Adaptability & Empathy: Leading a Team and Future-Proofing SEO with Grant McKinstrie

Hey, hi everyone. Welcome to your show, E-coffee with the experts. This is your host, Ranmay. And today we have Grant, who is the CEO of Digital Position with us. Hey, Grant, how is it going?

It’s going well. How are you? It’s great. Happy to be here. Thank you for having me. Lovely. Yeah, I’m doing well.

Lovely. Again, before you move any forward, let’s get to know the human being in the mic. Why don’t you talk us through your journey thus far? How did you land up in the digital marketing space? How was your earlier life? What’s like? And also more about digital position. The agency, what do you guys do? What do you guys specialize in? So that our audiences know more about the agency, and then we take it off from there.

Yeah, absolutely. So my journey into digital marketing was completely on accident. I feel like I’ve heard a very similar story from a lot of people was they had really no idea in terms of SEO or PPC. Initially, they had no idea that was really a job or anything like that. And originally, I was looking to go to… I went to school for Sport Management and Finance. I originally wanted to work in an athletic department. Then after finishing college and graduating and trying to look for a job afterwards, I was verbally confirmed to get a job in an athletic department. Unfortunately, they had to go through budget cuts, so I got a little screwed over after that. After signing a lease for an apartment, and so I was desperately looking for a job, I worked as a ticketing guy for the local AAA baseball team, and then was told by It was my buddy of mine that I should go look into this SEO position because they just need people for customer service experience. Historically, in most of my jobs, had a lot of climate, just people facing roles. I was a manager at a frozen yogurt store.

I was a concierge manager at a hotel resort. But all in all, it just ended up working out where I had no idea what SEO was. I was just able to talk my way through the interview because I had decent people skills, and they just had me learn SEO on the fly, come back the next week, tell them a little bit about SEO, and then happen to just get a job in digital marketing, having no clue what SEO even was to even begin with. And that was about seven, eight-ish years ago. So it’s been a pretty wild ride to go from starting there, moved over. We worked at that previous agency for about three and a half years, then jumped ship and went over to digital position and went from SEO Account Lead when I started digital position to Hybrid SEO and PPC Account Lead to operations supervisor, manager of operations, director of operations to CEO over the course of three years of being at digital position as well. It’s been a very crazy transition over the course of those couple of years, but it really all started from I had no idea what SEO was, and really unplanned of even becoming a CEO of a digital marketing company at the end of it.

But we can I’ll probably get into some more specifics about what that looked like later on. But that was generally the journey and the cliff notes version of it. But it was never planned, had no idea what it was, and it just happened to work out pretty well, and I can’t complain. I’m going to be happier? But in terms of digital position itself, we’re a digital marketing agency that focuses on SEO and PPC, which is our bread and butter. We do advertising for any platform out there from Google Bingo, Bing, Amazon, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, et cetera, you name it. We do it. We also do creative work as well with video creative, with static images, animations, et cetera. So we just We just cover everything underneath the sun that we possibly can for the comfort for the clients that we work with. We do generally specialize in the health and wellness space just because that is something that our entire team is heavily invested in. We have a couple of pickleball. You could say pickleball pros. We’ve We had actually legitimate volleyball pros within our company and still do. Just a lot of very active people.

And not everybody necessarily needs to be an athlete, but a lot of people are just very mindful of their general health and wellness and try to live active and healthy lifestyles. And that’s just something we’ve always gravitated towards in terms of clients that we wanted to work with. But at the same time, we work with plenty of other clients underneath the sun that aren’t directly health and wellness related, but also just fantastic people to work with and just have genuinely good businesses and people we just want to be able to help out with.

Lovely. I’m quite glad you narrated the story. You know what? I speak with at least 10 agency owners, our CEOs, our senior agencies, like yourself, if not more. None of them have ever told me that they planned to get into a CEO or digital marketing when they were starting out. We all have that story where we land up into the space, and I’m really glad the way you have risen off the ladder. Really happy for you. Thank you.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard a single story of anyone going through schooling and they’re just like, I really want to do SEO, or even have any idea what it is before.

Absolutely. Continuing from that, Grant, I came across your story about becoming CEO with no prior experience of the role. It can be really daunting. It can be really challenging. Talk us the initial challenges or how you took up that role. How was it like within the initial days?

