Welcome to Milestone Moments, the show where we explore the journeys that lead to success.
I'm Sheila Slick, your host and founder of Five Milestones. In every episode, we will bring you
insights from the minds of entrepreneurs, leaders, and experts who will share not just their expertise
but the milestone moments that have reshaped their journeys and led to significant achievements.
So if you're looking for motivation, you're in the right place. Subscribe now and discover the
milestones that mark the path to success. Thank you for joining us on another episode of
Milestone Moments in Business and Leadership. And today, my special guest is Logan Hughes,
CEO of Hype Digital in Manchester, New Hampshire, who transitioned from eight years in medical
services to successful entrepreneur. His digital marketing side hustle turned into a thriving
business, leading him to a Dink 5000 recognition twice. As a family man, Logan advocates for work
life balance, as well as mentors professionals for entrepreneurial and mindset development.
Welcome to the show, Logan. Sheila, thank you for having me. That's a wonderful intro. I appreciate
it. So you transitioned from the medical field to entrepreneurship. Can you tell us about that
pivotal moment that led you to this new path? I will give you the short story on that. So I love
to speak around mindset. It's been a very important part of my journey here. So there came a point
where I'm a creative person at heart. I love to create. I love to design. I love to make music.
This is who I am. So luckily, I got a job with my cousin in medical device sales and was there for
a while. Money paid well, insurance, everything that you could possibly imagine, allowed me to
buy my own first place and whatnot and live a really good life. But it came several years into
this. I always say this, but I kind of felt like my soul was being sucked from my body. I was just
like, I was just working on Excel sheets all day and I wasn't feeling that fulfillment. And I was
really depressed. And one thing that I started looking into and started reading some books
around mindset, I started writing in my journal daily. I will leave my nine to five job and start
my own job. I didn't know what that job was at the time, but I wrote in that daily for a year.
Along that journey, I kind of found my way into social media management, which I was like,
this is pretty cool. I can be creative. I can help business out. It's a win-win. And then I found my
love, which eventually became website design and doing the whole thing. But every single day,
I wrote in my journal, I'm going to leave my nine to five job for a full year. Come January,
I didn't leave. I was scared. And at the time I had my side hustle, which was social media management
and some website design stuff. I had maybe like a couple thousand dollars coming in. It wasn't
anything to blink at, but it was something there. And so I didn't make the move. And then a couple
weeks later, my boss, cousin pulls me into my office and it was like, Logan, unfortunately,
your job is being phased out. We're going to give you three months to kind of figure things out,
which is nice, helping family out. To me, that was a pivotal moment. That was my mindset perspective
being like, I wrote in my journal every single day. I visualized what that would feel like.
And I didn't make the move. Here's the universe. Here's God, whoever, kick you in the butt,
say it's time to make that jump. So I went all in. I left my full-time job. I had some money
coming in. I had to figure things out like insurance and benefits and how it was going to
be able to support my family at the time. But thank God I did. It's been a wonderful experience. And
looking back on it, it was definitely the right move. So.
Well, the next question I have for you is what were some of those challenges you faced
transitioning from side hustle into a thriving business?
Some of the challenges were that that I faced, which I found out
a year into this was you have to pay taxes. I wasn't keeping my books in place. So when I came
down to the end of the year and I was operating as a freelancer, I didn't have my QuickBooks done.
I wasn't financially savvy. So that was a major kick in the butt that I was like, okay, if I,
if I need to do this, I need to act accordingly and actually act like I have a business. So that
was the biggest thing I think for me during that time was having to dive in and learn the basics of
putting your books together and, you know, having to pay, pay taxes. Cause you know, at the end of
that year, I got stuck with a decent amount of money that I had to pay. And I was like,
I'm never going to do that again. But yeah, that was the biggest challenge that I faced at the time
was how do I, how do I sort of turn this freelancer mentality into what would actually be,
you know, a sustainable business.
So Height Digital Manchester emphasizes creativity in its approach. Can you share
a strategy that led to a success story for one of your clients?
There's, there's been a lot of these, I love working with other agencies in itself, right? So
our height digital, our team consists of around 200 people. It's a really large agency and we have
a lot of great data that we know works. Cause we have franchises across the country. So
we know what's working in Oregon with a specific business, you know, Bobby does work in New
Hampshire, obviously this changes the demographic location. I partnered up with a fabulous woman
and she works primarily with dentists doing a lot of implants. And when she started with us,
she was using us as sort of the fulfillment for this client. I think when we started with them,
they were around $800,000 a year. And this was like a general dentistry type of place within one
year of working with us with doing both SEO and Google ads. I believe this past year, he
rose to 5.4 million in the year and moved to, to solely implants. So we've grown their business,
you know, tenfold and everyone's very, very happy with the results.
