Scaling to 18 then back to 15: David Kieran, Zoma

Connor: Welcome to Exit Ready, the podcast about building a successful agency, because building a successful agency and one that’s ready for sale are parallel journeys. I’m Connor McAuley and today I’m talking to David Kieran, the founder of a multidisciplinary agency named Zoma. David, tell me about yourself and Zoma today. Who are you and what does the agency do?

David: Thanks for having me on. Zoma is a full-service marketing agency based in Dundalk in County Louth. We’re a team of 15 people currently. We have marketers, creators, an in-house production team for video, photography, graphic design, and we have strategists. Basically we have everything in-house so we can offer full-service to businesses across all industries. We work with companies of all different sizes in all different markets. We’re usually working with marketing managers, marketing directors, sales teams. Businesses trust us to deliver the marketing strategy and to deliver across all areas of that strategy. We’ve grown massively in the last three to four years since we launched Zoma back in 2021. We’re in business 10 years this year, so it’ll be a special milestone. November of this year we’ll be hitting 10 years. I’m only 34, so I started off when I was 24. It’s hard to believe 10 years later we’re sitting here talking about how the business has grown.

I’m a graduate of DCU. I did business and marketing in DCU, graduated and left college not really knowing where I wanted to be or where I wanted to go. I went travelling, went to Vancouver with my wife Fiona, and got working with a marketing agency in Vancouver. That really opened my eyes to how far ahead the North America market was in terms of marketing, software, and what was available to businesses when it came to digital marketing in particular. I took a lot of golden nuggets home from Vancouver, seeing there was a really good opportunity to enter the market in 2016, when digital was only really starting to grow here. It hadn’t really kicked off at that stage.

I set up Marketing For Me. I went around literally just doing websites for friends, for family, for sports teams, for whatever. It just grew from there. I knew if I got one website off someone, I’d probably get another one down the line. I always refer to it like a painter. When a painter comes into your house and does a good job, more than likely you’re going to refer that painter to someone else. I had the same mindset.

Even today, the sales part of the business is my strongest area. I went door to door, the old traditional way of trying to sell. That definitely worked for me because at that stage a lot of people in digital didn’t want to leave their laptops or get out of the office. Going door to door gave me an advantage at that stage. That’s where I started off and it just grew and grew from there.

Connor: You’ve given me so much to ask. The journey sounds so similar. I’ll start at the very end. That door to door, we would have made a hundred phone calls every single day in the early days because that’s what it took to get us in front of other people. We’d have been on the road constantly heading up and down the breadth of the country trying to drum up business. As you said, there’s other people who just don’t want to get away from behind that computer. If you’re putting that effort in, well, it combines, it grows, and it’s beneficial for us all over time. But 10 years, what a milestone that’ll be.

David: I remember I used to have a whiteboard up on the wall and I had a target that I had to get two websites a month. That was just to get by, to put food on the table and to have a bit of a living. If we think of today, how many websites we do in a week never mind a month, it’s frightening. That was always the goal. I love sports. I’ve always been very driven and very focused.

Once I saw the opportunity, I went after it. Shopify is a platform everyone’s familiar with in e-commerce now. Shopify only really started to take off here in Ireland in around 2018, but I started doing websites on Shopify in 2016. That’s what they were using in North America. We were the first Shopify partner in Ireland. That definitely helped us. As Shopify grew, we grew too. You see the e-commerce powerhouse it is today. Getting in with them was a really good boost. We built ourselves off those kinds of partnerships and getting in with the right type of business in the beginning. We were probably lucky, and you create your own luck as well. Sometimes a door just opens. I’ve done jobs for people who were probably on the cheap, but it opened the door to something else afterwards. We got very lucky in some of the businesses we got in the early days.

Connor: You said something brilliant that I talk about all the time. You will go in with a loss leader, hoping it will prolong the journey and you’ll get more work or a referral. Something I say a lot is that we grow with our customers. As they grow, we do too. When you’re working with this breadth of clients across the country, that’s fantastic, because as their businesses scale, there’s always a greater need for our service. They’re going to reinvest some of those profits back into digital marketing, creative, development of their site, and we grow right alongside them.

