From a Team of Unpaid Interns to a Successful Agency with Hala Taha

0:0010 years ago, I made the decision to build my personal brand that was elevated, yet approachable, and reflected who I was, not just what I did. I created my website with ShowIt because it's true drag and drop freedom so you can easily build and update your site. Plus, their real human support team, game changer. Want to try it for yourself? Head to jasminestar.com forward slash show it for a 14-day free trial and first month free when you subscribe.

0:39Welcome back to the Jasmine Star Show, a place where y 'all know we talk about life, business, and everything on the in-between. Today, I couldn't be more excited to have a LinkedIn expert and podcast professional queen that she is. Now, Hala and I have had conversations both in the podcasting space and then separately on LinkedIn. And I couldn't be more excited to see how much her career has grown. She is CEO of YAP Media. Y 'all, we are going to be breaking down the best and the newest of what the top podcasters, what celebrities are doing in this space, how she's been able to create synergy and create a business around being a true professional and amazing at what she does.

1:18Hala, welcome to the Jasmine Starr Show. I'm so excited to be here, Jasmine. Thank you for having me. Okay. So this has been a long time coming. Our paths intersected a few years ago. And for people who've been on the podcast and been around the block, y 'all know that the people I bring on the show are people I know have cultivated a relationship with and people who I know are here to be in a place of service. Every objective for the podcast has been like, what is the one action item you could do or take away? And so one of the things we want to start off with, let's start hit the ground running.

1:48I know we can talk about an origin story, but let's start driving out some value. So one of the things I found the most inspiring about your story is that before you hired a team, you started with unpaid interns. Now, I kind of just want to tap a little bit there because the thing that I see a lot of times that stopping people from taking action is not having enough support or thinking that it has to look a certain way. And one of the things that I wanted to unwrap with you is like, if you are setting out to hit a goal and you're ready to take action and you need help, Hala, do you have insight on how people might do that?

2:17Totally, totally. So I love this part of my story because it just goes to show the organic growth that we had. So basically, I had a lot of super fans that would reach out to me after they listened to the show when I first started. And they would reach out to me on LinkedIn because that's where I first started. And they'd be like, Hala, Hold on. Hold on. Let's pause here. Let's pause here. Can you go back and give a little bit description? You're like, okay, that's where it first started. But like fill in that gap. Yeah, 100%. So in terms of the people reaching out to me and wanting to work for me, they actually reached out to me first.

2:48It wasn't me asking them. They were inspired by how passionate I was. And the fact that I was doing everything for free as a side hustle, part-time job. And I would talk about that on my podcast, how like, you know, I'm just doing of service. I'm not trying to make money. I just want to help people. And I would go on LinkedIn and I would put my podcast stuff on LinkedIn. And then I became one of the top podcasters on LinkedIn. And then I started to get super fans and they would tell me how much I improved their lives, how much they appreciated all the hard work I was doing. And they would be like, I just want to help you make this bigger.

3:22I want to make sure that you're one of the top podcasters in the world. How can I help you? What can I do? So what I would say is, why don't you come on my team and I'll show you how to do everything that I do. So I would teach like one guy how to do my website because I was a marketer, right? I've been a marketer since I was 17 years old. Even before I worked a corporate job, I was, you know, interning at a radio station. I had a really popular blog site when I was just like 20 years old, right? So I've been in this world for like a really long time. So I knew how to do websites, videos, graphics, copywriting, social media, all these different things.

3:57And I'd say like, Hey, just come work for me for free. I'll teach you in return. I'll teach you how to do all these skills. Stay as long as you want. When you feel like you're not learning, move on. Or maybe down the line, there's an opportunity where I can hire you. But for two years, it was just a volunteer group. And like I said, it happened super organically where people were asking me and I just had the idea like, all right, let me pop everybody in a Slack channel and basically just start a team. Oh, interesting. And so I put everybody in a Slack channel and then I started having monthly calls with them, weekly calls with them.

4:30And then slowly by slowly, we turned into Yap Media. Interesting. Okay. That's fascinating. Now, I had listened to a podcast that you were on and you were talking about creating posts that align with LinkedIn's editorial agenda. So can you bridge the gap between you're building out this intern team that's turning into an official business, not knowing it at the time. Can you explain what that editorial agenda means? And then how do people take advantage of it? Were you putting interns on it at the beginning? Talk to me about that. Totally. So the editorial agenda really has to do with LinkedIn's algorithm.

