Journey To $100 Million

Every month, Erik looks at the company’s financial statements - bank statements and credit card statements. He looks through each line item one by one and questions whether or not the company needs that thing still. Almost without fail, he finds something every month that we can either cut or reduce. Each time, he’s cutting probably at least $100 in recurring fees. He’s happy to spend the money if it’s going to get us ahead. It’s important to be ruthless about your expenses. If it’s unimportant or wasteful, you should cut it. These expenses could start popping up all over your company and while some are fine, you should pay attention to lowering your expenses. — 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 fi

Recently at a black-tie event, Erik ran into his lawyer, Gabe McCoy, whom he talks to a lot about entrepreneurialism. Gabe has been going out to Dallas for several years getting work. Gabe was the one that originally planted an idea in Erik of doing something similar in Orlando which Erik has talked about many times before. Gabe said things are going very well for them there as the rates are better and the economy is much better in Dallas. The difference between what he’s doing and what we did is the amount of time he’s spending networking in Dallas. What we did was schedule meetups, fly in the day of, host the meetup, then fly back out shortly after. We were busy so we didn’t dedicate enough time to cultivate relationships with people down there in between the meetings. What Gabe is doing is much more calculated. He started off once a quarter then increased the frequency to once a month and now he’s going for a whole week every single month. And it’s working for him! This is a great model if you want to c

Every once in awhile, Erik has to come in and do extra work outside of the regular 9-5 because most of that time is dedicated to assisting employees, conducting meetings, etc. He’s realized that his work here is not to get his own work done but to make sure that the team is on course for the mission and remove any barriers that might show up. If he wants to do something extra like record podcast episodes or write a blog post, he has to do it in the early hours or on the weekend. Find what time works for you and reschedule yourself so you can get your work done as well as helping out your team.

Have you ever had a subscription service that kept charging your credit card even after you tried to get them to stop? This has happened a couple of times for Erik. The first time was when he and Kevin first merged companies over 2 years ago. There was some overlap in the services that they used and they’d cancel service for the redundancies. One such service was Vonage that Kevin used at his old office. Vonage refused to cancel it and wouldn’t even discuss the account with Erik when he called because the account was under the name of an employee who no longer worked for the company. After 2-3 months of continuing to get charged, Erik came up with a plan to get a prepaid VISA debit card for about $20. He went into the account and changed the payment method to the prepaid card. And all of a sudden they were out of it. In a more recent and slightly different circumstance, you have to give Google a credit card if you use Google Maps on your website. He did the same thing with the prepaid account and gave th

In business when you’re done doing work, you send out an invoice complete with a payment term which is how many days you allow your client until they’re supposed to pay you in a system called Accounts Receivable. We track all of it down to the invoice and client levels. The higher your AR, the more money you don’t have that you’ve already done work on. Your goal should be to get your AR down as low as possible and that doesn’t mean just not working for the clients; it means collecting your payment as quickly as possible. We are moving towards net 0 which is how many days you give your clients in order to pay their bill which means on the first of every month, we bill their credit card or ACH and then do the work for the rest of the month. That’s what we’re doing for all new clients but we have old clients who are on terms. When Erik first started working for himself, he followed the terms that the government does which is net 30 meaning he wouldn’t get paid until a month after he’s started work for the cl

You probably know a couple of companies that specialize in a certain platform. There’s a common phrase, “The riches are in the niches,” and while that can be a good route to take, it can also be dangerous. Why? Because platforms come and go. For example, what if you were one of the influencers who focused solely on Vine? Then when Vine became uncool all of a sudden, they stuck with it until it shut down. The people that stuck with it until the end went down with the sinking ship that was Vine. That is very risky. So you can’t just focus on one platform. If you don’t have a lot of time for social media and decide to curate and build up your audience on just one platform, that’s different than focusing your entire business around it. That’s one thing we do not do at Array Digital; we are very platform-agnostic. For example, we are not a company that advertises solely on Facebook or solely on Google so if either one of those platforms falls to the wayside, we just shift our business to whatever is new and h

Erik and Kevin decided to hire another salesperson in addition to Kevin who is a business developer. Instead of simply putting an ad in a newspaper (which you should really stop doing) or online somewhere, we wanted to first get the message out ourselves. So Erik got in front of the camera and laid out exactly what he wanted out of a prospect. That message was put out on all of the company’s social media channels. That same day, multiple resumes came through that were super highly qualified and have been following our company for a while. This was great because it was people who we’ve been following and who have been following us, have a genuine interest in our company, and took action. That is the power of social media. You can put any message out into the world and craft your message for your audience and it’ll register with them much more than going the typical route. Build an audience and see how you can use it. — Erik J. Olson is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. The Founder &

