Journey to $100 Million: Entrepreneurship & Digital Marketing

At Array Digital, we have an entry fee and what we call it is “fundamental Professional Services.” It’s a group of services and products that we offer to every single one of our clients, it’s non-negotiable, but it does have a fee so essentially it’s an entry fee.

We came up with this because we want to work with larger clients and this fee kind of pushes away the smaller clients who won’t be able to justify working with us for just one service because these will be automatically added. It also allows us to offer a certain level of service and maintain profitability.

Our professional services include our monthly calls and meetings, the software we use to track everything, the video reporting, creative services, a dedicated project manager, all bundled together. If we have a client that doesn’t want to pay those fees will probably not be a fit for us because they won’t see the value in these services while the larger clients we have love these services and don’t even bat an eye at their price. Our entry fee right now is $375/month.

Do you feel like you’re wasting time and money with clients? If so, you may want to consider an entry fee as well.

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Erik J. Olson is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. The Founder & CEO of Array Digital, he is also the host of the Journey to $100 Million Flash Briefing and daily podcast, and the organizer of the Marketers Anonymous monthly meetups.

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Kevin Daisey is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. He started his first company when he was just 23, and is the Founder & CMO of Array Digital. Kevin is also the co-host of the Journey to $100 Million Flash Briefing and daily podcast, and the co-organizer of the Marketers Anonymous monthly meetups.

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For more information on the show, and to check out past episodes, go to journeyto100million.com!

When Erik first started his custom software development business 6 years ago, he needed a way of keeping track of tasks for both the company and the clients. They tried to build their own task tracking tool and they ended up abandoning it. It took countless hours to build a tool that, in the end, is an inferior tool - it sucked compared to the tools they could just pay for.

You have to make a decision: am I willing to use a tool that doesn’t do 100% of the work I need it to or spend potentially thousands of man-hours to build a tool that you’re probably not ready to build?

Find a tool that is a close fit and start using it. Don’t spend time and money and effort that should be used building your company and satisfying your clients building a tool that will only be used internally. Keep your focus on your internal processes and keeping your clients happy.

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Erik J. Olson is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. The Founder & CEO of Array Digital, he is also the host of the Journey to $100 Million Flash Briefing and daily podcast, and the organizer of the Marketers Anonymous monthly meetups.

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Kevin Daisey is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. He started his first company when he was just 23, and is the Founder & CMO of Array Digital. Kevin is also the co-host of the Journey to $100 Million Flash Briefing and daily podcast, and the co-organizer of the Marketers Anonymous monthly meetups.

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For more information on the show, and to check out past episodes, go to journeyto100million.com!

Recently, Kevin has been organizing his social media content (particularly on LinkedIn) into themes for each day of the week. He created a design board with 2 themes for each day of the week and designed post graphics to go along with each of those days, giving him lots of content to work with. It’s resulted in consistency and an increase in engagement on all his posts. Here are a few ideas that you can try yourself.

- Motivation Monday

- Trend Tuesday: stats, business trends, digital marketing, etc.

- Team Wednesday: he features someone on the team or the whole team just to show the gratitude he feels for his team.

- Throwback Thursday or an event

- Win Friday: shouts out something great that happened during the past few weeks

You should, of course, be posting other things but this takes care of hitting a minimum number of posts.

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Erik J. Olson is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. The Founder & CEO of Array Digital, he is also the host of the Journey to $100 Million Flash Briefing and daily podcast, and the organizer of the Marketers Anonymous monthly meetups.

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Kevin Daisey is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. He started his first company when he was just 23, and is the Founder & CMO of Array Digital. Kevin is also the co-host of the Journey to $100 Million Flash Briefing and daily podcast, and the co-organizer of the Marketers Anonymous monthly meetups.

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For more information on the show, and to check out past episodes, go to journeyto100million.com!

One of the things we do very well at Array Digital is communicating with our prospects and clients. We put a lot of effort into communicating with our clients.

Back about 12 years ago, Erik worked for a retired Commander in the US Navy at a DoD contractor. He told Erik that the biggest cause of issues in the US Navy was communication. It stuck with Erik that communication is extremely important from that point.

At Array Digital, we’ve put a process in place so that we’re communicating everything with our client and they’re communicating everything with us. We started off doing digital marketing reports to give them an analysis of what we’re doing and the difference our efforts were making. We did this weekly and most of the clients didn’t watch because they couldn’t keep up with it so we went to monthly and found that that wasn’t frequent enough. So we’ve settled on every 2 weeks. We tell them the good, the bad, and the ugly plus our plan of attack.

We also have a monthly call and talk about what happened in the last month and what’s upcoming.

