How Emma Tessler Built Her Social Media Marketing Agency on a Train, with Emma Tessler, Founder of Ninety Five Media

Join me as I sit down with the incredible Emma Tessler, the founder and CEO of Ninety Five Media, and host of the podcast Stop Scrolling, Start Scaling. In this episode, we discuss Emma's impressive and early rise to success as well as her life journey that encompasses values, money, and gratitude. Emma's story is filled with early examples of leadership and initiative, from self-organizing fundraisers as a child to managing part-time jobs in high school while maintaining stellar academic records. 

 

She shares her early passion for interior design after taking a class in high school, which eventually led to her attending the prestigious Fashion Institute of Technology. Despite knowing her career path pretty clearly, she opens up about how she navigated the challenge of following this passion to NYC, where she barely made enough to cover living expenses. 

 

She reveals how this struggle opened up the doors for her to build Ninety Five Media, her social media marketing empire, while she commuted on the train to and from the city. Moving away from the interior design world wasn’t always part of the plan, but the pandemic had other things in store for her.

 

Emma also opens up about the significance of financial planning as an entrepreneur, how she set herself up for success early on, and her approach to earning, spending, and investing her money, including celebrating milestones with meaningful purchases. 

Key Topics:

1. Having a self-starting mentality from childhood
2. Getting eager to get into the workforce as early as possible
3. Emma’s first lessons in taxes with her first paychecks as a young girl
4. Feeling like everyone else had everything figured out in high school and how she leveraged that into her passion for interior design
5. Getting offered a job at the firm she interned at before she even graduated college
6. Navigating life in NYC that didn’t pay enough to cover living expenses
7. How she spent a 4-hour-per-day commute building her online marketing business
8. Embracing a “what’s the worst that can happen?” mentality while building her business
9. How the pandemic shook the interior design and marketing industry to its core
10. Making the plan to leave her interior design job to go all in on her business
11. The support systems Emma leaned on to help get her business off the ground
12. Getting serious about saving, investing, and planning for retirement
13. Doing a lot of money mindset work to get rid of mental blocks
14. How her mom’s entrepreneurial mindset impacted Emma as a kid
15. Rewarding yourself with milestone gifts to remind yourself of your accomplishments as an entrepreneur

 

 

Connect with Emma online: 

 

Websites: https://ninetyfivemedia.co/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emmatessler/

Instagram: @ninety.five.media

Podcast: Stop Scrolling, Start Scaling