Today we’d like to introduce you to Mark Howells.
Mark, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
I took a roundabout journey to starting a marketing agency. From a young age, I knew I had an entrepreneurial spirit to me. When I was a kid, I went to Maui with my Mom in a house trade situation for a month. Now, Maui is beautiful, and if I went there now, I would love it.. but as a kid staying at home in the middle of nowhere on the island, I felt there wasn’t a ton to do there. This was my first inclination of my entrepreneurial spirit as I ended up making leis and setting up a roadside “shop” selling them to tourists driving by.
I have always struggled between the follow your passions route vs follow the money route. Some people are lucky and quickly find a path that aligns both, but usually it’s one or the other. I knew I was destined for one of those two paths as compared to the follow the paycheck only route, due to that strong entrepreneurial spirit.
In College, I was certainly not one of those people who knew exactly what major I wanted to be in, but once I came to terms with not being able to major in beer, my choices came down to psychology or business. I had an interest in people and why they made the choices they did. Luckily, I landed upon marketing, being the juxtaposition of psychology and general business. It was very interesting to me that the ways in which you explained products and services, the images that went along with it, and what people perceived about brands could guide them to purchase something.
In those days, it was all about the 4 Ps of marketing (Product, Price, Place, and Promotion), and things were a far cry from the current digital marketing tactics like tracking visits to sites via pixels and geofencing digital billboard content. I also found out that when I graduated, a lot of the “marketing” jobs were actually sales jobs. After some soul searching (in other words, I need to make some money now), I ended up at a door to door business telephone sales job. I don’t think I knew what a pyramid scheme was at that point, but I certainly do now. The difference between the touted money we could make and my actual commission based checks was significant, but I learned even more about people and met my eventual wife there, so a pretty good experience all told.
After that position, as well as a stint trying to become the waiter with the least amount of flair, I followed the cashflow route and got into a large corporate job as a financial software trainer. The weeks of onboarding was harrowing… learning a totally new world of acronyms and skills, needing to understand financial markets and the needs of financial advisors in relation to them. ETF, GTC, the Greeks, FTSE… my mind reeled with everything we had to learn. Things became a bit easier when the first on site trip for training was to Palm Springs with about seven other trainers around my age. The markets closed at 1pm there, so we were to the hotel pool with beers in hand by usually 3pm each day. Good pay, and flying all around the country with everything covered was a dream come true at that point. But after years of the same thing, the travel and repetitiveness of the position weighed on me, and I decided I wanted to get into management. At that point, I was living in Maryland and was told I could move back to the NY area to potentially start working towards management, but I knew the lifestyle shift was not for me. Nothing against NY, as it’s one of my favorite cities, but the cutthroat aspects of business and fighting tooth and nail for positions just wasn’t my cup of tea.
I decided to leave and took a management job in training at a local MD company, which was shortlived due to project cuts. Both the financial training and management jobs had their place in defining my work at Dakota Ridge. From my professionalism, soft skills and work ethic, to learning a bit about facing my fears of talking in front of a room of people, or how to manage both good and bad workers… I feel it has all played a part.
So, faced with being unemployed after the brief attempt at management, I took a step back as I knew that corporate training was not very fulfilling for me. I decided to shift over to the follow your passions route by founding a mobile app startup around an idea I had for in-person event-based social media. Talk about putting it all out there. Sweat, tears, money… luckily no blood. I laid it all on the line for three years with my co-founders. For numerous reasons, it never went anywhere, but again, looking back I chalk it up to a chance to learn more about myself and business. During that time period, I actually went to a conference on what a wonderful thing failing is, and all of the knowledge, fortitude, and emotional power you can gain from it. I too believe that, as I’ve witnessed it first hand.
With a few attempts at both the paycheck route and the passion route in different industries behind me, I knew I needed to reassess and that’s when I decided that marketing was really my calling. I had done all the marketing for the startup, and have a strong combination of the analytical/technical mind on one side and creative mind on the other that is a great makeup for marketing, so I decided to go back to my College roots and jump back into the marketing world.
I got an opportunity to work with an Accounting firm working mainly on content at the start. I voraciously jumped into learning everything I could about the new world of digital marketing. All the new tech that was out, the latest strategies, the best tactics for conversions, etc. A lot of marketers will focus on one area to specialize in, but I always wanted to learn the newest, best info, which was probably the precursor to becoming a strategist. I ended up moving into the Marketing Director position with them and was their first remote employee upon my move to Colorado.
Quickly after my move out West, I got the Boulder bug and wanted to shift into an industry that was more in line with the lifestyle. Athletics or natural food were my targets, and I ended up taking over the US marketing for an athletic apparel company from Switzerland who had their US base in Boulder.
While there, I continued to grow my skills and had transitioned from working more on the content side of things into more of what I term technical marketing, including automation and analytics. This also threw me into numerous different aspects of marketing on the more strategic side. I loved taking a step back from the day to day and seeing the bigger picture of how it all worked together.
While at the company, that darn little entrepreneurial passion also started creeping in again, and I started to think about joining that passion with my passion for marketing… and going out on my own. I wanted to not only help one company but many companies. So, I embarked on my career as a marketing consultant and strategist.
