Female Founder Friday | Rebecca Borough
It’s Female Founder Friday, and I’m pleased to share the startup story of woman entrepreneur, Rebecca Borough. Rebecca was looking for a way to combine her passion for education and youth development with a business plan that would not only serve a social mission, but create real value for companies. Her search ended when she had the idea for Knit Marketing! Knit Marketing is a digital marketing agency that empowers diverse youth in Los Angeles to learn as staff members specializing in GenZ and Millennial marketing through social media management, content creation, and web development. Digital marketing is a diverse field with many methods deployed to get websites performing well on search rankings; you could enlist the help of a PPC Agency to do this for your own website.
The story of how I’m connected to Rebecca is rather interesting. One of her employees has been reading my blog and emailed me to suggest her boss. Her note shows what a positive impact Rebecca and Knit Marketing are making! Yesenia wrote:
“I work for Knit Marketing, and reading your blog reminded me of my boss, Rebecca Borough, who is a female founder I really look up to. She created Knit Marketing, a social enterprise digital marking agency that helps businesses grow while employing untapped youth that need work experience, like me. The “like me” rung very true to me. Haven’t we all been young and searching for a place to gain work experience outside of fast food restaurants? I would have loved to participate in an enterprise like Knit Marketing instead of working at Denny’s on the Pennsylvania turnpike. I’m sure my work experience would have been much more helpful in my life as an entrepreneur.”
So, if you want to know more about how Rebecca came up with Knit Marketing, or are curious about social entrepreneurship, don’t miss Rebecca’s answers and advice below.
What inspired you to create your company?
I wanted to work with youth to give them a learning opportunity and I also had a background in marketing. It seemed like an obvious connection to employ teens who are already on social media all the time to run digital marketing campaigns.
What was your biggest obstacle and failure in going from idea to business?
We didn’t have any challenges going from idea to business. I had support and training from grad school and a project accelerator that I participated in, so when I started with my first team and client, we were prepared to launch. We took things slow and grew little by little. We’re facing the biggest obstacle right now, in scaling enough to be sustainable. We’ve had organic growth the first two years, and have reached a point where we’ve brought on more team members and are trying to figure out what’s next. We have a few initiatives in the works, so time will tell what ends up sticking.
What’s next??
We’ll be bringing on more team members this summer and expanding our product offering to host regular marketing workshops as well as growing our annual Get Stuff Done Conference. We’re also growing Knit Marketing’s client base through advertising, networking, and developing an in-house sales team. Furthermore, we also want to work with clients in as many different sectors as possible to give us a wider range of experience of marketing campaigns in fields such as law. To elaborate, when it comes down to how to improve firms online visibility there are several tools in a marketer’s toolbox that are unique to the legal sphere.
What is a life or business hack that you recommend to help other female founders?
It’s sort of the opposite of a hack – don’t cut corners in life or in business. Take time to read, learn, walk, eat well, rest, and do whatever you need to do to make yourself a stronger whole person. In business, take time to develop skills and develop your team members and co-workers by training them and exposing to anything that will make them dream big. Understanding when you need to bring in an expert too can help. Digital marketing can be a rough world, and getting someone like Avidon Marketing Group to help steer you down the right path can be unbelievably helpful. All these things take time in the short run, but will greatly benefit you and the people around you in the long run. Measuring the success of your digital marketing attempts is also incredibly useful for you to analyze whether they are benefitting your business or not. Fortunately, there’s plenty of resources online on writing marketing reports, which are vital for your company.
If you had a theme song what would it be?
Right now, for Knit, it’s Ruth B’s “Lost Boy,” because we’re in a dreaming Neverland stage, finding it hard to grow up, but having lots of fun!
Another more depressing personal one is Regina Spektor’s “Hero,” because I constantly feel like we’re fighting against so much to just be the hero of our own stories.
Please share your best piece of advice for aspiring female founders.
Don’t take this the wrong way, but try not to complain about life being so hard because you’re a female. It’s true that there are fewer opportunities and the world is not equal, but play to your strengths. If you’re selling a product or service that people need, no one cares what gender or color you are. Spend more time creating something meaningful, something that speaks to the world, and less time wondering how you’ll achieve your dreams even though the cards are stacked against you. In fact, it’s a really exciting time to be a female founder, and you can definitely use it to your advantage.
