From Fired to Founder: Tyler Lane on Building an Analytics-First Agency

Foreign welcome to the Agency Uplift Podcast. The podcast all about the unique experience of growing a digital agency. The ups, the downs, the challenges, the learnings. I'm your host, Sean Lang, agency owner of over seven years and co founder of Social Commerce Club. And today I'm joined by Tyler Lane, CEO and founder of Session Interactive. They are a digital marketing agency that transforms brands with untapped potential into Internet powerhouses. Tyler, happy to have you here.

John, thanks for having me, I appreciate it.

Yeah, no problem. So why don't you tell me a little bit more about your agency before we get into it.

Sure, yeah. So I started it as a consultant. I was a practitioner, SEO analytics, CRO background with a bit of paid and just grew up from there. You know, it was classic mentality of, you know, seeing if I could figure it out and then quickly understood that I was a little bit overwhelmed and needed some, some team support after I was able to, to close some larger deals, grow from there. So now, yeah, we've been around about six and a half years or so now and three distinct departments, SEO, you know, broad acronym there, it's really encompassing in terms of content marketing, technical aspects, local, you name it. And then we have paid media, paid search, paid social, a bit of programmatic and then analytics. That's really our key differentiator. Web analytics primarily.

So you started consulting and then that sort of grew into an agency. So what, what made you want to get into consulting and then what sort of led the decision to go from that to an agency and bring people into the mix?

Yeah, no doubt, great question. So my, I wasn't say I was forced into it. I worked in agencies for a number of years, three different agencies in particular here in Denver, Colorado and I was actually let go from all three. This is kind of a story I'm going to start, start telling on social. It wasn't like I was laid off, I was, I was fired. Right, let's be clear. And you know, it wasn't, you know, I have great relationships with, with a lot of those agencies still. And at the end of the day I was like, okay, let's, let's see if I can do this. I've got some skills, I've got a great network that I was able to maintain and focus in on over those years. And so that just impetus for being on my own. Let's see, let's see if I can get some work going. And the analytics component was really compelling into different agencies that I used to work with. So I would contract back with those Existing agencies or out or established relationships with new agencies that I've, I've known for a while, but never worked with directly and then started landing direct clients from there. So that was really the, the big piece that, that, that forced me into this, so to speak.

So you were really good early on at seeing the value in relationships.

Yeah, a thousand percent. I mean, I'll, I'll, I'll really. I was talking to someone yesterday, one of, one of our agency partners actually, who I met years ago when I was working a client side and it was, it was through a company, Health and Wellness in Denver. And at the time they had gone through a ton of different agencies, design agencies, usability and dev agencies, paid media, SEO agencies. So I was the digital marketing manager at the time. So I was able to get exposure to all of those different agencies. And that really helped me, like, oh, I really, I'm curious about SEO, curious about paid, really attracted to analytics at the time. And I saw, you know, the future of that and I was really compelled and I, I knew that I needed to get more exposure. So I was really. The desire to go into agencies and then, and then, you know, fast forward, I was like, I, I maintained all those relationships and reached back out and literally, I think within a couple of weeks of me announcing that I was on my own, I had like four or five meetings set up and I was, I closed like two or three deals with different agencies. They're like, just, come on, we, we want your support immediately. So I was, I got, I got lucky for sure.

That is, that is huge. That is one thing that I can say I totally dropped the ball with early on, especially in, in our agency is I just really enjoyed being backend operations, building systems, you know, managing stuff. And, and I let my partner just sort of do all of the relationship stuff. And I feel like I've been playing catch up for like the last five years, being like, wow, the relationships are actually where like all of the gold is like, that's, that's this one thing that you, you can't really opt out of. And it's funny because I do talk to a lot of, I'll call them like accidental agency owners, people who are more or less, you know, technical specialists who, who thought that you can be a technical specialist. And then that translates to starting a business and owning an agency and realizing, oh shit, there's so much more to it than this. And a lot of these people say I'm an introvert. I don't really know how this fits. I'm like, well, you kind of, you kind of do have to figure the relationship out, the relationship piece out a little bit. Because at the end of the day, this is a, this is a people business. Like, we're managing people, we're working directly with people. We're basically just selling the time of people to other people. It's like totally like people all the way down.

