Journey To $100 Million

Whenever Erik goes to the gym, he speaks with the top sales rep of the gym. This individual has been working with this particular gym chain for years, and brings in more orders for new members than anyone else. Recently, this individual has been talking about how he is looking for a change in his career. What he wants to do, is take his sales skills and bring them to the other gyms in the chain in order to teach other sales reps how to effectively sell memberships. He had been talking about this a lot, but just recently talked to leadership about it, and is getting the opportunity! The moral of the story is: you can talk about something all you want, but if you do not take action, it is not going to happen. This individual was able to ask leadership for what he wanted for his career, and he got it - something a lot of employees do not do. In business, it is important to speak up and make clear what you want. Sometimes you may not always get the answer you want, but you will not receive anything if you do no

Erik’s parents opened a video store when he was in high school. His dad had just retired from the Air Force, and his mother was working for the Federal Government at the time. To help out, Erik worked at the store on the weekends and a few weeknights. Erik would work the counter checking customers out, and he’d also work the floor helping customers pick videos. During that time he learned a ton about retail and customer interactions. Customers would constantly ask for recommendations on movies to watch. To make sure he could help, Erik assigned himself “homework”, and ended up watching a lot of movies! Inevitability a customer would come up to Erik with a movie in hand and would ask him if he’d seen the movie and recommended it. At first, he would tell them yes, even if he didn’t personally like it. But quickly he realized that it was better to give his honest opinion of the movie. If he didn’t like the movie, or wasn’t a fan of the genre, then he’d tell them. That feedback resonated with customers. Ha

Bob Pizzini, a new acquaintance of Kevin’s and the owner of iFly in Virginia Beach, served in the military for 26 years. Physical fitness was a big part of Bob’s work-life in the military, and continues to be to this day. It so happens that many of the team here at Array Digital are very physically fit. We talk about physical fitness often in the office. As an example, Kevin has been going to the gym at least 3 times a week; Erik is challenging himself to run 1,000 miles this year and also lifts weights at night; Glen lifts weights often; Jamal is an Olympic weightlifter; Shannon rides her bike 15-20 miles...for fun! The others in the office also work out quite a bit. Many of the wins we report in our daily huddle have to do with our physical fitness and achieving our fitness goals. How does physical fitness fit in with your life or your team or your company? It’s great for us to see each other challenging ourselves. But more importantly, we have to stay healthy to continue to do what we do. — Erik J.

About two years ago a salesperson came into our office and left an analysis document for a local company, which was the first time we had seen a digital marketing review. In episode 260 of Journey to $100 Million, Erik talks about the continual development of our digital marketing reviews along with a 17-point checklist. Within this digital marketing review, we systematically go through a prospect’s digital marketing footprint (the good, the bad, and the ugly) and document it. We have experimented with different versions and are constantly editing our template. We now have a digital marketing review that has a 17-point checklist with everything we check for a prospect. This checklist covers all of our services we define as digital marketing: online advertising, social media, SEO, and websites. We look at how prospects are doing in all of these areas, from the outside in. When selling to prospects, Erik greatly recommends you have a process to look into how things are going for that prospect. Sometimes a cus

Everyone has those days where they feel overly tired and wish they can skip their early morning plans. In episode 259 of Journey to $100 Million, listen in as Kevin talks about the “do it anyway” mentality. Kevin gives credit to Andy Forsilla and his podcast, MFCEO, for this hustle mentality. Kevin’s alarm goes off at 5 am to go to the gym before work and some days it’s easier to turn the alarm off and go back to sleep. The real problems arise during the days when you have plenty of time and simply do not want to get out of bed. Kevin has been abiding by the “do it anyway” mentality. He tells himself to act now and to get it done with and get the day started. We only have a certain amount of time on this earth, and you gotta get the work done. Try the “do it anyway” mentality! Wake up, get your tasks done, and you’ll feel way more accomplished. Not only that, but you’ll feel a lot better, and start to overcome the things that normally block you! — Erik J. Olson is an award-winning digital marketer & e

In episode 258 of Journey to $100 Million, Erik discusses how he recently started deleting emails, leaving zero remaining in his inbox. Erik clears out his mailbox fully about every six months, something that causes him many mixed feelings. Although Erik loves it when he clears out his email, he often wonders where all the emails and actions are! However, Erik is able to put his mind at ease when he realizes that he has put together a solid team and assigned them to take over the operational work. Communication with the customer and “boots on the ground” details no longer go through Erik, but instead goes through the team. Inbox zero is beneficial to Erik because he is able to say organized and stay on task, but he must adapt to the fact that he is no longer needed on certain assignments. Overall, he feels accomplished knowing he has an amazing team that can take over the work. When the team can take care of this other work, Erik can go where he is needed. Inbox zero allows Erik to highlight the fact he is

