Spotlight On: Darin Lynch, Founder & CEO, Irish Titan

Spotlight On: Darin Lynch, Founder & CEO, Irish Titan

2022-09-09T14:35:35-04:00September 9th, 2022|Minneapolis-St. Paul, Professional Services, Spotlight On|

3 min read September 2022 — In an interview with Invest:, Darin Lynch, founder and CEO of full-service e-commerce and digital strategy company Irish Titan, talked about the technology landscape and how it is changing. Lynch discussed challenges he has seen within the industry, such as labor shortages and legislation, but also highlighted the success the company has had over the past year as well as his plans for the future.

What have been some highlights from the past year and what are your priorities for the near term? 

The last 12 months have been good for us and I have been very happy with our growth and people. We’ve had some significant wins, adding new logos to our portfolio with a few very significant brands coming down the pipeline. I’m broadly very proud of our employees or as we call them, our Titans. We have what we call a Titan-only model, which means we do all of our work exclusively with our employees. 

We’ve also had our best 12 months of hiring, even during this time of labor shortages, which speaks to the culture and our ability to retain talent here. I have significant growth goals to get us to 150 titans but for us to scale like that we need a significant management team.  We have augmented our management team specifically to create layers and increase our scalability. 

How has demand for your services changed? 

When I began Irish Titan, it was a conscious decision to not take on investors at the start-up stage. I realized the market was not ready for us, nor the kind of support and technology we could facilitate. We therefore went to market as a digital agency initially in order to gain traction within the business eco-system and develop relationships. This allowed us to build our index of e-commerce business. Five years ago, we reached the critical mass needed to go to market exclusively as an e-commerce agency rather than more broadly as a digital agency. A saying I like is ‘to narrow your focus to broaden your appeal.’ This approach accelerated our e-commerce business because serious clients or merchants want to work with experts. 

The pandemic was actually good for our industry. In the first six months of the pandemic there was as much growth in e-commerce volume as there was in the previous six years combined. We were able to ride the wave with our already established relationships and capabilities. 

What advice would you give people looking to enter the e-commerce space? 

If they are merchants, I would encourage them to think about why they are not already online. Secondly, I would ask who they are targeting, how it relates to their brick-and-mortar operation, how they are going to approach bricks and clicks and operationally, how they will execute against strategic goals beyond just making the website. 

For agency or technology partners, I would encourage them to believe in their own capabilities and passions. There was a lot of easy money early in the pandemic because of the capital going into the market from the government. Recently, easy money is drying up, which thins the herd, but the industry continues to have a bright future.     

What are common challenges within the industry? 

The challenges we see with our clients are what all the headlines are already saying, which is workforce, whether that is retaining, recruiting or the challenges associated with wage inflation and how a business is managed. Wages increased for us faster than we could determine to adjust pricing. Supply chain is another challenge for merchants. Our merchants tend to have fewer technology problems than they used to and while it is still and always a priority, it’s less of a challenge. 

Are there any new innovations that you are starting to implement? 

One of the best advancements in the last few years has been the emergence of SaaS-based e-commerce platforms. That has allowed merchants to focus on growing and running their business rather than on the technology overhead to maintain their platforms. Merchants can now preserve money for things like marketing, allowing them to capitalize on tech advancements.

I also believe “headless commerce” will continue to grow. What that does is separate the shopping cart functionality from the content, brand, and user experience while browsing. That has taken root and we are actively doing more of those projects. Product information management systems, or PIMs, are going to grow in importance as they are systems designed to store product data at a high level of data hygiene. AI is also becoming more important for marketing emails and things like that.

What have been some of your keys to success? 

The Twin Cities area is highly educated, which is valuable. What has been a challenge is that there is no strong center of gravity around e-commerce. We are really the only Minnesota based e-commerce agency with national reach, which is great from a competitive moat perspective but creates a challenge of hiring people with e-commerce experience.  For that reason, we have invested in training and onboarding programs to compensate. In 2011, I defined our Golden Circle and our values, which are POTIS passion, ownership, teamwork, impact and skills. That’s what we look for in the people we hire. There is value in hiring the right person because training hard skills is much easier than soft skills. We’ve invested in the community here so PR is HR. By creating awareness, it has facilitated our ability to hire. It makes things more effective. 

How do you see the overall economic landscape evolving? 

We live in an interesting time right now where there is a herd mentality. There is hesitancy in the market because of recession signals. At the same time there are trends that conflict with that information, so while there is challenge in the general market, from an economic perspective, everyone pausing exacerbates the problems so forward momentum will aid that.

For more information, please visit:

https://irishtitan.com/

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