At the ripe old age of 25 -- well, she was all of 24 when she started her company a few months ago --
Shauna Nicholson of Birmingham is striking out on her own.
The Oakland County native says she's met skeptics -- more than one -- but she's not daunted. In fact, she's inspired.
"I've been called crazy a couple times," she says. People seem surprised that she chose Michigan for a start-up business, but she says the location has many benefits. "I know everybody is complaining about the economy and recessions, but as soon as I announced I was going on my own, I've gotten help, even from people not in the tech field."
The support, she says, isn't something she would expect to find everywhere, and especially not in bigger cities like Chicago, where she lived for a little while. Here, at home, in Oakland County, however, she's got lots of support and a developed a deep network, something she's found crucial as she starts up. "I knew I needed to be in a place where I had a solid network to back me up," she says.
Before starting her eponymous firm, she worked with Wixom-based web site builders Biznet. While there, she says, she helped the company develop their Internet marketing team. She says she loved what she did so much that she started thinking about how she could take what she was doing a step further. At the same time, she got the entrepreneurial bug.
Nicholson's specialty is developing online marketing strategies. Using a team of contractors, she not only helps businesses harness the tools of the Internet to bring traffic to their websites, she finds ways to get the traffic to spend money while there.
When a company decides to go online and do business there, she says, they need to use all the tools at their disposal. Developing a website is just part of the game. They need to think about marketing, business tactics, social media, how their e-commerce store will work and integrate into their sites. Her goal is to take all of those elements and find what will work best for each business.
"There are a lot of companies out there who just do web development, ... but when you put strategy to it, its a completely different ball game," Nicholson says. "It's the difference between a brochure site and a site that makes money. I tend to come across people who enjoy making money."
So far, she says, she is off to a good start. While most of her contracts do not allow her to divulge the clients' names, she says that she has landed some great ones already. "Q1 for 2010 is going to be incredible," she says. For instance, she's helping a Detroit brick and mortar store take the leap into ecommerce. She's also helping another e-commerce store re-launch itself and look at how to up its return on investment.
As Nicholson builds her company, she is happy to have found a space in Birmingham that caters to upstart businesses. It's a "co-working space" called Urbane on Adams. The building houses residential apartments, but has a dedicated business space where entrepreneurs and residents can work, have use of equipment like copy and fax machines, and have an upscale address for the businesses.
Nicholson says the co-working office has side benefits, like allowing her to have a place to go to "see other faces." She also values being able to bounce ideas off of her co-workers. For instance, one officemate, Henry Balanon, creates iPhone applications for his business, Bickbot.com. "We go back and forth all the time about different stuff, or innovations. Even the basic stuff, like writing a proposal, what's your bidding tactic, what did you do."
Getting to know her neighbors online also has been really valuable. "I am really well linked in to the social media world, especially in Oakland County," she says. Twitter, and participating in real world gatherings with other users, has helped her find leads, ideas, new tools and build business relationships.
"I went to my very first 'Tweetup' a couple years ago. If you aren't going to the offline stuff you won't find the value in it," she says of Twitter. "There's a lot of people who use it for networking stuff. It's kind of the networking thing that never sleeps."
Nicholson knows she's got a long way to go in the business world. "I'm really, really new," she says. However, she's thankful she chose Oakland County to get started. "Everyone here is really open source, for lack of a better word. They'll share their experiences with you. You don't get that in a lot of places. People are like, 'I've been there, let me help you.'"
Follow Shauna Nicholson on Twitter here and find her marketing wizardy online here.
Clare Pfeiffer Ramsey is managing editor for the Detroit-based web publication Model D Media
Photo credits:
Black and white portrait - Acacia Shanklin
Train tracks - Acacia Shanklin
Colored portrait - Ashley Nicholson.