Meet Chris and Susie Bulman, two highly specialised coaches and social media experts with a truly inspiring story to tell.
Sometimes, life is cruel. Sometimes it takes far more than it gives. Sometimes the most undeserving of us get the most pain and heartache. But, sometimes, those who are victims of life’s many and varied cruelties find a way of turning things around to carve their own successes.
There are few out there who are more deserving of such a success than Chris and Susie Bulman, a husband and wife team who have taken everything life has thrown at them, and turned it into something special. A thriving social media and specialist coaching business which has seen remarkable growth since its inception.
It was their perseverance and inspiring story that made them the obvious choice for this year’s Newcomer of the Year Award. But what is that story – and why did it lead them to where they are now? Read on for our exclusive interview with Chris of the Chris and Susie Bulman partnership, and find out how for yourself.
But first, let’s meet the power couple themselves. Hashtags at the ready!
Chris and Susie Bulman
Social media is complicated, enormous and not exactly as easy as people think it is. In fact it’s far from it! To harness its power – you need to know what you’re doing, and you need to dedicate yourself to an ever-changing practice. That’s where the likes of Chris and Susie Bulman come in. They started with a small social media marketing and engagement business, and have taken what they know to the public, educating others on this delicate and wholly rewarding art.
Chris’s social media story began with the hunt for his birth mother, he found her after a few months of searching on the internet..That’s where his passion was ignited. After racking up the years working in retail, customer service and marketing, social media marketing was his next step. Chris brings exceptional people skills, business acumen and a fierce marketing mind to the Think Social partnership.
Susie’s roots are in the field of editing and writing (over 10 years of experience) for the likes of Which? Tatler and Marie Claire magazines. She even launched a very successful glossy magazine in Dubai. Susie brings her extensive knowledge of what makes quality content to the table, ensuring all communications are of the absolute highest standard.
Between them, and following on from a very traumatic 5 years of their lives, they created Think Social Business – a social media company which favours relationship building and engagement over cold, hard numbers. Now, they teach others how it’s done with their own social media coaching and training service.
Some time after their win we caught up with Chris to find out what their story was, what it’s life juggling both a social media and a coaching business and what the future had in store for Think Social, and for their family.
How did you feel when you won the Newcomer of The Year Award?
Susie didn’t come with me – she’d definitely have come if she’d had an inkling! We didn’t really expect to win. Obviously we wanted to, but didn’t really expect to, so it was a huge surprise and a real flood of emotions. I have to say I was truly shocked, but over the moon, because – like everybody – we’re working really hard and it’s amazing to get some recognition for the work that we’re doing.
Has the win had an effect on your business?
It certainly has internally. It’s been built into our marketing campaign. Obviously, locally, we do a lot of networking and relationship building with other business. For our clients, it’s had a big impact in terms of the relationship we’ve got with them, and the credibility of what we’re doing.
When it’s just the two of you, husband and wife team, working together, living together, family life together and everything else, it’s not easy to get recognition sometimes. So to get it from an external body, especially like the coaching association or the APCTC, it’s a big deal for us. It’s spurred us on. It’s given us some more energy to keep going.
Where did all of it begin? Can you give me a brief overview of your journey?
Susie and I both have always wanted to run our own business. There were some issues for Susie, she suffered four miscarriages over five years of heartache. WWhen she finally became pregnant and the possibility of her carrying to term looked realistic, we decided that it was the right thing for her to not work. We wanted to reduce her stress levels as much as we could and avoid her having to commute into London every day. So she stopped work but went freelance. Then a year after our daughter was born, I got made redundant. So we had a young child, I wasn’t earning and Susie was working as much as she could but without commuting which meant a huge reduction in our income. It was a pretty tough time, financially especially.
I took six months out. My head wasn’t in the right place to go and work for someone else again, and Susie and I started discussing where we wanted to go, what we wanted to do, and we started looking for opportunities that used both of our skill sets. Mine are in retail management, customer service, relationship-building and marketing; and Susie’s are with with online, editorial, copywriting and magazine editorial skills. We were looking for looking for an opportunity to put those two things together. When it finally came around, it was pretty special – a light-bulb moment. And literally one night we decided what we were going to do, and by the following day we’d already built a websiteand designed our logo, and off we went.
Who has been the biggest influence on you?
This is going to sound very cheesy, but: each other. We’re working together, and we’re working together so closely, drawing on both of our experiences and skill sets, that really has been the influence. Like everybody, you have your up days and your down days, and hopefully they’re not both on the same day as each other, and you influence each other to keep going. Obviously we have the kids as well now. I’d like to say that it was someone famous with a big quote or something like that, but it’s not. It really was just each other, and wanting to get something that we both wanted.
What makes you and your service different?
