Balancing People, Processes, and Profitability in Digital Marketing

Hey, hi everyone. Now, welcome to your show, E-Coffee with Experts. This is your host, Ranmay here. And today we have Danielle Matthews, who’s the Director of Operations at Vendilli Digital Group with us. Hey, Danielle, how’s it going?

It’s going well. How about yourself?

All good. I can’t really complain. Krija, Danielle, before we move any forward, let’s get to know the human behind the mic. Why don’t you talk us through your journey thus far, how it started, what are you doing right now? And also more about Vendilli Digital Group, what you guys specialize in, what are your core competencies, and we take it off from there.

Okay, yeah. I work for Vendilli Digital Group. We are a Pittsburgh-based digital marketing agency. We specialize in web design development, SEO, PPC, and HubSpot Consulting. We are HubSpot platinum tiered solutions provider. And really what we do with our service offerings, our goal is to help our clients grow their business. And we like to do that by using a data-driven approach. And what we do is we use that data and we combine it with our service offerings as a means to generate more sales opportunities for them, digitally and beyond. My background, I started As a graphic designer, I went to the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. I graduated with my degree in Graphic Design, got my career start, just going down the design path. I had a little bit of management experience from college, just work-related on the job. I slowly worked my way into more management roles and creative management, art direction, things like that. It was a nice blend of my creative skills and also my logical capabilities, my ability to reason and problem-solve that way. When I joined then Daily Digital Group, I joined as our senior art director. I’d already had a couple of years of experience leading creative teams under my belt.

But then I moved into operations just because the agency itself grew tremendously over the last few years. We had acquired a couple of different companies, and we just experienced the explosion. We needed to have a more defined operations department. When the opportunity presented itself, I was happy to move into the role just to get a little bit more of the business side of things and help keep things running day to day, refining our processes, and just making sure that what we were doing was reflective of the work we wanted to do, and everybody was on the same page with that.

Absolutely. Understanding how to make profits, revenue. It has its own challenges and the fun side to it as well. Then you have transitioned from art to graphic design and now into operations. Then probably have gone through this half the cycle, if not the full cycle. What inspired this evolution? What were the initial challenges? I mean, this is not an easy shift from a career standpoint. What were the initial challenges? Tell us more about operations. It’s madness, right?

It is a little bit of madness, but I do enjoy the chaos. I enjoy being busy.

You don’t say that. I understand. Yeah.

I enjoy being busy and doing multiple things. I like being a resource. I don’t really do well being bored. So that is definitely helpful with this role. I mean, really, from the art to operation side, when I’d set out my art career in high school, I was on a fine arts track. I was into drawing and painting and things like that. I actually started at the School of Visual Arts in New York, which is a very perceived historical art school. I set the bar really high just to prove to myself that I could do it, but I went into it, admittedly not knowing what I would do with it. So when I got there in my first semester, I realized really quickly that a life in fine arts was going to be very, very difficult. But I had a graphic design course where they went through the Adobe Creative Suite at the time, and we learned all of the different tools and the applications of it. And I really grew to love commercial art. And I was like, you know what? This is my ticket out of the parents’ basement vibe. This is the way that I’ll get an actual job, and I can do what I love, but still be profitable and make money with it.

So I ended up going into the commercial side of things. I ended up transferring back home once in the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, got my degree, and I was fortunate enough to get right into the job market I started. I’ve been an agency my entire career, so I don’t know anything other than agencies. And it’s been a ride. Agencies are very fast paced. They can be a little grueling at times, but every day is different. And it’s a very unique place to work if you’ve never been in an agency.

Absolutely. Agency life has its own charm. I mean, yeah, it is hectic. It does get hectic, especially in office. I can relate to that. But it has its own fun side. Talking about operations, your current role emphasizes people, processes, a lot of it actually, and then profitability. How do you see all of these three elements interconnected and What strategies do you employ to optimize them as much as possible?

