About our speakers
Brandon Briggs is the Executive Vice President at IT Delight. With more than two decades of experience, Brandon is recognized as a technology and e-commerce industry leader, people leader, channel expert, and problem-solver.
Darwin Liu is the Founder and CEO of X Agency, a digital marketing firm devoted to taking your company’s profitability to the next level with a powerful and highly skilled team of growth hackers, engineers, writers, and storytellers. His commitment to building an outstanding team highlights a culture that radiates outwardly, evident in their steadfast dedication to excellence.
Key takeaways
Importance of Ownership and Partnership in Work
Rather than simply completing tasks, proactively identify problems, propose improvements, and contribute to project success. This level of commitment fosters a true partnership where both parties invest not only in financial gain, but also in the success of the work.
Selecting External Contractors and Team Integration
Successful integration is more than just outsourcing work; it involves finding people who feel part of the team and are committed to the success of the project.
Culture of Constructive Criticism
Darwin emphasizes the importance of building a corporate culture that accepts constructive criticism. At his agency, lower-level employees are encouraged to share their ideas with higher-ups, creating a meritocratic environment where good ideas can come from anyone.
Transcript
Brandon: Yeah, well, listen, I certainly appreciate you taking a few minutes for those that are kind of joining us or listening in at some point in time. Right? This is just our kind of podcast type series. Right. What we’re trying to do here is go through those we’ve had the opportunity to work with in the past, get to know you guys a little bit more. This is a great way for me, to be honest, to get to know all of the projects, the ins and outs, the things that we’ve worked together on. And it’s so it’s super casual, super exciting. But that’s it. Right. So we’re looking forward to hearing any sort of honest learning and feedback and all that kind of stuff that you’ve gathered over, over your time. But before we do any of that, tell us about you. Tell us about X agency, what you’re doing.
Darvin: Cool! So, you know I won’t go too deep into what I do because it’s about you guys, not about me. But marketing is sort of something I’ve been doing. I personally have been in the marketing world since 2008. I graduated college and, you know, 2008, I really, you know, I did horrible in school, by the way. So I kept back in high school and almost flunked out of college. And when I graduated, I really didn’t know what to do. Right. So I quickly rolled the dice, I went to Google, I typed in how to get rich online. And the first thing that came up was marketing. It was the Warrior Forum back in the day, and it was marketing, online marketing. So I drew up my, you know, for, for I’d say over 2 to 3 years. I started learning marketing, doing web dev running Google ads back in the day when it was still, you know, the wild, wild West. Facebook just started and I was doing it for about two years, you know, doing all this stuff on my own. I gained experience for it, so I started entry level at a marketing job, you know, just so that everyone is clear. It wasn’t my end. It was sort of a means to an end. I still knew that I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I still want to do my thing, but I need to pay my bills. So entry level agency.But because I love marketing so much and I’ve learned so much on my own time and I still do stuff on my own side, I quickly got promoted at the company, right? So within five years I built up my network. I was the lead strategist at the company running the large accounts. I mean, at that point I had my side clients. I was making a good chunk of change. And then I decided to do something crazy and, you know, start it all over again, which was, all right, let me quit this job and run a full scale agency. Right. So it went from doing great to doing bad. And by that point, everyone was asking me the same question, which was like, Darwin, are you stupid? Right? Like, why would you do that when you’re doing so well right now. You’re in a great position. You know, you have these side clients. It’s like your life is going great. But for me, it was like, well, I want to be true to myself. I want to be authentic. So I’m not going to continue doing what I don’t want to do, which is where X agency came from. Right? And a lot of the values that I got personally is what I bring towards X agency as well. So X agency I think started with 2018 or something like that. I don’t even know anymore. I started with three folks, but we have grown tremendously. We’re in the Inc. 5000 we’re at. I don’t even know right now, maybe 22 ish full time and maybe ten ish part time ish folks, right? So we’re growing like crazy exponential growth. But we have been growing year over year. It was at triple digit rates until more recently when the economy’s beaten down. We’re a full scale marketing agency. I guess the big difference about X agency itself is, you know, when I left my old agency, I left for a couple of reasons. There were a couple of holes that I saw that a new agency sort of could plug in and fix. Right. At the majority of agencies, what normally ends up happening is because marketing moves at a record clip. There are no standard operating procedures for what they do. A localized expert becomes a localized expert when he leaves. He takes all of that knowledge with him. So every single account, there was no standard. Some accounts did great, other accounts didn’t. The difference with us is over here, you know, we’re standardizing excellence, right? Our typical account grows maybe 30% right off the bat within the first two months without us touching increasing spend or anything like that. We’ve had, you know, double digit clients that have actually improved triple digits where we’re not increasing the spend by triple digits, we’re increasing spend by 20% and they’re, they’re making an additional triple digit return. Right? Yeah. A recent client, as an example would be we took them from year one where they were making 47 million, but once we took them, they were at $103 million in revenue. We doubled their revenue. However, we only increased their spending by about 20%. So that’s what we do. And we standardize excellence. And how do we do that? Right. We run large scale tests across all of our accounts. So, you know, we have these theories, hypotheses and we’ll test it across multiple accounts, see if it works. And when something works, we apply that as a standard operating procedure to all of our accounts. That’s sort of how we standardize excellence. And excellence is something that we care about, which is why when we are looking for, you know, providers, when we’re looking for partners to actually do our work, we need to vouch and we need to make sure that they actually do great work, which is our way of you guys, guys. So I have been doing great work and we are you know, we do love using them as a partner. They’re always on point. Sure, there’s mistakes, but everyone makes mistakes. But they’re right on time. Even with the change in the hours, they’re still on call. They’re, they’re still, you know, making timely changes. So Yeah. That’s, that’s sort of where we’re at right here.
