Journey to $100 Million: Entrepreneurship & Digital Marketing

The year was 2005 and Kevin was working for a large engineering firm. On the side, Kevin had been developing websites as a hobby, just like he had been doing since 6th grade. He had yet to consider the fact that he could continue this hobby as a career and make a profit. In episode 199 of Journey to $100 Million, Kevin shares the instance when he realized he was ready for something bigger than just sitting in a cubicle.

Although Kevin loved the engineering firm at which he was currently employed and appreciated the opportunity, he ultimately knew he wanted to start his own business. He started to explore and meet different business owners and individuals that began to request website designs, and for the first time, he was being offered money to build these sites! He started making money from these websites equivalent to what he was making at the firm he was working at. Once he realized he could make the same amount of money, if not more, he was hooked. He talked to his company about leaving to start his own business and the rest is history!

Be sure to listen in to the upcoming episodes where Kevin will be talking about how he started his business, the challenges, situations he had to deal with, and the groups & relationships he made that got Kevin where he is today!

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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.

Today’s episode is a special one! In episode 198 of Journey to $100 Million, Erik talks about a VERY special entrepreneur: his father, Larry Olson - and today is his birthday!

Erik’s father, Larry, was an entrepreneur for years after his service in the Air Force. Once he retired from the Air Force, Larry found a franchise that he bought into and then opened a video store by the name of West Coast Video that Erik worked at while in high school.

Larry eventually opened up a second store and needed help with all the inventory he had bought for the opening. Erik decided to help and took on the job of matching up the loads of VCR boxes with the actual videos (as we know back in the day they were separated in the store to prevent shoplifting.)

This was a very big task and every day Erik would get some friends together and go line up the boxes one by one and start matching them together. It took weeks to get this finished, but it ended up being a lot of fun for Erik and taught him a lot about hard work and meeting deadlines.

Larry would work until 11 PM at the store and then arrange the accounting books until sometimes as late as 2 am. He did everything for these video stores. It was a lot of hard work, but Larry persevered and always succeeded! Seeing all his father had done, Erik was shown what hard work really looked like and he learned a really big lesson about entrepreneurialism early on: you have to find people to trust and just let them do their job so you can focus on other parts of the business!

“I’m really proud of you Dad. It’s your birthday so I wanted to give you a special shoutout. Larry Paul Olson - Happy Birthday! I love you”

- Erik

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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.

As you may have heard in a previous episode, Kevin is currently reading multiple books to increase his knowledge in sales and to grow Array Digital. One of these books, which he has been reading with our Sales Manager Glen, is called SPIN Selling. In episode 197 of Journey to $100 Million, Kevin shares a big tip that he came across while reading the book thus far.

In SPIN Selling, the author, Neil Rackham, gives a lot of advice on a sales method proven to work through research studies. Within this method, he talks about how "closing tactics" do not work on larger sales. In smaller sales (at a couple hundred bucks), closing tactics can come across as pushy, but because they have the product you want and there will be no need to interact with them again, you still buy the product. For larger sales, you are dealing with companies that have to trust you. Because of this, closing techniques just do not work. You must develop a relationship to find the problems facing the company and discover solutions in order to make the sale, without being too pushy or aggressive with closing techniques.

Kevin agrees with this completely and it's how he has always operated. He has always had conversations with people and genuinely tries to understand their business. If the business is not a fit or they don't want to go forward, he’s not going to force himself upon them. This may take a lot of meetings and brainpower and may not always end in a sale, but it is what is necessary if you want to make the big sales!

—

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 the 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.

In episode 196 of Journey to $100 Million, Kevin has a special treat for you all! He shares the books he has been reading as of late that have continued to teach him useful ideas/lessons that we have implemented here at Array Digital.

Kevin switches off between listening and reading the actual copy of these books. Sometimes it is hard to find time during the day to read so it's easier to listen to the audio version of these books during Kevin’s 30-minute commute to and from work. Some read, some listen, some do both - it is whatever works best for you!

