As a Certified Online Business Manager® and CEO of Zargarian Consulting, Mary Zargarian and her team of amazing consultants partner with coaches and service providers to save them time and stress so they can grow profitable businesses with heart, not hustle.
Zargarian Consulting is the agency that ambitious businesses need if they’re ready to separate from their busy selves so they can grow a business with more heart and soul.
Below we caught up with Mary to talk about her entrepreneurial journey so far.
Q. What inspired you to become an entrepreneur?
Mary: When I had my son in 2017, I knew my life and career was changed forever. I always thought that becoming a mother would make me more risk averse but it was quite the opposite. I now had a stronger stance in my values and what kind of family and world I wanted my son to grow up in. Things that I would turn a blind eye to in my career before, I now felt obligated to speak up or walk away from.
This is not my first business. From 2011-2013 I was a partner in a wedding planning business in San Francisco. The only reason that was dissolved was because I had moved away from the city and was travelling regularly for my corporate career. But, the energy and community I felt as an entrepreneur stayed with me.
I’ve always been inspired by this notion that the possibilities are only limited by your imagination and resourcefulness. Whereas in corporate you work harder and walk away with the same salary (or a menial merit increase), as an entrepreneur the rewards can be plentiful. A corporate career can also feel competitive and ruthless, but my experience as an entrepreneur has been one of community over competition, recognizing that we are all bringing our own unique perspective and experiences to the market and that there is abundance to share.
Q. What are your top 3 favourite online apps, tools or resources and what do you love about them?
Mary: We use these 3 tools in every client engagement that we have:
- Dubsado – This Client Relationship Management (CRM) tool allows us to collect intake information from leads, do meeting scheduling, proposals, contracts, and payments all in one platform. We love how we can customise the workflow based on the service that is being booked and everything is in one place for reference by our team as well as our clients via a Client Portal. We currently run two “brands” in Dubsado – one for leads and clients, and another for candidates to join our amazing team.
- Zapier – Zapier is quickly becoming like another team member to us. This resource allows us to integrate our systems and automate a lot of the administrative or repetitive tasks that we once would have someone do for us. For example, when a new lead comes into our Dubsado, it pulls that information over into our project management tool plus sends a celebratory slack message to our #new-leads channel to announce that there is a lead there to welcome and nurture. It has helped us streamline communication and make our disparate systems all “talk” to each other.
- ClickUp – ClickUp is our project management tool of choice, but it’s much more than that to our team. It is the central hub of our business with internal and client dashboards, client folders and project templates, a reference to all of our standard operating procedures, and how we collaborate on internal projects as well. This PM tool gives us the ability to customise how we look at our work in different ways to best suit the user and project. There are built-in automations so when certain triggers happen in a project we have templated tasks and actions that happen ‘automagically’ for us, saving us time and human error with repetitive tasks. It’s so easy and customizable that we’ve now implemented ClickUp for half of our clients to support their growing businesses!
Q. What entrepreneurial tricks have you discovered to keep you focused and productive in your day-to-day busy schedule?
Mary: I plan out as much as I can so if something comes up that needs my immediate attention, I already know how it will impact my workload. Besides the typical annual, quarterly, and monthly planning, I also plan out each week on Sunday evenings to get a sense of the work that needs to be done across our business and clients’, plus how that needs to integrate with what I have going on in my personal life with school, volunteer commitments and family.
I then take it another step further and as I wind down each day, I take some time to look at the next day and make sure I can wake up starting my day understanding the schedule and priorities. This has contributed to me feeling like I can truly take my time to open up my computer in the morning and enjoy breakfast with the family – something that wasn’t possible in corporate.
My advice would be to set clear boundaries with your time. It took me a while to figure this out for myself and now I feel like I am in a much better place. I am on a different coast in the U.S. from most of my clients, and 3 hours behind. I used to wake up stressing to feel like I needed to “catch up” on work, but when everything is working right in business we ideally would have everything planned and anticipated. Even when things “go wrong” you would have a plan in place to help overcome the challenge. Once I realised this, we set up the resources to support business appropriately. I now have my scheduler time block my availability for me to protect my time and energy best.
Q. If you were to write a book about yourself, what would you name it and why?
Mary: Stop Shoulding on Yourself. I know I’m not alone in taking certain paths in life because you feel like you should – either a parent or mentor have told you to or you make an assumption that this would be best so you can please others in your life. Many of the choices I made in my corporate career and in my personal life have been to please others or because I have told myself that this is the best or only way.
I’m still a work in progress, but now ask myself first, “Is this what I want? How will making this decision support or change my life?” Usually the answers to these questions make it clear for me if this is something that I am doing because it is right for ME, or if I’m making it because I feel like I should.
Q. What has been your most satisfying moment in business?
Mary: My most satisfying moments in business are to watch someone else grow because of our work together. This is what called me into becoming a certified coach, why I love to mentor and support my team to nurture their curiosities in business, and what I love to see in our clients.
Even recently I have had conversations with prior clients and their businesses continue to thrive beyond our work together because we helped them set up foundations in their business and brought to our early conversations a more strategic perspective to what they would have considered “business as usual”. For example, one client is launching a new and exciting group program with the help and support of a team that we highly recommended. The support and relationship were ones that we knew would serve this team well. Another client is consolidating all of their systems into a tool that we recommended, not only simplifying the operations of their business but also bringing her core programs into a more profitable state.
Even though we are no longer a part of these activities, we recognize the importance of the role we played in paving the way for that continued success.
To keep up to date with Mary, connect with her on LinkedIn and follow her on Instagram.