Season 5, Episode #6: From Stuck to Successful - Interview Kevin Daisey – Entrepreneur, Digital Marketing & Personal Branding Expert

From Stuck To Successful

Host Dave Scott interviews Kevin Daisey, co-founder of Array Digital and Rival Digital, about the journey of scaling marketing agencies. The

Key takeaways

• Kevin Daisey achieved rapid growth by moving from a general agency model to hyper-verticalization in the legal and HVAC sectors.
• Implementing PR strategies without clear messaging or established content can amplify brand confusion rather than drive leads.

Main topics

• Hyper-verticalization in marketing
• Personal branding and PR strategy

Notable quotes

If you're not scalable, you can't grow.

Conclusion

The episode offers a roadmap for entrepreneurs to achieve predictable

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:14) Hey, everyone. Welcome to another episode of From Stuck to Successful. I'm your show host, Dave Scott. Welcome to the show. This is the podcast where you learn how to fix what's broken inside of your business, reignite passion for growth, and scale using a proven playbook and AI. Again, I'm your show host, Dave Scott. Welcome to the show. Today, we've got a friend of mine named Kevin Daisy on the show. Kevin owns Array Digital and another company called... rival digital and he is the founder and of both of these firms with another business partner. Eric and his team specialize in helping companies build personal brands, PR and getting them exposure that they need in order for them to grow with pragmatic sales and marketing. They hyper verticalized recently to just work with law firms. I'm a big fan of Vern Harnish and the book Scaling Up among many books on scaling. And what I've found in doing this for so long, too long actually, is that if you're not scalable, you can't grow. It's going to be like stressful chaos forever. And unless you put in the implement and implement the foundation in order to grow and scale and you hyper-verticalize like Kevin and his firm, Array Digital, it's going to be just really difficult. So this is a great episode talking about just pragmatic content creation. marketing that works, as well as what it means to build a personal brand and actually talk about yourself on social media and content today. So without further ado, here is the episode with my friend, Kevin Daisy. Speaker 1 (1:46) Kevin Daisy, welcome to another episode of From Stuck to Successful. It's good to have you on the show, my friend. Speaker 2 (1:51) Yeah, Speaker 1 (1:51) good to see you. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, you're very welcome. It's going to be good. We're going to go on a journey together and just talk about all the things. So before we get too far down the road, I said your first and last name, so the audience knows that. But just give us some baseball card stats, maybe like the name of your company and where you live. Let's start there. Speaker 2 (2:07) Cool. Yeah. Well, I live in Virginia Beach, Virginia, on the East Coast. from Schengen-Tig Island, Virginia, which is off the East Coast as well. Small town, wild horses, pretty cool spot. My two agencies that I'm a co-founder and owner of is Array Digital, focusing on the legal space, and Rival Digital, which focuses on the HVAC vertical. Speaker 1 (2:34) Okay. That we're going to talk about those today. And as we talked about before we, we get out of the green room and hit record, you know, I'm so interested in the hyper verticalization. I think there's so much value in that. So we'll dive into that. Let's go back. Like if we were to, uh, this is a, uh, Gen X reference millennials and Gen Zers won't get this, but if we were to go with Einstein and Doc Brown and hop in the DeLorean and go back in time, like what made you start your first agency and where did you start your professional career? What'd that look like? Speaker 2 (3:03) It's probably similar to a lot of folks. I was young, though, when I made that decision. We're still young, Kevin. We're still young. Yeah. I mean, I don't know what you're talking about. I'm actually a millennial, technically. I was born in 82. All right. I was just as mad when I found out as anyone else. But real quick side story. I talked down to kind of millennials for a while, like 10 years ago. Yeah. And I got the Millennials on the Move Award. which is a local coastal Virginia magazine put out an award. I got millennials in the movie. I'm like, whoa, what? I'm not a millennial. And my business partner was like, well, you got an award. Just lean