James Hipkin, Websites & Digital Footprint

Which industry do you work in

Website design and development, digital marketing strategy.

What is your top personal value?

Honesty. We try to be clear and transparent with everything we do. When there's a problem, we step up and do our best to sort things out. When we're asked to do something we always consider its value to our client's business. This means we often say no. If it's not going to add value to what our clients are doing, we don't want to take their money.

BrandAPeel Mug

Buy Now

What do you do when you aren't working?

I'm very interested in food, especially fermentation techniques used around the world.

What makes you unique?

I have a music degree in composition and theory and spent six years working in Rock & Roll before getting my first real job.

What do you love about what you do and how do you help others?

I gain great satisfaction from using my experience to help business owners use marketing to create value for their customers and their business.

What is the number one goal you are trying to achieve in your professional life?

Create a healthy business that can support clients and employees long into the future.

Can you define the word Entrepreneur?

This ven diagram has significant overlap. Being an entrepreneur implies that there's something innovative about what you are doing and/or that you are starting something new. At the same time, you are a business owner. A business owner isn't necessarily starting something new or innovative.

What did you do before you became an entrepreneur or business owner?

I worked for existing advertising agencies.

Publish Your Multimedia, Interactive, Digital Book

Buy Now

What happened to inspire you to start a business or buy one?

I was aging out of the ad agency world and was tired of the politics and BS. I believed that the website is the most valuable digital asset that a business owns and most are terrible. I saw the opportunity to buy a vendor, a digital production studio, and shift it into website design and development. This allowed me to apply my many years of marketing strategy work to bear on this key asset and key inflection point.

What is the number one skill a successful Entrepreneur or Business Owner needs to possess to be successful?

Humility. You have to be self-aware and willing to grow and evolve from experiences.

When you started what mistake or failure taught you the most about running a business?

Be very, very careful about who you partner with.

How do you stay motivated to keep trying when there is a set back?

I really enjoy helping people.

Share a success you are very proud of.

I saw an opportunity to reimagine small business website design and development as a SaaS subscription. Used our dev team to write the software so that stay-at-home moms could be trained to design and develop websites for small business owners.