How Entrepreneurs are Winning as Search Moves to AI with David Sonn

Episode Transcript
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(00:21):
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Now, let's dive in.

Marc Bernstein (00:40):
Good morning, America.
How are you?
And how are you?
I re- I really, I really aminterested in knowing how you
are, but you can't respond tome, so that's it.
I'm interested because there'sso much going on in the world,
and there's a lot of chaos, andthere's there's just a lot of
stuff out there.
So I hope, and you may belistening to this months later,

(01:02):
so maybe everything's great.
But in the meantime, I do hopeyou're doing well.
Uh our listeners are I'mfinding out are primarily
entrepreneurs, and we tellstories of entrepreneurs, and I
have a very interesting one heretoday named David, and I'm
going to be calling him Dave.
But um we're going to startout.
I don't usually do this, butI'm going to start with a topic

(01:24):
of the day that is directlyrelated to his uh to what he
does, because he's in thedigital marketing business, and
we're we've talked a lot aboutAI, and it's hard to avoid that
topic.
So every few weeks I bring itup again because it's changing
so rapidly that the topicchanges.

(01:44):
And in just talking for a fewminutes, I've discovered there's
something new we have to thinkabout it.
So so, Dave, tell me about yourthoughts on with the current
state of the issues we'redealing with with AI and what
you're dealing with in yourbusiness, and then we'll be able
to get back to that later inthe show.

David Sonn (02:01):
All righty.
Well, good morning, Marc, andthank you for having me.
Good morning.
Of course, we're all using AIto work better, faster, smarter,
and do bigger and betterthings.
But what's interesting to me isthat the AI platforms are now
creating a new marketing channelwhere people are very, very
comfortable in asking longqueries, trying to get answers

(02:25):
to their questions.
So there's a fundamental shiftthat's occurring.

And I and we talked about this briefly, and I
find myself, I'm actuallyforcing myself to use my AI
program as my search enginerather than Google or one of the
other search engines because Ifind it more accurate, more
comprehensive, more researchinvolved, less marketing driven

(02:50):
as of today.
That could I may imagine thatmight change.
But as of now, that's the wayit is.
So I get that.
We're gonna go back to that.
I appreciate you bringing thatup, and we'll go back to that
when we talk about your businessbecause I'm sure that has to do
with the future of yourbusiness and how you're going to
address it.
So, in the meantime, let meintroduce you.
This is David's son.
David is president and founderof Arc Intermedia out of uh King

(03:15):
of Prussia, Pennsylvania.
And as one of the firstdigital-only customer
acquisition agencies in thePhiladelphia area, which is
another term, I like that term,but it's a marketing agency,
Dave launched Arc Intermedia inJanuary 2010.
Arc was built to delivermeasurable results, not vanity

(03:36):
metrics, and he structured thecompany for long-term stability,
creating a culture of trust andaccountability with zero
layoffs since day one, which ispretty interesting.
His role within the agency isto lead sales and business
operations with theresponsibility of attracting and
supporting highly talenteddigital experts that provide the
agency's clients with the bestsolutions.

(03:58):
Welcome, David.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Dave, um tell me about youknow, the only thing I'm really
interested in prior to yourbusiness is your humble
beginnings, where you came from,how you ended up in
Philadelphia, and how you becamean entrepreneur.

David Sonn (04:16):
So the entrepreneur piece wasn't by design.
I grew up in northeasternPennsylvania, north of uh
Scranton, in a small town calledHonesdale, and it was a very
rural setting.
And when you went away tocollege, there weren't a lot of
white-collar jobs in that smalltown, and you kind of signed off
onto the fact that you wereprobably going to move away.

(04:38):
So after graduating college, Imoved to Philadelphia to start
my professional career.

You guys still have family up there in
Hoensdale?

David Sonn (04:47):
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 longtimefriend which would ultimately
become my uh business partner,and we naively believed that we

(05:12):
could do it better.
And it was at the advent of theInternet, when people were just
now getting the Internet intotheir homes.
Companies, most of them didn'thave websites and didn't know
why they would even need awebsite, and we had the
brilliant idea that we couldlaunch a web design company, one
of the first in thePhiladelphia area.

