Ep 131 – Maiya Holliday, Mangrove – Mission > Marketing: B Corp as Operating System, Not a Sales Tactic
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Featuring: Maiya Holliday, Mangrove
In episode 131, I sit down with Maiya Holliday, founder and CEO of Mangrove Web Development, a Certified B Corp agency that’s been building websites for change-makers since 2009.
Maiya shares her evolution from self-taught coder to agency leader, how she built Mangrove into a values-driven, fully remote team long before it was trendy, and why B Corp certification serves as an operating system rather than a marketing badge.
We dive into the realities of serving nonprofits and purpose-led organizations, how to balance mission and margin, and how AI is reshaping collaboration between designers and developers. Maiya’s insights are both grounding and inspiring for anyone building a business around impact and intention.
Key Bytes
• B Corp certification can provide structure for how an agency operates—not just a label to display.
• Nonprofit clients aren’t “low budget” if you help them tie digital to their mission, revenue, and reach.
• AI is changing agency workflows fast, but curiosity, ethics, and experimentation keep it human.
• Merging two purpose-driven teams isn’t about scale—it’s about shared values and vision.
• Mangrove’s evolution shows that you can stay small, focused, and deeply impactful.Chapters
00:00 Intro: From coder to CEO
01:00 The origin story of Mangrove Web
03:30 Becoming a Certified B Corp
06:00 Lessons from the certification process
09:00 Staying accountable to B Corp principles
11:00 How competition has evolved in the B Corp space
14:30 Why Mangrove focuses on nonprofits & foundations
17:30 Pricing and positioning in the nonprofit world
20:00 The role of AI in Mangrove’s workflow
23:00 How design and dev are converging
27:30 Internal AI tooling vs. client-facing tools
30:00 Building trust as a strategic digital advisor
32:20 Rapid fire: remote work, creative parenting, and common myths
34:50 Closing thoughtsResources Mentioned
https://www.ai4np.org/
Maiya Holliday, CEO and Founder of Mangrove Web Development, is a creative leader and collaborator who crafts digital solutions to augment the impact of changemakers. She is a self-taught coder with over a decade of hands-on experience. Maiya aligns folks toward actionable goals that help articulate and communicate their organization’s purpose and impact on the web, with people, planet, purpose, and equity at the core. She has led over 200 website projects for changemakers and purpose-driven organizations.
Maiya led Mangrove to become a Certified B Corp in 2016 and has since championed the cause of socially and environmentally conscious businesses, deepening their impact. She values working alongside a diverse team of talented people who are passionate about what they do.
A Bay Area native, Maiya now lives in the mountains of Truckee, CA, with her husband Shaun and little humans Terner and Miles. You might also find her in Oakland or Australia, where she tends to show up on a regular basis.
Contact Maiya on LinkedIn, the company's LinkedIn page, or their website.
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Steve / Agency Outsight (00:03.458)
Welcome to Agency Bites. I'm your host, Steve Guberman from Agency Outsite, where I coach agency owners to build the business of their dreams. This week on Agency Bites, I'm joined by Maya Holliday, CEO and founder of Mangrove Web Development. Maya is a self-taught coder turned creative leader who's built more than 200 websites for change makers and purpose-driven organizations. Under her leadership, Mangrove became a certified B Corp back in 2016, and she's been a champion for businesses that put people, planet, purpose, and equity at the core.
ever since. And I'm super thrilled to have you here. Thanks for joining me.
Maiya Holliday (00:36.826)
Thank you. Good to be here. Thanks, Steve.
Steve / Agency Outsight (00:39.712)
So Mangrove, you recently made a transformation, new leadership. Walk us through kind of some of the evolution of the agency since launch and women-owned status and kind of where you guys are today and some of these key moments that you've experienced.
Maiya Holliday (00:58.584)
Yeah, so I'll give you the short but complete history. Started just myself traveling around with my laptop and I was a developer and just kind of doing little side jobs here and there and figuring out a way into this new career that I decided that I had some business learning about. And then...
You know, over the time, over the years hired a project manager and a couple other devs specifically grabbed another female developer who was one in one of one in a needle in a haystack, I guess, at the time. And, um, when I, like one of the first pivots in the business was when I had my first son who's now eight and I sort of had to build in my own maternity leave. I was still working as a sole.