I worked with a number of clients, but I knew there was more to come. Something bigger. An idea started forming around the experiences I had with all of the companies I had worked for, both as an employee and consultant. I saw similar pain points. They found it hard to keep up with the speed of marketing changes, industry changes, and competitive changes. They couldn’t handle the complexity of marketing opportunities these days. The resources were usually limited. And they usually had a throw it against the wall and see what sticks campaign strategy, thanks to a lack of strong foundational strategies.
I admit it, in my early days as a marketer, I was along for the ride without an awareness of how much these pain points hindered company growth. But later in my career, I started to raise the flag in companies I worked at, and at times got turned away for trying to change too much.
Out of this was born two things. First, my passion for helping companies realize the opportunities readily available through knowledgeable and strategic marketing. Secondly, the impetus behind the programs and what we do at Dakota Ridge Marketing.
It’s somewhat cliche, but I truly believe that all my experiences jumping between the passion and paycheck paths in different industries and positions have led to founding and running Dakota Ridge, and the ability for us to help companies boost their revenue in numerous ways, as well as achieve their own goals and dreams.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
It has certainly not been a smooth road. I can dilute down my struggles to two main obstacles that have both reared their ugly head throughout my road to where I am today.
The first of which is money. I know that a lot of people have financial struggles, but it seems I’ve had a love/hate relationship with money. I equate this to my switching from route to route following passions, money, or attempting at a combination of both.
I have had times where the money came freely, and I usually spent it on extracurricular activities and other short-term vs long-term endeavors. ie. I didn’t invest much. I’ve also had times where money was extremely tight. But these ups and downs are true to the ebbs and flows of life, especially when you’re struggling with the right path to take to fulfill many aspects of life that I want to achieve.
The second of which is self-worth. In other words, do I deserve/am worthy of success in my own business endeavors (among many other aspects of life)? I’ll spare you the details, but I had some familial relationships that have hindered my “worth growth”, both as an adolescent and well into my adult years. The lack of self-worth that I’ve struggled with over the years has hindered a lot of opportunities and has blocked me from success that I could and should have been deserving of for a long time now. To be honest, I still struggle at times with it but am in a place now where I know that any success that comes from my hard work, dedication and knowledge is well deserved.
I believe that how far Dakota Ridge Marketing has come and success that is yet to be seen is in part a culmination of the dedication and strength it’s taken to shine the light on a lot of my own demons over the years.
Alright – so let’s talk business. Tell us about Dakota Ridge Marketing – what should we know?
We have the privilege to work with SMBs who are usually struggling to achieve or exceed their growth goals and help them boost revenue so their businesses and lives can be enhanced.
From an industry perspective, we’ve looked at the “niche down” idea for a while. I know that niching down can be very beneficial for a business… becoming the expert in a specific industry, but the programs we have can truly be used for any industry. That has come to fruition as we’ve worked with such diverse industries as CPG, HR SaaS, CBD, Government Software Development, and Social Media Apps. So, instead, we decided to niche down on our service offerings through our two programs. They are very diverse in coverage, but that is solely what we do. For example, yes, we cover SEO, but I don’t want to be doing that for a company unless they have their entire strategy built out through our foundation program first.
I am very process driven, and after so many years in marketing, I knew that being guided by a process was very important to being successful. That’s why the first program, our strategic Marketing Foundation Program (MFP) is eight weeks of discovery calls, research, analytics and deliverables that encompass six main areas to focus on with each client. Business (i.e., goals, industry, competitive landscape), Audiences (i.e., segmentation, personas), Branding (i.e., personality, imagery guidelines), Messaging (i.e., key messaging), Campaigns (i.e., channels & tactics, funnel diagramming), and Tools (i.e., martech stack).
The second program, our Managed Marketing Services (MMS) is a 12 step process that goes through specific steps to align campaigns with business goals, simulate every step of the buyer journey so we know what metrics to shoot for, run tests and report on campaigns, and setup cadences and optimizations to continue the growth.
Overall, our goal is to shift companies away from the general “we need SEO” or ” we need a Facebook ad” that has become so rampant these days, to the mindset that truly successful marketing requires a cohesive strategy that pulls together numerous parts to feed into a process of implementing that strategy that has extremely high probabilities of success. Sometimes I do think of a majority of what we do as the “boring stuff” that is needed surrounding that SEO and Facebook Ad campaign in order to support them, so they’re much more successful than a campaign built on limited/no strategy. But that boring stuff is also the important stuff that so many businesses miss.
If you align all of the strategic parts and implementation process pieces we cover, you have the making of an environment to boost revenue like no other.
Any shoutouts? Who else deserves credit in this story – who has played a meaningful role?
When I think about people who have helped me get to where I am today, one person rises above the rest. My wife.
The effects of regularly switching between passion and paycheck routes are never easy on a relationship or family, but my wife has supported me through it all. Luckily, throughout our journeys, both personally and together, we have become aligned in our viewpoints on the importance of following your passions in life, as opposed to just going after the paycheck.
When you’re starting any sort of business, it helps so much to have strong support around you. Whether that’s friends, family, a mentor, etc. The best is when your partner is that person, supporting you every step of the way.
Also, whenever any self-doubt arises, she’s always there to tell me how much she believes in me… something that goes a long way when you’re down on yourself, or the situation you’re in.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://dakotaridgemarketing.com
- Phone: 720-597-3737
- Email: info@dakotaridgemarketing.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dakotaridgemarketing
- Other: https://www.linkedin.com/company/dakotaridgemarketing/
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