Bold Journey Magazine Feature
This article originally appeared in Bold Journey Magazine and can be found here.
We were lucky to catch up with Kennan Buckner recently and have shared our conversation below.
Kennan, so great to have you with us and we want to jump right into a really important question. In recent years, it’s become so clear that we’re living through a time where so many folks are lacking self-confidence and self-esteem. So, we’d love to hear about your journey and how you developed your self-confidence and self-esteem.
I think from an early age, I knew that I wanted to do something creative with my life. I didn’t think of “business owner” as a job, but I was always writing, journaling, crafting or making things. I think that sort of self expression from childhood led into expressing myself through what I was creating. Being confident that I was on the right path and doing something that I enjoyed gave me the courage to keep pressing into those skills and desires. I believe God orchestrates our path and our lives, and I know that even seasons of my life that were difficult have given me things that I needed for where we are today.
Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
My husband and I started Marken Media Co. in 2017. We help small business owners with their websites and marketing. At the time, we had two young sons and had just moved back to my small hometown south of San Antonio, Texas. We started our business in our spare bedroom, then quickly realized that in order to set boundaries between work and life we needed a separate office space.
In 2018, we leased our office, painted the #devinecolorwall, and began sharing our commercial space with our community — offering workshops, hosting events, and offering coworking space.
Today, we have four amazing kiddos. Owning our own business allows us so much freedom! I have the flexibility to spend most of my time with my kiddos, homeschooling our oldest two, and focusing on our business a couple days a week and more often as needed.
In 2022, we launched the Marken Map as a cohesive way to help our clients. Our step-by-step plan is directional marketing map that you can follow on your own, or hire us to implement it all for you. We start with a quick 15-minute call to make sure we’re a good fit for your project. After the Marken Map, based on the package of your choice, we develop the strategy and messaging, design and build your website, and then connect you with your ideal customers immediately.
My husband Marcus is definitely the idea guy and is always dreaming up new solutions for problems business owners face or creating things in our music studio. He invented a new solution for musicians, podcasters, and producers that will essentially allow people to record studio-quality audio on the go without having to sound treat their entire room. The pilot product will launch soon. You can get info and alerts at www.alpacamic.com.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
Early in our business we began noticing a theme around the things we were doing and what was resonating with our community and our clients. CREATE • COLLABORATE • CELEBRATE quickly became the core values of Marken Media Co.
1. Create
Create work you love. Create products and solutions that make an impact in the world. Create a life that you enjoy. In order to create you have to try things. You have to be willing to be new at something. In order to create you need to STOP consuming and give yourself space. Something we learned early on, especially as generally creative people, we’re not good at creating for its own sake. It’s easy once you have monetized your creative work to then only create with it’s making money. But that sucks you dry and drains you. You have to create a rhythm and routine of creating just because you enjoy it.
2. Collaborate
There really is enough of the pie to go around. There are enough people in the marketplace to serve. You don’t have to get intimidated or get territorial over the market or the niche you serve. You have to develop a collaborative mindset — otherwise you’re going to miss out on a lot of healthy opportunities to work with others, learn new things, and grow as a person and as a business. If you’re struggling with imposter syndrome or feeling jealous of others who “do what you do” or feel like you have to be better or cheaper in order to win — you need to start collaborating more! Get yourself around people that are a few years ahead of you in the journey, someone outside your immediate market who does what you do, or around a mentor with a healthy experience of collaboration to grow.
3. Celebrate
You can’t win if you don’t know what winning looks like to you. You don’t have much to celebrate unless you know that you’re winning! Entrepreneurs are notorious for their lack of celebration. We’re always on to the next goal, and we’re terrible at stopping to enjoy it when we’ve reached a milestone! Decide in advance what you’re going to do when you reach a goal (be it monthly, quarterly, yearly). Then mark the occasion by celebrating what you’ve accomplished.
Okay, so before we go, is there anyone you’d like to shoutout for the role they’ve played in helping you develop the essential skills or overcome challenges along the way?
In 2021 a small business group I had been a part of was dissolving. I had been part of the group, which focused on women in business, for about a year and had gained so much from the monthly accountability and wisdom-sharing. I began praying about a new source of community, accountability, and growth because I knew I needed to be connected to something!
We’d been in business full-time for four years at that point and had continued to increase our revenue year-over-year. Then as providence would have it, I saw an Instagram ad for an agency marketing coach. She specifically offered coaching to business owners who were 1-2 person branding agencies (that’s us!) and she helped them scale their business without hiring employees (win! because neither of us ever wanted to be a boss). I found Pia Silva on iTunes, began listening to her podcast, ordered and read her book Badass your Brand, and we soon joined her program.
In April 2022, we began the journey of transforming our business! In the NoBS group, we had weekly accountability/coaching calls. And I began working my way through the courses and implementing as much of it into our business as I could! Also around that time, we’d just found out we were pregnant with baby #4, so I had a clock ticking!
Pia helped us ditch less profitable offerings and implement a true system for both attracting clients and managing our projects. (I can’t believe I used to rely on “when inspiration struck” to create content, social media, or email campaigns).
Now we have a smooth and repeatable process in place that allows us to serve our clients even better. We are able to follow the 50/25/25 rule for work and life — 50% of your time on client work, 25% of your time working on the business itself, and 25% of your time doing whatever you want!
We’ve also been able to implement many of these principles, practices, and structures for our own clients so that they can live the life they want!