REACH OR MISS - Entrepreneurial Marketing Success

Chris “Mercer” Mercer, co-founder of MeasurementMarketing, is a sought after measurement marketing expert. Mercer (as he’s known) and his team have been helping marketers, marketing teams, and agencies measure their marketing so they know what’s working and what’s not.

First by planning out what’s important to measure in their marketing, then how to actually measure it (using tools like Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics), creating dashboards that are actually useful, and pulling actionable insights from what’s being measured to begin forecasting and optimizing future results.

Mercer spends countless hours reading, practicing, adjusting and innovating to improve his skill set. He has a knack for teaching, and is known for his ability to simplify even the most complex ideas for his audience.

He can be found speaking at conferences and events, such as Traffic & Conversion, Social Media Marketing World, Content Jam, TravelCon, Digital Elite Camp, Baby Bathwater Institute, and others.

Most passionate about

• I'm very passionate about the art of systems as it relates to measurement, but also as it relates to entrepreneurship and building brands that are very customer-centric and listening to customer journeys. I think that is absolutely what I am obsessed with right now—figuring out how to perfect those things.

Mercer’s career and story

• My main background is sales management. I come from everything managing sort of a pipeline by nature.
• When we moved online, I created a WordPress site to show people how to do WordPress sites, essentially. It was like a membership site. That led very quickly to people saying, “This is a lot of work. Can you build our sites for us?” We created an agency and that's where we sort of grew, digital marketing-wise.
• We said, “Okay, we're going to build the site and we will also help you optimize the site”—something called “conversion rate optimization.” In order to optimize, and in order to improve, like, an opt-in rate or a conversion rate for a purchase, you have to know what that rate is.
• We set up Google Analytics for our clients. We would deliver the site with their Google Analytics and say, “Here’s how you can tell any leads you got from Facebook.”
• Almost overnight, when we made that shift, we started getting a lot of referrals from clients, but they weren't referrals for sites. They were people coming to us saying, “We already have a way but we need help with our Google Analytics.”
• We wanted to eventually diversify the business because that was a great business. It's still a great channel of revenue for us, but we wanted to be able to diversify.

Best advice for entrepreneurs

• I think the keyword is going to be deceptively simple, but it's listening to your customer.
• If you take a second to listen, they will tell you, “Yeah, you're kind of on the right track, but maybe do this instead, or do it in this particular way.” All of a sudden, it becomes a lot easier to grow a business when we listen to our market.

The biggest, most critical failure with customers

• It was when I did the exact opposite of what we just talked about—when I wasn't listening. I was telling the customer, “Here's how this thing works.” The thing that comes to mind for us is that we have a certification program where we will work with agencies.
• I think sometimes, too, ‘If it's our idea, it's a good idea,’ but it doesn't necessarily mean it's a good idea. It's just our idea.

Biggest success with customers

• We were making some changes to one of our offers. Our do-it-yourself training program is called the Measurement Marketing Academy and it's a just-in-time learning platform to learn all this stuff.
• We noticed way too...

Aidan Sowa is an entrepreneur who got into the digital marketing space in 2016 due to working with the MIT Enterprise Forum Cambridge.

Aidan is now the founder and CEO of Sowa Marketing Agency. Sowa Marketing Agency specializes in helping luxury realtor get featured in the media, guaranteed.

Aidan believes all entrepreneurs have the choice to differentiate themselves from their competition or die as a commodity.

Most passionate about

• I'm the CEO and founder of Sowa Marketing Agency. Essentially, we specialize in helping luxury realtors become the authority in the industry by getting featured on major media sites, like Yahoo, Forbes, and the like worked.
• Within the next nine years, we’ll try to reach nine figures.

Aidan’s career and story

• I originally worked with the MIT Enterprise Forum Cambridge.
• Learned a bit about digital marketing. Eventually, I decided to start my own company around digital marketing, to help entrepreneurs. I wanted to see how that would work. And it did work. I would just have to experiment a lot.

