Announcer: 0:00

The following programming is sponsored by Marc J. Bernstein. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of this station, its management, or Beasly Media Group. Entrepreneur, founder, author, and financial advisor Marc Bernstein helps high-performing business owners turn their visions into reality. Through his innovative work and the forward-focused forum, Marc connects entrepreneurs to resources that fuel their success. Founders Forum is a radio show and podcast where entrepreneurs share their journeys, revealing the lessons they've learned and the stories behind their success. Join Marc and his guests for a mix of inspiration, valuable insights, and a little fun. Now, let's dive in.

Marc Bernstein: 0:40

Good morning, America. How are you? And how are you? I re- I really, I really am interested in knowing how you are, but you can't respond to me, so that's it. I'm interested because there's so much going on in the world, and there's a lot of chaos, and there's there's just a lot of stuff out there. So I hope, and you may be listening to this months later, so maybe everything's great. But in the meantime, I do hope you're doing well. Uh our listeners are I'm finding out are primarily entrepreneurs, and we tell stories of entrepreneurs, and I have a very interesting one here today named David, and I'm going to be calling him Dave. But um we're going to start out. I don't usually do this, but I'm going to start with a topic of the day that is directly related to his uh to what he does, because he's in the digital marketing business, and we're we've talked a lot about AI, and it's hard to avoid that topic. So every few weeks I bring it up again because it's changing so rapidly that the topic changes. And in just talking for a few minutes, I've discovered there's something new we have to think about it. So so, Dave, tell me about your thoughts on with the current state of the issues we're dealing with with AI and what you're dealing with in your business, and then we'll be able to get back to that later in the show.

David Sonn: 2:01

All righty. Well, good morning, Marc, and thank you for having me. Good morning. Of course, we're all using AI to work better, faster, smarter, and do bigger and better things. But what's interesting to me is that the AI platforms are now creating a new marketing channel where people are very, very comfortable in asking long queries, trying to get answers to their questions. So there's a fundamental shift that's occurring.

Marc Bernstein: 2:30

And I and we talked about this briefly, and I find myself, I'm actually forcing myself to use my AI program as my search engine rather than Google or one of the other search engines because I find it more accurate, more comprehensive, more research involved, less marketing driven as of today. That could I may imagine that might change. But as of now, that's the way it is. So I get that. We're gonna go back to that. I appreciate you bringing that up, and we'll go back to that when we talk about your business because I'm sure that has to do with the future of your business and how you're going to address it. So, in the meantime, let me introduce you. This is David's son. David is president and founder of Arc Intermedia out of uh King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. And as one of the first digital-only customer acquisition agencies in the Philadelphia area, which is another term, I like that term, but it's a marketing agency, Dave launched Arc Intermedia in January 2010. Arc was built to deliver measurable results, not vanity metrics, and he structured the company for long-term stability, creating a culture of trust and accountability with zero layoffs since day one, which is pretty interesting. His role within the agency is to lead sales and business operations with the responsibility of attracting and supporting highly talented digital experts that provide the agency's clients with the best solutions. Welcome, David. Thank you. Thank you. Dave, um tell me about you know, the only thing I'm really interested in prior to your business is your humble beginnings, where you came from, how you ended up in Philadelphia, and how you became an entrepreneur.

David Sonn: 4:16

So the entrepreneur piece wasn't by design. I grew up in northeastern Pennsylvania, north of uh Scranton, in a small town called Honesdale, and it was a very rural setting. And when you went away to college, there weren't a lot of white-collar jobs in that small town, and you kind of signed off onto the fact that you were probably going to move away. So after graduating college, I moved to Philadelphia to start my professional career.

Marc Bernstein: 4:45

You guys still have family up there in Hoensdale?

David Sonn: 4:47

Um I do have a sister, but that's all now. Gotcha. Um So moved to Philadelphia, tried to begin to start my career. I worked at a couple agencies, I learned what not to do, life lesson there. And then I had a longtime friend which would ultimately become my uh business partner, and we naively believed that we could do it better. And it was at the advent of the Internet, when people were just now getting the Internet into their homes. Companies, most of them didn't have websites and didn't know why they would even need a website, and we had the brilliant idea that we could launch a web design company, one of the first in the Philadelphia area.

Marc Bernstein: 5:32

Yes. And that was early like 1996, I believe you said, right?

