Journey To $100 Million

As you may have heard in a previous episode, Kevin is currently reading multiple books to increase his knowledge in sales and to grow Array Digital. One of these books, which he has been reading with our Sales Manager Glen, is called SPIN Selling. In episode 197 of Journey to $100 Million, Kevin shares a big tip that he came across while reading the book thus far. In SPIN Selling, the author, Neil Rackham, gives a lot of advice on a sales method proven to work through research studies. Within this method, he talks about how "closing tactics" do not work on larger sales. In smaller sales (at a couple hundred bucks), closing tactics can come across as pushy, but because they have the product you want and there will be no need to interact with them again, you still buy the product. For larger sales, you are dealing with companies that have to trust you. Because of this, closing techniques just do not work. You must develop a relationship to find the problems facing the company and discover solutions in order to

In episode 196 of Journey to $100 Million, Kevin has a special treat for you all! He shares the books he has been reading as of late that have continued to teach him useful ideas/lessons that we have implemented here at Array Digital. Kevin switches off between listening and reading the actual copy of these books. Sometimes it is hard to find time during the day to read so it's easier to listen to the audio version of these books during Kevin’s 30-minute commute to and from work. Some read, some listen, some do both - it is whatever works best for you! Kevin has recently been trying to read on a more consistent basis and has made good progress throughout the year thus far! He is not intrigued by every single thing in these books, but shows that if you are able to pull just one little nugget of useful information out of each book, it is totally worth the time! If you take at least one new idea/lesson from the books you are reading and use it to improve your company, even in the most minor ways, then it was

Here at Array Digital, we have a weekly management meeting every Monday morning. During these meetings, Erik’s first agenda topic is to review the to-do list from the previous week’s meeting to see what progress has been made. In episode 195 of Journey to $100 Million, Erik explains how a recent management meeting has helped him understand what tasks are most important to the Array Digital team. In this meeting, when Erik asked what work had been done since the last meeting, he was frustrated upon realizing nothing had been done. Erik does not like the fact that the only work getting done is in the meeting itself. The goal should be for each person to do their work and then the four individuals in the meeting review that work to figure out the next step. It is essential to understand whether something is critical to the success of Array Digital. If a normal week goes by and the work does not get done, then that work is obviously just not important. What Erik hopes to do now is acknowledge that if something

In previous episodes, Erik has talked a lot about our onboarding process here at Array Digital. We are proud of this process because we understand how critical it is to being successful for our clients, and know how much communication and configurations are needed during this 2 to 3-week period. In episode 194 of Journey to $100 Million, Erik talks about setting expectations for this onboarding process we have created. The onboarding process allows us to complete the work needed before we can actually produce the deliverables we were hired for. For a long time, we were not sure how we should handle this onboarding process and couldn’t decide whether or not we should get paid during this timeframe. We came to the realization that we were spending a good portion of time and energy during this period that was clearly billable work. Although you may not see evidence of the work, our onboarding process is real work, producing real deliverables. After we realized that onboarding was billable work, we wanted to m

Back in Erik’s project management days, he received an amazing opportunity to oversee 5 new projects. Being assigned to this many projects showed the progress he was making in his career, the respect he had gained from his superiors, and his enthusiasm towards this opportunity. In episode 193 of Journey to $100 Million, listen in as Erik shares a huge lesson he learned from one of those projects. When Erik was reviewing each of these projects, he quickly determined one of them was in deep trouble. No one was content with the performance of the project including the client, employer, and team. After making sure the other projects were doing okay, he decided to focus his efforts towards improving the struggling project while he still could, before this became a failure. Although Erik put 95% of his time into this project, it never truly improved and no one could ever figure out how to make it any better. To put it frankly, this project was miserable for Erik. One day the client just canceled it and Erik’s 4 ot

In episode 192 of Journey to $100 Million, listen in to Erik as he speaks on a very useful marketing tool: Buffer. Buffer is a tool for social media management that allows you to create a buffer (aka queue) of future posts and schedule them out. Posting on your own is a good technique, but the problem when running a company like Erik is that you forget about posting on social media until late at night or when you are waking up early, which are not ideal times to post and engage with your target audience. So with Buffer, every time you think of a post at a time that may not be ideal, you upload it to Buffer which will then post it to the platform of your choosing at the time you’ve selected. About a month ago, Erik experimented with his Twitter posting 10 times a day. There was no way Erik could post 10 times a day at appropriate times because he runs a company and is busy all throughout ideal posting hours. Therefore, Erik used Buffer in order to load up all the tweets for the day early in the morning whe

Kevin has previously been talking about guarding time, blocking time, and many different ways he plans to be more efficient on a day-to-day basis. In episode 191 of Journey to $100 Million, Kevin talks about the importance of time management and setting priorities in order to be more efficient and get the important work completed! This tip was given to Kevin from, friend and colleague, Zack Miller. What Zack suggested for Kevin was to prioritize the tasks he has to do throughout the day as priority 1, 2, and 3. So, when looking at all the things he must do everyday, Kevin should write them out, and then give them priorities accordingly. Priority 1 is the tasks that you absolutely must get done, and cannot finish the day without - and then goes down the spectrum from there. Your goal should always be to avoid ending your day without getting through your priority 1, 2, and 3 tasks, but worst case scenario, you absolutely have to get priority 1 tasks done. Once able to get priority 1, 2, and 3 tasks done, you