Best advice for entrepreneurs

• My best advice for any entrepreneur who's starting out is to set their goals; to focus on monthly, yearly, 10-year goals and be able to play it down. So many people start at the beginning of the year and have all these big goals in mind and then they eventually give up.
• I highly recommend that people really nail down their goals so they know exactly what needs to be done.

The biggest, most critical failure with customers

• I would probably say that my biggest failure as a business owner was taking on every single customer. That was a big mistake because when people came in with really high expectations, I would take them on anyway. And then we've them frustrated with me.
• When I first started my company, that led to chargeback and almost ruined my business. It was a painful experience. I was fortunate enough that this didn't happen, but it was definitely a pretty devastating blow.

Biggest success with customers

• One of the biggest things we did is start utilizing our own marketing methods for ourselves. So, being able to not just be seen like any other business, but being able to generate positive media presence and being able to build out our social media services.
• I feel like that has really impacted the way our customers have seen us, especially all these luxury realtors. They can see for themselves that we truly believe in what we're selling. We're not just trying to sell them on something. It's something of real value.

Aidan’s recommendation of a tool

• For us, social media is the easiest way to reach customers.
• We still get a huge number of clients just by sending out messages on Instagram.
• We're also doing the traditional kinds of social media stories.
• LinkedIn
• We have the entire profile built out, and things of that nature, and we've actually automated our invitations. That way, we’re reaching out to clients every single day.

Aidan’s one key success factor

• One of my key success factors is believing in myself and being able to follow through on what I want to do.
• It's one thing to write something down, and it’s another thing to take action and really make your goals all day. So, being able to take action is probably the key thing.

Aidan’s Mountain

Since we believe that the best way for entrepreneurs to get fast, big, and sustainable success is by leading your (new) market category, and the entire entrepreneurial journey reminds me of...

It took me fourteen years of research that included following 120 entrepreneurs from their first stages, Interviewing more than 200 successful entrepreneurs, and listening to thousands of them. Here are the three factors of the Formula for Entrepreneurial Business Success.

1. New / Non- existing thing - that’s needed

Jon Lee Dumas invented a daily podcast, Jeff bullas started to write about social media when the first innovators seeked for information, Mike Stelzner started to share content for free, Douglas Burdett started to interview authors of new marketing books, John Nemo cracked the code for selling through LinkedIn, Pam Wasley established the interim executive model, Mike Allton built websites for clients and shared content about social media to find more customers when he realized that what his customers really wanted was to learn about how they can use social media. So, he became a blogger and social media educator. and the list goes on.

You don’t need to be the first, and you don’t need to be the only one in the world that offers that product or service, you do need to be the first or unique among your target audience.

The story I heard in my interview with Mike Allton is a great example not only for choosing a new needed service (or in that case, information) but what it takes to find it.

Mike Allton

Mike Allton is a Content Marketing Practitioner, award-winning Blogger, and Author in St. Louis, and the Chief Marketing Officer at SiteSell. He has been working with websites and the Internet since the early ’90s and is active on all of the major social networks.

Mike teaches a holistic approach to content marketing that leverages blog content, social media and SEO to drive traffic, generate leads, and convert those leads into sales.

Mike’s entrepreneurship

• I started the Social Media Hat back in 2012. At that time, I had been building websites, and as part of that website business, I was blogging about social media marketing in order to give my prospects and customers helpful information. It didn’t attract people who needed websites, it attracted people that already had a website and wanted to learn about their social media opportunity.
• So, as a result, I wasn’t growing my online business, but I discovered that I like to write and I like to teach people how to use social media blogging.
• I realized that the content doesn’t help to sell websites, however, I decided to create a site about social media blogging and that what I did.
• I’ve used my site as a testing ground for anything related to online marketing. I execute the test and write about it and I found out my audience really appreciates those kinds of insights.
• And in the meantime, I was experiencing making money through the website and I tested that as well. Affiliate relationships, Google AdWords, Display ads, and many other monetization techniques. The most successful way to make money is to have a product that can you sell a lot of, so it can scale.

