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Meet Collin Tovar of Elite Marketing Studios in Scottsdale (Northern Eastern Phoenix)

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Today we’d like to introduce you to Collin Tovar.

Collin, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
I always knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur at a young age. My number one driving goal and dream was to own a business that allowed me to live a life of financial and time-freedom being able to spend quality time with the people I loved and experiencing life to it’s fullest and happiest every single day, never settling for anything less.

I started my first business when I was in 8th grade called Coco Strapz, a stylish & tradable add-on cushion that velcro-wrapped around a standard backpack or luggage strap to add additional support and style to your heavy bag. My mom helped me make a prototype and sent it over to a factory overseas along with an investment to get 2,000 of them manufactured.

I created a website and logo myself and started to sell them at swap meets, garage sales, etc. While I didn’t make a ton of money from this idea, my hunger for entrepreneurship grew. I LOVED the idea of owning my own business where I could solve a problem, in this case, alleviating the pressure of heavy school backpacks, and be able to make a living doing what I wanted and loved. For then on, I never gave up chasing that dream.

Between 8th grade and my senior year in high school, I had started and failed five businesses that included a watch company, a few drop shipping companies, and a couple other online ventures. So, as much as I hated the idea of going to college (the opposite of what any young entrepreneur desires to do), I enrolled in a local community college to work towards a general business degree while working as a Teppanyaki chef at a restaurant called Benihana with my best friend from high school, George Janko.

I worked 40+ hours a week there and made great money being 18 and right out of high school, but on top of being in college, that job was stressful and I realized I wasn’t staying true to my original dream and goal to chase what made me happy. After working there for a year, I left to take a job opportunity as a regular barista at a somewhat underground small coffee shop called Dutch Bros. Coffee that focused on people first and money last. Everyone thought I was crazy, including my parents. But working at this coffee shop helped me regain my happiness and my confidence in myself. My plan was to work there for the required year to franchise a shop myself with the help of my parents.

Naturally, my attention and motivation to complete college began to quickly diminish as I started to feel that entrepreneurial spirit gets fired up again. The year I started working there, Dutch Bros started exploding in the valley. Everyone got to know this unique and fun coffee shop, so naturally, the franchise requirements raised up significantly.

So, after working as a barista there for 1.5 years, at age 20 I came up with my biggest business venture idea yet, a coffee food truck that would deliver fresh coffee on demand and attend food truck events/festivals while the food truck craze was just gaining traction in the US. I learned how to put a professional business plan together and pitch it to a group of investors seeking $300,000 for 3 trucks.

After MANY passionate arguments with my parents, they agreed to let me drop out of college and I quit my job at Dutch Bros. to pursue this venture. This was my big moment. Though unfortunately, the partnership between myself and the investors dissolved due to a few disagreements in the business plan.

Literally, the day after my partnership ended with them, I got a call from my old manager from Dutch Bros. telling me he was moving to Austin, Texas to start a coffee shop in downtown and he wanted me to be a co-owner. I was shocked. So, I flew out to Austin to check out the build site and business plan and agreed to pursue it with him.

Though after a couple of months of working to get the website up, coffee bags made, graphics are done, etc., he called me and said he felt it wasn’t in his cards to pursue the coffee shop. At this point, I knew I had no plan. I knew going back to college would be a nightmare for me and not pertain to my goal of being happy or owning a business and I knew that I was getting older and still living at home with my parents because I was unemployed with no successful business to show for.

So, with my limited options, I went and became the store manager of a Starbucks franchise inside the gift shop at Fairmont Scottsdale Princess. There, I really learned what it was like to manage a crew, set budgets, and manage a small business. Though I wasn’t happy there, I learned what I needed to, so I took what I learned and pleaded for my job back to Dutch Bros. Coffee where I knew I would be ultimately happy. But at this point, I am 22 years old and back to square one. Working as a barista at a coffee shop and living with my parents.

