Chapters
0:00 Welcome Ashley Rector, Founder Quimby Digital
2:06 Ashley’s origins as an entrepreneur
4:26 The power of networking
6:17 Harness Magazine is born
10:16 Quimby begins
12:00 The blessing and curse of being an entrepreneur
15:23 Winning your first role out of school
17:30 Standing out against all other applicants

Each week, we interview proven leaders from our network, to learn from their experiences, and share their Talent Attraction and Candidate Experience stories with you.

• Our mission is to promote the accomplishments of our guests
• Highlight the companies where they work and the services, and products that they offer
• Share success stories from their experiences and, most importantly
• Provide strategies for job seekers and advice to talent seeking to accelerate their careers.
  

Today’s guest is Ashley Rector – Quimby Digital. Ashley literally has entrepreneurialism in her genes!  She is the founder of a successful digital marketing agency specializing in organic social and is focused on serving founders and executives of start-up companies.  Before starting Quimby, Ashley was a practicing attorney and she started a women’s focused magazine which she eventually sold.  Ashley’s story is fascinating and we are excited to share her career journey!

• Ashley comes from a family of entrepreneurs and is a successful entrepreneur several times over
• She is a strong supporter of mental health
• Ashley leads an all female marketing agency and is an advocate for female entrepreneurs
• She shares her secrets for winning in interviews and networking your way to “unreachable” opportunities

Bell Falls Search Focus on Talent Podcast – Ashley Rector, Founder – Quimby Digital

[00:00:06] Ron Laneve: Hello and welcome to Episode 22 of the Bell Falls Search Focus on Talent Podcast. We have another entrepreneur with us today, a founder of a full service digital marketing agency based here in Cleveland, Ohio. Her firm has strong expertise in social media marketing, content creation, and brand awareness development. Not only is this individual very adept at marketing, but she also has her law degree and was a practicing attorney for some time. She built, scaled and sold a digital publishing platform. She’s a staunch advocate for mental health, and she’s a leader in advancing awareness and opportunities for female entrepreneurs. I couldn’t be more excited to introduce to you Ashley Rector, Founder of Quimby Digital. Ashley, thanks for being here.

[00:00:56] Ashley Rector: Thank you Ron, and thank you for the intro that made me feel special.

[00:01:00] Ron Laneve: Did I miss anything? I was going down your LinkedIn profile and remembering our coffee conversations and I was always fascinated by all the things that you’ve accomplished and want to make sure I didn’t pass anything over? 

[00:01:09] Ashley Rector: No, that was amazing. I should have you like introduce me on every single call that way.

[00:01:15] Ron Laneve: Building on that, and again, as you and I were talking, the more and more of these conversations I have, it’s clear that there’s no linear path to one’s career. And even from where they start with their college degree and where they go after that. And you’re a pretty great example of that. So can you walk us through, your evolution from graduating through college to your law degree, to your publishing business, to where you’re at now?

[00:01:40] Ron Laneve: And not only how you did it, but why along the way, the decisions you made. And again, take us to where you’re at.

[00:01:46] Ashley Rector: Yeah, of course. Yeah, the journey was not linear, that’s for sure. And I think like just reflecting back on my career as a whole than just mindset going into what I’m going to do for the rest of my life. Because that’s how it’s always positioned to us, right? Like we’re in school, then we decide a career and that’s what you’re gonna do for the rest of your life.

[00:02:06] Ashley Rector: So that’s a big decision to make when you’re 18, right? Going into college. And I was fortunate enough that when I grew up — Drellishak is my maiden name. And so Drellishak’s Auto Service has been around forever. My great-grandpa started it. So there was this long line of entrepreneurship in my family and I think every single one of my uncles has started their own business, including my dad who sold last year.

[00:02:30] Ashley Rector: So from very early on as a young child, I was always involved in business conversations. Even from the age of six, he was having me walk around the office, go talk to people. So I always knew, I think deep down that eventually owning my own business was always gonna be the plan. But that journey, it wasn’t a straight line.

[00:02:52] Ashley Rector: So I ended up going to University of Toledo and getting a degree in psychology because I thought I wanted to be a psychiatrist. And then I got my bachelor’s and realized, no, that’s not what I wanted to do. So I had to do some soul searching. Still very young in my early twenties coming out of college. And I ended up working at a bank.

[00:03:13] Ashley Rector: So I was at the in-store teller booth in Giant Eagle, how they have like Huntington Bank. So I work there and we worked the line and then we also did like car loans and credit cards and all of that stuff. And I got really good at selling actually during that which seems weird, but it was true. So like you had marks you had to make. And after being at the bank for a while. I ended up going to my dad’s company and he could see I was doing well at sale. So he was like, come and do lead gen for me. And I was like, okay I’ll give it a whirl. So while I was there, a lot of what I had to do was learn about the FCRA.

