Dan Gray aims to help brands find the right agencies at no extra cost. With more than ten years of experience in growth marketing, especially in customer acquisition and e-commerce, he worked with many well-known companies.
During his career, Gray saw a common problem; as teams grew, they often needed outside experts in areas such as marketing, design, and PR. He noticed that most marketing leaders don’t have much time to research and choose the right agencies. This led him to start Vendry, a one-stop company that helps brands connect with vetted agencies in the US, Canada, and the UK.
Below, Gray explains how Vendry is helping agencies connect with clients efficiently. He also offers advice for aspiring entrepreneurs seeking to start a business.
How is Vendry helping businesses connect with the right agencies efficiently?
One of the big elements of what we do is that we save organizations time; it is a very daunting process for teams to do internally. We estimate that on average, when we take a lot of searches for a client, we’re saving them between 20 to 40 hours of work, researching the right agencies, setting up calls, meeting with them, gathering all the information, vetting them, you know, that’s a really exhaustive process. From a time-saving standpoint, we let our clients focus on other work they’re used to doing by taking care of that for them. Also worth mentioning, is that our process is entirely free for brands. We don’t charge our clients anything to run a search through us. We’re compensated through the agency itself. So, from a brand’s perspective, it’s a free way to source additional agency ideas, at no cost to their team.
What would you say is the biggest challenge your agency and clients are facing right now?
I think it’s just a really tough macro environment. The world is moving so fast, and businesses are constantly trying to figure out how to continue their growth. For some businesses, that’s been more challenging than others in the last few years. When businesses come to us, the challenge that they’re trying to solve is essentially how to keep the momentum going. How do we continue winning? And a huge piece of that is bringing on external help. We have seen a huge trend towards organizations downsizing their companies, and it’s an unfortunate trend that seems to be continuing. When that’s the case, there is a need to bring on individuals with specialized expertise. Many agencies are often called upon to fill that gap where they don’t necessarily have the means to do that in-house. That’s a challenge. Some clients want to bring on multiple agencies of record to solve all of their problems. What we’re trying to do is help them solve that puzzle without them having put a ton of resources into solving it themselves.
What’s one money habit you wish you could change?
As a business owner, you need to be conservative, and there are times when you need to be aggressive, and it’s difficult to switch between the two. Being a bootstrapped organization, we’re aligned on being profitable every month. When you’re constantly in survival mode, especially in the early years of a business, it’s easy to adopt a conservative mindset, but we’re fortunate now that we’re growing as an organization. It does take a different frame of mind to flip the switch and think; how do I reinvest maybe a little bit more aggressively to push the company’s growth even further? So, from a money habit, it’s more than just trying to think about what sort of fiscal level of responsibility or aggression is required for a given moment. There’s no right answer. It’s imperative that you understand the conditions your business is operating in and stay on top of your finances.
What advice would you give other entrepreneurs?
I would say lean into your skill set. If you’re technical or an engineer by nature, you might find yourself in a much more product-driven organization. And so, I’d say that, for an entrepreneur, you obviously have to build a diverse skill set, especially when you don’t have the means to hire a big team or complement yourself with supporting resources. Figure out what it is you’re good at. If you have an organization that reflects that and really leans into that as your competitive advantage, I think that’ll serve you well. The second thing is to build a kind of business that makes sense for your life. It is easy to become envious of people raising billions of dollars through venture capital or of someone with a one-person side hustle. There are so many different forms of entrepreneurship and business success; define what success looks like for you and hold yourself accountable to it!
David Messiha | Staff Writer
