Eric Rivas is the CEO of Respect Network, a Richmond, Kentucky-based firm that specializes in online reputation management, negative content removal, and search result suppression for individuals, executives, and businesses. He leads a team that operates at the intersection of SEO strategy, legal frameworks, and platform policy — helping clients reclaim control of how they appear online.
Rivas came up through the unglamorous end of the workforce. His first job was running a shaved ice stand at fourteen. From there came a call center, a warehouse sorting returns, and eventually a break into digital marketing that would define the next decade of his career. He built expertise across agencies, corporate marketing teams, startups, and nonprofits — developing an unusually broad view of how organizations communicate and how that communication shapes perception.
Before founding the reputation management practice that became Respect Network, Rivas ran Roots Marketing, a boutique digital marketing agency focused on small businesses. That experience forced him to get specific about problems and specific about solutions — a discipline that carried directly into his current work. He also holds an MBA and a BS in Marketing from Utah Valley University and studied law and finance abroad in Florence, Italy, an experience he credits with giving him a working comfort with ambiguity and cross-disciplinary thinking.
Respect Network Corporation was originally co-founded by Drummond Reed in 2011 as a Seattle-based personal data startup with more than 70 founding partners. Rivas restructured and refocused it as Respect Network LLC with a clear mandate: help people and organizations whose digital records no longer reflect who they actually are. Today the firm works with executives, entrepreneurs, and companies facing everything from defamatory reviews to legacy news articles to coordinated online attacks — using a combination of legal strategy, technical SEO, and content development to produce lasting results.
Rivas is fluent in English and Spanish. He approaches leadership the way he approaches client work: methodically, without shortcuts, and with a commitment to setting honest expectations from the start.
What is your typical day, and how do you make it productive?
The first hour of my day is completely offline. No email, no Slack, no news. I use that time to read — something outside my immediate field, usually. Behavioral science, legal theory, business history. That reading habit probably does more for my thinking than any productivity system I’ve tried.
After that I work through a short list of priorities. I don’t build a twenty-item task list. I pick the two or three things that genuinely move something forward that day and make sure those happen before anything reactive takes over.
Afternoons are for team work — pipeline reviews, client strategy calls, one-on-ones. I keep meetings tight and end them with a clear next action or I don’t hold them at all. By late afternoon I try to do one longer-form thinking session: writing, planning, or working through a problem that doesn’t have an obvious answer yet. That’s usually where the most useful ideas come from.
How do you bring ideas to life?
The first question I ask about any idea is: who is this actually for? Not who might find it interesting — who has the specific problem this solves, and is that problem real enough that they would pay to have it fixed?
If the answer is solid, I move fast. I sketch the process, identify what I don’t know, and start filling in the gaps by doing rather than planning. Paralysis usually comes from trying to answer every question before you start. Most of the important questions only become visible once you’re in motion.
A lot of the best refinements to our service at Respect Network came from situations that didn’t fit the existing playbook. A client’s case would surface something we hadn’t thought through, we’d solve it, document the solution, and build it into our standard approach. That iteration loop — real problems, real solutions, documented and scaled — is how the service actually gets better.
What’s one trend that excites you?
Legal infrastructure catching up to the internet.
For most of the web’s history, harmful content operated in a gray zone. Platforms weren’t responsible, individuals had limited recourse, and the cost of doing nothing was always lower than the cost of acting. That balance is shifting. Courts are issuing removal orders more readily. Platforms are developing real policies around documented harm. Regulatory frameworks around data and defamation are tightening in ways that were unthinkable five years ago.
That trend is meaningful for our clients because it opens up pathways that didn’t exist before. The toolkit we can use on someone’s behalf is genuinely growing. And as the legal infrastructure becomes more reliable, the outcomes become more predictable.
What is one habit that helps you be productive?
Writing things down immediately.
Not in a notes app, not in a task manager — on paper, in the moment. If I have a thought during a meeting or a call that I don’t want to lose, I write it before I do anything else. The habit sounds low-tech and it is. But the act of writing by hand forces a kind of compression that typing doesn’t. You have to decide what the actual point is before your hand moves.
I review those notes at the end of the week. A surprising number of the things I thought were important on Tuesday feel irrelevant by Friday. The ones that still feel important get acted on.
What advice would you give your younger self?
Get useful faster.
I spent a lot of early career time trying to look competent before I was competent. Building the perception of expertise before I had done the work to earn it. That’s a trap. It costs energy that should go into actual learning, and it creates a gap between how you present and what you can deliver.
The people who move fastest are the ones who admit what they don’t know, find someone who does know it, learn it, and move on. Ego is expensive in this business. Curiosity is cheap and compounds.
Tell us something you believe that almost nobody agrees with you on.
Most reputation problems are not communication problems — they’re product problems.
A lot of companies come to us wanting to take down a bad review or a negative article. And we can help with that. But the more honest conversation is sometimes: why did this review happen? What did you actually do or fail to do that produced this reaction?
When the underlying issue is real, reputation management buys time but doesn’t solve the problem. Eventually, the bad signal accumulates faster than the suppression or removal can work. The clients who get the best outcomes are the ones willing to fix the actual thing, not just the digital record of it.
What is the one thing you repeatedly do and recommend everyone else do?
