Will Haire is the Co-founder and CEO of BellaVix, a marketplace management company helping D2C brands increase sales on leading e-commerce platforms. An e-commerce expert, Will holds various marketing and advertising licenses from Amazon, Alison, Hubspot, Hootsuite, and Google. He delights in assisting brands to become market leaders in their respective categories.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- Will Haire shares what inspired him to start BellaVix — and how he adjusted to being a business owner
- What should you look for in a business coach?
- The value in recognizing your product’s worth and knowing when you’ve reached capacity
- How BellaVix distinguishes itself from competitors
- When should a manufacturer seek the expertise of an e-commerce management expert?
- Will reflects on the challenges he encountered early in his marketing career
- Using predictive analytics during the hiring process
In this episode…
eCommerce platforms have been on the rise for the past few decades — a result of the advancing digital age and marketing initiatives. Industry titans, including Amazon and Walmart, attract millions of consumers to their online stores monthly. There’s no arguing these e-commerce giants have paved the way for digital retailers. What marketing strategies can smaller brands implement to drive more digital traffic to their sites?
If you desire to scale your e-commerce business, understanding the value of your product and business capacity is crucial. When launching a brand, it may feel advantageous to provide clients with a remarkable deal to kickstart business deals, but as your clientele expands, you risk shortchanging your product’s worth. You can maintain competitive pricing without diminishing the value of your services.
In this episode of the Top Business Leaders Show, Bela Musits welcomes Will Haire, Co-founder and CEO of BellaVix, to discuss his experience launching a company and the unforeseen challenges that occurred in the early days of the business. Will also shares the value of knowing your company’s worth, how to differentiate yourself from competitors, and the benefits of leveraging predictive analysis during the hiring process.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- Bela Musits on LinkedIn
- Rise25
- Email the team at Rise25: support@rise25.com
- Will Haire on LinkedIn
- BellaVix
- BellaVix’s Blog
Sponsor for this episode…
At Rise25, we’re committed to helping you connect with your Dream 100 referral partners, clients, and strategic partners through our done-for-you podcast solution.
We’re a professional podcast production agency that makes creating a podcast effortless. Since 2009, our proven system has helped thousands of B2B businesses build strong relationships with referral partners, clients, and audiences without doing the hard work.
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When you use our proven system, all you need is an idea and a voice. We handle the strategy, production, and distribution – you just need to show up and talk.
The Rise25 podcasting solution is designed to help you build a profitable podcast. This requires a specific strategy, and we’ve got that down pat. We focus on making sure you have a direct path to ROI, which is the most important component. Plus, our podcast production company takes any heavy lifting of production and distribution off your plate.
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Episode Transcript
Intro 0:04
Welcome to the Top Business Leaders Show. Powered by Rise25 media, we featured top founders, executives and business leaders from all over the world.
Bela Musits 0:20
Hello, listeners Bela Musits, co-host of the Top Business Leaders podcast, where we feature CEOs, entrepreneurs, and top leaders in the business world. This episode is brought to you by Rise25. We help b2b businesses cultivate and reach their dream relationships, and connect with more clients, more referrals and strategic partnerships to get your business return on investment through done-for-you podcast. If you have a b2b business and want to build great relationships, there is no better way than to profile the people and companies you admire on your podcast. To learn more, go to Rise25.com or email us at support@Rise25media.com Today’s guest on the podcast is Will Haire. He is the Co-founder of BellaVix, a full-service marketing marketplace marketing agency for direct-to-consumer retail brands who want to aggressively grow sales on the world’s largest marketplaces like Amazon and Walmart. Welcome to the podcast, Will.
Will Haire 1:32
Hey, thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here to chat a little about my journey and what we do as a business.
Bela Musits 1:38
Yeah, super. So let me ask you this question. If you’re at a social event or a non-work related social event, and you get introduced to somebody, and after the introduction, they say to you, Oh, very nice to meet you will, what do you do? How do you answer that question?
