365: Plug All the Holes in Your Marketing with Dan Salganik

Dan Salganik, Founder and CEO of VisualFizz, helps established B2B companies plug all the holes in your marketing through integrated, outcome-focused strategies. Driven by a desire for freedom, travel, and creative expression, Dan built a fully remote agency that allows him to explore the world while helping clients create distinctive campaigns, strengthen their marketing capabilities, and generate long-term customer value.

In this conversation, Dan introduces The Growth System 4 Tracks Framework—Brand & Digital Foundations, Staff Augmentation, Transformation, Transition & Expansion, and RevOps Growth Inflection. He explains how companies can select and combine these tracks to strengthen their foundations, expand internal capabilities, support acquisitions and geographic growth, and align marketing with sales. Dan also discusses growing through quality rather than speed, building larger client relationships through trust, and shifting VisualFizz from commoditized services toward solutions focused on business outcomes. He shares how identifying small gaps across the customer journey can improve efficiency, strengthen retention, and create sustainable revenue growth.

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Plug All the Holes in Your Marketing with Dan Salganik

Good day, listeners. Steve Preda here with The Management Blueprint, and my guest today is Dan Salganik, the Founder and CEO of VisualFizz, a company that empowers industry-leading brands to maximize their potential with effective marketing strategies and custom-tailored campaigns. Dan, welcome to the show.

Yeah, thanks for having me, Steve. I really appreciate it.

It’s great to have you, and I’d like to learn about your personal ‘Why’ and how you’re manifesting it in VisualFizz.

Wow, that’s a big question to start with. I’ll start with my kind of goal for a little bit of freedom, which is funny because the more you grow, the less freedom you have. But for many years, I started VisualFizz because of a need to travel and to have freedom to do what I want. I’m a very expressive person, and after working at a number of agencies and finding things they do wrong, and also being a big traveler, I actually decided to launch VisualFizz almost 10 years ago, which is crazy to me.

And ultimately, we’ve seen this company grow quite a bit in that time. But I built it out to have the ability to travel, to do the things I want, to build a team, to build also campaigns that are fun and they’re unique and build customer value. So you started with a great question, and there’s so many reasons why—my kind of personal philosophies and why I manage and run and grow VisualFizz—but I think travel, freedom, and the ability to see creative campaigns at scale are just a few of them.

So I saw on your website that one of your goals is to travel at least 100 days a year. So is this business travel? Is this personal? Is this a combination?

I’d say almost no business travel counts, right? Because then you’re just doing business. I love business, but that’s totally separate. It’s personal travel. Basically, every single year, yeah, for almost 10 years, I have spent about a little less than a third of the year traveling, and some years a lot more. And so, being a remote company—and pre-COVID we were remote—we’ve built this style and methodology and processes, everything around being a fully remote company or an organization. And so, yeah, I do 30-day trips. I do two-week trips. I do two-, three-month trips.

But for me, it's always very important that work doesn't slow down. But you're going to regret working your whole life. Share on X I like the phrase, “You don’t die with your money.” It doesn’t come with you, but what you do have is experiences that you can remember and memories and everything—photos and things like that. And you’re not going to want to cherish your photo when you’re at a nursing home of you working in front of a computer. It’s going to be you with friends and family, enjoying the world and eating well and drinking well and seeing sights and exploring history and things like that.

Yeah. My dad, he was a doctor. He worked very hard all his life, and he always told us when we were kids that he was going to retire at 60 and travel around the world with my mom. And then when he was 60 years old, he had this opportunity to run this hospital, and one thing led to another, and he turned 70, and then he no longer wanted to travel.

And he literally said, “Oh, I wish we traveled more while we were young because now I don’t want to travel.” So that kind of resonates with me, what you say. It’s great that you have this awareness and you make it happen. So when you travel, do you run your business remotely?

100%. My business runs with my laptop, and if I’m lucky, I have a second monitor with me. Actually, nowadays I travel with a second monitor even on a flight, if I have to take a flight.But I have a second monitor with me. I have my laptop. My business comes with me. That’s number one.

So I might switch my hours a little bit. I might change things around, but I’ve got a great team. I delegate. It’s interesting because in the early days, it was hard to travel because we didn’t have a lot of clients, so we didn’t have a lot of money. Still don’t have a lot of money, but we didn’t have nearly as much when I started the company. Nowadays, we’re a growing business, and it’s great. So finally—it’s the whole dilemma. It’s like we’re finally growing. We’ve got a real business. I can pay myself a real wage.

