Journey to $100 Million: Entrepreneurship & Digital Marketing

One of Erik's New Year's Resolutions for 2020 is to write and publish his first book. He started writing his book in December 2019 and finished the first draft rather quickly. He then took a long break from writing his book but he recently got back into it. He is now in the process of editing the first draft himself. So far he has edited the first four chapters of what is currently a 14 chapter book. He believes it will take him about another month or two to finish his own editing before he hands It off to a professional editor. He figures it will take them another two months to edit the book and get it ready for publishing so he's estimating the publish date to be around Labor Day this year.

The book is about all the lessons he has learned in getting his company to $1 million in yearly revenue. It took him about eight years of being in business for himself to finally hit that mark. The vast majority of businesses never make it to $1 million a year. That's why he wanted to write this book - to help other business owners get to that point, and hopefully achieve it faster than he did.

When it comes to setting your goals or resolutions, oftentimes you will start with a bang and lose some steam along the way. That's okay. What's important is you get back to it and not give up.

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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 have been several times in the last three to four years where it became clear to Erik that he needed to make a change in his business.  The first time was when he was running his software programming business and working with Kevin who was running his web development business. They worked together for about a year on mutual projects before it became clear that they could do better together. But, once it became clear they decided to make the change quickly, and they did.  That's when together they formed Array Digital.

Jake was hired at the time to provide search engine optimization (SEO)  services to our clients.  That was all we offered as far as ongoing services at the time.  After doing that for about a year it became really clear to Erik one day that digital marketing was the way to go. He had been studying it in depth when he finally brought it up to Kevin, and within days the decision was made to focus solely on digital marketing. 

Similarly, during this pandemic, it has become clear who we should focus on bringing on as clients going forward. We have tweaked our marketing and offering to reflect this.

When it's clear it's time to pivot, pivot fast.

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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 are in week 6 of the Coronavirus pandemic in the US. Zoom meetings have exploded in popularity. People are attending 1, 2, even 3 meetings a day. From the time the pandemic broke out and the country shut down Erik has been bombarded with invitations to Zoom meetings. He attended many of them that first week as he was trying to gather information on what was going on, what the government loans were about, and what he should do next. But, after that first week he really scaled back on attending these. He felt he got the information that he needed in those first several meetings and then decided to take that information and put it into action.

Many people are still attending numerous Zoom meetings a day and listening to the same information over and over again. However, they are failing to do the most important thing which is to take action. They are waiting to learn all the facts and analyze their next move and that's leaving them paralyzed with fear.

Erik's advice is to scale back on the Zoom meetings unless there is a clear objective and information you seek to gain from it. Instead take action. Put into practice everything you’ve been learning that will help you and your business.

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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 heard a phrase to the effect of, “We’re not a family, we’re a professional sports team.” What that means is, you always want the best people around you. With a family, you don’t really get to choose who is around you. For better or worse, you are born with this set of people and you’re pretty much stuck with them.

With a company, it’s much more like a sports team where players come and go, they get drafted to other teams, some retire, but you always want the best players you can get. Sometimes, your stronger players can make up for the weaker players, but for the most part, they’re holding you back and you have to just let them go.

To take it one step further, on a professional sports team, you practice…a lot! Why don’t we do more of this in our businesses?

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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 hard to believe but our deal flow has actually increased since the Coronavirus. We are several weeks into the pandemic and we are signing new deals. When the news first hit that the country would essentially be shutting down Erik was pretty scared and it put him in a funk. The next day he was starting to come out of it and by the third day we were on the offense. We quickly realized that we needed to re-think some of our strategies and marketing efforts.

The first step was to cut unnecessary expenses. We regularly monitor expenses and cut back when needed so there wasn't a whole lot to cut, but we did trim off about $1,000-2,000 a month of expenses. Next, We doubled down on marketing. We realized that some industries were doing much better than others, even thriving, so we decided to tweak our marketing to reach those industries. It has really paid off. In the last couple of weeks we have signed four new deals amounting to $15,000 in monthly revenue. That kind of deal flow exceeded even our goal. Sure, we have lost some, but overall we are signing new deals with businesses who are doing great right now.

