FARMER SCHOOL STUDENT STEPS UP IN A BIG WAY

When Emil Barr set up his dorm room during his first year at Miami, he never intended to make it the home of a social media startup that would have more $1 million in annual revenue a couple of years later .

“I think that if you told me when I entered Farmer that I’d be making TikToks all day, I would’ve thought you were crazy . I was an economics major, I knew nothing about social media, I didn’t even have an Instagram, I was one of those kids without social media,” he said .

In fact, his original plan for college had nothing to do with Miami, or even Ohio . “I said, ‘I’m not going to go to a state school . I’m going to get as far away from Ohio as possible .’ I wanted to go to school in a big city . I couldn’t stand the idea of living among the corn fields,” Barr said . “But I went and visited some campuses and they kind of felt dry and dead . And then I visited Miami and the Farmer School. And I was like, ‘Wow, like this place is just alive. This place is beautiful. This isn’t like any other college campus.’ I was like, ‘I guess I’m going to Miami.’”

Barr arrived in the midst of COVID, and got into social media pretty quickly during the pandemic . And for someone with not a lot of social media experience – or perhaps because of it – he noticed something about a lot of social media .

“We were looking at social media and some social media feeds and we just saw some really bad posts, just some really out of touch marketing . And we thought, as students we’re making Instagram stories every day . We can probably do a better job and make a little bit of money on the side to go out,” Barr said . “So the initial thesis was that there was a large market demand for good cheap social marketing .”

“But the more time we spent in the space, we found that there was less demand for good cheap social media and just a demand for good social media,” he said . “There were very few firms that did social media well, and there was a lot of demand to do better on social media .”

“Then TikTok came along, which was game changing because we went from competing with every single A-list agency that had massive Facebook ad budgets and 10 years of declining track records to a relatively clean slate,” Barr said . “We were able to hire a team of Miami students, some influencers, some people that worked with brands that did well on TikTok, some influencers that built out their own profile to over a million followers, and sort of throw together this into a package .”

StepUp Social started as an idea in a coffee shop and was run out of Barr’s dorm room . “We’ve been able to do this because we’re twice as cost effective as our competitor’s options . And that’s really helped us scale like crazy these last six months,” Barr said in May 2022 . “By last summer it was a business . I mean it was fun . We were doing about $10,000 a month, which I thought was awesome at that time But right now we’re doing about $40,000 a month and we’re probably going to hit a million dollars a year if not by the end of this summer, definitely by the end of this year .”

Fast forward to March 2023 . “We have hit a million, so we’re at about a million dollars a year now . Um, so that’s been big and that was like really crazy,” Barr said . “We were a TikTok agency and TikTok was sort of seen as this ‘nice to have’ for companies, but it wasn’t essential in any way Our biggest gift last year was when Facebook rolled out Facebook Reels and Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts and now there’s Pinterest Watch and Snapchat Discover .”

“What we saw is all the data showed that people spend more time watching short sub-60-second videos on social media and that they’re more likely to engage with them on social media: in terms of both giving it a like or clicking a link if it’s an ad . Your engagement rates are much higher,” he said .

It’s been a busy couple of years for the Miami University rising senior who turned 20 in January . StepUp Social now has more than a dozen clients and nearly 20 employees . The firm won the Main St Ventures Launch It! Cincy pitch competition in 2021 . It was part of the Miami University Redhawk Launch Accelerator’s seventh cohort in 2022, and a companion startup in social media marketing education, Flashpass, is part of the eighth cohort for 2023 Barr was one of 10 students that Miami chose to highlight in the TV series “The College Tour .” And his FlashPass concept took the top spot in the spring 2023 Venture Pitch Competition .

“I’m impressed by StepUp Social . Everyone on the team is great to work with – responsive, creative, and with an insightful grasp of how to get meaningful results,” Dot Crane, Content Marketing Manager at Northern Kentucky Convention and Visitors Bureau, said . “In less than six months the TikTok channel they created for us is already outperforming the national average for accounts like ours .”

The company has become bigger than the dorm room and the coffee shop can handle, growing from Barr and two friends to nearly 20 employees . One of them is account manager Danielle Barnes, a senior Human Capital Management and Leadership major, who connected to Barr and StepUp Social through her business fraternity .

“It’s honestly really exciting to do this now, especially because Step Up is mostly made up of college students and we’re all in it together . Not only figuring things out, but doing exciting work that you don’t really see your peers doing as much,” she said . “I think it’s something that’s not only fun to be able to see where the company is leading the way, but also be a part of that process in itself .”

Barnes is one of several employees who is older than its founder “He’s able to believe in something and not only just believe in it, but put it into action . He didn’t wait until he was a certain age or he graduated college,” she said “He realized that it was something that he wanted to get done now and has put in a lot of work in order to get it done . It’s inspiring to say the least .”

Barr credits the Farmer School for helping him to achieve the success he’s had so far. “I wouldn’t be able to do this if I wasn’t in the Farmer School as a business student . I wouldn’t know where to start . There’s so many things I learned even in those first two years of classes, like Excel, modeling, and these skills that Farmer teaches,” he said When interviewed in May 2022, Barr indicated that he was looking to build the company so that someone might buy it, but now, that’s not quite the path he sees .

“I do think what we’ve done is impressive and I do think that it was a really crazy two years and a lot of work went into it . I just don’t think that this is where the story ends Imagine how far we’re going to grow now that we’ve nailed down our product and now that we are consistently getting results,” Barr said . “We have a 97% customer satisfaction rate . We’re hiring 3 or 4 people a month . My goal is looking ahead and I’m super excited that this could be a $5 million a year company very quickly, very soon .”