Brandon: That’s awesome man. You hit on so many great things there, though I, I love that you’re learning. You’re taking the learnings from all of that, right? That massive amount of money. No single merchant, if you will, could ever have those learnings on their own. Right. Because the scale is just not the same and the in the uniqueness. So I mean, you know, kudos to the process, right, that you guys are going through. And thanks for kind of teeing it up for me too. I mean, you know, obviously we’re here too, to learn a little bit about, you know, working together and all that kind of fun stuff. So tell me a little bit more about that, right? You started to dive into what’s important to you and kind of like what you built, but what’s important when you’re looking for other vendors or other other people to come join your team, essentially, right? I mean, you could hire internally, you could grow. That’s one path. You could, you know, you can outsource, if you will. You can bring somebody like ourselves in. What is it that you’re after? What are you looking for in that? In that type of group?
Darvin: Yeah. So there’s a couple of things I would say. But kind of to summarize the two points, one would be ownership. So we’re looking for folks who come in and truly own their past. Right? If we wanted to hire a company that we were just throwing items to, I’ll go to Upwork. I’ll find a solo entrepreneur Indian from India who can just come in and work on this for us. At $8 an hour, we can do something like that. But that’s not ownership that that, you know, you can find. That’s a dime a dozen. We want folks who will fix issues or understand issues that we don’t understand, because we’re not the web dev folks. We are marketing folks. We assign a task we don’t know all the stipulations that come with it. So we want folks who actually own the whole thing and want to see it from inception to completion. This is where Dimitri on your team has been doing great at, which is, you know, there’s things we miss. He’ll come in and say, hey, are you sure you want to do XYZ? This is what it is. And he owns the whole thing, which is great about it today, right? So if anyone’s listening, Dimitri is the main person we’ve been working with, and he has been great at sort of. What he, what he’s good at. But the next thing that we also care about is a true partnership, right? A partnership versus a sort of a contracting slash consulting sort of collaboration. A partnership is where, again, we want to truly see the success of the account, whether it is web dev or marketing or whatever it is. And imagery has been on call even during his break times and things like that. And it does seem like a true partnership. And that is what we truly, truly do go after. So those two and then really just again finishing the task. Right. It’s, it’s and you guys are getting that done too.
Brandon: So yeah that’s amazing I mean ownership for sure right. It is. It’s difficult right. Like you said when you go to these various other solutions like Upwork, you can find freelancers, you can do it. But but having somebody who, who feels like a part of the team, who feels like, you know, at least from the clients that I’ve worked with, I found, like the ones that have been the most successful are the ones where I dive in and I feel like I’m part of their team too. Right? So. So how do you do that? Right? How do you take somebody who’s external like us and maybe even across the, you know, across the big blue ocean here and include them as part of your project team so that that customer feels like they’re getting taken care of.
Darvin: Yeah. Well, and that’s I would say tough. Right. So internally we can standardize that. So in terms of a partnership itself and finding a partner who can do that for us, I think that really, truly is a, you know, try it and see what happens. It’s very I think people orientated the meat and I’ll give you examples of how IT Delight. And Dimitri does it, whether it is hopping on our video calls with us during his off hours and really going through the ropes and trying to help us figure out how to do things. Or whether it is, you know, warning us beforehand that some of our ideas aren’t the best ones. Right. That is more of a partnership where versus us assigning tasks and them saying, hey, Dimitri saying, hey, this is my I get off at five, I’m done. I am not, you know, I’m not helping you with your account anymore or we are assigning a task and he knows it’s wrong and he’s not going to go correct us or tell us what you know, what to do to fix it, right? So. Or even how to save on ours. Right. You know, Dimitri will give us scenarios where it’s like, hey, if you did this, it’s way more hours. And that truly shows that he cares not just about, you know, your bottom line or his bottom line, but truly everyone’s bottom line so that we can make this a successful partnership.