Steve / Agency Outsight (01:43.694)
Mm-hmm.
Maiya Holliday (01:57.424)
So we ended up doubling at the time we went from three to six people. That's when I actually stopped doing client work and coding and shifted more to working, just working on the business instead of in the business. And we became a B Corp around that time as well in 2016. had always, I always had this purpose driven
Steve / Agency Outsight (02:11.864)
Mm-hmm.
Maiya Holliday (02:25.52)
aspect of our business. actually studied international development and thought I was going to go into some sort of public health or public policy, realized I was much better at coding and creating websites and doing technical things, and then wanted to apply that back into supporting organizations doing progressive things. so B Corp certification really solidified that for me. The more I read about it and learned about it, the more it just fit and created this scaffolding for what I already
saw our business doing and it created kind of opened up a lot of different pathways to how we could build out the business. Like I got certified at a time when I was still the sole owner and sole proprietor and we didn't have any other full-time employees so that really put the structure in place as we grew as an organization. And then
We kind of steadily grew over the next couple of years. And then in 2022, we merged with another B Corp agency in Canada that had a six person design team. were at the time we were 18 people, about eight full-time and 10 kind of halftime contractors. And we merged with Man Over Board, which is a fellow B Corp who we had partnered with for a number of years and established a headquarters in Canada. I don't recommend.
paying taxes in two countries if you can avoid it, but it's great to have a Canadian entity. And we have a lot of great Canadian clients and we have a couple full timers there. And my business partner now, Andrew, is our creative director. He was running Man Over Board prior and it's just a really great alignment of a more design led agency and a more dev focused agency coming together. So.
Steve / Agency Outsight (03:51.598)
Sure.
Maiya Holliday (04:15.256)
At one point in time, we were 24 people. Now we're about 15 and we've gone through all the iterations and all the motions over the past 16 years now and it's all about where we are.
Steve / Agency Outsight (04:28.939)
Yeah. I didn't realize, so I knew there was an alignment in culture and client and vision and things like that in the two agencies. I didn't realize there was such an alignment in the names, mangrove and man overboard. And it's an easy merge. Yeah.
Maiya Holliday (04:39.344)
Yeah, we had fun doing some little graphics and inside memes during that time.
Steve / Agency Outsight (04:48.427)
I can't believe you didn't rename it as mangrover board or something like that.
Maiya Holliday (04:51.428)
That was about the 10th time I've heard that actually. I know.
Steve / Agency Outsight (04:54.507)
Man, I thought it was so original. Talk about kind of your process in becoming certified B Corp. And like, as you grew, did those requirements shift for you? Like, I know you said it opened up a lot of doors for you, but as a one person shop versus, you know, a 10 and 16 person shop, like how does that impact, you know, vary and how do the requirements change?
Maiya Holliday (05:19.384)
Yeah, so when we first got certified, one of actually the best pieces of advice I got that I always try to pass along is that the certification process can be pretty daunting. It's relatively rigorous, depends on the size of your organization, but even if you're one-person organization, there's a lot to move through. And so one of the best ways to approach it is to, there's a,
The impact assessment is called the B Corp Impact Assessment. You can just Google it and you can sign up. You can create an account. You can start going through it. Even if you're not ready to become a B Corp or you're not fully on board or you're just curious, whatever, you can go through and you can like mark things off and kind of start going through the assessment and almost just like do a trial run of where you would land and then see where you land and kind of liberally say,
yes to certain things where you can flag certain things to come back to and just see where you end up. They've made a huge shift in the assessment and the way that they're sort of certifying with the latest impact report, but at the time or the certification process, at the time that we got certified, it was the threshold was to get 80 points. you know, there's I think the highest B Corp at the time was maybe a hundred and
40 points, it's a pretty wide range and there's a lot of things that are like 0.25 points and are hard earned. so the first time we did it, I think we got 40 points or something. And then I went back through and I marked things like, okay, we don't have a child labor policy, we don't have a breastfeeding policy, we don't do carbon offsets. Like those are all things we can do. We can move our bank to a more responsible bank. had never really...
considered that as an impactful move. And so then I went back and started doing those things. Then I went back through, answered yes to those things, kind of worked our way up. And so when we first certified, we had, I think 80.5 points at the threshold of 80 to certify. So just squeaked by, but, and then over time we've, you know, there's quite a bit of work of just,
Steve / Agency Outsight (07:33.057)
Just barely made it, perfect. Yeah.