But you can’t leave the business for too long because then you have other issues. But it’s a good balance between the two, and I always do bring my laptop no matter where I go. You never know what happens. But if I’m truly taking time off, which is very, very hard, I give my wife my cellphone. I either don’t take my laptop or I put my laptop away in the safe, and I don’t touch technology. Because honestly, it’s very easy to get distracted.

It is super easy to get distracted. So let’s talk about frameworks because this is what the podcast is about. So tell me a framework that you have developed or you picked up somewhere that allows you to do something better than other people, whether it’s more effective, whether it’s bigger impact, whether it’s more organized, whether it’s generating an insight that can be explained in three to five steps.

I love that. Actually, this is really great timing because we just built a brand-new framework, and I just soft-launched it to the world. We had a big event last week, and it’s called the Growth System. And it’s for our soft launch called VF3, VisualFizz 3.0. We’ve scaled up. This is kind of our software reboot. There's four tracks. It's a track system, so it's similar to a framework, and they're driven by the following. Share on X Let me actually backtrack a little bit.

It’s developed for mid-market and enterprise B2B companies, especially companies that have been around for a long time, hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, but have something that’s broken or maybe needs improvement, et cetera. And so they come to us, and instead of saying, “Oh, I think you need SEO. I think you need paid search,” it’s solutions-focused, not services. The services come after. And there’s four tracks that are built off of. Each track can take three months, six months, 12 months, two years, et cetera. It just depends on the business.

The first one being the brand and the digital foundation. Many of my clients come from boring industries, my favorite. They need to rebuild. They came in understanding there’s private equity money, there’s new competition coming up, this, that, and the other. It’s a new brand, rebrand, or brand infrastructure, and then web infrastructure, all focused on sales. So everything here is focused on RevOps, sales, et cetera.

The second one, track, is staff augmentation, capability accelerator. It’s helping brands that are really great at something and really not great at another thing, or have a very expensive team internally where they feel that they can outsource to an agency for a large discounted price, for lack of a better word to put it. An example is we took over the tech arm of one of our clients, saved them about 50% in their budget, doubled their capacity, have a full team, 100% uptime, things like that.

The third, the one that I'm probably most excited about, is transformation, transition, and expansion which is all about mergers and acquisitions, national expansion, franchising, scaling locations, things of that nature Share on X and how to ensure that those are done accordingly, kind of symbiotically, consolidated properly. And the way I put it is, you’re spending $50 million or whatever you’re spending to buy a company, spend half a percent or a percent of that purchase value on the marketing, on the consolidation of brands, on sales materials, HR communication, kind of that side as it pertains to marketing.

And the final one is RevOps, growth inflection. We come in, we look through the CRM, we work with the sales teams, we audit the sales teams, we do interviews with the sales teams, and we make sure that marketing and sales are not oil and water. We combine them, we develop everything, we focus on lifetime customer value, post-sales transactions, and really driven towards long-term growth and revenue, basically generation. So a little bit longer than the few sentences you asked me for, so I apologize. But this is the future framework that VisualFizz will be built upon and scale upon for the future. Share on X Like, we’re just launching this as we speak. My website’s in progress right now.

Yeah. I love it. So the big picture is that you fix the foundations, then you give them people who can actually execute, then you transition. Does the transition mean that from staff augmentation, you transition to their own team? Or what does—

No, not necessarily. They don’t have to go one after the other, and that’s something I’m trying to work around communication-wise. You might start with brand infrastructure and go straight into demand gen, RevOps. Because we need to scale now. Or you might say, “Hey, VisualFizz, why don’t you just take over our SEO department fully?” Or it’s a little bit of both.

I’ve talked to a lot of mid-market and larger, a couple quite large billion-dollar-plus companies that said, “You know what? I don’t need a new website, but I really need to understand how we focus on communication with our sales teams,” or, “We do need visual improvements for our brand. We don’t need the new website.” So you can pick and choose a little bit. My goal is to not have to do that, but there’s not a linear step that you have to take between one, two, three, and four. It’s really, “Hey, we need to scale. I do $500 million today.

I want to buy three locations across the United States. This is what I’m looking at. My goal in five years is $750 million. How do I get there, VisualFizz?” And we lay out year one, two, three, four, and five, what we do, and how we plan to scale alongside the company.

Love it. So you basically productized your offering to these four major situations, and they can be implemented piecemeal. You can start anywhere, and you can keep stacking them. That’s super interesting. So let me switch gears here and ask you, what drives growth in your business, in VisualFizz?

For a lot of time, it was the very generic hustle and bustle of just trying to do good. Be a—how do I put it? Being there. Being the fastest to answer the phone, being the fastest to email back, getting the best proposals, because that’s what you do as a small agency. But as you grow, you don’t win on speed, you win on quality. It’s different. As a startup or as a startup who’s interested in an agency, you go fast, fast, fast. But I actually tell clients, “I’m not interested in speed.” That’s why these tracks that I told you, they take a year, two years, three years.

