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Zac Gregg talks with Jason Barnard about signal over noise.
Signal Over Noise! Zac Gregg—Co-Founder & Managing Partner of Vital Design—Reveals How to Cut Through Industry Confusion and Find Your True Market Focus
Zac Gregg, co-founder and managing partner of Vital Design (one of New England’s top digital marketing agencies), shares the strategic pivot that broke his company through the dreaded $1 million ceiling. Drawing from his 20+ years of leadership experience taking multiple companies public, Zac reveals how to identify genuine market signals hidden within industry noise and build unstoppable growth momentum.
Get ready for a deep dive on:
- Breaking the $1M ceiling: How specializing in digital marketing instead of traditional branding transformed a project-based business into a $25M recurring revenue machine
- The signal vs. noise framework: Why clients say they want rebrands and websites but really need traffic, leads, and revenue—and how to hear what they’re actually asking for
- Industry specialization secrets: The bold Cardinal agency case study that threw away 19 industries to dominate one—and why the algorithms reward laser focus
- The cobbler’s children principle: How Vital invests $50K monthly in their own marketing to become the biggest sandbox for client learnings
- AI-era positioning strategy: Why being a generalist is “a very bad place to be” and how to become the expert content that powers LLM models
- The 80/20 specialization rule: How Vital focuses 80% on higher education while strategically maintaining 20% in B2B manufacturing and e-commerce
- Niche-down decision framework: The one, three, and five-year goal system for strategic focus without abandoning profitable existing clients
This episode delivers battle-tested strategies for agency owners, service providers, and entrepreneurs ready to break through revenue plateaus by finding their signal in the market noise.
#SignalOverNoise #DigitalMarketingAgency #BusinessGrowth #MarketingStrategy #IndustrySpecialization #FastlaneFounders #ZacGregg #VitalDesign #AgencyGrowth #BusinessScaling #MarketingFocus #RevenueGrowth #EntrepreneurStrategy #BusinessPivot #MarketingAgency #BusinessBreakthrough #NicheMarketing #AgencyLife #BusinessLeadership #MarketingExpert
What you’ll learn from Zac Gregg
This episode was recorded live on video September 16th 2025
Links to pieces of content relevant to this topic:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-368-scaling-digital-marketing-for-specialized/id1193085635?i=1000684866511
https://open.spotify.com/episode/7G0gdfm3qbgofWxhXzaS6t
Zac Gregg
Transcript from Zac Gregg with Jason Barnard on Fastlane Founders And Legacy. Signal Over Noise
[00:00:00] Zac Gregg: We spend about $25,000 a month on paid media, which for a small service business, a hundred and plus people these days. We’re about a $25 million company. A hundred and some odd employees. We had to spend about 25,000 a month in paid. We are doing about $15,000 a month in what we would consider SEO or our AI search optimization, as well as content marketing. And then we spend about $10,000 a month on our just projects and updates, which we consider like supporting HR, supporting our sales team, those types of things. So we put our money where our mouths is, we try to learn the lessons our clients need to learn before they learn them.
And that was a big part of what came next as well is we gotta do this for ourselves, guys. So we ask ourselves tougher questions than our clients do all the time.
[00:00:58] Narrator: Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard. Each week, Jason sits down with successful entrepreneurs, CEOs, and executives, and get them to share how they mastered the delicate balance between rapid growth and enduring success in the business world.
How can we quickly build a profitable business that stands the test of time and becomes our legacy? A legacy we’re proud of. Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard.
[00:01:27] Jason Barnard: Hi, everybody and welcome to another Fastlane Founders and Legacy with me, Jason Barnard. And a quick hello and we’re good to go.
Welcome to the show, Zac Gregg.
[00:01:39] Zac Gregg: Pleasure to be here, Jason.
[00:01:41] Jason Barnard: Brilliant. I ran outta breath when I got to Gregg, so I said it a bit strangely and I do apologize. Usually I take a huge breath. And today, I decided just to sing right off the top and it didn’t work out very well. We’re gonna be talking about Signal Over Noise, which I love as a title.
And having read through Gab’s notes for this, she’s done a great job. A lot of it is figuring out how to identify the noise and ignore it. Pay attention to the signals and do what the signals are telling you. Is that more or less it?
[00:02:09] Zac Gregg: Sure is. You gotta listen and you gotta learn.
