You Already Have Everything You Need to Get Your First Clients
Most founders think their first problem is a lead problem.
It usually isn’t.
When Alexis Garrison left a stable agency career to start AG Digital Group, she assumed the hardest part would be finding new business from scratch. What she found instead, in her first year of building a B2B marketing consultancy, was something almost every founder eventually discovers: the network she already had was worth more than she realized.
The Network Problem Isn’t a Network Problem
Alexis spent years building relationships through agency work before she ever went independent. When she finally committed to running her own business, she assumed she’d need to build a client base from zero. Instead, close to all of her early work came from people she already knew.
This is a pattern worth sitting with. A lot of founders quietly believe their network won’t want their services, or worry they’ll be bothering people by reaching out. That belief rarely holds up once tested. The relationships built over a career don’t disappear the moment you go independent. They’re usually still there, waiting for a reason to reconnect.
The work isn’t building a network from nothing. It’s trusting the one you already have.
Every Business Has a Season You Didn’t Plan For
The first year of running a business comes with a learning curve that has nothing to do with skill. Alexis discovered this when summer arrived and her pipeline slowed. Working internationally, she hadn’t accounted for the fact that much of Europe takes real time off in July and August.
It’s easy to misread a quiet season as a sign of failure. It’s rarely that. Every industry has a rhythm, and most founders don’t learn theirs until they’ve lived through a full year of it. The instinct to take a slow month personally is common, and it’s usually the wrong read. It’s not always a signal to fix something. Sometimes it’s just the season.
Narrowing Your Focus Is What Makes Growth Possible
Alexis didn’t start with the specialty she has now. She began broad, offering the services she’d trained in, and only later noticed where her particular skill set intersected with an underserved need in her industry. Once she saw it, she narrowed in.
That decision is what made her business scalable. A tightly defined offer is easier to explain, easier to refer, and easier to grow. The tradeoff is real: staying broad can feel safer, because it means saying yes to more kinds of work. But broad offers are also harder to hand off, harder to systematize, and harder for other people to understand well enough to send you referrals.
Narrowing isn’t a limitation. It’s usually the thing that makes the next stage of growth possible at all.
Growth and Letting Go Aren’t Opposites
As Alexis’s business grew, she hit a familiar wall: too much demand, not enough hours. The instinct for a lot of founders in that position is to protect quality by doing everything themselves. Alexis felt that instinct too, and named it clearly. Letting go is hard when the standard you hold for your own work feels like the whole reason clients trust you.
But holding onto every task doesn’t actually protect quality long term. It just moves the bottleneck. The founders who scale well aren’t the ones who lower their standards to hire. They’re the ones who build a system for training, feedback, and quality control, so the standard travels with the business instead of living only in one person’s hands.
There’s no universal right answer here. Some founders choose to stay small and high-touch on purpose, and that’s a legitimate choice, not a failure to scale. What matters is making the decision intentionally instead of by default.
Working Hard for Yourself Feels Different
Maybe the clearest thing Alexis named in this conversation: the hours themselves didn’t change much between working for an agency and working for herself. What changed was who the hours were for.
That distinction is easy to underestimate before you’ve experienced it and hard to explain once you have. The same workload that once felt draining can feel like an investment once it’s building something that belongs to you.
The Takeaway
None of this requires a specific industry or a specific business model. Whether you’re running a wellness practice, a coaching business, or a B2B consultancy, the same questions show up: Are you using the network you already have? Are you reading a slow season accurately? Is your offer focused enough to grow? And are you willing to let go of a task before you’re fully ready to, because the alternative is staying the bottleneck in your own business?
Those questions don’t come with universal answers. But asking them honestly is usually the first real step toward the next stage of growth.
This episode is part of the FoundHer Rising series, conversations with women founders in wellness, coaching, and consulting who are building businesses on their own terms.
Full Transcript
Christine Hakkola: Welcome to FoundHer Rising, the podcast for women founders in wellness, coaching, and consulting who are ready to build businesses that create freedom, impact, and income. I’m your host, Christine Hakkola, business coach, former psychotherapist, and mentor to women scaling service-based businesses.
Today I’m joined by Alexis Garrison, founder of AG Digital Group. She’s a B2B integrated marketing strategist based in Maine, helping companies build the systems and infrastructure they need to drive long-term, sustainable growth. Alexis, welcome to the show.
Alexis Garrison: Thanks for having me. I’m so excited to be here.
