Meet Entrepreneur, Margaret Ekukinam Ujong, Founder Of Butterfront Consult, The Company Provides Simple Support Services To Business Owners
Innovative Entrepreneur, Margaret Ekukinam Ujong is the founder of
Butterfront Consult, a company that provides simple support services to business owners who manage their businesses all by themselves but are struggling with the weight of all that work.
Sharing the inspiration that birthed this business idea, she speaks to Elorasblog in this interview.
Please tell us a little bit about your background?
My name is Margaret Ekukinam Ujong, wife, mum, business owner, founder, entrepreneur, serial entrepreneur, business consultant of 6+ years, author and writer. Although an entrepreneur at heart, I hold a Master’s in Geography and Environment from the University of Ibadan and I am working towards a doctoral degree soon.
While we were younger, we had dreams and aspirations, have you fulfilledl any?
When I was younger, I had wanted to be many things; a doctor, an economist, a banker, someone who did great things.
Today, I may not have been in any one of those 3 professions but, I am doing great things by the grace of my Creator. And so yes, I am fulfilling my most important aspiration, which is to be someone who did great things.
What motivated you to start up Butterfront consult ?
Butterfront Consult was birthed from a very real need and painpoint.
For the first 3 years in entrepreneurship, I wore all of the hats in my business. I was my own CEO, my own sales exec, marketer, accountant, customer rep, HR, etc.
The demands became too much, I no longer found fun in my passion, which is,business. It became like a ‘job’, I wasn’t happy, I wasn’t making progress fast enough, wasn’t showing up enough, my energy was constantly low, I was wasting money unduly, and, my family and social life was taking a big hit.
The long and short? I was stressed.
But then, everything changed when I had a mindset shift. If I invested in spending money into building a team, delegating or decentralizing my business’ operations from centering on me and moving to others in the team instead, my business could move forward faster and that investment can’t be money wasted or money I should ever regret spending.
After discovering that a number of other entrepreneurs probably grappled with the same issues I had, I knew I had found a new business.
Butterfront Consult was then birthed as an answer to the unspoken yearnings of small business owners (full-time entrepreneurs or 9-5 workers with ventures on the side) who were and are buckling under the weight of managing the day-to-day affairs or operations of their businesses all by themselves and simply need help.
Can you share with me the services that Butterfront consult provides?
As a B2B business support consultancy, our offerings include;
- Core support (for those in need of business managers or DIY support in the forms of business clarity or business confidence consultations).
- Admin or VA support services to include managing Social handles, and online pages/presence.
- HR support where we craft before and after support staffing materials tailored to their hiring needs.
- Marketing support to include designing your promotional materials, advert copies, Marketing strategy plans, online advertising campaigns and more.
- Research and Technical support — if you need data of any kind to work with, or, research information on your market, customers, competitors and industry, we do all that for you and present them to you in a way you can understand and employ towards growing your business.
- Creative Support — Anything that will help your business stand out from the crowd, from, branding it better or differently, to, brainstorming on Value Propositions for you and researching market or customer niches you can explore….the job of our creative support services is to give you the practical tools you need to stand out from your competition.
Because we are a dynamic support agency, we are constantly adding new and vetted services to our array of offerings so long as they align with the needs of our target market and we can confidently offer them.
Butterfront consult : Where did you get the inspiration?
I was surfing the internet once, looking for information to help with the market research service and consultancy I was already running then, when I stumbled on a foreign business firm that offered full-service support services to owners of businesses.
That was when it clicked that, I could replicate a thing like that here drawing from my own painpoint and those of several other entrepreneurs.
Because I am a natural serial entrepreneur myself, starting a second business alongside the one I was already doing, didn’t prove too difficult, and so, that was how, in addition to the existing business I had then, Butterfront Consult leapt from being just an idea on paper, to being something real and on ground.
And although the name “Butterfront” was just a word that came to my head and stuck, I have been a passionate and loyal representative of the brand ever since.
Did you attend any form of training before setting up this business?
My trainings come from freelancing these services to other business owners, and, from running business of my own.
Butterfront Consult may be officially less than 6 years old, but, I have been doing business for 8 plus years now. So yes, all of that background experience have proven invaluable towards launching this company.
How were you able to raise capital for this business?
Interestingly, the bulk of the capital for this business was privately sourced. We are talking personal savings, those from family, and one or two angel investors.
However, because we are now looking to scaling big time, more formal funding options will have to be explored. We are on this right now.
Can you share with me the setbacks and challenges you’ve encountered in this business?
The unrealistic expectations of some customers is one thing we have had to deal with. For example, a customer who is struggling with sales may expect that we should come onboard and magically find them 1,000 organic sales or 10,000 organic followers in one month. These things don’t work like that and so we do our best to tell them what is realistic upfront so they do not part with money and be disappointed, or worse, get upset.
Another challenge is having one or two customers insisting on coming into our office space rather than transacting business with us virtually.
We have had no problems with that as we can always get them to our temporary office site or set up face-to-face meetings anywhere else.
However, because we are a fully registered remote company with full-time remote staff who work 8am to 7pm, Mondays to Saturdays, non-tech savvy customers can find the entire model a little hard to comprehend, but, this is the modern-day model of running most companies now, plus, it’s a model that’s helped us save hugely on overhead costs and expenses for the now until we launch in our head office.
We tell them this and hope to win those ones over. Thankfully, we have recorded great success in that respect.
Butterfront consult is a
support agency that provides simple support services to business owners who manage their business all by themselves but are struggling with the weight of all that work. How can companies trust your services?
We are a result-driven agency. When you come to us to request a service, we ask for your expectations of what you hope us to give you. If your expectations are, from our experience in doing business, unrealistic, we let you know upfront so you can manage those expectations or so you don’t waste your money.
If, on the other hand, these are expectations that can be realistically achieved, we get to work at once and you do not get to pay us complete until we have been able to deliver to you what we had told you we could realistically deliver.
Also, as we grow, we shall be heavily invested in employing testimonial marketing. We believe that once prospects see the positive feedbacks from other customers like themselves whom we have already worked with, trust is easily built and they can come to us with an appreciable level of peace of mind.
Finally, all our staff are not entry level employees. These are people with at least, mid-level professional experience in their fields. This is important because, we want to be able to produce results that we can be proud of and our customers can also be happy about.
Where do you see Butterfront consult in 5 years?
We would want to dominate a huge part of our market in 5 years. We have already started on this by building thought leadership in this field we are in.
We want to build further on this and become the go-to for any business owner thinking “professional, reliable and customer-centric” support service for their small or mid-sized business operations.
Email: elora.akpotosevbe@yahoo.com
What do you think?