Journey To $100 Million

We recently let go of a client that we had only had for about two months. There were a lot of red flags from the very beginning of this deal. Even before we signed the contract he was asking for us to make changes to our contract and changes to the scope of work. We have a rule that we only allow one concession per contract if needed, but we broke our own rule and gave in to all of the requests because we wanted the deal. Erik met the client for the first time after that contract was signed. During that meeting, the client was complaining about the work we were doing for him. He said we were not doing enough and he felt misled by the sales process. In the end, the client suggested we continue though and see how things went. At that point, we should have parted ways.   After that, he started complaining about the actual creative work we were doing. He became very involved in the creative process and it was clear it just wasn't working out. Looking back it is a deal we probably shouldn't have made in the fir

Erik has always felt comfortable speaking in public and actually enjoys it...we know, shocking! But his point in being there is not just to have an enjoyable time speaking in front of people. There are people there to learn from you and what you’ve done. Erik used to talk about whatever topic he was told to talk about even if he didn’t actually sell those conversations. He realized after years of doing this that if he’s not pitching his services in these talks, then he’s losing a great opportunity. There are ways to provide value while also extracting value. No matter what he’s asked to talk about, there has to be a tie-in and if there’s not, this may not be the right opportunity. If you’re going to take your time, energy, and probably money, then you really need to have an ask as part of your talk.  — 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 or

Lately on Twitter Erik has offered to coach new entrepreneurs or agency owners that are looking for a little help. He’s doing this because he wishes he had received this kind of coaching when he was starting out. He's a big believer in learning from other's mistakes and he enjoys coaching aspiring entrepreneurs. The way he sees it is entrepreneurialism is a journey that everyone is on. Many people are ahead of you and many are behind, but eventually everyone will get to where they need to be. The path is much quicker when you learn from those who are ahead of you. That's why he has written a book about how he got started in business and hosts this podcast with Kevin. His aim is to help other entrepreneurs learn from his mistakes. Erik's book has been written and now needs to be edited. Once that's done he may look into offering coaching or some sort of Mastermind course to follow up the lessons learned in his book. If you're a new entrepreneur, and are interested in 30 days of free coaching by Erik, reach

Going live is something that we started doing on a regular basis a couple of months ago. We started doing a live stream every Friday at noon and we called it lunchtime live streams. Every week one or two of us will get in front of the camera and talk about a different topic. These days we might be talking about the Coronavirus or marketing or how to market during the Coronavirus crisis. We talk about things that are important, relevant, and relatable to the business or marketing world. Sometimes we'll have guests on our live stream, as is the case this week. This is a great way to present different points of view and also double your audience. We have our audience and they have theirs. It's an effective way to reach both and really get some exposure. If you've never gone live you should consider doing it. These days when most people are cooped up at home, it's a good way to meet with people, have people get to know you, hear your message, and learn what you're about.  Think about how going live could help

Thanks to the Coronavirus the purpose of social media changed drastically overnight. At the time of this recording, in March of 2020, we are in the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic. Before now you could say the purpose of social media for a business was to put out content and engage with its audience. Today, in the middle and this pandemic, social media is serving a very different purpose. Today it is being used as a tool for mass communication. Websites only work for communicating information if someone goes to your website. Email newsletters only work if you’ve invested the time to create one with a big following. Nothing serves up information quite the way social media does - from informing the public about what's going on with your business, whether you're open or closed, whether you need the public’s help, to using it as a tool to communicate with employees. For many businesses social media is the only method of communication right now. Quite frankly social media has become essential for communic

Running a business can be very challenging. Oftentimes you have to make hard decisions and sometimes you have to make them quickly. During this time of the Coronavirus crisis, we have had to make some of those decisions. With some of our clients going out of business and others having to shut down for the unforeseeable future, we have had to make decisions to help keep the company going. Erik and Kevin quickly decided to make small cuts in order to avoid deep cuts. They decided to cut back on software that isn't essential to our operations, cash awards for our monthly staff award winner, company lunches, and IRA company matches.   They weren't decisions that were made lightly but they were necessary. Cuts like this avoid deep cuts like having to let go of employees. That's what we want to avoid. When tough times hit it's important to make decisions quickly. It could make the difference between small cuts now or deep cuts later on. — Erik J. Olson is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. Th

Erik has never been a big fan of discounting his rates. He is a strong believer that when you set a price for something you should stick to it. In fact, we have written it into the sales process that we will not discount our rates. We've done it in the past and often it ended up causing problems down the road. At the time of this recording in March of 2020, we are in the middle of the Coronavirus crisis. This is unlike any time we’ve ever seen before and it's requiring us to re-evaluate business. Erik recently looked at our competitors' social media posts and found that many of them haven't posted since all of this started, or they’ve re-posted the information everyone else seems to be posting about, like washing your hands and funny pictures of telecommuting. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of action geared toward getting new customers. Erik thinks this is a mistake. Erik is super focused on getting new business right now. As a result we have decided to offer our first month of service fees FREE to any

