Hearty Dave is the founder of Banana Digital, a Brisbane-based Digital Marketing agency that she started with her partner, James in 2020. They help businesses find quality leads and clients on social media.
Since its inception, Banana Digital has helped businesses all over Australia, Europe, and the United States in growing their client base with Facebook & Instagram ads.
For more details, visit their website here.
Here we sit down with Hearty, to know a bit more about her journey as an entrepreneur.
Q. Tell us a little more about your journey as an entrepreneur – how did you get started? What inspired you?
Hearty: I have a strong business background prior to starting Banana Digital. A Certified Public Accountant (CPA) by profession, I had a lot of experience in management roles, leading teams, and managing a business’s profitability.
I had friends who were starting their own businesses and they would always ask me to have a look over their businesses and see what could be improved. Often I would find their biggest problem is the lack of enough business because they didn’t have a proper marketing strategy.
They’d then ask me how I would market their business. I found myself naturally reading about online marketing strategies online and building campaigns that were suitable for their business and those ended up making them money and pushing their growth. I found my natural flair for digital marketing through this experience.
Q. What’s one thing in your routine that you do consistently that has made a huge difference in your personal or business life?
Hearty: Reading books about leadership, mindset, and success principles. If you want to succeed, you need to learn the success principles from people who have gone further ahead of you.
I have a passion for personal development and I love that there’s always something new to learn every day and that by applying what you’re learning, you can get better each day.
Q. Who are your mentors and inspiration? and what knowledge or insight did they give to you that was valuable?
Hearty: My mentor and inspiration in the industry is Depesh Mandalia of SM Commerce. I was a self-taught digital marketer when I started and I thought I knew everything that I needed to know until I discovered Depesh Mandala’s teachings.
The foundations he teaches are pretty strong and his techniques are solid. The platform that he’s created for digital marketers called Ad Signals is the best I’ve seen in the market.
Q. What has been your most satisfying moment in business?
Hearty: One of the most satisfying moments for me in business was turning things around for our clients a few months after the Apple IOS14 update hit advertisers in 2021. The majority of the accounts that we managed took a big hit even though we were prepared for what was to come. It took a lot of effort, going back to basics, and doing a lot of testing to get back into creating incredible results for our clients.
Q. How do you market your business, and which tactics have been most successful?
Hearty: We’ve built our own business network and we hold a lot of networking events (both online and face-to-face).
This has proven to be a great strategy for us as the relationships we’ve built allowed other people to refer us comfortably to businesses they know.
Q. What have been your biggest failures or challenges?
Hearty: I’ve had many failures and challenges in my career. I see all of them now as learning opportunities. Each failure led me to another opportunity and then another, and then another. I see them all as a step ladder to success. But if there’s one thing I wish I had been more deliberate about, it would be building my own network long before I needed a network.
When my partner and I were looking for jobs outside of our industries after we lost our jobs during COVID, we realized that we were complacent this whole time and didn’t build a network outside of our industries. We knew we had to change that so in 2022 we started actively building our network.
Q. How did this failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success?
Hearty: Building our own network and expanding our reach to people outside of who we’d normally interact has allowed us to connect with a lot of really smart and driven business owners and learn from their own experiences.
We realized that we didn’t have to figure out entrepreneurship all on our own. Each person we met was very helpful in sharing their experiences and expertise on a certain subject and this has allowed not only us but our entire network to benefit.
Q. If someone was to create a TV show about you, what would it be about and what would it be called?
Hearty: The Entrepreneur Freedom Revolution. It would be about an entrepreneur’s journey toward freedom.
Most business owners start a business because they want time and financial freedom, but the majority of us find that it brings the opposite in our first few years in business – ie you are either time-poor or lacking money or both. The show would be about the realities and struggles of entrepreneurship, looking at the mindset and the actions we take to succeed and achieve our big dream.To keep up to date with Hearty and her journey, connect with her on Facebook, and Instagram.
