Journey to $100 Million: Entrepreneurship & Digital Marketing

For many years, since Erik started his own agency before Array Digital, he started taking his staff out to lunch every 2 weeks. At the time, his staff didn’t have a really strong sense of team because of the staff augmentation style his business model had. For that reason, he invented company lunch.

Since then, we’ve gone to company lunch every two weeks on a Thursday and had lunch on the company. But when COVID hit in March, we couldn’t get together and have lunch so we decided to do virtual company lunch. We would play games and have a theme, obviously bring your own food. It worked well especially for the employees who don’t normally get to participate in company lunch as now we have more employees who don’t work remotely than those that do.

Then, about 2 months ago, we’ve been having company lunch but modifying it by eating outdoors. It’s a great time to let your guard down and have a good time with your coworkers regularly. It’s a great way to build the team up so think about taking your own company out to lunch outside.

—

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.

—

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

You may be thinking, “Well what about my employees? Aren’t they the most valuable asset?” Well, of course. Your employees are an extremely valuable asset but it all ties into trust. Everyone we hire, we have to have trust in them and they must fit our core values; that flows into everything we do. But the trust that the company has is how you’re going to build long-term relationships, how you’re going to get referrals, and how you’re going to retain your clients even in bad situations. The trust that you will deliver, perform, and get the results that they’re looking for.

Trust is something that you have to prepare and build up to. It’s going to take time to build trust with your clients but once you do, that’s when you start to get referrals, business, and long-term clients. Trust takes forever to build, but you can lose it very quickly.

—

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.

—

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

A vanity URL is essentially a simple and easy to remember website name. We are big fans of buying vanity URLs. You can get them on Google for about $12 a year, and that includes privacy. The reason you would get a vanity URL is for better marketing. For example, we have a webpage within our website that is geared toward marketing our services to lawyers. The full URL of that is something long that we don’t remember - something along the lines of www.thisisarray.com/maketing-for-lawyers. That's not really short or easy to remember when putting it on marketing materials. Instead, we purchased a vanity URL, www.arraylaw.com, that redirects the user to the webpage that’s intended for prospective law clients. That is much easier for others to remember and it's easier on the eyes.

There is no limit on the amount of vanity URLs you can purchase and redirect to different pages on your website. At $12 a year through Google, it's a great buy and a smart marketing strategy.

—

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.

—

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

Erik recently attended a Mastermind workshop with other agency owners. One of the things that came up was whether to niche or not. This is something that Erik and Kevin have gone back and forth on since Array Digital’s inception three years ago.

Chris Dreyer of Rankings.io was part of the Mastermind and he made a strong case for niching. Of course there are pros and cons to niching, but overall the pros outweigh the cons by far.

Pros:

Greater trust

Sales conversion

Higher fees

Reduced competition

Many more

Cons:

Smaller market

More risk

When the pandemic hit earlier this year we quickly learned that some industries fared better than others. We took inventory of which of our clients were doing well and which were not. It was then that we decided our niche should be medical, law and home service industries.

—

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.

—

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

Erik recently saw a message in one of the groups he’s part of where someone asked about simple web-based meeting agenda software recommendations. This person is focusing on a tool that can hopefully make running meetings easier and more effective but this tool would start to become a distraction.

To run an effective meeting, you need the basic tools like an Internet connection but a tool is not going to make a meeting effective and communicate what you want to communicate in the meeting. Good communication, being apathetic about the topic at hand, having a structure to the meeting, and an open dialogue make a good meeting. A lot of the time, people focus on the tool but not on the actual communication. Focusing on the tool rather than thee communication is an escape from the real problem: people being afraid to speak up, being apathetic, and being disengaged.

Just use a simple document to outline the things you want to cover in the meeting. Otherwise, you’re just going to have a rambling session which doesn’t make for a great meeting. The tool Erik would suggest is an agenda and you go from top to bottom. It can be that simple.

—

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.

—

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

Have you ever had a hard time getting in front of your ideal prospects?

Everyone wants more clients, leads, and prospects but the way that you find them is to figure out where they’re hanging out and then go there.

Now that we have segmented our business we know who the people are that we want to get in front of, we can figure out where to go to find them. Think are there any events where your ideal client might gather? Find an event that caters only to their industry which puts you in a room with 100+ ideal prospects. It’s either going to be an in-person event (post-COVID), an online event, or where you advertise online.

—

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.

—

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

Whenever you have someone’s attention, you have an opportunity to cross-promote something else that you’re doing. For example, on this podcast, we have an outro where we cross-promote another initiative that we’re doing.

Once you grab someone’s attention and provide them with value, then you have an opportunity to cross-promote something else you’re doing. It’s a powerful tactic similar to repurposing content.

—

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.

—

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

We are now 7-8 months into this Coronavirus pandemic and the recession that has come along with it. Erik recently asked on Twitter if the Coronavirus recession has taught you any business lessons that you will keep for the rest of your career.

For Erik, it reinforced a lot of the beliefs that he had going into the recession. Erik studied how to recession-proof your business around 2018 because a lot of people were predicting a recession in 2020. No one thought there was going to be a pandemic but they were right about the recession.

The first lesson Erik has learned is that we don’t really need an office, at least not right now. We’ve been operating fine remotely. Offices will likely be a thing again in the future but we’re far out from that. Lesson learned: we can hire from anywhere in the US and we don’t need to get a bigger office. This office is more than enough.

Several people responded to Erik on Twitter so make sure to listen to the episode to hear those too.

—

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.

—

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

One thing that has helped our cash flow tremendously is the fact that we bill and get paid in advance. It took a long time to get to this point in our business but once we made the shift we noticed immediate benefits.

Many service Industries bill in arrears, meaning they bill after work has been completed. Contractors will often take a deposit and payments after completing milestones, and their final bill will come sometime after all work is complete. Then, if they have payment terms of 14 days, 30 days, 60 days, or even 90, they often have to wait weeks, if not months, to get paid.

Most of our clients are on auto-pay, meaning we draft their account or charge their credit card automatically every month. There are a few that pay us by check, but if they do our payment terms are seven days. Sometimes prospects will question that, but overall it works for us and helps us get paid faster.

—

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.

—

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

We love ACH!

ACH Stands for Automated Clearing House. It’s essentially a transfer from one bank account to another. It is our preferred way for clients to pay us. We used to accept many forms of payments, but in the last two years we moved to ACH and we love it. We get paid faster, there is less admin work, and there are minimal fees.

We use Quickbooks to set up ACH payments and bill clients. It’s a simple process that requires you to connect your bank account to Quickbooks one time. Then, when you want to get a client on ACH you ask for your client’s account information to make the transfers. QuickBooks does all the work by drafting the client’s bank account every month and sends them a sales receipt for their records. It’s a win-win.

—

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.

—

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