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You don’t want AI being the one speaking
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on behalf of your brand, I being the one who’s putting the tone together and who is putting together output there, that it’s going to be public facing for you. It’s like handing your brand over to an intern.
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You’re now listening to leverage for growth.
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Awesome. Thanks for having me, Jess. You’re really looking forward to this.
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Yeah. I mean, so you mentioned almost a decade, you know, so we’re not quite there. Nine years ago, in 2016, here at the recording is when I started Digital Neighbor, as you mentioned, right here in Tampa. It began pretty small. You know, I had a lot of experience before kind of being, in-house. I worked in some of the, larger corporations here in Tampa.
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You know, Johns Hopkins Medicine was a director there for digital.
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Worked on the agency side, some of the larger agencies here in Tampa,
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and then, finally ended up, as an in-house marketing director at a personal injury attorney, and hence why I enjoy working with lawyers and kind of found my way back into that.
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And in 2016, you know, after working for other people, I just really came to the conclusion that now is,
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a good time to get it started. So we started pretty small, helping local businesses get found online. You know, we started as an SEO agency, over the years, it’s grown now into a full service digital marketing agency, that works with clients all across the country.
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So we do all your typical digital marketing stuff, right? SEO, paid search, web design, social media. But really, what makes what I think makes us different is how we approach that relationship. And that’s what I think is really led to this sustained growth and, sustainability of us is that, you know, digital neighbor of that name. A lot of people ask, where does that come from?
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It comes from Mister Rogers Neighborhood. He’s still the North star of the agency. And, we want to approach digital marketing like a neighborly conversation, versus just some kind of black box that you don’t know what’s going on. So we want to be transparent. We want it to be focused on results that people know exactly what’s going on and, make people feel like, you know, that we have skin in the game and really care about them like a true partner does.
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Yeah, that’s a great question. So I always knew, like, inside this is the, the kindness and kind of that neighborly is the north star of the agency. But I just kind of had that, like, as, something that I felt. Right, kind of more like a gut feeling. But then as we grew, that’s where we had to start writing things down and making it more official.
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Hey, here’s our mission, vision and values. So we didn’t start with that. It’s something that kind of grew over time, more out of necessity than anything else as we onboarded new people. And I wanted them to clearly understand this. These are our core values, which also our expectations for people that work here.
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Absolutely. And so, for example, last week we have a Monday all hands, meeting for the agency. And I have a CEO corner. And we’re starting to do a core values campaign where we kind of go over those core values just to kind of help set expectations. Within the company there. So I think it’s important for everybody to understand that everything you do needs to be reflective of what those, values.
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And the mission is here.
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Yeah. I mean, that’s a very, very simple answer. There
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is just. You never, ever, say no. So when especially when you’re starting out the first couple of years. So you have a client, you’re doing SEO and you’re like, hey, you know, your website is a big part of SEO. We should make some fixes here. Oh, can you do that for us?
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And a young Eric’s like, yeah, of course. And so now we got to figure out how do we do web design. How do we do web development. Then we realized like, hey, you know, what goes really well with SEO is some paid ads and paid search ads, you know, oh, can you do that for us? Yeah, of course we can do that.
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Right. And so it kind of organically grows and you start adding those skill sets to your utility belt there as an agency over time. So quite frankly, it was just organic growth. I didn’t go out and say, hey, we’re gonna do social media now. It was really the client saying, hey, you know, we’re looking at doing Facebook. Can you help with that?
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And just never saying no.
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Hey, guys. Jesse here. I just wanted to take a second and thank you very much for listening to this podcast. And I was just actually on a podcast as a guest right before this recording. And, the host had asked me, you know, what exactly do you do with agencies? And because of a thing called an offer triangle that was able to answer that very simply, I said most agency owners are stuck being an operator, and they really want to become the CEO.
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And the three things that hold them back most is an unscalable business, inconsistent lead flow, and clients and micromanaging a team. So Niching control helps them to develop a scalable business, consistent revenue and empowered team. And the host is like, oh wow, that makes sense. They were able to see very quickly what the value is. And that way I was able to bring and that offer triangle is the framework we’ve used in Niching control for the last year and a half or so, and it has really been a game changer.
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Daisy, one of our, agency clients, she use it to position and attract high ticket clients, and she doubled her PR agency within four months. So it has a very profound impact. And what I would like to do for you, just as a gift, is to give you that training. You can go to niche and control E-commerce triangle for a seven day trial of our Scalable agency accelerator.
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And it just gives you that access to the first step, the foundation of a scalable offer, which is messaging and positioning. So if you are trying to attract premium clients and you’re trying to figure out that messaging, you can go to niche and control that comms triangle and get that free trial today.
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Yeah, yeah. So lot of different lessons there. So one of the ones early on is that people absorb and learn in different ways. So one example is I’m a big visual guy. So I love loom. So I record myself with loom. Hey, here’s how to set up Google Tag Manager. Right. Here you go. Follow it. And then someone else watches.
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That has to pause the all the time and like needs a checklist. So other people they want a written out checklist or want it written out so they can follow along and they don’t care about the video. So I was kind of early on kind of that lesson. Because we also have one of my, digital strategists here.
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She doesn’t like videos at all, like she doesn’t want tutorials or anything. She just wants to write it out. And so understanding that there’s different ways for those processes in there. And then also and that’s to this days our golden rule is you need to have checkpoints and a checklist in there. So even if you’re recording it like at the end basic like okay, that’s how you set up Google Tag Manager.