Do you have a bold vision and mission? If you’re subscribed to this podcast, you probably do. However, is it defined and written down? Ours here at Array Digital is to dominate digital marketing in Hampton Roads (what we call our area) - it’s very direct, it has an intent, and it’s something that we can measure. That’s our three-year plan, and our vision is the podcast total. In episode 257 of Journey to $100 Million, Kevin uses Array Digital’s goals as an example to explain how to craft a mission statement for your business. The key takeaways are to make it short, focus on a bold goal you’re excited to accomplish, and keep it simple, stupid! — 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

Here at Array Digital, we no longer bill by the hour. When we did, CEO Erik J. Olson had to do a lot of calculations to figure out - what is the correct hourly rate? There are so many factors at play, and it’s hard to determine what to base your rate on. Is it the going rate nationally or locally? Do you base it off the given skill set or resources use? Or, do you just pick a number you feel the service is valued at? This is only the beginning of the idiosyncrasies of determining wage. To find the minimum, you need to know what your costs are. We still have the spreadsheet that helped us land on a number, but we’ve since switched to monthly charges and yearly salaries to ease on the process. In this episode, Erik will weigh the pros and cons of each method of paying employees and explain why Array Digital ultimately switched to salary to save time, paperwork, and give workers what they’re worth. — Erik J. Olson is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. The Founder & CEO of Array Digit

In episode 255 of Journey to $100 Million, Kevin has a trick to share with you regarding client communication. We have phone calls and meetings on a constant basis with our clients in order to ensure we are doing our job to the best of our ability. But, every other week we send out digital marketing reports to our clients in order to explain the touchpoints, recommendations, and analytics of the campaigns we are running. Along with these reports, we have one of our team members record themselves explaining all aspects of the report so our clients can better understand the information. Sending these videos not only allows us to get the faces of our team in front of our clients, but also provides us insight on how engaged our clients are by seeing if they have opened the reports. These video reports have been a great tool thus far. If you are sending an update to a client for a project, ad campaign, or anything at all, you can use tools like Loom to record yourself along with your screen to improve communi

In episode 254 of Journey to $100 Million, Erik has a tactical piece of advice on a tool that we use for our company: Zapier. Array Digital could not operate without Zapier, especially with the great majority of our work being cloud-based. Here at Array Digital, we are 99% cloud-based. The 1% exception is the video and audio editing we do with downloaded platforms. With Zapier, we are able to connect these cloud-based systems in order for different data to be moved around to its needed platform. For example, our Zapier is configured with things like our Facebook Ads account, so when we get a lead form from FB, this information can automatically get sent to our sale’s Slack channel or inputted into a Google Sheet. The more automated our systems are, the better. This is due to the fact that this does not have to be done by a team member, and a team member does not have to remember to do it. Anytime you have to rely on someone to remember to do a task, it occasionally gets forgotten, and the work does not get

Are your team members sharing their wins with everyone on the team? In episode 253 of Journey to $100 Million, Kevin talks about how we talk about our wins in the huddles we hold every morning. Every morning at 9:17 each team member takes about a minute to talk about their issues, tasks, and then ends with their wins from the day before. Everyone on the team should have a win, and it is really cool to see the wins that everyone has for the day prior, no matter how big or small. Something as small as getting a new book, or something as big as landing a new client counts as a win - we just want to hear the wins our team members are having on a daily basis! No matter what, everyone should have a win, even if they had a bad day. Sometimes it is hard for people to come up with these wins, but is important for everyone to share their wins as it is a great tool for team building. If you are not discussing wins within your company, start doing it - however big or small the wins might be. — Erik J. Olson is an aw

In episode 252 of Journey to $100 Million, Erik talks about how he wants our meetings here at Array Digital to be shorter and better planned. Erik noticed that when we have meetings scheduled, we tend to stick to the duration of the calendar invitation regardless of how much time we really need. Instead, moving forward Erik wants us to set all meetings to half an hour long. In doing this, he hopes that the meetings will kick off on time, an agenda will be created, and if team members only have 30 minutes of time, they will be more organized for the meeting. Stop wasting time, just book the meeting, get in, make a decision, and get out. You cannot press forward if you are sitting in meetings for hours with six team members debating ideas. Keep your meetings short, keep them focused, and get people back to work! — 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

Being a digital marketing agency, we aim to be very active on various digital marketing platforms. In episode 251 of Journey to $100 Million, listen in to Erik as he talks about an experiment he conducted with his Twitter account. Kevin and Erik both have an individual personal brand they are constantly trying to grow. They both support Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. Our current strategy is to post two times per day on Facebook & Instagram, once on LinkedIn, and Twitter happens to be the outlier. Not knowing how to approach twitter, Erik ran an experiment testing if he increased the number of tweets, and focused on a topic to determine if it would grow his following. Before that, he would not use a strategy, but instead, just post his thoughts. Erik decided to talk about the topic of entrepreneurialism on Twitter, and post a lot more actively using the Buffer application. This experiment has shown tremendous results, growing his following from 650 to 2,596! If you are on Twitter, be sure to

Kevin once took on a project he didn't think he could succeed in, however, he took it on anyway and ended up giving back the client’s payment. In episode 250 of Journey to $100 Million, Kevin explains this situation, and what he learned from it. Back in the day, Kevin met with a potential client and went over the functions and features of the site they wanted to build. Kevin knew it would be difficult, and he worried that his team did not have the capabilities to build it. Therefore, Kevin decided to give it a shot himself. About two months in, the demos of the site were not working properly and he came to the realization he could not complete this project. Unfortunately, the client ended up asking for the money back. Kevin speaks on how he now understands he should not have attempted this project, especially knowing that his own employees would not be able to take on the project either. Fast forward to today, and Kevin now knows to consult his team and only pursue work that he knows would be manageable.

