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Company: Knowmad Digital Marketing
Owners: Diona Kidd
Year Started: 2002
Employees: 11-25 (Intermediate)
Welcome to An Agency Story podcast, I’m your host Russel.
In this episode we're joined by Diona Kidd, the innovative co-founder of Knowmad Digital Marketing, based in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Diona shares her inspiring journey from her musical roots and technical expertise to establishing a successful digital marketing agency. Hear how her love for music and technology led to building computers, programming, and ultimately, founding her agency. Discover the significant turning points, including weathering the 2008 recession and her humorous adventure of almost getting lost on the New York subway while securing her first client.
Tune in to learn how a blend of creativity, structured processes, and resilience can drive success in the digital marketing world.
Enjoy the story.
Show Notes Insights:
The Importance of a Defined Process and Niche: Diona’s story emphasizes the value of having a structured process and a specific niche for an agency. By focusing on industrial and manufacturing companies, Knowmad Digital Marketing has been able to streamline its operations and deliver consistent results. This approach not only simplifies project management but also enhances client satisfaction by providing proven results.
Leveraging Relationships and Referrals: The episode highlights how nurturing client relationships and leveraging referrals can significantly contribute to an agency’s growth. Diona mentions acquiring new clients through referrals from satisfied customers, which underscores the importance of delivering exceptional service and maintaining strong client connections.
Welcome to An Agency Story podcast where we share real stories of marketing agency owners from around the world. From the excitement of starting up the first big sale, passion, doubt, fear, freedom, and the emotional rollercoaster of growth, hear it all on An Agency Story podcast. An Agency Story podcast is hosted by Russel Dubree, successful agency owner with an eight figure exit turned business coach. Enjoy the next agency story. Welcome to An Agency Story podcast, I'm your host Russel. In this episode we're joined by Diona Kidd, the innovative co-founder of Knowmad Digital Marketing based in Charlotte, North Carolina. Diona shares her inspiring journey from her musical roots and technical expertise to establishing a successful digital marketing agency. Hear how her love for music and technology led to building computers, programming, and ultimately founding her agency discover the significant turning points, including weathering the 2008 recession and her humorous adventure of almost getting lost on the New York subway while securing her first client. Learn how a blend of creativity, structured processes, and resilience can drive success in the digital marketing world. Enjoy the story.
Russel:Welcome to the show today, everyone. I have Diona Kidd with Knowmad Digital Marketing with us here today. Thank you so much for being on the show today, Diona.
Diona:I'm glad to be here. Thanks for having me on.
Russel:I am glad to have you. What does Knowmad Digital Marketing do and who did you do it for?
Diona:Knowmad Digital Marketing is a digital marketing agency that works with industrial and manufacturing companies. We help them build programs that grow their sales pipeline. We have a program that we follow. Manufacturers and industrial companies love this. We have a predefined process that we follow. It's proven results for clients that we've worked with. It's a lot of fun to work with this group.
Russel:Love that. Proven results, specific niche, great formula for success. Can't wait to hear more about, how you've evolved your agency and where you're at today. But before we get to that, if you don't mind, let's go back in time. Doesn't sound like young Diona ended up where she may have originally predicted. What was young pre high school Diona thinking she was going to do with her life?
Diona:Pre high school. That is a good long time ago. Let me think about that for a minute. I'm not even sure I had a plan. I liked doing music. I thought that at one point I would be a studio musician or I would be a sound designer architect. I played drums. I was into all kinds of music. Now I play piano. That was pretty much the direction I was headed.
Russel:So something music. Is that ultimately where you started out in actually realizing that dream or what were your early career days like?
Diona:It's interesting, so I, I was into music. I, started to end up, worked in, clubs. I did, electronic music and that got me into computers. I didn't have a lot of money so I built computers, um, in order to be able to do the electronic music and that's how I got into building websites. I started, learning how to program. I started getting, uh, different jobs as a programmer and doing, um, websites on the side. One thing led to another. I was fixing computers and, um, I ended up getting a job offer to go work at a pharmaceutical company. It's a very circuitous route here. I ended up doing, um, programming for them and, building internal websites. I left it there because I wanted to, I just, I didn't see that progressing, very far, very quickly.