So when they focused just on those implants, was that partly a result of what people were clicking
on Google or booking services for? Yeah, great question. They always had that as a service,
but definitely that's, that's the big moneymaker right there. Right. So the more that we were able
to generate, you know, leads specifically for implants, they not only, you know, grew their
practice, but hired a couple other dentists underneath them, grew their business to, you
know, adding additional secretaries. They're now Spanish speaking as well. So that's a little
great market to kind of tap into, but, but certainly through, through keyword research and,
you know, working hand in hand with practice and this other agency, cause that's really what
she's worked like 20 plus years in that industry. She knows exactly what's happening. So
and that's really a big part of overall marketing, which I love a lot is that it's not just about
SEO. It's not just about PPC, these things here. It's more so about communication and building
relationship and partnership. Right. So, you know, I don't want it to seem when I'm working with the
client that they're just outsourcing it to me and there's nothing there. My, my job is to make sure
that, you know, I'm a facet into your business. I want to make sure that you can rely on me, like
you know, like I'm a regular employee, you know, obviously there's some small things there, but,
you know, I try to build that relationship and partnership as much as I can. So that was a great
result that we had certainly.
Well, we make smart decisions when we have that data. Yes. Doing your own Google ads can be quite
difficult. I always tell people, find an expert in the Google ads. You'll probably get a better
return on your investment than just winging your own ads. So I'm not going to be doing that. I'm
not winging it.
Yes. Yeah. Real quick about that. There's so many times that if you run a business, most likely you
would get a notification from Google saying, Hey, here's $500 free credit. Right. We've seen that
time and time again. And what they're actually doing, that dashboard is a little bit different
than the actual ads account, the ads manager account in the backend. So when we run ads,
it's not just a simple, you know, here's just one ad, there's multiple levels to that. So certainly
if you have any questions regarding anything Google related, Google and Facebook really good about
taking money if you're not sure what you're doing. So just want to make sure that you get to generate
the most ROI for your business.
So does a business like you also specialize in Google Analytics?
Yes. Google Analytics is a extremely important platform to have not only from from PPC, but we
use it with SEO and Facebook ads as well. There's a lot of tracking that you can find in Google
Analytics that you just can't find within search console or even Facebook ads manager. There's,
they do pretty good things in their own, but Google Analytics has a really,
you can find out really specific information. So we use it quite a bit for obviously everything
PPC, anything, anything that you're spending ads on, we use it for as well as SEO for sure.
So is there one specific thing we should look out for in those reports that sticks out more
than any of the other terms?
I kind of like to, with the analytic portion, you can dive in and take a look a lot of around
the pages that are being shown a lot. Pages that are being clicked to and generating the most
traffic to. I always like to emphasize those, obviously the homepage being one of them for
service-based businesses, a lot of them. If you don't have this page is an FAQ page,
right? Especially for trade businesses or service businesses, really FAQ pages, super important,
right? And testimonial pages. So you're able to see the pages that are generating a lot of traffic.
You're also able to see the pages that aren't. And when we comb through our actual, say SEO report,
we can determine and see the actual search queries that people are searching for. And if there's not
traffic being sent from those keywords, we want to make sure that we're generating content based on
those keywords, right? So to improve the click-through rate and so forth. So we see
exterior painting near me is being shown as a keyword that's being searched for. And there's
no click-through rate, there's no traffic. That's us being like, okay, well, we need to create a
page, a location page or service page around that search term, as well as create content for that
as well. That's one way to really take a look at that and really make sure that you're providing
Google with some great information that's really going to help you out.
Well, thank you for those insights. I'm going to go do my FAQ. I don't have my frequently asked.
So let's talk about family balancing family life with the demands of entrepreneurship can be
challenging. So how do you personally manage and prioritize your work life balance and
any advice you'd want to share to entrepreneurs striving for the same?
Yeah. Great question. And it's a work in progress. It always is. There's the other day,
my son comes home at like, you know, five o'clock in the afternoon. And there's some situations to
some times where, you know, six o'clock rolls around, I'm checking my phone for emails, right?
And I'm like, ooh, I need to kind of pull back away from that. I learned a lot and I learned
really quickly. And the reason why I got into entrepreneurship in the first place,
starting my own business, because I wanted that freedom. Everyone talks about freedom,
but you know, I wanted that for my family. I wanted to be able to spend time with my child
and my wife and just, you know, have that time. Right. So one thing that I learned rather quickly,
and this came from a really a good mentor of mine was establishing a transition period between
your work day and personal day. So what that looks like for me is that I, whenever I end the day,
it's let's say five o'clock and I build in a 30 minute sort of block where I either go for a walk,
go outside, I read a book, meditate, whatever it may be, just to decompress my work day and
transition into family time where I can be present. A lot of that helps with when I'm done with the
day, making sure that I kind of do a brain dump. I kind of jot down things that went well,
but I also plan my next day. So I'm not waking up in the morning. I'm not thinking later on tonight
that, oh man, I got to do this. I got to do that. I have it all down. So I know what my tomorrow
looks like. I'm able to sort of, you know, be clear of that and focus in and be more present.