Yeah. Pure services. I, I mean, I can't agree more, Sean. I mean, I mean, it benefited me in the sales process. I was never, you know, I, I wouldn't say I was the, the best SEO out there. Right. I wasn't immersed in every aspect of it. It's almost impossible to be that person. But I, you know, got to that not only the network in terms of business that, that help helped grow our own company, but also the network in terms of employees. Right. So as we started, we moved from contractors to that network was essential. We would send, we would create job wrecks on LinkedIn and get like a thousand applicants. And they were all terrible. Right. And then a couple weeks later, someone in our network would reach out, Hey, I saw you post it. And like that was that that person? We've, we've probably done that four or five times. And at, at the end of the day, it's that person that we already have that rapport with. So, yeah, you have the mutual trust.

They, they know what you're about, you know what they're about a little bit. So you're already like five steps ahead.

100%.

Yeah. That's huge. So you, you mentioned analytics. You were always drawn to analytics. And so I'm, I'm curious how, how that's worked out, because in my experience working with marketers, we're a very fickle bunch and we like to focus on the shiny object and the sexy thing and the thing that you can take screenshots of and post on LinkedIn and get all the dopamine. And I find that analytics generally doesn't fit into that. So most agencies aren't very good at it. So break that down for me a little bit.

Yeah, so true. So true. It's funny, just like even today, like, attribution is essential and it's very difficult in certain cases and analytics doesn't get its fair shot. We, you know, majority of brands, we work with mid market enterprise, I'd say enterprise more so. But mid market doesn't really, they don't have a line item for web analytics. Right. They're not like, oh yeah, we need to maintain this. They assume their agency is just, that's, they're going to just incorporate that in and we've seen majority of agencies that have um, you know, hey client, can you place the tags here or oh, we need you to do this. And it's like no, we, I recognize like the agency needs to own that. Right. And that's just was, it just became just a clear cut differentiator of ours of around, hey, we're, we're going to 100% strategize and put together a quality SEO strategy and paid campaign strategy for you. But we're not going to do anything unless we're confident in the data. And every client we've worked with doesn't matter the size big to small and they have large discrepancies in the data accuracy. And it needs to be maintained. It's just like with any other, with any campaign structure, regardless of channel needs to be maintained and updated and improved. So it's a, it's a big thing again, not super sexy. And that's also what we realized, Sean, was that clients were didn't necessarily a budget, they wanted to focus on lead generation activities as much as possible and weren't necessarily going to dedicate specific budgets to analytics. So we really restructure the offering to be more nimble around CRO as well as analytics. Just to state like, listen, we're going to keep your data as clean as possible. We're going to back it up, we're going to integrate it with data lakes like BigQuery, et cetera and merge it with your CRM data using AI and other tools. But we're also going to really do aspects around CRO that are going to improve your conversion value and improve your usability, which therefore is going to benefit all of the channels SEO paid, whatever is is sending traffic to your site. So that seems to be a bit more compelling and honestly it's a bit, it's a better value for the client.

Totally. I mean it's one of those like force multipliers. It's like I want this output, okay? But this output is going to be a 1x at best unless we actually take the necessary inputs to make it a 2 or 3 or a 4X.

Yeah, well, classic.

It's like trying to get your kids to eat their vegetables when all they want is the ice cream.

Right?

This is the thing, this is the thing that's actually going to give you longevity and give you the results that you want.

Sean, I don't care about that. I want the ice cream.

Come on, just give me the freaking ICE Classic. And I mean, we're all the same. I mean, as an agency owner, when I'm, you know, looking at and assessing different vendors that we want to work with, I still catch myself like being the client and, or being the dumb prospect and being like, oh man, I'm totally, I'm totally selling the outcome short because I just, I want what I think I need and I don't want to pay more than I think I should pay for it. And at the end of the day, I'm the problem.