Yeah, really, it all was… I mean, leading up to being offered the position for CEO was, in my perspective, an accident to a degree, and not to really discredit anything that was done or the value of the role, but it was really just I became so enamored or just very involved in the culture of digital position here. I just love the people here. I really started. I continued to enjoy the work that I was doing after going through a burnout period with SEO, which is I went in to become a hybrid SEO and PPC account lead. Then I started to develop processes inside the company and resetting a foundation of how do we do employee onboarding, offboarding, client onboarding, client offboarding, all these different things that are building the ground-based foundation of this company to a degree. It was just things I continued to enjoy doing. The previous CEO at the time, the CEO at the time, was just like, Hey, continue to work on some of these things. There’s these opportunities things to be able to work on. I was just like, Yeah, I would love to be able to take on some more of these projects.

Just over this time, it was not me necessarily realizing it, but was building my entire understanding of how the entire business functions and how all these pieces fit together from PPC, SEO, to development, to support, to financials, to business development. All of these different things I just had so much insight into after developing all these processes over the period of time that come about a little a year and a half ago when the CEO approached me and he was just like, Hey, I need to be able to take a step back out of this company. You probably have developed just a crazy amount of knowledge about the company inside and out just from all of these things that you’ve been working on over the course of the year and over the course of the past couple of years and formally offered me the position at that point, which was just such a, again, completely took me by surprise. I had no idea. Very few times in my life have I truly been that speechless, and it was a very humbling type of experience to go through. But with that being said, it was such a natural progression of what happened from my entire journey within digital position, where although I understood the business inside and out, but with no prior experience of the role, the amount of leadership that I then needed to be able to put underneath my belt and really understand and be able to improve, because historically within my life, I always define myself as more of a support player.

I’ve never particularly always been that big leader type of guy with a big voice. If you just need me to be the guy that’s just passing… If you need me to be the Scottie Pippen of the team or be doing all the assists, I will gladly do that. If you do need me to carry the team and be a Michael Jordan, maybe I’m not going to be the best type of guy for that, but at the same time, I can absolutely do whatever I can to possibly get better and become that type of person. I’ve always been able to be a lot more adaptable in that sense. I’ve always felt comfortable in as long as I know this is the betterment for the team or the betterment of the organization or whatever it might be for the betterment of everybody else, I am willing to do whatever the heck it takes to make that so that everybody else can have potentially a easier life because of it. Because that’s going to make me feel fulfilled and that’s giving me a drive of something outside of just doing something for myself that is going to make that much easier for me to be able to accomplish.

With all that being said, it just all to play out properly. I had a ton of trust within the CEO and the other co-owner, Steve, who Roger and Steve, both are the co-owners of Digital Position, had a ton of trust and instilled a ton of confidence in me in terms of taking over such a massive jump in role. I already had built this incredible relationship with the entire team as well. It wasn’t something where I’m just injected in as a CEO for a company and nobody knows who I am and I don’t have these relationships and they’re like, Oh, head macho is just jumping in here. It was like, I built this up over time where I’ve established really close relationships with a ton of people on this team. I would gladly go out and grab a beer with any single person on this team if we were all in person and just enjoy a nice conversation with them because they’re all genuinely great people and I love each and every one of them. Then also it continued to give me that ability to have a much larger impact on something larger than myself and be able to influence and impact other people’s lives by what I decide to do with my leadership opportunity within being CEO of the company at the same time.

So all in all, it has continued to give me that massive amount of fulfillment that I’ve always looked to get because thinking back to COVID days where things were really depressing and really sad, and it was really hard to get through a day-to-day back in those days to thinking to now where I actually have purpose and more things that I can continue to focus on. I’m busier than I’ve ever been in my entire life, but I’m arguably the happiest that I’ve ever been in so many instances of just what transpired over the course of the past year. There’s been some crazy lows over that period of time, but at the same time, I really can’t complain because that just comes with the nature of the beast, just doing the best as it possibly can with it.

Absolutely. I I, again, feel that passion in your voice when you talk about leadership. From that perspective, leading a company requires a different skillset. Like you mentioned, a lot of responsibility there because the decisions that you’re making are impacting people’s lives and quite literally. They are a associated with you for whatever amount of time, but it does impact their lives in terms of what management or company-level decisions are being made. Similarly, people management is a skill which becomes very important when you’re leading the show, right? So how do you feel? You loved that or you had it within yourself with the role? It just lost in. So what was your story about it, about people management?