5:04So LinkedIn's algorithm is four steps. Okay. So I can go through the four steps if you'd like. But the last step is what makes LinkedIn unique. Essentially, they're monitoring all the top posts of the day. And they have human editors, not AI, not machines, human editors that are scanning through all the top posts of the day. And essentially, they're trying to control LinkedIn's editorial agenda so that LinkedIn stays branded as this professional website for professionals, for entrepreneurs, for hiring, for recruitment, because LinkedIn has a goal, you know, competing with Indeed and ZipRecruiter for hiring and recruitment.

5:37And they also have a goal of keeping users online for as long as possible so they can sell ads. So those are their two goals. And so if If you want to be popular on LinkedIn, you've got to align to those two goals. You've got to keep people for as long as possible on the platform. And you've got to align to LinkedIn's editorial agenda, which means that you've got to align to your topic plus careers, your topic, you know, and the intersection of recruitment, hiring and so on. So that's what I mean by aligning to LinkedIn's editorial agenda. It's how you play nicely with LinkedIn's algorithm. So to your point, eventually, once I started having a team, like the origin story was that fans were asking me to join the team.

6:17And at first, I didn't know what to do with that. But then eventually, I was like, okay, you can learn under me. And, you know, before that, I was doing a lot of volunteer work. I was president of my alumni association. I was president of the Young Employee Network at Hewlett Packard. I had this blog site with 150 female bloggers who worked for free for me too in the blog, in and out for like three years. Right. So I've had all these experiences like recruiting interns. So for me, it was like really natural. I was like, yeah, just come learn with me. Like this is what everybody does. Right. Like so.

6:48So that's how that team started. And then I started to formalize it. Once I had my interns, I started doing like, you know, summer internships and started promoting that on LinkedIn. And then I like winter internships. And I would put out videos. And because internships is a hot topic on LinkedIn, because it aligns with their editorial agenda. that's probably why it picked up steam because it aligned with their editorial agenda, like you were saying. Okay. So it's been cool because the way that you're frame of the story is a little bit origin story and a lot value-driven, which has been pretty fantastic.

7:24So you start off with interns, it becomes a little bit more formalized. You're strategically aligning your objectives with the editorial agenda on LinkedIn. And then at what point do you say, okay, I now have a business. Yeah. So really, it was me paying attention to what my audience was telling me, number one. And number two, it was me finding myself with more time. So the first reason why is because people like you would come on the show. And after they would come on my podcast, they were all celebrities, entrepreneurs, and so on. I had a pretty big podcast from the start in terms of notoriety, right?

8:00Not in terms of downloads. And so I had these guests that would at the end of the show be like, Hala, who does your LinkedIn? How did you grow so fast? How did you grow so big? like, Hala, who does your podcast? Could you do this for me? And I'd always say like, no, no, I'm so sorry. I've got this intern team. I had a really cushy job at Disney. And I was like, this is just like for fun. I just do this of service. I can't help you. And I really pushed people back for almost a year. And then COVID hit. And it was 2020, March of 2020. Actually, my dad got really sick. He ended up passing away. And I found myself in my parents' house while my dad was in the hospital.

8:38having so much free time because work was shut down. I was stuck at my parents' house. I couldn't see my friends. I couldn't see my boyfriend because I had gotten COVID. And at that time, March 2020, it was like I had the plague, right? Nobody wanted to be around me. And so for like two months, I found myself with all this time. And Heather Monaghan, who's still my client, she was my first client. She came on my show. She asked me and I said, I can't help you. And she kept messaging me on LinkedIn. Holla, your videos are awesome. You have to show me how to do your videos. And I wanted Heather as a mentor because I looked up to her.

9:10She was like who I wanted to be in 10 years. And I was like, I can't do it for you, but I'll teach you how to do it. And so I started scheduling these meetings for her on Saturdays. And we did like two meetings. The second meeting, I was showing her like my Slack channel, my drive, my templates. And she's like, Hala, I just had a call with VaynerMedia. And I can give them my money. They're great. But your stuff is better. You have a social agency. You just don't know it. you hate your job. You told me like, quit your job. I'll be your first client. You can't say no. And I was like, okay, I guess I'll try.