Christine: Oh, I’m so excited to have you. We just had a few minutes to chit chat and I was ready to dive right in — I had to remind myself we needed to hit record first.
Alexis: I know, we could go on for way too long.
Christine: We’ll have to cap it at some point, but let’s dive in. Let’s go back to the beginning for a moment. You had a career history before starting your own business, and my understanding is you went back and forth for a while before deciding to become self-employed. Tell me about that journey and what ultimately made you take the leap.
Alexis: I was working for agencies in larger cities outside of Maine. I was always remote-first, even pre-COVID, and I found this niche world of business-to-business marketing that I’d never learned about in school — the differences between B2B and traditional marketing. I found this niche within the tech space and grew my career to a point where I hit a ceiling at these agencies. I was working so hard essentially for somebody else, giving my skill set and knowledge over to others instead of investing in myself. I wanted to see what I could do, but that came with the back and forth of, can I do this on my own? Am I fully invested in myself and my skill set to do this? Or do I want the safety of working for somebody else and having that stability?
My parents were entrepreneurs too. They owned their own business my entire childhood, and I saw the struggles, the conflict, the hours they put in. For the longest time I said, I’m never going to own my own business. That’s not me. It did not go that way. I finally had an aha moment almost two years ago when an agency was making changes and my position was let go. Instead of looking for another job, I said, let’s see what I can do. Now, two years later, here we are.
Christine: You were given the nudge.
Alexis: Yes, it sounds like it.
Christine: Maybe not surprising — I hear that kind of story from so many folks. You described that challenge so well: being drawn to the perks of entrepreneurship, but also the perks of a stable salary. It sounds like you went back and forth for a while, which a lot of people do, and then the universe often works in someone’s favor to nudge them toward entrepreneurship.
I want to go back for a second so listeners understand what you do. A lot of our guests work in health and wellness, coaching, and consulting, and we have fewer B2B service providers on the show. Can you describe the difference between what your early education taught you about marketing and what you actually found in B2B?
Alexis: When I was studying marketing in college, it was all about the agency lifestyle — creative and advertising for big companies you’d see TV commercials for. I never learned about the differences between direct-to-consumer and business-to-business marketing, or even product growth marketing. I started my career in a media planning role at a traditional agency in Portland, buying typical ad space before digital had its boom. I worked at a couple more agencies in that same space, on things like lottery accounts. Then I found a connection who worked at a business-to-business marketing agency in New York that specialized in tech, and I learned a whole new world.
The difference is, typical D2C marketing is: I see an ad, I go to the website, I purchase this. There’s a whole user journey — did they add it to the cart, did they check out. Business-to-business focuses on sales between large or mid-sized corporations. I tend to work with enterprise-level global companies. The major differences: you’re going after C-suite personalities, going right to the pain points and solutions you solve for, and you’re focused on a really long customer journey. A lot of my sales cycles are a minimum of nine months to a year and a half, sometimes two years, because it’s based on platform technology, cybersecurity, fintech — big business decisions that take a long time.
So we’re focused on generating leads and nurturing them toward sales. I work a lot in marketing operations, using HubSpot to build huge user-journey lead-management architecture. When we get a lead, how do we treat it? Where does it go based on its criteria? Is it warm? Is it within our ideal client profile? It’s granular structure around how leads move through the pipeline. It’s a completely different universe than a pretty creative ad someone clicks on and buys a product from on TikTok. People don’t realize that. It’s almost a different language.
Christine: I think a lot of our listeners can resonate on a certain level, because a lot of small service-based business owners — whether acquiring one-on-one clients as they start out, or wanting to scale beyond that — are thinking about the same questions, just not in the language you just used, because this is what you live and breathe. They’re thinking about who am I serving, where do I get leads, how do I bring clients into my world. What you described actually makes a lot of sense to a lot of service-based business owners. But I find it so interesting that this isn’t what you thought you’d be doing when you started in marketing.
So let’s go back to that first year, first year and a half. I can see now why it was a struggle to make that decision, since you had a long sales cycle and were stepping out of something secure. What were some of the early successes that kept you motivated, and what were the challenges?
Alexis: One of the reasons I struggled so much with going out on my own was the concept of, how am I going to get new business? I didn’t really see the networking community I’d already been building — relationships from contracts at agencies I’d worked at, or relationships built over ten years in the space. To this day, about 99% of the work I get is referral-based, which is awesome. I’ve built and established some really strong relationships. A lot of the companies I work with are either seed-funded startups where we’re building the architecture from ground zero, or established companies where we’re working within a whole different kind of structure.