And finally, for our Priority 1 clients, we have a quarterly business review for the clients to meet with Erik or Kevin, usually about 2 hours at a time every quarter where we discuss their business, not just their digital marketing.

And that’s just the formal process; we talk to our clients extremely regularly.

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Erik J. Olson is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. The Founder & CEO of Array Digital, he is also the host of the Journey to $100 Million Flash Briefing and daily podcast, and the organizer of the Marketers Anonymous monthly meetups.

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Kevin Daisey is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. He started his first company when he was just 23, and is the Founder & CMO of Array Digital. Kevin is also the co-host of the Journey to $100 Million Flash Briefing and daily podcast, and the co-organizer of the Marketers Anonymous monthly meetups.

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For more information on the show, and to check out past episodes, go to journeyto100million.com!

Recently we had the pleasure of unseating a competitor that worked with our prospective client and it all culminated in us writing a letter for the prospect to fire the other vendor. It was a very rewarding feeling.

The way we actually got this client was a bit different than the process usually goes: they were someone on our radar but not someone we were prospecting. Kevin went to meet with them about something completely unrelated and pitched our services a little despite feeling like there wasn’t much we could really do for them and their already well-run online presence.

They did, however, start to uncover some things they could use help with. They saw how passionate we were and the communication we have and became very interested in us.

The prospect wasn’t sure how to let go of the other marketing company without completely cutting ties and ruining that relationship so she asked us to draft an email to do so.

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Erik J. Olson is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. The Founder & CEO of Array Digital, he is also the host of the Journey to $100 Million Flash Briefing and daily podcast, and the organizer of the Marketers Anonymous monthly meetups.

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Kevin Daisey is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. He started his first company when he was just 23, and is the Founder & CMO of Array Digital. Kevin is also the co-host of the Journey to $100 Million Flash Briefing and daily podcast, and the co-organizer of the Marketers Anonymous monthly meetups.

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For more information on the show, and to check out past episodes, go to journeyto100million.com!

Today we’re joined by a special guest: our administrative assistant, Katya!

Years ago, Katya opened and closed a Latin dance studio because, like many new business owners, she overlooked a lot of steps required in starting a business. One of the mistakes they made right off the bat was overpaying for a space in a prime location in Virginia Beach when in retrospect she knows they should have built up their clientele first or renting space from an established dance studio.

Second, they didn’t have a plan in place for covering expenses in the beginning. They underestimated the costs of starting up the business and operating it on a daily basis but they also relied on credit instead of cash to cover those expenses. Those first few months were all about getting the business up and running and there were a lot of startup costs. Looking back, Katya knows that they should have had a better plan in place for covering operating expenses for at least the first 6 months or until they became profitable.

And they should’ve minimized startup costs like waiting to fully furnish the studio till they had the funds to do so instead of doing it from the very beginning. And the light-up sign they got for the front of the studio, an expensive $2500 unnecessary but pretty purchase.

Advertising was another major expense and they weren’t aware of what channels to use. They had no idea what channels their target audience would see and would get them the most bang for their buck.

They closed down 7 years ago and Katya only just now got rid of the last of the T-shirts. This experience taught Katya that doing something you love and owning a business doing something you love are two very different things. Running a business is a full- and part-time job put together and it doesn’t always leave time to do the thing you love anymore.

Katya’s advice to someone starting a business, though, is go for it. You will likely have to commit more time and money to it than you expect so be ready for it. Have a plan in place for maintaining the business until it can maintain itself. And when in doubt, get a mentor or hire professionals who can see you through it.

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Erik J. Olson is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. The Founder & CEO of Array Digital, he is also the host of the Journey to $100 Million Flash Briefing and daily podcast, and the organizer of the Marketers Anonymous monthly meetups.

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Kevin Daisey is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. He started his first company when he was just 23, and is the Founder & CMO of Array Digital. Kevin is also the co-host of the Journey to $100 Million Flash Briefing and daily podcast, and the co-organizer of the Marketers Anonymous monthly meetups.

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For more information on the show, and to check out past episodes, go to journeyto100million.com!

One of Erik’s friends recently asked why most of his podcast episodes are about the negative things going on in the business, surely there are some positives. And he’s right but Erik talks about the negatives because he knows there’s so much potential here to be something really amazing and whenever the team does stumble, there’s the disappointment that the company isn’t perfect.

If you can stop making stupid mistakes and can learn from them, you’ll just continue to improve over time. There are certain mistakes that he’s told the team can NEVER happen again. For example, there was an issue with the Contact Us forms on a few websites that we run (he’s talked about it on the podcast before). This mistake hasn’t happened again because we found an automatic way of handling it.

