Lexie Murray

Built by accident. Scaled with purpose. The financial lessons Alexandra learned the hard way.

Alexandra ‘Lexie’ Murray started ‘Be Seen Socials’ during a pandemic pivot. Six years later, her all-female team has launched over 100 brands and she's only just beginning to appreciate what that means.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• COVID did not derail Lexie’s career. It handed her one.

• Six years of revenue growth and she still wishes someone had sat her down with a P&L in year one.

• Hiring slowly is not caution. It is a strategy. She learned that after six years, not one.

• An all in-house model protects margin in a way that outsourcing never can. The numbers prove it every month.

• The women coming to launch their brands often don’t know capital is available to them. That is the gap Lexie is now working to close.

Most agency owners will tell you they spotted a gap in the market. Lexie will tell you she spotted nothing. She was working in programmatic marketing in Los Angeles, building a life that looked like it was heading somewhere very specific, when COVID arrived and made every plan irrelevant.

What followed was not a pivot, it was improvisation. A consulting arrangement with her former employer, a small roster of clients and work that quietly grew into something she had not named yet.

Be Seen Socials was not founded with an intent, instead it was an evolution.

“I didn’t have one of those neat, lightbulb origin stories,” Lexie says. “For a long time it didn’t feel like a brand. It felt like a job I’d backed into.”

That changed in 2022. An office, four employees, a space that could double as a content studio. For the first time the business had walls around it. That space that felt like a proof point.

What Be Seen Socials Does

The agency sits in a very specific part of the market. Organic only, Instagram and TikTok only, no paid media, no ad spend, no outsourced production. Every person on the team is in-house and every person on the team comes with a content background.

That last point matters more than it sounds. Most agencies that describe themselves as organic content specialists are running the strategy in one place and the production somewhere else entirely. The two rarely speak the same language. At Be Seen Socials, the person thinking about why content should perform is the same person making sure it does.

The office doubles as a studio, which is included in every client package. The launch package, the signature offer that takes a brand from sample stage through to full market launch, does it in four months. The industry average for that same journey is closer to two years.

“Our entire team has a genuine content background. The thinking behind a client’s growth and the execution of it live in the same place.” Lexie Murray

The Capital Decision

There was no funding round. No investor deck. No external capital at any stage. Be Seen Socials has been built on revenue, reinvestment, and two structural decisions that Lexie now understands were the most financially significant she made.

The first was keeping everything in-house. When agencies outsource production, they are also outsourcing margin. Every external supplier on every client account is a cost that quietly erodes what the business actually keeps. Choosing not to do that was not a grand strategy at the time. It was about how Be Seen Socials valued quality. The financial case only became visible later.

The second was how the team grew. Rather than recruiting experienced senior hires, Lexie built people up from junior roles. The agency’s General Manager and Head of Creative both started as junior account managers. They grew into their positions over time, inside a business they already understood.

The result is a team that know the systems, the clients, the standards, and a business that was not paying external market rates to access that knowledge instead they developed it.

If you ask Lexie about her biggest financial mistake, she does not point to a deal gone wrong or a bad bet. She points to a gap. For the first several years of running Be Seen Socials, she did not properly understand her own numbers. Or what her P&L was telling her and what a healthy balance sheet should look like. What the figures she was looking at once a month were trying to say about the state of the business underneath the revenue.

She was making decisions. They were just not fully informed ones. “I didn’t invest the time early on to actually understand my numbers properly. That financial literacy came much later than it should have, and I have no doubt it slowed my growth.” 

The second mistake was speed. Hiring quickly felt like momentum. It was not. A wrong hire, she now knows, is not a salary problem, it is a team problem. It costs the people around that person, the clients working with them and the time spent unwinding what should not have been built in the first place.

What She Would Do Differently

Documentation. From day one. In hindsight Lexie held too much of the business in her own head for too long. The systems, the processes, the way things worked at Be Seen Socials, they existed, but they lived with one person. Every time someone new joined, every time the business scaled, she was the one who had to reconstruct it. Manually. Over and over again. 

The fix, she now believes, is treating documentation as infrastructure rather than admin and investing early in the tools that make that infrastructure possible.

“That single shift, treating documentation and systems as a capital investment rather than an afterthought, would have freed up so much of my time to actually focus on growth.” 

Equally Lexie believes her  most profitable decision was two decisions. Neither dramatic yet both compounding. The in-house model means margin is not being surrendered to external suppliers on a recurring basis. Every client, every month, the business keeps what it earns. That is not a one-off win. It is a structural advantage that shows up in the P&L quietly and consistently.

The second decision of growing people internally rather than acquiring senior experience means the team that exists today was built with an understanding of how Be Seen Socials works from the inside. They were consistently  invested in over time. The return on that investment is a leadership team that is deeply embedded into business, not just employed by it. Neither decision looked like a profit strategy individually yet together, they are the most profitable thing the business has built.

There is a pattern Lexie has started to notice in the women who come to her wanting to launch a business. Many of them do not see funding as something that is available to them. Not because they have looked into it and found the door closed but because no one has ever shown them the door.

The knowledge gap around capital for women founders is not about eligibility. It is about visibility. The options exist. The information does not always reach the people who need it.

“I wish I’d understood the range of funding options available to business owners back in 2021, when I took on my very first launch client. It would have changed how I approached that early stage.” 

Lexie is actively working to change that for the brands she works with and for the version of herself that spent the early years building a business without the full picture.

The Through Line

Between 100 and 200 brands. That is the number Lexie lands on when she adds up everyone Be Seen Socials has worked with across content creation, social media management and TikTok. 30 to 40 of those have gone through the full launch process. Some of them are brands she has shopped personally for years. That part still catches her off guard when she says it.

But the number that matters most to her is not the client count. It is the number of women-led and women-owned businesses in that list. The ones that started as an idea and became something real, with Be Seen Socials somewhere in the story of how they got there. The agency was not planned. The impact it has made absolutely was not. And yet here it is.