Zac Gregg talks with Jason Barnard about signal over noise.

Signal Over Noise! Zac Gregg—Co-Founder & Managing Partner of Vital Design—Reveals How to Cut Through Industry Confusion and Find Your True Market Focus

Zac Gregg, co-founder and managing partner of Vital Design (one of New England's top digital marketing agencies), shares the strategic pivot that broke his company through the dreaded $1 million ceiling. Drawing from his 20+ years of leadership experience taking multiple companies public, Zac reveals how to identify genuine market signals hidden within industry noise and build unstoppable growth momentum.

Get ready for a deep dive on:

Breaking the $1M ceiling: How specializing in digital marketing instead of traditional branding transformed a project-based business into a $25M recurring revenue machine

The signal vs. noise framework: Why clients say they want rebrands and websites but really need traffic, leads, and revenue—and how to hear what they're actually asking for

Industry specialization secrets: The bold Cardinal agency case study that threw away 19 industries to dominate one—and why the algorithms reward laser focus

The cobbler's children principle: How Vital invests $50K monthly in their own marketing to become the biggest sandbox for client learnings

AI-era positioning strategy: Why being a generalist is "a very bad place to be" and how to become the expert content that powers LLM models

The 80/20 specialization rule: How Vital focuses 80% on higher education while strategically maintaining 20% in B2B manufacturing and e-commerce

Niche-down decision framework: The one, three, and five-year goal system for strategic focus without abandoning profitable existing clients

This episode delivers battle-tested strategies for agency owners, service providers, and entrepreneurs ready to break through revenue plateaus by finding their signal in the market noise.

#SignalOverNoise #DigitalMarketingAgency #BusinessGrowth #MarketingStrategy #IndustrySpecialization #FastlaneFounders #ZacGregg #VitalDesign #AgencyGrowth #BusinessScaling #MarketingFocus #RevenueGrowth #EntrepreneurStrategy #BusinessPivot #MarketingAgency #BusinessBreakthrough #NicheMarketing #AgencyLife #BusinessLeadership #MarketingExpert

What you’ll learn from Zac Gregg

This episode was recorded live on video September 16th 2025

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1X1EHRhFLw

Links to pieces of content relevant to this topic:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-368-scaling-digital-marketing-for-specialized/id1193085635?i=1000684866511https://open.spotify.com/episode/7G0gdfm3qbgofWxhXzaS6tZac Gregg

Transcript from Zac Gregg with Jason Barnard on Fastlane Founders And Legacy. Signal Over Noise

[00:00:00] Zac Gregg: We spend about $25,000 a month on paid media, which for a small service business, a hundred and plus people these days. We're about a $25 million company. A hundred and some odd employees. We had to spend about 25,000 a month in paid. We are doing about $15,000 a month in what we would consider SEO or our AI search optimization, as well as content marketing. And then we spend about $10,000 a month on our just projects and updates, which we consider like supporting HR, supporting our sales team, those types of things. So we put our money where our mouths is, we try to learn the lessons our clients need to learn before they learn them.

And that was a big part of what came next as well is we gotta do this for ourselves, guys. So we ask ourselves tougher questions than our clients do all the time. 

[00:00:58] Narrator: Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard. Each week, Jason sits down with successful entrepreneurs, CEOs, and executives, and get them to share how they mastered the delicate balance between rapid growth and enduring success in the business world.

How can we quickly build a profitable business that stands the test of time and becomes our legacy? A legacy we're proud of.  Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard. 

[00:01:27] Jason Barnard: Hi, everybody and welcome to another  Fastlane Founders and Legacy with me, Jason Barnard. And a quick hello and we're good to go.

Welcome to the show, Zac Gregg. 

[00:01:39] Zac Gregg: Pleasure to be here, Jason.

[00:01:41] Jason Barnard: Brilliant. I ran outta breath when I got to Gregg, so I said it a bit strangely and I do apologize. Usually I take a huge breath. And today, I decided just to sing right off the top and it didn't work out very well. We're gonna be talking about Signal Over Noise, which I love as a title.

And having read through Gab's notes for this, she's done a great job. A lot of it is figuring out how to identify the noise and ignore it. Pay attention to the signals and do what the signals are telling you. Is that more or less it? 