[00:02:15] Jason Barnard: Yeah, you listen and a lot of times, we listen to noise and it’s hugely damaging to the business and I’ve been guilty of that many times over the years. Now, before we start, I always show people’s Brand SERPs, and here you’ve got a baby Knowledge Panel on Google. We search your name and the Knowledge Panel is just the name.
I call it a Knowledge Panel sprout and it could be super, super big with photos and descriptions and social media profiles and people that Google associates with you. And the reason I wanted to show this is because you call yourself Zac Gregg sometimes, and Zachary Gregg others. And that’s a huge problem for the machines because they presume it’s gonna be two different people and you’re kind of diluting your brand equity by appearing to be two different people. And machines are quite simplistic. So my recommendation to you, which you can take or not as you want, would be to standardize either Zac or Zachary.
[00:03:11] Zac Gregg: Love it. Love it. I can always use the advice. It’s great to see it too.
[00:03:16] Jason Barnard: What’s lovely is ChatGPT gets it right off the bat, but I don’t think that’s a photo of you.
[00:03:23] Zac Gregg: Nope. That’s a podcast that I was on before this one. I’m sure.
[00:03:28] Jason Barnard: Okay. And what’s really nice with ChatGPT and other AI engines is that they are getting it more right.
But they tend to give more choice. And I think your name, Zac Gregg, is probably quite unique. So it’s focusing on you. And a lot of the time, it will start saying, well, here’s multiple people with that name. Which one do you mean? Give me some more context. And that’s an example of how ChatGPT and AI in general are now creating conversations.
They say, I need you to give more context so that I can help you with what you want. Whereas with Google, when you’re searching somebody’s name or you’re searching for something, I look at that and I make the choice of which link I check, click there, I’m having a conversation. So that’s where we are at Kalicube® and I hope you found that interesting and helpful.
[00:04:13] Zac Gregg: Super cool. I’ve not been doing the ChatGPT slew thing, so that’s pretty cool to see.
[00:04:22] Jason Barnard: Right, and that’s interesting. I tend to think that everybody’s using ChatGPT or Google AI mode, Perplexity, but in fact they’re not. And it’s really lovely to understand that i’m assuming that that was obvious to everybody, and it absolutely isn’t.
[00:04:37] Zac Gregg: No, it’s funny the way we use ChatGPT, right? I use it every day. And I use some other LLMs, but rarely am I using it to search myself. And it’s something that I tried to fair too very rarely with Google myself.
But now, I haven’t even thought about using it to Google myself, to do AI search on myself.
[00:05:04] Jason Barnard: Right.
[00:05:04] Zac Gregg: So that was great and it’s really important. I do it for my company all the time. I’m always doing the same exact drill with our company, trying to figure it out. And that was interesting. Really cool, Jason.
[00:05:15] Jason Barnard: Brilliant. Yeah. What I kind of think, to a lot of people, this is BOFU stuff. It’s people who know your name or your company’s name and they’re doing due diligence of a sort, but with a machine that they consider to be intelligent and therefore they trust the recommendation and what the machine is saying.
But that’s not the topic for today. That’s my topic every day. And today, the idea was to change topic. And we’re gonna start with your company that got ceilinged at a million dollars. Now, I hear that happens a lot and they’re breaking through that million dollar barrier. It’s really difficult, and once you do it, you fly.
Can you tell me your story?
[00:05:50] Zac Gregg: I think you’ve got a couple things that happen. Sub $1 million, is your heart really there? Is that what you’re doing a hundred percent of your time? Us as entrepreneurs, we’re always focused on multiple projects at once. We’re always trying to figure out where to put our time, and I think the typical story of the Sub Million Dollars Zac Gregg and the Sub Million Dollar Vital. We loved the space we were in. We loved what we were doing. We had a natural audience and that was local and small, and businesses oftentimes that I had already started. So that sub $1 million was just almost, it was a convenient operation of marketing to market friends, family, ideas that I had and the local audience that we had here as entrepreneurs.
In 2000, obviously the internet was not as big of a marketing platform, so you worked through business of commerce chambers, things like that. You were a product of your environment. But things changed rapidly in from 2000 to 2012. And the idea that we became very passionate and I became very focused on digital was the first specialization that we experienced that caused us to break through a ceiling.
[00:07:09] Jason Barnard: And what was that and why did you choose to specialize?
[00:07:13] Zac Gregg: Yeah. I think we saw the writing on the wall. I think the torture of being a brand agency when you’re constantly doing a project and then it ends and then doing a project and then it ends. And what we found is that we were doing a lot with social media.
