https://youtu.be/0ZVG6G9tQZM
Andrew Miller is the co-founder and VP of strategy at Workshop Digital, a search engine marketing agency that helps sales teams generate and convert sales qualified leads. We talk about the cost of customer acquisition, task-relevant maturity, and understanding the ROI of your marketing efforts.
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Task Relevant Maturity with Andrew Miller
Our guest is Andrew Miller, the co-founder and VP of strategy at Workshop Digital, a search engine marketing agency that helps sales teams generate qualified leads and convert them to customers. Andrew, welcome to the show.
Thank you, Steve. Good morning. Pleasure to be here. Appreciate you having me on.
It's great to have you. So, Andrew, let's start with the usual question that I'm always curious about. How did you become an entrepreneur and a co-founder of Workshop Digital, a digital marketing agency? Tell us a little bit about your journey.
Yeah, it was very unintentional. This is a chapter of the Workshop Digital story that most people don't know that I'm a reluctant entrepreneur, or I was in the early days. I was happily full-time employed here in Richmond, first at the Martin Agency, and then at CarMax, two both great companies to work for. Loved every minute of it, great people, connections I still have to this day. But I was pushed out of the nest a little bit when my wife decided to attend grad school.
We had to move out of state for a few years, so I wasn't able to keep my full-time job. Parmax offered me the option to stay on as a contractor, which I initially declined. I didn't think that consulting or contracting was the role for me. I wasn't sure about the autonomy, the uncertainty. But at the time, we were moving to Michigan, a state which didn't have many great job prospects, so I reconsidered the offer and actually accepted it thinking worst case scenario is I can honor the contract and work through the first six months, get settled in Michigan and figure out what comes next.
And I will say that was 2007 and I've been self-employed ever since, haven't looked back. I have been bitten by the entrepreneurial bug and I love it. And I know it's not for everybody, but the lifestyle, the autonomy, the sense of purpose has given me a lot of enthusiasm, and that hasn't changed for almost 15 years.
That's awesome to hear. So that's just proof that it's not necessarily an innate, inborn thing to be an entrepreneur. It may be something that evolves over time, and as you say, the entrepreneurial bargain beat you and now you're infused with it. So that's pretty cool, so along the way, as you built your business, what kind of business frameworks or concepts did you embrace? So, give me something that, whether it's a fully fledge management blueprint or whether it's a concept that really inspired you and which you decided to take on board and implement in your business?
The entrepreneurial spirit evolves over time, as the entrepreneurial journey beats you and infuses you with it.Share on X
Sure, so there are two, two that have been instrumental in our growth. And so, you know, that initial chapter got us up through 2007 to 2009, around the end of 2009, early 2010, as luck would have it, very fortunate to have grown the solo consulting business to the point where I had to start hiring employees. And that became a different challenge. It almost became a separate career. And I like to think about it as a separate career than my technical days of actually doing the work for clients.
So, around 2010, I started hiring employees. I realized I didn't know jack about managing people. I had never done it, never been exposed to it. I had great managers in my prior careers, but I had never had to do it myself. And I didn't realize how hard it was. So fast forward to 2015, my current business partner, Brian Forrester, and I merged our two companies together to form Workshop Digital. So, at that point, we were immediately a 20 plus person company.