Today we’d like to introduce you to Aya Kikimova.
Aya, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I came to the U.S. from Kazakhstan at 16 as an exchange student — one year, one host family, and a crash course in a totally different culture and language. It planted a seed. I went back home, but I couldn’t stop thinking about coming back, so I did, first for college and then to build a career here.
To understand why I do what I do now, you have to go back further, though. I was about five when the Soviet Union collapsed, and I grew up in the chaos that followed — a childhood where money was tracked closely, where I had five toys total, and where responsibilities started early because they had to. I watched a currency become worthless almost overnight, and I watched my own family navigate that collapse by becoming entrepreneurial — running small businesses, finding opportunity in a system that was falling apart around them. That’s where my respect for small business owners comes from. I saw firsthand what it takes to build something out of nothing, and how much courage and resourcefulness that requires.
Professionally, I spent years on the corporate side of marketing, including stints at Fortune 500 companies and Microsoft, where I worked on large-scale budgets and learned how sophisticated marketing operations run at scale. It was an incredible education, but I kept noticing the same gap: small businesses needed that same caliber of strategic, data-driven marketing, but rarely had access to it. Agencies serving them were either too generalist to move the needle or too expensive to make sense for a local business.
That gap — and everything I’d seen growing up about who actually builds economies — is what led me to start LeapEngine. I wanted to bring enterprise-level marketing — real SEO strategy, paid search and social that’s accountable to ROI, CRO grounded in data instead of guesswork — to the wealth managers, home services companies, and e-commerce brands that are the backbone of local business. Fifteen-plus years into marketing now, that’s still what gets me up in the morning: small business owners are the ones who make this all work, and they deserve marketing that actually works for them.
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?
Has it been a smooth road? Not even close.
The scariest part was the transition itself — going from a six-figure corporate income with a clear lane and a title, to absolutely nothing. No security, no steady paycheck, no benefits, just a blank canvas and no idea where to start. To make it more intense, I was pregnant when I started LeapEngine. The anxiety was so overwhelming that I remember sitting there unable to even open a business bank account. It felt impossible, and honestly, I felt like a failure before I’d even begun.
Then something clicked. I started talking to people — one conversation led to a referral, that referral led to another, and that’s how I landed my first client. For the first six months, my paycheck was $500 a month. But I poured everything into that one client, making absolutely sure they saw a real return on their investment. It paid off — within six months I had five more clients, was able to raise my prices, and referrals started coming in on their own.
That became the foundation of everything: it’s all about people. Good clients — kind, respectful, fair — make all the difference. Good team members — honest, consistent, doing quality work — are everything. I learned that the hard way, through difficult clients and team members who didn’t pull their weight, or worse, tried to take advantage of me and the business.
Building a company while pregnant, and then with an infant, meant working during nap times and evenings while being the sole caretaker during the day — and the primary breadwinner. I was living off savings with no guarantee the income would hold. I’d started LeapEngine on the philosophy of not locking clients into long contracts — month-to-month, earn the relationship every month. At first that worked beautifully, and a lot of those month-to-month clients turned into multi-year relationships. But some clients took advantage of that structure — letting us do the heavy lifting of the initial setup and cleanup, then taking it in-house right after we’d fixed everything. Eventually, for the health of the business and its long-term value, we moved to a minimum six-month contract.
There’s also a kind of struggle nobody really talks about: running a business means being everything at once. Marketing is what I know, but I also had to become the accountant, the sales team, my own marketing department, the operations person, the people manager — all of it, constantly, with no handoff. Add in the mental load of decision fatigue, big dreams followed by real disappointments, and learning where the actual sweet spot is for me and the company — it’s a lot to hold at once.
And being a woman-owned and led company has come with its own layer of struggle — I’ve lost pitches to male-led competitors who were more expensive and less experienced, simply because of who they were. It’s frustrating, but it’s also part of why I care so much about building something real and sustainable on my own terms.
It hasn’t been smooth. But every one of those struggles is part of why LeapEngine works the way it does today.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
LeapEngine is a boutique digital marketing agency based in New Jersey, and our focus is simple: bring enterprise-caliber marketing to small and mid-sized businesses who’ve never had real access to it. We offer SEO and local SEO, Google Ads and Meta Ads, LinkedIn B2B outreach, and conversion rate optimization (CRO) — and we work across industries, from wealth management firms to home services companies to e-commerce brands.
What sets us apart is where our approach comes from. I spent over 15 years in marketing, including time at Fortune 500 companies and Microsoft, managing large-scale budgets and learning how the best marketing operations are actually run. LeapEngine takes that same rigor — strategic, data-driven, accountable to real ROI — and makes it accessible to business owners who don’t have a Fortune 500 budget but deserve Fortune 500-level thinking.
We’re known for treating every client relationship like a partnership, not a transaction. We go deep into understanding a business before we ever touch a campaign, and we measure ourselves by whether our clients can point to real, tangible growth — not vanity metrics. A lot of our client relationships started as short, low-commitment engagements and turned into multi-year partnerships, because we prove our value instead of asking clients to take it on faith.
What I’m most proud of, brand-wise, is that LeapEngine has always been built around the idea that small business owners are the backbone of the economy, and they deserve marketing partners who actually fight for their growth the way they fight for their business every single day. That’s the whole reason this company exists, and it’s still what drives every decision we make.
In terms of your work and the industry, what are some of the changes you are expecting to see over the next five to ten years?
Where do I see this industry going? Honestly, we’re in the middle of the biggest shift I’ve seen in over 15 years of doing this.
The biggest one is AI-driven search. People are increasingly getting their answers directly from tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews without ever clicking through to a website. That means the old playbook of “rank #1 and wait for clicks” isn’t enough anymore. The businesses that win over the next 5-10 years will be the ones that show up as the trusted, cited answer inside those AI experiences — not just the ones with the highest keyword ranking. We’re already shifting how we think about SEO for clients because of this — it’s less about chasing an algorithm and more about building real authority and trust signals that both humans and AI systems recognize.
The second big shift is that AI is becoming a great equalizer. Tools that used to be exclusive to Fortune 500 marketing departments — predictive analytics, automation, real-time optimization — are now accessible to a local home services company or a small e-commerce brand. That’s exciting, because it levels the playing field. But it also means AI-generated content and ads are becoming commoditized fast. Everyone has access to the same tools, so they stop being a differentiator.
Which brings me to what I think is the real long-term trend: authenticity and trust become the actual competitive advantage. When everyone can generate polished content in seconds, real brand voice, real relationships, and real proof of results are what set a business apart. I think the agencies and businesses that thrive won’t be the ones that automate the most — they’ll be the ones that use AI to do the repetitive work so they can spend more time on the human parts: strategy, relationships, and genuinely understanding a client’s business.
For small businesses specifically, I think the next decade is going to reward the ones willing to adapt quickly and invest in being visible everywhere — search, social, AI answers, local listings — rather than betting everything on one channel. It’s more complex than it used to be, but it’s also a real opportunity for smaller, nimbler businesses to compete with players who have far bigger budgets.
Pricing:
- SEO: Custom pricing, typically $1,000–$4,000/month (includes AI/answer engine optimization to help brands show up in AI-powered search results)
- Local SEO: $800/month
- Ads Management (Google, Meta, etc.): $1,500/month per platform, plus a $1,000 one-time setup fee
- Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO): $1,000–$3,000/month
- Consultation: FREE if our client
Contact Info:
- Website: https://leapengine.co
