HQ:
West Palm Beach
Business: A digital marketing agency
President: Shay Berman
No. of employees: 27
Shay Berman hasn’t been sleeping much – by design. He typically rests from 4 to 6:30 a.m. and again from 6 to 8:30 p.m. He read about successful people using this snooze strategy and thought he would give it a try.
Shay Berman, Founder of Digital Resource
And besides, who has time for sleep when you have a fast-growing tech company to run?
Berman is founder and president of Digital Resource, which helps clients with SEO, website design, social media and live chat services. “Everything we do is custom. We don’t do anything cookie cutter,” he said. “We will custom create a strategy that fits our client’s needs.”
Berman graduated from Michigan State in advertising, and while there his professors, who were also Google executives, helped him develop a proprietary link-building system for SEO. Then he founded a landscape construction company and dove into internet marketing to grow his business. He loved the marketing part and learned about management, but “being in the weeds literally myself was not what I wanted to do long term.”
Berman sold that business to a friend and moved to Palm Beach County “paradise” about five years ago. After working briefly for another marketing company, he thought he could do it better. Digital Resource was born on his couch.
Its customers are dentists, ice cream shops, car places, roofers, landscapers, pet stores, you name it. “We have clients that spend $300 a month and others are spending tens of thousands – it really depends on what they are trying to accomplish.”
Many of them come for the SEO services but social media marketing is also a big company focus.
Unfortunately, companies often don’t do that well on their own, Berman said. “They think that they don’t have to be personable through their presence or they think it will be the be-all- end-all to get them success. It has to be worked at and earned and you have to play the long game with it.”
Digital Resource Holiday Party
Berman believes 2018 will be the year of video marketing but he also thinks managed live chat is underutilized: “There is no other medium online that allows you to reach out to the potential customer before they reach out to you.”
Today, Digital Resource has 27 employees, tripling in the last year because it strengthened relationships with strategic partners and focused harder on sales and client retention.
“Our goal is to double if not triple again this year,” he said. “We have hundreds of customers in the state of Florida alone. We are keeping our revenues private but I will tell you that we will place on the Inc 500 list of the 500 top companies this year. It’s not official but based on the past year we will qualify this year.”
Company culture is key, he said: “When a business gets to this size, it is the people that drive it. We try to live by our three principles in everything we do: transparency, fun, efficiency. I want my employees to feel like when they wake up in the morning this is where they really want to go.”
The office exudes energy, with writing all over every wall. Said Berman, “We call it organized chaos and it is how I think, too.”