Scaling for Success: Inside the Journey of Building a Global Digital Agency

Hey, hi everyone. Welcome to your show E-Coffee with the Experts. This is your host, Ranmay here. Today we have Steve, CEO and co-founder of BeFound Online with us. Hey, Steve, how’s it going?

Good, Ranmay. How are you?

Good. Yeah, good. Can’t really complain. Steve, before you move any forward, let’s get to know the human behind the mic. Why don’t you talk us through your journey so far, how you ended up in the SEO digital marketing space, and also a bit about what we found online, your agency, and we take it off from Absolutely.

I think this is officially my third career. I started out in customer service, found my way into technology, and then from technology, found my way into digital marketing. Interesting enough, that was the path, following your passions, and I just kept exploring different passions. I’d like to say that in 2006, I was liberated after an acquisition, and I was thinking about technology jobs, but I had fallen in love with digital marketing. The genius that I am, I decided that without any experience in the agency world, I would start an agency. Why not? That’s what I did. I set out in 2006 to do that, was working on my own, mix and match a couple of contractors here and there. Then in 2009 with a co-founder, founded BeFound Online. We scaled a bit from there, and we’ve had some fun ever Lovely.

From being a startup to now working with global clients, it has been quite a journey, I must say. What strategies or hats you feel that have worked for you in making your agency successful when the way it is now?

It’s really difficult to up-level your agency if you’re working with small and mid-size companies to get to mid-size and enterprise companies. I think our inflection point for that was We grew up as an agency partner. While we had and still have plenty of direct clients, we leverage partnerships relationships, historically, where clients may not have had paid media services, they don’t have paid search, for instance, or they don’t have an SEO practice. We’ll partner for those practices, and we’ll be invited to participate in those bids or those RFPs. That’s how we started winning larger clients and enterprise clients, because you got You tag along with somebody, if you will, the larger agency of record, the agency that’s doing three or $400 million, and your department, if you will, within that agency. You get to go along that way. But the realization when you start doing that is that you are qualified, you are capable. Now it becomes your own calling card, and you get to start calling on companies, so you get to leverage that. It’s that first time you get to work with McDonald’s, and people put it on their websites. If they had a project with McDonald’s that made them 10 pounds, 10 euros or $10, they put it on their website and they’re going to talk about it because they’re hoping to get the next large client as a result, and you just keep parlaying that rolling up.

But the other thing is to get out to meet the people who you want to do business with. Do you want to work with CMOs of mid-size and larger companies? Do you want to work with executives of these enterprise firms who are the decision-makers? You’re not always selling something, but you want to get to know. You want to be in these social circles. You want to go to the events that they attend. You want to present. You want to speak at those events. You want to get out there. In fact, I heard a story just a couple of weeks ago. A friend who wasn’t necessarily intentionally pivoting his agency, but they decided that as one of their strategies, they would try to speak and present within the health and wellness space. Over the course of two years, they became subject matter experts. They doubled in size, and now 80% of their revenue comes from the health and wellness space.

Lovely, great. You describe your leadership as un-leadership. Let’s unpack this concept and explain how it fosters a thriving agency culture.

I start with what I think about unleadership, it’s first be human and just treating people with respect and treat people how you want to be treated. I’m not a really fan of what I call Pink Slip Tuesday. Have you ever been shit-canned, Ranmay? Have you ever been fired?

Not really. One startup where things did not work out.

That’s different.

Yeah, But otherwise, not really. I’m thankful, not during pandemic as well.

Absolutely, right? Having been let go twice, I don’t like the way that you show up at an office. I call it Pink Slip Tuesday because I don’t know why, but maybe it’s because both times I got fired, it was on Tuesday. You show up and your boss shows up and he goes, Hey, Ranmay. Do you have a few minutes? I want to talk. Immediately, the bells start ringing your head out. What did I do wrong? Am I getting fired today? We try to avoid things like pink slip Tuesday. I want to make sure everybody in the organization knows where they stand and whether the ground is firm or whether the ground is shaky. I think about being human first and being the example. I try to, what do they say, walk the walk and talk that I like to be vulnerable. I like to talk to the team. I like to solicit feedback. Yes, absolutely. There are times and places when you need to make decisions, and you’re the only one who can for the company or the department. There’s that piece of it, too. But it’s about for people, giving them the opportunity to express themselves, giving them the opportunity to grow, and even self-define their path forward or their future.