2. Technology is a success factor

Andres Pira started to use VR systems that allow his real estate clients to walk through and see what they are buying, without actually being there, and sold an extensive amount of units just with this technology. Dorothéa Bozicolona-Volpe uses technological listening tools to focus on understanding customers’ needs to help her clients make their digital transformation. Paul Bratby got some geeks that turned his trading strategy that hasn’t lost a quote for 15 years, into a software. Mellissah Smith worked with a development team that developed the technology for developing automatic marketing strategies without a human.

You don’t necessarily need to develop a new...

Kevin Urrutia is the co-founder of New York based Voy Media who specialise in creating for clients Facebook and Instagram ads that are sophisticated and super creative. Kevin's team are usually half on site and half around the world. During lockdown they have all.

been working remotely. Kevin also has his own podcast - Digital Marketing Fastlane which helps you to build. launch, grow and scale a successful online business.

Kevin is a travel and nature enthusiast. In his spare time, you can find him hiking through Mount Fuji or booking his next adventure.

Most passionate about

• For me, the most passionate route is marketing.
• We do a lot of online marketing here at my current company, which is Voy Media, but it's not just online marketing for other brands.
• I still do my online marketing for my own companies. I have my own e-commerce brands that I'm working on. What I'm most passionate about is doing marketing for other brands, but using those skills to make my own businesses in my own companies.

Kevin’s career and story

• We started marketing. A marketing agency wasn't something I wanted to start.
• When I was running my other companies, I wanted to connect with other founders and entrepreneurs to help them with their stuff. Initially, I thought that Voy Media was going to be a great way to invest in startups.
• It was a way for me to meet entrepreneurs, but then that turned into, “Hey! We need help with advertising. We need help with marketing.” That led us to turn into a traditional business model. That's how we came up.

Best advice for entrepreneurs

• My best advice is, for approaching the customer, consider: If you were that customer, how would you want to market your product? How would you want to sell the product? How would you want to handle complaints or returns? I always think about it like that.

The biggest, most critical failure with customers

• At one point, like any business, you over-promise stuff that you can do. As a new entrepreneur, you always want to over-promise. You want to promise and over-deliver, but sometimes you make the mistake of saying, “Yep, I could do that.” And then you get overwhelmed because you don't know how to solve the problem. You know how to solve their issue. Then the customer does get upset.
• That’s something I think about. It really affects your journey. When you're working with your new company, you want to minimize those moments. A lot of times, they're just not fun to deal with. And they stick with you for a few days or months.

Biggest success with customers

• It was when I was doing the cleaning company. We really focused on making it super easy for customers to book and tell us what they wanted for their cleaning.
• I liked that because it made them trust us to book a service. Cleaning is a very personal thing. You're literally letting a stranger into your home. By having a great, simple price, by answering phone calls, by answering customers’ text messages to us about their apartments, we made customers feel comfortable booking with us.
• It’s being very customer-focused and customer-centric and trying to figure out what they want.

Kevin’s recommendation of a tool

• Ebook/Book
• The book that's really helping me think about marketing, think about sales and business, is DotCom Secrets by Russell Brunson.
• It talks about how to run a business and how to make money running a business. It teaches you the core fundamentals of marketing and sales.

Kevin’s one key success factor

• I think my key success factor is that I...

Imran, the founder & CEO of BIZBoost and BTweeps. Creating Meaningful and Personalized Digital Media Experiences, Globally, Human to Human, Since 2009.

Most passionate about

• I run a company called BIZBoost. I started in 2010 as a brand.
• Initially, I focused on building a diverse and global network, both leaders and influencers, on the 9th of March, 2014.
• I passionately believe in doing what you love and loving what you do. So, here I am, creating meaningful and personalized digital media experiences globally.

Imran’s career and story

• I started everything on Twitter.
• In 2009, I came onto the digital media space.
• I started analyzing and observing what people were doing.
• I created my network of influencers and leaders.
• The first thing I did was analyze and connect.
• During that journey, I gained a lot of knowledge and exposure.
• I hustled to different and diverse networks of people.
• It has been almost 11 years, and it's a really creative and intentional journey. I'm living my dream. So, it's a life of my own choices, a life of my own decisions. Being a creator is kind of a responsibility, so it's not about me.

