Q. Kindly give our readers an introduction to your business. Please include what your business is all about, in which city you are located and if you have offices in multiple locations/ cities.
A. My name is Lorcan Kinsella. I’m the founder and CEO of Brand Nova Digital. We are an experienced digital marketing agency based in New Ross County, Wexford. We specialize in responsive website design and e-Commerce website development and are trusted SEO experts.
What sets us apart from other agencies is our uniquely designed digital marketing dashboard, Nova360. This allows us to streamline your strategy, and transform your online conversions, and reduce your marketing budget, and substantially increase your revenue over time. We have had great success since its launch. We launched Nova360 officially in 2020. We also have offices in Savannah, Georgia. We’ve just opened in February 2021 in the U.S, looking to build on our current growth trajectory in the United States.
Q. Kindly give us a brief description about yourself (it should include your brief educational or entrepreneurial background and list some of your major achievements).
A. I’ve been involved in digital marketing for the last 20-25 years. I built my first website pre-2000, and I’ve always had a great fascination with search engine optimization. I’ve always been involved in business and have had a number of businesses within that time. I opened and founded Brand Nova Digital in 2010. My biggest learning experience was with the LaunchMen, which was an information marketing launch company based in San Diego in the United States. And I learned quite a lot in terms of how you can grow one’s business by leveraging good website design; good copywriting call-to-action; good search engine optimization; a very strong pay-per-click advertising campaign; strong social media, and marketing, and email marketing.
I am the moderator and founder of social media marketing in Ireland, which you can find us on LinkedIn. In 2010, after I sold my company, Safecom, a security telecommunications company. I could see that there was a big shift to digital marketing and jumped in and really wanted to find out as much as I could.
Q. What three pieces of advice would you give to budding entrepreneurs?
A. Well, certainly, I would highly recommend getting into digital marketing. Digital marketing, it’s really in its infancy. When you look at Facebook, LinkedIn, all of these are quite young platforms. And it is only evolving into much more sophisticated areas of where you can really leverage and grow your businesses online. There has been a paradigm shift of where the old bricks and mortar has actually stopped and you have this emergence of online retail stores, which provides massive, massive opportunity for young entrepreneurs.
Another piece of advice, digital marketing and business in general is like a marathon, not a sprint. So, always take small steps and look to the long-term strategy rather than short-term gains. Invest wisely in your staff, find the best talent you can, eCommerce UI/UX website design, search engine optimization, data analytics etc.. It always pays to have good expertise within the business.
Q. What would you say are the top three skills needed to be a successful entrepreneur?
A. Number one, I would say, it is all about the long term. Being persistent and at times being humble and taking your failures on the chin. It is an opportunity to learn from failure to see how you can actually improve going forward. Never give up. It’s always important to stay the course if you believe in what you’re doing. And finally, don’t take things too seriously. Enjoy the ride.
Q. How many hours do you work a day on average?
A. I usually work between, 6 – 8 hours a day. I’m a big believer in time and the management of time. It’s precious. It’s one of our more precious commodities. I think it should be respected. So, I always believe in using good project management platforms where you can have deliverables and deadlines. I get much more productivity out of having deadlines rather than actually open-ended lists.
Q. To what do you most attribute your success?
A. Patience and perseverance.
Q. How do you go about marketing your business? What has been your most successful form of marketing?
A. I focus our business on four pillars. The first pillar is search engine optimization. That would be onsite, offsite, and technical SEO. Number two is pay-per-click advertising. Number three, social media management focusing on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter. And finally, number four e-mail marketing. The one digital marketing strategy which I really think has been the most successful form of marketing for us is search engine optimization.
Q. Where did your organization’s funding/capital come from and how did you go about getting it? How did you obtain investors for your venture?
A. We have organically grown our company from day one. We just reinvest everything that we have organically grown within the company. So, all revenues have been reinvested to develop the company more. It’s been a very organic journey for us, and we’ll continue to do that going forward.
Q. What is the best way to achieve long-term success?
A. The best way to achieve long-term success, I think, is to pay attention to the detail, for example, having your accounts up-to-date and make sure that all invoices go out on the day that they are raised. Make sure that there’s a very strong credit control process in place. Reduce waste and improve processes and automate where possible.
Q. Where you see yourself and your business in 5 – 10 years?
A. Where do I see myself? I would like to think that we will continue to grow building e-Commerce websites, building our marketing services, search engine optimization, pay-per-click advertising, social media, email marketing, and growing our Nova360 marketing dashboard subscription base to small, medium, and large multinational companies in Ireland and abroad.
Q. Excluding yours, what company or business do you admire the most?
A. One business that I really admire the most is Tesla. I admire Elon Musk and what he has done, which is extraordinary. And as a role model, you don’t get any better than Elon Musk. He’s just extraordinary on how he manages his time, the businesses that he has built, the innovation, the technology, the dynamism. It has to be really admired. Tesla would be one company that I would really, really admire.