9:41And so I took her as my first client. What month is this? So now it is like June of 2020. I took her as my first client. And by July, I had a second client who was a billionaire and it was a$30 ,000 monthly retainer. So how much did you charge Heather? Like 700 bucks a month, like nothing. and then I wait wait wait holla holla holla I know that this is your story and you have said this story so many times but I'm like can we just pause for the gravity of what happened because in a three month time period while you're going through uncertainty in the world the landscape of the world in March 2020 looked crazy for a lack of better words you're dealing with the potential loss of your father and you're at Disney but Disney closes down and you have extra time and within three months somebody decides to pay you$700?

10:36$700 a month to start like working on her like it was first videos then I took over her LinkedIn and did that and got the processes for that and then I started taking over her podcast within like one month and she still wasn't paying me a lot because she was like my beta right and so but then I had a billionaire who came on my podcast his name was Jason Waller and he at the end of the show was like hey do you do social and production and now I could say yes. So I was like, yeah, sure I do. I do. And I had no website. I had no logo. Me and my first intern, Timothy Tan, put together a PowerPoint.

11:10And I remember I presented the PowerPoint to Tim and I had LinkedIn services for 3 ,000, podcast production for 3 ,000. And then there was like, I think Instagram for 3 ,000. And he's like, why don't we just make it 10 ,000 each? He's a billionaire. And I was like, yeah, you're right. Maybe I should do 10 ,000 each. And so I did it. I presented to him. I had really good presentation skills. They used to call me the PowerPoint princess before they called me the podcast princess in the corporate world. So I made like an awesome PowerPoint. And at the end of it, he's like, let's do it. And I was like, oh, okay.

11:41And then all of a sudden, I was making$30 ,000 a month for a brand new agency. I was able to start hiring some people and putting people on payroll. And then I got Kara Golden of Hint Water. I took over her social, Hint Water social. Okay, okay, okay. So let me go back and ask a couple of clarifying questions. When you land a$30 ,000 a month client and you're still working with a$700 a month client, does anything change? No. And by the way, I was still working at Disney. It took me six months to quit Disney and I was making almost$200 ,000 a month in my agency and I had 30 employees around the world.

12:16And then I quit Disney because I was very scared to quit my job. Got it. So your third client, what are you charging her? It was like, just like Jason Waller. I was like, now I was a white glove agency, you know, and everybody wanted to work with me and we were really good, right? I created a really awesome team. So then I was a white glove agency and Heather would help me get clients and refer me. And I kept, you know, I always gave, Heather still has the homie discount. It's not$700. You know what? There's no tea, no shade. I'm so happy she found somebody took a risk just desserts for somebody like seeing like, you know, a diamond in the rough.

12:54Okay. Yeah. I would pull back and there's somebody who's listening and what they're thinking or what they're saying is that must be nice. That sounds like it was easier for her. And if you were only looking at March of 2020 to let's say December 2020, somebody in that siloed amount of time might be able to say it was easy for her. Maybe. But what I want to point out was from that time in March 2020, how long had you been creating content on LinkedIn prior to that for free, giving back, building your brand? How long before that? Two years. But before that, I had a blog for three years. And before that, I had online radio shows and shit for another three years.

13:39So this was like 10 years in the making. And by the way, I worked nonstop for four years straight. Every weekend, every Saturday, every Sunday, I had a side hustle podcast, I had a side hustle agency, and a really like executive corporate job where I was running a whole email marketing team at Disney. And I was doing all those things at once. And actually, I would wake up super early in the morning and I wouldn't go to bed until like 1 a.m. and I would just like work consistently through. And I was lucky because I was with a boyfriend at the time that also was super obsessed with his career. So we would just like work side by side together and just, you know, grind it out.

14:18So I was hustling really hard. And I actually lost like a lot of friends and like people thought I was crazy. And then finally, it paid off, you know, like it really took off after like two and a half years. And then you've even seen me like it's been a slow growth and a lot of hard work. So I really wanted to what I like to do is like I like to point out possible thought patterns that people might have and then just clarify it from the beginning. And one of the things that I have seen, and I can't speak to this to you with certainty, which is why I want to bring it up if you're cool at talking about it, is for so long, you and I were cut from a similar cloth, right?

