Missing Link a well executed success

MISSING LINK SOCIAL Media is a specialist social media marketing agency based at the Mariners Building in Tuggerah with a team of five.

Perry Henderson founded Missing Link Social Media in December 2012 but his story goes back a while before that.

Going back way beyond 2012 when Perry Henderson was in his final years at school he saw the potential of social media marketing and determined to undertake a business degree at the University of Newcastle with a major in Marketing.

At the time Australian universities were not offering any courses in social media so he enrolled at the Michigan State University in the USA and studied social media marketing.

After completing his Bachelor of Business at UON he continued his studies at The Entourage, a business coaching college where he learned world-class sales strategies that would facilitate the growth of his business. He paid for this via a micro loan from the NAB bank.

With this knowledge he established Missing Link Social Media with no money but the drive and determination to succeed.

This meant that he would operate the business by day and work two jobs at night and at the weekend. Importantly he had the support of his family

It was a low-risk venture and at that time he was single. Marriage would come a little later.

Additionally, at that time he had few competitors.

The course he undertook at The Entourage taught him the fundamentals of business. “It is all about systems and processes and these enable staff to understand and make day to day decisions enabling me to work on the business and build it,” he says.

He also listened to people and was mentored by his university lecturer Dr Anton Kriz and a year later by Tony Denny the successful businessman who had just set up the Gosford Classic Car Museum. He met Mr Denny because of picking up the Museum as one of his first clients. “I really learned a lot from Tony,” he says.

“Tony was an inspiration, he taught me self-reliance, to look inward for solutions on the basis that no one knows your business better than yourself.”

The DJ agency who he worked for was his very first client and it wasn’t long before he had to move out of home and into an office in the Platinum Building in Erina. This move enabled him to engage his first employee, Melinda Brennan and that was in 2015 and she continues to be very much part of the team.

Today Missing Link Social Media has 25 customers and in recent years turnover has been growing at 25% year on year.

The business is well along the way to becoming a million dollar a year agency.

In 2019 Missing Link was one of seven Finalists in the Social Media Marketing Institute’s Social Media Marketing Awards in the category Best Small Social Media Agency of the Year.

Having got the business onto a solid footing Perry is now concentrating on balancing it with his family life.

A couple of years after starting the business he married is long time girl friend who has backed him all the way. With three children and recently moving into a new home the Henderson Family needs a father.

Perry’s day starts at 4.00am and he is in the office by 8.00am having completed an hour’s exercise programme, had breakfast followed up on emails and spent time with the family.

He makes a practice of leaving work at 5.00pm to be with his family for the evening meal and to put them to bed.

Commenting on how their service has evolved, Perry says, “A few years ago, we started providing new services to help more of our services-based clients close the loop on the enquiries we were generating for them via social media.

After becoming a Certified Consultant of ActiveCampaign, we introduced email marketing, lead nurturing, and sales CRM setup to our list of services.

As we work through these services with clients, we also establish sales KPIs and processes, including the often-underutilised follow-up process.

It has been amazing to witness the substantial impact these services have had on increasing conversion rates, shortening the sales cycle, and lowering the overall customer acquisition cost for our clients”.

The Missing Link Team: Willow Boyd, Lisa Henderson, Beau Cantor, Perry Henderson, Hannah Evans, Christopher Lapa (not in photo Melinda Brennan)

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