Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey in business development but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with Mike Coombe, director of MCM Agency, located in Epsom, Surrey, UK.

What's your business, and who are your customers?

You'll receive an immersive experience partnering with MCM. You'll not only get elite-level paid advertising and email marketing, but you'll get a fractional CMO that integrates into your team to ensure sustainable and predictable long-term business growth. Our core focus is to grow your business long-term, not to run around in circles chasing audiences and ROAS. Our process is to stabilise your paid media accounts and email/SMS account. Once they're stable, it makes it predictable, which means we can scale confidently (if that is your business objective). We work with brands that want to make their accounts and business more efficient, and we can adapt to that. How? We know how to run your ad accounts in the best way they can be. We've been mentored by some of the best advertisers, creative directors, and consumer psychologists in the world. But we don't stop there. We take a deep dive into your business and solve problems or improve on things like conversion rate optimisation, average order value, customer lifetime value, and ultimately, PSM (Profitable Scaling Margin). If that's not enough, our two Directors have 25 years combined senior Project Management experience and have started, scaled, and sold two 7-figure brands. Why does that matter to you? Because we use that knowledge to get your primary business objective as efficiently as possible. We look forward to speaking with you.

Tell us about yourself

I started out as the cliche kid selling stuff at school, but I took it a bit further and used to sell pirated copies of Adobe Photoshop on eBay and make a fortune for a 14-year-old until I got banned. I never had too much interest in school and ended up going to University because my friends were all going to the same one (Southampton Solent), so I tagged along. But it changed my life for the worse in the short time after I left and for good in the long term.

I studied Business & Marketing at Southampton and then got thrown into a high-level project management job in London. It was great at first, but toward the end, I started exploring ways to make money online. This must have been around 2005/2006. Nothing really took off. However, I had enough of London and upped and left to go and live in Norway, where I worked a bar job part-time in the evenings and worked during the day as a marketer, and that quickly turned into a full stack media buyer after falling in love with the art of advertising.

Six years later and I've finally found the perfect business partner, so we launched MCM Agency in November and scaled to around $34,000 monthly recurring revenue within eight weeks. My business partner and I have formulated an 18-month exit plan from the agency in which we will move over fully into his (and now mine) SaaS company. I can't say any details about it as it's very understandable, and you think you can see it on our LinkedIn profiles, but that's not it :D.

What's your biggest accomplishment as a business owner?

I forgot to mention above, but I've actually done all of this whilst traveling the world, so I was in Vietnam when the pandemic hit and have been moving to Turkey, Mexico, SE Asia, Europe, and back to the UK for a few weekends. So for me, it would be earning multiple six figures as a solo media buyer whilst chilling on the beach with a cocktail 1 minute from my apartment.

What's one of the hardest things that comes with being a business owner?

I do find it working in distributed teams hard. It's absolutely fine when you're solo, but when you have staff members, it's finding the right balance of "do I time track them or trust them." Michael, my business partner, is fully against any time tracking for full-time staff, but I'm still on the fence as we've already had two issues with staff at MCM, let alone people I hired when I was solo.

What are the top tips you'd give to anyone looking to start, run and grow a business today?

  1. Cliche, but build your personal brand and just go wild on social media.
  2. Make sure you have a pure passion for what you do. I literally live and breathe advertising.
  3. Network! Find secret slack groups, and talk to people who are further along. I always bang out conversations with people earning 10x what I earn, it doesn't intimidate me, and nine times out o 10, especially in this industry, they are super cool.

Where can people find you and your business?

Website: https://www.mcmagency.co.uk/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MCMAgencyLTD
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mikecoombe1989/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/MCMAgencyMike
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-coombe/

If you like what you've read here and have your own story as a solo or small business entrepreneur that you'd like to share, then please answer these interview questions. We'd love to feature your journey on these pages.

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