Meet Hannah Perry

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Hannah Perry. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Hannah below.

Hannah, thrilled to have you on the platform as I think our readers can really benefit from your insights and experiences. In particular, we’d love to hear about how you think about burnout, avoiding or overcoming burnout, etc.

My experience with burn out… phew it was rough. I burnt out in college because I was doing way too much. In order to afford my tuition, I worked a full time social media marketing job with an agency, and a part time bartending job on top of my full time course load. While also trying to maintain personal relationships with friends who lived on opposite ends of the GTA, I was rarely sleeping in my own bed. For context I put nearly 100,000kms on my car in my first year of college. With the intention to complete a 3 year program, near the end of my second year I decided that something had to give. I was spreading myself so thin that I wasn’t fulfilling my duties appropriately with any of my responsibilities. I decided to withdrawal from school with a 2 year diploma instead of 3 and I booked an appointment with an entrepreneurship incubator with the college to start my own social media marketing agency. I formally withdrew from school the day of my appointment with the incubator, and that day I was also let go from my full time agency job. With the decisions I had made and 3 huge life things happening 2 hours apart from each other it was like… BOOM… you’re in this. That day I committed to creating an agency that not only provided a high level experience for my clients, but also supported me in undertaking a journey to grow through and heal from my decisions as a 22 year old. It wasn’t a quick fix to my burn out, I have spent years learning and undoing the damage I did to my body and my mental health. Through going back to the drawing board numerous times and learning to take rejection I’ve been able to work with countless wonderful people who understand my heart and share the same goals in wanting to create a life that’s free from the hustle and are willing to put the foundational work in to make that happen. The day I started my agency I decided that a corporate job is hard, starting a business is hard, working a retail or restaurant job is hard, everything is hard, and I have to fully and completely commit to the flavour of hard that I can tolerate and what feeds my soul. Although I still work hard, I have found a craft that is fulfilling and feels a lot less like hard work so that I can catch the signs of burnout quickly and redirect.

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?

This is an exciting question! I have a social media marketing agency called Cofellow and a podcast called Procrasturbation Station.

First I will tell you about my agency. After working for an agency in college and managing between 45-75 accounts, I really hated how every account was treated the same regardless of the demographic they served. I want to do things differently with Cofellow. In full transparency, as I hold space for social media to be a beautiful, wonderful place to nurture community, it can also be a place that leads to comparison and chasing an ideal highlight reel that’s rarely realistic. I figured if I don’t really love social media, there’s bound to be many entrepreneurs who don’t like it at all who I can help spend less time online and more time doing what they’re passionate about. I work primarily with entrepreneurs who’s brands are an extension of themselves with creativity at the heart. This could be handmade products, social ventures and passion based businesses with a goal to create impact. This is a broad niche, I know, and I like it that way as having variety in my clients allows me to expand my skills by creating variety in my day. I work with event companies, non-profits, fashion brands, artists, jewelry brands, influencers and more. I work to create a foundational system that promotes a brand organically based on what their unique demographic responds to.

In terms of my podcast, this is a platform to strengthen my skills in public speaking by creating a space to discuss self sabotage and personal development from a place of self acceptance first. It’s my motto that if you’re a perfectionist or a procrastinator, self development might not make those qualities go away, while looking at it from a place of compassion and realism allows us to use these truths of human nature to our benefit rather than our detriment. My goal with this platform is to encourage my audience to think creatively and to chase their curiosity about life. I do interviews with entrepreneurs who have a story to share and with my solo episodes I speak candidly about my experience and offer perspectives that I wished I had learned sooner.

What’s super exciting to me about all of this is I’m hoping to take my experience with my marketing agency, and my skills with speaking on my podcast and apply it to speaking to large audiences in public settings. Think a Ted Talk for entrepreneurs that’s essentially a podcast episode on a live stage. This is my long term plan, for now I’m focusing on making my agency self sufficient and creating a huge library of podcast content.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

I can’t say there was one single quality or skill that impacted my journey most, as my wins and losses have compounded into one, unprecedented story just as anyone who reads this might say the same for themselves. To qualify this a bit, my biggest attribute would be an unadulterated, potentially occasionally delusional refusal to give up. With my entire mind, body and soul, I am determined to create a life that I can be proud of. I am quite spiritual which lends to my willingness to persevere as I choose to believe that although things can be hard, no matter what I will always land on my feet. In terms of tangible knowledge that I possess would be my ability to receive feedback be it positive or negative and to reflect on my actions before I decide my next move.

As an entrepreneur it’s a common experience that what you’re building is an extension of yourself and I encourage readers to nurture that piece of your soul until it blossoms in spite of any naysayers. Don’t be afraid to fail because even through failure, you’ll end up right where you need to be. Keep your feet planted in your roots and remember where you started while you aim for the stars. In addition to maintaining integrity in what your soul calls you to do, remember to put yourself in the shoes of your customer when you receive feedback. While elevating your customer’s experience through first hand testimony is paramount, you don’t always need to apply feedback if the person you heard it from doesn’t represent the customer who puts food on your table.

We’ve all got limited resources, time, energy, focus etc – so if you had to choose between going all in on your strengths or working on areas where you aren’t as strong, what would you choose?

This is such an interesting question as I believe that both answers can be true at the same time. It’s my goal in life to know as much as I can and learn as much as possible. I know in my heart that no one person can know everything, however I’m sure going to try. My personal time is spent researching and learning as much as I can, while also recognizing that understanding something in theory is much different than understanding it in practice. I believe as an entrepreneur it’s our job to have a high level understanding of the inner workings of our brand which means picking up many skills you may not have imagined yourself doing in order to develop a framework with which you can hire someone who specializes in that skill. I will never ask someone to do something in my business that I haven’t done myself. To the same degree, what I’m able to implement in practice is limited to the same 24 hours a day as everyone else. For example if I need a new website for my business, I can either spend hours upon hours learning how to effectively design and launch a website, or I can research what I want to accomplish and seek someone who’s already put in the years of training to develop such skills. Another example could be if I need a proverbial plumber for my digital business, I can spend time learning how to gut my pipes just to do it wrong and spend twice as much fixing it, or, I can hire a plumber. In this case, I believe knowing your strengths and playing to them is an excellent way to be successful.
The way I see this question is both playing to your strengths while also investing your energy to improve yourself are both the right way. It’s about creating an internal system that expands and contracts. Our businesses can be a playground that allows us to expand our skills as people so that our strengths can grow, while simultaneously allowing us to contract by withdrawing to our bread and butter that we know we can execute flawlessly every time.

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Image Credits

Images 2&3, (headshot and speaker panel) courtesy of On a Cloud Creative

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