Best advice for entrepreneurs

• Businesses must believe in knowing their customer first, even before pitching their services and approaches, because without knowing who you are dealing with, the possibilities of building a healthy connection become in vain.
• You have to connect with your customers and consumers, human to human. This is a really important approach. It takes a lot of patience, but it goes a long way and has benefits.

The biggest, most critical failure with customers

• It was trying to look into the wrong places and connecting with the wrong people. It took a few years for me to figure out the right direction and the right kind of people who are our ideal consumers and customers, so we weren’t hitting the wrong places and connecting with the wrong people.

Biggest success with customers

• Referrals are one of the biggest successes that we have gotten so far.
• We get forward into a business relationship. We connect deeper, we sell better, we share values.
• They tend to refer their network to BIZBoost. They tell them that BIZBoost is reliable and is one of the best companies around.

Imran’s recommendation of a tool

• Instagram and Twitter
• They are the best tools for connecting with people and serving them and communicating with them and/or marketing and selling our service.
• Businesses that aim to go global, that aim to connect with diverse people with diverse perceptions, should check out Twitter to build their presence. It's a completely different platform of perceptions within a limited character of creative writing; you can connect with great people.

Imran’s one key success factor

• The one key success factor is consistency and patience.
• It's a dilemma for creators and entrepreneurs that they have a huge list of things to do. They have to connect with their teams, their partners, their clients. So, it's all about how to consistently and efficiently optimize your flow, be an executive, and execute the flow in the most disciplined manner.

Imran’s Mountain

Since we believe that the best way for entrepreneurs to get fast, big, and sustainable success is by leading your (new) market category, and the entire entrepreneurial...

My first executive marketing role wasn’t about marketing! At the age of 27, I was chosen to become the first Customer Service Manager and a board member.

No one in that water systems company understood what I was going to do—and who needed a customer service manager when professional technicians went to fix whatever was needed when a customer complained?

To tell you the truth, I didn’t know exactly what this job meant, either. All I knew was that it was a strategic decision; the sales department said that the reason for not meeting their sales goals was a lack of good customer service.

I started by following one rule: to never leave a customer unsatisfied. I talked with each customer who needed a service. Mainly, I listened to them very carefully. The next step was to build a team of service providers who listened to customers and found the solution that would make them happy.

The next step was to build a new team of technicians that love to give good service. I did something else, too. I decided that I didn’t want to earn money from customer service itself, so all the payments went directly to the technicians.

Within 6 months, customer service went from being the biggest obstacle for closing a sale to the biggest driver for selling. Our customers' satisfaction skyrocketed…and so did the sales.

It was probably the most effective marketing campaign that I ran in my more than 30 years as a marketing director.

When I asked Warren Coughlin, one of my recent guests on the REACH OR MISS Podcast, for his best advice for entrepreneurs, he said, “I always think it's ‘to serve’! My definition of sales is professionally helping people solve problems, making it a kind of an honorable activity.

“If you have a service focus for your customers, like always wanting to help them, you're going to have long client and customer relationships.”

This wasn’t the first time we heard successful entrepreneurs talking about 'serving your customers.'

Josh Elledge from Up My Influence and SavingAngel told his story about it:

“When I started as an owner of a small-town newspaper, I was so uncomfortable to sell; I was so scared, so I ended up failing miserably. And after that, for the next five years, I did sales and marketing for a network of law firms and had to sell every day for a commission-based salary. I was very miserable, and then, I suddenly realized that it’s not about convincing people to buy; it’s about listening to people's needs and finding how I can help them. The minute I understood that, I started to enjoy my connection with my clients and started to succeed dramatically. I found the win-win formula.”

Bob Burg, author of the “Go-Giver,” said that “shifting your business context from getting – to give, is the most financially profitable.”

