Last week, I sat down with Laurence Moss, the founder and CEO of one of the top Instagram only marketing agencies in the world: Greedy Growth.

In this competitive sphere of business, the majority of people try to dominate an entire industry, for example marketing. But what if you spent years learning a particular area of that and then became the authority within that sub-industry?

This is exactly what 16 year old Laurence residing in the United Kingdom did.

When Laurence was 13 at the start of 2018, he started building up niche communities on Instagram. Dedicating hours a day to learning this skill and different techniques, it wasn't long before he'd amassed over 350,000 followers between all of his pages.

Next, he started to work out how to monetise them with e-commerce stores and cost per acquisition campaigns, proving that Instagram was a force to be reckoned with, and had such a huge marketing power that any business could benefit from it if used properly.

By 2019, he'd officially launched his full service Instagram marketing agency Greedy Growth. Offering unique and result driven services, Laurence quickly closed deals with large B2C companies, ranging from startups to companies doing tens of millions of pounds a year in revenue.

I wanted to ask him some questions about how he managed to get to this stage, and what advice he has for budding entrepreneurs and marketers.

What motivated you to start all of your ventures?

I feel like this is an extremely important question. Too many people find themselves becoming an entrepreneur because they're attracted to the lifestyle, the cars, and the flashy modern interpretation of entrepreneurship. They will fail. It's as simple as that.

I dipped my feet into smaller ventures at the start and I immediately fell in love with the process. So I did it again, and again, and again, until I'd created my true vision: a full service Instagram marketing agency.

It's not the sight of cash in your bank account, or the ability to buy more things, it's the feeling when you come off a call and you've closed the client on the other end. You get a yes. It's a sense of accomplishment. What makes me even more happy is when the client comes back a month later and becomes so hooked to my agencies services from the results they got, that they want to double their monthly marketing spend with us.

Do you think that the formal education system nurtures entrepreneurs?

Absolutely not. The reason being is that in school, the first thing you do is learn things. You learn the 'solutions'. A few months later, you have an test, and you're given problems. You're expected to use these solutions that you've already learnt to answer the problems. However, this kind of thinking and way of being is counter intuitive to creativity.

Entrepreneurs in real life don't have the solutions before the problems. That's why they're so successful. They find a problem, and they solve it. The ability to come up with solutions is what defines an entrepreneur, and in that sense, the education system does not support it.

Finally, what's 1 tip you'd give to a marketer that's starting out?

Empathy. If you aren't willing to understand and delve deep into the minds of who you're trying to market to, you have zero chance of success.

It also relates to the current situation with Covid-19. You can by all means market to people, there's nothing stopping you from doing that, but you have to be sensitive.

There are real people on the other side of that screen, and their interests and emotions are all unique, so understanding that is crucial. As Peter Parker in Spider-Man said: 'with great power comes great responsibility'. In this case, you need to be (both as a brand and a marketer), very aware of your social influence.

Looking forward, Laurence hopes to take the next few months to scale up his agency, expand his client base, and become the number one authority in the instagram marketing sector.