Kevin has recently been trying to read on a more consistent basis and has made good progress throughout the year thus far! He is not intrigued by every single thing in these books, but shows that if you are able to pull just one little nugget of useful information out of each book, it is totally worth the time! If you take at least one new idea/lesson from the books you are reading and use it to improve your company, even in the most minor ways, then it was worth it!

To get a list of these books, check out the rest of our show notes on journeyto100million.com!

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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 the 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.

Here at Array Digital, we have a weekly management meeting every Monday morning. During these meetings, Erik’s first agenda topic is to review the to-do list from the previous week’s meeting to see what progress has been made. In episode 195 of Journey to $100 Million, Erik explains how a recent management meeting has helped him understand what tasks are most important to the Array Digital team.

In this meeting, when Erik asked what work had been done since the last meeting, he was frustrated upon realizing nothing had been done. Erik does not like the fact that the only work getting done is in the meeting itself. The goal should be for each person to do their work and then the four individuals in the meeting review that work to figure out the next step. It is essential to understand whether something is critical to the success of Array Digital. If a normal week goes by and the work does not get done, then that work is obviously just not important.

What Erik hopes to do now is acknowledge that if something does not get done, ask the team: “Is this really important?” and if the answer is no, just scrap the initiative. When you find that a task is just dragging, you have an important choice to make: either push it through or just understand it is not important and throw it out. If you start thinking about what is important in your organization, it can save you tons of time and money.

—

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 the 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.

In previous episodes, Erik has talked a lot about our onboarding process here at Array Digital. We are proud of this process because we understand how critical it is to being successful for our clients, and know how much communication and configurations are needed during this 2 to 3-week period. In episode 194 of Journey to $100 Million, Erik talks about setting expectations for this onboarding process we have created.

The onboarding process allows us to complete the work needed before we can actually produce the deliverables we were hired for. For a long time, we were not sure how we should handle this onboarding process and couldn’t decide whether or not we should get paid during this timeframe. We came to the realization that we were spending a good portion of time and energy during this period that was clearly billable work. Although you may not see evidence of the work, our onboarding process is real work, producing real deliverables.

After we realized that onboarding was billable work, we wanted to make it clear to the client that they should not expect to see any overt evidence of the work we are doing since they are still paying us. In our contract, we explain to clients that the first 2-3 week onboarding process is full of internal work that must be done in order to ensure success. The key is to explain this beforehand in a clear manner; you cannot just tell a client one time what they should expect and think that’ll sink in. When you sign a new client, you are best served by setting expectations for your onboarding period in order to prevent confusion and chaos in the future.

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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 the 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.

Back in Erik’s project management days, he received an amazing opportunity to oversee 5 new projects. Being assigned to this many projects showed the progress he was making in his career, the respect he had gained from his superiors, and his enthusiasm towards this opportunity. In episode 193 of Journey to $100 Million, listen in as Erik shares a huge lesson he learned from one of those projects.

When Erik was reviewing each of these projects, he quickly determined one of them was in deep trouble. No one was content with the performance of the project including the client, employer, and team. After making sure the other projects were doing okay, he decided to focus his efforts towards improving the struggling project while he still could, before this became a failure. Although Erik put 95% of his time into this project, it never truly improved and no one could ever figure out how to make it any better. To put it frankly, this project was miserable for Erik. One day the client just canceled it and Erik’s 4 other projects were taken away from him.

Erik learned a big lesson because of this cancellation. Whenever you are overseeing multiple projects, do not just jump on the landmine. Erik should not have put so much effort into this one project once he saw that it was doomed; he should have just declared it was a problem and focused on his other 4 projects.

If something is outright failing, just let it fail. As an entrepreneur, this is obviously difficult because it is shoved down your throat to never give up. And of course, that holds true, but the reality is, never give up until it is really obvious you need to, because you can lessen the damage by ending a project.

—

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 the 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.

In episode 192 of Journey to $100 Million, listen in to Erik as he speaks on a very useful marketing tool: Buffer. Buffer is a tool for social media management that allows you to create a buffer (aka queue) of future posts and schedule them out.

