"A truly successful CEO should be passionate, inspirational, and leave their ego at the door."
Sophie Bowman is a Forbes and Entrepreneur.com published contributing digital marketing expert, best-selling author, and multi-award-winning entrepreneur who launched her first creative agency online a decade ago so she could travel the world and work from anywhere without pants.
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Table of Contents
Welcome to your ValiantCEO exclusive interview! Let’s start with a little introduction. Tell us about yourself.
Sophie Bowman: After discovering I would never financially progress as a special needs teacher and a dash of an early mid-life crisis turning thirty without ever having lived abroad, I decided to go big and make my then-side hustle my business.
I onboarded a few social media and digital marketing clients on retainer and relocated from London, UK to Marrakech, Morocco for two years before relocating to the USA five years ago. I have been lucky enough to work with some major brands including a judge for PepsiCo NFL contest in 2020, one of a small team handling an album release social media campaign for DJ Khaled, and many more. I became a best-selling author in 2021, and release my next book revealing a slew of social media secrets for business owners in early 2022.
NO child ever says I want to be a CEO when I grow up. What did you want to be and how did you get to where you are today? Give us some lessons you learned along the way.
Sophie Bowman: I actually always wanted to be a female Richard Branson from as early as I can remember. I knew I had to be the boss.
Tell us about your business, what does the company do? What is unique about the company?
Sophie Bowman: Digital marketing became a vital tool during the pandemic as businesses were forced to close their doors and many business owners without an eCommerce presence were caught with their proverbial pants down. I found myself inundated with business owners desperate to build their online presence ‘yesterday’ while realizing that most social media users had no strategy in place to convert their followers to customers, hence the name of my company convertyourfollowers.com. Failure to convert your followers is the online version of flushing money down the toilet. Followers are hot leads, and should be converted so that you can retarget them and increase sales.
My monthly packages are expensive so I decided to launch a book in early 2022 that will give all business owners, influencers, and entrepreneurs access to my proven conversion process for less than $50. Of course, it’s aptly named How to Convert Your Social Media Followers. I have been branding cool creative brands for years, but sometimes simplicity is best, and as social media can be a confusing realm, I wanted to keep things simple.
How to become a CEO? Some will focus on qualities, others on degrees, how would you answer that question?
Sophie Bowman: A truly successful CEO should be passionate, inspirational, and leave their ego at the door. Being approachable and understanding to your team is the key to employee retention and a happy workforce, I’ve worked for some CEOs that do not reflect any of these qualities, and the employee turnover was huge and it made for toxic work environments. You have to be willing to listen to your team, not be afraid to try new things, and delegate what you can off your plate so that you focus on building the business; there is nothing more offensive to employees who feel like their every move is being watched and monitored. If you can’t trust your team to slay in their role, either they shouldn’t be on the team or you have control issues, it’s as simple as that.
What are the secrets to becoming a successful CEO? Who inspires you, who are your role models and why? Illustrate your choices.
Sophie Bowman: I kind of answered this in the last question but I will always be an avid Richard Branson fan because he was brave enough to go to battle with major brands like British Airways, believes in work ethic over education, and has a whole load of fun while he does it; what a life he has lived! I also think Sara Blakely is amazing. Who would have thought a pair of pants that suck in your love handles could take over the world?
Many CEOs fall into the trap of being all over the place. What are the top activities a CEO should focus on to be the best leader the company needs? Explain.
Sophie Bowman: I meet a lot of CEO’s who are brilliant but also sometimes a disorganized hot mess. I find the common denominator is trying to run and control every aspect of the business. It all comes down to hiring the right people so that you can trust to handover the majority of tasks to them while you focus on business development.
The Covid-19 Pandemic put the leadership skills of many to the test, what were some of the most difficult challenges that you faced as a CEO/Leader in the past year? Please list and explain in detail.
Sophie Bowman: I honestly breezed through it, because I have worked remotely and employed a remote team for over seven years. The only challenge I faced was trying to explain to business owners that you can’t expect one post from an influencer you free gifted to drive thousands of sales; customers need to see a long-term strategy to achieve this level. That and the fact that dealing with everyone’s anxiety and overall deteriorating mental health and workload overwhelm made people more difficult to manage.
What are some of the greatest mistakes you’ve noticed some business leaders made during these unprecedented times? What are the takeaways you gleaned from those mistakes?
Sophie Bowman: The two biggest mistake business leaders are making is failing to appoint an experienced person to handle their brand’s social and digital marketing channels, with the second being that they have no strategy in place to convert social media followers to customers. Social media is a lot more complicated than simply posting content with a few hashtags. If this is your strategy, your efforts are futile. You are not going to see any growth by following the amateur plan. Secondly, if you’re not converting your followers, why are you even on social media? Apart from a little bit of brand awareness, what’s the point?
In your opinion, what changes played the most critical role in enabling your business to survive/remain profitable, or maybe even thrive? What lessons did all this teach you?
Sophie Bowman: In previous recessions, digital marketing is usually the first cost business owners cut, but the opposite happened during COVID. I found myself having to turn away clients because I didn’t have the capacity to take on so much work. I tried to hire but for some reason, strong social media people are difficult to find.
What is the #1 most pressing challenge you’re trying to solve in your business right now?
Sophie Bowman: Finding the right talent to hire who have multiple skills and industry knowledge like me. With the risk of sounding arrogant, I wish I could clone myself so that I had a team of Sophies who together could take over the digital marketing world.
You already shared a lot of insights with our readers and we thank you for your generosity. Normally, leaders are asked about their most useful qualities but let’s change things up a bit. What is the most useless skill you have learned, at school or during your career?
Sophie Bowman: Physics – I hated that and math, and there is literally no point in me ever having learned physics when we literally never use it in my industry.
Thank you so much for your time but before we finish things off, we do have one more question. We will select these answers for our ValiantCEO Award 2021 edition. The best answers will be selected to challenge the award.
Share with us one of the most difficult decisions you had to make, this past year 2021, for your company that benefited your employees or customers. What made this decision so difficult and what were the positive impacts?
Sophie Bowman: One of the most difficult decisions was choosing to sell my conversion secrets in a book for less than $50. I spent seventeen years educating myself in this sector, so it feels like I’m under-selling it, but at the same time, I didn’t want to price business owners and other social media users out of the business. I won multiple awards in 2020 for my pro bono efforts to help business owners thrive instead of merely survive, and this is a theme I want to continue because marketing shouldn’t have to cost thousands of dollars a month.
Jed Morley, VIP Contributor to ValiantCEO and the host of this interview would like to thank Sophie Bowman for taking the time to do this interview and share her knowledge and experience with our readers.
If you would like to get in touch with Sophie Bowman or her company, you can do it through her – Linkedin Page
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