It's. Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, that's, I mean, we're all guilty of that too. The tools, especially the, the tools that are coming out these days with, with AI inte, like they're sexy perceivably, but just like, yeah, at the end of the day you're not really thinking it through. You gotta make sure it's integrated with your core strategy, which, you know, easier said than done.

So on that note, with AI tools and AI integrations in, in your arena, and I'll still bring it back to analytics because I think that it's a bit of a black box for a lot of people. But are they actually that helpful in that, in that area? Because I do think that in like I'm, I use AI a lot, I build a lot with AI and I also know that a lot of AI is kind of smoke and mirrors and not as helpful as a lot of people would have you believe.

Yeah, I mean, I'll take that, that question to two parts, you know, because we're, when I say we're our SEO and it's a broad acronym, there's, you know, geo, whatever you want to call it, component. We're really immersing that just into search as a whole. Right. We're not necessarily thinking those as two separate items, but attribution. Right. It comes down to it and a lot of LLMs are stripping out referral data. So, you know, if, if, if Google doesn't have a referring source, it's going to lump it into direct or unassigned, which is incredibly confusing and, and tells. Tells clients a lot of different mixed signals. Right. So, but there are aspects and select ways that we can kind of, we can monitor traffic and creating distinct channel groupings around it as much as possible. Again, I'm not saying it's foolproof by any means. Right now we're still working on it and still looking to, to do that. So we're reporting on it. Right. And trying to monitor it. There's not a distinct way to optimize it towards, from an SEO perspective just yet. And then the, the, the other point is just around, you know, how we're utilizing AI. I know that wasn't necessarily your direct question, but in terms of.

It's always one of them, right?

Yeah, well, I think, you know, there's definitely some moral aspects, some legal aspects too that we all need to be aware of. Of course, that are still a lot of lot up in the air. We're modifying our MSAs and our scopes to really outline like, hey, we're, we're going to be using aspects of AI. There's always a human involved. That's really important to us, creating individual GPTs for individual clients and just feeding that model as much as possible. And so, you know, we can be a bit more strategic, a bit more nimble for select aspects. You know, the tactics around SEO and other aspects of paid media are like, that is really, that's really simple at this point, right? And really clients are going to be paying for more value based, more strategic based collaborations, which we always want to strive for. I think all agencies do the, the peer tactic components is, is less and less. So that's why, you know, we're using AI to help, you know, aid on our team. We're not replacing anyone, we're aiding our team to help augment and help strategize with them through, through a pretty structured process.

So yeah, that, that makes a lot of sense. You know, one thing that I've been saying for a while and I'm seeing more and more and I'm starting to sort of build out more and more is like we're getting past the point of the business of people managing people is we're now people managing people managing AI. And that that additional AI layer essentially allows us to add more and more value. Because I think, and what I see coming down the pipe is as we add more and more value, the perceived value is going to diminish as we all get accustomed to the output just getting higher and higher and higher. So right now, right now it's still kind of honeymoon phase. Like oh, like they're doing all these things for me and eventually it's going to be like, yeah, that's table stakes. Like that you have to do that, that volume of work just to get through the door. Like what else can you do else you can do is I think the actual what strategy are you bringing to the table? What different angle are you bringing to the table? What are you seeing that I'm not seeing?

Yeah, I I couldn't agree more, Sean. I mean at the end of the day we're, we're always going to be beholden to our, what our clients can implement. Right. We're, as I mentioned, we're not a development shop. However, we want to ensure value is, is, is correctly articulated and you know, we'll do on page work and a bit of like light development. Hey, the client's dev team is backlogged or the client's content team is backlog. Great. We have, we have a, we're a content marketing agency as well. So we'll, we'll supplement with that. So it's, you know, we can provide a lot to a client but ultimately through AI and through other, other aspects, but ultimately it's up to the client to implement. Right. So it's just like we don't want to overwhelm clients and get, they get, they get overwhelmed, they get annoyed. There's always stuff for us to f Satan and that's the big thing for us is like business immersion versus just channel specific work. Like how can we really impact you guys in terms of a lot of the, the core services that we offer, even stu services that we don't indirectly or directly offer.