I think to the original of I wasn’t just placed in this role. I had time to develop the relationships with everybody in the company. So I was able to establish a floor of trust to be able to go off of coming into this role because I could bear… In a lot of ways, I still have a ton that I’m learning, and I’m a year of a little past a year into being in the CEO role here. And if I suck, I want to be able to trust the team to be able to be like, Grant, you’re doing a crap job over here. You need to figure this out. Here’s ways that you can possibly improve. I feel like I’ve established that amount of trust within the team to that I’m going to get that feedback if I need to because I am in no way, shape, or form above anybody else within this company. I still have just as much to learn as everybody else, and I have as much to learn from anybody else in this company as they have as much to learn from me. I think it’s, one, having that relationship to start, but two, it’s also understanding that everybody is handled very differently and treating it as such.

There is no way that you can build a core culture in here while everybody is the exact same human being or is treated the the exact same way. Everybody has their own needs, their own requirements, their own way of how they like to be managed or how they like to be overseen within the company. It is the only way I feel like you can possibly approach management and continue to have success within a culture of a company. I think to the understanding of people management is in tandem with the point of I was able to establish those relationships. I was able to understand each individual person, what I felt like needed to do with those relationships because I could go to one guy on your team and I could say, Frank, you are sucking ass this month. You are doing really bad. I don’t know what you’re doing, but you need to get your shit together. He’s going to take that, he’s going to take that. He’s going to run with it. And I know he’s going to be just fine. I could not say that to, I don’t know, Sarah on my team, who is just a little more timid or a little more shy or somebody else who just does not take feedback that well.

You need to be able to go and you need to be able to go and you need to approach with clear empathy of, Hey, what’s going on? Can I help you? What’s going on? Is there anything that I can help you with? And just being able to help guide them to those next steps as being like, Hey, you suck. You need to get better. Because for some people that works, other people it doesn’t. But it’s just one of those things of really recognizing how you need to be able to treat people with empathy, but also being able to get the most out of people at the same time is something that has naturally progressed for me over the course of the past year. It is not something that I innately felt like I had by any means, but again, being able to lean on those relationships and knowing that I would be able to get that feedback as needed was really helpful to know that I could trust that. If I did say something or I did screw something up, people aren’t just going to be like, Grant, you suck. I quit. Anything like that.

In that regard, there’s just a ton to learn from that aspect that every person is different. You need to treat everybody as humans. We all want to live happy and healthy and fulfilling lives. It’s just as soon as you start to take that away from anyone, then you’re just pushing them out the door slowly but surely.

Absolutely. Now, coming to a CEO, Grant, the wellness industry is constantly evolving, right? Now, there’s a lot of less coming in, so a lot of competition there. How do you stay ahead of the curve and ensure your SEO strategies are future proof for your clients?

Yeah, there’s been a ton of change over the course of the past, even 6-8 months. We think of Q4 and all the algorithm updates that happened over the course of that period of time. We saw dozens of clients just absolutely tank in traffic. In some ways, we threw our hands up and we were like, We feel like we have done everything in the book. Then we come back to March of 2024, another algorithm comes through, and then we have all of those accounts start to ramp right back up because Google makes mistakes, too. Clearly, it was recognized that, Hey, these actually should have been doing okay, considering all these… Everything That’s something that we’ve been doing in the meantime. There’s really leaning in on historically what has worked for SEO, but also always taking a look at if for some crazy reason, if SEO were to die out of Google, there is something else that is always going to come down the pipeline. We were always constantly thinking of what would be this possible next step? And then that just helped us use our way into figuring out we should be looking to do Amazon SEO, we should be doing Pinterest SEO, we should be doing more YouTube SEO.

Like YouTube SEO, we were always doing, but it just helped us branch out into if Google blows up for whatever reason, what other platforms could we possibly leverage? Seo in some way, shape, or form is always going to exist or it’s going to be some form of way to gather that, for which we’ve formed this owned media, which is not something that you’re paying for. It’s all based on the merit of your performance, based on the merit of the content you’re putting out there. But it’s really just continuing to find ways that, Hey, if everything blows up, it’s like, What is our next move? I think that just helps us continue to keep that mindset of how can we constantly continue to innovate things so that we don’t end up getting caught sitting on our hands where we should be continuing to find ways to be able to push SEO forward. Because with AI and SGE or the AI overview sections, it’s like there is just a ton of change that is happening and is going to continue to change over the course of the next couple of years, and we just need to constantly be ready, and we just always need to be prepared.

