Hey, entrepreneurs. It's your podcast, Mogo, feel better here. I am excited for this episode as as as I know you are. Before we jump into this episode, I'm gonna ask you, if you are also a podcaster and you're looking to grow your podcast or monetize your podcast, make sure you stay till the end of the episode. I have a special deal for you or a special offer, if you will. But ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, let's jump into the episode. Welcome to Invest in Yourself, the Digital Entrepreneur Podcast. Join the podcast mogul Phil Better as he interviews successful entrepreneurs that make their living in the digital world.

Now, let's join your host, Phil Better, and his special guest today on Invest in Yourself, the Digital Entrepreneur. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Invest in Yourself, the digital entrepreneur podcast. I am, of course, your host with the most feel better. And today, we have a very special guest. Not only they are they a digital entrepreneur, they are also the host of the 1st custom customer's first podcast.

1st customer's Partner

at pardon?

1st customer's podcast.

1st customer. Okay. Let's redo that.

Okay.

Welcome back to Invest in Yourself, the digital entrepreneur podcast. I am, of course, your host with the most feel better. And today, I'm very excited to introduce you our guest. They are the host of the First Customer Podcast, a partner at the 9. They they are owner, investor in Trucking Labs, so many other things here. They are an incredible digital entrepreneur, and I'm just happy to have Parris Vega on the show today. Parris, thank you so much.

Thank you for having me. Glad to be here.

So, Parris, I gave you a bit of an introduction. I would love for you to introduce yourself to my audience so they can get to hear who you are from your words. Yeah.

So I'm Parece Vega, and I'm a partner at The 9, like Phil said, and I started out as the marketing director there. And they were a website design and development agency for about 15 years. And, they hired me to start the marketing department. They had dabbled in it before, but they hadn't really taken it, very seriously in the past. And so I joined their team as the marketing director, started the marketing department, defined the services we were gonna offer, came up with our initial processes for every service that we offered, and it was lead gen, SEO, and, I think maybe a little bit of social media management at first. And we started going on sales calls. Me and the CEO went on sales calls to some of their bigger website clients and started to convert them over to digital marketing clients. And, that company has grown, I think, about double each year since I joined.

A lot of that's come from the marketing side of things, because they had, you know, a couple hundred clients and they just hadn't tapped into them to fully offer the marketing services. So tapping into their existing client base and then also going outside of that and taking advantage of, you know, the big shift that happened 2020 when a lot of brick and mortars, especially on the e commerce side, were like, hey, we should probably sell on the Internet, you know. And so any hesitation people had with doing business online was kind of removed. It's kind of a one of the very few benefits of what happened during COVID and the pandemic. It kind of sped up the move to ecommerce and the value of all the digital marketing services out there. And so we were poised, you know, perfectly. I think 3 months after I started is when the lockdown happened. And so we all went remote and had to do sales through Zoom, you know, and, managing the team remotely through Slack and Zoom and everything.

But still, you know, the company's managed to grow, at a good pace for the past 3 years. And, yeah, digital marketing is is a large part of that. Especially now we're seeing a lot of growth on the SEO side. But that's taken up most of my time the past 3 years. Now we've we've grown the team. But, like, by no means was it all like me doing this at this company because we had to as part of building out this department, we had to hire lots of people. And, every person, that we added to the team, you know, was a huge value add and taken over some aspect of the process that I had to learn to let go of. And I think that's always a hard thing that that people struggle with whenever you're trying to scale is, realizing that you can't do everything.