For me, they are very intertwined. Without the right processes in place and then the right people to implement them, it’s going to be very hard to be profitable. And if profitability is the only facet that you’re looking for, you probably don’t have the right measurement in place in terms of the quality, consistency, and then the trust that you’re going to put behind that to really mean anything. You’ll be profitable, but your brand won’t be well known for being anything really great besides just being profitable. People might feel ripped off down the road. In terms of ways to optimize them, for me, it’s a lot of consistency and objective evaluation of what’s working and what’s not working. What could we be doing better? It’s having open conversations about hang-ups on inefficiencies. I personally like to have an open-door policy, and I welcome ideas for improvement. If somebody feels that something’s not working or they have a better way of doing things, I want to hear about them. I want to be looped in so we can figure out how we can be better moving forward in the future. It’s a constant cycle of testing and experimenting and learning and just doing it over over again.

Some of the things that we’ve developed and put in place that have been really helpful, we do project post mortage for every project that we finish in every account if they leave us. And what we do is we sit down and we objectively talk about What went well? What didn’t go well? What are things that we could have done better from this perspective? We get a lot of really good stuff out of it. We get a lot of really good ideas for new processes or service offerings that we may have been missing. It’s just a good way to take a step back and evaluate everything. We also do premortems for projects also. With a premortem, before we start anything, we sit down and it’s similar where we talk about, Okay, let’s imagine that something has failed in this process. What went wrong and where and how do we work to avoid that? A lot of times we develop things out of there that keep things on the rails so that they are profitable. Because what we don’t want to happen is have something it go wrong and it gets so far down the road and it’s a disaster.

We don’t want a project to go off the rails and the quality suffers, or then we end up not being profitable from it.

Now, are you involved in hiring? I’m sure you would be, right?

In hiring, yes.

Okay. So how do you ensure that you build a very strong team? Because while a team is important for any organization and for any department or function for that matter, but in operations, it becomes very critical. So how do you ensure you have the right fit when you are interviewing or are getting a candidate or an employee onboarded?

Yeah. So with that in the hiring process, we really want to take the time to make sure we’re vetting all of our candidates very thoroughly. Usually, we’ll get a bunch of applicants for a certain role, and then one person might sort through them and whittle it down to maybe the top five. And then we’ll work to reach out first-round interviews, and then second-round, we bring them in to meet with the entire leadership team. And there’s four or five of us on our leadership team, so they get to meet a lot of faces if they make it to the second-round. And we all ask different sets of questions, just sit it them in regarding the role. I would say in our hiring process and what we look for, half of it is the skills that you have and that you bring to the table, technically. And then the other half is really in the soft skills, because a lot of times in our field, some tactical skills can be learned. And if you’re just really driven and you have the right soft skills, you can set yourself up to learn those skills and run with them.

That makes all the difference. So we try to be very thorough with our process us. Sometimes it’s round three of hiring, and if we don’t get candidates that really impress us, we’ll go back to the board. We’re very big on right person, right seating our agency. It’s very important to make sure we have the right people in the right roles doing the right thing. Because otherwise, it’s not a great fit. We try to work with people. If there’s challenges that they’re experiencing day to day with the role, and we try to have a model of coaching and counseling and constant clear feedback for them so that they know what to be focusing on and to grow with. That’s really our ultimate goal. We want to keep people on board, but it really starts in that hiring phase of making sure you’re getting the right person in the door to begin with. It’s just taking time and vetting them very, very carefully and thoroughly.

I’m glad you mentioned about they’re going to learn the soft skills side of things because in operation, let’s say project goes wrong, all your skills set go out of the window if the project is not right and the client is yelling at you. It should be so much of thinking on your feet that helps you analyze and then handle the situation which you cannot really find in a skill set point of view from an interview perspective. I’m really glad you mentioned that. And then, yeah, talking from a client perspective, how does a typical onboarding process looks like, Danielle, at your agency? How do you handle the client through the process initially?

