Entrepreneurship, Building A Brand Online, & Making A Bigger Impact with Erin Boerema

Erin Boerema is a full-time creative entrepreneur from Jackson, Mississippi, and the 23-year-old CEO & founder of Optimal VA Solutions → [a digital agency focused on social media, content marketing, email marketing, and branding/design for entrepreneurs, content/course creators, business owners, and brands], and branding coach/strategist.

She also created and hosts an up-and-coming podcast called Making Sense Of Entrepreneurship, which is all about starting a business from scratch and building that business from the bootstraps up, the journey of entrepreneurship itself, and basically #ALLOFTHETHINGS related to scaling your online business, building an online community, working from home, and sharing expert insights on what it’s like as you begin transitioning from employee to entrepreneur.

Her biggest passion truly lies in helping other creatives, business owners, entrepreneurs, and even content creators find their passion, develop their purpose, grow a community of loyal followers, and showing them how to harness the power of the internet to pursue those passions the best way possible, so they can make a living doing what they love and make the most impact!

Tell us about who you are and what you do.

Hey there, my name is Erin Boerema and I consult with and help business owners, brands, entrepreneurs, content/course/digital product creators, and creatives, in general, to establish an online presence and grow their visibility consistently online so they can begin making more connections, growing their online community, engage with them consistently, and start to generate more leads, attract more clients or customers, and increase their revenue & profit within a shorter amount of time, with the least amount of additional effort added to their daily schedule, and with the least amount of capital and risk as we like to custom fit our offer to any given prospect’s needs, budget, and the size of their business or brand.

Tell us how you created this brand and what was the sole idea behind it.

So, if we start by taking it back to the very beginning of my journey, if I were to be able to effectively tell you how I decided to start my brand, Optimal VA Solutions, initially, followed later by the start of me building out my brand, and then most recently followed by the creation of the

Making Sense of Entrepreneurship podcast and it’s own brand as well, we would need to look back at what drivers and situations ultimately were the main motivators and drivers behind the beginning of my journey altogether.

So starting back in August of 2018 – I was making a change after a year of waiting table in a high-anxiety, high-pressure, and toxic work environment where I was waiting tables, which I’d done for roughly a year exactly and I hated it – truly I was just stuck in the swing of that job and the familiarity of it every day…

What’s funny is the way I worked – I was wearing myself out and the managers who were superior to me knew I was a hard-worker but as I mentioned before → it was quite the toxic work environment – imagine working a 19-hour shift as a WAITRESS in a 24hr diner setting for $2.32/hr plus tips – but each week working roughly 38 or 39 hours which would end up being 1 hour shy of being able to be compensated for overtime and sadly I would work the entire floor myself and let the other waitresses take the early relief part of the shift and stay until morning myself and I was beyond exhausted with that type of work so I transitioned into working as a receptionist, and then an administrative assistant, then an accountant’s office assistant and file management girl, and I kind of bounced from here and there and into different types of office settings but basically what I’m getting at is no matter WHERE I found myself working, I found that I was always miserable and working far too hard for someone else to reap the ultimate benefits – I kept finding that it really didn’t seem to matter where I transitioned to and began working at, I was just extremely unhappy either with the job being far less challenging and engaging than what I wanted to be doing, or I’d be taken for granted as an employee in general – I had a knack for finding rather toxic work environments everywhere I turned to it seemed like for a while – but I was finding myself rather depressed and overworked all the time and something always felt like it was absolutely wrong for me – something just wouldn’t work out no matter who I was working for and it could be anything from just rather unpleasant and toxic coworkers and sometimes management teams being the worst ones to work alongside – or there would be just disorganized chaos within the smaller businesses and holes in their operational standards or maybe an absolute lack of systems and processes in place to ensure that the position I

was working was able to be done in an effective, efficient, and clearly laid out fashion which made my positions less stable, and some just wouldn’t be enough to be able to keep paying my bills, and even some of those jobs I worked it seemed like there would always just be something I couldn’t handle in terms of my mental health, emotional health, or in terms of financial health…

For the amount of effort and the level of work that I was constantly putting into my job – it was always as if I was working myself to death just to grow someone else’s business, dream, mission, or as if I was putting all of my efforts into results that would be benefiting the business but not doing much for me at the same time…

Leaving the world of corporate environments and organizations to venture out on my own, however, did not arise from any one of these particular emotions surrounding the jobs I was sick of working in – I would only later (because of the circumstance I’ll explain in just a moment or two) until after I’d successfully gotten my very first client within my own business and came to the understanding of just how unhappy I was before starting my own business.