Maiya Holliday (07:43.394)
maintaining your score. mean, it's really a big exercise in accountability and in ensuring that you're referencing your goals and your commitments and that you're actually building that into your practices. But a lot of it becomes second nature. like, it's changed the way that we hire so that we're always like the way we write up job descriptions so that we are sort of
open to a more diverse, open and welcoming to a more diverse talent pool, where we post things, how we try to, how we run our hiring process. We, I don't know, we think through like which vendors we work with, which partners we work with, making sure we're here, we're connected to diverse perspectives and diverse input and.
ensuring and solidifying what we've kind of always done, but working with fellow purpose-driven clients and making sure that we're thoughtful about just about every different touch point of the organization and making sure that there's nothing that feels it's going against the grain of our values, I guess. And then there's a lot of things that are real, a real stretch that we have to like keep pushing ourselves to improve upon. there's
especially in the last couple years, speaking to fellow agency owners, it's been a really tough couple years in the agency world. And so there's sometimes there's like a real push and pull of aligning with our B Corp commitments and not so much that there's like a polarity, there's just a where's my attention and time going? Is it going towards furthering our impact or is it going towards
keeping the business viable in a float. And I don't have an answer or summary, but I just want to call that out as a real aspect of what we've experienced over the last couple of years and just continuing to create intention around following our B-Corp values, like re-certifying. We've re-certified twice now. Our next one's coming up next year.
Maiya Holliday (10:00.91)
And just like this kind of continued re-engagement, it's really meaningful because it's really aligned with what we already wanted to be doing. The last thing I'll say about it is like, I wouldn't pursue B Corp certification just to sort of open doors or get work or as like a sort of business strategy, I guess, unless it's really meaningful beyond that to you.
Um, maybe like five or 10 years ago, uh, there were, when we first got certified, which was, uh, in 2016, there were a lot less agencies. So it was, it did have more value as a differentiator. There's a ton of B Corp agencies now. And, um, it's, it's not as much of a, of a marketing or like, it's not as much of a differentiator anymore. And so I would, and it's a lot of work. So.
Only do it if it really aligns with what you already believe in, what you want to be doing. like, you know, it's, there's, there's advantages to it, but it's not worth it if it's not really at the heart of what you're doing.
Steve / Agency Outsight (11:11.842)
Well, I was going to ask that because it has become a more crowded space, both the agency that's focused on purpose driven clients, but also becoming B certified, you in the past, like I said, five-ish years become far more crowded. And so have they tightened up the requirements and how have you seen the, like, as it's gotten more crowded, have you seen that impact your competition levels?
Maiya Holliday (11:23.717)
Mm-hmm.
Maiya Holliday (11:37.072)
Um, in terms of tightening the requirements, the new requirements are, um, different and stricter in certain ways or certain things that are required where they used to be sort of optional. You could grab points from different areas. Whereas now there are certain things that are required. I don't know. Um, I haven't gone through it in detail because, um, our certifications coming up next year and I'm just starting to look at it. Cause I was, um, plenty busy with other things last year and a half, but.
Steve / Agency Outsight (12:05.548)
What's the frequency of recertification? it every couple of years? Okay.
Maiya Holliday (12:07.824)
Every three years. Yeah. So we, we certified right before they changed last time. And then I kind of willfully ignored the new standards for a while so I could catch my breath. Um, but I would say, I actually don't, I don't think there's any need to actually make the certification more rigid in order to, uh, make it more exclusive, if you will. I mean, the more, the more organizations that become B Corps, the better, like we're,
we're moving towards this triple bottom line purpose driven corporate accountability and that's good for everybody. and there's no reason to sort of like weed people out, but we still, as long as the certification is still has its like clout and is really solid and respected.
