What’s It Like to Run an Agency: A Conversation With Amine Bentahar, COO of Advantix Digital (AVX Digital)

Welcome to the Marketing Growth podcast. I’m your host, Shane Barker, and my guest today is Amine Bentahar, Chief Digital Officer and COO at Avantix Digital—a Texas-based agency that helps brands amplify their digital presence.

In today’s episode, we’re going to talk about his journey in the world of digital marketing. I’m excited to learn more about his entrepreneurial journey and the vision of his agency.

Hey, man. How are you?

Good, doing good. So what I like to start off with is kind of getting to know you a little bit. For the individuals that are on the podcast or people that are listening who don’t know a lot about you, give us a little background. Like, where did you grow up? I know you’re currently in Texas right now, right? In Addison? Or is that where your agency is?

I love Istanbul. I mean—beautiful city. I was just there. I did a speaking event—and let me explain what a speaking event is: that’s where people actually used to go to a place and see people speak. Now, because of COVID, nobody knows what that is. I’ll have to explain that to my younger listeners because they’re like, “I’m not sure what that means.”

Istanbul is beautiful, man. I was just there speaking at an event, and it was stunning. If you had the opportunity to be there for any amount of time, then I’m jealous. That’s awesome.

So, I’m going to stop you because this is what’s interesting to me. A: I knew by looking at your background that we were going to have a problem getting everything in because of all the stuff you’ve done—and this is what’s awesome. I want to talk about your family a little bit more, and then I want to jump into… because you just talked about like six major things. I have, like, a thousand questions.

But let me ask you about your family. You grew up in Morocco—how big was your family in Morocco?

That’s awesome. See, I’ll tell you—I have a smaller family, and I’ve always been envious of people that have big families. Because family reunions are phenomenal, and the networking there… and then now you have family all over the world. So anytime you go visit, you go hang out—good things can happen there.

So give us a little—because obviously you have the Moroccan culture and then you have the culture here in the U.S.—tell us something interesting. Give us an interesting fact about where you grew up. Like, give us something—it doesn’t have to be super secret, right? You don’t have to give up all the sexy stuff from your childhood—but what is something interesting about where you grew up that’s probably different than what people would expect here in the U.S.?

You know what’s funny? So my dad and my brother—my family’s done a lot of traveling. When I was growing up, we did a lot of traveling, and my dad and my brother have probably been to—I don’t know—maybe 30 countries. My dad and brother? 50, 60. They just next-level love Morocco.
They absolutely love it—the food, the culture, the people. They had nothing but a great experience there. So to hear that, yeah—I mean, it’s actually on my list. My short list. Well, it is on my short list—it’s just really short right now because we’re not traveling. So I see that and I go, “Ah, it’s on my list,” but I don’t know how quickly I’ll be able to get there.

And obviously, now you’re in Texas, right? Over in the Dallas area. You already talked about college. Now, I did see something interesting. So you went to college—was it at… where’d you go in Texas? You went to college somewhere?

So that’s what caught me off guard. Is it actually, like, an e-commerce college that they had there?

For me, I was like, “God, there’s a college that teaches e-commerce?” Like, I can’t believe I missed out on this—especially with your background. So I was like, in my mind, “Oh, he specialized. He went there because it was e-commerce.”

Oh man, I was excited about that. I was like, this guy got some serious training in e-commerce.

Well, you did—not only from, a college perspective, but obviously in the real world. I mean, we’re talking about Microsoft and some of these other huge companies that you’ve worked for. And we’ve already talked about your first job, like—I don’t even know what it would be because you’ve had so many, so many jobs that we talked about a little earlier.

So how did you… what—how did you get into digital marketing? So, we talked about digital marketing. When was your first marketing job where you’re like, “Hey…” you jumped into the digital side of things? Was it Microsoft? Is that when you—

“Let me look that up and we’ll do that soon! Let me get educated.”

That’s funny. And with a lot of things, people come to you and say, “Hey, you need to start doing this.” You’re like, “Not a problem. We can get that fixed, not a problem. We’ll get it done.” Just gotta do a little research and figure out what you just said. “SEO” sounds like an acronym I should probably know—and I’ll figure it out. “We’ll start on Monday.”