In the early days of ID Web, the size of Kevin’s team used to matter so that he would be able to stand out as a company instead of as an individual. In episode 248 of Journey to $100 Million, Kevin explains how having a small team is preferred here at Array Digital. When Kevin ran ID Web, he wanted to let prospects know that his company had way more capabilities than just a one man team. Kevin hoped to show he had a team of experts and wanted to look bigger so that he could land better opportunities. Fast forward to today, and Kevin prefers the small team we have at Array Digital. It is great to have a team to get the job done, but your goal should not be to have as many people as possible. We are growing rapidly, and will need to continuously hire new team members, but the revenue to employee ratio is our main concern. We do not want to just hire people and then not be able to pay our employees the salary they deserve, give good raises, purchase new equipment, etc. The more profitable we are, the more o

About a month ago, we signed a new client here at Array Digital. In episode 247 of Journey to $100 Million, Erik talks about how we, unfortunately, had to terminate this client’s contract. After we sign a new client, we go through a routine onboarding process. In this process, we have our project manager, Jamal, set up a kickoff meeting with the client and our operations team. With this particular client, Jamal sent out an email to set up this meeting but received no response. He followed up with a second email, even calling the office as well - still no response. We even had Glen, the account manager, go to the client’s office just to find out the point of contact had gone AWOL. At this point, it had been three weeks since the contract had been signed, and we were completely blocked from doing any work. A lot of the times when we get blocked by a client, Erik tells the team to do whatever it takes to get the information/resources needed in order to get the work done. In this case, we were unable to begin

When Erik transitioned from being a DOD contractor to starting his own company, he realized the need to let everyone know this transition was taking place. In episode 245 of Journey to $100 Million, Erik talks about the importance of letting your connections know about the work you are doing. When Erik made the switch to commercial work, he created a printed announcement and sent it to all 235 contacts he had an address for. This was more meaningful than an email, and let everyone know what he was doing so they could hire or refer him. You cannot just tell people what you are doing, and expect it to sink in. You have to tell everyone you know, on a frequent basis, what you are doing. Make it crystal clear what you do, put it in writing, and get it in front of everyone you know. It’ll lead to business and referrals! — 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 pod

For the first decade of running his own business, Kevin would work late into the night to ensure all his work had been completed. In episode 244 of Journey to $100 Million, Kevin shares the reasoning behind making the switch from working late nights, to being an early bird. Back in the day, Kevin would work his normal business hours just like everyone else. In doing so, throughout the day, he felt as if he was always playing catchup with emails, phone calls, one-off tasks, etc. During core business hours, Kevin would have to attend meetings, manage team projects, and ensure his company was running smoothly. After the day's work was over, and Kevin had eaten dinner, he would get back on his laptop and crank out work with Jason, our web developer. During this time there were no distractions, it was quiet, and he could take care of the work he wasn’t able to get to during the day. About two to three years ago, Kevin made the switch to the working early mornings. Now, Kevin wakes up at 5 am and is able to get m

How do you go about charging your clients for the services you provide? In episode 243 of Journey to $100 Million, listen in to Erik as he explains the different pricing recipes almost every agency owner follows. Most agencies start off charging by the hour for their services, maybe $50-$75/hour. The reality with hourly wages is that you are working your tail off, without gaining all of the monetary value you are expecting. The next step would be to charge by the project. With that, you take on a risk with a fixed price project, having to deal with administrative burden, defining a scope of work, as well as having to deal with change orders. Most agencies like to avoid all the weight that comes along with per-project pricing, so most owners move away from that and go into pricing like retainers and recurring revenue. How do you price recurring revenue? You could price based on the value you are delivering due to your skill set/time, based on what the market says the value is, or you could charge based on w

When you are at a business event or meeting, there is a big difference between networking and business dating. In episode 242 of Journey to $100 Million, listen in to Kevin as he shares how to get the most use out of networking events. With Kevin’s previous start-up company, networking became the single most important aspect of growing the company. Networking drove business, got leads, and gained new contacts. Here at Array Digital, Kevin’s network is still what we rely on to this day. When at events and meetings, it is easy to get trapped in your comfort zone and only speak to individuals you already are acquainted with, which ends up being a big waste of your time. When you are at these events you do not want to be business dating: hanging with connections that you already know. The goal should be to have a plan with a purpose when going to these events. You should know who you are going to talk to, who is going to be there, and if you already know someone there, maybe even ask who they can get you in fr