In today’s podcast episode, I share some of the most inspiring and educational stories of successful entrepreneurs who won their success by serving their customers best.

The first story is about Jeremy Parker from Swag.com, who told me, “I’m never satisfied in terms of customer success. We should go above and beyond to make our customers’ experience great.”

Jeremy Parker is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and serial entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and CEO of Swag.com, the best place for companies to buy quality promotional products that they’ll actually want to keep.

They work with 5,000+ companies including Facebook, Google, Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, and TikTok. They are #218 on the 2020 Inc 500 (fastest-growing companies in the US). Also, CrainsNY named Jeremy one of the 40 Under 40.

Jeremy’s career and story

• I’m actually a filmmaker. I even won the Audience Award at the 2006 Vail Film...

Ronny Leber has been able to contribute to countless award winning events for over a decade. He has been on stage in front of more than 5 million people all over the world while working with some of the biggest brands in the world. Ronny loves to transform others by making them shine on stage and helping them to shape their own legacy. Besides working as a legacy coach Ronny is a multilingual tv & event-host and a keynote speaker.

Most passionate about

• I have the opportunity and the privilege, to be a host, commentator, and moderator on TV, and I love it. I'm absolutely enjoying it and I'm very passionate about it.

Ronny’s career and story

• I want to work at events that bring the whole world together.
• It was back in 2008 when I had those thoughts. At the same time—as a coincidence, in a way—a professional soccer team from Vienna was looking for somebody to host the youth teams’ games, like, once a month on a Saturday afternoon. Through some friends who were working there, they asked me. I said, “Well, okay. Yeah, sure.” For me, that was not a job; it was like a hobby. I remember I got 70 euros—I got paid seven euros per game. Back in the day, I thought, ‘Wow I really got a good deal out of that.’
• One year later—on the 25th of June, 2009, which was the day Michael Jackson died—I was at a party for my former sports university. I was working there and was a DJ. At 5:15 in the morning, I left. It was a long party. At the same time, a colleague of mine who worked for a professional ice hockey team in Vienna left as well.
• Funny enough, the first-ever hockey game for that team that I saw live was in the stadium where I was the announcer. Then, suddenly, it was not just 100 or 150 people. I got the kids’ soccer games. It was like 1000 people there. That was the first time ever, back in 2009, when I thought, ‘Hey, this could be a career.’
• I started taking classes in that direction. For over a year, I took classes in voice education, speakers’ education. I started to take singing lessons and acting lessons. I danced competitively. I did all kinds of things that I could do in terms of expanding my field and getting better at what I do.
• I did the ice hockey for nine years. I quit because it was just so much time for me.

Best advice for entrepreneurs

• I believe that every entrepreneur has something unique about them. Many entrepreneurs started because they love what they do and wanted to create a business out of it.
• In the beginning, I was focused just on my craft. I was focused on loving what I do and doing it, and not on building the business.
• You need to be able to measure the important things because what you cannot measure, you cannot manage.

The biggest, most critical failure with customers

• The biggest failure that you can have with customers is not being prepared.
• At the end of the day, you need to know their needs, wants, and desires.

Biggest success with customers

• The biggest success for me was when I was able to host 120,000 people, which was, for me, one of the most incredible events that I've ever been a part of. That event was in 2019, and it was “INEOS 1:59 CHALLENGE.”
• I feel really blessed that I work in a field where I feel that I have had many successes. I believe it's also a mindset. You need to set yourself up for success. Basically, I think it's believing in yourself and following the journey, always having a next step, knowing where you want to go and then just being hungry.

Ronny’s recommendation of a tool

• Slack - which is a fantastic way to communicate with your team
• Trello - A planning app where you can go from Idea to action in...

Jason Zilberbrand is the President of VREF Aircraft Value Reference & Appraisal Services. He is an Accredited Senior Aircraft Appraiser with the American Society of Appraisers (ASA), and an Accredited Member of the Appraisers National Association (ANA), and he is also an Accredited Member of the International Society of Appraisers (ISA), Expert Witness, broker, inventorying dealer, acquisition agent, aircraft owner, aircraft operator, contract negotiator, consultant, teacher, conference speaker, and author.