Yes.
And that was early like 1996, Ibelieve you said, right?
It was.
It was a long time ago, and itwas a plan that we kind of went
into.
We had no money, the banks hadno interest in us, we had no
roadmap because people weren'treally building websites, but we
were uh 20-somethings with nofear, and uh uh we just thought

(05:55):
that this is how you would doit, and there was no looking
back.
But we we ran the companysuccessfully for over 12 years,
um, started the the organizationwith uh three employees, again,
all in all in our 20s, all justum bright-eyed and just willing
to get after it.
Those three folks that joinedus in the very beginning all

(06:17):
went on to have very good andsuccessful careers and um
fantastic experience.
I learned how to run a businessby running a business.
And again, I didn't go intothis, I didn't go to college
thinking that I was going tobecome an entrepreneur, but I
always had this idea that I feltlike I could do things better

(06:38):
or different, and I just love tomake decisions.
And you so that was a that was a web development
company, that's where youstarted.
Yeah.
But I know at some point youpivoted, and I think that was
maybe 13, 14 years later,something like that.
Yeah.
So we were doing websiteproduction, and I began to grow

(06:58):
a little bit tired of theproduction angle, and what I was
more interested in is online,how could I move the needle for
companies?
How could I affect theirrevenue, their profits, their
sales leads?
That became very, veryinteresting to me.
So then I came up with the ideathat I was going to create a
digital marketing agency.

(07:20):
And I wasn't going to getfocused on any of the
traditional advertising likeradio, TV, print.
I really wasn't interested inthat.
Rather, I was interested in thedigital side because I could
get measurable results.
I could take on a client'sneeds and campaigns, and I could
measure right back.
I could connect the dots thatif I did X, I could show you

(07:44):
that I generated X amount oftraffic or leads or what have
you.
And that was exciting to me.
I was willing to kind of liveand die by the metrics.
Live and die by the metrics, but that's kind of
that's that's what I would callthe hard side of what you do.
There's a I would call a softside to what you do too, which
is that you have you mentionedwhat you do for your clients,

(08:06):
you have a very client-focusedapproach, from what I
understand.
We we really are.
I mean, sure.
There's a lot of companiesnowadays that will claim to do
digital marketing.
But what I believe sets usapart is more of the customer
service piece, the hands-on, thehonesty, all of that.

(08:26):
In fact, we just went throughuh rebranding very recently.
We now position ourselves asthe enjoyable agency, and we use
that to highlight that we aregoing to hyperfocus on the
customer service, on gettingback to you, but it means much
more than that.
Marketing is an investment in abusiness, and because it's an

(08:47):
investment, it has to show areturn.
And what is enjoyable for ourclients is that they know they
have a partner that has abusiness focus, that understands
that dollars in has to producedollars out.
So we are really wired in thatregard.
On top of, for us, enjoyablemeans our clients know that

(09:08):
we're gonna be here tomorrow.
We've been in business for 15years, we've had no layoffs,
we've built a very stablecompany that's enjoyable for our
clients.
And our clients, when theycontact us, they know that
they're going to speak to thesame person.
Our turnover rate is less than3 percent.
And as a client or a customerof anything, I hope you can

(09:30):
agree.
It's really nice to know thatthe person on the other, you
know, other side of the phone,the other side of the video
call, if you will, understandsyou, has institutional
knowledge.
You are very passionate aboutyour business.
I am.
I certainly am.
And I have to say, just anaside, everybody that comes on
the show is always worried abouthow they're going to come

(09:52):
across and whether what if Imake mistakes, things like that.
And we talked about thatoffline.
You're doing great, so don'tworry 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.
That's right.
There you go.
So speaking of which, so that'sa lesson learned, right?
But over the well My firstquestion is all entrepreneurs
have challenges.
We talk about this all the timeon the show.
It's not it's not a smoothride.
It's not something you do ifyou want to just like you know,
ride the train to retirement.
You know, sure.
It doesn't work that way.