It might be a scary time to put yourself out there but it's important to remind others that you are still around and you are open to new business.

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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 have had the journeyto100million.com domain name for quite some time now for our podcast. It used to point to a landing page on our thisisarray.com website. That landing page had information about the podcast, previous episodes and links to various podcast playing apps. The problem with the landing page was users had to click through the links that would then take them to the main page for the podcast player, which they would then still have to open up in order to listen to the podcast episode. In other words, they were having to do some work in order to find an episode and play it.

Once we became aware of this problem we decided to change that. That’s when we found plinkhq.com. Plink is a program that creates smart links that automatically open a user’s preferred podcast player if they're using a smartphone, or the main page of a podcast player if they’re on a computer. This makes it much easier for a user to get right to the podcast episode, which makes them much more likely to actually listen to it.

It’s important to make it easy for your customers to buy from you or remove any potential roadblocks. Try to see things from their point of view and see how you can improve things for them.

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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 receives a lot of offers from vendors to put together explainer videos to explain his offering to potential buyers. Explainer videos are animated videos, usually between 20 and 60 seconds in length, with professional voice talent, that explain your services or products in a visually appealing and concise manner. You may have seen some online. They're pretty popular. Some depict cartoon figures or even stick figures to show how your product or service works, and others might show a hand rapidly drawing a scene, depicting the same thing.

In Erik's opinion humans gravitate towards other humans and trust them more. He recommends getting in front of the camera yourself and talking about your value proposition. No one can tell your story better than you - you've lived it, you are passionate about your offering, and you know it inside and out. That's what people want to see. So get in front of a camera and go for it. Even if it's a camera phone. It doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be authentic. Authenticity trumps perfection.

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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!

We normally are a boots-on-the-ground, in-person kind of selling agency. We like to meet prospective clients face-to-face and really get to know them. Social distancing due to COVID-19 has changed the way we normally do things. These days we are meeting prospective clients entirely online. From initial phone calls to sales presentations, kickoff meetings, and follow up meetings, everything is now being done virtually.

We have always used Google Hangouts for our daily huddles and some internal meetings as part of the team works remote. Now, we are using that technology and occasionally Zoom meetings to conduct all of our meetings, whether internal or external. It has been challenging but it has opened our eyes to new possibilities. If we can go about business as usual through virtual meetings that opens opportunities to new clients in markets larger than ours, and hiring more remote talent to serve those clients. That’s exciting.

It will be interesting to see how this changes business for us after all of this is over.

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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!

Whenever we sign a new client we have a whole onboarding process that we have to follow. We have to set up their accounts, get access to their website and credentials, and assign tasks to the team. Erik has a couple of onboarding steps he has to take too. For quite some time now he has been sending handwritten cards to new clients. The card welcomes them to the team and thanks them for entrusting us with their work. It may be a bit ironic for a digital marketing agency to send snail mail, but it's different and Erik believes it is well received.

Recently, Erik started to send quick video messages to new clients in addition to the handwritten card. He typically sends this to them within a couple of days of them coming onboard. The video has a very similar message to the card. He got this idea from Jason Swenk, the leader of a Mastermind group he's a part of. Jason had sent a video welcome message to Erik when he joined the group and Erik thought it was a great idea. So, now Erik does the same thing and he has received great feedback on it.

When it comes to onboarding new clients, think about what you can do to stand apart from the crowd and make them feel welcome.

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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 more important than ever to remain relevant with your customers.

The businesses that are doing well right now are those who had a strong social media presence before the pandemic and were already engaging with their customers. Now it's even more important. It's important to get in front of your customers every day if you can and let them know that you're still in business. Communicate what you are doing to stay safe, what you’re doing to keep them safe, and what has changed or remained the same. If you have a storefront, let your customers know if and when you're open and how you're operating. If you're a restaurant and offering curbside pickup or delivery, and you weren't before, definitely let your customers know.

Leverage social media to get your message out and remind your customers you are here for them. It may not lead to growing your business right now but staying in business is just as important.

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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!