Young entrepreneur leads Gen Z in the modern workplace, keeps close eye on AI
When an individual experiences failure, that person can do two things: grieve and feel ashamed and defeated, or take the opportunity to explore the best path for the future. Successful business leaders today are those who have shrugged off failure, grabbed opportunities and took decisive action. One such leader is Clarry Herrera, Founder and CEO of AGENIX Digital and a thought leader in the digital marketing space in the Philippines.
Herrera landed his first job as a virtual assistant at the age of 20 in 2018, but things didn’t go as planned: he was fired after just one month. Despite the setback, he remained determined and found a job as an Amazon virtual assistant.
After a few more months, he stumbled upon a job post for a management trainee for SEO services in a startup company called To The Top Agency. Even though the startup’s offer was less than his salary at the Amazon job, he saw it as a golden opportunity to learn about the SEO industry and get hands-on experience with digital marketing. Within six months of training, he was promoted to SEO Manager and was entrusted with managing the campaigns of major clients, creating reports and handling proposals. Eventually, he was promoted to Vice President of Services, giving him even more exposure to the day-to-day operations of running a digital marketing agency.
After a year at To The Top, Herrera felt confident enough to start his own agency, and took a leap of faith to leave his job and start from scratch. “It wasn’t easy, but with the trust of my first client-turned-partner, we started providing services to clients in the United States, and it grew from there. We now have a team of full-time employees and freelancers providing a range of services beyond SEO. It’s been challenging and rewarding since I come from a family of public school teachers and I’m the first entrepreneur in my family,” he revealed.
At his very Gen Z agency—where the employees’ average age is 25—Herrera prioritizes the continuous transfer of knowledge among team members. To achieve this, he implements monthly training sessions for each of the company’s six departments, focusing on upskilling within specific roles.
“In addition to these sessions, we conduct multi-agency training based on internal skills gap assessments, with member feedback fine-tuning our training pipeline. To support employee well-being, we also host bi-monthly wellness seminars and webinars on topics such as mental health and exercise for remote workers,” the CEO said. “We believe in encouraging open communication and feedback among team members so that everyone has the opportunity to share their insights and improve our agency’s processes. We also recognize the importance of staying up-to-date with industry developments and seek external consultants and trainers for specialized knowledge in SEO and digital marketing. Our goal is to ensure that every team member has access to the resources and support they need to thrive within our agency and beyond.”
Known among his business associates and staff as an entrepreneur with a consultative and empathetic leadership style, Herrera continues to value proactive communication, accountability through empathy, and decisiveness. “I prioritize creating a positive and productive working environment for my team,” he said, “because believe happy and engaged employees lead to company growth.”
To date, the agency has done work for Decode Global, OwnagePranks, Southwestern University, Asian Institute of Management, to mention a few clients. In particular, AGENIX DIGITAL helped OwnagePranks, a popular YouTube account with 5.4-million subscribers, improve the download rate of their app by 300 percent after a six-month SEO campaign. OwnagePranks steadily improved its SEO ranking in a two-year period, thanks to AGENIX Digital’s experts.
The young businessman takes a number of factors into account to ensure his company’s growth. “Firstly, the scalability of systems is essential to maintain the quality of work and ensure that our business model remains sustainable as we continue to grow. To achieve this, we’ve implemented SOP documentation for our processes and effective training modules for our team members,” he said. Secondly, he added, AGENIX constantly revisits its service offerings and adjusts them to align with the latest market trends. Additionally, Herrera adopted a bottom-up approach to decision-making, ensuring that all team members are empowered to provide feedback and contribute to the direction of the company. This consultative decision-making approach is helping to ensure that the agency’s policies and strategies are well-received and effectively implemented throughout the organization.
“In terms of changes in the market, we’re keeping a close eye on AI technologies. We recognize that these new innovations have the potential to greatly impact how we do business and how business owners perceive our services. To prepare for this, we’re constantly integrating new technologies into our systems and building partnerships with tech companies, allowing us to revisit our offerings and services, and engage in product and market development,” he said.
“We’re also continuously updating our processes based on what’s working in the current market. For instance, we’ve recently conducted extensive in-house training on how to use ChatGPT to improve the quality of our work and services. Furthermore, we believe that the SEO industry is moving towards a more holistic marketing approach. Simply doing SEO alone is no longer enough to have a good digital footprint,” he declared, “so to keep up with this trend, we’re developing new services that integrate SEO with other areas such as social media marketing, video marketing, and content marketing.”
Indeed, Herrera resolutely intends to remain adaptable to the ever-changing digital marketing space, provide his clients with the best possible services and be a shining example to his fellow Gen Z entrepreneurs.
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