How Digutal Connect Went from Startup to Industry Leader | Charles Kennedy

Meir H: Well, Google is very clear on their process. They do not want to see content generated by AI. They want to have content that's generated by an individual because that content is going to be duplicated. So what do we do? But everybody jumps on the bandwagon to use AI. There's not that many different industries where you're not going to have 200 different websites that are identical. Welcome back to the podcast. Today I'm joined by Kennedy, the consulting chief technology officer at Digital Connect, a leading name in the enterprise web development space. At RevGen AI, we build AI automated outbound and thought leadership podcast systems for B2B founders. And this show is where we're spotlighting growth minded leaders who are driving innovation in their industries. Today, we'll explore how Charles and his team are creating impacts, scaling growth and shaping the future of digital experiences. Charles, it's great to have you. Nice to meet you. Thanks for having me. Perfect. So can you just share a little bit about Digital Connect and really like what inspired you to focus on enterprise web development? So it of starts a long time ago, back in about 2005-ish. I started to build a an electronics website to sell electronics, right? So I came up with an idea at high school. I like stereos. So I decided I was going to sell some speakers and radio decks by doing so. I actually kind of caught the eye of some other local businesses that wanted to be online. And at that time, it was a little bit of a mystery to get online in my area anyway for small businesses. ⁓ So kind of like an aha moment, and they wanted to get online. They had kind of inquired to me, how can we do this as well? So I decided to help them get online. And by helping them get online, they also had other questions on, you know, how you get email, how you get a domain name, how you get all these things. ⁓ So I kind of seen it also as an investing lucrative moment at the time. ⁓ I went ahead and opened a design company called Design X Crew. And we would design websites and graphics and help people get online. ⁓ That went on for a few years before we finally changed the name to Avuendo. And Avuendo was basically AVU-E-N-D-O and it was Avuendo branding. That was for us to provide a full brand for companies. And in that time, that lasted about four or five years as well. And mainly kind of grew to something I never realized it was going to be. You get a lot of clients that start asking you for CRMs and how do I make sure I do this or how do we market online? ⁓ Just so many different questions come up. And finally, we're like, you know what, think we need to change this brand one more time. Evuendo was a weird term for people to utilize. ⁓ The spelling of it is funny. ⁓ So we purchased the name digital with a U and that's D-I-G-U-T-A-L and it's digital incorporated. ⁓ We had a philosophy that, you know, we no longer just build websites, we manage the entire digital landscape for that business. And here we are now where we used to go and hunt for work. And now we actually respond to issues that clients have. So at this point, clients reach out to us that have enterprise problems. And that could go from just their development and sprints. It can go to website functions and features not working. They need to create an entire web development application for, know, they need a full AI integration or, you know, they just have an IT team that's not getting the job done. And a lot of times you'll get these businesses that have a full AI team or a full tech team that is in the middle of trying to figure out how to best and most efficiently get the job done. But that cost comes at a specific number because you have so many members on the team and each one of those members will need a different, I would say a different field of expertise. Right. So those different fields of expertise are very expensive where we can bring that in at a third of the cost of you actually hiring all of those people. So it's been a very, very, very landscape changing business for sure as we grow. Because now we're getting into AI, which is our whole other monster in itself. That's kind of the rundown of how it started. Yeah. No, I like that evolution. then the transition that you described of like, at the start, you're going out to hunt. And now you've established this credibility. You've established ⁓ this leadership in your market to where people come to you for solutions and your forward thinking. Obviously, everybody's talking about ⁓ AI these days, but really, like, I'm also curious because. being on the cutting edge, it's always a chase to keep up with it. And so I'm really interested to hear what shifts and trends are you focused on right now that are actually shaping how you're serving your clients? ⁓ For example, I know that you guys focus on a lot of different outcomes, but if you can just share what's exciting you most lately. ⁓ For us, think some of the most exciting things is going to be this new era of AI. ⁓ At this point for us, it's like hitting a, you you're hitting