Um, which I think it, which I think it is, it's not easy to do, but in terms of the competition, mean, there's so much competition in the agency space, regardless right now, like the post pandemic bubble bursting of, uh, so much work and then new agencies, new micro agencies coming out, people moving remote. Like we've been remote since I started because I was traveling around. we've been remote since 2009, but there's a.
a lot of new organizations that are realizing, hey, we can have different talent pools from all over the place, maybe be able to charge a little bit less by shifting how many full timers we have or how many in-house people we have or the kind of our overhead costs or whatever. And so I don't think the B Corp thing is really like having any more impact in the grand.
scheme of the agency landscape right now. Like there just is a lot of competition and you got to figure it out. But I would, the more the merrier for, you know, people actually committing to becoming a V Corp. Like that's great.
Steve / Agency Outsight (14:18.319)
Yeah, it just makes for a better world all around and agencies or businesses in general operating, you know, according to a certain set of guidelines and yeah, all for that. Now, which came first, the focusing on nonprofits? I know you're leaning more into that now or the be certified or were they just both part of naturally part of your kind of woven fabric of the agency from the beginning?
Maiya Holliday (14:36.016)
Okay.
Maiya Holliday (14:42.928)
Yeah, I mean, guess then working with nonprofits came first. I worked in a nonprofit as a program coordinator for a kind of volunteer vacation organization doing trips to Tanzania. And I ended up doing a website for a guy who was building a dam in his village there and just did a little separate web page with a PayPal link. And I was realized like, well, that's a hell of a lot more.
effective than anything else I've done all week, teaching volunteers how to teach HIV education in Swahili is like a little convoluted. so that really clicked with me. And so I came out of that nonprofit space originally and just naturally over time, we've worked with a lot of nonprofits and the B Corp alignment. The B Corp alignment was really nice because it adds in the for-profit space with
clarity around who is aligned with our values there. but yeah, that nonprofit piece has been there since the early days. Those were like my late night Googling, building things and tables and Dreamweaver projects back in the early days.
Steve / Agency Outsight (15:59.119)
you're bringing me back. Memory lane, I love it. Yeah, Photoshop layers and Dreamweaver. Yeah.
Maiya Holliday (16:01.946)
We quickly moved on to CSS tables or CSS structure, but you know.
Steve / Agency Outsight (16:07.727)
Yeah, I love that. I do think so a lot of agencies will say we do nonprofit because we'll do it for free or a discount, but we're really focused on whatever FinTech or consumer, blah, blah, whatever. And nonprofit is like their kind of badge of we do good things for good people, but agencies like yours that lean into it as like, you know, purpose-driven, planet-driven, good for the people, et cetera, kind of clients. That's your core focus. You're not doing banking and anything else.
So the mindset of, if it's nonprofit, you know, how do we build a business around businesses that don't have a lot of money? And you've done this successfully now for quite a while. and you're leaning deeper into it. I mean, talk about that mindset and path forward for you.
Maiya Holliday (16:54.082)
Yeah, I mean, we do have some, you know, we do have some for-profit companies, we do have some anchor clients, but over 85 % of our revenue comes from what we consider purpose-driven or mission-driven organizations, nonprofits, or by-pocketer women-owned businesses. And those parameters are aligned with how the B Corp assessment defines them. But
Steve / Agency Outsight (17:19.769)
Mm-hmm.
Maiya Holliday (17:23.328)
We don't do any really small organization sites or really small sites. Usually our sites start around 25 or 30K and I say that because I think there's a lot of really small nonprofits that are of scraping things together and we've done that before of kind of a little build here, a little bit there.
just get someone up and off the ground. And that's what, that's kind of how I got my start as a freelancer. But we're doing a lot more projects now where there's actually like a, typically like a full RFP for the project. There's a decent, decent budget allocated. It's really aligned with vital goals of the organization to fundraise or to, for stakeholder alignment and engagement for,
you know, it's tied really directly to their revenue. And so the kind of sites we're doing are really supporting nonprofits and foundations and other purpose-driven organizations to actually like further the mission and impact of the organization, but also to solidify different revenue streams. And there's a lot of, you know, there's still a lot of organizations out there who really
heavily depend on their website or are under utilizing their website in order to support their work. the reason we're called Mangrove is because the Mangrove root system supports this whole ecosystem of things to grow and live and thrive within this root structure. And I really see web and digital as just that is.
there's all these organizations doing great work and our work is meant to support and augment that and to kind of push them out into the world. And there's a lot of different ways to do that really effectively. And so, I mean, it's completely true that the nonprofit space has been severely impacted since this administration and there's a lot of funding being pulled and it's not.
