Journey to $100 Million: Entrepreneurship & Digital Marketing

Have you ever added automation in your business where automation was not needed? We have here at Array Digital. In episode 179, listen in to Kevin as he shares a couple examples of how we realized that you must be careful with what you automate within your organization.

One aspect of our business we tried to automate was the marketing for ourselves. We are a digital marketing agency, but when marketing for ourselves, Kevin came to the realization that we went a little overboard with automation through using gated content, funnels, and other automation tools. The reality was that we did not gain enough leads to deem this automation successful. We are a very personable, face-to-face, relationship type of company. If you hire Array Digital, it is a partnership: we sit down with you, spend time figuring your company out, and we understand that hiring us is a big decision. We understand when you hire us, you are putting faith in us with your entire marketing and advertising budget.

Because of this we can’t gain these types of deals by someone downloading an eBook. Yes, it will get people in our funnel, and grow our awareness within the industry, but all the work to gain this is not worth it. From the expenses of HubSpot, the content we push, and the team creating it, this automation just did not pay off. We ended up abandoning this automation about half way through, but we were stuck paying for the software. We still ended up using HubSpot for sales, but that is a high price to pay for just a sales service. Finally, the bleeding of the payment has stopped, and we learned a big lesson.

Marketing was not the only aspect of our business that we were thinking about automating. We were considering automating our sales process as far as appointment setting, tasking, and reminders to call prospects and what not, but stopped ourselves ahead of time. The reality is, that Glen (our sales manager) and Kevin are the only people on the sales team. They are not yet overwhelmed by sales and leads to the point where they can’t take care of these tasks themselves.

We now understand, before Array Digital goes and invests into another piece of software, it is important to take care of these tasks the hard way with the systems that we already have in place. This might be a little bit more difficult, but it’s what we must do for now. As we grow we are going to hire more sales team members, and then maybe we can put some automation in place. The key here is to be careful about adding automation too early and in places that you do not need 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 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.

We recently got a loan from the bank, and Erik is pretty excited about it. In episode 178 of The Journey to $100 Million Podcast, listen in as Erik explains our reasoning behind extending the line of credit for our business. We already had a line of credit for $25k, and rarely used it. We would borrow a thousand here and there, and pay it back very quickly - but did not necessarily need the line of credit. But, the point is that it’s always there if we need it, and every time we use this money and pay it back, we are building up credit.

We recently got this credit line extended, which is the loan that Erik is speaking on. We now have a $75k line of credit. We are not tapping into it anymore than we have in the past, but it obviously gives us more padding in case we need it for certain situations. The main reasoning for getting a line of credit is for cash flow purposes.

For instance, let’s say you do a bunch of work for a client and complete it before you can even invoice the client. A lot of companies invoice using what’s called net terms. Say a contract is “net 30,” that means the moment Erik gives a client the invoice, they have 30 days to pay it. If you use net terms, that means that you are continuing to fund work until the client pays you back. So, you are putting out a lot of funds, and then you are waiting to get paid, equalling a cash flow problem. This is where a line of credit can be very helpful, but that is not why we extended our credit.

The reason we extended our line of credit is because we wanted to hire a salesperson before our PnL (profit and loss) allowed us to do it. If our company were to grow organically, then we would wait until we had enough profit every single month on a consistent basis, and that profit would go towards the new hire. Additionally, this salesperson we wish to hire should be a positive return on investment. In other words, however much we are paying for salary, that person should bring in more than that amount in revenue. That's unlike a typical employees who, realistically, are expenses. You want to minimize expenses, but when it comes to an investment and someone that is going to return money, you want to maximize that. Because of this, we wanted to get a salesperson in place as soon as possible and before our cash flow organically allowed it, hence the reason we extended our line of credit.

We have not tapped into this extended line of credit yet, it is there just in case - everything is looking good. Having this safety net in place gives Erik and Array Digital a sense of security. If you do not already have a line of credit, talk to a banker. It is easy to set up, and doesn't cost anything (unless you’ve had a balance for a long time.) This credit can give you comfort, while also helping with cash flow.

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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 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 177 of Journey to $100 Million, Kevin brings attention to an issue that he has seen with some of our top clients, our highest paying clients, and clients that we have built a very strong relationship with. These clients are very comfortable with us, they like us, they trust us, and have full confidence in us. So you may be thinking, what’s the issue here?

Every other week we send out a digital marketing report to each of our clients sharing the clients’ data, along with a video our digital marketing manager creates explaining the successes or failures of their marketing campaigns. What we found, is that since some of these clients are so comfortable with us, they do not watch these reports. They do not interact with the reports, and sometimes it is even difficult to get them on a call or meet with them to discuss this data every month due to their full trust in us. The problem is, we still need to get in front of them, and sit down to make sure there is full transparency, as well as ensuring that there is no business changes that we are unaware of.

