IAM1154- Founder Leads a Fast Growing Marketing Agency

Tanner entered the digital marketing industry in 2018, starting his own digital marketing agency while he was still attending college at The University of Utah. What started as a side business/hobby has quickly transformed into what Ranksey Digital Marketing is today – a fast-growing marketing agency that specializes in web design and search engine marketing.

• CEO Hack: Being extremely organized
• CEO Nugget: Don't stop on a channel just because you didn't get immediate results
• CEO Defined: Living your dream and purpose

Website: https://ranksey.com/

Facebook: https://fb.me/ranksey
Twitter: https://twitter.com/RankseyDigital
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ranksey/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rankseymarketing/

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Transcription

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00:21 – 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.

00:48 – 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 Tanner Scott of RankSky Digital Marketing. Tanner, it's great to have you on the show.

00:59 – Tanner Scott

Great to be here, Gresham.

01:01 – Gresham Harkless

Super excited to have you on. Before we jump into the interview, I want to read a little bit more about Tanner so you can hear about all the awesome things that he's doing. Tanner entered the digital marketing industry in 2018, starting his own digital marketing agency while he was still attending college at the University of Utah. What started as a side business slash hobby has quickly transformed into what Rainsky Digital Marketing is today, a fast-growing marketing agency that specializes in web design and search engine marketing. Tanner, great to have you on the show. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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01:31 – Tanner Scott

Absolutely.

01:32 – 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 and hear a little bit more about how you got started, what I call your CEO story.

01:41 – Tanner Scott

Yeah, so I have a pretty interesting story. Throughout college, I always kind of had this entrepreneurial feeling and, you know, I just gravitated towards it. So it was always kind of in the back of my mind. But I actually ended up starting my business a little prematurely. So I graduated with a bachelor's degree in marketing from the University of Utah.

What happened was, you know, during my time in college, I always had a career in the construction industry, actually, So completely different from what I'm doing now. Because of that solid career, I never really spent a lot of time, building up my resume, doing internships, and all the things that really contribute to landing a good job right out of college. So that ended up hurting me quite a bit.

Once I tried looking for a position, everything out there was really requiring 2 plus years of experience, especially marketing. After a few months on the job search, I just gave up on it and decided I was going to give myself some experience. It was really, really naive of me to just start a marketing agency. The first time I did any of this stuff was with my first clients. So yeah, it was definitely a learning experience.

03:06 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, but I appreciate you going out on a limb. I think so many times, people don't decide to go out on that limb and start their business and all the awesome things that they're doing. But you're absolutely right where I think, especially in digital marketing, I don't know if you feel the same way, that there's so much, obviously, that you can learn and you take courses and books and things like that, of course, but I think there's a lot that you can learn from kind of cutting your teeth on the actual marketing itself. So I imagine you've got a tremendous amount of experience by being able to do that.

03:37 – Tanner Scott

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I truly think that's the best way to learn any new skill. Truth be told, my degree didn't really prepare me to enter into the workforce. So, you know, just being pushed into it and having my back up against the wall, you know, I sold some really cheap contracts and I was just trying to figure out as I went. I mean, it was definitely not an easy experience, but I'm definitely glad that I did it.

04:05 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. Sometimes you have to go through those, you know, less than ideal times to get to where you want to be. So many times you hear about people that become successful largely because they, you know, even give away their service or they intern or they're doing all these things. But I love, you know, that you kind of did that and, you know, within your, your business, it sounds like, and as you said, you had those first clients that maybe you were able to kind of, you know, develop those skills while you were also providing, you know, services for them. So I love to hear how that has grown from there.

04:33 – Tanner Scott

Yeah, it's been really awesome. Digital marketing is one of those things that is constantly changing, right? I would consider myself more of an entrepreneur than I would a marketer. This is probably not gonna be my first venture. At some point, I'm gonna probably get bored of it and go on to something else.

04:56 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. Now I can definitely relate to that. A serial entrepreneur to say the least it sounds like in the making. So love to hear how you grow and have you back and hear a little bit more about, you know those things that you're doing. But I wanted to hear a little bit more about Rainsky Digital Marketing. Could you take us through a little bit more on what you're doing there and how you're serving the clients you're working with?

05:16 – Tanner Scott

Yeah, so in the very beginning it was I'm gonna work with anyone that has a checkbook. I'm sure a lot of people listening can relate to that. But over time, of course, I definitely figured out that was not the right approach. Then it was, okay, I know I need to niche down, but I don't feel like I've been doing it long enough to really know what I like and what I don't like type of thing. I'd say that that evolution probably happened about 2 years ago. So the last couple of years, you know, we've just been really focused on identifying the markets that we are best at serving.

So far, that's been kind of industrial type businesses, blue collar, that seems to be our bread and butter, specifically companies that sell equipment, something that's too large to sell online, just driving regeneration for companies like that. So, primarily we focus a ton on web design and that's really how we get a lot of clients to the door and how we kind of upsell our other marketing services. But outside of that, our focus is really on search engine marketing.

As I said, for those high-ticket products or services, specifically SEO, that's kind of our bread and butter. That's kind of how I came up with the name Rinksy. It's just a play on the name rank. You know, these days it's kind of hard to come up with a business name that has a domain that isn't taken. So that's kind of just how that worked out.

07:01 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. No, I love that. As we were kind of, you know, connecting before we hit the record button, I love the kind of play on words for that. You know, everything that you're doing as well too, and being able to kind of find that niche and the people that you wanted to serve. I think so many times we forget that that journey doesn't just happen at a snap of the finger. Sometimes we have to evolve to find the industry, to find the niche, to find the way that we want to kind of serve the clients that we work with.