[00:03:50] Ashley Rector: He sold a background screening company, so it was a lot of like employment law related things. He did background checks for a lot of the hospitals nationally. And I started to really like the law. I just followed my gut instinct. There were like these passions that I’m like, let’s tease this out a little bit.  I decided after being at my dad’s company for a year that I was gonna take the LSAT and just see could I qualify to even get into law school? So I studied, I took the lsat and then I ended up getting a scholarship to Capital University which is in Columbus.

[00:04:26] Ashley Rector: Yeah. So I ended up becoming an attorney. And while I was there, I knew that I didn’t wanna go the law firm route. I just didn’t have the grind in me, I think for the 80 hour work weeks. I wanted to go in-house somewhere and really be mentored.

Everyone kept saying no, it’s impossible. It’s impossible to go in-house straight out of law school.  I’m like nothing’s impossible. I started networking and I actually went on LinkedIn and I started looking at all the in-house attorneys in Columbus, Ohio. because there was L Brands and Express all these different, bigger companies. And I started just meeting attorneys for coffee and I landed an internship at Express.

Then they introduced me to my first job outta law school, which was in-house at a large REIT in Columbus. And the rest was kind of history for my attorney career. I ended up doing that for around four or five years, being in-house counsel, managing the east region of that portfolio. And honestly I wasn’t top of my class. I was middle of the road, middle of the road GPA but networking and getting out there and talking to people is exactly why I secured that job opportunity.

[00:05:40] Ron Laneve: Understood.

[00:05:40] Ashley Rector: Yeah. And I don’t think it’s much different now, honestly. 

[00:05:44] Ron Laneve: It’s interesting, you’ve already hit on two common themes that I’ve had with every conversation, with every entrepreneur I’ve talked to is the networking part, obviously. And as a recruiter, I’m a big advocate of that. But the selling part, whether it was a customer service role at Progressive or I’ve had a CMO who was the, was also a CEO of a large company in town who Attributed a lot of her selling experience back to working at Dairy Queen when she was in high school and, making more money for the owner. So it’s that selling and then networking are clearly two themes here. Was the publishing business next?

[00:06:17] Ashley Rector: Yeah, so then it got interesting. I’m very creative. I have an analytical side to my brain, but I’ve always been a writer since I was young. At the time that I launched the digital and print magazine, the primary magazines for women were Cosmopolitan, Seventeen. And it was it was very superficial content. There were so many things going on in terms of like career transitions and people getting married and infertility, like all these stories that weren’t being represented. And really with that premise, I was like, there has to be a place that will share stories from women around the world that are everyday women about the stuff they’re going through.

[00:06:56] Ashley Rector: And so I ran with that idea and I launched Harness Magazine. It’s still around today. And I ended up doing that in my free time while I was an attorney. So I was publishing stories. I can’t even tell you how many stories I published. We had, we eventually had over 6,000 writers all around the world.  And so thousands and thousands of stories.

I did six print issue runs, so we put out six magazines and we distributed those nationally. And I hustled. I went to independent coffee shops and was like, buy my magazines wholesale. We did events, we did launch parties, we did influencers. We ran the gamut.

[00:07:36] Ashley Rector: And really the way I was able to attract so many individuals to share their story was on social media. So I started growing the Instagram account long before the business even launch. So when I launched the website, I had an audience to launch to, and then it just grew. I was doing that while I was an attorney and it was a lot.

[00:07:59] Ashley Rector: So while I was there, I hit a wall and I suffered like extreme burnout and so I ended up going into the hospital for three days and it totally changed the trajectory of my life. I think that I always thought I have no limits. And that’s how I lived, like in terms of pushing and ambition.  And in fact, my brain broke. There are limits and amount of stress that you can take. And one day I was fine, I shouldn’t say that there were signs, and then the next day I was grumbling. And so I had to make a decision on, how am I going to rebuild? And what does my life look like?

[00:08:35] Ashley Rector: Having two very demanding jobs was not it. So I put my notice in at Washington Prime. Then a few months later, I sold the magazine to a woman who still owns it and has grown it way further than I have today. We’re still in touch. So she’s translated it into Spanish now too, so it’s bilingual.

[00:08:56] Ron Laneve: So you took a hard reset on both opportunities. Okay. And how long did you take time off or think about, what to do next. And then what led you to, do you know the next thing?

[00:09:07] Ashley Rector: Yeah. Not very long because I had to make money. I think I took eight weeks FMLA or something and then really got my crap together and decided what is it that I like to do? And marketing had always been something I had a knack for.  I grew the magazine so quickly and it was all because of the marketing that we did. And that was like my decision. I’m going to be a marketing consultant. So I ended up contacting some individuals in the Cleveland area and deciding to move back home to Cleveland. Because I want to be by family where my roots are.