that Y in the road. Which way are you gonna go? Are you gonna continue on with what's old? Or are you gonna join everybody else with what the trend is. AI is extremely helpful for response needed tasks. So if there's something that needs to be calculated or researched for your specific set of goals and spit back to you, I believe that is 100 % the future and we want to utilize that to the best of our abilities. The biggest problem that we see, especially in some of our more enterprise companies, they have been investing in this AI content creation, which is becoming an extreme problem because there's so many LLMs, learning language, you know, they're learning language models. There's so many of them, right? And the way that they function, obviously, at a really, really small level is they're able to take words, and they're able to add those words together what should be suggested. The problem is, is if you take a company, A, B, and C, in totally different parts of the country, and you say, we are We are a farm or we are a, you know, ⁓ we sell vitamin C liposomal, whatever it may be, whether it's a product or a service. The problem is, is when you ask that AI to generate your content, it's going to do it in the same way for everyone. So one, the biggest problem is determining how are we going to make sure this AI is not giving me the same sequence terms and content that it's giving the next guy because we need to be like, is AI gonna, are we gonna tell it to, go search the internet for these terms combined and don't use them if they're somewhere else. You know, it's a little bit harder for AI to go out and search that much data, even though it probably, in a way it might in the real near future because it's adaptable. But then you have the problem of the AI and how much of that is actually right. So if you introduce a mass amount of data, then it still has to be reviewed or checked, you know, manually. So it's just a big concern for us. So we've been working with several different corporations and entities on how to minimize the impact of that. ⁓ And then just lastly, like, Google and Bing and these companies where they create the algorithms. It's no different than a test we take at school and we have a whole bunch of ⁓ actual like ⁓ essays to do, right? The students have this essay, they hand it in. Once they hand in this essay, the professor is gonna go and look at it, right? And they're gonna say, hey, look, this looks like it's generated by an AI. Well, Google is very clear on their process. They do not want to see content generated by AI. They want to have content that's generated by an individual because that content is going to be duplicated. So what do we do when everybody jumps on the bandwagon to use AI? There's not that many different industries where you're not going to have 200 different websites that are identical. And how do you differentiate them? So it seems to be a big issue that people are gonna need help with. So we definitely are looking to dive into the problem because it's gonna need a solution for sure. highlighted ⁓ a real problem that not enough people are addressing right now of what happens post the adoption curve and how are you setting yourself up to actually stand out, still have a voice, still be distinguishable, still be unique in the post-AI era. And this is an area that we focus on heavily as well. the end of the day, like we're a marketing agency and what we focus on is how do we connect people? Right. We can use all the fancy AI tools, but if we're not being able to stand out, appear human and actually create that connection, then nothing actually works. And so that's, that's how we're also thinking about it is like in sort of like the 80 20 rule of like 80 % now is possibly going to go to AI can do a lot of tasks and agents are going to get more and more capable, but the 20 % still needs to be human to where what actually matters, what is that, you know, that special touch that we have that we were also going to be craving from each other more and more, the more, you know, this technology, it permeates in society. think that that will become more and more important. So I'd like that that you're forward thinking in that way to how you can actually maintain your uniqueness, your authenticity. And so that brings me into my next question because obviously what we focus on here is go to market. And I'm really curious about how you think about marketing and client acquisition and really like how you're actually converting your content or your other marketing channels into real pipeline. Can you explain like what's been working best for you guys in that regard? So for us, During this time, obviously, so particularly we do a lot of DOE and DOD clients. ⁓ Just because we've gotten to that point where the voices are loud and the. the recommendations are a lot higher level. So at the same time that we get to that level, maybe for the past three and a half years at a really high DOD, you know, where everybody's got to have security clearance to even discuss the projects that we're working on or Department of Energy, same thing. We get into the kind of Trump