Jason spent over 15 years as an inventory aircraft dealer with a $300-million-dollar credit facility, and over $4.5 billion in completed aircraft transactions.

Most passionate about

• I help buyers and sellers of airplanes, ranging from small little piston aircraft like Cessnas to commercial aircraft, like you would fly on an airline.
• Most of my clients are either financial institutions that provide loans for this type of equipment or individual buyers of these aircraft who are looking to deal with some sort of estate planning or refinancing.
• My firm is the largest aircraft appraisal firm in the world. We do a couple thousand desktop appraisals a year. If you're familiar with Kelley Blue Book for cars, we manage a similar software platform for aircraft values.

Jason’s career and story

• I started off in a family business: an aviation insurance company. So, right out of college, I worked for the family business. I did that for a decade. It was all business jets.
• I cut my teeth in the industry, working with what are today considered the classic business jets. These were airplanes that were used by Fortune 500 companies and high-net-worth individuals. They were flying them globally. My father's company provided coverage for maintenance.
• I started getting requests from clients to assist them in buying airplanes. That was really when the light bulb started to go off that there were things that I could do in aviation that weren't necessarily tied to the family's business.
• I left the insurance company and started an inventory dealership—like a car dealership, except we had planes and cars. I did that full-time through 2013. When the recession hit in 2008, I started to appraise more airplanes. I think it just was a natural progression of my career.

Best advice for entrepreneurs

• Some of the tricks that I use are to try and create obtainable goals and set those goals every day so that eventually I hit the big goal, but I’m not taking on such a massive project.
• One of the ways to do that is to look inward and see what your strengths are, then try and bring in other people who can bridge the gap of your weaknesses.
• You have to trust those whom you delegate work to, which is another big challenge for entrepreneurs. So, you have to trust the people whom you hire; otherwise, don't hire them.

The biggest, most critical failure with customers

• I think that one of the biggest failures that anybody can have is assuming that the other person or the customer sees things from your perspective.
• When you're young, or at least when I was young, I tended to explode on people who were looking for help and who might not have done it in such a respectful way.
• So, my biggest failure, unfortunately, was burning bridges with some potentially really important customers because I didn't care to engage with them the way that they wanted to engage with me.

Biggest success with customers

• My base success, I think, comes with the new business, and that is trusting the fact that the customer base would be able to adapt to change.
• My biggest success today is asking permission before I go down a path, including when it’s personal, with my wife. I talk...

Jenn T. Grace, M.S., Founder & CEO of Publish Your Purpose.

Jenn T. Grace is a nationally recognized business strategist, speaker, and award-winning author. She has been featured in Forbes, The Huffington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and CNBC.

Jenn passionately believes the more raw and real we can be—the deeper the connections we can experience. This drives her fierce commitment to bring voice to the invisible stories that free people from their isolation.

She is committed to giving underrepresented voices power and a stage to share their stories, speak their truth, and impact their communities. She is the Founder of Publish Your Purpose and In addition to publishing 70+ books that share the stories of others, Jenn has written six, including her memoir, House on Fire.

A marathon runner, animal lover, and novice birder. She lives in Connecticut with her family.

Most passionate about

• I feel like my passion always lies in helping people tell their stories. And how I do that is by helping people publish their books—primarily nonfiction books and memories.
• What I'm really passionate about, as of late, is making a difference within the larger publishing space and context surrounding the predatory practices of many publishers out there, who are essentially taking advantage of first-time authors.

Jenn’s career and story

• I was a consultant. My background is in marketing, so that's certainly a unique angle that we bring to the publishing process. We really have a strong focus on the marketing side.
• I wrote my first book in 2013. I started it probably at the end of 2011, beginning of 2012. I self-published it, and I made every possible mistake. It was not a good-quality product.
• I wrote a second book, and I learned from all of my mistakes on the first one. And then I wrote a third book.
• By the time I was in between my second and third books, everyone I knew kept asking me, “How did you know how to hire an editor? How did you know how to lay out the book?” I kept getting all of these questions: “How did you do this? How did you do that?” The process of having one-on-one conversations with people and then teaching people in smaller groups how to get their books published eventually led me to found a full-blown publishing company in 2015.