Russel:Is this while you were still doing music in your career or was this like as one was increasing, the other was is going by the wayside?
Diona:No, I, I was doing gigs at night and then I was going to work during the day. They were very long days, but they were a lot of fun.
Russel:Okay. Wow. Sounds like, like Neo almost from The Matrix. Electronica gigs at night and programming by day.
Diona:Yeah, basically. And I was teaching myself how to program. I basically I figured out that I was in pharmaceutical R& D at that point, and there wasn't really a path there for growth. I ended up getting a job in Charlotte, North Carolina, moved down here and I had been doing like side work, building websites for people. But then in one of my jobs, I ended up working with the marketing department and realized that I really liked doing online marketing. It was very new at that point. I was helping figure out how to do email marketing. We were building a e-commerce platform. This is before Shopify. I just started working with, business owners on the side. Again, I was always doing side hustles and, working with business owners to market their businesses online and ended up starting my own, own company. I didn't really know what I was going to do with it. Mix of programming and websites and marketing. It kind of evolved from there.
Russel:Sounds like a very, slow, but sure path down this road is as you started to, sounds like, picked up skills and side hustles, as you said. Then eventually got to the point where you're like, okay, this is where I'm going to make it be my money maker. One of the things that we had talked about previously, and a lot of folks with musical type backgrounds or interests do often end up in the agency space. Why do you think that connected so well, your music to your programming skills that you ultimately created for yourself?
Diona:I think programming and music and internet marketing, all three of these things are very, very well defined. They're process. They're mathematical. They're detailed. Detail of music matters, a detail in marketing matters. You have this kind of creative, but also very, um, disciplined approach and it lends itself very well to internet marketing.
Russel:I don't know how long of a timetable this path was as you started to pick up these skills as you shared. Was there resistance in the transition to actually make this your full time thing, this idea that you could turn your music career into what was actually going to be the breadwinner for yourself? How did those things work or not work together as your story evolved there as you shared it?
Diona:This evolution took about 10 years and in the first few years, I came to realize as much as I love music, that's a lot of late nights. It wasn't the lifestyle that I wanted. I looked ahead and I said, okay, by the time I'm 30 or older, pick a number. What do I want my life to be like? That didn't match up with it. So I started making different connections with different people and exploring what they were up to and starting to get a shape of what I wanted my lifestyle to be like. Where do I want to spend the bulk of my time if I'm, spending, think, you spend 40 hours a week at least, it depends, on your work? What do you want that to be like? That's what I started shaping as I went through those years. I would try something, and it, it mostly worked, it kind of worked, and I would figure out what I liked about it, what I didn't like about it, and then evolve it to the next opportunity, mostly through the people I've met and the opportunities that I saw. One of my talents, and I'm fortunate to have this, is to be able to recognize an opportunity when I see it and actually move on it. Those two things are really important. You've got to be able to do both. That's what I did during that time frame. Just continue to iterate.
Russel:That's definitely how it comes across. You shared a moment there where you're like, okay, this has moved from side hustles to, an official business, if you will, or however you look at it. Was that a big leap or was it just another small iteration into where you had already been? Is there any major encounters that, occurred when you officially made that transition?
Diona:It was, uh, it was a big leap. I had a side hustle. I'd worked for someone. I had mentors everywhere I worked. Thankfully. I worked for a gentleman that explained to me about, um, tax shelters. Setting up a company. He helped me set up my first one and it was for a side work. Then I worked for that business that I was working for while I'm doing side hustles, um, for a long time. I would have stayed there. It was a fantastic company. I loved working there, but they sold. When they sold, I became unhappy with the new culture that I got pulled into. I'm of the belief, life is too short to be unhappy. I ended up, actually booking my first client out of New York. I can't even remember how I met them. But I ended up meeting a client, booking him, flew to New York, signed the papers. It was a blizzard in New York. I almost got lost, um, on the subway, didn't thankfully, and that was my first client just out of the gate. Coincidentally, when I had, I had booked my first client, I had a, um, house renovation I was carrying at the same time. I was a single woman, renovating this house. I'd signed the papers for the house, uh, heard about the acquisition, went through the acquisition, was very unhappy, ended up offering my company to work consulting for them. That didn't work out. Then I booked this client. I'm just hustling. I'm booking new clients. I'm starting to build my business while I'm carrying the renovation. I was young enough to where it wasn't so scary.
