IAM1151- CEO Helps Businesses with Creative Digital Marketing

As CEO of Online Optimism, Flynn Zaiger spends his day keeping his employees happy, his clients happier, and the office pups happiest. Flynn started the agency in 2012 by himself with only a laptop and lots of coffee. Over the last decade, he's grown the team to 20 employees across offices in Washington, DC, Atlanta, and New Orleans. They help businesses all over the world with creative digital marketing, including search, social, and website design – essentially, anything that touches a screen.

• CEO Hack: Ramp software
• CEO Nugget: Humanize your brand and feature your staff more
• CEO Defined: Providing great careers to those who trust you

Website: https://www.onlineoptimism.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/flynnzaiger
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/flynnzaiger/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/onlineoptimism
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/online.optimism
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@onlineoptimism

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Transcription

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00:27 – Intro

Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO podcast.

00:55 – Gresham Harkless

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Flynn Zager of Online Optimism. Flynn, it's great to have you on the show. It's great to be here, very excited to talk. I'm excited as well too. And before we jump into the interview, I want to read a little bit more about Flynn, so you can hear about some of those awesome things that he's doing.

As CEO of Online Optimism, Flynn spends his day keeping his employees happy, his clients happier, and the office pups happiest. Flynn started the agency in 2012 by himself with only a laptop and lots and lots of coffee. And over the decade, he's grown the team to 20 employees across offices in Washington, DC, Atlanta, and New Orleans. They help businesses all over the world with creative digital marketing, including search, social, and web design, essentially anything that touches a screen. Flynn, super excited to have you on the show. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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01:44 – Flynn Zaiger

Excited to do it.

01:46 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome, Well, let's do it then. So to kind of kick everything off, I wanted to rewind the clock a little bit here a little bit more on how you got started, what I call your CEO story.

01:53 – Flynn Zaiger

Yeah, absolutely. When I was a little bit younger than I am right now, we just essentially, I was in a city that was growing New Orleans in 2012, like it's been doing over really the past 2 decades, was going through revitalization. A lot of businesses are excited and ready to grow. Internet marketing was a little scarier back then.

Social media was coming around, but Google ads were in its, I would say, infancy, Facebook, all that stuff was just starting up and I graduated college and I want to say that you know I had big dreams of running a business and having a lot of employees but really I wasn't, didn't really like my job and I applied for other jobs and didn't get them. And when you're unemployed and unable to find work, the easiest thing to do, I guess, is to create your own job. So I started this business pretty good at internet stuff.

I made a nice little MySpace page when I was a kid and helped my parents' business out. And then we just went around trying to be as helpful as possible. I think back then, one of the things that I always kept in mind was that a referral was almost just as good as a sale. And if I was going to help someone out and they offered to pay me for an hour or 2 of work, I would tell them to keep it and instead refer me to a bigger business or a client.

I was really young when I started, but even for any new entrepreneur out there, your word of mouth and reputation is going to be what makes or breaks your business. And so when I started, I helped out as many people as I could. And a lot of those stories of people we helped in 2013, and 2014, still talk to and still get referrals from 7, 8 years later. So it was, it was really key to our growth.

03:28 – Gresham Harkless

Nice. I absolutely love that. And, And, you know, I'm real big into sometimes you can find a lane, sometimes you can't. So you have an opportunity sometimes within us to create your own lane. And you being able to do that is absolutely huge. And you hear so many times people that are that become successful. Sometimes they're interning or they're volunteering their time and doing things, you know, from that standpoint. But I love that kind of spin on it that you've been able to do. Planning those C's very early on by providing, you know, really great work and helping out people, as you said so well, and then saying, okay, just please refer me to somebody else and understanding how that could potentially pay benefits years and years down the line.

04:04 – Flynn Zaiger

Absolutely. It's really a long-term vision that I think is what you might not typically get in your first year, but it's the key to success.

04:11 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. Sustainability, especially too, and being able to kind of have that reputation and have other people speak on that reputation as well to other people is absolutely huge. And so I know I touched on it a little bit, but when I read your bio, could you drill down a little bit more, tell us how you help, how you serve the clients that you work with, and what that looks like?

04:27 – Flynn Zaiger

Absolutely, so we do creative digital marketing. So as you were saying, if you touch the screen, we try to make it look better, make it a little more efficient, and get it higher in the feeds or on Google. We typically break down into 4 services. The first build great websites, typically WordPress, although we do venture into other platforms when their needs demand essentially. The second one is social media. And that's always fun, always changing, always new networks out there, growing, shrinking. And of course, the monopoly of Facebook and Instagram at the top. And then we do a search.

When we say search, we do organic SEO, which we consider pretty much anything that you want to appear on Google. So it's not just getting you higher on Google, but it's once people get to your page, telling you a good story, getting them to convert whatever that means for your business. And of course, paid ads as well. And then we dabble in whatever's new and out there because you never know what's coming out on the internet.

