Scaling a Digital Marketing Agency with Paddy Moogan

<p>Most people go to Las Vegas hoping to shrug off the demands of work, but for Paddy Moogan, a trip with mates turned into a life-changing business opportunity. On a trip to Sin City, his friend approached him with a proposal: why not take Paddy’s expertise in digital marketing and launch their own agency, a shop where they could call the shots on everything from work culture to clients. “It felt like a good idea at the time to talk about starting a business together,” he says, and after taking thirty minutes to come up with a plan, they decided to go for it. <a href="https://www.aira.net/" target="_blank">Aira</a> was launched in 2015. </p><p>The early days took some adjustments. In the first six months, Paddy and his partners tried to divide up their roles and responsibilities, with Paddy taking on the marketing, sales, and raw strategy, while his co-founder focused on delivery and operations. But they soon discovered that divvying up the job didn’t mean better work. “Because we split our roles, we didn’t actually work together all that much, the way we had for the first nine months. We did our best work when we were working together.” Bucking convention, they got the band back together and decided to keep their business roles much looser. </p><p>It’s this not-quite-conventional approach that helps keep Aira at the top of its game. While other shops might do SEO because a client asks for it, Paddy and his team slow the process down and dig deeper into how the client wants to grow.  He makes a point of pinpointing their client’s actual needs—ranging from content marketing to paid media—and how they interact with the business’s pain points (including tricky spots like investor pressure and pitch meetings). Aira takes a collage approach, offering a buffet of short- and long-term solutions that will both quiet a nervous investor and actually, you know, grow the business.</p><p>Paddy reminds us that SEO is not instant gratification: it actually takes six to twelve months to pay off. “As a company, the thinking has