Recently, we had a face-to-face meeting with a client of ours. When in this meeting, we asked if they had been looking at our video reports. They told us they had not been reviewing the reports, because they had been so busy due to the fact they had their best month ever in over three years! That is awesome, and they thanked us for having assisted in that - but, while we were doing a great job for them, they were not listening to our reports and recommendations or interacting with us.

When we are not constantly in communication with clients, we run the risk of clients growing apart from us, or having a business change that we are not aware of. For this particular situation, Kevin talked about how a lot of great things came from this meeting. A lot of aspects came to light, a lot of positive was brought out of it, and more importantly, a lot of tasking was created due to this meeting. If we did not sit down with this client, none of this would have happened.

Even though you may be performing well for a customer and doing a good job, you can’t let them fade away and have months go by without talking to them just because they are happy with your work. It is crucial to make sure you are doing something to check in with clients, get in front of them, and have them spend at least 30 minutes to an hour with you to keep the relationship going. It is very important, and it can even help you find other opportunities and improve your work. If you are off a clients radar, and not a part of the conversation, you are going to find out issues when it is too late.

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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 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.

When we are talking to a new prospect, one of the things we actively try to do is put ourselves in their shoes. In episode 176 of The Journey to $100 Million Podcast, Erik talks about the strategy we use when trying to acquire new clients. When we are selling to these prospects, we want to understand exactly what their challenges are when it comes to running their business, while also focusing on getting this prospect leads.

Here at Array Digital, we work with a lot of different businesses, and we’ve seen quite a bit. We actually act a lot like consultants for most of our clients when it comes to giving them business advice. A lot of times when we are talking to a brand new prospect, we have a pretty good idea what is going on within their business, and the problems they may face. But, the best thing to do is get them to explain to us exactly what is going on. We need to understand, from their perspective, what their problem is that we could possibly assist in solving.

When Erik first started off on his own, he would make assumptions on why clients were coming to him for help. Around 50-75% of the time, Erik was right in these assumptions because he had been in the industry for a good amount of time. But, the issue was, he would make big assumptions of what the full problem was, which was a mistake. Fast forward to today, and Erik tries his best to not assume anything as far as what a prospect’s problems are. He wants the client/prospect to state precisely what their problem is. We want them to talk much more than we do when we sit down with them for the first or second time in order to understand what they feel their problem is, and express their vision for the future.

The key here, is getting the prospect to explain to us what success looks like, based on their budget. We want to understand how many leads they are looking for, how much revenue they hope to increase, and what their vision is. Once we know that, we are able to go back to the drawing board, look at their digital marketing presence, and come up with a plan to bring back to them. A lot of times, we hold two or three meetings before we actually ask for the prospect’s business. This is a lot of work, but it allows us to establish a very tight relationship centered around what the prospect needs. We may bring ideas to them, but we discuss it, and that allows the prospect to pick and choose what they feel is best for them.

This is the best way to acquire new clients in our eyes. As Ian Altman says, you have to put yourself in the shoes of the buyer. You are about to form a partnership, and you want to understand exactly where they are coming from, and align your ideas with theirs! When you do that, it is beneficial to both parties.

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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 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 175 of Journey to $100 Million, listen in to Kevin as he talks about a very exciting comment that a prospect shared with us. Kevin recently met with a prospect for a second time, that happened to be a franchise business with a couple partners involved. Over the course of these meetings, Kevin and our sales team had been spending about an hour per meeting talking business & marketing, sharing how Array Digital could help their organization.

What happened that was so exciting, was that this prospect called us a strategic partner for their business. Why is this so important? Because Kevin strives for prospects to think this way about our company. Not only that, but we still have not sold this prospect yet, they are currently in the sales process, yet still referred to us as a strategic partner. Furthermore, they also referred to our competition as vendors, allowing us to stand out. We have been trying to drive home this message that we are a strategic partner, and Kevin was flattered to have already been referred to this while still being in the sales process.

Array Digital is not interested in being a vendor, one-off, or a project based company. We strive to be partners and that’s it! If you are not interested in being a partner, participating in the marketing campaigns & strategy meetings, or participating in the monthly calls that we require - odds are that you are probably not a good fit for us. But in this case, even just halfway through the sales process, this prospect already identified us as a strategic partner. We still must talk about budgets and solidify a basic strategy for them, but we hope to sign very soon, and are excited for the work our future holds.

This was a huge win for Kevin. He really wants everyone to understand the type of business that we are running. We aim to run a company that gets results, and builds not only partnerships, but long-lasting relationships as well. That is how we will continue to grow this business. As we go through our new sales process, making this clear will be a huge step within the process. It is very exciting to have a prospect identify us as a strategic partner up front before we sign them, and it offers a clear difference between us and our competitors.