14:53Like we're going to figure it out. We're going to work. We're going to do everything we can to figure out a way. Did you ever experience that work becoming integrated with your identity? Like what was happening during this time of like something to prove, at least not for you. I can't say yet. But for me, I felt like I had something to prove. I felt like I had a chip on my shoulder. I felt like I just needed to get it done. And then it wasn't until I took a big step back and like, brought myself down that I'm like, Oh, I'm mixing my identity with my professional career. Did you ever experience that?

15:24Yeah, you know, I've had a lot of pivoting in my career. I first started my career as in radio, I actually dropped out of college when I was 19 years old to work for Angie Martinez, who is the voice of New York. She's like a huge radio personality at Hot 97, which at the time, 10 years ago, was like a big deal to work at Hot 97. How did you get connected with Angie? I just worked my way up. I was an intern in the program department and I was the rock star intern. And then I ended up quitting my job because she asked me, she's like, can you come work for me every day? And I was like, okay. And, you know, that was a crazy thing for me to have done at 19 years old, quit college and all my siblings were in med school.

16:05So I was like totally the black sheep of my family and like basically got like, you know, kicked out for a while. But I did it because I was really passionate about it. And at the time I was singing. I've always wanted to use my voice to make a positive change in the world. And I took this internship originally at Hot 97 because I was trying to push my music. I was songwriting, singing. And then I got to Hot 97 and I realized like, oh, you know, I really like being an online personality. They let me do commercials. I would do like online radio shows with the up and coming DJs on the side. And I was like, okay, like I'll just be the next Angie Martinez.

16:41They're priming me for that anyway. So I worked there for free, zero money for three years, zero money. I made my money at night selling showcase tickets and like and hosting underground hip hop contests basically. And that's how I would make my money. but I learned so much. I learned sales skills, like radio skills, production skills, all this kind of stuff. So I don't regret it at all. But three years into it, I remember like really wanting a job. My parents were giving me a lot of pressure. I felt like a failure. And I remember waking up one day and they had given a producer job to one of my really good friends.

17:14We were like best friends. We had a radio show together and everything. And I texted him. I was like, hey, Drewski, I don't feel like going to work today. You know, I'm really bummed out. If you want to learn how to be the producer, learn it on your own. because I was basically doing the job for free because like it was like an intern period. And I was like, just pissed off, right? He showed the text to Angie because he was in trouble. He didn't know how to do his job and he needed me there. And he was like, Hala's not coming into work today. Angie got really mad at me. We made up since then and she fired me.

17:40She pulled the plug. She like told everybody, nobody can talk to me. All the DJs were my mentors, like three years of my life just taken away from me. And at that point, I was like devastated. And I was Hala from Hot 97. Everybody from college knew me, Hala from Hot 97. My Twitter handle was HalaHot97. And I had like grown a following. And I felt like my identity, to your point, your original question, right? My identity was stripped away from me because I had too closely tied who I was with the brand of Hot 97. And suddenly I cried like somebody died because I literally thought that I was going to spend the...

18:14Everybody at Hot 97 spends their whole career there. Even to this day, almost everybody that worked there when I worked there still works there. And so I literally thought this was going to be my life. This was going to be my family. This is it. And she like shut that dream down for me, right? So at that point, I decided to start my blog. But then something else happened similarly where I was rejected. I did this blog for three years. We became super popular. Within three months, we were one of the most popular hip hop blog sites in the world. We were the sorority of hip hop and I was the president, right?

18:46And so we would host events. Okay, wait, holla, holla, holla. Okay, so things stop for you at Hot 97. Are you still working at night? For selling showcase tickets and stuff? Yeah. All that died with Hot 97. Okay. So then you started a blog and are you living off savings? How are you getting money to survive? Yeah. I had some money because I would do marketing. I would do marketing for hip hop festivals. I was always doing side hustle marketing and stuff like that to make money. Okay. Okay. Yeah. So that's how I had money. So I started this blog site and I went back to school. and basically I was like, no one's going to blackball me.