David Sonn: 5:35

It was. It was a long time ago, and it was a plan that we kind of went into. We had no money, the banks had no interest in us, we had no roadmap because people weren't really building websites, but we were uh 20-somethings with no fear, and uh uh we just thought that this is how you would do it, and there was no looking back. But we we ran the company successfully for over 12 years, um, started the the organization with uh three employees, again, all in all in our 20s, all just um bright-eyed and just willing to get after it. Those three folks that joined us in the very beginning all went on to have very good and successful careers and um fantastic experience. I learned how to run a business by running a business. And again, I didn't go into this, I didn't go to college thinking that I was going to become an entrepreneur, but I always had this idea that I felt like I could do things better or different, and I just love to make decisions.

Marc Bernstein: 6:42

And you so that was a that was a web development company, that's where you started. Yeah. But I know at some point you pivoted, and I think that was maybe 13, 14 years later, something like that.

David Sonn: 6:53

Yeah. So we were doing website production, and I began to grow a little bit tired of the production angle, and what I was more interested in is online, how could I move the needle for companies? How could I affect their revenue, their profits, their sales leads? That became very, very interesting to me. So then I came up with the idea that I was going to create a digital marketing agency. And I wasn't going to get focused on any of the traditional advertising like radio, TV, print. I really wasn't interested in that. Rather, I was interested in the digital side because I could get measurable results. I could take on a client's needs and campaigns, and I could measure right back. I could connect the dots that if I did X, I could show you that I generated X amount of traffic or leads or what have you. And that was exciting to me. I was willing to kind of live and die by the metrics.

Marc Bernstein: 7:54

Live and die by the metrics, but that's kind of that's that's what I would call the hard side of what you do. There's a I would call a soft side to what you do too, which is that you have you mentioned what you do for your clients, you have a very client-focused approach, from what I understand.

David Sonn: 8:09

We we really are. I mean, sure. There's a lot of companies nowadays that will claim to do digital marketing. But what I believe sets us apart is more of the customer service piece, the hands-on, the honesty, all of that. In fact, we just went through uh rebranding very recently. We now position ourselves as the enjoyable agency, and we use that to highlight that we are going to hyperfocus on the customer service, on getting back to you, but it means much more than that. Marketing is an investment in a business, and because it's an investment, it has to show a return. And what is enjoyable for our clients is that they know they have a partner that has a business focus, that understands that dollars in has to produce dollars out. So we are really wired in that regard. On top of, for us, enjoyable means our clients know that we're gonna be here tomorrow. We've been in business for 15 years, we've had no layoffs, we've built a very stable company that's enjoyable for our clients. And our clients, when they contact us, they know that they're going to speak to the same person. Our turnover rate is less than 3 percent. And as a client or a customer of anything, I hope you can agree. It's really nice to know that the person on the other, you know, other side of the phone, the other side of the video call, if you will, understands you, has institutional knowledge. You are very passionate about your business.

Marc Bernstein: 9:43

I am. I certainly am. And I have to say, just an aside, everybody that comes on the show is always worried about how they're going to come across and whether what if I make mistakes, things like that. And we talked about that offline. You're doing great, so don't worry about it. Thank you. Thank you. You're a natural for sure.

David Sonn: 10:01

If you're not failing, you're not trying hard enough.

Marc Bernstein: 10:03

That's right. There you go. So speaking of which, so that's a lesson learned, right? But over the well My first question is all entrepreneurs have challenges. We talk about this all the time on the show. It's not it's not a smooth ride. It's not something you do if you want to just like you know, ride the train to retirement. You know, sure. It doesn't work that way. What kind of challenges have you experienced? You haven't had turnover, so it doesn't sound like company culture is a big challenge. What kind of things have you had?

David Sonn: 10:30

Yeah, so I mean I kind of touched upon it with the first company that I launched that you know there was no road map, no money, and and that was its challenges, but you know, we were just in the in the point of our lives that it didn't matter. We were just gonna run hard and make it work. With this company, Arc Intermedia, I guess one of the challenges that we see now is that at the director level, at the VP level, the people that can actually hire us, we're noticing that there's much more transition. And when a new person comes in, it's not really sexy for them to retain the incumbent. So what our challenge is is to show them, look, we have this institutional knowledge. We have uh respectfully speaking, we've got deeper knowledge about this than you do. And it's it's that challenge of making sure that they understand that retaining us is the better move, is the right move for the company. Because again, they're getting a marketing agency that has a business focus.