Maiya Holliday (19:39.984)
It's not an easy space to be in, but we've diversified enough over time that we have a lot of for-profit organizations as well. We also work with lot of foundations and philanthropies. There's a lot more private dollars moving around and community foundations that we've worked with and things like that. So we're just trying to find those spaces where what we do can really drive an...
Steve / Agency Outsight (19:56.527)
Right.
Maiya Holliday (20:09.145)
and organization forward.
Steve / Agency Outsight (20:11.023)
Love that. Now I know you are leaning heavily into AI. Who's driving that at your agency and what's that impact for you as a company and as a leader?
Maiya Holliday (20:14.968)
Mm-hmm.
Maiya Holliday (20:22.252)
Yeah, at the moment, I'm probably the main driver. And I'm working on how to sort of operationalize and kind of create more of a culture of exploration and building AI practices into our business. It's fun as a developer, my AI and like
a lot of workflow automations that use AI and things like that are really exciting to me. I've actually been like vibe coding some apps and like dabbling back into this like coding space that I've had no ability to be part of for the last however many years, because I'm too rusty. it's really exciting because of the way I think about different like data sets aligning in different pathways through
information and also just like personally when I'm feeling really like
just kind of scattered and having a hard time synthesizing things, just getting like that feedback and clarity from going back and forth with Claude or Chowtubti. Our devs are using it in a lot. The devs really naturally are really, always lean towards experimenting and they're constantly learning. Like nothing's ever stayed the same in dev for more than.
a couple of months. And so it's really natural for them. The pace is extremely fast right now of things moving, but we've been using Cursor AI as a team for the past year or so. We're constantly thinking through how the website development process is changing, how to better align Figma to content creation and...
Maiya Holliday (22:17.72)
organization to actually building the site and kind of streamlining things. So that's really exciting. And the devs are kind of driving their own path in some ways in that with, with me kind of riffing on it with them. The designers just by nature are a little bit less like
they're just not moving at the same pace because they aren't always like shifting and adapting as much as the developers are. So it's a little bit newer, but it's really cool. I've seen them just in the past like couple of weeks be a lot more curious and experimental with different things. know, Figma is driving a lot of different workflow shifts and it's actually like, see, I see like, you know, the dev process is...
obviously gonna like the execution is just becoming faster and faster and websites are just being rapid prototyped and the actual like kind of coding is being consolidated and we're becoming more like architects and engineers, which is kind of cool because that's where a lot of our devs are moving anyway. They're kind of past the point of just like punching and front end and API integrations and things. So that's great to see, but.
I see the, I see the devs thinking more about user experience because they're, taking a step back and doing less like hands on execution. And I see the designers thinking more like developers because they are like, were playing with framer and just seeing what it was doing from Figma. And that means that the designers have to actually update our Figma files to be structured a little bit differently so that it's like more machine readable. And like I'm building some.
tooling that helps take like Figma design to more like a content generator and organizer that our clients can use where they can kind of create content outlines and then like have help like what kind of wire framing out the pages that aren't included in there and then have help like writing the content that's aligned with their content guidelines and their brand and everything. so, but in order to do that, the Figma.
Maiya Holliday (24:34.018)
like the notation in Figma and the meta and data in Figma has to be, has to actually like speak dev. And so it's cool because like there's, there's more of this like cross pollination happening as we're dabbling in different spaces and thinking about different workflows and the way that things interface. And I think our team's always been pretty strong on kind of reaching over the fence of different departments and understanding how things work, but I'm seeing.
I'm seeing design and dev especially kind of move closer toward each other, which is kind of fun. So to answer your question, you know, we're building the plane while we're flying it really, but we are trying to kind of create intentional spaces around like intentional policies internally about how we use AI and how we use, you know, any client data, making sure it's protected and, and then also just creating a culture of
curiosity and exploration, which we've always had, but really instituting that at a different level because I mean, the pace of things moving right now is wild and there is really a shift in the agency world towards like move, like experiment, be a little bit scrappy or figure things out, know, MVP stuff and just like keep, you know, figuring out how to solve the problem and what's actually valuable. And then
Steve / Agency Outsight (25:35.759)
Hmm.
