Today we’d like to introduce you to Mina Park.
Mina, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
I moved here from Texas after graduating college at UT in Austin and snagged my first job at BLT Communications – a Hollywood ad agency. As a coordinator there, I was heading more into an account managing career path but then I saw an ad to apply for the MLB Fan Cave that essentially threw me into the creative field.
Major League Baseball was essentially advertising the Fan Cave as a dream job for baseball fans to come to NY and be paid to watch sports. I tried to come up with the most creative auditions in the process and I guess it worked as I got the gig and started writing blogs, designing graphics and shooting videos with MLB players in New York.
From there, it launched a five years stint working in sports social media for FOX Sports and the Los Angeles Rams, learning more about content creation and social media strategy while working some huge live events like the Super Bowl.
My good friend, Ricardo Marquez, floated an idea in 2018 to start a social media agency and I was all about it. We felt that with our experience in the space and creativity, we had a good grasp on what was successful on the Internet. And with that, Crispy Chicken was born! We’re now just over two years old with five full-time employees and the future is looking bright (thankfully even through a pandemic).
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
We are running Crispy Chicken completely bootstrapped so it definitely hasn’t been the smoothest at times. For us, the hardest challenge early on as a start-up was being comfortable and confident enough in ourselves to actually invest money back into the business. We tended to hold on to what was in the bank account because we were unsure when the next deal would come, causing us to overwork ourselves. Once we had enough funds to hire our first employee, everything changed from there.
Crispy Chicken Social Media Agency – what should we know? What do you do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
Crispy Chicken is a social media agency and by that, we mean we only offer social media services such as strategy, channel management and content creation. People often ask us if we build websites as well but we decided to specialize in social only at the moment, as we feel the most comfortable in excelling in that space. I am the head of creative so I oversee the ideation and content creation of the assets we produce for our clients.
As a company that mainly services entertainment clients, it’s always rewarding to see celebrities or actors of the show we’re working on comment or share the content we make. For most of our content, we’re trying to make people laugh so if we can create a genuine reaction to it, then we know we did a good job.
I think the unique thing about us as well is that Ricardo and I come from a long history of working all different roles within social media. From being social coordinators who write copy and publish posts, designing and editing the actual content, to being strategists and analyzing data and monetization goals, we have a robust knowledge of social media from the bottom up… which isn’t always the case for a lot of leaders in social media departments.
Do you feel like our city is a good place for businesses like yours? If someone was just starting out, would you recommend them starting out here? If not, what can our city do to improve?
There were huge benefits for us starting Crispy Chicken in a major city like Los Angeles. For one, we are big entertainment nerds so it made total sense for us to be in the city where it all happens. Being on video calls for pitches or intros is totally fine, but whenever we had the chance to meet a potential client in person, it was always 100% better in helping create those relationships. Before the pandemic, we would go on quarterly trips to New York as well solely because of that factor.
Image Credit:
Crispy Chicken
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