This episode, CEO of MSM Digital Mario Mirabella talks about how he self-taught himself the design skills he needed to start a marketing agency, the pros and cons of teaching yourself coding, and how to get the first customers for your agency.
Mario Mirabella is the CEO of MSM Digital, an award-winning, full-service Digital Marketing Agency with over two decades of industry experience.
Mario has been successfully building brands and launching revenue-generating marketing campaigns for over twenty years.
Mario helps businesses review and evaluate their online presence and market position and implement proven solutions to uncover their “IT” factor. He focuses on supercharging brands to stand out from the crowd, gain more attention, generate more leads and ultimately increase revenue. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency:
- The best way to teach yourself design skills.
- How to start a marketing agency.
- Getting the first customers for your agency.
- The perks of doing the marketing for restaurants.
- How to get new customers.
- The pros and cons of teaching yourself coding.
- The benefits of hiring contractors.
- How client relationships work.
- The traits that make people successful.
Resources:
Connecting with Mario Mirabella:
Connecting with the host:
- Josh Hoffman on LinkedIn
Quotables:
- 5:50 – “We started doing free work, so I started talking to friends and friends of friends who might need something, you need a website, you need a logo, I had no idea how to price anything but again I had nothing to show so I basically said hey I’ll do it for free, what do you need and that’s how it all started.”
- 26:03 – “I always suggest get your foot in the door, do an internship, if you’re coming right out of school get the experience because that’s real-world experience you’re not going to learn anything in a book that you’re going to learn in the real world, in the actual market space, where businesses are working on real projects with real clients at a fast-pace at a high volume it’s a warp speed course so I always recommend that to then really understand what do you like, what do you really want to do?”
- 31:46 – “That’s why building a company all those years ago utilizing contractors was key because they weren’t on payroll they were per project you can manage your money better utilizing contractors in that sense, you knew exactly what you were paying out regardless if the project took three months to complete you didn’t have to worry about weekly paychecks with the person and all of the sudden you’ll be in the red, that would be a piece of advice for anybody starting out in this type of industry and looking to build up a team.”
- 35:05 – “I could teach someone how to use photoshop, I could teach somebody how to code, but I can’t teach them the passion, the drive, or the motivation to excel in whatever they do, I can’t teach that it has to come from within.”