I [inaudible 00:26:41] and drew and then I had an email campaign for pre-order run around that image and the idea that Santa is not the only one who can send gifts around the world and share in the magic, and we all need something to believe in. So those ideas around the pre-order campaign, email campaign that went for about five weeks across that. And then that was the first time I’ve developed an animated video of developing that theme.
Felicia Rusher:
That’s about a little Christie and again, it’s the first time we’ve gone into more the brand awareness as opposed to hard sell, which I can already see is paying off in spades. So it’s about a little Christie Koala who’s writing a letter to Santa with a gift for her family, and then Santa is reading her letter and delivering those gifts to her family. And then he checks his naughty and nice list, and Christie’s on the very nice list, so he [inaudible 00:27:41].
Catherine:
That’s so cute, I love it.
Felicia Rusher:
So it’s very much a brand identity and also just that whole idea and pulling on the emotions of gift-giving basically. So doing that video, I learned a lot in engaging professionals to do that and doing my due diligence around hiring the right people. There was a lot to learn about deciding on how long the video needs to be and where it’s going to be shared. All these things sound really obvious, but sometimes you need them.
Felicia Rusher:
So if it’s a Facebook animation, you need to consider that the sound’s not on, so the video needs to work without sound and things like that. And once you know those things, we designed each frame of the video, what it was going to look like. And I did all the drawings of the frames and then engaged the professionals to pull it all together with the music and text. It was a lot of hard work, but that’s one of the assets we’ve created around the campaign of, I Still Believe in Santa, and really trying to make that Australian rather than making it… Because Santa can feel wintry, that was my [crosstalk 00:28:47]. It just really just forgetting that and just creating something that is very Australian around Santa that we can use in the campaign.
Felicia Rusher:
So what’s happened then, I’ve got this whole story I can build assets of. What we’re in the process of doing now I have a template that’s part of the animation that can take product images and lifestyle images that will go into our Facebook ads. Even the postcards that I send to customers in their thank you with their gifts, has got a image of the video and a link to a lot of things on it. We’ve got a catalog that’s gifts for her, gifts for nana, whatever, which has the video. I know that we can use that imagery on that. And it’s just really shaping up to be a really, create the theme and content once and leverage over all your channels that’s working really well.
Catherine:
It makes the continuing the campaign over a longer period a bit easier, because you’ve got all of these different creative bits and pieces that you can share.
Felicia Rusher:
It’s working really well. And one of the things that’s probably working very well for us is, just having a video is just another excuse to contact customers and launch something and celebrate. And I’m using it as a list builder as well. So I was actually using the ads for a giveaway and then sending them to a page and asking them a question about the video and then getting their data, so that’s working really well.
Catherine:
What a great idea.
Felicia Rusher:
Yes. So things like that, the Facebook templates and things like that. It just takes the stress out of where I was probably three years ago, which was, what am I going to promote this week, what’s the message this week, and trying to create new brand messages, new campaigns around the brand every single week. Whereas, we’ve got one strong campaign and we’re just leveraging that. And it just really takes the stress out of it and makes everything easier really
Catherine:
It’s working presumably.
Felicia Rusher:
Definitely. Like I said, we’re 50% up for the rest of the year and I think it’s even a bit higher. I don’t want to speak too soon because it’s October, but the last few weeks have really started to pick up. It’s been going really well.
Catherine:
That’s so exciting. I love it.
Felicia Rusher:
Thank you.
Catherine:
Brilliant. Whilst we’ve been chatting, I sneakily snuck onto your website and I can see that you’ve got the beautiful graphic or the illustration that you drew on your home page as well.
Felicia Rusher:
Yes. The front page is the Christmas page.
Catherine:
It’s really cool. So listeners, please go and check it out. I Still Call Australia Home.com. It’s definitely something to give some inspiration on how you can come up with a concept like this and then execute it across quite a long period of time and still be able to maintain a campaign that’s driving sales over such a long period of time. So really cool. Now, as we finish up, I’ve obviously just shared your website URL. Do you want to share your social links at all? You said maybe not Instagram.
Felicia Rusher:
Maybe not Instagram. Everyone’s going to go there now. The Facebook probably is just I Still Call Australia Home, because I have it on Facebook, but that’s probably our main other channel.
Catherine:
Excellent. So listeners, you can go and connect with Felicia and her team there and check it all out. Any last words of advice or inspiration that you’d like to share with the audience before we finish up?
Felicia Rusher:
I think the only thing is this stuff is really, for me anyway, has been hard. It’s been probably having an E-commerce business, I’ve done a lot of hard things in work, but this is probably the hardest. You’ve just got to really have a vision and stick to it. I think, if you’d asked me three or four years ago, I was probably thinking this is never going to work, but the reality is, if you just keep your head down, focus on what you’re good at and do the work, that you will get there.
Catherine:
I think that’s a really solid truth there. I don’t think in E-commerce that there’s any such thing as an overnight success. Certainly not a business that’s going to last the distance anyway. I know Felicia is very good at keeping track of what’s working and what’s not working in her business. So she’s very clear about what to put her effort into. And I just want to echo what you’ve said today in that, really figuring out what your strengths are and focusing on implementing and seeing it through and not just flitting from one shiny object to the next, in the hopes that you’re going to get that magic pill because it just doesn’t work like that.
Felicia Rusher:
There’s a lot of people who tell you it will work like that. It doesn’t.
Catherine:
Sadly. No, it really doesn’t. However, if you can focus on that consistency, which you have, and you get something done and implemented, and then you layer over it, the next thing that you learn. It might’ve been SEO and then it might’ve been something else. And then it might’ve been email marketing and now you’re learning how to pull together these big campaigns and that’s what’s driving your growth, which is super exciting to see.
Felicia Rusher:
Thank you.
Catherine:
Fantastic. So I’m going to link to those pages on our episode show notes. So if you want the easy option, just click from there, go and check her out. And thank you again so much for joining us on the show this week.
Felicia Rusher:
Thank you so much, Catherine, for having me. It’s an absolute pleasure.