Marc Bernstein: 11:30

How how do you get that across? How do you do that without giving away your secret sauce or anything? I mean, how do you how can how do you do that? How do you meet that challenge?

David Sonn: 11:39

It's actually not as hard as it may sound. First off, we'll show results. At the end of the day, if if someone's delivering results, if someone's showing you a 5x, 8x, 10x return, kind of crazy to kick that to the to the curb, right? So we're gonna show results, we're gonna show historical knowledge, we are going to be helpful. We are going to make sure that that person is a success as well.

Marc Bernstein: 12:06

Um you you gave me some really good notes before the show. And one of them is uh you're you're a thinker, I know that. Because you we you know, and one of the things that and we only this is very unusual. Usually I meet my guests months before we do the show. We're really backed up. We had an opening, we met for the first time two days ago to speak. So you did some thinking, and one of the things is you've mentioned lessons learned. I'm not going to say them. I want you to tell me the ones that you think are important, but I will start at this one, the culture matters, because we're this is a big topic on our show. So let's talk about that and then tell me other lessons you might have learned.

David Sonn: 12:45

Culture absolutely matters. And you hear it all the time. But here's the big story. It has to start at the top. The people at the top have to set that tone. They have to, you know, walk the talk and they really have to lead by example.

Marc Bernstein: 12:58

What does that mean in your business? Because everybody says that, but what is it in your business, what does that mean?

David Sonn: 13:03

At its fundamental core, to me, it means treating people the way you would want to be treated, treating people the way you would want someone to treat your mom, treating people the way you would want someone to treat your child.

Marc Bernstein: 13:16

If you look at it through that lens, start that with treating your employees that way. Sure.

David Sonn: 13:20

If you if you if you build inside with great people and you treat them the right way, you treat them how you would expect to be treated, it begins to work itself out. And and nothing, nothing can't be accomplished if you have the right tone, if you have the right ambition, and you create a culture where much like a sports team, you're going out there to compete. You have good people, you have people with skills, you have people that want to win. You just need to help them get there and and you know get them to understand that they are appreciated and they are making a difference.

Marc Bernstein: 13:56

You um you you know one of the things I know that you say, if you said it to me several times in different ways, is put yourself in their shoes. What are other ways that you do that?

David Sonn: 14:05

Well, I uh that one I am going to touch upon because it's really important. When I'm talking to a client, when I'm providing consulting and they have X goal that they need to achieve or a budget or whatever, what I do, and I just I I just I guess I can't help myself being an entrepreneur, I put myself in the shoes of that company's CEO or director or what have you, and I begin to think about if this was my livelihood, if this was my decision to make, if this really mattered for myself, my staff, my family, what was the decision I would make? What would be the recommendation? When you can take on that mindset, the decisions are easy.

Marc Bernstein: 14:45

That's a great jumping off point for a quick commercial. We'll be back in one minute on Founders Forum.

Announcer: 14:50

At Arc Intermedia, we don't just run digital campaigns – we outperform the competition, delivering real business results for companies worldwide since 2010. Arc Intermedia is a digital marketing agency that's focused on growth that shows up on your balance sheet. Arc Intermedia manages every digital program like an investment portfolio – strategically balancing all channels to maximize returns and eliminate waste. You’re not super successful in business for over 15 years without doing right by everyone. No revolving door, no layoffs, no excuses. Just a proven, tenured team that delivers year after year. Arc Intermedia invests in the brightest minds and best tools, injecting the latest tech with creativity so our clients don't have to. Compare our solutions, expertise, and longevity to your agency today by visiting arcintermedia.com. That’s Arc Intermedia.com.

Marc Bernstein: 15:51

We're back on Founders Forum with my guest today, David Sun. David, I'm going to switch things up a little bit. I usually save this for the end, but it's relevant to some of the conversation I want to have with you. Um, if you and I are sitting here a year from now and we're and we're looking back on the last year, what would have to happen over that year period for you to feel that that was a successful year in your life, in your business life, personal life, if you want anything you want to touch on? Let's start with that and then I have some questions around that.

