Create a Facebook Ads Management Agency and Flourish with Monica Louie

Service based business must know who their customers are, how to reach them, and how to serve their needs. In the facebook ads management agency business, you not only need to know your customer, you also need to know who their customers are so you can reach them.

Today, I am excited to have my friend, Monica Louie, on this podcast. She has a fantastic business called Monica Louie, LLC. She actually had another business before this one and sold it to start this new business. Like Monica, you can be successfully unemployed.

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Monica Louie Created a Facebook Ads Management Agency to Make Money Without A Job

Monica has a few different facets to her business. She is a Facebook and Instagram ad strategist, so she has her agency that she has been growing for the last two years.

She has been building up her team and their processes where they manage Facebook and Instagram ads and now promoted pins on Pinterest for their online business owner clients.

Monica initially started this business as a Facebook ads coach, where she worked with people one on one, creating campaigns, and teaching them the ins and outs of the ads manager.

She still does this from time to time. She loves working with and teaching people and she also does speaking.

The third facet to her business is where she has her online training program, called Flourish with Facebook Ads.

In addition to the course, they meet in a group coaching setting, where they get together on Zoom two times a month. They dive in to the back end of their campaigns and Monica gives them specific feedback on their strategies.

Monica gets to connect with a lot of different business owners at different levels in their business. She loves using her experience and helping them scale.

What Monica Louie was like before she was successfully unemployed

Monica went to college and she expected to get a good job and make good money.

She figured she would work for a company for 40 years and get really good at whatever it was she was doing.

She planned to save money and retire someday, and in the meantime have a family.

She got into her corporate career and was moving up in the ranks. Monica started looking at the people ahead of her on the ladder and she realized they didn’t have the life she wanted for herself.

She and her husband were newly married and they were starting to plan to have kids and she started thinking there had to be more.

Monica knew there had to be people out there who were living life on their own terms and were creating and setting their own schedules, not having to commute day in and day out, if they didn’t want to.

Right out of college, Monica read, The Millionaire Next Door, and that book opened her eyes to the thought that if you want to be a millionaire, it is usually doctors, lawyers, and business owners.

The only path that sounded interesting to Monica was business owner, and it planted a seed.

As she started questioning her career path, she started brainstorming. She felt like just a worker bee at her job, as she didn’t have a platform to share her ideas and take a stand to improve processes and systems they were working on. She thought it would be great to be the boss one day and make the decisions and create something.

Monica started listening to podcasts at this same time and she wanted to learn more about leadership.

She started listening to the EntreLeadership podcast, from the Dave Ramsey team. In 2012, she was introduced to Michael Hyatt and she listened to his first podcast about leadership as well.

Watch the entire facebook ads management interview here:

From there, Monica started learning about blogging and the power of writing, spreading your message, and building an audience. She also read The $100 Startup, by Chris Guillebeau. She didn’t know if she was a writer, but it sounded interesting.

During all of this, she had her first son, and she realized wanted to be home and have flexibility, and she also wanted to make an income from home, but she didn’t know what that looked like.

As they started setting themselves up to make that shift, they saved up money and paid off their car. They thought they were in a good position, and, in 2013, when Monica was pregnant with their daughter, the numbers aligned and she left her job.

A couple of months later, the numbers started to dip. She dived into personal finance to figure out how to stay afloat on a single, middle-class income.

They got really focused on attacking their debt and they paid off $120,000 of debt in two years on a single, middle-class income. Monica’s husband is in law enforcement and his co-workers saw what they were doing and started asking him how they did it.

Monica thought that would be what her blog should be about, because they figured things out, paid off so much debt, and they could help people. That is the path she went down.

She learned about blogging, online marketing, Facebook ads, and webinars.

Monica Sold Her First Business for a Profit and Started Her Service Company

Monica was proud of herself for being consistent with blogging and having two little kids at home. It was slow going in the beginning, because she had little traffic and a small email list.

She started learning about the power of Facebook ads from Amy Porterfield. Amy shared that Facebook ads were a low cost way to spread your message and reach more people.

These ads are highly targeted and you could get in front of the people who were most interested in what you share and teach.

Monica decided to go all in and take everything she learned from Amy and apply it. She created her first campaign and had really great results. Her business was not making money at that point, but she decided to invest a little bit of money, which felt like a lot at that time, into reaching more people and it worked.

She took her learnings from that campaign and applied them again a couple of months later, and she brought her cost per email subscriber down significantly. Things were going really well.

As she was meeting people in the personal finance space, people were saying that Monica could help others with Facebook ads. As people started asking questions about Facebook ads in a Facebook group, other people started tagging her and dropping her name.

At first, Monica was resistant, because she didn’t feel like an expert. She started helping people, working one on one, and doing some projects. She was up front that she only knew what she experienced.

As Monica was working with people, testing different strategies and audiences and doing different things with ads, they were getting amazing results.

That’s when she decided to pivot. She looked at the trajectory of sticking with personal finance expert route and looked at the people ahead of her and she didn’t know if that was what she wanted to do. She really loved helping online business owners reach more people with their Facebook ads.

At the end of 2016, Monica decided to shift and someone in her network asked if they knew of anyone looking to sell their personal finance blog. She reached out to him and sold her blog and she was able to fully focus on transitioning to the new business.