Maiya Holliday (26:03.226)
kind of deal with the code debt a little bit later, which is not how everyone likes to work. But that's more of where I come from having been a self-taught coder. So I feel like we're kind of getting back to that a little bit and figuring out a happy medium.
Steve / Agency Outsight (26:09.017)
Yeah.
Steve / Agency Outsight (26:19.011)
Yeah. So you've got some guidelines, maybe a rough roadmap. Have you found a way to monetize AI as a delivery service, you know, a service that you're delivering yet, or is it more for internal automations in internal efficiencies, things like that.
Maiya Holliday (26:35.758)
Right now we're just focusing more on internal tooling. And I think it's like such a wide world and like kind of the wild west out there in terms of building things for clients. There's a lot we can do, but I mean, just using ourselves as more of like a demo space to figure out what's reasonable, what's realistic. I do think there's so much opportunity in like the nonprofit space in
there's a lot of things that are adjacent to websites that involve like just different data sets being cleaned up or aligned or workflows being streamlined and this and that, and we could go in all sorts of directions with that. often we're, when we're building websites, we're building some sort of like API integration, which is, is not at all dissimilar to an AI.
optimize workflow automation. So I think there's gonna be a natural progression over time where we start to incorporate different tools or different systems or different add-ons as we go. But I think the heart of what we're gonna be doing is making our workflows more efficient internally so that we can just provide more value within the same budget or do things faster or kind of shift more of our bandwidth and resources to
strategic initiatives and then the execution is faster.
Steve / Agency Outsight (28:04.183)
And find more profitability, right? If you can do things more efficiently, do more projects, you know, a compressed timeline with more, you know, with less, et cetera, there's more profitability, but a lot of shops I see in the, the not-for-profit and, Purpose Driven Space, they're doing, they're integrating like the digital transformation of like what you're saying is how do we help member engagement? How do we help with fundraising and capital campaigns and things like that? And how can AI help, you know, move that stuff forward as well? So it's like you said, it's,
Maiya Holliday (28:06.393)
It is.
Steve / Agency Outsight (28:33.549)
websites, it's digital things and so there's a lot of value there. Yeah.
Maiya Holliday (28:36.898)
Yeah. Yeah, there's so much opportunity. mean, there's my head is spinning with like that many ideas, but I think the challenge in coming from a recent sort of agency meetup that was centered around AI, the challenge is really to focus on like what has the greatest value. There's a ton of opportunity. There's also an insane level of adoption and then abandoning.
Steve / Agency Outsight (29:05.827)
Yeah. Yeah. The squirrely, you know, the shiny thing for the shiny things. And somebody just mentioned an MIT report that said 95 % of all AI projects just fail quickly because they're let's try this doesn't work, you know, but similar to you, I get that same endorphin rush as I did when I would like type something in the dreamweaver and see it live in a browser. When I do something in make or Zapier and I see it like
Maiya Holliday (29:05.866)
Different projects and so figuring out what? Yeah
Maiya Holliday (29:21.548)
Mm-hmm.
Steve / Agency Outsight (29:31.617)
end-to-end work. I'm like, my god, I'm a developer, I'm a programmer. And so I get that same rush that you're talking about. Yeah.
Maiya Holliday (29:38.89)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, but there's a... And the other thing is like, I don't want to reinvent all the wheels. There's so much being developed right now that there's a whole group that's AI for nonprofits that is led by a colleague of mine who was part of the B-Corp space, Cheryl Conti.
And she just wrote a book on it. And so we're also just trying to loop in resources that already exist. I'll share that in the, you can share it in the show notes, but there's a, we want to like bring in tooling from partners, bring in there's, you know, the more I'm building things, the more I'm remembering how many edge cases there are and how many outliers there are and everything you're building. so
just figuring out what problems make the most sense for us to solve, either for ourselves or for our clients and for what reason, and then just leverage other things that are out there that help connect the dots. And I think that's part of our jobs too, is that we, as experts in this space, even though we may not know a whole lot more than anyone else who's an ex, none of us are really experts on AI.
just yet, there's just too much to wrap our heads around. we probably have like, we can be more trusted voices of like what's viable to use and what's reasonable and worth investing in. Like, I think there's a lot of, like if we're overwhelmed with it, you have to think like, what does the average client who's not so technical think? some of them are probably just freaking out and tuning out half of it and abandoning it, or they don't understand if it's even safe to like, OAuth something with.