If you do not have a set advertising budget, what are you doing to acquire new clients? In episode 190 of Journey to $100 Million, listen in to Erik as he explains the importance of advertising when trying to grow your business. It has been shown that most legit businesses (businesses that have actual operations) need to advertise in order to get a steady stream of new clients coming in. If you “advertise” through word of mouth, you are not exactly marketing for your company unless you are putting a real significant effort behind gaining referrals. Gaining referrals is great, but the main goal of advertising is to gain new prospective clients and customers that are attracted to your company and offerings. There are a couple different ways to do that, but for us as digital marketers we like to use websites, SEO, social media, and online advertising such as Facebook or Google. In order to get a start, most companies will put an actual budget in place for advertising. When putting this in place, it is common

Kevin has recently been talking about how he plans to guard his time in order to better prioritize his tasking. In episode 189 of Journey to $100 Million, Kevin talks about how he plans to increase his work efficiency through a useful time management method called time blocking. Kevin does not have this strategy fully incorporated into his everyday schedule yet, but he knows what it is, how to use it, and plans to implement this strategy ASAP! Time blocking is a type of scheduling method that allows you to block off fixed portions of time to work on specific tasks. For example, in a previous episode Kevin talked about how he needs sales to be his main focus for now. With time blocking, Kevin would set aside a specific time to solely focus on sales and prospecting. For him, he is going to have time blocked on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday (Monday and Fridays are not the best times to sell and prospect). During these days, he is going to set aside a specific amount of time every week, on a recurring basis,

As Erik continues to do more speaking engagements, he realized the need for some sort of contract for these extra business ventures. In episode 188, listen in as Erik explains the contractual process he has created for these engagements, and his reasoning behind it. Erik felt the need for a speaking engagement contract because he wanted to set expectations for the customers he plans on speaking for. Erik wants zero ambiguity between him and the customer, and aims to make it clear what the customer will receive from him. Within this contract, Erik lists out all the different things the customer should expect from Erik based on the conversations he has had with them. Things like how Erik will promote, when he is going to arrive, and the talk he plans to give are included in this contract. Erik’s goal is to handle these speaking engagements the same as any business transaction. This contract is about one or two pages, has a signature block, and that's about it. Erik wants to keep these contracts simple for no

How do you manage all of the things that your team needs to get done? In episode 186 of Journey to $100 Million, listen in to Erik as he explains how we track our tasking here at Array Digital, and how we previously transitioned to a new software. A task tracker is a piece of software that tracks all of the tasks that need to be done within a company, and is essential to any business. Going back to when Array Digital was a software development only company, we used a software called GitHub - which was perfect for our individual tasking when building software. As we transitioned into a digital marketing agency, we started to hack together different solutions and found the need for recurring issues, which GitHub did not offer. We did not want to switch task trackers if we did not need to, so we implemented a lot of processes in order to ensure that the tasks (most recurring) that we needed for operations could be completed. After we fully transitioned to a digital marketing agency, we realized that we were ju

In a previous episode, Kevin talked about how the buzz we have created at Array Digital had a positive effect on our sales, but that is not the only aspect of our business that our brand awareness has helped! In episode 185, Kevin talks about the impacts on recruiting as a result of our brand buzz. Recently, we posted a video that Erik recorded to our social media platforms stating that Array Digital is looking to hire a sales professional. The video explained the position while also stating some requirements that we are looking for within this position. We are currently trying to grow our sales team, and knew that this could jumpstart our process. Within hours, this post got tons of exposure, with a large amount of likes and shares. We did not pay for an ad to boost these posts, all we did was post this video to our platforms, and we had tons of individuals reaching out to us! Not only that, but these resumes we are starting to receive are high caliber sales individuals that have the potential to be great

Everyone once and awhile, Erik will have our team here at Array Digital post to social media on his behalf. In episode 184 of Journey to $100 Million, Erik explains some issues we’ve had dealing with Erik’s social media postings. In the beginning, Erik would have our team post every once in a while. The team would post things like if he had a video created, they would post that on his behalf. But, over time, Erik started to ramp up the quantity of social media content he pushed out on his personal brand account. Erik’s personal brand is on four main channels: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. As we ramped up the quantity of this content, Erik was not able to keep up with all the postings - and now we have a full time team member that takes care of all social media for us. Now, our social media expert is doing a lot of Erik’s social media posting for him. Most of these posts consist of a regurgitation of something Erik has already produced. We even use these Journey episodes as content on social me

