SDH202: Making a Change and Becoming an Innovator with Laura Roeder

Are you tired of being the face of your business? Do you want a little less of the pressure off of you? Do you want to remain CEO of your company, maintain freedom and flexibility of your time? In today’s episode, we get to see how this can be done with Laura Roader, founder of Meet Edgar, an online program that shares and re-shares social media postings for online businesses. With only 10% of social media advertisements reaching followers on Facebook lately, Meet Edgar allows businesses to get the most bang for their buck, by continuing to repost those ads and alerting followers on updates to create continued engagement, and acquisition of new traffic as well. Meet Edgar was hatched from Laura’s first business, LKR Social Media, which was a social media training business. Edgar was essentially an automation of what she was teaching entrepreneurs; which was how to effectively market on social media. She also taught entrepreneurs how to categorize their marketing by promotions, blog posts, personal content, and so on. She found it weird and frustrating that she had to keep her social media content in a separate place or spreadsheet, and somehow copy and paste what she could onto a social media platform. She wanted to streamline the process, and modernize it to make it easier on herself, and everyone else. Luckily, her husband was a software developer, and he was able to build her the first version of Meet Edgar. Initially, she planned on running LKR and Edgar simultaneously, and have Edgar be an optional software package of LKR. But when Edgar launched in July of 2014, it was a hit immediately with 17 customers in its first month, 50 the next, and eventually 100 within its first few months! Less than a year after its launch, Edgar became a million dollar company, and matched LKR as a seven-figure business! She then decided that she wanted to stick to software, and shut down LKR. She was ready to move on from the training business and no longer liked running a company that was dependent on her constantly creating a product, and promoting. With the software business, she had no choice but to outsource a lot of the work, because software developing was not her area of expertise, and she preferred heading a team instead of everything falling on her shoulders. So she went into Edgar with the intention of building a scalable business and began delegating certain departments and aspects of the company to strong members of her team. It was especially important for Edgar to grow without her in the beginning because she needed to go on maternity leave, and being able to hand off her company to capable leaders gave her peace of mind, and allowed for distribution of ownership within her staff, and help grow them as leaders Hear more as Laura shares some of her tips and tricks for online marketing talks more about becoming a more passive CEO, and building a business that she truly enjoys that doesn’t compromise her freedom! In this episode, you will… Learn how to evolve and modernize your product and services Figure out how to transition your business and your team See how to balance being a new mom and an entrepreneur Know how to distribute ownership to strong leaders within your team Be able to run a remote business Learn how to market your business and make connections via email INSIGHTS “Right from launch, this business needs to not only function without me, but be able to grow without me, and really thrive without me. So I think I made very different decisions right from the beginning with giving people ownership over other areas of the business…it didn’t become a bottleneck of, ‘What would Christina do?’”- Laura Roeder “There’s this idea that whenever you’re upset about something, you have another imagined reality in your head, and you’re upset that whatever you’re experiencing does not match that idea…when I think of it that way I think that’s absurd…I just find that helpful to remember [when] we’re not growing fast enough [or] we’re not making enough money…It’s so easy to benchmark yourself against these crazy standards…I think you just have to stay grounded, and really remind yourself why you are doing this, and what you’re really after.” –Laura Roeder “It’s fun to strive for bigger goals in the business, but as soon as it becomes not fun, I think you really need to step back and be like, ‘Why am I creating something for myself that I don’t enjoy?’” –Laura Roeder   RESOURCES Meet Edgar Website Laura Roeder Website Meet Edgar LinkedIn Meet Edgar Facebook Meet Edgar Instagram Meet Edgar Twitter Scaling Up by Verne Harnish