In the space of three years, Vicky Owens flipped a passion project into her very own award-winning six-figure raking social media empire, working with the likes of Netflix, TikTok, and PrettyLittleThing. Oh, and did we mention. She’s 24-years-old.
Being 24 with a mega successful business is hugely impressive. Take us back, how and why did you decide to start up on your own?
I started my business when I was 21, just after lockdown. I was at home with no income due to crippling panic attacks, and I had no motivation to work. I occasionally posted on my own social media and learnt how to grow a following pretty fast, so I came up with the idea to ask local businesses if I could run their social accounts. Bare in mind, this was before the wave of social media managers, I thought I'd come up with a million dollar concept!
I charged £100 per month and outreached to around 50 businesses, 3 were interested so I got to work and filled the rest of my time by learning about how to ACTUALLY get results on social. I was fascinated by the psychology of marketing and understanding people's spending habits. Within a couple of months, I had grown my own social even further and got amazing results for my clients, and it snowballed from there. I upscaled to businesses who paid me 4-5 figures to get them organic results on social and the workload massively increased so I took my sister on to work with me full-time.
You mention “snowballing”, how did you manage to scale the business so quickly?
I think by utilising the power of social media and my expertise to reach new leads every day and not being afraid to outsource things I'm not good at. For example, I find the operations side of the business very overwhelming and for a while that really let us down. As soon as I brought someone on the team to handle this, our service was 10/10. I also invest a lot in learning and go to a lot of business events and retreats.
As the business got busier, how did you maintain work-life boundaries?
Since the beginning, I’ve always established strong boundaries with clients; for example, none of them have direct one-to-one contact with me, because I'd always be on my phone if they did! Some clients have had a problem with that, others respect us more for putting it in place. I think because I’ve been brought up to be polite and respectful, I expect that from others, so it was a big shock to find clients who feel like they own you 24/7. At this point, if a client can’t respect our ways of working, they’re not the right client for us.
What’s the hardest part about running your own business?
That the highs are SUPER high and the lows are SUPER low. And although you might have an amazing team, you’re really on your own. Your team clock off at the end of the day, they don't feel the pit in their stomach when we lose a client. I've also found it hard to gain people's respect as a young woman in business, I feel like a lot of people speak down to me and my team. However, now I know we're bloody amazing at what we do, I don't feel the need to prove anything to anyone.
If you were starting from scratch today, would you do anything differently?
I would invest my money into a good coach sooner and into outsourcing tasks. One lesson I've learnt is, you need to spend money to make money.
How does coaching benefit you?
I've been with some great coaches and some not so great. Overall, I love that they can offer the solution to any problem you have, because they have a wider perspective of your business. It's also great to check in with someone every month and have some accountability, both personally and for the business.
What’s one piece of advice you swear by?
That success is 100% guaranteed if you don't give up. This sounds really generic and not true, but I wholeheartedly believe it. If you want something bad enough and work towards it every single day, you'll get it. It may take 10 weeks or 10 years, it all depends on how bad you want it.
How do you see your business developing over the next couple of years?
I definitely want to take a step back in the next few years. It's my DREAM to be a mum so I want to make sure everything is set up for that. I'd also like to move more into social media consulting for well-known brands and teach them how to go viral and come up with an amazing strategy. I'm not going to lie, some MASSIVE brands have a whole team just for their socials and it's awful! I'd love to go in and give them some of my Vicky magic.
Speaking of Vicky magic, what advice would you give to a brand on social?
CONSISTENCY - 99% of people I speak to who are trying to grow will have a session with me, do what I tell them to do, then give up after a few weeks because it's too much for them. The reason why this happens is because their “why” isn't strong enough. If I told you that if you posted 3 times a day on TikTok every day, it’d buy you your dream home and you'd never have to worry about money again, then I bet you'd find time to do it. Plus, I’d stop listening to all the noise you hear online about how to grow and just focus on posting quality content.
And last but not least, if you could sign any client right now, who would it be and why?
My two favourite brands at the moment are Odd Muse and Luxe Collective. They're both young founders like me and have smashed it on social, but I'd love to get in there and elevate their presence even further!