However, the straw that seemed to be the final straw to break the camel’s back in terms of the idea that started it all for my journey, the main motivator or the main things that truly pushed me to start my own service-based business from home wasn’t a decision that I made because of any of those things… Although they played huge factors in my decision process… For me, the straw that finally broke the camel’s back and inspired me to make the big decision to start my work from home journey, which then transitioned into my entrepreneurial journey and the birth of my brand wasn’t any of those toxic work environments, and wasn’t because of any of those standard types of jobs… It was a combination of all of those things and then what happened was that some very difficult situations arose both in my personal life and then a traumatic event that happened to my family in a very unprecedented way. For me, getting back and forth to work was becoming a nightmare because I was making such minimal pay for the type of work I was performing and when my transmission suddenly went out – I was scrambling to get around let alone to work daily 45 minutes away from my home.

Additionally, there was a situation that finally made it extremely hard for me to be able to be away from home for long working hours anymore and unfortunately most of my time was requiring me to be available at home. But the most impactful thing that happened was that I received some very unexpected, painful, and rather sudden news of my Aunt Susan, whom I adored, who we only a few days earlier celebrated her’s and her identical twin – my mother’s – 54th birthday of.

I will never forget the call I got from my mother the night it happened when she had to tell me that they had discovered her passed away in her bed – they officially said it was a heart attack that took her in her sleep – I can’t tell you how it pains me even now as I share this story with you now, and my immediate thoughts were of not only my poor grandmother who in her mid 70’s would now be burying one of her little girls in the spot she had originally intended to be buried in one day in our family cemetery, and of my sweet 17-year-old cousin who was supposed to be enjoying the best year of her life (the second half of her senior year of high school) would now be trying to navigate each day without her mother, and would now have to instead of enjoying senior year have to start trying to navigate a new world full of grief, anger, and yet a world that no longer offered her the comfort of her mother… This was and still is such a horrible memory for me and that was roughly around the same time I learned my mother had been diagnosed with breast cancer (which she is now a breast cancer survivor, thankfully).

I remember amidst the pain I felt that night, I remembered that I was scheduled to work a shift from 7 am to 3 pm the following day and even though it was roughly midnight the night before – I remember calling my manager to ask him if someone would pick up my shift because there was just absolutely no way possible I could do it and being told that if I wanted to keep my job that I would be there no later than 7 am, and if I wasn’t there then he would just go ahead and make sure to remove me from the schedules and I could just not come back at all except for my final check pickup. I had never in my entire life been as hurt as I was by the way I was treated in this situation but it also brings up a very real aspect of working in a corporate environment – no one should have to worry about losing their job when something so tragic and unprecedented like this happens – I told him that was fine and to do whatever it was he felt he had to do and I never looked back.

Flash forward a couple of months and the way I got my foot into the door in a “work from home” setting was by working as a customer support/billing support representative for a virtual call center and while this wasn’t the most thrilling type of work I ever had, it was one I could easily work from my home and I was making more money than I’d earned from any of the jobs I had worked in the previous months before this one came along and with the extra money I was making from that call center job, the support of my fiance both financially, and emotionally, and months on months of research and time-spent educating myself in various types of service-based business ideas and offers I felt made the best fit for me, I was able to plan, strategize, and birth my brand → Optimal VA Solutions. And that is where the big idea and where the big push to start my own business and brand online all began.

Go in detail and tell us about how your brand works. You may keep this from the audience’s perspective.

Optimal VA Solutions brings authenticity and creativity to online marketing and advertising while helping customers establish their online presence, build their brand’s authority by establishing them as an authoritative source or expert within their industry, & make a bigger impact online by building a community that serves as a place to engage, connect with, and convert more of their ideal buyers so they can create a business and life that they love.

Explain the challenges you went through while you were working on brand creation.