So it really starts in the sales process. We take the time to really get to know our clients in the sales process before they even sign, because we want to make sure that we’re a fit for them as much as they’re a fit for us at the end of the day. So there’s a really thorough process that we go through. Sometimes in the sales cycle, multiple people are brought in just to meet them and get an understanding of their needs and what we can do to help them and really assess if it’s going to be a fit or not. Once we sign anybody, our onboard process is pretty thorough. We do kick off meetings just to get the whole team in front of this client. Then from there, our department branch out just based on their needs. We like to tailor what we’re doing, specific to what they’re for. Some folks come to us and they already have an established brand and they don’t need help with their brand. They don’t need brand copywriting or a logo or anything like that. They just need a jump to your website. We really tailor it. Some folks, they’re just starting out or they don’t have that strategy, so we need to approach that.

Our onboarding takes shape based on what stage that they’re at. Some clients, they’re just very put together and they’ve done all of that already, and they have very different goals. We take the time to work with them. Usually, our first month of engagement is a lot of getting to know you. Just different departments will break out and do their own meetings and their own processes to get the information that they need to get started. Then we go on to a bi-weekly meeting maintenance where we have those audiences to ask questions and present work and get understanding from there.

Lovely. I’m talking about operational efficiency. How do you measure that? Because what metrics do you consider as most important while you are tracking your operational efficiency?

The biggest one that we measure internally, we measure employee utilization rate, and we have that set at 80%. What that means is we want 80% of an employee’s time while they’re here to basically be billable work. It’s any work that we can attribute or go back to a client account. If we notice that folks are starting to fall below 80%, it means that we might not have enough things coming in the door, and maybe we need to check our sales pipeline and start bringing some more things in. If they’re any higher than that, tell us, Hey, this person’s probably really stressed out. They have a little bit too much going on. Can we move things around internally if they’re higher or lower than that number? Do we have to balance our work on out better to manage that? That’s the number one that we look at is the utilization rate. But the other things that we look at in terms of operational efficiency, we really try to look at on projects. A lot of estimated versus actual comes into play because really when we’re pricing on projects, whether it’s a retainer model or a custom project quote where it’s just a one-time fee, we really want to make sure that our estimates are as close as possible.

We want to be hitting that on the mark. If we have a custom project and we go way over budget, that’s telling us that we didn’t look at our process thoroughly enough. There were obviously things in here that we didn’t account for. We need to maybe go back and and consider that in our next estimation. If we’re coming in way under, it means we’re very efficient for one, but for two, we probably need to adjust our prices and our estimates be a little bit more reflective of the time it takes us to actually complete a project.

Lovely. Great. Then, Danielle, you have gone through the grind. You have moved across roles, and now, obviously, you’re successfully managing the ops in your agency. What advice would you want give to young professionals who are listening to us today, in a spiraling to build a successful career in digital operations?

My advice to anyone starting out would be, honestly, find somebody above you, find a mentor, and really let them take you under their wing and listen to what they have to say. Always be open to feedback and growing. Always ask what you’re doing better and take that and run with it, because there is nothing more valuable than being given the gift of feedback to grow from it. If that’s what your goal is, if you want to grow and do bigger and better things, you have to be open to feedback and growing, and you’re going to have to put in the time and the hours and the effort, sometimes outside of work, to get that done. But to achieve your goals, it’s life-changing. You have to do all of that to make it happen. But I feel like I wouldn’t be in the position that I’m in if I didn’t have really great mentors who helped me get here.

Lovely.Danielle, thank you so much. This has been a brilliant conversation. For our audiences, if they want to reach out to you, how do they do that?

You can visit our website at www. Vendili. Com. That is spelled V-E-N-D-L-I. Com.

Again, thank you so much, Danielle. It was lovely speaking with you. Cheers.

Thank you so much. I appreciate it.