Dallas McLaughlin is a 12-year veteran of Phoenix, Arizona advertising agencies, where he has worked with hundreds of businesses across travel, hospitality, e-commerce, retail, real estate, finance, and nonprofit industries. From single person start-ups to national franchises, he’s led the strategy, managed teams, and executed full-funnel digital marketing strategies to help businesses meet their annual growth goals. His new digital marketing firm offers SEO, web, and paid media services at affordable prices.
What is Dallas McLaughlin LLC all about?
Dallas McLaughlin LLC is founded on the belief that there is a whitespace that exists between businesses who can benefit the most from great marketing and the ability to afford a partner who can offer great marketing services. After over a decade of large agency experience, I’ve launched Dallas McLaughlin LLC to begin filling this space by offering best-in-class web, SEO, and paid media services to small businesses at fair prices.
Tell us a little bit about your background and how you started your business?
In 1999 I was a 14-year-old who spent a lot of time visiting local bookstores. There I discovered a book which was an introduction to website development – a very rudimentary guide to writing HTML, setting up a domain, managing DNS zone files, and FTP access. I became obsessed with developing websites at a young age. It felt like magic to me. Soon after that I turned my focus to driving website traffic and focused on growing my knowledge of search engine optimization. Eventually, Google search ads and paid social media ads took off and that became my next opportunity. My business then is the triangulation of all three of those things. Building high-performance websites, optimizing them to attract organic traffic, and placing highly targeted paid advertisements with the goal of driving incremental website traffic.
How has the pandemic affected you or your new business?
At the beginning of the pandemic, I was on the leadership team of a large full-service advertising agency. Several of their clients are presently on the Fortune 500 list, in the top 100. All this to say that I was holding a comfortable leadership position at a large agency, collecting a nice salary. However, as I saw the impact the pandemic had on businesses – large and small – I felt a calling to do something more meaningful with my talents. I actually chose to leave my role at a full-service agency and start my own small business with the goal of helping other small businesses by offering best-in-class web, SEO, and paid media services at fair prices to help these business owners get back on their feet and help their businesses find stability in these times.
What was the biggest problem you encountered starting up and how did you overcome it?
There is this belief that many business owners have, that in order to effectively advertise and market their product they need a large budget, and that budget needs to be managed by an expensive advertising agency full of expensive talent. If they can’t afford to do that, they can’t market and advertise. The earliest conversations I’ve had to have with clients is that in fact, you don’t need a large budget and that budget is often less efficient when invested into a full-service agency. By working directly with a best-of-breed practitioner like myself, business owners can be selective in their investment, more in control of where they are advertising, and keep costs down while keeping dollar per dollar efficiency up.
What were the top mistakes you made starting your business and what did you learn from it?
I don’t know if I consider it a mistake, but in hindsight, I would place the business operations higher on the priority list. I prioritized things such as a brand strategy, website design and development, visual identity and messaging before the forming of the business, opening bank accounts, approval on credit cards, setup of invoicing and accounting systems.
Again I don’t feel that it was a mistake, but I found myself in a place where I was ramping up the business while trying to piecemeal together the operational side of it which introduced friction into the overall launch of the business.
What is one thing that you do daily to grow as an entrepreneur?
Personally, I have to maintain a craftsman mindset. Meaning, I have to take time to continually learn from those around me. For me, and in a COVID world, this mostly means learning from those around me in a digital sense. I’m always reading industry articles, listening to podcasts of top business thinkers and innovators, and always discussing the industry and business within smaller social circles to learn what others are doing, what they are struggling with, and what is working for them. Then I try to apply those lessons to my day-to-day work.
What are three books or courses you recommend for new entrepreneurs?
The Art of War is the obvious first recommendation I make to everyone. However, I always make that recommendation with the caveat that it needs to be read through the lens of a business owner and not a war-time general. The book is all about understanding competitive advantage, when and how to exploit weaknesses, how to understand where you’re vulnerable, how to build leadership skills, and help people understand and execute your vision. These lessons are just as important today as they were in the 5th century. Growing up and even today, I maintain a healthy balance of Seth Godin, Malcolm Gladwell, Simon Sinek, Brene Brown, and the occasional Gary Vaynerchuk when you need that extra little kick.
What are you learning now? Why is that important?
One thing that I think business owners underestimate when they decide to start a business is how much time and effort must go into the operational side of the business. In my case, I think of myself as a true craftsman when it comes to the tactical execution of my job. What my clients pay me for. And you have this idea that that’s what you will do all day. But the reality is that there is so much energy spent on the financials of the business, tracking income and expenses, submitting invoices, getting paid, paying contractors and partners, tracking and management of receipts and so much more. I’ve really had to take a crash course and understand how to create and position my business from a legal and financial position to put myself in a healthy and sustainable position to win for a long time to come and not find myself in a bad position due to a minor oversight of something I didn’t understand.