I mean, we used to do authorship for SEO because Google said it'd be the big thing in like 2015, 2016, and then in 2017 they were like JK and they stopped doing all of that. And we've dabbled in different social networks and now we're beginning more TikTok management and ads. We've been really building up LinkedIn capabilities during COVID-19 when everyone's networking budget and convention budget went online.

So I think that's what I most like about the search and social and the websites is everything we do. We don't sign contracts longer than a year because I think personally it's impossible to sign up to Joe's marketing contract longer than a year. Today's actions will significantly impact our future endeavors in 2022. So I think that's what I enjoy the most. And that's why our clients rely on us. It's a full-time job to stay up to date on what the algorithms want to show to its users nowadays. And so we essentially help our clients to navigate that crazy world that is the internet.

06:21 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. And I imagine that everybody who might be listening might be thinking and having heartburn and thinking about all the different things that could juggle, which is why it's so important to kind of be able to lean on an agency like yours and to be able to kind of navigate each of those pieces. I love what you said about signing the contract for a year, not so much because you guys know that you're not gonna be able to execute, but because you're aware of the changing landscape and how rapidly it changes. Not only are you testing, but you're also, I think, building a strong reputation and relationship with those clients because you're also letting them know that you're gonna continue to test out and we're gonna give you whatever solution you might need to reach your goals.

07:02 – Flynn Zaiger

Yeah, Absolutely. I think that adaptability has really been key.

07:06 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Would you consider that to be what I like to call your secret sauce? It might be you personally or the business or a combination of both. What do you feel kind of sets you apart and makes you unique?

07:15 – Flynn Zaiger

I think it is 0% me and 100% my team. I think our strength and the biggest challenge is always hiring talented individuals. I've been incredibly lucky to hire some of the best that I've ever met. And they're really leaders in design and social and search. I think that is absolutely what helps us stand out. The other thing is we are a digital agency, we have clients around the country, and most of our clients have actually met them face to face. And even during COVID, we kind of expanded our client base.

So we used to be only in New Orleans, we're now in Atlanta and DC or the DMV area around here. And because COVID was happening, no 1 could meet face to face so we could get clients and do marketing all around the country, but we've built up clients and teams there. So even today, one of our company values is screens will not replace handshakes. I know it's kind of ironic to say on a podcast, but we still believe that connections happen face-to-face.

Even if we're gonna be doing social media for a company, it's good for that campaign to start off over coffee, over cocktails, shake their hand, talk to them, and really get a feel for that connection. Because that's all these social networks and everything we're doing online is just a replacement for sitting around a coffee shop and talking shop and hanging out. And so we really kind of see that connection. And I see my staff wanting to make those connections as our secret sauce to success.

08:41 – Gresham Harkless

Nice. I love that. And I'm going to add in, because you didn't say it, humility as well, Sue, and being able to kind of lead and grow everything. I'm sure there's a little bit of humility you have as well, Sue, in your secret sauce. But I love understanding the contrast between how people interact online versus face to face; it's like they're in competition. But I love the synergy between those and how you realize how they complement one another and how they're both able to kind of work hand in hand. And I think so many times people will forget about that as it's kind of replicating but providing you the opportunity to maybe even meet with coffee with more people than you would have before rather than saying, oh, we're not ever going to meet for coffee. That makes sense.

09:16 – Flynn Zaiger

Yeah, I take any invite I could get. Even it could be a freshman college intern, and they're like, hey, but if they take the time to reach out to you, I'm not saying I do the most convenient coffee meeting time. Sometimes it's 7 a.m. Just to make sure that they actually wake up. But I think that in any face-to-face connection, you never know who's gonna be able to help you out. So I'm always up for it.

09:37 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I wanted to switch gears a little bit and I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an app, a book, or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

09:49 – Flynn Zaiger

Yes, this is something that we just switched into and I apologize that it's like the least sexy category that we could come up with, but we just used a new financing and expensing tool called RAMP and it's been incredible. And I say that as someone who has gone through the entire lifecycle of expensing at a company. So everything used to be bought by me and you had to come up to me and ask for the purchase. And then we switched to the always classic Excel spreadsheets and pictures of receipts that would get texted and emailed. We upgraded to Google Sheets.

And then we tested out a whole bunch of different systems and just did a whole bunch of demos of like, Expensify and Abacus. And I gotta be honest, Ramp's software has like blown me away. It does a lot of stuff to not only track it, make it easy for our staff, which was really the big thing. We're now at 21 employees, which was making our spreadsheet system a little bit of a nightmare. And it's, again, like you were saying, our humility and I want my staff to feel that our software and tools get in the way as little as possible so they can just focus on their job.