[00:09:44] Ashley Rector: My aunt at the time was also a marketing consultant and she took me under her wing. So I started doing marketing for a law firm in Cleveland actually. I was on the opposite side, which is really interesting. Until I decided to venture out on my own and start the agency and start growing it.

[00:10:00] Ron Laneve: Understood. So now to Quimby. I gave a little intro on the things I think you, you focus on, I remember when we had coffee, you had a very specific niche when it came to who’s your best kind of ideal client profile. So can you talk about that a little bit and where your sweet spot is as an

[00:10:16] Ashley Rector: Yeah, for sure. Quimby has been around for four and a half years, and since its inception, I knew I wanted to work with startup founders. I shouldn’t say we. I like to work very quickly and fast and we do social media marketing, the organic side, so the production of the content that you see every single day that doesn’t have ad spend behind it. We also do the paid ad side, but primarily it’s organic social. And so to move on trends and produce the sheer amount of content that we produce, you have to be able to move like this. And so most of our clients are. Either very nimble when it comes to marketing or squarely sit in the startup space.

[00:10:56] Ashley Rector: And normally they’ve gone through like a seed round series A, series B. So we’re working directly with the founder or the CMO and we’re plugging in, as an extension of the marketing team or the first marketing hire truly. It’s interesting we get to see all aspects of the business that way too. I will say over the last year we’ve started to have some clear delineations in terms of niches. We actually serve a lot of climate clients and we have one based in the UK right now. That’s just such an interesting area to work in. Then we do get a lot of female founders because the agency itself is all female led and run. And so yeah it’s fun.

[00:11:36] Ron Laneve: Couple things, I’m gonna deviate a little bit. So back to the entrepreneurial calling. So you were fortunate to be surrounded, as you mentioned by entrepreneurs. For individuals who don’t have that surrounding and don’t have those, fortunate opportunities, what would you suggest to somebody thinking that they wanna be an entrepreneur? How do they make that evaluation? How do they those steps and understand if it’s for them or not? 

[00:12:00] Ashley Rector: Yeah. That’s hard. I love entrepreneurship, but I also think that it’s a very hard path. We joke sometimes in our family, it’s like a sickness, right? Like we, we got infected the sickness of having to launch our own companies.

It is a blessing and it is a curse. So I think for anyone who wants to start their own business you really have to like what you do, like some fundamental part of it I talked to some founders and they just wanna start a company because they think it’s going to make a lot of money. This is gonna be like your baby you’re gonna spend so much time with it that there has to be some sort of aspect of building this business that you love. ’cause it will take you away from the things that you love. I think having that core passion that you just can’t replace it, and then the ability to, say, okay, I’m scared and I’m gonna do this anyway.

[00:12:55] Ashley Rector: Because so much of the decision making is on the precipice of I’m either gonna fall off this cliff and die, or I’m gonna fly. And you have to make that decision, and that’s really hard to do.

But oftentimes, those scenarios in your business where you quantum leap is right on the edge of I don’t know what’s going to happen next. You have to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. I think it’s just thriving in the chaos. I guess I always start with passion and then from there, building out what the business looks like. What does this year look like? Who are the clients you’re trying to serve? Is there a product market fit? 

[00:13:29] Ron Laneve: I’m going to put a few words in your mouth and I hope you agree. People want to talk about their successes, right? Founders, entrepreneurs like to have conversations. People will grab coffee with you or lunch and they’ll talk to you about what they’ve done and the challenges they’ve seen. I know you’re the same way. You use networking to get into the legal profession when no one said it could be done. I guess what I’m asking here is, do you agree with that? Do you agree that other founders and entrepreneurs , go find the ones that will talk to you and have a conversation with them and ask ’em for their help.

[00:13:58] Ashley Rector: Yeah, a hundred percent. I think finding somebody in the industry that you aspire to be like. Because you don’t know the challenges until you’re in it running a company. I actually belong to a ton of networking groups and one of them is female agency owner specific. There’s 30 of us and we all run marketing agencies and we all have similar problems and similar cycles. Some of us are competitors and everybody is very transparent on the struggles. People who are higher in revenue than me, longer in business, whatever, they’re like, this is what’s next. It helps to know okay. I’m gonna face these scaling challenges or, hiring or whatever it looks like.

[00:14:38] Ron Laneve: Hiring that’s near and dear to my heart. Let’s talk about that. Part of what I try to do is a is appeal to or give some suggestions to college students or, even individuals. Thinking about the, making that transition into the workforce.  From a marketing perspective. What’s your take on what Skills and expertise, individuals should be adding to their to their repertoire, to their bag of tools as they think about making that transition.

