Kyle O'Connor - Alpha Dog Agency

South Bend, IN

574-303-4475

kyle@alphadogagency.com

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Kyle O'Connor went to school at Sterling College to play basketball then finished his degree at Bethel University where he studied sports management. He has worked for the Cubs organization, wrote for the Bleacher Report and covered Notre Dame basketball. He later took a job at an advertising agency in New York that lead him to starting his own agency, Alpha Dog, in South Bend in 2013.

Q: What lead up to you starting Alpha Dog?

The writing was fun, but it just long-term wasn’t something that was going to happen. I’d always been interested [in marketing] even when I was working in baseball. I worked a lot on the promotion and marketing side, so I had an interest in marketing. I had family in New York so I saw a job opening there and took the job there. I was low man on the totem pole, it was smile and dial, you know, bunch of cold calls. But for as much as that job sucked, I was around some of the best sales leaders in the country...I look at it as getting free sales, actually paying me for sales training, for all that time. I know some of these VPs, I sat in their meetings every morning, they go out and they charge $10,000 to $25,000 for a sales course and I was getting paid to do it. So most of the job sucked but that really prepared me for what I’m doing now. If I wouldn’t have had the agency experience, there’s no way I’d be able to do what I’m doing now.

Q: What were some achievements you had in other jobs that lead you to starting Alpha Dog?

In the sports world it kind of just snowballed into where I was given opportunities due to achievements. In high school, record breaking for football and basketball... and then I went to go play basketball so just seeing that on a resume as an achievement then led to the baseball jobs. I did well at the baseball jobs then that led to writing, so those kind of snowballed into something. With marketing I just kind of had to start all over again. I did have good numbers in New York but it wasn’t like I was the top even at my level of the agency... So really when I started Alpha Dog I came in pretty fresh, I really didn’t have much to speak of. I was just in my in-laws basement, cold-calling places for the first six months. And I had to give a lot of sweetheart deals which was basically just you give us a lifetime for free, let us take over your marketing just so we have case studies to show other people. So the past achievements definitely helped with stuff but with marketing I really came in with no degree, not really any experience, nothing.

O'Connor says that when he hires for his agency, experience won't necessarily matter since he came into the business with little experience himself.

I have someone that comes in for an interview and I see no experience usually as a positive just because it means that they have no bad habits. What we do isn’t really rocket science, and even before coronavirus our entire workforce was remote. I’ve had a girl work for me for two years that I’ve never met, she does a great job, very valued employee but I’ve never met her. I don’t need to meet her as long as she keeps doing her job. Anything digital it’s pretty apparent if they’re not doing their job... I typically don’t ask if they went to college. If they did and then if they have a higher education that’s relevant to what I need, it’s going to be apparent pretty quickly that they already have that and then maybe it’s less training or whatever. That’s advantageous but no bad habits is usually a good thing to have.

Alpha Dog has a core four employees that have daily tasks and three or four freelance employees a month. Bigger projects may have upwards of 10 people working on them. For the most part, everyone works independently since the staff is all remote.

I do most of the SEO, a lot of the web design, and then I’m the relationship guy, so I’m usually the one speaking with clients, fielding their calls, returning emails. A lot of the other stuff now has been delegated... As far as staff and what they’re doing, I don’t really honestly keep a pulse on that. At the end of the week or the end of the month I can see what they’ve been doing. I don’t check in with any of them daily really. Pretty much monthly I check in with them. So I don’t really worry about staff, I just kind of let them do what they’re going to do.

I also do the analytics, so reports in analytics. I’m a big data nerd. It bores a lot of people so it's tough to find someone who wants to do that. I have no problem putting together the data reports, and those go out monthly just so they know we are doing our job.

Alpha Dog offers month-to-month contracts for it's clients. O'Connor says this is not only helpful for him as he plans the business's expenses each month, but also for his clients who are all local small and medium-sized businesses.

My biggest asset is probably my ability to sell. And when you can go to a business owner and in your back pocket you have the no contract dart or you can be like, "give us a chance for three months, if you don’t like us, you know, tell us...you’re done with us and you owe us no more money." It makes selling incredibly easy to at least get your foot in the door. And then if you do your job you’re fine.

SEO, our search engine optimization, is a big part of what we do. That’s going to take like a year usually for most verticals for people to see any kind of movement. And we only work with small and medium sized businesses, almost all locally owned, so when you go to them and say, "hey we need a year to get you where you want to be on SEO," and you give that entire year cost to them up front, most of them can’t foot that. So it’s just easier to break it up into monthlies.

The monthly reports also make it easier for O'Connor and his team to give clients relevant information and insights about their businesses.

On the data and analytics, it's really just their traffic, their inbound traffic, and how much money we’re giving to them, we’re bringing to their door. So a typical analytic report at the end of the month will be, if they’re running paid ads, we’re just going to do an audit of the paid ads [and] kind of see where their cost per click is at, what keywords are being used, all that. And then their organic traffic, so when you just search for something where they’re landing on SEO local results, website traffic will be another one. And then some also ask for social media traffic, so basically it's just traffic reports and SEO reports. We have clients who will ask daily and we tell them not to worry about it until the end of the month. We have some who will get their Google listing up and as soon as they have a Google listing they’re like "I just searched and we’re not number one." So it's tempering expectations too. Once things get rolling and they get those monthly reports, they’re usually happy.

Q: How has working with the clients data changed over time? Even as far as the technology you’re using?