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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 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.

On this podcast, you may notice that Erik talks a lot about mistakes we make. It is essential to discuss these mistakes in order to understand the things you could’ve done beforehand to avoid them. In episode 174 of Journey to $100 Million, listen in to Erik has he explains the importance of recognizing the mistakes you make within your company.

Once we make a mistake here at Array Digital we like to rewind and figure out what happened through a root cause analysis. A root cause analysis is figuring out the main reason for this mistake/problem. After we realize we’ve made a mistake, our first step is acknowledging it - something that a lot of companies do not tend to do. Some people will try to cover it up, or make an excuse. But, when Erik started Array Digital, he decided that we are going to be truthful and honest when mistakes are made. You must acknowledge these makes so you can be introspective and figure out what happened.

To figure out what exactly happened, we conduct a lessons learned session. In this meeting, all of the stakeholders internally involved in the mistake or project get together and descontruct the situation. If we receive feedback from a client, we will also look into this and decipher what it means for our Array Digital team . We like to not only figure out what we could have done better, but also what we can do moving forward to ensure the same mistake does not happen again.

Every person screws up, every company screws up. You must own up to your mistakes if you want people to consider you authentic. Owning up and fixing these mistakes will allow your company to grow and get better over time. The last thing Erik wants, is to have a company 5 years down the road making the same mistakes. Once you acknowledge that these mistakes are made, you are able to fix them. Array Digital is getting smarter, better, and faster - but that is only going to continue to happen if we recognize our mistakes. In your business, recognize the mistakes you are making. Focus in on the mistakes, figure out what you could’ve done to avoid them, and then put a process in place so that you will never make that mistake again. If you do that, you will win - and win BIG!

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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 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.

As you may of heard in a previous episode, we have recently discontinued one of our services here at Array Digital. In episode 173 of Journey to $100 Million, listen in to Kevin as he shares with you the outcome of discontinuing this service. We had 30 clients that had previously used this, and from these 30 clients, the total revenue per month was $891 combined. Unfortunately, we had to reach out to each client and let them know that we were discontinuing this service. We let them know there were a few options for them, as well. They could either upgrade to a different service, or we could refer them to a company that could help them out.

Some of these clients were upset and some were worried, however this led us to an opportunity where we could upsell and give them better services. As a result, we transitioned from having 30 clients using this service to 3 clients in this category. Not only that, but we went from $891 a month from 30 clients, to $5,200 a month from 3 clients. That is a 480% increase! Plus, instead of having 30 clients for this service, which lead to a lot of administrative work, headaches, and possible issues that may arise - we now only have 3 clients for this service!

Discontinuing this service was huge for us, and we are really excited about it. We feel bad about the clients we had to let go, but we did the best we could to help them out and get them transitioned. It is important to take a look at your business and evaluate the services you have, and see which ones are on the low end that are not worth your time, as well as not making you any money. If that is the case, see if there is an opportunity to reach out to them, and possibly upsell. Of course, in our case, we're discontinuing a service that forced us into this situation. But, it ended up in our favor with a 480% increase!

Overall, we see that although discontinuing this service may have negatively impacted some of our clients, we saw an opportunity for growth, which ultimately benefited our company by bringing in a significant increase in revenue. Sometimes the tough decisions can be the most favorable for your company. We are excited about this change, so stay tuned!

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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 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.

Do you use social media to express your personal thoughts and views on the world? Or do you use it for personal satisfaction? Maybe you use it to try to get business value out of it? In episode 172 of Journey to $100 Million, listen in to Erik as he shares some tips on how to use social media in the business world. There is no right answer to these questions, and a lot of people use platforms like Facebook or Instagram for purely personal reasons. Some use it to share pictures of their kids & family, drinks/food, or whatever they want.

These posts are perfectly fine if you use those platforms for personal reasons, but with business purposes, really think about the strategies you wish to employ. Are things like posting about drinks by the pool, hanging with friends, or going to a party going to help you business? The key here is to think about how you can separate social media from your personal and professional aspects.

With a platform like Facebook, you can have a personal profile that you lock down and only your friends, family, or whoever you allow will see this page. Then, you can also have a business page that you set up for your business or personal brand that is wide open to the world. You can then use that business page to make a business account on Instagram. If you use platforms like this, really take some time to think through your objectives. Think: why are you doing this, what is the purpose, and what is the objective behind these business accounts?

Erik’s main objectives are to obtain new business, get referrals, and to be seen as an authority figure in his industry. He also hopes to help entrepreneurs that are younger and have not gone through the experiences he has. That is what he cares about and what he hopes to accomplish, which are topics he posts about as well. There is more to his personal brand strategy, and has even written down this strategy for himself and Array Digital as well.