That was one of my first struggles: how am I going to get work? Once I finally committed one hundred percent — not going to look for another job — I reached out to past relationships and launched from that baseline. I was really busy for the first few months. Then this past summer was my first real downtime, and I thought, I have to go after work and reach out to my network. Since I work with a lot of international companies, people don’t always realize a lot of the tech space is headquartered in Europe, or Canada, or Holland, or Denmark — places you don’t necessarily think about. And unlike Americans, they take real time off in the summer, so July and August are naturally slow for B2B. Figuring out those ebbs and flows was a challenge.
My business model also shifted. I started with the idea of doing paid media, since that’s what I was doing before — I was head of paid media and performance marketing. But I had this skill set in HubSpot and developing marketing ops and revenue ops journeys, seeing the entire marketing picture. I realized there’s a huge gap in the industry for specialists in marketing ops and revenue operations who truly understand it. Over the last six or seven months, my primary business has shifted almost entirely to marketing ops and HubSpot contracts. Now I’m a Platinum HubSpot partner and work closely with them. That’s been a huge shift in my business model — that’s the ebb and flow of year one.
Christine: You actually touched on three things that often happen for people in their first year to year and a half of a service-based business. One — and I love how candidly you shared this — you didn’t realize the value of the network you already had. That’s a journey a lot of women go through when they go out on their own. There’s this moment of, how am I going to find leads? We forget for a moment, or a week, or a few months, that many of us are actually very well connected. Sometimes, due to societal beliefs or how we were raised, we worry about bothering people, or we assume no one will want the service, and there’s negative self-talk attached to that. But when we can move past it and push outside our comfort zones to actually talk to people in our network — colleagues, past employers, whoever it is — many, many women I speak with build their business, often to the six-figure mark, just by leveraging their warm network. It sounds like you did that really well.
Alexis: To that point, I want to add one thing, because this was a huge decision for me too. I always prided myself on being a very independent person. I took care of myself, and I never asked anyone for anything. So I was at the point of thinking, if I go out on my own, what happens if I’m not making any money? Would I become reliant on my partner or family members if something happened while I was self-employed? That was a huge thing for me to overcome — the pride I had in having built a strong career and a strong resume. And also, what would happen if I failed at starting out on my own, and then went to apply to companies, and they asked what I’d been doing for the past two years?
Christine: I think you can’t win either way.
Alexis: I saw this happen to my mom. She and my dad owned a company together for fifteen or twenty years. She was in finance, high up at a company, then went to work for my dad’s business. When they sold it, she was like, well, what do I do now? We owned a small company ourselves — what does that show? I ran a company, I was head of everything, but if I want a job back at a huge corporation, they’re going to question my experience. She said she could have gone so much farther in her career if she hadn’t started her own business. Those are all the things you think about and contemplate. Women have gotten so much stronger in the job force, and I like to think we take pride in our growth and how independent we’ve become. You have to really trust your skill set and yourself. That was a huge thing for me to overcome.
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Christine: I really appreciate you sharing that. I think a lot of women have similar fears, and it can be easy to push those down or think we’re the only ones who feel that way. So thank you for sharing.
The second thing you went through in that first year — and I want to normalize this — is getting used to the ebbs and flows of your industry. Yours were very specific, since working internationally means there are cultural factors at play, like people not working in the summer, that you weren’t anticipating. Every industry has its own version of that first-year adjustment. Without knowing those are external factors beyond our control, or just the nature of the industry, we can take it personally — misreading it as, I’ve failed, or I didn’t plan well — when really it’s just a season. It takes at least that first year in business to get in touch with that and then capitalize on it.
Alexis: It’s not something you realize as an employee, because you have contracts and you’re still working regardless. But on your own, you notice — I haven’t heard back from anybody in a couple weeks, everyone’s on vacation, no one’s responding. What am I going to do for new business? It’s not that employers don’t think about those things, but they’ve been in business long enough that they manage them, and it doesn’t get communicated to employees. It can be a big wake-up call.
Christine: And they think Americans are crazy for not taking their time off.
Alexis: As someone who’s family immigrated here, I can concur. Most of my international clients tell me to take a day off, and I say, I don’t understand, I have work to do.