Russel:Yeah, got to appreciate some young naivety.
Diona:Yeah. If I had known what I know now, I would never have done that. But at the time, it was like, no, that's just what I needed to do, so I did it. It turned out really well. Anytime I got discouraged, I went back to my friends that worked for that company and talked to them, and they would tell me how miserable they were, and I'd go back and do what I was doing. I found it very encouraging, actually.
Russel:That's very cool. A lot of transition and things going on there. At some point in the business, I don't know how long it was to this point, but you, sounds like you took on a partner. How long into the process was that an idea that even came about? How did that all unfold?
Diona:We've met each other through user groups. Programmers have user groups. Softwares have user groups. We met each other through a user group and we ended up hiring each other for, for engagement. We liked working together, and at some point we decided, both of us mutually, separately, decided it would be really nice to take a vacation. If we had a business partner, that would be possible. We liked each other and we were actually organizing the group together, the user group as well. We ended up deciding that it would make a lot of sense to merge our businesses. That's how Knowmad Digital Marketing came to be. He had a really great name. I'm terrible at naming things. I was like, you know, let's just use the name you have. It's great.
Russel:What was your business name prior to that?
Diona:It was called Modern Flow.
Russel:All right. I mean, sounds like there's gotta be a reason behind, I kinda like it. What was the reason behind the name?
Diona:You know, I don't even remember now. I just thought Knowmad was so appropriate. It's K N O W M A D. It's Knowledge Workers and Nomadic Lifestyle. Both of us were really into that at that point. We thought that we would, you know, live wherever in the world and work. You know, you could go to England, you could go wherever you wanted to travel and be able to work from there as a knowledge worker.
Russel:Gotta love a good naming story. As you were merging in, was that a difficult process? Was there any kind of, I wish I would have done this better in, in bringing it or did it happen all nice and seamlessly?
Diona:I'm sure we could have done that better. However, I'm happy with how it went. It took time because, I had my clients and he had his clients and your clients get attached to you. It took time for us to, operate as a business as opposed to individual contractors. We didn't know what we didn't know at that point. We did not come from the agency world. We were both, programmers and we originally were open source, an open source programming company. We evolved to do marketing at a later date. There was a lot of iteration that we went through in order to figure out the business model.
Russel:It sounds like it took time, but one of the things that you, sounds like you also gave it was time. Versus, you know, running too fast or trying to throw too much of it. Sounds like some element of naturally unfolding. What is something you think back as you would have done differently about it?
Diona:I would have gotten myself out of the day to day delivery a lot sooner. That would have made, yeah, that would have made developing the business easier. For a long time I've spent time in the delivery, which has been fun. I love doing things like that. I love doing PPC, SEO, all the things. But being able to pull myself out of that and get the, right people in place and get the right structure in place for the business has made a huge difference for freeing me up to be able to work on business development, which helps us get better clients, which is just a positive perpetual motion. I see that as confirmation that you're in the right place. Anytime I'm like, oh, I should have done that a long time ago, that's confirmation I'm on the right track.
Russel:I think you're in company with about 99 percent other agency owners out there probably would look back and once they've seen the light of what you shared, wishing they had gotten there sooner, focused on that sooner. But that's a good way to look at it. I think it even falls into the idea that, I even just stopped asking the question of what would you go back and tell yourself, earlier in your journey? Most folks just say, well, I would tell myself this, but I don't think I would have listened. You're going to have to go down the, the school of hard knocks, no matter how you like it. It's just, can you go through the school quicker so you can get to the place that you already are because you weren't going to listen to yourself? Which makes sense. I assume just given where you relayed your, where your business is at today, who you focus on, how you deliver that, wasn't where Knowmad started. Talk to us about how you decided on chemical manufacturing as the area that you were gonna focus on?