Will Haire 1:57
Yeah. So it goes a couple of ways. I usually tell people I run a marketing agency because that’s the easiest way for the layman. My family and friends think I work for Amazon or Walmart. They just, they don’t understand the differences. They’re just like, I’ve ordered something from Amazon. I can’t say I’ve had my mother call me to complain about her package on Amazon as some magic wand and I can fix whatever issue it is. So for all intents and purposes, but for the layman listening to this podcast, I run a marketing agency, we just happen to focus on marketplaces.
Bela Musits 2:31
Super, super. So you’ve worked in sort of e-commerce businesses for quite a while? Yeah. What What was the motivation for starting BellaVix?
Will Haire 2:41
Yeah, so I worked at different agencies for a long time. And I’ve always been in advertising, I started off as SEO and it’s just a very slow game. And I, you know, I love SEO. But I’m a guy who has, like, terrible add. So I need things that move around a lot and are very dynamic. And I found that satisfaction with advertising. So I started doing that a little over 10 years, probably closer to 12 years now. But I started doing that a long time ago. And I started working with small businesses. And I really enjoyed the experience. And as I matured in my career, started working with larger agencies and larger brands. And what I found that drove me a little crazy, because I’m somebody who really cares about the experience of working together as it’s a true partnership. I’m a steward of the finances you give to me. So it’s important that I represent my brands well, and we have good expectations. And more importantly, we have good returns, because you’re not going to work with somebody who just spends all your money. And what I found in my previous environments, and as I grew in my career, it was more of a numbers game. So my last agency I worked for, for example, it was me and I managed to people. And we managed 50 accounts. So it was, it was bananas. The only way to describe it, it was crazy. It was hard to keep organized. And it was hard to be a good steward of the brands I represented. So in 2018, I just had enough of it. I was like, You know what, this is not what I want to do for the rest of my life. Nor is it what I want my legacy to be. So I quit in 2018 and decided to run my own agency. I found my Co-founder shortly after quitting. And together, we decided to open a marketing agency that’s focused on marketplaces but delivers a very personalized service. And we’re able to offer services that cut across operations and advertising. And that’s kind of just a story of how we got started and what has been some of my experiences working in the marketing industry for 10 plus years now.
Bela Musits 4:50
Yeah, great story. So let me ask you a question. You know, a lot of people who are working for a company, they’re there for a period of time they get frustrated, they don’t Like the way things are going 98% of those people will leave that company and go join another one. Yeah, but you decided to start your own. What was sort of the trigger that said, You know what, I’m going to do this on my own, because I think I can do it better by myself.
Will Haire 5:15
That’s a good question. I’ve always been entrepreneurial. So the original plan was just to fund our own e-commerce business. We wanted to do something in the beauty space. And what I found out because I always side household, I always consulted on the side and made some extra cash around holidays and stuff, it always helped. I decided that in order to fund the e-commerce business, because we didn’t want to take on any debt, I would just take on more side hustle. And I took on so much side hustle, it just became a full-time thing. And my first 10 clients, for example, were people I worked with at different agencies in the past. And when they found that I left and I was doing my own thing, they came out of the woodworks and said, hey, well, what would it be like to work together and of course, being young and not knowing my prices were ridiculous compared to the services they were getting. But we learned a lot really quick. And it enabled us to get started to be able to afford the current lifestyle we were living, and as well as start to hire some employees. So right off the bat, because I did work in agency, it’s all about Systemising things, putting processes in place, and then hiring somebody at a third of your cost actually to execute a lot of the concepts. So that’s, you know, it was almost a neat because I was doing it so long. So unintentionally, it turned into a business, we still aspire to open an e-commerce business. But we’re having a lot of fun with what we do. Now we get to work with some really cool brands. We’ve worked with Instapot. In the past, we work with Children’s Place; we’re in their portfolio of companies, and they work with them across multiple brands. So for a guy like me, who has terrible add, it’s great. It’s a very dynamic environment. And I get to work with a lot of people that I enjoy their company and we overcome challenges together. So it’s, it’s a really fun, fun lifestyle.
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