Today we’d like to introduce you to Mukwenda Kandole.
Hi Mukwenda, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
My journey in starting my company and getting into advertising started with my background in missions work.
I come from parents in ministry and have traveled to 16 developing nations and in that, I found a deep love for storytelling to connecting people to the needs in other areas.
I joined an internship of a humanitarian organization called Missions.me in 2014 that did storytelling incredibly well and became a student of their practices. I then got an opportunity to get an internship with Daniel Brian Advertising – a full-service advertising agency in Detroit, Michigan.
Under their agency, I worked with big brands and learned how to do purpose and emotion-driven marketing.
I went off on my own in 2017 and started spark to focus on brand consulting, video production, and digital marketing to help founders with a passion scale their operations.
For the past five years, I’ve been able to help brands like Chick-fil-a, TBN, Fox, SVS Vision, Universal Studios, Michigan Medicine, and 1DayLA Freedom Experience with Justin Bieber.
All while not having a degree, but a passion to spark the potential in brands, founders, and organizations.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
The main struggles have been growing a company and growing as a person at the same time. Spark was the first company I ever started and everything is new in the beginning.
There is a growth in confidence, skills, and mental toughness that only comes in the “doing”.
I’ve been blessed with great mentors and relationships that have guided me along the way but it is not for the faint of heart.
I’ve lost many deals, slept on couches and in a walk-in closet as I was building my company, and contemplated quitting many times due to anxiety.
But it’s all worth it in not just the revenue but the person you become on the other side of trials.
Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about Spark?
My passion has been to help founders and dreamers to scale their brands.
My company, Spark, guides growing brands who are looking to go from good to great and don’t know how they should grow and what their story is.
We come in to provide the guidance, content, and marketing to spark their full potential.
We specialize in brand consulting for brand foundation and growth, high-end video production, and digital marketing to drive traffic and results.
The best feeling is to help a founder who feels stuck and seeing them scale faster and greater than they thought. That’s what makes it worth it.
One of my favorite projects was helping a car dealership, who was duped by a bad partner and was in a bad financial place. He had a great heart and my team and I became driven to help him get results to grow his dream company. In 6 months, we were able to increase their car sales by 58%, get the content we produced for them viral in their local community, and got them millions of impressions and brand awareness.
They were able to hire a dozen more employees and are expanding into a new state. That’s why I do what I do.
What would you say has been one of the most important lessons you’ve learned?
How you do anything is how you do everything. The growth in my company came by treating every project and client like they were my dream client. Success is a habit, it’s not a destination.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.sparkyourbrand.me
- Instagram: sparkyourbrand_
- Other: https://vimeo.com/sparkbrand
Image Credits
Emmanuel Afolabi
Brian Craig
Brandon Romo