David Sonn: 16:23

I guess the way I would answer that first from a business side is to make sure that the company is moving in a in a good direction, that all those that have bought in, you know, staff and clients are comfortable and that things are moving in in a in a very good direction so that there's stability and peace of mind. I am all about peace of mind, sleeping well at night, and taking care of those that take care of you. And I really do think about that literally every day with my business. As far as the other pieces, you know, the aspects of your life, working out is important to me. If you really have something that's important to you, you create a schedule, you create a way to do it. I the alarm for me goes off at 5 15 a.m. every day, Monday through Friday. That's how I get into the gym. It's important to me, and therefore I carve out time. My business life, I put it, I, you know, put it all in. I I work real hard during the day. You know, sometimes, you know, most times, like a lot of folks eating lunch at desk at your desk and that kind of thing, and and and trying to connect with people, both the staff and the clients. And then on the personal side, obviously family is important. I'm married, I've I have two boys, super important. And as as a family unit, we get involved in a lot of volunteer work, a lot of charity work, and that's really, really important to understand where you stand in this in this world. P Yeah.

Marc Bernstein: 17:55

So one one thing I want to reference, which I think is part of your your future vision, we were talking about AI at the beginning of the show and how people are starting to look at AI as a search engine. Do you have any goals, business goals aligned with that vision over the next year?

David Sonn: 18:13

Sure. Let me kind of back up on that whole piece. Late in 2023 when we were beginning to be exposed to Chat GPT and some of the other ones. Obviously back to the beginning of the show, yeah, great with workflow and all that stuff. But I saw something else. I saw an opportunity for a marketing channel. I thought that this is maybe one of the first times ever that Google was going to have some kind of a challenge with search. So in our annual meeting in tw early 2024, I challenged my entire team. I'm like, look, this is a direction I believe that we need to head. We need to learn, we need to experiment, we need to fail, we need to learn how we could even roll this into a program that could benefit clients. We started with ourselves, we used, you know, our our own company, our website, our content, did lots of tests, and I will tell you this: in 2025, I began to see more legitimate need leads, sales leads through the AI platforms for our agency than I had been seeing for several years from Google. I can tell you that I've got legitimate leads through the AI platforms for a home elevator company in the Philippines, a publishing company in LA, a hack company in Arizona, a real estate company in the UK. These are legitimate leads that we are now working through, and it's even making uh you know a difference for us. And through that experience, I believed that we could roll out new programs for our clients. So in the past, we always did SEO, search engine optimization. In the beginning of 2025, we've converted all of our SEO clients into what we call organic visibility and AI. And really what that means is having a bigger focus on optimizing for the AI platforms for traditional search engines and answer engines, which are like the Reddits of the world, the cores of the world, and those kinds of things. And people will say, well, isn't that just good marketing? Well, companies don't have infinite budgets. They don't have infinite resources to produce all the content and maintain those presents and have a strategy. So that's where we're leading our company.

Marc Bernstein: 20:21

So what that means is your clients will have AI visibility, right? And then how does that generate ultimately business for them?

David Sonn: 20:32

So here's another part where the world has changed and is upside down. In the past, with most digital marketing, you get plenty of metrics and analytics and you can measure it all. In the AI platforms, we're really not getting anything. And so it begins to hearken back to the older days of like, let's look at business metrics. Is revenue up? Are sales leads up? What are the quality of those sales leads? What's in your pipe? And really looking at that and looking at it from a whole holistic view of how are we moving the entire company forward and what what is the piece of the puzzle that AI is contributing to that?

Marc Bernstein: 21:12

So it sounds like uh somehow combining being able to get from AI, providing AI services for your clients, and then being able to provide back from that some data and metrics because that's your company's middle name. Trevor Burrus, Jr. Yes.

David Sonn: 21:27

And and again, we love to have true partnerships with our clients. We look to them to provide us, show me the contracts closed, show me the revenue generated, tell me what's happening in your CRM, your pipeline, and help us begin to measure back what's working.

Marc Bernstein: 21:44

Since that's a new frontier, how there'll be some challenges. How do you do you have a strategy as to how to address the challenges, how to figure that out?