We were doing a lot with content production. We were an early adopter of HubSpot. We were an early adopter of some of the key ideals behind inbound marketing. As such, with our extra bandwidth, we began the content marketing, content generation. I started sharing the secrets, started sharing things that I had been told and were trade secrets for a long period of time.
And that’s the way that salespeople and a sales culture of the two thousands, early two thousands really, forced us to go. By 2010 to 2012, we were releasing all sorts of our trade secrets and information and helping people understand what to do. And what we found is people were coming to us and saying, you’re not really articulating the services you provide, but I want to be like you. We want to see our face everywhere. We wanna be on social media. We wanna have content out there, proliferating the algorithms and the search results wherever they may be found. And that’s where it started.
And we started saying, we’ve got a product here. The way that we produce this content, which was almost a retainer format, about 20 to 50 hours a month of spending time, creating content, and then proliferating that content throughout the web using all sorts of different channels.
It was an experiment at first of excess utility, followed by almost groundbreaking innovation over the next 10 years. And people just wanted to be like us. Soon, we figured out how to advertise the product, how to package the product, which was essentially digital marketing coordinators, paid media.
Paid media retainers and those types of things, but they turned into the natural evolution of people’s websites and control of their websites, and it was a very sticky product unlike what had been kind of the bane of our existence, which was early branding where it was just not sticky.
People had that money for that 10,000, 20,000, $50,000 rebrand. And then they didn’t want to talk to you again for another year or two years, and that was not sticky and that was painful. And you were only as good as your last sale. And this was pretty up groundbreaking, 15 years ago.
[00:09:43] Jason Barnard: Right. So it was pivoting rather than nicheing down. And it was pivoting to something that didn’t really exist at the time. When you did that, we talked just before the show about the difference between noise and signals.
[00:10:01] Zac Gregg: Sure.
[00:10:01] Jason Barnard: So was this a question of hearing a lot of noise and then realizing that which of that noise was actually signaled?
[00:10:08] Zac Gregg: Yeah, I think for sure. I think that the noise was, this is not a product or a service that people are interested in or want to talk about, but seeing the signals that everyone was really asking the question. The noise was I need to rebrand. I need a new website. But the signals were, that’s not really what they wanted. They wanted more traffic, more leads, and more revenue. And once you started turning the conversation on its head and saying, you’re coming to me for a website, but what you really want are more leads, more traffic and more revenue.
It started to be you don’t need a website. What you really need to start doing is adding certain sections to your website. You need to start doing a major job with conversion rate optimization. You need to be better at thinking about what your buyer’s journey looks like, what your funnel looks like.
And this wasn’t I need to rebrand and I need a new website, which would’ve been the traditional game of every marketing director for the 20, 30 years before we were in existence. And the website was new in 2000. The website was just a natural. They just treated it like a new business card, a new brochure, and it wasn’t. What they were missing and the signals that we were seeing is that people fundamentally didn’t understand the world that we were about to work and move into. They still don’t. In a lot of ways, most organizations are run by salespeople and VPs of Sales because they’re the ones who are the company’s indebted to for growing them through ceilings. And it is more and more.
Less and less of a secret. But that signal was definitely there for us, and the signals didn’t stop there. COVID changed, it became more signals. And next thing you knew, we weren’t the only people doing digital marketing strategies and paid strategies and this, and now all of a sudden the race was to, what are we gonna be next, guys?
And that’s the world we’re living in right now.
[00:12:07] Jason Barnard: Right. And so, right now, there’s a lot of noise.
[00:12:11] Zac Gregg: Yeah.
[00:12:11] Jason Barnard: People talking about AI. We’re all getting overexcited about it. What few of the signals and the noise around AI, ChatGPT, Search, Perplexity providing answers? And we talk a lot at Kalicube® about the AI building of funnel, as I talked about earlier. And you need to get involved in that conversation. Now, from what I’ve said and what you’ve heard around the web, what’s the noise and what’s the signal?
[00:12:35] Zac Gregg: Well, I think the signal is become an expert in a field so that you’re the content that powers the LLM models, right? And so, being a generalist is a very bad place to be right now. We had to really decide like what areas are our areas of onboarding? Where are people asking questions around? What are the struggles that they’re having? Which was always kind of our SEO approach. Now, our AI search approach is what are the questions that people are asking?