We decided from early on who our target audience was going to be. We do now have clients overseas and all over the UK, but they predominantly come through recommendations and word-of-mouth, rather than any marketing we’ve done. We wanted to concentrate on a local market, work with SMEs and businesses who didn’t have the time to dodo their social media or the understanding to do it properly. Essentially this is all we do. We’re specialists in this field alone. We don’t do anything else (apart from blog writing and email marketing which is part and parcel of what you need for effective social media marketing). We don’t do full-on marketing. We don’t build websites for other people. We don’t try and do everything.
Our Twitter following, for example, is about three and a half thousand, or something like that. We’re not numbers-obsessed. We’re quality-obsessed. A lot of agencies out there feel the pressure to have a hundred thousand followers, or whatever, and have sent however many tweets. For us it’s very much about using our social to create relationships with people we already know, or want to know, rather than just everybody and anybody, and be numbers-driven. It’s more about quality, and we encourage that when we’re training other people as well. Quality gets good results.
What have your biggest challenges been?
As much as we’ve got a great work-life balance, we work from home still, which means that we’re never far from our children, at times that we want to be with them. The advantage of what we do is: it’s not time-related, so we don’t have to finish at five, or we can do stuff in the evenings. We go out to coach people, or they come to us. It’s really flexible. But on the other side of it, having children at home when you’re trying to work – that’s a challenge. But we’re taking the business to the next stage. We’re just in the process of converting our garage – in fact, work started on it today. We’re creating an office environment, with a dedicated training area.
I’d say the other challenge was setting up the business, and then Susie falling pregnant almost straight away. That was a shock to the system as well. But most of the challenges have really been around growing a business with two very small children, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Did you ever feel like throwing the towel in and if so, what made you continue?
Thankfully, not yet. Because it’s just giving us what we want. Giving us rewards that we’ve never got working for someone else.
What do you think your clients value most about what you offer?
When it comes to coaching, people get very stressed people can get very stressed because the general message is that it’s easy: everyone’s telling them that anyone can DO social media. And that’s one of the things I say to people: it’s really not easy. It’s incredibly time-consuming. There’s a lot to take on board, there’s a lot to think about.
Most people go blindly posting here, there and everywhere, and don’t bring any strategy. What we try to do is give people the confidence to go away and think, ‘Do you know what? It’s not easy, but now I have these tools, and I get an understanding of what I’ve got to do.’
Social is such an ever-changing environment, but because we specialise in it we’re able to invest a lot of time in learning and updating our own skill sets. Our clients get that from us. When it comes to coaching, they know that they’re going to get that absolute latest information, that’s going to make their social work for their business.
What new and exciting plans do you have for this year?
Well as I mentioned, we’re converting the double garage, so it’s a really big space. It’ll be a really nice purpose-built office, it’ll have its own entrance for our clients to come in, it’s going to be great. That takes our business out of our house as well, and with the children it’s really nice to have that opportunity.
We are also finalising details of our first employee. They’re starting within the next few weeks. We’re really busy and expanding, and that’s where we want to go. I really want to grow my business. I really want to employ people. It’s something I’m really passionate about, and one of the things I miss about not working for other people was being responsible for employees and staff and such, and that is a driving force for me, to be an employer in the local market, and be able to give other people opportunities.
Can you give us one tip for standing out from the crowd as a coach?
It sounds really obvious, but knowing your subject. Because I’m in an industry that is just changing so rapidly, all the time, and there are new social networks coming out, and new ways of doing things. It changes constantly. Facebook, for example, has an algorithm that works in the background, that’s constantly being changed by Facebook. We as social marketers need to keep up to date with those changes, to understand what they are. It’s so vital that we know our industry inside and out to be good coaches.
APCTC members like to aspire to those that are considered experts in their field. Can you share how well you’re doing in terms of:
Client feedback and emotional rewards
Fortunately, because of what we do, we’re able to direct people to leave recommendations for us on our Facebook page, and again, we’ve kind of made that part of our sales process. If you don’t ask you don’t get, and so we always ask our clients for feedback and stuff, and I’m glad to say that so far it’s all been positive. But I’m not afraid of negative feedback either, because at the end of the day, if it helps us improve what we’re doing and what our business is. You can look: go to our Facebook page and see that real people have left these reviews.
Monetary success and business growth
We’re way ahead of where we’d thought we’d be at this stage. It was always in my plan to recruit, and it was always in my plan to get a dedicated office and things, but I just didn’t expect it by this stage. it’s been a snowball effect, and the snowball’s just getting bigger and bigger. When we started, we weren’t doing coaching. When we started out, we just were going to manage people’s social, that was our thing. We recognised the need for people who wanted to do it themselves, and moved into the coaching side of things.
Your work-life balance
I think it’s where we want it to be at the moment, and the reason we’re converting the garage and not renting an office away from home.
Do you have a final message for anyone who aspires to you?
People say, ‘take risks’. On the face of it, a couple who’d just had a child –Lilliana was a year old when we set the business up – we’ve got a mortgage and everything else. Neither of us were working. It’s a massive risk. But if you really believe you’ve got something, you should just go for it. We’re lucky. It’s working at the moment, but I wouldn’t want to do it again!
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