Okay, so Now we have several people on the team who started out on the paid media side and have moved over to analytics or SEO because they wanted to follow their passion. Absolutely. They can follow. We’ll help. That’s the start of it. That’s the start of it on leadership.

Since we’re talking about culture, I just have curiosity, do you get involved in the hiring process?

I do. I want to make it a point. We’ve been as large as 50 people, and right now we’re about 25 people. I want to remain involved in hiring. I want to be the cultural fit. To your point about culture, I want to interview a bit for emotional intelligence. I want to interview a bit for cultural fit. I’m not the decision maker in the process, but there’s one box with my name next to it, and that’s culture fit. If I put an X in the box, then the team, as a team, we have to decide if other people think differently because maybe they’ve got all the commensurate skills they need for the role, but they don’t quite fit the culture box. But if they’re a hard no on culture, we’re going to pass.

Okay. Yeah, I wanted to understand that and I thought as much. And in talking from your experience, you have in this space for quite some time now, Steve. What are the common mistakes that companies make when it comes to their digital marketing strategy? You would have picked up a lot of clients and all these discovery call sessions. So what are these mistakes which you find common across the board?

I’ll give you the top 10 list. One of the most common mistakes that I find is, it’s in your question, it’s that they don’t follow a strategy. They don’t have a strategy. They have a plan and they have tactics, but they don’t really have a destination in mind. They don’t have a goal that goes with it or when they need to get there. Some companies do, but then they don’t back into the tactics well enough. They say, We want to earn 20% more revenue next year. They want to go from 20 million to 24 million. Great, everybody runs off and they try to get to 24 million. There’s nothing cohesive that has everybody on the same path to get to 24 million. You need to tie the front and the back end of that strategic plan together. A lot of companies fail in it. The other thing, number two on my list, is there still exists too many silos in sales and marketing. I’m sure you run into it all the time where you’ve got the social is here and they’re producing content, but now you have the advertising team and they don’t talk, they’re not aligned.

You’ve got social ads that look very different from the organic social and different things like that. Then we don’t have strong attribution models, so everybody claims their own, we won. So organic social says, We got all this traffic. Paid social gets all this traffic, and then the website gets all this traffic, and everybody’s claiming all those conversions as their own. I think we need to tie together better. I think we can now. Data-driven attribution is leading the way.

And since you’re talking about different channels of communication, and while it all started with search agents, now we have all the mediums, so then you get your leads, traffic, sales, revenue from. To ask for you, what digital marketing channel is the most effective at generating leads? I know that it will depend on the niche that we’re in.

What a loaded question. I think all of them… I’m going to answer this one. I’m going to take a step back from the question and say all of them and none of them. It’s very client-specific. It’s very client-specific. It depends on the client. It depends on the industry. Sometimes there’s seasonality. There’s a lot of competition in the space. Where if you might think about lead gen in the B2B space, you’re leaning on LinkedIn. I think too many people lean on LinkedIn conversion ads instead of LinkedIn awareness ads. Back to the sales and marketing example for leads, they don’t bring their sales and marketing teams together well enough because social media, this, I know this. I’m not telling you anything you don’t know. It’s that social media is breaking all the rules of the funnel. You’ve got so much going on in the same place. Bring your sales and marketing teams together and let them go to battle in LinkedIn We let them figure it out. It depends on the business. Again, your business model might dictate that your clients are on Instagram, and so you’d advertise there and get some influencers working for you there.