David: 100 percent. We’ve actually spent a bit of work this year on our mission and our value statements. That’s exactly what we landed on: as they grow, we grow. If we can make the businesses we work with grow into a better position online, we’re going to grow with them as well. So that’s always been at the core. It’s funny you say it. It’s literally in our mission statement.

Connor: We’re speaking the same language. Now, a big question for me, and this is something we did as well. You rebranded from Marketing For Me to Zoma in 2021. What was behind that change and what has changed in the business since?

David: I operated Marketing For Me on my own from 2016 to 2018. In 2019, Chris, who’s our creative director and CEO of Zoma, was doing graphic design work for me on projects. Websites and graphics going hand in hand. Six to twelve months after Chris and I started working together, Richie, our content director here at Zoma, was doing a lot of video and photography work, because websites are only as good as the content on them. To make a really engaging and attractive website, you need really good content with it.

The three of us started working together on project after project after project. We were like, why are we working independently here? There’s a chance to create a business and a brand that’s going to be at the forefront of the industry for what we can do. We had big ambitions. We sat down in the middle of COVID in a pub in Dundalk, brainstorming where we could go with the business. Before we even came up with a name, we put down what we wanted our brand to be about. We wanted to make sure we invested in the people who work in Zoma, that they have a really good work-life balance and that we give them every opportunity to grow within the company. We also wanted that when people saw our brand, it really stood out from other businesses. We didn’t mind being disruptive and being out there.

The old suit-and-tie model was disappearing. We could see what we had with the big tech companies. We always looked at businesses in bigger markets than Ireland. We’d look at agencies in Sydney, in Vancouver, in New York, wherever. That’s what we were looking at for ideas and the potential of where we could go. We said we needed something that stood out. A buzzword.

A to Z. Everyone always goes with A because A comes first. We were the opposite. We said, we’ll go Z. So we had the letter Z and then we had to build a word from it. The first one was Zomi, Z-O-M-I. It just didn’t sit right. We kept playing around and eventually we came up with Zoma, and we all agreed there was something we could really move forward with. From that pub in Dundalk, Zoma was born.

We launched the rebrand in February 2021. At that time it was three of us. I think within three months we were six of us. That’s how quick the company started to grow from when we rebranded. Moving away from the traditional suit and tie, you’ll see our logo with vibrant pink. You cannot miss it. That reflected the agency and how vibrant we were, and the new ideas we were bringing into the industry. Not just a new company, new ideas, new initiatives, a new way of doing business.

We heavily invested in work-life balance. We had social clubs. We were all going out doing golf. Way before the work-life balance culture came in after COVID, we were doing this. That stood out to people. Even more so after COVID, when they saw the benefit of investing in mental health and physical health. From my sports background, I find that if you’re in the best shape physically and mentally, you’re the most creative you can be. It allows you to build confidence, in-person skills, communication skills, creativity. That was always a big reason we pushed physical and mental wellbeing.

Connor: And the rest is history at this point. I literally had a conversation an hour ago with another agency owner where we were talking about health and wellbeing and being at your peak yourself to be able to drive your business forward. I have to be the first to say that I let the business take over. I didn’t train well, I didn’t eat well, I was a stress eater in the business. Now on the other side of that, I’m doing all the things I should have done back then. I started my agency in 2009. There wasn’t that focus then. It was the grindset, the grind mentality. There still is a bit of that, a lot of it for me. But today, even at a founder’s level, we have to focus on our own work-life balance to perform at the highest level.

David: 100 percent. As you grow as a business, I would have been heavily involved in operational work when we launched Zoma. Now as CEO and managing director, you’re a lot more removed from that. It’s about getting the best out of your team and creating the greatest environment for them to work in. It’s so important that they enjoy coming into the office, enjoy working in teams together, enjoy working on projects together. I have to be shown that I’m doing that in order for them to do it. It starts from the top down.