The most expensive solutions are not that. And they've been really great. They've kind of been super helpful in customer service and onboarding. So I know that no one's looking for cool expense software. But if that has been causing problems in your life and you're looking for one that seems like a great tool, we've only really been using it for a month, but I love my expense software at the moment, which I don't think is a sentence that most CEOs get to say. So I've been excited about that.

11:17 – Gresham Harkless

I wanted to ask you now for what I call CEO Nugget. So this could be a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. It could be around creative digital marketing, or it might be something if you were to hop into a time machine, you would tell your younger business self.

11:28 – Flynn Zaiger

Yeah, I think one of the things that we've been learning over the years, and we really try to emphasize to other business owners is all about humanizing your brand and you see this a lot more lately from bigger companies. I think small and medium-sized businesses tend to be scared of it. When we say humanizing your brand, we literally mean putting the people in your company on camera, on your social media, doing photo shoots with them, video, all of those interactions. And that is honestly sometimes terrifying.

I mean, A, it's not your business anymore. You're showing other people. B, there's always the fear that if there's turnover you've now spent a lot of money promoting someone who's not there anymore. It's just, but it works. A, it's so much better engagement. Social media feeds, everything that we've tracked, everything that a lot of bigger studies have shown is that people love engaging with other people. So if you put someone's face on content, it will get more likes, it will get more comments.

Then the other thing is as the workforce gets younger and millennials, and now we have Gen Z starting on our team, and soon too, I think, it goes like 2035, 2036, that the majority of the workforce will be millennials or younger. They want that recognition. So not only is this going to be better for your marketing and better for your conversions, but it does actually increase retention to feature and appreciate your staff. Yes, you do have to work, you're gonna be promoting them.

So they might get poached, you have to make them actually like working for you, but they are going to like working for you if you appreciate them and feature them more. So I think it's gotta kind of get over your fears. And if your social media, if your website doesn't feature your staff's face and pictures and names and horoscopes or favorite animal, whatever you want to show off, you should change that because your website content, your marketing will do better if you showcase the people behind the scenes.

13:20 – Gresham Harkless

I wanted to ask you now my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We're hoping that different quote-unquote CEOs on their show. So Flynn, what does being a CEO mean to you?

13:27 – Flynn Zaiger

I think it's providing great careers to those that trust in you. I think that is kind of the end-all deal of what I see in your role running a company. I mean, it used to honestly be a little different. It used to be, you know, hire more people, grow bigger, make more money. And I think not that old, but as I've gotten older, I've kind of shifted it to what to can we provide for those who invest their time in us and I've been told not to give this speech because I used to give this to people on the first day but I'd be like you're working with us 40 hours a week you're gonna see us more than your friends more than your family more than your loved ones you will see your co-workers.

I was told that that was a sad statement to tell people, which is fair. But it's true. It's true. And if you have to spend this much time in Slack channels with people that you work with, you should love or at least enjoy or appreciate or get value out of what you do. And I think my job as CEO is to make sure that that's happening. And if it's not happening, you know, course correct or get them a different job at a different organization. Like that, we should be helping people find fulfillment in their job. Hopefully, that's what our agency would be wonderful if everyone really found fulfillment only working on optimism, but that's probably not the case. And that's okay. That's my role as CEO is to not stand in the way of reaching whatever goals are.

14:54 – Gresham Harkless

Flynn, truly appreciate that definition. And I appreciate your time even more. What I wanted to do was just pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know and of course how best they can get out of you and find out about all the awesome things you're looking at.

15:08 – Flynn Zaiger

Absolutely, thank you. So if you have any questions right around marketing, I mean if you want a proposal, I love giving website and marketing proposals, but really if you are a small business owner, no matter how small or big, I was in your shoes less than a decade ago. And I really do love talking to organizations just starting out to answer questions, talk about your WordPress school problems, talk about why your Facebook ads aren't performing as well as they used to, or just explain anything about the internet.

I find it to be a fascinating place that we are all now stuck on, whether you like it or not. So feel free to reach out with a question, or of course, if you are in the DMV, let me know. Grab coffee with you, always happy to chat. You can reach me at Flynn, F-L-Y-N-N at onlineoptimism.com, or just send a message to any of our social feeds and our social team will tell me that someone's trying to reach out. We're always happy to talk. It's pretty much all about online optimism.

16:00 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. And to make it even easier, we'll have the links and information in the show notes as well too, so that everybody can follow up with you. But I appreciate you for taking some time out, obviously, today. I appreciate all the awesome work you do and the words of wisdom as well today too about humanizing online, humanizing business, and forgetting about those pieces as we sometimes do and how we can kind of course correct and redirect our attention and our energies towards that. So thank you so much for obviously doing that and embodying that as well too. And I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

16:26 – Outro