Brandon: Yeah. No good. Good points. I mean, I think that’s an incredibly important part of it. Right? It’s so many companies, so many, even freelancers, so many, you know, agencies out there, it’s about how do they maximize the revenue that ultimately comes in. Right. I think it’s an important thing to take a look at that and make sure you find a partner that says, this isn’t about revenue per job, right? This is about the lifetime of a relationship that we’re going to be able to kind of build together. And sometimes that means you take less today or better tomorrow, right?
Darvin: Exactly. And I like that phrase that actually nails it right on the head.
Brandon: So that’s awesome man. You so you’ve, I mean, and you brought up a couple of things, right? It’s like sometimes it’s not always the easiest thing for somebody to come back in and say, hey, this isn’t let’s not go that route. Because this is why, when you’re thinking, now, this is what we’ve always done or, you know, any, any I guess, recommendations. Any thoughts to maybe those you know, agencies like yourselves or merchants, if you will, that are out there who are in that boat where they’re, you know, you have a developer, excuse me, or someone coming to you saying, let’s look at this in a different way. Any, you know, any suggestions on how you listen to those and how you look at those? Because they may be wrong, but they might be right.
Darvin: And I think that is more of a people process. Right. So for our side at least, you know, we kind of made it. So it’s more of a meritocracy where the people on the lower end aren’t afraid to give insight to the folks on the, on the top end. So this is our culture. So when we have a partner that can come in and say that stuff to us, that is our culture. So we take that as, you know, constructive criticism or as ideas versus a bad idea and getting emotionally attacked from it. So I think you have to build that into your culture. A lot of and I do have a bunch of agency friends, and I still do keep in contact with my old higher ups at the other agencies. And they don’t, you know, they, they still want it’s hard for, for most folks to take criticism. And two, they are still all about the numbers. Right. Can we instill something where it’s not just about the numbers, but it’s more about the true partnership that all comes from the top down from the culture. And it really has to be put into sort of play for the company. Otherwise. I mean, there’s thousands, I don’t freaking know, ten, tens of thousands of agencies out there. What makes you so special? What? What? You know, like what? What separates you apart? And for a lot of companies, it isn’t. It’s just me too company. So you can either try to sell more or you can try to be better, which is to be a partner, you know, so that that is an easy way to, to get more clients.
Brandon: Oh, that’s. Yeah, that’s interesting. You know, one of the challenges I’ll throw out may be a scenario here because, you know, a lot of the merchants and people that we work with directly in fact, it happens less on the agency side, a whole lot more on the merchant side. Right. Let’s fix the cost of everything we do. Right. That’s what they want. They want to see a, you know, we can’t have a project that balloons. We can’t have, you know, we just want to know exactly what it’s going to be, that there’s some pros to that and there’s some cons to ultimately how that goes. But you know when you’ve got someone looking at a development partner, you know, trying, trying to come in and maybe that’s the holdup right there, trying to say, let’s see how low I can get this price. Let’s see how low, you know, what might you suggest to them? You know, in terms of how you evaluate a development partner on maybe factors that are not just about price?
Darvin: Yeah. So there’s a couple of ways. And just as a segue it to like your prices are actually amazing compared to, you know, say so just so that everyone knows this is, you know, nothing to do with pricing, at least on this side, right? But it’s it’s I would say again, interview them on the questions. One is to find out who’s on the account. But two is, you know, are these folks personable? Right. Like and a couple of lists of questions that we would normally try to ask is, all right, well, how do you handle client emergencies when it’s during off hours? Yeah. You know, what else do you do when there’s XYZ difficult situations for XYZ, you know, your past clients or will ask for references, which we did with you guys, and then we’ll reach out to them and see, you know, what they’re about. So yeah, there’s a couple ways to use ChatGPT, find some questions.
Brandon: Yeah. Why not? Right. That’s really cool. You know, as you went through the course of, of your projects with us you know, there’s learnings on both sides, right? I mean, we’re learning from you. You guys are incredible marketers. You’ve got an amazing process, right? And we’re seeing how we should change some of our development ideas in order to better reflect, you know, the better marketing goals that you guys are ultimately going to implement. And I think those are some of the things that we’re learning as we go through working with people like yourselves. Right. And then of course, that gets applied, you know, towards everybody we work with. What were some of those challenges, if you will, that you came across or how did we work through maybe some of those challenges that we came across. So.
Darvin: You know, a lot of things I’d say again, you really do have to, I guess, speak your opinion or at least ask for what you want to ask for. And if there is some middle ground in terms of, you know, us using a web dev company or using a partner, then great. And if not then what usually ends up happening is you move different ways, right? So but like yeah, usually I’m again with you guys there has not been anything, no arguments, nothing, nothing hard to ever even there has been no, you know, hard conversations where I had to go to I’ve got to write the higher up rep. I forgot his name, but I never had to go to anyone and say, hey, Dmitri isn’t doing his job, or Dmitri isn’t around, or Dmitri isn’t doing XYZ. You guys have always done everything. Sure is. Have there been mistakes? But yeah, again, we make mistakes too. And when we bring it up and it gets fixed right away.