“Lose an hour in the morning and you will spend all day looking for it.” Kevin used to work late and get up late but in the last 2 years, he’s been waking up at 5 am and no it wasn’t an easy change but it is one that’s changed his life and increased his productivity. Before 9 am and by the time he gets into the office, Kevin has gone to the gym, checked his email, listed out his tasks for the day, taken his kids to school, driven 30 minutes into the office, checked the news, and maybe had a bit to eat somewhere in there. Even if he’s unable to get tasking done throughout the day, he’s at least knocked those things out of the way so that if his day is filled with client or internal meetings, he’s still gotten stuff done. After dinner, he puts the kids to bed and does a bit more work, checking to see if he’s missed anything and following up on some tasks. Are you a morning person? What’s your routine like? — Erik J. Olson is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. The Founder & CEO of

Do you have a recruiting process? A defined process for finding quality people that want to work for you and how do you determine whether or not to bring them in? We have a very defined process for creating a job ad, posting that, and where we post those ads. Once people do apply, we have a set of screening questions that go to every single person that applies, looking for obvious red flags that will keep them from moving forward through the hiring process. Find out what our 5 questions are by listening to this episode. — 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

Erik now works under the philosophy that if you screw something up, it’s best to just own up to the mistake. At his previous jobs, he would play the corporate game where he just wouldn’t mention it, would imply that other people made the mistake, or he’d work around it. When he left that company, he and a guy named Clint Stevens formed a business intelligence company that did work for the US Navy. It was mostly a two-man shop. One time he was in a meeting and the customer was pissed because something had gone awry. Clint came out and took complete responsibility for the mistake. Erik could visibly see the project manager that was in that meeting visibly relax a bit and his anger subsided. He switched gears from complaining about the problem to helping us fix the problem. This caused Erik to fix his own tactic and he saw the same result; people started off mad but the moment you own up to your mistake, they are a lot less angry. Now, he’s not saying take the blame for something you didn’t do but if you a

At Array Digital, we have an entry fee and what we call it is “fundamental Professional Services.” It’s a group of services and products that we offer to every single one of our clients, it’s non-negotiable, but it does have a fee so essentially it’s an entry fee. We came up with this because we want to work with larger clients and this fee kind of pushes away the smaller clients who won’t be able to justify working with us for just one service because these will be automatically added. It also allows us to offer a certain level of service and maintain profitability. Our professional services include our monthly calls and meetings, the software we use to track everything, the video reporting, creative services, a dedicated project manager, all bundled together. If we have a client that doesn’t want to pay those fees will probably not be a fit for us because they won’t see the value in these services while the larger clients we have love these services and don’t even bat an eye at their price. Our entry fe

When Erik first started his custom software development business 6 years ago, he needed a way of keeping track of tasks for both the company and the clients. They tried to build their own task tracking tool and they ended up abandoning it. It took countless hours to build a tool that, in the end, is an inferior tool - it sucked compared to the tools they could just pay for. You have to make a decision: am I willing to use a tool that doesn’t do 100% of the work I need it to or spend potentially thousands of man-hours to build a tool that you’re probably not ready to build? Find a tool that is a close fit and start using it. Don’t spend time and money and effort that should be used building your company and satisfying your clients building a tool that will only be used internally. Keep your focus on your internal processes and keeping your clients happy. — 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 $1

Recently, Kevin has been organizing his social media content (particularly on LinkedIn) into themes for each day of the week. He created a design board with 2 themes for each day of the week and designed post graphics to go along with each of those days, giving him lots of content to work with. It’s resulted in consistency and an increase in engagement on all his posts. Here are a few ideas that you can try yourself. - Motivation Monday - Trend Tuesday: stats, business trends, digital marketing, etc. - Team Wednesday: he features someone on the team or the whole team just to show the gratitude he feels for his team. - Throwback Thursday or an event - Win Friday: shouts out something great that happened during the past few weeks You should, of course, be posting other things but this takes care of hitting a minimum number of posts. — 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 Briefi

One of the things we do very well at Array Digital is communicating with our prospects and clients. We put a lot of effort into communicating with our clients. Back about 12 years ago, Erik worked for a retired Commander in the US Navy at a DoD contractor. He told Erik that the biggest cause of issues in the US Navy was communication. It stuck with Erik that communication is extremely important from that point. At Array Digital, we’ve put a process in place so that we’re communicating everything with our client and they’re communicating everything with us. We started off doing digital marketing reports to give them an analysis of what we’re doing and the difference our efforts were making. We did this weekly and most of the clients didn’t watch because they couldn’t keep up with it so we went to monthly and found that that wasn’t frequent enough. So we’ve settled on every 2 weeks. We tell them the good, the bad, and the ugly plus our plan of attack. We also have a monthly call and talk about what happene