Absolutely. And talking about changes, what is the best use of AI you’re doing right now at digital position that you’re most excited excited about. We all do these experiments with AI, right?

Yeah, absolutely. What I love about it is I have been digging a lot deeper into building the custom GPTs, which in and of itself is It’s always technically been around if you started using AI and you just had this one really long chat with ChatGPT of, Here’s all the information of brand voice about this business or this and that. But the ability to have this custom GPT where I can feed it an unbelievable amount of information about our brand voice of business. Here are all these examples of content of our brand voice that we feel truly fits us, and then be able to have it top in our brand voice in whatever whatever fashion that we possibly want for specific topics, for emails, for content generation ideas. It really expands the realm of we can do what we were doing way faster in the sense that I don’t have to spend a ton of time trying to think of the ideas. It just helps me get there 50 to 60% faster because I am not the most creative guy in the world. But if I do have an idea and I can at least register that it’s a good idea, I can take with that and run with it far quicker at that point than trying to just off the top of my head, try to come up with something unique or creative or something that’s going to be able to drive a ton of volume in that sense.

So I think the ability of using those custom GPTs and really narrow in on, here is everything that you can possibly work with to spit out this perfect brand voice for content piece or meta-titles, meta-descriptions, whatever it might be. Eighty, 90% of the time, it’s pretty darn good, especially with GPT 4.0. The quality is only getting that much better. Still not perfect. It always needs a human element to it. So I always want to provide that initial caveat because I think too many people will either listen to stuff like that or see all of these different iterations or different posts of people saying, I posted 2,000 pieces of content onto my SEO blog, and I’m ranking for all these different terms, which happens for maybe a week, and then it just could completely devalued because it’s all crap content. You still need that human element I feel like we always will, but at least in the meantime, that’s continuing to be a focus for us.

Absolutely. Since we’re talking about AI, moving on, from a content perspective, what is that work best for the wellness brand? What does that resonate the most with the target audience in this particular niche?

Sorry, were you saying what resonates well with health and wellness people when it comes to AI or just people within the health and wellness space?

When it comes to content.

Yeah, I think it’s making it all relatable. That’s what people genuinely care about in every way, shape, and form is, how can this possibly relate to me? How can I then envision myself in my own situation within whatever product, service, however, whatever it might be personally? I think it sounds easy, but it’s so incredibly hard because I think we’ve taken this authenticity thing and we’ve blown it out of proportion to the word authentic, I feel has lost a lot of meaning and value over the course of the past several years. All of these UGC creative pieces where we’re flipping through YouTube Shorts and TikTok and videos where people are trying to be authentic, but really, they’re just reading off of a script almost all the time. So we’ve almost been trained to feel a very different way and approach content. We have everybody saying, Hit that like button, smash the subscribe, hit the like button, smash the subscribe button, ding the bell for notifications. All these things where it’s constantly driven for an end result. It’s not ever feeling authentic because it feels like people are just doing it for the sake of the money, the Fame, whatever it is, as opposed to, I am telling you this information because I genuinely care about it, or because I think that everybody should know about this thing because I really like the product or I really like the service, which is just becoming harder and harder.

But when you come across that, it’s so powerful that if I were to see somebody, if I were to go to a friend and I would be like, What is the best pair running shoes? And they’re like a marathon runner. They’re doing 5Ks on a regular basis. I am going to trust what they say 100% of the time because they know their stuff. They’re in the space, and I know they’re not being paid to tell me the answer of, I think these Hoka shoes are the best possible shoes for running or something like that. You’re getting a very authentic response and experience from somebody and being able to emulate that in any way, shape, or form for any creative, any content, health and wellness related or not, is easily the most powerful thing that can be accomplished, but it’s just very difficult to do at the same time.

Absolutely. Finally, Grant, for our listeners, what is a piece of advice you’d want to give to our young listeners today, trying to make a mark in the digital marketing niche or starting their careers out?