But jokes aside, I have something to share with our listeners. At this point, I’m going to take a slight detour to discuss a little bit about SEO. I know it’s really hard to stand out and get noticed by crawlers, especially when there’s a sea of content out there in your niche. My team has extensive experience helping big and small businesses get ranked for organic keywords on Google.

If you’d like some help with your SEO strategy, reach out to us at ShaneBarker.com. We’d be happy to let you know our secrets.
Now that we’ve got that covered, let’s jump right back into our conversation with Amine.

So, how did that all transition into AVX? That’s the digital agency you have there in Dallas. How did that transition happen? Because I think you were kind of talking about that story—obviously, very rich history of traveling, with Istanbul and all the different companies you’ve worked for.

How did that work out? At what point did you realize, “Hey, listen. I’ve done this for Microsoft. I’ve done this for all these big companies, and now I need to do it for myself”?

So was it a Starbucks or a garage? Because I know garages seem to be pretty popular too. I know, like with Apple—garage. So you did Starbucks…

And the coffee is way better than in a garage, right? I mean, I think the older companies were more garage, and Starbucks is probably the newer companies in the 2000s.

I think that’s exactly it—yeah. I’m more with the Starbucks side of things. Garages—you can’t control the heat, the air… and it doesn’t smell like coffee. Anyway, side note.

One thing I have noticed—you’ve got some really cool friends. Your friends seem to introduce you to people. That’s how it works out. Like, “Hey, let me introduce you to this person,” and “This person.”

You’ve had two different situations now where you’ve told me, “Hey, yeah, my friend introduced me to this other person.” People must really like you. You must be pretty likable.

Agreed, agreed, agreed. So tell us—obviously, the company’s been around since 2011—when did you get involved with it?

Gotcha. Five years. And you were talking about taking it from a C-minus to an A-plus. I don’t even know if we have enough time to talk about all the awards you guys have achieved. I had to do like two hours of research just to find out all the stuff you guys have done in that small amount of time.
But tell us a little bit about your services. What do you guys provide over there?

So voice—we’re going to talk about voice. I’m going to save that for a little later on because I have lots of questions about that. Obviously, with Amazon and Alexa and all the other fun stuff that listens to all of our conversations on a daily basis—it’s going to be interesting to talk about how you guys are doing that. I’m really intrigued about the future of that. With all the different devices we have in our house, I think it’s going to be an interesting segue.

So what are some of the types of, like, marketing tools and technologies that you guys use to stay on top of the current trends? Because in digital marketing, and what you guys do—SEO, PPC, everything—how do you stay on top of everything? It’s always changing. Is there anything you guys specifically specialize in, like PPC? Or are you really just on top of all angles of marketing?

That’s awesome. So it sounds like you guys really care not only about your customers, but also about the people that work for you. And you go out there and grab the big individuals. So how did that work out? I mean, obviously, when you started doing this about five years ago, did you have to put some capital in? It sounds like—I mean, you’re grabbing the big players from other agencies. That’s probably not cheap, last time I checked. I’m assuming they’re probably the big people with the big salaries.

So how did you guys do that? Did you come in with an influx of capital and say, “Hey, we’re going to go ahead and bring on these individuals,” and that’s how you’ve grown it? Or what’s…

I love that. I love that. Go and grab the best people. I mean, it sounds so basic—that that’s what you should do—but I think so many people go after others just because of lower salaries or other reasons. And it’s like, if you get the best, right? It’s going to cost you some money, but that’s really making an investment in your company and your agency. It’ll come back tenfold, especially when they come with processes and ways they’ve worked with other clients. I mean, hiring one of those individuals and then bringing on a big client—good brings good, right? Brings good things to the table.

As an entrepreneur, I totally second Amine’s views on hiring the best talent.
It’s been a wonderful, insightful conversation today. We’re going to wrap up this segment here, but in our next episode, I’ll be back with Amine to discuss the future of voice search optimization and the future of digital marketing.
Stay tuned to Shane Barker’s Marketing Growth Podcast.