In today’s episode, Brooke speaks with Hani Anis, founder of Anis Collections and the marketing company Kahani Digital. She started her first company in 2017 while she was still in college at the age of 21. She was doing marketing in corporate investment banking and decided to take 6 months off and work on Anis Collections. Fast forward to 2020, when she got a VC job in corporate marketing. She was approached during Covid by her friends in the freelancing spaces. In Sept/Oct of 2020, the world started working again and she had a corporate job, a company and freelance projects. She knew she didn’t have that much time on her hands. She sat down during the holidays with her family and expressed her struggles and she decided she liked the freelance, small business route. She decided to resign from her corporate job. With Kahani, she had all the work coming in but no name, no branding, no employees. She knew this wasn’t what she planned for. It goes to show that starting a business can go an untraditional route. She was able to get traction by word of mouth. With her digital marketing company, she didn’t have a business plan like with her fashion company. Her promise to herself was to say yes to opportunity and that will lead to momentum. When hiring, you are investing in your company but in the beginning, that person adds a load initially until they start to take the load off. Her first hire came from a friend who knew someone who needed a job in the industry and as she moved forward, she used interns and contract people found by posting in her networking group. She found that people can be trained in marketing and it wasn’t technical. She wanted to find someone who was a good fit to the team and the client. Relationship building is important and without that, it can hurt you.The major hurdle she had was internal struggle to maintain clients so it didn’t affect her employees. Her retention rate has been great but it’s something she still thinks about. Work life balance has also been a struggle. She has very clear boundaries for her employees about not working outside of their working hours and balancing their own lives with vacation time. As a founder, she felt like she could never take a break. That didn’t work well. She was working 7 days a week and she realized that she had a team that she could let go things to her team. She gradually got to the point of taking weekends off and making time for vacations. Hani encourages other people to take on entrepreneurship where they love what they do on a daily basis. Know you can have fun with it and not have an insane amount of pressure to make it a multi-million dollar thing. Don’t scale it so much that quality is affected. It’s ok if it’s just your passion. Looking back she wishes she would have looked at the moment and savored it a little more. Now she’s at a point where she appreciates the small wins more because those moments are important. When you struggle with impostor syndrome, fake it til you make it. When she started out, she had to fake confidence in public until she built her confidence. She hopes to wrap up 2022 but slowing down more personally and giving her team more time to focus on the creative aspects of the business.   I started out as most South Asian kids do -  aspiring to be a doctor. I did all the AP classes, internships, research, and hospital volunteer work but then eventually got to Organic Chemistry in college and decided that medicine was definitely not for me. Distraught, I came home to my dad and said, " Now what do I do"? We decided that business - particularly finance - would be a good fit and turned out, it was. Fast forward to my senior year of college and with the help of my friends and family, I founded Anis Collections, a luxury South Asian bridal boutique that helps brides, grooms, bridesmaids, and groomsmen find their dream outfit for their big day. This business is truly my passion project and my favorite part is doing fittings with clients and watching them react to my custom creation. I still went off and got a full-time position in Investment Banking, where most recently I was working on digital strategy for a Venture Capital firm. Through the pandemic, I was also freelancing and working for Natalie Barbu's agency. I learned that I loved working on small businesses through my agency work and found that being a South Asian founder myself, there was no agency that really catered to that niche. The more I worked freelancing for South Asian-owned and founded brands, the more I realized that this is the market I wanted to help. In February 2021, I quit my full-time position in VC and went freelance full time. Through word of mouth and my network, I was able to book more clients and the business doubled in less than a month of me leaving my job. I then worked to establish a name, branding and hiring out my team. Kahani means to tell a story and that is exactly what we believe in doing for your brand through social media and digital marketing.Links:Instagram: https://instagram.com/kahani.digital?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=Kahani Digital: https://www.kahanidigital.com/about-kahaniJoin Allobee:https://www.allobee.com/plus