So let's switch gears a little bit. You've been in this game for quite a while now. What are some, what are some of the bigger struggles that you've, that you've encountered as an agency owner? And like how did you get through those?

Yeah, I think, you know, shout out to Kent Lewis. I just went to a talk with a couple days ago Agency Con here in Denver and Kent's a really a polarizer, just a great figure in the northwest digital marketing agency scene. And he had a talk recently around employee engagement and just the big things around that stay Stay interviews and all the trials and tribulations he's gone through with, with 100% turnover with multiple agencies. So I'd say, you know, retention, employee retention is really big. We, you know, I know I've been in client side and you're, you're partnering with an agency. You want consistency, right? I want Sean. He's been there. He knows my business. I do. I don't want someone else. And it's inevitable there's going to be some employee churn, of course. But it's a, the big thing for us is what we're continuing to focus on. I don't think anyone has, it has a dialed in. Perfect is, is just around the retention models and the different things that we've learned over the years and how we can really adapt to ensure that we have got the key players. I read a book a while ago, I honestly can't remember the title of the book, but it was really about. It was making sure you have clear. It sounds cliche or it sounds really trite, honestly, what I'm about to say, but it was like, you have clear employee goals for the position, right? Of course. And then you have. There you understand their personal goals, where they want to be, and it's your goal, right? To collectively to ensure that they're hitting and they're growing at your particular company as it sees fit to their employee goals as well as their personal goals. And the second, their personal goals or they have visions to become a director. And we don't have that role open at session. I want to be very clear with them to state, like, let's get you to that role outside of session. You know, you've maximized your time here. You've done amazing things. We appreciate it. But you're, you're no longer. You need to be at a different level. And that's not necessarily available here. That's just a random example. But that's like the level of relationships that I want to develop with our employees, to know that they can come to me directly and make sure that they are getting what they need out of us and we're getting what they. What we need out of them. And again, it's like, it's like kind of talking them out of working with us. But, you know, if, if they're going to be frustrated or if they know that there's not a clear path for advancement, we're doing them a disservice. So that's a big thing. I'd say the, the summary around employee engagement and strategies around that, that's really interesting.

And that definitely takes. I mean, as an agency owner and when capacity is always shifting and you're trying to preserve client relationships, when you see that coming down the pipe, I mean, it's, it takes a lot of integrity to be able to actually stick. Handle that. Like, that's, that's, that's. It sounds simple when you say it, but that's actually much more difficult in the moment when you're like, oh, this is going to disrupt this and this and this. So true. But it's the right thing to do. I heard something on. I don't remember what podcast it was on. It was a number of years ago, and it made me, it made me stop and be like that. That's in that's insane. That's crazy. Essentially it was similar to identifying when someone is reaching, is reaching the end. Either you're practically identified it or maybe they have said it in, in, in so many words. And it's basically the, the business owner, I don't remember if this is specifically to agencies. So I'll say the business owner approaches the employee and says, if you think that you're going to leave, let's call this your 90 days notice. I'm going to give you a 15% raise. And for the next 90 days you're basically, you're, you're going to do your best work for me because I'm giving you a raise. You have 90 days to look for a new role and I have 90 days to fill your role as well. Let's make this work. And the, and the idea is it's just like this like massive high five, this massive sendoff where by the time that person exits, the person coming in is, is ideal for the role. And when we think about how much of a gamble hiring is and how expensive hiring is and how expensive it is to hire the wrong person, giving somebody a 15 raise for three months is actually like a tiny price to pay for, for a really, really smooth, smooth handover. So when I heard that I was like, holy crap, that's, that's interesting. Have I implemented that? No, I've never. But, but I want to. I think about it every now and then being like, what would that look like? How I love that look.