Christine: The third thing I want to name before we fast-forward to today — and I think this is a nice segue — is that you did something very wise early on. You started broad when you went into business for yourself, but you quickly realized where the opportunity was, where it intersected with your skill set and what you enjoyed, and you narrowed your services so they were more tailored. That’s often what it takes to grow a business successfully and create sustainable long-term income. I want to hear how that’s evolved into today. What does your business look like now, and where do you see it going?
Alexis: Today versus when I started — I began with the idea of demand gen only, performance marketing, generating and nurturing leads for clients, with nothing in operations. But my brain doesn’t work that way. I like to see the entire journey: what happened to the leads I generated? Did sales do anything with them? How are they being handled and managed? Over the years I grew my marketing operations and revenue operations skill set, and I started getting bigger, longer-term contracts managing clients’ HubSpot instances, their CRMs, their Salesforce, and building the architecture for how they manage revenue and marketing operations.
It turned into a snowball effect of referrals — she knows her stuff, she understands the entire journey — because I understood everything from initial lead gen through the pipeline and could optimize systems around what people actually need to see. I think of myself now as the middle person, because when sales and marketing work together, it’s the most beneficial thing for the whole company. If I can be the person who connects those dots — understanding what marketing needs, what sales needs, and that salespeople want easy, streamlined processes because they’d rather just email, talk, and call than go into HubSpot — then I can make sales’ lives easier while still giving marketing the performance metrics they need. It just spiraled from there. Now I get these big HubSpot contracts and get lost in portals for hours and days.
Christine: That’s a good problem to have, but I imagine it has its downsides. Before we get to those — I want to name that it’s relieving and exciting to hear you talk about the importance of seeing sales and marketing as an integrated whole. So often I hear from clients, or see how they’ve set things up on their teams, that they treat those two processes as very separate, living in their own silos. There are obvious issues that arise when marketing doesn’t know what sales is doing and vice versa. More broadly, I always appreciate when a service provider has a holistic view of a business, because it allows for a more meaningful impact. When we look at one slice of a business without considering the downstream effect on the rest of it, it’s hard to make educated decisions. As a business coach, when a client comes to me with a problem, I rarely respond to that problem directly — I want to know why it exists and what it’s connected to.
It sounds like you realized that too as you got deeper into your own work. What I see as the downside — and I want to hear how this relates to where you’re at now — is that it can pull you out of niching. The benefit of doing one thing within one type of client’s business is that it’s infinitely more scalable, keeps the business model simple, and is easier to market. The broader your services get, the harder it is to explain what you do, and you often become the bottleneck in your own business, because everyone wants the full picture once they find out about you, and you end up stretched thin — sometimes to the point of needing to significantly change your business model. Say a little about how that relates to where you’re at now.
Alexis: All of that resonates. One important thing to realize is that when I’m working on CRM systems, especially HubSpot, I become an extension of a company. I have to understand, start to finish, every avenue contacts or leads are coming from, how they’re treated, what the sales process looks like, what the C-suite wants to see in reporting. I have to understand the intricate details of their business, their model, their products. It’s almost like being an employee of their company while being a contractor.
With the level of these projects and retainers I’m getting, it requires a whole knowledge base — understanding the tech and the SaaS world. I absolutely love what I do, but the problem is I’m getting so much business that I’m stretched thin. There’s a decision point: do I only take one big project at a time, or do I take on more, grow, and hire specialists in different lanes within HubSpot? Different people for different avenues. There’s also the question of letting go and training, and trusting that other people will work and operate the way you would, with the same knowledge and skill set. I was actually talking about this recently with my dad, who I go to for business advice. It’s hard, because nobody’s going to work exactly like you, with your background and foundation. It’s a very niche skill set — finding someone with a tech background who understands marketing and sales and can implement the tactical operations is rare.
Christine: You wouldn’t be able to hire just anyone; they’d also need to come with a certain skill set and be trainable.
Alexis: Right. So it’s a rock and a hard place — do I take the time to find someone mid-level and invest in training, or an entry-level person and scale them up, or do I just keep doing it all myself? It’s all part of the business model thinking that needs more attention now.