[00:02:09] Zac Gregg: Sure is. You gotta listen and you gotta learn.

[00:02:15] Jason Barnard: Yeah, you listen and a lot of times, we listen to noise and it's hugely damaging to the business and I've been guilty of that many times over the years. Now, before we start, I always show people's Brand SERPs, and here you've got a baby Knowledge Panel on Google. We search your name and the Knowledge Panel is just the name.

I call it a Knowledge Panel sprout and it could be super, super big with photos and descriptions and social media profiles and people that Google associates with you. And the reason I wanted to show this is because you call yourself Zac Gregg sometimes, and Zachary Gregg others. And that's a huge problem for the machines because they presume it's gonna be two different people and you're kind of diluting your brand equity by appearing to be two different people. And machines are quite simplistic. So my recommendation to you, which you can take or not as you want, would be to standardize either Zac or Zachary.

[00:03:11] Zac Gregg: Love it. Love it. I can always use the advice. It's great to see it too.

[00:03:16] Jason Barnard: What's lovely is ChatGPT gets it right off the bat, but I don't think that's a photo of you.

[00:03:23] Zac Gregg: Nope. That's a podcast that I was on before this one. I'm sure.

[00:03:28] Jason Barnard: Okay. And what's really nice with ChatGPT and other AI engines is that they are getting it more right.

But they tend to give more choice. And I think your name, Zac Gregg, is probably quite unique. So it's focusing on you. And a lot of the time, it will start saying, well, here's multiple people with that name. Which one do you mean? Give me some more context. And that's an example of how ChatGPT and AI in general are now creating conversations.

They say, I need you to give more context so that I can help you with what you want. Whereas with Google, when you're searching somebody's name or you're searching for something, I look at that and I make the choice of which link I check, click there, I'm having a conversation. So that's where we are at Kalicube® and I hope you found that interesting and helpful.

[00:04:13] Zac Gregg: Super cool. I've not been doing the ChatGPT slew thing, so that's pretty cool to see. 

[00:04:22] Jason Barnard: Right, and that's interesting. I tend to think that everybody's using ChatGPT or Google AI mode, Perplexity, but in fact they're not. And it's really lovely to understand that i'm assuming that that was obvious to everybody, and it absolutely isn't. 

[00:04:37] Zac Gregg: No, it's funny the way we use ChatGPT, right? I use it every day. And I use some other LLMs, but rarely am I using it to search myself. And it's something that I tried to fair too very rarely with Google myself.

But now, I haven't even thought about using it to Google myself, to do AI search on myself.

[00:05:04] Jason Barnard: Right.

[00:05:04] Zac Gregg: So that was great and it's really important. I do it for my company all the time. I'm always doing the same exact drill with our company, trying to figure it out. And that was interesting. Really cool, Jason.

[00:05:15] Jason Barnard: Brilliant. Yeah. What I kind of think, to a lot of people, this is BOFU stuff. It's people who know your name or your company's name and they're doing due diligence of a sort, but with a machine that they consider to be intelligent and therefore they trust the recommendation and what the machine is saying.

But that's not the topic for today. That's my topic every day. And today, the idea was to change topic. And we're gonna start with your company that got ceilinged at a million dollars. Now, I hear that happens a lot and they're breaking through that million dollar barrier. It's really difficult, and once you do it, you fly.

Can you tell me your story? 

[00:05:50] Zac Gregg: I think you've got a couple things that happen. Sub $1 million, is your heart really there? Is that what you're doing a hundred percent of your time? Us as entrepreneurs, we're always focused on multiple projects at once. We're always trying to figure out where to put our time, and I think the typical story of the Sub Million Dollars Zac Gregg and the Sub Million Dollar Vital. We loved the space we were in. We loved what we were doing. We had a natural audience and that was local and small, and businesses oftentimes that I had already started. So that sub $1 million was just almost, it was a convenient operation of marketing to market friends, family, ideas that I had and the local audience that we had here as entrepreneurs.

In 2000, obviously the internet was not as big of a marketing platform, so you worked through business of commerce chambers, things like that. You were a product of your environment. But things changed rapidly in from 2000 to 2012. And the idea that we became very passionate and I became very focused on digital was the first specialization that we experienced that caused us to break through a ceiling.