Scott Evans is the cofounder of national strategic online and digital marketing agency, Gorilla 360.

He has over a decade of experience in marketing, spending the last five years specialising in search engine optimisation and search marketing.

Scott enjoys partnering with his clients and learning from their business building experience.

• What career path led you to where you are now?

I’ve always been in marketing. I started building websites when I was at school and Uni and I started Gorilla about six years ago. I’ve been lucky enough to spend some time in the UK over that period where I got to learn from the best digital minds in the world essentially.

Our business and my career has evolved as marketing has evolved. We started out quite broad and doing online/offline marketing and then specialised in online, particularly SEO, and then the last couple of years we’ve drilled in even more and now working primarily with eCommerce businesses.

• How has technology advancement changed how business works?

From a marketing perspective, I guess is my area of expertise but I don’t think you can separate marketing and technology or business and technology anymore. Our business wouldn’t exist without technology and most of our client’s businesses wouldn’t exist without technology. So eCommerce stores, their shopfront is driven by technology, their marketing channels are driven by technology, their backend solutions are driven by technology – their logistics, their shipping, their warehousing are all managed and run with technology. If you have the right tools then your business can become far more streamlined in the e-commerce space.

If you’ve got the right tools and technology you can pinpoint where revenue leaks are occurring and then work to plug those leaks. Those sorts of tools over a decade ago either didn’t exist or were limited to the guys with million dollar marketing budgets. The technology and those sorts of online tools have levelled the playing field for the little guys and so I love that as it gives everyone access to tools that can really improve their business, so technology and marketing really go hand in hand.

• As a younger business owner, what advice do you have for others that may be considering branching out?

Two things. Number one, keep going. There will be ups and downs and there will be challenges along the road and that is life, not just business. I think if you know the reason or the why you are doing things life is much easier and business is much easier, and if you believe in what you are doing then that goes a long way.

Secondly, I think specialising is a big thing. These days it is really easy to get caught by shiny things or to try and do too many things or specialise in too many areas and I think if you can get known in one particular area then that goes a long way to being successful.

• Where would you like to be in 10 years?

I would love to continue to grow Gorilla and our team. We have got some awesome marketers working for us now and I’d love to see them continue to grow and develop with us. There are also a lot of super talented digital marketers in Newcastle and I’d really love for them to call Gorilla home. I think I’d love to still be working with every single client we’ve got now.  It would be great to still be working with every single one of them, know their businesses absolutely inside and out and continuing to help them grow. That would be a great place to be.

• Have you had any significant Hunter-based mentors during your career that inspire you?

I’m really very fortunate that I am from a family of entrepreneurs and businessowners and they have probably been my biggest mentors in terms of guiding me along the way and providing inspiration and a bit of common sense at times. So I’m really lucky in that respect and they know who they are.

Also, on another level every single person that you work with along the way can be a mentor. I know a lot of our clients we look up to and that they’ve built great businesses and they all have a different approach to business but there is something to be learned from every single one of them so we try to look at our clients as mentors but still work with them on a peer to peer basis as well.