Posting on your own is a good technique, but the problem when running a company like Erik is that you forget about posting on social media until late at night or when you are waking up early, which are not ideal times to post and engage with your target audience. So with Buffer, every time you think of a post at a time that may not be ideal, you upload it to Buffer which will then post it to the platform of your choosing at the time you’ve selected.

About a month ago, Erik experimented with his Twitter posting 10 times a day. There was no way Erik could post 10 times a day at appropriate times because he runs a company and is busy all throughout ideal posting hours. Therefore, Erik used Buffer in order to load up all the tweets for the day early in the morning when he has time and schedule them out. If you are looking for a social media tool that will get your message across at the right time, consider Buffer!

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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 the 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.

Kevin has previously been talking about guarding time, blocking time, and many different ways he plans to be more efficient on a day-to-day basis. In episode 191 of Journey to $100 Million, Kevin talks about the importance of time management and setting priorities in order to be more efficient and get the important work completed! This tip was given to Kevin from, friend and colleague, Zack Miller.

What Zack suggested for Kevin was to prioritize the tasks he has to do throughout the day as priority 1, 2, and 3. So, when looking at all the things he must do everyday, Kevin should write them out, and then give them priorities accordingly. Priority 1 is the tasks that you absolutely must get done, and cannot finish the day without - and then goes down the spectrum from there. Your goal should always be to avoid ending your day without getting through your priority 1, 2, and 3 tasks, but worst case scenario, you absolutely have to get priority 1 tasks done.

Once able to get priority 1, 2, and 3 tasks done, you know that you have accomplished everything that you felt was important for that day. There are going to be other things in play like meetings and one-offs that get thrown at you during the day, but if you are able to get the 3 priority tasks done, you are completing the tasks that are going to move you and your company in the right direction.

Every morning in our daily huddle, Kevin writes out his tasks for the day as everyone does. But, now when he writes out these tasks, he prioritizes them using this strategy. Any other tasks he has to do that are not priority 1, 2, or 3 still go on the list, but Kevin understands what he must finish first. The key here is to not plan your day around the clock. You should plan your day around finishing your priority tasks, and that is the end goal. By doing this, the important tasks will get finished, time does not get wasted on low-priority tasking, and you can continue to grow not only individually, but as a company - on a daily basis!

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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 the 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.

If you do not have a set advertising budget, what are you doing to acquire new clients? In episode 190 of Journey to $100 Million, listen in to Erik as he explains the importance of advertising when trying to grow your business. It has been shown that most legit businesses (businesses that have actual operations) need to advertise in order to get a steady stream of new clients coming in.

If you “advertise” through word of mouth, you are not exactly marketing for your company unless you are putting a real significant effort behind gaining referrals. Gaining referrals is great, but the main goal of advertising is to gain new prospective clients and customers that are attracted to your company and offerings. There are a couple different ways to do that, but for us as digital marketers we like to use websites, SEO, social media, and online advertising such as Facebook or Google.

In order to get a start, most companies will put an actual budget in place for advertising. When putting this in place, it is common for the advertising budget to be tied a specific percentage of the company’s revenue. If that percentage is low, around 1%, you are probably not putting a whole lot of effort into your advertising. You may be boosting some posts, but you are not really moving the needle. If you are just doing 1% of your revenue, you might as well cut it all together because you are not putting enough into your advertising to really see results.

If you want to move the needle, you need to be putting 5-10% of your revenue right back into advertising. It sounds like a ton, but it is a business expense you must bite the bullet on, because otherwise new business will dry up: money in should always be money out. This does not happen overnight, so it is smart to start with a lower percentage, but the goal should be to ramp it up to 10% in the future. If you do not have at least 3-5% of your revenue being pushed back into advertising, you are not doing enough to grow your company - bottom line.

In order to grow a company, you must have new clients calling and walking through the door. If you are not advertising, that is just not going to happen. Setting aside a portion of your budget for advertising can be very lucrative, although sometimes it may seem like a high portion of your revenue. That being said, when creating and monitoring an advertising budget, be sure to keep it as something you can actually manage that will not crush your company. If you do it right, you could see results that you never thought were possible.

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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 the 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.