What has been your most effective marketing strategy to grow your business?
What I have found most effective was leaning on nearly twelve years of deep advertising agency experience to understand exactly who I was speaking to when I went to market. Understanding what pain my target audience is experiencing, amplifying that pain through my messaging, and then offering the cure to that pain. I delivered this messaging through highly targeted ads on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn targeted at geographics, company names, company size, job titles, and job seniority and aligned every message to empathize with those individuals and speak directly to what they are likely struggling with in a non-sales manner. This helped form an immediate connection with my target audience and kick off a lot of conversations.
If you only had $1000 dollars to start a new business, knowing everything you know now, how would you spend it?
$1,000 can go a long way when invested in paid social media ads and paid search ads. For example, I would build a list of the top 100 companies I want to sell into and for as little as $10 per day, I would then place LinkedIn ads targeting every one of those companies. To be even more efficient with my $1,000, I would add additional targeting to focus only on the decision-makers within the organization by explicitly targeting only job titles matching Directors, VP, President, CEO, Owner, etc. What this does is it allows you to go around the gatekeepers who typically manage and filter the correspondence with these individuals and for roughly $50 per 1,000 people reached, you can go directly to them with your message.
What’s your best piece of advice for aspiring and new entrepreneurs?
When I think of the most successful entrepreneurs, I think of someone who had a profound belief about where the world was headed and how they were going to play a role in crafting that world. It’s this belief that led them to become an entrepreneur in the first place. But what I think happens is people take the leap into entrepreneurship and the fear of failure sets in. Then, new entrepreneurs tend to alter their view of the future, leading them to sacrifice on their vision to find an easier, safer route to success. But I think that is selling yourself short.
Even if you succeed, it will only be a version of what you dreamt of. I think you should be open to a changing landscape and new opportunities, revising the future you’re predicting, but I don’t think you should ever change your approach or initial belief because it gets hard or scary. The harder it is, the scarier it becomes, the more rewarding it will be when you find out you were right.
What is your favorite quote?
I don’t know who even said it, and I’m sure I’m paraphrasing, but one that has stuck with me since childhood is that, “the future is just a distribution of possibilities.” To me, I’ve always thought of this as the idea that we tend to think of the future and what we will become as being defined by one big leap or some big defining moment. But to me, the future is truly defined by a series of thousands upon thousands of micro-decisions occurring on a day-to-day basis.
Who’s email you reply to, who you cold-email, who you take a meeting with, who you randomly run into at a grocery store, an angry customer that frees you up to work with another, and so on. These are all very tiny moments in the grand scheme of things, but each impacts and feeds into greater, more defining moments which ultimately culminate in what our future looks like.
When we think we’re making the “big decision,” it has usually been manifested by the thousands of decisions that preceded it, that without, the “big decision” never would have been a decision we were able to make.
What is your definition of success?
Though I’ve invested my career and built a business in an industry that is very competitive and focused on “growth” and revenue, my idea of success is having the freedom in my day to turn off my computer, ignore my work and spend my time with my children and significant other as I please, without being mentally somewhere else. To do this, you need to have a sustainable business that can run without you having to micro-manage every detail of the day, where you can make one decision rather than one thousand, where your customers and clients are not dependent on your every action. To me, building a business that creates space to enjoy my life is my definition of success.
How do you personally overcome fear?
I’ve always been fortunate that fear hasn’t really played a role in my professional career. I think I learned early on in life how to manage and mitigate fear in the traditional sense. Of course, everyone is fearful of certain things, but I don’t typically deal with fear on a daily basis in my business. I think that is because I know that in every meeting, client interaction, or in settings where professionals typically experience fear, I’m fully prepared. I’m prepared because I’ve dedicated tens of thousands of hours to a very narrow domain of knowledge and I know that as long as I stick to what I know and trust myself, there is nothing to fear. If for some reason I’m fearful in the future, to me it will mean I was unprepared, I’ve potentially overlooked something, or I’m out of my depth on a subject I shouldn’t be speaking about.
How can readers get in touch with you?
I think the best way to reach me is by email. I live by inbox zero meaning that if anything is sitting in my inbox, it’s because I need to take action on it. As soon as I complete the action, the email is archived away. This means that every email gets the attention it deserves and I’m fairly quick to respond to anything that comes in. Feel free to drop me an email at dallas@dallasmclaughlin.com. If you prefer social media, you can find all of my social media profiles linked on my website at dallasmclaughlin.com.
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