Review what you’re not doing.
Once a month I look at the commitments, strategies, and projects that I’ve quietly stopped working on. Most of them dropped off for good reasons — priorities changed, the opportunity closed, better information arrived. But some of them deserve to be restarted or formally killed rather than left to quietly decay.
That review keeps my plate honest. It also tends to surface one or two things that got deprioritized for the wrong reasons — usually because they were hard, not because they weren’t worth doing.
When you feel overwhelmed or unfocused, what do you do?
I go for a walk without my phone.
It sounds trivial and I resisted it for a long time because it felt like avoidance. It’s the opposite. The overwhelm usually comes from holding too many open loops at once. Walking without input gives the brain space to actually process them instead of just accumulating more.
I come back from a twenty-minute walk with a clearer sense of what actually matters right now. Not always — but reliably enough that it’s become my default reset.
What is one strategy that has helped you grow your business or advance in your career?
Being extremely specific about what problem I solve.
Early in my career I described what I did in broad categories — “digital marketing,” “brand strategy,” “online growth.” Those categories are real but they don’t create trust. Nobody hires a category.
The turning point came when I learned to say exactly what outcome I produce, for whom, in what timeframe, and why. At Respect Network, that means being able to tell someone in two sentences what we do, who we do it for, and what they can expect. That clarity converts at a completely different rate than vague expertise does. It also attracts better clients — the ones who understand their problem clearly enough to describe it.
What is one failure in your career, how did you overcome it, and what lessons did you take away from it?
Early in running Roots Marketing, I took on clients without being clear enough about the scope. I was eager to close and optimistic about delivery, which is a combination that consistently ends in disappointment — for the client and for the team.
I overcame it by doing the uncomfortable thing: having direct conversations with affected clients about what had gone wrong and what we were changing. Some of those conversations were painful. All of them were clarifying.
The lesson was that clarity upfront is not a sales risk — it’s a trust investment. The client who knows exactly what they’re getting and agrees to it is a much better client than the one who signed based on implied promises. Now, we at Respect Network spend more time on expectation-setting before we start than we used to spend on the entire pitch.
What is one business idea you’re willing to give away to our readers?
A reputation monitoring service built specifically for small business owners — not enterprises, not executives, just the local accountant or contractor or therapist who has no idea what’s being said about them online until it’s already cost them a client.
The technical infrastructure exists. What doesn’t exist is a simple, affordable, plain-language product that tells a small business owner: here is what shows up when someone searches your name, here is what changed this month, and here is the one thing you should do about it. That product, priced right and explained clearly, would have an enormous addressable market.
What is one piece of software that helps you be productive? How do you use it?
Claude+notion has changed how I run the team.
We use it for everything: client strategy documentation, process playbooks, project tracking, and onboarding materials. Before we had a unified system, knowledge lived in people’s heads and email threads. When someone left or a process changed, the institutional memory went with them.
Now every repeatable process has a documented home. New team members can get up to speed without relying entirely on existing team members to explain things. And when something breaks, we have a record of what was supposed to happen — which makes fixing it much faster.
What is the best $100 you recently spent? What and why?
A decent external monitor for my home setup.
I put it off for years because it felt like an indulgence. Then I bought one and immediately wondered why I had made that decision for so long. Screen real estate changes how you work. Having two documents open side by side, or a browser alongside a draft, removes a constant small friction that I hadn’t fully registered until it was gone.
Sometimes the upgrade that seems cosmetic is actually a workflow change.
Do you have a favorite book or podcast you’ve gotten a ton of value from and why?
Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss.
Voss spent years as an FBI hostage negotiator and the book translates that experience into a practical framework for high-stakes conversation. What struck me wasn’t the negotiation tactics specifically — it was the underlying point that most of communication is about making the other person feel genuinely heard before you try to move them.
That applies directly to reputation management. When a client comes to us they are usually stressed, sometimes angry, and worried that nobody takes their problem seriously. The first job is not to pitch a strategy. It’s to understand the situation well enough that they feel confident we actually understand it. Everything else flows from that.
What’s a movie or series you recently enjoyed and why?
Slow Horses on Apple TV+.
It follows a team of disgraced MI5 agents stuck in a bureaucratic backwater and the cases that pull them back into the field. What I appreciated about it is the writing — the show takes institutional failure seriously as a subject. It’s not just about the mission or the villain. It’s about how organizations protect themselves, how information gets buried, and what it costs the people inside.
That kind of organizational realism is rare in the genre and it makes every plot development feel grounded in something true.
Key learnings
- Reputation problems that stem from real product or service failures cannot be resolved permanently through content strategy alone — fixing the underlying issue is the only durable solution.
- Specificity in how you describe your work builds trust faster than broad expertise claims; the more precisely you can articulate who you help and what outcome you produce, the better your client conversion and retention.
- Upfront clarity about scope and expectations is a trust investment, not a sales risk — and the cost of vague promises accumulates in client relationships long after the deal closes.
Effective team scaling depends on documented systems, not individual knowledge — processes that live only in people’s heads leave with them. - The best way to grow professionally is to close the gap between perceived competence and actual competence as fast as possible, which requires admitting what you don’t know and learning it rather than performing expertise you haven’t earned yet.