The point here is to think through what you want to do with social media for your business, and stop posting irrelevant content. Most people just post random stuff without a clear reason for doing so. Posting things like drinks by the pool should not be on business profiles because it won’t achieve your objectives. If you haven't defined objectives, that is step number one. If you have these objectives defined, you must be diligent and disciplined and avoid doing something contrary. You want to extract as much value out of social media, before it extracts value out of you!

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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 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 171 of Journey to $100 Million, Kevin talks about our sales policies we have recently put together here at Array Digital. We have never created sales policies before - it used to just be Erik and Kevin hitting the streets and closing deals. But, now that we have Glen (our new sales manager), and plan to hire more sales team members, we realized a need for structured sales policies within our organization. If we hope to hire new sales team members in the future, it is crucial to have sales policies in place.

These sales policies include standard procedures and regulations within our sales teams. These sales policies are not yet complete, and still a work in progress, but as we continue forming this, we are going to add to our policies and fine tune it just like any other document that we have. Throughout these sales policies there are many different aspects, and in this episode, Kevin goes into depth about a couple.

One of the aspects we cover is a minimum commitment term. This is something you must ask for as a salesperson within our company. When asking for a commitment, we ask for (by default) a 12-month minimum commitment. If that doesn’t work, the prospect has some leverage to go down to 9 months or 6 months, but we always start off going for 12 months - that is what we want and is our standard ask.

Another aspect we included is an agreement policy, for example a “valid for only 7 days” agreement after we send a contract to a prospect. We ensure that these agreements cannot be copied from prior agreements, and must also be signed by either Kevin or Erik. We also cover pricing in within policy. Under no circumstances do we lower prices or give discounts. This plays into our fundamental professional services as well. We require these services for all clients, and a salesperson cannot sell any services at all without them.

Payment options is one of the most important aspects out of our sales policies, because you need to get paid! In the payment section of our policy, we cover things like ACH, credit cards, and checks. At Array Digital, we prefer default ACH, but you have the ability to use credit card if need be. If a bigger company is not capable of either, we can take a check, but we must ensure that this is a client that we are comfortable taking a check from. Also in this payment section we cover things like commissions, operations, and how the sales team integrates and works with the operations team. We also speak on how involved the sales team should be, to ensure that we are not pulling in too many resources when trying to make a sale.

These are just a few things that we have to embody in our policies. If Kevin were to hire another salesperson, he wants to be able to say: here are your policies, here are the things you have to follow, and here is what I expect from you. Do you have sales policies within your organization? If you don’t, don’t worry, because we just recently made ours and it is growing every day!

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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 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.

Happy 4th of July everyone! As you may recall, Erik spoke on a previous episode about how we analyzed all of our clients and grouped them by how much revenue they produce on a monthly basis. In episode 170 of Journey to $100 Million, listen in as Erik explains why we got rid of our hosting only clients here at Array Digital. After grouping our clients, we found that we have a rather large bottom-tier group of clients. These clients pay us less than $100 per month, and all have one service in common: hosting only.

What is hosting only? In the past, when we were building websites over the years, we would get paid by project. After we finished building the website, we could either give the code to the client and they could host on a server of their choosing, or we could host it for them - thus birthing our hosting only service. We started to host for these clients as it brought in extra revenue for us. We were charging about $10 a month at first for hosting, which is the going rate. We were not trying to make a killing, but instead trying to get some recurring revenue going.

Over time as we morphed into more of a digital marketing agency, we got away from providing hosting only as a service. We stopped offering it to new clients, and the only people that had this service were old clients that were legacy. We have been trying to convert these remaining legacy hosting only clients to other services we actually sell, like unlimited content changes. But, a lot of them have resisted to upgrade. These clients were just not interested, or our sell was not a compelling enough reason to change. We have been trying to do this for about two years now.

After we did this analysis to figure out who was in this hosting only category, we concluded that we really did not want to support these clients anymore. The total monthly recurring revenue from all these hosting only clients combined was only $1,000. The proportion was way off, and even if we jacked up the price, it still would not be enough to justify. So, we decided to get rid of hosting only.

This has happened before where we have discontinued services, and it’s always somewhat of a painful process. You have to really think through what services you want to keep long term. Then the services that just don’t fit anymore, unfortunately you have to rip off the band-aid and tell your clients you are going to discontinue it and they either need to upgrade to one of your current services, or migrate to another provider.

That is our plan with our hosting only clients. We have reached out to them, and our sales manager is trying to contact them one more time to let them know we are truly getting rid of this, and then see if they want to upgrade. If not, we will coordinate with them so that they can take their files and go to a hosting company that is going to be way cheaper than us, and a better fit!

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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 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.