If at lunchtime you go into our canteen, it’s all fit meals. There’s no chicken fillet roll or anything like that. The whole culture has changed, even in the canteen. It’s for a reason. We’ve all seen the benefits of doing team challenges together. Last week we had a fitness fundraiser for Daffodil Day. We raised over €21,000 for the Irish Cancer Society and that was a fitness fundraiser on our rooftop here in Zoma. We had over 200 businesses come in and take part. It just shows you how important people are placing fitness now and getting your team out and involved in social events. It’s a massive part of business today and there’s a big reason behind it: people are seeing the return from it.

Connor: You’ve mentioned your team a lot already and how much you focus on them. You’re based in Dundalk. For any of my clients and anyone watching this who are further afield, Dundalk is pretty much smack-bang between Belfast and Dublin on the island of Ireland. There’s always challenges in non-major-city areas when you’re trying to hire a high-performing team. Have you found that’s a challenge for you in Dundalk and the greater area, or do you think all the effort you put into wellbeing and creating a good environment for the team is actually what’s driving good staff to you?

David: Honestly, it’s been an advantage to us. Being in Dundalk, as you said, we’re right in the middle of Dublin and Belfast on the M1 corridor. We’re an hour’s drive either way from two of the biggest cities in Ireland. Because we’re such an attractive place to work, and we’ve won multiple Best Place to Work awards and wellbeing awards, people are reaching out to us for work. They’d love to get away from the busy commute. They know they could be doing long commutes into Dublin, driving around the M50, taking over an hour and a half to get to work. They’re losing three hours a day to travel some days. That alone is very difficult for mental wellbeing. We’ve become a very attractive place to work.

Because we’re outside of the cities, we were also very clever about which markets we went after. We went after rural businesses. People in Ireland forget how big a business there is in rural parts of Ireland. A lot of businesses enjoy coming to Dundalk. It’s very accessible, very easy to get to. We’ve had no difficulty in hiring and we have a very high retention rate. Very few people have left us. That’s a really positive side, because we invest a lot in people when they join Zoma to make sure they’re really upskilled and able to work at the highest quality. We spend time getting them to the level we want them at, so it’s important they stay with us after that initial investment. We’ve definitely seen the wellbeing investment as a huge advantage.

Connor: Amazing. I love it. You can never invest too much in your team. If you want to get the best out of them, you need to be working alongside them and giving them every opportunity to succeed in their role. From my perspective, you’ve identified yourself as MD and CEO of the agency, but you weren’t always the MD and CEO. You were in delivery for the longest time. What’s the hardest part of business today at this level and this scale, compared to when it was just you?

David: Probably the hardest part is not being able to be as creative and being stuck in operations like I used to be. I used to love delivering websites for clients. I used to love being able to take their ideas and visually present them. I’m missing out on that at the minute. You still get involved in projects and give your overview, but it’s hard to get into the real development part of the website.

I’m only 34. Being young and dealing with team and staff and decision-making, we went from a structure of three to a structure of 15. Being able to financially manage that took a lot of learning, a lot of upskilling, and a lot of personal risk. We’ve made mistakes. Everyone does. The biggest thing I always say is that if we make a mistake, we learn from it. I always go back to sport. When a team loses they’re probably at their most dangerous because they’re learning from what they’ve lost. I have that mindset too. If we’ve done something wrong in Zoma, we’ll learn from it and make sure we don’t make that mistake again.

The biggest change for me was managing the team and trying to get the best out of them as the team grew. When you get over 10 full-time staff, people always tell you that’s the dangerous time to be in business. You can really fall between two bar stools at that stage. We took the jump up to 18, 20 staff, but we were nowhere near as productive and as profitable as we were in previous years when we made that jump. So we actually scaled back a bit. We redefined our team and structure and built our leadership team out to allow us to take our next growth journey. That’s been a big part of the last year or so. We were never ready for the growth that we took so quickly. We needed to scale back a little bit, make sure we were leading well and all working well, in order to take the next step going forward.