We’re looking at a new client now in the food space, and they’re asking for the go-to-market strategy for three test markets. One of the keys for them is going to be microinfluencers on TikTok and on Instagram. And then the client is pretty excited about Facebook because they share on Facebook. They do stuff on Facebook, and we’ll go there and we’ll be there. But I actually think there’s more play on TikTok and Instagram, but we’ll see. We’ll test it out and find out. But it all depends on the client. You can generate leads and opportunity from most anywhere. I think the key is really identifying your audience first. And then once you’ve identified your audience and/or your ideal client profiles, now you can go take a look at the channels and tactics for where you might draw them in. But another pet peeve of mine- That’s not a pet peeve. One of the things I think that folks in the industry are lacking, another thing is true media mix. Understanding that programmatic and paid ads can work together, or programmatic and paid social can work together along with content and SEO to create this bigger picture, and that your leads or your opportunities, they come in from anywhere now.

You’ve probably read some of this dance, but pre-COVID, we used 17 pieces of data before we ever bought a product, and we’re up to almost 30 now. So we’re clicking around a lot more. I don’t know if that means we’re more discerning or we just have less attention, but we do a lot more clicking. I’ve decided that I don’t like the marketing funnel anymore. It’s this idea that there’s this piece up top, those 25 sources, that’s get to know us. Then below that line is work with us. Any one of those 25 sources could lead directly to a new client. Those 25 sources also interact. It’s this crazy world we live in where you could be on TikTok in one moment and say, Wow, that’s really cool. Then you’re going to go to the website and check it out. Then you’re going to go back to social media and find out if your friends are using it. Then you’re going to go out, you’re going to go out to an event or a party, and you’re going to, Oh, what? He has that, too? What do you think of that product? You get all these different data sources, but then you cross the line into becoming a customer or working with us.

Absolutely. That’s a great way not to answer your question.

I’m kidding. But taking you from that, what are some of the most common SEO myths that you encounter SEO myths.

Wow, there’s so much. Right now, the most common that I’m seeing is… It’s always SEO, is that? That’s I know it’s always SEO is dead. That’s always everybody says it. You’ve been in this space a long time. Now people are saying that AI is the SEO killer. Once and for all, AI is going to kill SEO. I watched a good friend of mine speak last week. His name is Andy Crestadina, and he’s brilliant. He says, AI isn’t killing SEO. Ai is complementing SEO. Ai is the evolution of SEO. What he likes to say is that AI doesn’t take sides like humans do. You can take a side, but it gives you its perspective. It gives you facts. Ai can’t throw a punch. He says, You’re going to take a position and you’ve got to get out there and evoke some emotion in your audience because AI is not going to do that for you. Use it, leverage it tools. But I had a friend ask me about LLMO. Are you familiar with this?

No, not yet.

And AIO, so AI optimization and LLM, Large Language Model Optimization, both upticks on this idea. Now that Gemini is released into production for us and we get the AI previews, really it’s optimized for schema and optimize. Use real people in your articles and your pieces and real quotes from real people and take a position that AI can support you. The myth of SEO is that AI has changed the world for SEOs. I think it’s only improving SEO after we get through the whole crappy content piece of it.

Right. And talking about AI, Steve, how do you feel businesses or agencies or marketers, let’s say, can leverage it to improve their content creation and optimization processes?

You need to be smart about how you use it. I can go out and pick an AI engine. I can go to perplexity or clog or ChatGPT right now, and I’d throw a couple of keywords at it and ask it for an SEO strategy, and it will give me one. I think the most important thing I’ve learned about AI is to build longer arguments for AI to think about and then give the AI a chance to ask you questions. That same product company I was talking about earlier, I did some homework in AI just to learn about the space, and I asked AI to generate a go-to-market plan. But what I did before I told it to create the plan, I said, Wait, before you create the plan, do you have any questions for me that will help you build a better plan? The machine gave me 10 or 15 questions that it wanted answers to. Then I filled in some of those blanks and it improved the output. I can… Anybody who’s taking AI content and publishing it straight away without an editor is failing. Anybody who’s not spending a lot of time building out quality prompts for AI is failing as well.

I think those are my two things. You can use it, you should use it. Do you look for cheat codes in your job when you’re working? You look for ways to save time or save time and save money? All the time, right? Yeah. Ai is just our next cheat code.

And looking ahead to 2025, Steve, what are your predictions for the biggest disruptions or innovations in the marketing industry?

