Agency Chat – Owning your niche…

Author: Ad Hacks November 28 | Blog

Entrepreneurial women. They’re front and center for Mirella, owner of a performance agency that specialises in working with brands that market to women.

Her purpose? To offer women who do amazing things the opportunity to showcase their work.

Events for women in eCommerce

At the young age of 23, Mirella started to organise events for women in eCommerce. They started out humble – happy hours and meetups. But they quickly grew into big conferences with full days of seminars and speeches.

Eventually, this resulted in a well-known event for women in the eCommerce industry, SheCommerce.

Here, Mirella met incredible women who were starting their own stores, with a great passion for their product, ideas, packaging… But little expertise in looking at the numbers.

And that’s how she found her niche.

Focusing in on a niche

“Women, when they’re really passionate about something, they get so involved in the product, the idea, the packaging, and they’re not looking at the business model, or their campaigns, or how to scale, or if it’s going to be profitable.

So that was my idea. To make SheCommerce kind of a funnel for my agency in a way.

I realised that I needed to focus on a niche and build my team and services around it.”

Important lessons in business

After launching PixelHaus, Mirella’s agency that grew into a mini incubator where female founders can come with their projects, she went through a learning curve.

“The biggest thing that I learned is having your business model down first before you start.

So literally outlining: how much money do I want to make, how many people do I need on my team to do that, and how much money are they going to make?

And really doing an algebraic equation, solving for x.”

The surrounding team

As Mirella’s team started to grow, she learned valuable lessons about goal alignment. Because often, salespeople are KPI’d and therefore compensated differently than say the media buyers or the performance team.

So when Mirella structured her team and their compensation, she made sure everyone was on the same page and there was a synchronicity between all members of the team.

Not only in compensation, but in delivery of the agency’s vision.

“Really what sells is someone telling the story. Someone that’s super passionate and can really pitch them this grand vision. I always make sure that there’s that first call that the biz dev will take, but you have the media buyer on the call to sell the grand vision of where this can go.”

Check out our full interview with Mirella below.

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