“Working for yourself and building a business you started is incredibly rewarding and gratifying,” says Paige Arnof-Fenn, the Founder and CEO of Mavens & Moguls. She is one of the very few distinguished women business leaders that have revolutionized the business landscape with her marketing, communications, and leadership skills. She established Mavens & Moguls and a few years after its inception, the Harvard Business School wrote a couple of case studies on the company’s business model, which Paige believes was a validation of her entrepreneurial skills.
The Journey to Entrepreneurship
Paige’s introduction to entrepreneurship was not planned despite both her grandfathers being successful entrepreneurs. She always wanted to work for a large multi-national business and be a Fortune 500 CEO. From her school days, she idolized business leaders like Meg Whitman and Ursula Burns. After completing graduation from Stanford University, she started her career on Wall Street in the 80s and then completed her MBA at Harvard. She then started a successful career in Corporate America at companies such as Procter &Gamble and Coca-Cola and also worked at three different startups as the head of marketing.
However, right after 9/11, the company that Paige was working for cut its marketing. Recognizing the entrepreneurial gene in her, she decided to take the leap and established Mavens & Moguls in early 2002. She worked under great mentors and senior managers throughout her corporate life that helped her advance and helped her discover the right path.
A Network of Seasoned Marketing Professionals
Mavens & Moguls is a network of seasoned marketing professionals with experience at the highest levels in small, medium, and large companies. These experts can do anything a marketing department, market research shop, public relations firm, or an ad agency does on an as needed or outsourced basis. “Unlike a traditional agency or consulting firm, everyone is senior and we all worked as clients in our previous lives so our heads and hearts are much more aligned with our clients,” adds Paige.
The company believes in solving problems over creating presentations and making recommendations. The services provided by the company include —Brand & Market Strategy, Market Research & Segmentation Analysis, Integrated Marketing, Youth Marketing, Database Marketing, Copywriting & Translation Services, Customer Advocacy, Brand Development and Positioning, Customer Acquisition and Retention Campaigns, Loyalty Programs, Customer Relationship Management, online and digital marketing.
These services are available in major metro areas around the globe. The company serves across Europe, Canada, and Asia. Moreover, the company professionals are fluent in languages such as Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, Japanese, and Mandarin Chinese for swift multi-cultural and cross-cultural marketing. The team structure of Mavens & Moguls is flexible that can provide customized services— especially during the time of crisis.
Finding the Routine
The biggest challenge that the pandemic put forth for Paige, her team, and her clients was the shutdown of all networking events, travels, and conferences. The spring and fall seasons, in particular, are usually busy times with many events, trade shows, business meetings, etc. However, the meetings that are being held this year are mostly virtual. “I have had more Zoom and Skype calls in the past 15 days than the prior 12 months,” asserts Paige. She believes pivoting to online meetings, webinars, etc. is a smart and productive way companies can continue to have conversations that educate and inform, build relationships, and move forward during this crisis period.
Paige emphasizes on helping the small businesses to be flexible and open-minded so that they keep working together with Mavens & Moguls during the crisis and create more flexible capacity going forward over the next year as the economy reopens. She also focuses on keeping the team motivated during these times. Activities such as virtual coffee meetings have been helpful when small groups on the team want to talk through specific issues. Moreover, several colleagues have even met online after work for a virtual happy hour as well. “It is starting to feel like the new normal by leveraging technology to build and maintain my relationships. We have learned that finding routines and things we can control helps,” added Paige.
Communication: A Key to the New Normal
In these unprecedented times, communication is the key to community, customer, and employee engagement. Paige believes that the pandemic has presented an opportunity for leaders to connect with anxious audiences and focus on the true relevance of their products or services. She acknowledges the need to communicate in a way that will give audiences better focus, helping them to create a bridge from today to the future.
Stressing on the importance of communication, Paige asserts that the leaders have a tremendous responsibility because before the pandemic, communications never had the power to help society in the way it does right now. “Words are part of the healing process and we can see which leaders and brands are doing the best job every day with messages that touch not only the mind but also the heart and soul,” she further added. She believes that this is the time for organizations to thrive by providing accurate, empathetic communication with transparency, truthfulness, and timeliness.
Humanity and Compassion
The most trusted leaders and brands are expected to have a competitive advantage in the post-pandemic world. Paige believes that employees, clients, and customers will remember who treated them well during the crisis and those organizations will be rewarded with loyalty for earning the trust during bad times. Thus, despite its consequences, the pandemic has signified the need for humanity and compassion among people. Moreover, the increased proliferance of social media, smartphones, and apps such as Zoom shows that technology does not have to be isolating, it can be used to build real-world communities and relationships as well.
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