All the while, George Janko, my high school friend that worked at Benihana had moved out to Hollywood to chase his lifelong dream of becoming a famous actor and singer. And after about a year of being there, he met with a guy named Logan Paul. A famous “Vine” star at the time – making 7-second videos that made the world laugh. Logan took George under his wing and taught him everything he knew, and George quickly became a wildly successful comedic influencer gaining millions of followers on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and more. He got to work alongside big social media stars like Amanda Cerny, Lele Pons, Mark Dohner, Team 10 (Jake Paul, Alissa Violet, etc). Combined these people had tens of millions of followers, subscribers on YouTube, etc.

I was driving out to LA to visit George ALL the time. At least once per month. I got to meet these stars and really watch the true rise of what was to be known “influencers.” I learned so much being around so many successful people and watching them live their lives entirely by getting big brands like Clorox, Dicks Sporting Goods, Toyota and more to pay them big bucks to post about their products. They were living the dream. All living together in one luxurious apartment complex in Hollywood (1600 Vine). Making more money than they could handle.

Seeing Geroge succeed to the level he has truly inspired me. And he was an amazing mentor to me, motivating me along the way on how to be a better man.

I learned and saw a true opportunity that the entire world hadn’t realized yet. You can make money purely by doing what you loved and posting about it on social media. So I took my unique opportunity of having the ability to rub shoulders and learn from the most successful influencers in the industry at the time and started taking what I learned to start my own brand on Instagram, the hotbed platform for getting paid to post. I started posting about going on one-day adventures with my friends like to the grand canyon or antelope canyon inspiring others to do what they love and not care what the rest of the world thinks.

At that time, growing my Instagram brand was more of a focused hobby rather than trying to focus on it as a career. So, how I spent most of my free time was researching ways on how to make money online. I came across a world of opportunity and started heavily learning email marketing, digital marketing, funnels, conversions, etc. I started getting pretty good.

With my knowledge, I was pretty confident in my digital marketing capabilities. But it wasn’t until I made a large investment into a pyramid scheme that would put me back $30,000 in credit card debt that I realized my life would be forever changed. I was 22 years old, a college dropout, barista who was now $30,000 in debt with no plan. I was forced to drum up the courage to tell my parents I couldn’t keep up with the monthly payments so they helped me officially file for bankruptcy. Not a very fun place to be. Lifewise, I was literally at rock bottom. But I decided to keep my head up and stay working at Dutch Bros while everything was getting worked out.

After my bankruptcy cleared, I took direction from my dad, a seasoned Arizona realtor, to get my real estate license to sell timeshares. He said I would be great at it and he even had a job lined up for me in California where the starting pay was $80,000/year.

Real estate school felt much like college to me and I began to dread it. I felt in my heart that I was missing out on my true passion and dream. Like I was “selling myself out” or “giving up” on my true dream of being an entrepreneur. So, even though I had a home run set up for me perfectly, halfway into completing my classes, I was approached with a brand spanking new network marketing company called WoTaBu. It stood for Worth Talking About. The entire company was created around the idea of living your life to its absolute fullest by traveling and adventuring with your friends. Bless my parent’s hearts, I dropped out without telling them to pursue this network marketing company instead of finishing my classes.

This network marketing company will forever be my “turning point” and I will be forever indebted to my mentors and friends and the wonder of opportunity that WoTaBu brought into my life. Of course, this company was easy for me to promote because this lifestyle was something I truly believed in. Plus, at this point, because I was building my Instagram brand, I had about 10,000 followers so I quickly became a top 25 producer within the company gaining a lot of recognition. I started speaking on team Zoom calls with hundreds of people motivating and teaching them. I got the right mentorship to read the right books and listen to the right audios. This is truly where I began to believe in myself in my ability to succeed.

Naturally, I really started to focus hard on promoting the company using my Instagram. My “brand” (photos) on Instagram was already centered around travel and adventure and living life to its fullest. So I grew my account pretty quickly to 30k, using what I learned from the social media stars and applying it.

Within that time, I got some REALLY cool opportunities. One of my favorite watch companies shipped me a few watches for free, I got free boots, free swimming trunks and I even got paid to post about a few things. But the coolest thing by far was getting reached out to by Coors Light. They invited me to fly into Telluride Colorado with them and stay at a luxury hotel there for a few days and climb Wilson’s Peak, the mountain made famous on their packaging/logo. A 14,000 ft., 9-hour intensive climb. Not only that, but we would also be climbing with the first BLIND climber to ever summit Mount Everest, Erik Weihnmayer, a true inspiration. This entire trip was all paid for.