Yeah, it's just, yeah, it is expensive. And you're, you know, you're essentially training these people up and they're, you know, they're, they're client facing too. So they've developed relationships with that, with, with those clients. And so yeah, maintaining that as long as possible. I love that. I love just the ability. Ultimately. It reminds me honestly of offboarding a client. Right, Totally. Hey, budget primarily is, is the reason we churn clients. We, we churned quite a few last year because they weren't really an ICP fit. We redid our ICP structure. But the big thing with us is offboarding. Like we want to be the best we can to that client to offboard them. We want to suggest meeting with their new agency, collaborating with their new agency. Here's what's working, here's some opportunities. That's a big thing for us. Access, of course, anything they need. You know, I've seen it in the reverse over the years where the other agency wants nothing to do with you. They essentially stopped work when they got the notice. And that's not us at all. And my whole mantra to Sean is like, you never know, right? You never know. That client could come back eventually. Maybe they're not going to have a great experience with a new agency. Who knows? And reputation is all we have. Quality is all we have here at session too. So that's, that's a big thing. What we, what we try to pride ourselves in.

Well, also one, one additional acquisition channel that, that some agencies go hard on, but I think a lot of us actually really, really underestimate is referrals in general. And that, that can come from a client that you haven't worked with for multiple years. You have no idea when that person is randomly just going to suggest to maybe your ideal, your ideal client fit. And then suddenly you get a call and they say, oh, so and so referred me. And that was from multiple years ago. And you're like, I'm so glad that we left on good terms. Even when maybe they were. Maybe they sucked as a client, maybe they were not good to work with, maybe you weren't good to work with, and then they still ended up sending you that referral like that, that, that I, we. We always try to like, make sure that there are no burned bridges. Even if, even if the relationship ended in on not good terms, there should always be. There should always be an ability to go back because at the end of the day, like, we're people and I want to help people. And I know that at the end of the day, even if a client wasn't very good to you or you weren't very good to that client, we all want to be good to each other. I think I firmly believe, like, at everyone's core, we all want to be good and we all want to be good to each other. And so, so leaving that door open whenever you can, it's. It's like the, the biggest, the biggest play possible. Like, it's, it's what you should do. People like to, to. To strut around and be like, I told that client to piss off. And yeah, yeah, dude, that's you. You. You think that that's a big brain move. It's not. That's a really bad move. Why are you doing that?

You're. You're. Do doing yourself a disservice. It honestly reminds me, Sean, of just when I first started out and, and even to this day, well, know more so when I first started out and people would ask for kind of free work or they'd be like, can you Take a look at this and things like that. And I would just be super frustrated. I would see posts on LinkedIn of like, never, never give free, do free work. And, and I then I saw a post from Will, Will Reynolds, Sear Interactive, which I respect. And I was just, you know, talking with a few Seer people earlier today actually, and he was just like, the value add that you provide around sending someone a quick loom video or, you know, here's a document that we did a while ago. This could help you out in your situation. I've done that more and more. I love doing that still. And it is that rapport. It's like I'm not expecting anything from the client is something or the prospect or whoever it may be. But it's, it's. I know it's going to go a long way with furthering that rapport. And to your point, Sean, you never, it's like they could come back around eventually. You're staying top of mind. Tyler and team were great with us. We're really help. We really appreciate that that added value. They didn't charge us anything. They weren't like hard trying to hard sell us by any means either. So those are the type of things that just around the relationship building and the human element component too. It's like, I want to be approachable, I don't want to take myself too seriously and I want to help people and I want to help companies achieve their goals.

So absolutely, I have one more point to that and then I'm gonna move on to the next thing. But sure, there, there was, I think that this was probably when we were still in a bit of a digital marketing bubble. I'll say between, I'll call this 2017-2020, when agencies thought that they could do no wrong. And it for a while we could do no wrong until the iOS 14 updates and then everything else afterwards. But there was this sort of rhetoric going around the agency circles of agencies talking and they were like, the agency guru is basically outright encouraging very adversarial relationships between you and the client. And in the moment it felt good because they're like, yeah, yeah, we do so much. Yeah, like they can't treat me that way. Like, how dare they. And then of course, Covid happened and iOS 14 happened and economic crisis after economic crisis happened and things have gotten more difficult and it's like, oh, like literally everyone's struggling and this whole like us versus them mentality, maybe it felt like it was working back when things were a lot easier, but even Then it was probably actually screwing you over and you just didn't notice as much. But now, now it's so much more readily apparent.