David Sonn: 21:55

We have begun to uh you know pick up on little data points where we can and referral traffic and those kinds of things. One thing that we are learning people are going to learn about you before they ever get to your website. Trevor Burrus, Jr. If you you've used the AI platforms, right? You put in your query, it gives you a whole long answer. It's a it's it's a wonderful user experience. They're learning about you before they ever get to your website. Now, what we are seeing is a rise in uh brand searches. And what I mean by that is they learn about your company in an AI platform. They grab your name of your company, they plop it over into Google, they do what we call a brand search, they go to your website, and then by and large, we're seeing, and if you look at your analytics, that visitor probably only consumes about three pages because they've already learned about you. And we're a world of researchers. We want to go out and we want to find the truth. Of course, your website is is the gospel. Everything is gonna be beautiful.

Marc Bernstein: 22:55

Yep, we have about five minutes left, so a bit more to cover. Um so those are challenges there. What are if if you're so we're talking to entrepreneurs on on the show today, what advice would you give to younger entrepreneurs? Actually, there's a lot of very young, experienced entrepreneurs, but new entrepreneurs, what kind of advice would you give them as they're starting their businesses?

David Sonn: 23:18

There's there's probably a couple. Um I uh one thing I will say, almost every company that is launched nine out of ten times, maybe ten out of ten times, they're underfunded. So if you think you need funding, you know, and that's not always great to take on investors, I get it. But you're likely I could probably look at your business plan and and tell you straight away you you're underfunded. So make sure you have the funding that you can weather the storm, that you can, uh especially if you're taking on people, make sure that you can take care of those that are taking care of you. Um have a plan. That sounds like a basic thing, but really look at, you know, how can you get from A to B? How can you get through year one? I I believe the stat is uh the first year uh most company 80% of companies fail. 97% of them never make it to 10 years. So you kind of have to have a plan. And then the other part is do not take sales lightly. Sales is the lifeblood of every single company. Make sure you have a plan for sales.

Marc Bernstein: 24:21

For what it's worth, because I've interviewed well over a hundred entrepreneurs on the show, the the most impressive businesses that I've seen were the ones that sales was the first thing they did. In other words, they started day one with with clients, whether that was from previous experience they had at a job or from you know, they they had been in the industry in some form or another, or they created a way to do that. But I do see so many new companies like you're talking about start out, they're underfunded, they try to get one client first, and but maybe they don't have enough money to fund, you know, to service that client or to enhance services or to expand the sales. So I love the idea having having come from always a sales background myself, and I've never had I would never have any business in what I do if I didn't if I couldn't sell. So so you know, I I I love that that that's a focus, and that's not an advice that I hear people giving a lot. People sent tend to forget about that. So that's really great. Um there were you know, we always have some kind of closing round questions, or we're getting close to that point. Um I kind of asked you this question because I just asked if you could speak to your younger self, what advice would you give you? I think it would be pretty similar to what you just said, right? Is there anything else you would add to that? Um can I say buying Bitcoin? There you go. There you go. It's not too late, by the way. And that's not financial advice, I'm a financial planner, but there's still one thing I know about Bitcoin. There's lim there's limited supply, so there's still demand. Um what what do you like to read? I know you're a reader, Dave. What do you read?

David Sonn: 25:57

Um So I actually like to read biographies, and I'm not gonna sit here to pretend that I'm a history buff. But rather I I really enjoy like people in this world that have made some kind of uh an impact, whether you know business, social, entertainment, what have you. There's always seems to be an underlying story. Like we as the public will see XYZ occur, but what's really, really interesting to me is how they see it or how you know the inner workings of it all. So, you know, right now I'm I'm reading uh Nikola Tesla. Um I think a lot of us have read the Steve Jobs book by Walter Isaacson, which was fantastic. Um I read Alan Greenspan, a little bit dry, but I learned a ton about the Federal Reserve and all the power that you know the chairman wields. So that was really interesting. Read about Kurt Cobain, that was interesting. And I I just ordered, just ordered the book, uh, the biography on Katherine Johnson, you know, the the NASA supercomputer one.

Marc Bernstein: 27:00

Yeah, amazing. Yeah, yeah. Pretty interesting. Um I like biographies myself and historical novels because I I like that's probably why I do the show, because I like hearing people's stories. To me, that's yeah because people are behind everything. Well, what's the story behind the story? And as much as we talk about AI and technology and all that, in the end, none of this happens without people. Thank you all for joining Founders Forum today. And uh, we look forward to hearing from you again next week and uh talking to you next week, and look for us on all the social media outlets, uh videos on YouTube, and have a great day!

Announcer: 27:46

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