This was by far THE COOLEST experience I have ever had. The hike was beautiful and challenging. I got to meet other influencers from around the world. And I got to see first hand that a large company like Coors Light was willing to invest this much time and money on this small group of influencers (about 10 of us) to climb their mountain. An experience I will never forget.

I knew there was nothing else to do but to help other influencers grow on Instagram to live that kind of life out. Out of working with people in WoTaBu and experiencing what I was able to experience with my journey on Instagram, and as this whole “influencer craze” (or getting paid to post) was on the rise, my passion quickly became to inspire and help others gain that opportunity for themselves. Not just by Instagram growth, but believing in themselves to pursue their true dreams to no end.

So, I took my experiences, existing credibility, and knowledge to start an Instagram growth company for influencers. Helping them to get to their first 10,000 followers and get paid brand deals from companies. After about three months, I had made about $20,000 and I was stoked. I knew I had something potentially big. But I knew I needed help.

Another one of my best friends from high school, Ryan Kroener, got me connected with his friend Chas Van de Motter to pitch as a client to grow his new non-profit video production business on Instagram. Though, there was something different about Chas. He approached me and said he liked what I was doing on Instagram and he thought we would make great partners.

That is when our company, Elite Marketing Studios was truly formed. In an industry of so many companies selling “fake followers” and “fake engagement”, we focused on the true quality of helping businesses gain organic followers that were actually interested in their product or services to help them increase sales from Instagram. Chas went hard in the Instagram Direct Messages and sold businesses directly through there, learning the true power of Instagram DM’s and how we could use it better than anyone else to develop REAL connections, not spammy like the rest. So we helped our clients learn and do the same to increase their sales.

Our business grew more and more by word of mouth because of the sheer quality of growth and the increase of ROI that these businesses were experiencing with our growth.

So, with our existing data and experience, six months later, I put together a plan to relaunch the influencer portion of the business so we could separate the needs of our clients. I got 10-20 of our friends to help out. (My girlfriend, Shae, my best friend Ryan, influencer friends in my network, etc.) We set a budget aside to grow their accounts for free in exchange for them promoting the brand that we called “Elite Influencers.” We had these people fill out an application and apply to… well, we didn’t even know what they were applying to yet, we just wanted to test the waters and see if we could get a random group of influencers to enter their info (Name, phone number, email, city, influencer goals, if they were willing to invest, etc.). The response was overwhelming. We got 700 applications in three months. Chas was scrambling to schedule a call each and every influencer to sell them on a package. We doubled our existing business in those three months.

Within just one year of working together, we produced 6 figures in sales in our company, just by grinding it out and figuring it out along the way. I’ve been very fortunate to get to where I am today and I am very grateful for everything I have learned. I have been given the opportunity to overcome adversity and become the person I truly want to be. 2018 will forever go down as the year I think I will have learned the most and made the biggest changes in my life. Now, old friends and coworkers that used to laugh at me when I was bankrupt, reach out to congratulate me and ask me for advice. I have fans making fan art of me and putting pictures of me on their walls. I have made it as a guest speaker on podcasts and am even starting to get articles written about me as an “inspiring story”!! It is a very exciting time for me and my life. And I am truly humbled by the entire experience that has brought me to where I am today. I now am living a lifestyle of time-freedom, not necessarily financial freedom just yet, I am far from that. But I get to wake up every day doing what I love and spending time with those that I love. I get to visit my girlfriend at work every day (who works at Dutch Bros by the way!). I go on at least one mini vacation every month. And it seems as if the world is starting to notice now what I have been trying to do for so long. All it took was me just doing it.