07:26 – Tanner Scott

Yeah, absolutely. To kind of add onto that, I mean, starting a business is like that in every facet, right? You just have to pick it up and figure it out. If you have that mentality and you're always trying to learn and you're not afraid of failing, that's really how you get through that roller coaster of ups and downs. So that's really important to mention because I think a lot of people overlook the process from unsuccessful to successful. It's definitely not linear, right?

08:01 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. I say so often that the real, I guess, way to represent success is I say much more like a plate of spaghetti than anything else where you have those windy turns and a lot of times sometimes you get to where you want to be, but It's not that straight, like you said, linear progression towards where that is.

08:19 – Tanner Scott

Yeah. Sometimes you end up in a great spot and you didn't even really intend on it.

08:24 – Gresham Harkless

You just run with that, right?

08:25 – Tanner Scott

So I mean, it goes both ways.

08:28 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. That's why those skills, those foundational skills that you talked about are so huge. So would you consider that to be what I like to call your secret sauce? This could be for yourself personally, the business, or a combination of both, but is it that ability to continue to kind of be okay, I guess, with failure, understand that that's part of the process, and continue to kind of try different things? Do you feel like that makes you unique? Is that your part?

08:48 – Tanner Scott

Yeah, I would definitely say that that makes me unique. In fact, that's one of our core values is we embrace failure. That's something that's so important to me because I could not even tell you how many times I failed throughout this process. Failure to me is a good thing because if you fail and you can learn from those mistakes, the key there is learning from those mistakes. The failure doesn't continue to happen like that, but that's a game changer. You need failures like that to boost you forward.

You really do. But I also have a podcast called Secrets to Scale. The question that I ask my guests on every single episode is what are your secrets to scale? So I'd say that this is kind of along the same lines as what you just asked me. But my answer to that question is processes and people. I think those 2 things are key to scaling a business.

09:49 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So 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 Apple book or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

10:01 – Tanner Scott

Yeah, that's a really good question. So for me, it's just being extremely organized. We have a project management tool that we use called monday.com. I'm sure you've heard of it. But for me, my hack has been, honestly, ever since we implemented that, and it was just me, I should say, when I implemented that, it seemed to change everything about my business. Being able to organize all of the things that I needed to do and prioritize them and schedule reminders and all that stuff, that's made a huge difference in my path to success. I'm not gonna say that I've found success yet, but.

10:42 – Gresham Harkless

Absolutely. So 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 digital marketing, or it might be something if you were to hop into a time machine that would tell your younger business. So.

10:56 – Tanner Scott

Yeah, that's interesting. I don't think marketing exists in the same sense it did before, especially when it comes to digital marketing. I think all marketing is not digital marketing, but I would say don't stop on a channel just because you didn't get immediate results. You've got to give it the old college try and you've got to make sure that you're putting in what you need to get something out of it before you just say, okay, you know, SEO is not for me, tried it for a couple months, nothing happened. SEO may be a bad example of that. Let's say Google Ads did it for 2 months and didn't really get a huge hour while on it, never gonna do it again. I think that mentality can have a lot of damage on anyone's business.

11:49 – Gresham Harkless

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

12:03 – Tanner Scott

For me, being a CEO gives my life purpose. When I was working for other companies, I felt like I was building someone else's dream and it just wasn't a good fit for me. Being a CEO is both difficult and rewarding. When you look back 2 or 3 months, or even 2 or 3 years from now, it's incredible to see the growth you've achieved during that time. There just really isn't anything that you can compare to that feeling.

12:39 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. I say so often myself that I feel like entrepreneurship equals hope and a lot of times it's because like you said, purpose, and it gives you that opportunity to kind of create things and build them, you know, out of sometimes just our thoughts in our minds and then see that come to fruition and manifest itself, make an impact with clients and so many different ways, be on podcasts and have podcasts.

So I think it's one of the most exciting things. It's definitely not without its challenges, but I think once you understand that you have that purpose, as you said so well, it allows you to kind of put all those steps and all those less-than-ideal days as much as the ideal days in alignment.

13:17 – Tanner Scott

Yeah, yeah, no question.

13:19 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Well, Tanner, truly appreciate that definition and I appreciate your time even more. What I wanted to do is 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. Of course, how best they can get ahold of you and find out about all the awesome things that you're working on and of course subscribe to your podcast.

13:37 – Tanner Scott

Yeah, so you know I think one thing that I was going to mention earlier is you know even if you try out a marketing channel and you know maybe it's good for your business, maybe it's not, maybe it's a complete flop. You still learn so much about your product your service and your market. So it's really not a total loss.

So I'd like to just emphasize that for companies that are thinking about investing in marketing or anything like that because even if you lose a thousand dollars a month for 3 months and it doesn't go anywhere, you probably found some other areas of weakness in your business that you needed to fix. But aside from that, I can be reached very easily. Our website is rinksy.com, R-A-N-K-S-E-Y on there. You can also check out my podcast, Secrets of Scout.

14:31 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Wanna make it even easier, we'll have the links and information in the show notes as well too so that everybody can check out everything you're doing, and also be able to subscribe to your podcast. Truly appreciate that last kind of tidbit and then that nugget as well too, because I think so many times we think everything we do is in silos.

So if you try Instagram marketing or advertising or whatever that might be, we sometimes forget that that can give you business information that can basically help you out with a potential other campaign on another platform, potentially just help you run your business better. So I love that last nugget because I think so many times we can look at things in silos when in actuality they're all kind of intertwined and interconnected. So Taylor, truly appreciate you again, my friend. I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

15:13 – Outro