So I love to have a transition period between work and your family life, especially when working
from home. It's one thing if you have a nine to five and you're going into office and you have
that driving time, right across from me is my son's crib, right? So, you know, I have to be really,
you know, confident of that and have that transition period. So that's really what's helped me sort of
have that balance in that.
Sounds like it clears your minds.
Yes.
I do it before I normally do it in the morning. I hadn't thought about doing it as a transition
between the two. So let's talk about that Inc 5000 recognition. Height Digit Manchester has
achieved the recognition twice. So what are some of the strategies that contributed to achieving
this prestigious recognition?
So I'm just, I'm fairly grateful and blessed to be a part of this company, first and foremost.
I think a lot of it has to do with the team that you have surrounded with. I had my own previous
agency before this. It was seventh level media. It was just myself and a couple other people.
That were, you know, freelancers themselves. And I got in a really good position because I merged my
existing agency with Tite Digital that, you know, I went from having no systems in place, really no
manpower to having full blown staff, right? So I just want to first say that I'm just grateful for,
you know, still having the opportunity to be with these guys. But it's a lot about the team, the
support system have in place and really networking. I wouldn't have gotten in this position if I
haven't really connected and networked my ass off to find people out there. And they finally
approached me to join this agency. But it's a support system and the ability to network,
I think, is working, is something that attributed to this. I'm just a small component of overall
agency life in this business. There's a lot of people that just are tremendous at what they do.
So it's certainly a team effort. To get, I guess, to get to my position, if you want to say that,
it's really about being open minded and networking and growing a really sustainable team that you
love and just have the same sort of core values that you have.
So what's your next milestone?
Yeah, it's a great question. I hate to put money on this. Like I'm not someone that's like,
oh, I want to grow my business to this. That would be nice. I just want to be able to do
that. I do have those tangible goals. I think this kind of follows a little more in line with
myself personally. I definitely want to have another child on the way and growing my family
and just spending time with my loved ones and traveling a lot more. Now I know that.
So in business perspective, always trying to do a million dollars a year in revenue,
sort of halfway there now and just kind of looking to grow that side of things. But personally,
it's really my family and just trying to travel a little bit more, spend time with my parents
and everyone. So that's probably my biggest goal so far.
So my last question, and as a mentor who guides professionals on entrepreneurial and mindset
development, what one piece of advice can you share with my audience that you often use with
your mentees?
That's a great question. It's funny because I asked that in my podcast quite a bit. That's
usually the last question that I ask. And it's funny getting put on the other side of this.
I love to start with the mindset portion of this with anyone who's my way as a mentor. I think
everything starts from a mindset point of view. So there's different practices that we use to
find out why you are looking to get into entrepreneurship, why are you looking to start
the business. And I forgot who came up with the strategy, but there's seven questions. You ask,
why are you starting a business? And you're like, okay, well, why are you really doing that? And
why are you doing that? It's a practice I love doing because you get to a point where you should
get to that why should literally make you cry. It should be something that's so ingrained with you
that you're like, this is why. And that's something that you can use any time in life when
things go really bad in business, you can pull that out. Things are not great relationship or
family, you can pull that out. And you just kind of go back to it. So whenever I'm talking with a
younger entrepreneur or business owner, they still don't really have that why. And it's my job to
help them walk them through that to be able to really determine what that is. I think that's
going to be the ultimate motivator on whether or not they're going to be able to do that.
And that's going to be the ultimate motivator on whether or not their business will succeed or not
succeed in the long run. So when I'm talking with young entrepreneurs or being a mentor to,
you know, the younger generation, I would say it starts a lot with the mindset and working on
finding out what that what that why is. So you have a podcast, you have a website,
how can our audience follow your journey? So yeah, you can reach me right on Facebook.
I love talking on Facebook. That's probably where I'm at most throughout all platforms.
Logan Hughes, you'll see a bright green background with a goofy looking face on there. That's me.
My podcast is the Get a Job podcast. That's just the getajobpodcast.com.
You can find me on heightdigital.com. Manchester, New Hampshire. But yeah, if you have any questions
or feel free to reach out about anything, you know, marketing related or chatting about mindset,
whatever I can do to be of service to others on there to help. So yeah, find me on Facebook.
Well, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you, Sheila. I appreciate it. Thank you.
And thank you all for tuning in. If you like these episodes, please follow Five Milestones
in Business and Leadership. And for more information, visit five milestones.com.