Tag : Shay Berman

By Riley Kaminer

Member Spotlight | Digital Resource

Business: Providing companies with custom online marketing strategies for business growth.

Founded: 2014

HQ: Downtown West Palm Beach

Employees: 125

Website: YourDigitalResource.com

The digital marketing landscape is the most complicated it has been since the dawn of social media. Facebook’s removal of certain ad targeting options coupled with Apple’s new anti-tracking privacy features have brought uncertainty to the space.

For the last eight years, West Palm Beach-based Digital Resource has been a trusted resource for companies looking to up their marketing game.

While Digital Resource works with businesses of all shapes and sizes across all industries, their typical client is a small to medium-sized business. They specialize in a few industries in particular, including medical services, franchising, and home services. Often, customers come to Digital Resource when they are looking to increase their lead flow and fine-tune how they present themselves online.

Since the pandemic, Digital Resource has been on a supercharged growth trajectory. The company reports that they have been increasing their revenues by $4-5 million each year. They also acquired their first agency, a Nashville-based marketing shop, last month. This growth, combined with an acquisition or two each year over the next few years, puts the company on track to increase their annual revenue from $11 million to $50 million within five years.

“West Palm Beach plays a great role in that growth,” Digital Resource founder and president Shay Berman told South Florida Tech Hub. “It’s a central base to pull talent from north and south.”

“And it’s a growing city,” continued Berman. “We hope to be a part of the positive transition of West Palm from a small to medium city to a large city.”

Berman also expressed excitement about the rise of South Florida’s tech scene. “There’s high quality talent in the area,” he said, noting that technologists from the southern end of the region are increasingly moving to Palm Beach. 

He explained that Digital Resource has benefited from the national and international trend of people wanting to move to our region. “The talent pool is growing on its own by people flowing here to live, and we’ve been able to take advantage of it by being a great option for them as they come into the state.”

When it comes to helping younger companies and startups chart out their most efficient digital marketing strategy, Berman advises that they find the right partner who understands how their business works first and foremost. Then they can try to implement the right marketing pieces. The other way around leads to disaster, he said. 

“The biggest reason why marketing fails is that marketers try to make a specific service or type of marketing fit the business. You have to understand the business, its growth, and how people would engage with it – and market to that.”

Berman underscores that social media is key to digital marketing success. “There are a hundred plus reasons to use social media as a business,” he said. “And you have to first understand why you’re using social media, and connect that to your business’s goals.”

By Nancy Dahlberg

Member Spotlight | Digital Resource & Shay Berman

Business: A full-service digital marketing agency

HQ: West Palm Beach

President: Shay Berman

No. of employees: 55

Website: yourdigitalresource.com

When Shay Berman moved his digital marketing agency, Digital Resource, into new offices last year, he wanted room to grow.

The company had been on a growth tear over the past couple of years and had outgrown its 1,500 square foot offices. The trade-up: 9,000 square feet that can accommodate up to 101 employees. Now that the team is back in the office, the much roomier space seems rather prescient with the pandemic still a threat.

Berman believes a creative team like his needs to be together physically to bounce ideas off one another and collaborate. “There is a culture that’s created when we’re physically together that can’t be recreated in a digital environment,” he says. So as soon as they were able to go back to the office, they did, although they moved back into physical offices in four phases.

And when the company – now with about 55 employees — is ready to grow again, there’s room for that too.

‘AMAZING PROCESSES’

In the past two years, Berman has been busy putting systems and processes in place to maximize growth and efficiency. He says the company has increased services by about 50% and the team has been growing by about 15 members a year and has become more specialized. “We used to have one person doing multiple things, and now every one of our services has its own dedicated specialists,” Berman says.

Clients represent over 100 different verticals, including fitness, restaurants and bars, medical groups, retail stores and financial companies. Berman is justifiably proud to be a Great Places to Work winner twice, which says a lot about the team and the company culture.

Digital Resource has racked up a number of awards, including its third time in the Inc 5000 Fastest Growing Companies. Shay was also named to the South Florida Business Journal’s 40 under 40 this year and to the 4 under 40 by the American Marketing Association.

Berman believes a key to Digital Resource’s success is its focus on innovating customer service processes. That included invested in custom reporting software that will report on all aspects of the client’s digital marketing campaign. “It’s 24-7 accessible by the client, It’s manipulatable and maneuverable to where the client can look at all the different metrics they want without support from a team member here.”

The company also systemized how team members communicate with clients, and incentivized account managers for retaining clients. Now, the account managers own the relationships — and the results.

“We have optimized the last two years to have amazing processes,” Berman said, adding that Digital Resource has a two factor layer of communication among team members so “almost nothing falls through the cracks.”

BERMAN’S AMA

Berman also does one on one sessions with everyone in the company every quarter now. “They can ask me anything … and it has also allowed us to continue to innovate for clients with new ideas I never thought of.”

We did our own AMA with Berman:

Areas of growth? Over the next year, Berman wants to steer the company into a lot more automation to help clients. “So instead of just sending them a lead, we help nurture that lead and track the metrics at a level that we don’t really see other marketing companies doing.”

What about hiring? “My philosophy for hiring is hire fast, fire faster. We give a lot of people that opportunity and we expect performance right away. … When I’m in the hiring process, I look at who the person is — are they someone who I see passion in their eyes or are they looking to punch a time clock.”

Secret to culture? “I believe in being fully transparent, where people know the goals and intentions behind everything, not just for themselves or their team but for the entire company, because if you want to get everyone rowing in the same direction, everyone has to know where they’re going …  If you show people your cards and  they are on the same team, they are going to help you get the win.”