Journey to $100 Million: Entrepreneurship & Digital Marketing

We took a hit with the pandemic and we lost a lot of revenue but we kept on selling and our revenue is now higher than it was before the pandemic. We are still growing and it's to the point where we need to grow the team. We have been wanting to bring on another salesperson and now the time is right.

Erik and Kevin have been working the last couple of years on developing a sales process and improving it. We hired our first salesperson, Glen, a year ago, and things have been going great. A year later we are finally ready to hire our second salesperson, and we did. We just brought on Francesca in May. She has been busy training with Glen and Kevin. She has been picking up on things quickly and Kevin has no doubt she is going to kill it in sales, helping us grow even more.

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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!

As per tradition, we have always hosted a company lunch somewhere near the office every other Thursday. This has always been something we all enjoy and it helps foster a great work environment. Lately however, we have not been able to have our company lunches due to social distancing for COVID-19. Now that our company is fully online we have begun doing virtual lunches every other Thursday because we missed our lunchtime together. In addition to company lunch, we have hosted a couple of virtual happy hours and the team has really enjoyed those too.

These things help contribute to our company culture, which Erik defines as how you work and do things when nobody else is looking. Erik highly recommends figuring out fun ways to bring your team together in a relaxed setting, to enjoy the time spent with one another.

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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!

It's important to align your brand experience with your brand promise. A lot of companies promise a lot of things with the messaging they put out on their website, social media, or printed materials. Sometimes they don't even know what those are. It's really important you not only know what your brand promises are but to uphold them. That will help you become a more resilient company and a company others can trust.

At Array Digital our brand promise is all-inclusive pricing and constant communication. We have worked to make billing as predictable as possible by offering all-inclusive pricing and bundled services. We also stay in constant contact with our clients with check-ins, monthly calls, and following up when we say we will. It’s important to us that we do what we say we’re going to do.

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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!

We were recently reminded of the days we used to bill by the hour. It’s pretty standard for service providers, but in our opinion there is a much better way.

It took years to make the graduation from billing by the hour to billing by the project. Then it took a few more years to go from billing by the project to a set monthly amount for ongoing services. Erik refers to it as a graduation because it was a graduation of sorts. Billing by the hour was time consuming and irregular. Sometimes clients would get upset if an invoice was significantly larger than previous invoices because we billed more hours that period. Project billing was a bit better, but it had disadvantages too. Trying to calculate how much a project would cost could be time-consuming and once you gave the client that estimate it was sometimes hard to justify any overages.

It was about two years ago that we decided to move to monthly recurring revenue and we're glad we did. Clients like knowing how much they’re going to pay every month, without any surprises. It also makes it much easier for us to project things like revenue and profit when we have a set monthly amount we can count on. If switching to recurring revenue is an option for you Erik highly recommends 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!

Our pricing and structure has been developed to service larger clients than we’ve been previously used to. But in our evolution, we’ve slowly moved up and set the bar higher. We’ve hired more people, we’ve put more energy into our services, communication, and customer service. So it’s harder for us to work with a super small client, therefore, our pricing is not really structured for those.

From our sales side, we’ll get these small clients who would require us to lower our threshold and prices to accommodate their small budget. But we need to start saying no to those clients, clients who don’t make sense for our company.

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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!

Erik recently posted on LinkedIn asking for questions he can talk about on the podcast. Here’s a question from Kate Johnson, “How can we instill a spirit of hustle and entrepreneurship in young kids?” Thank you, Kate, for the question.

The first time Erik made his own money was in 7th grade. His mom sent him out to shovel snow and he started doing it for his neighbors too. The next year, he cut grass. It was easy to get work and recurring revenue.

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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!

It has been over two months since Array Digital started working 100% from home. Like many other companies we have taken all of our operations remote. This was a big change for Kevin who had committed to working in an office setting at least five years ago. He's had no home office or any real dedicated space for work from home.

After a couple of weeks of remote work though he saw the need to create a space. So he created a little area in his den for his home office. With each passing week he has done something to make the space more productive. One weekend he actually built himself a desk. Another day he went to the office to pick up his large monitor. He has added a few pieces of equipment and he continues to make improvements to his new home office.

The truth is no one knows when things will get back to normal or when we'll be able to get back to the office. So we're making the most of our temporary offices at home. It's possible we’ll go back in a couple of months or even keep working from home permanently. We're fortunate to have these options.

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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!

As business owners, this isn’t a great time to be in business for most people. Now there are exceptions of course but most businesses are really impacted by COVID-19 and the shutdown of the economy for the last 3 months.

Businesses in retail, travel, transportation, events, and restaurants have been driven to bankruptcy.

Erik had been reading that a lot of these businesses were already on the brink of bankruptcy for years before COVID hit. The businesses that were in bad shape before going in are probably not going to exit at all or will exit in bad shape.

Here’s the bottom line: if you can survive this, then you got it and you will flourish. Keep your head up and think about the positives. Think about what you can do differently when you reopen. Do what you need to do to survive then take advantage of the opportunity that will come afterward.

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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!

We've talked about Profit First before, but it's worth bringing up again. Profit First is a book by Mike Michalowicz. The teaching in the book is a unique system to manage business finances. Essentially all money that flows into the company as revenue goes into one account called Income. From there the money is dispersed twice a month to various other accounts that have been set up for different purposes. For instance we have an account called License and Insurance. The money that gets dispersed to this account is saved up all year to pay for the business license tax bill and liability insurance bill that we get every year around March. Another important account is the Operating Expenses account. This is where most of our monthly operating expenses are paid from. We also have separate accounts for Profit, Owner’s Tax, and a few others.

The idea is to pay yourself a certain percentage of profit with each disbursement and the rest goes to the other accounts based on set percentages too. The money in these accounts should be enough to pay for their intended purposes. If you ever find yourself borrowing money from one account to pay expenses for another account it indicates a problem and you should re-evaluate your expenses. It's been so helpful that a few of us in the company now use the same tactics for our own personal finances.

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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!

In Erik’s career, there has been a couple of times when he’s put good money into newspaper advertising and it yielded nothing. The first time was when he was helping his wife with her cake bakery. They would offer coupons and he would see those coupons coming back so it seemed that people were actually reading it.

Then he decided to spend $250 for an ad in the Sunday newspaper and NO ONE brought the ad in to redeem their free cupcake. It was a complete waste of money.

Erik then did it again with his software business 80/20 and ran color ads that were about $800 each for about a year, spending about $10,000 in total. He had one person say to him that he saw his ad but that was the extent of his ROI on running newspaper ads.

He did learn that newspaper advertising doesn’t lead to much more than brand awareness.

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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!