into Speaker 1 (3:40) it and accept it. Let's use it. Even though you're bashing on them, they still loved you enough to give you an award. And then I had to write a piece for this article that was what I love most about my generation. I was like, oh, crap. Speaker 2 (3:52) Was that hard to write? Were you like, I don't like anything about us. What the heck? I can't do this. I'm lying. It was very difficult. Actually, I have the article framed right behind me here. That's so funny. I probably should go read it because I probably don't even know what I said. But anyways, Speaker 1 (4:05) sorry for the tangent. I love it. I love it. Poor millennials. They'll get it. It's okay. We love them. I'm one of you. Yeah, yeah. So anyway. Yeah, but how'd you start your agency? Let's come back to that. Speaker 2 (4:14) I'll go way back. So this is back in middle school. And again, I'm from a really small town. Our high school, middle school, all that's all one school. There's 350 kids across all grades. Yeah, rural America. And so we didn't have as much access to computers and stuff as most schools. We did have an HTML class in like seventh, sixth or seventh grade. It was not even a full class. It was just kind of like a side thing. And I kind of liked it and started messing around and making websites for myself, things I was interested in, dumb stuff. And then I used it. I made websites for like my 11th and 12th grade year final projects for classes that I kind of struggled in. While I still kind of didn't get great grades in that class, my final credits or final projects were like extra credit. I would have higher scores than the valedictorian in the class. Because no one was making websites to go along with a final paper in biology. Of course not. And so it still didn't strike me as an opportunity as a career. So I went on to a trade school. I like designing and building things. I had an art scholarship, which I decided not to use. And I went into drafting. And I was like, well, maybe I'll do architecture. Anyway, I came out of that school, two-year, get my associates, computer and drafting. I made websites during college as well that helped me Speaker 1 (5:44) in those situations. Speaker 2 (5:46) And Speaker 1 (5:46) then I went into Speaker 2 (5:47) the civil engineering field. So I moved from there over to the Virginia Beach area. And I got a job in an engineering firm. Thought that was the best thing ever. Real job. Again, where I'm from, there's not really a lot of opportunity for jobs. And so that was going fine for the two or three years. I was killing it. Loved it. And then, I don't remember how this happened, but somehow someone introduced me to this group. And it was like a technology group. And they're like, yeah, you should come out and hang out. We got a board meeting tomorrow night. Just come out. I'm like, okay. And I'm not from the area, so I don't really know a whole lot of people, right? Right, right, right. So I get to this boardroom, and they're like, hey, welcome, introduce yourself. And when they say, what do you do? I was like, well, I don't want to say I work in a cubicle at this engineering firm. I design websites. Speaker 2 (6:42) This was a room full of entrepreneurs and heads up at Cox Communications. Speaker 1 (6:48) It Speaker 2 (6:48) was Speaker 1 (6:49) a Speaker 2 (6:49) pretty serious room that I just kind of fell into. Yeah, I kind of fell into this room. People just raised their hands. I mean, this is 2005, 2006. I need a website. Oh, can you make a website for our group? And just kind of took off. Speaker 2 (7:07) The president of the organization kind of like took me under his wing and he's very successful business owner and I was like, hey, I think I'm gonna start my own business and quit my job. He said, that's a terrible idea unless you have like money saved up and a plan and all that stuff. Speaker 2 (7:26) I decided to screw that and just quit my job within six months. And that's when I started my first agency, which was called IDWeb. And just started networking and meeting people and became the go-to website company in the area within a few years, I would say. I love it. Speaker 1 (7:50) Grew that Speaker 2 (7:50) to Speaker 1 (7:51) about Speaker 2 (7:51) six to Speaker 1 (7:51) eight people with the office. And so first got started in web design, web development, web management, hosting, all those things. And God, hasn't the world changed over time since 2005? Now Speaker 2 (8:01) this is going to date me. I used to build sites back in GeoCities. Do you remember that