Those questions are changing. And then what are the results that are getting served up? And what we’re finding is that, we just like most marketing agencies have had to make a major change towards industry specialization. Both because the paid dollar only goes so far.
So when you’re doing paid advertising, and let’s face it, paid right now is like the S&P 500, right? Is paid the right, the safe spend? It’s the one that changes right now the least, and gets you results. It’s expensive, it’s addictive. It causes you to overlook other avenues, but it’s safe.
And so it’s a part of everyone’s marketing mix right now. And we, just like everyone we work for, had to figure out how do we get the most out of those dollars? It became around figuring out what were the parts of our business that people came in and represented the best clients that we had?
So both niche and both products, right? And those are the things that we continue to work on our clients with and ourselves with. So one of the things about Vital, I would say, when you talk about signals. The biggest thing that we had is that we were in an industry too, that everyone was the cobbler’s child.
If you look at most marketing agencies, they’re unimpressive in what they put out there for themselves and the amount of marketing they do for themselves. We have a commitment here at Vial that we are our own biggest sandbox. We are a platform. We get platform like learning from having hundreds of clients who do similar things in similar industries, but we want to be out there on the cutting edge of that being the biggest sandbox of all of our clients to give us the biggest learnings.
And so we made a commitment to ourselves that if we were gonna tell our clients that we could make money for them, we were going to. Doing marketing, it was a revenue generating expense, then we are going to be able to do it for ourselves. And so we spend about $25,000 a month on paid media, which for a small service business, a hundred and plus people these days. We’re about a $25 million company, a hundred and some odd employees. We had to spend about 25,000 a month in paid. We are doing about $15,000 a month in what we would consider SEO or our AI search optimization, as well as content marketing. And then we spend about $10,000 a month on our just projects and updates, which we consider like supporting HR, supporting our sales team, those types of things. So we put our money where our mouths is. We try to learn the lessons our clients need to learn before they learn them. And that was a big part of what came next as well, is we gotta do this for ourselves, guys. So we ask ourselves tougher questions than our clients do all the time.
[00:16:11] Jason Barnard: Right. And that’s been incredibly valuable too. And it’s worked incredibly well. At Kalicube®, we’re doing the same thing, so it’s really interesting to know that it works to the scale of 25 million where we’re not yet. We actually have a hundred SOP playbooks for our clients and we’ve actually implemented them all.
So we hand over these SOP playbooks based on the data that we have, and I can honestly say to them, we’ve made all the mistakes before giving you this playbook. So we can give you the playbook and know that it actually works. It’s something similar for you.
[00:16:41] Zac Gregg: Incredibly valuable. It’s incredibly valuable. You know, as the entrepreneur, like if you can’t get past me, I’m not selling this on your behalf. And ultimately, I’m helping sell all the time, right? I’m put in that room, close that deal, and I have to have confidence that we’re gonna be able to do the job for especially the size and scale of the companies and institutions that we’re working for.
We determined that specializing around higher education, and education in general was our best kind of area of experience and knowledge.
[00:17:13] Jason Barnard: Is there a huge amount of investment in digital marketing by higher education?
[00:17:20] Zac Gregg: Yeah, it’s the Wild West. It’s probably one of the best decisions we made. It’s not for everyone, but there were a couple key signals in. We did an exercise. We had talked to Cardinal, I don’t know if you’ve ever met them. Great group out of, I think, Atlanta, Georgia. We had met with them. We had met with a bunch. We try to do our diligence. We try to always keep talking to people in the industry and we had spoken to them and they had literally one of the most complex digital marketing plays I’ve ever seen of a digital marketing agency. In that they said they serviced X amount of industries, I can’t remember, let’s say 20.
And they had the deepest amount of content on those 20 than any one company I’d seen in any of those 20. And one day, we asked them to talk about it because we just couldn’t keep up. We couldn’t keep up with all the industries we were trying to serve and the services we were trying to provide.
We know that the services are all interrelated and we can’t cut them willy-nilly. There are some companies that start just as PPC, but we felt that like one of our biggest advantages was a lot of services. So how do you cut the industries or service all the industries with the content you need to compete in the digital market world?
And Cardinal, between the time we’d scheduled the call and the time that we had met with them, had gone down to one industry, which was mind boggling to us because they had so much content. And our question was, you threw all that content away? You navigated that labyrinth and then you threw it all away?
Tell me what you did and why? And the guy’s just a maniac in his positive way. And he went and put all his bets in the healthcare. He kind of went after small, not small, but service and hospitals and things like that.
