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Meet Dan Bergano of Norba Design in Scottsdale

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Today we’d like to introduce you to Dan Bergano.

Dan, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
While it seems like almost every other entrepreneur that I’ve met has early childhood stories of running lemonade stands or selling candy to their friends, I was the exact opposite. I was always someone who just followed the normal path that is constantly reinforced – get good grades, go to college with a sensible degree, get a good job with a big company, and then work there until retirement.

I grew up in New Jersey my entire life and went to school in upstate New York where I majored in finance. Math was one of the subjects I always did well at and when I took an economics class in high school that interested me, finance seemed like the right fit. After graduating, I took a contracting position with a German-based investment bank right on Wall Street in NYC. I put my full effort into that and after management noticed, I was offered a full-time offer that I accepted.

Even in my short time with this company for three years, I saw countless waves of layoffs and it seemed that it wasn’t sustainable, so I followed my boss to a larger US-based investment bank located in Times Square when he left. I had every intention of working corporate jobs like these until my 50s/60s when I could retire until I began working at this job. At the end of the day, it’s what’s to be expected of working at a large investment bank in New York City, but the micromanagement and toxic environment provided me the opportunity to take a step back and rethink the direction that my life was heading for the first time.

I started religiously reading any business book I could get my hands on, as it provided a light at the end of the tunnel for getting out of this miserable situation that I was in. The more I read, the more I realized that I knew I could succeed at starting my own business if I put in the work. I decided that website design was the route I was going to take due to its low startup costs and general interest in the subject, and I jumped right in. For three to four months while still working full time, I got a lot of bad looks from management as I’d leave work around 5 pm every night (when it was expected to work much later than that) so that I could spend a few hours every night learning how to code, the basics of business, and other key subjects.

Instead of feeling like I was trapped at a job, I’d never felt freer in my life and it made me rethink other areas of my life that I wanted to improve as well. Paying expensive rent in the NYC area and the miserably cold winters didn’t seem like a good mix for an environment to start my business and run it full time so I started researching other areas to move to. I narrowed it down to Phoenix, San Diego, and Austin and although I didn’t know a single person there and never had visited before, I signed a lease online for an apartment in Scottsdale and got in my car to start the 37-hour drive cross country.

Since then, it’s been about over two years running my website design and search engine optimization (SEO) firm full time. I’ve always been an ambitious person so I’m by no means satisfied where I’m at currently, but the business has grown from a startup that included constant stress watching my savings disappear to a fully functional business that has been able to cover my living expenses and get me back to a place where I can save money again. We have been fortunate enough to work with amazing clients such as Comedy Central’s Trevor Moore and American Fashion TV Star Isaac Mizrahi. My main focus has always been on under-promising and overdelivering for my clients and that hard work has led to referrals from previous clients being the main source of my business growth year over year.

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
I’d be surprised to hear of any entrepreneur out there who’s had a smooth road. It’s the nature of what we do – there are always going to be highs and lows on a daily and weekly basis. The biggest challenges came up before I even started the business. The process of quitting my safe job at a prestigious investment bank, moving across the country, and starting a business using a new skill that I taught myself was filled with a lot of self-doubt and stress.

When you make a lateral move or take a next step forward that is “normal” (such as taking a higher-paying job or going back to school), the news is met with praise and genuine happiness from friends and loved ones. Going against the grain of what’s considered “normal” in my experience was met with reactions of confusing, condescending, and disappointing tones.

I knew what I was getting myself into and I was ready for the negative backlash, but it still didn’t make the self-doubt any less difficult to deal with. As someone who had always followed the rules and taken the safe choices, it almost felt as though I was on the verge of everything falling apart in my life at the same time with all of these radical changes.

I had gone from living in a nice apartment right on the Hudson River and making more money than I needed to living back with my parents for a few months and cold calling businesses to try to hustle my way to get my first few clients. The one story I always think about in the early days is how I got my first two clients – I found a list of local businesses online and I made a list of 100 or so to call that had poor-looking websites. It was the dead of winter and school was out, so I went to a local community college and locked myself in a group study room for six to seven hours and decided I wouldn’t leave until I called every single company. This got me maybe five to six interested parties and eventually led to my first two web design clients.

