The past

Hi, my name is Shopi Soponyai (check out my LinkedIn profile), the founder of Shopographic. For the past 15 years, I have been living in New Zealand, Costa Rica, and Hungary. While living in New Zealand for ten years, I mainly worked in 5-star hotels in the hospitality industry. I considered the top of my hospo carrier when I had the opportunity to manage a golf resort in The Coromandel. With this position, I later discovered that my passion lies in marketing.

I wanted to educate myself on marketing further. No matter how busy I was, besides my day-to-day job, I always found room to grow and develop my skills about my passion. That’s where my passion lies – I felt.

Five years ago, I ran operations at a golf resort in one of the most beautiful places on earth, called Matarangi, New Zealand.

Besides being the general manager, I was responsible for four areas within the resort: golf, accommodation, restaurant, and events departments. On top of that, I was also doing all the sales and marketing activities. This job was great. Though I was busy, I got to spend a lot of time combining my passion for marketing and my primary position as a GM to grow the business.

For me, the visuals, that is, what people see about the business online, were a top priority. I wanted to get these in order; tasks included graphic design, website building, social media marketing and communication, photography, and offline marketing ideas execution).

Success was excellent, and numbers started showing the results within a year. Later I realised, my dream is to repeat this with my business one day.
My brother joined forces with me in New Zealand, and we started working on various projects while working full-time in our everyday jobs. It was tough, but hard work paid off.

About 2 years later, the opportunity arose to relocate to Costa Rica and continue what we loved doing the most besides traveling. So my family and I made a huge decision, and after ten years, we gave up our life in New Zealand. We packed up as much as possible, put our belongings into 5 suitcases – one of which was only my photo equipment – and started our new adventure in Central America.

The present

In early May of 2017, I returned to Hungary after about 12 years overseas. Seeing the considerable impact marketing had on my previous jobs, I knew it was time to help other businesses with that. So I started my own business when I moved back to Hungary. In the past 5 years, I have been working on helping mainly hospitality businesses to build their visual presence online. My key areas of expertise are website building, Google Business, SEO, Google Ads Campaigns, Graphic design, and Business photography. I had a video podcast program on Youtube called BeMyGuest, and started a Facebook Group to share my ideas for free.

In 2021 we left Hungary and now returned to New Zealand again. Currently, I am working on setting up my business and new life here in New Zealand.

The future

When it comes to marketing, for us business owners, it is not always easy to get the foundations right, E.g.:

• Building a well-functioning website.
• Maximising our Google Business Profile.
• Doing our SEO right.
• Creating meaningful photography about the business.
• Producing online Google Ads.
• Or just maintaining our own social media platforms in general.

I understand the importance of focusing on the foundations. No matter how many leads one generates, when the solid foundations are missing, one is just wasting money. I know that because I have been working on all these for the past 10 years.

My mission is to help businesses build a solid foundation online. A solid foundation such as a well-functioning website, a well-optimised Google Business Profile, and an excellent SEO that will work on its own in the future with minimal maintenance.

Allow me to provide you the services and expertise needed to grow your business by building solid foundations. This way, you can spend more time doing what you love and did not have time doing so far – such as focusing on developing your business.