Diona:It actually came out of a recession. The 2008 to 2011. I'm not sure exactly where it happened in there, but there was, there were, there was a time where it got really dark, right? Meaning that, businesses were not, they were shutting their doors. We were operating through that and we ended up acquiring a book of business from a company. We had been helping this other agency, they had been outsourcing to us. We ended up acquiring their book of business because they were shutting their doors. In that book of business was a chemical manufacturer, um, that we've been working with now for, gosh, probably 15 years or more. That relationship changed the way that we thought about digital marketing and how we help clients. They've been such a great partner over the years and they ended up referring us to another business, which referred us to another business, which is how we have several clients in this space. We work with industrial companies. Several of them are in the chemical space. Some of them are in, um, some other areas of the industrial sector. That's how that came about. It's an interesting group and they, it's a fascinating part of our economy that I've, I, previous to this, I've never given much thought to. It's where all the things that we're so used to come from. The thing that we've struggled with, and I think we've come to terms with it now is, uh, the conflict of interest when you niche down. How concerned are your clients about any conflict of interest? How do you handle conflict of interest, especially when you're a smaller agency? Because it's hard to say, oh, we're going to put a whole separate team on it because you don't have, you're not that large. For us, it's been a series of conversations with our clients on, on who we're talking to and, um, what business we're taking on and how does that impact them? Having those kind of relationships that our clients have been hugely beneficial, they've been so supportive and I'm so grateful for them.
Russel:I can totally see that. It is certainly a unique niche there. What I want to make sure folks caught onto was this idea. I think sometimes the fear, in focusing on a particular niche is maybe even sometimes that referral base might go away, which is the source of a lot of agencies, lead gen, if you will. What you shared there is no, like they, you're, they will refer to other similar or like businesses, maybe not their number one competitor next door, but, that there's nothing that goes away about that aspect when you do even focus on a particular niche, like you did.
Diona:One thing that I want to make sure to say about that is it's also required some training on the part of, well, I've provided training for our team on how to handle that, because you also don't want to share strategies. Just because one company pays for it, you don't start using it for the other one. There's non disclosure agreements that you have to think about. There's a lot to handle in there, but the conversations, the communication with the clients are key. Because if we don't have that, then the rest of it, it just doesn't work.
Russel:I love you share that. That is a good one, that aspect of it, of the competition, conflict of interest. It sounds like you've, you know, I think that communication piece is huge. It's better to have us working on both of you than not working, not having us work with you and we can take all these collective learnings is going to benefit everyone more than it's going to hurt or anything like that. That old, old C word just seems so important in the agency business or maybe just in life in general, but I appreciate you reiterating that. Let's talk a little bit about, it sounds like, you know, you've spent a lot of time not only focusing on that, but I imagine what a derivative of that is, is the work on the product and the process itself to deliver results. Did that just come organically because you were focusing on that niche, or were you very intentional about refining and building a product per se?
Diona:It's been a mix of both. As I mentioned, we're programmers, my business partner and I. We think programmatically. That first client that I mentioned, they inspired this idea of a lead generation machine. This was, trying to think what year this was. It was quite some time ago, over 15 years ago. What we have found over time is a lot easier to run the business when we run the same, our clients through the same process. Every engagement is not a snowflake. We're not figuring it out. It's not so black box with these specialists and they, it's not as much pressure on them as well. We have a process that we put our clients through and it, it is what we have found over time. It's been a bit organic with figuring out over time, what is it that we need in order for this to be successful. We'll go through an engagement. Over the years, we've gone through engagements and learned, oh, you know what? We need to know more about the audience in this way, or we need to qualify the market a little bit more to make sure that, you know, the market is stable or growing. There are different things that we need, and we've reincorporated that into our process and built it over time.
Russel:It just speaks to, this was on a special episode podcast, a book called Unmanaged written by Jack Skeels. One of my big takeaways that he refers to in his overall methodology is that, agency business is a project driven business, which is basically the business of doing something new, every time. No matter what we write, a website is not a website. There's 18 million different inputs into whatever your ultimate deliverable is in this space. But this idea it sounds like you've captured is how can we leverage making not everything as new, as you said, a snowflake, every single time and leverage parts of that process to, compound each other from client to client, project to project, engagement to engagement. I thought that was really, awesome element you shared to how that's been effective in your journey. What's next? Where do you take the business from here?