How Did You Start Your Facebook Ads Management Agency?

You didn’t start big. Tell us about the process of starting a service company where you are helping people. What insights would you give someone who is trying to do the same thing?

Looking back, the steps she took were not intentional. She just knew she liked working with people.

Monica started with one-on-one coaching. It really helped her to get the experience of working with people and different strategies and develop her process, in order to teach it.

She was then able to create her online course, and when she launched it, it was successful. At the same time, she had people reach out who wanted her to manage their ads for them. These were seven figure business owners, and it made sense for them to outsource their ad management.

Monica decided to grow her team to be able to manage clients. She didn’t advertise ad management, but people knew she worked with business owners on their Facebook ads, and they wanted her to do it.

She then hired one team member who was a coaching client initially. She caught on quickly to what Monica was teaching her in the coaching capacity. Monica worked very closely with her to build their processes to make sure she had someone do the work and keep the quality high.

They started small with just a couple of clients in the beginning, and after a couple of months, when they got their processes down, they felt they could represent their clients and brands well.

They then decided to open this up and expand their team. When it came to hiring for her team, they were able to get off on a faster footing if the new hires had experience and an understanding with Facebook ads.

It has been an evolution of refining their processes and adapting to changes. As you think about growing your team, make sure you have really clear documentation.

Shifting from one business to the Facebook Ads Management Agency may be tough. Here is how Monica handled it.

When you were thinking about pivoting in your business, what went through your mind? Was it a necessity to change or a desire? Tell us about the shift to go from one to the other.

It was really scary. Monica knew they had a good story of paying off all of the debt, but she didn’t know that she had that good of a story with Facebook ads yet.

As she started to build her confidence and work with clients who were getting amazing results, that’s when she felt more comfortable and knew she needed to push past the imposter syndrome and step into it.

As she was starting to shift her business, she didn’t initially land on Facebook ads, she thought she learned more about starting her business online and could help people with blogging, content creation, and growing an email list.

Monica knew there were a lot of business coaches and she would need to get specific and niche down about how she could help people, and this is where the Facebook ads kept coming up.

As she made the shift, she attended her very first FinCon, which is a conference for bloggers, podcasters, media, and influencers in the financial space. At that event, she was talking to different people about how she was thinking about pivoting and how she was nervous.

Monica knew her blog had potential and she didn’t know if she should just stay focused on that. Four different people gave her the green light. If that is where her heart is, than go for it. One of those people was her mentor, Tiffany Aliche, who owns the successful blog The Budgetnista.

Monica hired Lisa as her first business coach and worked closely with her to uplevel and structure her business in the right way.

How did Monica Scale the Facebook Ads Management Agency to be Successfully Unemployed

It has been a big challenge making sure they are working with the right people. The process of vetting who they are working with has changed over time, both when hiring team members and taking on clients.

When they work with clients, Monica’s team needs to make sure their funnels are working and their path to profit is already working. Facebook ads are just one part of the marketing strategy.

While they are great at creating ads, targeting, and giving feedback to improve conversions, they need the rest of the puzzle to be converting as well.

They’ve gotten really clear that their clients need to already have that path to profit be refined and working well. Monica’s business works with two main types of clients.

The first type of client they work with is high level bloggers who are making great money from their blog posts, most of the time through affiliate marketing and also display ads.

When they drive targeted traffic to those blog posts, they can do so at a low cost, but the blog post has to convert in order for it to work. When their clients already have those high conversions in place, that is where the magic happens.

The second type of client has the digital products like courses, software, ebooks, etc. When those are already selling well, they can drive highly targeted traffic to them.

Where Will The Future Take Monica Louie and Her Business?

Monica is continuing to grow her team and she just hired two new team members.

She sees at least two more positions being added in early 2020. This will help them maintain that high level of service.

Monica just started her own podcast this year. She wants to continue speaking and getting her name out there to grow the brand and help more people.

Monica is going to be doing a live Facebook ads workshop in Portland in 2020. Her friend hosted one a few months ago and Monica taught at it.

She had a great experience connecting with a small group of people and working with them on the ins and outs of their campaigns. She doesn’t have any dates set up at this point.

How Monica Is Giving Back to Make Thing Better For Others

Monica and her team talk all the time about how they help people help people. It was important to her that she found a way to make money at home to make the world a better place. She wants to make a positive impact.

We can get focused on the numbers and reaching more people, but it comes down to the ripple effect.

The Advice Monica Would Give To Her Younger Self

Back in college, Monica thought she would get a degree, get hired by a company, learn their processes, and do what they said.

Had she known she was going to start her own business, she would have paid attention to her management and business classes. This could have helped set her up to be a leader.

If she was back in college, she would take business classes and soak it all in.

The Advice Monica Would Give to Anyone Who Wanted to Become Successfully Unemployed Like She Is

If you want to build a service-based business, get really clear on what it is that you are great at, how you help people, and who you want to work with.

This is something that Monica accidentally did. She became well known in the personal finance space as someone who is good at Facebook ads.

Pick a niche and get really clear on who it is you want to serve, not who you think is going to pay you the most, and then record what it is you do, so you can grow and scale.