How Makena Finger Zannini Scaled The Boutique COO to $1M in Just 8 Months
Discover how Makena Finger Zannini built The Boutique COO, a high-level business support company for entrepreneurs, from freelance roots into a $1M+ business in just eight months. Her journey shows the power of practical support, relentless outreach, and scaling with transparency in an oversaturated industry.
I’m Makena Finger Zannini, founder and CEO of The Boutique COO. We help entrepreneurs scale faster by offering practical, high-level business support—from virtual assistants to marketing to bookkeeping.
Our model solves a common pain point: small and midsize businesses often struggle to find the right hires and are too often locked into expensive, rigid contracts with traditional agencies. At The Boutique COO, we built a transparent, flexible approach that puts SMBs first.
The Inspiration Behind The Boutique COO
I realized there was a huge gap in servicing small businesses, after freelancing supporting SMBs for almost a decade.
I’d seen too many business owners drowning in admin and missing growth opportunities, while being preyed on by the many coaches and consultants promising unrealistic results. I wanted to create a different kind of support, rooted in transparency and practicality for business owners.
Relevant Background and Skills
Yes, I spent a decade on Wall Street and in tech, while freelancing on the side, which gave me both the financial and operational toolkit to grow companies quickly. My analytical approach is undoubtedly the most important toolkit that has helped me to grow my business.
Too many small businesses make decisions without knowing core numbers and being able to bring that knowledge to both my own businesses and those of my clients, has been a true differentiator for us.
Landing the First Clients
I started with pure cold outreach. I was reaching out to around 1000 prospects per week—manually, before the days of cold outreach tools! That initial hustle gave me my first few clients, which spurred our early growth.
I’ve offered extremely customizable support from the start which made a huge difference in our early growth. I believe that too rigid of an offer can prevent early growth when you need to be more open to adjusting to your clients—you can also become more rigid over time if you want to automate.
Also Read: How Nikita Sherbina Scaled AIScreen to $1M+ by Reinventing Campus Communication
Early Business Model
The model has stayed quite similar over time. We have always been hourly-based instead of retainer based, which allows more practical and flexible support for SMBs. We have had no minimum and no long-term contract from the beginning and I believe the trust that that has created, has been a huge factor in our growth.
One thing we’ve changed significantly over time is our qualification—early on we took almost every client, and now we are much more selective. We’ve looked at various factors and how they affect or relate to a client’s long-term fit with us, and added in qualifying factors.
It never gets easier to turn away business, but I’ve learned the hard way enough times to recognize when a client isn’t the right fit for us.
Timeline to $1 Million
I hit $1m within 8 months. We grew a ton the first year, growing by 20x between Month 1 and Month 12.
We really started growing once we had our first few solid case studies, which also came with very happy clients who promoted us often. That word-of-mouth really grew our reputation quickly in the early days.
I truly don’t think there was a single turning point; rather, there was a compounding over time of our success. In reality, it’s those small and consistent actions that keep you growing over time rather than anything specific. By continuing to build one client, case study, partnership, offer, and learning, at a time, you wake up and have made progress. Action is the most important thing!
Marketing Channels That Worked
Our initial channels were a very heavy amount of outbound and the resulting referrals, and we started to supplement with paid as the business grew. We have also kept our social media very active from the beginning as we believe it is the best conversion tool you can have when done well.
We continued to add a channel or two at a time, building on the multi-channel strategy we had started. We also found that channels built on each other—our social media acted as a conversion tool for our paid ads, and our partnerships helped to push folks our way who then we converted using more intensive outbound outreach.
Top 3 Scaling Challenges
Hiring was our initial first challenge as we had to hire extremely rapidly to accommodate our growth. We’ve learned a lot about how intensive we need our process to be, including multiple interviews, an assessment, reference checks, and more.
We have absolutely raised the bar over time and have learned to look for experience we didn’t consider before, for example, looking for previous freelancing experience as a way to identify someone who is confident in being client-facing.
Defining our business model has always been a challenge, as our model is quite different from the standard in our industry. It’s hard to explain how wide the breadth of our services is, and to differentiate ourselves from the extremely oversaturated market of professional services offerings. We have continued to refine messaging through pure trial and error, adjusting our messaging over time based on what the data shows resonates most clearly.
Qualifying clients is a challenge of the last year or so that we have just started to truly crack. We initially took nearly any client who came to us, and over time we have increased our requirements of clients, specifically in terms of size and growth. Part of being able to qualify effectively is also having data over the lifecycle of clients, which can take time.
Also Read: How Max Shak Turned nerDigital Into a $1M Marketing Agency in 3 Years
Pushing Through the Hard Times
Absolutely—there have been several. Some of the hardest have been with clients being absolutely unkind or plain old mean to myself or my team. It can be so defeating to put so much effort into supporting a client, and to run our business in such a high-integrity way, and have the occasional client be just completely unrealistic in their expectations.
I’ve been through enough moments like this, that I know now that it will eventually pass. When these moments do happen, I focus on giving myself time to recover emotionally and leaning on my own personal board of directors for guidance on how to handle it.
I find it really encouraging to talk to other business owners who have been through similar things and to have their expertise and support to lean on.
A Mistake That Became a Lesson
An early mistake for me is not letting someone go early enough. It is a CEO cliché that it’s rare that you let someone go too early, and I fell into that trap. I want to provide support to my team so much that it was easy to continue to push that decision down the road, but ultimately it cost me financially and cost the rest of the team morale.
Once I made the decision to let them go, the business was immediately better off and I learned to be more objective in the future when evaluating performance rather than giving unlimited chances.
The Reality of Hitting $1M
It doesn’t feel like you’ve “made it”, at least it didn’t for me. If anything, at each major milestone, the stakes get higher and the pressure increases. Maybe if we hit a different milestone or $1m was my final goal, that would have felt different, but I personally feel like the pressure just grows the bigger we get and I was not prepared for that!
Evolving as a Founder
My role has evolved to include an increasing amount of relationship building, which I didn’t expect. I spend a lot of time just connecting with other business owners which supports my companies in many indirect ways, including gaining experience and advice, building brand reputation, and begetting partnerships and other opportunities.
What I’d Do Differently
I would have done an automation push before each time I hired. I think it would have saved us a lot of time and set new team members up for as smooth of onboarding as possible.
🛠 The Present & Future
Where The Boutique COO Stands Today
We are between $3–4m in revenue at the moment and have more than 100 team members in total. We are continuing to expand into new verticals in the coming years as a way to deepen our market penetration!
Current Focus
Automation! We are building our own tech focused on automating a lot of our team and client admin and I’m really looking forward to seeing that continue to ease admin burden across the company, and improving team and client experience.
Staying Connected to the Mission
I definitely do. I’d say I feel a lot more mature as a business owner now—less naïve and more realistic about the many challenges that come, specifically the ones that feel unfair. I’m not sure how business owners do it if they aren’t connected to the mission, as it’s a lot of work and a heavy burden to bear if you don’t have that north star.
Also Read: How Kateryna Odarchenko Scaled SIC Group to $1M in Just 2 Years
Best Advice for Entrepreneurs
Listen to the market. Too many founders have such a specific idea of what they want to offer that they don’t listen to the feedback (explicit or implicit) that they are getting from the market. It’s of course important to believe in yourself and what you’re doing, but if you’re too rigid about your approach, you will have a long road ahead.
Books, Habits, and Tools That Helped
It’s the simple things for me—getting enough sleep, surrounding myself with people to give me both honest opinions and unconditional support, and being consistent about my goals and efforts. Consistency will get you ahead faster than anything else!
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