Recently we had the pleasure of unseating a competitor that worked with our prospective client and it all culminated in us writing a letter for the prospect to fire the other vendor. It was a very rewarding feeling. The way we actually got this client was a bit different than the process usually goes: they were someone on our radar but not someone we were prospecting. Kevin went to meet with them about something completely unrelated and pitched our services a little despite feeling like there wasn’t much we could really do for them and their already well-run online presence. They did, however, start to uncover some things they could use help with. They saw how passionate we were and the communication we have and became very interested in us. The prospect wasn’t sure how to let go of the other marketing company without completely cutting ties and ruining that relationship so she asked us to draft an email to do so. — Erik J. Olson is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. The Founder &am

Today we’re joined by a special guest: our administrative assistant, Katya! Years ago, Katya opened and closed a Latin dance studio because, like many new business owners, she overlooked a lot of steps required in starting a business. One of the mistakes they made right off the bat was overpaying for a space in a prime location in Virginia Beach when in retrospect she knows they should have built up their clientele first or renting space from an established dance studio. Second, they didn’t have a plan in place for covering expenses in the beginning. They underestimated the costs of starting up the business and operating it on a daily basis but they also relied on credit instead of cash to cover those expenses. Those first few months were all about getting the business up and running and there were a lot of startup costs. Looking back, Katya knows that they should have had a better plan in place for covering operating expenses for at least the first 6 months or until they became profitable. And they sho

One of Erik’s friends recently asked why most of his podcast episodes are about the negative things going on in the business, surely there are some positives. And he’s right but Erik talks about the negatives because he knows there’s so much potential here to be something really amazing and whenever the team does stumble, there’s the disappointment that the company isn’t perfect. If you can stop making stupid mistakes and can learn from them, you’ll just continue to improve over time. There are certain mistakes that he’s told the team can NEVER happen again. For example, there was an issue with the Contact Us forms on a few websites that we run (he’s talked about it on the podcast before). This mistake hasn’t happened again because we found an automatic way of handling it. When a problem comes up, focus on it, then form a process around it to make sure it never happens again. If it continues to happen, then you’ve got another problem you need to address. — Erik J. Olson is an award-winning digital marke

Erik recently reconnected with a contact he met about 3 years ago when he was doing software development. Since then, Erik has focused on digital marketing and his contact is now an executive director at an organization that throws a lot of events in downtown Norfolk. Reconnecting with him was an opportunity for both of them even though it didn’t result in an exchange of work. Anytime you can give someone a summary of what you and your company are doing is beneficial for you especially if you’ve changed courses since the last time you interacted with them. Erik has done this a few times since being in business for himself by sending a letter to all the people he had physical addresses for, explaining what kind of business he’s started and that if they know anyone who needs those services that they can reach out to him. — 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

Erik’s first job out of college was as a construction engineer because his major in college was Civil Engineering. He moved to Norfolk and very quickly there was a project where a couple of old buildings were being demolished and some guys decided they were going to extract the copper and make a couple of bucks on the side. So one Saturday they went out and were cutting copper piping out of the crawlspace. The superintendent would drive it out in his pick-up truck to the recycling facility load after load as they were cutting the copper out all day. He was the only person who knew for sure how much money they were making but at the end of the day, he paid the crew $500 each. Erik was young and naive so not only did he think to ask the right questions about the legality of this situation but he’s also sure the superintendent made out with more money than he paid the crew members. A couple of months later, another superintendent was caught taking a spool of copper wire out of a building. He got busted by th

There’s an email newsletter named Help a Reporter Out (HARO) which Erik has used off and on over the years. This is the concept: there are reporters at publications that want a source for an article they are writing. They put out a query saying they need someone with this experience or this expertise to comment on an article I’m writing. These queries go out to people like Erik who want PR three times a day and if your expertise matches the query, you contact them and they’ll use you as an expert source in their article. Erik was very into them, responding to the queries at least once a day about a year ago, last holiday season. Many of them were about predictions for digital marketing trends 2019. This was perfect because it would position Erik as an expert in the digital marketing field and this could be an opportunity to reach people that are reading these publications. Erik was getting a success rate of about 50% and got cited on a lot of websites, in a lot of articles, with hyperlinks back to our websi