Connor: Brilliant. You’ve talked about sports so much, and I know you’re the front-of-shirt sponsor of Dundalk FC. Do you play yourself, are you a huge fan of the team, or is it just local?

David: I used to play. I went up to underage level with Dundalk, but I went down the Gaelic route in the end instead of the soccer route. Me and Chris would have played with Dundalk right up to under-18 level. It was always in the heart of us, Dundalk. The club went through a very hard time. They got relegated at the end of 2024 and were in a really poor financial state. Chris, our CEO, saw an opportunity to reach out to the club and say, look, we know you’re in the First Division, but we think we can come in and really help with the rebuild of the Dock at this time last year, early 2025.

We came in as front-of-shirt sponsor. Took a massive risk, but honestly it’s really paid off for us. It helped that the club got promoted at the end of last year. They won the First Division. They’re back in the Premier Division of the League of Ireland this year and going really well. The exposure we’ve got from that, the network we’ve got access to, there’s a lot of business people involved with Dundalk and the League of Ireland. People say sponsorship can be risky, but for us it’s been really beneficial in launching the brand at a stronger national level.

We were just delighted to have got in at the stage we did. We did the jersey launch for the Dock in December/January. It was the most-streamed and most-viral jersey launch video ever in League of Ireland history. We brought back one of the club’s biggest names, who was the main focal point of the video, and it became the biggest-selling jersey in Dundalk FC history, off the back of that launch video. It was a really good collaboration for us. We could really show what we can do.

Connor: Brilliant. I love it. You don’t make your own luck, or you do make your own luck, or you think it’s luck, but ultimately it’s just a collection of decisions you’ve made that have benefited the business. I love that. You’ve been able to help the club, you’re helping your own business, and you’re showcasing the work you can do. That’s an incredibly smart move.

I’m going to go back to the very, very start, because I love the fact that you’re multidisciplinary. Some of my clients and people watching this are singularly focused. They’re on Shopify, they’re on Craft CMS, they only do branding. We were the same as you. We kept everybody in our ecosystem as long as possible. We got them for the brand, kept them for the website, looked after all their ongoing marketing materials, then got them for their print later on because that was the other side of our business. The more you can do that, the more you become a trusted partner of their business. You’re at the table, you can help them make decisions that benefit their business and you can help them scale.

You’ve gone through a period of three or four years of growth, you took a pause, and now you’re going again. What does the next three years look like for Zoma?

David: At the minute we’ve changed our messaging and our tone of business to really appeal to global brands. We were very focused on doing work for Irish brands, but now we see a real opportunity to work in other markets. We’re making ourselves attractive to larger companies, more multinational style. We might be working with the same number of clients, but we’d be working at a higher scale with the clients we are working with. That’s the growth strategy we’re looking at.

We were at an event this week where we were exploring opening a global office. Could we take the route of opening another office outside of Ireland? That’s something we’re really looking at. We think that’s the next step on our ladder: to appeal to global brands, you need to be a global agency. So we’re exploring that.

We’re also looking at whether there are other areas of the marketing sphere we can move into. Obviously AI is a massive part of everything we’re doing today. A lot of businesses are afraid to move into AI and invest in it. We’re actually starting to do a lot of work on the AI service side. We’re exploring whether we launch a sub-brand of Zoma as an AI agency. We have a couple of people in here who are very good in AI. We’re starting to work with a lot of businesses, not just on marketing, but on how AI can improve their operations, how AI can improve their profitability.

For us, yes, AI has come in and changed the industry, but content is content at the end of the day, and people will engage with people. Storytelling and messaging has never been more important than ever, because with AI, if you can stand out and be real and tell a story and tell your brand messaging, you’re going to engage with customers and grow. We actually see content as one of our biggest growth areas over the coming months and years, and we’re really looking to grow in that area too.