Best advice for entrepreneurs

• The best thing that I would recommend is to track your data. The only way that we can really scale and increase that impact is if we really truly know the very core of whom we're serving.
• The more clear you can be on whom you're serving, and the more you track that, the more robust it becomes, and the easier it makes your marketing for purposes of finding more of that same person.

The biggest, most critical failure with customers

• I think, in a lot of ways, it’s ego.
• I had this kind of ego that was telling me, “You can't switch focuses, you can't switch your business, you're known for doing this consulting work, and you've worked for a decade to build your reputation in that specific consulting area.”
• I think if I had listened to my intuition, listened to my gut and my instincts, I would have started the publishing business even faster, or perhaps more confidently, rather than fighting it like an internal battle with myself that no one actually saw on the surface.

Biggest success with customers

• One of the things that I was completely hell-bent on achieving was to get national recognition for our chamber of commerce. I had such laser focus.
• This is a really good example of how I do this in my business. I had laser focus on winning the Chamber of the Year award on a national level in the U.S.

Jenn’s recommendation of a...

Dan Morris is an investor, advisor, and B2B growth expert with a mission to leverage his experience to impact 1000 businesses positively by 2025.

Helping companies to succeed in volatile markets, increasing profitability from existing strategies, and helping CEOs take positive steps forward to grow their business is where Dan’s expertise is focused.

Before turning 30, Dan left a finance career to join a digital agency that showed him what a fast-growing services business could be – it went on to sell for £100m. He then launched a digital signage network publishing content to thousands of screens, and helped a content marketing agency reach #61 on the INC. list.

Most passionate about

• We are working with businesses that need some help with growth. We help B2B, SaaS, and services businesses that are stuck in that six- to seven-figure revenue range and that need to break through to the next level.
• We help them identify and break down that barrier.

Dan’s career and story

• I started my career at a very large bank. They taught me to negotiate to understand numbers very quickly, but I realized that my calling was really with smaller businesses that were moving much faster—a lot less red tape and a lot more entrepreneurial energy.
• I found myself working with a group of entrepreneurs who had several different businesses. When the global financial crisis hit in 2008, we were working on a very exciting project, selling to a group of banks, but all of a sudden, they ran out of money. The opportunity arose for me to go with that group of investors from the UK out to the United States and help them build a business that became 61 on the Inc. list in the next four years.
• When I left working with those businesses, I trained as a product manager, then worked with technology businesses and SAS companies. My training as a product manager helped me to focus even more on what the customer really wants, how to really get the customer to understand the value of the technology, how to build technology that really works for the customer, how to communicate that in sales and marketing, and how to talk with the technology teams.
• I really wanted to give away some time and understand technology businesses that were out there and that I could potentially be a part of. As I worked with lots of those early-stage customers, I recognized that there was a big opportunity in helping them build those initial building blocks.

Best advice for entrepreneurs

• Aligned with exactly what we do today I advice entrepreneurs to take the time to review. Have a look at who you're actually working with. Talk to them and understand what they're actually using your product or service for.
• If you review, you can build that information into a refinement. You can focus more on delivering more for what people are already getting from you. Then, once you've developed that refinement, you can roll it out.

The biggest, most critical failure with customers

• I think the biggest fail for me was not realizing earlier how many people we could help if we just kept it simple and delivered on this four-Rs framework, rather than being tempted to get in and try to fix everything within a business.

Biggest success with customers

• We were onboarding in January 2020. This is a company that had been around for nine years and they'd grown to hundreds of thousands of revenue, even around a million dollars in revenue.
• They'd been in a heavy services business they've been a heavy into the software side of their business. And they'd struggled a little bit with who that core customer was. Over the years, they’d had a lot of successes. Then they'd come back down to a point where they just said, “You know what? We really...