Today we have a special guest Tony Delmercado, the Co-founder and COO of Hawke Media. It’s crazy that Hawke Media has grown from zero to 50 employees in 2 years. We are excited to talk with Tony because we are in a growing phase with our businesses and would love his insights.

Hawke Media is positioned as an outsourced CMO and digital marketing team. They handle everything from paid acquisition, lead nurturing, email marketing, influencer marketing, high level strategy, creative resources, and websites. It’s their goal to be the best in class in digital marketing services without costing too much. They have scaled their business around this strategy. They bootstrapped this business with their own money, and keep adding employees with different skill sets as they scale up.

Topics discussed include:

  • They don’t have to answer to anybody and they manage their company according to their own values
  • Tony and his partner Eric Huberman worked on other projects together and grew up in the digital space and decided to offer digital marketing soup to nuts
  • They started out giving advice, then started helping out where there was a need
  • The services they offer are demand based, they hire someone when they had at least three people asking for a specific service
  • They have put a premium on learning and growing
  • Three grand a month is the price for each service, such as email marketing or creative
  • They call it the Chinese menu of digital marketing
  • They finally put in a client tracking system about 6 to 8 months ago
  • That way they can see who takes the time and energy and generates a small amount of revenue
  • They also have brackets of communication of what is included in the package
  • They are sincerely trying to help the clients grow by doing things that matter
  • As a month to month agency clients aren’t locked in, but it they are serious about growing the business they may need to stick around for awhile
  • Eric started the entity Hawke Media, their working relationship is very yin and yang, they are both comfortable in their own roles
  • Their first employees were email, facebook and influencer space roles in January 2014
  • The salespeople get paid base pay plus a commission
  • They give people autonomy and provide a good platform
  • They use the OKR method and give raises after performance reviews
  • Get stuff done, learn quickly, be cool – these are the things they hire around, for a culture fit rather than a skill fit
  • They have a week of orientation, and then they get to run client accounts, they are big on trial by fire, but they still check in weekly and monthly
  • For the future they hope to shore up their boots on the ground effort and business development in other cities besides LA
  • Their service offering is always getting better
  • They also hope to get an International office and get International clients
  • They want to be badass and help clients grow

Resources Mentioned:

Stay Connected:

  • If you’d like to take your entrepreneurial journey to a whole new level, join fellow “scalers” on the inside by joining the Zero to Scale Insiders program. For just $19/mo you get access to Justin and Greg and several other like-minded entrepreneurs who want to help you succeed in your journey!
  • Be sure to join our free Facebook group for continuous discussion and let us know your thoughts on today’s podcast.  
  • We’d love to get a 5 star rating on iTunes from you. We don’t plan on asking for this in the episodes themselves since most people are doing other things when they’re listening, but we’d love if you left one for us.????