19:24I'm going to make it no matter what. I still had so much fire in me and to be honest, like to be 19 and like I was dating Chris Brown at one point, like I was hanging out with like so many celebrities and so like I just like was so full of myself in a good way at that point. I had like a lot of belief in myself and that I could do anything, right? I was obsessed with the law of attraction and like I thought I could do anything. So Hot 97 fired me, basically. I was devastated. But within like literally four days, I had this idea of starting something new to empower women in the hip hop industry that were being overlooked like me.

19:59And I put out all these solicits on Twitter and Craigslist. And I was like, hey, if you're a pretty girl and you want to learn how to blog, like, you know, apply here and blah, blah, blah. I'll teach you how to blog and I'll teach you everything. And let's do this. Because I had been blogging on the side for the DJs at Hot 97, like DJ Enough and Funkmaster Flex, right? So I had learned all this stuff and I was like, let me just create a blog. One part. Yeah. When you're blogging, it's written word. So when you had said if you're a cute girl, was it a visual and a written blog? How did that come into play?

20:30I just was at the time, I wanted to have like this bad girl club, like let's do a hip hop blog site. And I actually wanted, like literally wanted pretty girls on my team. Not everybody was like drop dead gorgeous, but I wanted cute girls because part of it was hosting parties. We would host parties and that's how we would make money, our events. So we would host parties and concerts. And it was like girls that like one girl worked at iHeart, one girl worked at Def Jam, one girl, you know, everybody worked at all these different like places. And I was the one that was like running the blog and building the website and teaching.

21:05I was like the nerd behind the scenes. I would like show up to the parties once in a while and like, and so on. So anyway, we were basically like semi-famous in the tri-state area. Everybody at Hot 97 ended up like making up with Mimi and Angie made up. And then the same DJs that didn't hire me back then started hosting me for all their parties. And then all of a sudden, I would get like shouted out on the radio more than I did when I was actually like interning for them and working for them every day because they respected me more because I had did it on my own. And they were like, whoa, like Hala just did something on her own in three months and everybody's talking about it.

21:39Like, okay, like we've got to like talk to Hala again, right? So it worked. I got what I wanted. And MTV actually reached out to us three months into the blog because basically I figured out how to utilize Twitter in a really innovative way before anybody else was doing it. When we would put out a blog, I told everybody to add the celebrity name. And then I hooked up all the girls' profiles to Twitter where every time we posted a blog, like you'd have 50 pretty girls like tweeting Drake at once right so what would Drake do retweet one of us right so we went viral all the time and that's how we blew up right away so MTV reached out to us and they were like holla like let's uh do like a short pilot so they came to one of our radio we had a radio show as well in in uh the sorority of hip-hop they came to our show and like we'd like you know we're filming and it was like really nothing big and nothing came out of it.

22:34But to me, it was like, well, what else is going to happen? Who cares? Right? Then two years later, after like so much hard work, like barely surviving, imagine I had like 50 girls to feed, like there was like no money to go around. We were broke as a joke. Right. And MTV was like, okay, like for real, we want to do this. And they, they filmed us all summer. They signed five of the girls. We were going to make like$5 ,000 an episode. And I thought I was rich. and like I was like so excited and two weeks before they were going to air like I'm telling you Jasmine we did like a dance show we had like a concert like we did everything they filmed us in the street in restaurants at our family's house the whole summer they got us a studio I didn't even say this they got us a studio on Broadway that was like all hooked up and like it was crazy like the real world is what I felt like right I felt like I was in the real world and it was right after Jersey Shore okay they pulled the plug after two weeks they didn't even tell me why it could have been because I was Arabic It could have been like anything, right?

23:30So it's like, they pulled the plug. They didn't tell me why. And this like totally broke my heart. Then suddenly, like the spirit that I had, I was just broken. I was like, you know what? Like I've been basically working for free for six years, just like always trying, always trying to make it. And everybody always tells me no. Even during this whole experience, I almost got a co-host job with Sway in the Morning on SiriusXM. And basically after two weeks, they like let me go. And so it was like, I just got like rejected from radio, rejected from satellite radio, rejected from TV now. And I was like, okay, this is not for me.