[00:15:04] Ashley Rector: Yeah, that’s a great question. So we hire for a variety of roles in the creative space, the way that we run content is like we’re like a Swiss Army knife. So when a brand rolls on, they get a copywriter, a graphic designer, an account strategist, like a video editor. There’s all these people, right?

[00:15:23] Ashley Rector: They have like specific roles and functions. And so depending on the role, obviously is what we look for. But I will say a commonality, because we do hire a lot of green talent for certain roles and then groom them.

Have they done internships and if they haven’t done internships, have they exhibited a portfolio where they’re passionate about what they do? Because you can very quickly tell, right? So like we have people who apply who are in college or just graduated, but while they were there, they had cultivated this portfolio because they were interested in what they were doing. And then motivation. There are some things that you can hire for and ambition is not, you know what I mean?

[00:16:02] Ashley Rector: So you can tell people, I have people who follow up with me in terms of submitting their resume and we tell them, Hey, we’re gonna interview at 10:00 AM and they send me the invite before I can send. So when you’re plugging into at least a startup, you want someone who can hit the ground running. Probably any business does. So it’s that I don’t know that ambition and drive to pursue what interests you outside of school.

[00:16:27] Ron Laneve: Yep. I like to focus on curiosity. I they all kind of fall in the same bucket, but, it just, it drives me crazy when I talk to college kids these days, and literally they’re a junior or a senior and they haven’t had an internship. That’s okay. But to your point, it’s so easy to start a side hustle or work on a project or go get Google Analytics certified or Learn just anything, Show some initiative. So thank you for that. 

[00:16:53] Ron Laneve: So how about, on, on the opposite end, for experienced people that you’ve interviewed over the years do you have any, examples of, things that were differentiating from a candidate? Interview perspective or that you can look back on and be like, oh wow, I’ll never forget this person ’cause they did this thing and they blew me away. And if not, I know I’m putting you on the spot. If not, generally, do you have suggestions for people in that boat? Right now we’re in this market where, as I mentioned before, supply far outweighs demand. People are applying to jobs or there’s 800 other people applying. How do you distinguish yourself in that situation? Any thoughts?

[00:17:30] Ashley Rector: Yeah, we actually just are finishing hiring up for a role right now and we got a lot of applicants and so this is like fresh in my mind. Actually two roles, a freelance role and a full-time role. In terms of the full-time role…

when we were interviewing the people who stood out the most are the people went to our website and reviewed our portfolio and case studies and actually understood them and referenced ’em in the interview. They went a step further in terms of they read it and then digested the information and applied that somehow to their experience. So not everybody did that. Obviously there were only a few, so that was remarkable.

And then in terms of the copywriter role, we had somebody who applied who, and this is for social media marketing, so the captions need to be relatively witty and unique, and so their email was tailored to us and then they inserted like gif within the email body. And it was very funny and very on brand for us, Quimby as a whole. And I was, oh my God, this person would fit in with the team, and so we interviewed them.

And then conversely there were applicants who applied, who clearly didn’t read the job description at all and ran it through AI. And and like I could very easily tell that this was like an AI that spit this out like ChatGPT. And so that was an automatic no for me. 

[00:18:57] Ron Laneve: Yeah, I’ve seen that already and it’s just mind boggling. How about one more question. How about ai, how are you guys leveraging it in your business for your clients?

[00:19:05] Ashley Rector: Yeah, it’s so interesting. We went from being , what is AI in the beginning of 2023 to actively using it in our business, which just is mind blowing to me. So we use it to refine content. So we’ll build out an entire brand, like an entire social strategy, and then we’ll run it through chat GPT and ask , where are the holes in this? Where could this be better? So we use it almost like a colleague, I don’t feel like it generates the best content. So sometimes it takes me longer to try and get content out of chat GPT than if I were to write it myself. But I can write stuff and so will the copywriters and then it’ll generate all these other ideas that I didn’t think about.

[00:19:48] Ashley Rector: And and then I leverage it for just industry insights. If I wanted to digest like an article or something and tell me the key points in it or whatever. So we’re using it to optimize right now. But I’ve been thinking about other ways to use it that I’ve been, do we want to develop some sort of social tool with ai?

[00:20:05] Ashley Rector: And so the entrepreneur in me is trying to avoid all the ways that I could use ai.

[00:20:10] Ron Laneve: I’m sure with your track record something something interesting and provocative will be coming soon so we’ll be

[00:20:16] Ashley Rector: Thanks.

[00:20:17] Ron Laneve: Ashley 

[00:20:17] Ron Laneve: I appreciate you being with us today and sharing your career journey and your story with us and suggestions. And again, great to see you

[00:20:24] Ashley Rector: Yeah, it was good to see you too. And thank you for having me on. This was wonderful.

[00:20:28] Ron Laneve: Yeah, my

[00:20:29] Ashley Rector: Thanks. Bye.

 

January 15, 2024