Pop Quiz, Monday with Kellen Kautzman, Owner at Send It Rising Internet Marketing
The Pop Quiz, Monday is a fun little exam that we love to give to savvy business owners. The examination is not a surprise after all since the interviewee already knew about the questions in advance. However, we can always pretend and have fun with the scenario of a young entrepreneur sitting in class nervously biting on their pencil. They are ready to take a pop quiz on a chapter that they were supposed to read the night before. Instead, they played Metroid all night on their SNES (Oops, this was me in high school). The real purpose of the pop quiz is that this is a fun way to introduce business tips from real-world experiences that you can not learn in a classroom. We want to thank our entrepreneur for being a good sport and volunteering their time to answer a few questions to help our community grow from their knowledge.
I want to introduce you to our guest today who will be taking our Pop Quiz Monday.
Can you please tell everyone your name?
Kellen Kautzman
What is your job role?
Owner of Send It Rising Internet Marketing
Tell us about your company?
Send It Rising is a full-service internet marketing and social media company based in Las Vegas. We specialize in developing and managing digital marketing campaigns for small business utilizing Search Engine Optimization (SEO), website management, Social Media and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) strategies, as well as cause marketing initiatives. Our company’s PPC team manages more than $250,000 in monthly spend for client advertising campaigns. We were founded in 2016 and have a team of over 20 internet marketing professionals.
What do you love most about your job?
I like that I continue adapting. What I am doing today looks nothing like what I was doing last year. Now-a-days, I might spend 10% of my time on Crypto Miner Group, edit a video for a cause marketing pro bono video we’re doing, take a couple of meetings and then get caught up on emails. Being unsatisfied with elements of what I am currently doing drives me to innovate. “Love” is a strong word. I would say that I do love working on the cause marketing videos. We’ll see how I feel next year!
What motivates you to get up everyday and go to work?
Coffee, and I have an outstanding team around me who handles most of the day to day operations for my company, so I am fortunate to be able to focus on things like public speaking, writing, and business development. Within the realm of entrepreneurship, I rarely struggle to stay motivated and be productive… there is so much to do!
How do your co-workers inspire you?
My co-workers are my employees. I enjoy being a kind and empathetic boss to them. My employees know that they are more important to me than my clients, which I am fully aware is a “cardinal sin of business.” I believe that happy and enthusiastic employees are the drivers of great businesses and that ultimately the best clients are attracted to companies whose employees enjoy their work.
How do you have fun at work (team building, pranks, etc..)?
Part of the Send It Rising culture is a work from home environment. If I don’t have meetings, I fully embrace pajamas at home. So, you could say we have pajama parties!
What are some of the challenges of your job?
My biggest challenge is motivating clients to engage with their marketing. Clients who consistently produce content are much more likely to succeed from an SEO and social media perspective. Motivating clients to take action, begin Facebook live, take more Instagram pictures and come up with videos that they self-produce is challenging. Most clients want to write a check, remain out of the loop and receive positive results. Another area where I feel challenged is effectively managing company growth in order to appropriately assign work and hire new employees. Because companies live and die on their payroll expenses, it’s consistently one of my top priorities to thoroughly assess all possible outcomes before hiring my next team member.
What are some lessons learned from a past project that you can share with us?
I built a website WhatEveryDogDeserves.com that was getting 500 visits a day. I believe this was my biggest failed business attempt because I was never able to successfully monetize the traffic. I learned that 500 visits a day and 10’s of thousands of visits on Pinterest doesn’t matter if the traffic doesn’t convert. Adsense pays very little. The silver lining is that I learned a great deal about social media and built some successful platforms in the process.
What advice would you give to some one who is starting out in your industry?
Overcoming tragedy is an overlooked element of success. Great leaders solve painful problems, make hard decisions and do the right thing when it hurts the most. The experience to make the right call under duress isn’t something that appears overnight. Your history, scars and past embarrassments lay the foundation of your leadership ability. The consistent cringe-worthy events in your life are necessary and will come to play substantial roles in how you deal with stressful situations. Even if it doesn’t feel like you are on the right path, you are.
Thank you for taking our pop quiz today. You get an A+ for effort. You can learn more about our interviewee and their business by visiting them on the web:
http://senditrising.com/
http://www.kellenkautzman.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/senditrising
Twitter: https://twitter.com/KellenKautzman