(10:22):
What kind of challenges haveyou experienced?
You haven't had turnover, so itdoesn't sound like company
culture is a big challenge.
What kind of things have youhad?
Yeah, so I mean I kind of touched upon it with the
first company that I launchedthat you know there was no road
map, no money, and and that wasits challenges, but you know, we
were just in the in the pointof our lives that it didn't
matter.
We were just gonna run hard andmake it work.

(10:42):
With this company, ArcIntermedia, I guess one of the
challenges that we see now isthat at the director level, at
the VP level, the people thatcan actually hire us, we're
noticing that there's much moretransition.
And when a new person comes in,it's not really sexy for them
to retain the incumbent.

(11:05):
So what our challenge is is toshow them, look, we have this
institutional knowledge.
We have uh respectfullyspeaking, we've got deeper
knowledge about this than youdo.
And it's it's that challenge ofmaking sure that they
understand that retaining us isthe better move, is the right
move for the company.

(11:26):
Because again, they're gettinga marketing agency that has a
business focus.

How how do you get that across?
How do you do that withoutgiving away your secret sauce or
anything?
I mean, how do you how can howdo 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 ifsomeone'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 behelpful.

(12:01):
We are going to make sure thatthat person is a success as
well.

Um you you gave me some really good notes before
the show.
And one of them is uh you'reyou're a thinker, I know that.
Because you we you know, andone of the things that and we
only this is very unusual.
Usually I meet my guests monthsbefore we do the show.
We're really backed up.
We had an opening, we met forthe first time two days ago to
speak.

(12:26):
So you did some thinking, andone of the things is you've
mentioned lessons learned.
I'm not going to say them.
I want you to tell me the onesthat you think are important,
but I will start at this one,the culture matters, because
we're this is a big topic on ourshow.
So let's talk about that andthen 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 toset that tone.
They have to, you know, walkthe talk and they really have to
lead by example.

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 tobe treated, treating people the
way you would want someone totreat your mom, treating people
the way you would want someoneto treat your child.

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

David Sonn (13:20):
If you if you if you build inside with great people
and you treat them the rightway, you treat them how you
would expect to be treated, itbegins to work itself out.
And and nothing, nothing can'tbe accomplished if you have the
right tone, if you have theright ambition, and you create a
culture where much like asports team, you're going out

(13:43):
there to compete.
You have good people, you havepeople with skills, you have
people that want to win.
You just need to help them getthere and and you know get them
to understand that they areappreciated and they are making
a difference.

You um you you know one of the things I know
that you say, if you said it tome several times in different
ways, is put yourself in theirshoes.
What are other ways that you dothat?
Well, I uh that one I am goingto 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 theyneed to achieve or a budget or

(14:17):
whatever, what I do, and I justI I just I guess I can't help
myself being an entrepreneur, Iput myself in the shoes of that
company's CEO or director orwhat have you, and I begin to
think about if this was mylivelihood, if this was my
decision to make, if this reallymattered for myself, my staff,

(14:37):
my family, what was the decisionI would make?
What would be therecommendation?
When you can take on thatmindset, the decisions are easy.
That's a great jumping off point for a quick
commercial.
We'll be back in one minute onFounders Forum.
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.

(15:51):
We're back on Founders Forum with my guest
today, David Sun.
David, I'm going to switchthings up a little bit.
I usually save this for theend, but it's relevant to some
of the conversation I want tohave with you.
Um, if you and I are sittinghere a year from now and we're
and we're looking back on thelast year, what would have to
happen over that year period foryou to feel that that was a

(16:13):
successful year in your life, inyour business life, personal
life, if you want anything youwant to touch on?
Let's start with that and thenI 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 surethat the company is moving in a
in a good direction, that allthose that have bought in, you
know, staff and clients arecomfortable and that things are
moving in in a in a very gooddirection so that there's
stability and peace of mind.