platform? So when I was in middle school, high school, I was using that and Yahoo Builder. Oh my God. I Speaker 1 (8:13) didn't Speaker 2 (8:13) have Speaker 1 (8:13) any money to host sites and build servers and stuff like that. Yeah. I mean, hosting platforms didn't even exist back then, right? Like host a source was a thing. GoDaddy wasn't even around. I mean, that's like, we're old, man. Now we're old. Now we can say we're old. I said we're not earlier, but we are. You actually had to Speaker 2 (8:28) build it in HTML, you know? Speaker 1 (8:29) Yeah. Yeah. Codes with carrots and everything else. And yep. Yeah, it's crazy. No CMS? No, no. Oh my God, no. I mean, the websites were so ugly. Although I would argue that we still do some e-commerce consulting every once in a while. And I have seen e-commerce sites that are uglier than SYN that get insane amounts of traffic because of domain authority and they've been around for so long. And because of the, you know, just the, yeah, just the authority period. And then I've seen like beautiful sites that brands have spent $1.1 million on and they completely suck. You know, they don't get any ROI, no lead gen form. like no traffic, like it's sad. So you grew Array, sorry, the name of your first company wasn't Array. When did it evolve into Array and what did that process look like and when did that happen? Speaker 2 (9:13) Yeah, good question. So yeah, I had IDWeb. It was called Ideation Web Studios. Got IDWeb.com and shortened it down to that. So yeah, so we were local. We built, you know, we did some logos and branding. We started doing SEO, local SEO. Speaker 1 (9:29) when you could create map listings for anyone, anywhere. That was kind of cool. You Speaker 2 (9:33) want to rank in this city? No problem. Give me a few minutes. So I grew that. I think we were probably doing like a quarter, almost not quite a half a million dollars in revenue. Kind of kept hitting this ceiling. Like just weren't, wasn't growing. Same every year. The reason I started Array is because I met my current business partner now through Entrepreneurs Organization. So he was in Vern Harnish, who started Entrepreneurs. organization. We weren't, neither one of us did enough revenue to be members, but there's a loophole, which is, it's called a strategic alliance partner. basically a sponsor and you get to hang out with the Speaker 1 (10:10) EO members. Like guys like Vern Harnish. Are you kidding me? That's awesome. Oh yeah. Speaker 2 (10:14) So we joined as Alliance partners. And so every month there's like local meetups and events and stuff like that. And I met him because he was doing the same thing as me. He was developing software and custom solutions. I was on web and marketing. Long story short, I started getting some big deals where My existing clients were like, hey, can you build us this platform or this system or this dashboard? And I'm like, I can design it, but we don't really have the development capabilities to build what you're looking for. And I've been talking to Eric Olson, my partner, and said, hey, could you guys do this? And he said, that's perfect. Yes, we can do that. Cool. I'll design it on my team and you guys can build it. And so about two or three projects in, we're working all together. And these are, you know, a couple hundred thousand dollar projects, which I had never seen anything like that before. Speaker 1 (11:05) A couple hundred thousand dollar projects. Yeah. If to a guy who's just starting out or new in it. Yeah, that's huge. Yeah. So I'm like five, you know, two grand Speaker 2 (11:12) for a website. And now it's like 150 grand for, for this. And the design piece makes more than our traditional websites, you know? So, so I kept bringing on the leads. He had the capabilities. Yeah. Obviously he was making more on the end, but he had, you know, higher paid Speaker 1 (11:30) staff and more risk, I guess, if you will. Speaker 2 (11:33) So we went to an EO thing that had a workshop on... Speaker 2 (11:41) growth through mergers and acquisitions. We're both there. We're listening. Meanwhile, we're doing these projects together as two companies. You and your new partner. Yep. And so afterwards at the happy hour, it was like, ha ha ha. What if, what if we were to merge? That'd be hilarious. Right. And that ha ha went to, well, wait a minute. That might not be a bad Speaker 1 (11:59) idea. That might not be Speaker 2 (12:00) bad. So fast forward, we have a project that I've had access to. $500,000 up front for one piece of it. With many more behind it, if that went