Yeah, good question. The thing is, there’s probably a couple of things. One, doing it is the best way to possibly learn in terms of thinking about so many people that we’ve interviewed lately who have gone to school for marketing, digital marketing, whatever it is. They come to the job here and they start working. They’re like, Nothing that I learned. It Digital Marketing School applies to this. They’re learning about things that were written in books maybe 10, 15 years ago that finally made it into copy form now, and it just does not make any sense anymore. You are not going to be able to keep up with the times of digital marketing and how it is continuing to evolve over the years by reading a book about it. And so at that point, it is continuing to test through, I don’t know, do open a Google Ads account and maybe try and help your local store with Google Ads. I don’t know, just something like that where you can continue to get your hands dirty and actually figure out, if I make budget changes here, I make bid adjustments here, I’m doing SEO content here, where, yeah, Build your own blog or build your own website, which is relatively inexpensive.

Make SEO tweaks, meta-title changes, add content here, build a blog there. It’s really there’s so many tools at our disposal to allow us to learn and then give real-time feedback from these algorithms that tell us relatively quickly whether or not something is working to be able to figure out. These are the things that matter because trial and error is really the biggest thing that tells you that really differentiates a good and a bad digital marketing person. As somebody who just lets things Coast and let it sit, you’re not going to be able to see the results that you’re looking for. But somebody who’s constantly testing is eager to look to see what is the next best thing that’s going to be able to work within this strategy is always going to be able to find the new thing, is always going to be able to It’s just always going to be able to move the needle forward because stagnation is just what kills digital marketing. Innovation and drive is going to continue, and passion is going to continue to make it better moving forward and be able to adopt and overcome all these algorithm changes that we constantly see on on on a regular basis.

Absolutely. I’m glad that you pointed out about coming through the academy, coming to the schools, and those classroom coachings, and then getting it into real life and seeing the actual implementation and the execution side of things when it comes to SEO or digital marketing at large.

Yeah, it’s so funny to me. It sucks because you do spend a lot of money to go to school and learn about these certain things. But really, when it comes to digital marketing, there’s certain things that you just… It’s just so far behind where it currently is at because I can’t even imagine what is being taught in some of those books, and it’s just…

Yeah, it’s. Even there. Yeah. I can’t completely imagine. I agree, Grant. This has been a brilliant conversation. But before I let you go, I would like to play a quick rapid fire with you. I hope you’re game for it.

Sure. Let’s do it.

All right. Your favorite sport?

Playing in my peak was baseball. Currently, I’ve been really enjoying pickleball.

All right. Your last Google search?

My last Google search? Let me just go to my history. I don’t even know. It seems so far ago. Where’s my history? It’s for a client. I was figuring out what an interest rate forward curve is. I still don’t know because I was just on the verge of googling that, so I couldn’t tell you what it is, but that was my last Google search.

All Okay. Your first paycheck, what did you do with that? Your first paycheck of your life? Oh, whoa.

That’s a really interesting question. First paycheck, what did I do with it? I think… Boy.

Ceo and CEO comes easy to you. Yeah.

I’m trying to think. I’m like, What was… Man, I assume back in the day, I must have bought a video game. I couldn’t tell you what, but man, I’m actually going to think a lot harder about that because I think that would be a really cool thing to be able to remember what I possibly did. I’ll have to go back in the memory books for that one.

All right, the last one will not be really further. Where do you find Grant on Friday? It’s after work.

Yeah, I am very involved in just always going to the gym. I try to go five, six days a week. So you will probably find me at my local gym, probably doing some workout or it’s just at least like the community at that gym, too, of just hanging out with the people there outside of that, probably playing pickleball or hanging out back at the house with my fiance and dog. It’s a lovely toss up, but any one of those things, 95% chance is probably what I’m doing on a Friday.

Lovely, Grant. Thank you so much for taking our time to do this with us and really appreciate it. But for our audiences, if they want to reach out to you, how do they do that?

Yeah. So you can find anything you want about the company in terms of at digitalposition. Com. And also you can find me on LinkedIn and reach out and connect with me there as well. More than happy to chat with anyone that’s either involved in the health and wellness space or maybe not and is just looking for anything assistance-wise when it comes to digital marketing. Really, what we try to tell people is the worst possible thing you can do by having… The worst possible outcome of having a conversation with me or the co founder Steve is you get free advice. We’re more than happy to at least try and help people out where we can, how we can. It’s really at the end of the day, we just want to work with good people and people that are putting out good stuff into the world.

Good. Thank you once again, Grant. Really appreciate it, man.

Cheers. Awesome. Thank you so much, Ranmay.