And that’s all he wanted to do. And he said it was exactly what we had learned. It’s too much. The algorithms don’t understand you and trying to get them to understand you, we were more complex than we think the algorithms could even understand. And that’s what it took and it didn’t work and it was too much work. And we’re just much better off servicing, the health arena.
It didn’t mean they threw away all their clients overnight, but they changed their website and was one of the most bold things I’d ever seen.
[00:19:52] Jason Barnard: And it worked incredibly well. It attracted more clients. The services were more productized because they were all very similar and the business took off.
[00:20:03] Zac Gregg: Nailed it, right? You nailed it. If you could put in the effort they had been putting, the monumental effort they had been putting on into 20 things into one thing. They were bound for success and their experiences, their salespeople. Rhino’s not different. There’s another great agency out there that did a great job, and they’ve been on a bunch of podcasts. They did a great job in the service arena, electricians, HVAC, those types of things. They’re incredible too. He talks about how his wife was sick of him selling everything to anyone, and that she was having to deal with the broken hearts, and tears of the employees who couldn’t keep up and couldn’t service those people that he was selling. And how hard it was on his employees, their employees. Everyone needed the focus. But as a salesperson, as a leader of a company, you just want to win at everything that you can win at.
And that was there for a long time. That was the way agencies were built. But in 2020, there was a seismic shift and I say 2020, but it was in that timeframe. Now, AI only, they’re not going to understand you for everything and they’re not gonna service you up for everything. You have to be incredibly narrow and pointed.
You can point at a couple things maybe, but you need to be narrow and focused.
[00:21:31] Jason Barnard: So you guys are education, higher education specifically, and that’s where you’ve niche down?
[00:21:37] Zac Gregg: I would say that we are not doing exactly what Cardinal did. I think that it was a lesson, and it was a lesson of how far you could shift. And there are some signals that we maybe aren’t listening to and maybe some that we should be listening to. But we have some five-year goals. We have three-year goals, and we have one-year goals. And our one-year goal is to kind of get ourselves into better shape around this stuff. I think the niching out into education.
We have an 80-20 rule. 80% of the marketing we do, 80% of the people we hire, 80% of everything is focused on education. So if that answers that question. But we service e-commerce pretty heavily. We’ve got some amazing e-commerce clients that we love. And we service people here at Vital in pods. So what we do is we build out pods to service the marketing mix that’s coming in the door.
And right now, the 80% of the marketing that we do, and the 80% of the clients and 80% of the pods that we’re building and creating internally are for higher ed. And then, there’s 20% that is actually B2B manufacturing and services. And then, another part of that 20% is e-commerce.
[00:22:52] Jason Barnard: Right. And so one question to end this with, it is actually now a question totally personal for Kalicube® is we’ve niched down on entrepreneurs corporations with $5 million revenue or more working on their personal brand.
Is that niche enough or do I need to niche down into a specific industry or set of industries?
[00:23:13] Zac Gregg: You need to listen to the signals, you know better than anyone. It is always gonna be more successful to know your audience even better. We tend as CEOs to have CEO think, and we listen to what we think makes sense for our business. It’s easier to take small steps. What Cardinal did was bold. I think we could all learn a less lesson from them. Can we all do it in practice?
[00:23:50] Jason Barnard: The lesson I heard from Cardinal was, and it’s interesting to say, it isn’t because your front facing website changes its focus to be very niche on one specific industry that you’re throwing all your clients out the door in the backend. It’s that you keep serving the clients you’ve already got, and you just refocus your marketing and pivot towards something very niche, as you say in the AI era, being niche and being understood to be as the single leading expert or best service provider for a specific niche is key. So have you got anything to add to that?
[00:24:25] Zac Gregg: No, I think you’re getting it and I think you have to service, there’s a balance and that’s why we talk about a one, a three and a five year goal, right? Which is you need to be able to figure out, as a business person, how to get yourself there, in as a company. How you get your employees there in? Reality is everyone loves focus. So the more you can focus, Jason, I think is what we’re talking about here, how you get there, it’s different strokes for different folks.
[00:24:58] Jason Barnard: Brilliant. Thank you so much, Zac Gregg. And you get the outro song. That was brilliant. Thank you everyone for watching. A quick goodbye to end the show. Thank you, Zac.
[00:25:10] Narrator: Your corporate and personal brands are what Google and AI say they are. We can give you back control. Kalicube®
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