Diona:That's a good question. At this point, what we're doing is building. Building out our sales and business development portion of the business. That is a lot of fun. We're going to shows with our clients and just deepening those relationships and meeting new people through networking at the shows, continuing to deploy this process for new clients, um, and building the book of business for the agency. I really enjoy seeing the team members inside of our business as they continue to grow. That's one of the most fun things about having an agency, I think, is hiring people in. I've got a guy, for instance, I've got a guy, Dan, I hired him. He really wanted to do brand strategy work. He came from account management. He has really great skills in account management. It would be easy to have him just do account management, but we've been working with him to provide the opportunities and the training for him to move into brand strategy. He does such great work on the brand strategy because he's really passionate about it. He's also doing some account management because we need that. He's been very flexible. We are continuing to grow our business so that there's enough volume for him to focus more on brand strategy. That's just one person. Right now we're a group of nine and everybody, you know, including the owners, we want, certain areas we want to develop. It's great to have the opportunity. I think we're at that point now where everybody can focus on their specialties and continue to develop themselves professionally while it's contributing to the agency as a whole.
Russel:I mean, it's such a great approach way to run your business. I think that's the way you keep smart, ambitious, growth oriented, curious people is to give them those opportunities to expand themselves. It's a quid pro quo sense that, hey, yes, we still need to do these other things, but we'll work together to, not only build the skills, but build the opportunities. I think that's such a great recipe for success. Maybe they find they don't like that and that's a side hobby and they want to stick to account management, right? Taking that kind of paralleled path is, is a really great approach when, when we can, sometimes we don't always have those opportunities, but I can imagine that's been successful to you to, hire, keep and retain good, good quality talent. Having fun and growing people and doing great work, that's the name of the game is what we do. Couldn't be more excited about what you've created and what the future looks like for you. As we wrap things up, last big question for you, Diona, is our entrepreneurs born or are they made?
Diona:They're made. 100 percent they're made.
Russel:That was so quick and confident.
Diona:They're made through the choices. They're made through their experiences, their choices. For me, my experience has been to learn to create value wherever I go and to be confident enough to know that I can figure it out. I think that's what makes an entrepreneur, that and the curiosity of how things work. You combine those things and that you've got an entrepreneur that's been made. Entrepreneurs come from all different walks of life. We're all from all different backgrounds. We are definitely made.
Russel:If you had a mic you could pick up and drop right now, that's what we would do with that answer. I love it. Very exciting. If people want to know more about Knowmad Digital Marketing, where can they go?
Diona:You can find us on the web at knowmad.Com. K N O W M A D com. You can also find us on LinkedIn. Just search for Knowmad Digital Marketing, starting with a K. There you go. Yeah, look me up. Find me on LinkedIn.
Russel:There we go. All right. Well, you know where to go, folks. Don't forget the K N O W. Awesome. Thank you so much today, Diona, for being on the show today and sharing your wonderful journey from the late night music gigs to a thriving agency. Very excited to, have had you on the show. Appreciate your time.
Diona:Thanks. Thanks. Good to be here.
We hope you've enjoyed this episode of An Agency Story podcast where we share real stories of marketing agency owners from around the world. Are you interested in being a guest on the show? Send an email to podcast@performancefaction.com. An Agency Story is brought to you by Performance Faction. Performance Faction offers services to help agency owners grow their business to 5 million dollars and more in revenue. To learn more, visit performancefaction.com.
Diona:I was on Slack today. We have this tool, it's called CultureBot. It's supposed to start water cooler conversations. I got on today and CultureBot was talking to our team about client work. I'm like, how did CultureBot, CultureBot is supposed to talk about, I don't know. What's your favorite time of year? It's supposed to talk about stuff like that. And it's one of my team members masquerading as CultureBot. He was in there. He's a pretty funny guy so I really enjoy him.
Russel:I'm sure he could have taken that to a weird place. It sounds like he stayed pretty tame, but I'm sure he could have really, gotten, gotten to an interesting place with that.
Diona:Yeah, he's, he's a comical guy. His name is Matt Edens. Idaho Matt, that's what we call him.
Russel:Idaho, Matt. Well, you gotta love office fun, office pranks. Even in the digital remote world, we can still, get that done.