Arthur Freydin

Arthur Freydin is an entrepreneur, business leader, and performance marketing specialist in New York City, NY. Notably, Freydin serves as owner and CEO at Tandem Marketing, a boutique marketing firm established in 2018.
A longtime advertising and marketing expert, Arthur Freydin helps eCommerce companies maximize brand outreach and scale sales efforts through paid advertising campaigns on social media, particularly across such popular platforms as Facebook and Instagram.
Freydin and the Tandem team specialize in social media advertising and growth consultation for eCommerce enterprises, taking on clients as projects with an initial ad spend as low as $3k a month, and utilizing such tools as creative development, audience testing and holistic business support to help them scale up to more than $100,000 per month.
Utilizing a 5-pillar paid advertising approach known as BASIC, Freydin and his team help eCommerce brands of all sizes and backgrounds scale their sales without constantly worrying about staying up-to-date with the ongoing changes in social media advertising.

Where did the idea for Tandem Marketing come from?

The idea for Tandem Marketing came to me after years of working with brands and agencies. I have a deep understanding of what brands look for and need from their agencies and can deliver on the things brands actually care about.
My agency experience has helped me round out my advertising experience across new e-commerce verticals to better serve those categories. That same agency experience also helped me understand different agency structures and became instrumental in developing the values of Tandem Marketing.

What does your typical day look like and how do you make it productive?

There is no typical day. I am directly involved with our senior media buyers and our clients. On any day, I could be involved in any of the following:
Head down in client strategy with our media buyers
Ideating new creative concepts to test
Develop custom reporting to look at trends and project revenues
Research leadership management courses for our team and develop career growth tracking strategies for our team
Collaborate with our Executive Assistant on ordering gifts for employees and clients
Project agency revenues for the next 6 months
Interview new candidates

How do you bring ideas to life?

I am an idea generator and can define ideas into action but struggle in execution. My team relies on my vision and I rely on them to help with execution. We are all on the same page when it comes to our own individual strengths and weaknesses and that is paramount to our success as an agency both to our clients and internally as our own developed culture.

What’s one trend that excites you?

The prevalence of e-commerce and the increasing evolution of the tools we use as marketers creates a constantly shifting and exciting ecosystem. Our jobs have literally become a constant shifting footbed of techniques and technologies and while adapting to that new reality has been a tremendous challenge, we have come out successful and are all excited by it.

What is one habit of yours that makes you more productive as an entrepreneur?

I have ADD (as do most entrepreneurs I’m sure). I find it very difficult to laser focus on projects from beginning to end and that creates challenges for the people on my team that directly rely on me.
Instead of trying to counteract the traits of my ADD (I do believe that it is one of the things that has made me successful), lately, I have become more conscious of what kinds of activities allow me to be more productive in my own way. For example, walking to and from the office (1 hour one way) has removed a massive screen as a distraction so all I have is my small smartphone screen. So I use that to its fullest extent and stay more productive on my walks than most days at the office.

What advice would you give your younger self?

Don’t be so critical of your shortcomings and utilize them to your advantage. Some shortcomings are only shortcomings if that is how you see them.

As an entrepreneur, what is the one thing you do over and over and recommend everyone else do?

Training your employees properly is difficult; train them in a way that puts mileage on their brains. While this can be truly difficult (both for you and your employees), they will take more initiative and that hard training will pay off in dividends later in their careers.

What is one strategy that has helped you grow your business?

Two things:
Focus on minimally viable products. Pushing to 100% completion will make you late to the game and lose a great competitive advantage. You will drive yourself and your team crazy by always trying to push to 100% completion and risk never releasing the product or service. Be OK with a 70-80% release and perfect with actual usage data post-release.
Hire around your weakness. I became more self-aware later on in my career and realized that there are absolutely things that I am just not good at, no matter how hard I’ve tried. After rounds and rounds of failing to fix my shortcomings, I finally embraced them and built a team with them in mind. This doesn’t mean that it’s smooth sailing though. Your team will need to understand your weaknesses and that working around them is not easy; sometimes they will want to tear their hair out. Be honest with yourself and with your team and build a bond. Earn their respect.

What is one failure you had as an entrepreneur, and how did you overcome it?

One failure I’ve had as an entrepreneur is assuming that all of the people I hire or work with think the same way I do (same strengths & weaknesses). Once I came to the realization that that is not going to be the case, I switched my hiring practices and expectations for each individual person. I began to recognize each individual’s strengths and weaknesses and hired around them.

What is one business idea that you’re willing to give away to our readers?

Create a business that services whatever your biggest struggle is. For us, it’s the minutia work; the work that no one else either wants to do or doesn’t want to do on an ongoing basis. For example, uploading Facebook Ads or monitoring accounts on holidays/weekends has always been a point of contention. Build a business that helps agencies overcome these challenges and give them comfort in outsourcing some of these tasks to an outside team.

What is the best $100 you recently spent? What and why?

I think business owners really underappreciate everything that you get with a Google Workspace membership. You get free video meeting (with recordings!) capabilities, an enormous and immensely useful cloud file storage utility, fantastic email/calendar apps, great admin options, tons of helpful and easy-to-use integrations, etc. This cuts out additional costs for Zoom & Dropbox. For us, this is a savings of $500 a month!

What is one piece of software or a web service that helps you be productive?

ClickUp has been helpful to keep our team on track, Milanote is great as a client presentation layer, Slack is essential from a communications standpoint (we don’t email each other anymore) and Google Drive is fantastic for keeping organized.

What is the one book that you recommend our community should read and why?

For me, fostering and maintaining a growth mindset has been absolutely essential in growing my agency. Mindset by Carol Dweck is a great start.

What is your favorite quote?

“We like to think of our champions and idols as superheroes who were born different from us. We don’t like to think of them as relatively ordinary people who made themselves extraordinary.” Carol Dweck

Key Learnings:

• Having a growth mindset – there is so much information available online, once you pick what you want to learn, finding the best educational tools to help you get there is key. But having that intellectual curiosity to continue to learn has paid dividends for both my personal and professional growth.
• Enjoy the now – It is very easy as an entrepreneur to be thinking 5-10 years out about your strategy, business plans, etc. But if you’re not enjoying it ‘in the now”, is it all worth it? I really enjoy all that I am doing and I love sharing these strategies with other business owners.
• Do not be afraid to fail. Every great entrepreneur learns from their mistakes and comes back even better having learned from the pain.
• Find a mentor to gain a new perspective.