Are you struggling to get your agency beyond the million-mark? What benefits await beyond seven figures? Erik Olson merged companies with his current partner four years ago and they started Array Digital, an agency that, in its beginnings, focused on website development and mobile application services. They introduced digital marketing services as a smaller branch and then realized it became more popular than expected. In his conversation with Jason, Erik spoke about making the decision to niche down and why reaching the seven-figure mark made such a difference. He also talks about his book about the journey to a million dollars. 3 Golden Nuggets Why seven figures? It took Erik 11 years to break a million dollars in revenue but he really saw a difference after that point. Why seven figures? “It’s a nice round number,” he says. It’s not random at all, only 4% of businesses reach the million-dollar mark, so reaching that number meant, to him, that he crossed the threshold of success. Once he did it, he realized that running the business became a bit easier. He finally had extra money to invest in their own marketing, getting clients gifts, a mastermind, and things that were unaffordable in the beginning. Invest in your people. A huge component of any business is its people and Erik knew this was another area that could see significant investment once the agency started growing. “When I hired my first employee, the only benefit that I had was paid time off,” he recalls. As time went on, they were able to offer more benefits like dental, medical insurance, and even retirement matching. He’s giving his staff what they need to be whole when it comes to their finances and the work itself. What he would do differently. If he had to start over from having a 300,000k business trying to get to one million, Erik says he would quickly focus on the ideal prospect. This is something that took him a long time but now he says he would 100% niche down at that point. “First and foremost, I would certainly identify very clearly who it is I'm talking to or want as a client. And then I would be pretty rapidly going towards niching.” Sponsors and Resources Verblio: Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by Verblio. Check out Verblio.com/smartagency and get 50% off your first month of content creation. Our team loves using Verblio because of the ease in their process and their large pool of crowd-sourced writers. Subscribe Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM What Are The Benefits Beyond the Seven-Figure Mark & How You Can Invest in Your Team {These transcripts have been auto-generated. While largely accurate, they may contain some errors.} Jason: [00:00:00] What's up, agency owners? Jason Swenk here, and I'm excited. I have another amazing episode. I have one of my mastermind members who runs a really successful agency. His partner has actually been on, so I thought I would bring him on as well. And we're going to talk about scaling to seven figures. I know a lot of you watching or listening are constantly trying to battle and you're really trying to get there. And it took me a number of different years to get there and he's going to talk about it as well. So let's go ahead. Get into it. Hey, Eric. Welcome to the show. Erik: [00:00:37] What's up, Jason? Thanks for having me. Jason: [00:00:38] Yeah. I just realized too. I've had Drew and Darren on and, and Kevin and you. Now you're the fourth person on the intro that you can see the drone, the drone flying out from experience. I see them, I see them, I could see the shining head off the edge. Erik: [00:00:57] Hey! Why’d you have to go there, man? Now that was awesome. As a matter of fact, uh, one of the pictures from the experiences my Twitter profile, picture up on the mountain, it was like the, I guess it's the first full day we hiked up Swenk mountain. Yeah, that was amazing, man. Jason: [00:01:14] It was fun, yeah, at sunset. So yeah, it was fun. And then o