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Here’s the five things that you need to do to make sure you’ve completed this task. So understanding what those mandatory are before the task is complete I think is really important.
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For sure. Yes.
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So we’re about 13 people.
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Yeah.
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Yeah. That’s such a great question. So I’m going to continue. What we were already talking about is just building out processes. Right. Having standards of how things are to get done. I think it’s just really important because that is where delegation comes in. Right? Understanding early on that you can’t do everything yourself. And if you want to give it to someone, they need to understand the process or what that checklist looks like so that you can give it to them.
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So the sooner that you say, hey, this task can take me half hour. If I documents, you can take me 60 minutes. That’s super annoying cause I’m doubling the time, but it’s going to save me so much time down the road. You know, that’s something I would definitely try to really hammer into a younger Eric’s, like, just spend that extra half hour, spend that extra 20 minutes to get that process written out so that other people can follow it.
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Otherwise you’re going to be stuck doing this, repetitive task over and over. So I think that checks all the boxes. Right. And it helps, save you time. It saves you money, it saves everything. There is kind of helping those, those processes. Then also the,
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the product ization. So I want to go back where I said, yeah, I say yes to everything.
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There’s a lot of positive to that, but there’s also a lot of negative. Right. Kind of staying in your lane knowing what you’re good at and really executing on that I think is really important. And so while I said yes and I was able to grow it, like now we do everything that’s fantastic. I don’t do that anymore.
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Right? So if someone comes to me and says, hey, can you build me a Wix website? No, we only do WordPress. Hey, can you run tick tock ads for me? No, we only do meta, right? So understanding
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what you do and don’t do is equally as important
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so that you’re able to, not drive the team crazy because I, as the person at the top, right, I, I’m the one who sets the direction, who sets the motivation for the agency, but also the one who drives the team the most.
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Crazy because I’m like, hey, we’re going to chase this shiny object here. And so I think that’s something as well, is make it having a clear process for innovation as well. So what we do is we have quarterly innovation meetings where I basically have to hold myself until that quarterly meeting to say, hey, this guys, this is a new shiny object.
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We should try this out, this new AI web page builder or whatever it is. Let’s try it out. And then we can come up with a process of testing it out and making it happen, versus me trying to spend my time on figuring it out or forcing other people to use it, I think is really important as well.
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Having those innovation processes in place.
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Yes.
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Yeah. And just keeping everybody kind of informed. Right. And that’s for me, just on a personal level is a big growing lesson is because I’m used to I’m an only child, so I don’t have to care what anybody else thinks. I just make decisions in a vacuum. Right. Hey, I want to I want to do this. This is what’s going to happen, right?
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So now that grows exponentially when you run an organization, right? I’m not an only child anymore. I got a whole bunch of people around me, and my decisions impact a lot of people. So understanding that and communicating that clearly with everyone, I think is very, very important.
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Yeah. So great question. So, you know, digital marketing is, being revolutionized, right? We have I, I have, other agency owners I talk with even myself where it can, it’s, scary where clients are potential clients like, oh, I can just give that to ChatGPT or, hey, I can just have AI execute that for me.
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I see that as an opportunity. It’s another tool that’s out there, you know, I remember when I first started this and social media was just kind of getting off the ground and people like, oh, we’re going to do Facebook, we’re going to do Twitter. Early days. Right? And they said, hey, we’re going to hand it off to, an intern and the interns going to run the company Facebook page.
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Right. And using AI, I equate exactly to that.
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You don’t want AI being the one speaking on behalf of your brand, I being the one who’s putting the tone together and who is putting together output there, that it’s going to be public facing for you. It’s like handing your brand over to an intern.
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So I’m really excited about continuing to grow as a partner and exploring together with clients what that evolutionary process looks like, where we go potentially from not always executing everything to being that, more of a strategic, I guess a partner for them and to see what that evolves into, like, you know, lovable dev builds websites for you.
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Right? I can go on there, give an AI prompt in three years, you know, Jesse, I think we might not be building websites. Love of what? Our devs are going to do that for us, but you still need to understand what is the, the brand tone. What is the brand voice? What’s the brand guide? What are the web guidelines?
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All these things do I need to put in place those best practices? Still need to have a human doing that. And so kind of driving that, that shift of what a relationship looks like between a marketing agency, digital marketing such as us and the client is what I’m really excited for the next couple of years. I see it as a huge opportunity.
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Yes. Yeah. Thank you.
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Yeah. So I’m very active on LinkedIn. So just find
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me on LinkedIn. Eric Ritter, my name, you can go to my website, digital neighbor.com. I have both the US spelling with the oh and the British Canadian version with the EU. So both of those will lead you to my website. On there you can learn more about my motion for marketing system, which is a proven system I put together in over 12 years working with law firms for them to have sustainable growth and take the guesswork out of marketing.
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You.
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My pleasure. Jesse, thank you so much for having me on. This was great.
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Agency owners. If you want to transform your agency to sustain and grow without your direct involvement, where you can stop working in the business and start working on the business, where you can free up your time, delegate work more effectively, price and position your services to finally get paid for what you’re worth and have the team run the day to day.
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Go to niche and control dot com slash case study. Now to learn more about leverage for growth and also to book a free strategy session with us, we’ll look at your systems determine exactly what you need to do in order for you to scale this year and to create a strategic plan so that you can live the life of entrepreneurship you’ve always dreamed about.
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Go to niche and control dot com slash case study now.