(16:44):
I am all about peace of mind,sleeping well at night, and
taking care of those that takecare of you.
And I really do think aboutthat literally every day with my
business.
As far as the other pieces, youknow, the aspects of your life,
working out is important to me.
If you really have somethingthat's important to you, you

(17:05):
create a schedule, you create away to do it.
I the alarm for me goes off at5 15 a.m.
every day, Monday throughFriday.
That's how I get into the gym.
It's important to me, andtherefore I carve out time.
My business life, I put it, I,you know, put it all in.
I I work real hard during theday.
You know, sometimes, you know,most times, like a lot of folks

(17:28):
eating lunch at desk at yourdesk and that kind of thing, and
and and trying to connect withpeople, both the staff and the
clients.
And then on the personal side,obviously family is important.
I'm married, I've I have twoboys, super important.
And as as a family unit, we getinvolved in a lot of volunteer
work, a lot of charity work, andthat's really, really important

(17:51):
to understand where you standin this in this world.
P Yeah.

So one one thing I want to reference, which I
think is part of your yourfuture vision, we were talking
about AI at the beginning of theshow and how people are
starting to look at AI as asearch engine.
Do you have any goals, businessgoals aligned with that vision
over the next year?
Sure.
Let me kind of back up on thatwhole piece.

(18:16):
Late in 2023 when we werebeginning to be exposed to Chat
GPT and some of the other ones.
Obviously back to the beginningof the show, yeah, great with
workflow and all that stuff.
But I saw something else.
I saw an opportunity for amarketing channel.
I thought that this is maybeone of the first times ever that

(18:37):
Google was going to have somekind of a challenge with search.
So in our annual meeting in twearly 2024, I challenged my
entire team.
I'm like, look, this is adirection I believe that we need
to head.
We need to learn, we need toexperiment, we need to fail, we
need to learn how we could evenroll this into a program that
could benefit clients.

(18:58):
We started with ourselves, weused, you know, our our own
company, our website, ourcontent, did lots of tests, and

I will tell you this (19:05):
in 2025, I began to see more legitimate
need leads, sales leads throughthe AI platforms for our agency
than I had been seeing forseveral years from Google.
I can tell you that I've gotlegitimate leads through the AI
platforms for a home elevatorcompany in the Philippines, a

(19:26):
publishing company in LA, a hackcompany in Arizona, a real
estate company in the UK.
These are legitimate leads thatwe are now working through, and
it's even making uh you know adifference for us.
And through that experience, Ibelieved that we could roll out
new programs for our clients.
So in the past, we always didSEO, search engine optimization.
In the beginning of 2025, we'veconverted all of our SEO

(19:49):
clients into what we callorganic visibility and AI.
And really what that means ishaving a bigger focus on
optimizing for the AI platformsfor traditional search engines
and answer engines, which arelike the Reddits of the world,
the cores of the world, andthose kinds of things.
And people will say, well,isn't that just good marketing?
Well, companies don't haveinfinite budgets.

(20:11):
They don't have infiniteresources to produce all the
content and maintain thosepresents and have a strategy.
So that's where we're leadingour company.

So what that means is your clients will have
AI visibility, right?
And then how does that generateultimately 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 digitalmarketing, you get plenty of
metrics and analytics and youcan measure it all.
In the AI platforms, we'rereally not getting anything.
And so it begins to hearkenback to the older days of like,
let's look at business metrics.

(20:53):
Is revenue up?
Are sales leads up?
What are the quality of thosesales leads?
What's in your pipe?
And really looking at that andlooking at it from a whole
holistic view of how are wemoving the entire company
forward and what what is thepiece of the puzzle that AI is
contributing to that?

So it sounds like uh somehow combining being
able to get from AI, providingAI services for your clients,
and then being able to provideback from that some data and
metrics because that's yourcompany'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 usbegin to measure back what's
working.
Since that's a new frontier,how there'll be some challenges.

(21:48):
How do you do you have astrategy as to how to address
the challenges, how to figurethat out?
We have begun to uh you know pick up on little data
points where we can and referraltraffic and those kinds of
things.
One thing that we are learningpeople are going to learn about
you before they ever get to yourwebsite.

(22:09):
Trevor Burrus, Jr.
If you you've used the AIplatforms, right?
You put in your query, it givesyou a whole long answer.
It's a it's it's a wonderfuluser experience.
They're learning about youbefore they ever get to your
website.
Now, what we are seeing is arise in uh brand searches.
And what I mean by that is theylearn about your company in an
AI platform.