Definitely gotten more efficient. So like social media is a big one to where, you know, when we first started it was going into every account and posting at the right time or whatever. Now we can afford to have scheduling software where we can go on a week at a time and make sure its good to go. Web design, we’re able to probably be a little bit more collaborative where before it was just me doing like everything. Now we can really sic teams on it. Automation of reports, we typically don’t automate reports but we could if we wanted to whereas before I was kind of going through getting screenshots and piecing together reports which isn’t ideal. So I think efficiency would probably be the main word you’re looking for. We’re able to be a lot more efficient now just because I don’t have to do everything semi-poorly anymore.

Q: How do you think analytics and data management could be made more efficient in the future?

So the continuing of AI and really AI into automation is huge because, as much as you can do with the paid campaigns, it’s a little easier because you can go in and automate a report. You can set your filters or whatever and just shoot out a report. Organically it’s still a little bit tougher. If you want to see an average of where they’re landing on a search, you need a fresh browser, you need to do one of these websites with like a hidden or third party browser and then just run it a bunch of times then get an average. So if it could be automated to where it's…"our AI just ran a thousand searches from this city here was your average landing."

O'Connor also thought that the reports could also be more readable for the end user.

When I go talk to somebody I usually wont’ think of how they portray it and I talk fast naturally and I’ll use words they don’t understand. Why would they understand? They’re boring nerd words. And then it's like yeah, some of what you’re paying me for is to translate into what I’m talking about. But to that point, when we send out these reports it does eat up time to where I’m putting a paragraph or two explaining what I’m saying. I’m real big on efficiency...so if it was more readable for them, because to make the bacon they still don’t know how to do it... so I’d be okay with the results being more readable... Even if I can save on minutes over a day over a week over a month it adds up if I could get rid of having to write those two paragraphs on every analytics report.

Q: What makes Alpha Dog stand out as a draw for local businesses?

So for local business I really don’t think we have a single competitor anywhere close... We have a very niche market. I mean you go to our website and look at our client list or you pick up the phone and call any of them or you can just do a Google search and you can see that we know what we’re doing... I don’t think there’s an agency until probably Chicago that would even come close to us with local SEO.

The three things that really stand out one is that (local SEO), two, the no contracts is obviously a huge thing for us. I’m not aware of any other agency anywhere that offers no contracts. I’m sure there are but I’m not aware of them. And three is all of our services are a la carte. So...we’ll usually do an initial meeting or ideally email and they kind of say we need this. We’ll run the keyword analysis, the volume analysis, comp analysis, we’ll say this is what we think you need. Then we send out a proposal and it's X amount of dollars per month, this is what you’ll ge,t but it’s all a la carte. So...they can take something away, add something, it's all just based off the hours that we’re going to have to put in. So they really get to build a custom marketing plan whereas most agencies you’re going to have your platinum package, your gold package, your silver package, your bronze package, you better pick one of them. So we’re able to be a little bit more flexible with that.

Q: Did you realize other agencies weren't doing no contract or a la carte and that's why you decided to go that route?

I really didn’t have the realization other places didn’t do it until after. I did it for probably more selfish reasons. One, I wanted to have the recurring monthly income, even if I’m going to take a little bit of a loss maybe over twelve months I don’t know that but I do know that every month I’m going to have this and I’m not going to die of a panic attack in 6 months. And the a la carte, that just made it easier for us on the sales side. So again I would like to say it was forward thinking or entrepreneurial thinking but it really wasn’t, it was selfish reasons. You go in to sell and I say I have platinum, gold, everybody’s heard that. They’ve heard that for years they’re usually kind of going to kind of roll their eyes where I get to say 'hey this is the plan, it's custom built for you, this is what we think is best depending on your budget, we want to squeeze into whatever your budget is, we can take away, we can add to.' And then I can say you know maybe we’re in a couple months into it and we realize we need to add a social post, maybe we don’t need this blog, we can adjust it. It's whatever you need. And remember, no contracts. It’s pretty tough for a business owner to be like, 'no I don’t want to do it.' So it was for selfish reasons but it ended up working out and it probably made Alpha Dog look a little bit more forward thinking than it was in reality, but that’s okay.

Q: Do you have any advice for students who want to enter a media field?

"Easy decisions hard life, hard decisions easy life."

At so many points and I screwed it up to where its just easy decisions put it off put it off and then if you just kind of nut up at some point and make the hard decision. It’s going to work out better even if it's just being honest with a client and not telling them what they want to hear which was an issue early for me.

Another one is just to start. Especially when you’re fresh out of school. Even if you’re saddled with a lot of student debt, you’re just going to end up with more obligations as time goes on. You’re going to have more debt you’re going to have more responsibility maybe you get married, maybe you have kids, bills are going to come up. Once you are done with school, whether it’s high school or it's college or it's grad school, that’s the best time to try because if you fail who cares. No reputation was tarnished, you gave it a shot, and you probably didn’t lose a ton of money.

Just start, because there’s so many 30 to 35 year old guys and girls now that I talk to who are like 'well, I always wanted to start but life got away from me.' I mean, if you’re going to fail you might as well, it’s better than failing at 50 when you have mouths to feed or whatever. A few words that are kind of taboo now but I try to say them all the time and I tell students the same is “I don’t know." You don’t want to seem like you’re asking dumb questions or that you don’t know something. I absolutely love it when it's people that I’m talking to or working with when they say 'I don’t know.' Or they ask questions instead of trying to do some long soap box thing and at the end it's like well you really don’t know what you’re doing do you, and they say yeah. So just admit you don’t know things. Ask a ton of questions.

"Life punishes the vague wish and rewards the specific ask." Just be specific know what you want to do.