After having an attitude of depression and feeling bad for myself my entire life because of my high school failures all the way up to my bankruptcy at 22, I made the decision to really BELIEVE in myself. I told myself that life issues are real and tough if you let them be, but I couldn’t survive without chasing my dream that was like a fire burning inside that I never wanted to extinguish. So, I never gave up. No matter how hard it got, nothing could have hit me harder than the challenges, fear, and adversity I had already faced. I knew I was unstoppable. And that’s the true message I want to inspire amongst your readers. To have an attitude of being unstoppable. That anything is possible. Because just a short year and a half ago, I was a depressed, bankrupt, 22-year-old college dropout barista, with no plan or direction. No matter what, there wasn’t anyone with an inkling of belief in me except my immediate family. The world had their chance to put me down, but it wasn’t until I let it put me to rock bottom that I realized I had no place else to go, but to PROVE to everyone that I could. And that is all it took.

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
The biggest challenge I had to face in the beginning was my bankruptcy and of course everything that came with that. I was already dropped out of college and had failed many businesses I attempted to start. My high school friends, my entire family, co-workers, and peers, everyone laughed at me and told me to be realistic. My coworkers at Dutch Bros were a couple years younger than me, many lived in their own apartment and wondered why I was living at home and working as a barista not in college, like the rest of the people my age, but pursuing a network marketing company. When everyone around me didn’t believe in me, I was forced to believe only in myself, realizing they couldn’t possibly fully believe in my dream until I painted it out for them in reality, not just words.

Please tell us about Elite Marketing Studios.
My main company is called Elite Marketing Studios. Originally, we specialized in helping businesses and influencers increase their organic following on Instagram helping them brand, convert, and sell more using solely their Instagrams. Now, we specialize in helping businesses convert more sales using direct messages and we help them create a “social CRM” for their followers retaining valuable information such as Name, Email, Phone Number and other important data points to know about your followers being able to take them off of Instagram into your custom database. We also offer our Instagram growth service to be white labeled (used under a custom brand name) for agencies looking to offer high-quality Instagram growth to their clients.

I also co-own a second business where we focus more on custom projects for businesses. We work with high-end clients with larger marketing spend who may not know exactly how to scale their online brands with these powerful digital tools like Directory Management, SEO, Reputation Management, Social Media Management, Funnel/Landing Pages, CRM, Processes, and Digital Advertising campaigns like Facebook Ads, YouTube Ads and more.

What sets us apart from the competition is our will to provide pure honest and quality service for our clients. We are still a small enough agency where we have a couple guys working with us and can manage and control everything with a close eye. You see a lot of these emerging big agencies now that force the client to pay loads of money, but the client doesn’t know where the money is going, how it’s getting spent or what the metrics look like. In a world of business today that is unfair, schemey and closed mined, we wanted to approach is with a fresh perspective to provide raw value up front that our clients would feel and experience first hand that not only encourages them to stay but feel confident enough to outsource our services to their clients and even refer their friends and cohorts to us.

This is where we have found the most successful and we plan on sticking to this route. There are a lot more agencies making A LOT more money than us. But we’re happy to grind it out the way we are doing things the RIGHT way. And because of that, we are now starting to hit our stride of growth.

Is there a quality or characteristic that has played an outsized role in your success?
I think there are a lot of qualities that pertain to becoming successful, not just monetary, but finding your true self and becoming the person you truly want to become. But the one that comes to my mind first is believing in myself. One thing that a man named Jeff Romney’s (Mitt Romney, the politician’s cousin), by far the HAPPIEST and successful person I have ever met taught me this: “Self-confidence comes down to one pure thing, simply doing what you told yourself you were going to do.” That is something that will stick with me forever. Self-confidence really IS just believing yourself and what you say. If you say you are going to quit a bad habit, then stop it! It became as simple as obsessively becoming more and more self-aware every single day taking inventory of what I was doing and if it was matching up with the person I told myself I wanted to become. Being a depressed, bankrupt college dropout, I was always feeling bad for myself. But when I started believing in myself and doing what I said I was going to do, I became so self-confident that nobody could do or tell me anything to stand in the way of MY happiness, success and my true dream.

Pricing:

  • Basic: $97/mo (up to 1,000 organic Instagram followers per month)
  • Elite: $297/mo (up to 5,000 organic Instagram followers per month + direct messaging)
  • Executive: $697/mo (Elite growth + full social media management)
  • Enterprise: $5,000/mo (used for custom digital marketing & advertising strategies)

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Getting in touch: VoyagePhoenix is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.

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