(22:29):
They grab your name of yourcompany, they plop it over into
Google, they do what we call abrand search, they go to your
website, and then by and large,we're seeing, and if you look at
your analytics, that visitorprobably only consumes about
three pages because they'vealready learned about you.
And we're a world ofresearchers.
We want to go out and we wantto find the truth.

(22:50):
Of course, your website is isthe gospel.
Everything is gonna bebeautiful.

Yep, we have about five minutes left, so a
bit more to cover.
Um so those are challengesthere.
What are if if you're so we'retalking to entrepreneurs on on
the show today, what advicewould you give to younger
entrepreneurs?
Actually, there's a lot of veryyoung, experienced
entrepreneurs, but newentrepreneurs, what kind of
advice would you give them asthey're starting their

(23:17):
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 needfunding, you know, and that's
not always great to take oninvestors, I get it.
But you're likely I couldprobably look at your business

(23:40):
plan and and tell you straightaway you you're underfunded.
So make sure you have thefunding that you can weather the
storm, that you can, uhespecially if you're taking on
people, make sure that you cantake 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 yearone?

(24:01):
I I believe the stat is uh thefirst year uh most company 80%
of companies fail.
97% of them never make it to 10years.
So you kind of have to have aplan.
And then the other part is donot take sales lightly.
Sales is the lifeblood of everysingle company.
Make sure you have a plan forsales.

For what it's worth, because I've interviewed
well over a hundredentrepreneurs on the show, the
the most impressive businessesthat I've seen were the ones
that sales was the first thingthey did.
In other words, they startedday one with with clients,
whether that was from previousexperience they had at a job or
from you know, they they hadbeen in the industry in some

(24:41):
form or another, or they createda way to do that.
But I do see so many newcompanies like you're talking
about start out, they'reunderfunded, they try to get one
client first, and but maybethey don't have enough money to
fund, you know, to service thatclient or to enhance services or
to expand the sales.
So I love the idea havinghaving come from always a sales

(25:04):
background myself, and I'venever had I would never have any
business in what I do if Ididn't if I couldn't sell.
So so you know, I I I love thatthat that's a focus, and that's
not an advice that I hearpeople giving a lot.
People sent tend to forgetabout that.
So that's really great.
Um there were you know, wealways have some kind of closing
round questions, or we'regetting close to that point.

(25:26):
Um I kind of asked you thisquestion because I just asked if
you could speak to your youngerself, what advice would you
give you?
I think it would be prettysimilar to what you just said,
right?
Is there anything else youwould 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 financialadvice, I'm a financial planner,

(25:48):
but there's still one thing Iknow about Bitcoin.
There's lim there's limitedsupply, so there's still demand.
Um what what do you like toread?
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 topretend that I'm a history buff.
But rather I I really enjoylike people in this world that
have made some kind of uh animpact, whether you know
business, social, entertainment,what have you.
There's always seems to be anunderlying story.

(26:18):
Like we as the public will seeXYZ occur, but what's really,
really interesting to me is howthey see it or how you know the
inner workings of it all.
So, you know, right now I'm I'mreading uh Nikola Tesla.
Um I think a lot of us haveread the Steve Jobs book by
Walter Isaacson, which wasfantastic.

(26:38):
Um I read Alan Greenspan, alittle bit dry, but I learned a
ton about the Federal Reserveand all the power that you know
the chairman wields.
So that was really interesting.
Read about Kurt Cobain, thatwas interesting.
And I I just ordered, justordered the book, uh, the
biography on Katherine Johnson,you know, the the NASA

(26:59):
supercomputer one.

Yeah, amazing.
Yeah, yeah.
Pretty interesting.
Um I like biographies myselfand historical novels because I
I like that's probably why I dothe show, because I like hearing
people's stories.
To me, that's yeah becausepeople are behind everything.
Well, what's the story behindthe story?
And as much as we talk about AIand technology and all that, in
the end, none of this happenswithout people.

(27:22):
Thank you all for joiningFounders Forum today.
And uh, we look forward tohearing from you again next week
and uh talking to you nextweek, and look for us on all the
social media outlets, uh videoson YouTube, and have a great
day!

Announcer (27:46):
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