Brandon: So you know that’s great, I think kudos to you guys right. I mean I think you’re building the type of culture both with the, you know, those who are coming in to help as well as those who you’ve got, you know, working with you directly where you like you talked about earlier. Right. It’s a culture of we’re all trying to move forward, right? We’re all trying to, you know, be unique, try different things. I mean, I think, you know, you can speak to marketing better than I can, but from my experience, from e-commerce marketing, you know, it seems like when everybody goes down one road, I’m always looking for what’s the other way, right? Like, because you know, just because everyone does one thing means that there’s some empty space over here and. Right. And I, I’ve always been a proponent of saying that, you know, Google, for example, rewards those who are unique. So be unique in some way.
Darvin: You know, and you’re absolutely right. That is another one of our values that we have, right? Be contrarians. If you want to, you know, so everyone you know, we focus on learning. We focus on knowledge. Everyone is required to stay up to date with the latest blogs from SEMrush, from search engine land, from search engine World. They’re they’re forced and required to understand it and read it. However, the difference with us is we have them understand it so they can think on it and do what’s different. Because if we’re doing the same thing as everyone else, which means we’re average, we get average results. You want extraordinary results, you better do extra extraordinary sh**
Brandon: 100%. I think you know, the one thing that always stands out to me, right is it’s like, look for someone who’s going to partner, who’s going to care about you, you know. Well, Darwin, thank you for sharing a little bit about your kind of experience with us. And honestly, I appreciate your kind words as we go into these. I mean, I never exactly know how it’s going to go. I’m sure you’re. I appreciate your kindness, you know? And again, nothing’s ever perfect, but at the same time, I think we work hard to understand and try to, you know, solve what we can. And that’s the one thing. You know, Igor, who’s our founder and CEO. The one thing that I have always appreciated, in fact, this is what attracted me to join him, you know, down this venture here is ITDelight expands through the United States and beyond? The customers that I talked to. Right. Everyone seems to say, you know, we went above and beyond in order to actually achieve what we needed to achieve. And I think that’s critical, right? None of us scope right 100% of the time. Right. There’s always things that come up. It’s e-commerce. By the time you’ve started to the time you’ve you’ve changed, something changed anyway. Right. So what is changing? But as we, as we kind of wrap up, I, I would say this I mean, you know, you you are an incredible marketing mind know we’ve got merchants listening in. Any tips, tricks, suggestions, anything maybe just kind of to end us on that. That gets you excited about ecommerce, ecommerce marketing and you know, give them something to think about.
Darvin: Yeah, I’d say a couple of points would be this. Right. We’re giving our secret sauce. Well, not really. It really goes back to the first point or the point we made maybe about five minutes ago, which is to do something different. You know, don’t be afraid to go against Google’s recommendations. Right? Like just put yourself in someone in whoever’s shoes it is, whether it’s Google shoes or client shoes or the agency shoes. Yeah. Figure out what their goals are. Right. Google’s goals are trying to generate as much revenue for themselves, by the way. So yeah, do something different versus what you normally do. Don’t be afraid to test it, because all those little tests that you do, the majority of them will fail. But the one that actually does work will bring 20, 30, 40% incremental revenue for all of your clients. So, zig, when other folks would say, be a contrarian, do different stuff. What I’m excited about really is, is all this talk about AI and what it can do for us and sort of moving into the future? I know, you know when they first came out, a lot of the folks that were kind of afraid thinking I was going to take their job, but I just used ChatGPT to write. This speech you know, this 2024 leadership speech. And it came out absolutely horrible. So that’s just a segue into sort of AI here, but it’s not you know, I won’t take your job if you can try to understand how to use AI and how to control AI versus letting AI, you know, use you. So for us, we think about how AI can benefit you. Right? Over X AI has really streamlined a bunch of our processes, whether it is content, whether it is summarizing items, whether it is turning bullet points into professional agendas. But for us, it is going to save us a good amount of efficiency and in the long run, revenue or increase our revenue and profit. So think about AI more as a tool for you and not as something that’s going to come in and take your job and take over Earth or whatever it is.
Brandon: But no man, I listen. Thank you so much. Thanks for sharing a little bit of knowledge. Thanks for sharing your time. And I really appreciate you.
Darvin: No, no, thanks for having me, man. This was actually pretty fun. So Yeah. No, thank you for setting this up, but thank you to the whole ITDelight team for doing amazing work and being a true partner to X agency.
Brandon: Absolutely happy to do it. Thanks for having us. Thanks, Darwyn. Talk to you soon, man.
