We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Darin Lynch. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Darin below.

Darin, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Being a business owner can be really hard sometimes. It’s rewarding, but most business owners we’ve spoken sometimes think about what it would have been like to have had a regular job instead. Have you ever wondered that yourself? Maybe you can talk to us about a time when you felt this way?

I can say with 100% certainty and authenticity that I feel profound PURPOSE as a business owner. And I use that word rather than “happy”, because some days are better than other days, and some of those other days are ones where I’d say I’m not “happy”. But not long after starting Irish Titan, I began to consciously recognize that I have the luxury of getting up every day and doing the things I think I’m good at and that give me energy. Some people don’t care about achieving that, but many do, and out of those, many of those never achieve it, or do so fleetingly. I’ve been fortunate enough to enjoy feeling that purpose for many, many years now. My own personal “Why” is to “Leave a Legacy” and founding and building Irish Titan has afforded me that opportunity. I can’t imagine doing anything else, and quite honestly, I consider myself terminally unemployable at this point. Anyone who would hire me for a “regular job” should have their head examined.

And I don’t know if our current state here at the beginning of 2024 is our “biggest risk”, but I’ll say this. We’re a successful business with 20 years of history, reputation, relationships and capabilities that we can lean on. We could take the safe route and optimize for where we are right now. But that’s NOT what we’re doing. We’re taking this 20th year as a chance to challenge even the whiff of status quo that may (or may not) have existed. We’re doubling down on our future with an expanded and seasoned leadership team, additional partnerships, and betting on our future vision of tripling our business in the next three to five years.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I’m an Iowa farm boy who somehow found himself growing up in technology, and with an ambition at a young age to be a “businessman” and own my own company (there’s actually a picture of 5 year old little me wearing a tie on my Dad’s tractor).

So I earned a degree in technology (thanks Iowa Hawkeyes), and lucked into pivotal experiences early in ecommerce, launching three national retailers’ first ecommerce channels between 1998 and 2004. That ultimately provided me the courage (naivete?) to take the plunge and found Irish Titan in 2004.

Fast forward to today, and we’re an ecommerce agency who builds and grows ecommerce brands (name checking Simon Sinek’s “Start With Why” mindset, that’s our “what”). Said differently, we build ecommerce websites and work with those clients on their ecommerce marketing activities. And we do all of that with a “Business First, Online Second” philosophy (that’s our “Why”).

We love what we do because of how closely it ties to actual business results. Traditional brochureware websites are important and create awareness and thought leadership. But ecommerce sites have a direct impact on revenue and profit. And therefore have a direct impact on creating and maintaining jobs. So we’re proud that our work has a direct impact on our clients’ employees and their families.

We have a unique and well defined culture whose lighthouses are our Why (Business First. Online Second.) and POTIS (which isn’t political, it stands for Passion/Ownership/Teamwork/Impact/Skills).

Those are the intangibles that make us unique, but we also have a very tangible unique, and that’s our “Titan only” model, which means that we do all of our work with just our “Titans” (our employees) – no contractors, freelancers or offshore resources. That has had a monumental impact on our business, creating a stronger employee retention model and also a much higher level experience for our clients. It comes with the additional risk of higher fixed costs (payroll vs. contractor fees) and compliance overhead (benefits and the like), but it’s a sacred potato for us.

Any fun sales or marketing stories?

For better or worse, marketing and sales comes naturally to me, and I’m comfortable with risk, so I’ve taken lots of risks on these fronts, and some have worked out better than others. But I can think of two examples that come to mind that speak to some rogueish character and persuasive charm.

In early Irish Titan days, our conference budget was microscopic – next to nothing. So we couldn’t afford fancy booth SWAG or food and bar sponsorships. So I had the bright idea to buy an Otis Spunkmeyer cookie oven. I’d take that with me to shows, and buy cookie dough in a nearby grocery story on my way. And I would pack a bunch of long, industrial extension cords to plug it in, because I never asked for approval for this prior to the show (why risk the chance of them telling me “no”, compared to just Irish charming them and saying “oops, sorry, I won’t do it again, do you want a cookie?”. Then I’d start making cookies, which produced this waft of fresh-baked-cookies drifting throughout the show. People came to the booth in droves.

I can also think of an example of some persuasive grit that helped us pull off a sale when the odds were against us. We were engaged in earning the opportunity to help a massive, nationally known NFL brand build and grow their ecommerce channel. Conversations had been going well, but there were, of course, a number of our competitors sniffing around the opportunity. I heard thru some back channels that the prospect was leaning towards maintaining the relationship with the incumbent agency. I took that as a challenge to NOT give up, and we created some additional assets, including video testimonials and a series of high-touch, professional but personal communications that ended up convincing the prospect that we were the right partner to work with them. And we’ve been working together for years since then.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

I don’t think we could be in business for 20 years if resilience weren’t part of our very nature. Sure, “the longer you’re in business, the easier it is to be in business” – there’s truth to that. But changes ranging from technology to personnel to industry cycles are part of the landscape of any industry.

I know we demonstrated particular resilience in 2016 and 2017, during a period we refer to as “our Troubles”. We were growing rapidly at this time, by every measure. We were hiring quickly, promoting quickly, adding clients quickly, and expanding services quickly. That’s all great – except for when it isn’t. And we weren’t ready for all of that at the same time. Especially when combined with some fundamental changes occurring to the technologies we were offering. So we outgrew our capabilities, in almost every sense. We weren’t executing well, our management team was overwhelmed, and our Titans as a whole felt like they weren’t winning. We were struggling financially and culturally. But we navigated that especially troubling time, thru a combination of factors. We revamped our process, invested more into people, and owned up to issues with our clients. But the consistent theme thru all of it was that I was proud of the resilience we displayed as an organization.

I would also suggest that we’ve been resilient in the seasons of change with personnel in our 20 years. We’re in an industry with an average tenure of 2 years. Although we far exceed that, our leadership team (which I consider to include Titans who aren’t necessarily managers – leadership and management are related but not the same) has morphed and evolved and recast. It felt like a gut punch the first time one of our leaders said they were moving on, but I came to understand that there’s a difference between “organic attrition” (not necessarily a bad thing) and “turnover” (a bad thing). The resilience to build an organization bigger than any single one of us has benefited Irish Titan, and it’s also created an environment where we maintain strong relationships with many of our Titan alumni.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.irishtitan.com
• Instagram: @dzflynch
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/darin.lynch/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darinlynch