and Elon Musk deal. So there's been a huge delay, I'll say, in work from DOD, DOE, because all the funds being moved around and pulled and kind of every time we hit those transitions, like everybody wants to do something different and they paused it. So we've had to shift. ⁓ how we were looking for clients because before we weren't really looking and then we kind of had to kind of look just to make sure that our pipeline in six months is still looking like it was six months ago kind of deal. ⁓ Obviously, because we want to keep continue to add more team members than we did the previous year. ⁓ And we want to kind of keep all of them still fully engulfed in work, I'll say. ⁓ So I think what we've done is we've tried some LinkedIn stuff. We've tried, ⁓ we continue to do Facebook. We continue to do Google Ads. And I think we've moved to RFP Mart and RFP Mart is basically request for proposal or request for offers, RFOs and RFPs where we look to respond to those. But obviously those are all risks because you're going in not knowing what they're willing to spend on a project. And when you look at those RFPs, They're probably ranging from 250,000 to 2 million. And you have to really understand how to foresee a project and nail the number at the right amount so that you can close that kind of deal. And I mean, we've done it. We've done several like that. but it's a very tricky thing to do. Yeah, I think. Yeah, yeah. announcing demand and support. point to best serve the market and hit that sweet spot? I think it's always an existential question and something that you you I don't I'm not sure you ever like are fully sure that you've picked the right price or like that. I think also in entrepreneurship, there's always like a kind of a form of the grass is greener. The other opportunity may be better. Like you're kind of like, there's, there's just something that I'm not doing that I'm missing here. And I think that that question kind of stays and it, and, and like it, I imagine that it doesn't really go away, but that that's like, ⁓ maybe the way I see it. And I'm, I'm, I'm interested in obviously understanding more about like, ⁓ your marketing strategy, like overall as a whole, how do you think, you know, like you've been able to establish your credibility, like what has it taken to get to where you are now? It's a tough thing. To get to where we are now, there's been thousands of sites worked on, know, thousands of connections that we've met that, you know, they've, you know, I mean, this is 2006. So we're 20 years in. So if you look back to just understand that, you know what, this person worked at three different places when We originally did work with them and now they're an executive or a marketing director or because they were in that realm of, can you help me figure out how to get this website for our business? So eventually they become, you know, a web, a website director or of some sort, you know, a manager of another business. And by doing so now we're like, Hey, you know what we can call this guy because we've done work with him before. We've done work with this company and we know that they're efficient and effective. So yeah, to, to, continue, have this question that really gets creative answers. ⁓ and so I like to ask it because if you had a magic wand and can change one thing in your business right now to make your own growth easier, what would you. What would you wave it on? What would be the one thing that you'd like to tackle first? ⁓ If there was one thing that we could tackle it on, I would say consistent leads. I mean, that's really the hardest part is sifting through ⁓ kind of the people that aren't serious, right? A lot of people want something, but they're not ready to pull the trigger or they can't. financially pull the trigger, but they're looking to have something done. So that's, that's really the hardest part is really trying to, trying to get through that, that process. And maybe it's just where the leads are coming from, right? ⁓ you know, you never know F for us, because we don't go too crazy with marketing. ⁓ You never know where those leads are actually really coming from. ⁓ We're not doing, you know, omnichannel marketing or ⁓ anything like that because we're always fixing problems, right? So we still have a problem, but we're, we try to fix everybody else's problems and kind of leave that at the wayside. until you need to build up your supply to be able to service more. ⁓ But it sounds like over the last 20 years you've gone from just transitioning into this digital ⁓ realm into becoming really a domain expert and forward thinking into really what actually matters most. And so it's really clear how you've been able to distinguish yourself and grow so big. ⁓ And I'm excited to see what you guys are cooking up and are going to start working on in the future. For any listeners who would like to connect or learn more about ⁓ digital connect, where's the best place for them to connect with you and reach out? ⁓ It'd be digital.com. was just www.digutal. there's a U instead of an I. Yeah. ⁓ Amazing. definitely you're welcome. I appreciate you inviting us on.