In a previous episode, Kevin talked about all we have done to create buzz for Array Digital within our operating area. In episode 183 of Journey to $100 Million, Kevin talks about how this buzz has impacted our sales! Creating awareness for your company is no easy feat, but the rewards you gain are well worth the hard work and dedication. As we follow along our sales process, we are starting to see that prospects are recognizing our company from our podcast, social media, meetups, and all of the other business ventures we have capitalized on. Even our sales manager Glen experienced this while prospecting right when he started working for our company! This prospect knew who Array Digital was because Erik had previously invited them to Marketers Anonymous, and it garnered attention. This individual felt more comfortable with us, and knew where we stood within our industry. Because of this, it was very easy for Glen to talk to this prospect and get a meeting set up. We are starting to realize that this buzz w

Have you ever been pleased to be disappointed? This is kind of an odd question, but in episode 182 of Journey to $100 Million, Erik talks about a situation where he was disappointed, but came to the realization that this specific feeling of disappointment was actually a good thing! We previously had gotten a deal for a relatively small amount of money: $1,200/month. This was a good deal, but it just wasn’t that big compared to the deals we had recently been getting. We had recently been getting multi-thousand dollar deals (per month) upwards of $10k a month from certain clients. So for us, getting a $1,200 a month deal for a project with a year long minimum engagement felt like a disappointment. It just didn’t seem like the size of projects that we had been getting. This was interesting to Erik, because after he got over his initial disappointment of getting this new contract (which didn’t make any sense to him,) he started to embrace it! Erik realized the reason he was disappointed was because it had meant

Are you creating buzz for your company within your community? In episode 181 of Journey to $100 Million, listen in as Kevin explains how we have done absolutely everything we can to create a name for Array Digital in our operating area. The region we mainly service is made up of 7 cities, and is referred to as the Hampton Roads area. We have done everything we can to hammer away and create a buzz about our company within our community in order to get the word out about who we are, and what we do! One of the ways we started to create buzz, was by creating a bold mission statement. Our mission is to dominate digital marketing in the Hampton Roads area. We have made this statement public, and it is completely out there including our social media platforms as well as our website. Not only that, but we created an even bolder vision statement. Within the next 10 years, we hope to grow to $100 million in recurring revenue. Stating this vision is one of the many ways we hope to stand out amongst our competition. A

Here at Array Digital, we have what’s called a KPI dashboard. KPI stands for key performance indicators, and this dashboard is a collection of those KPIs. In episode 180 of Journey to $100 Million, Erik shares with you all the benefits that come along with measuring and tracking your performance through KPIs. Every Wednesday morning we look at and review our company’s KPIs after spending Tuesday afternoon gathering the data. We have a spreadsheet that is shown for the whole company at once, and it has about a dozen KPIs on there. These KPIs vary from things like how much new revenue we’ve collected over the last week, how much we’ve lost, NPS (net promoter score), the number of times we have posted on social media, and a whole bunch of other stats. This started about a year and a half ago. Back then, we did not understand what KPIs were important, and what were not, but over time we continually refined our KPIs, and every quarter we updated our goals. We also have these KPIs color coded to where if we are

Have you ever added automation in your business where automation was not needed? We have here at Array Digital. In episode 179, listen in to Kevin as he shares a couple examples of how we realized that you must be careful with what you automate within your organization. One aspect of our business we tried to automate was the marketing for ourselves. We are a digital marketing agency, but when marketing for ourselves, Kevin came to the realization that we went a little overboard with automation through using gated content, funnels, and other automation tools. The reality was that we did not gain enough leads to deem this automation successful. We are a very personable, face-to-face, relationship type of company. If you hire Array Digital, it is a partnership: we sit down with you, spend time figuring your company out, and we understand that hiring us is a big decision. We understand when you hire us, you are putting faith in us with your entire marketing and advertising budget. Because of this we can’t gain

We recently got a loan from the bank, and Erik is pretty excited about it. In episode 178 of The Journey to $100 Million Podcast, listen in as Erik explains our reasoning behind extending the line of credit for our business. We already had a line of credit for $25k, and rarely used it. We would borrow a thousand here and there, and pay it back very quickly - but did not necessarily need the line of credit. But, the point is that it’s always there if we need it, and every time we use this money and pay it back, we are building up credit. We recently got this credit line extended, which is the loan that Erik is speaking on. We now have a $75k line of credit. We are not tapping into it anymore than we have in the past, but it obviously gives us more padding in case we need it for certain situations. The main reasoning for getting a line of credit is for cash flow purposes. For instance, let’s say you do a bunch of work for a client and complete it before you can even invoice the client. A lot of companies inv

In episode 177 of Journey to $100 Million, Kevin brings attention to an issue that he has seen with some of our top clients, our highest paying clients, and clients that we have built a very strong relationship with. These clients are very comfortable with us, they like us, they trust us, and have full confidence in us. So you may be thinking, what’s the issue here? Every other week we send out a digital marketing report to each of our clients sharing the clients’ data, along with a video our digital marketing manager creates explaining the successes or failures of their marketing campaigns. What we found, is that since some of these clients are so comfortable with us, they do not watch these reports. They do not interact with the reports, and sometimes it is even difficult to get them on a call or meet with them to discuss this data every month due to their full trust in us. The problem is, we still need to get in front of them, and sit down to make sure there is full transparency, as well as ensuring that