Erik has mentioned many times in this podcast he's a big fan of Twitter. It's his social media platform of choice for business purposes. He's very active on there and over time it has paid off. Erik regularly has public conversations with people on Twitter but oftentimes it will then move into direct messages. He believes that's where the magic happens. That's where leads are created and more meaningful conversations take place. With so many new followers every day, and many conversations taking place, it's sometimes hard to keep track of who needs to be replied to. One way he has simplified this for himself is by using Zapier. Erik is a big fan of Zapier for everything it does. He has talked about it on this podcast numerous times. The way he uses it for his direct messages is he has Zapier create a task for him in our daily task manager (Asana) anytime he receives a new direct message on Twitter. The task contains a hyperlink to the direct message in Twitter. He clicks on the link to take him to the d

Although Erik is part of numerous professional organizations there were a couple of questions that he had about scaling an agency that he couldn't get answers to from those organizations. That's when he turned to a Mastermind program for digital marketing agency owners. He joined this organization earlier in the year, along with Kevin, and it's been very beneficial to the both of them. The first question he had was about the role of sales within operations. He had a gut feeling about how involved sales should be within operations, and many times his gut feeling is the right way to go, but he wanted reassurance. He found that within the Mastermind program. The other question he has, which he has not asked yet, is whether we should be going after bigger brand name clients as we scale the business or if we should continue to pursue smaller owner-operator type businesses. Again Erik has a hunch as to which would be better but he would like the input of other agency owners who have been there. It's great to b

Array Digital is Erik’s third company. His first business consisted of him being a third-tier subcontractor for the Navy. All of his revenue came from one client and his client wasn't the decision maker. Whenever something needed addressing it would have to go up the chain of command to the decision maker. When the project was eventually awarded to another company it put Erik out of business. That's when he learned the importance of diversification in the client base. Diversification is important in the number of clients but also the industries those clients serve. Ideally you want to have numerous clients that pay smaller amounts rather than a handful of clients that pay you large sums of money. That way if you ever lose one client or a couple you stand a far better chance I'm going on without them. These days, the way Array Digital is set up, we could lose our biggest client and still be okay. Erik regularly checks on the health and diversification of our client list to make sure no one client or indust

Kevin set a goal to make it to the gym 180 days this year. He's been going to the gym regularly for a while now, but he's been averaging about three days a week. To make it to the gym 180 days this year he has to go to the gym about 15 days out of the month or four days a week. That's really only one more day than he is so used to doing, but when it comes to going to the gym it is a big commitment. Often things come up, sometimes he'll get sick, so four days a week might not always be feasible. He can plan for that by going every day after a week where he wasn't able to make it all four days. Staying in shape is important to Kevin. He's noticed a change in the muscle he's been able to put on and he's been feeling great. Next year he plans on increasing the goal but for now he's happy with the goal he set for himself. Think about your goals and how you can track them on a weekly or monthly basis. Tracking makes it much more likely that you will reach them in the end. — Erik J. Olson is an awar

One of Erik's New Year's resolutions for 2020 is to kick ass at a Half Ironman. A half Ironman consists of swimming 1.2 miles, biking for 56 miles, and running 13 miles. It's a lot of activity. Erik started training for this at the beginning of 2020. He realized he needed the guidance of a coach in order to do really well. He debated between hiring a coach to work with him one-on-one or buying a program written by an Ironman training coach. He decided to go with the written training program. This will be his guide to doing his absolute best at the event. Like training for an Ironman, when it comes to business endeavors it is important to learn from others who have done what you’re trying to do. Erik and Kevin receive coaching by way of a business consultant that evaluates the business operations on a regular basis. They also belong to a mastermind program that is made up of other agency owners, and Erik belongs to a professional organization made up of business owners that make $1million dollars a year in

LinkedIn is the platform that Kevin used to not pay very much attention to. It was something that he would check maybe once every couple of months and update just to keep his business profile current. But, this has changed in the last couple of years. Kevin is much more active on LinkedIn these days and it's really paid off. Kevin believes it's important to open yourself up on LinkedIn. It's not like other social media platforms, it's full of business people waiting to connect. He suggests going into your settings and changing the privacy settings to allow all LinkedIn users to connect. Connecting is more important than following. Engage with people and connect with them. This will help you grow your audience and get more people to learn about what you do. Kevin now has about 16,000 followers. He gets about 100 connection requests a day. As long as they are from the U.S. and they don't look like they’re trying to sell him something he accepts most of them. He himself sends out about 10 connection requests