I spoke on many of the initial challenges I struggled with as I DECIDED to create my own business and brand but when I was first starting out there were many challenges I had to overcome that I still struggle with even now. Creative burnout is a reality many new and even well-seasoned entrepreneurs experience from time to time for example, and one of the best ways to resolve creative burnout is to establish a work routine for yourself that consists of breaks periodically throughout the day as well as a time for you to shut off the computer, leave your

home office, and enjoy things outside of your work-life at the end of the day. Another large struggle I think many entrepreneurs face in the beginning, and throughout their journey, and something I struggle with every once in a while is the sensation of “imposter syndrome” or feeling like your living a separate life while you get established – my best advice for anyone suffering from the feeling of “imposter syndrome” is to really focus on building out an offer you are confident in and being honest and authentic about where within your journey you currently are and setting a clear vision of where your aiming to grow towards and sharing celebrations of milestones along the way and sharing that with your audience.

How do you manage your finances through the services you offer. Any fundings etc received?

There are plenty of online resources and tools such as Honeybook, Quickbooks, or Freshbooks, and many other software options that aid in making finance management much easier. I personally utilize Honeybook and Quickbooks to manage all of my brand’s management of finances, invoices, and expense management as well. I started my business with what I had in my personal bank account and the loving support of my husband who worked a good bit harder until I got established and built my brand from the bootstraps up.

Tell us your future vision about the brand. How far do you want to take it? What is your dream about taking it to the next level?

For 2021-2022 specifically, I am aiming to reduce ongoing business expenses and focus on overall financial health in order to look at opportunities for adding new team members in various roles and areas for our brand. I also aim to update and enhance both our client experience and customer service processes and systems in order to make the experience as ideal for our clients as possible. I never will be past the point of needing to review and enhance those processes as we look toward the future. In total, I aim to bring on a full team of employees to manage and maintain the brand while I oversee things from more of a CEO’s perspective (rather than myself being so heavily present within the business like working in the business on a daily basis) so I can focus on building my personal brand and grow the Making Sense of Entrepreneurship podcast to be available and visible in more ways across more of the social platforms.

What message would you like to give to anybody who has a plan of creating something of their own and making a living through it?

THERE’S NEVER A GOOD TIME TO GET STARTED!

Trust me, if there is one lesson I have learned with the most truth to it in entrepreneurship, it’s hands down got to be the fact that there will NEVER be a “PERFECT” time to begin, and I’ll tell you what, I tried to find every excuse to keep planning things initially or waiting for the right things to work out first, but when I finally got a grip on my mindset, I realized that it was so much more worth the results I got once I was actually here to show up and “begin” as you might call it, but I also realized that it doesn’t matter where and with what you get started with, it simply requires you to BEGIN.

Start with where you authentically are within your journey and share and connect with likeminded people and with whom you’ll come to know as your own online community, and as you grow, learn, and develop, as long as you are showing up every single day and remaining consistent for your audience, they’ll grow WITH you and your skills and experiences, of course, will develop over time as well.

If you continue to wait for the right time, I can assure you now there ISN’T such a thing. As my grandmother once said to me, “Erin, you sure are good at planning, so how about this year quit planning, and start DOING?”…..

I can’t tell you how incredible of a reminder that is for me even today and on an everyday basis. You’d be surprised what you are capable of when you begin and you remain consistent with your efforts.

TAKE YOUR TIME BUILDING OUT YOUR BRAND & A PERSONAL BRAND AND MAKE SURE YOU’RE SHOWING UP CONSISTENTLY, EVERYDAY TO GAIN YOUR AUDIENCE’S TRUST & SUPPORT

One more thing I’d like to point out, as I have learned through the course of this pandemic, is that I wish I had paid more attention at the beginning of my entrepreneurial journey to the importance of building my personal brand strategy and being consistent and present – every day – showing up for my audience every single day. I already know, I do get it, social media can feel incredibly time-consuming especially when it’s but one of the hats we wear as entrepreneurs daily.

Plus, with constant trends to keep up to date with ever-changing algorithms and less time in your busy day, it is exhausting & can be super hard to grow that audience from scratch – trust me I know what it’s like.

However, let me remind you, friends, that the point of your online presence isn’t about followers or the numbers of likes you have – but rather it’s about being someone who is available to your current and future clients. So, ultimately, a personal brand strategy means being PRESENT for your audience consistently. The way to consistency is to establish strict posting schedules, a strategy, and a calendar to keep everything organized and scheduled ahead of time for publishing.

Early in my journey, I truly underestimated the importance of building my personal brand on social media and how key a role it would have in the growth of my business and client base.