An Interview with Selwa Lukoskie – Fleek Consulting

by Alexander Martin | Jun 13, 2023 | Business

Kindly give our readers an introduction to your business. Please include what your business is all about, in which city you are located and if you have offices in multiple locations/ cities.

Fleek Consulting is a digital marketing agency. We’re based in Charlotte, NC (our home state), but we have remote employees all over the globe and serve businesses of all sizes on a national level.

Kindly give us a brief description about yourself (it should include your brief educational or entrepreneurial background and list some of your major achievements).

The owners are myself (Selwa Lukoskie) and my husband, Jereme. My background is in content marketing. Jereme has a background in customer service. I worked in Corporate America for several years, and in 2014, we had our first child. After she was born, I decided I didn’t want to return to a corporate desk job, so we invested in some training to improve our marketing and service skills and started our agency in 2016.

What inspired you to (start a new business venture) or (to make significant changes in an existing business)? How did the idea for your business come about?

As a new mom, I wanted to work from home. Back then, remote work was not as popular as it is now. (This was pre-COVID.) I knew the only way I’d be able to have the flexibility and work-life balance I desired was to start my own company. I was researching business ideas online and came across a website that was advertising a training course for local lead generation. I knew it was right up my alley, because I already had some digital marketing experience, so we decided to invest in the training and start our business. Since then, we’ve grown to serving hundreds of clients on a national level, achieving great success through SEO, PPC and content marketing.

What three pieces of advice would you give to budding entrepreneurs?

Always be learning.
Be willing to make big sacrifices now to achieve the lifestyle you want later.
Don’t be generic – find a way to stand out from your competitors, whether its through your brand, the type(s) of services you offer, or something else.

What would you say are the top three skills needed to be a successful entrepreneur?

Sales
Copywriting
Marketing

If you don’t have those skills, then you should hire people who do.

How many hours do you work a day on average?

6-8

To what do you most attribute your success?

God and My family. They are the reason we got into this line of work and decided to start our own business.

How do you go about marketing your business? What has been your most successful form of marketing?

A combination of local networking and, more recently, digital marketing/SEO. We haven’t invested much into online marketing up to this point, because we’ve been too busy serving our clients. Client retention has been a major factor in our success. Some of our clients have been with us for over 5 years. I’d say that and local networking/referrals have played the biggest role in getting us to where we are today.

Where did your organizations funding/capital come from and how did you go about getting it? How did you obtain investors for your venture?

Luckily there isn’t a lot of overhead in this type of business, so a large initial investment was not needed. We used a credit card to fund the initial training and resources needed to build our first few client websites. Then we took the money earned from our monthly marketing retainers to grow and expand. Joining a BNI (Business Networking International) group is a small investment and it introduced us to a lot of the clients we currently serve.

What is the best way to achieve long-term success?

Help as many people as possible achieve their goals. Come alongside your clients/customers as partners; treat their business as if it’s your own and help them grow. If you do that, they’ll tell other people about you, and you’ll grow as well.

Where do you see yourself and your business in 5 – 10 years?

We’re aiming to build a company that we can pass down to our children and that they can help us run when they’re older (within the next 5-10 years). I see a multigenerational, family-owned digital marketing agency that’s harnessing the power of new technology and AI to serve local and national businesses, alike. I see my kids learning how to build websites and apps, brainstorm content and write sales copy alongside myself and their dad. All while running our family homestead.

Excluding yours, what company or business do you admire the most?

It’s hard to pick just one … any company that is achieving success by helping others is admirable. There are a few coaches I’ve learned from in the digital space that really know what they’re doing and are always providing tons of educational value to the community.