When a problem comes up, focus on it, then form a process around it to make sure it never happens again. If it continues to happen, then you’ve got another problem you need to address.

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Erik J. Olson is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. The Founder & CEO of Array Digital, he is also the host of the Journey to $100 Million Flash Briefing and daily podcast, and the organizer of the Marketers Anonymous monthly meetups.

—

Kevin Daisey is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. He started his first company when he was just 23, and is the Founder & CMO of Array Digital. Kevin is also the co-host of the Journey to $100 Million Flash Briefing and daily podcast, and the co-organizer of the Marketers Anonymous monthly meetups.

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For more information on the show, and to check out past episodes, go to journeyto100million.com!

Erik recently reconnected with a contact he met about 3 years ago when he was doing software development. Since then, Erik has focused on digital marketing and his contact is now an executive director at an organization that throws a lot of events in downtown Norfolk. Reconnecting with him was an opportunity for both of them even though it didn’t result in an exchange of work. Anytime you can give someone a summary of what you and your company are doing is beneficial for you especially if you’ve changed courses since the last time you interacted with them.

Erik has done this a few times since being in business for himself by sending a letter to all the people he had physical addresses for, explaining what kind of business he’s started and that if they know anyone who needs those services that they can reach out to him.

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Erik J. Olson is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. The Founder & CEO of Array Digital, he is also the host of the Journey to $100 Million Flash Briefing and daily podcast, and the organizer of the Marketers Anonymous monthly meetups.

—

Kevin Daisey is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. He started his first company when he was just 23, and is the Founder & CMO of Array Digital. Kevin is also the co-host of the Journey to $100 Million Flash Briefing and daily podcast, and the co-organizer of the Marketers Anonymous monthly meetups.

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For more information on the show, and to check out past episodes, go to journeyto100million.com!

Erik’s first job out of college was as a construction engineer because his major in college was Civil Engineering. He moved to Norfolk and very quickly there was a project where a couple of old buildings were being demolished and some guys decided they were going to extract the copper and make a couple of bucks on the side.

So one Saturday they went out and were cutting copper piping out of the crawlspace. The superintendent would drive it out in his pick-up truck to the recycling facility load after load as they were cutting the copper out all day. He was the only person who knew for sure how much money they were making but at the end of the day, he paid the crew $500 each. Erik was young and naive so not only did he think to ask the right questions about the legality of this situation but he’s also sure the superintendent made out with more money than he paid the crew members.

A couple of months later, another superintendent was caught taking a spool of copper wire out of a building. He got busted by the police and that’s when Erik realized what a mistake he’d made and how much trouble he could get into. This person got greedy and he got burned, a phrase Erik has carried with him throughout the years and seen play out several times over in business.

The lesson learned: don’t be greedy. You may win the battle but you’ll lose the war and have to deal with it later.

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Erik J. Olson is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. The Founder & CEO of Array Digital, he is also the host of the Journey to $100 Million Flash Briefing and daily podcast, and the organizer of the Marketers Anonymous monthly meetups.

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Kevin Daisey is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. He started his first company when he was just 23, and is the Founder & CMO of Array Digital. Kevin is also the co-host of the Journey to $100 Million Flash Briefing and daily podcast, and the co-organizer of the Marketers Anonymous monthly meetups.

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For more information on the show, and to check out past episodes, go to journeyto100million.com!

There’s an email newsletter named Help a Reporter Out (HARO) which Erik has used off and on over the years. This is the concept: there are reporters at publications that want a source for an article they are writing. They put out a query saying they need someone with this experience or this expertise to comment on an article I’m writing.

These queries go out to people like Erik who want PR three times a day and if your expertise matches the query, you contact them and they’ll use you as an expert source in their article.

Erik was very into them, responding to the queries at least once a day about a year ago, last holiday season. Many of them were about predictions for digital marketing trends 2019. This was perfect because it would position Erik as an expert in the digital marketing field and this could be an opportunity to reach people that are reading these publications. Erik was getting a success rate of about 50% and got cited on a lot of websites, in a lot of articles, with hyperlinks back to our website.

We recommend you check out HARO for free PR; it’s a great way to get yourself out there and position yourself as an expert.

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Erik J. Olson is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. The Founder & CEO of Array Digital, he is also the host of the Journey to $100 Million Flash Briefing and daily podcast, and the organizer of the Marketers Anonymous monthly meetups.

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Kevin Daisey is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. He started his first company when he was just 23, and is the Founder & CMO of Array Digital. Kevin is also the co-host of the Journey to $100 Million Flash Briefing and daily podcast, and the co-organizer of the Marketers Anonymous monthly meetups.

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For more information on the show, and to check out past episodes, go to journeyto100million.com!