Our team has been in Washington, in Germany, in the UK, all over in the last year doing content for companies. The big thing is, when we get in working with a business, they don’t want to outsource it to someone else. They’d rather take us over and shoot the content because it’s feeding into their marketing campaigns and they’re used to working with us. We’re working with really big companies who have multiple global locations, and that’s the type of customer we’re going after now. That’s where our growth strategy for the next year or two will focus.

Connor: I’ve seen some agencies who have opened a stateside office and have done incredibly well. It does open up more challenges as well as opportunities. Going in with your eyes wide open and understanding that, having boots on the ground, not just a remote site, has been really beneficial for other agencies I’m aware of.

You’ve answered my next question about AI. You guys are leaning into it heavily. I’m a huge advocate of it. I think it will never replace the creativity that we humans bring to the process and it will never replace the strategy that we will inherently know from doing this for many years. But the operational side, the delivery of service, can be streamlined, automated, systemised, and made more effective and efficient in the business. For me, this is the greatest opportunity in our trade: to maximise our efficiency, be more cost-effective and scale off the back of it, because we’re ahead of everybody else. We’re focused on this more than most of the population and we need to capitalise on it now. Are you using it internally to systemise your own studio? How are you doing that?

David: We’ve changed our business hugely by bringing AI into it. A big part is our CRM and our workflow management. We’ve nearly fully automated that. We’ve moved to Notion for our CRM. Everything from lead generation right through to project sign-off goes through Notion. We have automations everywhere across all teams to make us more efficient. The mindset is, if you’re doing the same thing daily over and over again, it can probably be automated. From financial and invoicing right through to follow-up emails, project timelines, everything. Loads of areas of the business have been automated to make our team more efficient and to free up time for them to be more creative. The more time and hours our team have to be creative, the better it is for our clients.

We don’t see AI as replacing anything. We see it as assisting us and helping us do business better. We bring that to businesses too, to show how AI is helping us so they can help themselves. People say, oh sure, you can just use AI for graphics. Yeah, you can, and it gets you started. But it’s not going to give you the final piece. If we were going to do a video production for a client, AI is not going to script it out to the level a human will. It can’t tell the story. You take the Dundalk video, for example. There’s no way AI could have produced the viral sensation we did. It couldn’t even have come up with the idea. People have to do that. AI assists in areas of the production, but it’s a tool we use to assist, not to replace people.

As businesses start to invest and use AI they’ll see the benefits. We’re all slow to change. I think that’s an Irish thing. Further afield you’d see more businesses willing to invest in AI. We see that with our international clients. They’re more in tune with what AI is doing. So it’s been a huge benefit to our business, both from an efficiency and an operational point of view.

Connor: The genie’s out of the bottle. It’s never going back in at this point when it comes to AI. I want to ask a couple more questions. If somebody was coming to you tomorrow wanting to start an agency like yours in a small town or a big town, doesn’t matter where, what advice would you give that person?

David: Probably the biggest thing is just to make sure you do a good job. We’ve built our whole business on referral marketing. If we do one good job it nearly leads to two good jobs afterwards. Or if we do one good job for a client, he’ll get you to do two other jobs for him. So not only are you creating new clients, you’re upselling other services if you do a good job for someone.

Getting yourself in the door is one thing. You have to make that network and create that relationship with people. You have to get out, you have to network, you have to build relationships, get involved in chambers or organisations, whatever it is. Create those networks, create that conversation with people, find out what the problem is. An easy way if you’re building websites is to go onto someone’s website and see if it’s a good website or not. That’s the starting point. Come back with an attractive offering to get in the door, and see where the relationship goes. That’s how we would have started off and built our business.

Make sure you give value to clients and that you value those clients. We’re at a different stage of our business now. When I was starting off, I made sure we delivered for our clients with as strong and dedicated a relationship as we could get from them. Now, you do what you can do. There’s only so much you can do at scale. But in those early days, when you’re small and agile, you’re very flexible and you can do a lot. You can really make yourself stand out and create real value for clients.