So now the growth is really driven around my clients’ peace of mind and my prospective clients’ peace of mind, knowing that they’re working with a decade-old agency, with team members who’ve predominantly been on our team for five years or more. Almost everybody is senior on my team. What drives growth is not so much quantity, never really has been, but it’s quality. And so my intent is not to win more customers. It’s to win bigger and better customers that are going to allow us for longevity, growth, and longer sales cycles internally. That’s really what drives growth today, is less stress and better clients.

So what does it take to land those larger, better clients?

A lot of work. I think there’s a couple. One is trust. Some clients will start small, and that’s where this whole model came from. I had a lot of clients come to me and say, “Hey, Dan, I need a new website.” And I’m like, “Okay, great, but your brand doesn’t look good.” I respect the brand, and I’m not somebody to say, “Oh, you need to do a $100,000 rebrand,” because some companies really don’t need that. But I say, “Let’s look from the inside out.” And before you go, “Hey, I need a new website,” or, “Oh, I need demand gen. I need paid search ASAP,” I go, “Wait a second. Hold up.

I’m not going to spend $50,000, $100,000 on sending traffic to your website when your brand and website can’t accommodate that.” And so we start small with execution around a brand implementation. That moves into web development. That can take some time. We’re not an AI cloud web builder. Like, it’s just not going to happen. We build proper sites for proper companies. And then moving forward after that, it becomes a marketing campaign. That lasts for years.

So for me, it's really driven around that methodology to work with clients and keep growing them and scaling them. Share on X And as such, we grow because we offer more services, but it’s in lieu of hiring full-time people on their end. And so I have an example with a client where they have no marketing department, not even a director, and they’ve actually had VisualFizz become the entire marketing department, agency of record. But beyond that, just—we are the marketing department. And we probably come at a third of the cost or half the cost of what a true marketing department would cost. So it’s a win-win for both parts.

So are you going to land large clients, or are you landing small clients that you grow into large clients? So how do you actually execute the strategy?

It’s both. Over the years, we’ve really pushed to be B2B-focused, and in doing so, our client size revenue—not for us revenue, but their revenue—has been larger. So maybe back in the day we would land $10, $20 million companies. Now it might be $500 million companies. But the engagement was the same. Same size. And so now it might be the same difference where we land a $300 million company, but we can start small, but there’s more room to scale up over time, kind of what I told you earlier, as we build trust. So it might just be a small engagement.

Like I said, “Hey, let’s just do a brand exercise.” And then it moves into, “Oh wow, you guys actually provided value. The ROI was there. Let’s move into something else.” I’d say our close rate is lower, unfortunately, but our average statement of work or proposal is higher. And so again, it’s quality over quantity. I may lose nine out of 10 because I’m competing against larger companies that do technically have more to offer. But there’s those clients that say, “You know what? I really like the small boutique agency.

I don’t want to go with the 100-person shop. I want to go with the 20-, 25-person shop. I’m going to be a big fish in a small pond versus a mid- to small fish in a big pond. I’m going to go with them.” And so those are the customers that I do win right now, the ones that understand they're going to be my big fish. They're really going to be well taken care of. Share on X And then again, the trust and everything else comes with it later.

Yeah. So what’s one thing that you’re trying to figure out in your business right now?

My pivot. That’s a really tough one. My business has changed a lot in the past year. From a leadership perspective, I’ve become the sole owner of the company, which I wasn’t before. It was a good decision for everyone. I think everyone left happy. And beyond that, it’s really now, how do I build VisualFizz up? One of my biggest challenges that I face, and I think a lot of agencies face, especially when they don’t internalize their problems, is we’ve become very commoditized.

All of our offerings that we have get compared to AI, as well as there’s a lot of offshore agencies that their biggest barrier to entry was their language. And now with AI, that’s no longer a problem because we can all do our work fluently. Smart people, but being a U.S. agency, that was our advantage. We charge what we charge because we’re U.S., and the barrier to entry was high. But now there’s all these other folks, as well as AI, as well as software, as well as everything else.

And so I realized that we can’t rest on the laurels of being a 10-year-old agency. That doesn’t matter to people. What matters is results. And so my biggest challenge right now is, how do I pivot my company from being this commoditized service? Even if they’re good, even if you’re the best, it doesn’t matter because it’s a commodity. You could have the best concrete in the city, but if you get an RFQ and the other guys are five cents cheaper, they’re going to go with them a lot of times. Not always, but a lot of times.