From a logical perspective, there were countless reasons to simply just go to another large investment bank or stay at my current job. To name a few – I’d feel like the four year degree in finance that I had would’ve been a waste if I didn’t use it anymore, I had five different certifications with different financial regulatory authorities which were rare with how young I was, I was working for a top investment bank, and I was good at what I did. Throughout my career, I was consistently ranked as either the top or one of the top individuals on my team and I had multiple people say to me that I was, “set for life” if I kept on this pace.

At the same time, I was 27 at the time and knew that absolute worst-case scenario if every business venture that I pursue fails, I could always go back to the corporate jobs until I could plan out my next step. However, the ultimate motivation, that still drives me to this day is the tremendous amount of freedom that I have these days running my own business and knowing that the better I do, the less likely it is that I ever have to go back.

From a business standpoint, there were plenty of challenges that came up and still come up to this day. The biggest one being that I had no skills at all running a business, selling, negotiating, etc. Instead of taking a fixed mindset approach of “I can’t sell” or “I’m just not that kind of person” I focused instead on challenging myself and thinking of it like any other skill out there. It just takes taking consistent action every day and learning from the obstacles that come up to improve for next time. People looking from the outside in only see the wins and the successes, but behind each success are hundreds of instances of failure and rejection, but that’s the only way you can learn and improve.

Please tell us about your business.
My business, Norba Design, specializes in getting our clients real results. We leverage website design and SEO skills to tailor a custom digital marketing strategy for our clients. The aim of every approach we take with clients is to give them a solid return on their investment that will last for years even after they are done working with us.

Most online strategies focus on the wrong things – font type, font colors, number of pages on the site, fancy graphics, etc. We do things differently at Norba Design, specializing in website design that creates a website that acts as a sales system for the businesses that we work with. Instead of just focusing on something that looks nice, we build a website that creates trust, clearly displays what makes our clients different, and makes it as convenient as possible to reach out to learn more.

From an SEO perspective, we noticed that there is a lack of accountability and transparency in this industry. We’ve come across countless business owners paying thousands of dollars every month and they have no idea what their SEO provider is doing and if it’s working. We specialize in a no-nonsense approach for SEO. We use the proven and tested best practices to get our clients more visibility on Google rankings so that their potential customers can find them as easily as possible. Additionally, we provide detailed transparent reporting so that our clients know exactly what we are doing to help their rankings, how their site is ranking, and what the next steps are in the long-term plan.

What makes me the proudest is helping business owners get more clients and leads. Since the business has grown almost exclusively through referrals, we know that when our clients win, we win. One example that stands out is a notary services client that we worked with. The owner had a very similar story to my own, she worked at a large investment bank that had a toxic environment, so she left to get her freedom back and challenge herself.

When I first met her at a networking event, she told me that business had been so slow that she was worried she was going to have to go back to the corporate world and give this business up. Fast forward 6 months later, after helping her with SEO, we were able to get her so many leads that she had to leave the networking group because she was so busy with all of the new clients she was getting. She is fantastic at what she does, so once she got the exposure to get organic leads from Google results, it led to countless referrals from happy past clients.

Is there a characteristic or quality that you feel is essential to success?
Although there are a lot of characteristics and qualities that it takes to overcome the challenges of running a business, the most important one for me personally has been having a growth mindset. Instead of looking at a challenge and saying, “I can’t do that”, you look at it as an opportunity to learn and improve.

As someone with no experience in the world of entrepreneurship in the past, it seemed like the only successful business owners either got lucky or they came up with some amazing invention. That couldn’t be further from the truth – it all starts with your attitude and mental state, and that sets the tone for what actions you take.

Let’s use an example of a potential client deciding to go with another company and not choosing your business. The person with a fixed mindset uses that setback to reinforce his negative beliefs such as “I’m not good at this” or “I will never be able to find a client”. It’s only a matter of time before these perceived failures build up enough to where it’s easier to give up than to keep dealing with the rejection. The person with the growth mindset looks at this as an opportunity to ask, “what can I do better next time”. With this mindset, you either succeed and gain a new client or you learn from your mistakes and continually improve.

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