I worked with businesses that had a hundred-euro budget right up to thousands of euros. You never know where it can go. Like we were talking about before we came on, you just never know where you get in or what it can lead to. It’s a risk and reward kind of mindset. I have a bit of a risk-taker mindset in me. A lot of CEOs and successful MDs and directors aren’t afraid of risk. They’ll see an opportunity and go for it. There are times we’ve got it wrong, yes, but as I said, we’ve learned from it. We’ve definitely got more reward than loss from the risks we’ve taken.

Connor: I remember way back in the early days we had a student come in and he just wanted a set of business cards. We gave him a set of business cards. It was a £23 project and it was me dealing with it. That client became our biggest. He went off after university, got a cracking job in a huge business and became our best client the year after. What’s also funny about the story is that I left that project, which was £23, and went off and sold a £10,000 brand within the space of about five or 10 minutes. That’s what you do. You will jump and wear different hats at every stage of the business journey. You have to put the grind in, you have to put the effort in to see it. I imagine your team are still learning from the efforts you put in going and knocking doors and being out and about. As your team scales further, the people coming in at the very end don’t see that work ethic that you had. You have to try to instil it as much as possible. That’s where the systems and processes come in, to make them aware of the level of activity that’s required.

David: Likewise, I remember one of our biggest clients we started with a photoshoot for probably 500 euro, and that turned into a 100,000-euro-a-year client. You literally do not know what you might get out of a job or a network or relationship. We have ones where we pitched, and it’s funny, last week we had somebody come back after four years on an email saying they’ll move ahead with the project. I’m like, I don’t think we can do it at that price anymore.

Connor: And they were cheeky enough to ask for it. I’ve only one more question. Is there anything I have not asked you so far that you think would benefit the people watching the show today?

David: Look, I think we’ve covered everything. Going into business, the importance of the brand, if anyone is working on developing their brand now, spending time on how you want your business to be perceived by people made a huge difference to us. Everyone in this business, no matter what project they’re working on, I always say, how can we make sure this brand we’re working on really stands out, is engaging for people, creates a story or whatever. Spending that time can be hard. When you’re looking to do a rebrand or launch a new website, you just want to get it done, fly through it. Just take some time to really think out the map of where you want to go with it and how you want people to engage with it. That’ll be golden when you move forward.

The economic landscape at the minute is challenging. It’s difficult to get out there and do business. But I also find we grew our business the most, the largest part of our business, was in COVID. When businesses were really struggling, that was a really good growth opportunity for us. I think now is an opportunity for people too.

We were at a talk just yesterday and this guy was saying the US is a very attractive market right now. When there’s economic turmoil, that’s when you have a real chance to enter a market and make a difference.

Connor: We were the same. We started in 2009, right in the middle of the financial crisis. There were people making changes. They were looking for new opportunities. They were looking to decrease their costs. We just happened to be the cost-effective option. Even in COVID, when that happened, we did very well by being first to market, by changing and pivoting our service, and also focusing on growing the business at the same time, rather than just sitting back. The States is a really good opportunity for businesses like ours at the minute, because it’s such a humongous market and they’re going through a troubled period, let’s say. There is always opportunity in that.

David: 100 percent. There’s an attractiveness to going into new markets at the minute, especially the US. That’s why we’re looking at it and seeing it as worthwhile. But you need to be strategic. South Carolina alone is the size of Ireland. You need the right plan for going into the US market. You’re not just thinking, I’m going to take on the whole of the US. Maybe start with a state-specific plan. There are definitely opportunities there.

Connor: A medium-sized city over there is our whole entire country. David, that’s everything from me. Thank you so much for joining me on the show today, and thanks to everybody else who’s tuned into the Exit Ready podcast. If you like what you’ve heard, please subscribe and leave a little review wherever you’re picking this up. If you want to build the best version of your agency, check out moveatpace.com where I share loads of resources, articles, and my own agency valuation assessment. Thank you all for watching and I’ll see you in the next show.