And so my intention is what I said earlier: focus on the solutions and focus on the outcomes within our system that I’m building, because I think customers are going to care more to hear, “Hey, I’m not Dan who offers SEO services for you forever. I’m Dan and VisualFizz who take your company from $75 million to $100 million in the next year.” Like, that’s what I think drives their interest. But my challenge is, how do I prove that model out? Because it’s not a standard model that people know yet. It’s not been drilled down like the agency model has been for so many years. It’s new.

And do you feel like you can control the client’s business? You’re so good that you can control their growth, you can make them grow?

No. I would be overzealous and confident to say that I can do that. But the thing I can do is I could help work alongside them to do our best to get there, right? And I’ll give you a couple examples because, I mean, it’s all in the case studies. I took one company with my team from $150 million to $350 million with them, with them, to then have a merger of equals, and now they’re probably worth half a billion, $600 million, something like that.

And then another company, at a certain time during the—I’m going to kind of keep it vague—from $700 million to $800 million to $900 million. But that wasn’t VisualFizz. That was the economy. But it’s about finding opportunities and holes within your client ecosystem that help. So, for example, I saw a hole in what they were currently doing. Their brand was totally off, so we worked on that first. But after that, you could have a pretty website, it might return, but what happened after that is I found a hole saying, “There is so much demand for this product right now.

There’s a big gorilla in the room, a massive, massive company, and there’s you guys, maybe third, fourth, fifth, whatever. But no one’s running paid ads, for example, because it’s a commodity. And why would you run paid ads for commodities?” We did that, and the return on ad spend and return on investment on that has been exponential. Just to get us on the top of that list, it’s an obvious statement, but that coupled with a good-quality website, all the sales materials, trackability, CRM improvements, da da da da da, the list goes on.

I can’t control if the economy goes poorly, if another war breaks out. I’m a nobody. But what I can do with my team is identify little holes that eventually do integrate sales teams better, save time, save money. Share on X Well, that too. Saving time of the sales teams means they could contact more people. And then when they win a sale, that’s it, right? Sales team got their commission. What I like to think about is, okay, well, what happens after we close that deal? Most agencies stop at conversion. My intent is, I have a document I’ve made.

It’s 25 points. We stop at point 20. Sales team takes over from 20 to 24, and we start again at 25 with that same client we already won. So we could take them from whatever they were, $500,000 to $2 million for our customer. So, okay, that was a very long tangent, but gives you an idea of what I think I can control. But no, I can’t control company revenue. I don’t have that much power.

Yeah. No, the only reason I ask this is because if you’re selling an outcome-based approach, then they will ask you, “Okay, show me the outcome that you’re going to deliver for us.” And it is really hard to deliver that and to control that, or it’s impossible even. However, I really like this concept of plugging all the little holes in the bucket, right?

There’s a lot.

Yeah. If you plug that, then they’re not going to lose their customers, and they’re going to grow naturally without even having to add on the top. So if you had a magic wand then and you could fix one thing in your business in the next 12 months, what would that be?

Agencies are such hard businesses, as you probably know, right? I would probably ideally like to fix the sales pipeline, which is obvious. Anybody would. But I’m only one person. It’s a small team, and I do manage. I’m a pretty active founder and owner and a CEO. And candidly, I’m not an outbound salesperson. I’m good at understanding people’s needs and the marketing world, but I’m not out there speaking at events every day. I’m not out there kissing babies and waving around and winning clients.

There are people who are really good at that, loud people who have a great social presence, like the Gary Vees of the world and the Neil Patels. They’re great at this thing. I’m okay. But what I am good at, and what my team is good at, is being knowledgeable about our clients’ needs and how to, again, figure out those challenges, plug the holes, and be useful. We’re not like a vanity agency. We don’t sell pretty little things. So sometimes it’s hard to say that we’re the agency for them when they don’t have the pretty little thing. So for me, what I would wave my wand around and say is, if I could have a really strong sales team member who works beside me, and again, I could hire somebody.

I know this. But I haven’t seen the best success with outside salespeople helping, like SDRs, et cetera, because no one sells the agency work like the agency owner until you get to a certain size, until you get to 100 people or whatever, and you deal with different challenges. So having somebody who understands the business and can find the leads when we need them, because I know that once we get them in the door, it’s pretty—it’s not crazy complicated to win that work.

But getting them at the right time to understand what we’re offering and, let’s say, speed up the sales process, which right now is very slow for most agencies. I’ve talked to a lot of owners. It’s a very slow sales cycle. That would be what I’d do, at least for now.

