This episode, the Founder and Creative Director of Asenka Creative Services’, Brian Hasenkamp, talks about how to know when an agency is ready to scale, the challenges of letting go of control as a business owner, and why networking is so important in business.
Brian Hasenkamp, the Founder and Creative Director of Asenka Creative Service, a marketing agency that focuses on strategic branding and marketing for mid-size businesses. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency:
- What being a minister teaches you about business.
- The benefits of understanding coding.
- How to know when to grow your agency.
- How to let control go as a business owner.
- The importance of networking effectively.
- How to track where you acquire new clients from.
Resources:
Connecting with Brian Hasenkamp:
Connecting with the host:
- Josh Hoffman on LinkedIn
Quotables:
- 13:07 – “I was shaping the business to be what I wanted it to be while it was still also being valuable to the customers but I didn’t want to work past a certain time, I had young children at that point so I wanted to save some time for that there was some personal time management that was all baked into my picture of the company and after I hired that person now it was serving that person and it was still serving the clients and it was still serving me but in a different way so when I say it shifted to an asset in my head I looked at it as something that now this is something that can provide for other staff, it can still serve the customers and it can provide for me but it’s a different type of thing now my hands don’t have to touch everything that’s going on here I guess it just took me up another level.”
- 21:51 – “That’s the bottom line of networking if you can help other people there’s a reciprocity there that comes back over time so it’s not so much the perfect pitch of anything like that but getting to know people building relationships that comes back to this build relationships and then just try and help people.”
- 22:13 – “The way I got this job being the podcast host is I was in the Philly startup community and there was a pitch event and someone didn’t show up to do their pitch and the pitch was already in my head so there like ok let’s move on and I ended up raising my hands and being like do you mind if I just pitch here’s my flash drive I’m ready to go and they said yes and little did I know Alex who runs DevNoodle the sponsor he took note of that and talked to me after and we’ve been talking ever since and we never did business together it was just two entrepreneurs talking and then he one day asked me hey I think you would be great for this host and I’ve loved it ever since.”
- 12:28 – “It’s funny actually that as soon as I hired that person, at the end of that day, after her first day working there, my whole mindset shifted on the business. It went from a business that I was building to an asset and it was right in that moment just changed. It was like, oh, okay, this my whole mindset shifted that day, which was strange cuz I had been in business for over five years, I think, at that point. So it wasn’t new, but just definitely a mindset shift.”
- 14:29 – “Yeah, I did get to a point where I had to take all that software off my laptop so I physically could not do the work even if I wanted to anymore. And I still remain in that situation and it kind of pains me at times. It’s like, oh, I just wanna go. But, yeah. I think the other, the only other real growing pains part is, and I think this is probably typical for most small businesses, is you never really have the cash or the business to do the hire, but you kind of need to do the hire and then it needs to follow. And so you’re always in that point of like, wait, but what if it doesn’t? And it’s always every step, every hire is that way. You’re never rolling in it and you’re just like, great, I can hire five people now. Just at least for me, it never went quickly there.”