Christine: You’re at what I consider a really exciting crossroads. You’ve built a business that’s successful and profitable. You have clients, a great reputation, a clear offer, and things are growing. When I get to speak with business owners at this crossroads, the thing I try to impress on them is that there’s no right or wrong decision. We’ve had guests on this show who made the very clear decision not to bring on team members, not to scale, and to keep a small, high-touch service business that brought in a good income. That guest’s story sticks with me because she’d created a real sense of balance in her life, and it was right for her. And I’ve spoken with other business owners who could make that same choice, but intuitively, for a variety of reasons, it doesn’t feel right — the high-touch, relationship-based model matters too much to them, and having a bigger impact and reaching more people matters too. So often, especially as women, we’re balancing how to keep the integrity, authenticity, and relationship aspect of the business while also growing in a meaningful, sustainable way. It sounds like that’s where you’re at too.
Alexis: It is. And it’s also about investing in your brand. Even as a marketer, one of the hardest things to do is remember to update your own website or advertise your own brand when you’re working on so many client accounts. I brought on part-time help who’s fantastic with brand development and the things I’ve been struggling to find time for. Now that I’m working on a rebrand and repositioning AG Digital, it’s going to come down to a decision: do I really invest and start hiring full-time people so I can focus on new business and growing, or do I stay status quo?
Christine: The question I’d ask is, if you could find that experienced person with a tech background and the sales and marketing knowledge who’s trainable and dedicated to your company, is that something you’d want to pursue?
Alexis: I think so. I definitely would. It’s a matter of making sure I’m set up for that — that I have projects and pipeline in place to support the system. I’m cautious, even when I don’t have three contracts in scope, about whether it’s worth hiring someone or whether I can just handle what’s on my plate.
Christine: Arguably, hiring would free up your time to go get more leads to fill that pipeline.
Alexis: That’s exactly my point. I don’t have time for new business right now. So do I hire someone to do my current work so I can go after new business, or do I just wait for it to come to me? I know I have to take that leap. It’s just my baby — the letting go is hard.
Christine: Spoken like almost every woman business owner I know. We have such high standards for making sure the level of service we provide stays consistent even as our business grows. I think it’s a wonderful quality, and where I see it work well is when we can harness it and realize it’s not about letting go of standards — it’s about hiring the right people, having an effective training system, and having good feedback loops to catch things if they start to go a direction we don’t want. It’s a big decision, and a lot of the work I do with clients is helping them get clear on what they really want if fear weren’t part of the equation. It sounds like you have a sense of what you want, but you’re working through the ifs, ands, and buts — how do I maintain quality control, how do I find the right person, how do I balance growth without compromising my standards or stretching myself too thin?
Alexis: It’s funny, because I’m working a lot of long hours right now. Don’t get me wrong, I worked that much at agencies too, as a department head — you work until the work is done. But I’ll say, to anyone listening, it is so rewarding to put in those same hours for yourself versus for someone else. My partner always commented that he wasn’t upset I was working so many hours — he knew I could do it on my own, and I was giving myself to somebody else when I could have been investing in myself and my own brand. That’s one of the biggest things I’ve learned this year — how rewarding it is to work hard for yourself, your brand, and what you believe in. It’s such a different feeling than working under a corporation.
Christine: I really appreciate you sharing that. I think most women who’ve already made the leap into entrepreneurship can relate, and it’s something we don’t fully understand until we’re in it — the difference between working hard for yourself versus for somebody else. For anyone listening who’s considering making that leap, knowing that reward exists on the other end might be the motivation to tip them over the edge.
Alexis: That’s one thing I didn’t realize going in. I was always told I was working too much, and now it’s a complete shift — people say, oh, you work for yourself, that’s awesome. Me working those hours is just the extra investment I’m making in myself. It feels very different.
Christine: Alexis, I feel like there are so many other directions we could take this conversation, but we’re going to run out of time. I’d love for you to share where listeners can find you and learn more about who you are and what you do.
Alexis: My website is agdigitalgroup.com. It’s going through a rebrand, so hopefully by the time this is live it’ll be beautiful and new for everyone to see. LinkedIn is probably where we share the most up-to-date stuff, as well as Instagram — it’s all under AG Digital Group.
Christine: Fantastic. Thank you so much for being a guest and for sharing your experiences and your challenges. I’m so excited to see which direction you decide to pursue. Thanks for being on the show.
Alexis: Thank you. My pleasure.
Christine: Thank you, listener, for tuning in to FoundHer Rising. If today’s episode resonated with you, follow the show, share it with another founder, and leave a quick review — it helps more women find these conversations. You can connect with me on LinkedIn or learn more at HakkolaHorizons.com. Until next time, keep rising and keep building the business that gives you freedom to live, lead, and create on your terms.