So who’s an ideal client? I mean, you mentioned that there are some small ones that you grow. You mentioned that you used to maybe shoot for $10 million to $50 million. Now it’s $300 million to $500 million. So what’s an ideal client that would find VisualFizz to be in their sweet spot?

The thing with revenue in my industry is it doesn’t matter. If you work with e-commerce or CPGs, it could be a $30 million company with a larger budget than my billion-dollar client. That’s just the nature of it. So the revenue doesn’t matter as much. But I do think half a billion to a billion dollars is a sweet spot. A known company, but one that needs a lot of background work. And so for me, a lot of my clients are in manufacturing, industrial, construction, and logistics, among other similar complementary spaces.

Most of them are 20 to 100 years old, and most of them do not have a fully fleshed-out marketing team. And so I do have a client right now that is my ideal client, and I would love to have 10 of them. They’re a client that doesn’t have a marketing department. They’ve kind of let us become the marketing department. They’re open to our ideas, and they’ve allowed us to really take on the role of the marketing team. And so they have many locations across the country.

They’re in the industrial space. They’re growing. They’re open to our ideas, and they want us to be kind of the people that do the work for them. Everything else comes as it does, right? But the attitude that comes with a good client, that’s my ideal customer profile. But for more of a vanilla answer, I would say half a billion to a billion dollars, looking for growth, boring industries, commodities, service businesses, B2B space, many locations, wants to grow, healthy budget.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is a big difference maker. If you can find someone that trusts you, I always found that it’s so much easier to deliver value to a customer that trusts you than one that second-guesses you, right? So it becomes a win-win if they can trust you.

Yes. And I’ll be honest, the quality of my team’s work, even if it’s not directly shown, because we are a business and we do the work for our clients no matter what. But I’ll tell you just upfront that when my clients respect my team members—because I’ve had people that aren’t very respectful. I’ve had clients who are not nice. A lot of them are great, some of them aren’t. They’re not respectful to my team, and though my team has to do the work no matter what, if the client’s really bad, I talk to them and I tell them, “This is not allowed.”

It’s my team over my client every day. But if they’re just not polite or they second-guess all the time, the team isn’t going to care as much about the project and do as good of work and really go out of their way. They’ll do the work. They’ll check the boxes. They’ll do what they have to do, but they’re not going to think at 10:00 P.M., middle of the night, “Oh my God, what about this idea for this client?” And I’ll tell you, the clients that my teams love, not because they’re nice and they’re pleasant, it’s because they respect one another. They will always go out of their way and come up with new, better ideas because it’s happening top of mind all the time.

And the other ones, they’re trying—and it’s anybody—they’re flushing it out of their system until the next time they’re needed. I don’t want to make it sound like we don’t care about our clients, but at the end of the day, it’s the same thing. You have bad relationships and you have good relationships. You’re going to call your friend who’s nice and wants to hang out with you versus the guy that pushed you on the street. Just makes sense.

Plus, you’re in a creative business, and sometimes you have to take a risk in order to create something really nice. And if they don’t trust you, then you’re not going to take a risk for them. Absolutely.

Exactly.

So that’s fascinating. So if I’m the CEO or CMO of this half-a-billion-dollar industrial company with 20 sites, and we don’t have a marketing team and we really have to get going, where can I find out about you and how can I connect with you?

Well, shoot me an email. I’ll give the easy one. It’s hello@visualfizz.com. Shoot me a LinkedIn request. I mean, any way to get to me is great. I will always take a call, a strategy call. I’m not a pushy sales guy who says you have to sign up right away. If somebody has ideas and just wants to run them by me and say, “Dan, listen, I may need you, I may not, but you’ve got 30 minutes, you’ve got an hour,” I, as much as I can make the time, try to make the time for anyone.

In fact, I was talking to the sales and marketing person at a company for two years. She never ended up even working with us because of budget constraints. I still have an excellent relationship with her. She’s very nice. We would talk probably once a month. So I’m big on just when the timing is right, it will work out. So I’m happy to help.

All right. So if you are one of these companies—industrial, maybe old economy, multi-sites, maybe in the Midwest, who knows where these companies are—a couple hundred million dollars to a billion dollars, and you want a really great marketing team and maybe someone who will fix your digital foundations and build your website, or give you staff, or help you transform, transition, and expand, and build your RevOps and marketing and integrate everything, then reach out to Dan, Dan Salganik, the founder of VisualFizz, and he will take care of you.

And if you enjoyed listening to this show, make sure you follow us on YouTube, give us a review, because every two weeks—sorry, every week—I bring you a couple of exciting entrepreneurs who are building great businesses and share their unique framework with you. So Dan, thank you for coming. Thanks for listening.

Yes. Thanks for having me. I so appreciate it.