Wow, that’s really interesting. I haven’t given much thought to it. I think we’ll finally be at a place where Google Analytics 4 is widely accepted and people stop grumbling about it. And we’ll start I can get better data because our GA4 data is a couple of years old. If I lean on that, I think our business intelligence and business decisions will get stronger simply because of the power of GA4, provided people know how to harness that power. There’s a lot there. It’s a complex platform.

Absolutely. Steve, finally, for our audience there, you have been able to run a successful agency for quite some time now. No one better than you to give a piece of advice to our young listeners today who are trying to make a mark or starting out on their entrepreneurial journey or starting out an agency. What would you want to advice to them?

Too many people wait for the perfect idea or they over plan their perfect idea. I was at an event, Mark Cuban was speaking. And funny enough, the gentleman who I was standing next to in the back of the room, Cuban calls on him to ask a question. And Mark Cuban says, Yeah, what’s your question? And the gentleman says, We’re a pre-revenue startup, and I would like to get your opinion on how we attract capital. And Cuban said, Excuse me, can you clarify that? Pre-revenue. Have you made any money? And the gentleman says, No. Cuban looks at him, excuse my expression here, but he says, Make some fucking money. At some point, you don’t have to have the perfect idea, the perfect product. You just need to be willing to go to market with it, and you need to persevere. I’ve worked with several… I mentor young entrepreneurs, and the success stories are those people who are gritty and just tough it out, and they get up and they keep fighting. This lifestyle is going to knock you around a bit. A lot of people will quit at the sign of first trouble, and they’ll go, and they’re good at job, and that’s fine, you can do that.

But if you really want to make a go of it, you can tell yourself that you can run out of time or money. But those truths move all the time. You win one new client, you’re not out of time or money right now. You win another client, you’re not out of time or money. If you’ve set these deadlines for things, you realize that, Well, my year-end deadline for 2025, it doesn’t work. I’m making some money. I can keep going. Or, Oh, end of March. No, no, then I’ll do this. Then I’ll do that. The other piecing advice I have is, Pick one horizon. There’s an old Chinese proverb that says, He who chases two rabbits, catches none. If you’re going Listen, I get a Moonlighter, it’s great. But if you’re going to be a Moonlighter, definitely put yourself in that box and commit a certain amount of time to your startup idea. If you’re going to go at this thing full-time, don’t stop midway and look for a job because it’s only going to distraction. Those are my two nuggets. It’s persevere, persevere, and then get after it. Get after one thing and don’t divide your time too much or you drive yourself crazy.

Good point, Steve. Lovely. Great. Before Before we let you go, I would like to play a quick rapid fire with you. I hope you’re game for it. Let’s go. All right. Your last Google search.

Finishing sauce. I was playing around yesterday and that’s what I was studying. It’s like barbecue sauce, if you’re not familiar, but it’s different. I needed to find out why it was different.

Okay. And your celebrity crush.

I’ve long had a lovely huge fan of Claudia Schiffer from many years ago. She’s still my celebrity.

I’m talking about many years ago. What did you do with your first paycheck, Steve? First paycheck of your life.

Really good question. I’m trying to think back of which job would qualify as my first paycheck. It was in college. I was in college, I was in university, and I got a part-time job and I got a check. What did I do with that money?

Wow.

It’s obvious it was something frivolous or I’d remember.

I’m in that agent stage, right? So I can totally relate to the agent. Finally, where do we When are you on Friday evenings, Steve, after work or after office?

It could be a combination of places. Usually, more often than not, it’s having dinner with my family on Friday nights. Sometimes it’s a happy hour, and it It depends if there’s a game on. I got to see a game. If there’s a good game on, I’ll be watching your game with some friends. I will usually close down the laptop on Friday nights and try not to crack it open again until Sunday.

Super. Really, Steve, this has been a fantastic conversation. I’m sure our audience would have enjoyed this and the insights that you have shared today. Really, thank you for taking your time to do this with us. Really appreciate it.

Thank you for having me. It’s been a pleasure. To know you.

Lovely. Thank you.