Google and they don't understand if it's worth paying for this service or that service. And so we're trying to like cut through the noise a little bit just with like some trusted recommendations as well.
Steve / Agency Outsight (31:36.388)
Yeah, that that's got to be a special place to be when you're seen as an advisor to that audience of a client and a trusted advisor where, you know, they come to you, we don't know what to do with this or should we be doing this? And I mean, even like 10 years ago, I remember that being from an email marketing standpoint, we need to do email marketing. Who do we, who do we use? And, know, and so on this level where there's so much more at stake, you know, to be able to be seen and trusted as that advisor is super valuable.
Maiya Holliday (31:57.316)
Mm-hmm.
Steve / Agency Outsight (32:05.343)
And that's how you move upstream in your niche and get deeper with it. So there you go. I want to wrap up real quick with just a couple random fun and lighthearted questions. So get ready. Here we go. Put on your creative hat. So what's the most unusual place you've ever opened your laptop to get work done?
Maiya Holliday (32:22.832)
On the end of a dock in a remote bay, it's called the Bay of Dolphins in Panama, that's actually where I started mangrove and you could only get there by 20 minute boat ride. And I lived at a little eco lodge there with a guy who was developing for couch surfing and worked there most days for the early days of mangrove.
Steve / Agency Outsight (32:34.921)
that's cool.
Steve / Agency Outsight (32:44.527)
That sounds idyllic and beautiful. That's awesome. If you had to give a TED talk on a topic outside of business or tech, what would it be about?
Maiya Holliday (32:48.215)
next
Maiya Holliday (32:54.128)
Oh God. How not to get your kids shoes on in the morning. don't know. I maybe how do...
Steve / Agency Outsight (32:59.822)
Hahaha!
Maiya Holliday (33:09.978)
how to be a creative parent who feels like they're failing most days, but figuring out some little pathways through it in the meanwhile. By no means an expert there, but can share some failings for sure.
Steve / Agency Outsight (33:24.303)
Yeah. And I can guarantee from the slight little window I have from all the way over here on the East coast, you're an amazing mom and it's challenging for every parent. So the morning battle for school and shoes and food and all that, we all face it. yeah. Finally, what's one outdated piece of quote unquote common wisdom in our industry that you wish we'd all stop repeating?
Maiya Holliday (33:37.402)
Yeah.
Maiya Holliday (33:48.496)
gosh.
Maiya Holliday (33:54.83)
That's a good one. Nothing is coming to mind for me, but there's so many things flooding my brain right now.
Maiya Holliday (34:08.25)
can't think of anything good, can I tell you later and you can add it in the show notes? My brain is stalling out.
Steve / Agency Outsight (34:12.943)
Perfect, yeah. Yeah, that's fine. And I think a lot of what we do these days, common wisdom, probably something to do with being a generalist, right? I'd rather be all things to all people or something like that, just because I'm so anti it.
Maiya Holliday (34:19.032)
What's yours? What's yours? How about that?
Maiya Holliday (34:29.272)
Yeah, I mean, I'm very sick of everybody telling me to niche down, but I think that's actually relevant. I know I think it's actually relevant, but I don't love hearing that one, even though I get it. get it.
Steve / Agency Outsight (34:33.985)
Even me? What do mean?
Steve / Agency Outsight (34:41.859)
Yeah.
Yeah, I don't know. mean, I common knowledge shifts so quickly in our industry that to say like, this is something that needs to be forgotten or never said again, I don't know. I really had.
Maiya Holliday (34:59.952)
I know that's a hard one, because a decade of things just flooded my brain, but I couldn't quite stop somewhere, you know?
Steve / Agency Outsight (35:03.161)
Yeah.
Steve / Agency Outsight (35:06.691)
Yeah. Yeah, we'll skip that one. We'll call that a flag. We won't use that one ever again. Well, Maya, I am a huge fan of Mangrove, huge fan of you as a leader, a female leader in tech, and a big fan of what you've been doing and continue to do. So I am grateful that you'd spend time with us today. And thank you for sharing your experience and everything that you've been able to impart on us with this episode today.
Maiya Holliday (35:28.048)
Thank you.
Maiya Holliday (35:34.394)
Thanks so much for having me. It's an honor.