1. Hello! Who are you, where are you located and what is your business?
I am Kyle Harms, and I am currently located in Vancouver, Canada. I am the CEO of Digital Hot Sauce (a marketing agency dedicated to getting results without any of the BS).
2. What is your back story and how did you come up with this idea?
Digital Hot Sauce founders, Scot Sustad and Reuben Zuidhof, have been entrepreneurs for years now. They ran a couple of startups and couldn’t find a single marketer who cared about their growth. They ate through their marketing budget but had nothing to show for it. They were frustrated with feeling ripped off, and decided to do it themselves, and better. That’s how Digital Hot Sauce was born.
3. How did you get your first customers?
We were fortunate to work within our local community in Vancouver, right off the bat. Through networking and word-of-mouth, we worked with local services to help them with their marketing needs. Quickly, word spread about our results and the level of personal care we had for the work we did, and we started to attract more and more businesses who needed marketing help.
4. Describe the process of launching your agency. What lessons were learned along the way?
As entrepreneurs ourselves, we were looking to connect with marketing agencies that could work with us on smaller budgets and provide provide results. We felt that we were billed a lot, and barely saw any results. That’s when we started researching about digital marketing, and developed a burning passion started to learn more about Conversion Rate Optimization and building audiences. We had an aha moment and decided to do it ourselves, and better.
That’s how we got to the process of launching Digital Hot Sauce. We had a burning passion to continue to build businesses through digital marketing, and knew we could help businesses have an impact and achieve their goals. We were in it for the long haul.
There are many challenges that come with starting a business. We quickly learned that building an agency wasn’t easy. We needed to hire the right people and create processes that would work for the team and our clients. We knew that there was a real need for digital marketing, and our mission to deliver results continued to drive us.
5. Since your early days, what has worked to attract and retain customers?
Honesty and meaningful work made all the difference for us.
We created Digital Hot Sauce with the idea that we wanted to make marketing more effective for everyone by delivering results and admitting when we’re wrong.
We always connected with our clients on grounds of communicating realistic expectations and having a partnership approach to things. We’re personable; people like us because we work hard and smart everyday. And most importantly, we care about the work we do. We want to make a difference in for the clients we work with and the world around us, which is why we focus on ‘meaningful work’ as one of our core values.
Our entrepreneurial mindset coupled with strategic marketing leadership and honesty have allowed us to consistenly build and maintain positive relationships with our clients.
6. What were your challenges and obstacles of growing your agency?
Running an agency isn’t easy. It was challenging to attract and retain high-level talent in an in-demand workforce. Additionally, sometimes, there was a disconnect between client expectations and what is possible, as well as the quality of the product or product market-fit.
Today, it’s a different story altogether. We’ve developed our ‘dream team’ as one might say, and perfected the balance between communicating realistic expectations with our clients and working with businesses that need the services we’re skilled to provide them with.
7. What has been helpful to you to grow your agency?
Growing our agency meant growing our team of marketers and specialists. Once we started hiring people who were skilled at their roles and cared about the agency and it’s growth, we were able to build out our processes and streamline not only our internal systems, but also the work that we delivered to our clients.
New perspectives, ideas, and the ability to execute on these helped us grow our agency and elevate the work that we do.
8. What is your advice for anyone looking to start an agency?
While there is a low barrier to entry when it comes to starting a digital marketing agency, it is important to know your way around the processes at least a little bit. Before you decide to open up your agency, make it a point to shadow or work closely with someone in the field and learn the ropes.
9. How are you doing today and what does your future look like?
Things are going really well at Digital Hot Sauce. We have new businesses in the pipeline, and are generating good results with our marketing efforts. Our team is adept at their respective fields, and we’re working with bigger clients.
We’re optimistic about the future. It’s exciting to see the growing impact we have via our clients. We’re working with companies who are in need of the services we’re skilled at providing, and we’re hoping to build our revenue even more so that we can employ an ideal team size.
10. What are some of the platforms or tools you use and companies you partner with to save yourself time, money, and hassles?
From the beginning, we’ve been major advocates and users of the major Google marketing platforms, like Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, and Google Data Studio. We’ve used these tools to monitor, optimize, and report on key information regarding the business – understanding customer behaviours, traffic, leads, and conversions.
For internal processes, we use ClickUp to assign work to our respective team members and to keep track of time logged for scope with our clients. This platform works as a repository for all our work. It has helped us understand workload capacity, streamline internal processes, and keep track of all our tasks.
11. What book or podcast recommendations do you have for agency owners?
Andy Crestodina from Orbit media is a marketing expert who writes insightful blogs and has a great book out on digital marketing.
12. Where can we learn more about you?
To learn more about Digital Hot Sauce and what we do, make sure to visit our website and social channels.
If you’d like to connect, feel free to reach out to me on my LinkedIn.