From Our Founder: The Business Behind the Marketing

Before I started Ryzn, I had already spent years working in sales and marketing, and one thing had become very clear to me: marketing can only fix a marketing problem.

That sounds obvious, but I don't think businesses always operate that way.

When sales are down, the instinct is often to generate more leads. When growth slows, spend more on advertising. When engagement is down, post more content.

But what if the leads are already there?

What if people are calling, but those calls aren't converting?

What if the advertising is working, but the website isn't?

What if you're bringing in new customers but losing existing ones?

What if you're promoting something that isn't particularly profitable in the first place?

Those were the kinds of questions I was interested in when I started Ryzn.

I didn't want to build an agency that looked at a marketing report, saw that clicks were up, and considered the job done. I wanted to understand what happened after the click.

I still think about marketing this way every day.

A lot of my conversations with clients end up going somewhere completely different from where they started.

We might start by talking about Google Ads and end up talking about how the phones are being answered.

We might sit down to discuss increasing a budget and realize that the bigger opportunity is improving conversion.

A conversation about promoting a particular service can turn into a conversation about pricing, margins, or whether that service should even be the priority.

Sometimes I'll visit a client's business and notice something I would never have found sitting behind a computer looking at analytics.

That's actually one of my favorite parts of what I do.

I like understanding how the business works.

I want to know what happens when someone calls. I want to know what the customer experiences when they walk through the door. I want to know which services make money, which ones the team wants more of, where things get stuck, and what the owner is trying to accomplish six months or two years from now.

Because once I understand those things, I can make much better marketing decisions.

Sometimes the answer is more marketing. Sometimes it isn't.

There have been plenty of times when I could have recommended that a client spend more money with us.

But if I don't think that's the best use of their money, I'm going to say so.

Maybe we need to fix the landing page first.

Maybe the follow-up process needs attention.

Maybe we're targeting the wrong service.

Maybe there's an opportunity sitting inside the existing customer base that nobody has touched.

Or maybe we really do need to spend more on advertising.

The point is that I don't want to decide what the solution is before I understand the problem.

That philosophy has been part of Ryzn from the beginning.

I also have a different perspective now that I'm a business owner myself.

Running Ryzn has made me even more aware of the fact that every business decision is connected.

I have to think about revenue, payroll, hiring, capacity, clients, systems, profitability and where I want the company to go next.

So when another business owner tells me they want to grow, I understand that "growth" isn't as simple as increasing a number on a marketing dashboard.

Growth has consequences.

If I bring on more clients, I need the people and systems to take care of them properly.

If I hire too early, that affects cash flow.

If I hire too late, that affects the quality of our work and how much I can personally give to each client.

If I invest in something, I need to understand what I expect that investment to do for the business.

My clients are making versions of those same decisions every day.

That's why I can't separate their marketing strategy from their business strategy.

That's the kind of agency I wanted to build.

Of course Ryzn does marketing. We manage advertising. We create content. We work on websites, SEO, social media, email, branding and digital strategy.

But I've never wanted our value to be defined by a list of deliverables.

I want a client to be able to call me and say, "Something isn't working," and know that my first response isn't automatically going to be, "Let's spend more on marketing."

I want to dig into it.

I want to understand what's actually happening.

And then I want us to figure out what makes the most sense for the business.

That's what Ryzn means to me.

It's also why our direction can be summed up in three words:

Strategy. Systems. Growth.

Not growth at any cost.

Not marketing for the sake of marketing.

Growth that actually makes sense for the business we're helping build.