But so true.

One, one thing I wanted to touch on. So you mentioned offboarding a, a non ICP cl. I talk a lot about ICP on this podcast and so, so do the guests. So I'm so glad that you said that. When, when you notice that a current client maybe no longer fits the icp, what does that look like? Is that a slow burn or is that like a. Guys, we gotta do something about this now. How, how do we address that?

Yeah, I think, you know, when we were first starting, it's like we want to, you know, you, you say it's classic, right? Sean, you know, what's up? Like, you say yes to everything, right? You're just like, yeah, I can benefit you. And you can, you can, you can one do that. And then quickly you realize like, oh well, this, this client's incredibly demanding for the retainer, right? And you know, we're burning through or not efficient as at all. And so, you know, signals for us over time, you know, as we matured and grew, being able to say no obviously is, is just an immense skill set or you know, saying I don't know on certain things as well. But evaluating those brands in particular around, you know, we found that individuals with, with really lean or you know, one person marketing teams are gonna, are gonna be difficult to work with in the sense that they don't have the ability to implement at the cadence that they really need to. We can implement for them. But likelihood, likelihood is their budgets are pretty tight too. And then they're likely reporting directly to the executive team. So if they're a startup or you know, a really small or mid market for or an SMB, those typically aren't traditionally a great fit. That said, right. We do have clients now that are really nimble marketing teams, but either the marketer gets it and they allow us, they are bought into the strategy because we're very transparent in understanding our roadmap and our structure of what we conducted and our quarterly business reviews that they're empowering us to understand, to go in and execute, right? And they're not becoming a bottleneck. So to really answer your question, like initially you want to extend that life, life cycle of the client as long as possible, but now it's just like, you know, you're doing yourself, you're doing them a disservice by, by essentially stating that like, you know, this is working, but not Working nearly as good as you could perhaps if you were, if you were to work with more of a nimble consultant or agency that's fixated on your, your brand size. So again, easier said than done. We, we never like churning a client at this point with, with our ICP really dialed in. We're not, we're not fighting to get any, you know, we're saying no 100% and we're trying to, to really isolate ourselves or fixate on particular clients that we know we're going to be successful on. Classic, you know, sales strategy as well. Because we, you know, reminds me of the, the surgeon, right, that, that takes on everything and they're, you know, their. The rate of Success is like 70%. Right. It's good. It's not great. And then the surgeon that's just specializes in one or two things and they were really critical or really strategic and scrutinize who they bring in because they're, they're like, we can definitely be successful with that person. It's the same thing with us. Right? So they're, they're. Their success rate is 98, 9%. Right. So we don't want to leave anything to that. And that's really. Those are, those are other conversations around niching down too, which we, we definitely have not done.

So I love that metaphor though, the metaphor of the surgeon, because that's visceral. Right away I'm thinking, man, I would not. I wouldn't be going to the 70% guy. Are you kidding me?

No, thanks. I think I can do it. Yeah. 70%. Yeah.

Yeah. What's the price? How cheap is it?

Exactly? You're negotiating with the surgeon.

Yeah. Not somebody that you want to negotiate on price with.

Exactly.

Well, Tyler, this has been awesome. I mean, we went to, went to some, some interesting areas that I didn't think we chat about today. So thanks for bringing that. Can people find out more about you and Session Interactive?

Yeah, Sean, you know, you inspired me and, and others too to, to start our own podcast. So we're starting a podcast called Built to Convert. So that'll be live here mid May. In the meantime, we're, we're really active on social media and in particular LinkedIn. And then of course you can reach us@session interactive.com. again, we fixate on SEO, a broad overview. Content marketing is in there. Usability, CRO, paid media, and. And then analytics is our core differentiator. So happy to chat. Always, always willing for a conversation.

Awesome, man. Well, I love the podcast title and thanks for coming on.

Thanks, Sean. Appreciate it.