OM10: Lori Highby | Stop Shooting Darts in the Dark

With a core personal value of lifelong-learning, Lori Highby has shared creative and strategic digital marketing, personal branding, and entrepreneurship lessons with people and organizations from all over. Her 20 years experience, education, and involvement range from currently owning a digital marketing agency, Keystone Click, being the 2013 recipient of the “Bravo! Entrepreneur Award” from BizTimes Media, teaching undergraduate students as an adjunct professor at UW-Milwaukee, and serving on numerous boards including the Better Business Bureau of Wisconsin. Lori earned her Bachelor’s Degree in Business & Marketing from Marian University and her MBA from Cardinal Stritch University.   What I want to talk about is your story and how you got to the place you are now. Let our audience know how you've got to be the expert you are. I was going to school to school for commercial art and graphic design. And I found I was working full time at a web development company while I was going to school and found that those were the marketing guys out doing all the fun things, they're going to golf outings, taking clients to lunch where the designers were just sitting at their desk, day in and day out. I'm like, I don't want to be doing that. At the same time, I was also taking a sociology course. I was really fascinated by how messages and visuals can really impact a decision that someone makes and that really comes down to marketing. So I shifted my educational direction to be in marketing, while also working full time. I was at this agency for about five years. I was doing SEO and PPC and email marketing before those were common acronyms in the space. And then actually went to a traditional marketing firm, where I was doing outdoor radio print for quite some time. They brought me on because they wanted to start tapping into the digital space a little bit. They weren't as eager as they had initially sold it. So while I learned a ton about traditional marketing and advertising, I found that my true passion is really in the digital space, because so many cool things can be done, and it's constantly evolving. In 2008, I decided to start my own shop. When I did start, I was just going to do websites, because that was something that I knew a lot about. I found that over time someone would ask me after we built the site, now how do we get found on Google? And I would just tell them what to do, because I knew how to do it. And or they'd say Facebook's coming up, and they're like, should my business be on Facebook? And I'd say, yeah, this is how you do it. So eventually, my clients were coming back and saying, Well, can you do this for me? Because they don't want to be doing it. So eventually we've evolved to become more of a strategic digital marketing agency. It was never a smooth path. I know this podcast is very much about overcoming the challenges that we faced. And I went in and started a business because I love marketing, and I'm passionate about it. Understanding the financials is something that I'd say, is probably one of my weakest areas. And I'm heading to a two-day workshop to better myself in this. I think that's one of the things that as a professional, and a leader is we continually need to be educating ourselves, while also aligning ourselves with those that have the strengths that are our weaknesses. It's still good to consistently be adding knowledge to our buckets. In the space that we're in digital marketing, there's new things happening all the time. We are constantly educating ourselves.   What was it like when you hired your first team member? I had no idea what I was doing. That's definitely another area where I invested some time to be properly trained. To be properly trained first on the interviewing process, I had someone coached me on how to conduct behavioral interviewing, and...