well. Yeah. Well, so we got together and we said, all right, we've been talking. We started looking at each other's books and NDAs were signed. Stuff like that. And we said, hey, Speaker 1 (12:22) if we sign this deal, we're going to merge and start a new company. Well, Speaker 2 (12:26) we lost that deal. So, and they said, well, we didn't hire you guys because it was a little clunky, two different companies. And you didn't have the redundancy. This other company has three or four project managers. You have one. Yeah, you're not saying it. So we said, well, we didn't win the project. So now we have to merge because we're Speaker 1 (12:48) losing these Speaker 2 (12:48) opportunities. Speaker 1 (12:49) Oh, no. Speaker 2 (12:50) So it wasn't like a true merge. We kind of basically just started a whole brand new company. We called it the Emerge. We have articles out there and we were on the... like a local business TV about merging and stuff like that. But it was more like we started a whole new company. So at that point, we were clearing a million together and we were able to join EO as true members because you have to do a million in revenue to be a member. So yeah. Anyway, that was in 2017. So we both, you know, I did my own thing for quite a while, 2006 to 2017. Speaker 2 (13:23) And we started the second agency in 2020, which I can talk about as Speaker 1 (13:28) well. So Array got its start kind of by happenstance and through a couple different mergers. Now, is the structure still you and your one business partner or are there three of you now because of the merger? Speaker 2 (13:40) No, there's just me and my partner, Eric. Okay. We have a COO who's, you know. running operations. So he's incentivized on profit and profit sharing and stuff like that. But it's just two equity partners, me and him. So backing up a little bit, Array was just the two companies sandwiched together. So we did some software, we did some marketing, we did locals, all local, no niche outside the local area. And so that went through some iterations. We kind of saw software was... just way too hard to sell predictably who needs custom software and if we were selling it today obviously we'd be in a pretty rough spot i think so we killed the software we went all in on digital marketing which is what i was doing anyway grew that to like two million something kind of just got stuck right there and that's when we joined a mastermind we got Speaker 1 (14:32) exposed to to knitting and verticals Speaker 2 (14:35) and we switched to red slowly to be in the legal space. So working with law firms, personal injury, criminal defense, family law. And at the same time, we had a bunch of HVAC companies that we liked and we thought that was really a good area to focus on. And so we just started a whole nother agency at the same time and said, all right, this one's going to go this way. This one's going to go that way. And we just kind of see if it was going to work and Speaker 1 (15:02) it worked very well. What, when you talk about in digital marketing is such a, you know, nebulous term, it's, you know, so vague and ambiguous being everybody. I feel like there's a lot of people who do it and a lot of agencies, especially now, but you guys have been around for a while and you've been doing it for a long, you know, I would say a long time. What problems are you guys solving that a lot of your clients, you know, didn't know that they had before? So like what, what's a daily like, what's a good prospecting discovery call look like? What problems are you guys really solving today? Speaker 2 (15:32) Yeah, that's a good question for sure. Yeah, I'm surprised how many people are Speaker 1 (15:37) like digital marketing. What does that Speaker 2 (15:38) entail? Speaker 1 (15:39) You know, our Speaker 2 (15:40) clients, an ideal client for us is a client that has somewhat established themselves. They've gone the hard route. They've done good work. They've put some process in place. They've, you know, they have built somewhat of a brand and good reviews, good client service. But the referrals and... The networks and stuff are not able to drive the business any further. So our goal is to take the good that they've started and done and get more eyeballs to it. I mean, at the end of the day, it's building on the brand and exposing the brand all the way down to, they don't know who you are, but we need to get a click and give them to your brand. So paid advertising, Google Ads, Meta. organic social media, more brand, thought leadership, content, SEO. SEO is the