February 20 was supposed to be the date of our first paid event, the State of Digital Marketing Address and we sold out our 200 tickets. Then came the winter weather advisory that said it would start snowing at 3 pm the day of the event which started at 5:30. Where we’re from, the moment people hear about snow, they freak out. So we were faced with a situation beyond our control and we had a big decision to make. We had to consider whether or not it would be safe for people to travel there and if they even would. We realized it didn’t really matter what the conditions would actually be like, the damage had been done the second the media blasted out the winter weather advisory. It was all anyone could talk about so Erik had to make the decision that we’d postpone it. It took a few days to get the new date and expectedly, a couple people dropped out and we gave them a refund which allowed us to sell those tickets at the full amount. It turned out to be a win in that regard. — Erik J. Olson is an award-wi

Kevin has put together a list of goals for 2020 and today he focuses on 1 of them: joining an advisory board group. He’s looked into Mastermind groups and he and Erik joined one for digital marketing agencies. You might say, aren’t those your competitors? And while there may be a chance of running into them, they are business owners across the country and around the world. Kevin and Erik were placed in a group that makes between $3-$20 million group even though we are at $2 million. These guys know exactly what we’re doing because they’ve done it before. They’re going to leverage this group and take advantage of every opportunity offered. Look for a Mastermind in your own industry and you should be doing the same. — 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-winn

Earlier this year Array Digital started doing lunchtime live streams at noon every Friday. We started by just doing them on Facebook and we have since added them to Twitter and YouTube. The live streams focus on what's going on in marketing and sometimes we talk about events we have coming up like our monthly Marketers Anonymous meetings and the recent State of Digital Marketing Address we just had. It’s important to get the attention of your potential clients on social media and going live is a great way to do that. In fact going live is expected to be a big trend in marketing for 2020. Consumers like to see others going live. It's entertaining and a fun way to consume content. Livestreams are often unscripted and offer the consumer a glimpse as to what that person or business is really like. It's a much different feeling than a polished, put together social presence and people like that. If you've never gone live you should consider it. It's easy. You can go live on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter,

Kevin recently read a book called “Creating a Story Brand” and he thought it was a pretty good read. He then started doing research on taglines and brand statements. He concluded that the brand positioning statement sets the tone for a brand and everything stems from that. A brand positioning statement is made up of four parts: - The target (the customer) - The category (the industry you’re in) - The differentiator (what sets you apart from the competition) - The payoff (the benefit to your customer from working with you) After analyzing our target audience and goals, Kevin came to the conclusion that Array Digital’s could be broken down into the following: - Target - companies - Category - marketing - Differentiator - bold - Payoff - aggressive growth He went through some exercises and came up with our new brand positioning statement. After trimming down the sentence he came up with the following: “Bold marketing for aggressive growth.” This is our new tagline and we’re starting to use it everyw

One thing Erik likes to do every year is set New Year's resolutions. It's something he's always done but just recently, in the last two to three years, he has taken it more seriously. The difference now is when he makes a resolution it's something that he really intends on keeping. In the past that wasn't always the case. At the time of this recording it is the beginning of March. Erik has spoken to people and asked them about their New Year's resolutions and found that many of them don't even remember what they were. Likewise, at the beginning of the year, when he would ask people what their resolutions were, they would chuckle and tell him their resolution, but it was almost as if they didn't believe it themselves. Erik believes that if you say you're going to do something you should do it. You shouldn't lie to yourself. There really isn't a point in setting goals you don't intend on keeping. So get serious about your goals, make a plan to reach them, remind yourself why you set them when you don't fee

These days when it comes to social media there is one platform that people believe is all the rage - that is Instagram. People believe that Instagram is growing at a rapid pace and that if a business wants to be successful and reach its customers that is where they need to be. The truth is Instagram is declining in growth. Last year, in 2019, Instagram grew 6.7%. This year, it is expected to grow between 4 and 5%, and next year even less. By 2023 it is expected Instagram will only grow about 1%. While there are many users on Instagram the numbers show us that anyone who is going to be on Instagram is most likely already there. Instagram is not growing exponentially, as some might have you think. And, within the next couple of years growth will become fairly stagnant. By far the number one social media platform to be on in order to attract customers is still Facebook. Like Instagram, its growth is declining, but that's because an overwhelming percentage of the population is already there. It is said that if

Here at Array Digital we have a policy called open paid time off. What that means is that employees can take off as much time as they need. We don't track the hours or days that they take off at all. There is a record of it but no one actually tracks it for any purpose. Everyone is free to take as much time as they need. We implemented this for a couple of reasons. When we stopped billing by the hour we also stopped tracking the hours that we worked. Since we were no longer tracking hours worked it also made sense to stop tracking the hours that we didn't work. Instead our work focused on client deliverables. We quickly put this new policy into place and learned a few things along the way. First, just because we have open PTO doesn’t mean that people can come and go as they please. We still expect our employees to be working during core business hours. If you get your work done early, and you have some bandwidth, we expect that you will ask others if they need help with something since we work as a team.